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Critic Richard Goldstein’s 1967 pan of Sgt. Pepper
The Washington Post has published this intriguing piece about how a 22-year-old critic came to write a negative review of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the New York Times when the album was originally released. Richard Goldstein, the critic in question, has the complete review on his website: you can read it here. Although he […]
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Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: “Monkberry Moon Delight”
Ran across this in the comments at the always-entertaining Dangerousminds.net, and felt moved to share. When Paul asked, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins obliged. My life has been taken over by Bystander, but I hope to post more in the coming months. Carry on.
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The Beatles, Sean Spicer, and the Chicago Women’s March
Saturday was a tale of two crowds: the kerfuffle over the inauguration audience and the turnout for the women’s marches around the country and around the world. Given that the facts / “alternative facts” in question concerned crowd size, it’s fitting that the ever-popular Beatles featured in a couple of the memes generated in the wake of […]
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Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles”
Please welcome back guest Dullblogger J.R. Clark, who sent in these thoughts on the hit song and video “Black Beatles.” If you’re not a fan of contemporary hip-hop music or the Mannequin Challenge, you may be unaware of “Black Beatles,” the recent Billboard Hot 100 number-one single by brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi, the […]
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The Beatles in musical context, 1963-1965
Guest Dullblogger Justin McCann, a freelance writer, musician, and self-described “inveterate lurker” on Hey Dullblog, offers these observations on the Beatles’ musical context in 1963-65. Please give him a warm welcome. As innovative as the Beatles were, their rivals — the Stones, The Who, the Kinks, Bob Dylan et. al. — were often just as […]
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Deconstructing The Beatles, the movie
Against all odds, and perhaps against our better judgment, life seems ever-so-slowly to be returning to normal. This morning I received an email from musicologist Scott Freiman, who lectures regularly on the Fabs, dissecting some of their most interesting albums in front of a live audience. Now Freiman’s lecture on the White Album has been […]
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Election reflections, Beatle-inflected
Like many Americans, I’ve found this week emotionally exhausting. In the aftermath of this election, blogging about the Beatles seems ridiculous, so I offer these reflections with the hope that they may be helpful. However angry we may be, may we return no one evil for evil. May these times make us stronger and more […]
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What John Lennon Thinks of Donald Trump
In the last few days, two people close to me have said they’ve found John’s “Gimme Some Truth” to be a tonic right now, even a cathartic. But this is the Lennon song that came to my mind, a day or two after the worst cataclysm to befall America since 9/11, and I’ve been listening […]
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McCartney Opens Sacramento Stadium with a Bang
Paul McCartney opened Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center on October 4 the same way he closed down Candlestick Park two years ago – with a nonstop volley of songs. The opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” sounded, and tens of thousands of fans started screaming. The overall mood, though decidedly more decorous than the heyday of […]
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American Bystander #3 is available
I try to keep my non-Beatles activities separate from this blog, for obvious reasons. And being from the Midwest, I have a positive horror of self-promotion. (This has been exactly as helpful to my career as you might expect.) But several readers have asked me to tell everybody about my dayjob, on the chance that […]