Beatles News
On March 15, 1967, a lone Beatle entered the recording studio to create a song that would forever define the Fab Four’s shift from teeny-bopper sweethearts to counterculture royalty.
George Harrison’s “Within You Without You” was the last track completed for ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. ‘ It opened the B side and served as a declaration of Harrison’s musical and ideological independence from the cultural behemoth that had become the Liverpool rockers.
Performed by Harrison, Neil Aspinall, and an ensemble of Indian instrumentalists, the song’s creation reflected the Beatles’ troubled dynamic at the time: distant, disjointed, and dissolving. A Reluctant Beatle’s Defining Work.
Shortly after ‘Sgt. Pepper’s release in 1967, George Harrison admitted to biographer Hunter Davies, “I don’t personally enjoy being a Beatle anymore. All that sort of Beatle thing is trivial and unimportant. I’m fed up with all this ‘me, us, I’ stuff and all the meaningless things we do. I’m trying to work out solutions to the more important things in life.”
Thus, “Within You Without You” was born. The track is a droning, hypnotic exploration of the soul’s transcendence from the body into something more significant than the individual, the collective, and, yes, even the Beatles themselves.
Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com
John Lennon believed he shocked the other Beatles with one album. Here's why he found their reaction to it surprising.
When John Lennon released the album Two Virgins in 1968, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were politely shocked. While they tried not to get caught up in the public outcry over the album cover — which featured full frontal nudity from Lennon and Yoko Ono — they didn’t approve of it. Lennon said it surprised him that McCartney and Harrison were so prudish. John Lennon said Paul McCartney and George Harrison were surprisingly prudish
Lennon and Ono chose to pose naked on the cover of Two Virgins because they wanted to reveal all of themselves to the public. It was a bold choice that brought the couple a great deal of blowback.
“It was insane!” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “People got so upset about it — the fact that two people were naked. I didn’t think there’d be such a fuss. I guess the world thinks we’re an ugly couple.” John Lennon and Yoko Ono's face peek out from a circle of the otherwise hidden album cover for 'Two Virgins.' There is brown paper over it. He found it particularly surprising that McCartney and Harrison did not seem to approve of the cover.
“George and Paul were a little shocked, that was weird. That really shocked me, the fact that they were prudish,” Lennon said. “You can’t imagine — it was so uptight in those days. It’s not that long ago, and people are uptight about nude bodies. We didn’t create nudity, we just put it out. Somebody else had been nude before.”
McCartney wasn’t sure this was the case.
“I was slightly shocked but, seeing as I wrote a liner note for the sleeve, I obviously wasn’t too uptight,” he said.
Source: cheatsheet.com
The Beatles never played in Nashville, but five decades ago, Paul McCartney set up shop in Wilson County. It was June of 1974 when one superstar came to Lebanon. That summer, the former Beatle and his band Wings landed in Middle Tennessee.
Lebanon resident Sandra Bryant referred to those days as Paul McCartney fever and her husband Tick remembered those days vividly.
“Everybody in town eventually knew, they were trying to keep it secret, but he was spotted in so many places,” Bryant said. Fifty years later, those stories are still being shared today. “He’s really cute! Haha, he was so cute! I thought I was going to faint!” said Sandra Bryan.
Legend has it, Paul and Linda McCartney were looking for a summer escape and through music industry connections, they found a farm in Lebanon on Franklin Road.
“It was these two houses, a house here, a house there, 133 acres,” said Troy Putman. Putman’s father, Curly, sealed the deal, and in return a trip of a lifetime in exchange for their family home. “At age 12, we went to Hawaii for six weeks that was sort of a paid vacation,” said Putnam.
Paul McCartney and his band Wings were spotted all over the square in downtown Lebanon in the summer of 1974. But is was a home on Franklin Road Paul McCartney called home in Middle Tennessee for six weeks.
“Paul McCartney spotting’s all summer, ya know, like Pokémon or something,” said Bryan.
Source: Blake Eason/yahoo.com
When Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr reunited The Beatles for their 1995 Anthology 1 in the early ’90s, they revisited a song John Lennon had written but never released. Set as a bonus track on the anthology, the three Beatles started working on “Free As a Bird,” originally written and recorded by Lennon in 1977 but never completed.
A simple piano demo, “Free As A Bird” was recorded by Lennon at his home in the Dakota Building in New York City. Though he never completed it in the studio, it was one of the songs he recorded to cassette during his “Househusband” period between 1975 and 1980.
As Anthology 1 was in the works, the former Beatles used Lennon’s previously recorded vocals from the demo. To complete the song, the three added their vocals to more verses, along with instrumentation. Lennon’s vocals were then weaved throughout the track, something co-producer Jeff Lynne achieved by using analog technology and tricks. To complete the song “entailed doing whatever manipulations [Geoff] Emerick [engineer] and [Jeff] Lynne could achieve to help bring out Lennon’s voice above the piano which was playing along with him,” recounted engineer Marc Mann in 1996, “as well as adding whatever effect onto his voice to give it that ‘Strawberry Fields’-Lennon sound.”
Source: Tina Benitez-Eves/americansongwriter.com
This week’s podcast episode of A Life in Lyrics sees Paul McCartney looking back on the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band track, A Day in the Life.
The Beatles' classic 1967 track is attributed to Lennon-McCartney but was mainly written by John Lennon with Macca contributing to the song’s middle section.
Reflecting on the opening lyrics about a “lucky man who made the grade”, McCartney wondered if the words were inspired by Lennon’s own struggles.
The 81-year-old said: “When John would bring these things in, it's only these days that I would say, ‘Was he talking about himself? Was there some sort of psychological aspect where he's a lucky man who made the grade?’
Mike McCartney, Paul McCartney's brother, was the original Beatles drummer
“And John did, around about this time, get a little bit out in Weybridge doing drugs. And we were a little disillusioned because we'd sort of given up playing live. So him bringing that in, I would just go with the picture that he was painting.”
McCartney also shared how the pressures of Beatles fame inspired Sgt Pepper’s: “Here's the idea. We are these four space cadets. We're just these four people in this slightly weird band. But what it's going to do is. Going to free us up.
“So we're not going to be the Beatles, which we are now getting a little bit sort of inhibited by, having to be those boys. We'll now just chuck all that away and we'd be these guys.”
Macca also spoke of Lennon’s love of history and Churchill when reflecting on the lyrics “I saw a film today, oh boy/The English Army had just won the war”.
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
Model and photographer Pattie Boyd is selling handwritten lyrics and personal letters that reveal her relationships with late Beatle George Harrison and guitarist and singer Eric Clapton.
Boyd, who turns 80 on Sunday, was married to both musicians, inspiring songs such as Harrison's "Something" and Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight" and "Layla".
More than 100 lots, including jewellery, clothes, photographs, handwritten lyrics and drawings by Harrison, are for sale in the "The Pattie Boyd Collection", which runs for auction online at Christie's until March 22.
"If I had one big treasure chest that explained me and my life, all these items here would be in it ... these are all examples of the wonderful life I have been living," Boyd told Reuters at a press preview on Thursday.
Lots leading the sale include the original artwork chosen by Clapton for the cover of Derek and The Dominos 1970 album "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs", with an estimated sale price of 40,000-60,000 pounds ($51,228-$76,842) and original handwritten lyrics for Harrison’s 1982 song "Mystical One" (30,000-50,000 pounds).
Source: Natasha Mulenga/reuters.com
The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover is one of the most iconic in the world - and it features a man who accidentally photobombed the Fab Four as they walked across a zebra crossing
The 'mystery man' on the cover of The Beatles' famous Abbey Road album ended up being part of the world's most epic photobomb. We've all jumped into a photo for fun when we're out and about. But this guy became part of music history without even trying.
On the front of The Beatles' Abbey Road record from 1969, you can see the band crossing a road in a line. But if you look closely, there's a man standing by the road in the background. He's one of the few people caught in the snap, and he didn't mean to be there.
This man, dressed in a brown coat and white shirt, was found years later after numerous people came forward claiming to be him. He's actually an American tourist called Paul Cole, who was waiting for his wife when the picture was taken. He told The Mirror: "[I told her] 'I've seen enough museums. I'll just stay out here and see what's going on outside'."
Source: mirror.co.uk
The Story Behind “Eight Days a Week” by The Beatles, Which Topped the Charts 59 Years Ago. The Beatles’ classic pop hit “Eight Days a Week” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 13, 1965. The song was the Fab Four’s seventh single to top the Hot 100 in just over a year, the first being “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which peaked at No. 1 in February 1964.
“Eight Days a Week,” which spent two weeks at the top of the Hot 100, replaced and was replaced, respectively, by a pair of classic Motown tunes— The Temptations’ “My Girl” and The Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love.”
“Eight Days a Week” wasn’t issued as a single in the U.K., and made its first appearance as a track on the 1964 U.K. album Beatles for Sale. In the U.S., the song was released as a single in February 1965, and later appeared on the 1965 U.S. album Beatles VI.
Source: Matt Friedlander/americansongwriter.com
The Beatles‘ “Love Me Do” is one of those bubblegum pop songs like The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” or The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” that is perfect in its simplicity. Paul McCartney said he and John Lennon had no idea what they were doing when they wrote the song. John said the tune was markedly different from later Beatles tunes like “Penny Lane.”
Paul McCartney need help from ‘grown-ups’ during The Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do’ era
During a 2012 interview with The Independent, Paul recalled what it was like writing songs with John during the “Love Me Do” era. “Writing songs we’d never done, except that when John and I first met, one of our conversations was: ‘What do you do?’ ‘Oh, you’ve written a couple of songs.’ ‘Oh, I’ve written a couple too,'” he recalled. “So we showed our songs to each other and agreed they weren’t...
Source: imdb.com
They came together.
Paul McCartney during his headlining set at England’s Glastonbury Festival Saturday — also the last night of his “Got Back” tour — made sure to get back with a bang.
The former Beatle, who celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this month, teased “a little surprise” for the crowd at the famed Pyramid Stage roughly 30 minutes ahead of his set’s scheduled end time just before midnight.
“My friend, your hero, from the West Coast of America… Dave Grohl!” McCartney said as he introduced the Foo Fighters frontman, 53.
The pair promptly started playing “I Saw Her Standing There.”
McCartney then asked Grohl to explain the long and winding journey he’d had to take to get to the U.K., which included two canceled flights on Wednesday and Thursday.
“But I swear, I would never miss being right here with you, right now,” said Grohl.
“Well, thanks, Dave. That’s so much appreciated,” said McCartney.
The pair went on to play “Band on the Run,” before McCartney let slip another surprise, this one hailing from the East Coast.
“From New Jersey… Mr. Bruce Springsteen!” said McCartney to an excited crowd.
Source: Jami Ganz, New York Daily News
