Beatles News
Beatles impersonators recreate the iconic "Abbey Road" photograph made 50 years ago Aug. 8 in London, where fans continue to flock to the famed zebra crossing near Abbey Road Studios. (Leon Neal / Getty Images)
We popped up from the London Underground station of St. John’s Wood and noticed right away that we were in a leafier part of England’s capital, outside the congested city center.
Just about a five minute walk down Grove End Road, we came around a curve and there it was: the unmistakable zebra crossing of Abbey Road.
Fifty years ago Sept. 26, the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album was released, showing, on the cover, George, Paul, Ringo and John jauntily striding across this very crosswalk in what would become one of the most iconic photos in rock ’n’ roll history.
Source: John Biemer/chicagotribune.com
When George Harrison asked his friend Eric Clapton to play the guitar solo on his new song, Clapton was understandably nervous about the situation. After all, The Beatles weren’t known for guests playing on their records. It basically hadn’t been done, and Clapton wasn’t keen on being the first to try.
However, George finally convinced him to shrug off these concerns and deliver the memorable solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Of course, that’s only part of the story. Beatles fans would be right to wonder why George needed anyone to solo on his latest composition.
For one thing, George was the Beatles’ lead guitar player. By the time of these White Album sessions (summer 1968), just about everyone on the planet knew what George played in the Fab Four.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Grow Old With Me is latest collaboration between the surviving Beatles members
Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Ringo Starr have reunited to record a cover version of a song written by John Lennon in the final year of his life.
The track marks the latest collaboration between the two surviving members of the Beatles and goes some way to reuniting the musical talents of the Fab Four, since part of a George Harrison song is also reprised on the recording.
Lennon wrote Grow Old With Me during the recording sessions for Double Fantasy, the final album he made before he was shot dead outside his apartment in Manhattan in December 1980.
Starr, 79, said he had not been aware that Lennon recorded a demo version of the song until he was played it by the record producer Jack Douglas, who produced Double Fantasy, which was co-written by Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow.
Source: Mattha Busby/theguardian.com
While The Beatles stayed together long enough to make The White Album, Let It Be, and Abbey Road, it doesn’t mean they enjoyed it. In fact, by the beginning of that run in 1968, the Fab Four had just about had it with each other.
That became easy to see during the sessions for The White Album, which Paul McCartney had dubbed (without exaggeration) “the tension album.” After all, he and John Lennon nearly fought in the studio while running through endless takes of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
In early ’69, things hadn’t improved much. If you can’t tell from Paul and George Harrison arguing in the Let It Be film, the hushed-up tale of John and George’s fistfight should fill in the blanks.
By the summer ’69 sessions for Abbey Road, John wasn’t pretending to care and sat out on Paul’s goofy “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” As for George and Ringo, they braved through it but savaged Paul’s song later.
Source: cheatsheet.com
One of the most entertaining hypotheticals for Beatles’ fans to discuss is what the Beatles would have sounded like or recorded if they had stayed together after the release of Let It Be.* In a sense, this is an even more fruitless counterfactual than another popular one: What songs would have been on The White Album if it hadn’t been a double album (which I have already covered). Unlike the case of that what-if, the songs the Beatles would have done together were never released as Beatles songs. And to imagine the Beatles staying together after 1970 is to wish away the centrifugal forces that had by that point already largely torn the four musical titans at the band’s center apart.**
But Beatles’ fans such as myself speculate nonetheless, aided by morsels such as collaborations between members after the break-up (most notably in the almost-Beatles song “I’m the Greatest!”), and demos of songs that later became solo work but were conceived or sometimes even recorded while the Beatles were still together (e.g., much of George Harrison’s first post-Beatle solo album, All Things Must Pass).
Source: JackButler/ricochet.com
“Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields” urged John Lennon in 1967. Now, for the first time, everyone will be able to walk in his footsteps, when the gardens immortalised in the classic Beatles song are opened to the public on 14 September, alongside a new visitors’ centre, cafe and shop.
Housed in a sleek, modern, light-filled building, it is a stark contrast to the original Gothic mansion that stood there when Lennon was a young boy and would bunk over the wall to climb trees and play hide-and-seek in its garden. Built in 1878 for a shipping magnate in the wealthy Liverpool suburb of Woolton (the family of prime minister William Gladstone lived nearby, in another long-gone pile) it was bought by the Salvation Army in 1934 and turned into a children’s home.
Lennon lived round the corner with his Uncle George and Aunt Mimi, and as well as sneaking into the garden with friends, he loved the summer fete held at Strawberry Field (in the singular, Lennon added the “s”). His aunt once recalled: “As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army band starting, John would jump up and down shouting, ‘Mimi, come on. We’re going to be late!’”
Source: Gavin McOwan/theguardian.com
Starr announced his 20th studio record, What's My Name, to be released on UMe October 25, 2019. What's My Name is the latest in a series of heartfelt and homespun records that Starr has produced in his home studio and a distinguished, ever-changing yet often repeating cast of musical characters and friends playing along with Ringo. Those friends include Paul McCartney, Joe Walsh, Edgar Winter, Dave Stewart, Benmont Tench, Steve Lukather, Nathan East, Colin Hay, Richard Page, Warren Ham, Windy Wagner, Kari Kimmel and more (full track and credit list below).For Ringo, recording at home, known as Roccabella West, has become a welcome and productive way of life. "I don't want to be in an old-fashioned recording studio anymore, really," Starr explains. "I've had enough of the big glass wall and the separation. We are all together in here, whoever I invite over. This is the smallest club in town. And I love it, being at home, being able to say hi to Barb, it's just been good for me and the music."
Source: prnewswire.com
Struggling singer-songwriter Jack Malikwaus (Himesh Patel) suffers a blackout and, when he awakens, he quickly discovers that he is somehow the only person in the world who actually remember The Beatles. Desperate to keep the songs written by John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison alive, he starts writing down the lyrics and performing them — which transforms him into a superstar and changes his life in ways he never could have imagined. On top of that, there’s a potential love story with his best friend, and the woman who believed in him before he went Fab, Ellie (Lily James). Such is the premise of the 2019 film Yesterday, which begs one question: What kind of sick mind imagines a world without The Beatles?
“Only someone who can’t imagine the world without The Beatles,” replies screenwriter Richard Curtis in an exclusive interview. “And, if The Beatles were to disappear, would do everything he could to bring them back again.” He pauses briefly before emphasizing, “You know, it’s an argument for The Beatles rather than against.”
Source: closerweekly.com
When music writers and critics decide to round up the best Beatles album, you find a familiar record at the top: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Rolling Stone not only named it the best Fab Four album; the magazine ranked it No. 1 on its list of “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2012.
There’s more where that came from. You’ll hear the oft-repeated line Ringo Starr delivered for the Anthology project. (He called it “our grandest endeavor.”) To Paul McCartney, whose work dominated the album, it was an album “in the spirit of the age,” “a huge advance” for the group, something the band did as “spokesmen” for their generation.
Another quote from Paul could hint at one reasons behind his personal regard for the album. “If records had a director within a band, I sort of directed ‘Pepper,’” he said in 1990. (At other points, Ringo has cited the much heavier 1966’s “Rain” and 1968’s “Yer Blues” as his favorite tracks.)
Source: cheatsheet.com
The Beatles discussed radically shifting their approach on a potential follow-up to Abbey Road.
John Lennon suggested the proposed recording more fairly showcase each from the group's principal composers, giving George Harrison equal footing for the first time. He would have the opportunity to contribute four songs, the same as Lennon and Paul McCartney. (Ringo Starr, Lennon added, could have two – "If he wants them.")
The news comes courtesy of Beatles expert Mark Lewisohn, who unearthed a tape from a meeting the Beatles held on Sept. 8, 1969, at Apple headquarters on London's Savile Row. The recording was made while Starr was hospitalized with stomach problems. "Ringo – you can't be here, but this is so you can hear what we're discussing," Lennon says at the beginning of the tape.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
