Beatles News
Among Beatles connoisseurs, it’s fair game to claim anything from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road as one’s favorite album. But even within that span of the catalog, a hierarchy of acclaim exists, and that hierarchy has been rearranged over the decades. The ecstatic reception of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band lasted at least a decade. By the turn of the nineteen-eighties, its immediate predecessor Revolver had joined it at the top spot of critical regard; twenty years after that, Abbey Road had displaced Sgt. Pepper. Now, a full 60 years after it first came out, Revolver is the single Beatles album held in the highest esteem — which, naturally, makes it a serious contender for the greatest album ever recorded.
In his new video above, music YouTuber David Hartley explains what makes Revolver so beloved by recounting the history of its production. As in his previous Beatles videos, he draws on the library of studio outtakes that make audible the evolution of each song, as well as on contemporary interviews with the Beatles and their collaborators.
Among his most illuminating sources is engineer Geoff Emerick’s memoir Here, There, and Everywhere — titled, incidentally after one of the songs on this very album, the challenge of whose recording he took on at just twenty years old. In the event, his youth proved an asset, granting him as it did the willingness not just to execute the Beatles’ “far-out” sonic ideas, but also to violate EMI Studios’ policies against experimental use of its hardware in the process.
Indeed, if it was possible in 1966, it seems to have been tried in the making of Revolver. As Hartley reveals, “I’m Only Sleeping” once featured a vibraphone, “Yellow Submarine” once began with a spoken-word intro, and “And Your Bird Can Sing” once kept getting interrupted by uncontrollable and quite possibly substance-induced laughter. Neither these nor any of the album’s other now-familiar, much-scrutinized songs took straight paths to their final forms. Into a runtime of only 35 minutes, the Beatles managed to put everything from “a children’s singalong song” to “a song complaining about all the money they were paying in taxes” to “a song about loneliness” to “a song about laziness” — while also transmitting the “great feeling of joy” for which their oeuvre is known.
Source: openculture.com/Colin Marshall
Hindsight makes it seem like The Beatles were a nonstop success in their early days. But it took them a while to make the leap across the pond. Though they had mounting success back home in England, record labels and record shops struggled to settle into the idea of The Fab Four. That is, until one song completely turned their heads. Learn more about the song that made America fall in love with The Beatles below.
Prior to The Beatles’ now-famous entrance into the American rock scene, they were a fledgling English band with a couple of top-selling songs. Both “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You” did well in their home market. But not even a favor called in from George Martin could get those songs on shelves in America.
“I would send them to my friends in America at Capitol Records, and say ‘This group is fantastic, you’ve got to issue them and sell them in the States,’” Martin once said in the notes of The Anthology Collection. “Each time the head of Capitol Records would turn it down and deny it, and say ‘Sorry, we know our market better than you do. We don’t think they’re any good.”’
This put a blockade on the band’s upward trajectory. They may have been greeted with deafening screams in England, but America was untouchable. The band didn’t want to go overseas to a middling reaction. According to Paul McCartney, they wanted to wait until they had traction to avoid the fate of many other English bands before them.
Source: americansongwriter.com//Alex Hopper
By the time the Beatles broke up in late 1969, they had recorded and released more than 200 songs — most of them originals — and left dozens more in the vault. While the bulk of those unissued tracks ranged from rough demos to jams, several were completed recordings that they rejected for one reason or another.
Among them was the first song written for drummer Ringo Starr: “If You’ve Got Trouble.” Composed by John Lennon for inclusion on 1965’s Help!, the tune was a heavy riff-rocker built on a modified three-chord blues progression.
From the start of the Beatles’ recording career, Starr was given a vocal spot on each of their albums (except for 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night) in order to please his fan base. Because he wasn’t a songwriter in the group’s early years, he sang either covers — “Boys,” on 1963’s Please Please Me, and “Honey Don’t” on 1964’s Beatles for Sale — or Lennon and McCartney cast-offs like “I Wanna Be Your Man,” from 1963’s With the Beatles.
“If You’ve Got Trouble” falls into the second category. According to Ray Coleman, the former editor-in-chief of Melody Maker, Lennon knew it was not his finest work.
“I wrote it. It's the funniest thing I've ever done,” Lennon told Coleman, who attended the recording session for the track on February 18, 1965, and wrote about it for the magazine's February 27 issue,. “Listen to the words,” Lennon said, laughing. “I didn't expect anybody to want to record it.”
Despite Lennon’s disregard for the tune, the Beatles put a fair amount of effort into the recording. The basic track — drums, bass guitar and rhythm guitar, played by George Harrison on one of his Gretsch electrics, according to producer George Martin’s notes — is energetic and polished. As Coleman reported, McCartney was happy with the vibe the group was creating.
Source: guitarplayer.com/Christopher Scapelliti
The social hierarchy of The Beatles formed as most groups do: the oldest is the leader. As the oldest founding member of The Beatles (save the drummer) and the one who recruited Paul McCartney, who then recruited George Harrison, the order of responsibility naturally fell to Lennon first. When the band was young and its members barely out of their teen years, Lennon’s quick, sharp wit pushed him to the front of the pack, both professionally and creatively speaking.
But as the band and its players matured, so, too, did the hierarchy. After so many hours of playing together, The Beatles had all honed in on their individual talents. They could stand alone on their instrument just as easily as they could work together in an ensemble, and the first album to show off this evolution with significant clarity was Revolver.
Released in 1966, Revolver features classic Beatles cuts like “Eleanor Rigby”, “Yellow Submarine”, “Got To Get You Into My Life”, and “Taxman”. Revolver shared a similar tracklist to earlier albums, with a majority of the tracklist being Lennon-McCartney compositions. What made the band’s seventh studio album so unique is that the songs that John Lennon didn’t write were becoming more and more successful.
Source: American Songwriter
The upcoming Beatles film is headed to Abbey Road. Deadline reports director Sam Mendes’ upcoming films, called The Beatles – A Four Film Cinematic Event, are taking to the iconic street in London to film a scene this summer. According to the outlet, the scene “involves approximately 80 extras and some vintage vehicles.” The movies star Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr and Harris Dickinson as John Lennon …
Source: everettpost.com/ABC News
For Beatles fans, the forthcoming expanded edition of Rubber Soul promises a wealth of new discoveries, from revealing session outtakes to the previously unheard John Lennon composition “Little Girl.” But the most important story surrounding the album isn't what listeners will hear in the vault recordings — it's what happened inside Abbey Road Studio Two during the autumn of 1965.
The sessions marked the moment when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr stopped accepting the technical limitations imposed by EMI Studios. Instead, they began demanding that the recording process itself become part of their creative vision—a philosophy that would lead directly to Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
By late 1965, the Beatles had become students of sound. Between tours, they were listening obsessively to records coming from America. Motown singles leaped from radio speakers with deep bass and crisp percussion. The Byrds’ jangling Rickenbackers electric guitars shimmered with remarkable brilliance. Compared with these productions, the Beatles felt their own records reflected EMI’s conservative engineering philosophy more than the sound they heard in their heads.
Source: guitarplayer.com/Christopher Scapelliti
An Antiques Roadshow guest was left stunned by the huge worth of an 'iconic' door number from John Lennon's childhood home. An Antiques Roadshow visitor was left stunned to discover that an item from John Lennon's childhood home was worth £8,000. The BBC show filmed in Sefton Park Palm House, Liverpool, with a repeat episode broadcast on Sunday, 26 July. One visitor brought an item from their uncle's home, that had actually originally been part of The Beatles star's childhood house.
According to reports, Lennon - who died in 1980 at the age of 40 after being shot outside his New York City apartment building - reportedly lived until the age of five in the Wavertree suburb in Liverpool, before living with his aunt and uncle at 251 Menlove Avenue.
The property is now a preserved site, and saw Lennon live there from 1945 until 1963.
We use your sign-up to provide content in ways you've consented to and improve our understanding of you. This may include adverts from us and third parties based on our knowledge of you. More info
Antiques Roadshow expert Raj Bisram met the guest on the show, who had brought along the door number from Lennon's childhood residence. As the audience expressed their astonishment, the visitor revealed: "In 1965, when John Lennon, the Lennon family decided to sell their home, a couple bought it and they moved in for just a couple of months and they sold it and moved on.
"The next couple that bought it, they didn't tell them that it was John Lennon's house, so they moved in, were having breakfast one morning, opened the curtains and there were five people in the garden taking photographs.
"That was when they realised they lived in John Lennon's house. They didn't like The Beatles very much, and they lived there for about 36 years, chasing people out of their garden, but the interesting thing about that story for me is that the person that lived there was my uncle," reports the Express.
Raj responded: "That's fantastic, that's provenance taken care of." The visitor went on: "I was one of the few Beatles fans that got into the house for about 36 years. When he was making changes to the gate, he gave me the old number plate."
Source: liverpoolecho.co.uk/Meghna Amin
Ringo Starr has long spoken about his special bond with fellow former Beatle George Harrison, which remained right until the end of the latter's life. In fact, as Starr relayed in the 2011 documentary "George Harrison: Living in the Material World," his friend's last words to him were a very touching offer.
Fans of the Beatles will likely know that Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001. It was a difficult time for Starr, whose daughter, Lee Starkey, was also going through a major health scare and was undergoing surgery in Boston to have a brain tumor removed. Ahead of the surgery and shortly before Harrison's death, Starr had gone to see his bandmate, who was already bedbound at that point, in Switzerland. "I said, 'Well, you know, I've got to go. I've got to go to Boston," Starr recalled telling Harrison (via Songsong). "He goes — it's the last words I heard him say, actually — and he said, 'Do you want me to come with you?'" Starr continued, voice breaking as he recounted the story. Starr went on to point out that it was a testament to Harrison's character, gushing, "That's the incredible side of George."
Thankfully, Lee, who is Starr's only daughter (he also has sons Zak and Jason Starkey), did survive her operation, and though she tends to keep a low profile, she and her children are said to be close with Starr. Speaking of Starr, he's continued to draw attention to Harrison's legacy, shouting out his late friend's daughter's book of poems in his honor, "Came the Lightening: Twenty Poems for George," and sharing sweet throwbacks to Instagram. What's more, we have no doubts Harrison would have been thrilled that his team shouted out Starr being honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on his website back in 2010. Gone, but always present.
Source: yahoo.com/Tessa Hayley Hellberg
On this day 52 years ago, what many consider the greatest solo album released by a member of The Beatles, including John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, reached No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart.
July 27 marks an important day in music history for many reasons. Cass Elliott released her first solo single, Dream a Little Dream of Me, in 1968. John Denver's song Annie's Song hit No. 1 in the U.S. And the Spice Girls earned their first No. 1 single in the UK with Wannabe.
And on July 27, 1974, Paul McCartney and the Wings' classic album, Band on the Run, hit No. 1 on the UK Album Charts for the first time. It had hit No. 1 in the U.S. earlier that year in April.
Released on Dec. 5 in the United States and Dec. 7 in the United Kingdom, Band on the Run included major hits such as Jet, Band on the Run and Helen Wheels. It also stayed atop the UK charts for seven consecutive weeks, and four consecutive in the USA.
Band on the Run would go on to be nominated for the Album of the Year Award at the 1977 Grammy Awards, while winning the Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo Group or Chorus. Band on the Run Considered the 'Best Beatles Solo Album'
Source: Yahoo.com/Chris Phelps
In George Martin, the Beatles had a producer who excelled at thinking outside the box. Martin‘s innovative studio techniques and openness to new ideas made him the ideal producer for a group as wildly creative as the Beatles. But he was only human, and like most people he preferred to wrap up the workday at a reasonable hour.
That didn‘t always sit well with the Beatles, particularly in their later years, when recording sessions frequently carried over past midnight..
“Some of the people here — the engineer, for instance — would always be trying to go home at 5:30, and we'd be trying to make history,” George Harrison says in the 1991 Beatles Anthology documentary as he, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr sit in Abbey Road Studios.
The Beatles certainly knew how to fight fatigue. When performing night-long sets in Hamburg in the early 1960s, they‘d take Preludin, an appetite suppressant and stimulant with effects similar to amphetamines — a.k.a. speed, or uppers — to help them stay awake.
Which is how they managed to get Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick to work after hours on one particular night in the late 1960s: by lacing a pot of tea — prepared by their roadie, Mal Evans — with speed. “Mal had this big teapot,” Harrison explained. “It was a big aluminum teapot, and I remember one specific incident where he made a pot of tea, and we doused the tea with uppers.”
Evans proceeded to take cups of tea up to the control booth overlooking the studio. "‘Cause they were asking, ‘Can we go home now?’” Harrison continues. “‘No, you can’t, you bastard. Have a cup of tea!’
“And then they were up there until 11 o‘clock at night.” “Yeah, and then they didn’t want to go home,” McCartney adds. “They wouldn‘t let us leave.”
It was only when the 1995 documentary first aired that Martin learned about the episode. Ironically, Harrison and John Lennon's first time taking LSD came after a dentist friend spiked their coffee.
It wasn‘t all fun and games, though. McCartney's love of pot got him busted in Japan. And American singer-songwriter James Taylor — who signed to the Beatles' Apple label in 1968 — claimed his heroin use influenced Lennon's decision to try the drug. He subsequently became addicted.
Source: guitarplayer.com/Phil Weller
