Rosanne Cash has been named the recipient of the “John Lennon Real Love Award,” an honor she will accept at the 38th Annual John Lennon Tribute concert November 30th in New York City.

Cash will perform several of her favorite Lennon and Beatles classics during the concert, which will also include guests Marc Cohn, Jesse Colin Young (the Youngbloods), Willie Nile, Scott Sharrard and Mark Erelli.

Non-profit organization Theatre Within presented its first tribute event for the late musician as a neighborhood gathering at their studio shortly after Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota apartment building in New York in December 1980. Proceeds from the tribute will support Theatre Within’s ongoing free workshops in creative expression and mindfulness, which use Lennon’s songs and message to encourage creativity and truth. The organization currently provides workshops through Gilda’s Club NYC, for children who have lost a parent to cancer, as well as adults in treatment and others impacted by cancer. The tribute concert is the only event of its kind worldwide sanctioned by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.

Source: Stephen L. Betts/rollingstone.com

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Ringo Starr is having a big moment. Pushing 80, the Beatle drummer shows no signs of slowing down. Thanks to the revelatory new Super Deluxe edition of the White Album, his legend is getting a boost. Fans can savor new dimensions to his playing on the 1968 masterpiece, in the definitive new mix from Giles Martin — finally, we can hear Ringo rock out on “Long, Long, Long” in all his glory. It proves what true fans have always known — he was the heartbeat of the Beatles.

But Ringo’s moving forward. The 78-year-old mocker who sang “Photograph” has a new coffee-table book of photos, Another Day in the Life. The book follows Ringo’s adventures around the world, dating back to his Fabs days — as he says, “photos by me and a few picked up along the way.” (Like the man says in A Hard Day’s Night, you can learn from books.) There’s a foreword from David Lynch, calling it “Ringoism in book form,” as well as Ringo’s own unique commentary, like when he reflects on the cover of Abbey Road: “We were sitting in the studio thinking, ‘We need a cover, let’s go to Hawaii! Let’s go to Egypt! Oh, sod it, let’s just walk across the road.’”

Source: Rob Sheffield/rollingstone.com

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“Hey Jude” remains the Beatles’ biggest-ever hit, the one that stayed at #1 for the longest. It’s also a document of the moment that the band finally started coming apart for good. And from at least one perspective, it’s a song about that fracture — one band member wishing a warm and only slightly premature farewell to his greatest collaborator.

In the spring of 1968, John Lennon separated from his wife Cynthia, leaving her for Yoko Ono. Paul McCartney felt bad for Julian, John’s five-year-old son. He went to visit Cynthia and Julian, to check in on them. And when he was on that trip, he came up with the idea for “Hey Jude,” thinking of it as “Hey Jules” at first. (He ultimately liked the name “Jude” better.) Julian didn’t learn until he was a teenager that the song was about him, but he also has memories of being closer with McCartney than he was with his own father.

So McCartney, by most accounts, wrote “Hey Jude” to comfort Julian. But John Lennon heard something else in the song. Years later in interviews, Lennon said that he thought the song was about him — that it was Paul giving him his blessing to go off with Ono and to leave the band behind him. For that matter, Paul McCartney had only just broken up with his longtime girlfriend Jane Asher and taken up instead with his future wife Linda Eastman. So maybe he was singing the song to himself.

Source: Tom Breihan /stereogum.com

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You don’t have to be a fan of the Beatles to appreciate their brilliance.

Over their relatively short career as the fab four from Liverpool, the Beatles recorded 206 original compositions across several different albums. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how many albums sold, but data suggest it’s somewhere between 272 million and 600 million.

More recently the Beatles celebrated the 50th anniversary of the so-called “White Album” (actually knowns as The Beatles) by remastering the originals and releasing a treasure trove of outtakes & previously unheard versions in a new box set.

As I listened to the new, sonically superior versions of classic songs like Back in the U.S.S.R, Blackbird, and Dear Prudence, I found myself clamoring for the other goodies nested in the box set package.

As part of the 50th-anniversary celebration, the new “White Album” comes with early recordings logged from George Harrison’s home. During the mid-to-late 1960’s, Harrison lived in the village of Esher, a part of Surrey and southwest of London. Before going into the famous Abbey Road Studios to record the “White Album,” the Beatles spent time at Harrison’s home going through their material to develop early-stage arrangements. All of it was recorded on a four-track recorder.

Source: Dan Pontefract/forbes.com

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A 59-year-old man was charged in Germany on Monday on suspicion of trying to sell stolen diaries and other items that had belonged to the late Beatle John Lennon.

The suspect, identified by the Berlin prosecutors’ office only as Erhan G., in 2014 commissioned an auction house in Berlin to sell the items, receiving an upfront payment of €785,000 (US$884,000), the office said in a statement.

Glasses from the estate of John Lennon are pictured during a press conference in Berlin. The glasses were among items stolen from Lennon's widow Yoko Ono in New York in 2006. Photo: Agence France-Presse

The items, which were stolen from Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono in 2006 and ended up in Berlin, also included letters, a recording of a Beatles concert and a pair of Lennon’s glasses.

Among them was Lennon’s last diary which ended on December 8, 1980, the day he was shot and killed in New York.
It contained the entry that on that morning Lennon and Ono had an appointment with photographer Annie Leibovitz. The resulting portrait of a naked Lennon curled up around Ono on their bed ran on the January, 1981 cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

Source: scmp.com

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Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton is my eighth rock biography since Shout! The True Story of the Beatles in 1981. It left me feeling more than ever that writing books about such people is no job for a grownup and determined never to be talked into another one.

I had intended Shout! to stand alone, but it started a chain reaction that has kept me chained ever since, with only temporary breaks for novels, short stories, plays, TV documentaries, musicals and journalism.

Researching the Beatles provided an irresistible flying start to a biography of the Rolling Stones, whose story was so closely bound up with theirs. Afterwards, it was almost obligatory to “do” Buddy Holly, who established the rock band concept with the Crickets, and first inspired John Lennon and Paul McCartney to try songwriting, as they in turn inspired Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and hundreds of other musically unschooled young Brits. Then there was no escaping Elton John, who was discovered by the Beatles’ music publisher, Dick James, and took to wearing outsize spectacles like Holly although his eyesight was normal.

Source: Philip Norman/theguardian.com

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