Crowd outside Dakota after the murder of John Lennon, December 9, 1980. Folks, I've been noticing certain topics growing like wild vines over the comment sections of various unrelated posts. So in the interest of housekeeping, I'd like to experiment with Open Threads. Ideally my goal is to have the comment sections hew fairly closely to the original post, so that lurkers and other quiet readers can use the comments to learn in greater depth on that topic. This Open Thread is for discussion of conspiracy theories related to the murder of John Lennon; I will not be participating, nor [...]

Folks, I've watched roughly half of "Get Back," and had a few thoughts and impressions that you might be interested in. It looks gorgeous, doesn't it? Great sound, great image quality, and that alone makes it a huge gift to the canon. Before I do, however, I want to link to a Dullblog post I wrote in 2014, "Let It Be: A Missed Opportunity." Re-reading it today I think it's quite prescient. I am not saying that Peter Jackson or anyone at Apple needed to read my lil' ol' post to figure out what a better documentary might look like...but I'm always [...]

Folks, I'm rushing out to Thanksgiving dinner, but here's the promised open thread on the Peter Jackson film. Put any thoughts/observations in the comments. For all my grouchiness, I'm really looking forward to seeing it. Enjoy!

Reading one of a flood of pre-Get Back reviews just now; the premise of the piece, in The New York Times no less, is that the breakup of The Beatles had multiple causes and is a topic of debate even today among Beatle fans and scholars. Its big reveal is that, thanks to a new film, maybe the Get Back sessions weren't utter misery (despite Lennon calling them "hell" and Harrison "the winter of our discontent"). In other words… Fear not, aging Boomers increasingly sentimental about your salad days! John, Paul, George and Ringo were as happy to be Beatles as you [...]

Following some mention in the comments, I was able to find a very nice VHS transfer of the pre-Anthology Beatles documentary The Compleat Beatles, streamable on the Internet Archive. I post it here for several reasons. When people talk about "the standard narrative," this is it. The Compleat Beatles is a well-told, extremely concise rendition of The Beatles' story as most fans knew it before the Anthology in 1995. In other words, from 1970 to 1995 this is what people thought, and even today I suspect that this version of the story is the most defensible. One thing I noticed is that [...]

[Folks, I responded to a comment from @Erin this afternoon, and felt that I was able to express some complex, important stuff in a reasonably concise way, so I'm surfacing it here. But before you read that… Whatever else they might be, The Beatles are an historical phenomenon; which means two things. First, each fan must create their own idea of the group out of the scraps that speak to them; all fans do this. But loving an historical thing means each fan's mental fabrication, made-to-measure and drawing from the fan's own preferences, moods and emotional needs, is more and more idiosyncratic, [...]