Beatles News

Here's something I find remarkable: There are only three professionally made recordings of The Beatles playing live in concert. Sure, there are bootleg recordings that don't sound very good. And there's a single-microphone recording from the band's days performing in Hamburg in the early '60s, but that's it.

All three professional recordings were done at The Hollywood Bowl. One is a performance from August 1964 and the other two from August of '65. And "professional" in the mid-'60s means they were recorded on three-track analog tape. That's the best they could do. Even the label, Capitol Records, concluded the recordings didn't sound good enough to release. They eventually did, but not until 1977, and even then the album they put out, The Beatles Live At The Hollywood Bowl, sounded just okay.

All that's changed thanks to the remarkable work of Giles Martin, son of the legendary Beatles producer, George Martin. Using new technology, Giles Martin has brought new clarity to the recordings, more presence and reduced the overall roar of the crowd, a sound that was so loud it drowned out much of the band's performance. Give a listen to Martin's reworked version of "A Hard Day's Night."

By: Bob Boilen

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The story of Revolver began in a night of hell and illumination.

"We've had LSD," John Lennon told George Harrison.

It was spring 1965. Lennon and his wife, Cynthia, and Harrison and his wife, Pattie Boyd, were attending a dinner at the London home of dentist John Riley and his girlfriend, Cyndy Bury. Before the foursome left, Riley asked them to stay for coffee, then urged them to finish their cups. Shortly after, he told Lennon he had placed sugar cubes containing LSD in the coffee. Lennon was furious. "How dare you fucking do this to us?" He knew something about the drug: It was a powerful hallucinogen – termed a psychedelic – and it caused changes in thoughts, emotions and visions that frightened some observers. Psychologist Timothy Leary had famously been fired from Harvard University in 1963 for conducting experimental therapeutic sessions with the substance.

"It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film," Cynthia Lennon said. "The room seemed to get bigger and bigger." The Beatles and their wives fled Riley's home in Harrison's Mini Cooper. (According to Bury, John and George had earlier indicated a willingness to take LSD if they didn't know beforehand that details

The man who wrote the Beatles’ only authorised biography has revealed his picks for what he considers their worst songs, while cheerfully admitting he is “asking for trouble”. But if anyone can get away with such a bold move, it’s probably Hunter Davies.

Hunter is the man behind Four Lads Who Shook The World, which was published way back in 1968 after he had spent 18 months living in their shadows. It’s an exciting time for Beatles fans. International Beatleweek (August 24-30) is upon us, and Hunter, now 80, is heading to Liverpool to discuss his “legacy” – The Beatles Book (to be published on September 1 by Ebury at £30).

Four years in the making, it is the definitive guide to everything and everyone associated with The Beatles, and is divided into sections: People, Places, Songs and Broadcast and Cinema. Its rating system (using mop tops!) grades particular subjects out of 10 – and includes lists such as 10 Best Songs, 10 Worst Songs and 10 Most Influenial People. Though Hunter had the final say, he was helped by a top trio of Beatles experts and authors who worked with him on the book: Spencer Leigh and David Bedford from Liverpool and Keith Badman.< details

In September 1974 George Harrison’s record label, Dark Horse Records, released its first two singles. The first was Ravi Shankar’s ‘I Am Missing You’. Produced and arranged by Harrison, it is a rare Shankar composition in a Western pop style. The other single to come out that same day was Splinter’s ‘Costafine Town’, which went top 10 in Australia and South Africa and made the UK top twenty.

Two years later, with his contractual obligations to other labels at an end, and with the winding down of Apple Records, George signed to his own label. In the intervening years there had been other Dark Horse Records releases by Stairsteps, Jiva, Henry McCullough (following his departure from Wings), and a band called Attitudes. First brought together on Harrison’s 1975 album Extra Texture (Read All About It), Attitudes included keyboard player David Foster, who also played on George’s debut for Dark Horse, Thirty Three & 1/3.

George’s seventh solo studio album was recorded at his home, Friar Park, between the end of May and mid September 1976, and was released two months later on 19th November. Shortly after beginning to make this record, George contracted hep details

In the days before the internet and social media, posters were the main way of promoting a gig. And one of those who helped sell Merseybeat – and some up and coming band called the Beatles – to the Liverpool public was Tony Booth. Now more than 50 years after he created a slew of posters for Brian Epstein and his stable of rising stars, artist Tony is set to hold his first ever exhibition of his work, coinciding with International Beatleweek.

The 83-year-old’s show will open at the View Two Gallery on Wednesday, just down the road from the Cavern Club in Mathew Street. Only a handful of the original posters produced in the hundreds by Tony in the 1960s have survived, with the majority thrown away once the gigs had taken place.

Although one Cavern Club poster, which he produced for a fee of five shillings (25p), sold to an American collector in a London Auction House for £27,500. Instead Tony, who trained as a poster artist after leaving school at 15 and started off creating promotional sales material for the Epstein furniture business and record shop, has faithfully reproduced 40 of his favourite posters for the exhibition. He says: “I never imagined in a million years they would on details

I'm not sure if you are aware, but it seems like sh*t has gotten seriously real. Honestly, I'm pretty surprised when I look out my window and don't see the four horsemen of the apocalypse in a steady cantor down Broadway. We live in a crazy world, and it seems like it's getting crazier by the nanosecond. This is stressful. Add that to the stress of being a human being, and magnify that by ten or twenty (because I'm stressed and a workoholic New Yorker) and that could be described as my state of being. In case you haven't heard, we wear our bitterness and sometimes bad attitudes as a badge of pride.

Here's the thing, all of this can get really wearing on your morale. It's easy to feel down at the end of the day. I'm a creature of habit and often seek solace in a number of things: friends, a darn good spin class, and my sacred self-maintenance rituals like bath and shower time. Putting the time and effort into taking care of myself, or yourself, really does affect your entire demeanor.

But lately, a shower or a bath wasn't cutting the mustard. Maybe I needed to take a vacation or maybe I needed to stop reading the New York Times every morning because life had started to drag me down in a major way. This girl was p details

Sir Paul McCartney has been one of the world's most coveted acts for decades. And on Wednesday, it emerged that the longest running scripted primetime programme ever had to bend over backwards to get him.

The Huffington Post reported that The Simpsons agreed to make Lisa, the family's iconic daughter, a vegetarian in exchange for the former Beatle's agreement to play himself on a 1995 episode called, of course, Lisa The Vegetarian.

Hank Azaria, who's voiced several characters over the course of the show's 27-series run, told the blog, 'I can tell you, over the years, they were tempted a bunch of times to have Lisa break her vegetarian vow'. He did, however, add that they 'probably have not because they made that vow to Sir Paul. No, you don’t break a knight’s vow. As we’ve learned from Game Of Thrones, you do that at your own risk'. The Birdcage actor features on the episode alongside the rock legend, playing Apu, an Indian immigrant character who was a fixture on the programme.

It's with the help of McCartney and his first wife, who also voiced a yellow incarnation of herself on the show, that Apu persuades Lisa to give up meat. 

By: Sameer Suri

Source: The Daily M details

In August 1966, as the Beatles made their way to Washington during what would ultimately be their last tour, a group of six scheming 15-year-olds from the District’s Chevy Chase neighborhood developed a plan: 1. See the concert. 2. For free. 3. By sneaking into what then was called D.C. Stadium. 4. Disguised as the Beatles’ opening act, a band called the Cyrkle. Incorporated into this plan were makeshift costumes, a rented limo, decoy groupies and the unwitting participation of D.C. police, who provided the fake band with a motorcade escort. Aside from a paragraph-long mention in the Washington Star, in which the kids refused to provide their names, the plot went uncatalogued in the public record. Now, on the concert’s 50th anniversary, members of the fake Cyrkle provide an oral history of how they pulled off one of the greatest pranks in Washington folklore.

The pranksters:

John Koehler: We were all from the same neighborhood. Half of us were away at school during the year, but we’d been hanging out since we were 6 or 7. I think the germ of the prank’s idea belonged to Eddie Merrigan or Mark Welsh.

Mark Welsh: I think Bob Booth came up with the idea.

Bob Booth: The details

These were the sounds that rang through the Bay Area that day: Ahhhhhh! Shhhhhhhriek! Rinnnnnnngo!

The Chronicle’s front page from Aug. 19, 1964, covers the Beatles’ arrival in San Francisco and the nearly incomprehensible frenzy that greeted them.

The Fab Four “made an entrance into San Francisco last night that can only be described as hair-raising,” the story read. “The young Englishmen stepped gingerly off a Pan American World Airways jet — “Jet Clipper Beatles” — at 6:25 p.m. and into a black limousine that perilously resembled a hearse.”

The Beatles were the most popular band in the world, and their biggest fans seemed to be teenage girls and young women who couldn’t get enough of their pop songs and hair helmets.

“Several hundred yards away, the Beatlemaniacs — 9,000 strong — were putting on the sort of demonstration that used to win Academy Awards for Bette Davis,” The Chronicle’s Ron Fimrite wrote. “They shrieked, they howled, they fought with a gallant band of 180 San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies ... and on occasion, they fainted dead away.”

You might not believe details

John Lennon's killer has at least five people pulling for his release from prison. With Mark David Chapman's latest parole hearing scheduled for some time next week, the state Parole Board has received five letters in support of letting the convicted killer out since his last bid for release in 2014, state officials say. The officials wouldn't comment on who wrote the letters, but one is likely a Florida pastor who has written on Chapman’s behalf in the past.

On the flip side, the Parole Board since 2014 received two letters in opposition to granting Chapman parole. That’s on top of 80 or so other letters of opposition in his file going back years, the officials said. One of the new letters opposing parole again came from Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, her lawyer, Jonas Herbsman, confirmed.

Herbsman wouldn't go into specifics but said the new letter reaffirms previous correspondences to the board made public that expressed fears for the safety of herself and Lennon's two sons — Sean and Julian — if Chapman is released. Ono's past letters also expressed concern that Chapman himself could face danger from one of the slain Beatles’ fans seeking revenge.

This is the ninth time Chapma details