Beatles News
Unlike his loquacious and chatty dad Paul, James McCartney is a man of few, but well-chosen words.
But get him one subject he is passionate about -- like animal rights and vegetarianism -- and he opens up a bit more.
"Hopefully animals won't be killed one day, preferably now as we live in the here and now, and they will be helped to live the lives they truly want to in their hearts," he said in a recent interview. "I know vegetarian/vegan/ayurvedic are the healthiest diets."
It's safe to say that McCartney will have plenty of vegetarian dining options when his tour hits Northampton at the Iron Horse Music Hall on April 7.
McCartney is touring in support of his latest record, "The Blackberry Train," on which he worked with legendary producer Steve Albini (of Nirvana and Pixies fame). The opening track, the jangling rocker, "Too Hard," also features George Harrison's son Dhani on guitar and vocals. McCartney indicated that he and Albini got right down to work when it came to making the record.
By: George Lenker
Source: Mass Live
The Beatles' George Harrison, the "quiet one," was in truth a kaleidoscopic force of nature. His songs and musicianship -- both with the fab four and beyond -- have not just aged well, but have become straight-up classics enshrined in the firmament of the 20th century music canon.
Without "If I Needed Someone," "I Me Mine," "Something," "Taxman," "Here Comes the Sun," or "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," the four would have been unbearably less fabulous. The same goes for his myriad of envelope-exploding contributions, including his chiming 12-string Fireglo Rickenbacker used throughout Hard Day's Night, his #wtf time-warped backward guitar on "I'm Only Sleeping" and his tamboura from the astral plane on "Tomorrow Never Knows." Harrison's genius is best summed-up perhaps with yet another of his underrated brilliant album cuts: "It's All Too Much."
And it never stopped. Harrison's 1970 magnum opus/dam burst following the Beatles' dissolution, All Things Must Pass, is filled with sublime sounds. The raw harmonica-driven "Apple Scruffs" could have been a White Album classic, his prostration before the universe in "My Sweet Lord" somehow became a pop staple (despite frivolous litigation) and the loping sing-along of "What is Life" all stand up to anything he did before or since.
By: Andy Gensler
Source: Billboard
The Beatles are reportedly readying a 50th anniversary release of their landmark album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
While no official announcement has been made, the band's websitefeatures four color bars matching the "Sgt. Pepper" uniforms worn by the Fab Four on the cover of that album, which was released on June 1, 1967.
Britain's The Times, citing sources at The Beatles' Apple Records, said the re-release will include "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" as bonus tracks. The songs were recorded during the same sessions as the songs on the "Sgt. Pepper" album, but were released four months earlier as a double A-sided single.
Decades later, producer George Martin said it was a mistake to have not included those two songs on the album.
Keith Allison, former bassist for Paul Revere & the Raiders bassist, noted on Facebook that he heard an advance copy of the remastered "Sgt. Pepper" album while visiting Beatle Ringo Starr a few month ago
By: Ray Kelly
Source: Mass Live
Paul McCartney took the term “solo album” to the next level on his first release following the dissolution of the Beatles in 1970. The multi-talented musician played every instrument on the appropriately titled McCartney, drawing on skills he’d honed through years serving as the group’s utility man — mastering guitar, bass, piano, and even drums. (That’s him, not Ringo Starr, behind the kit on "Back In The USSR,” “Dear Prudence” and "The Ballad of John and Yoko.”)
The one-man-band approach was temporarily retired after he formed Wings in 1971, but McCartney continued to play a variety of instruments throughout his career. On 1989’s Flowers In The Dirt, which just received a deluxe reissue treatment as part of the McCartney Archive Collection, he can be heard laying down the beat on the funky “Rough Ride.”
“I have a kit which is based on Ringo’s. I figure I can’t go far wrong with a kit like his,” McCartney, 74, tells PEOPLE. “So it’s lovely, I love it. I always like a chance to get on the kit. I’ve done it since the early days of the Beatles.”
It was a talent developed out of equal parts curiosity and necessity in the early 1960s, when the nascent band were playing a club residency in the seedy red light district of Hamburg, Germany. “There’d be these kits lying around from the other bands. I’d occasionally get down and practice on ‘em and see if I could figure ‘em out. But one of the nights, one of the guys we used to work with, Tony Sheridan, his drummer hadn’t turned up. So I drummed with him. It was terrifying, but it gave me a love of drumming.”
By: Jordan Runtagh
Source: People
It was a night that changed music history: Dec. 8, 1980.
Beatles alum John Lennon, who taught us all to "Imagine" had just returned home with his wife Yoko Ono when he was assassinated outside the Dakota Building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Now, WTOP is learning exclusive insights on that fateful night from singer/songwriter Willie Nile, who performs at Hamilton Live on April 8 and was at the recording studio with Lennon that night.
