Beatles News
If there’s one thing Beatles fans have always wanted, it’s “more Beatles.” Otherwise, it’s hard to imagine the endless reissues being successful. In the last few months (i.e., 50 years later) alone, we’ve seen an Abbey Road reissue and heard of a pricey vinyl singles collection coming in November.
So when the band returned from India in 1968 with tons of new songs, it didn’t seem like a negative. “Paul [McCartney] must have done about a dozen,” John Lennon said then. “George [Harrison] says he’s got six. I wrote 15. And look what meditation has done for Ringo — after all this time he wrote his first song.”
But the band couldn’t come close to cramming all that music on one record. For a group that usually released tightly produced, single-disc albums, something would have to give. (Indeed, many things gave during the wild sessions that produced the White Album.)
Producer George Martin, often considered the fifth Beatle, was among those who thought a double album was a bad idea. And he told the band about it at the time.
Source: cheatsheet.com
After The Beatles broke up, the questions didn’t stop coming. People were still listening to the Fab Four’s records throughout the 1970s and wanted to know everything — the meaning behind songs, who wrote and played what, and any other details a Beatle might divulge. (That hasn’t really changed.)
Maybe the most popular topic was whether John Lennon or Paul McCartney wrote the main part of a Lennon-McCartney classic. Once an interviewer got that answer, they usually shifted to the inspiration for the song and how it got made (who played what, etc).
Fortunately for Beatles fans who enjoy in-depth looks at the music, John and Paul usually obliged. However, the meaning behind a few songs has remained obscure over the years. “And Your Bird Can Sing” (Revolver) is one of them.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Looking back at the Beatles’ darkest hour, it’s easy to point to the White Album sessions (1968). After all, there was so much negative energy John Lennon and Paul McCartney almost fought in the studio. And that’s not mentioning how Ringo quit the band for a few weeks that August.
Meanwhile, George Harrison had written some of his best work (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Long, Long, Long”) but still had trouble getting his band mates interested in his songs. Indeed, the White Album didn’t come easy.
But The Beatles did finish their double album without breaking up. In the January ’69 Let It Be sessions, you could argue band relations were just as bad while the results were significantly worse. (George called it “the low of all-time.”) This time around, there was an actual fistfight in the studio.
That incident, combined with an argument with Paul, led directly to George walking out on the group. But John didn’t seem worried about George’s absence at all. He had suggestions for what song they should play and who might replace their departed lead guitarist.
Source: cheatsheet.com
If The Beatles were down one band member, it wasn’t the end of the world. In most cases, Paul McCartney would pick up the slack and the recording would go on. A famous example came in 1969, when John Lennon asked Paul to be his backing band on “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”
That track went all the way to No. 1 on the UK charts. By then, Paul had a lot of practice sitting in for Ringo. During the contentious White Album sessions of ’68, Paul played drums on four tracks, including “Dear Prudence” and “Martha My Dear.”
The band needed a replacement for Ringo because the drummer split down in August after he’d had enough of the bad vibes in the studio. Whether waiting for hours for someone to show up or having Paul criticize his playing, Ringo’d had his fill.
Instead of shutting the White Album sessions down for a while, The Beatles decided to keep going. And the three remaining band members all took a crack at drums on “Back in the USSR.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
The Beatles drummer Ringo Starr discussed the fiftieth anniversary of the group’s eleventh studio album, Abbey Road and the song that Starr wrote on the album entitled Octopus’ Garden which was written when he left The Beatles temporarily in a new interview. Ringo Starr revealed what almost killed Paul McCartney recently.
“I’d left the band because it was too crazy and too tense. I just said, “I’m going,” and I got Maureen — my wife at the time, God rest her soul — and the kids, and we went to Sardinia [Italy]. And it just happened: While I’m there, Peter Sellers had his boat there, and so we went out for a day on his boat. I was just hanging out talking to the captain, and he was telling me that octopuses go ’round the ocean finding shiny stones and things to put around their cave entrance. So it’s like their garden. And at the time, thanks to marijuana, it seemed like the best idea I’d ever heard!”
Source: Mike Mazzarone/alternativenation.net
In 1962, as The Beatles began to make a name for themselves in Liverpool, they were handed an audition by major label Decca Records to which the group rocked up and performed ‘Love of The Loved’.
The track, which was a mainstay of The Quarrymen’s live setlist of the time and proved popular with their then cult following, was mainly written by Paul McCartney but is now classed as part of the extensive Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership.
The band, who regarded ‘Love of The Loved’ as one of their strongest tracks at the time, surprisingly decided to never officially release the track having signed their record deal and instead handed the material over to their fellow Liverpudlian Cilla Black who used it to kickstart her career.
Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk
Ever since the Beatles broke up in the 1970s, music fans desperately wanted them to come back together. They never did, but occasionally surviving members of the Beatles have collaborated. Ringo Starr recently released a song called “Grow Old with Me.” Let’s see how this song manages to reunite the Beatles in its own special way.“Grow Old with Me” is a song written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono that was included on the 1984 album Milk and Honey. The song is a plaintive ballad about a man’s desire to grow old with someone, making it lyrically similar to the Beatles’ song “When I’m Sixty-Four.” The song is especially poignant because it was released after John’s untimely death; despite John and Yoko’s desire to grow old together, they never could. The song also works quite well coming from Ringo, as he and his wife, Barbara Bach, have been together for nearly forty years.
Source: cheatsheet.com
The Beatles broke up five decades ago, but you would never know it from looking at the charts. In late September the group reissued the 50th anniversary edition of its 1969 album “Abbey Road,” which hit No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. and the top spot in the U.K.
The deluxe reissue features a remixed version of the original album and also includes two discs’ worth of previously unheard material, a 5.1 surround-sound mix on Blu-ray, and a 100-page hardcover book. At a price just under $100, it’s easy to see why someone would be tempted to buy it, even if they already own the original version of the album.
The physical media sales are only part of the story. Billboard noted that to reach the No. 3 spot, the group had sold 81,000 physical albums, but according to Forbes, the group’s music has been streamed on Spotify 1.7 billion times in 2019. The group doing 30% of that streaming is between the ages of 18 and 24, followed by 25- to 29-year-olds, at 17%. That means almost half of the streaming is coming from people under the age of 30.
Source: Daniel Bukszpan/cnbc.com
It wasn’t any state secret that The Beatles used drugs. Looking back at Rubber Soul, George Harrison spoke of the effect the band’s use of marijuana consumption had on that record. And Paul McCartney said he wrote Revolver’s “Got to Get You Into My Life” about weed.
Of course, John Lennon’s 1968 arrest for possession of hash removed any lingering doubts. But most of that was going on outside of the studio. Apart from the occasional forays — as John and Paul had during the Abbey Road sessions — most Beatles recordings feature the band sober enough to walk straight.
George Martin, the band’s father-figure producer (and head of Parlophone Records), certainly ran a clean studio during his early years working with the band. However, by 1968, the rules had changed a bit.
Source: cheatsheet.com
One thing Beatles fans love about the Fab Four is the band members’ ability to play multiple instruments as well as sing. In early records, you would hear John Lennon on harmonica (“Love Me Do“) or Paul McCartney on piano (“Little Child”) in addition to their guitar and bass, respectively.
By the time of the Revolver sessions (1966), Paul was playing all sorts of keyboards, and he even shredded his way through a guitar solo George Harrison likely would have taken in the past. And Paul didn’t stop there.
When Ringo wasn’t around — or Paul simply felt like working on his own — he’d even play drums on Beatles songs. So when fans heard two lead guitars rocking through “And Your Bird Can Sing” on Revolver, it wasn’t a safe bet that the band’s two guitarists (i.e., John and George) were playing.
Source: cheatsheet.com
