Beatles News
After The Beatles broke up, John Lennon railed against his former bandmates in a 1970 Rolling Stone interview. Entitled “Lennon Remembers,” the lengthy interview sees the musician discussing his problems with The Beatles, his love of Yoko Ono, and his distaste for his bandmates’ solo careers, among other things. Five years after the interview, Lennon’s opinion of his former bandmates had softened considerably. He also said that they hadn’t cared about his harsh words.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
Paul McCartney had a passion for music at a young age. That passion expanded once he discovered rock ‘n’ roll. Later in his life, McCartney would become a rock legend with The Beatles and his solo career. The former Beatle still recalls the first record he bought that ignited his love for music. McCartney grew up in Liverpool in a working-class home. While his family wasn’t wealthy, they did have a piano in the house that his dad often played. He always loved music, even the old-school songs that his dad would play. However, Paul McCartney says everything changed once he discovered rock ‘n’ roll. In an interview for his website Paulmccartney.com, the British artist said rock was a “completely different sound” when it arrived in Liverpool.
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles sometimes had to devise creative ways to get through their many interviews, which tended to be at the reporter’s expense. It didn’t help that the press gave them nicknames that didn’t truly represent their personalities or that they often asked stupid or irrelevant questions.
In The Beatles’ early career, the press observed the band during interviews and gave them “tags” based on their apparent personalities. John Lennon was the witty Beatle, Paul McCartney was the cute one, George Harrison the quiet one, and Ringo Starr was, well, Ringo Starr.
All of the nicknames couldn’t have been farther from the truth. The Beatles were many things, but the press didn’t care enough to discover who they were as people.
Their labels were only half the issue. Once The Beatles’ fame skyrocketed, they had to deal with tons more interviews filled with uninspiring, uninteresting, foolish, and often head-scratching questions.
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
George Harrison wanted to evoke the good times he had with The Beatles in his song, “When We Was Fab.” However, not all of the tune’s lyrics stem from fond memories. There’s a dark lyric that speaks about one of the things George hated about being a member of the Fab Four.
George Harrison performing at the Prince's Trust Concert in 1987.
Being Beatle George was hard. It was a constant push and pull between screaming fans and not being able to stretch his creativity to its fullest. Beatlemania aged him and made him paranoid. John Lennon and Paul McCartney often pushed him and his songs aside. However, on top of it all, George desperately wanted to break free and explore spiritualism. He didn’t want to be a glorified session man or a teen idol. George wanted to be God-conscious.
However, years after The Beatles split and everything settled, George came to terms with being a Beatle. When he entered the studio in 1987 to record Cloud Nine, he suddenly wanted to create a song that evoked the spirit of his old band. What resulted was “When We Was Fab,” a song (and music video) that had more Beatles Easter eggs than “Glass Onion.”
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
Over 70 million people tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964, to watch the Beatles’ first live U.S. television performance. The Fab Four captured America’s hearts and forever secured a place in pop culture history. Despite TV’s role in the group’s immense success, lead guitarist George Harrison claimed he was not a fan of American television. Many of us can probably relate to his reason.
In a 1971 interview on The Dick Cavett Show, Harrison said he didn’t watch television in America because “it’s such a load of rubbish.”
The world-famous rocker explained, “It just drives you crazy — the commercials. You just get into something and then, ‘Sorry, now, another word from and another word from.'”
The “Here Comes the Sun” songwriter said, “In the end, you know, they just put commercials on all the time.”
Asked whether British TV had advertisements, Harrison responded, “Yeah, but it’s really done good.”
Source: Rita DeMichiel/cheatsheet.com
Roll over, Sgt. Pepper. The Beatles’ Revolver is way beyond compare. Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield declared it “the best album the Beatles ever made, which means the best album by anybody.”
And thanks to a lavish new reissue overseen by Beatles producer George Martin’s son Giles Martin, Revolver has never sounded better. It’s got extras (28 early takes, three home demos, remastered mono and new stereo mixes of “Paperback Writer” and “Rain”). You can buy a 63-track super-deluxe special edition (five CDs, four LPs, a 7-inch EP, a 100-page hardcover book); a deluxe special edition (two-CD digipak and 40-page booklet); or the standard special edition (the original 14 tracks, digital and on CD, LP or vinyl picture disc).
So why does 1966’s Revolver outplay 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which used to be widely considered the band’s finest hour? Seven Beatles authorities offer their explanations:
Source: Edna Gundersen/Edna Gundersen
The Beatles’ career has been so exhaustively documented, chronicled and bootlegged, it can feel as if there aren’t many surprises left to uncover. But the footage in Peter Jackson’s recent documentary on the band, Get Back, certainly proved that assumption wrong … particularly the mind-blowing jam session where the band conjure the documentary’s title track out of thin air. Knowing the Beatles possessed unparalleled studio chemistry is one thing; seeing them nonchalantly chisel away at a musical idea and create greatness in real time is another thing entirely.
A bonus disc on the new expanded, remixed and remastered box set of 1966’s Revolver offers an even more transformative experience: a jaw-dropping sequence of Yellow Submarine work tapes traces the song’s evolution from a fragile, sad wisp sung by John Lennon to its later iteration as a Ringo Starr-directed psych-pop goof. That the band steered Yellow Submarine from morose folk trifle to boisterous stoner singalong seems improbable, but the tapes don’t lie: through a combination of focused acoustic woodshedding and whimsical studio risks, the band arrived at the more familiar, upbeat Yellow Submarine.
Source: Annie Zaleski/theguardian.com
Take a trip down a quiet country road near Rye and you'll stumble across a stunning windmill recording studio. Owned by The Beatles legend Sir Paul McCartney, Hogg Hill Mill sits surrounded by astonishing countryside views.
Many know that Sir Paul just cannot stay away from Sussex. After owning a property in Hove's Millionaire's Row with ex-wife Heather Mills, he now owns a farm in the village of Peasmarsh where he grows hemp.
While he is believed to spend much of his time living in New York, Sir Paul stayed at his farm for a period during the COVID pandemic to record his McCartney III album. A picture shared by a fan account on Instagram shows a pensive Sir Paul working on his album in his studio in Icklesham.
Source: Luke Donnelly/sussexlive.co.uk
Yoko Ono felt John Lennon’s songs were less popular than The Beatles’ songs. She felt the same thing about George Harrison’s songs.
Yoko said listeners should be more “mature.”
Yoko Ono named two of John Lennon‘s songs that dealt with real-world issues. She said these songs were less popular than The Beatles’ songs because they weren’t optimistic. In addition, Yoko discussed what she thought about George Harrison’s songs.
The book Lennon on Lennon: Conversations With John Lennon includes an interview from 1972. In it, Yoko said the album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was a masterpiece. The album contains the songs “Working Class Hero” and “God.”
“And then the other one, which is Imagine,” she added. “Obviously Imagine was more popular, because it has a little sort of sugarcoat on it, as John puts it.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
With stunning new stereo mixes and extensive outtakes documenting the journey of each song, the compendium captures John, Paul, George, and Ringo at the peak of their collective power
Some Fab Four folklore: In 1966, when Paul McCartney tried to impress Bob Dylan with an acetate of “Tomorrow Never Knows” — the sprawling, experimental acid freakout that concludes the Beatles’ seventh (and arguably best) LP, Revolver — Dylan quipped, “Oh, I get it: You don’t want to be cute anymore.”
In the liner notes for the weighty, new Super Deluxe edition of the album, the Cute One offers a different take: In the half a decade since they’d busted out of Liverpool’s bar-rock caverns, they’d simply become worldly. They’d discovered musique concrete, Indian music, Motown, and drugs, drugs, drugs. Although a sempiternal intellectual like Dylan might not have been able to see it at the time (he reportedly countered Macca by playing him his own witty-not-cute Blonde on Blonde acetate), the Fab Four were no longer a boy band and hadn’t been for a while, at least since they explored Dylanesque folk rock on Rubber Soul. In fact, by 1966, they’d become sorta sophisticated.
Source: Kory Grow/rollingstone.com
