Beatles News
Micky Dolenz lent his voice to many of The Monkees‘ most famous classic rock songs. In addition, he performed many songs by The Beatles on tour. During one performance, he wanted to cry while singing a song from The Beatles’ The White Album.
According to njarts.net, Dolenz said it was impossible for him to choose a favorite Beatles album. He also said he was a massive fan of The White Album. He said he loved “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” but he couldn’t pick a favorite track from The White Album because there were too many good songs on it.
According to Westworld, Dolenz once went on tour with Christopher Cross, Todd Rundgren of Utopia, Jason Scheff of Chicago, and Joey Molland of Badfinger. They all performed songs from The White Album. In addition, Dolenz performed classic Monkees tracks such as “I’m a Believer” and “Pleasant Valley Sunday” on the tour.
Source: cheatsheet.com
George Harrison started the Traveling Wilburys by accident. The European record companies needed an extra song for Cloud Nine. So, he had to make a new one quickly. George enlisted the help of his friends Jeff Lynne and Bob Dylan to expedite the process, and his other pals, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison, came along to watch.
George and Lynne wrote the song, but they needed lyrics. After seeing a box in Dylan’s recording studio that said “Handle With Care,” they wrote the song around that. However, having his friends, each of them expert singer/songwriters themselves, in one place was ultra-rare. It would have been silly for George to pass up an opportunity for all of them to sing on the song. Thus, the Traveling Wilburys was born. Thank god for happy accidents.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Midway through the second episode of The Beatles: Get Back — the longest of the three, at nearly three hours — Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who shot the original footage in 1969, is talking to the Beatles about the movie they’re currently in. The group is sitting around at a makeshift recording studio on a movie sound stage. “There’s a lot of good stuff, but there’s no story yet,” Lindsay-Hogg tells them. He’s been filming for a week and a half or so, and most of what he has is the guys noodling on guitars and singing half-formed lyrics, plus some internal fighting. Plans have changed several times. They’re not really sure what’s going to happen by the end.
Source: Alissa Wilkinson/vox.com
SLIPKNOT and STONE SOUR frontman Corey Taylor has praised director and producer Peter Jackson's "The Beatles: Get Back" documentary, calling it "one of the most fascinating things" he has ever seen.
The three-episode, nearly eight-hour documentary features the four members of THE BEATLES — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — crafting what was to become their final album. (THE BEATLES recorded "Let It Be" before "Abbey Road" but released the latter first.) It also includes the band's iconic final performance on a rooftop in London.
Taylor, who released his first solo album last year, discussed "Get Back" in a recent interview with HardDrive Radio's Lou Brutus. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I watched the first episode and then, obviously, life kind of pulled me away.
Source: blabbermouth.net
After an hour of this lengthy three-part documentary about The Beatles, I was wondering if it was going to be nothing more than an extended jam session – gripping stuff for diehard fans, but a long haul for the rest of us. When Peter Jackson got his hands on this never-before-seen footage, he must have realised he could make something longer than The Lord of the Rings, without the wardrobe department or the CGI. There are many occasions over the course of almost eight hours when the word “interminable” springs to mind. We watch John, Paul, George and Ringo fooling around – first in a cavernous film shed at Twickenham Studios, then in the basement of Apple headquarters in Savile Row. They go through endless renditions of their own songs and, by way of limbering up, an encyclopaedic collection of rock ‘n’ roll classics.
Source: John McDonald/afr.com
During and after his time with Wings, Paul McCartney and his songs faced lots of criticism from music critics. During an interview, Paul agreed with that assessment. He revealed he couldn’t even listen to one of Wings’ songs because it went “nowhere.” Subsequently, Paul revealed why he kept writing songs even though he knew some of his songs were subpar.Ballads formed a major part of Wings’ discography. Many of Wings’ most famous songs such as “My Love,” “London Town,” and the hit live version of “Maybe I’m Amazed” were ballads. In addition, some of the band’s other big songs like “Silly Love Songs” and “Uncle Albert” weren’t exactly hard rock. During an interview with Rolling Stone, Paul agreed with the critical sentiments that his post-Beatles songs were “too soft.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
I suspect that no one—truly, no one—could have imagined the success of the new Beatles documentary, “Get Back,” the director Peter Jackson’s recut of the footage shot in January of 1969 that produced the dim documentary “Let It Be.” After having taken on the task of reshaping our entire conception of the First World War in his previous “updated” documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Jackson has now taken on the harder task of reconstructing our view of Paul’s quarrel with George over the guitar riffs in “Two of Us.” Even so: nearly eight hours of guys making desultory passes at old songs, painfully constructing new ones through hours of repetition and the testing of tentative lyrics—“Is Tucson in Arizona?” John checks with Paul as they write “Get Back”—all the while mildly bickering and talking past one another in a family broth of warm memories and clouded quarrels? Really? Only the remaining coterie of grizzled Beatles fans, surely, would respond. But the documentary works and, apparently, has been an astonishing success both in the numbers of people who have watched it and the number of responses it has provoked.
Source: Adam Gopnik/newyorker.com
On Aug. 31, 1998, Variety reported that New Zealand filmmakers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh would transform J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of books into three films. Reporter Benedict Carver added that the books are “a highly prized literary property that has eluded filmmakers for years.”
It was the culmination more than three decades of trying to adapt Tolkien’s work for the screen, after the world of visual effects had finally caught up to the British author’s fantastical storylines.
But three decades before, the Beatles had tried to get a “Lord of the Rings” film off the ground. After playing themselves in “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!,” the Fab Four was ready to play fictional characters. Apple Films executive Denis O’Dell spearheaded the hunt for material, and Lennon reportedly loved the idea of “Rings.” Lennon would play Gollum, Paul McCartney would play Frodo, George Harrison would be Gandalf and Ringo Starr would play Sam.
Source: Tim Gray/variety.com
The Beatles were only together for eight years. And yet here we are a half century after they split up and they are still with us, as powerful a presence as they ever were. Thanks to the new three-part Disney+ docuseries The Beatles: Get Back, we are in the midst of a new round of Beatlemania. And it’s thrilling.
If you haven’t had a chance to watch all eight hours of Get Back yet, we urge you to immediately. It’s a fantastic reminder of how the greatest of all rock ’n’ roll bands worked together in the studio and of the bonds that tied them together — and occasionally drove them apart. And to complete your own Beatlemania, check out 11 more films with or about the Fab Four.
Source: Chris Nashawaty/aarp.org
Over the five decades since the Beatles decided to record an album live in the studio with a camera crew filming the sessions, the story has settled into pop history as a xgrim fable of eroding male bonds, erupting egos, and dissipating creative chemistry. As veteran Beatles chronicler Mark Lewisohn described the events in his book The Beatles Recording Sessions, they represented “the most confusing and frustrating period in the Beatles’ entire career.” Longtime Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, in his memoir Here, There and Everywhere, described the time as “torturous and fraught with tension.” Among the Beatles themselves, George Harrison, in an interview, cast the 1969 recording sessions as “the low of all time,” and John Lennon remembered them as “the most miserable sessions on Earth.”
Source: David Hajdu/thenation.com
