Beatles News
Paul McCartney's death rumor lasted years, and just wouldn't go away.
Paul McCartney decided not to address the rumor of his death and saw it as good publicity.
The rumor got out of hand with media members tracking down McCartney on his farm.
John Lennon angrily called out the Detroit radio station for making up the rumor and denied any coded messages in Beatles records.
During the '60s, The Beatles faced lots of stresses. One of them was completely unexpected, and it was the rumored death of Paul McCartney. The rumor blew up in the US after it was reported by a radio station in Detroit. The result was absolute chaos, as media members went out to find Paul McCartney, trying to confirm his identity.
As we'll reveal in the following, McCarntey didn't panic over the rumor. We'll reveal how he initially reacted, and how he was eventually fed up with the entire story. We'll also reveal John Lennon's reaction, who was just as frustrated with the story that lasted years.
Let's take a look back at how it all went down.
Source: Alex Passa/thethings.com
I am writing with reference to the letter published on December 2, ‘In my life ... an ode to Christmas’. Regarding John Lennon’s song In My Life – from The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul – Bernie Smith said, “Lennon was a supreme wordsmith writing about his friends and lovers whom he would never forget...”
Steve Turner, in his book A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles’ Song (Revised Edition, 1999), discovered that Lennon’s lyrics share the style and sentiment of Charles Lamb’s 18th-century poem, The Old Familiar Faces. The first and last stanzas go like this:
“I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces ...
“How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.”
Paul McCartney said Lennon wrote the lyrics for In My Life, based his melody on the previously covered Smokey Robinson song, You Really Got a Hold on Me.
Source: jamaica-gleaner.com
The day the Julian Lennon album Valotte was released in 1984, my older brother and I pooled our lawn-mowing money and rode our bikes to Record Express in West Hartford, Connecticut. Our local top-40 station, 96.5 WTIC FM, was playing “Too Late for Goodbyes” every other song—MTV too—and we had to have it.
I still have the album. He’s on the cover, black-and-white, sitting backward on a chair, staring out at you, unsmiling. I know now, though I didn’t know then, how much he looks like his father in that shot. I was 9 years old. The album was probably my gateway to the Beatles, the first lesson in an education.
Lennon surrounded by reporters in 1984, the year his album Valotte was released. It earned him a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and "Too Late For Goodbyes" became a number-one hit. Some speculated that the song was about his father.A year ago, I interviewed Lennon. The Beatles documentary Get Back had just come out, and Lennon had seen it with his half-brother, Sean. (Sean’s mother is Yoko Ono; Julian’s was Cynthia Powell, John Lennon’s first wife.) The interview was meant to be part of a larger project about what it’s like to have a song written about you. “Hey Jude” was written by Paul McCartney about Julian and Cynthia; a friend of mine, Chadwick Stokes of the band Dispatch, had recently written a song about me and my family and some hard times. That project is for another day; here, now, is my interview with Lennon. In it, he told me about his new record that was coming out. The title: Jude.
Source: Ryan D'Agostino/esquire.com
The Chrysler Museum of Art will present Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm from December 5, 2023 – April 7, 2024. Traveling from the National Portrait Gallery in London to Norfolk, the Chrysler Museum of Art will be the first venue in the United States to host this major exhibition, burnishing the Chrysler’s reputation as an institution committed to the presentation of the diverse histories of photography through exhibitions and the permanent collection.
Captured by McCartney using his own Pentax Camera, the exhibition features more than 250 photographs taken between November 1963 and February 1964, illuminating the period in which The Beatles became international superstars. The photographs were rediscovered in McCartney’s personal archive in 2020. McCartney describes this collection as “the eyes of the storm,” chronologically documenting the experiences of the band on their travels beginning in November 1963 at the height of Beatlemania and culminating with photographs taken in February 1964 during the final days of the band’s first triumphant trip to America. Most of these photographs have never been made into prints, existing as negatives and contact sheets for 60 years until now. The exhibition is accompanied by a best-selling book of the same name.
“What struck me about these images, beyond their obvious historical value, was McCartney’s sensitivity to his subjects,” said Erik Neil, Macon and Joan Brock Director of the Chrysler Museum of Art. “The empathy that is at the center of his music is equally evident in his photographs.”
Source: visitnorfolk.com
The release of the last Beatles song, “Now and Then,” ranks among the band’s pivotal moments such as their 1964 U.S. television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show and the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The idea of a “final” Beatles song is a milestone; the most successful band in the history of popular music rallied together to give us one final masterpiece.
The Beatles have always captured our imaginations. Seeing the surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, interact with past images of themselves and their former bandmates in Peter Jackson’s “Now and Then” video is worth the price of admission. And hearing Paul harmonizing with John Lennon once again is emotional. It’s right up there with other Beatles reunion tracks from the 1995 Anthology series, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.”
Jackson’s innovative video features footage from the original 1995 sessions of Paul, George, and Ringo working on Lennon’s “Now and Then” demo. For me, seeing “The Threetles” together in the studio brought back the memory of another song featuring the surviving Beatles.
Source: Sean Gaillard/culturesonar.com
Paul McCartney's rider demands might be stricter that the rules he enforces on his employees.
Fans find Paul McCartney's rules for his staff to be professional and logical, not "beyond weird."
Many fans praised McCartney's calm security team rule as a genius idea.
Fans appreciate McCartney's desire to have a variety of instruments ready for studio sessions, considering him admirable and awesome, not weird.
He is among the biggest names in all of music. Paul McCartney continues to enjoy a remarkable career, past his fame and fortune with The Beatles.
However, like so many other artists, the musician needs to implement strict rules for his staff to follow. In the following, we're going to take a closer look at what those roles are, and if they're indeed, "beyond weird."
Fans don't seem to think so. We'll reveal what the fans had to say, while also taking a closer look at his rider demands. We can argue that the rider demands might be a little more difficult than his current rules for the employees.
Let's find out what they are, and more.
Source: Alex Passa/thethings.com
Back in 1976, the world was still hurting from The Beatles’ break-up and during the first ever season of the now-iconic US show Saturday Night Live, the producer took it upon himself to do something about it. Lorne Michaels delivered a speech about the Fab Four directly to camera, saying, “I’m inviting you to come on our show” and imploring Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr to put their differences behind them and reunite. Adding a little extra incentive, Michaels then whipped out a cheque for $3000 – not an amount to be sniffed at back then – and said it would be theirs if they came back together on SNL.
It was, like most of SNL’s output, a gag intended to entertain and stir things up, but what Michaels didn't know was that two of the band were watching and actually considered it. As recounted in Man On The Run, Tom Doyle’s excellent book about McCartney in the 70s, Lennon and McCartney were actually watching the show together that night in Lennon’s Dakota building apartment, just 22 blocks north of where it was being filmed. They were, writes Doyle, “laughing their asses off and, just for a minute, actually considering his offer. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we went down?’ said John. ‘We should go down now and just do it.’”
Source: Niall Doherty/yahoo.com
The Beatles seemed to be on the verge of a breakup before recording 'Let It Be.' Producer George Martin couldn't believe they made another album.
When The Beatles told producer George Martin that they wanted to get back into the studio to record an album after Let It Be, he could hardly believe his ears. He assumed the band would break up. Recording Let It Be had been a miserable experience for all involved and he didn’t see a future for The Beatles.
In early 1969, The Beatles gathered to begin working on Let It Be. Tensions among the band members were at an all-time high. Their recording sessions for the White Album had also been challenging, and Let It Be was no different.
“This was a very difficult period,” Paul McCartney said in the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “John was with Yoko full-time, and our relationship was beginning to crumble: John and I were going through a very tense period. The breakup of The Beatles was looming and I was very nervy.”
Still, the band decided to get in the studio again that same year to record Abbey Road. Martin found this astonishing.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
In 1969, Lennon and Yoko Ono delivered a highly unusual concert in a venue better known for droning lecturers than droning guitars
The year 1969 was predisposed to notoriety. Yet, it was before man made his first (and grammatically incorrect) step on the moon that John Lennon stepped foot into Lady Mitchell Hall. Complimenting the (less than musical) yelps of his new partner and collaborator, Yoko Ono, Lennon delivered nearly half an hour of improvised feedback generated using an amplifier and electric guitar to an audience that had no idea what he was going to perform. As The Beatles – and the 60s – imploded around him, John Lennon was certainly making an interesting career move …
“That was the big difficulty – how do you follow the Beatles?”
The Beatles played Cambridge before in 1963 as part of their near-endless tour of British theatres and art venues. Back then, Lennon and McCartney were on the cusp of their fame as songwriters and only just replacing rock and roll standards like ‘Twist and Shout’ with their own compositions like ‘All My Loving’ and ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. There would be a rapid development from these short and sharp songs to the experimentation of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album.
Source: David Quinn/varsity.co.uk
The last time John Lennon’s one-time lover May Pang was visited by his ghost, it was while she was watching an episode of Law & Order. “But when you talk about stuff like this, people think you’re imagining it or are a little crazy,” the 73-year-old says. “So I don’t ever talk about it.”
For someone so savvy, Pang is astonishingly innocent. Or maybe it’s the other way round. She grew up loving The Beatles and met Lennon in 1970, when she was 22 (he was 10 years older). A receptionist for Allen Klein, she was – a year later – working as a personal assistant for both Lennon and his avant-garde artist wife Yoko Ono while they lived at New York’s Dakota Building. Lennon and Ono were having problems in their marriage; it’s a matter of record that Ono decided Pang would be a useful distraction. Having encouraged Lennon to make a move on Pang, she ordered Pang to comply. Pang had her doubts, but was too junior (and, once Lennon kissed her, dazzled) to demur.
A new documentary on the pair’s relationship – titled The Lost Weekend: A Love Story – explores what happened next. Pang and Lennon lived together in LA and New York. They spent time with Lennon’s young son, Julian, who he had with his first wife, Cynthia Powell, and who’d been kept at arm’s length by Ono. They also hung out with Paul, George and Ringo and did ordinary boyfriend and girlfriend stuff (if being taught to play guitar by a musical legend counts as ordinary).
Over Zoom from her home in New York, Pang has the air of someone determined to age disgracefully: she’s wearing purple lipstick, has purple streaks in her grey hair and is given to naughty chuckles. She holds up her hands. “I don’t have the fingers for it, but John’s teaching me how to play ‘Ain’t that a shame’,” she says. “He said, ‘This is what my mum taught me, on the banjo.’ And I’m like, ‘Is this good? Cos it doesn’t sound good!’”
For both she and Lennon it was a genuinely creative period. He wrote a song about Pang, called “Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)” on the album Walls and Bridges (which contains Lennon’s only solo No 1 US single, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night”). Pang helped produce the album and also provided backing vocals on the track “#9 Dream”. While they were in LA, Lennon drank like a fish, was frequently moody and could be violent. But, according to Pang, they had a blast on the whole.
Source: Charlotte O'Sullivan/independent.co.uk
