Beatles News
There are a few jams in the history of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performances which will live long in the memory for the musicians who share the stage. But surely there’s no bigger performance than this jam session on ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ featuring George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and a plethora of stars all take the stage.
There have been some incredible moments in Rock Hall’s long history, but none rank as highly as the institution’s third-ever event. That night saw The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and the Drifters all be inducted into the quickly filling mantle of music.
While The Beatles were being inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1988, not all the surviving members of the iconic band would attend the event. George Harrison and Ringo Starr would arrive at the show without Paul McCartney. The singer boycotted the event as the result of ongoing business disputes.
Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk
What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve got older. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without my realizing it, aged. What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty, vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. It’s a little disconcerting—sad, even. Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged.
I think what makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being.
There’s one girl—a woman who used to be a girl, I mean—whom I remember well. I don’t know her name, though. And, naturally, I don’t know where she is now or what she’s doing. What I do know about her is that she went to the same high school as I did, and was in the same year (since the badge on her shirt was the same color as mine), and that she really liked the Beatles.
Source: Haruki Murakami/newyorker.com
It was 56 years ago; nearly 73 million people were watching when “The Ed Sullivan Show” went on the air and The Beatles took over music forever.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, fresh from Liverpool, England, kicked off the first of three Sunday appearances on the variety on Feb. 9, 1964.
A screaming crowd and national television audience watched that first show, and the yelling did not subside as the quartet sang five songs over two sets.
Here are five fun facts about that smashing debut:
Source: Dayton Daily News
It was 55 years ago; nearly 73 million people were watching when “The Ed Sullivan Show” went on the air and The Beatles took over music forever.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, fresh from Liverpool, England, kicked off the first of three Sunday appearances on the variety on Feb. 9, 1964.
A screaming crowd and national television audience watched that first show, and the yelling did not subside as the quartet sang five songs over two sets.
Here are five fun facts about that smashing debut:
PLAYLIST: The Beatles opened their set with “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You,” and “She Loves You." Later in the show, the band returned to play “I Saw Her Standing There” and ended their set with their No. 1 hit, “I Want to Hold Your Hand." All but “She Loves You" would appear on the group’s first album for Capitol Records.
‘Here Comes the Sun’, the iconic song most synonymous with guitarist George Harrison, featured on The Beatles 1969 album Abbey Road and is remembered as one of the band’s biggest hits.
Harrison, who wrote the song in early 1969 while staying at the country house of his friend Eric Clapton, was enduring a difficult period of his life when he created the track having recently quit The Beatles and had been arrested for marijuana possession.
“‘Here Comes the Sun’ was written at the time when Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘sign that’,” Harrison later wrote in his autobiography. “Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house.”
Source: Lee Thomas-Mason/faroutmagazine.co.uk
In the mid-’60s, George Harrison’s explorations into Indian music had a marked impact on the sound of The Beatles. From the opening notes of “Norwegian Wood” to the very Eastern “Within You Without You,” George’s use of the sitar and tambura made the Fab Four a more interesting band.
But that shift in focus had its side effects. The time George spent learning the sitar took time away from his guitar playing beginning in 1965. Looking back in ’77, he said he barely played the guitar for about three years.
During that stretch, George had to look on as Paul McCartney grabbed the solo on “Taxman” (a song George wrote in ’66) and “Good Morning, Good Morning” (’67). But after his return from India in ’68, George once again focused on the guitar.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Despite the millions she earned as one of Britain’s top entertainers, Cilla Black and her husband Bobby Willis hated throwing stuff away.
Huge plastic containers in which the food for their five dogs was delivered were reused as storage boxes.
Supermarket plastic bags were filled with tapes of original music recordings, and some of these were even found stuffed inside a 1970s fondue set in the larder.
Piles and piles of photos and videos were stashed in black bin liners and left to gather dust in the attic, alongside boxes of Star Wars toys and Beano comics.
Source: Nicole Lampert/dailymail.co.uk
It’s impossible to wrap your head around quite how busy The Beatles were during the first few months of 1964.
After kicking off the year with a marathon 18-day residency in Paris - two shows a night, mind you - they re-recorded their hits in German (“Sie liebt dich, ja ja ja!”), played the Ed Sullivan show - twice! - made a classic movie, and a classic album, published John Lennon’s book of nonsense verse, hobnobbed with Muhammad Ali, and crisscrossed the globe from Blackpool to Hong Kong to Adelaide to San Francisco.
Nevertheless, as summer turned to autumn the Fab Four were told, basically, ‘pull your fingers out, lads, there’s wedge to be made.’ And so they slunk back to the studio and cracked on with their second album of the year. Their fourth, by the way, in the space of just 21 months.
Source: ClashMusic
If you ever watch the Super Bowl halftime show, you know how much lip-snyching takes away from the performance. However, with hundreds of millions of people watching around the globe, some performers don’t want to take the chance they’ll mess up.
When The Beatles agreed to perform “All You Need Is Love” for the first global broadcast transmitted around the world, John Lennon seemed to realize that singing it live was the only way to go. Behind the scenes, the band’s production team at Abbey Road thought it was a bad idea.
“Miming to a prerecorded track was the safest course of action,” engineer Geoff Emerick wrote in Here, There and Everywhere. Emerick described Lennon’s plan to sing live as “a foolhardy — though brave — decision.” Producer George Martin agreed the Fab Four should tape everything.
Source: cheatsheet.com
“I was worried that there were not enough people who knew about us,” says Jeff Lynne, who expresses his concern about revitalizing ELO at a headline festival at Hyde Park in London in September 2014.
“We took a great opportunity. The public could go home any time, they didn’t have to wait for us at the end. But it was still full. I remember looking through a small hole in the curtain and saying, “They’re still here!”
Of course they were. The festival was sold out and moved the full quota of 50,000 tickets in just fifteen minutes. It seems ridiculous that one of the most bankable stars ever doubted that he still had an audience. But then Jeff Lynne is not your typical rock star.
Modest and self-coding, it is difficult to compare the softly spoken 71-year-old – his Brummie accent intact despite living in Los Angeles for many years – with his status as head of ELO, with record sales of over 50 million and counts. Indeed, from 1972 until their original dissolution in 1986, ELO scored more transatlantic Top 40 hits than any other band in the world.
Source: Paula Griffin/gotechdaily.com
