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Beatles News
From the moment Paul McCartney, coolly holding his iconic, beat-up Hofner bass guitar, plucked the first notes of the "Out There" tour kickoff in Brazil, the audience must have recognized something momentous was happening.
He was playing "Eight Days a Week," the 1964 rocker that is one of the Beatles' most memorable No. 1 hits. And yet, until that show, the song, penned by McCartney and John Lennon, had never been played onstage. Lennon thought "Eight Days a Week," which the group struggled to write, was "lousy."
It's one of a handful of never-performed Beatles treasures that McCartney exhumed for his "Out There" tour. The nearly 40-song set list starts almost every night with "Eight Days a Week," then slips in four more rarely performed numbers from the Beatles catalog.
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Julian Lennon’s White Feather Foundation charity has been gifted by a signed boxset from Paul McCartney to raise money to help people who are dying from lack of clean water and sanitation.
The White Feather Foundation was named after something Julian’s father, Beatle John Lennon, once said to him if he should ever pass away. To let Julian know he was OK, John promised to send a message in the form of a white feather.
“Then something happened to me, whilst on tour with the last album, Photograph Smile, in Australia. I was presented with a white feather by an Aboriginal tribal elder, from The Mirning people, which definitely took my breath away. The White Feather Foundation was created for the purpose of giving a voice and support to those who cannot be heard.
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I remember when Paul was dead. It was the fall of 1969 — my first year at the University of Victoria — and I, like the rest of my generation, was stunned at reports that the real Paul McCartney had been killed in a car accident two years earlier and replaced with a look-alike.
Like many others I hunted for hints of his death in the lyrics of earlier Beatles albums — “turn me on, dead man” in the White Album’s Revolution 9, and John Lennon’s supposed phrase “I buried Paul” in the song Strawberry Fields Forever. It was a hoax, of course, but it persisted for weeks until Life magazine reported that “Paul is still with us.”
And, happily, he’s with us still, as the now 71-year-old ably demonstrated at his three-hour concert in Ottawa on Sunday. Certainly, he’s not the rocker of yore with smooth cheeks and a dense mop of hair — neck wattles, sagging jowls and dyed can’t be denied — yet by all accounts those who saw his performance were amazed.
BOSTON – Somewhere in a musty attic in Liverpool there has to be a portrait of an aging Paul McCartney because the guy who rocked out Fenway Park Tuesday night sure didn’t act like a 71-year-old.
The former Beatle played for two hours and 40 minutes at the venerable ballpark and treated fans to 38 songs. (A far cry from the 11-song set The Beatles played during a half hour show at Suffolk Downs back in 1966).
One of the richest men on the planet, a knight of the realm, and driving force behind some of greatest songs ever recorded, McCartney surely doesn’t need the cash or adulation he received at the sold-out show. Clearly, Sir Paul still finds joy in playing out.
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When Paul McCartney left The Beatles in 1970 he decided to drop out of public life for a while. Taking his wife and children Macca headed off to his newly bought farm house in the Mull of Kintrye to raise sheep, walk on the beach and pen gentle folky ditties.
It wasn’t until a year later in 1971 when the former Beatle raised his head above the parapet again with the release of the album that had largely been written on Kintrye – Ram. He probably wished he hadn’t bothered. When the press compared Ram with the output of his former sparring partners they found it to be twee, slight and a tad half-baked. It was no match at the time for Lennon’s primal screams or Harrison’s spiritual ditties. Although it sold well Ram became a exhibit A for Macca detractors.
Source: brandish
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Half a century after they had their first hit and four decades after they split up there remains an insatiable appetite for tales about The Beatles. And amazingly, even now they keep on coming.
Thus the burgeoning success of Standing in the Wings: The Beatles, Brian Epstein and Me – the memoirs of Liverpool’s Joe Flannery which recall the Fab’s formative years on their way to pop superstardom.
The book is barely off the presses and its publishers are talking of a second print run, while its author is preparing for a nationwide promotional tour – and with the tantalising prospect of America, Canada and even Japan to follow.
Source: Liverpool Echo
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Fenway Park is preparing for thousands of spectators in the next five days, none of whom are coming to see any home runs. As the Red Sox begin a new series in Seattle tonight, their home plate is currently being converted into a concert venue to host two of Boston's biggest concerts of the summer: Paul McCartney and Jason Aldean.
Rock legend Paul McCartney will take the stage tomorrow night for a record-breaking crowd. Tickets for tomorrow's show sold out in a whopping five minutes back in April, making it the fastest-ever sellout for a concert in Fenway history. McCartney is returning to perform in Boston for the first time since 2009, when he broke another attendance record for drawing the largest crowded the ballpark had ever seen for a two-day concert.
Source: Bostlnno
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In early December 1961, Brian Epstein drew up a contract that bound The Beatles to him for five years. Only Paul McCartney was hesitant about signing it. McCartney told Epstein that he hoped The Beatles would make it big, as Howard Sounes recounts in Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. “But I’ll tell you now, Mr. Epstein,” McCartney declared, “I’m going to be a star anyway.”
Macca was 19 at the time. He turned 71 last month and the steely resolve he showed Epstein has never wavered.
McCartney, worth about $650 million according to Forbes magazine, is on the road this summer to burnish his musical legacy. Not only his own, but The Beatles’ legacy, too. The plan is to cement his place in pop history by giving fans what he calls, with Liverpudlian understatement, “a good night out.”
John Lennon‘s widow, Yoko Ono, may be 80 years old, but she remains as creative and active as ever. The avant-garde artist and the latest incarnation of her Plastic Ono Band have recorded a follow-up to their 2009 album, Between My Head and the Sky, that’s scheduled for a September 17 release.
The new collection, titled Take Me to the Land of Hell, includes guest appearances by Roots drummer Questlove and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, while surviving Beastie Boys Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Michael “Mike D” Diamond collaborated on remixes for the release.
“The energy I have right now, and the desire to continue to make as much great work as I can, is really moving me forward all the time,” says Ono in a statement. “This album is the culmination of a lot of ideas I’ve been having over the last few years and I feel proud to release it at such an exciting time of my life.”
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OTTAWA — Fifty-six years to the day after Sir Paul McCartney met his former Beatles bandmate John Lennon in a church hall in a suburb of Liverpool, England, the legendary rocker was in Ottawa preparing to play the nation’s capital for the first time in his career.
A perfectionist by nature, McCartney came to town at least one day before kicking off the North American leg of his Out There! tour to lead a full band rehearsal, the Citizen learned, begging the question: what’s Ottawa like through the eyes of Sir Paul McCartney?
Keeping tabs on the English musician was surprisingly difficult, especially considering he was once partially responsible for a worldwide fan frenzy known as Beatlemania. Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which have been known to erupt when stars like Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth are caught in town, stayed fairly subdued, with comments centring around McCartney’s upcoming show rather than a minute-by-minute play of his whereabouts.
ARTISTIC culture separated by hundreds of years will be coming together during a performance at Gosden House School next month.
Pupils at the Bramley special educational needs school will be performing Shakespeare’s classic comedy, Twelfth Night, to mark its ten-year collaboration with Globe Education.
The performance of The Bard’s play will also be mixed with songs from the album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as a way of saying a fond farewell to headteacher and Beatles fan Jon David, who is retiring this year.
Mr David helped develop the school’s relationship with Globe Education, based at Shakespeare’s globe in London, which has made annual visits to the school for a decade to work with pupils aged five to 16.
Source: Get Surrey
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Fans of the Beatles have always been a passionate bunch. But few can rival Ottawa’s Yvan Tessier. He bought his first Beatles album, Yellow Submarine, in 1968. Since then he’s amassed one of North America’s largest collections of vinyl Beatles records. He owns around 5,000 of them, worth an estimated $70,000.
As a band, The Beatles only released a handful of studio albums. But Tessier’s collection includes both mono and stereo versions, records pressed in different countries, re-releases with different labels and covers, box sets, bootleg albums, even records given to fan club members that were never sold to the public. Then, of course, he has all the records released by the band members from their post-Beatle solo careers. Tessier’s reason is simple."Because I'm a label geek! I just have to have every single version."
It's also made him an expert in all things Beatles. Tessier has contributed to Beatles books and magazines. He's helped to authenticate rare albums. He is particularly versed in the Beatles albums made details
Paul McCartney has carried more tunes in his day than a pallet full of iPods. Music, says drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., is in “every fiber” of McCartney’s being: “Even if he’s making a little fruit salad, he’s humming a tune or whistling away. The music doesn’t stop around him. It’s beautiful.”
The same could be said of Laboriel, who is not only McCartney’s drummer but his harmony partner of more than 10 years. Musicality runs in his blood: his father, Abraham Laboriel Sr., is a highly respected bassist, and Abe Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps when he graduated from Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 1993.
Watching Laboriel work has been one of the great joys of McCartney’s return to the stage, after the 71-year-old former Beatle took most of the ’90s off from touring. (McCartney and his band, including Laboriel, guitarists Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray and keyboardist Paul “Wix” Wickens, return to Fenway Park on Tuesday.)
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Hand-signed memorabilia from the Beatles, particularly the late John Lennon and George Harrison, get more and more rare every year. That only makes events featuring them more and more special.
Such an event returns again this year as WZLX presents the Beatles Art Show and Sale on Saturday, July 6, just days before Paul McCartney takes the stage at Fenway Park. The four-day exhibit will display plenty of classic artwork from the Beatles’ career, namely lithographs and animation cells from the Yellow Submarine movie. Many of these pieces will be hand-signed by the Beatles themselves. Every single piece will be up for sale.
Source: Classic Rock WZLX
Photo Credit: Ron Campbell
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Nearly 50 years after writing the conceptual art book Grapefruit, writer, artist and peace activist Yoko Ono has released a sequel that she hopes will inspire people and get them thinking and reading.
Acorn, a book of 100 "instructional poems" and drawings that will be published on July 15, goes back in time, according to the widow of Beatle John Lennon, because it is something she originally created for the Internet in the 1990s.
Each day, for 100 days, she communicated a different idea for people to explore. She has now compiled them in a book.
"I like the idea because many people are not reading books anymore. They are just going to the computer," Ono, who turned 80 earlier this year, said in an interview.
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