Their Own Records In Their Own Words - Please Please Me and surroundings

I SAW HER STANDING THERE
(Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "That's Paul doing his usual job of producing what George Martin used to call a 'potboiler.' I helped with a couple of the lyrics."

PAUL 1988: "I wrote it with John. We sagged off school and wrote it on guitars. I remember I had the lyrics, 'Just seventeen/Never been a beauty queen,' which John... it was one of the first times he ever went, 'What? Must change that!' And it became, 'you know what I mean.'"

PAUL circa-1994: "Sometimes we would just start a song from scratch, but one of us would nearly always have a germ of an idea, a title, or a rough little thing they were thinking about and we'd do it. 'I Saw Her Standing There' was my original. I'd started it and I had the first verse, which therefore gave me the tune, the tempo, and the key. It gave you the subject matter, alot of information, and then you had to fill in. So it was co-written... and we finished it that day.

MISERY
(Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "It was kind of a John song, more than a Paul song... but it was written together."

PAUL 1988: "John and I were a songwriting team, and what songwriting teams did in those days was wrote for everyone. 'Misery' was for Helen Shapiro, and she turned it down. It may not have been that successful for her because it's rather a downbeat song... 'the world is treating me bad, misery.' It was quite pessimistic. And in the end Kenny Lynch did it. Kenny used to come out on tour with us, and he used to sing it. That was one of his minor hits."

PLEASE PLEASE ME
(Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1963: "Our recording manager (George Martin) thought our arrangement was fussy, so we tried to make it simpler. We were getting tired though, and just couldn't seem to get it right. In the following weeks we went over it again and again. We changed the tempo a little, we altered the words slightly, and we went over the idea of featuring the harmonica just as we'd done on 'Love Me Do.' By the time the session came around we were so happy with the result, we couldn't get it recorded fast enough."

JOHN 1980: "'Please Please Me' is my song completely. It was my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song, would you believe it? I wrote it in the bedroom in my house at Menlove Avenue, which was my auntie's place. I heard Roy Orbison doing 'Only The Lonely' or something. That's where that came from. And also I was always intrigued by the words of 'Please Lend Your Ears To My Pleas,' a Bing Crosby song. I was always intrigued by the double use of the word 'please.' So it was a combination of Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison."

PAUL 1988: "It's very Roy Orbison when you slow it down. George Martin up-tempo'd it. He thought it was too much of a dirge, and probably too like Orbison. So he cleverly speeded us up... and we put in the little scaled riff at the beginning, which was very catchy."

LOVE ME DO
(Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1963: "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."

JOHN 1972: "Paul wrote the main structure of this when he was sixteen, or even earlier. I think I had something to do with the middle."

RINGO 1976: "The first record, 'Love Me Do,' for me that was more important than anything else. That first piece of plastic. You can't believe how great that was. It was so wonderful. We were on a record!"

JOHN 1980: "'Love Me Do' is Paul's song. He had the song around in Hamburg even, way, way before we were songwriters."

PAUL 1982: "In Hamburg we clicked... At the Cavern we clicked.. but if you want to know when we 'knew' we'd arrived, it was getting in the charts with 'Love Me Do.' That was the one. It gave us somewhere to go."

PAUL 1984: "'Love Me Do' ...the first song we recorded, like, for real. First serious audition. I was very nervous, I remember. John was supposed to sing the lead, but they changed their minds and asked me to sing lead at the last minute, because they wanted John to play harmonica. Until then, we hadn't rehearsed with a harmonica; George Martin started arranging it on the spot. It was very nerve-wracking."

PAUL 1988: "'Love Me Do' was us trying to do the blues. It came out whiter because it always does. We're white, and we were just young Liverpool musicians. We didn't have the finesse to be able to actually sound black. But 'Love Me Do' was probably the first bluesy thing we tried to do."
PAUL circa-1994: "George Martin said, 'Can anyone play a harmonica? It would be rather nice. Couldn't think of some sort of bluesy thing, could you John?' John played a chromatic harmonica... I actually had one too but he'd been clever-- he learned to play it. John expected to be in jail one day and he'd be the guy who played the harmonica. The lyric crossed over the harmonica solo, so I suddenly got thrown the big open line, 'Love me do,' where everything stopped. Until that session John had always done it. I didn't even know how to sing it... I can still hear the nervousness in my voice."

P.S. I LOVE YOU
(Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "That's Paul's song. He was trying to write a 'Soldier Boy' like the Shirelles. He wrote that in Germany, or when we were going to and from Hamburg. I might have contributed something. I can't remember anything in particular. It was mainly his song."

PAUL circa-1994: "A theme song based on a letter... It was pretty much mine. I don't think John had much of a hand in it. There are certain themes that are easier than others to hang a song on, and a letter is one of them... It's not based in reality, nor did I write it to my girlfriend from Hamburg, which some people think."

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW A SECRET
(Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "Well, I can't say I wrote it 'for' George. My mother was always... she was a good comedienne and a singer. Not professional, but she used to get up in pubs and things like that. She had a good voice. She could do Kay Starr. She used to do this little tune when I was one or two years old... she was still living with me then. The tune was from a Disney movie: (sings) 'Do you want to know a secret? Promise not to tell? You are standing by a wishing well.' So, I had this sort of thing in my head, and I wrote it and just gave it to George to sing. I thought it would be a good vehicle for him, because it had only three notes and he wasn't the best singer in the world. He has improved a lot since then; but in those days, his ability was very poor."

PAUL 1984: "A song we really wrote for George to sing. Before he wrote his own stuff, John and I wrote things for him and Ringo to do."

GEORGE 1994: "'Do You Want To Know A Secret' was my song on the album. I didn't like the vocal on it. I didn't know how to sing."

THERE'S A PLACE
(Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "'There's a Place' was my attempt at a sort of Motown, black thing. It says the usual Lennon things: 'In my mind there's no sorrow...' It's all in your mind."


TWIST AND SHOUT
(Medley/Russell)

JOHN 1963: "I always hate singing the song, 'Twist And Shout' when there's a colored artist on the bill with us. It doesn't seem right, you know. I feel sort of embarrassed... It makes me curl up. I always feel they could do the song much better than me."

JOHN 1971: "The more interesting songs to me were the black ones because they were more simple. They sort of said shake-your-arse, or your prick, which was an innovation really. The blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain, and also about sex, which is why I like it."

JOHN 1976: "The last song nearly killed me. My voice wasn't the same for a long time after-- everytime I swallowed it was like sandpaper. I was always bitterly ashamed of it because I could sing it better than that, but now it doesn't bother me. You can hear I'm just a frantic guy doing his best."

PAUL 1988: "There's a power in John's voice there that certainly hasn't been equaled since. And I know exactly why-- It's because he worked his bollocks off that day. We left 'Twist And Shout' until the very last thing because we knew there was one take."

RINGO 1994: "We started (recording the album) about noon and finished it at midnight, with John being really hoarse by 'Twist And Shout.'"

FROM ME TO YOU
(Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1964: "'From Me To You.' It could be done as an old Ragtime tune... especially the middle-eight. And so, we're not writing the tunes in any particular idiom. In five years time, we may arrange the tunes differently. (jokingly) But we'll probably write the same old rubbish!!"

JOHN 1980: "We were writing it in a car, I think... and I think the first line was mine. I mean, I know it was mine. (humms melody) And then after that we just took it from there. We were just writing the next single. It was far bluesier than that when we wrote it. The notes, today.. you could rearrange it pretty funky."

PAUL circa-1994: "The thing I liked about 'From Me To You' was it had a very complete middle. It went to a surprising place. The opening chord of the middle section of that song heralded a new batch for me. That was a pivotal song. Our songwriting lifted a little with that song. It was very much co-written."

THANK YOU GIRL
(Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "'Thank You Girl' was one of our efforts at writing a single that didn't work. So it became a B-side or an album track."

PAUL 1988: "We knew that if we wrote a song called, 'Thank You Girl' that alot of the girls who wrote us fan letters would take it as a genuine thank you. So alot of our songs were directly addressed to the fans."

SHE LOVES YOU
(Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1963: "We wrote that two days before we recorded it, actually."

PAUL 1963: "John and I wrote it together. We were in a van up in Newcastle somewhere, and we'd just gone over to our hotel. I originally got an idea of doing one of those answering songs, where a couple of us sing about 'she loves you' ...and the other one sort of says the 'yes, yes' bit. You know, 'yeah yeah' answering whoever is saying it. But we decided that was a crummy idea anyway. But we had the idea to write a song called 'She Loves You' then. And we just sat up in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it, you know."

JOHN 1963: "'Yeah.' That's sort of the main catch phrase from 'She Loves You.' We'd written the song, and then suddenly realized we needed more... so we added 'yeah, yeah, yeah' and it caught on."

JOHN 1980: "It was written together (with Paul) and I don't remember how. I remember it was Paul's idea-- instead of singing 'I love you' again, we'd have a third party. The 'Woooo' was taken from the Isley Brothers 'Twist And Shout,' which we stuck into everything."

PAUL 1982: "Occasionally, we'd overrule George Martin, like on 'She Loves You,' we end on a sixth chord, a very jazzy sort of thing. And he said, 'Oh, you can't do that! A sixth chord? It's too jazzy.' We just said, 'No, it's a great hook, we've got to do it.'"

PAUL 1988: "We rehearsed the end bit of 'She Loves You' and took it to George. And he just laughed and said, 'Well, you can't do the end of course... that sixth... it's too like the Andrew Sisters.' We just said, 'Alright, we'll try it without,' and we tried it and it wasn't as good. Then he conceded, 'You're right, I guess.' But we were both very flexible. We would listen to George's ideas too, because he was a producer and a musician, and he obviously knew what he was talking about. There was good to-and-fro. We loved that bit, and we rehearsed it alot. John and I wrote that in a hotel room, on twin beds during an afternoon off-- I mean, God bless their little cotton socks, those boys WORKED! Here I am talking about an afternoon off, and we're sitting there writing! We just loved it so much. It wasn't work."

I'LL GET YOU
(Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1963: "The B-side of 'She Loves You' was meant to be the A-side."

PAUL 1963: "If we write one song, then we can get going after that and get more ideas. We wrote 'I'll Get You,' which is the B-side, first. And then 'She Loves You' came after that. You know-- We got ideas from that. Then we recorded it."

JOHN 1980: "That was Paul and me trying to write a song... and it didn't work out."

PAUL circa-1994: "It's got an interesting chord in it-- 'It's not easy/ To pre-TEND...' That was nicked from a song called 'All My Trials' which is on an album I had by Joan Baez."

ON SONGWRITING

(DURING THE 'PLEASE PLEASE ME' PERIOD)

JOHN 1963: "All the better songs that we have written-- the ones that anybody wants to hear-- those were co-written. Sometimes half the words are written by me and he'll finish them off. We go along a word each, practically."

ON RECORDING THE 'PLEASE PLEASE ME' ALBUM

JOHN 1963: "We sang for twelve hours nonstop. Waiting to hear the LP played back was one of our most worrying experiences. We're perfectionists. If it had come out any old way we'd have wanted to do it all over again. As it happens we're very happy with the result."

JOHN 1976: "That record tried to capture us live, and was the nearest thing to what we might have sounded like to the audiences in Hamburg and Liverpool. You don't get that live atmosphere of the crowd stomping on the beat with you, but it's the nearest you can get to knowing what we sounded like before we became the 'clever' Beatles."

PAUL 1988: "The whole album only took a day... so it was amazingly cheap, no-messing, just a massive effort from us. But we were game. We'd been to Hamburg for Christ's sake, we'd stayed up all night, it was no big deal. We started at ten in the morning and finished at ten at night... it sounded like a working day to us! And at the end of the day you had your album. There's many a person now who would love to be able to say that. Me included."

Paul McCartney Says Obama Has Brought Hope Back To The World

By Howie Edelson

Paul McCartney gave a surprisingly candid interview to LA Weekly in which he gave a shout out to president-elect Barack Obama. McCartney was asked about the most historical event that he's ever witnessed, to which the former Beatle replied, "The death of John Kennedy. He was our hope and he got wiped out, and we hadn't realized that hope could get wiped out quite so easily. But now Obama's brought it back. I love it."

McCartney went on to say that the biggest obstacle he's overcome in his life was the death of first wife Linda McCartney; he felt that he became an adult upon the birth of his and Linda's first child Mary in 1969, and that emotionally he still feels like he's 25.

When asked if he felt nostalgic for the past, McCartney said, "Nostalgia's not the right word because it implies something sort of wrong. I love the past. There are parts of the past I hate, of course. My mum died, Linda died, John (Lennon) died, and George (Harrison) died, so I can't say I love everything about it, but I have a great affection for the past. And why shouldn't I? I was just some kid from Liverpool who walked around the streets with John Lennon, and wrote songs with him, and met this beautiful girl from New York, then married her and had kids with her -- why shouldn't I love the past? Mine has been good."

He said that he began to feel that the Beatles had begun making "important" music around 1966, with their Revolver album: "It's difficult to discuss this without sounding immodest, but I think I started to feel it around the time of 'Eleanor Rigby.'Prior to that, I thought the music was very good, and I realized we were in a different league when we wrote 'From Me To You,'because it had a middle eight in it and went somewhere we hadn't been before... For me, 'Eleanor Rigby'was the start of that."

McCartney has been receiving nearly universal praise for his latest Fireman album called Electric Arguments. He says that he's way past the point of worrying about pleasing the critics: "The thing is you think about, the first time we ever went out with the Beatles was risky. I mean, you know, we were no one and we had to build the whole thing up. I think every time you go out, from time to time, you're just not in your hottest period, you know, record-wise. So you just go, I just do my best, you know, try to play some good music. If people come and see me, you know, then great. If they buy the album -- better."

After his appearances on ABC's The View and Sirius'The Howard Stern Show on Wednesday (January 14th), The New York Post reported that McCartney, girlfriend Nancy Shevell, and Linda McCartney's brother -- and Paul's chief legal counsel -- John Eastman were spotted having lunch at the exclusive Manhattan eatery Michael's. The trio reportedly asked for a table in the back far away from the paparazzi.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: An article from 1967

The Messengers

The cover on a new LP album called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a photomontage of a crowd gathered round a grave. And a curious crowd it is: Marilyn Monroe is there, so are Karl Marx, Edgar Allan Poe, Albert Einstein, Lawrence of Arabia, Mae West, Sonny Liston, and eight Beatles.

Eight? Well, four of them, standing around looking like wax dummies, are indeed wax models of the Beatles as most people remember them: nicely brushed long hair, dark suits, faces like sassy choirboys. The other four Beatles are very much alive: thin, hippie-looking, mustachioed, bedecked in bright, bizarre uniforms. Though their expressions seem subdued, their eyes glint with a new awareness tinged with a little of the old mischief. As for the grave in the foreground: it has THE BEATLES spelled out in flowers trimmed with marijuana plants.

With characteristic self-mockery, the Beatles are proclaiming that they have snuffed out their old selves to make room for the new Beatles incarnate. And there is some truth to it. Without having lost any of the genial anarchism with which they helped revolutionize the life style of young people in Britain, Europe and the U.S., they have moved on to a higher artistic plateau.

Cunning Collages. Rich and secure enough to go on repeating themselves--or to do nothing at all--they have exercised a compulsion for growth, change and experimentation. Messengers from beyond rock 'n' roll, they are creating the most original, expressive and musically interesting sounds being heard in pop music. They are leading an evolution in which the best of current postrock sounds are becoming something that pop music has never been before: an art form. "Serious musicians" are listening to them and marking their work as a historic departure in the progress of music--any music.

Ned Rorem, composer of some of the best of today's art songs, says: "They are colleagues of mine, speaking the same language with different accents." In fact, he adds, the Beatles' haunting composition, She's Leaving Home--one of twelve songs in the Sgt. Pepper album--"is equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote." Conductor Leonard Bernstein's appreciation is just as high; he cites Schumann. As Musicologist Henry Pleasants says: "The Beatles are where music is right now."


Like all good popular artists, the Beatles have a talent for distilling the moods of their time. Gilbert and Sullivan's frolics limned the pomposities of the Victorian British Empah; Cole Porter's urbanities were wonderful tonics for the hungover '30s; Rodgers and Hammerstein's ballads reflected the sentiment and seriousness of the World War II era. Today the Beatles' cunning collages piece together scraps of tension between the generations, the loneliness of the dislocated '60s, and the bitter sweets of young love in any age. At the same time, their sensitivity to the absurd is sharper than ever.

Cheerful Skewering

By contrast, their early music had exuberance and an occasional oasis of unexpected harmony, but otherwise blended monotonously into the parched badlands of rock. I Want to Hold Your Hand, the Beatles' biggest hit single--it has sold 5,000,000 copies since 1963--was a cliché boy-girl lyric and a simple tune hammered onto the regulation aaba popsong structure. But the boys found their conventional sound and juvenile verses stultifying. Says Paul McCartney: "We didn't like the idea of people going onstage and being very unreal and doing sickly songs. We felt that people would like it more, and we would like it more, if there was some--reality."

Thus it was that the group's chief lyricist, John Lennon, began tuning in on U.S. Folk Singer Bob Dylan (The Times They Are A-Changin'); it wasn't Dylan's sullen anger about life that Lennon found appealing so much as the striving to "tell it like it is." Gradually, the Beatles' work began to tell it too. Their 1965 song, Nowhere Man ("Doesn't have a point of view, knows not where he's going to") asked: "Isn't he a bit like you and me?" Last year's Paperback Writer cheerfully skewered the craven commercialism of the hack.

An even sharper departure from Big Beat banalities came as Tunesmith McCartney began exhibiting an unsuspected lyrical gift. In 1965, he crooned the loveliest of his ballads, Yesterday, to the accompaniment of a string octet--a novel and effective backing that gave birth to an entire new genre, baroque-rock. Still another form, raga-rock, had its origins after George Harrison flipped over Indian music, studied with Indian sitar Virtuoso Ravi Shankar, and introduced a brief sitar motif on the 1965 recording Norwegian Wood. Now everybody's making with the sitar.
Copping Out, Plugging In. Meanwhile, the growing sophistication of the Beatles' outlook found expression in a series of sharply observed vignettes of English life. The most poignant was last year's Eleanor Rigby, who
Lives in a dream, waits at the window,
Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door ...
Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear ...
Darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there ...
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

Fantasy took flight in their songs...

Fantasy took flight in their songs, from Yellow Submarine's childlike picture of a carefree existence beneath the waves to the vastly more complex and ominous vision in Strawberry Fields Forever of a retreat from uncertainty into a psychedelic cop-out:
It's getting hard to be someone .
It doesn't matter much to me.
Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to strawberry fields.
Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about ...

Moreover, Strawberry FieIds, with its four separate meters, freewheeling modulations and titillating tonal trappings, showed that the Beatles had flowered as musicians. They learned to bend and stretch the pop-song mold, enriched their harmonic palette with modal colors, mixed in cross-rhythms, and pinched the classical devices of composers from Bach to Stockhausen. They supplemented their guitar sound with strings, baroque trumpets, even a calliope. With the help of their engineer, arranger and record producer, George Martin, they plugged into a galaxy of space-age electronic effects, achieved partly through a mixture of tapes run backward and at various speeds.

Psychic Shivers. All the successes of the past two years were a foreshadowing of Sgt. Pepper, which more than anything else dramatizes, note for note, word for word, the brilliance of the new Beatles. In three months, it has sold a staggering 2,500,000 copies--each a guaranteed package of psychic shivers. Loosely strung together on a scheme that plays the younger and older generations off against each other, it sizzles with musical montage, tricky electronics and sleight-of-hand lyrics that range between 1920s ricky-tick and 1960s raga. A Day in the Life, for example, is by all odds the most disturbingly beautiful song the group has ever produced. The narrator's mechanical progress through the day ("Dragged a comb across my head, found my way downstairs") is tensely counterpointed with lapses into reverie and with chilling tableaux of frustration and despair:
I read the news today, oh boy,
About a lucky man who made the grade . . .
He blew his mind out in a car.
He didn't notice that the lights had changed.
A crowd of people stood and stared,
They'd seen his face before;
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords . . .

At the end, the refrain, "I'd love to turn you on," leads to a hair-raising chromatic crescendo by a full orchestra and a final blurred chord that is sustained for 40 seconds, like a trance of escape, or perhaps resignation.

It's a long way from "I want to hold your hand" to "I'd love to turn you on."

In between, the Beatles kept their cool, even when they were decorated by the Queen. They managed to retain the antic charm that had helped make them the rage of Britain and that sparkled on millions of TV screens in February 1964, when America got its first glimpse of them live on the Ed Sullivan Show. Only once did they show a serious lapse in taste: the cover of their 1966 album Yesterday and Today was a photograph of the four wearing butchers' smocks and laden with chunks of raw meat and the bodies of decapitated dolls. Reaction in the U.S. was so violent that Capitol Records pulled it off the market, explaining that it was a misguided attempt at "pop-art satire."

Pilgrimage to Liverpool. Now that the Beatles' music is growing more complex and challenging, they are losing some younger fans. Teeny-boppers, most of whom would rather shriek up than freak out, are turning off at A Day in the Life, doubling back through Strawberry Fields and returning to predictably cute 1964-model Beatles--in the form of such blatantly aping groups as the Monkees.

On the other hand, the youngsters who were the original Beatlemaniacs are themselves older now, and dig the Beatles on a less hysterical level. Two years ago, Kathy Dreyfuss of Los Angeles went on a pilgrimage to the Beatles' home town of Liverpool with her mother. "I was such a screaming fan I couldn't eat or sleep," says Kathy, looking back from the very earnest vantage point of 16. "I realize now I was submerging all my problems in the Beatles. I still like them, but it isn't such a madness. Now their songs are about the things I think about--the world, love, drugs, the way things are."

In exchange for the teeny-boppers, the new Beatles have captivated a different and much more responsive audience. "Suddenly," says George Harrison, "we find that all the people who thought they were beyond the Beatles are fans." That includes not only college students but parents, professors, even business executives.

Hardy Minority. Considering that the Beatles' trademark is offbeat irreverence, their effect on mature audiences is oddly amusing. If the teeny-boppers made the Beatles plaster gods, many adults make them pop prophets, and tend to theorize solemnly, instead of seriously, about their significance. The Rev. B. Davie Napier, dean of the chapel at Stanford University, says that "no entity hits as many sensitive people as these guys do." Napier, who has dwelt in past sermons on Yellow Submarine and Eleanor Rigby, is convinced that Sgt. Pepper "lays bare the stark loneliness and terror of these lonely times," and he plans to focus on the album in an address to freshman students. Atlanta Psychiatrist Tom Leland says that the Beatles "are speaking in an existential way about the meaninglessness of actuality." There is even a womb's-eye view. Chicago Psychiatrist Ner Littner believes that the Beatles' "strong beat seems to awaken echoes of significant early experiences such as the fetal intra-uterine serenity that repetitively reverberates to the mother's heartbeat."

Other over-interpreters include the listeners who--like literary critics dissecting a sonnet--ferret out indirect references in Beatle lyrics and persist in catching a whiff of drugs in such innocuous songs as Yellow Submarine. And there is still the hardy minority that insists on viewing the Beatles as the great put-on of the century.

Derivative Mewing

Not so long ago, the pop scene was going nowhere. Rock 'n' roll had catapulted into the bestseller charts in the 1950s on the chugging riffs of Bill Haley and His Comets (Rock Around the Clock) and the rhythmic caterwauling of Elvis Presley. But even they were bleached-out copies of the vibrant, earthy rhythm-and-blues sung in the subculture of Negro music. Until the early 1960s, rock 'n' roll went through a doldrum of derivative mewing by white singers, with only occasional breakthroughs by such Negroes as Ray Charles and Fats Domino.

The Beatles, along with other British groups--the Rolling Stones, the Animals--revitalized rock by closely imitating (and frankly crediting) such Negro originators of the style as Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Soon the Negro "soul sound" surged into the white mass market. The old-line blues merchants have enjoyed a revival, and a younger, slicker breed of rhythm-and-blues singers--notably Lou Rawls, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross and the Supremes--have taken up commanding positions on the sales charts. "Until the Beatles exposed the origins, the white kids didn't know anything about the music," says Veteran Blues Shouter Waters, 52. "Now they've learned it was in their backyard all the time."

As the Beatles moved on, absorbing and extending Bob Dylan's folk-rock hybrid and sowing innovations of their own, they were like musical Johnny Appleseeds; wherever they went, they left flourishing fields for other groups to cultivate. "They were saying, 'If you want to get better, here's the route,'" says Art Garfunkel, 25, half of the folkrock duo, Simon and Garfunkel. Nowadays, according to Independent Record Producer Charlie Greene, 28, "no matter how hard anybody tries, no matter how good they are, almost everything they do is a cop on the Beatles." Yet the Beatles' example is not limiting but liberating, as other rock musicians have attested with generous praise. Says hefty Cass Elliott of The Mama's and The Papa's: "They're untouchable."

Today, the rock scene has shifted from England back to the U.S., and particularly to the West Coast (some San Franciscans are calling their city the Liverpool of the U.S.). There, as elsewhere in the States, rock is currently in the-midst of a huge syncretic surge toward a new idiom--and the Beatles' wildly eclectic spirit hovers over it all. As the Lovin' Spoonful's songwriter, John Sebastian, says: "Here we are in the middle of the mulch."

Blues, folk, country and western, ragas, psychedelic light and sound effects, swatches of Mahler, jazzlike improvisations--all are spaded into the mulch by such vital and imaginative groups as the Doors, the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Byrds and the new British trio, the Cream. Like the Beatles, most of these groups write their own music and thereby try not only to arrive at their own peculiar mixture of elements, but also to stamp their identity on whatever they do.

Hippie Anthem. None has so far matched the distinctiveness and power of the Beatles' mixture--which, after all, is responsible for having boosted them into their supramusical status. Thus their flirtation with drugs and the dropout attitude behind songs like A Day in the Life disturbs many fans, not to mention worried parents. The whole Sgt. Pepper album is "drenched in drugs," as the editor of a London music magazine puts it. One track features Drummer Ringo Starr quavering, "I get high with a little help from my friends." Another number, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, evokes a drug-induced hallucination, and even the initials of the title spell out LSD, though the Beatles plead sheer coincidence.


The overall theme of drugs is no coincidence

All four Beatles have admitted taking LSD at least occasionally. Yet it is not clear whether their songs are meant to proselytize in behalf of drugs or simply to deal with them as a subject of the moment. In the most recent Beatle pronouncement about LSD Paul McCartney said: "I don't recommend it. It can open a few doors, but it's not any answer. You get the answers yourself."

Some segments of the Beatles' audience read messages into the songs that may never have been intended. The hippie brigade, for example, has adopted as an anthem of sorts She's Leaving Home, which tells of a runaway girl whose parents gave her everything money could buy but no happiness. "Man, that's the story of the hippies," says one of them. A 15 year-old boy who left home to become a hippie interprets the Beatles' songs as a put-down of his parents: "They're saying all the things I always wanted to say to my parents and their freaky friends."

Blowing Away Cobwebs. Even the Beatles' nonmusical utterances tend to take on the tone and weight of social prophecy. "Only Hitler ever duplicated their power over crowds," says Sid Bernstein, who organized their three New York concerts. "I'm convinced they could sway a presidential election if they wanted to." If that is far-fetched, the fact remains that when the Beatles talk--about drugs, the war in Viet Nam, religion--millions listen, and this is a new situation in the pop music world.

It is not altogether a bad situation, either. And it could be worse. At least the fact that nobody ever bothered to ask Elvis Presley about anything indicates a certain level of discrimination. In any case, callow as their ideas sometimes are, the Beatles exemplify a refreshing distrust of authority, disdain for conventions and impatience with hypocrisy. "I think they're on to something," says their friend Richard Lester, 35, who directed their two films. "They are more inclined to blow away the cobwebs than my contemporaries."

Kids sense a quality of defiant honesty in the Beatles and admire their freedom and open-mindedness; they see them as peers who are in a position to try anything, and who can be relied on to tell it to them straight--and to tell them what they want to hear. As for the parents who are targets of the Beatles' satirical gibes, they seem to be able to take a large number of direct hits and still come up smiling. Says Chicago Public Relations Man Walter Robinson, 39, father of three boys: "The Beatles are explorers, trusty advance, scouts. I like them to report to my kids."

Within the Maze. Characteristically, the Beatles are uncomfortable on their pedestals and soapboxes. They have always insisted, as Paul McCartney says, that "the fan at my gate knows really that she's equal to me, and I take care to tell her that." John Lennon's remark that "we're more popular than Jesus," which set off an anti-Beatle furor last year, was not a boast but an expression of disgust. Though he phrased it ineptly, he was posing the question: What kind of world is it that makes more fuss over a pop cult than over religion?

To discourage fuss, the Beatles lead their private lives within a maze of high hedges and walls, security guards and secret telephone numbers

Even John Lennon's art-nouveau Rolls-Royce, painted with a rainbow of swirling floral patterns on a bright yellow background, has smoked one-way glass in the side and rear windows to keep the curious from peeking in. The boys make occasional outings to such London nightspots as The Bag of Nails and The Speakeasy, but must plan them with a military eye for the element of surprise and a ready path of retreat in case they are mobbed. Only in the past few months has it become possible for them to walk through the city like ordinary mortals. Ringo Starr explains the fine points of the art: "If you're not dodging and running, you don't get people excited. If you take it cool and just trot about, they leave you."

Otherwise the Beatles live in a style that is quietly luxurious--as well it might be, considering their income from records, films, television appearances, song publishing and copyright royalties, and assorted tie-ins with Beatle merchandise. The most conservative estimates put the net worth of Harrison and Starr at $3,000,000 each, and of Lennon and McCartney at $4,000,000 (because of their extra earnings as songwriters). The figures could easily be twice as high.

Stockbroker Belt. The three married Beatles and their look-alike wives own large homes in Weybridge, part of the suburban "stockbroker belt," 40 minutes from London. John, 26, his wife Cynthia, a former art student, and their four-year-old son Julian, live in a Tudor mansion with a swimming pool. Like the other Beatles, John has a taste for outlandishly gaudy outfits custom tailored in brocades, silks and the like, for gadgets (five TV sets, uncounted tape recorders and cameras), and eccentric collections (a huge altar cross, a suit of armor called Sidney).

Down the hill from John is Sunny Heights, the 15-room tile-and-stucco digs where Ringo, 27, wallows in domesticity with Wife Maureen, a former Liverpool hairdresser, and Sons Zak, 2, and month-old Jason. Ringo, who never practices drums between Beatle performances, has made his place the group's unofficial clubhouse; on the spacious grounds are a treehouse and an old air-raid shelter, and indoors an elaborate bar named The Flying Cow.

George, 24, the newest Beatle husband (he married London Model Patti Boyd early last year), lives near by in a big white bungalow. He and his friends are daubing the outside walls with colorful cartoons, flowers and abstract designs, some in fluorescent paint that shines in the daylight. Unlike Ringo, he practices a great deal, and his music room is strewn with 12 guitars.

Bachelor Paul, 25 (his favorite "bird" is 21 -year-old Actress Jane Asher), is a movie addict, loves "the look of London," tools around town in a spiffy blue Aston Martin DB 5. He lives in a high-walled house in the city's prosperous St. John's Wood neighborhood--oddly furnished, for a Beatle in a tastefully quaint style, including an oldfashioned lace tablecloth on the diningroom table--and has daily bouts of "bashing" at the piano, which he has never quite learned to play.

Victorian Shadows


The Beatles keep in touch constantly, bounding in and out of each other's homes like members of a single large family--which, in a sense, they are. Their friendship is an extraordinarily intimate and empathetic bond. When all four are together, even close friends like Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones sense invisible barriers thrown up between themselves and outsiders. "We're still our own best friends," each says.

With good reason. Not only are they welded together by the sheer fact of being the Beatles, but they also share a common lower-middle-class background in the sooty, Victorian shadows of Liverpool. Paul, the son of a cotton salesman, and John, who was raised by an aunt after his father deserted the family, were playing together as early as 1955. George, whose father was a bus driver, joined them in 1958. Two years later they met Ringo (born Richard Starkey), a docker's son. Their families were dubious about musical careers. "If Paul had listened to me," says Jim McCartney wryly, "he would have been a teacher." But the boys persisted. Besides the musical satisfaction, playing in a band was a way to be somebody especially with the local girls-to make some money and exert their nonconformity. And after they linked up with Brian Epstein, the elegant would-be actor and son of a wealthy Liverpool furniture retailer, it was a way to get out of Liverpool. Epstein shrewdly piloted their career until his death last month at 32 TIME, Sept. 8).

So tightly knit is the quartet that a leading idea for their next movie is to present them as separate manifestations of a single person. They constitute a four-way plug-in personality, each sparking the circuit in his own way. Paul outgoing and talkative, spreads a sheen of charm; he is the smoother-over, the explainer, as pleasingly facile at life as he is at composing melodies. George, once the least visible of the group, now focuses his energies on Indian music and philosophy; an occasional contributor to the Beatle songbook, he is the most accomplished instrumentalist of the lot (he has always played lead guitar).

Ringo, a thoroughly unpretentious fellow, is also the most innately comic temperament; he is the catalyst, and also the deflator, of the crew. Most mysterious of all--and possibly most important--is John, the creative mainspring, who has lately grown strangely brooding and withdrawn; he is more thoughtful and tough-minded than the others, reads voraciously. His telephone is usually answered by a tape-recorded voice, asking the caller to leave a message. But Lennon rarely returns calls, instead, so the story goes, plays the tapes over and over with maniacal glee.

Recipe for Orchestra. Since the Beatles gave up touring a year ago, each has had more freedom to tackle individual pursuits. John has a major acting assignment in the forthcoming Richard Lester film called How I Won the War; Paul tried his hand at a movie sound track and wrote a fine score for the current release, The Family Way. But their most rewarding activity is still as a group--making records.

They have transformed themselves from a "live" performing team to an experimental laboratory group, and they have staked out the recording studio as their own electronic rumpus room. To achieve the weird effects on Sgt. Pepper, they spent as much as 20 hours on a song, often working through the night. The startling crescendo in A Day in the Life illustrates their bold, erratic, but strikingly successful method. Says Paul: "Once we'd written the main bit of the music, we thought, now look, there's a little gap there; and we said oh, how about an orchestra? Yes, that'll be nice. And if we do have an orchestra, are we going to write them a pseudoclassical thing, which has been done better by people who know how to make it sound like that--or are we going to do it like we write songs? Take a guess and use instinct. So we said, right, what we'll do to save all the arranging, we'll take the whole orchestra as one instrument. And we just wrote it down like a cooking recipe: 24 bars; on the ninth bar, the orchestra will take off, and it will go from its lowest note to its highest note."

The 41-piece orchestra, as it turned out, consisted mostly of members of the New Philharmonia, who had trouble following the recipe

Unaccustomed to ad-libbing, they had to be cajoled by John and Paul, who threaded among the musicians, urging them to play at different tempos and to please try not to stay together. Partly as a result of filling that "gap," the Sgt. Pepper album cost three months of work and $56,000--which is about as much as it costs to record five albums for London's New Philharmonia Orchestra.

Sound Pictures. Such recording practices are early steps in a brand-new field. George Martin, the producer whose technical midwifery is helping to make the steps possible, likens them to the shift from representational painting to abstractionism. "Until recently," he says, "the aim has been to reproduce sounds as realistically as possible. Now we are working with pure sound. We are building sound pictures."

In fact, some observers predict that "sound pictures" may prove to be the medium through which the Beatles--and the more adventurous rock groups in their wake--can merge with "classical" contemporary music. Already, says Robert Tusler, who teaches 20th century music at U.C.L.A., "the Beatles have taken over many of the electronic concepts in music that have been worked on by the German composers of the Cologne group. They've made an enormous contribution to electronic music."

Whatever else it comes to, the Beatles' approach to recording Sgt. Pepper will serve as a model for future sessions. And the boys themselves will be commanding more and more of the technical operations. "We haven't pushed George Martin out of the engineers' booth," says McCartney, "but we've become equals. The music has more to do with electronics now than ever before. To do those things a few years ago was a bit immoral. But electronics is no longer immoral."

In their other enterprises too, the Beatles are reaching out for total artistic autonomy. They are talking about directing their next film themselves. Last week they careened through the southwest English countryside filming Magical Mystery Tour, an hour-long TV special, for worldwide broadcast during the Christmas season. They are not only providing music but writing, directing, producing and financing as well. When it is wrapped up to their satisfaction, they will offer it to the highest bidder. And they have already written songs--later this year they may do a full score--for a forthcoming feature-length animated cartoon based on Yellow Submarine.

Filling the Gap. Unlike the occasional celebrity who grows to believe his own publicity and uses it as a license, the Beatles have maintained their good humor and, apart from toying with drugs, their exemplary behavior. But fame and instant millions also have a way of inflicting private agonies on public personalities. The Beatles' current solution is spiritualism, specifically "transcendental meditation," as propounded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 56, a tiny, cherubic seer with shoulderlength locks. The yogi, unfortunately, is somewhat less than lucid when it comes to describing his insights. Two 30-minute sessions of transcendental meditation a day, he says, enable a person to perceive the divinity within himself. "It is the direct, simple and natural way of coming to That." What's That? Replies Maharishi: "I am That, you are That, all this is That."

That's good enough for John, Paul, Ringo and George, who plan to take two months off to study with Maharishi at his Academy of Meditation in Shankaracharya, Kashmir

"The four of us," explains Ringo, "have had the most hectic lives. We have got almost anything money can buy. But when you can do that, the things you buy mean nothing after a time. You look for something else, for a new experience. It's like your Dad going to the boozer and you want to find out what the taste of drink is like. We have found something now which fills the gap. Since meeting His Holiness, I feel great."

The feeling is mutual. Says His Holiness: "I can bring them up as very practical philosophers of their age. They can do a great deal for the youth which they lead." Precisely what marvels the yogi has in store for his disciples is a good question. Yet for openers he has persuaded the Beatles to renounce drugs. Paul claims that he now realizes that taking drugs was "like taking an aspirin without having a headache." Says' John: "If we'd met Maharishi before we had taken LSD, we wouldn't have needed to take it." Skeptics notwithstanding, the Beatles could well be on to something fruitful again, which may find expression in who knows what strange new musical forms.

And what, after all, could be a more fitting philosophy than transcendentalism for the Beatles, who have repeatedly transcended the constricting identities foisted on them by press and public, whose whole career has been a transcendent, heel-clicking leap right over pop music's high Himalayas? On the basis of what they have achieved so far, it would be rash to dispute George when he says: "We haven't really started yet. We've only just discovered what we can do as musicians, what thresholds we can cross. The future stretches out beyond our imagination."

Something you can't see that isn't shown...

by Dave Haber

The fortieth anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band passed on June 1, 2007, with no release of anything special from Apple Records. The fortieth anniversary of the White Album similarly passed on November 22 of last year. There's been no official Beatles releases since 2006, Capitol Albums Volume 2 in April and the Love soundtrack later that November.

Now, it appears something is possibly up at Apple Records. An observant Beatles fan has noticed that in the "sites" section of The Beatles' official website www.thebeatles.com, there is a link, and actually a thumbnail representation of the homepage, to an official "Sgt. Pepper's" site.
Only problem is, the link is broken, there is no "Sgt. Pepper's" site.
What could this mean? All the other "sites" at thebeatles.com are sites to promote their recent products, going back to Beatles 1 and Anthology, the movies Help! and Yellow Submarine, and the more recent releases of the Capitol Albums, Let It Be Naked and Love. So, does this mean a new official release from Apple somehow involving Sgt. Pepper's is on the horizon?

Our unofficial, anonymous, industry sources can only say they've heard of no plans for a new release of Sgt. Pepper's. It's possible the new site is related to the recent news that Cheap Trick would be bringing a show to Las Vegas recreating the Sgt. Pepper's album, but we were under the impression that's not yet a done deal. Or it could be something totally different.
BTW, I've heard from fans who say they think it was just something left over from a feature about the album on it's fortieth anniversary. That's possible, but I've checked the Internet Wayback Machine (www.archive.org) and there is no mention of anything about Sgt. Pepper's on thebeatles.com in June, July, August or even later in October of 2007.

Stay tuned, when we learn more, you'll see it here...

The Beatles - RKO Radio Biography

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With the Beatles in India - Part 6

by Paul Saltzman

These are excerpts from the new, Deluxe Limited Edition, box-set book, The Beatles in India. The time that John, Paul, George and Ringo spent at the Ashram in India, in 1968, was the single most creative period in their illustrious careers--they were inspired to write 48 songs in the few weeks they were there. But the real reason they went to India was to find inner peace: George Harrison shared this with me in one of the many intimate times I was fortunate to spend with the Fab Four.

Part 5 here or start from here

Dear Prudence

Walking toward Raghvendra's quarters, I met Prudence and Mia Farrow out for a stroll. We greeted each other. Prudence stopped. Then Mia.

"You're the fellow from the hotel in Delhi, aren't you? You came to our room." Prudence turned to her sister. "Mia, this is the guy who brought you that lovely, big yellow mum." Mia brightened. "That was so good of you." Mia took my hand for a moment and smiled. "That was such a horrible day. We'd just arrived from New York, exhausted from the long flight, and then that press thing happened. But your generosity made a difference." I said I was glad, and after a few more warm words we parted. Later that day, I learned that Mia and I had something in common, and that was the reason we'd both come to Rishikesh. We had each gone to hear the Maharishi lecture, she in Boston just a month beforehand, hoping to find a salve for the pain of heartbreak, searching for a new self-respect by going within, irrespective of the love of others.

It was Prudence who had actually introduced Mia to meditation. At the ashram, Prudence immersed herself in meditation for such long hours that she didn't come out for her meals, having a tray set outside her door. After a while she stayed in her room around the clock. She was either blissed-out or, as one of the Beatles later voiced, flipping out. Either way, it became a cause of great concern and George, followed by John and Paul, tried to get her to come out. Prudence wouldn't even answer the door. I would be gone by then, but eventually, after three weeks of Prudence's staying in her room, John and Paul took their guitars and serenaded her through her locked door and drawn curtains, singing a little ditty John wrote for the occasion. It worked. The drapes moved slightly and Prudence looked out. After a moment, a slight smile animated her face and eventually she emerged. The little ditty was Dear Prudence and it became part of the Beatles' next album--The Beatles--widely known as The White Album.

Within You, Without You


The next day, I sat with the Beatles overlooking the Ganges. After chai, everyone left except George and me. Sitting alone with him I felt shy, awkward. George was quiet and intense, but friendly. He was then just a few days away from his twenty-fifth birthday. I told him I loved Norwegian Wood and asked him how long he had played the sitar.

"A little over two years," he answered. "It was when we made Help. We were filming and there was a sitar around. I was curious and fooled around with it on the set. But, the first time I really listened to sitar music was off a Ravi Shankar album. Later, I met him in London and asked him to teach me. He agreed, but it wasn't until I came here with Pattie, to Bombay where Ravi lives, and studied with him that I really got deeply into it. And into India and all it has to offer, spiritually and otherwise."

A baby monkey dropped down onto the far end of our table from the thatched roof above, scampered four or five feet towards us, grabbed a crust of bread lying there and chattered off, noisily. We both laughed at its apparent pleasure. "I'm going to practice for a while. Would you like to come and have a listen?" George asked.

We walked over to his bungalow and into a small meditation room, about eight feet by ten feet, with only a white futon on the floor and his sitar. George sat cross-legged near the center of the room and I sat facing him a few feet away, my back resting against the wall. He gently nestled the large gourd at the base of the sitar against the sole of his left foot, as soft sunlight filtered through the slightly dusty windowpanes. Everything was glowing. I could smell the faint aroma of sandalwood incense from somewhere outside as George closed his eyes and began to play. As the multilayered music, like a kaleidoscope of exquisite colours, filled the small room my eyes closed and I drifted dreamily on the waves of sound. Time shifted. It seemed to slow down. He played an Indian raga for fifteen minutes, or maybe it was forty. As he finished, the musical reverberations slowly fading into silence, I felt a soft, delicious feeling of peace. When I opened my eyes, he was gently laying his sitar back down. The sunlight had shifted across the futons and there was an vibrant, soothing aura in the room.

In the relaxed conversation that followed, he told me that his wife Pattie had learned transcendental meditation first and then got him interested. The Beatles' interest in meditation and spirituality had begun several years before Rishikesh. George was influenced by the writings of the Indian scholar and sage Vivekananda and had been exploring the spiritual aspects of life for some time. As he found exciting books or passages, he would share them with John, Ringo, and Paul. As they delved into deeper spiritual questions they found drugs less capable of helping them find the inner answers they were looking for. Earlier, smoking marijuana and hashish, and taking LSD for fun and for exploring consciousness, had brought some positive results manifested in their songs. In time, though, drugs became somewhat of a dead end. I had experienced this as well.

On August 24, 1967, the Maharishi was giving an introductory lecture at the Hilton Hotel in London and Pattie and George took the other Beatles along to hear him speak. Afterward, they went backstage for a private meeting. They were drawn to his message and the Maharishi invited them to leave with him the next morning by train for a ten-day meditation retreat in Wales. But, after only one day at the retreat, they learned of the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, and returned to London. When the Maharishi returned to the city they continued to study with him and he invited them to Rishikesh for the three-month intensive meditation course.

I asked him what meditation was like for him. He was quiet for awhile, and thoughtful: "Meditation and Maharishi have helped make the inner life rich for me. The meditation buzz is incredible. I get higher than I ever did with drugs. It's simple, the vibration is on the astral plane, and it's my way of connecting with God." He was silent for a moment, and with a profound modesty he added, "Like, we're the Beatles after all, aren't we? We have all the money you could ever dream of. We have all the fame you could ever wish for. But, isn't love. It isn't health. It isn't peace inside. Is it?" He gave me a dear, even loving smile. Neither of us spoke for several minutes.

Sometimes, it's only much later that we realize the impact another person has had on us. I've never forgotten his words. Only years later would I realize that, in that moment, George changed my life. He was one of my heroes and he was pointing the way, telling me where to 'find myself'. Not outside myself, in money or fame or anything else external, but within myself. He was also telling me that that's also why he and the other Beatles were there--to find something deeper within themselves. In time, I would come to understand that it's a universal journey: To know ourselves, to like ourselves, profoundly, to be self-realized, we must journey within. George and I sat quietly a while longer, and then we went out into the warm winter sun.

(End)

Looking back at Ghandi and the Beatles

An article today about the connections between Ghandi and the Beatles in The Times of India reminds us that way back in 1967, John Lennon was very keen to have Gandhi on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

Fellow Beatle Sir Paul McCartney was quoted as saying, "The idea of having Mahatma Gandhi was dropped as head of EMI Sir Joe Lockwood said the album might not be released in India if his picture was used."

Ghandi shown in alternate Sgt. Pepper's photo

In other connections between The Beatles and Ghandi, the article also points out that John Lennon once said, "I refuse to be a leader and I will do something which prevents me from being Martin Luther King or Gandhi and getting killed." Ironically, he was murdered in New York one month later.

Also, George Harrison quoted Gandhi after the break-up of the Beatles. He said, "I don't say I am Beatle George. I certainly am going to control my own concept of myself. Gandhi says create and preserve the image of your choice."

Read The Article: Imagine, Gandhi on Beatles album cover (From The Times of India)

AHMEDABAD: Mahatma Gandhi and lead Beatle John Lennon sported similar round frame glasses. Gandhi had fought against the British but this Liverpool
boy was inspired, like so many others around the world, with this great Gujarati’s idea of pacifism.

It may interest everyone; including foreign delegates pouring in for Vibrant Gujarat, that way back in 1967 Lennon was very keen to have Gandhi on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

Fellow Beatle Sir Paul McCartney is quoted as saying, “The idea of having Mahatma Gandhi was dropped as head of EMI Sir Joe Lockwood said the album might not be released in India if his picture was used.” Lennon once said, “I refuse to be a leader and I will do something which prevents me from being Martin Luther King or Gandhi and getting killed.” Ironically, he was murdered one month later in New York on December 8, 1980.

Another Beatle, George Harrison, quoted Gandhi after the break-up of the band: “I don’t say I am Beatle George. I certainly am going to control my own concept of myself. Gandhi says create and preserve the image of your choice.”

Gandhi was the last great idea to come out of Gujarat, a state now going for an image makeover. Gandhi’s initial support and push came from the textile barons, largely Jains, of Ahmedabad, then known as Manchester of the East. Besides being patriotic, they sensed a business opportunity in ‘Swadeshi’—it meant more consumption of cloth they produced. Most of Ahmedabad’s textile mills in fact did good business during The Great Depression when India’s freedom struggle was peaking.

The Beatles’ indulgence in alcohol and experiments with drugs is well known. McCartney was arrested at Tokyo airport and spent time in a Japanese jail for carrying marijuana. This was one area where The Beatles differed with Gandhi. But his legacy has ensured that Gujarat stays a ‘prohibition’ state where consumption of liquor without permits, which are extremely restricted and only number around 25,000 in a population of 55 million, is a crime.

First-time offenders get to sweep the Gandhi Ashram as penance. Try all the same. If you get caught, the ashram is a
must-see anyway. And yes, Lennon loved the Japanese. He married one — Yoko Ono. The other affair is now on, with Japan a partner in Vibrant Gujarat.

Hard Day’s Night for Beatles Reissues

If you still believe in Santa Claus, you might also have expected to wake up on Christmas morning and find an iPod stocked with the long-promised reissues of all the Beatles albums. But if you know the shocking truth about Santa, you probably know that the vaunted Beatles reissues don’t exist either, outside the vaults of EMI, the group’s record label, and Apple, the company the band set up in 1967 to oversee its interests.

Fans who had hoped for a remastered Beatles catalog have had to settle for mementos like a $395 “White Album” pen.

Other long-anticipated Apple projects, like DVD versions of the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert and the “Let It Be” film, failed to turn up for the holidays as well. And if you put any faith in Paul McCartney’s passing mention, in November, that the 1967 avant-garde track “Carnival of Light” might be released, don’t hold your breath: this track has been dangled before (about a decade ago, when Mr. McCartney used it as the soundtrack of an unreleased “photofilm,” made from photographs of the Beatles taken by his first wife, Linda).

Indeed, whenever Mr. McCartney releases a new album (as he did the week “Carnival of Light” was mentioned), reports of “long-lost” Beatles tracks that “might be released” suddenly surface, but the recordings themselves do not.

Even the most believable of reports, floated by EMI insiders, proved fruitless this year. During the summer EMI was said to be preparing a deluxe remastered edition of the “The Beatles” (popularly known as “The White Album”) to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its release. The anniversary came and went, with no sign of the reissue.

Instead, Apple sent e-mail messages to fans directing them to beatles.com, the official Web site, where they could celebrate the anniversary by buying a $395 “White Album” fountain pen. Also on offer were a “White Album” hoodie and T-shirts. Presumably, the wizards at Apple think people will want these things in time for the Beatles edition of Rock Band, the computer game to which the group agreed, this fall, to lend its name and music.

What’s wrong with this picture?

It is not for lack of interest at either end of the food chain that the Beatles can’t manage to get upgraded versions of their classic recordings onto the market, except by way of a video game or a site-specific show (Cirque du Soleil’s “Love,” in Las Vegas).

EMI, which owns the group’s recordings, remastered them at least two years ago. According to a 1989 agreement that ended 20 years of lawsuits between the Beatles and EMI, the label can do nothing without an O.K. from Apple. But Apple is supposedly keen: early in 2007 it hired Jeff Jones, a record executive whose last job was overseeing historical reissues for the superb Sony Legacy series.

There would have been no reason to hire someone with that background if archival reissues were not in the company’s plans, and since Apple acts only with the unanimous consent of its four shareholders — Mr. McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison — presumably all four have agreed to a release program, at least in principle.

And how many record labels, just now, are facing an army of consumers who are saying, in effect: “We’ve bought this music several times already — on mono and stereo LPs, on picture discs and audiophile vinyl, perhaps on cassette and most recently on CD — but please, we beg you, sell it to us again.”

So what’s the holdup? No one is willing to say, but Mr. McCartney recently asserted that EMI was demanding an unspecified concession that the Beatles were unwilling to make.

Frankly, the reasons hardly matter at this point: to collectors awaiting these releases, either on physical CDs (improved sound being the main point of remastering) or as digital downloads (where convenience trumps audiophile considerations), the inability of Apple and EMI to get this music onto the market is a symbol of how pathetic the record business has become, and how dysfunctional Apple continues to be. On Beatles chat boards and Web sites, the $395 pen, in particular, was greeted with derision.

This must be intensely frustrating for Mr. Jones; in fact, people close to EMI and Apple say he has a significant list of projects that he would love to release. But in the nearly two years he’s been at Apple, he has presided over the video game agreement and a DVD documentary about the making of the “Love” show (which, in truth, includes a few revealing moments, showing the difficulties of dealing with Apple’s shareholders, from Cirque du Soleil’s point of view).

While EMI and Apple have been squabbling, collectors have taken matters into their own hands, pooling unreleased tracks and compiling anthologies that are far more ambitious than anything EMI is likely to release. Usually, these unauthorized desktop bootleg projects (which are of course illegal) have attractive cover art and copious annotations, and these days money rarely changes hands for them: the people who compile them distribute them freely (and encourage others to do so) either on home-burned CDs and DVDs or, increasingly, on the Internet.

Some are curatorial masterpieces. A label called Purple Chick has assembled deluxe editions of each commercially released album, offering the original discs in their mono and stereo mixes, along with the singles (also in mono and stereo) released at the time, as well as every known demo, studio outtake and alternative mix.

Drawing mostly on an earlier generation of less obsessively organized bootlegs and adding otherwise unbootlegged rarities when they turn up, Purple Chick has generally chosen the best-sounding and most complete takes (editing together fragments where necessary) and has done some speed correction and other sonic tweaking.

It offers upgrades, as well: when copies of the unmixed, unedited four-track masters of four songs from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” began circulating at the end of last year, Purple Chick revised its “Sgt. Pepper” compilation to accommodate them.

So if you wanted to celebrate the anniversary of “The White Album,” you could turn to Purple Chick’s “Beatles Deluxe,” which covers 10 CDs. And if you want to begin the new year by commemorating the 40th anniversary of the “Let It Be” sessions, which ran from Jan. 2 to 31, 1969, you still have a few days to find Purple Chick’s “A/B Road,” which offers nearly 96 hours of those sessions on 83 CDs.

It can be a slog — songs are rehearsed endlessly — but its best moments are magical. Along with discussions, fights and jam sessions, you hear classic tracks coming together, from the first time one of the Beatles walks the others through its chord progression, straight through to the finished arrangement, with lyrics taking shape along the way.

Purple Chick has also compiled the group’s BBC radio performances on 10 CDs and a CD-ROM (compared with EMI’s two-CD official release), and is currently working its way through all the available concert recordings.

Another label, Lazy Tortoise, is compiling chronologically all the Beatles’ television and radio interviews. And on DVD, the FAB label is doing the same with the group’s film and television appearances, from 1962 to the present.

Nobody who collects these things would hesitate to buy officially released archival projects, if only Apple and EMI would release them. Perhaps by the time the 40th anniversary of the “Abbey Road” album rolls around, on Sept. 26, Apple and EMI will have gotten it together.

Thanks to The New York Times Electronic Edition.

So, let's go on! Playing The Beatles Backwards: The Ultimate Countdown Part 3

By JBev

To most Beatles fans, choosing between the songs of the Fab 4 is a bit like choosing between children. But, on the JamsBio exclusive, Playing The Beatles Backwards, one intrepid fan dares to rank the original songs of The Beatles and give his reasons why in a worst-to-first countdown. Prepare to hit the message boards to defend your favorites, and follow the countdown all the way to Number 1.

165. “You Like Me Too Much”

My, my, we think pretty highly ourselves, don’t we, George? Here we have a song in which Mr. Harrison practically taunts his girl to leave him, knowing full well that it would never happen. (He is a Beatle, for Pete’s sake.) He also exhibits some stalker tendencies when he admits that if she does indeed try to leave, he’d track her down. These are not the kind of warm-and-fuzzy sentiments that race up the pop charts.
The song is also a victim of a bit of fussiness as far as the arrangement is concerned. While making the Help! soundtrack album, The Beatles began to take their first tentative steps away from their usual guitar-bass-drums set-up and experiment with instrumental flourishes. Keyboards are featured prominently on this song, with John chipping in on electric and Paul and George Martin doing a kind of dueling piano thing throughout.
While this type of sound expansion would become de rigueur later on and become one of their hallmarks, on Help!, the results were hit and miss. I’m not sure that you can say here that the keyboards add very much to the finished product.
Harrison wouldn’t really hit his stride as a composer for about another year or so. In songs like this, he seems to be trying to match the Lennon-McCartney hitmaking style, but he always lacked the pair’s facility with killer hooks. It was just a matter of time before he carved out his own songwriting niche and churned out songs that would rival the others in terms of quality, if not quantity.

164. “Maggie Mae”

So we hit a bit of a gray area with this song. It technically was not written by The Beatles, as it is a traditional Liverpool folk ballad dating back to the 1800’s. Fitting right in with the anything-goes spirit of Let It Be, this tiny snippet of the song, played during their endless rehearsals, was pasted onto the finished album.
But, if you check the credits on the actual Let It Be record, you’ll see the songwriter listed as “Trad. Arr. Lennon-McCartney-Harrison-Starkey.” And the traditional folk ballad is “Maggie May,” spelled like the similarly titled but completely different Rod Stewart hit. By changing the final “y” in the name to “e,” The Beatles could get around come copyright issues.
It can also be debated how much “arranging” was actually done on the song, since the group had been playing it practically since they were formed and probably never put much thought into it on the day it was recorded, since it was just a way to warm up for more important matters. And McCartney mustn’t have thought much of it anyway, since he left it off of the Let It Be…Naked rerelease he spearheaded a few years back.
All of this hoo-hah for a song that’s barely 40 seconds long and features Lennon singing in a nearly indecipherable Liverpudlian brogue. It was just a lark, so we’ll leave it on the list and move on.

163. “Tell Me What You See”

This lightweight McCartney shuffle doesn’t exactly set the world on fire, but it does have its charms. Alas, the lyrics aren’t chief among them, as Paul stretches them to the breaking point in an attempt to fit the rhyme and meter. (The line “I’ll make bright your day” is a prime example; you can almost hear E.B. White in his grave pursing his lips in disapproval.)
What it does have going for it are inventive instrumental touches that give the song some life that it might not have had in a more basic style. Exotic percussion sneaks around at the edges to complement Ringo’s nifty little stop-and-start beat. And the piano parts are effective here as well. Throw in some nice harmonies adding some zip to a typically solid melody from Paul, and you have a decent little filler.
We mentioned two songs ago on the list about the haphazard results of The Beatles experimentation on Help!. The stuff that failed on “You Like Me Too Much,” which might be the catchier song of the two when stripped down, works well to lift “Tell Me What You See.” The band was still feeling this process out, but it would pay big dividends down the road.
So feel free to overlook the obviousness of the lyrics. (Who else is she going to see, Paul? You’re standing right in front of her.) Instead, bounce your head along to the catchy beat knowing that songs like this one played a small but instrumental role on the way to the masterpieces to come.

162. “Thank You Girl”

You can tell that this is one of the Beatles’ earliest numbers because of the presence of harmonica, which John Lennon apparently had welded to his lip at the end of 1962 and then surgically removed in 1964. It was an attempt at an early single but instead ended up as the B-side to “From Me To You.”
Lennon and McCartney clearly had ulterior motives here, as they later admitted in interviews that the song was a shout-out to all their female fans. The boys knew that every single Beatle-loving female in England would hear the “Girl” in the title and think that their idols were singing directly to them. Commence swooning.
The harmonies on this song stand out. I like the way that John and Paul sing the same notes in the first line of each verse before Paul soars up above John in the second line. It’s a nifty little trick that highlights how well their two voices meshed, an underrated facet of the group.
This is also an example of the two songwriters working together to write a song, as they did often in those first years. I always have a soft spot for those collaborative efforts, because you can hear the camaraderie between the two. Just visualize John and Paul, the greatest rock and roll songwriting team ever, sitting in a room with their guitars, calling out lines to one another and toying with the melody. If you do, even a little trifle like “Thank You Girl” sounds extremely poignant.

161. “I’ll Cry Instead”

Many of the songs that were written for A Hard Day’s Night that didn’t make the final cut for the actual motion picture differed somewhat from the typical Lennon/McCartney fare of that period, whether in tone, sound or lyrical content. “I’ll Cry Instead” is one example.
At first listen it seems like a rushed country-style throwaway, over and done with in about 1:45 or so and forgotten just as quickly. Maybe Lennon wanted it that way, because the lyrics provided a glimpse into his mindset at the time that he seemed reluctant to provide.
After the first verse sets up the song as a run-of-the-mill brokenhearted lament, the second begins to shed some interesting light on the songwriter’s situation. “I got a chip on my shoulder that’s bigger than my feet/I can’t talk to people that I meet.” Suddenly this sounds less like the lament of a generic romantic wannabe and more like the very specific domain of one John Lennon, a rock star with the world at his feet yet unable to communicate his daily distress.
More of the same insecurity and anguish come through in the bridge: “I get shy when they start to stare/I’m gonna hide myself away.” Sadly, in the last verse he pulls back, relying on false bravado and shutting out any further speculation.
It’s too bad that Lennon wasn’t quite ready to expose himself in a more accessible fashion, choosing to mask these feelings in a song that would recede on the album behind smash hits like the title cut and “Can’t Buy Me Love.” “I’ll Cry Instead” represents a missed opportunity: a truly revealing self-portrait reduced to paint-by-numbers.

160. “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey”

We delve back into the wild and woolly White Album Disc 2 for this one, a raucous, firebell-laden raver courtesy of John Lennon. It seems like it’s more of an idea than a fully realized song, but Lennon gives it his all, scream-singing the lyrics with an abandon that feels positively cathartic.
It turns out the song may have indeed been a way for John to blow off some steam, as he later claimed that he was indeed referring to himself and Yoko and how the rest of the world had gone crazy around them, yet they remained blissfully oblivious. (And for the rest of the world, you can read that phrase as codename for a certain trio of bandmates whose names rhyme with Saul, Blorge, and Schmingo.)
I’m not quite buying Lennon’s claims of love-induced euphoria throughout these notoriously tense sessions. Maybe on the day he recorded the song he felt “such a joy,” but I get the feeling that he was as fidgety as everybody else during this time. Why else would he and Paul jokingly refer to the band around that time as “Los Paranoias”?
While many could read way into it and see “monkey” as a drug reference, I think John was innocent on that count. This song is too much of a throwaway to be sinister, so let’s take it at face value. It’s a shade more than two minutes worth of unhinged rock silliness, and it’s nice to hear The Beatles could have a little fun even in the darkest days.

159. “One After 909”

Delving back into their distant past, The Beatles unearthed, for Let It Be, one of the first songs that John Lennon ever wrote. They tried to record “One After 909” in an early 60’s sessions in an attempt to turn it into a possible single, but it never came together. You can hear these futile tries on Anthology 1, and you can understand why the song was shelved.
On Let It Be, with little to lose at that point, the group ripped into it and turned out a much better version than they ever could have in the early days. Those initial stabs at the song depict four youngsters trying awful hard to get everything just so, and that effort snuffs all the life out of it. But, by 1969, they were working with the confidence that seven straight years of unprecedented success had bred. They get inside the song and inhabit it, pulling it here and there instrumentally while Lennon and McCartney barrel through the harmonies.
That said, I’ve always been of the opinion that Billy Preston’s musical contributions were negligible at best. While it can’t be denied that his presence helped keep the band from engaging in steel-cage bitch sessions in the studio, his organ, to me, left a lot of the songs on which he played with a dated feel, and this song is an example. I actually think that in the haste to assemble Let It Be as all parties began to go their separate ways in 1970, Phil Spector and co. left many of Preston’s finer efforts on the cutting-room floor (like his soulful work on the unused version of “The Long And Winding Road.”)
As for “One After 90,” it certainly sounds like it was written by a 17-year-old. (I think the song may have been the main parodistic target of Spinal Tap’s “All The Way Home,” a train song that was the alleged first songwriting effort of the fictional band.) But it is powerful to hear The Beatles, on the verge of severing, revisiting a song they played when what they eventually accomplished was still nothing more than a dream. That’s why Let It Be, originally meant as a celebration of roots, instead unintentionally became a sad portrait of dissolution. There would be no getting back from this.

158. “I Want To Tell You”

Leave it to George Harrison to write a song about not having anything good to say. “I Want To Tell You”, found on Revolver, has George at a loss for words whenever he gets near the object of his affection. But this isn’t merely schoolboy shyness. You get the feeling here that what George has roiling inside of him is far too deep for anyone to convey.
That stuttering, indecisive approach to the lyrics would be mimicked by John Lennon a year later to much greater effect on “Strawberry Fields Forever.” There it mirrored Lennon’s feelings of disconnectedness with society at large; on “I Want To Tell You,” the effect is almost too overbearing for such relatively trivial subject matter.
The whole song has an unsteady vibe to it, which may be what the band intended. The dissonant piano chords produce a kind of hypnotic effect, but they don’t really gibe too well with the rest of what’s going on. And George’s vocal is a bit spacey, as if he couldn’t be bothered whether or not he ever accurately expresses his emotions.
But Harrison deserves credit for being at the forefront in the exploration of new territories that the band likely never would have otherwise encountered. If “I Want to Tell You” doesn’t quite gel, it’s unwieldiness still proves fascinating.

157. “Don’t Bother Me”

Let’s survey the titles of some of the songs written, recorded, and released by The Beatles in 1962 and 1963. “Love Me Do”: Oh, how sweet. “Thank You Girl”: Very polite. “She Loves You”: Well, thanks for letting me know, friend. “P.S. I Love You”: Right back at you, sugar dumpling.
“Don’t Bother Me”: Whaaaat?
George Harrison snarled his way through this number on the band’s second album, With The Beatles. It represented his first solo songwriting effort to make the cut, and suddenly there was a totally unique perspective in town. Amidst all the flowery sentiments and charming little ditties, George penned an ode to the desire for solitude.
Now, when you listen to the lyrics, the song does reveal itself to be a tad more straightforward in that the singer’s Garbo-esque request is spurred on by his true love being away from him. Still, from the downbeat melody in a minor key to a chorus that simmers with disgust rather than exploding with joy, this was a sharp left turn for the group, and George was at the tiller.
Though Harrison would later dismiss the song as a poor first try at songwriting, it holds up OK if you’re into a more bluesy approach. And who knows? Maybe that bit of surliness inspired Lennon and McCartney to break from their own happy-go-lovey rut and expand their songwriting horizons.
Whatever the case, “Don’t Bother Me” is essential as the first utterance from the quiet Beatle. Who knew, at the time, he would have so many revelatory things to say?

156. “Sun King”

Woe to the enterprising fool who tries to glean some meaning from the foreign languages spouted by The Beatles in the latter stages of “Sun King,” the opening part of the first medley on Abbey Road.
The band just smashed up random words from a variety of the Romance languages. All attempts at a coherent translation will prove futile.
Nor did John have the legendary King Louis XIV in mind when he wrote the song, even though the French regent also was known as the Sun King. It turns out Lennon was just strumming along here with no particular purpose other than maybe to induce a pleasant mood. All those warbly guitars and Ringo’s thumping bass drums provide a soporific effect that’s quickly shattered on the album by the opening bars of “Mean Mr. Mustard.”
The pretty harmonies, evident throughout Abbey Road, and those hilariously nonsensical foreign phrases are the best parts of this song, which otherwise drifts into the ether. George Harrison once said that the band was trying to create a vibe similar to what Fleetwood Mac was doing at the time. I’m not sure the Mac, hearing this aimless finished product, would have been flattered.

(3 - To be continued here)
Thanks to JamsBioMagazine

Start from part 1 here

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Maureen Starr

A video montage of The late Maureen Cox/Starkey/Tigrett.
Song:"I Should have known better"