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A piano with a Beatles theme -- signed by Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr -- will allow East St. Tammany Habitat for Humanity to construct a home for a veteran and his or her family.

The two world-famous musicians signed the piano, restored and painted by Slidell artist Lori Gomez, in the fall. But it took months of effort to obtain certificates of authenticity and a certified estimated value before the piano could go up for auction on the Web site, Charitybuzz.com.

The auction started April 2, but it all came down to the final minutes before it closed April 16 at 2 p.m. About 50 ESTHFH supporters gathered at Carreta's Grill in Slidell to watch the final countdown on their smart phones and IPads.

While bids on the piano had only reached $41,000 by that morning, cheers from the crowd could be heard as the price jumped to $55,500 at 1:50 p.m. then $71,000 and $81,000 within seconds at 1:55 p.m., and $91,000 at 1:56 p.m. Per Charity Buzz's rules, bidding was extended twice -- for a total of 20 extra minutes -- when last minute bids were made.

In the e details

Digital distribution may have only reached its true potential relatively recently, but the concept of artists reaching music fans directly and instantly was actually being banded around by pioneering songwriter Donovan and his friends The Beatles half a century ago.

Speaking to Music Week, Donovan revealed that, way back in the 1960s, he and The Beatles discussed the concept of a communication network by which they could distribute music digitally and connect with anyone in the world, whenever they wanted - much like the internet as we know it today.

“The internet is what we spoke about, me and The Beatles, sitting around at Apple, but we didn’t know it was called the internet. We didn’t know that the military establishment were working on it and it was going to come,” he said.

“John Lennon and I would sit around when we became pals and the other guys were there too. John said, Wouldn’t it be great if we had our own satellite? We could do exactly what we wanted, couldn’t we? We wouldn’t have to deal with what’s details

Liverpool is known all over the world as the birthplace of The Beatles. (And #scousebrow. Look it up.) Obviously, a large portion of the city's visitors are there to see what The Beatles saw in their formative days.

And there's a lot left to see, although most of it has been prettied up, such as the Albert Docks, which houses a Beatles visitor center, and The Cavern Club, where the band played in its early years. (The Cavern Club actually had to close down in the 1980s, but it was rebuilt using a lot of the original bricks.)

Of course, Beatles-themed tours are plentiful, ranging from the Magical Mystery Tour (a two-hour sightseeing bus tour) to the The Beatles Fab Four Taxi Tour (a private taxi tour.) But only one tour can get you inside the childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

The National Trust operates tours inside Mendips, Lennon's home, and 20 Forthlin Road, Paul McCartney's home. Other tours can only look at the homes from the street. If you're a die-hard Beatles fan, you don't want to be standing on the street watching someone else details

It may seem like you know a lot about Yoko Ono. The artist, who has been prolific and active in the art world since the 1960s, was showing her conceptual work at a gallery in London in 1966 when she met John Lennon (see How Eight Art World Power Couples Met and Fell In Love). She released her first solo album in 1970 entitled Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. And die-hard Beatles fans blame her for the immensely popular band's break-up. This year, the artist will have a survey at MoMA, "Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971," which will offer a look back at the early years, gathering roughly 125 performances, films, works on paper, installations, and archival materials. In anticipation of the show, we've uncovered some things about Ono that may change the way you see her.

1. She was one of the first women accepted to study philosophy at the esteemed Gakushuin University in Tokyo.

2. Her second husband (she had three), film producer Tony Cox, kidnapped and hid their daughter, Kyoko, and joined a Christian cult, cutting off all communication from Ono. Ono did not see her dau details

"It's like my record collection is actually sitting in this room," Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong said midway through his acceptance speech at the 30th annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. "The fact that I heard Patti Smith's Horses as a kid, and now there you are standing there."

Armstrong paused for a split second to take in the moment, looking out across the rows of tables that included Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Joan Jett, Stevie Wonder, Peter Wolf, Steve Van Zandt, Bill Withers, Jerry Lee Lewis and many other of his favorite artists. "I love rock & roll music," he said. "I have from the first moment I opened my eyes and took my first breath."

That was a common sentiment throughout the five-and-a-half hour ceremony at Cleveland's Public Hall Saturday night, perhaps the only event that could find Miley Cyrus singing into the same mic as Green Day's Mike Dirnt on a Beatles song while Bill Withers, McCartney, Starr, Beck, Karen O, Wonder and Dave Grohl joyously played alongside them. "A lot of different types of music are in [the Hall of Fa details

"He had a habit of just giving his art away to people," Yoko Ono softly explained, in a phone interview with The Huffington Post. "He was pretty generous about that."

Yes, that humble "he" refers to John Lennon, the legendary singer, songwriter, musician and artist who inspired the world to imagine peace. As such, it's not a huge shock that he enjoyed giving away his drawings. "We had a big lawyers meeting and the whole time they were talking he was just scribbling something," Ono said. "The lawyers would come to John and say, 'What are you doing?' And he was making this beautiful, beautiful artwork. And the lawyer said, 'Well, can I have it?' And he said, 'Sure, sure.' That's just how John was."

Due to Lennon's aforementioned altruism, many of his works have wound their way into lucky hands throughout the world. Still, a precious supply resides with his artistic collaborator and great love, Yoko Ono. The 82-year-old multidisciplinary artist is presenting her treasure trove of sketches for the world to see, providing art lovers and Beatles-maniacs alike details

Abbey Road Studios is among the most famous recording studios in music history, and while music fans are no doubt familiar with the albums that came out of Abbey Road – the Beatles catalog, Dark Side of the Moon, The Bends, among many others – not many have actually seen the inside of the storied London studio itself. That is, until now.

For Inside Abbey Road, Google has teamed with the studio to present an in-depth, multimedia guided tour through the famed studios by combining the search engine's Google Maps technology with YouTube videos, interactive exhibits and more.

"Abbey Road Studios has been a hive of creativity and source of world-class recordings for more than 80 years," Giles Martin, producer and the son of longtime Beatles collaborator George Martin, said in a statement. "The artists using the studios have sold countless millions of records and have helped create popular culture as we know it today. It's an inspirational place and an honour for me to work there today. This collaboration with Google gives the outside world a great insight into th details

Ringo Starr snubs autobiography offers - Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Ringo Starr refuses to write an autobiography because publishers are only interested in his career with The Beatles.

The 74-year-old drummer has been approached to tell his story in a book on numerous occasions but has always refused because he doesn't want to pen a tome that primarily focuses on his time with The Fab Four and discounts his life and work after the band split in 1970.

Instead, Ringo prefers to tell tales of his life and share memories with his fans in his songs, starting with 2008 LP 'Liverpool 8'.

In an interview with Billboard magazine, Ringo said: "I've been invited to write it (an autobiography) by several publishing houses but I don't feel they're interested in my autobiography - they're only interested in the eight years I was in The Beatles. So for some reason it came to me, starting with 'Liverpool 8', I'm going to write snippets of my life on each album. One track on each is dedicated to memories of the past, incidents of the past. I do it instead of an autobiography."

Ringo has just released a new LP, 'Postcards From Paradi details

Sir Paul McCartney has issued an impassioned appeal for an end to the senseless slaughter of baby harp seals taking place off Canada's east coast. The Canadian government has authorized the killing of up to 468,000 harp, hooded and grey seals. The seals-almost all just a few weeks of age-are shot, clubbed and skinned for their fur despite dwindling global demand for seal products. Humane Society International is the only organization on the scene to bear witness to the 2015 commercial seal hunt.

McCartney said: "Canada's brutal commercial seal hunt has begun, and once again thousands of baby seals will be shot and bludgeoned to make fur products that nobody wants or needs. The European Union's trade ban on commercial seal hunt products has already helped save more than one million baby seals from a horrible fate. But we need to ensure the EU keeps this strong ban intact. That's why my friends at Humane Society International are once again setting out for the ice flows for the grim task of catching this horror on film. Their videos of the bloody seal slaughter provide the only vital details

It’s difficult to find an area of music that the Beatles didn’t influence, but their contribution to the progression of heavy metal is often overlooked. Perhaps best remembered for their psychedelic art-rock and flawless pop singles, the Fab Four could certainly let their hair down and fire off some headbangers, inspiring metal architects like Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons. Plus their pioneering work with distortion, feedback, unorthodox lyrical topics, and death metal roars helped provide the building blocks of the genre.

So without further ado, in chronological order, here are nine Beatles songs that clearly helped pave the road to heavy metal.

1. “Twist And Shout,” from Please Please Me (1963)

A rock vocal to end all rock vocals, John’s performance on “Twist And Shout” is made all the more remarkable when you realize he was suffering from a terrible cold. On top of that, The Beatles were booked to record their first album in a single day, so by the time Lennon got this (his final track), he larynx was pretty details

Were you upset by the breakup of the Beatles back in the day? So was Ringo Starr.

The Fab Four drummer told the Times of London that he often spent the 1970s and '80s in a boozy haze.

“I was drunk,” he said. "Some of those years are absolutely gone.”

Starr, 74, explained to the paper that the group's split affected him for a long time. “I was mad,” he said. “For 20 years. I had breaks in between of not being.”

This isn't the first time the famous mop-topped performer has opened up about his alcoholism in the wake of the breakup. After entering rehab with wife Barbara Bach in 1988, he later told People magazine that the band's dissolution left him "absolutely lost." Drinking helped keep him that way.

"It got progressively worse, and the blackouts got worse, and I didn't know where I'd been, what I'd done," he told the magazine. "I knew I had the problem for years. But it plays tricks with your head. Very cunning and baffling is alcohol."

By: Ron Dicker

Source: the Huffington Po details

1965: Music's greatest year ever? - Sunday, April 12, 2015

Here in the media-saturated 2010s, we get to relive the events of the momentous 1960s in an inexorable year-by-year march.

Last year, the Beatles re-invaded America. Next year, 50th-anniversary journalism will see to it that the miniskirt and Star Trek are born again. In 2017, we'll be tripping on a Summer of Love rehash.

This year, there's a lot on our plate - 1965 was a turning point in American history. As depicted in Ava DuVernay's Selma, it was the year the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights march to Montgomery, Ala., spurred Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Voting Rights Act into law.
In Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein showed how it was also the year that reaction to the Watts riots in Los Angeles helped create the culture-war divide that still defines American political discourse.

And as socio-political tumult grew, pop music stretched itself in response. With rock and roll then a decade old - the Elvis Presley youthquake detonated in 1955 - the music was growing more sophisticated in its rebelliousness.

Was it th details

In a ceremony last year at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the Beatles’ original manager, Brian Epstein, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The honor was well deserved. Epstein’s early oversight of what many consider to be the most popular musical act of the 20th century led some to call him the fifth Beatle. Some of the strategies he used to propel the Beatles to prominence (while also probably costing them a fortune in lost potential revenue) would be ill suited to today’s world of digital streaming, music piracy and YouTube, which makes Epstein a case study in how much music management has changed since the early 1960s.

Epstein was born in Liverpool in 1934 to Harry and Queen details

In a nondescript building tucked away on a quiet street in west London, Stella McCartney and her team are comparing the properties of a real leather shoe with the various non-leather swatches being considered for her brand’s winter 2015 shoe collection.

Women of differing ages, ethnicities and body types come in and out of the room with a constant flow of new ideas while McCartney acts as a kind of real-time editor, deciding what colours, materials and shapes feel right for the upcoming season.

An assistant is frantically taking notes to capture her feedback while snapping digital photos of the things that catch her eye.

McCartney does not use any animal products — no leather, no fur, no skins, no feathers.

“We always have this conversation about our non-leathers. We are, of course, the most ethical and loving company in the fashion industry,” she says half-joking, almost mocking herself, “but at this stage I always have to apologise to my designers and creative team for the limitations [this creates].”

Her busi details

When ‘Ravi Shankar: A Life In Music’, is unveiled at the Grammy Museum here, on April 29, it would mark the first exhibition in the United States to celebrate India’s most esteemed musician, who died on December 11, 2012, at La Jolla in San Diego, California.The date, April 29, would also be the renowned sitar player and Beatles’ inspiration Ravi Shankar’s 95th birthday.Through a collection of sitars, artifacts and rare photographs from the Shankar family, the exhibit will provide visitors with a one-of-a-kind glimpse into the Grammy-winning world music icon’s early life, the roots of his musicality and his vast impact on Western music, according to a press release.“Ravi Shankar is as synonymous to world music as Elvis Presley is to rock and roll,” said Bob Santelli, Executive Director of the Grammy Museum, in a statetement. “Through his decades of world concert performances and the relationships he built with Western artists such as Yehudi Menuhin, Philip Glass, John Coltrane, and The Beatles, Shankar was instrumental in introdu details

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