Beatles News
The White Album includes one of the most oblique songs in The Beatles’ catalogue. Luckily for fans, John Lennon opened up about the song’s meaning during a famous interview. Interestingly, John revealed the White Album song in question reflected some of his personal feelings — and had an odd joke in it to boot.
In the book Lennon Remembers, John told Rolling Stone co-founder Jann S. Wenner that violent revolution seemed inevitable. However, John didn’t think this was a good thing because he didn’t want to die. John revealed he poured his feelings about violent revolution into one of The Beatles’ songs.
“‘Revolution 9’ was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens,” John said. “That was just like a drawing of revolution. Because arbitrarily, I was making… all the thing was made with loops. I had about thirty loops going, I fed them onto one basic track. I was getting like Beethoven and I’d go upstairs, chopping it up and making it backwards and things like that to get sound effect.
Source: cheatsheet.com
I’m not sure if anyone ever remembers the first time they heard the Beatles, they’re just a pivotal part of a lot of people’s lives from early on as was the case for me. My earliest memories of the Beatles or even music for that matter was my parents blasting ‘Yellow Submarine’ in an old Toyota Landcruiser navigating through the bumpy red roads of Arnhem Land Northern Territory; my two sisters, brother and I would join my parents in singing “we all live in a yellow submarine” at the top of our lungs.
It wasn’t until my early teenage years that I started exploring the Beatles for myself. I started from their first album Please Please Me (1963) and listened track by track right through to the iconic Let It Be album (1970). I would constantly find myself changing my favourite song and album: it seemed the albums would never differ in their consistently brilliant songwriting and innovative sounds and harmonies. Revolver (1966) seemed to stand out to me the most. I remember the first time I heard the third track on the album: a waltzing pop, psychedelic masterpiece written by John Lennon, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’. My dad had plugged his iPod Classic into the car and played the track as he drove me to school that morning and it instantly resonated with me. I’d never heard anything like it and, to put it lightly, it blew my mind and shifted my view on music drastically. I knew I wanted to write songs like that.
Source: musicfeeds.com.au
When George Harrison released “All Those Years Ago” in May 1981, it was a heartfelt tribute to his Beatles bandmate John Lennon, who’d been shot dead the previous year while the song was coming together.
When fans listened to Harrison's words about his lost friend, they also heard the three surviving Beatles together for the first time since the band broke up a decade earlier.
The number had started out as a song for Ringo Starr, but the drummer didn’t like the lyrics, so Harrison scrapped them in November 1980, while keeping Starr’s drum track in place. The recording was on a back burner when the news of Lennon’s murder flashed around the world the following month.
Like Paul McCartney, Harrison opted to go to work as usual in his recording studio. The death of someone he’d known since the age of 13, and regarded as a hero, was an experience that numbed and shocked him.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
Choosing a best track from 'Abbey Road' is like selecting which limb you'd least like to lose.
Ranking anything — let alone a masterpiece of the magnitude of Abbey Road by The Beatles — is an exercise in futility.
There’s simply no objectivity to such ordering. All one really does when they say that they like ‘Because’ more than ‘Octopus’s Garden’ is reveal something about themselves; about their own complex and personal notion of the good. Ask 12 different people to name the best song off Abbey Road and one will get 12 different miniature diary entries; a dozen little snatches of taste.
But hey, there’s value in that, and there’s value in the conversations that such rankings inspire. A core component of loving music means discussing it, and working out where your opinion slots in amongst others — that’s all a ranking can ever hope to do.
So, don’t read the following list as anything like a definitive ranking of a classic album. Read it as a conversation-starter; as an opportunity to dive into one of the musical masterworks of the 20th century, track by track; and as a little snatch of the self being revealed.
Source: Joseph Earp/junkee.com
John Lennon wasn’t a superstitious man, however, he once had a premonition while recording one of his solo songs. Interestingly, the song in question was originally by someone else. Here’s a look at the time famous producer Phil Spector made John sing an old track.
John released an album called Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s an album of covers of 1950s and 1960s songs representing the early days of rock ‘n’ roll. One of the tracks on the album was a cover of “Just Because” by Lloyd Price. While most of the songs on Rock ‘n’ Roll were hits, Price’s “Just Because” didn’t chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
During an interview with Rolling Stone, John discussed an interesting thing he did while recording “Just Because.” “[Phil] Spector had made me sing called ‘Just Because,’ which I didn’t really know – all the rest of the songs I’d done as a teenager, so I knew them backward – but I couldn’t really get the hang of it,” he said. “At the end of that record – I was mixing it just next door – I started spieling and saying, ‘And so we say farewell from the Record Plant,’ and a little thing in the back of my mind said, ‘Are you really saying farewell?’ I hadn’t thought of it then. I was still separated from Yoko and still hadn’t had the baby, but somewhere in the back was a voice that was saying, ‘Are you saying farewell to the whole game?’
Source: cheatsheet.com
Of all the albums released by The Beatles, Let It Be (1970) has to be the strangest of the bunch. It’s not strange in its musical approach (quite the opposite). But it has the feel of an LP patched together for a band that was no longer functioning (which it was). Hence the Phil Spector treatment on a few of the album’s most famous tracks.
That includes “The Long and Winding Road,” a song Spector really went to town on. Originally a subtle piano ballad by Paul McCartney, Spector added an orchestral part and a choir to the flawed backing track. And McCartney hated it when he first heard Spector’s finished product. Then it hit No. 1 in America anyway.
In all likelihood, it would have sounded quite different had McCartney given it to Tom Jones. According to the Welsh singer, that was a very real possibility. By Jones’ account, McCartney offered it to him prior to the Spector sessions that changed “The Long and Winding Road” forever.
Source: cheatsheet.com
egendary musician Paul McCartney has five kids. The former Beatle has four kids with his first wife, Linda. The rock-and-roll legend also has a daughter with his second wife, Heather Mills.
Paul and Linda were inseparable once they started dating in 1968, until Linda McCartney died in April 1998 from breast cancer. According to Rolling Stone, the McCartneys were married almost 30 years and only spent 10 nights apart during their marriage. Paul adopted Linda's daughter Heather from a previous marriage and the couple had children Mary, Stella, and James.
A year after Paul's beloved wife Linda died, he fell head over heels in love with Heather, a former model turned activist. The superstar married his second wife in 2002, but they separated in 2006, and Paul and Heather's divorce was final in 2008. The legendary musician forked over a $35 million settlement in the divorce, but it was worth it. Heather's supposed shady past and their public divorce were hard on the entire family.
Source: Callie McGuire/nickiswift.com
In early 1984 the songs and albums written, recorded and released by The Beatles were put up for sale by ATV Music. At the time, the band did not know too much about copyright, so could not do anything to stop their songs from being taken away. At the time, Paul McCartney and John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, decided against purchasing the rights to the band's songs.
In 1985 Michael Jackson bought the rights to these songs for approximately $47.5 million (approximately £36.7 million).
This meant that he took the rights for songs such as Hey Jude, Let It Be and Yesterday.
Speaking about the unexpected turn of events in the 1980s, McCartney recalled what happened while he was on The Graham Norton Show in 2014.
He told the talk show host: "[We lost] the early Beatles stuff. It was a carve-up."
Source: Callum Crumlish/express.co.uk
In a new interview, Alice Cooper described the moment his manager Shep Gordon was asked to take on the Beatles – and why he refused.
In a new episode of Joe Bonamassa’s Live From Nerdville podcast, Cooper said he was in Gordon’s office, presumably during the period when the British band were attempting to rearrange their business concerns, when the potentially life-changing call came through. The episode is available below.
“He was managing Luther Vandross, Blondie, everybody… Gypsy Kings, Groucho Marx, Raquel Welch,” Cooper said. “He calls me into the office one day and he’s like, ‘Look, everybody’s driving me crazy, except you and Groucho… I want you to be here when I call and resign from everybody.’ I went, ‘Okay.’ I’m sitting there as he goes, ‘Yeah, I think I’ve done enough, I think you can move on…’ We open a bottle of champagne. He says, ‘It’s done – it’s me and you!’ I went, ‘Great!’”
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
John Lennon had plenty of time to reunite The Beatles between the Fab Four’s breakup in 1970 and his untimely death in 1980. However, this never happened. During an interview from 1970, John explained why he thought recording with The Beatles again would be pointless — even if it made sense at one time.
In the book Lennon Remembers, which includes the transcript of a 1970 interview, Rolling Stone co-founder Jann S. Wenner and John discussed The Beatles at length. At one point, John revealed he was going to meet the other members of The Beatles soon to discuss financial matters. Subsequently, Wenner asked if John would record with them again.
“Not a chance,” John replied. “I wouldn’t record with anyone again. I record with Yoko, but I’m not going to record with another egomaniac. There’s only room for one on an album nowadays, and so there’s no point.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
