Beatles News
Among the astonishing 250-plus shows that The Beatles played in 1963, a couple were especially poignant. On April 8, The Beatles were entertaining the Swimming Baths in Leyton, east London, while Cynthia Lennon was alone in Sefton General Hospital, Liverpool, giving birth to Julian. It was not yet necessarily the custom for fathers to attend births in 1963, but even so, Lennon would not have a moment to meet his first-born until April 11, squeezed between shows in Birkenhead and Middleton.Another significant gig was the August 3 booking at their former proving ground, The Cavern. Since the most recent of their 280-plus previous engagements at the Mathew St cellar on April 12, the tenor of the fans had changed. Quoted in Spencer Leigh’s book, The Cavern, club doorman Paddy Delaney recalled, “The crowds outside were going mad. By the time John Lennon had got through the cordon of girls, his mohair jacket had lost a sleeve. I grabbed it to stop a girl getting away with a souvenir. John stitched it back on.”
Source: Danny Ecclesto/mojo4music.com
In 1971, George Harrison put on the Concert for Bangladesh, and Ringo Starr was the only former Beatle to perform. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney worried about the optics of performing with former bandmates and declined to join the event. Starr admitted that Harrison also had these concerns; because of this, he said Harrison didn’t expressly invite him. Regardless, Starr showed up to perform.
In 1971, Harrison and Ravi Shankar hosted two benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden to fund relief efforts for refugees from the Bangladesh Liberation War. He welcomed a number of musicians, including Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, and Billy Preston.
The benefit concert was a success and set the tone for the celebrity benefit concerts to come. Beyond that, though, it helped raise awareness of a conflict many Americans knew nothing about.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
Ringo Starr has never shied away from getting a little help from his friends. The drummer’s close buddies for many years included his Beatles bandmates, who assisted him in his solo career. George Harrison helped Ringo with solo project days after injuring himself on a mountain hike, for instance. Yet Ringo’s musician friends extended beyond The Beatles.
1. Ringo Starr had an ‘intimate relationship’ with Keith Moon of The Who
Ringo and Keith Moon had different drumming styles — understated elegance compared to bombastic bashing — yet their personalities meshed well. One of Ringo’s former girlfriends said he had an intimate relationship with Moon, meaning they could hold entire conversations without speaking.
The Who drummer once angled for his friend’s job in The Beatles, but that didn’t hurt their relationship. Moon babysat Ringo’s son Zak. In a full circle moment, Zak became The Who’s touring drummer later in his life.
Source: Jason Rossi/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles are the most covered bands of all time. Even in the 1960s, bands and artists were already taking songs from The Beatles and putting their own spin on them. While the members of The Beatles didn’t love every cover, they did receive royalties, so they were mostly okay with them. However, George Harrison called one Beatles song cover “rubbish” and didn’t want to be associated with it.
George Harrison didn’t write many Beatles songs, as Paul McCartney and John Lennon shared most songwriting duties. However, Harrison did get a chance to shine every now and then, and his songs appeared more frequently in The Beatles’ later projects. His song, “If I Needed Someone”, was released in 1966 with Rubber Soul. It’s a love song Harrison dedicated to his then-wife, Pattie Boyd.
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles‘ “All You Need Is Love” reuses the chorus of “She Loves You.” Paul McCartney revealed this was his idea. In addition, “All You Need Is Love” quotes from the famous English folk song “Greensleeves.”In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul said “All You Need Is Love” references other songs because he decided it should. “‘All You Need Is Love’ was John’s song,” he said. “I threw in a few ideas, as did the other members of the group, but it was largely ad-libs like singing ‘She Loves You’ or ‘Greensleeves’ or silly little things at the end and we made those up on the spot.” For context, you can hear a snippet of “Greensleeves” in the song starting at three minutes and 13 seconds in. Paul sings the chorus of “She Loves You” around three minutes and 22 seconds in.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
“One of these days we must sort through our old compositions. We might be sitting on a goldmine! Some of them might stand a chance. Meanwhile we go on writing – mainly for our next LP.” John, April 1963
This, the band’s appearance on the annual Royal Variety Show was, in publicity terms, the biggest night of their career so far.
Staged in front of members of the Royal Family, the show was watched in almost every home in Britain.
John’s famous introduction to the band’s last song was *the* moment of The Beatles’ early TV career – the following day, everyone was talking about it:
Source: thebeatles.com
It took time, but George Harrison proved he was hardly the third wheel among The Beatles’ songwriters. He might have been the most progressive writer in the group and wrote several experimental songs that saw him dabbling in technicolor psychedelia and Indian music. George’s demo for “Love You To” is a wonderful look at how the sitar- and tabla-led Revolver song took shape from the bare-bones acoustic version.
It wasn’t the first Beatles song with George on sitar (that would be “Norwegian Wood”), but “Love You To” was the first Fab Four tune where the Indian instrument takes the lead. George turned the Revolver song into a showcase for the sitar, starting with two lush opening strums.
From there, George layered in some drones underneath a gentle mini solo and then launched into the song proper. He performed several memorable riffs during the song’s three-minute runtime, including a solo starting at the 1:35 mark.
Source: Jason Rossi/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles got so big, so famous, that it started making some members of the band nervous. George Harrison was among the musicians who grew wary of the hysteria that surrounded himself, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney.
Though Harrison, Lennon, Starr, and McCartney gained fame and fortune through the rise of the Beatles, they gave up a lot, too — privacy, security, peace. Harrison felt the relationship between the band and their fans became “very one-sided.”
“The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give,” he said, as reported in The Love You Make by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines.
Around 1965, Harrison’s nerves really started getting to him. The chaos that surrounded the band felt, all of a sudden, too close to home. He worried that he or one of his bandmates would get assassinated.
“I wanted to stop touring after about ’65, actually, because I was getting nervous,” Harrison told the author of TLYM in 1987. “I didn’t like the idea of being too popular. There was that movie The Manchurian Candidate. … I think in history you can see that when people get too big, something like that can very easily happen.”
Source: Kelsey Goeres/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles still draw people’s attention more than 50 years after the band disintegrated. The slew of No. 1 hits in the United States proved their popularity, and their status has hardly waned in the decades since they broke up. The tunes have stopped flowing (more or less), but the Beatles’ money hasn’t. Surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr added to their stockpiles by earning nearly $4 million for the docuseries The Beatles: Get Back.
Ron Howard’s Beatles documentary Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years landed in 2016 and gave fans a look at the band at the height of Beatlemania. Peter Jackson’s 2021 Disney+ series The Beatles: Get Back fast forwarded in the band’s timeline to the project that helped bring about the end of the group.
The Fab Four filmed the early 1969 recording sessions that gave us the album Let It Be (and director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s film of the same name). Paul’s headstrong/forceful leadership didn’t sit well with his bandmates. The Beatles rebounded from the Let It Be/Get Back sessions with Abbey Road, the final record they made together, but they never fully recovered and officially broke up in early 1970.
Source: Jason Rossi/cheatsheet.com
When The Beatles broke up, George Harrison and John Lennon were not happy with former bandmate Paul McCartney. Lennon disparaged his solo music and wrote pointed lyrics about McCartney. Harrison said that he would never work with him in a band again. They talked trash about him privately too, but they made it clear that the people they were talking to shouldn’t join in.When The Beatles broke up, McCartney sued the band in order to take control of their catalog from manager Allen Klein. This, coupled with festering irritation over McCartney’s behavior in the studio, infuriated his bandmates. Lennon wrote the brutal “How Do You Sleep?” about McCartney, and Harrison said publicly that he wouldn’t want to work with McCartney again.“To tell the truth, I’d join a band with John Lennon any day, but I couldn’t join a band with Paul McCartney, but it’s nothing personal,” he said, per the book George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters. “It’s just from a musical point of view.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
