Dirk Voetberg
Great-looking, but when it rains, they're SH*T (image links to a neat merch site) From my very funny friend Dirk Voetberg, on Facebook: "With the almost-death of printed media and the ubiquity of Uber, is it any wonder that newspaper taxis are now practically nonexistent?" Go friend him. He will make you laugh.
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 [...]