Michael Gerber • Hey Dullblog, the Beatles fan blog

Did The Beatles Help Kill Rock and Roll?

By Michael Gerber|2014-07-16T10:18:30-07:00May 10, 2012|Beatles Criticism|

Sure, they seem harmless enough. But were they leading rock off a cliff? Commenter Hologram Sam (nice handle, man) pointed us to a nice little screed by Gene Sculatti, where he compactly autopsies the music we love. If that name sounds familiar, it's because Sculatti was the main brain behind the fun pop culture compendia The Catalog of Cool and Too Cool.I thought the piece was provocative enough to surface on a post of its own. Read it and give an opinion: were The Beatles part of the problem? Or can their example lead rock back to life?

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Re-slamming "Ram"

By Michael Gerber|2014-07-23T12:52:34-07:00May 7, 2012|Paul McCartney|

I thought critical opinion had largely come around to appreciating Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram, 41 years after its release, but apparently not. It’s true that allmusic.com gives it five stars, having inched its rating up over the years, but a couple of reviews of the remastered album, due out later this month, are déjà vu all over again. The latest issue of Qmagazine gives the remastered album 2 stars. For context, the previous issue included a rapturous 5-star review of the reissues of the Human League’s Dare and Fascination albums, and called Lana Del Ray’s Born to Die a “Must Buy” [...]

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"Perfect Beatles Double Bill" on Salon

By Michael Gerber|2013-09-09T09:03:50-07:00May 1, 2012|George Harrison, Living in the Material World|

Several nowhere boys ED PARK • Just saw this on Salon—a very good review of the Scorsese documentary on George and of "Nowhere Boy." I love that the author, Erik Nelson, describes himself as "a card-carrying Beatlemaniac, with a mail-order degree in advanced Moptopology." This is my favorite paragraph: "A much scruffier and ultimately more revealing insight into the Beatles Creation Myth comes from the 2009 "Nowhere Boy." This movie is set entirely in those moments when a strange kind of human alchemy transpired, in the grimy laboratory of Liverpool. No attempt is made to explain how the magic happened, but the viewer gets [...]

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Let us now praise VERY WHITE people…

By Michael Gerber|2013-09-02T20:36:08-07:00April 25, 2012|1963|

1963: The Beatles (and Nell?) relax in the sun in Weston-Super-Mare during a week’s appearance at the local cinema. MIKE GERBER • This photo's Beatleness caught my eye, but my love of Python made me post it. An extra scoop of cosmic ice cream to the first person who makes the connection in the Comments... Friend Shirley Tulloch made the following comment when she posted it on Facebook. "Never seen this pic before. If that is Nell in the background, he was truly blessed no? ;)"

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Toppermost of the Toppermost?

By Michael Gerber|2012-04-25T20:24:00-07:00April 25, 2012|Uncategorized|

Another month, another Q magazine "Best Of" list. This time it's "The Real Best Of" most of the usual suspects (the Stones, the Smiths, Madonna, Springsteen, etc.), with the cover declaring "AND IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK . . ." And OK, this worked, because I wanted to see what Q is presenting as "The Real Best Of" the Beatles.The Beatles 10-best list was chosen by Rob Fitzpatrick, and I give him credit for declaring them "the most underrated pop group in history. " I agree that "they're the only group in the history of pop music that are actually better than everyone [...]

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"Treasure trove" of Harrisongs?

By Michael Gerber|2014-12-30T20:15:17-08:00April 21, 2012|George, George Harrison, solo|

King of Fuh The Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot talks to Olivia Harrison and Giles Martin about the impending release of Early Takes, Volume I, a new set of Harrison rarities from the early solo period. According to them, this is just the tip of the iceberg.Says Martin, “You get very excited when you see a tape box marked, ‘George, Eric (Clapton), Ringo (Starr) and Klaus (Voorman),’ and then you listen and realize it’s just hours of them chatting in the studio. But other times you stumble across something really great. You are digging for gold, and there was a lot there.”"Exploring My [...]

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The unexpected from Ono and McCartney

By Michael Gerber|2013-08-14T04:02:20-07:00March 27, 2012|Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono|

NANCY CARR • I think Michael’s comments on the previous post about Paul McCartney’s seeking to entertain an audience, while Yoko Ono seeks to instruct one, are right on the mark and help clarify why people frequently can’t stand one or the other of them. What I find interesting about their respective tendencies is that both do their best work (in my opinion, of course) when they ease off those attitudes. When McCartney worries less about whether people will like what he does, and when Ono expresses her musical gifts without apparent concern for whether the results sound explicitly experimental, they sound [...]

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My complicated feelings about Beatlegs…and yours?

By Michael Gerber|2014-07-23T12:53:32-07:00March 17, 2012|bootlegs|

Forgive me if this post is a bit hasty—I sat down to write my parody Downturn Abbey, which I'm doing for St. Martin's on a brain-busting turnaround, but…I was in the middle of replying to Craig's nice comment on the previous post, and an issue occurred to me, one probably pretty central to this blog yet something I don't recall us ever discussing. It's this: What do you think about Beatles bootlegs? Do you collect them? Do you feel kinda bad about listening to "illegal" recordings? A major find. I collected Beatles bootlegs pretty obsessively from 12-16. I would head to the same [...]

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Don’t judge by its disturbing cover . . .

By Michael Gerber|2014-12-07T14:22:48-08:00March 3, 2012|John Lennon, Paul McCartney|

“Lennon and McCartney: Together Alone” (2007) is an in-depth look at the solo careers of both men that is comprehensive, well-written and illustrated, and refreshingly free of bias. It’s changed the way I think about some of Lennon's and McCartney's solo music. For example, I’ll never hear “Watching the Wheels” the same way again. I can hardly stand to read anything biographical about either Lennon or McCartney anymore, since so many writers moved to compose book-length works on them are grinding an ax of some variety. Reading John Blaney’s book was, for me, like opening a window and letting welcome fresh air [...]

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The King Features’ version of "Tomorrow Never Knows"

By Michael Gerber|2014-12-26T10:50:19-08:00February 9, 2012|1966, cartoon|

Robert Freeman's rejected cover for Revolver, 1966. A Tomorrow Never Knows cartoon? It happened. The Beatles cartoon is wince-worthy, for sure, but have a little sympathy for the animators. As the years passed, they had to shoehorn what The Beatles were becoming—that is, overtly weird-ass—into the family-friendly Fabs from 1964. After watching the clip below, the following scene popped into my noggin.... The time: June 1966.The place: Conference room "B" at King Features Syndicate, here in Southern California. There's acoustic tile. Fluorescent lights. Shitty coffee. At the west end of a grim metal table ringed by uncomfortable chairs, hangs a portrait of Snuffy [...]

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About Michael Gerber