Beatles News
One day in mid-October 1963, John Lennon had dropped by at the house in Wimpole Street, London, where Paul was living with the family of his girlfriend, Jane Asher.
The two of them went down to a little room in the basement and sat together on Mrs Asher's piano stool.
Their manager Brian Epstein had told them that their next, most important task was to compose a song to crack the elusive American market.
Up to now, their hit singles in Britain — From Me To You, She Loves You, Please Please Me — had all flopped over there.
After an hour or so of doodling about, Paul went upstairs to the bedroom of Jane's brother, and put his head around the door.
Source: Craig Brown for the Daily Mail
In November 1971, George Harrison stopped by The Dick Cavett Show to act as one of the main guests for an episode of the talk show along with Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar and rock singer Gary Wright. Segments of the episode were recently shared to YouTube by Daphne Productions, Inc., which owns the rights to the classic talk show. The interview features a young Harrison, who’d still been a member of The Beatles just a little over a year earlier.
Related: The Beatles Share Previously Unreleased Early Acoustic Take Of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” [Listen]
One of the segments shared to the show’s YouTube is that of a conversation with the topic of drugs within rock and roll and show business. After Cavett allows Harrison to vent on his frustration with the over-commercialization of American television, George briefly touches on the time he and John Lennon were dosed with LSD by their dentist. He also discusses his take on whether or not rock start should bear responsibility for glamourizing drug use.
The two do get a little serious late on in the segment where the topic of heroin use and the problem with substance addiction amongst entertainers.
Source: Tom Shackleford/liveforlivemusic.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: Kenneth Womack/salon.com
On November 23rd 1971, George Harrison made a welcome stop by the legendary studios of the Dick Cavett Show. It may have begun as an open and frank conversation but it soon got very serious as the Quiet Beatle began to open his mouth.
Harrison was a year or so away from the break-up of The Beatles and the furore surrounding the Fab Four had not yet subsided. It must have baffled the newly emerging songwriting powerhouse, Harrison has shown himself to be.
The singer and guitarist had stepped out of the shadow of the group which had changed music so irrevocably. His debut solo record All Things Must Pass is arguably one of the best solo Beatles albums and his recent benefit the Concert For Bangladesh had seen him use his fame for good. But he still couldn’t avoid questions about The Beatles.
The episode has been restored and uploaded in segments which you can find below as well as the full clip, we’d suggest the latter. The full clip may lose a little in picture quality but it does allow Harrison’s sometimes gruff, sometimes sharp, answers to land fully. Harrison may have shared the stage with his friend Ravi Shankar and the rock singer Gary Wright, but on that night it was all about George Harrison, the Beatle.
Source: Jack Whatley/faroutmagazine.co.uk
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: Kenneth Womack/salon.com
Hard to believe, but next month sees the 50th anniversary of the day The Beatles broke up.
The four of them had been together for under eight years, Ringo having joined John, Paul and George in the summer of 1962.
Yet as President Obama noted when presenting Sir Paul McCartney with an award at the White House, in that short time they had 'changed the way that we listened to music, thought about music, and performed music, forever'.
Even Her Majesty the Queen — hardly your typical fan — said in a speech on the occasion of her golden wedding anniversary: 'What a remarkable 50 years they have been for the world... Think what we would have missed if we had never heard The Beatles.'
Source: dailymail.co.uk
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
