Beatles News
The Grammy Awards are Sunday, the culmination of the awards season for the music industry. The award for Album of the Year is the big one, and this year's nominations are Childish Gambino, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Lorde and Bruno Mars. Adele took top honors Last year, shocking everyone who thought Beyonce was a lock for her album "Lemonade."
Our current Head2Head trivia champ Amy Liu is being challenged by her fiance, David Yang, who does small business consulting.
Questions
1. Who is the oldest comedian to win a Grammy?
2. Which three U.S. presidents have won Grammy awards?
Source: By Rebekah Bradford Special to the Post and Courier
In rumpled white kurtas and pyjamas, John Lennon and Paul McCartney strum their guitars on the steps of a verandah. Ringo Starr, a bit out of place in a long coat, looks on.
With marigold garlands around their necks, Starr and McCartney -- this time with George Harrison -- sit cross- legged on a dais, in front of yoga guru Mahesh Yogi, and with a host of others.
The stills, among the many photographs that capture the seven weeks the Fab Four spent in the yogi's ashram near the Ganges, will be on display in Liverpool, UK, from next month to mark 50 years of The Beatles in India, an event that will also be celebrated by the ashram, organisers said.
One of the sitars of composer-instrumentalist Ravi Shankar, who famously introduced The Beatles to Hindustani classical music, will also be on display at Liverpool.
Source: outlookindia.com
The Beatles and their wives at the Rishikesh in India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, March 1968. The group includes Ringo Starr, Maureen Starkey, Jane Asher, Paul McCartney, George Harrison (1943 - 2001), Patti Boyd, Cynthia Lennon, John Lennon (1940 - 1980), Beatles roadie Mal Evans, Prudence Farrow, Jenny Boyd and Beach Boy Mike Love.
OPINION: Here's a story to please anyone who thinks that the signature note of the universe is irony. But first a little research task for you.
Go find someone of my generation. It shouldn't be hard. Look for a stately mien, hard-earned wisdom and slumping dugs. If unsure ask for help fixing your cell phone. If your interviewee bursts out laughing you're there.
Now tell him or her you want to know the first thought that comes into their mind when you say the word maharishi. And I'll wager a fat bottle of shiraz that anyone my age will say the Beatles.
To my generation all pop music is a footnote to the Beatles. When I was young it was compulsory to have an opinion on all four members of the group. I thought Lennon pretentious, McCartney saccharine and the other two characterless and I've seen no reason since to change my view. Like everyone else I've got several Beatles songs seared in my skull but that's only because the tunes were catchy. The lyrics had all the profundity of a mid-priced greeting card.
Source: stuff.co.nz
“Don’t butcher the butcher cover album,” the saying goes.
Good advice. This famously rare Beatles record could be worth some serious money. And one local man has a copy he can’t see.
Peter Smith, now blind, bought it when he was a child living with his family in Puerto Rico for a spell.
“That little 8-year-old boy made a very wise investment,” he said.
Yes he did.
The 1966 record, called “Yesterday and Today,” originally featured a weird photograph of the Fab Four dressed as butchers, holding slabs of meat and doll parts. Some, citing Paul McCartney’s comments at the time, interpreted the image as a protest of the Vietnam War. It features songs such as "Drive My Car," "Nowhere Man," "Yesterday," "We Can Work It Out" and "Day Tripper."
The record company had 750,000 copies made, but the photograph was condemned when it hit radio stations and stores, prompting Capitol Records to recall The Beatles’ ninth U.S. release on its label.
Source: Parker Adam Parker aparker@postandcourier.com
Pattie Boyd was married to the Beatle but obsessively pursued by Clapton. Both would write songs about her; both would cheat on her. In a new documentary, she reveals what it was like to be at the heart of music’s most toxic love triangle.When Pattie Boyd was 21 she married a Beatle. Wearing a Mary Quant dress and fox fur coat, the archetypal dolly bird model – all long legs and big eyes – married George Harrison, making her the most envied girl in Britain. It was the swinging Sixties and she was the epitome of glamour, inspiring Harrison to write Something, one of the best love songs ever written.
hat was only the beginning of her story. Fellow guitarist and rock star Eric Clapton was so consumed with unrequited love for the wife of his friend that he wrote Layla, declaring his anguish and passion for her.
In a story woven through with obsession, drug addiction and alcoholism, and tortuous heartbreak for both of them, when he…
Source: thetimes.co.uk
Much before The Beatles, there was Ravi Shankar, and long before him, there was Indian classical music. But for the six billion people of this planet who happen not to be Indian, the three seemed to magically appear together in a moment of celestial, psychedelic epiphany in the 1960s. This reading is rubbish, of course, but perceptions have a way of edging out facts.
There are many more players in the sequence of events that was to culminate with Indian classical music bursting on to the world stage with Western pop: the “quiet Beatle” George Harrison, American folk rocker David Crosby (of The Byrds and, later, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), the musicians of the Asian Music Circuit in the UK and what Harrison would no doubt call destiny.
Harrison’s interest in Indian music began accidentally, in April 1965, on the sets of The Beatles’ film Help! , which had a sequence filmed in an Indian restaurant in London with Indian musicians playing Indian instruments, including a sitar. “George was looking at them,” according to John Lennon in the documentary The Beatles Anthology. The film’s music composer, Ken Thorne, used an Indian ensemble of sitar, flute, tabla, ghunghroo, tanpura and possibly a dilruba and surbahar to play a Beatles medley called Another Hard Day’s Night. The piece was not particularly well played, but it was appropriate to the occasion. And it got Harrison interested in the sitar.
Source: Live Mint
The narrow path leading to the main hall of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ashram—or the Chaurasi Kutia Ashram as the locals refer to it—in Rishikesh is slippery even when not wet. What was once a paved thoroughfare, used by hundreds of disciples of the globe-trotting Indian ascetic, is today covered with moss that requires visitors to mind every step.
Even as the impressive architecture of the buildings along the main walkway is hidden with foliage of plants splitting through the concrete, the giant hall inside, where the Maharishi gave his sermons, is a burst of colour. The hall is airy and spacious with a large platform at one end. Graffiti in all sizes adorn the walls, lending a colourful character to what fans have christened the “Beatles Cathedral”. While not much signage or information is provided at the ashram, the graffiti has been painted over the years by those who managed to sneak in with cans of spray paint and their love and loyalty for the British band from the small city of Liverpool who won over the world.
Source: Live Mint
Paris Jackson is the daughter of pop royalty, but her heart beats for rock ‘n’ roll. She previously referred to her father Michael’s sometime duet partner, Paul McCartney, as “the love of her life,” and Tuesday night she achieved her life’s dream of meeting her hero.
The long-awaited summit went down Tuesday night in Los Angeles at a star-studded party thrown by Sir Paul’s daughter, megastar fashion designer Stella McCartney. Dubbed “Stella-chella,” the Coachella-inspired festival featured some of the fashonista’s famous friends, including Katy Perry, Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn, and new couple Dakota Johnson and Chris Martin.
It was there that Jackson, rocking a striped sweater dress and oversized red fanny pack, managed to snag a picture with the 75-year-old Beatles legend. Clearly, it was a moment she would never forget. “I cried like a goddamn baby,” she captioned the photo when she shared it to Instagram. In an interview with Teen Vogue last May, Jackson, 19, admitted that she doesn’t have a strong desire to be a public figure, but would like “just to get better at writing.” Specifically, she’d like to write a song for a certain former member of the Fab Four.
Source: People Music
For Christmas I gave my two grandchildren (ages 3 and 5) a set of DVDs of the Beatles singing 40 of their top hits. I asked my daughter how the kids liked them, and she said, "It is amazing, they know all the lyrics!"
Which gave me the idea for this article.
The obvious answer as to why the music of the Beatles has endured is that the group wrote fabulous songs and sang them well. They were also together for a relatively short time as compared to groups like the Rolling Stones, so they have not been subjected to the oldies circuit. Their body of work is all the more precious for that. The group in a sense never aged and will forever be associated with youth, including our own youths if you are a baby boomer. The Beatles' songs provided us with the soundtrack for our years of idealism and disillusionment.
When I was in Prague a few years ago , I asked our woman guide, who was about my own age (then 66), whether she and her friends knew about western music during the repressive Communist years. She said, "We had some smuggled albums, and we had secret listening parties, and, of course, the Beatles' records were especially prized." She said the music gave them a sense of freedom and hope in midst of Communist oppression, especially after the Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring in 1968.
Source: grandhaventribune.com
Paul Goresh, who famously snapped the only photo of John Lennon with his killer — one of the last pictures of the legendary Beatle — has died. He was 58. Goresh, from North Arlington, N.J., had been sick for some time, his cousin Rosanne Taylor wrote on a John Lennon Facebook fan page that he maintained. She confirmed his death to the Daily News on the phone Tuesday. Goresh died Jan. 9, she said.
“It is with much sadness and a heavy heart that I need to let you know of Paul’s passing. Paul had been sick for awhile . . . We spoke every few days and he was touched by the outpouring of love and good wishes that were sent to him,” she wrote. “Every one of you touched his life in a unique and special way, and he wanted me to let you know that that meant the world to him,” she added. Taylor said Goresh had requested that no service be held for his death and the family is honoring his wishes. “Everyone knows his love of The Beatles and especially John Lennon. I hope they are together and happy now,” she wrote. Goresh was forever haunted by the photo he took on Dec. 8, 1980 outside the Dakota apartment building at Central Park West and 72nd St. on the Upper West Side.
Source: Daily News
