A documentary filmmaker named Paul Berriff has discovered some great photos of The Beatles he took as a 16-year-old assistant on the Yorkshire Evening Post. The pix are going on permanent display in Liverpool. Here's the site.This is now my favorite picture of Paul.
“Happy New Year…” Friend Jon just forwarded me this news article detailing a letter that John Lennon wrote a young songwriter in early 1970. The letter never reached the songwriter--it was intercepted and sold. Which I think is quite a neat metaphor for both Lennon's fundamental decency, and how the circumstances of his life conspired to make it difficult for him to express that.
Folks, I'm trying to assemble a list of the best Beatles blogs out there, so we can link to them. What are your regular stops? Put your faves in the comments.
You know you're destined to be a rockstar when you have your school photo printed as a record sleeve. Good news! The Wrap.com reports that the 2006 Nilsson documentary, “Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?” has finally found a distributor. The article says that the film will be at NYC's Cinema Village on September 10th, and be released on DVD before year's end. Folks, if I wasn't so sick these days, I'd fly out and lead a peaceful takeover of Cinema Village for an evening. I expect you to do Dullblog proud. I was lucky [...]
Why pick an Isley Brothers song for the title? Yesterday evening, I was perusing Shout! and, as ever, thought it was a really great, fluid, surprisingly no-nonsense large-grain history of the group. Well, maybe "really great" is a bit much, given the book's anti-Paul bias, but it's still wonderfully written, and was essential in its time. If you were a Beatles fan in the early 80s like I was, Shout! was the companion volume to The Compleat Beatles. I'm looking forward to comparing it with Davies, as soon as I can lay my hands on that book. (It's not really [...]
Paul McCartney performs a rare version of Blackbird in this video from 1968. http://youtu.be/3uqGCqMYaHQ
...just maybe not when you're thirty-five. [Update February 2015: Here's a mini-doc on the "bigger than Jesus" controversy:] http://youtu.be/ETFKXMdjbkU
"What's the creepiest photo you have?... Yeah, that one." This is a two-part news program from 1989, where the author of the muckraking "The Lives of John Lennon" (just released at that time) debates Hunter Davies, the author of "The Beatles" authorized biography from 1968. Davies is very charming, and makes some very good points about Goldman's tendency to veer off into—well, the nicest thing to call it is "creative writing." I think that's exactly how any sensible person should read it; at points Goldman stops writing about the real John Lennon, whoever he was, and begins crafting a character [...]
So there, John. A great comment from Nancy on the breakup of the Beatles, in the comment thread... Here's another thought, prompted by your post and the responses to it: both John and Paul reacted to Brian Epstein's death in ways predicted by their reactions to their respective mothers' deaths. John learned from his whole childhood that he couldn't really trust anyone (from his p.o.v., both his parents abandoned him), and that if you loved someone, he or she would vanish or change beyond recognition (his Uncle George, his mother, Stu Sutcliffe, and from his perspective, Cynthia). Paul learned from his [...]