Beatles News
Paul McCartney announced the latest installments of his ongoing Archive Collection, a pair of deluxe reissues dedicated to the Wings-era LPs 1971’s Wild Life and 1973’s Red Rose Speedway. Both reissues arrive December 7th.
For the 3CD/1DVD limited deluxe edition of Wild Life, the newly remastered original album will be paired with two discs worth of rough mixes, home recordings, b-sides, single edits and other unreleased material, including a minute-long home recording of “Indeed I Do.” The DVD for the set boasts rare footage of acoustic home videos, rehearsals and more.
“The Wild Life deluxe package includes a 128-page book written by David Fricke telling the story behind the album
Source: Daniel Kreps/Rolling Stones
It seems fitting that, when you read about the creation of The Travelling Wilburys in 1988, it's hard to sort out which stories are true and which are apocryphal. After all, the five megastars who made up the supergroup went by pseudonyms and claimed to be half-brothers: Nelson (George Harrison), Otis (Jeff Lynne), Lefty (Roy Orbison), Charlie T., Jr. (Tom Petty) and Lucky (Bob Dylan). Other legends abound: Did the name “Wilbury” come from Lynne telling George Harrison, during sessions for the former Beatle's comeback record Cloud Nine, that “we'll bury mistakes in the mix”? Did the four other members ask Orbison to join the band right before he went on stage? Did George Harrison announce the project for the first time during a radio interview? The answers are no, kind of and maybe — at least according to Jeff Lynne, who recalls the group’s formation as quick and simple. While working on Cloud Nine, he and Harrison started throwing out names of people with whom they’d love to be in a band. “Whenever we asked somebody, they would join immediately, so the group was formed in about 15 minutes,” he tells Billboard.
Source: Joel Keller/billboard.com
Having played nearly 3,000 shows with Elton John since 1972, Davey Johnstone — the Rocket Man’s trusted musical director and guitarist — says it’s tough to pick favorites. Maybe Thursday’s or Friday’s stop at Madison Square Garden as part of Elton’s long farewell tour will end up on his list. But there is one 1974 concert at the Garden that stands out from all the rest they have done in New York.
That’s when John Lennon joined them onstage on Thanksgiving Day as part of a deal he’d made when Elton played piano on the Beatle legend’s single “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.”
“I was at the studio at the time,” says Johnstone, “and Elton said, ‘Well, I’ll play on it, but if it gets to No. 1, you have to come onstage with us at Madison Square Garden.’ And John went, ‘Yeah, OK’ because he never expected it to be a No. 1 hit, which it was. So John had to make good on his promise.”
Source: By Chuck Arnold/nypost.com
It’s been almost fifty years since The Beatles‘ seminal White Album was released, and despite its age, it still manages to make news the world over.
In light of the upcoming anniversary release of White Album Super Deluxe Edition, a previously unheard demo of While My Guitar Gently Weeps has been made public for the first time since it was recorded.
Only a few seconds in, George interrupts the Abbey Road crew: “Maybe you’d have to give him [Paul] his own mic”.
George also sings the original lines he later ended up discarding: “I look from the wings at the play you are staging / As I’m sitting here doing nothing but ageing.”
This demo gives a glimpse into the band’s refinement process. It took another three months of recording to get the final product, the version which we all know and love.
Source: hhhhappy.com
October 9 saw the annual lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower of Light on Viðey outside of Reykjavík.
Created by Yoko Ono in 2007, the Imagine Peace Tower stands as a tribute for Ono’s late husband, musician John Lennon. The tower is illuminated between the October 9 until the December 8, marking the birth and death of Lennon. The tower stands tall as a symbol for the world peace campaign Lennon and Ono began during the ‘60s.
During this year’s lighting of the tower, spectators were able to see a video message featuring Ono before the peace tower was lit. The path toward the light tower was signposted by a romantic trail of torches. Although the drizzly weather dampened the visibility of the surroundings, a spectacular surprise display of the Northern Lights were a memorable addition to the event.
Source: Words by Mulan/grapevine.is
The Beatles may arguably have had the first fandom ever, so insane was Beatlemania.
But every day the lives of men and women around the world are changed by fandom, whether that’s a film star, a book, a TV show, a game, or a boy band, and new documentary I Used To Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story tells the wonderful stories of four women who have had their lives dramatically changed by their love of a boyband – Backstreet Boys, One Direction, Take That and The Beatles.
From the craziest thing she ever did to get close to her idols to the moment that left her heartbroken, 68-year-old Susan tells Metro.co.uk what it means to be a life-long Beatles fangirl…
Susan, The Beatles:
Susan, 68, has been a Beatles fan since the band’s early days in the 1960s but says the craziest thing she ever did to get close to the boys took place when she was 14.
Source: Rebecca Lewis/metro.co.uk
Beatles fans are going to get their fix this weekend.
This year’s annual London Beatles Festival was canceled due to downtown construction, but organizers have instead put together a two-day mini-festival to whet fans’ appetites for 2019.
Two Groovy Nights, sponsored by A Taste of Britain, is on at the Palace Theatre Friday and Saturday, featuring a renowned Ringo Starr tribute artist, Ringer Star (Mike Callahan), and Canada’s top tribute band, The Caverners.
Saturday afternoon there will also be a forum of music and Beatles experts talking about the band, which continues to influence pop culture more than 50 years after they arrived on the scene.
“We scaled back the festival after last year’s three-day success (5,000-plus fans turned out), but we still wanted an event for Beatles fans to whet their appetites for next year when we’ll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album,” said organizer Paul Rivard.
“That will be big.”
Source: lfpress.com
The Beatles were already a monstrously successful band before the summer 1967 release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But that album brought them to a new level of cultural prominence — one that began to transcend pop music or even celebrity. Sgt. Pepper was arguably the first event-album, the LP that wore its own experimentalism on its sleeve and forced any serious-minded people to reckon with what the Beatles were doing. You could not be a culturally informed person and dismiss the Beatles in 1967. It just wasn’t possible. After Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles stopped being an extremely popular band of pop musicians. Instead, they became, more or less, goodwill ambassadors to the entire human race. That’s not an easy position to be in.
Source: Tom Breihan @tombreihan/ stereogum.com
Prague’s John Lennon Wall on Kampa Island near Čertovka, is one of the Czech capital’s most frequently Instagrammed locations, a crowd-sourced mural visited by hundreds of tourists daily.
Called “Zeď Johna Lennona” in Czech it was first decorated by an unknown artist who, following the December 1980 assassination of John Lennon, painted a single image of the singer-songwriter and some lyrics on a blank wall across from the French embassy.
Throughout the years the wall filled up with graffiti and Beatles’ lyrics; in the late ’80s, it was the source of a political clash between the communist regime and young Czechs who took to the space to express their grievances.
On November 17, 2014, the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, the Lennon wall was painted completely white by a group of student-artists activists who left the words “wall is over,” a play on the Lennon tune “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).”
Source: Katrina Modrá/news.expats.cz
If you follow the 610 Stompers, the star of an amusing new Paul McCartney music video may look familiar.
The first in a series of videos for “Come On To Me,” the latest single from Sir Paul’s current “Egypt Station” album, features Mike Marina, a proud Stomper since 2014.
Until the concluding scene, Marina is the only person in the clip, which was shot mostly at Rubensteins, the high-end men’s clothing store at the corner of Canal Street and St. Charles Avenue.
Marina plays a security guard named Fred who, bored by the Muzak on the store’s speakers, cues up “Come On To Me.” He then lip-syncs and dances his way through the song and the store, all unabashed, big-eyed enthusiasm and joy.
His epic performance, informed by his Carnival season street dancing with the Stompers, is meant to inspire “amusement or bewilderment,” he noted recently. “One of the two.”
Source: KEITH SPERA/theadvocate.com
