Beatles News
If you hear anything about the upcoming Peter Jackson documentary The Beatles: Get Back (due September 2020), you’ll hear how it aims to tell a different story than Let It Be, the 1970 doc that showed the Fab Four headed towards their breakup.
You can count Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the two surviving Beatles, among those who see Get Back as a correction. “I am really happy that Peter has delved into our archives to make a film that shows the truth about The Beatles recording together,” Paul said in a statement on the film’s release.
If Get Back indeed shows a happy and united Fab Four, it would surprise most Beatles fans. After all, George Harrison did walk out on the band during the January 1969 sessions. And John Lennon described the “dreadful, dreadful feeling” hanging over the group at the time.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Welcome to the "Sheltering in Place with Classic Albums" series. Each week, I'll present a new album for your consideration—a means for passing these uncertain times in musical bliss. For some readers, hearing about the latest selection might offer a chance reacquaintance with an old friend. For others, the series might provide an unexpected avenue for making a new one.
For the inaugural selection in our series, we begin with "Rubber Soul," arguably the Beatles' maiden voyage into classic album-hood. No less than the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson described "Rubber Soul" as the greatest LP of all time. When he first heard it, Wilson recalled, "I couldn't deal with it. It blew my mind."
Released in December 1965, the Beatles' sixth studio album took its name from Paul McCartney's concept of "plastic soul." In his coinage, plastic soul referred to the band's penchant for transforming musical forms — often American rhythm and blues — into their own image, retaining their fundamental qualities in the process of making them their own. Perhaps even more dramatically, the record featured several tunes that upended prevailing 1960s thinking about gender norms at the time, making the album revolutionary in more ways than one.
Source: salon.com
Drummer Pete Best is explaining, not for the first time, what it was like for him that late summer’s day in 1962 when he was sacked suddenly from The Beatles, a beat combo from Liverpool who were about to become the biggest band the world had ever seen.
Best recalls an uncomfortable-looking band manager Brian Epstein explaining that other band members John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison didn’t think his drumming was up to scratch, and that they were replacing Best – who’d been with them for two years through those formative, frenetic Hamburg gigging days – with Ringo Starr.
“We were rockers, we were little hardies, we could handle ourselves. But when I got back home and I told my mother what happened, behind the sanctuary of the front door, I cried like a baby,” he recalls.
Source: irishtimes.com
From Al Jolson’s black-faced tearjerker “Mammy” to the Rolling Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadows” (which portrayed a struggling unwed mother confronted by the looming ghost of her own mother), songs about moms have often spelled trouble.
Nothing was more outrageous than The Doors’ oedipal opus, “The End,” in which an unhinged Jim Morrison screamed, “Father, I want to kill you, Mother… I want to…” Hoping to dodge an inevitable storm of controversy Elektra Records understandably substituted Jim’s “f-ck you” for an indecipherable feral groan from Morrison that teemed with self-loathing.
Lennon later confessed to having overwhelming oedipal desires towards his mother, Julia, after he accidentally brushed his hand against her breast as the two enjoyed an afternoon nap together.
Even naming one’s band The Mothers was fraught with issues, as the mad maestro Frank Zappa discovered. Irked by the implications of the group’s questionable moniker, Verve Records demanded the Mothers change their name, which led to Frank’s playful bastardization of Plato’s quote, “Necessity is the mother of invention” and called his band The Mothers of Invention. Thus, any questionable notions their original name might have conjured were instantly quashed.
Source: John Kruth/americansongwriter.com
Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David mixed together sweet and sour the way the Beatles did.
In a telling scene set on an airplane in Seinfeld, Jerry lucks into a seat next to a gorgeous model in first class and revels in the pampering. “More anything? More everything!” he exclaims to a flight attendant in “The Airport” (season four, episode twelve). An equally revealing moment about Larry David comes in the opening minutes of season ten of Curb Your Enthusiasm, when David, walking down the street, casually grabs a selfie stick from a tourist, breaks it over his knee, and continues his stroll.
As Curb Your Enthusiasm wraps up its typically fraught and hilarious tenth season with its 100th episode Sunday night, while Seinfeld’s more relaxed Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is in limbo after eleven seasons, we may not see much in the way of new television from these two comedy geniuses for a while, though Seinfeld has a book of comic musings coming out in October, his first since 1993. While we await whatever David and Seinfeld do next, let’s savor their creations like a smooth cup of brew from Latte Larry’s.
Source: nationalreview.com
As part of the Concert for George in 2002, Paul McCartney led an all-star band in a touching rendition of his Beatles bandmate George Harrison’s iconic hit ‘All Things Must Pass’. The song is sung in memory of Harrison a year after his passing and its message still rings true today.
The Concert for George was held at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 29 November as a fitting memorial to the mercurial songwriting genius and former Beatle, George Harrison, on the first anniversary of his death. The event was organised by Harrison’s widow, Olivia, and his son, Dhani, and was a global musical event, expertly guided by Eric Clapton. The profits from the event went to the Material World Charitable Foundation, an organisation founded by Harrison.
It welcomed a host of incredible guests for the evening, opened by Anoushka Shankar, Ravi Shankar’s daughter, the stars on show were brighter than ever. It even saw a Monty Python comedy break introduce Academy Award-winner Tom Hanks singing ‘The Lumberjack Song’—but the real party began when ‘George’s Band’ rolled into town.
Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk
Peter Jackson’s Fab Four documentary, Beatles: Get Back, will hit theaters 4 September.
The documentary film will focus on the Beatles’ final year together, cut from 55 hours worth of footage filmed back in 1969, when the band were recording what would become the seminal record, Let It Be. It will feature never-before-seen footage, including a behind-the-scenes look at the Beatles’ iconic ’69 rooftop gig.
The film is said to provide a cheerful counter-narrative to the original Let It Be film, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. While the latter had a gloomy undertone and exposed many conflicts and arguments between the band members experienced, the upcoming film will apparently show the Beatles joking around and having a good time with each other.
In a statement about the film, Paul McCartney said: “I am really happy that Peter has delved into our archives to make a film that shows the truth about The Beatles recording together. The friendship and love between us comes over and reminds me of what a crazily beautiful time we had.”
Source; Terence Stanley/guitar.com
It's perhaps no surprise that America's "Sister Golden Hair" shares a Beatlesque guitar line, considering the presence of producer George Martin. But the connection actually runs deeper.
"I very openly tip my hat there to 'My Sweet Lord,'" composer Gerry Beckley told Songfacts in 2016. "I was such a fan of all the Beatles, but we knew George [Harrison] quite well and I just thought that was such a wonderful intro."
Martin brought a suitably deft production style to "Sister Golden Hair," which was released to radio on March 19, 1975. Elsewhere, a number of his artful touches bolster Hearts, the second in a run of albums with America that expanded their elemental style. Martin also brought engineer Geoff Emerick, a key figure in the Beatles' late-period studio renaissance.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
Raquel Welch was one of the many big names — or future big names — to appear in the wacky British satire The Magic Christian. In the black comedy, Ringo Starr plays a former homeless derelict who is adopted but the richest man in the world, played by Peter Sellers. Taking aim at greed and capitalism, the film sees the wealthy Sir Grand test the limit people will go to for money in a bizarre, offbeat caper aboard a luxury liner, The Magic Christian.
The episodic movie features the likes of John Cleese and Graham Clapham, who would go on to form Monty Python, as well as the likes of Spike Milligan and Richard Attenborough.
Welch also has a small part as the villainous Priestess of the Whip.
As things start to take a turn for the worse aboard The Magic Christian, guests begin to attempt to abandon ship.
Source: Minnie Wright/express.co.uk
HERE WE GO AGAIN....
The battle between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones has been going on ever since they first crossed paths on the charts almost 50 years ago. The argument at the time, and one that still persists, was that the Beatles were a pop group and the Stones were a rock band: the boys next next door vs. the bad boys of rock. But it's not that clear cut, and never has been. So who's better? We asked two of our writers to choose side and make their arguments. Then we give you the final word. Here goes ...
These bands have more in common than their respective critics acknowledge: They're both British, they both grew up with American rock 'n' roll records that made up their early repertoires and they both shaped 20th-century music as we know it. But only one group continued to cut new paths at every step: the Beatles.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
