Devin McKinney • Hey Dullblog, the Beatles fan blog

Mark Lewisohn’s “Tune In” Worth the Wait, Says Beatles Blogger

By Devin McKinney|2014-08-01T11:57:13-07:00December 3, 2013|biography, books, Mark Lewisohn, Reviews, Tune In|

DEVIN McKINNEY • I hope you’ll all toggle over to the arts blog Critics at Large, where I’m a contributor, to read my review of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, volume one of his three-part Beatles biography. I know, posting that request here is a bit like asking one’s lover to have dinner at the home of another. But I’m proud to post stuff over there, where it’s in super-fine company. And besides, all of us here in the free-content blogosphere need to help each other out.

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Cries and Whispers, Crashes and Flutters: 10 Favorite Beatles Musical Micro-Moments

By Devin McKinney|2016-12-03T07:44:13-08:00November 27, 2013|1963, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, John Lennon, Lennon, McCartney, Paul McCartney, Ringo, Ringo Starr|

Recording "Real Love," 1994:Gut genius at work. DEVIN McKINNEY • We all know you can take the Beatles to the outer limit and upper extremity of significance—Best thing in universal history—and then narrow that unit to its subordinate but still-impressive absolutes: Best miracle of the 20th century; best socio-cultural force of the 1960s; Best group of the “rock era.” Having accepted all of that, you can, and we all have, then go superlative in descending levels of specificity: Best album; best song; best vocal performance—John; best vocal performance—Paul; best bass playing; best guitar solo; best everything else. But have we [...]

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When I’m Seventy-Three: What John Lennon would look like today

By Devin McKinney|2013-11-20T07:52:42-08:00November 20, 2013|alternate history, Beatles on the Web, cartoon, Graphic Art, John Lennon|

DEVIN McKINNEY • Huffington Post today features John Lennon headlining a festival of dead pop stars as they might look today, in computer-aided speculations created by the Sachs Media Group in partnership with “photo restoration and manipulation company” Phoejoe. I study John’s digitally aged image, looking for the flaw in the algorithm, the misjudgment of hairline or jowel nomenclature, and can’t find it. The others are pretty interesting as well. And here’s the classic analog representation of all four Beatles “when I’m sixty-four,” commissioned for the multi-artist anthology The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (1969), often used for [...]

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Book Review: “Beatles vs. Stones”

By Devin McKinney|2014-02-03T05:09:15-08:00November 11, 2013|1968, Beatles vs. Stones, biography, books|

Beatles vs. Stones by John McMillian 288 pp. Simon & Schuster, 2013 Reviewed by Devin McKinney Note: This review was first posted, precipitately, on July 22nd, after review copies of John McMillian's book were sent out; it was difficult for the reviewer to resist reading and responding to it immediately. Now that the book is publicly available, we repost the review, without any changes. A character in Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude claims that every small-group dynamic found in fiction or in life is comprehensible via the Beatles model of organizational relationships: “The Beatles thing is an archetype, it’s like [...]

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Literary approaches to the Beatles; or, the difference between a book and a record

By Devin McKinney|2013-12-11T09:29:27-08:00October 30, 2013|1966, Beatles on the Web, books, Eleanor Rigby, John Gardner, Robin Wood|

DEVIN McKINNEY • Once, a long time ago, I tried to maintain, just for the record, a running tab of Beatles references or mentions that cropped up in the course of my day. During that period (the latter half of the 1980s), the daily references were not many; the group’s public profile was in a relative slough of despond, and looking back, we can pinpoint those years as equidistant between the first Great Beatles Revival (1976-78) and the second (1994-95). Though I lost the tabulation long ago (so much for “the record”), I can bet it would, if compared to similar checklists [...]

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All I’ve got is a photograph: Ringo snaps Miami fans

By Devin McKinney|2014-12-30T21:28:59-08:00October 27, 2013|1964, fans, Ringo, Ringo Starr|

DEVIN McKINNEY • Courtesy of Joe Bonomo, writer, professor, rock fan, comes this item. Ringo took this shot of fans from the back of the Beatles' limousine. He doesn't remember for sure, but he believes it was in Miami Beach on the Beatles' first trip there, February 13-22, 1964. The article in the Miami Herald has some great quotes from local fans, some of whom remember the Beatles' visit, and poses a mini-mystery of the kind I love. Someone objects that, since the kids are wearing jackets, this can't be Miami. But the writers do their research and discover that, indeed, there [...]

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World Party: What The Beatles Might Have Sounded Like Had They Been Just One Guy (Who Grew Up Listening to The Beatles)

By Devin McKinney|2013-09-13T15:22:54-07:00September 13, 2013|Beatle-inspired, Beatles tributes, concert, Covers|

Karl Wallinger c. 1991, Lennoning. DEVIN McKINNEY • Last week, my wife and I had the pleasure of seeing World Party perform at City Winery in Manhattan. World Party is Karl Wallinger, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who has been making music on and off since the late ‘70s, first with The Waterboys and then on his own. For the last few years he’s been performing in America and England, usually accompanied by fiddler-mandolinist Dave Duffy and guitarist John Turnbull. He’s one of my favorite musicians ever, not just Beatles-influenced but Beatles-besotted, and I really don’t know why it’s taken me so [...]

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The Beatles (at the BBC) Again

By Devin McKinney|2013-09-12T15:00:14-07:00September 12, 2013|1962, 1963, 1964, BBC, bootlegs, Reissues|

The Beatles, with Pete Best on drums, rehearse for their first BBC appearance, Playhouse Theatre, Manchester, June 11, 1962. Photo by Mike McCartney. DEVIN McKINNEY • What a bounty this autumn brings us. In addition to the long (as in loooong) awaited first volume of the Lewisohn biography (the multiple iterations of which will blanket like sweet snow our Fall and Winter); Kevin Howlett's The Beatles: BBC Archives 1962 to 1970, which looks indispensable for the cover alone; and The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story, a new graphic novel by Vivek J. Tiwary (which I can only hope comes [...]

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The Fab Files, Pt. 1: Beatles “not a seller,” says movie exec probably no longer in biz

By Devin McKinney|2013-08-18T00:55:06-07:00August 9, 2013|Fab Files|

DEVIN McKINNEY • I was in the attic earlier, emptying out, so as to nominally organize, boxes containing several years' worth of Beatles clippings, magazines, newsletters, programs, and other collected print effluvia. Some of them date back 35 years or more, and I thought it would be fun to post a few of the more interesting ones. Here's a column from the Village Voice of February 7, 1995. (Click to enlarge.) Live at the BBC is recently out, as is Backbeat; the high performance of one against the non-performance of the other is the text and the tension. Interesting tangents are drawn [...]

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The Beatles and Gettysburg: Forward into the past

By Devin McKinney|2013-08-13T22:37:53-07:00July 31, 2013|Abbey Road|

DEVIN McKINNEY • Our town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, recently hosted festivities and commemorations around the sesquicentennial of the Civil War battle that occurred in the fields all around us. Tourists, there were many; and where tourists gather, chatchkis will be sold. Among them, this arresting item: Lincoln, Pickett, Lee, and Meade crossing a road made famous little more than a century after the battle that brought them together. Figures of the past are called forth to recreate a tableau, utterly independent of themselves, that to us is itself an image from, and of, the past; yet the combination propels both a bit [...]

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About Devin McKinney