Beatles News
John Lennon was the first Beatle to join the group. (Lennon didn’t meet Paul McCartney until the Quarrymen, the pre-Beatles skiffle band that Lennon founded, played their second show.) Lennon was also the first Beatle to release a solo single, and the first to leave the band. But he was the last Beatle to hit #1. That must’ve been weird.
The nascent rock-critical industry certainly regarded Lennon as the most important, poetic, and generally great Beatle, and much of the public probably agreed. But Lennon wasn’t making hits. All of Lennon’s former bandmates had multiple #1 singles before Lennon ascended to that summit. By the time he got there, Lennon didn’t even think it was possible. He’d spent his immediate post-Beatles years carving out a different path, becoming the world’s loudest and most visible protest performance-artist, staging public stunts with his wife Yoko Ono. He and Ono had done what they could to inject rock ‘n’ roll with avant-garde sensibilities — sometimes successfully, sometimes not. He’d become a public voice against the Vietnam War and against Richard Nixon, and Nixon spent years trying to get him deported as a result.
Source: Tom Breihan/stereogum.com
Few songs are as well known as “Yesterday,” the Paul McCartney classic that went out on The Beatles’ Help! album in 1965. In fact, when BMI rounded up the most-played songs of the 20th century, it landed at No. 3 with more than 7 million radio airplays. (That count came 19 years ago.)
For a band that had rocked to No. 1 in America with tracks like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” fans definitely got a different look with “Yesterday.” For starters, none of Paul’s bandmates appeared on the record.
There was no harmonizing from John Lennon, no guitar work by George Harrison, and not even a lick by Ringo. In their place, you hear a string quartet accompanying Paul on acoustic guitar.
Source: cheatsheet.com
The Beatles may have broken up almost 50 years ago, but drummer Sir Ringo has been keeping himself busy with his solo career ever since. In fact, it’s now been 30 years since he started touring with his supergroup, Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band. And Ringo may be about to turn 79-years-old, but the former Beatle still gets struck by bouts of stage fright. Speaking with NBC News’ TODAY, Ringo revealed how he deals with it.
Ringo continued: “I do one ritual while I’m touring.
“That is an hour and half every night before I go on stage.
“I have a baked potato, some vegetables and a vegetable drink. And that keeps me settled.”
Last Christmas, Ringo joined Sir Paul McCartney for a Beatles reunion at the latter’s final O2 Arena performance.
Paul invited Ringo and The Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood on stage to perform in an iconic Beatles reunion supergroup.
Source: celebgossipnews.co
Danny Boyle’s latest film, Yesterday, makes pleasure feel guilty, but it’s not a guilty pleasure. Instead, it’s an expertly crafted film telling the surprisingly complex emotional story of one man’s impossible dilemma involving some of the greatest art ever made—and it makes us question our own personal morals in the process.
Yesterday centers on Jack Malik, played by newcomer Himesh Patel. Jack is a talented but struggling musician who gets into a terrible bike accident when a blackout strikes the entire world. He wakes up bruised, battered, and in a weird alternate reality where everything is almost exactly the same, except no one else remembers the Beatles. Except him.
It’s a ludicrous, preposterous premise with unimaginable possibilities. Jack now possesses the keys to fame and fortune beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. He also knows these keys don’t belong to him, but no one else is aware of that. They just think he’s some unrivaled musical genius unlike the world has ever seen. So, as he starts to play Beatles songs for people, he very quickly gets very famous, and instantly feels incredibly terrible about all of it.
Source: Germain Lussier/io9.gizmodo.com
In the later years of The Beatles, there were John Lennon songs that told you exactly what was happening. “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” the No. 1 hit John recorded alone with Paul McCartney in 1969, offers a perfect example. It’s a straightforward story of events surrounding his wedding.
That was quite a different story compared to a song like “Norwegian Wood.” On that Rubber Soul track, John spoke of how he composed it with deliberately obscure lyrics. (It was about an affair he wanted to hide from his wife Cynthia.)
But on the classic “In My Life” (also from Rubber Soul), John had something of a breakthrough as a songwriter. Rather than writing in code or speaking from someone else’s point of view, he dug into his own personal history.
Eventually, the song became a bit of a literary creation and less a journalistic snapshot of places he remembered in Liverpool. But it began with mentions of both Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields — places that later became legendary in Fab Four lore.
Source: cheatsheet.com
It’s well documented the love Bob Dylan had for The Beatles. The enigmatic singer’s adoration for the pop maestros wasn’t just kept to the band as a group but as respect for each member. In 1970, Dylan got together with The Beatles’ man with the guitar George Harrison for a recording session, from which came this beautiful cover of ‘Yesterday’.
Dylan’s particular affection for George was a known fact, least of all because of his work with Harrison in the supergroup Travelling Wilburys which also included Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. More importantly, because Dylan saw in Harrison one of the more important songwriters of a generation, though he admitted working with George to try and find his voice following the split of The Beatles.
Source: Jack Whatley/faroutmagazine.co.uk
By the time the Beatles played Shea Stadium to 55,000 fans in 1965, the screams of the crowd were so loud that the band couldn’t hear themselves play a note.
But at one gig, four years before, they very much could hear themselves play, all too clearly. In fact, pretty much the only other sound they could hear was metaphorical tumbleweed blowing across the venue floor.
The venue in question was the Palais Ballroom, in Aldershot, Surrey, England. This was the Beatles’ first gig in the south of the UK, set up for the four by their pal, Sam Leach.
Leach’s big idea was to get as many London record company execs into the Palais as possible. It proved, however, impossible to get even a single one.
Source: Wolfgang Wild/considerable.com
By early 1969, The Beatles had already started going their separate ways. In January of that year, the contentious Let It Be sessions exposed the many animosities between the band members. Before they’d put a dent in the album, George Harrison walked out with plans to quit the group for good.
George’s problems with Paul McCartney ended up on film for all to see in the Let It Be documentary. But that was only part of the story. George and John Lennon reportedly got into a fistfight during these sessions as well. And Ringo remained weary following his own walkout the previous summer.
With John and Yoko set to be married in March ’69, The Beatles didn’t seem built to last. Yet they wouldn’t go out without releasing many more classic songs. “I’ve Got a Feeling,” the last great collaboration between John and Paul, was among them.
In between the Let It Be and Abbey Road sessions, John found himself with a great wedding story to tell but only Paul around to help him record it. So he and Paul knocked it out on their own. Soon after, it became the final Beatles No. 1 hit in England.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Paul McCartney has written countless lyrics that have been part of the soundtrack of the live of millions. But the opening line “When you were young and your heart was an open book…” was an especially evocative entry in his songbook because of its place in the James Bond movie franchise. ‘Live And Let Die’ entered the UK singles chart on 9 June 1973, and remains a key moment in McCartney’s live set more than 45 years later.
The song was even more significant to Beatles fans as it reunited Paul with the esteemed producer George Martin. He composed and produced the score for the film of the same name, the first to star Roger Moore in the 007 role. The title track, written by McCartney, was more than just one of his classic ballads, twice changing gear into suitably high-speed instrumental sections featuring Martin’s quite brilliant orchestrations.
Source: Paul Sexton/udiscovermusic.com
On every Beatles album, you see the majority of songs credited as Lennon-McCartney tunes. However, after the early days of John and Paul writing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and other tracks “nose to nose,” most songs came from one songwriter or the other.
Few would mistake “Come Together” for a Paul McCartney tune. Likewise, the idea that John Lennon could have written “Your Mother Should Know” seems insane at this point in time. Nonetheless, the publishing deal had both men credited on all Beatles tracks they wrote.
After The Beatles broke up, that led to a lot of confusion. John spoke of how people kept telling him how great “Yesterday” was. Over the years, he became exhausted trying to explain it wasn’t his. (He liked Paul’s classic tune but never wished her wrote it.”)
When he ran through who wrote what on all the Beatles albums, there were some songs John simply laughed about. In fact, he said he “would never even dream of writing” one Lennon-McCartney track from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Source: cheatsheet.com
