Beatles News
Ringo Starr has sent “peace and love” to his long-standing friend and former bandmate Paul McCartney on his 80th birthday.
The ex-Beatle was among the many famous names sending their best wishes to McCartney as he marked the milestone ahead of headlining Glastonbury next weekend.
Referencing their 1968 song Birthday, Starr wrote on Twitter: “They say it’s your birthday Saturday happy birthday Paul love you man have a great day peace and love Ringo and Barbara love love peace and love.”
Source: breakingnews.ie
George Harrison was not a fan of American radio and television personality Dick Clark. In 1979, the American Bandstand host and “America’s oldest teenager” produced a biographical film called Birth of The Beatles. Clark needed Beatles songs and footage to complete the project, and George didn’t like it.
George didn’t like people who wanted a piece of The Beatles for their own gain.
During a 1987 interview, J. Kordosh of Creem Magazine told George he’d seen Clark’s documentary. George wasn’t impressed. He said all Clark did was send letters to The Beatles about wanting clips for his own projects. He always wanted a piece of The Beatles, like everyone else. George said Clark was greedy.
Source: cheatsheet.com
I am suffering terrible Fomo (fear of missing out). This week my “dad rock”-loving daughters will be at Glastonbury, enjoying our greatest living singer-songwriter perform in front of what may be the largest audience in the 50 glorious years of the world’s best music festival. Sir Paul McCartney has turned 80 and it is difficult to overstate his seminal influence and unparalleled status in not only Britain’s, but the world’s pop culture.
Think about it: multiple generations being genuinely excited by the opportunity to share in some of the world’s best-loved songs, performed by an 80-year-old, who has spent the past week in the US, fronting three-hour shows with superstars like Bruce Springsteen thrilled to share a stage with him.
Source: inews.co.uk
There’s a lovely scene in Peter Jackson’s recent documentary The Beatles: Get Back that sums up the taken-for-granted brilliance of Paul McCartney. It’s another day in Twickenham studios, where McCartney is single-handedly wrestling the Beatles into recording a new album. John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are at best semi-detached but McCartney is grafting away, writing from scratch songs good enough to make them believe in the band again. In this particular scene he’s at the piano, guiding the band through a hymn-like new number while his fiancée Linda Eastman chats to Yoko Ono in the foreground. The song they are merrily ignoring is Let It Be.
Source: Dorian Lynskey/theguardian.com
trange to think about it now, but when Ringo Starr launched Ringo and His All-Starr Band in 1989, he hadn’t been a touring musician since 1966.
The drummer had been in this really good band that only toured for four years before deciding it wasn’t for them and that they were just going to make records.
They were called the Beatles, and it turned out to be a pretty good move because the very next year, they released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which some contend is the greatest album of all time.
After the breakup of the Beatles in April 1970, Ringo had about four good musical years during which he played on solo albums by John Lennon and George Harrison, performed at the Concert for Bangladesh, released two successful albums of his own – 1973’s “Ringo” and 1974’s “Goodnight Vienna” – and scored five top 20 singles: “It Don’t Come Easy,” “Back Off Boogaloo,” “Photograph,” “You’re Sixteen” and “Oh My My.”
Source: Scott Mervis/spokesman.com
Tom Petty said George Harrison never left without telling him how much he loved him, which is no surprise. George’s widow, Olivia Harrison, said her husband often had loving relationships with his friends.
In a special edition of Rolling Stone called “Remembering George,” Petty explained, “I reminded him that we’d met, and there was some kind of weird click. It felt like we had known each other all our lives, and in a very personal way. We wound up just hanging a lot.”
That’s an understatement. After Petty and George “clicked,” Petty returned to Los Angeles, only to happen across George in a random restaurant. George thought it was weird that they’d bumped into each other because he’d just asked Jeff Lynne for Petty’s number.
Source: cheatsheet.com
In the 1960s, Beatlemania became so widespread that George Harrison said The Beatles were sometimes frightened by the unruly crush of fans. He explained that there were several near-misses with danger whenever they toured. While they found chaos wherever they went, Harrison explained that Texas felt particularly bad. He said that the first time they visited the state, the police were woefully unprepared for the sheer amount of fans who had come to see the band.
Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and John Lennon of The Beatles wave as they exit a plane.
In the 1960s, The Beatles inspired pandemonium wherever they went. A Scottish concert promoter, Andi Lothian, said the crowd was unlike anything he’d ever seen before.
55 years ago today, Pan Am flight 101 was greeted by over 5,000 Beatles fans as it arrived at New York's JFK airport, bringing The Beatles to the US for the first time and causing riotous scenes as they touched down.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Peter Jackson is quick to tell you he doesn’t have a favorite Beatle. Though he’s the soul of chatty cordiality in a call from his New Zealand headquarters, one senses that he finds the teen-magazine question has a whiff of impropriety to it: “I’ve always loved the Beatles as a group. You take any one member away and it’s not the Beatles anymore. I have to say, I love the Beatles because I love the music; I love the songs.”
There can be no doubt that Jackson, after his intensive review of 130 hours of audio and 57 hours of long-hidden video of the band at their career hinge point of January 1969, has no non-Beatle equal in knowledge of the group. If he has a humble brag it’s his, “I have no criticizing of the Beatles in my DNA,” but he’s no mere fan boy. His three-part, six-plus-hours “The Beatles: Get Back” documentary series on Disney+ is as unvarnished and all-inclusive as he could make it.
Source: Fred Schruers/latimes.com
Most of the time, George Harrison didn’t enjoy being a Beatle. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and on some occasions, the band’s producer George Martin either treated George as a junior member or a glorified session man. No one cared about his songs. Touring the world constantly throughout the first half of the 1960s aged him too.
However, somewhere along the way, George came to terms with being a Beatle. Releasing an album and playing for hundreds of fans suddenly wasn’t as daunting. George got a new generation of fans, and those who’d been through Beatlemania were older. No one was chasing him down anymore.
George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono at The Beatles' Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1988.
Source: cheatsheet.com
George Harrison‘s wife, Olivia, had one of the hardest jobs in the world. Being Mrs. Harrison wasn’t always a walk in Friar Park. While she supported George at every turn, he was sometimes a lot to handle. There were hiccups in their marriage. However, they got over them.
When George met Olivia in 1974, he said he had “no voice and almost no body at times.” In Martin Scorsese’s documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Olivia said, “When I first met him, he said, ‘I don’t want you to think you’ve discovered something about me I don’t know. I’m not claiming to be this or that or anything. People think they found you out, when I’m not hiding anything.’
“I thought he was really somebody who was saying something that I connected with. He was really a very captivating person… I liked the music, I liked what he was doing. We just seemed like partners from the very beginning.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
