Beatles News
A 1960s rock star taught George Harrison a musical trick that helped him write The Beatles’ "Something." John Lennon said that "Something" differed from all of George's previous compositions.
The Beatles‘ “Something” is one of George Harrison’s masterpieces. He probably couldn’t have made it alone. Another 1960s rock star taught George a musical trick that helped him write “Something.” John Lennon would later say that “Something” differed from all of George’s previous compositions.
The Beatles’ ‘Something’ was inspired by someone who was there with them in India
Donovan is a folk/psychedelic rock singer who became famous for 1960s tunes such as “Atlantis,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” “Sunshine Superman,” “Mellow Yellow,” and “Season of the Witch.” He famously went on The Beatles’ trip to India to study meditation. Donovan’s personal website says that he taught George a descending chord pattern that the Beatle would later use on the ballad “Something.”
Gold reports that, during a 2024 interview with Record Collector Magazine, Donovan discussed his influence on the “My Sweet Lord” singer. “I became George’s mentor for songwriting,” the Hurdy Gurdy Man recalled. “He was in the shadow of John and Paul for so many years and I said, ‘Look, I’ll show you a few tricks, how to encourage the songs.’
“There’s a way to encourage the song to come,” he added. “You can tease it, like fishing. I told him how to play a chord then put your ear on the guitar, listen to the open chord and try a tempo. You can hear melodies, believe it or not. Melodies appear, but you’ve got to be quick to catch them.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
BY THE END OF 1972 IT HAD already become clear to John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr that they may have made a mistake hiring Allen Klein as their manager. Paul McCartney, of course, had come to that conclusion long before.
The individual Beatles were flying high in their solo careers, but with their contract due to end, dissatisfaction with Klein and his practices was coming to a head. Former London Records producer Allan Steckler, employed by Klein in 1969 to work with artists including The Rolling Stones and, after their acquisition by Klein, The Beatles, could sympathise.
“Working for Allen Klein had its benefits and its shit days,” states the 89-year-old music biz lifer, philosophically, from his New Jersey home. “Some days he could be the greatest person in the world. Most days he was the biggest asshole you ever met.”
With the Apple organisation that Klein still headed owing product to EMI and Capitol Records, but nothing in the pipeline, the pugnacious mogul called Steckler into his office. “Can you come up with something?” asked Klein.
In late 1971, with The Rolling Stones recently severed from Klein but their existing catalogue still controlled by the pipe chewing martinet, Steckler had been charged with the collation and packaging of Hot Rocks 1964-1971, quickly to prove an enormous and enduring success (it’s since clocked 12x platinum in the US). Unsurprisingly, Steckler suggested doing something similar with The Beatles.
“And The Beatles being The Beatles, one album turned out not to be enough,” says Steckler. “So I went to Klein and I told him that and he said, ‘Do two albums.’ So I did.”
I put that package together. And I never got credit for it.
Source: Danny Eccleston/mojo4music.com
The Trials of Heather Mills, which airs at 9pm on Channel 5 this evening, features the former model’s confidante Pamela Cockerill, who opens up about the early days of Mills’ six-year marriage to the former Beatle.
The couple – who had a 25-year age gap – met in May 1999 at the Pride of Britain Awards in London, just over a year after Sir Paul’s first wife Linda died of breast cancer. McCartney was married to Linda for 29 years and they shared three children together. He also adopted Linda’s daughter from a previous marriage.
Following their 2002 wedding, Mills moved into his home in Rye, East Sussex, which McCartney had bought with Linda in 1973.
During the 90-minute TV special, Cockerill – who wrote Mills’ 1996 biography Out On A Limb – explains how Mills struggled living in the shadow of “inescapable presence” Linda.
She said: “I think Heather found it quite hard to live in the same house that, only a couple of years before, Linda had been living in.
“And the house hadn’t been changed that much. [Linda] was an inescapable presence because obviously, she was a big part of Paul’s life.”
She further claimed that McCartney had included tributes of his love for his first wife into the design of some of the rooms.
She continued: “There were little plaques saying ‘I love Linda’ over the doorways and photos of her around.
Source: Tina Campbell/standard.co.uk
Paul McCartney released “Take It Away” as the second single from his Tug of War album in 1982. The song soared into the Top 10, which wasn’t bad at all considering that it was one that McCartney had originally intended to give away to an old Beatle buddy.
What is “Take It Away” about? For whom did McCartney originally write the song? And why did he end up playing most of the instruments himself instead of with his band Wings? Here’s the skinny on one of Macca’s truly wondrous pop confections.
Sorry, Ringo
Even with all the tumult surrounding the death of John Lennon in December 1980, the surviving Beatles still entered into a flurry of recording activity in and around that time. Ringo Starr planned a new album, and he reached out to both George Harrison and Paul McCartney for songs. As McCartney explained in an interview for Club Sandwich around the time of the album’s release, “Take It Away” was one of the songs he wrote for his buddy:
Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com
To say The Beatles are one of the most famous musical bands in history would be an understatement. With songs like “Hello, Goodbye,” “Hey, Jude,” “Come Together” and “All You Need is Love,” Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison became the best-selling musical act of all time and rank as some of the 20th century’s most prominent individuals. So naturally more than 50 years after The Beatles’ dissolution, there are still plenty of people interested in them, with proof of that including the release of the three-part documentary The Beatles: Get Back to Disney+ subscribers in 2023.
But now The Beatles are about to be spotlighted on screen in a way that’s never been done before, as it’s been announced that director Sam Mendes is spearheading multiple movies centered on the band. It’s reminiscent of how Kevin Costner is dedicating four movies to the story he’s telling in Horizon: An American Saga, but what exactly can we expect from these Beatles movies? That’s what we’re here to talk about. What Is The Release Date?
Although none of these Beatles movies have specific release dates yet, per Deadline, which broke the news about these flicks, shared they will have “full theatrical windows in 2027.” That indicates that rather than Sony Pictures, the studio distributing these movies, releasing them all at once or week after week, there will be several months between each release, allowing moviegoers enough time to process the cinematic story they watched before moving on to the next one. According to THR, production is expected to begin in the United Kingdom in mid-2025.
Source: Adam Holmes/cinemablend.com
At 87, the dapper insider is releasing a new book of interviews conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people nearest to it.
Peter Brown was a witness to some of the Beatles’ most important moments. His new book with the writer Steven Gaines is the oral history “All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words.
Peter Brown stood in his spacious Central Park West apartment, pointing first at the dining table and then through the window to the park outside, with Strawberry Fields just to the right. “John sat at that table looking through here,” Brown said, “and he couldn’t take his eyes off the park.”
That’s John as in Lennon. And the story of the former Beatle coveting this living-room view in 1971 — and how Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, eventually got their own place one block down, at the Dakota — is just one of Brown’s countless nuggets of Fab Four lore. In the 1960s he was an assistant to Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, and then an officer at Apple Corps, the band’s company. A key figure in the Beatles’ secretive inner circle, Brown kept a red telephone on his desk whose number was known only to the four members.
Source: Ben Sisario/nytimes.com
John Lennon’s long-lost Hohner harmonica, featured on Beatles classics such as “From Me To You” and “Please Please Me,” has been found over fifty years after it first went missing.
The Association of Chromatic Harmonicas (ACH!), the leading harmonica historical society, announced Monday that the 1959 Model-C Chromatica Harmonica had been rediscovered and that the instrument had been mailed to John’s son Sean in a padded envelope with signature requested.
The story of this legendary harmonica begins in 1960 as the Beatles (John, Paul, and George with then-members Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe) traveled through the Netherlands by Volkswagen van on their way to their first Hamburg residency. Allen Williams, their manager at the time, stopped in Arnhem when Pete requested a bathroom break. As the group stepped into De Oude Mondharmonicawinkel (Ye Olde Harmonica Store) to use the facilities, Lennon slipped a harmonica into the pocket of his trousers. Not to be outdone, McCartney nicked a few licorice drops from a bowl at the cash register.
It was Beatles producer George Martin who first suggested that Lennon try blowing into the instrument rather than just slapping it against his arm. Before long, he had mastered the harmonica well enough to add it to the Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do.” But not everyone in the group was happy with John’s new toy. When George Martin asked the group if there was anything that they didn’t like about the song, George Harrison said “Yeah, I don’t like John’s harmonica.” Nevertheless, Lennon continued to play the instrument on many of the Beatles’ earliest recordings.
Source: Scott Freiman/culturesonar.com
Paul McCartney recently penned an essay for The New Yorker about writing "Eleanor Rigby." The Beatles' beloved song was inspired by "an old lady" that McCartney helped out while growing up. "Hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write," he said.l
Paul McCartney offered a deeper look at his creative process in a new essay for The New Yorker, titled "Writing 'Eleanor Rigby.'"
The beloved song by The Beatles was released on August 5, 1966 as the second track on the band's seventh album "Revolver." It was conjointly issued as a double A-side single alongside "Yellow Submarine."
The song's titular character has long been a source of intrigue for Beatles fans. It's widely assumed that McCartney was inspired by a grave marked with "Eleanor Rigby" at St. Peter's Church in Woolton, where he met John Lennon as a teenager in 1957.
McCartney has said this wasn't the case, and reiterated in the essay that he doesn't remember seeing the grave, though admits he "might have registered it subliminally."
Instead, the 79-year-old rocker attributed the song's inspiration to "an old lady that I got on with very well."
Source: Callie Ahlgrim/businessinsider.com
John Lennon once said that George Harrison wasn't hip anymore. Here's a look at whether he was right or not.
Even The Beatles didn’t always knock it out of the park. Case in point: John Lennon once said that George Harrison wasn’t hip anymore. Here’s a look at whether he was right.
The book Lennon on Lennon: Conversations With John Lennon features an interview from 1975. In it, John said he wasn’t impressed with one of George’s live shows. “Now it’s always The Beatles were great or The Beatles weren’t great, whatever opinion people hold,” he said. “There’s a sort of illusion about it. But the actual fact was The Beatles were in for eight months, The Beatles were out for eight months.
“The public, including the media, are sometimes a bit sheeplike and if the ball starts rolling, well, it’s just that somebody’s in, somebody’s out,” he said. “George is out for the moment. And I think it didn’t matter what he did on tour.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
Lorne Michaels tried and failed to reunite The Beatles on SNL, despite offering a check for $3,000 and 3 songs.
Lorne Michaels almost succeeded, as John Lennon and Paul McCartney considered going to the studio that night.
George Harrison showed up to SNL to get the $3,000 check, but Michaels refused unless the whole band reunited.
As the man behind Saturday Night Live throughout almost all of its history, Lorne Michaels has accomplished amazing things. Between casting a slew of performers who have become rich and famous and making the masses laugh for decades, Michaels' legacy will go down in history.
On top of that, Michaels has managed to convince most of music's biggest stars to appear on his show. However, one thing that Michaels never pulled off was was reuniting The Beatles on SNL.
This article will how Lorne Michaels tried to reunite The Beatles on SNL and totally failed. The article will also reveal how close Michaels' attempt to bring The Beatles back together came to succeeding.
Source: Matthew Thomas/thethings.com
