Beatles News
Ringo Starr has a very unique place in The Beatles’ career. While most listeners know that the band’s sound wouldn’t have been what it is without Starr’s singular playing, his non-flashy, simple style keeps him from the spotlight at times.
Starr’s playing is characterized by impeccable timing. He always knew exactly what to play for each song, whether a simple blues-rock number or a psychedelic haze. Even Starr himself recognizes his timing. He once credited it as the thing he’s most proud of from his time with the group.
Starr was brought on after the other three members had been established, but The Beatles didn’t become The Beatles until Starr joined their ranks. Right from the start, it was clear that Starr’s timing was going to completely reshape the group’s career.
“Yeah, and I’ve got a lot of footage of George,” Starr once said. “He had that great line, he said, ‘You know, and the Beatles did this,’ and somebody said to him, ‘Did you have a click track?’ He said, ‘Yes, we did. Ringo, his name was.’”
Starr’s Timing
According to Starr, there is no trick to his signature timing. Instead, it’s just innately inside the iconic drummer. His timing can’t be repeated. He’s a once-in-a-generation talent.
“God gave me just great time,” Starr admitted in the same interview. “Jeff Lynne—they did a documentary on him. Jeff would call me over, ‘Could you play on this track?’ because we live close, and I’d go over, and he’d say, ‘Oh, just let me get the click.’ I said, ‘Jeff, I am the da** click.”
“It’s been asked a million times,” he continued. “I don’t know how I got to [play like] that. It just happened. And a lot of the way I play [it] just happens. I’ll keep the time and play rock or shuffle or whatever, and then I’ll come in wherever I come in, because you feel it from your heart.”
Source: Alex Hopper/americansongwriter.com
Tehuan Harris is a news and features journalist at Collider, reporting and writing about all things music and reality TV (sometimes). She is a talented journalist and a natural storyteller who writes with curiosity and interest. After graduating from university, she jumped straight into journalism, with one goal in mind: to tell stories that matter.
Only the Fab Four saw the breakup coming, as tensions had been brewing for a while. However, the show must go on, as all four members of The Beatles pursued solo careers. George Harrison’s first stop was at the studio with Bob Dylan, as he helped him record “If Not for You,” a love song for Dylan’s wife, Sara, before their turbulent divorce.
Although Dylan was friendly with The Beatles, which led the four-piece band to record “I’m a Loser” inspired by the man himself, Dylan was closer to Harrison than to any other member. “If Not for You” helped build a friendship that no one in music can replicate, and the pair came together in a supergroup called The Travelling Wilburys. However, the friendship would not last as long as it should, as Harrison would soon succumb to cancer in 2001.
Harrison grabbed the opportunity to work with the “Like a Rolling Stone” singer almost immediately after he went solo. In fact, news of their collaboration created a buzz in the media while the Beatlemania slowly died down, and fans grieved the Fab Four’s separation. Dylan first recorded the song in March 1970, a month before the Beatles’ breakup hit the tabloids. It was recorded during the Self Portrait sessions, though the song was never meant to be for the album.
Source: Teguan Harris/collider.com
Of the four distinct personalities that comprised The Beatles, the one largely regarded as the most clean-cut, straight-laced, and the kind of guy you’d be willing to introduce to your parents was the “cute” one, Sir Paul McCartney. Yet, in an ironic twist of events, McCartney was the first Beatle to spend a significant time in jail over drug possession. Of course, it wasn’t the charge that was remarkable—everyone but Ringo Starr had already had run-ins with the police over drugs by 1980. But Macca was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
More specifically, the musical legend behind hits like “Blackbird”, “Helter Skelter”, and “Yesterday” was at the Tokyo International Airport while on tour with his band Wings. The musicians had recently been in the States, and while there, McCartney had amassed an, er, significant collection of marijuana. Not wanting to waste his stash, McCartney quickly threw it into his carry-on luggage and went through airport security.
As McCartney described it, “When the fellow pulled it out of the suitcase, he looked more embarrassed than me,” per Performing Songwriter. “I think he just wanted to put it back in and forget the whole thing, you know. But there it was.” And indeed, there it was.
Paul McCartney Spent Just Over a Week in a Tokyo Prison
While marijuana certainly wasn’t legal in the United States in 1980, legal punishment for possession was much more lax in the U.S. than in Japan. Airport security officials arrested McCartney on the spot and escorted him to the Drug Supervisory Center for interrogation. From there, police took McCartney to the Tokyo Narcotics Detention Center, where he was given the descriptor “Inmate No. 22.” Japanese drug laws meant that McCartney was facing up to seven years of hard labor. He managed to get out in nine days on good behavior (and super-mega-rockstar status), though he was banned from Japan for years.
Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com
McCartney's oldest child, Heather Louise McCartney, was born to Linda and her then-husband Joseph Melville See Jr., on Dec. 31, 1962, in Tucson, Ariz. By the time she was 3, however, Heather's parents had divorced.
In 1967, Linda and McCartney met. The couple got married on March 2, 1969, and McCartney officially adopted Heather around the same time. Like her parents, Heather has pursued a career in the creative arts. She studied printing at the Photographers' Workshop in Covent Garden, London, later winning the Young Black and White Printer of the Year award.
She then studied pottery and design in college and became an established potter. She eventually launched her own line of houseware products, called Heather McCartney Designs. In 1999, McCartney traveled to Atlanta to support the launch of Heather's brand, marking his first public appearance in the United States since Linda's death the previous year. "I'm happy to be here," he told Entertainment Tonight. "She's a lovely girl and I'm very proud of her."
When asked by the outlet who her biggest inspirations were, Heather answered, "My mom and dad. My brother and sisters, completely."
Aside from appearances in the documentaries The Beatles: Get Back and Let It Be when she was little, Heather has largely stayed out of the public eye. McCartney and Linda's first child together, Mary Anna McCartney, was born in London on Aug. 28, 1969.
Mary followed in her mother's footsteps and became a photographer. In an interview with journalist Alain Elkann, Mary revealed that she fell in love with photography at a young age, having been introduced to it by her mom.
Source: Nicole Briese/people.com
Fans of The Beatles are about to get a new look at the band from the point of view of George Harrison.
Random House is set to release the new book The Third Eye: Early Photographs in October, described as “the first ever collection of George Harrison’s personal photos taken between 1963 and 1970.”
The book will feature over 200 color and black-and-white images capturing the rise of The Beatles. The images, curated by Harrison’s widow, Olivia Harrison, were taken from the rocker’s personal photos and 8mm film stills.
According to the description, the photos give fans an “inside look at the human beings behind the Beatles, trying to hold onto themselves-and enjoy themselves-while standing at the center of the storm.”
The book will include essays by Olivia, as well as authors Colm Tóibín and George Saunders, and the photos will feature commentary, including never-before-seen quotes from George.
The Third Eye: Early Photographs will be released Oct. 6 in the U.S. and is available for preorder now. There will also be a deluxe edition coming later in the fall.
Source: Everett Post
The train from London cut through the verdant English countryside like a dreamy reverie. Tidy suburbs gave way to rolling hills until I was deposited in East Sussex, the enclave along the English Channel where Paul McCartney maintains a 160-acre estate and neighboring recording studio. The landscape outside looked like Hobbiton: sheep and hares dotting the meadows, a Dutch windmill towering overhead.
When Sir Paul arrived, he was dressed entirely in black, looking spry and sunny. He guided me to an upstairs lounge, where we settled on a couch, a plate of chocolate chip cookies between us. For the next hour and 20 minutes, it was just Paul and me.
Man on the Run, a new documentary about McCartney’s formation of Wings in the 1970s, arrives on Prime Video February 27. Directed by Morgan Neville, it is another in a series of McCartney-approved films that burnish not only the Beatles’ legacy, but also his own. The occasion of the film—and Jann Wenner’s recent 80th birthday—is an opportune time to publish the full and unexpurgated interview I conducted with McCartney for Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, only a fraction of which made it into the book. The interview is an exegesis on McCartney’s relationship with Rolling Stone and the underground press of the 1960s, but also a deep dive into Beatles history—the breakup; the legal debacles that tore the band apart; Paul’s admiration and skepticism of Yoko Ono; his rocky relationship with John Lennon in the post-Beatles years; and the duo’s eventual reconciliation in Santa Monica in 1974.
On March 25, 2015, I’d flown to England with low expectations, figuring a rock-and-roll lion of McCartney’s stature would be overly diplomatic. Instead he was candid, freewheeling, and even pointed, blaming Rolling Stone and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for crafting a revisionist history of the Beatles that cast him as the perennial also-ran to Lennon, whom the magazine venerated after his 1980 assassination—transforming Lennon into “the James Dean character,” says McCartney. Looking back, it was an opening salvo in Paul’s decade-long campaign to establish himself in popular memory as the co-equal to Lennon—foreshadowing Peter Jackson’s epic Get Back documentary and the many books, films, and exhibits that McCartney has since produced. In the interview—which Vanity Fair has published in two parts—McCartney was keen to separate myth from fact, taking issue with biopics of the band and even published histories, including the work of the foremost Beatles scholar, Mark Lewisohn. “It’s interesting because I’m a fact, not a myth,” he told me. “For me, this is fact.”
Source: vanityfair.com/Joe Hagan
George Harrison didn’t need the Beatles to prove himself. But according to his closest collaborators, he still needed a band.
In the aftermath of the group’s breakup, Harrison appeared to adapt to solo life more naturally than any of his former bandmates. He was the first to release a solo album, 1968’s Wonderwall Music, and when the group finally dissolved, he surged creatively. His 1970 triple album, All Things Must Pass, was both a commercial triumph and a personal vindication, proving that the guitarist long overshadowed by Lennon and McCartney had a world-class voice of his own.
Yet even at the height of that success, Harrison never fully embraced being a solo artist.
Instead, fate — and friendship — would pull him back into a band setting, alongside Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne in the Traveling Wilburys. Speaking to Uncut in 2007, Harrison’s widow Olivia said the supergroup restored something he’d been missing since the Beatles’ collapse.
Every night, as we were relaxing with a few drinks, George and I had the same conversation: ‘We could have a group, you know?’ ‘Yeah, we could.’”
— Jeff Lynne
“George had those intense moments in his career when it was absolute bedlam,” she said (via Guitar.com), referring to periods including his turbulent final years in the Beatles and his personal upheaval involving Eric Clapton. “So there were times when he craved solitude, but he also loved being with friends.”
Lynne saw that conflict firsthand while producing Harrison’s 1987 comeback album, Cloud Nine. All the latest guitar news, interviews, lessons, reviews, deals and more, direct to your inbox!
“We were three-quarters of the way through Cloud Nine, and every night, as we were relaxing with a few drinks after mixing a big epic or whatever, George and I had the same conversation,” Lynne recalled. “‘We could have a group, you know?’ ‘Yeah, we could.’
“He didn’t like the idea of being a solo guy — that’s what he told me. He was never comfortable with it. He wanted a group, and, of course, George could do anything he wanted.”
Harrison’s explosive burst of creativity in 1970 suddenly makes more sense in that light. All Things Must Pass wasn’t just artistic release — it was backlog, as years of suppressed songs were finally given oxygen. But as the decades passed, his output slowed. He released six albums in the 1970s, but only three in the 1980s. Cloud Nine was his first in five years.
Source: guitarplayer.com/Phil Weller
John Lennon was known to be somewhat cynical from time to time, but especially when it came to much of his own music. The songwriter racked up an impressive 22 No. 1 hits and has seven Grammy awards. However, it seems like he always had a tendency to be his own worst critic. Here are some songs that John Lennon played a part in writing, which he would later express he wasn’t the biggest fan of.
“Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”
This one might surprise some Beatles fans, as it is one of the most referenced off their 1967 album. However, unsurprisingly, Lennon was not a fan, at least of the production. However, he still did a version with Elton John in 1975, which got him to the top of the Billboard charts. “I heard ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ last night,” he said in 1980. “It’s abysmal, you know? The track is just terrible. I mean, it is a great track, a great song, but it isn’t a great track because it wasn’t made right. You know what I mean?”
“It’s Only Love”
This song was recorded in 1965 for The Beatles’ Help! album, one side of which was written for a movie of the same name. “It’s Only Love” was one of the songs on Help!‘s B side, so it wasn’t used in the film. Honestly, it’s probably better it wasn’t, because I’m sure Lennon would have had something to say about it. For Lennon, it was the lyrics that he couldn’t stand. “‘It’s Only Love’ is mine,” he said in a 1980 interview. “I always thought it was a lousy song. The lyrics were abysmal. I always hated that song.” He would even call the lyrics a big regret of his because he found them embarrassing to sing.
“Run For Your Life”
Alright, last but not least (in our eyes, anyway), we have “Run For Your Life”. An Elvis Presley fan himself, Lennon actually wrote this one after being inspired by a line from Presley’s song, “Baby, Let’s Play House”. He even told Rolling Stone that he “never liked ‘Run for Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off,” referencing the Elvis tune. He would later continue to bash the song, calling it his “least favorite” Beatles tune and a “throwaway track.” Apparently though, the track, which was the first recorded for 1965’s Rubber Soul, was a favorite of fellow Beatle George Harrison’s.
Source: Kat Caudill/americansongwriter.com
Paul McCartney opens up about mending fences with John Lennon before the star's 1980 death. McCartney says making up with Lennon is "one of the great blessings in my life". He talks about their bond in the new documentary Paul McCartney: Man on the Run.
Paul McCartney is forever grateful that he and John Lennon gave peace a chance. The legendary musician and his late bandmate had a bond so tight they were like brothers — but after the Beatles’ breakup in 1970, their friendship frayed.
In the new documentary Paul McCartney: Man on the Run, McCartney says he’s glad that he and Lennon were able to set aside their differences before the “Imagine” singer’s tragic murder on Dec. 8, 1980. “One of the great blessings in my life is that we made up. It’s beautiful and it’s sad at the same time,” says McCartney, 83. “You know, we loved each other all our lives.”
McCartney and Lennon first met as Liverpool lads, and went on to find international fame and success as members of the Beatles alongside George Harrison and Ringo Starr. But their relationship soured as the band broke up in 1970, and things culminated in a lawsuit McCartney filed against his bandmates after taking issue with manager Allen Klein and the way he was handling their finances.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney in New York City in 1968.
A 1971 diss track from Lennon called “How Do You Sleep?” added further salt into the wound, and the two grew apart. In Man on the Run, McCartney talks about finally mending fences with Lennon before his death, and even recalls a visit to Lennon’s New York City apartment with wife Linda.
Together, they watched Saturday Night Live as creator Lorne Michaels offered them a good chunk of change to head on down to Studio 8H for an impromptu Beatles reunion. “We got kind of excited. We just go down, we show up, hey! But it was like, why? It’d be great for them. Would it be great for us? We’ve come full circle and now we’re off on another journey,” he recalls in the film. “So we just decided to just have another cup of tea and forget the whole idea.”
McCartney only briefly addresses Lennon’s death in the film, saying that “time can take the edge off” as his daughter and Lennon’s son discuss his reaction to losing the musician. Lennon’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, adds that the pair “had a once-in-a-millennium chemistry that I don’t think we’re likely to see again.”
Man on the Run, which hits Prime Video on Feb. 27 in an intimate look at McCartney’s post-Beatles life in the 1970s, from his family life in Scotland to his decision to form and tour with Wings. The film, directed by Morgan Neville, features interviews with McCartney, Linda, their daughters and Wings band members.
Source: Rachel DeSantis/people.com
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr of the Beatles started out in Liverpool, England, but it wasn’t long before the band took the entire world by storm. As the group ascended to superstardom, the famed foursome expanded their horizons and put down roots around the UK and beyond.
The group’s 1964 song “I’ll Follow the Sun” is “a ‘Leaving of Liverpool’ song,” McCartney explained in his 2021 book The Lyrics. “I’m leaving this rainy northern town for someplace where more is happening.” Once they did leave, the band's rise to fame was stratospheric. Of course, it wasn’t all massive crowds and wild concerts; the four led quieter lives in their time at home, where they penned and practiced some of their greatest hits. To provide a peek behind the curtain into their private worlds, we’ve rounded up some domestic snapshots of the iconic musicians below.
Harrison spent the first six years of his life at 12 Arnold Grove in Wavertree, Liverpool, before the family moved into a council house (a form of British public housing) at 25 Upton Green in Speke. The three-bedroom home, as seen in this 1955 photograph of Harrison at age 12, served as a frequent rehearsal spot for the band, who then called themselves the Quarrymen. Because the dwelling was much larger than the terraced house he spent his early days in, the young Harrison “ran around and round it all that first day” as his family settled in, according to biographer Hunter Davies.
Source: Michael Gioia, Michelle Duncan/architecturaldigest.com
