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Beatles News
He’s the man who once hung up on John Lennon. And despite that, he still went on to play on the ex-Beatle’s most iconic song, “Imagine,” which was recorded 50 years ago this spring.
Alan White, who now lives in the Seattle area, was just another struggling young English rock ’n’ roller when, one night in September 1969, he took his position behind the drums with his band Griffin at the matchbox-sized Rasputin club in London. White didn’t know that Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, were sitting anonymously at the back of the room. The next evening, the drummer was frying up a meal for some of his bandmates at the small house they shared near Wembley Stadium in London when the phone rang.
“A voice announced, ‘Hello, this is John Lennon,’” White remembers with a chuckle. “I thought it was a mate pulling my leg, put the receiver down, and went back to the kitchen.
“Luckily, the caller rang back. This time I listened and thought: Hang on. Maybe it is John Lennon.”
Source: seattletimes.com
The director of a new documentary about the Beatles in India said there was a “paradox” about the band’s success in that country.
Ajoy Bose – an author whose movie The Beatles and India premiered in the U.K. this past weekend before it gets a wider release later in the year – argued that the Fab Four’s influence on the continent went much further than their celebrated visit to learn from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Rishikesh in 1968.
“You can tell the Beatles’ story so many different ways,” Bose told The Guardian in a recent interview. “I always felt that the India part of the Beatles saga was bigger than Rishikesh.” He said the connection began with George Harrison’s use of sitar on the set of their movie Help!, following a short visit to Delhi in 1966.
“For me, this isn’t a story about the Maharishi,” Bose noted. “It’s about four working-class lads from Liverpool, who got deeply into Indian culture, when George was the de facto leader of the group.” He recalled his own experience of discovering the group as a young teenager. “I was from the English-speaking Bengali middle-classes, who had been details
When I was little, I watched the “Yellow Submarine” animated film on VCR until it practically fell apart. No, seriously – the VCR player would completely reject the movie. This is not to say that it is a good movie, certainly not by any stretch of the imagination. It is a drug-induced, hippy dream/nightmare lasting for a seemingly plotless ninety minutes. Regardless, it was foundational for my childhood. After every viewing, I would run around singing “Hey, Bulldog” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” for hours. I devoured every song in that movie like it was the last time I would ever hear it.
When I got older, “Yellow Submarine” was traded in for “Help” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” Again, the cycle of watching and re-watching continued. At one point in my childhood, my dad could play five seconds of any Beatles song on his guitar and I would proudly identify it with ease. While my abilities have since subsided in that department, my passion has remained.
Source: dukechronicle.com
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The Beatles and George Martin were so close, George was even described as the ‘Fifth Beatle.’ He worked with the band for the entirety of their career and continued work with Paul McCartney along with many others in his long career.
How did The Beatles meet George Martin?
The Beatles met George Martin when they went to audition for the producer in 1962.
At this time, George was not a producer known for his work in pop music, and The Beatles had been turned down by Decca Records despite their manager Brian Epstein’s persistence.
In the end, Brian managed to get two meetings in with George, first on February 13, 1962, and then again on May 9.
Source: Jenny Desborough/express.co.uk
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George Harrison had a very interesting career after The Beatles. Not only did he release solo work, but he also became far more involved in Indian culture, collaborating with Indian artist Ravi Shankar. He also made a supergroup with other top musicians, showing his breadth of work before his death in 2001.
How many albums did George Harrison make?
Outside of his work with The Beatles, George made 12 solo studio albums.
He also made two compilation albums, one of which was at his famous Concert for Bangladesh, as well as two albums with supergroup The Travelling Wilburys.
His first album, Wonderwall Music, came out in 1968 while The Beatles were still performing together.
Source: Jenny Desborough/express.co.uk
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Ray Cordeiro considers himself the luckiest radio DJ in the world.
In a storied career spanning over 70 years in Hong Kong, Cordeiro has interviewed superstars including the Beatles and Elton John, and even received an MBE — an order of the British empire for outstanding achievement or service to the community — from Queen Elizabeth.
Cordeiro, who holds the Guinness world record for the world’s longest-working DJ, retired last month at the age of 96.
“I’ve been talking all my life about music and all, and I’d never thought that I would retire. I never thought that I was getting older,” he said.
Cordeiro was born in 1924 in Hong Kong and is of Portuguese descent. His musical tastes as a child were influenced by his brother who was 10 years older and collected records from groups like the Mills Brothers and the Andrews Sisters.
Source: ALICE FUNG/apnews.com
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Elton John and John Lennon shared a close bond, and their stories from humble beginnings to superstardom correlate significantly. Even though their time at the top didn’t coincide with one another, they saw the world from a similar perspective, and the final time that the former Beatle took to the stage was to duet with his friend.
Elton would later liken their friendship to a “whirlwind romance“, and even though they only knew each other for a few years, the two were inseparable. Elton was even named the Godfather of Lennon’s son, Sean, which shows just how much he respected and admired the Rocketman.
For Elton John, like countless other artists, The Beatles represented a pivotal figure in music, and the group expanded his horizons. Little did he know that when he first listened to the band as a youngster, he would be arm in arm collaborators, relying on him as one of his closest friends.
The height of their friendship occurred in 1974, a time when Lennon lost a bet with Elton and had to put his phobia of stepping back on stage to the back of his mind to join his friend at Madison Square Garden.
Source: Joe Taysom/faroutmagazine.co.uk
During a famous interview, John Lennon said Bob Dylan “helped” him change his attitude about writing songs for The Beatles. John revealed he wouldn’t have written two of The Beatles’ classic songs if Dylan didn’t cause him to change his outlook. Here’s what he had to say.
In the book Lennon Remembers, Rolling Stone co-founder Jann S. Wenner discussed many of The Beatles’ most famous songs with John. In addition, he asked John about a handful of more tracks that were more obscure — but no less amazing. For example, Wenner asked John about the circumstances under which he wrote “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.”
“I was in Kenwood and I would just be songwriting,” he said. “The period would be for songwriting and so every day I would attempt to write a song, and it’s one of those that you sort of sing a bit sadly to yourself, ‘Here I stand, head in hand…’
Source: cheatsheet.com
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The White Album includes one of the most oblique songs in The Beatles’ catalogue. Luckily for fans, John Lennon opened up about the song’s meaning during a famous interview. Interestingly, John revealed the White Album song in question reflected some of his personal feelings — and had an odd joke in it to boot.
In the book Lennon Remembers, John told Rolling Stone co-founder Jann S. Wenner that violent revolution seemed inevitable. However, John didn’t think this was a good thing because he didn’t want to die. John revealed he poured his feelings about violent revolution into one of The Beatles’ songs.
“‘Revolution 9’ was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens,” John said. “That was just like a drawing of revolution. Because arbitrarily, I was making… all the thing was made with loops. I had about thirty loops going, I fed them onto one basic track. I was getting like Beethoven and I’d go upstairs, chopping it up and making it backwards and things like that to get sound effect.
Source: cheatsheet.com
I’m not sure if anyone ever remembers the first time they heard the Beatles, they’re just a pivotal part of a lot of people’s lives from early on as was the case for me. My earliest memories of the Beatles or even music for that matter was my parents blasting ‘Yellow Submarine’ in an old Toyota Landcruiser navigating through the bumpy red roads of Arnhem Land Northern Territory; my two sisters, brother and I would join my parents in singing “we all live in a yellow submarine” at the top of our lungs.
It wasn’t until my early teenage years that I started exploring the Beatles for myself. I started from their first album Please Please Me (1963) and listened track by track right through to the iconic Let It Be album (1970). I would constantly find myself changing my favourite song and album: it seemed the albums would never differ in their consistently brilliant songwriting and innovative sounds and harmonies. Revolver (1966) seemed to stand out to me the most. I remember the first time I heard the third track on the album: a waltzing pop, psychedelic masterpiece written by John Lennon, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’. My dad had plugged his iPod Classic into the car an details
When George Harrison released “All Those Years Ago” in May 1981, it was a heartfelt tribute to his Beatles bandmate John Lennon, who’d been shot dead the previous year while the song was coming together.
When fans listened to Harrison's words about his lost friend, they also heard the three surviving Beatles together for the first time since the band broke up a decade earlier.
The number had started out as a song for Ringo Starr, but the drummer didn’t like the lyrics, so Harrison scrapped them in November 1980, while keeping Starr’s drum track in place. The recording was on a back burner when the news of Lennon’s murder flashed around the world the following month.
Like Paul McCartney, Harrison opted to go to work as usual in his recording studio. The death of someone he’d known since the age of 13, and regarded as a hero, was an experience that numbed and shocked him.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
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Choosing a best track from 'Abbey Road' is like selecting which limb you'd least like to lose.
Ranking anything — let alone a masterpiece of the magnitude of Abbey Road by The Beatles — is an exercise in futility.
There’s simply no objectivity to such ordering. All one really does when they say that they like ‘Because’ more than ‘Octopus’s Garden’ is reveal something about themselves; about their own complex and personal notion of the good. Ask 12 different people to name the best song off Abbey Road and one will get 12 different miniature diary entries; a dozen little snatches of taste.
But hey, there’s value in that, and there’s value in the conversations that such rankings inspire. A core component of loving music means discussing it, and working out where your opinion slots in amongst others — that’s all a ranking can ever hope to do.
So, don’t read the following list as anything like a definitive ranking of a classic album. Read it as a conversation-starter; as an opportunity to dive into one of the musical masterworks of the 20th century, track by track; and as a little snatch of the self being revealed.
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John Lennon wasn’t a superstitious man, however, he once had a premonition while recording one of his solo songs. Interestingly, the song in question was originally by someone else. Here’s a look at the time famous producer Phil Spector made John sing an old track.
John released an album called Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s an album of covers of 1950s and 1960s songs representing the early days of rock ‘n’ roll. One of the tracks on the album was a cover of “Just Because” by Lloyd Price. While most of the songs on Rock ‘n’ Roll were hits, Price’s “Just Because” didn’t chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
During an interview with Rolling Stone, John discussed an interesting thing he did while recording “Just Because.” “[Phil] Spector had made me sing called ‘Just Because,’ which I didn’t really know – all the rest of the songs I’d done as a teenager, so I knew them backward – but I couldn’t really get the hang of it,” he said. “At the end of that record – I was mixing it just next door – I started spieling and saying, ‘And so we say farewell from the details
Of all the albums released by The Beatles, Let It Be (1970) has to be the strangest of the bunch. It’s not strange in its musical approach (quite the opposite). But it has the feel of an LP patched together for a band that was no longer functioning (which it was). Hence the Phil Spector treatment on a few of the album’s most famous tracks.
That includes “The Long and Winding Road,” a song Spector really went to town on. Originally a subtle piano ballad by Paul McCartney, Spector added an orchestral part and a choir to the flawed backing track. And McCartney hated it when he first heard Spector’s finished product. Then it hit No. 1 in America anyway.
In all likelihood, it would have sounded quite different had McCartney given it to Tom Jones. According to the Welsh singer, that was a very real possibility. By Jones’ account, McCartney offered it to him prior to the Spector sessions that changed “The Long and Winding Road” forever.
Source: cheatsheet.com
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egendary musician Paul McCartney has five kids. The former Beatle has four kids with his first wife, Linda. The rock-and-roll legend also has a daughter with his second wife, Heather Mills.
Paul and Linda were inseparable once they started dating in 1968, until Linda McCartney died in April 1998 from breast cancer. According to Rolling Stone, the McCartneys were married almost 30 years and only spent 10 nights apart during their marriage. Paul adopted Linda's daughter Heather from a previous marriage and the couple had children Mary, Stella, and James.
A year after Paul's beloved wife Linda died, he fell head over heels in love with Heather, a former model turned activist. The superstar married his second wife in 2002, but they separated in 2006, and Paul and Heather's divorce was final in 2008. The legendary musician forked over a $35 million settlement in the divorce, but it was worth it. Heather's supposed shady past and their public divorce were hard on the entire family.
Source: Callie McGuire/nickiswift.com
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