Beatles News
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
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.
Source: Kelsey Goeres/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles collaborated closely with one another for almost a decade, writing songs together, swapping ideas, and switching their instruments to get the most creativity out of each record as possible. But one of the Fab Four noticed that once Paul McCartney had stopped working on his own music, he stopped caring about anyone else's songs. And, eventually, it got too much for the Beatles singer.
John Lennon and McCartney wrote the bulk of the songs for The Beatles. Making up the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, the long-time friends penned such iconic tracks as Help!, Ticket to Ride, Eleanor Rigby and In My Life.
But they also wrote many songs on their own, separately, before bringing their work to their pals.
Lennon spoke to Playboy in 1980 shortly before he died where he confessed McCartney sometimes irritated him during the recording process.
Source: Callum Crumlish/express.co.uk
John Lennon explained the origin of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Notably, the song doesn’t really resolve itself. Despite this, a famous movie created a narrative for the character of Jude.
“He said it was written about Julian, my child,” John said. “He knew I was splitting with [his first wife] Cyn and leaving Julian. He was driving over to say ‘Hi’ to Julian. He’d been like an uncle to him.
“You know, Paul was always good with kids,” he added. “And so he came up with ‘Hey Jude.’ But I always heard it as a song to me. If you think about it … Yoko’s just come into the picture. He’s saying, ‘Hey, Jude — hey, John.'” John felt the song was Paul giving him permission to leave the band.
John was asked what he thought of Paul as a lyricist. “I don’t think he’s made an effort to, but I don’t think he’s incapable,” he said. “I don’t think he’s as good as me, but he’s certainly not incapable. ‘Hey Jude’ is a damn good set of lyrics and I made no contribution to that. A couple of lines he’s come up with show indications he’s a good lyricist, but he just never took it anywhere.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
