By STEPHEN McGUIRE

Whether it served as a musical launching pad or the place the stars called home, Queens has played a pivotal role for some of the biggest names in popular music.

The following is a look at some music legends whose careers were shaped right here in the Big Apple’s biggest borough.

These innovators of 1980’s thrash heavy metal formed in Queens in 1981. The band’s first gig was in the basement of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Sanford Avenue.

In the early 1990’s the Flushing rockers joined forces with rappers Public Enemy to record "Bring the Noise." The song has influenced the ever growing trend in some of today’s most popular songs — the fusion of the two music genres.

Greeted by over 3,000 screaming fans, Queens laid out the welcome mat on February 7th ,1964 for the Beatles as they arrived at Kennedy Airport — it was the first time the four lads from Liverpool set foot on American soil as a band.

Their historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show two days later brought Beatlemania to living rooms across the country.

In August of 1964 the "fab four," played two sold out shows at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium and the following year, The Beatles’ American Tour began with a show at Shea Stadium on August 15th.

The Shea show marked the biggest show of their career and up until that point was the largest drawing and grossing rock and roll concert ever with 56,000 screaming fans in attendance.

The master of lounge love songs was raised on Talbot Street in Forest Hills and graduated from Forest Hills High School in 1946.

The singer in the doo wop band Sha Na Na –which gained a loyal fan base following appearances at the 1969 Woodstock festival and the big screen adaptation of "Grease"— graduated from Martin Van Buren High School in Queens Village.

The man with the smooth voice made his singing debut in 1949 and rose to stardom in the 1950’s while living in Elmhurst. From 1956 to 1962 his music was hardly absent from the album charts.

Belafonte was at the forefront of the 1950’s "calypso craze" and while hits like "Day-O," an adaptation of the "Banana Boat Song," made him a music star, they also made money for songwriter Irving Burgie, a Hollis resident who wrote the lyrics and music to 35 Belafonte hits.

The composer of "God Bless America" and "White Christmas" once called Bayside home.

"Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" was written by this African-American composer who was born in Flushing in 1854.The Bland housing development which currently stands at the intersection of College Point Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue is named after him.

The "Godfather of Soul" was surely feeling good when he lived in St. Albans on Linden Boulevard.

BOOGIE NIGHTS: Before serving the borough as the home of the Flushing Council on Culture and the Arts, Flushing Town Hall was a nightspot caught in the heat of the 1970’s disco inferno.

Soon to be rock’s next big thing, expect to see this punk-pop trio from Flushing at the top of the charts in the near future.

Arguably the most influential American pop musician of the 1960’s, the man who reinvented what it meant to be a singer/songwriter and changed the face of rock music forever once lived near Reeves Avenue and 150th Street in the shadow of Flushing’s Queens College.

Dylan drew inspiration from another Queens folkie, Woody Guthrie.

The former frontman of Jane’s Addiction and creator of the early 1990’s Lolapalooza festivals hails from Bayside.

These Wayne, New Jersey
rockers named their 1999
release "Utopia Parkway,"
after the Queens thoroughfare
with the same name.

Half of the legendary duo of Simon and Garfunkel, he was born in Queens in 1941. Simon and Garfunkel first met in grade school and both members of the famous folk rock duo graduated from Forest Hills High School and attended Queens College. The duo immortalized their home borough, not in the lyrics, but in the title of the "59th Street Bridge Song" – a reference to the Queensborough Bridge — but Simon and Garfunkel split up in 1971.

In 1990 the Forest Hills folkies were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The "original folk music hero" who transformed his tunes into a "vehicle for social protest and observation" lived in Howard Beach.

During the "Great Depression," the singer/songwriter hitchhiked and rode the rails across the country.

From his travels came the inspiration to write "This Land Is Your Land."

He died at Creedmoor Hospital in 1967.

The famed opera and Broadway composer had a home in Whitestone.

The theater rock foursome that took the world by storm in the 1970’s played their first gig at the Coventry Club on Queens Boulevard in 1973.

Lead singer/guitarist Paul Stanley (b. Paul Eisen) grew up in Flushing and Bass player Gene Simmons (b. Chiam Whitz) practiced his licks in Jackson Heights.

Legend has it that the band, originally called "Wicked Lester," came up with the name Kiss while riding in a car on Queens Boulevard.

Some say that the band named themselves Kiss – a shortened version of Kissena Boulevard— after a favorite hang out spot on a Flushing Street.

If domination of the rock world followed by a marketing campaign that included comic books, dolls and even lunch boxes didn’t work out for the now equally famous and infamous Queens rockers, both may have had second careers to fall back on.

Paul Stanley could have decided to work at the furniture store his father once owned on Queens Boulevard and before spitting fire and fake blood, lizard tongued Gene Simmons was a New York City elementary school teacher.

Girls just want to have fun and that’s exactly what this girl from Ozone Park did when she won the 1985 Grammy Award for Best New Artist.

Ozone Park’s Cyndi Lauper and mom were just having fun when they celebrated the Grammy winner’s birthday at Yuraku Japanese Restaurant in Flushing.

Lauper holds an honorary high school diploma from Richmond Hill High School and her sister, who once ran for mayor of Phoenix, Arizona, is currently an acupuncturist in Glendale.

The wild -haired vocalist scored big hits in the 1980’s with "Time After Time," "She Bop" and "Girls Just Wanna
Have Fun."

The singer and actress, born Ethel Zimmerman, was a native of Astoria and worked on films at the movie studios there.

This Queens native pounded the skins on her drum kit for Hole during the Courtney Love-fronted grunge band’s last tour.

Before getting her start in on the Manhattan night club circuit and rising to "pop diva" status, the "Material Girl" lived in Corona and perfected her singing and stage skills at a Forest Hills dance club.

Before recording their first album and becoming heavy metal icons the original line-up of this band lived together in a modest apartment near Archer Avenue.

If you’ve heard the one-hit wonder "Cars" by Gary Neuman then you’ve heard a Moog.

The unique and hauntingly futuristic sounds of the Moog synthesizer were made popular by several 1980’s disco and new wave music hits. Robert Moog, the inventor of the namesake synthesizer piano, lived in Flushing and attended Queens College.

Hey Ho Let’s Go! The leather-clad foursome, whose speedy guitar driven songs gave birth to "punk rock," formed in Forest Hills in 1974 and the original members attended Forest Hills High School.

In their early days, the band would lug their equipment in plastic shopping bags aboard the subway to commute to the lower Manhattan night club CBGB’s. It was there where their blistering and furious 20-minute musical sets —sometimes culminating with band members destroying their guitars —earned them their first record contract.

The band immortalized their native borough in the songs "We’re a Happy Family" and "Rockaway Beach."

Half of the famous folk duo
Simon and Garfunkel, Paul Simon
attended P.S. 164 in Flushing and graduated from Forest Hills High School in the late 1950’s. After parting ways with musical partner and Forest Hills High classmate Art Garfunkel in 1971, Simon went on to have a lucrative solo career. Simon captured the spirit of his home borough in the lyrics of "Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard," which gives a nod to Corona.

Paul in his 1963 Queens College
yearbook photo.

This guitarist for the legendary rock band the Eagles once lived in Fresh Meadows.

STONES IN THEIR SHEA DAY:

Over the years Shea Stadium has played host to concerts featuring rock’s finest including the Beatles in the 1960’s and the Who, the Police and the Rolling Stones in the 1980’s.