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Beatles News
When NBC canceled The Monkees in 1968, after just two seasons, Micky Dolenz – a California child actor turned teenage pop sensation – might well have joined Jay North, Paul Peterson and Johnny Crawford on the scrap heap of singing TV has-beens.
That, of course, is not what happened. Fueled by ever-ripening ‘60s nostalgia, the Monkees records – many of which were wonderfully written and sung – have remained in high regard, and have continued to sell consistently, if not spectacularly.
All of which adds up to a relatively consistent five-decade career for George Michael Dolenz Jr., who’s 74 years old but as impish and eager to entertain as ever. Not long ago, he finished another cross-country Monkees reunion (with Michael Nesmith, the other surviving member of the quartet) and on Sept. 24, he’ll perform at Ruth Eckerd Hall with a traveling musical circus called It Was Fifty Years Ago Today – A Tribute to the Beatles’ White Album.
Source: stpetecatalyst.com
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he John Lennon Educational Tour Bus (Lennon Bus), the premier non-profit 501(c)(3) state-of-the-art mobile production facility that provides hands-on creative experiences to students of all ages, returns to New York City Hall for the launch of the sixth annual Come Together NYC month-long residency on September 16, according to Yoko Ono Lennon.
This year’s launch event, entitled Imagine A City With No Gun Violence!, began on board the Lennon Bus with a roundtable discussion bringing student activists and elected officials together with the Bronx-born musical artist Prince Royce to discuss the next steps needed to end gun violence. The event then moved outside to the steps of New York City Hall for a program featuring the participants in the roundtable including Councilmembers Daniel Dromm, Mark Treyger, and Alicka Ampry-Samuel, along with over 200 students from all five boroughs coming together to inspire student activism in honor of John Lennon, who was killed by gunfire.
Source: globenewswire.com
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In the summer of 1968, the other three Beatles watched as Ringo took off for Italy after taking flack from Paul McCartney for the drum part on “Back in the U.S.S.R.” When George staged his own walkout early the following year, people around the band couldn’t help thinking the end was near.
To Geoff Emerick, the legendary engineer behind Sgt. Pepper’s and Revolver, the happiest he remembered John and Paul toward the end was early ’68, when they were recording “Hey Bulldog.” Prior to the heated White Album sessions, the old songwriting partners/friends still had their moments.
A lot changed with the arrival of Yoko in the studio, and true Lennon-McCartney collaborations became fewer and farther between. However, early in the Abbey Road sessions, John and Paul found that old spark. It happened when they picked up a crazy old song from two years earlier.
Source: cheatsheet.com
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If you ask a Beatles fan or even a casual music listener why the Beatles broke up, they’ll probably have one simple answer: Yoko Ono. John Lennon’s second wife Yoko was an artist in her own right and was famous for sitting in on the Beatles’ recording sessions. Because of the tension this created between the group, numerous commentators have blamed Yoko for the band’s dissolution. Paul McCartney has repeatedly said that the Beatles did not break up because of Yoko, but does this mean that the two singers are friends?
When Yoko first insisted on entering the studio during the Beatles’ sessions, Paul was annoyed. He told CNN “We weren’t sexist, but girls didn’t come to the studio — they tended to leave us to it. When John got with Yoko, she wasn’t in the control room or to the side. It was in the middle of the four of us.”
Paul would later admit that these experiences caused him to harbor some ill-will towards Yoko. He said that he found her presence in the studio “intrusive,” though he understood that her behavior stemmed from her intense romance with John.
Source: The Cheatsheet
Beatles impersonators recreate the iconic "Abbey Road" photograph made 50 years ago Aug. 8 in London, where fans continue to flock to the famed zebra crossing near Abbey Road Studios. (Leon Neal / Getty Images)
We popped up from the London Underground station of St. John’s Wood and noticed right away that we were in a leafier part of England’s capital, outside the congested city center.
Just about a five minute walk down Grove End Road, we came around a curve and there it was: the unmistakable zebra crossing of Abbey Road.
Fifty years ago Sept. 26, the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album was released, showing, on the cover, George, Paul, Ringo and John jauntily striding across this very crosswalk in what would become one of the most iconic photos in rock ’n’ roll history.
Source: John Biemer/chicagotribune.com
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When George Harrison asked his friend Eric Clapton to play the guitar solo on his new song, Clapton was understandably nervous about the situation. After all, The Beatles weren’t known for guests playing on their records. It basically hadn’t been done, and Clapton wasn’t keen on being the first to try.
However, George finally convinced him to shrug off these concerns and deliver the memorable solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Of course, that’s only part of the story. Beatles fans would be right to wonder why George needed anyone to solo on his latest composition.
For one thing, George was the Beatles’ lead guitar player. By the time of these White Album sessions (summer 1968), just about everyone on the planet knew what George played in the Fab Four.
Source: cheatsheet.com
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Grow Old With Me is latest collaboration between the surviving Beatles members
Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Ringo Starr have reunited to record a cover version of a song written by John Lennon in the final year of his life.
The track marks the latest collaboration between the two surviving members of the Beatles and goes some way to reuniting the musical talents of the Fab Four, since part of a George Harrison song is also reprised on the recording.
Lennon wrote Grow Old With Me during the recording sessions for Double Fantasy, the final album he made before he was shot dead outside his apartment in Manhattan in December 1980.
Starr, 79, said he had not been aware that Lennon recorded a demo version of the song until he was played it by the record producer Jack Douglas, who produced Double Fantasy, which was co-written by Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow.
Source: Mattha Busby/theguardian.com
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While The Beatles stayed together long enough to make The White Album, Let It Be, and Abbey Road, it doesn’t mean they enjoyed it. In fact, by the beginning of that run in 1968, the Fab Four had just about had it with each other.
That became easy to see during the sessions for The White Album, which Paul McCartney had dubbed (without exaggeration) “the tension album.” After all, he and John Lennon nearly fought in the studio while running through endless takes of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
In early ’69, things hadn’t improved much. If you can’t tell from Paul and George Harrison arguing in the Let It Be film, the hushed-up tale of John and George’s fistfight should fill in the blanks.
By the summer ’69 sessions for Abbey Road, John wasn’t pretending to care and sat out on Paul’s goofy “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” As for George and Ringo, they braved through it but savaged Paul’s song later.
Source: cheatsheet.com
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One of the most entertaining hypotheticals for Beatles’ fans to discuss is what the Beatles would have sounded like or recorded if they had stayed together after the release of Let It Be.* In a sense, this is an even more fruitless counterfactual than another popular one: What songs would have been on The White Album if it hadn’t been a double album (which I have already covered). Unlike the case of that what-if, the songs the Beatles would have done together were never released as Beatles songs. And to imagine the Beatles staying together after 1970 is to wish away the centrifugal forces that had by that point already largely torn the four musical titans at the band’s center apart.**
But Beatles’ fans such as myself speculate nonetheless, aided by morsels such as collaborations between members after the break-up (most notably in the almost-Beatles song “I’m the Greatest!”), and demos of songs that later became solo work but were conceived or sometimes even recorded while the Beatles were still together (e.g., much of George Harrison’s first post-Beatle solo album, All Things Must Pass).
Source: JackButler/ricochet.com
“Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields” urged John Lennon in 1967. Now, for the first time, everyone will be able to walk in his footsteps, when the gardens immortalised in the classic Beatles song are opened to the public on 14 September, alongside a new visitors’ centre, cafe and shop.
Housed in a sleek, modern, light-filled building, it is a stark contrast to the original Gothic mansion that stood there when Lennon was a young boy and would bunk over the wall to climb trees and play hide-and-seek in its garden. Built in 1878 for a shipping magnate in the wealthy Liverpool suburb of Woolton (the family of prime minister William Gladstone lived nearby, in another long-gone pile) it was bought by the Salvation Army in 1934 and turned into a children’s home.
Lennon lived round the corner with his Uncle George and Aunt Mimi, and as well as sneaking into the garden with friends, he loved the summer fete held at Strawberry Field (in the singular, Lennon added the “s”). His aunt once recalled: “As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army band starting, John would jump up and down shouting, ‘Mimi, come on. We’re going to be late!&r details
Starr announced his 20th studio record, What's My Name, to be released on UMe October 25, 2019. What's My Name is the latest in a series of heartfelt and homespun records that Starr has produced in his home studio and a distinguished, ever-changing yet often repeating cast of musical characters and friends playing along with Ringo. Those friends include Paul McCartney, Joe Walsh, Edgar Winter, Dave Stewart, Benmont Tench, Steve Lukather, Nathan East, Colin Hay, Richard Page, Warren Ham, Windy Wagner, Kari Kimmel and more (full track and credit list below).For Ringo, recording at home, known as Roccabella West, has become a welcome and productive way of life. "I don't want to be in an old-fashioned recording studio anymore, really," Starr explains. "I've had enough of the big glass wall and the separation. We are all together in here, whoever I invite over. This is the smallest club in town. And I love it, being at home, being able to say hi to Barb, it's just been good for me and the music."
Source: prnewswire.com
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Struggling singer-songwriter Jack Malikwaus (Himesh Patel) suffers a blackout and, when he awakens, he quickly discovers that he is somehow the only person in the world who actually remember The Beatles. Desperate to keep the songs written by John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison alive, he starts writing down the lyrics and performing them — which transforms him into a superstar and changes his life in ways he never could have imagined. On top of that, there’s a potential love story with his best friend, and the woman who believed in him before he went Fab, Ellie (Lily James). Such is the premise of the 2019 film Yesterday, which begs one question: What kind of sick mind imagines a world without The Beatles?
“Only someone who can’t imagine the world without The Beatles,” replies screenwriter Richard Curtis in an exclusive interview. “And, if The Beatles were to disappear, would do everything he could to bring them back again.” He pauses briefly before emphasizing, “You know, it’s an argument for The Beatles rather than against.”
Source: closerweekly.com
When music writers and critics decide to round up the best Beatles album, you find a familiar record at the top: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Rolling Stone not only named it the best Fab Four album; the magazine ranked it No. 1 on its list of “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2012.
There’s more where that came from. You’ll hear the oft-repeated line Ringo Starr delivered for the Anthology project. (He called it “our grandest endeavor.”) To Paul McCartney, whose work dominated the album, it was an album “in the spirit of the age,” “a huge advance” for the group, something the band did as “spokesmen” for their generation.
Another quote from Paul could hint at one reasons behind his personal regard for the album. “If records had a director within a band, I sort of directed ‘Pepper,’” he said in 1990. (At other points, Ringo has cited the much heavier 1966’s “Rain” and 1968’s “Yer Blues” as his favorite tracks.)
Source: cheatsheet.com
The Beatles discussed radically shifting their approach on a potential follow-up to Abbey Road.
John Lennon suggested the proposed recording more fairly showcase each from the group's principal composers, giving George Harrison equal footing for the first time. He would have the opportunity to contribute four songs, the same as Lennon and Paul McCartney. (Ringo Starr, Lennon added, could have two – "If he wants them.")
The news comes courtesy of Beatles expert Mark Lewisohn, who unearthed a tape from a meeting the Beatles held on Sept. 8, 1969, at Apple headquarters on London's Savile Row. The recording was made while Starr was hospitalized with stomach problems. "Ringo – you can't be here, but this is so you can hear what we're discussing," Lennon says at the beginning of the tape.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
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The Beatles weren’t a group much given to squabbling, says Mark Lewisohn, who probably knows more about them than they knew about themselves. But then he plays me the tape of a meeting held 50 years ago this month – on 8 September 1969 – containing a disagreement that sheds new light on their breakup.
They’ve wrapped up the recording of Abbey Road, which would turn out to be their last studio album, and are awaiting its release in two weeks’ time. Ringo Starr is in hospital, undergoing tests for an intestinal complaint. In his absence, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison convene at Apple’s HQ in Savile Row. John has brought a portable tape recorder. He puts it on the table, switches it on and says: “Ringo – you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”
What they talk about is the plan to make another album – and perhaps a single for release in time for Christmas, a commercial strategy going back to the earliest days of Beatlemania. “It’s a revelation,” Lewisohn says. “The books have always told us that they knew Abbey Road was their last album and they wanted to go out on an artist details