Beatles News
Even the Beatles didn’t quite comprehend what awaited them in New York on Feb. 7, 1964.
Six days after “I Want to Hold Your Hold” broke through as their first No. 1 hit in the U.S., Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison braced for a warm welcome as Pan Am Flight 101 out of London neared its destination in Queens.
Never, however, did they expect the spectacle they found when they disembarked.
Some 3,000 fans, many of them smiling, shrieking, hysterical girls who skipped school on a Friday, ambushed JFK Airport, congregating along the rooftop and pushing past police barricades to catch a glimpse of the mop-topped British heartthrobs.
Delighted screams from overwhelmed teens served as the soundtrack as the grinning, waving Beatles stepped off of a Boeing 707 and onto American soil for the first time.
Those screams became a staple of McCartney, Lennon, Starr and Harrison’s two-week trip, during which they made history on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” played back-to-back concerts at Carnegie Hall and journeyed down to Washington, D.C., and Miami Beach.
“No one will understand the emotion of us landing in America,” Starr told the Daily News in 2019. “But it was New York, and all of the music we loved came from there. It was just far out.”
Source: Peter Sblendorio/nydailynews.com
Former Beatles star Sir Paul McCartney has revealed how his bandmate John Lennon hated wearing glasses until he discovered singer Buddy Holly's iconic specs-on lookSir Paul McCartney has revealed that John Lennon only started wearing his glasses when Buddy Holly made them cool.Macca said: “John had these horn-rimmed glasses at the time. If ever there would be a girl coming round, John would whip his glasses off... and squint. “But when Buddy came along, the glasses stayed on.” John changed to smaller, round NHS-style frames in 1966, for his role in the film How I Won the War. Sir Paul was speaking on a Radio 2 show marking 65 years since Holly’s death, aged 22, in an air crash, which is aired tomorrow. He also told host Bob Harris the Beatles were in awe of Holly, as he sang and played guitar at the same time. He said: “We thought, this is what we have to do.”
Source: Nicola Methven/mirror.co.uk
Sir Paul McCartney feared he'd be "finished off" when he was robbed at knifepoint.
The 81-year-old musician has recalled the terrifying moment when he and wife Linda were recording Wings' 1973 album 'Band on the Run' in Lagos, Nigeria, and were ambushed with all their “cameras, tape recorders, cassettes in a bag, and Linda’s photographic equipment”.
In an interview for his record label, seen first by The Sun newspaper, he said: “We’d been visiting some of our crew at their house and someone said, ‘Do you want a lift home?’ We said, ‘It’s such a beautiful night, we’ll walk.’”
Adopting a "desperado" spirit, the couple wandered into a no-go area and thought they were being offered a lift when a car stopped and the driver wound down his window.
Paul recalled: “I just say, ‘No, listen man, very nice of you but we don’t need a lift.’”
The vehicle, which contained 2five or six local guys" drove off but then suddenly stopped again.
Source: crowrivermedia.com
John Lennon didn't think it was a bad thing that The Beatles' fans screamed during their concerts. He was protective over the group's fans.
When John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr took the stage during Beatles concerts, they could hardly hear themselves play. Their audience began screaming before they saw the band and rarely stopped until after the band had departed. Members of the band found this frustrating, but Lennon defended their fans. While he seems like the most unlikely defender, his wife said he felt a great deal of gratitude for Beatles fans.
Footage of The Beatles running to take the stage during their concerts almost always includes shots of people covering their ears. The sound of screaming was so loud that the music could hardly reach the audience. Even the band couldn’t hear what they were doing.
“Screaming had just become the thing to do,” Starr said in The Beatles Anthology. “We didn’t say, ‘OK, don’t forget, at this concert — everybody scream!’ Everybody just screamed.”
While this bothered some members of the band, Lennon didn’t have a problem with it.
“We played for four or five years being completely heard and it was good fun,” Lennon said. “And it’s just as good fun to play being not heard and being more popular. They pay the money; if they want to scream — scream. We scream, literally; we’re just screaming at them, only with guitars. Everybody’s screaming — there’s no harm in it.”
Source:Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
It was the summer of 1966.
The Beatles were in the middle of a tour that had them play five shows in just three days at Japan’s famed Nippon Budokan arena — but when they weren’t performing, they were holed up in the presidential suite of the Tokyo Hilton creating a work of art that came to be known as "Images of a Woman."
That painting, believed by some experts to be the only artwork jointly made by all four Beatles (or at least signed by all four), was sold at Christie’s auction house in New York on Feb. 1.
"Images of a Woman" was estimated to fetch somewhere in the realm of US$400,000 to US$600,000 and “crystallizes a magic moment in Beatles history,” said Christie's specialist Casey Rogers during a phone interview. Its final sale price was nearly three times the high end of that estimate — US$1,744,000.
“It’s such a rarity to have a work on paper outside of their music catalog that is (a) physical relic, this tangible object with contributions from all four of The Beatles,” Rogers said of the 21.5- by 31-inch painting.
“It’s memorabilia, it’s a work of art, it appeals to probably a much larger cross-section of collectors… It’s a wonderful piece of storytelling.”
Source: Radhika Marya /ctvnews.ca
In 2023, Paul McCartney set the internet ablaze when he somewhat casually mentioned that he was working on a new song from The Beatles. Fans of the group were initially worried, as he mentioned he was using artificial intelligence to do so, but their fears were mostly assuaged after it was revealed how exactly the tech was being utilized. Months after the single, titled “Now and Then,” dropped, the track’s producer has stated that the legendary musician was just as respectful as one might hope during the delicate recording process.
“What was really exciting for me was watching Paul’s total respect for his band members in the process of doing this,” said Giles Martin, the producer behind “Now and Then.” He partnered with McCartney and Ringo Starr, the only two remaining members of The Beatles, on their surprise new single.
Martin told Louder Sound that while he and McCartney were working on “Now and Then,” the superstar went out of his way to ensure that the four members of the band were all represented and heard on the tune. When asked about the late musician George Harrison’s role on the track–which was recorded decades ago–Martin explained how McCartney treated his work.
“Paul was like: ‘Okay, the rhythm that’s being played by George, can you just isolate that? I want to hear what George is doing,’” Martin stated during the interview all about the making of “Now and Then.” He added that McCartney wanted to “make sure that we are playing exactly the rhythm he is playing and that we follow that on the record.”
Martin stated that when they were making the single, which was kept secret until the two Beatles rockers and their team were completely ready, McCartney felt that it was “really important that his contribution is really respected and that we’re not washing things out with too much color,” meaning the work that Harrison left behind.
Source: Hugh McIntyre/forbes.com
Millions, if not billions of people across the world have heard of The Beatles, or at least heard the names John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. One name that often gets lost when combing through the history of The Beatles, however, is May Pang.
Pang, at the age of 73 was recently featured in the documentary “Lost Weekend.” In the film, Pang paints an intimate picture of her life and goes into detail regarding the ups, the downs, truths and lies regarding her relationship with John Lennon. What started as a magical weekend getaway, turned into a whirlwind romance between the two.
Over the years, Pang amassed a collection of rare photos she was able to capture throughout her time with John and his son Julian. The photographs themselves show a different side of John that is both humorous and beautiful. Some of the photographs have significance to them regarding The Beatles to include the last photograph of Lennon and McCartney together.
Pang has a story to tell, one that resembles a rock ‘n’ roll fairytale. When approached to do the documentary, Pang was hesitant. “People were asking me all the time about doing something like this, but I wasn’t ready to say yes,” Pang said.
By 2017, Pang was no longer taken aback about the idea of doing the documentary and began the process of combing through all the photographs and materials she had. “We could have finished it in 2020 but Covid slowed that up a little and that gave us time to look at everything.”
Source: fsunews.com
Yoko Ono gave the handwritten lyrics of a song from The Beatles' 'Rubber Soul' to a composer. The piece later fell into different hands.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon put so much extra work into their music sometimes that it’s remarkable. For example, they once turned the handwritten lyrics of a song from The Beatles’ Rubber Soul into a work of art. The piece soon fell into the possession of a famous musician.
On the surface, The Beatles’ “The Word” isn’t much of a psychedelic song. It has more in common with the Motown music of the 1960s than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Despite this, “The Word” has hippie vibes. It proclaims the importance of love, which The Beatles would later do in their most popular psychedelic song, “All You Need Is Love.” “The Word” also paved the way for John’s high-minded solo songs like “Imagine” and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).”
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul recalled creating a psychedelic manuscript of the tune’s lyrics with John. “We smoked a bit of pot, then we wrote out a multi-colored lyric sheet, the first time we’d ever done that,” he said. “We normally didn’t smoke when we were working. It got in the way of songwriting because it would just cloud your mind up ‘Oh, s***, what are we doing?’ It’s better to be straight. But we did this multi-color thing.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
After debuting last year at London's National Portrait Gallery, Paul McCartney's unseen photos of The Beatles as they became international icons will be shown in New York. Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm takes us into the frenzy that was Beatlemania as the Fab Four toured six cities and touched down in America for the first time. On view at the Brooklyn Museum from May 3, 2024, the exhibition will present a fascinating look at this special moment in music history.
Taken on McCartney's 35 mm camera, the mostly black and white photos follow the band in Liverpool, London, and Paris before they hop stateside to tour. It was also during this time that they gave their iconic performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which skyrocketed them to fame. Given McCartney's place in the group, he was uniquely positioned to take these images, which serve both as a historical archive and as an affectionate photo album of four close friends.
“Since first arriving in New York in February 1964, Paul McCartney has built a strong, everlasting connection to the city. His vibrant photographs from The Beatles’ first visit capture the energy of the city, the excitement of the American fans, and the frenzy of the band’s status as celebrities. Yet the images also record The Beatles’ fun and delight with each other. Through McCartney’s lens, we feel the intensity of being at the center of such extraordinary events,” says Catherine Futter, director of curatorial affairs and senior curator of decorative arts.
Source: Jessica Stewart/mymodernmet.com
Paul McCartney said The Beatles' "Drive My Car" contains a joke derived from a common theme in blues music. John Lennon barely had anything to say about the song.
The Beatles were just full of surprises. Paul McCartney said The Beatles’ “Drive My Car” (1965) contains a joke derived from a common theme in blues music. On the other hand, John Lennon barely had anything to say about the song.
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul recalled the writing of “Drive My Car.” “It was wonderful because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came and suddenly there was a girl there, the heroine of the story, and the story developed and had a little sting in the tail like ‘Norwegian Wood’ had, which was ‘I actually haven’t got a car, but when I get one you’ll be a terrific chauffeur,'” he said. “So to me, it was LA chicks, ‘You can be my chauffeur,’ and it also meant ‘You can be my lover.’
“‘Drive my car’ was an old blues euphemism for sex, so in the end all is revealed,” he continued. “Black humor crept in and saved the day. It wrote itself then. I find that very often, once you get the good idea, things write themselves. So that was my idea and John and I wrote the words, so I’d go 70-30 on that to me.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
