Beatles News
On June 1, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded the anti-war tune “Give Peace A Chance”. The song would be officially released a few days later, but the scenario surrounding the recording of the song is quite interesting. And if you’re a diehard Lennon fan, you probably know the story quite well.
Though the song itself is an uplifting tune against violence, some listeners found the song (as well as its recording process) to be in poor taste. The Story Behind the Recording of “Give Peace a Chance”
“Give Peace A Chance” was originally written by John Lennon alone, though it was credited to Lennon–McCartney. The tune was written while Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, staged their famous “bed-in” honeymoon in Montreal, Canada. This, specifically, is where the controversy comes in.
The title of the song came from a phrase that Lennon would say when asked by reporters what the purpose of the bed-in was: “Just give peace a chance.” Fans of Lennon thought that the stunt, which involved the pair simply sitting in bed on two separate occasions for about a week at a time, was a solid nonviolent protest against the Vietnam War. Many critics at the time called the song that came from the stunt “clever.”
Source: americansongwriter.com/Em Casalena
The 82-year-old singer-songwriter found fame in the 1960s and has gone on to release a number of hits including Live and Let Die and Let It Be. Now, Paul works as the lead patron of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA).
In his role, the Wings frontman still visits the educational facility to support the students on their graduation day. Another person who works at LIPA is David Stark who shared with The Mirror US Paul's commitment to the students.
"For the last 20 years I've been involved with LIPA, which Paul is the patron of, and he was instrumental in getting that off the ground in the early 90s," Stark explained. He continued, "They have the graduation day every year in July and I give out the same writing advice every year. And Paul's always there. So he makes a big effort."
Paul also holds one-on-one sessions with the songwriting students before their graduation, according to Stark. He explained, "He'll sit down with each of them for half an hour or so to talk about their songs. He's great. He really is."
He continued, "He makes a big effort and I'm very proud to work with him." Stark has met Paul several times and shared what he's really like when the cameras aren't on him.
"I met him many times and he's just a great guy," Stark told us. "And, you know, not all people realize that he does all this on the side and he makes a big effort."
He continued, "He's very open. He'll talk. He's happy to talk to students or kids or anybody. He's very encouraging. He really is. And, you know, he's going to be 83 in June. That's amazing."
Paul isn't the only member of The Beatles Stark has connections to. Shortly after the death of John Lennon, he met the singer's aunt, Mimi Smith. Recalling his meeting with Mimi, Stark told us, "I really got on with her."
Source: themirror.com/Scarlett O'Toole
He explained how they'd been introduced by a mutual friend who was visiting Mimi at the time. Stark remembered clearly what he and Mimi talked about, with John's aunt telling him everything about the musician's early life.
"She's telling me everything about John and his early life. You know, how he was wise and gabby when he was a kid," he explained. Mimi also showed Stark all of John's old school exercise books, as well as his school tie and cap.
Artwork from more than 100 records will be displayed at Lincoln Castle from Thursday 5 June to Sunday 24 August.
They will include The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Duran Duran's Rio, and Elvis Presley's eponymous debut album from 1956.
The exhibition, called Playback: Art of the Album Sleeve, will also include contributions from some of the designers behind the covers.
Malcolm Garrett, who created covers for Buzzcocks, Duran Duran and Peter Gabriel, and Mark Farrow, the man behind sleeves for the Pet Shop Boys, is among the artists who have taken part in a film about their inspirations.
Kimberley Vickers, the castle's general manager, said: "Album art is so much more than packaging – these iconic covers have become era-defining images that have shaped popular culture."
The exhibition, which will be on display in the Victorian prison at the castle, will be free for annual pass holders and included in the price of a day ticket.
Source: Paul Johnson/bbc.com
On this day in 1967, The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a boundary-pushing record that redefined what a rock album could be. With psychedelic sounds, orchestral arrangements and a concept-driven structure, Sgt. Pepper’s quickly climbed to No. 1 on the charts and is now widely considered one of the most influential albums of all time.
Another transformative moment came on June 1, 1974, when Dr. Henry Heimlich first published details of his abdominal thrust technique — now known as the Heimlich maneuver — in the journal Emergency Medicine. The method, which helps choking victims by dislodging food from the airway, has since been credited with saving thousands of lives. June 1 has since been recognized as National Heimlich Maneuver Day.
June 1 also marks World Milk Day, created by the United Nations in 2001 to recognize the importance of milk in global nutrition. The day is now celebrated in more than 80 countries, highlighting the role of dairy in agriculture, health and economic development.
If that’s not enough, history buffs might raise a glass of Scotch today in honor of a 1495 entry in Scottish records, marking the first known written reference to whisky, according to the History Channel. A monk named John Cor was commissioned to make “aqua vitae” — the water of life — at Lindores Abbey.
Source: cleveland.com/Molly Walsh
Just under six decades ago, on May 30, 1968, the Beatles went into the studio to begin recording their eponymous “White Album,” a double-album full of career-defining hits but one that did not come without its fair share of regrets from those involved, including producer George Martin and musicians Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. For as creative and inspired as the album was, the dynamics in the studio were fraught at best. The Fab Four was fast approaching the end.
Seemingly just as quickly as they burst onto the scene several years earlier, the Beatles seemed to be departing from their time as one of the greatest, most popular rock bands in the world in a similarly impressive blaze of glory. As for Martin’s regrets? Starr posed an interesting solution that was just as goofy and lighthearted as one might expect from the affable percussionist.
George Martin Regretted This Aspect Of The White Album
The Beatles’ 1968 “White Album” is a massive beast of a record. The double album release featured cuts like “Blackbird,” “Helter Skelter,” “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and many, many more. While not all 30 tracks would become the band’s most popular songs, it was a particularly impressive collection of writing styles, creative inspiration, and musical arrangements. But producer George Martin had his doubts about including that many tracks at one time.
“I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than a double,” he said in Anthology. “But they insisted. I think it could have been made fantastically good if it had been compressed a bit and condensed. A lot of people I know think it’s still the best album they made. I later learned that by recording all those songs, they were getting rid of their contact with EMI more quickly.”
Drummer Ringo Starr had a laughable solution to Martin’s qualms with the album: “I agree that we should have put it out as two separate albums,” Starr said. “The ‘White’ and ‘Whiter’ albums.” In a testament to the different wavelengths the band was operating on at the time, not everyone agreed that there was too much on the double record. (We’d wager a bet that you can guess which try-hard Beatle was okay with the lengthy tracklist.)
Source: americansongwriter.com/Melanie Davis
John Lennon performs on the keyboard during "One To One", a charity concert to benefit mentally challenged children at Madison Square Garden, Aug. 30, 1972, New York. Greene County native Gary Van Scyoc was in the band that backed Lennon at the concert.
Gary Van Scyoc graduated from Waynesburg High School in 1964, just a few months after the Beatles exploded in America’s consciousness and made being a musician one of the coolest jobs around.
As “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” were blasting out of thousands of transistor radios, Van Scyoc had no way of imagining that in just a handful of years he’d be the one playing bass alongside John Lennon and not Paul McCartney, Lennon’s fellow Beatle and songwriting collaborator.
“It was just so cool to work with John,” Van Scyoc recalled during a recent phone conversation from his home in the Poconos. “He never told me one thing to play, I had total freedom.”
Van Scyoc worked with Lennon and Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, thanks to being a member of the New York band Elephant’s Memory. The group mixed radicalism and “a rough sound,” according to a review that appeared in The New York Times in July 1971. It was shortly after that review appeared that Lennon and Ono relocated to New York and immersed themselves in the cauldron of radical politics and avant-garde art that was bubbling in Greenwich Village. They saw Elephant’s Memory play at Max’s Kansas City, what was then one of New York’s hottest nightspots, and invited them to work with them.
Source: heraldstandard.com/Brad Hundt
McCartney is an incredibly meticulous musician. He oversees every step of the making of his songs, and has done so since the early days of his songwriting partnership with John Lennon. Whenever he felt a movie didn't do their music justice, he wasn't shy to say so. The cast and crew working on the upcoming biopics have a difficult task on their hands, as their biggest inspiration might just be their biggest critic.
Paul McCartney Wasn't Happy With Previous Beatles Biopics
When it comes to having his life portrayed on screen, it makes sense that Paul McCartney would be protective. The Beatles' legacy has certainly exceeded any individual person, but that doesn't mean that the people involved aren't real humans who will be affected by any inaccuracies shown to the world. McCartney doesn't usually seem that concerned with the way he's perceived by the public. He's in his 80s, and for the past 60 years, he's been one of the most recognizable and revered musicians in the world. So, safe to say, he has thick skin.
"One of my annoyances about the film Backbeat is that they’ve actually taken my rock ‘n’ rollness off me," he complained. Not only did they wash him as a musician, but they also got things wrong about The Beatles' creative process. They credited John Lennon for things that McCartney actually did, maybe because they felt it fit him better, and that annoyed the bassist to no end, because he feels that it's now forever in the public's mind.
"They give John the song Long Tall Sally to sing and he never sang it in his life. But now it’s set in cement. It’s like the Buddy Holly and Glenn Miller stories. The Buddy Holly Story does not even mention Norman Petty, and The Glenn Miller Story is a sugarcoated version of his life. Now Backbeat has done the same thing to the story of The Beatles."
How Will The Upcoming Biopics Be Different?
Despite his past reluctance to the previous projects revising The Beatles' story, Paul McCartney has recently been getting more involved in new works of art about his band's legacy. In 2021, he worked alongside Peter Jackson to release The Beatles: Get Back, a three-part, 8-hour-long documentary made from the footage used to make the 1970 movie Let It Be. This project allowed him and Ringo Starr to not only set the record straight about what the making of that album was like, but also to share the last Beatles song, Now and Then, with the world.
Source: collider.com/Val Barone
Originally, in the early days when they were yet to dominate the global music scene with record sales of 600 million, the group called themselves The Quarrymen, and even flirted with the name The Silver Beetles for a short while.
Their ultimate choice, The Beatles, was a witty homage to Buddy Holly's The Crickets, with an ingenious play on "beat," that hinted at the band's roots in beat music and the cultural Beat Generation.
But stick to the lore of The Beatles and you'll find John Lennon often spun a fantastical story about the origins of the name, claiming it came to him in an extraordinary vision where a man on a flaming pie declared, "You are Beatles with an A," leaving fans to wonder if it was genuine insight or Lennon's trademark wry humor.
Lennon, who died at the age of 40 in 1980, once reflected on the naming process, revealing, "I was looking for a name like The Crickets that meant two things, and from crickets I got to beetles."
He cleverly altered the spelling to BEA to give it a layered meaning, "And I changed the BEA, because 'beetles' didn't mean two things on its own. When you said it, people thought of crawly things; and when you read it, it was beat music."
Source: irishstar.com/Ellie Hook
Just under six decades ago, on May 30, 1968, the Beatles went into the studio to begin recording their eponymous “White Album,” a double-album full of career-defining hits but one that did not come without its fair share of regrets from those involved, including producer George Martin and musicians Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. For as creative and inspired as the album was, the dynamics in the studio were fraught at best. The Fab Four was fast approaching the end.
Seemingly just as quickly as they burst onto the scene several years earlier, the Beatles seemed to be departing from their time as one of the greatest, most popular rock bands in the world in a similarly impressive blaze of glory. As for Martin’s regrets? Starr posed an interesting solution that was just as goofy and lighthearted as one might expect from the affable percussionist.
George Martin Regretted This Aspect Of The White Album
The Beatles’ 1968 “White Album” is a massive beast of a record. The double album release featured cuts like “Blackbird,” “Helter Skelter,” “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and many, many more. While not all 30 tracks would become the band’s most popular songs, it was a particularly impressive collection of writing styles, creative inspiration, and musical arrangements. But producer George Martin had his doubts about including that many tracks at one time.
“I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than a double,” he said in Anthology. “But they insisted. I think it could have been made fantastically good if it had been compressed a bit and condensed. A lot of people I know think it’s still the best album they made. I later learned that by recording all those songs, they were getting rid of their contact with EMI more quickly.”
Drummer Ringo Starr had a laughable solution to Martin’s qualms with the album: “I agree that we should have put it out as two separate albums,” Starr said. “The ‘White’ and ‘Whiter’ albums.” In a testament to the different wavelengths the band was operating on at the time, not everyone agreed that there was too much on the double record. (We’d wager a bet that you can guess which try-hard Beatle was okay with the lengthy tracklist.)
Source: americansongwriter.com/Melanie Davis
On This Day, May 30, 1964…
The Beatles hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with their debut single, “Love Me Do.”
The track, written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, had the pair duetting on vocals. The song was recorded three different times, with different drummers. Original drummer Pete Best initially recorded it, and then it was rerecorded with his replacement, Ringo Starr. A third version featured session drummer Andy White, which was featured on The Beatles’ Please Please Me album.
In addition to the U.S., “Love Me Do” topped the chart in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.
Following “Love Me Do,” The Beatles went on to have 20 #1 hits, the last being 1970’s “The Long and Winding Road,” from their album Let It Be.
Source: everettpost.com
Beatles Unisex Varsity Jacket: The Beatles Logo Purple & Grey 