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Beatles News
From the Long Players series: writers on their most cherished albums.
The album wasn’t a recognisable art form before the Beatles. If the British pop stars of the time, Cliff, Billy, Marty or Adam released an LP it was to earn extra royalties from their regurgitated singles. When, in February 1964, Cathy McGowan broke the news on Ready, Steady,Go! that the Beatles had reached No 1 in the US charts, her teenage audience knew that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” wasn’t destined to be reproduced as an album track. For UK followers, the Beatles could be relied upon to invariably provide only new music for the extra outlay required to buy an LP.
Then came the rhapsodic phase when every new record seemed designed to take the pop album to a new and previously unobtainable level. Sandwiched between Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper in this amazing trilogy was Revolver. When it was released in the summer of 1966 I was working at Tesco in Hammersmith King Street where the man who delivered the Nevill’s bread at 8.30 every morning also carried a stock of contraband EMI albums, which he sold at half price.
It was from Fred the bread man that I acquired the musical highlight of that or any othe details
The 50th anniversary of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was much celebrated in 2017. But this Christmas also marks 50 years since the release of another Beatles production that received much less critical acclaim – the Magical Mystery Tour film.
Much of the music within it was produced during a particularly fecund period (even by the Beatles’ standards) and is, or course, peerless – from the music hall echoes of Your Mother Should Know through the plaintive, melodic Fool on the Hill to the boundary breaking I Am the Walrus.
Unfortunately the film itself fell far short of that artistic bar. First broadcast on Boxing Day 1967, it is, to put it mildly, seriously flawed. Incoherent, sexist, technically shaky and verging on boring, history hasn’t been kind to its cinematic qualities.
Contemporary reviews and audience responses were also so generally scathing that Paul McCartney was moved to issue an apology of sorts to the television broadcast’s 20m viewers. He said in a hastily convened interview:
Source: Adam Behr
CLEVELAND, Ohio - The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum unveiled an updated Beatles exhibit Thursday, showing off new Fab Four items, including one of John Lennon's early guitars and the piano Lennon and Paul McCartney used to write "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "We Can Work It Out," "Eleanor Rigby" and other iconic songs.
The Beatles display, located in the Rock Hall's downstairs main exhibition area, also features costumes, instruments, lyric sheets and other Beatles items.
In addition to the two new pieces, the display includes items that are regularly rotated through the museum's collections, including a suit worn by George Harrison during the Beatles' 1966 tour and a pair of Ringo Starr drum sticks used in a Sept. 15, 1964. Beatles show at Cleveland's Public Hall.
The piano was originally owned by the family of Jane Asher, a girlfriend of Paul McCartney. McCartney lived with Asher's family for a few years.
Source: cleveland.com
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As sales of music across the board continue to decline in favor of streaming, another manner of determining an act's popularity is by seeing how often people search for them on Google and YouTube. By that metric, it would seem that the Beatles are decidedly less popular than they were a decade ago.
Digital Music News has looked at data provided by Google Trends and concluded that they've had 70 percent fewer searches between January 2004 and the present. The graph includes all searches related to the band. According to the chart, interest has been declining steadily, although there was a major spike -- its highest placing in 13 years -- in September 2009. That corresponds with when the Beatles reissued their entire catalog and released a special version of the Rock Band video game on Sept. 9, 2009.
They note a similar pattern for searches on YouTube, beginning in 2008. However, the article does not acknowledge that, over the past few years, unauthorized uploads of Beatles songs have been removed from YouTube due to copyright infringement. The official Beatles YouTube channel has only 28 videos.
Source: Ultimate Classic Rock
The Beatles Christmas messages began as a personal show of holiday gratitude to the band’s fan club, but grew into an annual tradition as important as any evergreen chestnut for a generation. Growing up, the silly off-key carols meant Christmas. They were exciting. They were fun. They were funny. I never in my life worried about offending someone by saying Merry or Happy Christmas because, due to these recordings, I would forever mangle greetings like “Hare Kringle” and “very new jeers.” Inviting Krishna devotees and insult comics into the happy proceedings.
Christmas was never a religious holiday at our house. It rocked. And it all started when radio stations started playing the crimbly greetings. Long after the Beatles broke up, prog and oldies stations alike would keep up the tradition.
The Beatles were natural comedians, as was their producer, George Martin. As a matter of fact, the producer only decided to work with the band after George Harrison got snarky with him. When The Beatles were asked what concerns they had with the first recording session, the guitarist took issue with the Martin’s tie. Thus began a subliminal comic teaming informing future sessions.
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The Beatles Christmas messages began as a personal show of holiday gratitude to the band’s fan club, but grew into an annual tradition as important as any evergreen chestnut for a generation. Growing up, the silly off-key carols meant Christmas. They were exciting. They were fun. They were funny. I never in my life worried about offending someone by saying Merry or Happy Christmas because, due to these recordings, I would forever mangle greetings like “Hare Kringle” and “very new jeers.” Inviting Krishna devotees and insult comics into the happy proceedings.
Christmas was never a religious holiday at our house. It rocked. And it all started when radio stations started playing the crimbly greetings. Long after the Beatles broke up, prog and oldies stations alike would keep up the tradition.
The Beatles were natural comedians, as was their producer, George Martin. As a matter of fact, the producer only decided to work with the band after George Harrison got snarky with him. When The Beatles were asked what concerns they had with the first recording session, the guitarist took issue with the Martin’s tie. Thus began a subliminal comic teaming informing future sessions.
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Sometimes, something as simple as a single clause in a contract can speak volumes about people. For proof, look no further than a contract for The Beatles for a 1965 concert in the state of California, which specified that the band would not have to perform in front of a segregated audience. Something that should be seen as a huge statement considering that the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.
What Convinced The Beatles of the Need for That Clause in Their Contract?
With that said, it is interesting to note that said contract was far from being the first time that The Beatles had taken a stance on the issue of racial segregation. After all, when The Beatles was on their first tour in the United States, they were surprised by the fact that the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, FL was segregated on the basis of race. As a result, the band refused to play, which was even more impressive because this happened at a time when they were still seen as one more short-lived teen sensation rather than the musical titans that they went on to become.
Source: Nat Berman
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An original 7-inch copy of The Beatles' debut single, "Love Me Do," has sold for almost $15,000 through the online collectors' site, Discogs.com. Experts say it is now the most expensive 7-inch single ever sold.
The demo copy of The Beatles' debut single for Parlophone, sold via Discogs, actually sold for $14,757 on 9 October. The record sold through Discogs was one of only 250 issued with Paul McCartney's name misspelled in the writing credit as "McArtney". Backed with 'PS I Love You,' the final single peaked at No.17 when it was first released in the UK, but topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the US in 1964.
The Beatles recorded 'Love Me Do' on three different occasions, with three different drummers, at EMI Studios at Abbey Road in London. The first "artist test" recording took place on 6 June 1962 and featured The Beatles' original drummer, Pete Best. This version (previously thought to be lost) was later included on the album Anthology 1. The first official recording of the song then took place on 4 September 1962. In August, Best had been replaced with drummer Ringo Starr, and the group recorded the song in 15 takes at EMI Studios.
They might be the icons of a musical revolution in the early 1960s, but now science is questioning whether The Beatles' music from that era was important.
"I think that our estimation of the Beatles' importance at that time, or how we think about them, has become vastly inflated," evolutionary biologist Professor Armand Leroi from Imperial College London said.
beatles full program teaser
He said the music that launched the Beatles onto the global stage — including songs like I Want To Hold Your Hand, She Loves You and Ticket To Ride — "is in fact relentlessly average".
And he said he had scientific evidence to back those claims up.
What can science tell us about the Beatles?
Source: Carl Smith
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If you’re someone who has ever kept Christmas cards from a person who was a powerful presence in your life at one time or another, you’ve perhaps noted how the sentiments they’ve expressed to you have changed over the years.
It can be quite an emotional surveying: to sit there with these collected cards in hand, shaking your head at the mutability of bonds between people. For years now, I’ve done a version of that with the Beatles’ Christmas fan club recordings—their holiday Valentine, in essence, to the people who bought their records, got their newsletter, and supported them at the most hardcore of hardcore levels.
Beatles collectors have pined for a release of these recordings, which usually comprise five or six minutes, for years now. I was trying to think what might sit atop a Beatles fan’s wish list for material in the vaults that has yet to come out, and we’re talking top five desires here. This year, a Christmas wish of sorts is sated, as Apple bestows upon us a lavish box set, dubbed The Christmas Records—on colored vinyl, no less, with original sleeves reproduced—of what had originally come out on what was called flexi discs.
Source: C details
Fifty years after the Beatles were at their zenith, I finally made a pilgrimage this year to the places sacred to their story. The crossing on Abbey Road in London. The childhood homes in Liverpool. Penny Lane and Strawberry Field.I loved it all, but the highlight of my visit to dank, misty Liverpool was surely meeting Colin Hanton, a gentlemanly but tart 79-year-old upholsterer who, six decades ago, played drums for the Quarrymen, the pre-Beatles band that included John Lennon, Paul [...] ...
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A new exhibition has opened at the Beatles Story, the Liverpool museum dedicated to the city's most famous band.
It celebrates the release in December, 1967 of the Beatles' film, Magical Mystery Tour.
The film was first aired on British television as a 52-minute-long, largely improvised, surreal comedy film featuring the Beatles.
The band's bass player, Paul McCartney, wanted to create a film based on the group and their music, in which various "ordinary" people were to travel on a coach and take a journey of spontaneous "magical" adventures.
McCartney, in a comment made in 2012, said of the film: "It turned out to be a wacky, impromptu romp that puzzled a few people at the time but as the years have gone by it now stands as a fond reminder of that period in our lives."
The film was poorly received by critics and audiences at the time, but the soundtrack, which included six new Beatles songs, was also released in December 1967, was a huge success. It was only off the top spot in the record charts by the band's own single, "Hello, Goodbye".
The soundtrack spent eight weeks at number one in the U.S. album charts and was nominated album of the year in 1968.
The United States Postal Service has unveiled a sneak peek at some of the postage stamps it will introduce next year, and among them is one paying tribute to the late John Lennon . The Lennon stamp will be the next installment of the USPS' Music Icons series of "Forever" stamps.
No release date has been announced for the commemorative stamp honoring the Beatles legend. The U.S. Postal Service has issued a number of other Beatles -themed stamps over the years, including one in 1999 that commemorated the Fab Four's 1968 animated flick Yellow Submarine .
Among the other artists who have appeared on Music Icons stamps are Elvis Presley , Jimi Hendrix , Janis Joplin , Ray Charles , Johnny Cash and jazz singer Sarah Vaughan .
Other notable people who will be honored with new stamps in 2018 include singer/actress Lena Horne , astronaut Sally Ride and children's show host Fred Rogers , a.k.a. "Mr. Rogers."
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If 2017 was a year for a new Ringo Starr album, next year will be an opportunity to revisit the vaults.
The Beatles drummer has announced a January 19 release date for new vinyl version of two of his albums, 1973's Ringo and the following year's Goodnight Vienna. Both have been remastered and will be pressed on heavyweight, 180-gram vinyl. Ringo, Starr's third album -- and only platinum seller -- was a smash featuring the hits "You're Sixteen," "Photograph" and "Oh My My" as well as collaborations with all four his Beatles mates. Goodnight Vienna was certified gold and launched the singles "No No Song" and "Only You (And You Alone)." The albums will be re-issued in their original form, with no additional tracks.
Starr released his 19th studio album, "Give Me Love," this year along with his 1999 holiday album I Wanna Be Santa Claus on vinyl for the first time ever. He takes his All-Starr Band back on the road on June 5 for a European tour that begins in Paris.
Source: Erica Banas
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“Wonderful Christmastime” is the worst of Christmas songs, but it makes up for it by also being the worst of all songs, the worst song ever written by a human, Beatle or otherwise, the worst melody, the worst synthesizer, the worst production, the worst Wings song, the worst pronunciation of the word “here,” the worst lyrics, the worst scent. I have never seen the cover of the 45, but I bet it f**ing sucks. "Wonderful Christmastime" is the most terrible song ever written by anyone, or anything, ever, including robots and gorillas and Puff Daddy and Courtney Love. No one likes "Wonderful Christmastime." No one. Paul McCartney hates it. All of Paul McCartney's wives hate it. Santa thinks it's a joke. God is like, " I did not bestow upon you the Breath of Life to dishonor me with this unMely dreck," and I imagine He's not real happy about "Ebony and Ivory" either.
Source: Jeff Vrabel
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