Beatles News
The Beatles were a major force in popular culture, however, Ringo Starr still felt “weighed down” by the Fab Four many years after their breakup. He revealed why the experience of being a former Beatle could be “heavy.” Here’s a look at what he had to say — and whether being a Beatles weighed him down commercially.
In 1992, Ringo gave an interview to Rolling Stone’s David Wild. During the interview, Wild mentioned a song John Lennon wrote for Ringo called “I’m the Greatest.” He cited the song’s line “I was in the greatest show on earth” as an example of Ringo’s “ambivalence” about his time in The Beatles.
“Of course that was John Lennon’s line,” Ringo said. “But sure, there have been times when I felt weighed down by it I’m still weighed down by it I mean, I’m sitting here, and I’m all excited about the new product, and you’re still going to be asking me about those days. Everybody wants to talk about those days, and sometimes it gets heavy for me. Right now that waitress is not looking at me as Richard Starkey. It’s Mr. Starr to her. It’s the Beatle, not even the former Beatle. When I am the oldest man on the planet, and I’m wheeled onto This Is Your Life, it will be as Beatle Ringo Starr. This will never end. But that’s cool, I suppose.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
John Lennon’s 1970 album “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” was his first song-based album following the dissolution of the Beatles—he’d previously released three avant-garde albums with Yoko Ono —and 50 years on it remains his most highly regarded solo work. Freed from the commercial demands of recording with the most successful band in the world, Lennon drew inspiration from within: He and Ms. Ono had recently undergone a new kind of therapy introduced by psychologist Arthur Janov, based on his book “The Primal Scream.” The therapeutic process involved re-experiencing childhood trauma and Lennon had plenty to work through—he barely knew his father and was removed from his mother’s care at age 5; she died when he was still a teenager. Co-producer Phil Spector helped realize the heady mix of fear, anguish and catharsis found on songs like “Mother,” “Working Class Hero” and “God.” “Raw” is typically the first adjective deployed to describe “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” and it’s not just referring to the lyrical content: The LP’s dark and atmospheric presence gives it a special mood.
Source: Mark Richardson/wsj.com
Every day throughout 1964, a postman called Eric Clague would deliver another bulging sack of fan letters to 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool, where Paul McCartney had been brought up, and where his father still lived.
That year, The Beatles were the four most famous young men in the world. In the first week of April, all top five singles in the American charts were by The Beatles.
Who was Eric Clague? Six years before, he had been a junior constable in the Liverpool police force.
On July 15, 1958, while off-duty, he had been driving a standard Vanguard sedan along Menlove Avenue when a 44-year-old woman stepped into his path. He braked, but too late: his car hit the woman, hurling her into the air.
An ambulance arrived, but there was nothing to be done. Julia Lennon was dead.
At that time, Eric Clague was a learner driver who was not supposed to be driving alone. His case was brought to court. Though an onlooker claimed Clague had been speeding, he denied it. The jury chose to believe him, and returned a verdict of misadventure.
Source: Craig Brown/dailymail.co.uk
If there are two things you would never instinctively put together, it’s The Beatles and Lewisham.
But once upon a time, the international pop stars played two gigs in the South London borough.
The first concert in March 1963 was before Beatlemania had really begun, while the latter in December 1963 was everything you would expect from the 60s icons.
There were screaming girls, uncontrollable crowds, and the streets were overflowing with people eager to catch a glimpse of the group.
They played their first gig at Lewisham’s Odeon Cinema on March 29 and performed a number of hits including Love Me Do and Please, Please Me.
Source: Ruby Gregory/mylondon.news
On August 17, 1960, the Beatles kicked off one of their earliest professional gigs—a months-long residency at the Indra Club in Hamburg, Germany. Over the next two years, the budding British rock stars, who’d struggled to book venues in their hometown of Liverpool, continued to perform regularly in the German city.
“We had to learn millions of songs because we’d be on for hours,” guitarist George Harrison later recalled, as quoted by the Los Angeles Times’ Dean R. Owen. “Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship, learning how to play in front of people.”
Now, reports Richard Brooks for the Observer, a trove of largely unseen letters, photographs and work permits from this pivotal period is set to go up for auction. The mementos—including a 1963 missive in which Paul McCartney discusses the release of the band’s first LP, Please Please Me, as well as sketches and poems by John Lennon—will go under the hammer at the London-based auction house Bonhams on May 5.
Source: Isis Davis-Marks/smithsonianmag.com
Jane Asher met the Beatles on April 18, 1963, at the Royal Albert Hall. The band had exploded onto the scene after their second single, Please Please Me, topped the charts that January, followed by three more singles and the album of the same name. Jane was only 17 but she was already famous herself as a child star and young actress in films like The Prince and the Pauper and television's Robin Hood series. She was also a panelist on the BBC's hugely popular and influential Juke Box Jury, which rated new music releases. She had already caught Paul's eye.
Paul later said: "I met Jane Asher when she was sent by the Radio Times to cover a concert we were in at the Royal Albert Hall – we had a photo taken with her for the magazine and we all fancied her.
"We’d thought she was blonde, because we had only ever seen her on black-and-white telly doing Juke Box Jury, but she turned out to be a redhead. So it was: ‘Wow, you’re a redhead!’
"I tried pulling her, succeeded, and we were boyfriend and girlfriend for quite a long time."
Source: Stefan Kyriazis/express.co.uk
The members of The Beatles were more than just bandmates, their relationships with one another were more like that of brothers.
The band’s drummer Ringo Starr recalled decades after John Lennon’s death the surprise and emotion he felt at hearing the voice of his old friend speaking directly to him on a recording Starr hadn’t been aware of.
Lennon wrote ‘Grow Old With Me’
Recorded a month before Lennon was gunned down in front of his New York City home in 1980, “Grow Old With Me” was eventually released on a posthumous Lennon album called Milk and Honey.
The album also featured two songs that received abundant radio airplay: “Nobody Told Me” and “I’m Steppin’ Out.”
The song’s opening lines are ‘Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be,’ quoted from poet Robert Browning’s 1864 work “Rabbi ben Ezra.”
Rolling Stone in a review of the album stated that Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono’s liner notes “consciously adopted the image of [the Lennons] as the reincarnation of Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning for Milk and Honey.”
Lennon’s inspiration for the song, according to John Lennon
Source: cheatsheet.com
Letters and memorabilia from The Beatles’ time in Hamburg are set to go up for auction in London next month.
The iconic band played over 250 shows in the German city between August 1960 and December 1962, with their time gigging and some of the relationships they formed there helping to propel them to fame in the UK and beyond.
The new auction lot will include previously unseen letters, work permits, photos, drawings, poems and more. Some of the items were sent by the band to photographer Astrid Kirchherr, who was engaged to former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe after meeting them in Hamburg.
The group were close with Kirchherr and wrote to her when they were back in the UK. In one letter that is going up for auction, George Harrison invited her to visit him and Ringo Starr in their new flat and instructed her not to put his name on the envelope when she wrote back.
Source: Rhian Daly/nme.com
It was the city that made the Beatles. Not Liverpool, but Hamburg, the north German seaport where, between August 1960 and October 1962, the group played more than they ever did at the Cavern in their home city.
Sixty years on, previously unseen letters, work permits and photos have been unearthed about the band’s time in Germany and their relationship with Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer best known for her stark black-and-white portraits of the Beatles taken in Hamburg before they were famous.
Letters to Kirchherr – who is credited with influencing the group’s style and signature “mop-top” haircuts – include one from George Harrison inviting her to London “to make him tea and give him cornflakes” and one from John Lennon, who mentions their just-released first single, Love Me Do, writing modestly: “It’s quite good but not good enough.”
Source: Richard Brooks/theguardian.com
Students 0n the class Zoom call could barely believe their eyes. Some gasped. Others cheered. A few started crying tears of joy.
“IS THIS REAL?” asked Glenna Jane Galarion ’21 in the Zoom chat, as Sir Paul McCartney logged onto the Princeton Atelier course “How to Write a Song.” The students had the rare opportunity to have their work critiqued by the legendary Beatles musician and songwriter when McCartney, calling from New York, joined their virtual classroom in February.
“When we started listening to [my group’s] song, Paul McCartney started bobbing his head,” Galarion told PAW. “And I thought, ‘No way is Paul McCartney, the greatest songwriter in music history, grooving to our song right now!’”
“How to Write a Song,” taught by poet and Princeton creative writing professor Paul Muldoon, has been offered at Princeton in various forms since 2010. Bridget Kearney, a songwriter and bassist for the band Lake Street Dive and a former guest artist in the course, is co-teaching with Muldoon this year.
Source: By Anna Allport ’23/paw.princeton.edu
