Beatles News
The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Rolling Stone named as the best album of all time, turns 50 on June 1st. In honor of the anniversary, and coinciding with a new deluxe reissue of Sgt. Pepper, we present a series of in-depth pieces – one for each of the album's tracks, excluding the brief "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" reprise on Side Two – that explore the background of this revolutionary and beloved record. Today's installment tells the story of how a school drawing by a three-year-old Julian Lennon inspired "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."
"I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelt LSD," John Lennon insisted to Rolling Stone in 1970 of the title of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." In interview after interview, Lennon begged listeners to accept that the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band standout was "not an acid song." The public, for their part, merely rolled their eyes.
Until the end of his life, Lennon maintained that the song was actually inspired by a painting that his three-year-old son Julian had made of Lucy O'Donnell, his classmate at Heath House nursery school. "This is the truth: My son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around," he explained during an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. "I said, 'What is it?' and he said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds,' and I thought, 'That's beautiful.' I immediately wrote a song about it. After the album had come out and the album had been published, someone noticed that the letters spelt out LSD and I had no idea about it. ... But nobody believes me."
By: Jordan Runtagh
Source: Rolling Stone
We're just eight days away from the release of the 50th anniversary edition of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which was painstakingly remastered and expanded by Giles Martin, the son of the Fab Four's original producer, George Martin.
Giles has now revealed (and retracted somewhat) that he is ready to move on to his next project, the Beatles' 1968 album The Beatles (aka The White Album)
The White Album was an oddity for the band. It was their only double album and the only one where a single was never released to radio; however, you would never know it from listening to classic rock stations who still play a wide selection from the set as if they had been chart toppers including Back in the U.S.S.R., Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Blackbird, Rocky Raccoon, Birthday and Helter Skelter. The album also contains a trio of songs that could be placed among the most beautiful from the Beatles catalog, Julia, Good Night and I Will.
Martin told the BBC on Thursday morning "The White Album, which is the next release – that is where they started becoming indulgent. There are 70 takes of Sexy Sadie, for instance. The efficiency went slightly out the window. There’s a lot of stuff. So, it’s getting the balance right.
By:VVN News
Source: Vintage Vinyl
The summer of love began on Thursday, June 1, 1967, a day that now lies closer to World War I than to our time. As London sweltered and swung, two LPs landed in the record stores—one each from the two acts now rated the greatest in the history of British pop music.The first was the debut album by David Bowie, which was a resounding flop: “I didn’t know,” Bowie said later, “whether to be Max Miller or Elvis Presley.” (Miller was a British music hall comedian of the 1930s, known as the Cheeky Chappie.) If you’d asked for Bowie’s record that day in 1967, the shop assistant might have scratched her head. And you would have had to fight your way through the throng trying to buy the other new release. Bowie, later celebrated for his sense of theater, had chosen a terrible moment to make an entrance.
That other album was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles, which had aroused feverish expectations and lived up to all of them. For 50 years now, it has been more than a record. It is the high-water mark of hippiedom and a landmark in the history of music. It was the first rock record to capture album of the year at the Grammys, a bastion long held by the forces of easy listening. Its engineer, Geoff Emerick—the sixth Beatle—won a Grammy too. Its producer, George Martin—the fifth—ended up with a knighthood, as did its driving force, Paul McCartney. (It’s not clear what the band’s drummer and other surviving member has to do to arise to Sir Ringo.)
By: Tim De Lisle
Source: Newsweek
If you’re getting bored of the free pianos in St Pancras station, there’s now a new way to make music while you wait for your train. They’re installing a retro-style jukebox, so commuters can play every top 40 hit from the past 50 years for free. That means you can choose from a whopping 57,000 tunes to entertain (or annoy) you and your fellow passengers with, including 1,255 number ones and 18,162 artists from Frank Sinatra and David Bowie to Ed Sheeran and, er, The Cheeky Girls.
After tallying up the tunes, The Beatles claimed the most top 40 tracks on the music box – a huge 280 – and so to mark the jukebox’s launch it will be covered in colourful crops of hollyhock in a throwback to the Liverpudlian band’s iconic ‘Mad Day Out’ photoshoot, as some of the pix were taken just around the corner from the station almost 50 years ago.
The jukebox will be a permanent fixture underneath Southeastern train platforms 11 to 13, but to catch it sporting its floral Beatles tribute head there from Wednesday May 17 to Saturday May 20, when Londoners will be encouraged to play out classic Beatle beats.
Source: Timeout London
It was 10am on Easter Sunday, 1974, and Iovine had just received a call from Roy Cicala, John Lennon’s go-to engineer at Record Plant Studios in New York.
Cicala had explained that the ex-Beatle urgently needed someone to man the phones… as in, five minutes ago.
Iovine, Record Plant’s always-willing 21-year-old gopher, unquestioningly did as he was asked – but not before informing his mom he wouldn’t be attending church that morning.
Maternal tongue-lashing survived, Iovine pitched up at Record Plant, only to find Cicala and Lennon laughing in his face.
The punchline: this was a test of his dutifulness… and he’d passed.
Jimmy Iovine had just bagged himself a job as John Lennon’s new Assistant Engineer.
This was the moment that Iovine says his life changed forever.
Before he was taken under the wing of Cicala (and Lennon), the now-Beats/Apple Music chief was working go-nowhere jobs in various New York recording studios – while expecting a far less cushy professional destiny to take over.
Having left school with no real qualifications, Iovine believed he’d end up doing what many young men from Red Hook, Brooklyn did in the early ’70s – joining their fathers toiling on the docks.
Instead, Iovine started working on Harry Nilsson’s Pussycats (produced by Lennon, engineered by Cicala), then on to timeless records by Lennon (Rock’n’Roll, Walls & Bridges), Bruce Springsteen (Born To Run, Darkness On The Edge of Town), Patti Smith (Easter), Tom Petty (Damn The Torpedoes), Stevie Nicks (Bella Donna), U2 (Rattle and Hum) and many more besides.
From there, he co-created Interscope Records in 1989, broke Dr. Dre, Eminem, Nine Inch Nails, Lady Gaga… and well, you know the rest.
By: Tim Ingham
Source: Music Business Worldwide
Does the world really need another book about the Beatles? The people behind “In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs” think so, and they’ve come up with a seemingly irresistible wrinkle: Ask a lineup of literati to choose the Beatles song that means the most to them. Since everyone likes the Beatles, the results are practically guaranteed to please.
Well, maybe. But the most predictable thing about this endeavor is how predictable it is. The Rule of Themed Anthologies says that one-third of such collections will be thought-provoking and insightful, one third will be just okay, and one third will be tossed-off words from writers too guilty or desperate to say no to the commissioning editor. “In Their Lives” satisfies this formula with eerie precision.
The only sensible approach to evaluating such a book is to enumerate the successes, of which there are several. Writing about “Eleanor Rigby,” Rebecca Mead notes, with typical clarity and grace, that the song, “which so perfectly captures the pathos of loneliness, was generated in an atmosphere of intimacy and friendship . . . a product of the extraordinarily fruitful four-way marriage that was the Beatles collaborative.”
By: Michael Lindgren
Source: Washington Post
The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Rolling Stone named as the greatest album of all time, turns 50 on June 1st. In honor of the anniversary, and coinciding with a new deluxe reissue of Sgt. Pepper, we present a series of in-depth pieces – one for each of the album's tracks, excluding the brief "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" reprise on Side Two – that explore the background of this revolutionary and beloved LP. Today's installment focuses on how Paul McCartney's solo travels after the end of the Beatles' final tour inspired the title track and gave Sgt. Pepper its famous "alter ego" concept.
"Right – that's it, I'm not a Beatle anymore!" George Harrison was heard to exclaim as the band concluded their touring career on August 29th, 1966, with a set at San Francisco's Candlestick Park. His remark bore a touch of hyperbole, but for the next few months, the Beatles effectively didn't exist. That fall afforded the foursome the most substantial stretch of personal time they had ever known as adults, allowing each to finally get to know the man he had become after four years as part of a collective identity.
John Lennon had been the first to venture out, accepting a part in director Richard Lester's satire How I Won the War. It was little more than a glorified cameo, but the role required him to be shorn of his famous mop-top – a metaphor if there ever was one – and film on location in West Germany and Spain. Harrison also went abroad several weeks later, pursuing his love of Indian culture by going to the source. Accompanied by his wife Patti, he made a pilgrimage to Mumbai to study sitar under the tutelage of virtuoso Ravi Shankar. Ringo Starr was joyfully playing the family man, spending time with his wife Maureen and baby son Zak in his Surrey estate, Sunny Heights.
By: Jordan Runtagh
Source: Rolling Stone
As San Francisco gears up to celebrate the golden anniversary of the Summer of Love—where, in 1967, an estimated 100,000 youths, sporting flowers in their hair and LSD on their brains, converged in the Haight-Ashbury sparking the hippie social movement—scores of city structures and buildings will pay tribute to that patchouli-laced era.
One venue’s celebration promises to be especially noteworthy. The landmark Conservatory of Flower building in Golden Gate Park will light up in a myriad of colors.
Illuminate, the group behind the Bay Lights, and Obscura Digital, a creative studio focusing on light-based art, will transform the stark white landmark with a series of illuminated scenes, which according to the conservatory, are “inspired by the rare tropical flowers within and the legacy of San Francisco’s flower children.”
Ben Davis, Director of Illuminate, said in a press release, “We are bringing that light back to where it all began in Golden Gate Park fifty years later with an electrifying, contemporary tribute.”
Groovy.
Light show can be seen nightly from sundown until midnight from June 21 through October 21.
Beatles fans, get your credit cards ready: On May 26, the Fab Four is unleashing a lavish revamp of 1967’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in honor of the landmark album’s 50th anniversary. Among the notable features of the reissue are outtakes and alternate versions of songs from the vaults — including the “Pepper”-era double-A-side single “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” — and a new stereo mix of the record that producers claim buffs up the painstaking vibe of the original mono mix.
“They were trying to create this immersive world that the stereo didn’t have,” Giles Martin, the man responsible for the new stereo mix (and, incidentally, the son of the late Beatles producer George Martin), recently told Rolling Stone about the original mono mixing sessions. “Nobody paid much attention to the stereo mix. What we did [today] was work out what they were doing in the mono mix and apply it to stereo.”
It’s a no-brainer that the Beatles team would choose to release a deluxe reissue of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The LP has sold over 11 million copies in the U.S. alone and remains one of the band’s most beloved records.
From an artistic standpoint, the album ushered in the Beatles’ most expansive and experimental phase, and featured even more studio innovations. “On ‘Pepper,’ it was like starting over from scratch, getting down to the individual tonalities of the instruments and changing them,” engineer Geoff Emerick told Guitar World. “They didn’t want a guitar to sound like a guitar anymore. They didn’t want anything to sound like what it was.”
By: Annie Zaleski
Source: Salon
Unseen footage of the Beatles on the set of their 1965 movie Help! will soon go on sale after the 8mm film was unearthed after 50 years in storage.
Actor Leo McKern, who played the evil swami Clang in the Beatles' second feature-length film, shot the 8mm film while on the set of Help! The Beatles appear in 10 minutes of the footage, which has an asking price of approximately $45,000.
"This is footage taken in 1965 of people who at the time were the most famous people on earth at the pinnacle of their collective career," books dealer Neil Pearson, who is selling the footage, told Reuters.
McKern reportedly filmed the Beatles during the Help! "snow scenes" in the Austrian Alps, with the group tobogganing and messing around with their stunt doubles on set.
There is also footage of candid behind-the-scenes moments between band members, including Paul McCartney smoking a cigarette and taking photographs.
The 8mm reel contains footage of McKern playing with his then-10-year-old daughter Abigail on the Help! set, as well as the Beatles' then-wives and girlfriends on set, the Guardian reports. Leo McKern died in 2002. The "snow scenes" footage remained in the family's garage until Pearson unearthed it while sorting through the McKern family's collection of children's literature.
By: Daniel Kreps
Source: Rolling Stone
