Beatles News
Paul McCartney and Wings' long-bootlegged One Hand Clapping album will finally get an official release.
The sessions were recorded in August 1974 at Abbey Road Studios when the band went into the venue to lay down some music for a documentary and a possible live record. The 55-minute show aired later that year but has been rarely seen since then. The accompanying record, however, has remained a favorite bootleg album for decades. The official release will arrive on June 14.
Paul and Linda McCartney were joined by Wings members Danny Laine, Jimmy McCulloch and Geoff Britton.
The project was recorded in four days by McCartney and Wings, who performed live-in-the-studio versions of favorites such as "Jet," "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "Band on the Run." The upcoming album features the tracks recorded for the show plus several numbers made off-camera. What's on Paul McCartney and Wings' 'One Hand Clapping' Album?
The group was still at the top of the charts with the Band on the Run album when they started conceiving One Hand Clapping. While many of the songs they performed during the sessions come from that LP, they also dipped into the past.
In addition to some earlier McCartney material ("My Love"), Wings also covered a few Beatles songs ("The Long and Winding Road," "Blackbird") and '50s cuts that helped form McCartney's rock 'n' roll foundation, including "Blue Moon of Kentucky," "Twenty Flight Rock" and "Peggy Sue."
Some of these tracks have appeared on other McCartney archival projects over the years, but the release of One Hand Clapping marks the first time they've been collected in full.
The set will be available in several formats, including vinyl and CD editions and digital.
Source: Michael Gallucci/ultimateclassicrock.com
The Framus 12-string Hootenanny acoustic guitar used by the late John Lennon in making the Beatles' iconic 1965 Help! album is expected to sell for up to $800,000 (£650,000) in an upcoming auction slated for next month.
Julian's Auctions said Tuesday in a news conference at London's Hard Rock Cafe in Piccadilly Circus that the prized musical instrument will be for sale in its MUSIC ICONS auction slated for May 29-May 30.
The guitar - described by the auction house as 'one of the most historically important Beatles guitars in rock history' - will be sold in an auction stemming from the Hard Rock Cafe in New York and online at juliensauctions.com.
The guitar was 'long forgotten and believed to have been lost' until it was 'recently found in an attic in the UK after being unseen for over 50 years,' according to Julian's.
'The discovery of John Lennon's Help! guitar that was believed to be lost is considered the greatest find of a Beatles guitar since Paul McCartney's lost 1961 Höfner bass guitar,' said Darren Julien, Julien's executive director and co-founder.
The Framus 12-string Hootenanny acoustic guitar used by the late John Lennon in making the Beatles ' iconic 1965 Help! album is expected to command up to $800,000 (£650,000) in an upcoming auction slated for next month.
Source: Adam S. Levy/dailymail.co.uk
Paul McCartney's son James McCartney and John Lennon's son Sean Ono Lennon came together for a surprise new single.
More than 60 years ago, the Beatles legends formed one of the most successful songwriting partnerships of all time, famously known as Lennon-McCartney. James, 46, recently revealed he had teamed up with Sean, 48, for a second-generation collaboration of Lennon-McCartney as he debuted a new song, "Primrose Hill," that the pair co-wrote.
"‘Primrose Hill’ is here! Today I am so very excited to share my latest song co-written by my good friend @sean_ono_lennon . With the release of this song it feels like we’re really getting the ball rolling and I am so excited to continue to share music with you," James captioned a photo of himself with Sean.
"Enjoy the song," James added, reminding his followers to enter his "Primrose Hill" music video contest. On April 2, James announced the contest on his official website. He invited fans to submit videos of couples capturing the "essence of love and romance" that might be included in the official music video for "Primrose Hill." Submissions for the contest have closed.
James also teased the release of "Primrose Hill" in an Instagram post April 2, writing, "I had a vision as a child in Scotland, on what was a lovely summer’s day. Letting go, I saw my true love and saviour in my mind’s eye. ‘Primrose Hill’ is about getting the ball rolling with me & finding that person."
Paul celebrated the song's release with a Facebook post promoting "Primrose Hill."
"My son James has a new song out called 'Primrose Hill' - check it out! And lots of love to Sean Ono Lennon who co-wrote the song," he wrote, adding a red heart emoji.
Source:Ashley Hume/foxnews.com
By the time the Beatles got around to recording Get Back, it’s a wonder all four of them managed to be in the same room at the same time. As anyone who watched Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary about the album will know, the band was rife with in-fighting.
The main culprit behind the rift seemed to be Paul McCartney and his uncompromising vision. As the story goes, Macca would often shun anything that didn’t fit his personal goals for Let It Be. George Harrison certainly found it unbearable, causing him to hang up his Beatles hat on January 10, 1969.
Though he eventually tempered his emotions long enough to embark on that iconic rooftop concert (you know the one), it was one of the final nails in the coffin for the Fab Four.
Soon after announcing his temporary leave, Harrison took to his guitar to write one of his most enduring solo tracks, “Wah Wah.”
Wah-wah
You’ve given me a wah-wah
And I’m thinking of you
And all the things that we used to do
Wah-wah, wah-wah
While the lyrics above may not seem particularly cutting, they were aimed at his Beatles bandmates and their constant squabbling.
“That was the song, when I left from the Let It Be movie, there’s a scene where Paul and I are having an argument, and we’re trying to cover it up,” Harrison once said. “Then the next scene I’m not there and Yoko’s just screaming, doing her screeching number. Well, that’s where I’d left, and I went home to write ‘Wah-Wah.’ It had given me a wah-wah, like I had such a headache with that whole argument. It was such a headache.”
Source: Alex Hopper/americansongwriter.com
It was the fall of 1980, and the ex-members of the Beatles were engaged in a cold war — largely with John Lennon.
A decade after the legendary band’s toxic implosion, George Harrison described his notoriously temperamental band mate as a “piece of s–t.”
“He’s so negative about everything,” Harrison, typically known as the quiet one, said of Lennon. “He’s become so nasty.”
The usually diplomatic Paul McCartney aired out his own bitter grievances at Lennon — his beloved boyhood friend and longtime writing partner — and wife Yoko Ono.
“The way to get their friendship is to do everything the way they require it,” McCartney bristled about the couple. “To do anything else is how to not get their friendship. I know that if I absolutely lie down on the ground and just do everything like they say and laugh at all their jokes and don’t expect my jokes to ever get laughed at … if I’m willing to do all that, then we can be friends.”
Source: Keith Murphy/nypost.com
Not everyone likes The Beatles. That said, trashing cultural icons is a modern phenomenon amplified by social media and done, largely, to attract attention. Yet whether you hate them or love them (yeah, yeah, yeah), their influence on pretty much everything pop music has offered since is, surely, undeniable.
Sixty years ago they left an indelible imprint on both music and film that continues to this day. In April 1964, John Lennon and Paul McCartney sat down in a hotel room and wrote a song to accompany the title of the band’s first (and best) feature film, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. The song itself is typical of their early output. A sugary song about love, less than three minutes long yet its significance cannot be underestimated.
The film of the same name was a black and white, only slightly fictional account of 36 hours in the lives of the band in which they played themselves. But for the first time it showed chart topping pop stars not as spoilt millionaires singing songs written by other people contracted to their record company but as ordinary boys from ordinary backgrounds with extraordinary talent who talked, joked and acted just like those who bought their records.
It was the first movie of its kind, a documentary style comedy musical in which they sang songs they wrote themselves and stripped the veneer off their superstardom. This was back when they genuinely seemed to have fun before they became more insular, stopped performing live and drifted off into drugs, barmy Swamis and their own god-like status.
Directed by Richard Lester, A Hard Day’s Night was nominated for two Academy Awards and launched a series of copycat films by other members of the ‘British Invasion’, notably Cavern Club stablemates Gerry and the Pacemakers as well as The Dave Clark Five.
Source: Mark Solomons/spectator.co.uk
The Beatles succeeded for countless reasons, but their chemistry as four instrumentalists had a lot to do with it. For the vast majority of their songs, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, with some production expertise from George Martin, made the magic in the studio without any outside help.
On occasion, they looked for guest performers who could augment their sound. Some of these folks were relatively unknown outside their fellow musicians, while others were stars in their own right. Here are five special guests who made a big difference on specific songs of the Fab Four. (Listed in chronological order.)
Alan Civil wasn’t the first guest to appear on a Beatles record, but his part on “For No One” made an impact that seemed to open the doors for the group to try it again. The song features McCartney singing about a guy whose relationship is crumbling before him, even though he’s too far in denial to see it. If McCartney’s vocals can’t get through to him, Civil’s lovely, melancholy horn part should do the trick. McCartney and Martin forced him to hit a high note that the instrument doesn’t normally reach, but Civil came through in spectacular fashion.
Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com
Editor’s Note: Former radio executive Laurie Kaye is the author of Confessions of A Rock ‘N Roll Name-Dropper: My Life Leading Up to Lennon’s Last Interview.She was part of the RKO radio team that interviewed John Lennon before his death on that same day of Dec. 8, 1980, and shared this excerpt with us from her book.
On December 8, 1980, I was overflowing with excitement, anticipation, and disbelief as I approached the Dakota Apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I was there to play my part in John Lennon’s one and only US radio interview following the release of his and Yoko Ono’s brand-new album, Double Fantasy, and the voices in my head were telling me that this was without a doubt about to become the best day of my life that I could ever even begin to imagine, and that I was truly the luckiest person on the planet.
Visions of thousands of screaming Beatles fans packed into Dodger Stadium so many years earlier swirled through my brain like milkshake in a blender, and I could barely keep myself from swaggering down the sidewalk as my associates and I approached the security booth area right outside the Dakota’s entrance.
I’d flown out one day earlier from the West Coast as part of our three-member RKO Radio team along with an executive from Warner Bros./Geffen Records, and although our RKO trio had already worked together on a number of attention-getting network radio rock specials and interviews over the past few years, including heading off to London just the year before to hang out with Paul McCartney and Wings, this would be an entirely different ball game…after all, we were on the verge of meeting up with someone who’d literally disappeared from the music business for the previous five years—JOHN LENNON!
Source: Laurie Kaye/culturesonar.com
Peter Brown, 87, worked for the Beatles, introduced Paul McCartney to his wife, Linda Eastman, was best man at John and Yoko’s wedding and was immortalized in John Lennon’s lyric, “Peter Brown called to say you can make it OK, you can get married in Gibraltar.” But the McCartneys reportedly ceremonially burned his 1983 book with coauthor Steven Gaines, The Love You Make, a warts-and-all Beatles bestseller many have called “The Muck You Rake.”
Brown and Gaines, who conducted hundreds of interviews with the Fab Four, their spouses, friends, families and business associates in the early 1980s for the book, had a lot more material than what made it into The Love You Make. Now Brown and Gaines present All You Need is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words — Unpublished, Unvarnished, and Told by The Beatles and Their Inner Circle, an oral history created from those original transcripts. Though light on musical insights, the book is heavy on personal drama and a piercing look inside the band. Here are 10 juicy takeaways.
Source: Tim Appelo/AARP
Ringo Starr has announced new tour dates for his All Star Band. Spring concerts were previously announced; the new run of shows will take place in the fall.
The nine new dates start on Sept. 12 in Omaha and run through Sept. 25 with a show at New York City's Radio City Music Hall.
Starr will also release a new EP, Crooked Boy, on Saturday for Record Store Day; a digital edition will arrive on April 26. "February Sky," the first single from the EP, was released last week. You can hear it below.
In other news, Starr's old band the Beatles will see their long-shelved 1970 film Let It Be receive a proper release. Disney+ will air a remastered version of the movie, about the making of the band's last-released album, on May 8.
Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band features Steve Lukather, Edgar Winter, Colin Hay, Warren Ham, Hamish Stuart and Gregg Bissonette. They will launch a spring tour on May 22 in Las Vegas; that run will wrap up on June 9 in Austin.
Source: Michael Gallucci/ultimateclassicrock.com
