Beatles News
James Taylor is one of the most iconic folk singers of the 1960s, which is saying a lot. Although the Beatles occasionally dabbled in folk music, they largely stayed in a separate musical lane from Taylor. However, that doesn’t mean he didn’t socially interact with the Beatles now and then.
In fact, Taylor auditioned for the Beatles. Later, Taylor had a front-row seat to the later years of the Beatles. Surprisingly, he admitted to being a bad influence on the group.
Rolling Stone reports Taylor was signed to the Beatles’ Apple Records in 1968. He was able to secure an audition for the label after his friend gave his demo tape to Apple’s head of A&R, Peter Asher. On a 2015 episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers, Taylor said scoring the audition was a great example of “being in the right place at the right time.”
Taylor was told he was going to audition for two Beatles an hour before the audition was going to happen. He recalled auditioning for Paul McCartney and George Harrison and being thoroughly intimidated by the experience, as most musicians would be. At the audition, he played “Something in the Way She Moves,” which was his favorite of the songs he’d written up to that point.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Just days before his death, The Beatles founding member George Harrison wrote a letter to Austin Powers director Mike Myers expressing his admiration for his work.
The letter, which would go on record as the final note ever written by ‘The Quiet Beatle’, was never mailed out to Myers but was subsequently passed on to the filmmaker who, coincidentally, ended up receiving on the day Harrison passed away.
Myers, whose father was born in Liverpool, once said: “You don’t know what The Beatles were in my house,” in an interview with WENN news. “They were everything. Liverpool was poorish and it was rough and all of a sudden it was cool to come from this town, so my parents were eternally grateful.”
Later, in a wide-ranging interview with GQ, Myers was asked: ‘Is it really true that the very last letter George Harrison wrote in his life was to you?’ and, remarkably, it was: “Yes. That’s mind-blowing, dude, for the son of a Liverpudlian, a person who worships the Beatles,” Myers replied.
Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk
The National Trust is looking for a guide to work at the childhood homes of Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
The "once in a lifetime opportunity" has become available due to a long-serving member of staff retiring.
The Beatles composed and rehearsed many of their early hits at the houses in Liverpool.
The charity said it wanted someone with "accurate historical knowledge" to bring the "early years of two of the Beatles' story to life".
Paul McCartney lived at 20 Forthlin in Allerton from the age of 13 to 22 and about 100 Beatles songs were composed there.
Lennon lived at Mendips, a 1930s semi-detached house in Woolton, with his Aunt Mimi from the age of five to 22.
Source: bbc.com
If you were looking for experimental music from The Beatles, you’d probably look to John Lennon first. After all, Lennon was behind the sound collage that was “Revolution 9” and another wild song the band rejected during the White Album (1968) sessions.
But Paul McCartney had gotten out in front of John in this regard. When Paul led the band through the free-form “Carnival of Light” in ’67, he’d long been experimenting with avant-garde music. (According to Ian MacDonald, Paul worked on tape loops and musique concrete as early as ’65.)
By the time The Beatles got near the end of the line, Paul felt ready to bring “prepared piano” to a Fab Four track. In this case, it involved altering strings to get a metallic effect. When George Harrison asked for a different piano sound on “For You Blue,” Paul got to work.
Source: Cheatsheet
he Beatles: Paul McCartney says John Lennon split the group
John Lennon and Paul McCartney were incredible songwriters and their joint powers created some of the best songs in the world. But they also had some pretty nasty things to say about each other, which they certainly didn’t shy from in their songs. But what happened between the pair of them, and did they patch things up?
John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote many of the Beatles biggest hits together.
Lennon and McCartney met at a local church fete in 1957, where Lennon was performing with a skiffle group called the Quarrymen.
After Macca impressed Lennon with his guitar stylings, he was invited to join the Quarrymen, and soon they brought along their friends to listen to their new song performances, inviting mates such as Nigel Walley and future Beatle George Harrison.
Source: Jenny Desborough/express.co.uk
Between summer 1968 and January ’69, relations between The Beatles hit an all-time low. During the making of the White Album, Ringo Starr registered his personal disgust with the situation by walking out on the band for a few weeks (in August ’68).
That left the group without a drummer, which led the remaining three to try their hand at the kit on “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Though Ringo returned before long, that set a precedent. Later in the White Album sessions, Paul McCartney played drums on “Mother Nature’s Son” even though Ringo was in the studio that day.
The following year, Paul was back on drums for a May ’69 single. On the A-side, listeners heard “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” John Lennon’s No. 1 hit. For its B-side, fans got the George Harrison track, “Old Brown Shoe.” In this case, Paul played drums on both because Ringo was on a film shoot.
Source: cheatsheet.com
On his first trip to England in 1968, James Taylor played for Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The younger half of the Beatles were impressed with the Chapel Hill-raised singer-songwriter, and they made Taylor the first act signed to the nascent Apple Records. Taylor began recording his debut album at Trident Studios, where the Beatles were also recording The Beatles at the time.
“We intersected in the studio a lot,” says Taylor in a new interview in the Guardian. “They were leaving as I was coming in. I often came in early and would sit in the control room and listen to them recording – and hear playbacks of what they had just cut.”
It’s hard to imagine what more a barely 20-year-old musician could want, but it wasn’t all good news for Taylor. He quickly picked up a drug habit in London, where heroin and other opiates were cheap and easy to find at the time.
“[Y]ou used to be able to buy something called Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, which was an old-fashioned medication. Essentially, it was a tincture of opium, so you’d drink a couple of bottles and you could take the edge off,” he recalled. Eventually, he shared his stash with none other than John Lennon, something that he clearly regrets to this day.
Source: Cameron LeBlanc/yahoo.com
In 1961, The Shirelles made history when “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” topped the Billboard Hot 100. It was the first time a black girl-group — any girl-group, some say — ever hit No. 1 on the leading U.S. pop chart.
When record-buyers took that single home, they found another gem on the B-side. That was “Boys,” a track Luther Dixon and Wes Farrell had written for the group of young ladies from New Jersey. Over in England, a Liverpool band called The Beatles started performing it live in their performances.
Though this early version of The Beatles featured John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, the vocal duties on “Boys” went to drummer Pete Best. Across town, playing for Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, drummer Ringo Starr also sang the song.
So when Ringo joined The Beatles in ’62, he kept running with the vocal whenever the band played “Boys.” And it never seemed to matter that the lyrics spoke of “boys — what a bundle of joy.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
Ever since the Beatles broke up, fans wished they would reunite. That sort of happened in the years following John Lennon’s death. Here’s how an unfinished demo by John led to a musical reunion for the Beatles.
Ultimate Classic Rock reported that, in 1977, John recorded a demo song called “Free as a Bird” for the musical The Ballad of John and Yoko. He never finished it and he died in 1980. According to The Beatles Bible, George Harrison approached Yoko Ono to see if he and the other surviving Beatles could work on some of John’s demos together. In 1994, Yoko would give Paul McCartney tapes containing four unreleased John tracks: “Free as a Bird,” “Grow Old with Me,” “Real Love,” and “Now and Then.”
Paul was moved listening to them. He said “I’d never heard them before but she explained that they’re quite well known to Lennon fans as bootlegs. I said to Yoko, ‘Don’t impose too many conditions on us, it’s really difficult to do this, spiritually.’”
Source: cheatsheet.com
The song "I Want to Hold Your Hand" is so incredibly simple lyrically. But when The Beatles released this song and showed how they could take a song about two lovers holding hands and make it into something special, the world definitely listened.
The upbeat music and beats mixed with a fun and energetic chorus were extremely contagious, and had fans everywhere singing along. This was only emphasized by when they performed the song live on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.
One of the most popular song written and sang by John Lennon was "Norwegian Wood" on the album Rubber Soul. This song had an almost folk-like sound to it all while telling a very intriguing story about John Lennon visiting a friend of his and staying the night.
Source: Alex Parisi/theblast.com
