Beatles News
Producer Chris Thomas and engineer Ken Scott have been speaking about the double LP, which has the formal eponymous title of The Beatles. The album has already gone platinum 19 times. On the new 50th-anniversary deluxe box sets released on November 9, the album’s 30 tracks are remastered and joined by 27 early acoustic demos and 50 session takes, most previously unreleased, in a process overseen by Giles Martin, son of the record’s main producer George Martin.
Scott and Thomas recall John Lennon’s surprising choice of favorite songs; why Ringo Starr walked out at one point; how George Harrison came into his own and stood up to George Martin; and how Paul McCartney fell asleep on the mixing desk after a hard day’s night finishing the White Album.
Thomas, now 71, was working as an assistant to George Martin at his independent production company AIR at the time of the White Album. He watched the early sessions from May 1968 then took time off on a short vacation, he said in an interview at the Arts Club in London: “I came back at the beginning of September. There was a little handwritten note from George Martin on my desk saying ‘I hope you had a nice holiday, I am off on mine now. Make yourself available to The Beatles.
Source: Mark Beech/forbes.com
Rosanne Cash has been named the recipient of the “John Lennon Real Love Award,” an honor she will accept at the 38th Annual John Lennon Tribute concert November 30th in New York City.
Cash will perform several of her favorite Lennon and Beatles classics during the concert, which will also include guests Marc Cohn, Jesse Colin Young (the Youngbloods), Willie Nile, Scott Sharrard and Mark Erelli.
Non-profit organization Theatre Within presented its first tribute event for the late musician as a neighborhood gathering at their studio shortly after Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota apartment building in New York in December 1980. Proceeds from the tribute will support Theatre Within’s ongoing free workshops in creative expression and mindfulness, which use Lennon’s songs and message to encourage creativity and truth. The organization currently provides workshops through Gilda’s Club NYC, for children who have lost a parent to cancer, as well as adults in treatment and others impacted by cancer. The tribute concert is the only event of its kind worldwide sanctioned by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.
Source: Stephen L. Betts/rollingstone.com
Ringo Starr is having a big moment. Pushing 80, the Beatle drummer shows no signs of slowing down. Thanks to the revelatory new Super Deluxe edition of the White Album, his legend is getting a boost. Fans can savor new dimensions to his playing on the 1968 masterpiece, in the definitive new mix from Giles Martin — finally, we can hear Ringo rock out on “Long, Long, Long” in all his glory. It proves what true fans have always known — he was the heartbeat of the Beatles.
But Ringo’s moving forward. The 78-year-old mocker who sang “Photograph” has a new coffee-table book of photos, Another Day in the Life. The book follows Ringo’s adventures around the world, dating back to his Fabs days — as he says, “photos by me and a few picked up along the way.” (Like the man says in A Hard Day’s Night, you can learn from books.) There’s a foreword from David Lynch, calling it “Ringoism in book form,” as well as Ringo’s own unique commentary, like when he reflects on the cover of Abbey Road: “We were sitting in the studio thinking, ‘We need a cover, let’s go to Hawaii! Let’s go to Egypt! Oh, sod it, let’s just walk across the road.’”
Source: Rob Sheffield/rollingstone.com
“Hey Jude” remains the Beatles’ biggest-ever hit, the one that stayed at #1 for the longest. It’s also a document of the moment that the band finally started coming apart for good. And from at least one perspective, it’s a song about that fracture — one band member wishing a warm and only slightly premature farewell to his greatest collaborator.
In the spring of 1968, John Lennon separated from his wife Cynthia, leaving her for Yoko Ono. Paul McCartney felt bad for Julian, John’s five-year-old son. He went to visit Cynthia and Julian, to check in on them. And when he was on that trip, he came up with the idea for “Hey Jude,” thinking of it as “Hey Jules” at first. (He ultimately liked the name “Jude” better.) Julian didn’t learn until he was a teenager that the song was about him, but he also has memories of being closer with McCartney than he was with his own father.
So McCartney, by most accounts, wrote “Hey Jude” to comfort Julian. But John Lennon heard something else in the song. Years later in interviews, Lennon said that he thought the song was about him — that it was Paul giving him his blessing to go off with Ono and to leave the band behind him. For that matter, Paul McCartney had only just broken up with his longtime girlfriend Jane Asher and taken up instead with his future wife Linda Eastman. So maybe he was singing the song to himself.
Source: Tom Breihan /stereogum.com
You don’t have to be a fan of the Beatles to appreciate their brilliance.
Over their relatively short career as the fab four from Liverpool, the Beatles recorded 206 original compositions across several different albums. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how many albums sold, but data suggest it’s somewhere between 272 million and 600 million.
More recently the Beatles celebrated the 50th anniversary of the so-called “White Album” (actually knowns as The Beatles) by remastering the originals and releasing a treasure trove of outtakes & previously unheard versions in a new box set.
As I listened to the new, sonically superior versions of classic songs like Back in the U.S.S.R, Blackbird, and Dear Prudence, I found myself clamoring for the other goodies nested in the box set package.
As part of the 50th-anniversary celebration, the new “White Album” comes with early recordings logged from George Harrison’s home. During the mid-to-late 1960’s, Harrison lived in the village of Esher, a part of Surrey and southwest of London. Before going into the famous Abbey Road Studios to record the “White Album,” the Beatles spent time at Harrison’s home going through their material to develop early-stage arrangements. All of it was recorded on a four-track recorder.
Source: Dan Pontefract/forbes.com
A 59-year-old man was charged in Germany on Monday on suspicion of trying to sell stolen diaries and other items that had belonged to the late Beatle John Lennon.
The suspect, identified by the Berlin prosecutors’ office only as Erhan G., in 2014 commissioned an auction house in Berlin to sell the items, receiving an upfront payment of €785,000 (US$884,000), the office said in a statement.
Glasses from the estate of John Lennon are pictured during a press conference in Berlin. The glasses were among items stolen from Lennon's widow Yoko Ono in New York in 2006. Photo: Agence France-Presse
The items, which were stolen from Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono in 2006 and ended up in Berlin, also included letters, a recording of a Beatles concert and a pair of Lennon’s glasses.
Among them was Lennon’s last diary which ended on December 8, 1980, the day he was shot and killed in New York.
It contained the entry that on that morning Lennon and Ono had an appointment with photographer Annie Leibovitz. The resulting portrait of a naked Lennon curled up around Ono on their bed ran on the January, 1981 cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
Source: scmp.com
Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton is my eighth rock biography since Shout! The True Story of the Beatles in 1981. It left me feeling more than ever that writing books about such people is no job for a grownup and determined never to be talked into another one.
I had intended Shout! to stand alone, but it started a chain reaction that has kept me chained ever since, with only temporary breaks for novels, short stories, plays, TV documentaries, musicals and journalism.
Researching the Beatles provided an irresistible flying start to a biography of the Rolling Stones, whose story was so closely bound up with theirs. Afterwards, it was almost obligatory to “do” Buddy Holly, who established the rock band concept with the Crickets, and first inspired John Lennon and Paul McCartney to try songwriting, as they in turn inspired Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and hundreds of other musically unschooled young Brits. Then there was no escaping Elton John, who was discovered by the Beatles’ music publisher, Dick James, and took to wearing outsize spectacles like Holly although his eyesight was normal.
Source: Philip Norman/theguardian.com
The Beatles are celebrating the 50th birthday of their 1968 double album - dubbed The White Album - with a deluxe edition that delves into the record's exhaustive recording sessions. An interview with producer Giles Martin, who oversaw the anniversary project, reveals some of the box set's secrets and surprises.
presentational grey line
The Beatles' ninth album has confounded, delighted and divided fans ever since its release in 1968. To some, it's their masterpiece: a vibrant explosion of ideas from a band no longer bound by format, genre or style. To others, it's a mess: a quixotic, fractured collection of songs that fails as often as it soars.
"You are either hip to it, or you ain't," opined Rolling Stone in its original review.
Simply called The Beatles, the 30-track double LP became known as The White Album thanks to its plain white, subtly embossed sleeve - and the contrast to the colourful explosion of their previous album, Sgt Pepper, was deliberate.
The White Album is turbulent, raw, and challenging - partly in reaction to the political upheaval at the end of the 1960s, as the Vietnam War and the assassination of Martin Luther King crushed the idealism of the Summer Of Love.
"Musically, there is beauty, horror, surprise, chaos, order. And that is the world; and that is what the Beatles are on about," wrote Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times.
Source: Mark Savage - BBC
On Nov. 8, 1968, John and Cynthia Lennon's divorce became official. It brought to an end a tumultuous romance that included courtship, marriage, childbirth and infidelity -- all within the growing shadow of Beatlemania.
Lennon met Cynthia Powell in 1958 while both were attending the Liverpool College of Art. “He was a real scruff, a real teddy boy. He looked as if he would punch you as soon as look at you,” Cynthia remembered during an interview with journalist Alex Belfield. “He ended up in my calligraphy class and he didn’t want to be there.”
Even though she initially dismissed Lennon as some kind of troubled rebel, Powell was won over by his musical talent. “Everyone else had gone for lunch and I was trying to gather my pens,” she reminisced about one of their school days. “He sat and played ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ right through, and I looked at him and I thought, ‘That’s for me.’"
The two began dating. Even in the early days, there were warning signs. Lennon had a notorious temper, a characteristic that many have attributed to an estranged relationship with his father. During one particular argument while in college, Lennon struck Powell across the face. She dumped him immediately, but three months later they got back together.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
Reissues have been dominating news about The Beatles and John Lennon lately, and fortunately for fans, this also means new things, like videos to enjoy.
Both The Beatles and Lennon camps have released new lyric videos in correlation with their respective reissues. Below you’ll find the lyric videos for “Back In The U.S.S.R” off the 50th anniversary edition of The Beatles (aka: The White Album) and “Gimme Some Truth” off the mega reissue of John Lennon’s Imagine.
The Beatles 50th anniversary reissue comes out November 9 and will be available in multiple formats, all of which can be pre-ordered right now at TheBeatlesStore.com. Imagine, meanwhile, is now available in multiple formats at ImagineJohnYoko.com.
Source: by Erica Banas/wror.com
