Beatles News
Teenage girls scaled fire escapes and hid in garbage cans outside a downtown Minneapolis motel in hopes of getting a peek at the Beatles when the band came to town in 1965.
The chaotic scene — Minneapolis' first and only taste of true Beatlemania — took place hours after the band's concert at Bloomington's Metropolitan Stadium. It drew a stern response from the Minneapolis Police Department, whose attempts to enforce a curfew gave the Fab Four the impression that this was a "very narrowminded town."
Reader Carol Becker heard from a friend that police were taken aback by the disorderly crowds that August night. Becker contacted Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune's reader-driven community reporting project to find out just how wild it was — as teen girls once again descend upon Minneapolis this weekend to see Taylor Swift at U.S. Bank Stadium.
"Is it true there was a riot of 15-year-olds here when the Beatles came?" Becker asked.
To answer the question, we turned to our archives and some local Beatlemaniacs, who painted a picture of a wild, unforgettable night — but not quite a riot.
Source: Zoë Jackson, Star Tribune
The Beatles dominated Christmas during the 1960s. A colossal, record-shattering success, the Fab Four helped completely reinvent pop culture, and were rewarded with an unprecedented four Christmas No. 1 singles.
‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘Day Tripper’ and ‘Hello, Goodbye’ all stormed their way to the top of the charts, despite never actually mentioning snow, ice, mistletoe, or the big day itself.
Indeed, The Beatles kept their Christmas missives to their fan club members. Aware that the sheer volume of letters being received meant that replies couldn’t always be sent out in a timely manner, the band decided to record limited edition Flexi-discs, which were sent out as festive treats.
Usually it was knockabout stuff – the odd recording, a few messages here and there, maybe a Christmas joke or two – but in 1967 the band decided to go all out. The disc had a coherent theme, while a raucous poem from John Lennon – in a Scottish accent, no less – illustrated his bizarre, Joycean grasp of the English language; indeed, the poem is a kind of mirror to the joyous nonsense that fuelled ‘I Am The Walrus’ earlier that year.
Source: clashmusic.com
Together Sir Paul McCartney and the late John Lennon are the most successful songwriting partnership in music history.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that when Macca speaks out on that intimate creative relationship, fans of The Beatles are all ears.
The 81-year-old recently posted a clip on the subject, promoting the paperback edition of his book The Lyrics 1956 to the Present, which has seven new song commentaries.
Asked about conflict during songwriting with Lennon, he said: “There was never that much battling, because if someone said, ‘I like this better’, it was generally a better idea. So you’d give into each other as long as it was a better idea.”
McCartney continued: “There weren’t many disputes because we were writing like this [facing each other] with acoustic guitars. And y’know I’m coming up with a bit of a line and then he’s following it up; just ping-ponging ideas. I look back on it and think, ‘Yeah you were a good collaborator’. At the time, it just felt good and we respected each other.
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
The Beatles dominated Christmas during the 1960s. A colossal, record-shattering success, the Fab Four helped completely reinvent pop culture, and were rewarded with an unprecedented four Christmas No. 1 singles.
‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘Day Tripper’ and ‘Hello, Goodbye’ all stormed their way to the top of the charts, despite never actually mentioning snow, ice, mistletoe, or the big day itself.
Indeed, The Beatles kept their Christmas missives to their fan club members. Aware that the sheer volume of letters being received meant that replies couldn’t always be sent out in a timely manner, the band decided to record limited edition Flexi-discs, which were sent out as festive treats.
Usually it was knockabout stuff – the odd recording, a few messages here and there, maybe a Christmas joke or two – but in 1967 the band decided to go all out. The disc had a coherent theme, while a raucous poem from John Lennon – in a Scottish accent, no less – illustrated his bizarre, Joycean grasp of the English language; indeed, the poem is a kind of mirror to the joyous....
Source: clashmusic.com
Right from the first play of Strawberry Fields, the reverse instrumentation sounds as though it is leaving the speakers and floating into the air.
On With a Little Help From My Friends, the backing vocals are more distinctive and brighter. The backward top line and melody on I Am The Walrus soars.
During Hello Goodbye every glorious nuance shines through the spinning blue vinyl record. Paul McCartney’s melancholic masterpiece The Fool On The Hill sounds particularly evocative with those enhanced wistful flutes. Magical Mystery Tour is one of those Beatles tracks that suggest a blue-print for Oasis with that brilliantly raspy vocal and up-tempo rock melody.
The track list has been expanded which might take a bit of getting used to for some. New life is breathed into the work which has been mixed in stereo and Dolby Atmos by Giles Martin at Abbey Road studios. The most significant addition is the recent single Now And Then which was originally a John Lennon demo recorded in 1977 at the Dakota building in New York. Yoko Ono gifted the track to the remaining Beatles back in 1994 along with Free As A Bird and Real Love.
Source: Richard Purden/theedinburghreporter.co.uk
Fans of The Beatles only have a couple more weeks to make it to Cleveland to check out the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s The Beatles: Get Back to Let It Be exhibit.
The exhibit was created as a compliment to Peter Jackson’s Emmy Award-winning docuseries Get Back. After a nearly two-year run it’s set to close on January 10.
As part of The Beatles celebration, the Rock Hall has been hosting “Beatles Friday” events — the last one is scheduled for December 29 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. It includes a screening of The Beatles Rooftop Concert, which was their last live performance, and “From The Vault,” featuring memorable clips of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison from the Rock Hall’s induction stage.
There’s also a Beatles trivia game show, with prizes awarded to winners; a Beatles set performed by the Rock Hall’s house band, The Mechanics; and fan meetups.
Source: kshe95.com
During December 1965 and the first two months of ’66, The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album spent eight weeks at No.1 in the UK and six weeks at No.1 in the US, and was still in the US Top 20 when the group returned to Abbey Road studios in April ’66 to begin recording material for their next new album. The ‘all killer no filler’ excellence of Rubber Soul had set a new benchmark for the world’s top rock artists to equal, and was even talked about as having shifted the focus of rock music from singles to albums.
As others strove to equal it, The Beatles set about the task of making something even better.
“At this point in their career there was very little external pressure on them,” Apple Records director Tony Bramwell remembers. “EMI had all but given up trying to make them do things, and [Beatles manager] Brian Epstein never interfered in that way.”
Being a close associate of the band since his days of being their roadie in Liverpool, Bramwell noticed a different kind of pressure on them. “They were no longer the four-headed mop-top monster they’d been at the start,” he recalls. “They were developing their own lives away from the band, with John and George leading their suburban existences, George becoming interested in Indian music and Paul being thoroughly metropolitan, checking out the galleries and exhibitions, going to clubs and so on.”
Source: Johnny Black/loudersound.com
ohn Lennon said he relied on producer George Martin to talk to other musicians. He explained why he had a hard time doing it himself.
Over the course of his career, John Lennon worked with many musicians. The Beatles brought in other musicians to play on their songs, and he collaborated with many artists in his solo career. Despite this, Lennon said he found it difficult to talk about music with other artists. He explained that he relied on producer George Martin to do this for him because he was too shy.
In the early 1960s, The Beatles began working with Martin. He helped transform their music and bring their visions to life.
“George Martin had a very great musical knowledge and background, and he could translate for us and suggest a lot of things,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “He’d come up with amazing technical things, slowing down the piano and things like that. We’d be saying, ‘We want it to go un, un and ee, ee,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, look, chaps, I thought of this, this afternoon, and last night I was talking to… whoever, and I came up with this.’ And we’d say, ‘Great, great, come on, put it on here.’”
Lennon said that Martin’s musical knowledge also improved their music. He was able to introduce instruments they didn’t know existed into their music.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
Paul McCartney played The Beatles' "Yesterday" for a major 1960s singer. He accidentally gave her the impression he was offering her the song.
Paul McCartney played The Beatles’ “Yesterday” for a major 1960s singer. He accidentally gave her the impression he was offering her the song. The 1960s star recorded the track anyway. Surprisingly, her cover sounds happy.
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul said he went to the home of a famous singer after writing “Yesterday.” He worried the track sounded too much like a preexisting song, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. “I took it round to Alma Cogan at her flat in Kensington and asked, ‘What’s this song?’ because Alma was a bit of a song buff; there are a lot of people around like that and I admire them a lot,” Paul recalled. “Alma was very songy, knew a lot of Jerome Kern and Cole Porter and that kind of thing, and she said, ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s beautiful.'”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/ cheatsheet.com
Philip Norman, the author of books about Paul McCartney, John Lennon and the Beatles as a group, discovers that Harrison was, among other things, a puzzle.
In a new biography, Philip Norman writes about the “paradox” of George Harrison, a man who was “unprecedentedly, ludicrously, suffocatingly famous while at the same time undervalued, overlooked and struggling for recognition.”
This was the central contradiction that made Harrison, the composer of classics like “Here Comes the Sun,” and “Taxman,” a fascinating figure, both as a Beatle and after the band broke up, as Norman explores in his book “George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle.” Norman tackled his latest subject after writing celebrated biographies of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, as well as “Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation,” a book that Harrison was critical of.
Source: Sopan Deb/nytimes.com
