Beatles News

A gay Jewish man living in 1960s England, Brian Epstein was a double outsider, all the more out of place with his natty attire and crisp diction as he ran his record store and sought affection in dangerous, degrading ways. But in November 1961, he gazed, mesmerized, upon four pumped-up boys in leather jackets and jeans driving crowds wild at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. He was particularly captivated by one: John Winston Lennon. Epstein soon became the band’s manager, in possibly the most auspicious match in rock history.

The predominant narrative of Beatles history gives insufficient credit to the role Epstein played in shaping the group’s image and preparing them for international adulation. He dressed them in tailored suits (better for attracting the girls); shopped their records to label after label, armed with little but his name and his unyielding faith; fostered their songwriting; and encouraged the musicians’ penchant for goofy wordplay in press interviews while urging sophistication.

Source: Joseph McCombs 

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Sean Lennon is talking about his mother’s child-rearing philosophy. “She had a very sort of postmodern, post-hippie, post-feminist way of thinking,” he says of Yoko Ono.“ It was very liberal, and she always treated me like an individual. She never really told me not to do anything, except get a Mohawk or a tattoo. So there were very few boundaries. She believed that kids are individuals and shouldn’t be treated like a subservient class.”

At 84, Ono—singer, artist, activist, and guardian of the legacy of her late husband (and Sean’s father), John Lennon—is enjoying a remarkable late-career reappraisal. The Ono oeuvre, once maligned as a conglomeration of unbearable neo-Dadaist pranks and unlistenable music, is now considered haute. Her conceptual-art projects—films, installations, happenings, and performance pieces, such as her 1964 work Cut Piece, in which she invited viewers to cutoff swaths of her clothing with a pair of scissors—today are seen as groundbreaking. Her albums and recordings, which mostly eschewed melody and traditional song structure, are held up as revolutionary. Even her clipped aphoristic “instructions,” famously compiled in books like her seminal 1964 Grapefruit, have been heralded as presciently tweet-like.

Source: Harper's Bazaar

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Paul McCartney may have something to say about Donald Trump on his forthcoming untitled album, according to the Liverpool Echo.

During a visit to students at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts last week, the paper reports that McCartney told the students, “Sometimes the situation in the world is so crazy, that you’ve got to address it." The Liverpool Echo says the song he's written will pertain to President Trump. Billboard reached out to McCartney's reps for details.

McCartney is a co-founder of the institute, also called LIPA, and was a student there when it was known as Liverpool Institute High School For Boys. The high school closed in 1985 and reopened as LIPA after an extensive renovation. McCartney is the school's Lead Patron.

He didn't elaborate further on the song according to the report, but given some other recent comments he has made, Trump and his followers probably won't be a fan of the song.

In an interview with the Australian newspaper the Daily Telegraph published at the beginning of July, he told writer Cameron Adams, “I'm not a fan at all. He’s unleashed a kind of violent prejudice that is sometimes latent among people," he said.

Source: Billboard

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n all-new Beatles documentary, It Was Fifty Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper & Beyond, is being released in the U.S. on September 8 on DVD, Blu-ray and VOD, by BFD distributed by The Orchard.

The film is director by Alan G. Parker, the director of Monty Python: Almost The Truth, Rebel Truce: The Story of The Clash, Never Mind the Sex Pistols, and Who Killed Nancy, among many others.

The film features rare archival footage unseen since the 1960s plus rare interviews with the Beatles’ original drummer Pete Best, John Lennon’s sister Julia Baird, Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein’s secretary Barbara O’Donnell, Beatles associate Tony Bramwell, Pattie Boyd’s sister Jenny Boyd, Beatles author Philip Norman, and more.

Source: Best Classic Bands

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In India, when we say "the wall" in public discourse, we generally refer to former Indian cricket captain Rahul Dravid for his impenetrable batting. But in Prague, the wall makes John Lennon, the famous English singer-songwriter-activist, relevant in a conversation. And like the Indian wall, the Prague wall also stands impenetrable, in terms of spirit for freedom.

Although Lennon, who lived on this planet for just 40 autumns, did not ever visit the capital of the Czech Republic, his name is taken every moment in the picturesque city, courtesy the wall. And when I witnessed it, the feeling was, to say the least, exciting. For a first-timer in the historic city of Prague, it was equivalent to witnessing history from close quarters.

The special wall, known as the John Lennon Wall, is located Velkopřevorské náměstí in Mala Strana, which is not far from the French Embassy in Prague. Once an ordinary wall, it came to be associated with Lennon since the 1980s when people started treating it as a symbol of liberty by painting it with graffiti inspired by the iconic singer and lyrics from the unforgettable Beatles.

But why the wall was chosen as a platform to express liberty?

Lennon was a hero for the youth of central and Eastern Europe when the totalitarian rule of the communists was underway and the iron regimes had banned western pop songs, including those sung by Lennon, for he was a man who backed freedom. Some musicians were even put behind bars for playing Lennon's songs.

Source: Shubham Ghosh

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Apple Corps, the company founded by members of The Beatles, on Wednesday won the dismissal of a lawsuit seeking the rights to the master tapes of the band's celebrated 1965 concert at New York's Shea Stadium.

U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan said Sid Bernstein Presents LLC, named for the concert's promoter, failed to show it deserved sole control over the Aug. 15, 1965, footage and deserved damages reflecting its many subsequent uses.

Daniels said the company, which said it had been assigned Bernstein's rights, could not claim to be the "author" of a copyrightable work even if Bernstein were the driving force behind the sold-out concert because he did not film it.

"The relevant legal question is not the extent to which Bernstein contributed to or financed the 1965 concert; rather, it is the extent to which he 'provided the impetus for' and invested in a copyrightable work - e.g., the concert film," Daniels wrote. "The complaint and relevant contracts clearly refute any such claim by Bernstein."

Source:Reuters

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When George Harrison stopped by to plug a new project for his old friend Ravi Shankar on July 24, 1997, it was almost as if he somehow knew this would be his last TV appearance. Sparked by an intuitive line of questioning by VH1’s John Fugelsang, Harrison turned expansive on his faith and what happens when we die.

Most of that, as you’d expect, was initially left on the cutting-room floor, as VH1 chose to focus instead on the musical portion of their conversation. Harrison was diagnosed with throat cancer later that year, and during the period before he died, the network reedited the former Beatles star’s segment to include his meditation on death.

VH1 then aired the expanded version on the day Harrison died, finally giving full voice to a remarkably deep conversation on the nature of death and salvation. Song performances included “Any Road,” a previously unheard number that later appeared on 2002’s Brainwashed; “If You Belonged to Me,” from the Traveling Wilburys‘ 1990 album, Vol. 3; and, most touchingly, the title track from All Things Must Pass.

How Harrison got there was pure happenstance. When he showed up unannounced with Shankar, he agreed to answer a couple of questions. “George had just produced the Shankar project Chants of India, and they were going to come and give us a little 10-minute sound bite and then take off,” Fugelsang told Chuck Daly in 2013.

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The debate over marijuana legalization doesn’t seem likely to end anytime soon, but if and when it’s ever decriminalized, enthusiasts should toke up in honor of the Beatles, who publicly came out in favor of it 50 years ago.

As noted by the Beatles Bible, the band members and manager Brian Epstein were all among the signatories when 64 of Britain’s best and brightest were rounded up to urge discussion of the issue by taking out a full-page ad in the London Times on July 24, 1967. Prompted by the arrest of acclaimed photographer and International Times founder John Hopkins — and his subsequent nine-month sentencing for possession — the group sought to call attention to what they deemed an unnecessarily harsh public policy.

Arguing that marijuana is “the least harmful of pleasure-giving drugs, and … in particular, far less harmful than alcohol,” the ad added, “Cannabis smoking is widespread in the universities, and the custom has been taken up by writers, teachers, doctors, businessmen, musicians, scientists and priests. Such persons do not fit the stereotype of the unemployed criminal dope fiend.”

Although none of the Beatles were in attendance at the meeting where the plan for the ad was hatched, their signatures weren’t offered without thought; in fact, it was Paul McCartney who ultimately ended up footing the bill after meeting personally with a pair of the group’s leaders. Although he hoped in vain to have his financial support kept a secret, his fears of a public backlash directed at the group proved unfounded.

Source: Ultimate Classical Rock

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In The Beatles’ 1966 song Taxman, George Harrison berates Harold Wilson’s proposed 95pc “supertax” on the UK’s highest earners. “If 5pc appears too small,” he sings bitterly, “be grateful I don’t take it all.”

But there was one man to whom the Fab Four were genuinely thankful for keeping their Revenue bill down: their accountant, Harry Pinsker.

Many people claim to have been in The Beatles’ inner circle, but Pinsker truly was. From 1961 to 1970 he oversaw their finances, set up their companies, helped buy their homes, and even signed off their grocery shopping.

“I first met them in my office – they were just four scruffy boys,” recalls Pinsker, now 87. “I hadn’t heard of them – few people had outside Liverpool. That changed.”

This is a bit of a tough question as all four of them were in the great Beatles movies “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help!” and “Yellow Submarine,” and their songs have been used to great effect in countless films. Each of them is an Oscar-winner, having nabbed the award for best original score (for a musical film) for the 1970 documentary “Let it Be.”

But individually, each Beatle’s film work has run the gamut in quality/quantity.

John Lennon

Before his death in 1980, Lennon had acted in very few films. His key role outside of the Beatles films was in 1967’s “How I Won the War,” which reunited Lennon with Richard Lester, director of “A Hard Day’s Night.” In the WWII comedy, Lennon plays an enlisted man who falls victim to the pratfalls of his hapless commander.

Though little came of his acting career, Lennon has 840 movie/TV soundtrack credits to his name, more than any other Beatle.

Source: Micah Mertes / World-Herald staff writer - Omaha.com

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