Beatles News
These days, anything connected to The Beatles should be considered incredibly valuable. Auctions regularly sell off memorabilia that has anything to do with the band for hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. While even the tiniest note or guitar pick can go for huge sums of cash, one of the members of the group himself admitted recently that he lost something that could have fetched one of the most impressive sums ever for anything related to the chart-toppers.
Paul McCartney recently launched season two of his popular podcast, Paul McCartney: A Life in Lyrics. The series, which is co-produced by iHeartPodcasts and Pushkin, sees the legendary singer, songwriter, and musician telling behind-the-scenes stories about some of his most beloved songs, as well as his time in the group that made him a household name. In the first episode of the second installment of the show, the Grammy winner revealed something that must have had longtime lovers of The Beatles cringing.
McCartney stated that “about 10-15 years ago,” he found something very special–both to him and to the history of The Beatles. He located “The school exercise book,” but this was no ordinary notebook. The musician referred to it as “the first-ever sort of Lennon-McCartney manuscript anywhere.”
Source: Hugh McIntyre/forbes.com
On Feb. 9, 1964, Americans witnessed the first truly seismic television event. What stands out most 60 years later, is just how ready The Beatles were for their invasion.
In the days before everyone cut their cable because no one had cable yet, there were these things called networks. Only a handful of these networks existed, which meant that people couldn’t help but watch the same things. Sometimes there was a very big thing, and just about everyone who was able to would sit down to watch.
The Beatles’ debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964, is the first seismic event in American television history. Americans had been wedded to their sets the previous November in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but there hadn’t been an event like this, one that people knew was coming.
So people gathered. And gathered. People of all ages. Kids tended to be frenzied with excitement for something novel and new, as kids always have been. Whereas, members of the older crowd seemed determined to practice tolerance for the follies of youth and set the good example, or perhaps conjure an anecdote for how things were better in their day.
Certain things will simply never change. Popular culture, though—and, really, the world—did change on that winter night when most of America met these four young men from Liverpool.
The Beatles had touched down at New York’s Kennedy Airport two days prior. Only one of them—George Harrison—had been to America before. These were guys who worshiped American culture. This was where the gods, in their view, had originated: Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and, most of all, the god of the gods, Elvis Presley.
Source: Colin Fleming/The Daily Beast
The Beatles included bits of other songs in "All You Need Is Love." Here's why this ended up getting them in a bit of trouble.
In 1967, The Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love” on a live broadcast. The song was a swift success for the band and became an anthem for the summer of its release. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. The band ran into copyright issues following the discovery that producer George Martin included a song that was not in the public domain.
“All You Need Is Love” includes elements from several songs, including “La Marseillaise” and the 1939 song “In the Mood.” The latter eventually became a problem for the band.
“In arranging it, we shoved ‘La Marseillaise’ on the front, and a whole string of stuff on the end,” Martin said in The Beatles Anthology. “I fell into deep water over that. I’m afraid that amongst all the little bits and pieces I used in the play-out (which the boys didn’t know about) was a bit of ‘In The Mood’. Everyone thought ‘In The Mood’ was in the public domain, and it is — but the introduction isn’t. The introduction is an arrangement, and it was the introduction I took. That was a published work.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
BEATLES legend John Lennon planned to live out his retirement on an Irish island - until disaster struck.
This is Dorninish, a 19-acre island off the coast of Ireland, that was both John Lennon's dream, and a colony for New Age hippies.
"I hope we're a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland, looking at our scrapbook of madness," Lennon one said, about his future with Yoko Ono.
Had Lennon not been killed in 1980, the legend would have gone through with his plans to turn Dorinish Island into his retirement retreat, according to his lawyer Michael Browne.
Other sources have said that Lennon was absolutely infatuated with the island, but that he wasn't ready to settle into island living and had wanted to wait until his career had slowed.
So he offered it out, free of charge, to the "King of the Hippies".
This was Sid Rawle, the founder of the Digger Action Movement.
Rawle was a New Ager, with an utopian vision of self sufficiency and communal living. He arrived on Dorninish with little more than his grand plans for raising livestock and growing vegetables.
His army of 30 hippies planned to set up a tribal community, where others could come to try an alternative way of living.
Source: Neha Dhillon/the-sun.com
A copy of The Beatles' "White Album" once owned by John Lennon is to go up for auction - with a starting bid of $50,000.
The stereo pressing of the 1968 self-titled double album from The Fab Four bears the serial number 0000006, which proves it once belonged to the former Beatle.
Lennon gifted the album to his chauffeur and bodyguard Les Anthony, who passed the record onto a relative. According to the auction house: "The LP was re-discovered after a television show named Find a Fortune was discussing rare records and the owner contacted the TV program and expressed his interest in selling the album.
"The program then contacted Mike Vandenbosch of More Than Music who purchased the historic piece."
This unique piece of Beatle history has now come up for sale by the Dallas-based Heritage Auctions.
The auction is live now and ends at midday (Central Time) on Saturday 24th February.
The auctioneers say that the album comes complete with the original poster that served as a lyric sheet, the four colour photos of each individual Beatle, and the black inner sleeves that only appeared with early editions of the LP.
They also state that "the jacket cover is in overall VG-EX 6 condition with some ring wear, bending, creasing, expected discolouration and staining" while the vinyl condition ranges from "Excellent" to "Near Mint" condition across the four sides.
It's long been thought that former Beatle roadie and manager of the band's Apple company Neil Aspinall held the mono edition of number 0000006 of the "White Album" and that only the group's inner circle held copies of numbers 0000001 to 0000020.
Source: Martin O'Gorman/radiox.co.uk
Every generation has it seminal events — for Baby boomers one of them was February 9, 1964, when The Beatles played on the “Ed Sullivan Show.”
That night 73.7 million viewers watched. It was more than 45 percent of all households. Today, only the Super Bowl gets those kinds of numbers.
The Beatles opened the show with “All My Loving”, “Till There Was You” and “She Loves You.” They closed with our Song of the Day, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The Beatles appeared on the show the next two weeks.
Sullivan’s guests rarely got paid. They looked at it as a shot in the arm for their careers.
Sullivan paid for The Beatles’ travel costs and $10,000 (equivalent to $80,000 today). Their appearances ushered in the British Invasion and influenced a generation to buy guitars, grow their hair long, and play music.
Some would become rock stars. Others just drove their parents crazy.
Sullivan’s musical director, Roy Bloch, wasn’t impressed with The Beatles. He made one of the worst predictions ever. He said, “The only thing that’s different is the hair, as far as I can see.I give them a year.”
Source: Sheldon Zoldan/news.wgcu.org
It’s hard to imagine a time when the Beatles weren’t the most famous band in the world — but in the early 1960s, the four lads from Liverpool were still trying to catch their big break.
So sets the scene for an anecdote from Paul McCartney’s podcast McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, the second season of which begins on Wednesday. In the first episode, the rocker, 81, offers a deep dive on the Beatles’ debut single “Love Me Do,” and recalls the group’s feelings toward stardom in the early days.
“There were all sorts of things, as I say, that you instinctively knew. Don’t try too hard. Don’t work too hard at reaching for it. ‘Cause the more you reach, the more it’ll recede,” he says on the podcast. “Just kid on that you don’t even want it. Something will happen.”
That phrase, “something will happen,” was one that McCartney says the Beatles often turned to, revealing that its origins actually came from when the group got into a minor car crash together and were stranded in a snow bank.
“We always related back to this accident we’d had on the motorway going up from London up to Liverpool where we’d skidded off into the snow, down a bank with our van, and at the bottom of the van were this, ‘How the hell are we ever gonna get home? It’s snowing. We’re freezing,’” McCartney recalls. “And someone in the group said, ‘Well, something’ll happen.’ And it was like, that became a mantra.”
Source: Yahoo
A George Harrison song that wasn’t a huge hit became influential. George’s song was commercially overshadowed by USA for Africa’s “We Are the World.”
George Harrison was not one of the artists featured on USA for Africa’s mega single “We Are the World.” Despite that, he paved the way for the song with his own music and actions. Here’s a look at a time when he took an influential moral stand.
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In 1971, George released the song “Bangla Desh” to raise money for the victims and survivors of the Bangladesh Liberation War and the ensuing genocide. He used a pair of concerts called The Concert for Bangladesh to raise funds for the same causes. Financial Times reports “Bangla Desh” was the first charity single. Since the idea of a charity single is so simple, it’s surprising no one had released one before the 1970s.
“Bangla Desh” was far from the last song of its kind. The genre came into full force in the 1980s with the release of Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and USA for Africa’s “We Are the World.” The former has become a Yuletide staple, while the latter is primarily remembered for the array of artists who sang on it.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
John Lennon quit The Beatles in 1969. That year, the band recorded an album that Lennon did not particularly like.
After The Beatles broke up, John Lennon frequently spoke critically about the work he made with the band. He said he didn’t consider himself a fan of The Beatles and complained about his bandmates. He had harbored negative feelings about the band while they were still together. According to longtime Beatles producer George Martin, Lennon was visibly fed up while recording one of the band’s final albums.
While Let It Be was the last album The Beatles released, they recorded it before Abbey Road. They recorded it in 1969, the same year Lennon announced he was leaving the band. According to Martin, Lennon’s fatigue with the group came through while recording Abbey Road.
“John got disenchanted with record production. He didn’t really approve of what I’d done or was doing,” Martin said in The Beatles Anthology. “He didn’t like ‘messing about’, as he called it, and he didn’t like the pretentiousness, if you like. I could see his point. He wanted good, old-fashioned, plain solid rock: ‘The hell with it — let’s blast the living daylights out!’ Or, if it was a soft ballad: ‘Let’ do it just the way it comes.’ He wanted authenticity.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
Sometimes less is more.
At least that’s the thought behind Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band on the Run (Underdubbed).”
Fifty years after its debut, the beloved album gets yet another rerelease, this time with a version that doesn’t include bonus tracks but instead pulls back some of the layers that were added after the original rough mixes. Hence, “underdubbed” in the title.
This isn’t the first time McCartney has revisited an album to strip off some of the bells and whistles to get closer to the original recording. He did it with the unfortunately titled “Let It Be Naked” back in 2003.
The “underdubbed” version of “Band on the Run” is notable for a slightly different song order from the U.S. release that will be jarring for those with the original sequencing committed to memory after decades of listening. The new order mirrors how the original tapes were discovered in McCartney’s archives and omits “Helen Wheels,” which McCartney didn’t intend to include on the album but did after it was a hit single.
Some of the changes with the songs themselves are subtle: a missing guitar riff or echo here, no backing vocals there. Others are more noticeable, like no orchestral overdubs, what sounds like a vocal flub on the title track and no vocals at all on “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five.”
Source: The Greenville Sun
