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Best Post-Anthology Tracks?
I was just prowling around on the internet — as one does on a Saturday night — and discovered a Lennon demo from December 1968 called “A Case of the Blues.” It’s a neat little scrap of a song. See what you think. Maybe all of you know it already? What are your favorite demos, […]
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Ethical Reflections on John/Paul
I’m writing this because the discussion on the “Were John and Paul Lovers?” post has been niggling at me for a while now. Though it was published more than six years ago, it’s one of Hey Dullblog’s most viewed and most contentious posts. And because Michael Gerber and I read every comment as it goes […]
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What are we doing here, anyway?
They don’t even golf like you or I. I was responding to a comment regarding the podcast Another Kind of Mind, and the application of “emotional intelligence” to The Beatles, and as I wrote the water grew deep enough for me to want this to be its own post. I have long thought—since 1995 or […]
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Swinging Through The Sixties Podcast
The many faces (and bodies) of The Profumo Affair. Since everybody seemed to enjoy last week’s post on Another Kind of Mind, a podcast offering some interesting new angles on Beatles analysis, I wanted to offer up another Beatle-related podcast I’d run across recently: Swinging Through The Sixties. Though the podcast is Beatle-tilted, it also […]
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Another Kind of Mind Podcast
The gentlemen under discussion, some years prior Reader Laura pointed me to an interesting Beatles podcast called “Another Kind of Mind,” and after listening to a bit, I think you guys would love it. AKOM describes itself as “Artists, musicians, & professionals who dissect and challenge Beatles narratives with irreverent, though-provoking analysis.” I think we […]
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Question Time!
Private Gripweed indulges his sweet tooth. I am attempting, with only partial success, to stay off my computer. I find, like so many of us, that frequent exposure to Facebook and Twitter makes my mind feel like the bottom of a birdcage; and on top of that, I was in production for Bystander pretty much […]
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John Lennon, Alma Cogan, and the Delicate Mechanism of Efficient Beatles Operations
This article and this article from the Daily Mail have long intrigued me, less for whether or not it they are definitely true or false than because their truthiness is revealing. They claim that John Lennon had an affair with Alma Cogan, a British singer eight years his senior, and that he apparently believed she […]
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The Problem With Being a Genius
In catching up on recent comments, I ran across a couple that suggested Hey Dullblog judges Paul McCartney more harshly than it does the other Beatles; and one of the persistent conversations here for the last couple years is an anti-Paul bias in the media (I suppose we are part of the media?). Why doesn’t […]
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George Starostin on music today
Longtime readers of Hey Dullblog will recall that I’ve posted about Starostin’s music reviews before. He’s prolific, insightful, and unafraid to swim against the tide — though he’s never a contrarian for controversy’s sake. His reviews of the Beatles catalog are well worth reading. His original site is here, and the site he is currently […]
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Robert Freeman, Photographer of the Beatles
On this busy Sunday (busy for me at least), let us pause for a moment to remember Robert Freeman, the man responsible for many of the most iconic images of the Beatlemania years. Freeman took the photos for With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles for Sale, HELP, and Rubber Soul, plus a proposed […]