McCartney’s 3 nods come on date of Lennon’s death

It was a bittersweet Grammy morning for the Beatles and their fans. On Thursday, the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death, Paul McCartney picked up three nominations for his album “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.”

Collectively, McCartney, Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr now have 163 nominations and 40 wins.

McCartney’s latest nominations -- for album of the year, male pop vocal and rock album -- give him his first shot at a best-album Grammy for his solo work.

“Seeing as I’ve never actually won a Grammy for my post-Wings work, it’s pretty exciting to think it might happen,” McCartney said in a statement issued Thursday. “It was a great album to make.... We’re very proud of ... the reception it’s had and I’m chuffed for Nigel,” McCartney said, referring to Nigel Godrich, the producer of the former Beatle’s latest effort, who also received a producer of the year nomination.

Unlike Lennon and Harrison, McCartney has yet to win a best album Grammy for any post-Beatles recording. Harrison, who died Nov. 29, 2001, won for “The Concert for Bangla Desh,” his 1972 all-star benefit album, and Lennon was given the best album Grammy posthumously for “Double Fantasy,” the last album he made before he was shot to death on Dec. 8, 1980, outside his New York City apartment.

McCartney now has 64 of the Beatles’ total group and solo nominations. He’s won 13 awards, 10 of those for his work with the Fab Four, three for his post-Beatles work with Wings. Of those, four of the Grammys are under his name alone. He won the 1966 contemporary male solo award for “Eleanor Rigby,” and the Grammy was given to him, not the Beatles.

Surprisingly, Lennon is the Beatle with the fewest Grammy awards, having earned six with the group and only the “Double Fantasy” album award from his solo career.

Harrison ranks behind McCartney in terms of Grammy respect, with 39 nominations and 11 wins. As with the group’s other members, most of the Grammy wins involve Beatles recordings (eight), and three came for projects he did after the group broke up in 1970.

Of Starr’s nine Grammys, eight are for Beatles work, the ninth awarded him as one of the numerous “Concert for Bangla Desh” players who received statues for that album.

McCartney, Harrison and Starr also have three latter-day Beatles Grammys apiece stemming from the 1996 “The Beatles Anthology.” For that project, they completed an unfinished Lennon recording, “Free As a Bird,” to create the first new Beatles record since the group’s demise a quarter-century earlier. Grammy rules precluded those awards from also going to Lennon.