Beatles News

Tom Frangione, the host of Beatles radio show Things We Said Today, is a big Mets fan, so much so that he wants to believe with all his heart that John Lennon contributed to the “Let’s Go Mets” chant that can be heard at the end of musician David Peel’s “The Ballad of New York City," a track from Peel's 1972 album, The Pope Smokes Dope, which Lennon and wife Yoko Ono produced and was released on Apple Records.

But Peel tells Billboard, “Lennon never said that. He never played on any of my songs. It was me and my hippie friends. Everybody who did the chanting was from the Bronx.”

The Mets, who hail from Queens and won the World Series in 1969, were the hot New York baseball team at the time. Even though Peel is a Yankees fan, he said they chanted “Let’s Go Mets” “because the Mets were the underdogs and the Yankees were the capitalists.”

Lennon was in the control room when Peel and his fellow singers belted out the chant, but he didn’t join them. “He didn’t want to upstage me,” Peel recalls. “He did what I wanted to do.”

Lennon and Ono met Peel in 1971 in New York’s Washington Square Pa details

The Beatles will reissue their Number One singles compilation 1 as a 2-Blu-ray/1CD collection – now titled 1+ – that boasts 27 songs and their accompanying promo videos alongside 23 more restored videos used for promotional purposes but never formerly released. That Blu-ray of alternate versions and rarely seen short films will include the Beatles' original video for the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band closer "A Day in the Life," with the 1+ restoration of that clip premiering via Mashable.

In the video, largely filmed between 8 p.m. and 1 a.m., footage of the Beatles messing around with some of their friends, including the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, is intercut with images of an orchestra preparing to perform during the early 1967 recording sessions for the track.

"These videos and films are spectacular reminders of the era we lived in," Paul McCartney said in a statement to Mashable. "They also rock!" Ringo Starr added of "A Day in the Life," "If you listen to my playing, I try to become an instrument; play the mood of the song. For example, 'Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,' — boom ba bom. I try to show that; the disenchanting mood. The drum fills are details

He'll always be known as the Beatles' drummer, but Rolling Stone Films sheds light on Ringo Starr's other life's work in a new original short, "Ringo Starr: Photographer." Directed by veteran Rolling Stone photographer Mark Seliger, the film interweaves candid interview footage, clips of Starr drumming solo on his gorgeous Ludwig kit and vintage Beatles photos from his extensive archive. "I think I really got more serious about it, more excited and interested in it, in the Beatle era," Starr says of his work behind the camera. "Photography became my passion alongside playing, really."

Starr's incredible archive — preserved in a new book, Photograph — includes intimate shots that only a fellow band member could have captured: George Harrison goofing off in the studio, John Lennon on the beach in Tobago with a sea urchin stuck in his foot. As the images progress chronologically, we see how the psychedelic era rubbed off on Starr's photography much as it did on the Beatles' music, leading him to experiment with fisheye lenses and multiple exposures. 

"These photographs allow us a very intimate peek inside the Beatles' world," says Seliger. "With his camera by his side, Ringo had the rare ability to details

An incredibly rare copy of a controversial Beatles album cover in which the Fab Four posed as butchers draped with decapitated babies and chunks of meat has emerged for sale for £4,500.

The original cover of The Beatles' album Yesterday and Today caused outrage on its release in 1966 - but by that point US record company Capitol had already printed 750,000 copies of it.

The Beatles are said to have submitted the gruesome image for use on the cover in retaliation for Capitol insisting on the release of the album, which was made up from leftover tracks from the band's previous two UK releases. Inundated with complaints, the record company soon withdrew the albums but in order to save money they simply stuck another photograph on top of the offending cover.

When word got out among fans of the modification many tried - unsuccessfully - to peel off the new cover to reveal the original image.

A handful of the unmodified covers survived and untouched copies of the original cover known as 'first state' are now prized collectors' items.

The album cover, known among fans as the 'Butcher cover', is owned by a former employee of Capitol Records who worked in the company's mail room.

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In 1969, a brave 14-year-old boy named Jerry Levitan armed with a tape-deck snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and charmed the legend into doing an interview about peace, music, the USA, life and the Bee Gees. Thirty-nine years later, Levitan offered the interview to the world.

Only he did it brilliantly.

I Met The Walrus is an animated short, in which Lennon’s original voiceover comes to life through wonderful pen animation by the tremendously talented James Braithwaite.

Listen to Lennon’s detached yet passionate musings on politics, human nature and marijuana. And appreciate the irony of how true some of what he said 39 years ago rings today.

"It’s up to the people. You can’t blame it on the government and say, ‘Oh, they’re doing this, they’re doing that, oh, they’re gonna put is us into war.’ We put ’em there. We allow it. And we can change it. If we really wanna change it, we can change it.” ~ John Lennon

Levitan’s once-in-a-lifetime Lennon adventure is now available in book form

By: Maria Popova

Source: Brainpickings

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The Nation's Favourite Beatles Number One

The Beatles were a musical sensation like no other. Since exploding onto the music scene in the early 60s, the band has had an unparalleled musical and cultural impact on Britain and the world for over fifty years.

The Nation’s Favourite Beatles Number One tells the stories behind some of the greatest Beatles songs ever. With interviews from Beatles’ insiders including musicians, friends, fellow performers and celebrity fans, we’ll hear about the stories behind the Fab Four’s best-loved hits.

These are the stories behind the 27 songs that reached number one here and in the U.S – from She Loves You to Paperback Writer, Hey Jude to Let it Be – as the show hears from the people who were there to witness in person the extraordinary rise and rise of The Beatles.

Some of the celebrity fans featured in the show include Michael Palin, Sandie Shaw, David Tennant, Twiggy, Bjorn Ulvaeus, George Ezra, Jake Bugg and Sue Johnston, who was even a Cavern club regular herself.

Across 120 minutes, this prime-time celebration of the biggest and most influential band the world has ever seen uses extraordinary footage from a number details

Fifty years ago it was rare for pop stars to make it on to the Honours List but that all changed on October 26, 1965 - the day The Beatles collected their MBEs from Buckingham Palace.

With four thousand screaming teenagers gathering at the gates of the Queen’s official London residence before the 11am investiture, it must have looked more like the queue for one of their concerts than the scene of a usually sombre ceremony - but patient fans got their reward when the band turned up together in John Lennon’s Rolls Royce.

The ceremony took place at 11am story was front page news in the Liverpool Echo that evening as you can see in our gallery of pictures from the day.

Despite several years of stage experience, the band were nervous before meeting the Queen - which led to one particular urban legend springing up about their day at the Palace.

John Lennon claimed later that the band smoked marijuana in the toilets beforehand to calm their pre-gong jitters (these were pre-smoke detector days after all) although George Harrison said later: “We never smoked marijuana... What happened was we were waiting to go through, standing in an enormous line with hundreds of people and we were so n details

Ringo Starr got by with a little help from his friends -- and some famous folks in the house -- at his Sunday, Oct. 25 show at the State Theatre in New Brunswick.

Bruce Springsteen watched the show from the audience with his mom, Adele Springsteen, after stopping backstage to say hello and goodbye to the Beatles legend, according to the theater.

Starr posted a pic of himself and Springsteen and a fella named Wayne on his social media sites prior to the show.

"Great to see Bruce," said Starr.

The Boss performed with Starr and his All-Starr Band in 1989, when Clarence Clemons and Nils Lofgren were in Starr's band, at the then-called Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel. Springsteen has a history of performing at the State Theatre going back to the mid-1970s. The last time he took the stage there was in in 1995, when he began his "The Ghost of Tom Joad'' solo acoustic tour at the venue.

The latest version of the All-Starr Band includes Todd Rundgren, Gregg Rolie from Santana, Steve Lukather from Toto and Richard Page of Mr. Mister.

By: Chris Jordan

Source: Asbury Park Press

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A giant image taken by Paul McCartney’s photographer daughter is helping to illuminate Newcastle this week and turn the focus on National Adoption Week. Mary McCartney’s eye-catching photograph of a small boy is being projected onto Newcastle Civic Centre and other city centre buildings to raise awareness of the need to find more people willing to adopt. Monday evening’s switch-on coincided with an Adoption Information Evening being held at the Civic Centre, which featured the dramatic projection on its main exterior wall.

There are currently 4,290 children in the care of local authorities in the North East – 505 of them in Newcastle. The average age of youngsters enduring the longest wait to find an adoptive family is just four years old, so McCartney’s image includes the caption “Too old at 4?”

The celebrity photographer - daughter of The Beatles star and his late wife Linda - has been working with the information organisation First4Adoption which organises the annual National Adoption Week. Her illumination will be showing until Sunday in the hope it will trigger interest among those able to adopt children aged around four.

McCartney recently took the official details

Sometime in the summer of 1993, ex-Beatle George Harrison drove to the recording studio in West Los Angeles where he was to record a brief cameo for The Simpsons. He would appear as himself in "Homer's Barbershop Quartet," an episode-long parody of his old band, and he was assured the session would be brief and discreet. His cover was quickly blown and the studio was swarmed with The Simpsons' writing staff, all professed Beatle fans, overwhelming him with more questions about the old band. Harrison glumly obliged until the show's creator, Matt Groening mentioned Wonderwall Music: a soundtrack album he'd released in 1968, and the first he'd released under his own name. Harrison perked up and started gushing. That album, he told Groening, was the most fun he'd ever had making a record--and almost no one, in twenty-five years, had ever asked him about it.

No one had asked him likely because almost no one had seen the movie. Even today, Joe Massot's Wonderwall is largely unknown, except as an artifact of Swinging Sixties psychedelia. In it reclusive, middle-aged microbiologist Oscar Collins (Jack MacGowran) becomes obsessed with the beautiful Vogue model next door (Jane Birkin) and her freewheeling world that he spies thro details

You would think that a supergroup featuring Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty would rack up massive hit singles.

Yet their band, the Traveling Wilburys, peaked at only No. 63 with “End of the Line.” The second single to be pulled from the October 1988 release Volume One, “End of the Line” still sounds fresh today. Its infectious, rollicking rhythm suggests traveling with buddies on a beautiful day.

The Traveling Wilburys’ story began in 1988 in the wake of George Harrison’s hugely successful comeback album Cloud Nine. Harrison was about to release another single from the album, the breezy “This Is Love,” and needed a B-side for the track. As fate would have it, Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty were hanging out in Bob Dylan’s studio, and Harrison suggested that they record a song together.

When George Harrison presented the resulting song “Handle with Care” to his record label, then-president Mo Ostin loved it so much that he urged the ex-Beatles star to expand the experience into an entire album. According to Ostin, Harrison took full charge of the project.

The name “Traveling Wi details

"All you need is love,” and a little luck doesn’t hurt either, as one Indiana woman found out recently at a Paul McCartney concert in Columbus.

Tara Horan has a lot to be excited about. She recently discovered that she is pregnant with her first child, but said it has been torturous to keep the news a secret, especially from her mother.

She wanted to make the birth announcement in a creative way, and then it hit her – what if she could have her No. 1 idol make the announcement for her?

When Horan talks about all the McCartney concerts that she and her mother have been to – and they’ve been to many -- she gets a little teary-eyed and her passion for the music is apparent.Horan has been a huge Beatles fan since she was a little girl. She credits her mother with introducing her to the music that would go on to have a profound impact on her life throughout her teen years and into adulthood. She even has a tattoo of the Fab Four on her arm.

For Horan, this wasn’t just a music fan meeting her favorite musician, it was truly a dream come true -- getting to share the most exciting news of her entire life with the help of her favorite Beatle.

By: J.J Dixon

Caught on a recording that has sat in a garage for 50 years is a chat with John Lennon that is a bit different than most. The interview, by New Zealand academic Dr Tony Taylor, has come to light in a newly published book and Carly Thomas sat down with the man who talked Beatlemania with John Lennon... twice.

Times change, that's a given. Years pass, decades pass and things that felt so immediate become history in the blink of an eye.

But some things, people, times, stand out more than others. They make an indelible mark and they become a yesterday that we hang things from. . Their memory lingers long after the fact. The Beatles have done just that. Think about the sixties and there they are: dapper suits, lyrics about young love, the hair and screaming fans.

It's those fans, the hysteria, the extreme reaction, that was new. It got given the title Beatlemania. It worried parents, made fans faint and it got Dr Tony Taylor, an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Victoria University in Wellington, thinking. "I started to look around just to see if anybody had written anything about this," he says.

"Nobody had, I was very surprised. The consumerisation and the cluster of revolutions - the youth revolu details

Give My Regards to Broad Street, released on October 22, 1984, is still an album that represents the nadir not just of the decade but quite possibly of Paul McCartney’s career. (Yes, he re-recorded Beatles songs; no, that wasn’t a good idea.) As such, a flinty little number called “Not Such a Bad Boy” arrived like a bolt of cool-rocking lightning out of the boring-retread blue.

It wasn’t enough to save Give My Regards to Broad Street, an awful album that was paired with a worse movie. But “Not Such a Bad Boy” is certainly worth returning to.

Paul McCartney, at this point, had scarcely attempted a rock song since the punky final edition of Wings flew apart, and “Not Such a Bad Boy” shows just what an awful loss that had been — even as it points the way to next-decade successes like Run Devil Run.

Appearing here with Chris Spedding and Dave Edmunds on guitars, along with the ever-faithful Ringo Starr at the drums, Paul McCartney tears into a straight-forward little groover about a reformed rebel now reduced to kitchen-pass adventures — and he sounds like he’s having no small amount of fun doing it.

By: Nick Deriso

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Even though they haven’t functioned as a musical unit for more than 45 years, there’s never been a shortage of material on the Beatles. In fact, you could easily fill a major library with all of the books that ruthlessly dissect every corner of the band’s career—from their songwriting and their instruments, to private letters and romantic relationships. Surely there’s nothing new to say on the subject of Beatleology, right?

Wrong.

Chip Madinger, along with co-author Scott Raile, has just released Strange Days Indeed – A Scrapbook of Madness, the first installment in his multi-volume LENNONOLOGY series. The book is a day-by-day diary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s life together, from the moment they met in November 1966, to Lennon’s tragic death in December 1980. The product of 15 years research, the book is the most comprehensive history of John and Yoko’s personal and creative existence ever compiled.

There are few people more qualified to literally write the book of Lennonology. Madinger has worked on numerous projects for the Beatles’ Apple Records, including The Capitol Albums Volume 1 package, Magical Mystery Tour BluRay release, and the sle details