Beatles News
John Lennon said The Beatles had to change in order to become famous. He shared why they felt this was necessary.
After The Beatles broke up, John Lennon had no fear of speaking his mind. He gave lengthy interviews in which he spoke poorly about his bandmates and their music. While Lennon spoke his mind in The Beatles — he notably caused a stir when he said The Beatles were bigger than Jesus — he said he wasn’t as honest as he wanted to be. He shared why they had to compromise in order to achieve success.
In the early years of The Beatles, the band received criticism for their clothing and long hair. According to Lennon, their style was already a compromise. They had to change themselves in order to seem palatable to the public.
“We weren’t as open and as truthful when we didn’t have the power to be,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “We had to take it easy. We had to shorten our hair to leave Liverpool. We had to wear suits to get on TV. We had to compromise.”
He said they didn’t necessarily realize they weren’t being truthful. They were just doing what it took to get their music career off the ground.
“We had to get hooked to get in, and then get a bit of power and say, ‘This is what we’re like,’” he said. “We had to falsify a bit, even if we didn’t realize it at the time.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
Paul McCartney is far and away one of the most successful musicians of all time in his home country of the U.K. In fact, depending on how one measures that title, he may win, as he has been racking up sales and hits since he launched his musical career more than half a century ago.
This week, McCartney is back on the U.K. albums chart, but not with a brand new title. Instead, he returns with one of his most beloved projects–which has now reached the ranking of the top-consumed albums in the country in four separate instances.
McCartney appears at No. 16 on the U.K. albums chart with Band on the Run. The third full-length from the former Beatles’ new band Wings was recently reissued for its fiftieth anniversary. The Official Charts Company counts the new extended edition as a separate entity, and its immediate success adds to the legend’s career totals.
According to the Official Charts Company, Band on the Run has now reached the albums chart in the U.K. four times. The set has spent more than four weeks on the tally–many more frames, actually. The title has now appeared on the ranking in four different forms, which speaks to not only how long the album has been around, but also its seemingly never-ending appeal.
Band on the Run debuted on the U.K. albums chart in 1973, when it was released. At the time, it hit No. 1, giving McCartney another champion. That specific offering has spent 124 weeks somewhere on the ranking.
Source: Hugh McIntyre/forbes.com
After the Beatles broke up in 1970, drummer Ringo Starr faced a crossroads. The Beatles’ Let It Be would close the book on that iconic group. It was a transitional time for the famed musician, who had already acted in the movies Candy and The Magic Christian, the latter with Peter Sellers. With his time in the most famous rock band of all time coming to a close, new adventures awaited him. These included an unexpected cinematic character study that begat an incredible sequel.
On the music front, Starr was the first Beatle to release a proper solo album on March 27, 1970 entitled Sentimental Journey. This was even before Let It Be hit stores. It was his take on the Great American Songbook, which he followed with the country collection Beaucoup of Blues on September 27. These two releases sold decently, with his debut going Top 10 in the UK and Top 30 in America. Two non-album singles co-written with his former bandmate George Harrison, “It Don’t Come Easy” and “Back Off Bugaloo,” went Top 5 in the UK and Top 10 in the U.S.
But it was in 1973 that his third album Ringo became a bonafide hit, going Gold in America and eventually Platinum. The two singles “Photograph” (co-written with Harrison) and the Sherman Brothers cover “You’re Sixteen,” both hit the Top 5 in the UK and shot to No. 1 in America.
Source: Bryan Reesman/americansongwriter.com
Get ready to see John Lennon like you’ve never seen him before.
A pop-up exhibit of candid photographs of the former Beatle, taken during his 18-month “Lost Weekend" from late 1973 to early 1975, is coming to the Keshet Gallery in Boca Raton the weekend of Feb. 16.
And the photographer who took them will be there, too.
“The Lost Weekend – the Photography of May Pang” showcases 31 images that cast a vastly different light on a period of Lennon’s life known mainly in rock lore for its overindulgence and excess partying.
Look at Pang’s photographs, and it’s clear the “Lost Weekend” was also about family, friends, love and reconnections.
The intimate glimpse is made possible because Pang was not just traveling in his circle, she was also his lover — one he took at the urging of, and while on hiatus from, his wife, Yoko Ono.
Love may be complicated, but the images collected are not.
There’s Lennon and his son Julian opening Christmas presents on Palm Beach in 1974 (five years before he bought El Solano on A1A and became a brief part-time island resident). There’s Lennon at Disney World walking unnoticed through the Magic Kingdom masses. There’s Lennon walking his dogs through a park in upstate New York.
“Photography was my hobby. I just always had a camera and took pictures,’’ Pang said in a phone interview recently as she sat in a Jacksonville art gallery, a few minutes before the opening of that exhibit.
“I would just pick up the camera and think, ‘Oh, that’s a good shot’ and I would just take them. Of course, as time has gone on (the images) have become iconic because no one else has taken photos like these.’’
Source: palmbeachpost.com
John Lennon began bringing Yoko Ono into the studio with The Beatles. Paul McCartney said some of their behavior was off-putting.
The songwriting relationship between Paul McCartney and John Lennon was one of the most prolific of all time. They began to write on a more individual basis as the 1960s wore on, and their working relationship fell apart entirely when The Beatles broke up. McCartney noticed a shift in their dynamic when Lennon met Yoko Ono. He believed Lennon was intentionally putting distance between them to leave more time for her.
When Lennon and Ono began a relationship, they started spending all their time together. He brought her to Beatles recording sessions, which bothered his bandmates.“Now John had to have Yoko there,” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology. “I can’t blame him, they were intensely in love — in the first throes of the first passions — but it was fairly off-putting having her sitting on one of the amps. You wanted to say, ‘Excuse me, love — can I turn the volume up?’ We were always wondering how to say, ‘Could you get off my amp?’ without interfering with their relationship.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
I was not yet 9 and living in Glenwood, Mrs. Thrash dutifully teaching third grade, when the Beatles invaded America. Asked for a world view, I would not be on the cutting edge of events.
That's 60 years ago, the same month that Louisville's Cassius Clay, speaking out when some Black youths in the South were fighting off police dogs, "shook the world" winning the heavyweight boxing championship.
As Muhammad Ali, whose bravery in the ring didn't stop people from calling him a coward when he refused military induction three years later, the Louisville Lip affected Western civilization.
So did the Beatles, four British chaps who brought their act over from Liverpool and shook the world before Clay entered the ring against Sonny Liston.
John, Paul, George and Ringo wore their hair foppishly long for the time. My dad took one look at the Fab Four and called them "hippies." Still, I ran home from church to watch the mop-toppers perform on the "Ed Sullivan Show."
The year 1964 was to them like 1973 in horse racing for Secretariat, 1998 in home runs for Mark McGwire, almost any year in hockey for Wayne Gretzky. Unsurpassed in every respect, although the Bee Gees came close musically in 1978 like Taylor Swift is doing now.
Six of their '64 hits reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts. The group's manager, Brian Epstein, elected not to chance an American visit until a Beatles tune went to the top.
Source: Bob Wisener/hotsr.com
Paul McCartney has misplaced an extremely rare, valuable Beatles artifact, as he lost the notebook where he and John Lennon wrote their earliest songs.
He lost the notebook within the past decade or so. Speaking on the podcast McCartney: A Life in Lyrics (which just launched its second season on iHeartPodcasts), he described how he would skip school to work on music with John Lennon. He would write down their compositions in an exercise book he had taken from school — "a nice little blue book, a hardback," he said.
"The school exercise book, I found it probably about 10, 15 years ago," McCartney explained. "I put it in my bookcase, and I've since lost it. I don't know where it is. I think it might show up somewhere, but it's the first-ever Lennon–McCartney manuscript."
The podcast's host, poet Paul Muldoon, said, "Oh dear." McCartney responded, "'Oh dear' is right, but you have to let these things go."
That book included the early hit “Love Me Do" (which is the subject of the episode of A Life in Lyrics) and "One After 909." It also included unreleased songs like the country number “Just Fun" and the doo-wop-inspired “Too Bad About Sorrows," each of which McCartney sang a cappella snippets.
Source: exclaim.ca
As 4,000 mostly hysterical school-skipping girls lined the Tarmac on their arrival, Paul McCartney, 21; George Harrison, 20; and Lennon and Starr, both 23, were given their first taste of what the US had in store for The Beatles
Moments before touching down at New York's windswept JFK airport, the captain of Pan Am flight 101 told a flight attendant: "You better tell the boys there's a big crowd waiting for them".
But stepping off that Boeing 707 on February 7, 1964, not even the Fab Four could have envisaged just how 'Beatlemania' would go on to grip America. Before taking off from London, John Lennon said to himself "Oh, we won't make it," while drummer Ringo Starr recalled feeling "a bit sick" with anticipation.
But as 4,000 mostly hysterical school-skipping girls lined the Tarmac on their arrival, Paul McCartney, 21; George Harrison, 20; and Lennon and Starr, both 23, were given their first taste of what the US had in store for them. "Pandemonium broke out among the stamping, banner-waving fans as The Beatles - John, Paul, George and Ringo - stepped from the plane," the Mirror wrote on its front page the following day.
Source: Christopher Bucktin/themirror.com
Coinciding with the 60th anniversary of The Beatles’ historic first trip to the U.S. this week, the second season of the McCartney: A Life in Lyrics kicked off with an episode looking at the Fab Four’s first big hit, “Love Me Do.”
Part of the episode features Paul McCartney discussing the artists who influenced him and John Lennon, including The Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly. As he talks about these artists, he draws comparisons with the many other people who said they were inspired by The Beatles when they saw the group’s famous performance on The Ed Sullivan Show back in 1964.
“[There are a] trillion people who say that, ‘I knew that’s what I wanted to be when I saw you four-headed monster on the telly … I’ve got to be part of this,’” McCartney explained. “Our current manager of Beatles’ Apple Records says that, Bruce Springsteen says that, David Letterman says that. They all formed on that night … this future for themselves. And there we were in Liverpool [a few years earlier] forming this future, in the same kind of deal.”
The Beatles’ landmark first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show took place on February 9, 1964.
Released in the U.K. in October 1962, “Love Me Do” was the first Beatles song to break into the Top 20 in their home country. It later reached No. 1 in the U.S. in May of 1964.
Source: Matt Friedlander/americansongwriter.com
Sixty years after the Beatles appeared live on “Ed Sullivan,” McCartney reflects on his photos capturing those halcyon days. The Brooklyn Museum will exhibit them, and some will be for sale later.
A self-portrait in the mirror, Paris, 1964, from the traveling exhibition. “We all smoked. Smoking gave us a suave, grown-up feel,” Paul McCartney recalled in an interview. Credit...Paul McCartney
They are now a collector’s trove — Paul McCartney’s own photos, shot 60 years ago, when the Beatles took Europe and America by storm: images of screaming fans (one carrying a live monkey); a girl in a yellow bikini; airport workers playing air guitar, and unguarded moments grabbed from trains, planes and automobiles.
McCartney, now 81, doesn’t like to sit still and reminisce about the past, so he chatted while driving home from his recording studio in Sussex, England. “My American friends call these small, one-way lanes ‘gun barrels,’” he said, warning his interviewer that at any moment the signal might die (it did). In the end, it took two days to complete a coherent conversation about the breakthrough period when the Beatles went viral, captured in the traveling exhibition “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-1964: Eyes of the Storm,” which features 250 of his shots. Currently it’s at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., and comes to the Brooklyn Museum May 3-August 18. (Don’t be surprised if the artist shows up for the opening.)
It was McCartney’s archivist, Sarah Brown, who found 1,000 photographs the musician had taken over 12 weeks — from Dec. 7, 1963, to Feb. 21, 1964 — in the artist’s library.
“I thought the photos were lost,” he said. ‘‘In the ’60s it was pretty easy. Often doors were left open. We’d invite fans in.” Even the recording studio wasn’t a safe space. “I was taking my daughter Mary to the British Library to show her where to research for her exams, and in one display case I saw the lyric sheet for ‘Yesterday,’” he said. A sticky-fingered biographer had swiped the original from their studio.
Source: Lucie Young/nytimes.com
