Beatles News

John Lennon’s departure from The Beatles split the band and rocked fans all around the world in 1970. The break-up came shortly after the Imagine hitmaker tied the knot with Yoko Ono, with the avant-garde artist bearing the brunt of the blame from The Beatles’ fanbase. The band dissolved following the release of their final album, Let It Be, and Abbey Road, having cemented their place in rock ’n’ roll history.

The split was far from amicable, sparking a feud between Lennon and his former bandmate Paul McCartney, during which they exchanged jibes publicly through the medium of their solo songs.

Later, however, they reconciled and reignited their firm friendship, which dated back to their schooldays.

Many whispers about a potential reunion circulated over the years, particularly in the latter half of the ‘70s, but it never transpired.

Source: Minnie Wright/express.co.uk

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The Walrus himself, Sir Paul McCartney, was recently interviewed by BBC Radio 4’s Sarah Montague. When Montague took McCartney to task over Coldplay’s recent decision to mercifully stop touring due to their awareness of the band’s own “carbon footprint”, McCartney reassured Sarah that he has no plans to do the same. Paul McCarney ‘refuses’ listening to John Lennon songs.

“I am aware of [his carbon footprint], and you do your best. But, it is very difficult if you’re going to tour. I AM going to go on tour in America. You can’t say… ‘we’ll go by Greyhound Bus,’ because that’s just as bad! We certainly can’t just bike our way around. It’s a reality, you just have to do it, and plant a lot of trees… that’s kind of how I offset it, is by doing things that will make up for it. If I tour, that’s going to involve travel, which is going to involve a carbon footprint.”

Source: Mike Mazzarone/alternativenation.net

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Any Beatles fan looking for a way to spend their Christmas cash might consider buying the latest book about the band.

Kenneth Womack’s “Solid State: The Story of ‘Abbey Road’ and the End of the Beatles” puts the Fab Four’s recording of their last album in 1969 in context of the social atmosphere and advanced technology at their disposal. The electronic talk may be a little much for some readers, but it does indicate musical growth.

Remember, “Let it Be” was recorded before “Abbey Road” but released after. Of course, the Beatles’ breakup actually began before the band reconvened to make their last record.

Still, they rallied together to create an album with new sounds, notably George Harrison’s fascination with the Moog synthesizer, Geoff Emerick’s engineering, which complimented the band’s cohesiveness, and George Martin’s arrangements. The overdubs on the song “Because,” which was influenced by a Beethoven piano sonata, resulted in a nine-voice recording.

Source: Robert Hite/thesunflower.com

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Around this time of year, it’s not uncommon to talk about people “of a certain age” having been around long enough not just to read about history, but to experience it.

Peter Asher has seen — has lived — that scope of history in the music world. Not as a witness, but as a person who lived it. And those were the stories he shared with a fascinated, delighted and sold-out Nighttown Monday night, and will again in another sold-out gig at the Cleveland Heights club on Tuesday night.

But “Peter Asher: A Musical Memoir to the ’60s and Beyond” was more than just a PowerPoint recitation of known history, replete with family photos, publicity stills and amazing audio and video clips. It was two-and-a-half hours of tales and anecdotes, interspersed with a little music and a lot of laughs, that put a whole era in perspective for those of us “of a certain age.” And maybe for those who’ve just read about it.

Source: cleveland.com

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The Beatles were never particularly shy about revealing their influences, especially early on in their career. On the Fab Four’s first record (Please Please Me), you couldn’t help but notice the fascination with The Shirelles, the girl group who’d made “Boys” and “Baby It’s You” famous.

On their second U.S. release, fans found the band saluting idol Chuck Berry with a cover of “Roll Over Beethoven” as the first track. Later, fans heard the Fab Four’s take on several Motown hits as well as a cover of a Smokey Robinson track (“You Really Got a Hold on Me”).

Kicking off the second side, listeners got a taste of the Beatles’ live shows with a cover of “Long Tall Sally,” a Little Richard song Paul McCartney loved to shout on the bandstand. Paul once said you had leave your body to pull off a Little Richard vocal.

Source: cheatsheet.com

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John Lennon and Yoko Ono fell madly in love after meeting in London in 1966. Though they were both married at the time, the avant-garde artist to her second husband Anthony Cox and The Beatles star to his first wife Cynthia Lennon, with whom he had one son, Julian Lennon, they soon started corresponding and later began their famous romance. In 1969, the couple tied the knot at a 10-minute ceremony at the British Consulate Office in Gibraltar.

However, the intensity of their relationship combined with the vicious backlash they faced from angry Beatles fans after the band split shortly after they married (a move many blamed on Ono) soon began to take their toll on Lennon and Ono.

In 1973, he embarked on an affair with their assistant May Pang and moved out of the New York home they shared together to set up house with her in Los Angeles.

The pair had a year-and-a-half romance but he had continued contact with Ono throughout.

Source: Minnie Wright/express.co.uk

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John Lennon’s wit was something special. Whether dropping a one-liner in an interview or rhyming “cigarette” with “stupid get” (at Sir Walter Raleigh’s expense), John had a way of entertaining himself and his audience whenever he spoke.

Of course, John could get himself into trouble when he got on a roll (see: “bigger than Jesus”). But when he kept his focus on the secular, everybody won. In his last major interview, John was at his wittiest when savaging Beatles songs and otherwise describing his life in music.

At several points, John became the target of his own ridicule, as when describing the period that drove him to write “Help!” While taking the interviewer through the very real pain he felt during those months, John couldn’t resist a one-liner. “It was my fat Elvis period,” he said.

Source: cheatsheet.com

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The Beatles are hailed as the greatest band of all time. To this day, the group’s music has transcended the times and inspired every generation of music since the 1960s. However, early reviews of The Beatles reveal that the group was not always beloved by critics.

Regarded as the most influential group of all time, The Beatles won countless awards during their career and after their break-up. While The Beatles reached critical acclaim, the group did not receive it immediately. In 2014, the Los Angeles Times compiled early reviews from when The Beatles first traveled to the U.S.

“With their bizarre shrubbery, the Beatles are obviously a press agent’s dream combo. Not even their mothers would claim that they sing well,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1964.

In 1964, The Boston Globe wrote, “The Beatles are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music…”

Source: cheatsheet.com

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They remain the biggest band of all time. Yet the Beatles barely lasted a decade and imploded at the end of the 1960s amid rumours of feuds between the band members and their wives. When the devastating news was revealed in 1970, many fans blamed Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, for tearing the band apart. In a major unearthed interview from 1971, Lennon (with Yoko in the background) discusses the end of the band and the reports of fighting. But is he telling the truth?

Lennon immediately points out that he was with his first wife Cynthia when the Beatles started and it never affected the band. He said: "I was married before the Beatles left Liverpool and that never made a difference."

The other Beatles would certainly have had some loyalty to Cynthia, who John married in 1962, and there was no denying Yoko was the reason that marriage ended. But many believed it was Yoko's artistic career that drove a wedge between Lennon and the band as he put his second wife and her needs first.

Source: Stefan Kyriazis/express.co.uk

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By 1968, The Beatles featured three premiere songwriters vying for space on the band’s records. If you didn’t deliver your best work, there was a good chance your song would get bumped. That happened to George Harrison on Sgt. Pepper a year earlier; then it happened again on The White Album.

Indeed, even on a double album, The Beatles didn’t have room for George’s “Sour Milk Sea” or “Not Guilty.” So it’s safe to say there was some stiff competition at this point in the band’s run. That’s going to happen with Paul McCartney and John Lennon writing songs for the same records.

But the competition didn’t end with songwriting. Since these three Beatles all played guitar, bass, and keyboard, you also had jockeying for who might play what on a particular track. Hence Paul taking a guitar solo on “Taxman” and John doing the same on “Get Back.”

Source: cheatsheet.com

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Certain album covers are iconic. Everyone remembers Michael Jackson posing on the cover of Thriller and a baby reaching for a dollar bill on the cover of Nirvana‘s Nevermind. The cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band arguably stands as the most famous album cover of all time. What might shock fans is that John Lennon wasn’t allowed to realize his vision for the cover. In an interview with GQ, Sir Paul McCartney remembered how “I mean, on the Sgt. Pepper cover he wanted Jesus Christ and Hitler on there. That was, ‘Okay, that’s John.’ You’d have to talk him down a bit — ‘No, probably not Hitler…’ I could say to him, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’ He was a good enough guy to know when he was being told.”

When asked why John wanted Hitler on the cover, Paul replied “It’s a laugh. We’re putting famous people on the cover: ‘Hitler! He’s famous!’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, but John, we’re trying to put heroes on the cover, and he’s not your hero.’”

Source: cheatsheet.com

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It’s been nearly a year since the announcement of the still-untitled Beatles film being helmed by Academy Award-winning director Peter Jackson, but some release details may have leaked.

Beatles fan blog The Daily Beatle found a listing on Amazon for a book titled Get Back: The Beatles, and it’s slated for release on October 15, 2020. The site also reports the book will act as companion material with Jackson’s film, which will be draw from 55 hours of never-released footage of The Beatles in the studio, shot between January 2-31, 1969. This footage came from the original filming of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary Let It Be, which ended with the famous rooftop concert.

Jackson said in a statement when the film was originally announced, “The 55 hours of never-before-seen footage and 140 hours of audio made available to us, ensures this movie will be the ultimate ‘fly on the wall’ experience that Beatles fans have long dreamt about – it’s like a time machine transports us back to 1969, and we get to sit in the studio watching these four friends make details