John Lennon performs on the keyboard during "One To One", a charity concert to benefit mentally challenged children at Madison Square Garden, Aug. 30, 1972, New York. Greene County native Gary Van Scyoc was in the band that backed Lennon at the concert.

Gary Van Scyoc graduated from Waynesburg High School in 1964, just a few months after the Beatles exploded in America’s consciousness and made being a musician one of the coolest jobs around.

As “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” were blasting out of thousands of transistor radios, Van Scyoc had no way of imagining that in just a handful of years he’d be the one playing bass alongside John Lennon and not Paul McCartney, Lennon’s fellow Beatle and songwriting collaborator.

“It was just so cool to work with John,” Van Scyoc recalled during a recent phone conversation from his home in the Poconos. “He never told me one thing to play, I had total freedom.”

Van Scyoc worked with Lennon and Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, thanks to being a member of the New York band Elephant’s Memory. The group mixed radicalism and “a rough sound,” according to a review that appeared in The New York Times in July 1971. It was shortly after that review appeared that Lennon and Ono relocated to New York and immersed themselves in the cauldron of radical politics and avant-garde art that was bubbling in Greenwich Village. They saw Elephant’s Memory play at Max’s Kansas City, what was then one of New York’s hottest nightspots, and invited them to work with them.

Source: heraldstandard.com/Brad Hundt

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McCartney is an incredibly meticulous musician. He oversees every step of the making of his songs, and has done so since the early days of his songwriting partnership with John Lennon. Whenever he felt a movie didn't do their music justice, he wasn't shy to say so. The cast and crew working on the upcoming biopics have a difficult task on their hands, as their biggest inspiration might just be their biggest critic.
Paul McCartney Wasn't Happy With Previous Beatles Biopics

When it comes to having his life portrayed on screen, it makes sense that Paul McCartney would be protective. The Beatles' legacy has certainly exceeded any individual person, but that doesn't mean that the people involved aren't real humans who will be affected by any inaccuracies shown to the world. McCartney doesn't usually seem that concerned with the way he's perceived by the public. He's in his 80s, and for the past 60 years, he's been one of the most recognizable and revered musicians in the world. So, safe to say, he has thick skin.

"One of my annoyances about the film Backbeat is that they’ve actually taken my rock ‘n’ rollness off me," he complained. Not only did they wash him as a musician, but they also got things wrong about The Beatles' creative process. They credited John Lennon for things that McCartney actually did, maybe because they felt it fit him better, and that annoyed the bassist to no end, because he feels that it's now forever in the public's mind.

"They give John the song Long Tall Sally to sing and he never sang it in his life. But now it’s set in cement. It’s like the Buddy Holly and Glenn Miller stories. The Buddy Holly Story does not even mention Norman Petty, and The Glenn Miller Story is a sugarcoated version of his life. Now Backbeat has done the same thing to the story of The Beatles."
How Will The Upcoming Biopics Be Different?

Despite his past reluctance to the previous projects revising The Beatles' story, Paul McCartney has recently been getting more involved in new works of art about his band's legacy. In 2021, he worked alongside Peter Jackson to release The Beatles: Get Back, a three-part, 8-hour-long documentary made from the footage used to make the 1970 movie Let It Be. This project allowed him and Ringo Starr to not only set the record straight about what the making of that album was like, but also to share the last Beatles song, Now and Then, with the world.​​​​

Source: collider.com/Val Barone

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Originally, in the early days when they were yet to dominate the global music scene with record sales of 600 million, the group called themselves The Quarrymen, and even flirted with the name The Silver Beetles for a short while.

Their ultimate choice, The Beatles, was a witty homage to Buddy Holly's The Crickets, with an ingenious play on "beat," that hinted at the band's roots in beat music and the cultural Beat Generation.

But stick to the lore of The Beatles and you'll find John Lennon often spun a fantastical story about the origins of the name, claiming it came to him in an extraordinary vision where a man on a flaming pie declared, "You are Beatles with an A," leaving fans to wonder if it was genuine insight or Lennon's trademark wry humor.

Lennon, who died at the age of 40 in 1980, once reflected on the naming process, revealing, "I was looking for a name like The Crickets that meant two things, and from crickets I got to beetles."

He cleverly altered the spelling to BEA to give it a layered meaning, "And I changed the BEA, because 'beetles' didn't mean two things on its own. When you said it, people thought of crawly things; and when you read it, it was beat music."

Source: irishstar.com/Ellie Hook

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Just under six decades ago, on May 30, 1968, the Beatles went into the studio to begin recording their eponymous “White Album,” a double-album full of career-defining hits but one that did not come without its fair share of regrets from those involved, including producer George Martin and musicians Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. For as creative and inspired as the album was, the dynamics in the studio were fraught at best. The Fab Four was fast approaching the end.

Seemingly just as quickly as they burst onto the scene several years earlier, the Beatles seemed to be departing from their time as one of the greatest, most popular rock bands in the world in a similarly impressive blaze of glory. As for Martin’s regrets? Starr posed an interesting solution that was just as goofy and lighthearted as one might expect from the affable percussionist.
George Martin Regretted This Aspect Of The White Album

The Beatles’ 1968 “White Album” is a massive beast of a record. The double album release featured cuts like “Blackbird,” “Helter Skelter,” “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and many, many more. While not all 30 tracks would become the band’s most popular songs, it was a particularly impressive collection of writing styles, creative inspiration, and musical arrangements. But producer George Martin had his doubts about including that many tracks at one time.

“I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than a double,” he said in Anthology. “But they insisted. I think it could have been made fantastically good if it had been compressed a bit and condensed. A lot of people I know think it’s still the best album they made. I later learned that by recording all those songs, they were getting rid of their contact with EMI more quickly.”

Drummer Ringo Starr had a laughable solution to Martin’s qualms with the album: “I agree that we should have put it out as two separate albums,” Starr said. “The ‘White’ and ‘Whiter’ albums.” In a testament to the different wavelengths the band was operating on at the time, not everyone agreed that there was too much on the double record. (We’d wager a bet that you can guess which try-hard Beatle was okay with the lengthy tracklist.)

Source: americansongwriter.com/Melanie Davis

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On This Day, May 30, 1964…

The Beatles hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with their debut single, “Love Me Do.”

The track, written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, had the pair duetting on vocals. The song was recorded three different times, with different drummers. Original drummer Pete Best initially recorded it, and then it was rerecorded with his replacement, Ringo Starr. A third version featured session drummer Andy White, which was featured on The Beatles’ Please Please Me album.

In addition to the U.S., “Love Me Do” topped the chart in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.

Following “Love Me Do,” The Beatles went on to have 20 #1 hits, the last being 1970’s “The Long and Winding Road,” from their album Let It Be.

Source: everettpost.com

George Harrison was the baby of the Beatles. He was the youngest member and, as such, was victim to his bandmates’ “older brother” mentality. He was brought into the mix by Paul McCartney, who subsequently guided the younger musician on his journey to becoming a rock star. Harrison soon grew tired of McCartney’s constant reminders that he was older and more experienced. It led to the fracturing of their relationship and was one of the contributing factors in the Beatles’ breakup. Learn more about this conflict below.
The Main Conflict Within the Beatles, According to George Harrison

There were several conflicts within the Beatles, but the rift between Harrison and McCartney might have been the most consequential. As stated earlier, Harrison was always treated as someone who needed the mentorship of his older bandmates.

McCartney and John Lennon, tended to favor their own artistic decisions over that of the younger Harrison. Though there may have been several things that contributed to this dynamic, Harrison seemed to think it was in large part due to how McCartney and Lennon saw him–even from the earliest days of their career.

“Paul and I went to school together,” he added. “I got the feeling that, you know, everybody changes and sometimes people don’t want other people to change, or even if you do change, they won’t accept that you’ve changed. And they keep in their mind some other image of you, you know. Gandhi said, ‘Create and preserve the image of your choice.’ And so different people have different images of their friends or people they see.”
Harrison and Paul McCartney

While Lennon was also involved in Harrison’s creative strife with the Beatles, he pointed a finger at McCartney when talking about his biggest struggles with the band.

Source: americansongwriter.com/Alex Hopper

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