Beatles News
An open letter John Lennon wrote to Cynthia has been unearthed after 41 years
In the original letter, which is titled 'an open letter to Cynthia Twist' and is dated November 15, 1976, the former Beatle said Cynthia had an 'impaired' memory of their marriage.
He claimed their relationship was over long before Yoko Ono arrived on the scene and accused her of double standards for wishing to get away from her past with the Beatle, yet was happy to speak about it to magazines.
Lennon sent the letter to a US weekly magazine for them to publish with the request that it is 'printed without any edits.
I think it only fair to me and your readers to present my side of the story'.
He wrote it in response to an article Cynthia had published in an English women's magazine earlier that year.
Source: Express.co.uk
The Beatles, the most popular and innovative rock group of their era — or any era — released their album Revolver 51 years ago this week. Though the album’s significance was largely overlooked at the time, the work is now widely thought of as even better than The Beatles’ acknowledged classic released a year later, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.
The 14-track Revolver was released in the United Kingdom on August 5, 1966, after recording sessions that lasted from April 6 to June 21 of that year. But that two and a half month period was easily eclipsed by the recording sessions for Sgt. Pepper, which began on November 24 of the same year but didn’t wrap up until April 21 of 1967. Pepper became the first Beatles album released in the United States in a version identical to its U.K. release. But when Revolver hit stores in the United States on August 8, 1966, the American version contained only 11 tracks.
Source: inquisitr.com
Few days seem to me as compelling as those summer days when storms breed in the great sagelands to our south.
The coming of a thunderstorm creates an aura of anticipation unique among weather phenomena, a curious mixture of dread, lest the storm unleash a deadly lightning bolt, and optimism, that it might cool the fetid air and water the garden besides.
I track the cells in the most modern of ways, by checking the latest Doppler radar on my smartphone.
And yet I also brace for storms the way humans have done for millennia.
I wait. And watch. And listen.
I like nothing so much as sitting in a chair in my yard, watching the clouds clog the southern horizon, starting as individual cottony puffs that coalesce into a curtain of steel gray, like the bow of a battleship.
I’m fascinated by how the air becomes still and somehow heavy in the minutes before the storm breaks, a sort of pregnant pause when the light turns a peculiar shade of pale yellow-green and the thunder, still distant, echoes with the malevolence of an unseen artillery battle.
Source:Baker City Herald
Bruce Sugar says when you're in the studio with Ringo, it's all about "acting naturally"
Bruce Sugar, Ringo Starr's longtime recording engineer, is very enthusiastic about the Beatle's forthcoming album, Give More Love, which will be released Sept. 15. “We're real happy with it. Everyone who's heard it can't wait till it's put out there in the universe.”
The album has 10 main tracks and four additional bonus tracks that are new versions of old Ringo songs, including a version of “Back Off Boogaloo” that was assembled from an old recently rediscovered tape. And as always, the album has an assortment of distinguished names playing on various tracks, including fellow Beatle Paul McCartney, Ringo's brother-in-law Joe Walsh, Edgar Winter, Peter Frampton, Nathan East, Don Was, Jeff Lynne, Timothy B. Schmit, and current Ringo All-Starrs Steve Lukather, Richard Page, Gregg Bissonette, among others, along with Sugar himself. He says the plans for the new album started coming together just after his last one, Postcards From Paradise, was released.
Source: Steve Marinucci
A gay Jewish man living in 1960s England, Brian Epstein was a double outsider, all the more out of place with his natty attire and crisp diction as he ran his record store and sought affection in dangerous, degrading ways. But in November 1961, he gazed, mesmerized, upon four pumped-up boys in leather jackets and jeans driving crowds wild at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. He was particularly captivated by one: John Winston Lennon. Epstein soon became the band’s manager, in possibly the most auspicious match in rock history.
The predominant narrative of Beatles history gives insufficient credit to the role Epstein played in shaping the group’s image and preparing them for international adulation. He dressed them in tailored suits (better for attracting the girls); shopped their records to label after label, armed with little but his name and his unyielding faith; fostered their songwriting; and encouraged the musicians’ penchant for goofy wordplay in press interviews while urging sophistication.
Source: Joseph McCombs
Sean Lennon is talking about his mother’s child-rearing philosophy. “She had a very sort of postmodern, post-hippie, post-feminist way of thinking,” he says of Yoko Ono.“ It was very liberal, and she always treated me like an individual. She never really told me not to do anything, except get a Mohawk or a tattoo. So there were very few boundaries. She believed that kids are individuals and shouldn’t be treated like a subservient class.”
At 84, Ono—singer, artist, activist, and guardian of the legacy of her late husband (and Sean’s father), John Lennon—is enjoying a remarkable late-career reappraisal. The Ono oeuvre, once maligned as a conglomeration of unbearable neo-Dadaist pranks and unlistenable music, is now considered haute. Her conceptual-art projects—films, installations, happenings, and performance pieces, such as her 1964 work Cut Piece, in which she invited viewers to cutoff swaths of her clothing with a pair of scissors—today are seen as groundbreaking. Her albums and recordings, which mostly eschewed melody and traditional song structure, are held up as revolutionary. Even her clipped aphoristic “instructions,” famously compiled in books like her seminal 1964 Grapefruit, have been heralded as presciently tweet-like.
Source: Harper's Bazaar
Paul McCartney may have something to say about Donald Trump on his forthcoming untitled album, according to the Liverpool Echo.
During a visit to students at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts last week, the paper reports that McCartney told the students, “Sometimes the situation in the world is so crazy, that you’ve got to address it." The Liverpool Echo says the song he's written will pertain to President Trump. Billboard reached out to McCartney's reps for details.
McCartney is a co-founder of the institute, also called LIPA, and was a student there when it was known as Liverpool Institute High School For Boys. The high school closed in 1985 and reopened as LIPA after an extensive renovation. McCartney is the school's Lead Patron.
He didn't elaborate further on the song according to the report, but given some other recent comments he has made, Trump and his followers probably won't be a fan of the song.
In an interview with the Australian newspaper the Daily Telegraph published at the beginning of July, he told writer Cameron Adams, “I'm not a fan at all. He’s unleashed a kind of violent prejudice that is sometimes latent among people," he said.
Source: Billboard
n all-new Beatles documentary, It Was Fifty Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper & Beyond, is being released in the U.S. on September 8 on DVD, Blu-ray and VOD, by BFD distributed by The Orchard.
The film is director by Alan G. Parker, the director of Monty Python: Almost The Truth, Rebel Truce: The Story of The Clash, Never Mind the Sex Pistols, and Who Killed Nancy, among many others.
The film features rare archival footage unseen since the 1960s plus rare interviews with the Beatles’ original drummer Pete Best, John Lennon’s sister Julia Baird, Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein’s secretary Barbara O’Donnell, Beatles associate Tony Bramwell, Pattie Boyd’s sister Jenny Boyd, Beatles author Philip Norman, and more.
Source: Best Classic Bands
In India, when we say "the wall" in public discourse, we generally refer to former Indian cricket captain Rahul Dravid for his impenetrable batting. But in Prague, the wall makes John Lennon, the famous English singer-songwriter-activist, relevant in a conversation. And like the Indian wall, the Prague wall also stands impenetrable, in terms of spirit for freedom.
Although Lennon, who lived on this planet for just 40 autumns, did not ever visit the capital of the Czech Republic, his name is taken every moment in the picturesque city, courtesy the wall. And when I witnessed it, the feeling was, to say the least, exciting. For a first-timer in the historic city of Prague, it was equivalent to witnessing history from close quarters.
The special wall, known as the John Lennon Wall, is located Velkopřevorské náměstí in Mala Strana, which is not far from the French Embassy in Prague. Once an ordinary wall, it came to be associated with Lennon since the 1980s when people started treating it as a symbol of liberty by painting it with graffiti inspired by the iconic singer and lyrics from the unforgettable Beatles.
But why the wall was chosen as a platform to express liberty?
Lennon was a hero for the youth of central and Eastern Europe when the totalitarian rule of the communists was underway and the iron regimes had banned western pop songs, including those sung by Lennon, for he was a man who backed freedom. Some musicians were even put behind bars for playing Lennon's songs.
Source: Shubham Ghosh
Apple Corps, the company founded by members of The Beatles, on Wednesday won the dismissal of a lawsuit seeking the rights to the master tapes of the band's celebrated 1965 concert at New York's Shea Stadium.
U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan said Sid Bernstein Presents LLC, named for the concert's promoter, failed to show it deserved sole control over the Aug. 15, 1965, footage and deserved damages reflecting its many subsequent uses.
Daniels said the company, which said it had been assigned Bernstein's rights, could not claim to be the "author" of a copyrightable work even if Bernstein were the driving force behind the sold-out concert because he did not film it.
"The relevant legal question is not the extent to which Bernstein contributed to or financed the 1965 concert; rather, it is the extent to which he 'provided the impetus for' and invested in a copyrightable work - e.g., the concert film," Daniels wrote. "The complaint and relevant contracts clearly refute any such claim by Bernstein."
Source:Reuters