Beatles News
Another year, another Beatles 50th anniversary remix box set.
This time, it’s the Fab Four’s sprawling 1968 double album “The Beatles,” a.k.a. the White Album, that’s getting a sonic freshening up, to be accompanied in the seven-disc “super deluxe” box set by dozens of demo recordings and alternate takes of songs — more than 100 tracks in all — from what is the bestselling title of all the fabled quartet’s original studio releases.
It follows last year’s half-century anniversary edition of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which was greeted by near universal acclaim for the updated stereo mix, accompanying surround sound version archival recordings that never previously had seen the light of day.
The forthcoming 50th anniversary White Album, out Nov. 9, brings out even more alternate takes and unreleased material because the Beatles spent even more time working up the 30 songs that made the final cut for the groundbreaking 1968 album released on Nov. 22, 1968.
Source: By Randy Lewis/LA TImes
One night in New York, John Lennon got very drunk at a party, took a girl into a room and had sex with her.
Unfortunately, all the guests’ coats had been heaped on the bed. So when people wanted to go home, they couldn’t retrieve them — and everyone, including his wife, Yoko Ono, realised what was going on.
That, in a nutshell, was what Yoko told me some time later. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘very embarrassing.’
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Of course, ‘embarrassing’ isn’t the word most wives would have chosen to describe the situation. But most wives aren’t Yoko.
She’d long known that when John got drunk, he’d behave irrationally and could sometimes be violent, and for this reason she always limited the amount of alcohol in their apartment.
But, on that particular night in 1973, there’d be no limit on drinks and drugs.
Other party guests said that they’d tried to calm John down, that he was blabbering and shouting and pushing them away before he disappeared into the bedroom with his conquest.
Source: Daily Mail
DEVASTATED London commuters have created a petition to save an odd message graffitied on a bridge — even when no one really knows what it means.
RANDOM graffiti doesn’t usually ignite so much passion in people, but for many weary Londoner’s on their commute home via the M25 motorway, a message emblazoned across a railway bridge became iconic.
The graffiti — written on the Chalfont Viaduct bridge in Buckinghamshire, in Greater London — reads: “GIVE PEAS A CHANCE”.
No-one knows for sure what exactly the phrase means — there has been speculation it was a message of support for a prolific London graffiti artist named ‘Peas’ after he got arrested, or a pun on the title of John Lennon’s 1969 protest song, “Give peace a chance” — but either way, it became a comforting reminder for many commuters they were almost home. Until it was recently ruined.
Source: news.com.au
Put on your Beatlemania garb and head to the Manship Theatre on Sept. 28 where Of Moving Colors will be celebrating the Fab Four in dance.
"It's the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' White Album and also the 50th anniversary of the animated version of 'Yellow Submarine,'" says Garland Goodwin Wilson, the contemporary dance company's artistic director. "We're commemorating it by looking at the Beatles' history."
The show is titled "Come Together," named for the opening song of the Beatles' 1969 "Abbey Road" album. In telling the story, the company will be using more than the Beatles' top hits.
“As we dove into a catalog with too many iconic songs to even hope to reference, I realized that we were holding the unique and almost selfish ability to pick whatever music we would like to work with,” Wilson says. “I saw a responsibility to choose songs that didn’t just come from Kasey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown but rather that touched on the many eras, phases and cultural dialogues that are so prevalent in the Beatles’s overarching collection of music."
Source: ROBIN MILLER | romiller@theadvocate.com
Summers at my house are soundtracked by the oldies. It’s something that I credit most of my random music history knowledge to, just my family sitting with each other around the pool, talking about songwriters from the ’60s and ’70s, listening to soul and rock and, of course, The Beatles. There is a shirt my dad occasionally wears to these parties, partly as a joke and partly for its shock factor. He bought it as a gag, I imagine at an airport, or in Venice, CA., where jokey t-shirts hang from store vendors like bananas off a tree. Sometimes, my stepmom will steal it from him and parade through the house in her pajamas, but its slogan isn’t serious to them. I always question the words, and they laugh and throw their heads back, saying, “It doesn’t really matter, does it? It was all their faults.” On the front, in big white letters, the t-shirt says one thing: I blame Yoko.
Source: Clara Scott Daily Gender & Media Columnist/michigandaily.com
Did Lennon really make this famous joke at the expense of his Beatle pal? Let’s find out…
It’s one of the standing jokes in the music industry. And it reportedly came from the mouth of John Lennon himself:
“Ringo wasn’t the best drummer in the world… Let’s face it, he wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles”
Now Lennon was known for his caustic wit, and this is a prime example of how biting he could be - even having a pop at his former Beatle colleague.
But did John Lennon actually make that joke?
Source: radiox.co.uk
Most hardcore fans know that the Beatles broke up before the album Let It Be was actually released. And, most rock historians would agree that the accompanying documentary film (also called Let It Be) pretty much showed a band populated by people who couldn’t stand each other, regardless of how good the music was. The film itself hasn’t been publicly available since the 1980s, though that may suddenly change. And, if a rebooted Let It Be movie is released, it might change people’s perceptions of the break-up of the most famous rock group of all time.
“I think there may be a new version of it,” Paul McCartney said in a recent interview on Radio X.
Source: Ryan Britt/fatherly.com
John Lennon’s sister Julia Baird is warning music fans to ‘get ready to dance’ when The Mersey Beatles hit the stage at Whitchurch Civic Centre in November.
After sold out shows in the USA, Asia and Europe, the world renowned Liverpool-born tribute band are retracing The Beatles’ footsteps on their ‘Get Back UK Tour’ which visits the same towns, cities and original venues the Fab Four rocked in the 1960s.
The Beatles famously played Whitchurch’s former Town Hall Ballroom – located on the site of the Civic Centre – on January 19, 1963.
This was the same day as the band’s important appearance on TV’s Thank Your Lucky Stars, playing their new single Please Please Me.
Source: whitchurchherald.co.uk
No one could have been surprised that, to paraphrase one of Paul McCartney’s earliest lyrics, hearts went boom — again.
From the moment Sir Paul took the stage Thursday night to face a sold-out Bell Centre and launched into A Hard Day’s Night — as perfect a musical representation of Beatlemania as he and John Lennon ever wrote — the belief in yesterday was evangelical in its fervour.
And yet one surprising thing about a McCartney show is that the glorious past is approached faithfully, but not reverently — at least in terms of sequencing. Immortals like Lady Madonna and Eleanor Rigby are placed side by side in the set list with more debatable efforts like the recent Fuh You and his 2015 collaboration with Rihanna and Kanye West, FourFive Seconds.
Source: Allen McInnis/montrealgazette.com
Today we have some incredible, never-before-seen footage of John Lennon recording his seemingly cutthroat song, "How Do You Sleep?" It's a song he released in 1971 and directed at his former Beatle bandmate Paul McCartney. Here's just a sample of the lyrics:
A pretty face may last a year or two
But pretty soon they'll see what you can do
The sound you make is muzak to my ears
You must have learned something in all those years
This previously unseen video, which includes the raw studio mix of the audio, completely unadorned, comes ahead of the Oct. 5 release of a 6-CD box set, Imagine - The Ultimate Collection. John Lennon's second solo album, Imagine, was released in Sep. 1971, just about two years after The Beatles went their separate ways. John Lennon said that this song was a response to lyrics on Paul McCartney's own solo album, Ram, that Lennon felt were directed at him. (Give a listen to "Too Many People" and "Back Seat of My Car" and you'll hear what Lennon was referring to.) Yoko Ono, who sat in on and co-produced these recording sessions, wrote to us to say that "John wrote many great songs, some tender and some mean... ... people thought this was about Paul, and Paul seems to have thought that too, so too bad it wasn't played too much."
Source: Bob Boilen
