David Bailey documentary: Four Beats to the Bar, and No Cheating
MIKE GERBER • In the process of relinking and refurbishing this site, I was reminded of a David Bailey documentary that I watched late last year. I think you might enjoy it — it's called "Four Beats to the Bar, and No Cheating." Well worth your time. http://youtu.be/zDjLXi-BPCA Will I ever get enough of the BBC? Probably not. And I know I [...]
Smile vs. Sgt. Pepper
The Boys away from the beach, 1967 NANCY CARR • I love the Beach Boys (not the way I love the Beatles, but still), so why can’t I wholeheartedly love Smile? I ask this question sincerely. I think Brian Wilson is a songwriter, singer, and bassist worthy of great praise. I understand why Paul McCartney was so blown away [...]
The Fab Files, Pt. 1: Beatles “not a seller,” says movie exec probably no longer in biz
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 [...]
John Lennon on Allen Klein, 1973
Courtesy of commenter @Karen (anybody know how I can link to her commenter profile?), here's a very interesting little snippet (possibly from LWT's "Weekend World," 06 April 1973), where John Lennon says a few words on Allen Klein, his soon-to-be ex-manager. As stated many times, John wasn't always so quick to admit when he'd made an error in judgment; he'd enter into [...]
Just how blind was John Lennon without his glasses?
Lennon peers down uncertainly at a 45. So we've all heard how John Lennon without his glasses moved around in the land of Monet—how his famous tough-looking stage persona was actually him peering nearsightedly into the crowd, hoping he'd see the incoming bottle or fist just in time to avoid it—but this photograph made me smile. Beatle John blinks down [...]
Harry Nilsson: The Shadow Beatle
Harry Nilsson in the studio, right around the time John and Paul made him famous. Can I just assume that everybody reading this knows Harry Nilsson? If not, scroll down to the bottom of this post, and listen—I'll wait until you get back. (You can also go to the great Nilsson site "For The Love of Harry," but it's recently [...]
Mike’s Dream Bootleg: Beatles Complete Anthology Recording Sessions Box Set
A beautiful sight for Beatles fans. One of my dreams for this site has been setting up a page for each UK album, then collecting all the available session recordings on YouTube, plus outtakes and remixes, and putting it in that one place. Organized chronologically, so that scholars could reconstruct the process by which the songs came to be—all the [...]
A Beatles Tarot
Paul McCartney's Tarot card, The Fool. While looking for neat images with which to illustrate this post on The Beatles' in-house astrologer, I stumbled upon an interesting article on The Beatles and Tarot. As a sample, here's a portion of the entry on Paul's card, "The Fool": Interpretation: Paul needed the Beatles more than the others did. He thrived in [...]
The Beatles and Gettysburg: Forward into the past
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 [...]