Beatles News
When you listen to the earliest Beatles albums, you are transported to a simple time in rock history. Hearing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the band’s first No. 1 U.S. hit, it’s impossible to imagine this innocent gang going on to record The White Album five years later.
But those five years were a lifetime for a band whose every move was watched by fans and dissected by critics. By the time John Lennon was writing “Yer Blues” and Paul McCartney recording “Helter Skelter,” that innocence seemed long gone.
However, when the Fab Four went their separate ways a few years later, no one in the band had turned 30. In brief, they were still very young men. It’s a reminder of how incredibly young — and, yes, innocent — they were when they first arrived in America (kicking off Beatlemania) in 1964.
Source: cheatsheet.com
After The Beatles breakup in April 1970, it didn’t take long for members of the band to tell their version of the story in song. Late that year, George Harrison offered an elegant tune about late-Beatles squabbling on his debut solo work, All Things Must Pass.
That song, titled “Run of the Mill,” dropped subtle hints about his deteriorating relationship with Paul McCartney. “You’ll arrive at your own made end with no one but you to be offended,” George sang.
On Paul’s side, his Ram album from 1971 zeroed in mostly on John Lennon and Yoko Ono. “Too Many People,” in particular, pissed off John with its measured critique of John’s activism and his relationship with Yoko.
Source: cheatsheet.com
How can you tell a band is headed toward a breakup? For John Lennon, the warning signs came in 1966, when he and the other members of The Beatles told Paul McCartney they wanted to stop touring.
Considering how much of a disaster Beatles tours had become by then, it wasn’t difficult for Paul to see the point. However, another dark omen came in 1967, when Brian Epstein, the band’s manager, died of a drug overdose. Lennon believed the band was genuinely in trouble at that point.
Nonetheless, the show went on for a little while longer. By 1968, John and Yoko Ono were officially together, and that effectively meant the end to the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team as it had been. But the band still had a chance to survive.
It wasn’t until 1969 that things went past the breaking point once and for all. Within a few years, Paul and John would be trading shots at one other on solo albums.
Source: cheatsheet.com
After being wooed by four mop-haired musicians in matching black turtlenecks harmonizing “Help!” on a television screen, 5-year-old Rob Sheffield became a Beatles mega fan.
“Don’t you know that band broke up?” his parents would ask. “They don’t exist anymore,” his teacher would say. It was the early 1970s, and while they weren’t wrong—The Beatles called it quits in the final months of 1970—they weren’t right, either.
Sheffield had seen them, right there on TV. He heard them with his own ears, on the radio and the vinyl records he played.
Almost five decades later, Sheffield, who has written about music and pop culture for Rolling Stone since 1997 and is a New York Times best-selling author of five books, is still listening to The Beatles.
Source: Erin O'Hare/c-ville.com
Despite the success of the John Lennon/George Harrison pairing on 1971’s Imagine, the two former Beatles never recorded together again — except for one other time. On March 13, 1973, Lennon, Harrison and Ringo Starr recorded “I’m the Greatest,” a song Lennon started writing in late 1970 but eventually gave to Starr. The tune, the opening track on Starr’s hit 1973 album, Ringo, also features “fifth Beatle” Billy Preston on keyboards, making it tantalizingly close to a late-era Beatles song (Preston played on the Beatles’ final albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be).
Source: guitarworld.com
When you read about The Beatles from 1967 on, you understand why the band split up a few years later. They had already stopped touring, so the main focus was on recording and matters like starting the Apple record label. In other words, they were mostly business partners by the end.
As of ’68, John Lennon had divorced his wife Cynthia and taken up with Yoko Ono full-time. In fact, John began bringing Yoko into recording sessions, something that bothered George Harrison and Ringo Starr while positively irritating Paul McCartney.
Source: cheatsheet.com
There’s an argument to be made that, at least early on, George Harrison was a bigger deal outside of the Beatles than he was when he was still in the band. That seems absurd, of course, since the Beatles were a one-time-only cultural phenomenon. Nothing before them was as big as they were, and nothing after them ever will be. But within the Beatles, Harrison was the Quiet One, the one always destined to be overshadowed. Throughout the band’s life, he’d made subtle musical choices to nudge the Beatles in certain directions. But he was just starting to write songs when the band was ending — or, at least, he was just starting to convince the other Beatles to record his songs — though he got a few great ones in there before the light finally blinked out. He simply hadn’t commanded the spotlight the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney had.
Source: Tom Breihan/stereogum.com
Previously lost footage of the Beatles performing live on BBC’s “Top of the Pops” is allowing fans to see a “day in the life” of the Fab Four.
A collector based in Mexico has discovered an 11-second clip of the band performing “Paperback Writer” on a June 16, 1966, broadcast of “Pops.” The BBC did not archive a tape of this episode, making this rediscovered footage the only known recording of this showcase.
Essentially a bootleg, the silent reel was filmed on an 8mm camera in the TV room of one Liverpool family.
“I think if you’re a Beatles fans, it’s the holy grail,” says Chris Perry, a TV footage expert based in Birmingham, UK. He tells the BBC, “People thought it was gone forever because videotape wasn’t kept in 1966. To find it all these years later was stunning.”
Source: Hannah Sparks/nypost.com
In his book Dreaming The Beatles, the great Rob Sheffield points out a fun postscript to the story of the biggest, most important, most iconic band of all time: Pretty soon after the Beatles dissolved, both Paul McCartney and John Lennon started bands with their wives. Sheffield has a great line about how you can’t really picture Mick Jagger and Keith Richards doing the same thing. But the Beatles had already become more famous than any human being should ever really be, and so that decision, from both Lennon and McCartney, makes a lot of sense. Those two bands were wildly different, but neither Lennon nor McCartney really had anything left to prove. So they both chased their own versions of domestic bliss, and both of those versions involved making music with their wives.
Source: Tom Breihan /stereogum.com
One of the many highlights of John Lennon's Imagine – The Ultimate Collection, the immersive and intimate super deluxe edition of his legendary solo album, released this past October on what would have been his 78th birthday, were the Raw Studio Mixes. Helmed by engineer Rob Stevens under the supervision of Yoko Ono Lennon, these aggressively visceral and emotionally touching mixes capture the exact moment Lennon and The Plastic Ono Band recorded each song, raw and live on the soundstage at the center of Ascot Sound Studios, at John & Yoko's home in Tittenhurst. The Raw Studio recordings are devoid of the effects (reverb, tape delays, etc.) that were added when co-producers John, Yoko and Phil Spector created the additional layers of production sound and added John's orchestral arrangements in New York.
Source: Universal Music Enterprises/prnewswire.com
