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Beatles News
George Martin, popularly known as the “Fifth Beatle,” was in high spirits with the Beatles’ audition for EMI on June 6, 1962, after which the producer offered them a recording contract. However, he was not satisfied with the performance of the band’s drummer, Pete Best. Hence, the Fab Four had to bring in a newbie, Ringo Starr, to take charge of the drums, because they thought him better than their former drummer.
Within a month of joining the band, Ringo Starr was in jitters about his future with the Beatles due to a decision made by Martin.
After two failed prior attempts by the Beatles to record the song “Love Me Do,” Martin noticed that Starr could not keep up with the pace. In a bid to get the song out as quickly as possible, he decided to hire a session drummer, Andy White, to get the job done.
Martin revealed the reason for his decision was that the inexperienced Starr was not yet ready for a fast-paced recording session. “I didn’t rate Ringo very highly; he couldn’t do a roll — and still can’t — though he’s improved a lot since,” he said in the book Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr. “Andy was details
The Beatles‘ “Your Mother Should Know” was inspired by Paul McCartney’s interactions with his aunt. In addition, it was supposed to advocate peace between generations. Notably, its message was really out of step with the 1960s counterculture.
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul discussed the origin of “Your Mother Should Know.” “My Aunty Jin and Uncle Harry and a couple of relatives were staying and they were in the living room just across the hall, so I just went to the dining room and spent a few hours with the door open with them listening,” he recalled.
This environment inspired him to write “Your Mother Should Know.” He felt the song was “basic.” Paul felt he probably wouldn’t have written it if Aunty Jin wasn’t nearby.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
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The Beatles wrote many songs that were love letters to various things and locations in the U.K. “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” are both dedicated to locations they visited in Liverpool. Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote one song in the early days of The Beatles as a “tribute to British rail.”
The Beatles first recorded “One After 909” in 1963 on the same day as “From Me to You.” However, The Beatles did perform it live earlier as The Quarrymen in 1960 and at the Cavern Club in 1962. The recorded version of the song wasn’t released until 1970’s Let it Be, the band’s final album. In a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, John Lennon said he wrote the song around the age of 17 and claims it was primarily a solo job.
“I wrote it when I was 17 or 18,” Lennon said. “We always wrote separately, but we wrote together because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes and also because they would say, well, you’re going to make an album together and knock off a few songs, just like a job.”
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles’ “Come Together” and “Something” were together and initially charted at different positions. Billboard changed its rules so that A-sides and B-sides charted together. “Come Together” and “Something” hit No. 1 together in the United States.
The Beatles‘ “Come Together” and “Something” both topped the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time. This only happened because Billboard changed its rules. On the other hand, the songs did not perform as well in the United Kingdom.
The Beatles’ 1969 singles “Come Together” and “Something” initially charted at No. 23 and No. 20, respectively. Then, the songs reached No. 10 and No. 11, and then No. 2 and No. 3. Subsequently, Billboard changed its rules.
Now, A-sides and B-sides would be counted together. Because of this, “Come Together” and “Something” reached the top of the chart at the same time, making the Fab Four’s first pair of singles to do so. The same phenomenon happened to The Beatles’ later singles “The Long and Winding Road” and “For You Blue.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/c details
Heather Mills "struggled" to live in Paul McCartney's family home, claims her new documentary The Trials of Heather Mills, which airs on Channel 5 and looks back on her tough childhood and her tumultuous marriage to McCartney. According to Mirror, Mills and McCartney were first introduced by Piers Morgan in May 1999 at the Pride of Britain Awards in London where McCartney presented an award in his late wife Linda's name, who had unfortunately passed away due to breast cancer. The Here Comes the Sun singer and the former model married in 2002 at a lavish wedding in Glaslough, Ireland.
Source: Mary Anthony/inquisitr.com
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Emmy-nominated actress, model and author Barbara Feldon joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about the "freedom and fun" of the 1960s, being a contemporary of the Beatles and her new memoir "Getting Smarter" on "Everything Fab Four," a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.
Feldon, best known for portraying the striking, sophisticated superspy Agent 99 on Mel Brooks and Buck Henry's classic sitcom "Get Smart," started out as a showgirl and model in New York City before moving on to acting. In fact, she and her husband at the time, the charming Lucien Feldon-Verdeaux (whose shocking story she details in her memoir, which is available on her website), were living in a fifth floor apartment off Park Avenue when the Beatles arrived to play "The Ed Sullivan Show" (on which Feldon herself had previously performed as a dancer) in February of 1964. "We heard this roar coming up from the street," she explains to Womack. "And looking down over the parapet, we saw this mob of young women." When she asked what they were screaming about, someone yelled up, "It's the Beatles!"
Source: Nicole Michael/salon.com
Today marks St George’s Day and so Sir Paul McCartney has honoured the two late Georges associated with The Beatles. Firstly, his fellow bandmate George Harrison, who died in November 2001, aged 58. And also Sir George Martin, The Beatles record producer, who died in March 2016 at the age of 90.
On his Instagram account, Sir Paul McCartney posted a picture of the two Georges in the studio, as captured by his late wife Linda McCartney, who died in April 1998 aged 56. The 80-year-old wrote: “Happy St George’s Day to Georges everywhere - Paul.”
Macca has posted similar tributes to the pair of “Georges I have known and loved” over the past few years. In fact, he still “talks” to Harrison through the evergreen coniferous tree that the Quiet Beatle gifted him before he died. Speaking previously with All Things Considered, Sir Paul said how Harrison was very into horticulture and a great gardener.
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
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Among the astonishing 250-plus shows that The Beatles played in 1963, a couple were especially poignant. On April 8, The Beatles were entertaining the Swimming Baths in Leyton, east London, while Cynthia Lennon was alone in Sefton General Hospital, Liverpool, giving birth to Julian. It was not yet necessarily the custom for fathers to attend births in 1963, but even so, Lennon would not have a moment to meet his first-born until April 11, squeezed between shows in Birkenhead and Middleton.Another significant gig was the August 3 booking at their former proving ground, The Cavern. Since the most recent of their 280-plus previous engagements at the Mathew St cellar on April 12, the tenor of the fans had changed. Quoted in Spencer Leigh’s book, The Cavern, club doorman Paddy Delaney recalled, “The crowds outside were going mad. By the time John Lennon had got through the cordon of girls, his mohair jacket had lost a sleeve. I grabbed it to stop a girl getting away with a souvenir. John stitched it back on.”
Source: Danny Ecclesto/mojo4music.com
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In 1971, George Harrison put on the Concert for Bangladesh, and Ringo Starr was the only former Beatle to perform. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney worried about the optics of performing with former bandmates and declined to join the event. Starr admitted that Harrison also had these concerns; because of this, he said Harrison didn’t expressly invite him. Regardless, Starr showed up to perform.
In 1971, Harrison and Ravi Shankar hosted two benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden to fund relief efforts for refugees from the Bangladesh Liberation War. He welcomed a number of musicians, including Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, and Billy Preston.
The benefit concert was a success and set the tone for the celebrity benefit concerts to come. Beyond that, though, it helped raise awareness of a conflict many Americans knew nothing about.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
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Ringo Starr has never shied away from getting a little help from his friends. The drummer’s close buddies for many years included his Beatles bandmates, who assisted him in his solo career. George Harrison helped Ringo with solo project days after injuring himself on a mountain hike, for instance. Yet Ringo’s musician friends extended beyond The Beatles.
1. Ringo Starr had an ‘intimate relationship’ with Keith Moon of The Who
Ringo and Keith Moon had different drumming styles — understated elegance compared to bombastic bashing — yet their personalities meshed well. One of Ringo’s former girlfriends said he had an intimate relationship with Moon, meaning they could hold entire conversations without speaking.
The Who drummer once angled for his friend’s job in The Beatles, but that didn’t hurt their relationship. Moon babysat Ringo’s son Zak. In a full circle moment, Zak became The Who’s touring drummer later in his life.
Source: Jason Rossi/cheatsheet.com
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The Beatles are the most covered bands of all time. Even in the 1960s, bands and artists were already taking songs from The Beatles and putting their own spin on them. While the members of The Beatles didn’t love every cover, they did receive royalties, so they were mostly okay with them. However, George Harrison called one Beatles song cover “rubbish” and didn’t want to be associated with it.
George Harrison didn’t write many Beatles songs, as Paul McCartney and John Lennon shared most songwriting duties. However, Harrison did get a chance to shine every now and then, and his songs appeared more frequently in The Beatles’ later projects. His song, “If I Needed Someone”, was released in 1966 with Rubber Soul. It’s a love song Harrison dedicated to his then-wife, Pattie Boyd.
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
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The Beatles‘ “All You Need Is Love” reuses the chorus of “She Loves You.” Paul McCartney revealed this was his idea. In addition, “All You Need Is Love” quotes from the famous English folk song “Greensleeves.”In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul said “All You Need Is Love” references other songs because he decided it should. “‘All You Need Is Love’ was John’s song,” he said. “I threw in a few ideas, as did the other members of the group, but it was largely ad-libs like singing ‘She Loves You’ or ‘Greensleeves’ or silly little things at the end and we made those up on the spot.” For context, you can hear a snippet of “Greensleeves” in the song starting at three minutes and 13 seconds in. Paul sings the chorus of “She Loves You” around three minutes and 22 seconds in.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
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“One of these days we must sort through our old compositions. We might be sitting on a goldmine! Some of them might stand a chance. Meanwhile we go on writing – mainly for our next LP.” John, April 1963
This, the band’s appearance on the annual Royal Variety Show was, in publicity terms, the biggest night of their career so far.
Staged in front of members of the Royal Family, the show was watched in almost every home in Britain.
John’s famous introduction to the band’s last song was *the* moment of The Beatles’ early TV career – the following day, everyone was talking about it:
Source: thebeatles.com
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It took time, but George Harrison proved he was hardly the third wheel among The Beatles’ songwriters. He might have been the most progressive writer in the group and wrote several experimental songs that saw him dabbling in technicolor psychedelia and Indian music. George’s demo for “Love You To” is a wonderful look at how the sitar- and tabla-led Revolver song took shape from the bare-bones acoustic version.
It wasn’t the first Beatles song with George on sitar (that would be “Norwegian Wood”), but “Love You To” was the first Fab Four tune where the Indian instrument takes the lead. George turned the Revolver song into a showcase for the sitar, starting with two lush opening strums.
From there, George layered in some drones underneath a gentle mini solo and then launched into the song proper. He performed several memorable riffs during the song’s three-minute runtime, including a solo starting at the 1:35 mark.
Source: Jason Rossi/cheatsheet.com
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The Beatles got so big, so famous, that it started making some members of the band nervous. George Harrison was among the musicians who grew wary of the hysteria that surrounded himself, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney.
Though Harrison, Lennon, Starr, and McCartney gained fame and fortune through the rise of the Beatles, they gave up a lot, too — privacy, security, peace. Harrison felt the relationship between the band and their fans became “very one-sided.”
“The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give,” he said, as reported in The Love You Make by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines.
Around 1965, Harrison’s nerves really started getting to him. The chaos that surrounded the band felt, all of a sudden, too close to home. He worried that he or one of his bandmates would get assassinated.
“I wanted to stop touring after about ’65, actually, because I was getting nervous,” Harrison told the author of TLYM in 1987. “I didn’t like the idea of being too popular. There was that movie The Manchurian Candidate. … I think in hi details