Faul McCartney expert wanted
"We Demand Justice" This morning, I received the following email: Hello, I'm Tatiana. I'm doing a project.. my class got to pick from 41 different topics and I chose one about "Faul McCartney." I was wondering if you had any information/ clues about this topic? If so could you email me back ASAP? Thank you very much! Who says doing [...]
Lester Bangs on the Beatles
"Uncool" is just another type of cool, Lester. Oliver Hall over at the amazing website Dangerous Minds surfaced this contentious clip by ur-rock nerd Lester Bangs dismissing Beatles nostalgia as "sick" and "a rip-off," a mind-killing corporate shill whose ultimate victims were "the consumer" and (gulp) "John Lennon." This explosion of insight comes from a TV series called "FM-TV," which [...]
Get Back: The Beatles’ Let it Be Disaster
Get Back: The Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster (Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt, 1994) In January, 1969, The Beatles began a project that ostensibly marked their return to concert performances, something they hadn’t done in over three years. The project was the brainchild of Paul McCartney, who hoped that performing before a live audience would restore the group’s fading morale and creative [...]
Paul and Hunter Davies, 1981
Hunter Davies in 1980 In the Allen Klein thread, @Ruth mentioned an interview Beatle biographer Hunter Davies conducted in 1981 with Paul McCartney, in which Paul expressed some more caustic feelings about John, rather than his usual "butter-doesn't-melt-in-my-mouth" persona. Though things apparently improved between Paul and Hunter Davies, McCartney was apparently pretty angry that the author chose to publish it [...]
Allen Klein Playboy Interview, 1971
"Scuse us, folks. It's the 70s." Ladies and gents, I have a treat. It seems the proprietor/tress of the wonderful Beatles tumblr Amoralto was reading our comment thread, and shot me a link to the entire scan of the Allen Klein Playboy interview. This link will take you to a site where you can download it. (A natural word of [...]
Allen Klein
Commenter @ChelseaQW sent in this interesting tidbit this morning, which I just had to share. It's from Allen Klein's November 1971 interview in Playboy magazine: VETTER: You make it sound as if they [John and Paul] were never really close. KLEIN: I can only tell you what John said when I asked him who he would call among the Beatles if he [...]
“These Paper Bullets!”: The Fabs Meet the Bard
For everyone who's wondered what might have happened if Shakespeare had met the Beatles, These Paper Bullets! delivers "a modish rip-off of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing with a serious backbeat." I saw one of the last scheduled performances of the play, by New York's Atlantic Theater Company, and it was a delight. Despite a few wobbly bits, it stands on its own as [...]
The Beatles and Class open thread
Saturday Evening Post, August 15, 1964. Beatles as City gents; two British stereotypes for the price of one! Over the past several months there's been a topic in the wind here on Dullblog — no, not just Beatle-boinking -- but the impact of class on the Beatles story. We've talked about it might've shaped their relationships with each other (particularly [...]
Bowie and The Beatles
Love you, too, Dave. Impossible, folks, to let a full Earth's rotation pass without a post on the late, great David Bowie. Bowie has always seemed to me to be a performer whose rise to fame would've been impossible without the Beatles coming first, preparing the way. The seven years of Fabdom were essential in priming the audience for what [...]