Beatles News

Ringo Starr got by with a little help from his friends -- and some famous folks in the house -- at his Sunday, Oct. 25 show at the State Theatre in New Brunswick.

Bruce Springsteen watched the show from the audience with his mom, Adele Springsteen, after stopping backstage to say hello and goodbye to the Beatles legend, according to the theater.

Starr posted a pic of himself and Springsteen and a fella named Wayne on his social media sites prior to the show.

"Great to see Bruce," said Starr.

The Boss performed with Starr and his All-Starr Band in 1989, when Clarence Clemons and Nils Lofgren were in Starr's band, at the then-called Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel. Springsteen has a history of performing at the State Theatre going back to the mid-1970s. The last time he took the stage there was in in 1995, when he began his "The Ghost of Tom Joad'' solo acoustic tour at the venue.

The latest version of the All-Starr Band includes Todd Rundgren, Gregg Rolie from Santana, Steve Lukather from Toto and Richard Page of Mr. Mister.

By: Chris Jordan

Source: Asbury Park Press

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A giant image taken by Paul McCartney’s photographer daughter is helping to illuminate Newcastle this week and turn the focus on National Adoption Week. Mary McCartney’s eye-catching photograph of a small boy is being projected onto Newcastle Civic Centre and other city centre buildings to raise awareness of the need to find more people willing to adopt. Monday evening’s switch-on coincided with an Adoption Information Evening being held at the Civic Centre, which featured the dramatic projection on its main exterior wall.

There are currently 4,290 children in the care of local authorities in the North East – 505 of them in Newcastle. The average age of youngsters enduring the longest wait to find an adoptive family is just four years old, so McCartney’s image includes the caption “Too old at 4?”

The celebrity photographer - daughter of The Beatles star and his late wife Linda - has been working with the information organisation First4Adoption which organises the annual National Adoption Week. Her illumination will be showing until Sunday in the hope it will trigger interest among those able to adopt children aged around four.

McCartney recently took the official details

Sometime in the summer of 1993, ex-Beatle George Harrison drove to the recording studio in West Los Angeles where he was to record a brief cameo for The Simpsons. He would appear as himself in "Homer's Barbershop Quartet," an episode-long parody of his old band, and he was assured the session would be brief and discreet. His cover was quickly blown and the studio was swarmed with The Simpsons' writing staff, all professed Beatle fans, overwhelming him with more questions about the old band. Harrison glumly obliged until the show's creator, Matt Groening mentioned Wonderwall Music: a soundtrack album he'd released in 1968, and the first he'd released under his own name. Harrison perked up and started gushing. That album, he told Groening, was the most fun he'd ever had making a record--and almost no one, in twenty-five years, had ever asked him about it.

No one had asked him likely because almost no one had seen the movie. Even today, Joe Massot's Wonderwall is largely unknown, except as an artifact of Swinging Sixties psychedelia. In it reclusive, middle-aged microbiologist Oscar Collins (Jack MacGowran) becomes obsessed with the beautiful Vogue model next door (Jane Birkin) and her freewheeling world that he spies thro details

You would think that a supergroup featuring Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty would rack up massive hit singles.

Yet their band, the Traveling Wilburys, peaked at only No. 63 with “End of the Line.” The second single to be pulled from the October 1988 release Volume One, “End of the Line” still sounds fresh today. Its infectious, rollicking rhythm suggests traveling with buddies on a beautiful day.

The Traveling Wilburys’ story began in 1988 in the wake of George Harrison’s hugely successful comeback album Cloud Nine. Harrison was about to release another single from the album, the breezy “This Is Love,” and needed a B-side for the track. As fate would have it, Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty were hanging out in Bob Dylan’s studio, and Harrison suggested that they record a song together.

When George Harrison presented the resulting song “Handle with Care” to his record label, then-president Mo Ostin loved it so much that he urged the ex-Beatles star to expand the experience into an entire album. According to Ostin, Harrison took full charge of the project.

The name “Traveling Wi details

"All you need is love,” and a little luck doesn’t hurt either, as one Indiana woman found out recently at a Paul McCartney concert in Columbus.

Tara Horan has a lot to be excited about. She recently discovered that she is pregnant with her first child, but said it has been torturous to keep the news a secret, especially from her mother.

She wanted to make the birth announcement in a creative way, and then it hit her – what if she could have her No. 1 idol make the announcement for her?

When Horan talks about all the McCartney concerts that she and her mother have been to – and they’ve been to many -- she gets a little teary-eyed and her passion for the music is apparent.Horan has been a huge Beatles fan since she was a little girl. She credits her mother with introducing her to the music that would go on to have a profound impact on her life throughout her teen years and into adulthood. She even has a tattoo of the Fab Four on her arm.

For Horan, this wasn’t just a music fan meeting her favorite musician, it was truly a dream come true -- getting to share the most exciting news of her entire life with the help of her favorite Beatle.

By: J.J Dixon

Caught on a recording that has sat in a garage for 50 years is a chat with John Lennon that is a bit different than most. The interview, by New Zealand academic Dr Tony Taylor, has come to light in a newly published book and Carly Thomas sat down with the man who talked Beatlemania with John Lennon... twice.

Times change, that's a given. Years pass, decades pass and things that felt so immediate become history in the blink of an eye.

But some things, people, times, stand out more than others. They make an indelible mark and they become a yesterday that we hang things from. . Their memory lingers long after the fact. The Beatles have done just that. Think about the sixties and there they are: dapper suits, lyrics about young love, the hair and screaming fans.

It's those fans, the hysteria, the extreme reaction, that was new. It got given the title Beatlemania. It worried parents, made fans faint and it got Dr Tony Taylor, an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Victoria University in Wellington, thinking. "I started to look around just to see if anybody had written anything about this," he says.

"Nobody had, I was very surprised. The consumerisation and the cluster of revolutions - the youth revolu details

Give My Regards to Broad Street, released on October 22, 1984, is still an album that represents the nadir not just of the decade but quite possibly of Paul McCartney’s career. (Yes, he re-recorded Beatles songs; no, that wasn’t a good idea.) As such, a flinty little number called “Not Such a Bad Boy” arrived like a bolt of cool-rocking lightning out of the boring-retread blue.

It wasn’t enough to save Give My Regards to Broad Street, an awful album that was paired with a worse movie. But “Not Such a Bad Boy” is certainly worth returning to.

Paul McCartney, at this point, had scarcely attempted a rock song since the punky final edition of Wings flew apart, and “Not Such a Bad Boy” shows just what an awful loss that had been — even as it points the way to next-decade successes like Run Devil Run.

Appearing here with Chris Spedding and Dave Edmunds on guitars, along with the ever-faithful Ringo Starr at the drums, Paul McCartney tears into a straight-forward little groover about a reformed rebel now reduced to kitchen-pass adventures — and he sounds like he’s having no small amount of fun doing it.

By: Nick Deriso

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Even though they haven’t functioned as a musical unit for more than 45 years, there’s never been a shortage of material on the Beatles. In fact, you could easily fill a major library with all of the books that ruthlessly dissect every corner of the band’s career—from their songwriting and their instruments, to private letters and romantic relationships. Surely there’s nothing new to say on the subject of Beatleology, right?

Wrong.

Chip Madinger, along with co-author Scott Raile, has just released Strange Days Indeed – A Scrapbook of Madness, the first installment in his multi-volume LENNONOLOGY series. The book is a day-by-day diary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s life together, from the moment they met in November 1966, to Lennon’s tragic death in December 1980. The product of 15 years research, the book is the most comprehensive history of John and Yoko’s personal and creative existence ever compiled.

There are few people more qualified to literally write the book of Lennonology. Madinger has worked on numerous projects for the Beatles’ Apple Records, including The Capitol Albums Volume 1 package, Magical Mystery Tour BluRay release, and the sle details

I don’t trust people who don’t like The Beatles.

In certain hipster circles these days, The Beatles are accused of being a boy-band media fabrication (a la One Direction, NSYNC, etc.), pandering musical thieves and overrated pop commodities.

I think they are talking about The Monkees, not The Beatles.

Granted, I never need to hear “Yellow Submarine,” “Octopus’s Garden” or “The Long and Winding Road” ever again but just because you sit around in a coffee shop or an online chat room declaring that the Beatles stink does not necessarily make it true. Backlash leaves such a bitter aftertaste.

I fell in love with The Beatles when The Beatles were falling apart. I’ve always felt a little cheated because I never got to experience the rush of buying a brand new copy of, say, “Revolver” (1966), tearing it open and hearing it for the first time before anyone else.

Last Tuesday night, my friend Alan Hanstein decided to recreate that thrill of the new by buying a sealed, vinyl copy of “Rubber Soul” (1965), opening it and playing it for a live audience at the Challenger Learning Center’s Planetarium. My nephew Hu details

A few weeks ago a historical marker passed seemingly unnoticed: the 35th anniversary of Paul McCartney’s “Temporary Secretary.”

The oversight isn't surprising. To the public at large, "Temporary Secretary" is one of McCartney’s least known, and most dismissed, singles. At the time, rock arbiter Rolling Stone magazine panned it and the rest of McCartney’s curious, synth-heavy second solo album, “McCartney II,” as “an album of aural doodles designed for the amusement of very young children” and the former Beatle’s voice sounding “like a cross between an insect and a windup toy.”

“Secretary” was issued as a 12-inch single in September 1980 and, despite the diss, in the intervening decades the once-scorned new wave ditty has become a secret weapon in the arsenals of DJs worldwide. I’ve heard spinners as varied as No Age’s Randy Randall, Mark “Frosty” McNeill of Dublab and Nightswim DJ Chris Holmes (who’s McCartney’s touring DJ) drop the song on unsuspecting Los Angeles crowds. The respected house DJ and producer Dixon named one of his mixes after it.

For reference, here’s McCartney&rs details