A BEATLES' HARD-DIE'S SITE

TELL YOURS HERE...

2012-12-31T23:42:00.000+01:00

YOU CAN ADD IN COMMENTS ALL THE BEATLES RELATED STUFF YOUR PASSION SUGGESTS. ALSO ANY OTHER ERA-RELATED STUFF (1960-1970) IS WELCOME.
We will post it all for you. (Please read the RULES)

Beatles Mighty Ones: And Your Bird Can Sing

2011-08-05T01:51:00.000+02:00

Beatles Mighty Ones: I've Just Seen A Face

2011-08-05T01:45:00.002+02:00

Beatles Mighty Ones: I Need You

2011-08-05T01:40:00.000+02:00

Beatles Mighty Ones: Day Tripper

2011-08-05T01:37:00.002+02:00

Beatles Mighty Ones: Nowhere man

2011-08-05T01:34:00.002+02:00

Beatles Mighty Ones: She Said She Said

2011-08-05T01:32:00.000+02:00

Beatles Mighty Ones: Tomorrow Never Knows

2011-08-05T01:26:00.002+02:00

Beatles Mighty Ones: Strawberry Fields Forever

2011-08-05T01:18:00.002+02:00

Beatles Mighty Ones: I Am The Walrus

2011-08-05T01:16:00.000+02:00

Beatles Mighty Ones: Rain

2011-08-05T01:14:00.002+02:00

Beatles Mighty Ones: Paperback Writer

2011-08-05T01:13:00.000+02:00

Beatles on TV

2011-08-05T01:08:00.002+02:00

Beatles on TV

2011-08-05T01:07:00.000+02:00

Beatles 1963

2011-08-05T01:04:00.000+02:00

Beatles 1963

2011-08-05T01:02:00.000+02:00

Backwards Beatles

2011-04-21T23:05:00.000+02:00

The Beatles "Rain" (multi cam)

2011-02-04T14:39:00.000+01:00

Illustrated Brazilian 45 & EP Beatles Discography

2011-01-30T11:34:00.005+01:00

A book that presents in size (almost) all covers of real Portuguese editions of the Beatles 45 rpm singles and EP in its different variations.

The book is on sale at FNAC (all stores)

Brazilian Memorabilia

2011-01-30T11:23:00.003+01:00

Beatles memorabilia: informations required...

2011-01-16T23:48:00.003+01:00

Hello! I'm curious about this little red box I found at a second
hand store with a picture of the Beatles and the words 'The
Cavern'; inside are die-cast figures of what appear to be the Beatles including a drummer with drums. Oh, and a dancer. I'm just wondering if they have any history? I've looked other places for information, but have had no luck; any help you
can give me would be appreciated. All the Beatles Best! Pam Grace

Beatles 50th Anniversary Concert

2010-10-21T01:57:00.002+02:00

Received:

Hi there,

Hope you are well. We love your blog!!

We think that your UK based fans would be interested in this very special Beatles 50th Anniversary Concert which is taking place at The Royal Albert Hall in London on 28th October. It promises to be an amazing and unique event

Kind regards,
Lisa

FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY, A TRULY UNIQUE COMBINATION OF THE ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA, THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL AND THE MUSIC OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST BAND -THE BEATLES.

Experience The Beatles as never before - with, the sound, the passion and the raw excitement of their timeless music recreated by the one of the most well loved orchestras in the world.

The Beatles Philharmonic Tribute marks the 50th Anniversary of the music of The Beatles. A musical spectacular of inspired classical interpretations from The Beatles' songbook, performed by the world renowned Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with special, star guest appearances from the legendary Dame Shirley Bassey, Tony Christie, Darius Campbell, Lenny Zakatek, Antony Costa and the UK’s Soul Queen - Beverley Knight

This unique production has got something for everyone, from Beatles’ fans to classical lovers alike. A musical marriage that embodies dramatic orchestral arrangements imaginatively fused together with rock and pop elements, but in keeping with the true spirit and style of The Beatles. A magnificent production that will take you back down memory lane all within the magical atmosphere of the Royal Albert Hall

Under the direction of conductor Alan Chircop and complimented by a 100-piece Chorus, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will deliver a magnificent performance of unique Musical Arrangements by Wayne Grima, which will also include a spectacular light show

Further highlights will include performances by Candy Rock, Maria Elena Infantino, Lynn Faure Chircop, Elliott Frisby, Analiza Ching, Maria Abela Manconi, Susan Black, Lou Jordan and Tony Moore. The grand finale will bring the orchestra, chorus and guest soloists together for the climax of a stunning night of music.

Well-known broadcaster and Beatles aficionado Mike Read will be presenting a narrative backdrop to this nostalgic philharmonic tribute, taking the audience on a trip through The Beatles’ musical heritage.

The event will be hosted by Fayon Cottrell and is supporting the Noah’s Ark Appeal, The Malta Community Chest Fund, and Nordoff Robbins amongst others.

70th Anniversary of John Lennon Honored With Music Video From New Movie

2010-10-10T09:32:00.001+02:00

Video Clip Depicting Birth of the Beatles Salutes Lennon on his 70th Birthday

The 70th anniversary of John Lennon's birth (October 9th) is being celebrated with multiple events worldwide - including concerts, exhibitions, CD reissues, film festivals, tribute recordings and "Nowhere Boy" - the new Weinstein Company movie opening Friday October 8th, that relates the story of his childhood and that has been endorsed by those closest to Lennon including Yoko Ono and Lennon's closest boyhood pals.

Now comes a brand-new music video based on a re-creation of the first recording made by Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison in 1958 - and on footage from the "Nowhere Boy" movie - to tell the story of Lennon's formation of the band that became the Beatles.

The song is "In Spite Of All The Danger" - a song written by Paul McCartney & George Harrison in 1958 and recorded by them with John Lennon on lead vocals. The recording was the first time the future Beatles ever entered a recording studio. They recorded the song at a private Liverpool recording studio in the summer of 1958.

The recording used for the song features the performance recorded for the movie soundtrack by star Aaron Johnson ("Kick-Ass") who portrays the young Lennon in the film.

The music video - directed by Beatles scholar Martin Lewis (who in 2002 produced the DVD Edition of "A Hard Day's Night") draws on footage from the "Nowhere Boy" movie (directed by Sam Taylor-Wood) to tell the story of the musical evolution of John Lennon from passive young Elvis fan to nascent guitarist to founder of the Quarrymen and future Beatles. All the key scenes in the development of the group are depicted. The first meeting of John and Paul McCartney (the Big Bang that led to the Beatles), Paul's impromptu audition for John, George's audition for John on the top of a bus, the first gigs that Paul and George played with John and many more. Like the movie, the story of the music video ends in August 1960 - the point at which Lennon changes his band's name from the Quarrymen to the Beatles and the group leaves Liverpool to play in Hamburg - the boot-camp that toughens up the band and hones their skills in preparation for their conquering of the world.

Says Lewis: "The story of the birth of the Beatles is one of the most improbable, yet totally true tales in history. One young boy from a provincial city who is wrestling with the consequences of a complex family life develops the drive and determination to escape his background. Music becomes his rock 'n' roll ticket-to-ride out of the nowhere of post-war Liverpool. The film 'Nowhere Boy' tells that story in an authentic and poignant way. It has been an immense pleasure and honor to fashion this music video telling a capsule version of the inspiring odyssey of John Lennon's early years from such great original material."

Seattle Beatles Rooftop Day back by popular demand

2010-01-24T19:57:00.002+01:00

Following their 2009 blockbuster performance attended by thousands in Seattle's Pike Place Market, Ken Mansfield, former U.S. manager of The Beatles' Apple Records, and Seattle's favorite Beatles cover band, Creme Tangerine, will again team up to celebrate the anniversary of The Beatles last performance famously known as "the rooftop concert".

In celebration of the historic anniversary of this concert, Creme Tangerine will perform songs from that concert, and a lot more on Friday, January 29th, 2010 on the rooftop balcony of the Copacabana Cafe in the Pike Place Market in Seattle at noon. Following the concert, Mansfield will talk about his work with The Beatles and lead an audience question and answer session.

"It was so cool to see the streets of Pike Place Market packed shoulder to shoulder with people celebrating the music of the Beatles - this music truly is a common bond people share together", said Jeff Lockhart, drummer of Creme Tangerine. "We wanted to do another rooftop concert at Pike Place with Ken and highlight the great work the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society does in Washington State."

Ken Mansfield stood bedside Yoko Ono on the rooftop three feet away from The Beatles throughout their famous last performance. Ken was a trusted insider of the Fab Four, managed the U.S. operations of Apple Records and shared in the unique last concert on the rooftop of Apple back in 1969.

The legendary last concert took place on Friday, January 30th, 1969 on the roof of their record company. The impromptu event was performed to a London lunch crowd without prior notice or fanfare as curious by-passers and adjoining office workers watched The Beatles perform what was then their newest songs including hits such as "Get Back" and "Don't Let Me Down" during a cold winter afternoon. It was also to be the last time The Beatles would perform live in public. The legendary concert was immortalized in the documentary Let It Be and fans have cherished this last glimpse of The Beatles together as a key highlight in The Beatles career.

Mansfield, former U.S. manager of Apple Records and former Director at Capitol Records, is a Grammy Award-winning producer and record-label executive who has worked with artists as diverse as The Beatles, Willie Nelson, The Band, Waylon Jennings, The Beach Boys, Judy Garland, Merle Haggard, Lou Rawls, Andy Williams, David Cassidy, Dolly Parton, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. A highly sought-after public speaker (Outreach Events), he is the author of two other books: The Beatles, the Bible, and Bodega Bay and The White Book. His latest book is titled "Between Wyomings".

Creme Tangerine is a dynamic five piece band from Seattle that performs the music of The Beatles for thousands each year. Rather than focusing on the personalities or look of the Beatles, Creme Tangerine focuses on performing their beloved music live for all to enjoy. Their performances have included The Beatles most recognized hits as well as different eras of the Beatles music and "the White Album" and "Abbey Road" in their entireties. Their high energy, quality performances appeal to those already familiar with and new to the music of The Beatles. Having released their debut album, "Creme Tangerine" in 2007, Creme Tangerine will be released their latest record, "The Abbey Road Project" in 2009.

Creme Tangerine is honored to highlight The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) at this year's rooftop celebration. LLS is the world's largest voluntary health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education and patient services.

2010 Seattle Beatles Rooftop Day will take place at the Copacabana Cafe in the Pike Place Market, which is located at 1520 1/2 Pike Place in Seattle. This location was voted "Best Rooftop Balcony in Seattle" by Seattle Weekly readers for 2008-09.

Oxford University offers Beatles summer course

2010-01-22T23:54:00.001+01:00

Oxford University has announced a one-week summer course on "The Beatles, Popular Music and Sixties Britain." The course is part of the Oxford Experience programme and takes place at Christ Church, one of Oxford's largest and most beautiful colleges from July 4 through 10, 2010.

Revered and reviled in equal measures, the Sixties continue to fascinate. This course is a journey through it from the British perspective, noting key events in politics, society and the arts. We will trace the development of the music of the Beatles and place their songs in context by discussing examples by other notable British groups of the period. However familiar you think this music is, prepare to hear more in it than before.

The course will be conducted by Dr. Rikky Rooksby, a tutor for the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education, and author of many articles, reviews and books on English literature and popular music.

Course content includes 1960-63; the early Beatles, 1963-65; first Liverpool then the world, 1966-67; Sgt. Pepper and the Summer of Love, The Beatles in the studio, The sixties goes colour: the country-culture, psychedelia, encounters or delusions? The nature of consciousness and reality, 1968; the White Album – doll's house or glass union? Politics, barricades, and street-fighting men, and 1969-70; Let it Be and Abbey Road. Eight track recording, litigation and ‘funny paper'. The end of the dream or the beginning of the voyage?

Enrolments will be accepted up to June 1, 2010. Early enrollment is advised as many courses fill before February. For more information about the course and the "Oxford Experience" 2010 programme, please visit www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/details.php?id=O09I102JDR.

The Beatles had the most loyal fans at the Cavern Club

2010-01-22T01:46:00.001+01:00

by Pete Price

The other week I was having a clean out and a tidy up. I came across a pile of original Merseybeat magazines all individually wrapped and now bright yellow.

I found myself looking back at the history of music from when I grew up. Those days were so magical to me, queuing outside the Cavern and the Iron Door.

Waiting to listen to the raw music, exciting and vibrant sounds and looking at the bands that would go on to great careers.

My favourites were Gerry Marsden, the Big Three, who Cilla used to sing with, and the Escorts. I wasn’t a great Beatles fan in those days it took me a while to get into their music. First time I ever saw them live was at the YMCA Hoylake. I always remember the tickets didn’t sell well, whereas Gerry Marsden was a sell-out every time.

There were many stories about those days and I am sure all of you have got some. I remember protesting outside the Cavern when Pete Best was sacked from the Beatles.

Here is an interesting story that a lot of people don’t know about. The Beatles’ early fans were very possessive towards the lads. The Beatles had an amazing bond with the fans at the Cavern. The Cavern Club girls idolised and romanticised about the four lads. And at each and every performance they would desperately strive to attract the attention of one or other of the group in the hope of an acknowledgment or perhaps even a date.

Two minutes before the Beatles took to the stage there would be a mass final preening session amongst the girls. The dust of compact powder would clog the air, hair curlers would be removed and frantic back combing took place. Many of these fans formed themselves into little groups of cliques. They of course had strange names. There was the Cement Mixers, the Bulldog Gang and let’s not forget the Wooden Tops. The fans were fiercely loyal and far from being annoyed the Beatles encouraged this kind of attention and yearned for such intimate contact in later years when they were playing venues so vast and cold that they were 200 yards away from their nearest fans.

So partisan and positive of the band were these fans when the Beatles fame began to grow there were many at the Cavern who were angry and resented their success. Wanting to keep them instead as the Cavern’s secret.

This began to manifest itself when the Beatles’ second single Please, Please Me was released. Many of the Beatles’ most dedicated hometown fans, naturally possessive of the group after two years exclusive ownership, realised that buying the record might well take the Beatles out of their grasp.

When the Beatles hit No 1 with Please, Please Me, Bob Wooler announced the news at the Cavern. It was met with a mix of silence and boos. The fans were devastated that they were going to lose their Beatles to the world.

So if it was left to the fans they would have stopped their career purely for selfish reasons. People that live in London don’t appreciate their tourist attractions. I wonder if you realise how good the Beatles Story at the Albert Dock really is? Whatever age you are you can immerse yourself in a real piece of history. But if you ever go down, give yourself a couple of hours and go and live in an era of days gone by.

No room for error

SELF-SERVICE online check-ins for airlines. £1 a minute to complain. Supermarket machines taking your money at the check-outs. Automated voices talking to you about train timetables and apologising if they make a mistake. Time wasted in stores looking for goods as there are no staff to help you.

Each one of these has taken jobs from people and in my mind has changed society for the worse. I remember growing up being told automation will make life easier for people. We didn’t realise we were being conned and many jobs would go.

What jobs are left are now being put to a stopwatch. How long will it take you do that? If you work at a supermarket checkout, how many customers can you get through in the shortest possible time? Doctors’ surgeries are all about footfall, doctors now work to a clock. There is no time now to make mistakes, to be human. Is there something very sinister at work here and is there a greater plan to wipe out all jobs? Where will it all end? It really is quite frightening. How will we make a living?

Courtesy of Liverpool Echo

Latest Beatles News as of Wednesday, December 30, 2009

2009-12-31T23:59:00.001+01:00

Aaron Johnson took musical training to play John Lennon
Actor Aaron Johnson has revealed he spent months learning to play the guitar before filming his new movie about John Lennon. "I wasn't a musician or a singer," he told the Daily Record. He also spent lots of time familiarising himself with Lennon's favourite music, including records by Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly.
Source: Gear 4 Music

Pattie Boyd art exhibit draws celebrity crowd
A large celebrity-studded crowd gathered for the opening of a photo exhibit by Pattie Boyd, rock legend muse to George Harrison of the Beatles and Eric Clapton, on Monday night in Barbados. Celebrities in attendance included model and actress Jerry Hall (former wife to Mick Jagger), Heiress Sabrina Guinness, and actor and singer Michael Crawford.
Source: Barbados Advocate

Review: Nowhere Boy has extraordinary drama
The reason Nowhere Boy works so well is that it's not one of those "before they were famous" films; nor does it tackle the birth of pop music in Britain. It's more about a boy than a Beatle. Director Sam Taylor-Wood has opted for a natural realism, free of arty flourishes, a style as sensible and conservative as John's Aunt Mimi.
Source: The Times, London

Video: World gets together to sing All You Need Is Love
To raise awareness to fight AIDS in Africa and around the world, on World AIDS Day, Starbucks launched the Starbucks Love Project. Their first event was a global singalong, in over 156 countries, people gathered together and sang the classic Beatles tune "All You Need Is Love."
Source: PopFi

Music Review: Nowhere Boy Original Soundtrack
The soundtrack to the film Nowhere Boy, which chronicles John Lennon's teenage years, can be easily summed up in one word: raw. Included on this album is rock and roll in its purest, most basic form. The soundtrack compilers clearly studied what the future members of the Beatles were listening to in the early to mid-50s.
Source: Blog Critics

Memorabilia - The Beatles Record Player

2009-12-24T02:18:00.000+01:00

This is considered by most collectors to be the ultimate piece to own of all commercial Beatles memorabilia. The 4-speed 17-1/2" x 10" x 6" NEMS record player was manufactered in 1964 and only 5000 were made. Very few survived, making it the most sought after item of Beatles memorabilia. So far only one or two mint or near mint units have turned up - the majority that have surfaced are in worn condition.
The colorful 20" x 11" x 7" packing box is even rarer, only a couple are known to exist. An owners manual was also included (pictured below). The serial numbers were on a piece of cardboard attached to the inside lid, and in most cases this has fallen off or is missing. The value has nearly doubled in the last three years for upper condition players, selling then from $1500 to $2000 and now in 1997 for $3000 and up, when they can be found.

Memorabilia: Beatles' Checks

2009-12-21T08:17:00.001+01:00

John Lennon - July 4th 1970 - A check written to Southern Electricity, probably for a power bill.

Ringo Starr - January 8th 1973 - Drawn from the National Westminster Bank Limited. Signed in purple felt.

George Harrison -March 21st 1972 - Drawn from the National Westminster Bank Limited. Signed in green pen.

Received: Zani remembers John Lennon

2009-12-18T22:56:00.002+01:00

We remember John Lennon, as he was tragically murdered by that bastard Mark Chapman on 8th December 1980, a great loss to music and the world in general.

With contributions from Alan McGee, Darron J Connett, Dean Cavanagh, Garry Bushell, Jonathan Owen, Mark Thorpe, Matteo Sedazzari, Paolo Hewitt, Patricia Rochester, Russ Litten, Sean Kelly, Simon Wells and Tracey Wilmot.

http://www.zani.co.uk/articles.aspx?id=175

John Lennon, we love you x

Matteo Zani Editor

Beatles Interview: Armed Forces Network, Paris 1/24/1964

2009-12-12T23:27:00.001+01:00

On January 24th 1964, the Beatles were interviewed for radio by the Armed Forces Network. At the time of this interview, the Beatles were in the midst of a 15-day string of performances in Paris, France.
The Beatles had not yet conquered America, but the seeds of their success had already been planted. The group would learn during this visit to Paris that they had scored their first American #1 single with 'I Want To Hold Your Hand.'
AFN correspondent Harold Kelley had the opportunity to speak with the Beatles in an interview that preceded their historic February 9th Ed Sullivan television appearance by 17 days.
Kelley met up with the group in their suite at the Hotel George V in Paris, following their January 24th performance at the Olympia Theatre. In spite of this, Kelley begins the interview with the words 'This afternoon in our Paris studios...' likely for continuity purposes. The show would later air as part of the AFN radio program 'Weekend World.'
While the Beatles were a phenomenon in Britain, they were still a very new phenomenon, and their individual names were not yet household words for many people outside of England. Kelley accidentally refers to John as John Lemmon.
Among the many points of interest in this interview, Paul talks about the process between himself and John during the songwriting of 'I Want To Hold Your Hand,' George recalls the story of Ed Sullivan's chance brush with the group at London Airport, and John explains Beatlemania by attributing their success to George's dressing gown. The lengthy interview is presented below in its entirety.
Following this stay in Paris, the Beatles would fly home to London on February 5th before turning America upside-down with their arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City on February 7th.

Q: "This afternoon in our Paris studios we're visiting with four young men. And if I just mention their first names, such as Paul and George and Ringo and John, I doubt if you'd know about whom we're speaking. But if I said we're here this afternoon with the Beatles, and if we were in England, I think we'd get a great big rousing 'Hurrah!' Wouldn't we, boys?"
(Beatles laugh)

PAUL: (dryly) "Oh yeah."

Q: "Well, let's see. We have to my right here, Paul McCartney. Paul tell us, how did the Beatles get going? How did you start?"

PAUL: "It's a funny story, really. (laughs) You know, it was back in the old days. We were all at school together, really, you know. We grew up as school teenage buddies, and things. It developed from there, really."

Q: "Well, did you sing together around school, or..?"

PAUL: "Yeah. George and I were at school together and John was at the school next door, and Ringo was at Butlins."

(Beatles laugh)

PAUL: "...and we just started playing guitars, and things. And it went on from there, really, as far as I'm concerned."

Q: "Well, you say those were the olden days. Now within the past year, you have mushroomed in tremendously... almost out of sight popularity. What was the click? What levered this great rage for the Beatles?"

PAUL: "Well, it's funny really. I think it was the Palladium show, you know, the television show in England. And then following hot in the footsteps we had the Royal Variety Command Variety (clears throat comically) performance."

(Beatles giggle)

PAUL: "It's difficult to say that, actually. Royal Variety Command Performance for the Queen Mother, you know. And it all came up from there, really. The national newspapers got ahold of it. And they got ahold of Ringo."

JOHN: "And Mike Brown found out about it."

PAUL: "Mike Brown found out about it. Yeah. A lot of columnists and things got onto the idea and started calling it 'Beatlemania.'"

Q: "Lets ask a question here of George Harrison. George, what is the status of Rock & Roll in England today? Is that what you call your music?"

GEORGE: "No, not really. We don't like to call it anything. But the critics and the people who write about it, you know, they have to call it something. So they didn't want to say it was Rock & Roll, because Rock's supposed to have gone out about five years ago. And so they decided it wasn't really Rhythm & Blues... so they decided to call it 'The Liverpool Sound' which is stupid, really, because as far as we were concerned it was just, you know, the same as the Rock from five years ago."

Q: "Can you describe Liverpool's sound?"

GEORGE: "Well, it's more like the old Rock, it's just everything's a bit louder. More bass and bass drum, and everybody sort of sings loud and shouts. (laughs) And that's it!"

Q: "Is the Liverpool Sound, then, 'THE' sound in the U.K. today? In England?"

GEORGE: "Yeah, well, that's... You know, all the records now... Everybody's sort of making records in that style."

Q: "Let's ask Ringo here. Now, you're the drummer. We caught your act at the Olympia the other evening. How long have you been beating those skins?"

RINGO: "Oh, about five years now. I've been with the boys about 18 months... with other groups before that. So that's five years."

Q: "Since you boys have gained your current popularity, have there been many other organizations trying to imitate you, or perhaps take the thunder away from you? Let's ask John Lemmon this."

JOHN: "Well, I suppose, a couple of people have jumped on the... (pause) railway carriage."

(laughter)

JOHN: "I mean, the bandwagon. But it doesn't really matter, you know, because it's flattery and it promotes the whole idea of us if we're away, and there's a few little Beatles still going to remind people of us."

Q: "Paul, let's go back to you for a moment. Whenever anyone sees your pictures, the first thing that strikes them is, naturally, your hairdo."

RINGO: "Hair-don't."

Q: (laughs) "Or Hair-don't! Some people have written as though you were having the sheepdog cut, or perhaps an early Caeser. What do you call it, and how come you cut it that way?"

PAUL: "To us it just sort of seems the natural thing, really, because it all arose... We came out of the swimming baths one day, and you know how your hair, sort of, flops about after the swimming baths. Well, it stayed that way, you see, when nobody bothered to comb it. And it sort of stayed in a style. So we've never really called it anything, I don't know, until the papers got ahold of it, and they called it the Beatle style. So I suppose we go along with them now, really."

Q: "Do you go to the barber at all?"

PAUL: "Well, you know, now and then. Do and don't."

Q: "Just to keep it trimmed."

PAUL: "Yeah. Just to keep it trimmed. But sometimes we do it ourselves, you know."

JOHN: "With our feet."

(giggles)

PAUL: "The other thing is, its really only our eyebrows that are growing upwards."

Q: "We've been told that in England today there's this 'Beatlemania' going on. What would you say Beatlemania is? That all the girls scream when they see you, and perhaps faint waiting in line. Let's be immodest a moment. What is the attraction?"

GEORGE: (laughs) "I don't know."

JOHN: "I think it's that dressing gown."

(laughter)

JOHN: "George's dressing gown is definitely a big attraction."

PAUL: "No, I don't think any of us really know what it is. We've been asked this question an awful lot of times, but we've never been able to come up with an answer yet, because I think it's a collection of so many different things, like, happening to be there at the right time, at the right moment. (sings) 'But the wrong face.'"

(laughter)

PAUL: "No but... A little bit of originality in the songs, a little bit of a different sound. I don't know. It's an awful lot of things. Maybe the gimmick of the haircut, as well. The luck getting into the national press at the right time. It's an awful lot of luck."

JOHN: (deep, comical voice) "It's all these things and more!"

Q: "Well, you mentioned songs. I understand you boys write your own material."

PAUL: "John and I write them. This is Paul speaking. John and I write."

Q: "Paul, yes. How do you think up an idea? Do you get together regularly, or an idea pops in your mind and you say 'Let's sit down and do it'?

PAUL: "Umm, if an idea does pop in your mind, then you do sit down and say 'Let's do it,' yeah. But if there's no ideas, and say we've been told we've got a recording date in about two days time, then you have got to sit down and sort of slog it out. But you normally get, first of all, just a little idea which doesn't seem bad. And you go on, and then it builds up from that. It varies every time though, really."

Q: "Paul, we've seen you here at the Olympia. Can you compare the French audience with what you're familiar with back in England?"

PAUL: "Well, there's a lot of difference, because in England the audiences are seventy-five percent female. Here, seventy-five percent male. And that's the main difference, really. Because they still appreciate it, but you don't get the full noise and the atmosphere of a place."

GEORGE: "No screams."

Q: "No screams and fainting. Why is it seventy-five percent boys?"

GEORGE: "I don't know, but I think they don't let the girls out (laughs) at night."

JOHN: "I think it's your dressing gown."

(laughter)

GEORGE: "Somebody said that they still have to have chaperones, a lot of them, you see. Whereas in England their out. It's funny. It's the same in Germany, all the boys like the Rock, and it's usually the same on the continent. I don't really know why."

Q: "'I Want To Hold Your Hand' is #1 on the Hit Parade, and we have a copy of it here right now, so let's sit back for a moment and listen to it."

('I Want To Hold Your Hand' is played)

Q: "How did you come to write that, 'I Want To Hold Your Hand'?"

PAUL: "This was one of those songs we were told we definitely had to get down to it. We had to get working. So we went and we found an old disused house. We were sort of walking along one day. We just thought 'We've got to really get this song going.' So we got down in the basement of this disused house, and there was an old piano there. It wasn't really disused. It was, sort of, rooms to let. We found this old piano and we started banging away there."

JOHN: "And I played organ."

PAUL: "Yeah. There was a little old organ there too. So we were just having this sort of informal jam session down there. And we started banging away, and suddenly just a little bit came to us. I think it was just the catch line. And so we started working on it from there. We got our pens and paper out, and we just wrote the lyrics down. And uhh, eventually you know, we had some sort of a song. So we went back and we played it to our recording manager, and he seemed to like it. So we recorded it the next day."

Q: "Do all your songs have a basic theme or story or message?"

JOHN: "Umm, no."

(silence, followed by laughter)

PAUL: (laughing) "That was a quick answer!"

Q: "That was quick."

PAUL: "They don't, but there's one thing that nearly always seems to run through our songs. People always point it out to us. That's the 'I' and 'You' and 'me' always seems to be in the title. You know... 'I' want to hold 'YOUR' hand, She loves 'YOU,' Love 'ME' do, and things like this. Well, I think the reason for that really is that we nearly always try and write songs which are a little bit more personal than others, you see. So by having these prepositions, whatever you call them, I and ME and You in the titles, it makes the songs a little bit more personal. I think that's the only sort of basic message that does run through our songs."

Q: Now, you coined this 'Yeah, yeah, yeah!' Isn't that really sweeping England right now?"

JOHN: "Yeah. Well, that was sort of the main catch phrase from 'She Loves You.' But we stuck that on... We'd written the song nearly, and we suddenly needed more, so we had 'Yeah, yeah, yeah.' And it caught on, you know. They use it for... If you're gonna be 'with it' or 'hip.'"

Q: "It's sort of a trademark for you boys now."

JOHN: "Yeah, we'll have to write another song with it." (laughs)

Q: "Paul, what do you think of your trip to the States? I understand in about a week or ten days you're going to be on the Ed Sullivan show. Could you tell us about it?"

PAUL: "Yeah, that's right. We're gonna do Ed Sullivan's show in New York. And we're taping one for later release, I think. And we're looking forward to those, and then we go down to Florida, Miami... Can't wait! And we do another Ed Sullivan there, but I think before that we do Carnegie Hall, don't we?"

BEATLES: "Yeah."

Q: "How were you selected for Ed Sullivan? Was he in England and caught your act or something?"

GEORGE: "When we were flying back... this is the story we heard... we were arriving from Stockholm into London Airport, and at the same time the Prime Minister and the Queen Mother were also flying out, but the airport was just overrun with teenagers. There was thousands of them waiting for us to get back. And Ed Sullivan was supposed to have arrived at that time and wondered what was going on, and you know, he found out it was us arriving. And also our manager went over to the States with another singer called Billy J. Kramer, and he did a couple of TV shows over there. And while he was over there, our manager got the bookings with Ed Sullivan. But he'd also heard of us from this London Airport thing. And that's about it."

Q: "And how about a movie? Is there a movie in the future?"

PAUL: "Mmm, yeah. We've been asked by United Artists to do a feature movie."

Q: "Will it be dramatic, or just strictly wrap around your singing?"

PAUL: "Oh, we don't know yet, really, what it's going to be like. I don't think we'll have to do an awful lot of acting. I think it'll be written 'round the sort of people that we are, and there'll be four characters in it very like us."

Q: "Do you plan to compose two or three songs specifically for the film?"

PAUL: "Actually, we've got to compose six songs specifically for the film. We've got to get down to that, too. That's a job."

Q: "And you boys really haven't had much of a chance to see Paris, have you?"

GEORGE: "Not really, no."

Q: "What do you think of it so far?"

GEORGE: "Well, it's nice. Quite nice."

Q: "How about the French girls compared to the British girls?"

RINGO: "Oh, we havn't seen any yet!"

(laughter)

Q: "John?"

JOHN: "Yeah well, I'm married so I didn't notice 'em."

(laughter)

Q: "We'll go back to Paul, then."

PAUL: "I think they're great."

Q: "You're single."

PAUL: "Yeah. I think the French girls are fabulous."

GEORGE: "But we have seen more French boys than French girls. So I mean, you know, we can't really tell."

Q: "Well, perhaps when you get to the Ed Sullivan show there will be more girls for you."

GEORGE: "I hope so."

RINGO: "Yeah."

Q: "Any of you been to America before?"

GEORGE: "Yeah, me. I went in September just for a holiday for three weeks."

Q: "Just George Harrison. Well, I see our time is up, boys. Thank you very much, Beatles, for being our guest on AFN this afternoon on Weekend World."

The Beatles on Rolling Stone

2009-12-05T00:47:00.006+01:00

The Beatles-RS 415 (February 16, 1984)

The Beatles-RS 217 (July15, 1976)

The Beatles - RS 46 (Novemebr 15, 1969)

The Beatles-RS 3 (December 14, 1967)

The Beatles-RS 24 (December 21, 1968)

Is Paul McCartney dead? White Album clues...

2009-12-02T22:27:00.002+01:00

“Don't Pass Me By” on The White Album is thought to be Ringo's tribute to his late friend. For in this song Ringo’s sings “I listened for your footsteps coming up the drive but they don't arrive. I wonder where you are tonight, don't pass me by.”

I listen for your footsteps
Coming up the drive
Listen for your footsteps
But they don't arrive
Waiting for your knock dear
On my old front door
I don't hear it
Does it mean you don't love me any more.

I hear the clock a'ticking
On the mantel shelf
See the hands a'moving
But I'm by myself
I wonder where you are tonight
And why I'm by myself
I don't see you
Does it mean you don't love me any more.

Don't pass me by don't make me cry don't make me blue
'Cause you know darling I love only you
You'll never know it hurt me so
How I hate to see you go
Don't pass me by don't make me cry

I'm sorry that I doubted you
I was so unfair
You were in a car crash
And you lost your hair
You said that you would be late
About an hour or two
I said that's alright I'm waiting here
Just waiting to hear from you.

One of the first signs of dissension in the Beatles: were the fierce arguments between Paul and Ringo. Perhaps it was after one of these, that Paul stormed out of studio on that tragic night and we’re hearing of Ringo’s sad evening at home hoping the Paul would come over to resolve their differences. He never made it, and Ringo tells us why:

John’s death Pan is I'm so tired.

I'm so tired, I haven't slept a wink
I'm so tired, my mind is on the blink
I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink
no,no,no.

I'm so tired I don't know what to do
I'm so tired my mind is set on you
I wonder should I call you but I know what you would do

You'd say I'm putting you on
But it's no joke, it's doing me harm
You know I can't sleep, I can't stop my brain
You know it's three weeks, I'm going insane
You know I'd give you everything I've got
for a little peace of mind

I'm so tired, I'm feeling so upset
Although I'm so tired I'll have another cigarette
And curse Sir Walter Raleigh
He was such a stupid git.

You'd say I'm putting you on
But it's no joke, it's doing me harm
You know I can't sleep, I can't stop my brain
You know it's three weeks, I'm going insane
You know I'd give you everything I've got
for a little peace of mind
I'd give you everything I've got for a little peace of mind
I'd give you everything I've got for a little peace of mind
(mumbling).

First he describes his mental anguish over missing Paul: “I haven't slept a wink, my mind is on the blink, I'd give you everything I've got for a little peace of mind.”

The real find comes right at the end of the song: a mumbling voice can be heard at the end of this cut and before the next one begins. When this mumbling is played backwards the voice is very clearly saying, “Paul is a dead man miss him miss him miss him.“

(End played backwards 3 times)

Paul is a dead man miss him miss him miss him!

The voice is probably John's, though some people insist it belongs to George.
The granddaddy of all the clues comes elsewhere on The White Album.

One of the more interesting aspects of The White Album is the short little song that appears on the record right before “Revolution Number 9.” It does not appear in the list of song titles nor do its lyrics appear on the lyric sheet.

(Song played)

Can you take me back where I came from?
Can you take me back?
Can you take me back where I came from?
Brother can you take me back?
Can you take me back?

Mm can you take me where I came from?
Can you take me back?

These allegorical lines leads into the selection which convinces many people that the Paul is dead rumor to be something thought of more than just a series of coincidences. The track is “Revolution Number 9.” In the beginning of the song one can hear two men quietly talking they're saying, “Realize I know all about George I'm sorry do you forgive me, yes.”

Listen carefully.

(First part played)

This is apparently is a conversation with the producer George Martin and could be about placing clues on the track. Then a voice repeats the phrase “Number 9” thirteen times. Listen again:

Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine.

Why should this phrase be repeated so many times and then again later in the song?

When one plays this phrase backwards, a voice says something entirely different”

Turn me on demand, turning on dead man, turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man, turn me on demand, turning on dead man, turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man, turn me on demand, turning on dead man, turn me on dead man.

In “A Day in the Life” on Sergeant Pepper, Paul sang, “I love to turn you on,” and now, if in answer several years later, we hear a voice saying in a Beatles song “turn me on dead man.”

Continuing frontwards on the cut, many strange sounds can be heard including car horns, a car crashing, fire burning. These clues are very difficult to pick out on the radio, so I will leave it to you to listen to your own version of “Revolution Number 9.” In the middle of the song a man calmly says, “He had a pole, we better get in to see a surgeon. So anyhow he went to the dentist instead. They give him a pair of teeth that weren't any good at all. So my wings are broken and so is my hair I'm not in the mood for words. Find the night watchman, a fine natural and balance, must've got it in the shoulder blades.“

This monologue is not constant and is interrupted by horns, screams and the sound of fire. Other dangling phrases can be heard such as, “take this brother may serve you well.” Some suggest that this might be Paul passing on his fame talent etc. to Billy Campbell the new Paul McCartney.

When this song is played totally in reverse more interesting phrases can be heard, besides the famous “turn me on dead man.” While the crashes, screams, and fire can still be heard, after about one minute and 10 seconds a faint “let me out” can be heard apparently from someone burning in a car. At two minutes and 30 seconds the fire sounds are very clear and we hear the phrase “there were two there are none now.” Paul and Rita? At five minutes and 35 seconds we hear someone screaming, “Let me out! Let me out!”

Depending on the quality of your stereo headphones, other phrases can be heard such as, “if you want it you can prove it. I'm not in the mood for work or words from John.” This song in the whole White LP became the world's most backwards played album and indeed opened up a whole new way of looking at recorded music. One thing should be mentioned in the context: it should be understood by everyone before a record is finalized and finally pressed and released, it goes through a cleaning and checking by engineers and this involves both frontwards and backwards playing of the tape in order to edit out any stray sounds for noises. All Beatles records went through this process as well; therefore, we can conclude that all the extraneous sounds—words that we have just listed—were checked out, and allowed to remain on the record by someone in control of such matters.

Who the Beatles Came From...

2009-12-01T07:23:00.000+01:00

1968 article from Redbook Magazine

Download

Memorabilia - Yellow Submarine

2009-11-21T00:50:00.006+01:00

ITALIAN MOVIE POSTER

WORKING+FINAL PRINT UK MOVIE POSTER

REEL TO REEL TAPE

FLOOR DISPLAY

NOTE PADS

YELLOW SUBMARINE WATCH

The Apple Boutique Story

2009-11-18T09:52:00.010+01:00

This first Apple venture was located at 94 Baker Street, London W1 and was as Paul said "A beautiful place where you could buy beautiful things."
The Apple boutique started life in the 19th century as a four-story house. Over the years it evolved into an office and shops in the busy part of London at the corner of Baker Street and Paddington Street. During the 60's three Dutch designers, Mr. Simon Posthuma, Ms. Josje Leeger, and Ms. Marijke Koeger had an initially successful fashion boutique called the Trend in Amsterdam. It was closed due to financial problems. Simon and Marijke wandered around Europe before moving to London where they met Simon Hayes and Barry Finch. Hayes became the business manager while Finch joined the 3 Dutch designers who became known as the "Fool." Pattie Harrison was familiar with them and even wore some of their designs. How it all started is not clear, but in September 1967 the Beatles gave the "Fool" 100,000 pounds to design and stock the new Apple Boutique.
The "Fool" engaged several dozen art students to paint a huge psychedelic mural across the entire front and side of the store. Instant complaints from local merchants soon had them erasing the mural. The "Fool" also created the psychedelic designs for John's Rolls-Royce and a fireplace for George. Pete Shotton managed the store with Pattie Harrison's sister Jennie. Invitations to the grand opening, on 5 December 1967, read 'Come at 7.46. Fashion Show at 8.16.' John and George were the only Beatles that attended. The only drink available that night was apple juice. The Apple Boutique turned out to be a financial disaster and was closed just 8 months later. On Tuesday morning, 30 July 1968 the staff was told they could give everything away. Paul's "beautiful place" was no more.

Posters

Apple Post Card

Apple Paper Shopping Bag

Apple Bookmarker

Apple Clothing Tag

Memorabilia - Cartoon Inspired Toys

2009-11-18T09:39:00.003+01:00

Beatles 1963 Audio Documentary

2009-11-14T23:59:00.001+01:00

Beatles 1963 Self Made Documentary

This is a homemade documentary from various interviews, sound bytes, and out takes gathered through the past few years. It deals with the year 1963 in the Beatles' lives. This mini-rockumentary is quite long, as it comes in at 1 Hour and 40 Minutes!!! So, if you are a Beatles fan, sure you will enjoy it. If you are a casual listener to the sixties music scene, it will give you some insight into the hectic lives that Beatles lived during this year. If you have any comments or requests, please write to jwitty@sympatico.ca

Download links:
Mediafire Megaupload Zshare

Many thanks to the original uploader. Go to the original post

Beatles 1966 Last Tour Audio Documentary

2009-11-14T23:58:00.000+01:00

A self made 'documentary' on the Beatles last tour of 1966. In this regular episode, you will hear from: The Rolling Stones, The Chantels, The Blue Things, The Problems Of Tyme, Ian & The Zodiacs, Maze, Orpheus, The Troggs, The Collectors, Mirage, and the North Atlantic Invasion Force. If you have any requests or comments, please write to jwitty@sympatico.ca

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Many thanks to the original uploader. Go to the original post

Unused Beatles album artwork by Jim Dine up for sale

2009-11-12T19:55:00.002+01:00

The graphite and watercolor artwork that you see above was created in 1968 and was destined for eternal rock 'n' roll fame. Hollywood's Capitol Records commissioned Pop artist Jim Dine to create a series of illustrations for a forthcoming Beatles album. But the project fell apart after the band decided to leave Capitol in order to form the Apple Records label.
The unused art ended up in the private collection of former Capitol Records President Sal Iannucci and his wife Aileen. Later this month, it will hit the auction block at Bonhams & Butterfields in Los Angeles where it is expected to fetch between $25,000 to $35,000.

The artwork consists of five individual pieces -- four depicting individual toothbrushes labeled for each member of the band plus a fifth showing all four toothbrushes together. Each item is signed and dated 'Jim Dine 1968' in the lower left corner, according to the auction house.
An acclaimed Pop artist, Dine used graphite and watercolor paints to create the works on vellum. Each piece stands approximately 17 inches by 14 inches.
"It's a lovely representation of how art and music can go together," said Sharon Goodman Squires, a specialist at Bonhams.
"The works have really wonderful signature imagery by Dine."
She said she doesn't know about the timing of the sale. "Like many people these days, the owners may be downsizing, but that's just speculation," she said.
The Dine works are part of Bonhams' fall auction of Modern, Contemporary and Latin American Art. The auction is scheduled to take place Nov. 17 in L.A. with a simulcast to the firm's San Francisco gallery.
The auction will consist of more than 200 lots, including works by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Diego Rivera, Alexander Calder and more.

byDavid Ng
Credit: Courtesy of Bonhams & Butterfields - Los Angeles Times

Bookshelf - Garry Berman: Going to See the Beatles

2009-11-12T19:41:00.000+01:00

Garry Berman
Going to See the Beatles: An Oral History of Beatlemania as Told by the Fans Who Were There
(Santa Monica Press; US: Apr 2008)

This text is excerpted from the 2008 book, We’re Going to See the Beatles: An Oral History of Beatlemania as Told by the Fans Who Were There by Garry Berman.

The Beatles managed to spend the morning of the next day, Feb. 8th, in relative quiet. John, Paul, and Ringo avoided the mobs of fans awaiting them in front of the Plaza by using a side door, and took a stroll through Central Park (George was stuck in bed with a sore throat). Of course, their “stroll” was really for the benefit of the army of journalists and photographers covering their visit. The streetwise photographers didn’t quite know what to do with the group at first, so they shouted out instructions for poses like “point to the sky!” and anything else that came to mind. Next, the Beatles headed for the CBS theatre on 53rd Street, the home of The Ed Sullivan Show, for rehearsals.

Sullivan had witnessed Beatlemania first-hand during a trip to England back in September, but hadn’t seen or heard the group perform. He was nonetheless impressed with the passion they instilled in their British fans, and in November negotiated with Brian Epstein to have the group perform on three separate Sullivan shows beginning in early February. The group would be paid a total of $10,000 for two live appearances plus a taping of a third performances to be aired later in the year.

The next day, on Sunday afternoon, the group performed a full run-through of the songs they would play on the show that night. They did so in front of a full studio audience, who had the privilege of getting the scoop on the rest of the country by several hours. A different audience was later brought in for the live broadcast. When the program went on the air at 8:00 p.m., it was viewed by an estimated 73 million people—the biggest audience for a television show ever to that date. It was only six weeks after Capitol Records officially released “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”

And it was the night Beatlemania exploded.

June Harvey: My friend’s father worked for an ad agency and it just so happened that he had tickets for The Ed Sullivan Show for that night. A client had given them to him. But he did not want them, so he gave them to us.

Two days before, they came into JFK, and there was quite a bit of fanfare and excitement. I think some of my friends tried to go out to the airport to meet them. I was working on a project for school and couldn’t get off, but I knew we had the tickets. And at that time we thought they were just a passing fad. We had no inkling that they would be some part of music history. It was just so early in their recognition factor. This was February, and their music had only started playing six weeks before. There was some momentum building, but really not any that I thought was over the top, other than when they came into JFK, I remember seeing on the news that there were a lot of screaming fans that had come out there.

The day of the show, my friend and I went down on the subway—we lived in the Bronx—and we’d take the Lexington Avenue line down. We had the tickets, but I do not think they were assigned seats, I think they were just entry tickets into the theatre. We had to wait outside for quite a long time, well over an hour, and it was freezing cold. I do remember that! There were two girls standing right behind us who were British. We struck up a conversation with them. They were on winter holiday, and one of the girls’ brothers went to school with John Lennon, and she knew John. They were from Liverpool, and we talked about their friendship with some of the Beatles, especially John.

It was very electric, it really was, like something exciting was about to happen.

Shaun Weiss: By Sunday I was hooked. Sunday was very interesting for us. My sister and I knew where The Ed Sullivan Show was so we walked down to the theatre with a bunch of friends of ours. As the day progressed, we were trying to find tickets to get in. My sister started to put on crocodile tears, and we had run into these two older people who were standing on line to go in. My sister said, “Do you have any extra tickets?” and they turned around and said, “We actually have tickets for friends of ours, and we don’t know if they’re showing up. But if they don’t show up, you can have them.” So my sister attached herself to them. The friends never did show up, and when it came to getting into the theatre, they only put a certain amount of kids up front. They stuck the rest of us up in the balcony. But it didn’t matter. It was so amazing just to be there and see Ed Sullivan walk out on that stage. We were in the last row of the balcony, by the center aisle. My sister snuck down to the first row of the balcony with one of her friends.

The Beatles kicked off the show with their first set of three songs: “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You,” and “She Loves You.” Later in the show, after performances by the cast of Oliver! (featuring future Monkee Davey Jones), impressionist Frank Gorshin, and other acts commonly seen on Sullivan’s show, the host brought them back to sing “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”

Shaun Weiss: When they came out to perform, you really lost sight of them onstage. It was just looking around and seeing girls screaming, and girls crying. Being as far up as we were, we really didn’t see them as well as you would on TV sitting in your living room. Being there was a whole different excitement. I was so caught up in this moment, the reality was just being there was the thrill. I don’t even remember the songs that were being played, just that I could not believe these guys from Liverpool were performing, and I was seeing this live. The charm of seeing them for the first time in person, and not really understanding what was happening to me. I was getting caught up in a hysteria that I didn’t understand. Everything else was fogged out.

The theatre had a way of locking you in, so that you couldn’t get out to bother the Beatles leaving. But we just opened the exit door and we all flew out, and tried to get around to the side to see them leave, but obviously they had other ways of getting out that we knew nothing about.

The things I remember about them were just their mannerisms—and how much fun it looked like they were having. But it also looked like they were kind of scared. Just their mannerisms standing there, and Ringo up on the drum set playing and his head shaking… That weekend, walking into it, I was unaware of what I was walking into. For the next five years of my life, I was obsessed with them. And the more I became obsessed with them, the more I geared my life to kind of hang in their corner.

June Harvey: We must have been fairly close-up in line because we were ushered into the balcony and we ended up in the first row. And the Ed Sullivan Theatre was very small, and the balcony hung right over the stage. I think Letterman has taken out the balcony. I was second from the end, and a photographer came in after all of us were seated, and there were a lot of screaming fans directly behind me. We were so close to the photographer that he could not get an angle on us. He leaned in and shot up over us. So all the pictures in the fan magazines were the people sitting right behind us, including the two girls from Liverpool.

The screaming was constant, but I remember hearing them sing, there’s no doubt about it. And we were literally hanging right over the stage so we could see them. It was a memorable experience.

Their Own Records In Their Own Words - Magical Mystery Tour and surroundings

2009-11-12T19:12:00.004+01:00

Magical Mystery Tour

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1972: "Paul wrote it. I helped with some of the lyric."
JOHN 1980: "Paul's song. Maybe I did part of it, but it was his concept."
PAUL circa-1994: "'Magical Mystery Tour' was co-written by John and I, very much in our fairground period. One of our great inspirations was always the barker: 'Roll up! Roll up!' The promise of something-- the newspaper ad that says 'guaranteed not to crack,' the 'high class' butcher, 'satisfaction guaranteed' from Sgt. Pepper... You'll find that pervades alot of my songs. If you look at all the Lennon/McCartney things, it's a thing we do alot."

FOOL ON THE HILL
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1980: "Now that's Paul. Another good lyric. Shows he's capable of writing complete songs."
PAUL circa-1994: "'Fool On The Hill' was mine and I think I was writing about someone like the Maharishi. His detractors called him a fool. Because of his giggle he wasn't taken too seriously... I was sitting at the piano at my father's house in Liverpool hitting a D6 chord, and I made up 'Fool On The Hill.'"

FLYING
(Lennon/McCartney/Harrison/Starkey)
PAUL circa-1994: "'Flying' was an instrumental that we needed for (the film) 'Magical Mystery Tour' so in the studio one night I suggested to the guys that we made something up. I said, 'We can keep it very, very simple, we can make it a 12-bar blues. We need a little bit of a theme and a little bit of a backing.' I wrote the melody, otherwise it's just a 12-bar backing thing. It's played on the mellotron, on a trombone setting. It's credited to all four (Beatles), which is how you would credit a non-song."

BLUE JAY WAY
(Harrison)
GEORGE 1968: "Derek Taylor got held up. He rang to say he'd be late. I told him on the phone that the house was in Blue Jay Way. And he said he could find it okay... he could always ask a cop. So I waited and waited. I felt really nackered with the flight, but I didn't want to go to sleep until he came. There was a fog and it got later and later. To keep myself awake, just as a joke to pass the time while I waited, I wrote a song about waiting for him in Blue Jay Way. There was a little Hammond organ in the corner of this house which I hadn't noticed until then... so I messed around on it and the song came."

YOUR MOTHER SHOULD KNOW
(Lennon/McCartney)
PAUL circa-1994: "I dreamed up 'Your Mother Should Know' as a production number... I've always hated generation gaps. I always feel sorry for a parent or a child that doesn't understand each other. A mother not being understood by her child is particularly sad because the mother went through pain to have that child, and so there is this incredible bond of motherly love, like an animal bond between them. But because we mess things up so readily they have one argument and hate each other for the rest of their lives. So I was advocating peace between the generations. In 'Your Mother Should Know' I was basically trying to say your mother might know more than you think she does. Give her credit."

I AM THE WALRUS
(Lennon/McCartney)
PAUL 1967: "Everyone keeps preaching that the best way is to be 'open' when writing for teenagers. Then when we do we get criticized. Surely the word 'knickers' can't offend anyone. Shakespeare wrote words alot more naughtier than knickers!"
JOHN 1967: "We chose the word (knickers) because it is a lovely expressive word. It rolls off the tongue. It could 'mean' anything."
GEORGE 1967: "People don't understand. In John's song, 'I Am The Walrus' he says: 'I am he as you are he as you are me.' People look for all sorts of hidden meanings. It's serious, but it's also not serious. It's true, but it's also a joke."
JOHN 1968: "We write lyrics, and I write lyrics that you don't realize what they mean till after. Especially some of the better songs or some of the more flowing ones, like 'Walrus.' The whole first verse was written without any knowledge. With 'I Am the Walrus,' I had 'I am he as you are he as we are all together.' I had just these two lines on the typewriter, and then about two weeks later I ran through and wrote another two lines and then, when I saw something, after about four lines, I just knocked the rest of it off. Then I had the whole verse or verse and a half and then sang it. I had this idea of doing a song that was a police siren, but it didn't work in the end (sings like a siren) 'I-am-he-as-you-are-he-as...' You couldn't really sing the police siren."
JOHN 1980: "The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko. Part of it was putting down Hare Krishna. All these people were going on about Hare Krishna, Allen Ginsberg in particular. The reference to 'Element'ry penguin' is the elementary, naive attitude of going around chanting, 'Hare Krishna,' or putting all your faith in any one idol. I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, in those days. It's from 'The Walrus and the Carpenter.' 'Alice in Wonderland.' To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it? (singing) 'I am the carpenter...'"

HELLO GOODBYE
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1980: "That's another McCartney. An attempt to write a single. It wasn't a great piece. The best bit was at the end, which we all ad-libbed in the studio, where I played the piano. Like 'Ticket To Ride,' where we just threw something in at the end."
PAUL circa-1994: "'Hello Goodbye' was one of my songs. There are Geminian influences here I think-- the twins. It's such a deep theme of the universe, duality-- man woman, black white, high low, right wrong, up down, hello goodbye-- that it was a very easy song to write. It's just a song of duality, with me advocating the more positive. You say goodbye, I say hello. You say stop, I say go. I was advocating the more positive side of the duality, and I still do to this day."

STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1968: "Strawberry Fields was a place near us that happened to be a Salvation Army home. But Strawberry Fields-- I mean, I have visions of Strawberry Fields. And there was Penny Lane, and the Cast Iron Shore, which I've just got in some song now, and they were just good names-- just groovy names. Just good sounding. Because Strawberry Fields is anywhere you want to go."
PAUL 1974: "That wasn't 'I buried Paul' at all-- that was John saying 'Cranberry sauce.' It was the end of Strawberry Fields. That´s John´s humor. John would say something totally out of sync, like cranberry sauce. If you don´t realize that John´s apt to say cranberry sauce when he feels like it, then you start to hear a funny little word there, and you think, 'Aha!'"
JOHN 1980: "Strawberry Fields is a real place. After I stopped living at Penny Lane, I moved in with my auntie who lived in the suburbs... not the poor slummy kind of image that was projected in all the Beatles stories. Near that home was Strawberry Fields, a house near a boys' reformatory where I used to go to garden parties as a kid with my friends Nigel and Pete. We always had fun at Strawberry Fields. So that's where I got the name. But I used it as an image. Strawberry Fields Forever. 'Living is easy with eyes closed. Misunderstanding all you see.' It still goes, doesn't it? Aren't I saying exactly the same thing now? The awareness apparently trying to be expressed is-- let's say in one way I was always hip. I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from the others. I was different all my life. The second verse goes, 'No one I think is in my tree.' Well, I was too shy and self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying. Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius-- 'I mean it must be high or low,' the next line. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn't see. I thought I was crazy or an egomaniac for claiming to see things other people didn't see. I always was so psychic or intuitive or poetic or whatever you want to call it, that I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way. Surrealism had a great effect on me, because then I realized that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity; that if it was insane, I belong in an exclusive club that sees the world in those terms. Surrealism to me is reality. Psychic vision to me is reality. Even as a child. When I looked at myself in the mirror or when I was 12, 13, I used to literally trance out into alpha. I didn't know what it was called then. I found out years later there is a name for those conditions. But I would find myself seeing hallucinatory images of my face changing and becoming cosmic and complete. It caused me to always be a rebel. This thing gave me a chip on the shoulder; but, on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted. Part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouthed lunatic musician. But I cannot be what I am not."

PENNY LANE
(Lennon/McCartney)
PAUL 1966: "I like some of the things the Animals try to do, like the song Eric Burdon wrote about places in Newcastle on the flip of one of their hits. I still want to write a song about the places in Liverpool where I was brought up. Places like The Docker's Umbrella which is a long tunnel through which the dockers go to work on Merseyside, and Penny Lane near my old home."
JOHN 1968: "We really got into the groove of imagining Penny Lane-- the bank was there, and that was where the tram sheds were and people waiting and the inspector stood there, the fire engines were down there. It was just reliving childhood."
JOHN 1980: "Penny Lane is not only a street but it's a district... a suburban district where, until age four, I lived with my mother and father. So I was the only Beatle that lived in Penny Lane."
PAUL circa-1994: "John and I would always meet at Penny Lane. That was where someone would stand and sell you poppies each year on British Legion poppy day... When I came to write it, John came over and helped me with the third verse, as often was the case. We were writing childhood memories-- recently faded memories from eight or ten years before, so it was recent nostalgia, pleasant memories for both of us. All the places were still there, and because we remembered it so clearly we could have gone on."

BABY YOU'RE A RICH MAN
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1968: "In 'Baby You're a Rich Man' the point was, stop moaning. You're a rich man and we're all rich men, heh, heh, baby!"
JOHN 1980: "That's a combination of two seperate pieces, Paul's and mine, put together and forced into one song. One-half was all mine. (sings) 'How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people/ Now that you know who you are...' Then Paul comes in with, (sings) 'Baby you're a rich man,' which was a lick he had around."

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
(Lennon/McCartney)
PAUL 1967: "We had been told we'd be seen recording it by the whole world at the same time. So we had one message for the world-- Love. We need more love in the world."
JOHN 1971: "I think if you get down to basics, whatever the problem is, it's usually to do with love. So I think 'All You Need is Love' is a true statement. I'm not saying, 'All you have to do is...' because 'All You Need' came out in the Flower Power Generation time. It doesn't mean that all you have to do is put on a phoney smile or wear a flower dress and it's gonna be alright. Love is not just something that you stick on posters or stick on the back of your car, or on the back of your jacket or on a badge. I'm talking about real love, so I still believe that. Love is appreciation of other people and allowing them to be. Love is allowing somebody to be themselves and that's what we do need."
PAUL circa-1994: "'All You Need Is Love' was John's song. I threw in a few ideas, as did other members of the group, but it was largely ad libs like singing 'She Loves You' or 'Greensleeves' or silly little things like that at the end, and we made those up on the spot."

LADY MADONNA
(Lennon/McCartney)
RINGO 1968: "It sounds like Elvis, doesn't it? No, it doesn't sound like Elvis... it IS Elvis. Even those bits where he goes very high."
JOHN 1980: "Paul. Good piano lick, but the song never really went anywhere. Maybe I helped him on some of the lyrics."
PAUL 1986: "'Lady Madonna' is all women. How do they do it? --bless 'em. Baby at your breast, how do they get the time to feed them? Where do they get the money? How do you do this thing that women do?"
PAUL circa-1994: "The original concept was the Virgin Mary, but it quickly became symbolic of every woman-- the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working-class women. 'Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. It reminded me of Fats Domino for some reason, so I started singing a Fats Domino impression. It took my voice to a very odd place."

THE INNER LIGHT
(Harrison)
PAUL 1968: "Forget the Indian music and listen to the melody. Don't you think it's a beautiful melody? It's really lovely."

ON SONGWRITING
PAUL 1988: "We knew we were good. People used to say to us, 'Do you think John and you are good songwriters?' and I'd say-- "Yeah it may sound conceited but it would be stupid of me to say 'No, I don't,' or 'Well, we're not bad' because we are good." Let's face it. If you were in my position, which was working with John Lennon, who was a great, great man-- It's like that film 'Little Big Man.' He says, 'We wasn't just playing Indians, we was LIVIN' Indians.' And that's what it was. I wasn't just talking about it, I was living it. I was actually working with the great John Lennon, and he with me. It was very exciting."

The Beatles on Bravo 1965

2009-11-11T07:38:00.000+01:00

Bookshelf: The Beatles Paperback Writer

2009-11-06T22:29:00.002+01:00

2009, 350 p., Plexus Publishing (UK)

"The Beatles: Paperback Writer" collects the most illuminating interviews, articles, reviews, and essays on the rock icons, from contemporary accounts of the group's rise in 1962 to recent analyses of their enduring cultural legacy. The band's influence on the Baby Boomer youth culture and its descendants is discussed by figures from all places on the pop culture spectrum: mainstream reporters, rock journalists, cultural commentators, performers, and the band's acquaintances and friends. Provocative articles cover the Beatles' pop-redefining experimentation with song structure and recording techniques and their embracing of psychedelic drugs, hippie utopianism, and pacifism -- all set against the dramatic backdrop of the counterculture. Editor Mike Evans includes penetrating pieces on such fascinating byways as the right-wing claims that the group was communist and the "Paul is dead" myth. The band's acrimonious split and each member's disparate, post-Beatles path are also profiled in this book that's a must-have for any serious Beatles fan.

Arguments included:
John Lennon 1940-1980
Ray Connolly
A Twist of Lennon
Cynthia Lennon
The Arty Teddy Boy
Mike Evans
Art into Pop
Simon Frith and Howard Horne
John Lennon 1940-1980 (2)
Ray Connolly
A Cellarful of Noise
Brian Epstein
Beatle! The Pete Best Story
Pete Best and Patrick Doncaster
Why the Beatles Create All That Frenzy
Maureen Cleave
The Sound of the City
Charlie Gillett....

and many more...

The Beatles on Bravo 1964

2009-11-02T23:59:00.003+01:00

Groupie lifts the lid on the excesses of the Beatles and Rolling Stones

2009-11-02T23:49:00.003+01:00

A groupie who was granted access to the inner sanctums of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones has lifted the lid on their hedonistic lifestyles in a new memoir.

Chris O'Dell had affairs with Sir Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan during the 1960s and 1970s while working as a personal assistant in the music business.
Now 62, she has written an autobiography in which she charts her years as a rock and roll hanger-on, which she describes as "like being given the keys to Disneyland".
She gained her first entry into the music world aged 20, after arriving in London from her home in Tuscon, Arizona with $100 in her pocket. She landed a job as an office assistant at Apple Records, at the height of Beatlemania.
Within months, O'Dell had hit it off so well with George Harrison that she moved in with him and his wife, Pattie Boyd, at their home in Henley-on-Thames.
In her book, she recalls the day that Harrison admitted he had been sleeping with Starr's wife, Maureen. "You know, Ringo, I'm in love with your wife," Harrison said as they sat at Starr's kitchen table. "Better you than someone we don't know," Starr shrugged.

O'Dell had her own three-month affair with Starr and claims that the band lived a drug-fuelled lifestyle. "We all drank and took coke, pot, amphetamines all the time," she said.
On one occasion, she shared a plane journey with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
"The plane started hitting some turbulence and then John and Yoko started singing the Hari Krishna chant. So we just chanted our way to the earth, basically, until we landed. And I thought, well, if I die here at least I'll be on the front page."

Chris O'Dell and Keith Richards backstage in Nashville

After the Beatles broke up, O'Dell became a personal assistant to the Rolling Stones and joined them on their infamous 1972 tour. Of her fling with Jagger, she said: "If there had been a job description being employed by the Stones back then, I'm pretty sure it would have included a proviso that went something like this: sleep with Mick whenever he asks."
Two years later she was hired as a tour manager for Dylan and began an affair with him. She went on to marry the Hon Anthony Russell, son of the fourth Baron Ampthill. Starr is godfather to their son. Now married for a second time, O'Dell has retrained as a drugs counsellor.

The book is entitled Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved. O'Dell kept diaries of her rock star days but waited until Harrison's death in 2001 before beginning work on it.
She claims that Starr has given the book his blessing.
"We're in our sixties now, some of us are even creeping towards our seventies," she said. "Everybody is grown up enough to realise this is what happened. We're well past it. Ringo's attitude today is, fine, as long as you tell the truth."

By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2009

Wirral songwriter completes George Harrison Beatles song 40 years on

2009-11-02T23:42:00.003+01:00

It's not every day you find yourself writing a song with a former Beatle.
But Wirral singer/songwriter Dean Johnson found himself doing just that when he was asked to complete a fragment of a song originally written by George Harrison at the height of Beatlemania.
The original 10 lines were given to biographer Hunter Davies by George for inclusion in his Beatles biography published in the late 1960s, but were put aside and forgotten until recently.
They were picked up by BBC Radio Merseysides Spencer Leigh, who suggested that maybe a contemporary songwriter could make the fragment into a song. He approached Dean.
Spencer called me out of the blue and left a message saying he had an interesting proposition for me, explained Dean, from Oxton. I called him back and when he said he would like me to work on Georges unfinished song I found it unbelievable, tremendously exciting and above all a complete honour.
My brief was to follow Georges sentiment through to its conclusion. The words were both brutally honest and compassionate and Harrison was obviously writing from the heart.
I just tried by my best ability to get into the mind of someone in Georges position and I am so pleased that most people who have heard it, think I achieved a credible continuity with the original lyrics.
The original fragment was written by George when Hunter had asked each Beatle to submit a sample of their handwriting. It was then discarded as scrap paper from the floor of Abbey Road studio, where it is almost certain that it would have been thrown out by the cleaners if he had not picked it up.

When re-examining these papers he came upon the remarkable discovery.
The lyrics are of a personal nature and were first thought to be a song of unrequited love but in hindsight they seem to allude to Georges uneasy relationship with John Lennon.
On the reverse side of the lyric are instructions on how to reach Beatles manager Brian Epsteins country house in Sussex, written in Epsteins hand.
It is now in the British Librarys Beatles collection, along with more material loaned by Hunter who plans to donate everything to the library after his death.
The collection ranges from a fan club membership card to the lyrics of A Hard Days Night, written by John Lennon on the back of a birthday card to his son Julian.
Hunters biography, entitled The Beatles, is republished this month, containing the lost lines with the blessing of Georges estate.
The finished song, entitled Silence (is its own reply), was performed live during an interview with Hunter Davies on Spencer Leighs On The Beat programme.

Silence (is its own reply)

I'm happy to say that it's only a dream
When I come across people like you,
It's only a dream and you make it obscene
With the things that you think and you do.
You're so unaware the pain that I bear
And jealous for what you can't do.
There's times when I feel that you haven't a hope
But I also know that isn't true.
Every time I ask you why
Silence is its own reply
Its so hard to prove what I can do
Compared to someone like you
You make it look easy but you still tease me
When you have got nothing better to do
When the tears are falling and its dawning
The truth will ring out so clear
That no-ones above you and nobody can love you
Until all that pain disappears
Every time I ask you why
Silence is its own reply
By the time we have talked it over
Itis time to say goodbye

Beatles' Era - Richard Lester

2009-10-24T19:32:00.000+02:00

Richard Lester (director) (born January 19, 1932) is an American-born British-based film director famous for his work with The Beatles in the 1960s.

Early years and television

Lester was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania He was something of a child prodigy, and at 15 began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, He started in television 1950, working as a stage hand, floor manager, assistant director, and then to director less than a year, because no-one else was around that knew how to do the work. In 1953, Lester moved to London and began work as a director in independent television, working for the legendary low cost television producers The Danziger Brothers on episodes of Mark Saber, a half-hour detective series.

A variety show he produced caught the eye of Peter Sellers, who enlisted Lester's help in translating The Goon Show to television as The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d. It was a hit, as were two follow-up shows, A Show Called Fred and Son of Fred.

Film career

A short film Lester made with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, was a favorite of The Beatles, and in particular John Lennon. When the band were contracted to make a film in 1964, they chose Lester from a list of possible directors. A Hard Day's Night showed an exaggerated and simplified version of The Beatles' characters, and proved to be an effective marketing tool. Many of its stylistic innovations survive today as the conventions of music videos, in particular the multi-angle filming of a live performance. Lester was sent an award from MTV as "Father of the Music Video." See IMDB for full list of Films.

Lester directed the second Beatles film Help! in 1965. He then went on to direct several quintessential 'swinging' films, including the sex comedy The Knack...And How to Get It (1965), which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Petulia (1968) (both with scores by John Barry), as well as the 1967 darkly surreal anti-war movie How I Won the War co-starring John Lennon, which he referred to as an "anti-anti-war movie"; Lester noted that anti-war movies still took the concept of war seriously, contrasting "bad" war crimes with wars fought for "good" causes like the liberation from Nazism or, at that time, Communism, whereas he set out to deconstruct it to show war as fundamentally opposed to humanity. Although set in World War II, the movie is indeed an oblique reference to the Vietnam War and at one point, breaking the fourth wall, references this directly.

In the 1970s, Lester directed a wide variety of films, including the disaster film Juggernaut (1974), Robin and Marian (1976), starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn and the period romance Cuba (1979), also starring Connery. However his biggest commercial successes in this period were The Three Musketeers (1973) and its sequel The Four Musketeers (1974). The films were somewhat controversial at the time because the producers, Alexander Salkind and Ilya Salkind, decided to split the film into two after principal photography was completed. Many of the cast sued the Salkinds as a result, stating that they were only contracted to make one film.

Superman

As the release of Superman neared, production on Superman II was halted to concentrate on getting the first movie completed. After the first Superman film was released in late 1978, the Salkinds went back into production on Superman II without informing Superman's director Richard Donner and placing Lester behind the camera for the completion of the film. Although Donner had shot approximately 75% of the film, Lester jettisoned or re-shot much of the original footage, resulting in Lester receiving sole credit for directing Superman II. Gene Hackman, who played Lex Luthor, did not return, and Lester instead used a stunt double and an impersonator to loop Luthor's lines into footage of Hackman shot during Donner's tenure on Superman II. The footage filmed by Donner was later integrated into television versions of the film with Lester's footage. In November 2006, Donner's footage was reedited into Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, using mostly Donner footage, with the only Lester footage being that which is necessary to cover scenes not shot during Donner's principal photography. Donner revealed on the new DVD of Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut that he has never heard from Lester since his firing after the completion of the first film.

Lester also directed Superman III in 1983. The third Superman film fared poorly with critics, with fans divided, and did not perform quite as well at the box office as the previous two movies had, although actually, the film still managed to be within the top 10 most successful films of 1983; the number of blockbuster sequels released that year (two 007 movies, Octopussy and Never Say Never Again, Return of the Jedi and Jaws 3) made for stiff competition for Superman III. Despite the competition, naysayers tend to overlook the financial success of the movie and deem it a flop. It is generally seen as the turning point where the series went into decline. As such, Lester is blamed by some fans for helping to ruin the Superman franchise.

Later years

In 1988, Lester reunited the entire Musketeers cast to film another sequel, The Return of the Musketeers. However, during filming in Spain, the actor Roy Kinnear, a close friend of Lester's, died after falling from a horse. Lester finished the film, then retired from directing, only returning to direct a concert film for friend Paul McCartney in 1991, Get Back.

In 1993, he presented Hollywood UK, a five-part series on British cinema in the 1960s for the BBC.

In recent years, director Steven Soderbergh has been one of many calling for a reappraisal of Lester's work and influence. Soderbergh wrote a 1999 book, Getting Away With It which consists largely of interviews with Lester.

Personal life

In Soderbergh's Getting Away With It, Lester reveals that he is a committed atheist and debates with Soderbergh (then an agnostic), largely based on the arguments of Richard Dawkins.

John Lennon & Richard Lester Behind the Scenes of How I Won the War

2009-10-24T19:31:00.000+02:00

How I Won the War is a black comedy film directed by Richard Lester, released in 1967. The film stars Michael Crawford as bungling British Army Officer Lieutenant Earnest Goodbody, with John Lennon...
How I Won the War is a black comedy film directed by Richard Lester, released in 1967. The film stars Michael Crawford as bungling British Army Officer Lieutenant Earnest Goodbody, with John Lennon (Musketeer Gripweed), Jack MacGowran (Musketeer Juniper) Roy Kinnear (Musketeer Clapper) and Lee Montague (Sergeant Transom) as soldiers under his command. The film uses an inconsistent variety of styles — vignette, straighttocamera, and, extensively, parody of the war film genre, docu-drama, and popular war literature — to tell the story of 3rd Troop, the 4th Musketeers (a fictional regiment reminiscent of the Royal Fusiliers) and their misadventures in the Second World War. This is told in the comic/absurdist vein throughout, a central plot being the setting-up of an Advanced Area Cricket Pitch behind enemy lines in Tunisia, but it is all broadly based on the landings in North Africa in 1942 to the advance on the Rhine following Arnhem.

How I Won The War has never been critically well received, but its status as a curiosity — if only as John Lennons only nonBeatles film role — seems assured. Its collation of images and tableaux is darker and less structured than its anti-war contemporary Oh! What a Lovely War, the drama is not as terrifyingly unhinged as the later Catch-22, and it does not come across with the humane compassion of MASH. Though there are some memorable exchanges between characters, and fragments of battle scenes that carry a strangely disturbing ring of truth, the script is very largely composed of intentional nonsequiturs, mostly based on British Army slang, and this along with the ongoing barrage of textbook Brechtian estrangement techniques makes it perennially difficult to know what the film is aiming to do. Lester himself, acknowledging this, argued that most "anti-war" films still treat war in a rational manner, while he tried to disassemble it to the pure perversion of everything human he found it to be.

Continuing on the absurdist tone established in Help! and considering this film an artistic success, United Artists gave Richard Lester free rein to create his next film, the nuclear war satire The Bed-Sitting Room. The three films accidentally constitute a trilogy that has developed a cult audience since their initial releases between 1965-70.

The film was made on location in Spain in the autumn of 1966. It has been said "Strawberry Fields Forever" was written by Lennon on the set. The film's release was delayed by 6 months as Richard Lester went on to work on Petulia (1968), shortly after completing How I Won The War.

She Loves You: the Lost Beatles Track Story

2009-10-24T18:59:00.010+02:00

by David Haber

What happened to the original masters of She Loves You and the subsequent making of Sie Liebt Dich is one of the biggest mysteries in the history and lore of the Beatles. This is my own theory.

The History of She Loves You

She Loves You was recorded at EMI Abbey Road Studio 2 on July 1, 1963. Mono mixing and editing was performed on July 4. Since the original tapes for these sessions no longer exist, all that Mark Lewisohn could say about this session in his book The Beatles Recording Sessions, besides the dates, was:

"Precise details of the recording takes no longer exist, but three reels of tape were filled in putting down She Loves You and its B-side I'll Get You..."

On January 29, 1964, while in France for live performances at the Olympia Theater, the Beatles recorded Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand and Sie Liebt Dich for their German fans at a recording session at EMI Pathe Marconi Studios, Paris. The first takes of Can't Buy Me Love were also recorded during those Paris recording sessions that day.

While it is commonly known that the original rhythm (instrumental backing) track from I Want To Hold Your Hand was used to record Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand, it is also commonly believed that the entire recording of Sie Liebt Dich was done completely from scratch. Quoting again from Lewisohn's Recording Sessions:

"First task was to add Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand vocals to the English rhythm track of I Want To Hold Your Hand, mixed down from four-track to two-track. The 'best' versions were takes 5 and 7, with overdubbed handclaps, edited together later.

"For Sie Liebt Dich, the Beatles recorded a new rhythm track, the 1 July 1963 two-track tape having been scrapped once the mono master was prepared. This was done in 13 takes, onto which they overdubbed, in one take, the vocals in the rhythm left/vocals right pattern of their earlier two-track tapes."

Because the two-track master is missing, She Loves You exists only in mono, as it was never mixed into stereo.

In addition, Allen J. Weiner, in The Beatles Ultimate Recording Guide, agrees:

"Sie Liebt Dich was a completely different recording from She Loves You and included a new instrumental track."

My Revelation

I've always personally accepted the above descriptions of how Sie Liebt Dich was created. Compare the released versions of She Loves You and Sie Liebt Dich yourself, they do sound very different from each other.
Although She Loves You only exists in mono, there are stereo versions of Sie Liebt Dich on both the Parlophone and Capitol Rarities albums. These versions sound as Lewisohn describes the final Paris recordings above, rhythm track on the left and German vocals on the right.

When listening to this stereo version of Sie Liebt Dich recently, I thought it might be fun to try and make a fake stereo She Loves You by synching the mono She Loves You on one channel with the rhythm track from the stereo Sie Liebt Dich on the other. (Others have attempted to do this as well, one bootleg actually passed off such a synch job as "the missing stereo version of She Loves You".)

However, when I attempted to do this, I immediately noticed that the two tracks are possibly more than coincidentally the same.

Despite the accepted documentation, I have found strong evidence that the Sie Liebt Dich that was recorded on January 29, 1964 in Paris might be new vocals overdubbed onto the July 1, 1963 She Loves You rhythm track, in the very same way they made Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand.

This means that even though the July 1, 1963 two-track master of She Loves You may now be destroyed or missing, I believe it could have still existed on January 29, 1964 for the making of Sie Liebt Dich.

Keys To The Puzzle

The key to proving that both tracks have identical origins is to hear them both at the same time. However, it is very hard to successfully play back She Loves You and Sie Liebt Dich together and keep them synchronized. I believe this is due to two major factors. These two factors are also very instrumental in understanding why, upon casual listening, the tracks seem to sound so different.

1. Tape Speed

Every release of Sie Liebt Dich is slightly faster than the Parlophone She Loves You. To add to the confusion, the Parlophone release is slightly faster than the American Swan and Capitol releases, which are similar. This makes the difference for American listeners even more acute. (Listen to the comparisons of the Swan She Loves You and the Odeon Sie Liebt Dich above.)

It is possible that the original speed difference is due to differences between the tape decks at Abbey Road where the rhythm track was recorded and those at Pathe Marconi in Paris where Sie Liebt Dich was produced (a difference which was later compounded when the mono mix of She Loves You made its way to America).

A turntable or tape recorder with a vari-speed function or a computer's sound editing program can be used to successfully match the speed of the two versions. When this is done, both versions become perfectly in tune musically with each other. This is an important fact. If they were totally separate recordings, played in the same key but at slightly different tempos, when corrected to match speeds, their musical keys would not match. But this is not the case.

The speed differential between the original Parlophone mix and the German mix may also be at least partially intentional, keep reading.

2. Tape Edits in Mono Mix

We can hear that the mono mix of She Loves You is very heavily edited. Sie Liebt Dich does not appear to be. Listen to this sound clip which contains three examples of edits in She Loves You from the version on the Past Masters 1 CD.

The first edit in the above version is slightly hard to hear, it takes place in the middle of the guitar after "you know you should be glad", this is approximately 1:15 into the song. The next two are much easier to hear, right before "pride can hurt you too" at 1:22 into the song, and then again right before "because she loves you" at 1:29 into the song.

These edits, and others, are in every release of She Loves You but they are easiest to hear on the Past Masters CD. Steps were taken during the mastering of earlier 45 and LP versions to hide the edits somewhat, this seems not to have been done when Past Masters was released.

The edits throw any synchonization attempts off, as they were done by hand and each physical tape edit possibly includes a tiny bit more of each recording than it should, or a tiny bit less. These slight editing mistakes are not big enough to notice upon casual listening, but are big enough to cause synch attempts to seem to drift in and out of synchronization as the edited version first includes tiny snippets of the original recording where it shouldn't, and then loses tiny bits later that should be there, when compared to the seemingly unedited Sie Liebt Dich.

A Controversial Theory

But why is the mono mix of She Loves You so highly edited, much more than any other early Beatles release? I have a theory as to why this is.

It is documented that at the time She Loves You was recorded, the Beatles were recording on a two-track tape machine. That means the song would have been recorded with the rhythm track on one channel and the voices on the other.

We also know that it took much time, especially in the early years, for George to work out his lead guitar parts, although once he worked out the part, he played very well. This is reason to believe that George's guitar might have been recorded separately from the rhythm track which was done first.

In the two-track days, for that to be accomplished, since both tracks were already taken up, one for the rhythm track and the other for the vocals, it would have been necessary to "mix down" both of these tracks to one track of a new tape, thereby opening up a new free track.

It's possible George Martin opted not to do this for two main reasons. First, a "mix-down" step would mean an additional tape generation, meaning the introduction of a lot of tape noise (hiss). Also, it meant relinquishing the ability to re-mix. Once mixed-down, the levels of the vocals to the rhythm track would be forever set and unchangeable, and it would be impossible, for example, to change something in the vocal without affecting the rhythm track.

Instead, it's possible to believe that George's lead guitar track was simply recorded on a separate tape, to be played back in synch with first two-track tape when making the mix. There is evidence they had done something similar to this earlier, on a smaller scale, with things like John's harmonica on From Me To You and Thank You Girl, where we know the harmonica is not part of the main rhythm track, because of tape evidence of the actual edit pieces, and differences in the mono and stereo mixes of the song.

If George's guitar had to be synched with the main tape when making the mono mix, that could explain why the mono mix is so heavily edited. It was way too difficult to get it all perfectly synchronized in one take, so they edited together all of the best attempts.

In addition, this perhaps explains why there is no stereo mix of She Loves You, because it would have been too hard to do, and there's no way they could do a stereo mix that sounded exactly like the mono one. There is documented evidence that George Martin did something like this again later, issuing I Am The Walrus in fake stereo rather than attempt a true-stereo mix because an effect created during the mono mix (the King Lear voice-over) could not be recreated in the same way.

I admit I have no proof that there was a separate George guitar track, it is only a theory. At the very least, upon the evidence of all the tape edits in the mono mix, the She Loves You master tapes must have been comprised of several separately recorded components which were assembled for the mono mix. This sheds some light on many of the lingering questions in the making of She Loves You and Sie Liebt Dich mystery.

Norman Smith, engineer for both She Loves You sessions

Putting It All Together

It's important to remember that all of the documenation we have on the making of both She Loves You and Sie Liebt Dich is shaky, at best. Taking a look again at the quote from Lewisohn:

"For Sie Liebt Dich, the Beatles recorded a new rhythm track, the 1 July 1963 two-track tape having been scrapped once the mono master was prepared. This was done in 13 takes, onto which they overdubbed, in one take, the vocals in the rhythm left/vocals right pattern of their earlier two-track tapes."

We know at least part of that account is wrong, the vocal overdubs were not accomplished in one take, as the outtake from Anthology proves.

I think it is reasonable to believe that the thirteen takes that Lewisohn describes it took to re-record the Sie Liebt Dich rhythm track could instead have been thirteen takes to successfully reconstruct the rhythm track for Sie Liebt Dich from the components of the original She Loves You master tapes. This process would have been very laborious, and could have easily taken thirteen tries, the very reason a stereo mix was abandoned originally.

At the same time, is it reasonable to believe it would have taken the Beatles thriteen takes to re-record the rhythm track for a song they already knew very well by this point?

If indeed some recombining of the master tapes was involved in recreating the She Loves You rhythm track, this could be the very cause of the speed differences between the two releases. It may have been necessary for them to slightly speed up the She Loves You two-track master in Paris as they were making the mix, in an attempt to make the various tape components match better.

Deciding For Yourself

Despite the difficulty due to the factors described above, it is still possible to synchronize She Loves You and Sie Liebt Dich enough to demonstrate the phenomenon of how alike they sound. When you listen to them synchronized, it sounds as if the lead guitar and bass guitar parts are identical throughout. In addition, the drum part also sounds like it is identical in several unique passages.

To help you explore the striking similarities between She Loves You and Sie Liebt Dich, I suggest to listen to the same segment of both songs, the Parlophone mono mix of She Loves You and the stereo mix of Sie Liebt Dich from the Parlophone Rarities LP.
Besides being generally alike, here are some specific things to look for:
The de-emphasized drum beat after the second "Yeah Yeah Yeah".
The lead guitar has an identical note-doubling in the phrase right before the vocal.
The unique drum break before "and you know..."
Extra notes in bass line under "but now she said she knows..."
The lead guitar phrases, the first of which starts sloppily.
When listening to these examples, try to focus on one instrument at a time. Listening in headphones makes it easier to focus on each instrumental element.

Also, listen for what is alike, rather than what is missing from one or other, as missing sounds can easily be explained by being "buried" in their respective mixes by other sounds or differences in the mixing and mastering processes.

After hearing the two versions of the song synchronized, and considering the details described above, it's my opinion that the two recordings, She Loves You and Sie Liebt Dich, were made using the same instrumental performance. However, we may never know the answer for sure. Many of the people involved are no longer with us, and it was years ago. Perhaps if more of the Sie Liebt Dich recording session (a bit of which is included above) is ever released from the EMI vaults, we may know if they really did record a new live rhythm track for Sie Liebt Dich that day in Paris in 1964. Until then, we'll just have to depend on our own ears.

And remember, it was George Martin who said "All you need is ears".

Fan's Arts: “Nowhere Man” animation

2009-10-23T13:09:00.000+02:00

Animated video created by Stelos485 inspired by “Nowhere Man” from “Rubber Soul” (Dec 1965)

Fan's Arts: “Sgt. Pepper’s (Reprise)” animation

2009-10-23T13:06:00.000+02:00

Arturo from Leon (Mexico) created this video animation in flash for a school project using “Sgt. Pepper’s (Reprise)” as soundtrack.

Why the Beatles Broke Up

2009-10-21T13:18:00.005+02:00

Mikal Gilmore on his new investigation into the Fab Four's fall.

I came of age in the time that was also the age of the Beatles, and I've always been grateful for that simultaneity. Along with the Beatles, and no doubt because them, many of us grew into an awareness that shared tastes in music might also amount to shared community, and that community could amount to new ideals, new oppositions, new fun, art, fear and political power. Now, these years later, I think of the Beatles as one of the most romantic and dramatic exemplars of democracy that helped move youth culture in the 1960s: They were themselves a democratic unit — all for one, one for all, and in times of disagreement, they nonetheless enjoyed a fraternal sense of accord that made consensus a functional part of their shared dreams.

But democracy is always tenuous and, in any real way, ephemeral, and it was how the Beatles exemplified these latter qualities that is what made for the dynamics we saw at work in the Beatles' end story. By the time they came apart, no matter the personal differences and rivalries and any internal pain and madness, the Beatles were just too big and important to break up without saying something about the world that they had helped shape. As the 1960s' hopes of community and free-form democracy gave way to something harder and more bitter, the Beatles too fell prey to the dissolution, and they knew it. After all, they had believed so deeply in love as a means to personal and social redemption, there was no way they could leave each other without breaking both their times and each other's hearts.

This has all been observed in many ways in the past, and will be for generations to come. Yet even if it makes a sad sort of sense — a symbol of unity that ends, like the era it centered, in disunity — there will still always be something mysterious about why and how the Beatles came apart the way they did, in so much rancor and avarice. John Lennon always referred to the band's end as "a divorce," but that was simply how he justified his own leave-taking (and clearly, Lennon was no model for how to separate fairly from others, given how he left his first wife, Cynthia).

What actually happened, I've come to believe, was something different and worse than divorce. I started work on this story well over a year ago, making my way through over 65 texts and taking (exactly) 1,440 pages of notes. Not surprisingly, the various historians, critics, biographers, musicologists, sociologists and journalists I read had strong views about whose motives accomplished what in the debacle, who was guilty and who was simply helpless in the sweep of events. In truth, there were good guys and no villains, but because these were fallible people, they certainly made some grievous errors.

Through all my research, certain conclusions became inevitable, and they managed to surprise me a bit: The Beatles' end was an accident, a maneuver by John Lennon that went horribly wrong.
It's long been known that the Beatles in fact ended when, in September 1969, Lennon announced to his bandmates, to his wife Yoko Ono and to manager Allen Klein that he was leaving his famous group, even as the album Abbey Road was meeting with the biggest sales the Beatles had yet known. Several months later, as this article chronicles, Paul McCartney also announced he was leaving the Beatles, though unlike Lennon, he said so publicly.

Though there are numerous moments in the group's chronology of dissolution that were crucial events, this move by Paul was perhaps the most critical of them all. He had loved the Beatles more than the others had — he had certainly loved John more than John had loved him — and it was due to Paul's resourcefulness and tenacity that the Beatles held together and moved forward so remarkably after the death of the manager who had made them famous, Brian Epstein. Though Lennon is more commonly regarded as the Beatles' true genius (which is inarguable: he wrote the bulk of their masterpieces and until the last couple years of their career, wrote the best tracks on their albums), it is also fair to say that without McCartney, the Beatles would not have mattered in history with such ingenuity and durability. Also, unlike Lennon, McCartney understood that the Beatles' four members would never create so much wonder separately as they had collectively. So for Paul McCartney — the only Beatle who had never left the group in a fit of pique or out of whim — to leave meant, in fact, the Beatles were over. He wasn't about to play any games about his love for what the Beatles were, nor was he going to dishonor his own pain.

McCartney had simply been forced into an impossible position by John Lennon, George Harrison and Allen Klein. At least two of those men should have loved Paul as much as he loved them, but instead they had come to resent what they saw as his drive and his domineering ways. Who knows what Lennon and Harrison thought would have become of the Beatles had it not been for McCartney — the only opinion they ever offered on the matter was that they had never expected to survive past Epstein's demise. The fact that they did is also what made them great forever, but no doubt in the midst of their unprecedented reality, any outside perspective was impossible; they were, after all, a notoriously insular outfit.

To the degree that any of this is tragedy — given that all things must pass — then it's indeed a manifold tragedy. Harrison and Lennon were profound men who understood the necessity for hope and fellowship, and yet they were also men who could be profoundly petty and ungrateful. Both of them early on came to dislike the reality of the Beatles' massive audience — "Fucking bastards, sucking us to death," John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970 — and both men became uncharacteristically obsessed with financial eminence near the group's end.

But what I found most troubling, most tragic, in all of this was two things: Both Lennon and Harrison (Lennon, clearly, in particular) did their best to sabotage the Beatles from mid-1968 onward, and when it all came irrevocably apart, I believe that both men regretted what they had wrought. I don't think that John Lennon and George Harrison (but Lennon, again, in particular) truly meant the Beatles to end, even though they might not have known it in the moment. I think they meant to shift the balance of power, I think they meant for the Beatles to become, in a sense, a more casual form of collaboration, and I think they clearly intended to rein in Paul McCartney. But they overplayed their hand and — there's no way around it — they treated McCartney shamefully during 1969, and unforgivably in the early months of 1970.

The immediate aftermath was as dramatic as everything that led up to it, though that isn't something we had the room to track much in this article, given its already considerable length. Lennon was furious and hurt when Paul said he was leaving — he too knew there would be no repairing this, even though he had already been indicating he thought the band would resume — and he and McCartney soon launched into some sour exchanges in interviews and in song.

When McCartney sued to dissolve the band's partnership, the three other Beatles claimed in court papers that they saw no reason to dissolve, that there was no real incompatibility that would prevent them all from continuing to make music together. They were saying this for legal and financial reasons, of course, but on some level, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr almost certainly meant it. They had thrown away something special, and the man they chose to align themselves with, accountant and manager Allen Klein, turned out to be somebody they lost faith in. After that happened, they again had Paul McCartney to thank, because his legal actions at the end probably saved their legacy. But the other Beatles never apologized to McCartney for how they handled him in 1970. Some things healed with time, but some losses were eternal. Near the end of his life, John Lennon said, "My partings are not as nice as I'd like them to be. I regret a bad taste to it."

I realize there's an unseemly aspect to concentrating on how terribly the Beatles ended. Clearly, their music outshines the disaster and it always will. And though Lennon and McCartney no longer collaborated in the same ways in the group's last few years, their presence together as they continued to make music, including their contrasts, was still a partnership — one that was too often missed in their subsequent music apart.

Unbecoming or not, though, I've never come across a story that fascinated or moved me more than this particular one. The end of the Beatles was convoluted and acrimonious, but it was also transcendent: No matter their problems, no matter how much they viewed one another with suspicion in their last year or two, the Beatles still knew how to talk to each other through their music, and nobody else has truly matched that heart-to-heart they achieved. Describing working with them at the very end, on Abbey Road, their longtime producer George Martin said, "There was an inexplicable presence when all four were together in a room. Their music was bigger than they were."

That presence went well beyond the confines of room; it was a presence in the world at that time. Better than that, it was a force in history; it made possible the world we now live in, and nothing will ever unmake that. I will always be grateful to have lived in the time of the Beatles.

©Copyright 2009 Rolling Stone

Why Beatles stopped touring

2009-10-21T10:11:00.000+02:00

From Beatles Anthology DVD.

Beatles in Phillipines (1966)

2009-10-21T10:09:00.000+02:00

From Beatles Anthology DVD.

What really happened (collected from various sources):

- It was 1966. No martial law yet (would be declared in 1971).
- The Beatles toured the Philippines.
- The band performed at the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium.
- The band had a day off.
- Imelda Marcos called The Beatles management/staff to invite the band to play in the Malacañang Palace, together with the children.
- The Beatles management turned down the invitation.
- Beatles management did NOT inform the four Beatles members themselves of the invitation.
- "Beatles snubbed Marcos" news circulated the next day.
- British government called up manager Brian Epstein questioning the band's/management's decision to turn down the Marcoses' invitation.
- Brian Epstein attempted to pacify the angry people by making a public statement of apology on national TV. But coincidentally, the airing was shut off/turned into static noise because of some airing problems.
- Riot ensued. People manhandled the Beatles at the airport

The Beatles Live in Manila July 4 1966

2009-10-21T08:26:00.001+02:00

In July 1966, when The Beatles toured the Philippines, they unintentionally snubbed the nation’s first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had expected the group to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential Palace. When presented with the invitation, Brian Epstein politely declined on behalf of the group, as it had never been the group’s policy to accept such “official” invitations.
The group soon found that the Marcos regime was unaccustomed to accepting “no” for an answer. After the snub was broadcast on Philippine television and radio, all of The Beatles’ police protection disappeared. The group and their entourage had to make their way to Manila airport on their own. At the airport, road manager Mal Evans was beaten and kicked, and the band members were pushed and jostled about by a hostile crowd. Once the group boarded the plane, Epstein and Evans were ordered off, and Evans said, “Tell my wife that I love her.” Epstein was forced to give back all the money that the band had earned while they were there before being allowed back on the plane.

The Beatles Return From The Philippines (1966)

2009-10-21T08:23:00.001+02:00

Their Own Records In Their Own Words - Sgt. Pepper and surroundings

2009-10-19T10:49:00.010+02:00

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Originally released in the UK, June 1, 1967

SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1980: "'Sgt. Pepper' is Paul after a trip to America and the whole West Coast long-named group thing was coming in. You know, when people were no longer the Beatles or the Crickets-- they were suddenly Fred And His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes, right? So I think he got influenced by that and came up with this idea for the Beatles."

PAUL 1984: "It was an idea I had, I think, when I was flying from L.A. to somewhere. I thought it would be nice to lose our identities, to submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group. We would make up all the culture around it and collect all our heroes in one place. So I thought, A typical stupid-sounding name for a Dr. Hook's Medicine Show and Traveling Circus kind of thing would be 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.' Just a word game, really."

PAUL circa-1994: "We were fed up with being Beatles. We really hated that fucking four little mop-top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn't want anymore, plus, we'd now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers... then suddenly on the plane I got this idea. I thought, 'Let's not be ourselves. Let's develop alter egos so we're not having to project an image which we know. It would be much more free.'"

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1970: "Paul had the line about 'a little help from my friends.' He had some kind of structure for it, and we wrote it pretty well fifty-fifty from his original idea."

JOHN 1980: "That's Paul, with a little help from me. 'What do you see when you turn out the light/ I can't tell you but I know it's mine' is mine."

PAUL circa-1994: "This was written out at John's house in Weybridge for Ringo... I think that was probably the best of our songs that we wrote for Ringo actually. I remember giggling with John as we wrote the lines, 'What do you see when you turn out the light/ I can't tell you but I know it's mine.' It could have been him playing with his willie under the covers, or it could have been taken on a deeper level. This is what it meant but it was a nice way to say it-- a very non-specific way to say it. I always liked that."

LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1980: "My son Julian came in one day with a picture he painted about a school friend of his named Lucy. He had sketched in some stars in the sky and called it 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,' Simple. The images were from 'Alice in Wonderland.' It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that. There was also the image of the female who would someday come save me... a 'girl with kaleidoscope eyes' who would come out of the sky. It turned out to be Yoko, though I hadn't met Yoko yet. So maybe it should be 'Yoko in the Sky with Diamonds.' It was purely unconscious that it came out to be LSD. Until somebody pointed it out, I never even thought it, I mean, who would ever bother to look at initials of a title? It's NOT an acid song. The imagery was Alice in the boat and also the image of this female who would come and save me-- this secret love that was going to come one day. So it turned out to be Yoko... and I hadn't met Yoko then. But she was my imaginary girl that we all have."

PAUL circa-1994: "I went up to John's house in Weybridge. When I arrived we were having a cup of tea, and he said, 'Look at this great drawing Julian's done. Look at the title!' So I said, 'What's that mean?' thinking Wow, fantastic title! John said, 'It's Lucy, a freind of his from school. And she's in the sky.' ...so we went upstairs and started writing it. People later thought 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' was LSD. I swear-- we didn't notice that when it first came out."

GETTING BETTER
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1980: "It is a diary form of writing. All that 'I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved' was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically... any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything's the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster."

PAUL 1984: "Wrote that at my house in St. John's Wood. All I remember is that I said, 'It's getting better all the time,' and John contributed the legendary line 'It couldn't get much worse.' Which I thought was very good. Against the spirit of that song, which was all super-optimistic... then there's that lovely little sardonic line. Typical John."

FIXING A HOLE
(Lennon/McCartney)
PAUL 1967: "It's really about the fans who hang around outside your door day and night. 'See the people standing there/ They worry me, and never win/ And wonder why they don't get in my door.' If they only knew the best way to get in is not to do that, because obviously anyone who is going to be straight and be like a real friend is going to get in... but they simply stand there and give off the impression, 'Dont let us in.' I actually do enjoy having them in. I used to do it more, but I don't as much now because I invited one in once and the next day she was in The Daily Mirror with her mother saying we were going to get married."

JOHN 1980: "That's Paul... again writing a good lyric."

PAUL 1984: "Yeah, I wrote that. I liked that one. Strange story, though. The night we went to record that, a guy turned up at my house who announced himself as Jesus. So I took him to the session. You know-- couldn't harm, I thought. Introduced Jesus to the guys. Quite reasonable about it. But that was it. Last we ever saw of Jesus."

SHE'S LEAVING HOME
(Lennon/McCartney)
PAUL 1984: "I wrote that. My kind of ballad from that period. One of my daughters likes that. Still works. The other thing I remember is that George Martin was offended that I used another arranger. He was busy and I was itching to get on with it; I was inspired. I think George had a lot of difficulty forgiving me for that. It hurt him; I didn't mean to."

BEING FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR KITE
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1968: "'Mr. Kite' was a straight lift. I had all the words staring me in the face one day when I was looking for a song. It was from this old poster I'd bought at an antique shop. We'd been down to Surrey or somewhere filming a piece. There was a break, and I went into this shop and bought an old poster advertising a variety show which starred Mr. Kite. It said the Henderson's would also be there, late of Pablo Fanques Fair. There would be hoops and horses and someone going through a hogs head of real fire. Then there was Henry the Horse. The band would start at ten to six. All at Bishopsgate. Look, there's the bill-- with Mr. Kite topping it. I hardly made up a word, just connecting the lists together. Word for word, really."

JOHN 1972: "The story that Henry the Horse meant 'heroin' was rubbish."

JOHN 1980: "It's all just from that poster. The song is pure, like a painting. A pure watercolor."

WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU
(Harrison)
GEORGE 1967: "I'm writing more songs now that we're not touring. The words are always a bit of a hangup for me. I'm not very poetic. 'Within You Without You' was written after dinner one night at Klaus Voorman's house. He had a harmonium, which I hadn't played before. I was doodling on it when the tune started to come. The first sentence came out of what we'd been doing that evening... 'We were talking.' That's as far as I got that night. I finished the rest of the words later at home."

JOHN 1967: "George has done a great indian one. We came along one night and he had about 400 indian fellas playing, and it was a great swinging event, as they say."

JOHN 1980: "One of George's best songs. One of my favorites of his, too. He's clear on that song. His mind and his music are clear. There is his innate talent. He brought that sound together."

WHEN I'M SIXTY FOUR
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1967: "'When I'm Sixty Four' was something Paul wrote in the Cavern days. We just stuck in a few more words, like 'grandchildren on your knee,' and 'Vera Chuck and Dave.' It was just one of those ones that he'd had, that we've all got, really-- half a song. And this was just one of those that was quite a hit with us. We used to do it when the amps broke down, just sing it on the piano."

JOHN 1972: "I think I helped Paul with some of the words."

JOHN 1980: "Paul's, completely. I would never dream of writing a song like that. There's some things I never think about, and that's one of them.

PAUL 1984: "I wrote the tune when I was about 15, I think, on the piano at home, before I moved from Liverpool. It was kind of a cabaret tune. Then, years later, I put words to it."

PAUL circa-1994: "I thought it was a good little tune but it was too vaudvillian, so I had to get some cod lines to take the sting out of it, and put the tongue very firmly in cheek."

LOVELY RITA
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1980: "That's Paul writing a pop song. He makes 'em up like a novelist. You hear lots of McCartney-influenced songs on the radio now. These stories about boring people doing boring things-- being postmen and secretaries and writing home. I'm not interested in writing third-party songs. I like to write about me, 'cuz I know me."

PAUL 1984: "Yeah, that was mine. It was based on the American meter maid. And I got the idea to just... you know, so many of my things, like 'When I'm Sixty-Four' and those, they're tongue in cheek! But they get taken for real! And similarly with 'Lovely Rita' --the idea of a parking-meter attendant's being sexy was tongue in cheek at the time."

GOOD MORNING GOOD MORNING
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1967: "I often sit at the piano, working at songs with the television on low in the background. If I'm a bit low and not getting much done, the words from the telly come through. That's when I heard the words, 'Good Morning Good Morning.'"

JOHN 1968: "We write about our past. 'Good Morning, Good Morning,' I was never proud of it. I just knocked it off to do a song. But it was writing about my past so it does get the kids because it was me at school, my whole bit."

JOHN 1972: "A bit of gobbledygook, but nice words."

PAUL 1984: "'Good Morning' --John's. That was our first major use of sound effects, I think. We had horses and chickens and dogs and all sorts running through it."

A DAY IN THE LIFE
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1967: "I was writing the song with the 'Daily Mail' propped up in front of me on the piano. I had it open to the 'News In Brief' or whatever they call it. There was a paragraph about four thousand holes being discovered in Blackburn Lancashire. And when we came to record the song there was still one word missing from that verse... I knew the line had to go, 'Now they know how many holes it takes to --something-- the Albert Hall.' For some reason I couldn't think of the verb. What did the holes do to the Albert Hall? It was Terry Doran who said 'fill' the Albert Hall. And that was it. Then we thought we wanted a growing noise to lead back into the first bit. We wanted to think of a good end and we had to decide what sort of backing and instruments would sound good. Like all our songs, they never become an entity until the very end. They are developed all the time as we go along."

JOHN 1968: "'A Day in the Life' --that was something. I dug it. It was a good piece of work between Paul and me. I had the 'I read the news today' bit, and it turned Paul on. Now and then we really turn each other on with a bit of song, and he just said 'yeah' --bang bang, like that. It just sort of happened beautifully, and we arranged it and rehearsed it, which we don't often do, the afternoon before. So we all knew what we were playing, we all got into it. It was a real groove, the whole scene on that one. Paul sang half of it and I sang half. I needed a middle-eight for it, but Paul already had one there."

JOHN 1980: "Just as it sounds: I was reading the paper one day and I noticed two stories. One was the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash. On the next page was a story about 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. In the streets, that is. They were going to fill them all. Paul's contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song 'I'd love to turn you on.' I had the bulk of the song and the words, but he contributed this little lick floating around in his head that he couldn't use for anything. I thought it was a damn good piece of work."

PAUL 1984: "That was mainly John's, I think. I remember being very conscious of the words 'I'd love to turn you on' and thinking, Well, that's about as risque as we dare get at this point. Well, the BBC banned it. It said, 'Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall' or something. But I mean that there was nothing vaguely rude or naughty in any of that. 'I'd love to turn you on' was the rudest line in the whole thing. But that was one of John's very good ones. I wrote... that was co-written. The orchestra crescendo and that was based on some of the ideas I'd been getting from Stockhausen and people like that, which is more abstract. So we told the orchestra members to just start on their lowest note and end on their highest note and go in their own time... which orchestras are frightened to do. That's not the tradition. But we got 'em to do it."

PAUL 1988: "Then I went around to all the trumpet players and said, 'Look all you've got to do is start at the beginning of the 24 bars and go through all the notes on your instrument from the lowest to the highest-- and the highest has to happen on that 24th bar, that's all. So you can blow 'em all in that first thing and then rest, then play the top one there if you want, or you can steady them out.' And it was interesting because I saw the orchestra's characters. The strings were like sheep-- they all looked at each other: 'Are you going up? I am!' and they'd all go up together, the leader would take them all up. The trumpeters were much wilder."

ON RECORDING (DURING THE 'SGT. PEPPER' PERIOD)
GEORGE 1967: "Now that we only play in the studios, and not anywhere else, we have less of a clue what we're going to do. Now when we go into the studio we have to start from scratch, just thrashing it out and doing it the hard way. If Paul has written a song, he comes into the studio with it in his head. It's very hard for him to give it to us, and for us to get it. When we suggest something, it might not be what he wants because he hasn't got it in his head like that. So it takes a long time. Nobody knows what the tunes sound like until we've recorded them and listen to them afterwards.

GEORGE 1967: "When we make a record, we may be knocked out by it when we first do it... but then when we listen to it a few times we begin to feel that it's not as good as we think it is. That's the way it happens. With the Revolver album, when we first did it, we were just really knocked out with lots of the tracks. But then, by the time the record is issued, we're a bit fed up with it and looking towards recording the new one."

JOHN 1967: "Sgt Pepper is one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right. We tried, and I think succeeded in achieving what we set out to do. If we hadn't, then it wouldn't be out now."

JOHN 1968: "We didn't really shove the album full of pot and drugs, but I mean, there WAS an effect. We were more consciously trying to keep it out. You wouldn't say, 'I had some acid, baby, so groovy.' But there was a feeling that something had happened between Revolver and Sgt Pepper."

JOHN 1972: "Pepper was just another psychedelic image. Beatle haircuts and boots were just as big as flowered pants in their time. I never felt that when Pepper came out, Haight-Ashbury was a direct result. It always seemed to me that they were all happening at once. Kids were already wearing army jackets on King's Road-- all we did is make them famous."

PAUL 1974: "Then the 'this-little-bit-if-you-play-it-backwards' stuff. As I say, nine times out of ten it's really nothing. Take the end of Sgt Pepper. Some fans came around to my door, giggling. They said, 'Is it true, that bit at the end? Is it true? It says, We´ll fuck you like Supermen.' I said, 'No, you´re kidding. I haven´t heard it, but I´ll play it.' It was just some piece of conversation that was recorded and turned backwards. But I went inside after I´d seen them and played it studiously, turned it backwards with my thumb against the motor-- turned the motor off and did it backwards. And there it was, sure as anything, plain as anything. 'We´ll fuck you like Supermen.' I thought, 'Jesus, what can you do?'"

RINGO 1976: "We'd finished touring in '66 to go into the studio where we could hear each other... and create any fantasy that came out of anybody's brain."

GEORGE 1977: "Sgt Pepper was only a four-track. Well, we had an orchestra on a separate four-track machine in 'Day In The Life.' We tried to sync them up. I remember-- they kept going out of sync in playback, so we had to remix it."

PAUL 1988: "EMI had very firm rules... which we always had to break. It wasn't a willful arrogance, it was just that we felt we knew better. They'd say, 'Well our rule book says..' and we'd say, 'They're out of date, come on, let's move!' We were always forcing them into things they didn't want to do... we were always pushing ahead: 'Louder, further, longer, more, different.' I always wanted things to be different because we knew that people, generally, always want to move on. And if we hadn't pushed them, the guys would have stuck by their rule books."

History of British Rock

2009-10-16T19:26:00.000+02:00

Beatles' Era - Pop Industry Report 1964

2009-10-16T00:22:00.001+02:00

UK documentary excerpt showing The Rolling Stones on-stage & contemporary interviews with Terry Dene & Ricky Valence mourning the loss of their short-lived stardom.

Beatles' Era - Jane Birkin and Citroen DS 1968

2009-10-15T15:31:00.000+02:00

Beatles' Era - Eartha Kitt 1962

2009-10-15T15:22:00.002+02:00

Eartha Kitt performs "I Want To Be Evil" - 1962

Beatles Posters at The Chester Antiques Show

2009-10-14T23:08:00.002+02:00

A collection of 1960s original movie posters will be attracting Beatles fans from across the region when they go on sale at The Chester Antiques & Fine Art Show at The County Grandstand, Chester Racecourse, Chester, England, from 15 - 18 October 2009.
Specialist movie poster dealers Quadbod from Birmingham will be showing three rare original posters for the Beatles' movies 'A Hard Day's Night' (1964), 'Help' (1965) and 'Yellow Submarine' (1968). These are full sized posters at 81ins x 41ins and will be priced at £850 each.

Terry Pearson from Quadbod explains, "Interest in Beatles memorabilia has always been high and specially so this year with the re-release of their CDs. Authentic 60s Beatles posters are now very rare, and to find three in such good condition is a revelation. They are very decorative and, course, enormously collectable."

The posters will feature among a range of movie posters, showcards and other memorabilia from Quadbod who are exhibiting at The Chester Antiques & Fine Art Show together with fifty art and antiques dealers from across the country. They will also be showing a rare poster from the famous British movie, The Blue Lamp, (1949) which starred Jack Warner, priced at £750.
The Chester Antiques & Fine Art Show features dealers from across the country offering for sale a wide range of antiques, works of art and objets d'art with prices from less than £500 to more than £20,000. It is widely regarded as the premier event for antiques collectors in the northwest.

The Chester Antiques & Fine Art Show
The County Grandstand, Chester Racecourse, Chester, England
15 - 18 October 2009
Times
Thursday 15 October 10.30am-6pm / Friday 16 October 10.30am-6pm
Saturday 17 October 10.30am-6pm / Sunday 18 October 10.30am-5pm
Admission: £5.00.

Beatles remastered Global chart

2009-10-14T23:05:00.002+02:00

The latest global CD chart for the week of Oct. 17 from Mediatraffic shows:

The highest ranking album for the week ending Oct. 17 is "Abbey Road" at #13, down from #9 last week. Then comes "The Beatles (White Album)" (#15, from #13), "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (#16, from #11), "Rubber Soul" (going up to #18, from #19 last week), "Revolver" (also advancing, from #20 to #19), "Past Masters" (#22, up from #28), "Magical Mystery Tour" (#25, from #32), "Help!" (#27, from #30), "A Hard Day's Night" (#28, from #33), "Let It Be" (#29, from #31), "Please Please Me" (#31, from #35), "With the Beatles" (#33, from #39), "Beatles For Sale" (#34, from #40) and "Yellow Submarine" (back on the chart at #40, after missing a week last week.)

On the U.S. Billboard Catalog Album chart, "Abbey Road" leads the pack at #2 (under Michael Jackson's "Number Ones"), while Hits Daily Double's Budding Album Release chart shows "Abbey Road" the highest ranking album at #26, down from #16 last week. The latest Official UK Charts Company chart (from 10/10) showed "Sgt. Pepper" highest ranking at #52.

Beatles Talkin' 1963 - 1

2009-10-14T22:54:00.005+02:00

RINGO 1963
(on his musical beginnings)

Q: "Ringo, it's been suggested that boys coming from the particular area that you've come from, if you'd hadn't found an interest in music, might have found it much more difficult to get out and make a go of life. Would you comment on this?"

RINGO: "I think it's true, you know. I mean, when I was sixteen I used to walk along the road with the rest of the lads, and we'd have all our trade coats on. You know, we'd had a few knocks with other rival gangs, sort of thing. But then I got the drums, and the bloke nextdoor played a guitar. I got a job and we started playing together. And another bloke from work made a bass out of an old tea chest... you know them days. This was about '58, mind you. And we played together, and then we started playing on dances and things, you know, and we took an interest in it. Then we stopped going, you know, out to sort of hanging around corners every night."

PAUL 1963
(on The Beatles' career before their recent fame)

Q: "You were very much younger when this enormous success started, and you're riding the summit of it now. Do you see it as interfering with the flow of your life?"

PAUL: "I don't really know what you mean by 'very much younger.' It was only a year ago."

Q: "But you've been working since '58, haven't you?"

PAUL: "Well, yeah... not working, you know. I mean, strictly speaking we've been out of work since '58 and we've been doing this as a hobby. 'Cuz we've only been doing it as semi-pros. I left school and went right into it. And we were only sort of picking up a few quid a week, you know. It really wasn't work. I think the main thing is now that, as we've got ourselves a bit of security... we don't really have to worry, at the moment anyway, what we're gonna do after it. So we don't."

JOHN 1963
(regarding the beginnings of The Beatles)

JOHN: "We started and finished several groups until we got one together that had the beginnings of a new sound. By then George had joined us. We began to do well as semi-pros. Then one day our big break came with an offer to appear at The Star Club in Hamburg. This is a kind of super-Cavern, where just about everyone who is anyone on the Liverpool scene has played at some time or another."

PAUL 1963
(regarding their Hamburg tours)

PAUL: "Back home in Liverpool we'd only ever done hour-long shows, so we just did our best numbers over and over again. But in Hamburg we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing. We played very loud in Hamburg... bang, bang all the time. The Germans loved it. The first time it was pretty rough. One night, we accidentally singed a bit of cord on an old stone wall in the corridor, and the owner of the place had the police on us. He'd told them that we tried to burn his place down, so they said, 'Leave please.' Funny really, because we couldn't have burnt the place if we had gallons of petrol... It was made of stone."

RINGO 1963
(regarding his earliest days with The Beatles)

RINGO: "The Beatles drummer was sick, so they asked me if I would sit in, you know, just for the day... just until he got better. I did that, and then I went off with another group when they got him back. Then he was sick again. So everytime he was sick they used to come and ask me to sit in. I loved it, you know, because they were a much better group than the one I was with."

JOHN AND RINGO 1963
(regarding the Beatle haircut)

Q: "Is the haircut an act by accident or design?"

JOHN: "Accident."

Q: "You didn't have time to get your hair cut in the first place?"

JOHN: "No, it just happened, you know. Ringo's was by design because he joined later."

RINGO: "Yeah, I designed it."
(laughter)

GEORGE 1963
(on Hamburg)

GEORGE: "We'd been to Hamburg. I think that's where we found our style... we developed our style because of this fella. He used to say, 'You've got to make a show for the people.' And he used to come up every night, shouting 'Mach schau! Mach schau!' So we used to mach schau, and John used to dance around like a gorilla, and we'd all, you know, knock our heads together and things like that. Anyway, we got back to Liverpool and all the groups there were doing 'Shadows' type of stuff. And we came back with leather jackets and jeans and funny hair, maching schau... which went down quite well."

JOHN 1963
(regarding the effect Brian Epstein had on their stage show)

JOHN: "We wore leather jackets in Hamburg... and we'd always worn jeans because we didn't have anything else at the time. Then when we went back to Liverpool, they all thought we were German because we were billed as: From Hamburg. They all said, 'You speak good English.' (smiles) And we just kept on with the leather gear until Brian came along."

PAUL 1963
(about the group's name)

Q: "Paul, where did the name Beatles originate?"

PAUL: "John thought of it first of all. Just as a name; just for a group, you know. We just didn't have any name. Well, oh yeah; we did have a name, but we had about ten of 'em a week, you know... and we didn't like this idea so we had to settle on one particular name. And John came up with the name Beatles one night. And he sort of explained how it was spelled with an 'E-A,' and we said, 'Oh yes, it's a joke.'"

JOHN 1963
(regarding 'Love Me Do' on the British charts)

JOHN: "It came to the charts in two days. And everybody thought it was a 'fiddle' because our manager's stores send in these... what is it... record returns. And everybody down south thought, 'Aha! He's just fiddling the charts.' But he wasn't."

PAUL 1963
(on left-handedness)

PAUL: "The only thing I couldn't cure myself of was being left-handed. I do everything with my left hand, and no matter how I try I can't change the habit. I just seem to do everything back to front. I used to even write backwards. Every time the schoolmasters would look at my handwriting they would throw swinging fits."

JOHN, PAUL, AND GEORGE 1963
(on how long The Beatles' recent fame might last)

JOHN: "How long are you going to last? ...well you can't really say, you know. You can be big headed and say, 'Yea we're gonna last ten years,' but as soon as you've said that you think, 'We're lucky if we last three months,' you know."

PAUL: "We've thought about it, and probably the thing that John and I will do will be to write songs... as we have been doing as a sort of sideline now. We'll probably develop that a bit more."

GEORGE: "I hope to have enough money to go into a business of my own by the time we do... ummm... flop. I mean, we don't know. It may be next week, it may be two or three years."

GEORGE 1963
(regarding the Liverpool sound)

Q: "George, what is the status of rock & roll in England today? Is that what you call your music?"
GEORGE: "No, not really. We don't like to call it anything. The critics and the people who write about it have to call it something... and they didn't want to say it was rock & roll because rock was supposed to have gone out about five years ago. They decided it wasn't really rhythm and blues, so they called it the Liverpool sound... which is stupid, really. As far as we are concerned it's the same as the rock from five years ago."

Q: "Can you describe the Liverpool sound?"

GEORGE: "It's more like old rock... but everything's just a bit louder. There's more bass and drums, and everybody sort of sings loud and shouts."

PAUL 1963
(on what comes after Beatle success)

Q: "None of you are really concerned with going on in this field as a profession?"

PAUL: "Yeah, of course we are. I think all of us really, if it suddenly flopped, then we would do something in this profession. But what we mean... like the conventional answer is, 'I'd like to do ballads and films and straight-acting,' which is so corny. Because half the people who say that can't act or ballad or film. So, umm, we probably wouldn't want to do that unless we thought we could do it. We're having a bash at a film next year, and if we find that any of us can act, say, one out of us may become actors. But we haven't got any great hopes of being actors at the moment."

Beatles Magazines 1963-64

2009-10-10T17:12:00.006+02:00

The Beatles By Royal Command - Published by A Daily Mirror (U.K.) 1963.

Beatle Hairdos & Setting Patterns Magazine , Published by Dell Publishing Co., Inc. NY in 1964.

The Beatles Are Back Magazine, Published by Macfadden-Bartell Corporation in 1964.

The Beatles Are Here Magazine, Published by Macfadden-Bartell Corporation in 1964.

Beatle Mania - The Authentic Photos Magazine, Published by SMP Publishing Ltd. in 1964.

The Beatles 'Round The World No. 1 Winter 1964 Magazine, by Acme News Co. INC. in 1964.

The Beatles Talk! Published by Deidre Publications in 1964.

Dave Clark Five Vs. The Beatles Magazine published by Tempest Publications Inc. in 1964.

The Beatles Meet the Dave Clark Five Magazine published by Kahn Communications Corporation in 1964.

The Beatles Fun Kit Magazine. Published in 1964 by Deidre Pub.

The Original Beatles Book - Two, Published by Peterson Publishing Company in 1964.

Teen Talk Magazine: Beatles on cover - May/June 1964.

Motion Picture Magazine: Beatles on cover - July 1964 - Published by Macfadden-Bartell Corporation, New York.

Beatles' Era - Candy

2009-10-07T22:07:00.000+02:00

Candy (1968)
Directed by Christian Marquand
Theme song performed by The Byrds "Child of The Universe"

Beatles' Era - Candy Trailer

2009-10-07T22:06:00.000+02:00

Trailer for the 1968 big screen adaptation of Terry Southern's classic book. Features Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, Ringo Starr, Charles Aznavour, James Coburn, John Huston and Ewa Aulin.

Ringo Starr as Mexican in the film Candy

2009-10-07T22:05:00.000+02:00

Ringo Starr in Candy (1968)

Ringo no longer signs...

2009-10-07T22:00:00.001+02:00

On October 13, 2008, in this short video, Ringo declares he will no longer sign any autographs dated after October 20, just one week after this announcement, and all future fan mail will be trashed, unread. This was in direct response to an inordinate amount of items which have recently appeared for sale on e-bay, and to those that repeatedly send cards and items to be signed.
This message was not aimed at "real fans" and after over 45 yrs of signing we know they will understand. Ringo has always signed items and is in fact the only Beatle to have been doing so.
Ringo also feels strongly that it is a waste of paper and we all should be mindful of our carbon footprint. At the end of the day Ringo wanted to make a message that was clear and to the point and is confident his real fans understand that.

Ringo signing autographs in Liverpool 08

2009-10-07T21:59:00.000+02:00

The Beatles: A Hairy Story

2009-10-06T22:08:00.000+02:00

by Bill Harry, Beatles' friend and founder of Mersey Beat

Moptops? What do you mean!
I never noticed anything particular about John, George, Paul, Pete or Stuart's hairstyles in the early days -- apart from the fact that initially some of them sported the traditional Tony Curtis style that was popular in Liverpool in the late fifties. It was a style referred to as a d.a. (duck's arse, because of the way the hair curled at the rear).
I had mine done at Max the Mad Russian's, near the Majestic Cinema in town.
Nor did I notice anything specific about their hair when they returned back from Germany. Looking at the photos of the time, taken by Astrid and by Mersey Beat photographers, I couldn't see anything that was radically different from the style most Liverpool youngsters and group members sported.

Then, when Brian Epstein took them over, I noticed that not only did he spruce them up in mohair suits made by his tailor Beno Dorn in Birkenhead, but he took them to Horne Brothers at the corner of Lord Street and had lots of publicity photographs taken of them enjoying a new coiffeur by the unknown barber there. I say unknown, because no one these days could quote the name of the barber who gave them the style, on the instruction of Brian Epstein, when he took them to the fashionable barbers in April 1963. Dezo Hoffmann photographed them having their hair cut and was to comment, "The hairdresser was a friend of theirs who liked Astrid Kirchherr's idea of longer hair for the Beatles. He would groom and discipline their hair for them every week."
Despite Brian and his Horne Brothers publicity pictures to herald a new Beatles image (he took them to the Empire Theatre to watch the Shadows, in their mohair suits, and pointed out how they bowed to the audience at the end of their act. John and Pete didn't like to abandon their leather gear, but they were outvoted. Once suited in mohair, with tidy shirts and tie, John again tried to rebel by unfastened the top button of his shirt when they went on stage, but Paul always stepped forward to fasten it again. Brian gave them neatly typed sheets instructing them not to swear or smoke on stage - paving the way for the Rolling Stones to adopt the image of 'the savage young Beatles', that Brian had carefully smoothed away), their hair style began to change initially in Hamburg.

The first steps were between the lovers, Astrid and Stuart. Millie Sutcliffe, Stu's mother said, "As for the haircut, it started when Stuart's hair was falling down and sticking out. One night Astrid had been moaning about his hair and then took him into the bathroom and cut it."
Hunter Davies, in his authorised biography, writes: "Stu turned up at the Top Ten that evening with his hair in the new style, and the others collapsed on the floor with hysteria. Halfway through he gave up and combed his hair high. But thanks to Astrid, he tried it again the next night. He was ridiculed again, but the night after, George turned up with the same style. Then Paul had a go, though for a long time he was always changing it back to the old style as John hadn't yet made up his mind. Pete Best ignored the whole craze. But the Beatle hair style had been born."
Although it's the 'authorised biography', this is inaccurate but, as writer Bob Spitz was to recall: "During an interview I did with Paul McCartney in 1997 for the New York Times, he confessed that almost half of the official Beatles bio -- done with Hunter Davies in 1967 -- was made up to spare girlfriends, wives, and family from some of the grittier side of the Beatles' legend. All of the nearly 1000 books on the Beatles were embroidered from that myth."
As a result of the implication that Pete ignored the style, many people over the years suggested that this is one of the reasons that he was kicked out, that he was uncooperative by not adopting the hair-style. Yet Astrid states that she never considered attempting to adapt Pete's hair in that style because she considered it too curly. When I discussed it with Pete he said that he was never asked to try out the new hairstyle -- and he would have done so if he had been asked.

Even Ray Coleman, in his book 'John Winston Lennon' writes, "Stuart, the first to have his hair cut and styled by Astrid faced John's scorn when, one night, he arrived at the club for work with what later became known as the Beatle haircut... Paul, always more conscious than the others about his appearance, was the next to ask Astrid to style his hair... John was the last Beatle to succumb to the Beatle cut. Only Pete Best declined, retaining his quaff and Teddy Boy aura that attracted the girls." As the last sentence about Pete indicates, writers speculate, they make assumptions, which I always think is a dangerous thing for writers to do. What evidence did he have that Pete declined? None, because Pete was never asked and would have tried the style if that was the wish of the other members.
But Ray's claim that Paul and John then followed by getting Astrid to style their hair is also wrong. John and Paul didn't have Astrid fashion their hair. They returned to Liverpool with the same hair style they'd left in.
When John received a sum of money from his aunt Elizabeth for his 21st birthday, he invited Paul to join him on a trip to Spain at the end of September 1961. They set off, but never got further than Paris, where they stayed for two weeks. They discovered that Jurgen Vollmer, a friend of theirs from Hamburg, was now living in Paris. They both decided that they wanted their hair fashioned in the way Jurgen had his hair, which was the way a lot of French youngsters had their hair styled.

He was to say "I gave both of them their first 'Beatle' haircut in my hotel room on the Left Bank" and later confirmed, "I gave them the haircut. It was their idea to have it the same as mine. They left Paris, and never brushed their hair back again. That's the real story of the haircut. Don't let anyone tell you different." And in an interview when George Harrison was asked how the Beatles haircut came about, he said, "I only brushed my hair forward after John and Paul came back from Paris."
In 'The Beatles Anthology,' John is quoted as saying, "Jurgen had a flattened down hair style with a fringe in the front, which we rather took to. We went over to his place and there and then he cut -- hacked would be a better word -- our hair into the same style."
While Paul confirmed, "He had his hair Mod style. We said, 'Would you do our hair like yours? We're on holiday -- what the hell!"

The hair style didn't raise any eyebrows on Merseyside, where it wasn't actually radically different from the hair style of the other local groups. Looking at photographs of the Beatles at the Cavern that I asked Dick Matthews to take for me I notice that John and Paul's hair was off their foreheads, while George's hair covered his forehead -- and John still had his sidies!
In their first interview for a major British publication, London's Evening Standard, journalist Maureen Cleave mentioned their 'weird' hair: "French styling, with the fringe brushed forwards." But it barely raised any attention in the British media.
However, it caused a sensation when the Beatles arrived in America in 1964. The affectionate term 'Moptops' was created and almost every comedian in the country cracked gags about their hair style. Hundreds of thousands of Beatles wigs were manufactured and it eventually led to the American youth growing their hair longer than had been previously acceptable for a young male.
Personally, I thought the wigs were more akin to the hair style of Mo Howard from the Three Stooges.

When the group first arrived in America photographers and journalists kept tugging their hair, asking them if they were wearing wigs.
Wigmania took off! New York radio station WMCA ran a competition for listeners to paint or draw someone in a Beatlewig -- either celebrity pictures clipped from newspapers or photos of friends. The most popular subjects were: Nikita Krushchev, Mayor Wagner, Alfred E. Newman (of Mad magazine), Brigitte Bardot and the Jolly Green Giant.
Capitol Records instructed all their staff to wear Beatle wigs during the working day until further notice and issued a memo: "Get these Beatle wigs around properly, and you'll find yourself helping to start the Beatle Hair-Do craze that should be sweeping the country soon."
On their arrival in February 1964, the New York Herald Tribune reported: "The Beatles' hairstyle is a mop effect that covers the forehead, some of the ears and most of the back of the neck.

During their first American press conference the group was asked questions such as 'Will you be getting a haircut?' and 'What's the greatest threat to your career -- dandruff or nuclear warfare?' Such questions continued throughout the press conferences during their autumn tour: 'What excuses do you have for your collar-length hair?' 'What do you do with your long hair in the shower?' 'Do you have any plans for a hair cut?' 'Does you hair require any special care?' and so on.
When Paul was asked 'Do you ever go unnoticed?' he replied, 'When we take off our wigs.'

A 60's joke picture: The Beatles "as we'd like to see them"

The American fervour about the hair style swept the world and in Sweden it was referred to as the 'Hamlet' cut and in Germany it was described as the 'mushroom.'
So far I haven't found out who was the first person, or publication, to coin the phrase 'moptop.'
I was intrigued many years ago when I noticed a full page feature in a major British women's magazine which claimed that the Beatles hair style was based on a photograph of Agnes Flannery, mother of Joe Flannery, a Liverpool manager who was a close friend of Brian Epstein.

Joe claimed that when the Beatles visited him at his Aintree flat early in their career they noticed a picture of his mother when young. Apparently, John fell in love with it.
Joe says, "John picked up the photo, admired the hairstyle and said to Paul McCartney, 'That's the way I want my hair to look.'"
Joe continued, "Compare the photo of my mother and John Lennon and the hairstyles are remarkably similar. I have spoken on a number of occasions with Astrid and she has told me that she never ever said she created the hairstyle. In fact the group went to a barber's at Horne Brothers at the corner of Paradise Street and Lord Street."
Agnes said, "The picture that intrigued John was taken at a studio in Bold Street, Liverpool, when I was just sixteen, two years before I married... I'm sure many folk will be thrilled to learn the true story of how the Beatles came by their distinctive hairstyle which, incidentally, I'd created for myself by washing and trimming my own hair in that particular way."
Pull the other one! Virginia and I used to go to Joe's flat when the Beatles were there, but I can't give any credence to this story.

Beatles' Era - Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

2009-10-06T22:00:00.003+02:00

Jack Cardiff's classic 1968 film, starrying Alain Delon and Marianne Faithfull.
Newly-married Rebecca (Marianne Faithfull) leaves her husband's Alsatian bed on her prized motorbike--symbol of freedom and escape--to visit her lover (Alain Delon) in Heidelberg. En route she indulges in psychedelic reveries as she relives her changing relationship with the two men.
Based on the short story "La Motocyclette" by André Pieyre de Mandiargues.

Beatles' Era - Girl In Gold Boots (1968)

2009-10-06T22:00:00.000+02:00

Opening credits to director Ted V. Mikels LA set Go-Go dancing crime thriller from 1968.

Don't Peel Your Butcher Covers!

2009-10-05T23:13:00.006+02:00

Back in 1966 the album Yesterday And Today was conceived. The Beatles wanted to submit artwork from their Paperback Writer project for this Capitol Lp. According to the contract they had with Capitol Records, Capitol retained the rights to the U.S. cover designs but they insisted Capitol use the Butcher Cover design for this Lp. The one they submitted was the Butcher Cover. Capitol ran a limited number of this artwork and sent it out for evaluation. The reaction was objectionable and this artwork badly received.

The Beatles quickly had another photo taken (the steamer trunk photo seen at the top of this page) and this one was made into a "slick" and pasted over the Butcher Cover design, shrink wrapped and distributed to the retailers. When people found out about this they preceded to peel them off to see the Butcher cover underneath. Depending on the amount and location of the glue some were very successful in taking the trunk cover off in one piece but many were NOT successful and basically ruined the cover.

From then until now people are still fascinated by the Butcher and are still determined to peel off the covers. In this modern era where the glue has aged and hardened even further, it's strongly recommended that collector's have the peel job professionally performed. In fact, it's only recommended that they only peel them in the cases where the trunk cover has excessive wear. All nice paste-overs should be left alone in their pure state.

There was a limited pressing of this Butcher design with the paste-over covers. After 30 years of people pulling them off the numbers of original paste overs are seriously dwindling making the paste-overs more sought after then the peeled versions. For instance, a near-mint mono pasteover will bring around $700-$800 but one of equal quality that's been peeled off will bring you $600-$700. And as time goes by the pasted over versions will go up in price more quickly because of their scarcity.

If you want to see the butcher cover, find a photo of one or maybe buy an "previously peeled" Lp. Or if your paste-over cover jacket is trashed, go for it. Nothing to lose.

...or, just in case... how to PEEL a paste-over Butcher.

One first has to realize that there are 6 (six) separate incarnations
of the Butcher. These are:
1. First State (never been covered) stereo
2. First State (never been covered) mono
3. Paste Over (second state unpeeled) stereo
4. Paste Over (second state unpeeled) mono
5. Peeled State (third state) stereo
6. Peeled State (third state) mono

Before any attempt is made to peel a butcher cover, one must first
determine the exact condition of the cover to be peeled.

Under a bright light look for any stains on the cover that are the
result of a liquid spilling on it. If you attempt to peel a butcher
that has had water, coffee, etc,etc spilled on it you will ruin the
cover. The butcher slick will come right up with the glue. DO NOT
ATTEMPT TO PEEL A LIQUID STAINED BUTCHER COVER.

Check the number on the back lower left on the back cover. You should
see one of the following:

1 or 2 - (pressed in Jacksonville, IL) 5 or 6 - (pressed in L.A.)
12 or 13 - (pressed in Scranton, PA)

Covers with numbers 1,2,5 and 6 use an alcohol soluble glue. Numbers
12 and 13 used a different glue that alcohol will not work on. These
covers must be peeled using saliva (it's the only solvent that I have
found that removes the glue from #12 & 13 covers). The actual method
used to peel covers is the same for all covers, it's just that #12 &
13 covers require saliva instead of isopropyl alchohol. NOTE: The
solvent used (alcohol or saliva) must be applied SPARINGLY! Too
much alcohol can leave the cover with a pink tint. Use a LITTLE AT A
TIME. A syringe with a 26gauge by 1 1/2" needle is a good dispenser
for alcohol. To use saliva, just keep your fingertip wet with it (more
on this later).

Now you are ready to start. The first thing to do is to get as much of
the `Trunk' cover off as possible (but not too much) until you can see
the Butcher slick through the white paper and glue covering it. It's
important to leave a good layer of paper fiber over the glue as this
provides a backing that the glue will adhere to while you are peeling.
For this step you will need a roll of 2" masking tape. Tear off an 8"
strip of masking tape and apply it to the CENTER of the `Trunk' cover
pressing it down firmly. Next, gingerly lift off the masking tape -
the `Trunk' cover will come up with the masking tape. Continue to do
this until all of the trunk cover is removed. NOTE: Be careful not to
get masking tape on any part of the cover except the
trunk portion as this will remove parts of the cover that you want to
keep (e.g. the `File Under: The Beatles' or the `ST 2553' number that
have been pasted over). Again, be careful not to take too much of the
`Trunk' paper off, leave a good backing for the glue to stick to.

Now comes the fun part. Remember, the glue is over 20 years old and
it's pretty crusty and hard. Don't attempt to peel more than 1 square
inch at a time. Starting in the upper left gray area, apply enough
alcohol or saliva to cover about 1 square inch. Saliva is applied
using the finger tip. Let the solvent soak in for about 1 minute so as
to soften up the glue.

Next, use your fingernail to LIGHTLY scrape the paper backing and
glue. Be careful at first to see how far down the Butcher slick is.
DON'T GO TOO FAR. If the Butcher starts to come up or if you see a
`nick' starting to form STOP IMMEDIATELY and move on to a different
part of the cover letting the trouble spot dry completely. You can
come back to it later. Nicks of this kind are usually caused by too
much solvent.

Continue in this fashion peeling 1 square inch at a time until the
cover is completely peeled.

If you do happen to get a nick in the cover, it can usually be taken
care of by LIGHTLY applying a #3 pencil to it (if the nick is in the
gray area) or whatever color you need to cover the nick. There's
something to be said for restoring nicked Butchers like this. It
covers up the ugly nicks and produces an over all better looking peel
job which can up the price and make it more valuable.

This method can be used to `clean' up Butchers that have an excessive
amount of glue on them from a previous attempt at peeling. Since there
is little or no paper backing from the `Trunk' cover for the glue to
stick to on these covers, you must take EXTRA CARE not to nick the
cover. Cleaning a Butcher after it's been peeled requires more care
than peeling from scratch, so BE CAREFUL.

If you do use alcohol and your cover looks like it's starting to get a
pink tint, try using saliva (as far as I can tell, saliva won't turn
the cover pink). Don't worry, the pink tint usually fades with time
(unless you've saturated the cover and left it to sit, but you
wouldn't do that, now would you?).

(BTW - store the record separately from the cover. If you store the
record in the cover, the seams will tend to split with the passage of
time)

John Lennon Interview: Look Magazine 12/13/1966

2009-10-05T22:40:00.000+02:00

In the fall of 1966, Look Magazine's European editor Leonard Gross and photographer Douglas Kirkland visited John Lennon on-location during the filming of 'How I Won The War.' The article, entitled 'John Lennon: A Shorn Beatle Tries It On His Own', was published in the magazine's December 13th issue. It is Gross's firsthand account of events on the movie set. The article also contains extended excerpts of conversations with Lennon, which are highlighted in blue.

Whoever would have dreamed that beneath that mop lurked a Renaissance man? Yet there, shorn, sits John Lennon, champion minstrel, literary Beatle, coarse truthsayer, who turned Christendom on with one wildly misunderstood gibe at cant. Now, face white, tunic red, playing wounded in a field of weeds, this pop-rock De Vinci is proposing to act for real. Relaxed to all appearances, he is all knots inside.

"I was just a bundle of nerves the first day. I couldn't hardly speak I was so nervous. My first speech was in a forest, on patrol. I was suppose to say, 'My heart's not in it any more' and it wasn't. I went home and said to myself, 'Either you're not going to be like that, or you're going to give up.'"

As he casts his weak brown eyes at the camera, the entire movie company jockeys for a glimpse. "I don't mind talking to the camera-- it's people that throw me."

Sure enough, he blows his lines. He waggles his head in shame. "Sorry about that." But under the low-key coaxing of Director Dick Lester, Beatle John becomes Private Gripweed, a complex British orderly, in an unorthodox new film, How I Won The War.

Lennon on his own-- rich for life at 26, yet poor still in what men of all seasons crave-- full knowledge of himself. Beatling by itself, he has found, is not enough. "I feel I want to be them all-- painter, writer, actor, singer, player, musician. I want to try them all, and I'm lucky enough to be able to. I want to see which one turns me on. This is for me, this film, because apart from wanting to do it because of what it stands for, I want to see what I'll be like when I've done it."

They stood silently in the deserted German square that Sunday morning, three young British actors costumed like the soldiers who had taken the town 22 years before. Then the one whose notorious locks had recently been chopped short observed, "I haven't seen so much fresh air together for about four years."

For John Lennon, the Beatles' leader, it had been one swift crazy ride to the top. But now, there were distortions, and he had recoiled. Grownups were twisting a Beatles' kids' song into an LSD trip-- an ingenious lament that he and Beatle Paul McCartney had polished off one wild night was, current rumor had it, actually the synopsis of an opera so bitter it could not be sung. A passing remark about religious hypocrisy had made Lennon a devil or a saint, depending on your tastes. Others might enjoy them, but to Lennon, who is nothing if not honest, the distortions had become a threat.

"I don't want people taking things from me that aren't really me. They make you something that they want to make you, that isn't really you. They come and talk to find answers, but they're their answers, not us. We're not Beatles to each other, you know. It's a joke to us. If we're going out the door of the hotel, we say, 'Right! Beatle John! Beatle George now! Come on, let's go!' We don't put on a false front or anything. But we just know that leaving the door, we turn into Beatles because everybody looking at us sees the Beatles. We're not the Beatles at all. We're just us."

"But we made it, and we asked for it to an extent, and that's how it's going to be. That's why George is in India (studying the sitar,) and I'm here. Because we're a bit tired of going out the door, and the only way to soften the blow is just to spread it a bit."

In that kind of mood, a Dick Lester set was just the therapy for Lennon. Each man is the kind who makes the New Theologians jump. To them, the individual is more thrill than threat-- a unique being who should be taken for what he is. Lester, who directed both Beatle films, gratefully recalls his first meeting with the group, when the movies were just an idea. "They allowed me to be what I damn well pleased. I didn't have to put on an act for them, and they didn't put one on for me."

This is what a Lester set is like: Once more, they are in a deserted German square, now, with all the paraphernalia of movie-making, with British 'soldiers,' Lennon among them, ready to comb the streets, with German 'soldiers' lying in wait. "Quiet please!" an assistant shouts-- just as a little boy walks into the scene. Apoplectic, the assistant rushes forward and shoves the child aside. Lester, whose normal weapon is humor, flushes. "Don't push!" he commands.

Once again, they are ready to shoot-- and once again, the child intrudes. For 15 seconds, Lester eyes the man silently. Then, "Boo," he calls, and "Boo" the cast joins in.

For Lester, a director makes no statement against violence by having thousands die. To him, each death must matter-- and in his new film, each does. Such were the ideas that captured Lennon, despite his doubts about himself.

He did not doubt alone. How I Won The War is staffed with seasoned British actors, all trained in repertory, all well-known at home and all suspicious. But none is today.

Samples:

"We expected someone a bit kinky, bitchy, arrogant. He is none of those things. He's completely natural."

"You're not working with another actor, you're working with an OBE, a multimillionaire-- in sterling, not dollars-- whose every word will be reported in the world press. The miracle is that he's so normal. I could wrap him up dialectically in two minutes, intellectually, in three. But he's got a certain inborn, prenatal talent. I have my talent, which I think is considerable, but it doesn't compare in his field."

"I don't think he does anything with a conscious thought of trying to impress. He's remarkably free. He does not act the part."

"We talk about him all the time. All of us feel the same thing. We find it difficult to be as normal with him as he is with us."

Lennon's lack of pretense astonished the actors. "He's someone who just tries anything," one of them marveled. "No stand-in, no special treatment, no chair for him."

During a break for tea one raw morning, Lennon queued with the rest. When his turn arrived, his heart's desire was gone. "You don't have to be a star to get a cheese sandwich," he mused. "You just have to be first."

They like his humor too. That same morning, a German mother pushed her three-year-old son up to the Beatle, clutching his autograph book in his hand. "Sign it!" she demanded. Lennon did as bidden, telling the boy, "Yes, sir, you put us where we are today." On location in Spain one afternoon, the script required Lennon to drive a troop carrier along the beach. Accelerating too fast, he spun the wheels; the rear of the carrier sank. As his crestfallen director approached the cab, Lennon peered sheepishly over his glasses and gave him a limp salute.

Lennon is not on; he is simply original. "America used to be the big youth place in everybody's imagination. America had teenagers and everywhere else just had people." He recognizes his own impact on the changes since then, but he refuses to concede that youth today is all that different-- particularly youth in England.

The last generation might have been just like today's young adults, he maintains, had it not had to fight the war.
"If they said, 'Fight the war now,' my age group would fight the war. Not that they'd want to. There might be a bit more trouble gettin' them in line-- because I'd be up there shouting, 'Don't do it!'"

"It just so happens that some groups playing in England are making people talk about England, but nothing else is going on. Pop music gets through to all people all over the world, that's the main thing. In that respect, youth might be together a bit. The Commie youth might be the same as us, and we all know that, basically, they probably are. This kind of music and all the scene is helping. But there's more talk about it than is actually happening. You know, swinging this, and all that. Everybody can go around in England with long hair a bit, and boys can wear flowered trousers and flowered shirts and things like that, but there's still the same old nonsense going on. It's just that we're all dressed up a bit different."

"The class thing is just as snobby as it ever was. People like us can break through a little-- but only a little. Once, we went into this restaurant and nearly got thrown out for looking like we looked until they saw who it was. 'What do you want? What do you want?' the headwaiter said, 'We've come to bloody eat, that's what we want,' we said. The owner spotted us and said, 'Ah, a table sir, over here, sir.' It just took me back to when I was 19, and I couldn't get anywhere without being stared at or remarked about. It's only since I've been a Beatle that people have said, 'Oh, wonderful, come in, come in,' and I've forgotten a bit about what they're really thinking. They see the shining star, but when there's no glow about you, they only see the clothes and the haircut again."

"We weren't as open and as truthful when we didn't have the power to be. We had to take it easy. We had to shorten our hair to leave Liverpool and get jobs in London. We had to wear suits to get on TV. We had to compromise. We had to get hooked, as well, to get in and then sort of get a bit of power and say, 'This is what we're like.' We had to falsify a bit, even if we didn't realize it at the time."

If Lennon is compulsive about anything today, it's about truth as he sees it. But he protests when he's labeled a cynic.

"I'm not a cynic. They're getting my character out of some of things I write or say. They can't do that. I hate tags. I'm slightly cynical, but I'm not a cynic. One can be wry one day and cynical the next and ironic the next. I'm a cynic about most things that are taken for granted. I'm cynical about society, politics, newspapers, government. But I'm not cynical about life, love, goodness, death. That's why I really don't want to be labeled a cynic."

It is in the context of the young man who recoils at distortion that his now-famous remark should be viewed. "I said it. I said we were more popular than Jesus, which is a fact." What he could not explain then was why.

He does not feel that one need accept the divinity of Jesus-- he, personally, does not-- in order to profit from his words. A frequent reader of ancient history as well as philosophy (his current lists includes a book on Indian thought and Nikos Kazantzakis's 'Report Greco'), he contends that man has mishandled Christ's words throughout the centuries.

"I believe Jesus was right, Buddha was right, and all of those people like that are right. They're all saying the same thing-- and I believe it. I believe what Jesus actually said-- the basic things he laid down about love and goodness-- and not what people say he said."

Christianity has suffered, he believes, not only because Christians have distorted Christ's words but because they concern themselves with structures and numbers and fail to listen to their vows. They 'mutter' and 'hum' their prayers, but pay no attention to the words. "They don't seem to be able to be concerned without having all the scene about, with statues and buildings and things."

"If Jesus being more popular means... more control, I don't want that. I'd sooner they'd all follow us even if it's just to dance and sing for the rest of their lives. If they took more interest in what Jesus-- or any of them-- said, if they did that, we'd all be there with them."

Would he call himself a religious person? "I wouldn't really. I am in the respect that I believe in goodness and all those things." And if being religious meant being 'concerned,' as Paul Tillich the late Protestant theologian, once put it? "Well, I am then. I'm concerned alright. I'm concerned with people."

At the age when most men are just beginning to adjust to the world, John Lennon has already nudged it a bit. The hysteria that surrounds him can no longer disguise the presence of a mind. His ideas are still rough, but his instincts are good and his talent, extraordinary. You may love him, you may loath him, but this you should know: As performer, composer, writer or talker, he'll be around for a long, long time.

©1966 Look Magazine

Beatles' Era - The Monkees Toys

2009-10-05T22:33:00.001+02:00

One of the many model kits for the Monkee Mobile

This was the board game put out to coincide with the television show.

Beatles Interviews 1968

2009-10-01T17:39:00.002+02:00

Disc 1 Disc 2 Disc 3 Disc 4 Disc 5

Beatles Cartoon - Help!

2009-10-01T17:37:00.000+02:00

The Beatles are visiting Paris, when Paul and Ringo spot a beautiful woman. They follow her to a fashion show, where a thief has stolen directions for the show. Paul and Ringo chase after him and end up at the Eiffel Tower.

Beatles Cartoons - A Hard Day's Night

2009-10-01T17:36:00.001+02:00

Bob Meets The Beatles

2009-10-01T17:26:00.000+02:00

Their Own Records In Their Own Words - Revolver and surroundings

2009-09-29T23:24:00.004+02:00

Revolver
Originally released in the UK, August 5, 1966
Single: Paperback Writer/Rain

TAXMAN
(Harrison)
GEORGE 1980: "'Taxman' was when I first realized that even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes. It was and still is typical."

JOHN 1980: "I remember the day he (George) called to ask for help on 'Taxman,' one of his first songs. I threw in a few one-liners to help the song along because that's what he asked for. He came to me because he couldn't go to Paul. Paul wouldn't have helped him at that period. I didn't want to do it. I just sort of bit my tongue and said OK. It had been John and Paul for so long, he'd been left out because he hadn't been a songwriter up until then."

PAUL 1984: "George wrote that and I played guitar on it. He wrote it in anger at finding out what the taxman did. He had never known before then what could happen to your money."

GEORGE 1987: "I was pleased to have Paul play that bit on 'Taxman.' If you notice, he did like a little Indian bit on it for me."

ELEANOR RIGBY
(Lennon/McCartney)
PAUL 1966: "I was sitting at the piano when I thought of it. The first few bars just came to me, and I got this name in my head... Daisy Hawkins picks up the rice in the church. I don't know why. I couldn't think of much more so I put it away for a day. Then the name Father McCartney came to me, and all the lonely people. But I thought that people would think it was supposed to be about my Dad sitting knitting his socks. Dad's a happy lad. So I went through the telephone book and I got the name McKenzie. I was in Bristol when I decided Daisy Hawkins wasn't a good name. I walked 'round looking at the shops, and I saw the name Rigby. Then I took the song down to John's house in Weybridge. We sat around, laughing, got stoned and finished it off."

JOHN 1980: "Paul's baby, and I helped with the education of the child... The violin backing was Paul's idea. Jane Asher had turned him on to Vivaldi, and it was very good."

PAUL 1984: "I got the name Rigby from a shop in Bristol. I was wandering round Bristol one day and saw a shop called Rigby. And I think Eleanor was from Eleanor Bron, the actress we worked with in the film 'Help!' But I just liked the name. I was looking for a name that sounded natural. Eleanor Rigby sounded natural."

I'M ONLY SLEEPING
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1980: "It's got backwards guitars... that's me dreaming my life away."

PAUL circa-1994: "It was a nice idea-- 'There's nothing wrong with it. I'm not being lazy, I'm only sleeping, I'm yawning, I'm meditating, I'm having a lay-in.' The luxury of all that was what it was all about. The song was co-written but from John's original idea."

LOVE YOU TO
(Harrison)
GEORGE 1966: "I play sitar on another track. I don't care if everybody is using 'em, you know. I just play it 'cuz I like it."

GEORGE 1980: "'Love You To' was one of the first tunes I wrote for sitar. 'Norwegian Wood was an accident as far as the sitar part was concerned, but this was the first song where I consciously tried to use the sitar and tabla on the basic track. I overdubbed the guitars and vocals later."

HERE THERE AND EVERYWHERE
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1972: "This was a great one of his."

JOHN 1980: "That's Paul's song completely, I believe. And one of my favorite songs of the Beatles."

PAUL 1984: "I wrote that by John's pool one day. When we were working together, sometimes he came in to see me. But mainly, I went out to see him."

PAUL circa-1994: "'Here, There and Everywhere' has a couple of interesting structural points about it... each verse takes a word. 'Here' discusses here, Next verse, 'there' discusses there, then it pulls it all together in the last verse with 'everywhere.' ...John might have helped with a few last words."

YELLOW SUBMARINE
(Lennon/McCartney)
PAUL 1966: "It's a happy place, that's all. You know, it was just... We were trying to write a children's song. That was the basic idea. And there's nothing more to be read into it than there is in the lyrics of any children's song."

JOHN 1972: "Paul wrote the catchy chorus. I helped with the blunderbuss bit."

JOHN 1980: "'Yellow Submarine' is Paul's baby. Donovan helped with the lyrics. I helped with the lyrics too. We virtually made the track come alive in the studio, but based on Paul's inspiration. Paul's idea. Paul's title... written for Ringo."

PAUL 1984: "I wrote that in bed one night. As a kid's story. And then we thought it would be good for Ringo to do."

PAUL circa-1994: "I was laying in bed in the Asher's garret, and there's a nice twilight zone just as you're drifting into sleep and as you wake from it-- I always find it quite a comfortable zone. I remember thinking that a children's song would be quite a good idea... I was thinking of it as a song for Ringo, which it eventually turned out to be, so I wrote it as not too rangey in the vocal. I just made up a little tune in my head, then started making a story-- sort of an ancient mariner, telling the young kids where he'd lived. It was pretty much my song as I recall... I think John helped out. The lyrics got more and more obscure as it goes on, but the chorus, melody and verses are mine."

GEORGE 1999: "Paul came up with the concept of 'Yellow Submarine.' All I know is just that every time we'd all get around the piano with guitars and start listening to it and arranging it into a record, we'd all fool about. As I said, John's doing the voice that sounds like someone talking down a tube or ship's funnel as they do in the merchant marine. (laughs) And on the final track there's actually that very small party happening! As I seem to remember, there's a few screams and what sounds like small crowd noises in the background."

SHE SAID SHE SAID
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1968: "That was pure. You see, when I wrote that I had the 'She said she said,' but it was just meaning nothing. It was just vaguely to do with someone who had said something like he knew what it was like to be dead, and then it was just a sound. And then I wanted a middle-eight. The beginning had been around for days and days and so I wrote the first thing that came into my head and it was 'When I was a boy,' in a different beat, but it was real because it just happened."

JOHN 1980: "That's mine. It's an interesting track. The guitars are great on it. That was written after an acid trip in L.A. during a break in the Beatles tour where we were having fun with the Byrds and lots of girls. Peter Fonda came in when we were on acid and he kept coming up to me and sitting next to me and whispering, 'I know what it's like to be dead.' He was describing an acid trip he'd been on. We didn't 'want' to hear about that. We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing, and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy-- who I really didn't know-- he hadn't made 'Easy Rider' or anything... kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, 'I know what it's like to be dead,' and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! And I used it for the song, but I changed it to 'she' instead of 'he.' It was scary... I don't want to know what it's like to be dead!"

GOOD DAY SUNSHINE
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1972: "Paul. But I think maybe I helped him with some of the lyric."

JOHN 1980: "'Good Day Sunshine' is Paul's. Maybe I threw in a line or something."

PAUL 1984: "Wrote that out at John's one day... the sun was shining. Influenced by the Lovin' Spoonful."

PAUL circa-1994: "'Good Day Sunshine' was me trying to write something similar to 'Daydream.' John and I wrote it together at Kenwood, but it was basically mine and he helped me with it."

AND YOUR BIRD CAN SING
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1972: "Another horror."

JOHN 1980: "Another of my throwaways."

GEORGE 1987: "I think it was Paul and me, or maybe John and me, playing (guitar) in harmony-- quite a complicated little line that goes through the middle-eight."

PAUL 1995: "One of my favorites on the Anthology is, 'And Your Bird Can Sing,' which is a nice song, but this take of it was one we couldn't use at the time. John and I got a fit of the giggles while we were doing the double-track. You couldn't have released it at the time. But now you can. Sounds great just hearing us lose it on a take."

FOR NO ONE
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1972: "Another of his I really liked."

JOHN 1980: "Paul's. One of my favorites of his. A nice piece of work."

PAUL 1984: "I wrote that on a skiing holiday in Switzerland. In a hired chalet amongst the snow."

PAUL circa-1994: "I suspect it was about another argument. I don't have easy relationships with women, I never have. I talk too much truth."

DOCTOR ROBERT
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1972: "Me. I think Paul helped with the middle."

JOHN 1980: "Another of mine. Mainly about drugs and pills. It was about myself. I was the one that carried all the pills on tour... later on the roadies did it. We just kept them in our pockets, loose, in case of trouble."

PAUL circa-1994: "John and I thought that was a funny idea-- the fantasy doctor who would fix you up by giving you drugs. It was a parody on that idea."

I WANT TO TELL YOU
(Harrison)
GEORGE 1980: "...about the avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say or transmit."

GOT TO GET YOU INTO MY LIFE
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1968: "We were doing our Tamla Motown bit. You see, we're influenced by whatever's going. Even if we're not influenced, we're all going that way at a certain time."

JOHN 1972: "I think George and I helped with some of the lyrics. I'm not sure."

JOHN 1980: "Paul. I think that was one of his best songs, too, because the lyrics are good and I didn't write them. You see? When I say that he could write lyrics if he took the effort-- here's an example."

PAUL 1984: "That's mine-- I wrote it. It was the first one we used brass on, I think. One of the first times we used soul trumpets."

PAUL circa-1994: "I'd been a rather straight working class lad, but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting. It didn't seem to have too many side effects like alcohol or some of the other stuff, like pills, which I pretty much kept off. I kind of liked marijuana and to me it seemed it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding. So 'Got To Get You Into My Life' is really a song about that. It's not to a person, it's actually about pot. It's saying, 'I'm going to do this. This is not a bad idea.' So it's actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret. I haven't really changed my opinion too much, except if anyone asks me for real advice, it would be stay straight. That is actually the best way, but in a stressful world I still would say that pot was one of the best of the tranquilizing drugs. I have drunk and smoked pot and of the two I think pot is less harmful. People tend to fall asleep on it rather than go out and commit murder, so it's always seemed to me to be a rather benign one."

TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1968: "'Tomorrow Never Knows' ...I didn't know what I was saying, and you just find out later. I know that when there are some lyrics I dig, I know that somewhere people will be looking at them."

JOHN 1968: "Often the backing I think of early-on never comes off. With 'Tomorrow Never Knows' I'd imagined in my head that in the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting. That was impractical, of course, and we did something different. It was a bit of a drag, and I didn't really like it. I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing. I realize now that was what I wanted."

JOHN 1972 "This was my first psychedelic song."

JOHN 1980 "That's me in my 'Tibetan Book of the Dead' period. I took one of Ringo's malapropisms as the title, to sort of take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics."

PAUL 1984: "That was one of Ringo's malapropisms. John wrote the lyrics from Timothy Leary's version of the 'Tibetan Book of the Dead.' It was a kind of Bible for all the psychedelic freaks. that was an LSD song. Probably the only one. People always thought 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' was but it actually 'wasn't' meant to say LSD."

PAPERBACK WRITER
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1972: "Paul. I think I might have helped with some of the lyrics, Yes, I did. But it was mainly Paul's tune."

JOHN 1980: "'Paperback Writer' is son of 'Day Tripper' ...meaning a rock 'n roll song with a guitar lick on a fuzzy loud guitar."

PAUL circa-1994: "I arrived at Weybridge and told John I had this idea of trying to write off to a publishers to become a paperback writer, and I said, 'I think it should be written like a letter.' I took a bit of paper out and I said it should be something like, 'Dear Sir or Madam, as the case may be...' and I proceeded to write it just like a letter in front of him, occasionally rhyming it... And then we went upstairs and put the melody to it. John and I sat down and finished it all up, but it was tilted towards me-- the original idea was mine. I had no music, but it's just a little bluesy song, not alot of melody. Then I had the idea to do the harmonies, and we arranged that in the studio."

RAIN
(Lennon/McCartney)
JOHN 1966: "After we'd done the session on that particular song-- it ended at about four or five in the morning-- I went home with a tape to see what else you could do with it. And I was sort of very tired, you know, not knowing what I was doing, and I just happened to put it on my own tape recorder and it came out backwards. And I liked it better. So that's how it happened."

JOHN 1980: "That's me again-- with the first backwards tape on record anywhere... I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana... and, as I usually do, I listened to what I'd recorded that day. Somehow it got on backwards and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint. I ran in the next day and said, 'I know what to do with it, I know... listen to this!' So I made them all play it backwards. The fade is me actually singing backwards with the guitars going backwards. (sings) 'Sharethsmnowthsmeanss!' That one was the gift of God... of Ja actually-- the god of marijuana, right? So Ja gave me that one."

RINGO 1984: "My favorite piece of me is what I did on 'Rain.' I think I just played amazing. I was into the snare and hi-hat. I think it was the first time I used the trick of starting a break by hitting the hi-hat first instead of going directly to a drum off the hi-hat. I think it's the best out of all the records I've ever made. 'Rain' blows me away. It's out in left field. I know me and I know my playing... and then there's 'Rain.'"

PAUL circa-1994: "It was nice. I really enjoyed that one."

DISCUSSING THE UNFINISHED ALBUM, MAY 1966
GEORGE: "We spend more time on recording now, because we prefer recording."

JOHN: "And we've done half an LP in the time we'd take to do a whole LP and a couple of singles. So we can't do it all, you know, but we like recording."

BRIAN MATTHEW: "Alright. When is it going to be finished?"

JOHN: "In a week."

GEORGE: "It should be finished in about two or three weeks time... because if it's not, we'll never be able to get another holiday in before we go away again, you see."

PAUL: (joking) "If we don't get it done soon, gov, we'll lose our jobs."

ON SONGWRITING (DURING THE REVOLVER PERIOD)
JOHN 1966: "Sometimes they say, 'Now you must write,' and now we write. But it doesn't come some days. We sit there for days just talking to each other, messing 'round not doing anything."

GEORGE 1966: "John and Paul's standard of writing has bettered over the years, so it's very hard for me to come straight to the top, on par with them. They gave me an awful lot of encouragement. Their reaction has been very good. If it hadn't, I think I would have just crawled away."

PAUL 1966: "I don't know whether poets think they have to experience things to write about them, but I can tell you our songs are nearly all imagination-- ninety percent imagination. I don't think Beethoven was in a really wicked mood all the time."

JOHN 1966: "It's too easy to put it off if we just meet without any plan and say, 'Shall we write something today?' If you do that then you feel as though you're losing a free day. What we're going to do is make dates beforehand and sort of say, 'Right, Wednesday and Friday of this week are for songwriting. And Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week.' Then we'll know it's something we've to keep to."

ON RECORDING (DURING THE REVOLVER PERIOD)
JOHN 1966: "One thing's for sure-- the next LP is going to be very different."

PAUL 1966: "I don't think we ever try to establish trends. We try to keep moving forward and do something different... and if in the meantime it starts a trend, that's ok. But we never try consciously to start them."

GEORGE 1966: "We all put alot of suggestions in after we've recorded a take. That's why we take so long to record a number. We've always cooperated with one another. Paul might come into the studio and say, 'Do this' if he has worked out the chords beforehand. But they always need changing."

JOHN 1972: "We'd had acid on Revolver. Everybody is under this illusion-- even George Martin was saying, 'Pepper was their first acid album.' But we'd had acid, including Paul, by the time Revolver was finished."

ON RECORDING AT EMI'S ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS
PAUL 1988: "George Martin would be saying, 'Can you turn the (guitar) amps down please? And John would look at George (Harrison) and say, 'How much are you going down? Let's go down to Five, alright?' John would go down to Six-- 'OK, I'm at Five!' 'You bugger! You're not. You're at Six!' There was always this terrible rivalry. You just wanted to be louder. But it's nice to listen to the Beatle records now. There's more guitar than you'll ever hear on a record these days."

'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' Dies At 46

2009-09-28T23:49:00.004+02:00

LONDON — Lucy Vodden, who provided the inspiration for the Beatles' classic song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," has died after a long battle with lupus. She was 46.
Her death was announced Monday by St. Thomas' Hospital in London, where she had been treated for the chronic disease for more than five years, and by her husband, Ross Vodden. Britain's Press Association said she died last Tuesday. Hospital officials said they could not confirm the day of her death.

Vodden's connection to the Beatles dates back to her early days, when she made friends with schoolmate Julian Lennon, John Lennon's son.
Julian Lennon, then 4 years old, came home from school with a drawing one day, showed it to his father, and said it was "Lucy in the sky with diamonds."
At the time, John Lennon was gathering material for his contributions to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," a landmark album released to worldwide acclaim in 1967.
The elder Lennon seized on the image and developed it into what is widely regarded as a psychedelic masterpiece, replete with haunting images of "newspaper taxis" and a "girl with kaleidoscope eyes."

Rock music critics thought the song's title was a veiled reference to LSD, but John Lennon always claimed the phrase came from his son, not from a desire to spell out the initials LSD in code.
Vodden lost touch with Julian Lennon after he left the school following his parents' divorce, but they were reunited in recent years when Julian Lennon, who lives in France, tried to help her cope with the disease.
He sent her flowers and vouchers for use at a gardening center near her home in Surrey in southeast England, and frequently sent her text messages in an effort to buttress her spirits.
"I wasn't sure at first how to approach her," Julian Lennon told the Associated Press in June. "I wanted at least to get a note to her. Then I heard she had a great love of gardening, and I thought I'd help with something she's passionate about, and I love gardening too. I wanted to do something to put a smile on her face."

In recent months, Vodden was too ill to go out most of the time, except for hospital visits.
She enjoyed her link to the Beatles, but was not particularly fond of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
"I don't relate to the song, to that type of song," she told the Associated Press in June. "As a teenager, I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends at school that I was the Lucy in the song and they said, 'No, it's not you, my parents said it's about drugs.' And I didn't know what LSD was at the time, so I just kept it quiet, to myself."

Vodden is the latest in a long line of people connected to the Beatles who died at a relatively young age.
The list includes John Lennon, gunned down at age 40, manager Brian Epstein, who died of a drug overdose when he was 32, and original band member Stuart Sutcliffe, who died of a brain hemorrhage at 21.
A spokeswoman for Julian Lennon and his mother, Cynthia Lennon, said they were "shocked and saddened" by Vodden's death.
Angie Davidson, a lupus sufferer who is campaign director of the St. Thomas' Lupus Trust, said Vodden was "a real fighter" who had worked behind the scenes to support efforts to combat the disease.
"It's so sad that she has finally lost the battle she fought so bravely for so long," said Davidson.

Paul McCartney on Beatles computer game: 'God, that looks hard...'

2009-09-23T23:12:00.002+02:00

In an interview with NME, out on Wednesday, Sir Paul said: ''I haven't tried it. When you go to a demo they play it and I go 'God, that looks hard'.''

''I think you either don't embrace the modern day or you do embrace it,'' he said. ''For instance, I held out on mobile phones for years. I could see everyone using them, I thought they were poncy. But then I got one and thought 'This is good'.

''So I'm not a dinosaur, I probably resist most trends until I think 'I'll have a go at this' and the Rock Band thing is similar because I'm not a video gamer.

''I go to people's houses and they're whacking away the Wiis, and I can see the fun, and I'll have a couple of games and get beaten instantly and think 'I don't like those games any more'.

Sir Paul said he understood that some purists might not see the point of allowing The Beatles music to be used in the game but thought it would encourage younger fans - and it also bypassed the stand-off over Beatles downloads.

''I started noticing lots of young kids were playing it, and for me the most interesting thing is that it will introduce Beatles music to people who might never have heard it because they game all the time, they don't listen to the radio, they haven't got much of a record collection,'' he said.

''Then the other interesting little side-effect that's come up is that we were having problems with iTunes - well, not iTunes, EMI was the problem - with downloading, which we'd like to do because that's how a lot of people get their music.

''We've kind of bypassed that because now you can do it on Rock Band.

''I always liked that, when you're told you can't do something, and suddenly there's a little route round the back.''

How many of the following facts did you know?

2009-09-23T23:04:00.003+02:00

So you think you are the biggest fan of the Beatles. But how many of the following facts did you know?

By Subhajit Banerjee

1. Impossible as it may sound there are still Beatles songs unreleased - the most notable ones being Carnival of Light (an experimental piece recorded on 5 January 1967 for The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave) and a 27-minute jam of Helter Skelter. A John Lennon composition the three surviving Beatles worked on in the early '90s prior to the Anthology release called Grow Old with Me also remains unreleased.

2. The Beatles (or at least half of it) sang for the Rolling Stones: Lennon and Paul McCartney provided backing vocals to the 1967 single We Love You.

3. Besides writing hundreds of songs for the Beatles, Lennon and McCartney also wrote dozens of songs for other artistes such as From A Window (Billy J. Kramer with The Dakotas), One and One Is Two (The Strangers with Mike Shannon), Step Inside Love and It's For You (Cilla Black), Come and Get It (Badfinger) and Woman (Peter and Gordon).

4. The Beatles’ third studio album A Hard Day’s Night is the only one to exclusively contain Lennon-McCartney compositions.

5. Paul is not McCartney's first name, James is. Lennon changed his middle name from Winston to Ono after marrying Yoko Ono in 1969.

6. At the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, Lennon is heard mumbling what sounds like "I buried Paul", which helped fuel the 'Paul is Dead' rumours. He's actually saying "cranberry sauce".

7. The only Beatles single to ever feature another musician on the credit is Get Back/Don't Let Me Down (credited to The Beatles with Billy Preston). Preston, recruited by George Harrison to ease the growing tensions in the band, played the Hammond organ on both songs.

8. Two days after Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band released, Jimi Hendrix opened his set at London's Saville Theatre with the title track, something McCartney considers his "single biggest tribute".

9. The final version of Strawberry Fields Forever was created combining two takes of the song in two different keys and speeds - a remarkable achievement considering the equipment and technology of the time - but still failed to fully satisfy Lennon.

10. The only Beatles track to be credited to Lennon and Harrison is an early instrumental called Cry for a Shadow recorded in 1961 when the band was backing Tony Sheridan. Flying and Dig It are the only two tracks to be credited to all four Beatles.

11. The BBC banned several Beatles songs - I Am the Walrus (for the use of the word 'knickers') and Fixing a Hole, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and A Day in the Life (all for alleged drug reference).

12. The working title for the film Help! was Eight Arms to Hold You.

13. For the Sgt Pepper album cover, cutouts of Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus Christ were requested by Lennon, but ultimately they were left out, though a cutout of Hitler was made for use.

14. Ringo Starr was the first to actually leave the group, walking out in 1968 during the acrimonious White Album sessions. As a result, the remaining Beatles all took turns on the drums for some of the tracks. When Starr finally returned he found his drum kit covered in flowers.

15. The closest the Beatles came to reuniting was at Eric Clapton's wedding to Patti Boyd in 1979, where McCartney, Harrison and Starr played. Lennon did not attend.

16. The last time Lennon and McCartney played together was at the Los Angeles Hit Factory studio in 1974. The abysmal (and possibly drug-fuelled) session, which also featured Stevie Wonder and Harry Nilsson, was of such bad quality that the bootleg recording was released as A Toot And A Snore In 74.

17. Lennon and McCartney each recorded demos called India which remain unreleased. Each of them also recorded a version of Fats Domino's Ain't That a Shame for their rock and roll albums (called Rock 'n' Roll and Снова в СССР respectively).

18. The first song ever written by Lennon was called Hello Little Girl. McCartney's first was I Lost My Little Girl.

19. Lennon was charged with plagiarism by Chuck Berry's publisher over Come Together which resembled Berry's 1956 song You Can't Catch Me. The case was settled out of court. George Harrison faced and lost a similar lawsuit over his solo hit My Sweet Lord which resembled the Chiffons' He's So Fine.

20. Lennon's number 9 connection: Lennon was born on 9 October 1940, his son Sean was also born 9 October, 1975. He wrote the songs #9 Dream (part of Lennon's ninth solo album Walls and Bridges which was released in the ninth month of 1974 and peaked at number 9 in the US charts) and with the Beatles - One After 909 and Revolution 9. He lived in apartment number 72 on 72nd Street in New York and was killed in the evening of December 8 when it was already early morning of December 9 in his birthplace of Liverpool.

Thanks to telegraph.co.uk

The Beatles 'bigger than Jesus' on Google

2009-09-23T22:55:00.004+02:00

Of course, it's only a bit of fun, but simply because there were more searches for "Beatles" than "Jesus" on Google for a couple of daysdoesn't mean that "the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Mainly because people don't type the things they like into a search box. Otherwise I'd be constantly harrying Google for coffee and kisses.

And because The Beatles had something new-ish out, you'd probably expect that to have happened. If Jesus had just issued a remastered version of The Bible, or a computer game ("feed 5,000 people using your Wii..."), maybe he'd be doing better.

Not to mention that doing a Google search on one term doesn't mean you have to forswear your love of the subject of another possible search term. Searching on "King Kong" doesn't mean you'd have to abandon your love of "Godzilla".

Still, the Telegraph report does have this interesting paragraph:
Though the graph clearly shows that The Beatles caught the imagination of more people during September than Jesus did, video games experts point out that The Beatles Rock Band has not fared as well in the shops as expected with rival music game Guitar Hero 5 outselling the Fab Four's version.

So, the albums sold nowhere near as well as expected - for all the excuses we keep hearing - and the computer game didn't sell well, either. Perhaps all those searches were people trying to work out what all the fuss was about?

(Graph above showing the relative popularity of the search terms Beatles and Jesus on Google over the past 30 days)

Beatles For Sale?

2009-09-22T22:57:00.000+02:00

After all that fuss last week, how have The Beatles re-releases done in their second sales stretch? (And their first full-week sale)?

Vanished completely from the Top Ten, and struggling. Rubber Soul is bested by the 42-weeks-on-chart James Morrison album; Help barely able to outsell Robbie William's Greatest Hits.

They're still selling, but in nothing like the numbers the shipping figures suggest EMI was expecting.

Beatles' Era - Twiggy’s 60th birthday

2009-09-21T20:01:00.005+02:00

‘World’s first supermodel” Twiggy’s 60th birthday is all set to be marked with a public display of pictures narrating the story of her life. ‘Twiggy: A Life in Photographs’ will celebrate the occasion by displaying more than 20 snaps starting September 19 - her birthday at London’s National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition will run to March 24.
It has been known that a book celebrating Twiggy’s 60th birthday, 'Twiggy: a Life in Photographs', will be published by the National Portrait Gallery this year.

Cecilia Joicey of the National Portrait Gallery says, ‘Twiggy has worked with leading portrait photographers from Cecil Beaton and Bert Stern in the 1960s to Steven Meisel in the 1990s and Annie Leibovitz in the 21st century, and combining these iconic images with her insights will provide a rare glimpse into the life of the world’s ﬁrst supermodel.’
The iconic photograph of Twiggy and her bob cut by Barry Lategan will be on display, as will more recent portraits by Bryan Adams and Sølve Sundsbø.

“Over my career I’ve had the privilege of working with many great photographers. I’m very excited to see so many of these portraits coming together at the National Portrait Gallery and in my new book,” the Telegraph quoted her as saying.
“It’s really interesting to see how fashion photography and portraiture have evolved throughout my career. I hope that this display and book will give people the opportunity to see these pictures that have captured definitive moments in my career,” she added.

Twiggy was born Lesley Hornby in London in 1949 and is married to the actor Leigh Lawson.Twiggy became the first prominent teenage model at 16, and was known for her large eyes, long eyelashes and thin build.

George Martin - The Record Producer

2009-09-20T11:20:00.006+02:00

BBC Radio 6, Broadcast on September 5, 2009

If the re-release of the Beatles catalogue, known among fans as Beatles Remastered Stereo and Mono 2009, rekindled interest in the Fab Four, then listeners might also like to cast their minds back to another prominent “member” of the group - producer Sir George Martin. (Of course, they’d like to include manager Brian Epstein in the group as well.)
In this BBC programme, Richard Allinson and Steve Levine examine Sir George’s work as a producer, arranger and, through his experiments with sound, technical innovator. Highlights include excerpts from the newly restored versions of the original master tapes for Please Please Me, along with analysis of the original multi-track of Come Together.

This programme also gives listeners the opportunity to hear some of the Beatles most famous songs in a new way. Because of the limitations of tape machines during the 1960s, it was necessary to either record or mix various instruments and voices onto the same track. Once they’d been committed to tape there was no way of separating them. But now, through the use of revolutionary software, listeners can hear some of these parts in isolation for the very first time.
In his exclusive interview, Sir George talks about various aspects of the studio and recording process, the albums Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road, along with a number of songs, including Strawberry Fields Forever, Tomorrow Never Knows and Rain.

Download directions: Do NOT click on links, but select them with right button and then choose "save object as..."

Disc 1
Track 1 Track 2 Track 3 Track 4 Track 5 Track 6 Track 7 Track 8 Track 9 Track 10 Track 11

Disc 2
Track 1 Track 2 Track 3 Track 4 Track 5 Track 6 Track 7

Thanks to Bruce M.

Opinions: Our own one ten days after...

2009-09-19T10:48:00.007+02:00

According to our own experience, remasters are not the big thing the whole world seems to say they are.... so the whole boxes do not worth the price, evspecially for those who own yet the 1987 CDs...

Our own check results:
- 1987 MONO CD are better than the remastered ones;
- Help, Rubber Soul and White Album's STEREO remasters are better than the 1987 ones:
all the rest of the remasters consists mainly in a bass frequencies augmenting with a loss of clearliness: the 1987 mixes are more similar to the original LP's sound, in the end....
- ...and - last but not least - the STEREO digipacks are very far from the original folders, (see the left side bar with the Apple logo!!!!): MONO edition's graphic rendition is surely better.

In the end: be careful not to easily give away your money in return of a big advertising operation...

This is our own opinion, but anyone of you can have his own one, and each one does not affect the other one...

Cheers.... Beatlesite

Juke Box Jury 12/7/1963

2009-09-17T00:38:00.006+02:00

On December 7th 1963, the Beatles gave an afternoon concert at the Empire Theatre in their hometown of Liverpool which was filmed for BBC-TV. Following the concert, the Beatles rushed to the Odeon Cinema in Liverpool for a special taping of the BBC-TV program Juke Box Jury.
Juke Box Jury was a weekly program featuring a panel of four celebrities who were given the task of rating newly released records as 'HIT' or 'MISS,' based on their personal opinions of the recording's potential to become a popular chart hit.
When the Beatles appeared as the four panelists for this edition of Juke Box Jury, they rated the latest releases by artists like Elvis Presley, Steve and Eydie, Bobby Vinton, Billy Fury, and the Swinging Blue Jeans. Most of the predictions the Beatles made on this episode of Juke Box Jury proved later to be correct, and only three of their predictions turned out to be incorrect.
Their December 7th Juke Box Jury appearance and a 30 minute film of their concert earlier that afternoon at Liverpool's Empire Theatre would both be telecast by BBC-TV later that same evening.
Juke Box Jury began as a program in America during the earliest days of television. The BBC version of the show debuted in 1959 and ran until 1967. The host of Juke Box Jury in Britain was David Jacobs.
John Lennon had appeared without the other three Beatles earlier in the year as a Juke Box Jury panelist in an episode that was taped in London on June 22nd 1963 and was aired on BBC-TV one week later on June 29th.

Song heard: Kiss Me Quick - Elvis Presley

PAUL: "The only thing I don't like about Elvis now is the songs. You know, I love his voice. I used to love all the records like 'Blue Suede Shoes' and 'Heartbreak Hotel,' lovely. But I don't like the songs now. And Kiss Me Quick, it sounds like Blackpool on a sunny day."

(laughter, followed by applause)

RINGO: "I didn't like it at all, no."

GEORGE: "I must admit I didn't like it very much. Not at all. It's an old track. And I think, seeing as they're releasing old stuff, if they release something like 'My Baby Left Me' it'd be number one. Because Elvis is definitely still popular, it's just the song's a load of rubbish. I mean, Elvis is great. He's fine. But it's not for me."

JOHN: "Well, I think it'll be a hit because it's Elvis, like people said. But I don't think it'll be very great. (comically) I like those hats, though, with 'Kiss Me Quick' on it!"

(laughter)

(Beatles vote by holding up cards. Consensus: HIT)

Song heard: Hippy Hippy Shake - The Swinging Bluejeans

RINGO: "I liked it. I thought it was good. But it's not as good as the original by Chan Romero. It still swings, and it should sell. I hope it does, anyway."

GEORGE: "I think it could possibly be a hit, because I know for a fact that The Hippy Shake's a very popular song around here. We used to do it ourselves."

(John laughs comically, the crowd of fans cheer)

GEORGE: "I know a lot of the groups around here do this song, and they're expecting somebody to come up with a new version of it. I think it could possibly be a hit. I like the way the Bluejeans did it, but I still prefer Chan Romero's version."

JOHN: "Yeah, I think it'll be a hit because they sort of re-made it for the last one, and it's better. Especially without that banjo. I like Bill Harry's version as well. I think it'll be a small hit, at least."

(laughter)

PAUL: "I think it'll be a hit too, because I don't think it matters much about the Chan Romero record being greater, 'cuz I don't think many people will remember the fact that he did it, and he wrote it as well. You know, I don't think people will remember. They'll just think of it as a new song."

(Beatles vote by holding up cards. Consensus: HIT)

Song heard: Did You Have A Happy Birthday - Paul Anka

GEORGE: "Well, I had a happy birthday, yeah."

(laughter)

GEORGE: "But I mean, If I'd have heard the record first, I maybe would have cut that out."

(laughter)

GEORGE: "You know, I definitely don't like it. It's not for me. (jokingly) And I didn't get the flowers either that he sent me."

(laughter)

JOHN: (jokingly, at the top of his voice) "I LIKE IT !!!"

(laughter)

JOHN: "I don't like these sort of sob songs, and it sounds as though he's on tremelo, technically. You know, it sounds a bit wobbley. Anyway, I don't like it."

PAUL: "Well, I don't like it either, because of that little crack in his voice. He sounds, you know, off his head."

(laughter)

PAUL: "Instead of 'Happy Birthday' it's (comically) 'Woo woo woo!'"

(laughter)

PAUL: "It's a bit off, and I don't like it."

RINGO: "Uhh, I didn't like it at all. It's such a big drag, man, the way it sounded, you know."

(Beatles vote by holding up cards. Consensus: MISS)

Song heard: The Nitty Gritty - Shirley Ellis

JOHN: "Uhh yeah. I like it. I thought it was somebody else. I've never heard of Shirley Ellis. I like all those kind of things. I'll buy it. But I believe it won't be a hit."

DAVID JACOBS: "Who did you think it was?"

JOHN: "At first I thought it was Mary Wells. I liked that."

PAUL: "The same as he said. In fact, I will say exactly the same 'cuz I agree with him. I love these kind of records but I don't think this one will be a hit, 'cuz I dunno... It doesn't say anything."

RINGO: "You know, we all like this sort of thing. I'd buy it, but I don't think it'll be a hit."

GEORGE: "Well, it definitely won't be a hit, in England anyway. It probably will be, or probably is already in the States. But I don't think it'll be a hit. The public haven't got 'round to that sort of stuff yet. When they do, I mean, that would be..."

DAVID JACOBS: "So, you mean you think that our teenagers are behind the Americans in their tastes?"

GEORGE: "Yeah I mean, just lately they've been going for some more way-out stuff, and Rhythm and Blues, and THIS sort of thing we've always liked. We've liked it for years. And it still hasn't caught on in England."

PAUL: "Well it's just that people who buy the records, their taste doesn't match the teenagers generally. Lots of teenagers love this kind of music but don't buy it, because they don't buy records."

(Beatles vote by holding up cards. Consensus: MISS)

Song heard: I Can't Stop Talking About You - Steve And Eydie

PAUL: "Uhh, yeah. I don't think it's a good'n. It's alright. That kind of thing is catchy. It may be catchy, but I just don't think it's good, generally."

RINGO: "I like it, you know. I think she carries them, actually."

(laughter)

GEORGE: "I think it's equally as good as (sings) 'da de-de-de-de de-de da-deee.' It's great, I like it, the sort of relaxed style of both. Yeah, I like it and I think it's a hit."

JOHN: "I don't like it as much as their last one. I don't even like it... I usually like everything Goffin and King write, but not this one. It's too sweet, you know. de-da-de, you know. A bit Christmassy, maybe. I don't like it, though. It'll be a vague hit."

DAVID JACOBS: "A vague one."

JOHN: "A vague hit."

(Beatles vote by holding up cards. Consensus: HIT)

Song heard: Do You Really Love Me Too - Billy Fury

DAVID JACOBS: "Do you really love me too, Ringo?"

RINGO: "Not you."

(laughter)

RINGO: "I didn't like it, you know. I've never bought one of his records, but he's very popular, so it's just uhh... no."

GEORGE: "Not bad, but it was okay, but I wouldn't buy it. And I thought the guitar is just exactly the same as Cliff's. In fact, it's only about a note difference."

JOHN: "He just said the bit about the beginning, didn't he, being like Cliff's one. The tune's not bad. It's quite pleasant. It's one of those you gotta hear again... uhh, tomorrow."

(laughter)

PAUL: "I quite like it, and the same things John said jokingly. The only thing I thought, as well as the guitar bit being like the Cliff Richard bit, the tune is just a little bit like (sings) 'Well I feed the cows and I milks the sheep and I...'"

(laughter, followed by applause)

PAUL: "But I still think it'll be a hit."

(Beatles vote by holding up cards. Consensus: HIT)

Song heard: There I've Said It Again - Bobby Vinton

GEORGE: "Umm, it's quite nice, but I mean, I don't think the record buying public buys this sort of stuff, I mean, the majority -- which will make it a miss. But you know, it's quite alright. I wouldn't buy it me-self."

JOHN: "Uhh, well, I dunno. What is Bobby Vinton doing? He's bringing the oldies back. He might do it, but people always cover them over here. But especially anything old. You know, everybody does it all at once. And he missed it with the last one here. (loudly, comically) I THINK HE'S GONNA MISS IT WITH THIS ONE TOO!!"

(laughter)

PAUL: "Umm, yeah. I think the thing about bringing back old songs and doing them these days, teenagers don't really want old songs brought back. I'm sure they'd like to have songs that they can call their own instead of bringing back their mum and dad's songs."

DAVID JACOBS: "Well now, just a minute. What about Frank Ifield and all that lot?"

PAUL: "Yeah, okay."

GEORGE: "What about Mule Train?"

(laughter)

PAUL: "Yeah well, you're probably right. But I'm sure that if you could get songs these days as GOOD as the old ones, only new songs, that would be ten times better."

JOHN: "Frank Ifield... that's just practically the same as the old."

DAVID JACOBS: "I might tell you that I'm terrified of disagreeing with you chaps, you know, in front of all these people. However, let's see what Ringo says. Ringo."

RINGO: "I liked it, you know. It's nice and smooth. And if you're sort of staying in one night, put it on."

(laughter)

RINGO: "But yeah, right. It won't sell."

DAVID JACOBS: "Thank you, Don Juan Starr."

(Beatles vote by holding up cards. Consensus: MISS)

Song heard: Love Hit Me - The Orchids

DAVID JACOBS: "Three Coventry school gils called the Orchids on 'Love Hit Me.' John Lennon."
JOHN: "Well you know, it's just a big cop, or pinch. It sounds... If it had come out before the Crystals and the Ronettes it would've been great. They've even got that, what is it... castanets?"

RINGO: "Tambourine."

JOHN: (loudly, giggling) Tambourine, is THAT what it's called!!"

(laughter)

JOHN: "It's quite nice, but it's sort of the British version, you know, which... although the song's original, I think. But it sounds... doesn't sound right."

PAUL: "It's okay. It sounds great for an English record, though, you know. Because about a year ago, if someone had brought this out and said 'Listen to this record,' I don't think you would've believed that it was an English one. It's marvelous, the sound things. And I think it's great. I like it."

RINGO: "It's good, you know. I wouldn't buy it. It may sell a few but not that many."

(Beatles laugh)

GEORGE: "I thought it was quite nice. I liked the idea of the British records sort of being on the way to boom-chicka-boom-chicka, all this. I like the American stuff like the Crystals, I mean, even though it is a pinch, you know. I'd rather they pinch the Crystals than carry on doing the stuff they've been doing."

(Beatles vote by holding up cards. Consensus: MISS)

DAVID JACOBS: "They say that it will be a miss, which in fact is most unfortunate, because we do have sitting in the audience three young ladies called The Orchids. Stand up, young ladies. There they are"

(crowd applauds)

GEORGE: (jokingly) "Sorry! Didn't mean it!!"

JOHN: (switching his card) "I'll change it to hit!"

(laughter)

JOHN: "I'll buy it! I'll buy two!"

DAVID JACOBS: (laughs)

JOHN: (comically) "I didn't know you were here!"

DAVID JACOBS: (laughing) "John thinks it's a lousy trick but we'll get on to the next record."

Song heard: I Think Of You - The Merseybeats

(As time was running out in the program, the Beatles did not share their comments on this song, but simply held a quick vote. Consensus: HIT)

DAVID JACOBS: "This is where I say that unfortunately we have to take our leave of you. So, on behalf of the Jury, that's John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison. Don't forget to join the Beatles later at 8:10 on BBC television tonight. And join us at the usual time next week for another session of Juke Box Jury. Goodnight."

The Beatles' Albums: Mono Vs. Stereo after the remasters

2009-09-12T23:40:00.005+02:00

by Bob Gendron

Every Beatles album through The White Album was mixed with the purpose of being heard in mono. Capitol’s remasters mark the initial occasion of Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, and Beatles for Sale being available on disc in a stereo mix; the converse is true for Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, and The Beatles.

Specifically, the group’s early records tend to sound unnatural in stereo, as the hard panning seems forced and artificial—which, in actuality, it is. In mono, the Beatles’ music thrives from ultra-dynamic front-to-back layering that, intentionally or not, often gives the impression of a stereo mix. The changes wrought by the remasters are dramatic.

Please Please Me is distinguished by a previously vacant fullness, richness, and enormity. There’s discernible air and echo around the swooping vocals on “Misery,” and resolute imaging on “I Saw Her Standing There”—quite a thrill. And the bottom end—quite possibly the single-biggest enhancement on all of the remasters—registers with a forceful thump rather than a dull, empty thud. No longer an undefined aural morass, “Twist and Shout” explodes with a clean yet musical clarity, the singing more distinctive and immediate, the instruments possessing true timbres and resonant clatter. And who ever notices the expressive “Yeah!” at the end of the take?

Similarly, the mono With the Beatles unfolds with ear-bending vibrancy and liveliness. The rolling vocal harmonizing on “All My Loving” astounds. Across-the-board upgrades in airiness, dimensionality, depth, size, and Paul McCartney’s vastly underrated bass lines are detectable on every song. And whether it’s the now-noticeable presence of the piano or the wonderfully rattling chords on “Money,” or discernible rhythmic rumble on “Hold Me Tight,” the record has received a startling facelift that even Hollywood’s most expensive plastic surgeon wouldn’t be able to configure. With the band long faulted for being too sweet, the mono remasters open up space for the argument that the Beatles possessed an edge—if not a slight mean streak (witness the 3-D imaging of “No Reply” off Beatles for Sale).

Vocal precision, smoothness, and extension become even more pronounced on Help! and Rubber Soul. Ditto for the realistic bottom end, long absent on most Beatles recordings. McCartney’s bass and Ringo Starr’s percussion ride side-by-side, and smart albeit illuminating shades and accents—the tambourine on “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” the twangy pitch of the guitar strings on “Ticket to Ride,” the breathlessness of Lennon’s singing on “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” the natural fade-out on “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” Lennon’s sucking of air through his teeth on “Girl,” the barbershop-quartet swoons during “Michelle”—emerge with breathtaking clarity. Enmeshed with the song as a whole, Starr’s Hammond organ playing on “I’m Looking Through You” now comes across as an integral part of the arrangement.

Revolver marks the point at which the mono-versus-stereo debates begin to get interesting. Admittedly, the backward tape loops on “Tomorrow Never Knows” sound cooler in stereo. In addition, stereo is how most listeners are accustomed to hearing music; for some, mono seems bare. Yet all that’s sacrificed with the latter versus stereo is a larger soundstage, a perceived sense of “hugeness,” and the security of familiarity; mono mixes exhibit an organic presence, naturalness, purity, and outright musicality that render moot any tradeoff. The horns on “Got to Get You Into My Life” have never emitted such boldness or pizzazz; the transparency of the chords during “Here, There and Everywhere” and movement of the bounding piano in “Good Day Sunshine” are utterly staggering. Pure genius.

And yet, the mono version of Sgt. Pepper’s trumps the stereo in several regards. In stereo, “She’s Leaving” runs slower and lower in pitch; the laughter in “Within You Without You” is quieter at the end; McCartney’s scatting is hardly audible on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)”; the psychedelic phrasing on “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” isn’t as clear. Such discrepancies owe to the time lapses that occurred between the mono and stereo mixes as well as the full (or partial) participation of the band and George Martin, both of which favored mono.

Accordingly, the stereo version of The White Album boasts life-size images and discerningly more pronounced frequency extension than its mono counterpart. The immersive experience gives birth to underexposed intricacies (the single snare drum strike that parallels the “shot” in “Rocky Raccoon”), defined footprints (McCartney’s bass purrs and growls), and completely new sounds (“Revolution 1” has what seems to be a horn—who knew?). Differences still abound. The mono version of “Helter Skelter” is shorter, sped up, and without Starr’s renowned “blisters on my fingers” comment. The aircraft effects during “Back in the U.S.S.R.” vary, and there are fewer grunts in “Piggies.” Due such distinctions—and no clear-cut winner between the two versions, although stereo does seem to have the edge—both versions are considered “authentic.”

Beatles' Era - Bobbie Gentry: Ode To Billy Joe

2009-09-12T10:16:00.000+02:00

Opinions: Beatles Remasters Dazzling, Expensive

2009-09-09T19:49:00.002+02:00

by David Bauder

Hard to believe that it's been 40 years since the Beatles sang "You Never Give Me Your Money." You had to expect at least one cheap shot, didn't you? The Beatles' remastered catalog and a dazzling coffee-table "Box of Vision" hits the market Wednesday, as most dedicated fans have known for months. Fanatics will line up, but for most people, a purchase decision is more likely to be financial than musical.

Technicians at Apple Corps Ltd. spent four years cleaning up and giving a digital punch to the master recordings left behind by the Beatles. Each is available individually, as well as in a $259.98 box set that includes the band's original discs, plus the "Past Masters" singles collection, 14 albums in all. Mini-documentaries are included for all but "Past Masters."
Also on sale is a $298.98 box of mono mixes for each album through the "White Album"; after that the music was only released in stereo. For those under age 50, mono has the same music coming through each speaker (stereo splits different parts of a track through different speakers) and was the dominant music system in homes until the late 1960s. At first, the Beatles devoted more attention to their mono mixes.
The "Box of Vision" is an $89.98 package (plus shipping -- it's only available by mail order) to fit all of the CDs with album-sized reprints of every album's covers and liner notes -- yet no actual CDs included.

Do the math: it's possible to spend upwards of $350 and receive not a single note of new music.

Given that we're in an era where artists have a hard time convincing fans they should pay for ANY music, that falls into the selling-ice-to-Eskimos category. Despite that, despite the economy, Amazon.com sold out its allotment of boxes and has a waiting list of buyers.
Now, this is the greatest catalog in popular music, so if your collection is Beatle-less, the box is a terrific buy. Really, though, what serious pop music fan doesn't already own some of these albums already?

Since the albums contain no outtakes or alternate versions, the remaster is the attraction. The advice here is to arrange a test-drive: buy, or borrow, an individual disc ($18.98 list, $24.98 for the White Album and "Past Masters") to see how much difference the sound makes before setting aside a few hundred bucks for one of the boxes.

In the case of "Rubber Soul," what's striking is how the new mix let you hear each background singer with sparkling clarity. A tambourine feels like it's jingling in your ear.
It sounds great. It ALWAYS sounded great, frankly. For an average person with an average sound system, the differences aren't going to make it seem like an entirely new listening experience.

What is new here are mini-documentaries on DVD, about three minutes apiece, on each album. They feature interviews with band members and producer George Martin, seemingly left over from the "Beatles Anthology" days, and some studio banter.
They're all fun and occasionally enlightening. Starr described the lengthy studio sessions for "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by saying, "It's a fine album, but I did learn to play chess on it."
Yet that mini-doc talks little about the album's epic "A Day in the Life." No time. Each piece is like a slightly elongated trailer for a show you'd like to see but doesn't exist.

The "Box of Vision" is a beautiful package, with the groundbreaking photo of the four Beatles with their faces in half shadow on the front of a box that has the size and shape of old record albums. Inside are plastic sleeves to insert copies of CDs, purchased separately, and two books.

Both are exhaustive. One lists the Beatles' complete discography, detailing the differences between British and American releases, which were substantial in the first half of the band's career, and all of the reissues. Another reproduces the album covers and all of the liner notes, including booklets of later CD releases like the "Anthology" series.
It's pleasantly memory-jogging and reproduces that experience, from before the CD era, of having something substantial you can hold in your hands while listening to the albums.

All of these packages ooze class and quality. Fans must decide for themselves if it's worth paying for things they've paid for before.

Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press.

Beatles' Era - The Beatles Vs. James Bond

2009-09-07T15:04:00.002+02:00

The two biggest pop culture icons to come out of Britain in the 1960s have a strangely antagonistic relationship. It began when James Bond famously insulted the Fab Four in 1964's Goldfinger. "My dear girl," Sean Connery instructed the hapless Jill Masterson, "There are some things that just aren't done. Such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above a temperature of thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. That's as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!"
The Beatles got their revenge by taking some potshots at 007 and Bond-style spy shenanigans in their 1965 film Help!, but it was all in good fun. Ken Thorne (who would go on to create the fantastic incidental music of The Persuaders!) composed a winning spy score that took some definite cues from Monty Norman's and John Barry's James Bond Theme. (The instrumentals were available on the American version of the soundtrack album, but sadly not the British one that ended up on CD. The American version was finally issued in 2006 as part of The Capitol Albums Vol. 2.)

In 1967 the animated Liverpudlians found themselves competing with secret agent James Blond for Pussy Galore... er, groupies... on their cartoon show. (Of course the actual lads couldn't be bothered to provide their own voices.) When Paul suggests that they "open the gate and let the lucky girls in," the screaming female fans trample right over the poor Beatles, flocking instead to a beaming blond hunk in a suit.
Paul laments, "Where did our fans go?"
A helpful, lovely meter maid (Rita?) explains, "Over to England's greatest detective... James Blond. Number 0-0."
"Oh-oh-what?" inquires George.
"That's all," says Rita, dreamily. "When the girls see him, they say 'oooh, oooh! Heaven!'"
"It's not fair!" complains Paul. (Perhaps he's still secretly stewing over that "earmuffs" remark.) "We do all the records and films and some dimpled detective gets all the glory!" The Beatles attempt to cash in on some of that glory for themselves by thwarting a crime in Penny Lane... only to discover (after performing the song to an animated music video) that the crime isn't being committed in Penny Lane, but against Miss Penelope Lane! And, of course, James Blond has beat them to it, and he ends up with Miss Lane. Can't the Beatles catch a break with 007?

They finally did two years later, when Ian Fleming's widow, Ann Fleming, expressed a grudging admiration for the Fab Four in a letter to adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor dated November 7, 1969*:
I am very out of touch, and will write a better bulletin soon: depression is in the ascendant, induced by having to pass what Kingsley Amis has written about Ian for the Dictionary of National Biography, and being assailed by the BBC for material for the Omnibus programme they are doing on Ian - I want to kick them all and burst into tears. Improbably, the Beatles have put my quandary into words - a song that goes

I want to be at the bottom
of the sea
In an octopus's garden in the shade

How do the Beatles know octopuses have gardens? I thought only I knew that, there must be more to them than meets the ear.
She got the lyrics slightly wrong, but the sentiment is there: Ann Fleming found solace in the music of the Beatles at a time when she needed it, which forced her to reconsider her apparently disdainful opinion of their music. Perhaps James Bond and the Beatles could get along after all?
Not if Bond producer Harry Saltzman had his way. Saltzman still wasn't won over. In his autobiography, My Word is My Bond, Roger Moore recounts an oft-told story about how the producer was displeased with Paul McCartney's title song for Moore's first Bond movie, the 1973 entry Live and Let Die:

When Harry first heard the song, he said he didn't like it but - perhaps reserving final judgement - turned to [composer and former Beatles producer] George Martin and said, 'So, who are we gonna get to sing it?' George Martin diplomatically told Harry that he already had one of the biggest recording artists of all time singing it.
Martin was now scoring Bond, and the Beatles got the last laugh when McCartney's "Live and Let Die" (performed with his new band, Wings) charted instantly and went on to become one of the best-known Bond songs of the entire series, covered over the years by the likes of Guns'n'Roses, Chrissie Hynde, Geri Halliwell and, most recently, Duffy.

A permanent truce was finally formed between the rival Sixties icons via marriage when Ringo Starr wed Bond Girl Barbara Bach in 1981.

Promoting A Hard Day's Night 7/1964

2009-09-07T14:35:00.002+02:00

To promote the worldwide theatrical release of the movie, 'A Hard Day's Night,' the following interview was conducted with the Beatles. Copies of the recorded interview were then sent to radio stations.
It was created to be an 'Open-end' interview-- meaning that once the interview was recorded, the questions were edited out so that local disc jockeys could read scripted questions along with the recording to sound as if they were personally conducting the interview.

Q: "I hate to bring this up, boys, but what happened to John?"
PAUL: (jokingly) "Well actually, he's gone down to the shipyards to have an estimate for a haircut."

RINGO: (mock seriousness) "I don't know, he's supposed to be here. He's late, isn't he?"

Q: "Well Beatles, we really are thrilled to have you here on the show today, and I want to talk to you about a great movie, 'A Hard Day's Night.' Ringo, was it really a hard day's night to make this first big one?"

RINGO: "Well, it was a hard two months. It took two months actually to make this film. But, umm, I think I found the biggest drag was when we were just sitting 'round doing nothing."

PAUL: "And getting up early. That was one of those things. We had to get up about six o'clock in the morning, you know, sometimes. Which is-- oh-- I'm sure it's not good for anyone, that. It's very bad for your health."

Q: "George, how about you? Did you find it an easy thing to do?"

GEORGE: "Oh no. In fact, you see, we're night owls, folks."

PAUL: (hoots like an owl, and laughs)

GEORGE: "You mightn't have noticed. No, but-- you know, we all go out at night. And then suddenly our day was reversed, so that we had to be up at six in the morning, but we still couldn't get the hang of going to bed at night. So we were going out at night AND getting up in the morning for the first week or so, and I just couldn't believe it. Six o'clock, somebody dragging me out of bed."

Q: "Ringo, at six in the morning what did you do about the bags under your eyes?"

RINGO: "Umm, well, I've always had 'em. I just filled them up a bit more."

(laughter)

Q: "How about you, Paul?"

PAUL: "Well, you know. I had a bit of trouble, but there was always this handy makeup man on the (laughs) ...on the scene to sort of paint your face up a bit."

Q: "Who combed your hair so early in the morning?"

RINGO: "We did. We all combed our... well, we don't actually comb it, we shake it."

PAUL: "It's the easiest way, you know. You just sort of shake it, it falls forward and you sort of comb it a little bit then, and it normally works out okay."

Q: "Ringo, was it a fun experience, or was it actually work?"

RINGO: "About eighty percent work, and twenty percent was all laughs."

PAUL: "Even the work, which was hard work, was still good fun because, you know, the film was a good laugh, mainly. I mean, even when we were sort of very tired and really knocked out, and we'd do a thing, when we actually saw it on the screen it looked, sort of, quite funny. I mean, there's one scene where I think I'd been out the night before and I was feeling so tired, you know. But I've seen it on the screen since and you can't tell."

Q: "I guess only the guys who participated in the movie know the truth."

PAUL: "True."

RINGO: "That's about right."

Q: "Ringo, the job of acting-- of saying lines, of reacting to the person who's acting opposite you-- did it come naturally to you?"

RINGO: "No, I don't think so. At first-- and I think we all had a terrible time tryin' to learn lines, 'cuz we wouldn't anyway. We used to sort of read them and try and learn 'em before we went on the set."

PAUL: "Yeah, I agree, you know. It was very hard to just learn a line and say it, because we've never done that sort of thing before. We've always just thought of something and said it, rather than actually read something on a piece of paper. But I think towards the end of making the film, we got the hang of it a little bit more. At first, it was very frightening, you know. It was nerve-wracking trying to say these things as though we meant them-- 'cuz that takes training as an actor, I reckon. So you know, we had to try and make it look convincing without having any experience."

Q: "Well the movie has been done now, and it's a great success. Do you feel now that you want to 'be' actors?"

PAUL: "Naw."

GEORGE: "Not really, no. We still... Even if 'A Hard Day's Night' is the biggest sort of box-office attraction ever, you know, it still won't make us feel as though we're actors. But I think we'd all enjoy making a new film."

RINGO "All different things that happened were funny to us, which they haven't printed and put on the film, but it's great when we go and see the film, then we can sort of say, 'Remember that bit-- if they'd have showed the one we did before, you know, where we all broke up."

PAUL: "This is another one of these bits-- where we got the giggles as well. Ringo is supposed to be sulking, and John sort of starts joking with him, and starts singing this song as though he's singing it to him, you know. It was quite a laugh making it. Probably doesn't sound very funny now, but anyway, it was."

RINGO: "It won't seem very funny on the screen, but to us, we were all breaking up, you know."

Q: "George, alot of people would like to know what has been happening with you romantically recently. Can you fill us in?"

GEORGE: "Oh, nothing much. Nothing exciting, sorry to say."

Q: "You mean you've been freelancing?"

GEORGE: "Oh, yeah."

RINGO: (laughs) "Everybody's freelancing."

Q: "Why do you say, 'sorry to say'?"

GEORGE: "Well, you know. People seem to expect you to get married and everything, you see. So, sorry to break their illusions, but I'm not. I'm freelancing, as you say."

Q: "How were your trips to Australia and New Zealand."

PAUL: "They were fine, you know. The only thing is, it's so far away when you go to Australia, and we tend to get a bit homesick for England, you know."

Q: "Paul, what do you think about all these other groups? Are they very imitative with the hair-dos and style of music?"

PAUL: "None of us think they're imitations, you know. There may be one or two sort of smaller groups that are. I think they're mainly the ones that never seem to make it, because to make it you've gotta be a little bit different. I think the ones that don't make it-- it's not annoying, it's flattering, you know, to think that they should want to copy us."

GEORGE: "Yeah. That's right."

George Harrison on Radio

2009-09-04T09:44:00.003+02:00

Filename: George Harrison - What Is Life.mp3 Size: 50.69 MB

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New Orleans lawyer creates the questions for a new Beatles Trivial Pursuit game

2009-09-03T10:58:00.003+02:00

Beatles expert Bruce Spizer sits in front of shelves full of band memorabilia at his home in New Orleans. Spizer created the questions that are being used new Trivial Pursuit The Beatles Collector's Edition board game.Which Beatle co-starred in a film with Peter Sellers? What New Orleans R&B singer was added to the Beatles' first U.S. tour as a replacement opening act? What was the initial name of John's Lennon's first band?

New Orleans attorney Bruce Spizer can answer any of those questions in a heartbeat. No wonder, since he recently spent three months making up 2,592 questions, including those three, for the new Trivial Pursuit The Beatles Collector's Edition board game ($39.95) scheduled to be released today.

Why was a specialist in tax law and estate planning called on to create an exhaustive Fab Four quiz? Because Spizer wrote the book about the Mop Tops. In fact, he wrote seven.

As obsessions go, Spizer's is relatively recent. It was a mere 12 years ago that his microscopic study of all things Beatles began in earnest.

Before that, his love of the Liverpool quartet followed a more-or-less predictable pattern. Spizer, 54, recalls hearing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on the Newman School bus in 1964. He was 8 years old, and soon swept up in the new sound of the English group. He said he was especially intrigued by the fact that John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote most of the group's songs, "which at the time was pretty unique."

In 1964, he had a chance to see The Beatles on their one visit to New Orleans, when they played to a screaming crowd at City Park Stadium (later called Tad Gormley Stadium). Trouble was, Spizer said, it was his sister's 16th birthday, so she got to choose the evening's activity. Unfortunately "she was a Barbra Streisand fan."

"I figured I'd see them next time," he said, with a lingering whisper of regret in his voice.

Spizer's devotion to pop music persisted throughout his youth. He played guitar in high school bands, served on the board of directors of the landmark Mushroom record store, and managed the popular late-Â¤'70s New Orleans band, The Cold. Somewhere in there, The Beatles dissolved, but life went on. During law school, Spizer said he "dutifully bought the solo albums," but he just didn't have the same passion for John, Paul, George, and Ringo's individual careers. Who did?

Then, in 1997, Spizer said he "settled a big class action lawsuit," the sort of settlement that might have provided him with a Mercedes or Rolex. Instead, in a moment of 1960s nostalgia, he decided to replace all of his old Beatles records, most of which had their album jackets ruined by roaches.

"Maybe roaches are Beatles natural enemies," he speculates.

Spizer sought first editions of the records he once owned. As he collected, he discovered that "collector books didn't make any sense." The dates of record releases were confused. His lawyerly mind was especially drawn to legal battles between the Vee-Jay and Capitol record labels, which vied to introduce the band in America. Spizer whiled away his late nights writing what he expected to be an article on the subject, that blossomed into a well-received self-published book.

"So in effect, yes," Spizer said, "I am the tax man and then I got the bug to be a paperback writer." (His $50 books are, in fact, hardbacks.)

One Beatles project led to another and another. Spizer became a sort of monk, laboring over a continuous stream of Beatles manuscripts.

His research revealed that a four-minute news story about The Beatles was scheduled for the CBS Evening News broadcast on the day President John Kennedy was assassinated. The story was postponed for weeks. When it finally aired, Spizer said, "the exuberant music of The Beatles" may have helped uplift the spirit of America.

"Many books attribute the success of the Beatles to the youth of American being despondent over the death of President Kennedy," Spizer said, but he does not believe there was a strict cause and effect, since the Beatles' popularity was worldwide.

Though Spizer was never able to interview any of The Beatles, he did speak to Beatles producer George Martin. Spizer said that when he met Martin in 2006, he was flattered to find that Martin was aware of his reputation as a Beatles authority.

Indeed, Spizer has spoken at music industry and Beatles fan conventions across the country, and has appeared as a Beatles authority on the CBS Morning Show, Good Morning America, and Fox News.

As his reputation grew, so did his small back room museum of Beatles memorabilia: logo lunch boxes, tumblers, tennis shoes, a rare record player, you name it. Spizer said he even has two "knock-offs" of Beatles stage costumes.

"I did show up in court once wearing the Ed Sullivan suit," Spizer said. "I don't think the judge noticed."

Then, last October, the folks from USAopoly asked Spizer to produce the hundreds and hundreds of questions needed for the new trivia game. Spizer said that he was told he'd been highly recommended for the job, but he's not sure by whom. The questions, Spizer said, are divided into six categories, each with 72 cards containing six questions, divided into easy, moderate, and hard .

Asked for a really hard question, Spizer offered this stumper: "What was the name of the Pan Am jet that flew The Beatles to America in 1964?"

Test your Beatles knowledge

Here are samples of easy, moderate and difficult questions from Beatles expert Bruce Spizer. See how you do:

Easy

Q: What was the name of the Beatles' first movie?
A: A Hard Day's Night.

Q: Which Beatle co-starred in a film with Peter Sellers?
A: Ringo costarred in The Magic Christian.

Moderate

Q: In what city did Paul McCartney record Venus and Mars?
A: New Orleans

Q: What New Orleans R&B singer was added to the first Beatles' US tour as a replacement opening act?
A:Clarence "Frogman" Henry replaced the Righteous Brothers.

Difficult

Q: What was the name of the Pan Am jet that flew the Beatles to America in 1964?
A: Clipper Defiance

Q: What was the initial name of Beatle John's first band?
A: The Black Jacks.

by Chris Granger
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