Beatles News

At a time when any pop star with two Top 40 hits is hailed as a legend, Ringo Starr is the genuine article.

Born 75 years ago in the Dingle section of Liverpool, Starr, along with Paul McCartney and the late John Lennon and George Harrison, forever redefined and altered the course of popular music.

Starr's drumming anchored The Beatles at rowdy Hamburg dives and over the screaming din at Shea Stadium. He has fended off crazed fans and battled an army of Blue Meanies.

Some would rest on their laurels, but not Richard Starkey, MBE. Indeed, it has been a particularly busy year for the once and still fab drummer.

Starr released a new album, "Postcards From Paradise"; was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by McCartney; published "Photograph," a collection of images from his private collection; announced plans to auction off 800 personal effects to benefit the Lotus Foundation charity he established with wife Barbara Bach; and kicked off a North American tour with his All Starr Band.

He is in the midst of a North American tour this month. Starr fielded a few questions before the start of the tour.

You launched the All Starr Band in 1989 with a talented lineup that changed wit details

John Lennon would have celebrated his 75th birthday this Friday. To celebrate the milestone, Yoko Ono, his widow, attempted to organize a party and a gift for him in New York City's Central Park. She invited the world to come and break a world record in Lennon's honor: arranging the world's largest human peace sign, a sign that essentially epitomizes Lennon's activism.

Fans came from all over — Italy, Venezuela, Ohio — to answer the call. Activists brought signs protesting war in all its forms. An unexpected number of children field tripping from several New York City schools sat singing along to tunes from the Beatles catalog piped through the loud speakers.

"We are more connected globally now," Luz Cano, a 14-year New York resident from Argentina, told Mic, marveling at the diversity. "I think younger generations are more aware of trying to make the world a better place and create peace."

The age range between the youngest and oldest participants was vast. However, it revealed the event's deeper significance: Beyond creating a visual tribute for Lennon, it was an opportunity to pass along the late artist's message to the next generation.

"If we instill in our children an understandi details

“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.”—John Lennon (1969) John Lennon, born 75 years ago on Oct. 9, 1940, was a musical genius and pop cultural icon. He was also a vocal peace protester, anti-war activist and a high-profile example of the lengths to which the U.S. government will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.

Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was Lennon who was being singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files collected on his activities and associations.

For a little while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.

Years after Lennon’s assassination it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics, a letter from FBI Dire details

A renegade with a bottomless bag of dance moves helps put the final contemporary touches on the 2015 remix of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson's "Say Say Say," off the newly remastered edition of McCartney's 1983 LP, Pipes of Peace.

Ryan Huffington directed and choreographed the clip, which premiered on Facebook and follows a young man as he traipses, in time, through his neighborhood to a slick, streamlined reworking of the indelible pop cut. The dancer joins up with similarly quick-footed kids before breaking off on his own, cutting loose on top of a car and watching another group of dancers, whom the camera catches beautifully through his outspread, perpetually shaking legs.

As his journey continues, the boy barges into a bodega and brings out the youthful, rhinestone-studded luster of an elderly woman before making his way to a backroom where the festivities are already underway. The final minute of "Say Say Say" is an ebullient dance-off rife with outrageous moves befitting the timelessness of McCartney and Jackson's party jam. 

By: Jon Blistein

Source: Rolling Stone

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If John Lennon had lived he would have been 75 on Friday, October 9, 2015. Instead, he was shot in 1980, outside the apartment building in New York where he had lived for nine years. Radio 2 has marked the anniversary with a two-part Monday-night series, John Lennon: the New York Years. Radio 4 devoted its Archive on 4 hour on Saturday to John Lennon Verbatim. All three programmes were made by Des Shaw for independents Ten Alps. There were thus bound to be common uses of source material, overlaps in the narrative but differences in style.

The Radio 2 series had film star Susan Sarandon as narrator, and drew on reminiscences from journalists, photographers and friends. Part one traced the rise of The Beatles’ fame in the US, from their first Ed Sullivan shows to after they split and Lennon, having fallen in love with Yoko Ono and out of love with Britain (lack of privacy, constant press intrusion), moved to New York, where he could go out for a chocolate milkshake in peace. Part two last night looked at the later years, how his music changed, why he loved the city so. Colourful, fast moving, it was hard to know who was talking because Sarandon breathed their names so softly.

Radio 4’s programme had no details

Paul McCartney, still stung by the loss of his wife, was feeling nostalgic as the 1990s drew to a close.

Instead of rehashing the obvious successes he’d had with the Beatles or Wings, however, he traveled further back – all the way to the music that first sparked something inside the hearts of a young John Lennon and Paul McCartney: The records of the 1950s, of Chuck Berry and Larry Williams, of Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent. Each played an important role in shaping the early Beatles sound.

So, while McCartney holed up in Abbey Road (site of so many brilliant Beatles recordings) and with Chris Thomas (who had co-produced Back to the Egg, the 1979 finale of Paul McCartney’s sunsequent band Wings), he went about things in an older old-fashioned way. That meant none of the decades-old studio-craftsmanship so closely associated with McCartney. Instead, the resulting Run Devil Run (released on October 4, 1999) was fast and loose, and — because of its early-rock leanings — almost nothing like the bulk of his other previously issued solo recordings.

McCartney tears through Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town,” and Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up,” and Be details

Looking back on his first meeting with The Beatles, film director Richard Lester remembers the unexpected topic of conversation that brought them together. “The boys found out that I was this pathetic jazz piano player,” he explains. “That gave them something to lord over me because I was the past and they were the future. John Lennon in particular hated jazz, and he told me that.”

When Lester met The Beatles in late 1963, the intention was to make a cheap, black-and-white jukebox movie to capitalise on the band’s extraordinary success. For his film, Lester assembled a remarkable cross section of talent – including Wilfred Brambell, Victor Spinetti, Pattie Boyd and Lionel Blair – who all witnessed first hand Beatlemania in full tilt. “It was becoming increasingly intense for the boys,” says Boyd, who met her future husband George Harrison on the film’s shoot.

Meanwhile Blair, an old friend of the band, recalls the logistical problems accompanying the shoot: “They couldn’t walk round the streets or anything. There were screaming girls everywhere.” But despite such obstacles, A Hard Day’s Night rose about the ruck of rock’n&r details

The other day I threw out my first Beatles album — which is akin to throwing out one of the only photos of a dead relative, a perfectly good organic burrito or a $20 bill. Beatles albums have been discarded before, but mostly by crazies and Klansmen back in early March ’66, when dubiously contextualized quotes from John claimed that “Christianity will vanish and shrink…” and that “We’re (The Beatles) more popular than Jesus now.” That was 49 years ago, three years before I was born.

On Friday, I turned 46. And instead of taking some kind of inventory (I’m saving that for 50), I began to think about my relationship with the Beatles, who were still together when I was born (take that, Y and Z Generations!). And my relationship to them, unlike that with just about everyone else in my life after nearly half a century (friends, family, women, pets, the government, R.E.M.) is more or less the same: pure love. I am the human equivalent of Ringo’s peace fingers, and have been since I first began playing with the LPs that my mother and father gave me to play with because I was an early-depressed child. Some of those wonderful objects had posters, and lyrics, and these details

In The Beatles Anthology, George Harrison recalled, "There used to be a situation where we'd go in (as we did when we were kids), pick up our guitars, all learn the tune and chords and start talking about arrangements. But there came a time ... when Paul [McCartney] had fixed an idea in his brain as to how to record one of his songs ... It was taken to the most ridiculous situations, where I'd open my guitar case and go to get my guitar out and he'd say, 'No, no, we're not doing that yet.' ... It got so there was very little to do, other than sit around and hear him going, 'Fixing a hole ...' with Ringo [Starr] keeping the time."

John Lennon would allow Harrison to weave guitar hooks into his compositions, but McCartney would sometimes remove Harrison's guitar solos on songs like "Another Girl," "Penny Lane," and "Hello, Goodbye." Throughout the Seventies, guitarists for Wings would quit after realizing they would have almost zero input on what they played or did not play. Which is fine; McCartney's a musical genius and should be able to hire who he wants to do what he wants. But Harrison didn't need or want to be a faceless session man getting paid on the clock.

Harrison was also losing Lennon, the big brother/ details

Before The Beatles became a legendary supergroup whose music is still celebrated by generations of fans, there was The Quarrymen.

The name of John Lennon’s first skiffle/rock and roll group, the Quarrymen was formed in 1956 and featured some of Lennon’s school mates. One of those mates was Rod Davis, who grew up with Lennon near Liverpool, and played with him as a small child, even attending Sunday school with the future legend.

Currently touring Canada in celebration of what would have been Lennon’s 75th birthday, Oct. 9, Davis will tell some of those stories from the early days at the Best Western Vernon Lodge, Oct. 15. Hosted by the Vernon Folk-Roots Music Society (VFRMS), the show will also feature a PowerPoint presentation with photos of the guys and the places where they grew up and performed. “He will also be playing some of the songs he sang with Lennon so long ago, and will wrap up the evening with a Q&A from the audience,” said Paul Tessier, with the VFRMS.

Davis, who grew up in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool, first met Lennon at St. Peter’s Church, where the boys both attended Sunday school. Later, they found themselves students at Quarry Bank High Schoo details