Plea to Paul: Let it be when it comes to claiming credit
Last Thursday Rolling Stone online published an interview with Paul McCartney about his current tour. It sounds like a stellar show—I’m sorry I haven’t been able to see it this year—but I groaned when I got to the part of the interview in which McCartney says, of adding “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” to the setlist, that he was “happy to kind of reclaim [...]
Experiment: Two Words
George Harrison, 1968 GEORGE HARRISON: I wrote "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at my mother's house in Warrington. I was thinking about the Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes...the Eastern concept is that whatever happens is all meant to be, and that there's no such thing as coincidence—every little item that's going down has a purpose. "While My Guitar [...]
Psychedelia in the UK: "A Technicolor Dream"
Inside the "Ally Pally," for The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, 1967 Any of you that have been interested by my burblings on "psychedelia"—by which I mean the whole gestation, birth and decay of the flower-power movement—will be interested in a video I streamed from Netflix last night: "A Technicolor Dream." It documents the UK scene: the Albert Hall poetry reading in [...]
Book Review: “Beatles vs. Stones”
Beatles vs. Stones by John McMillian 288 pp. Simon & Schuster, 2013 Reviewed by Devin McKinney A character in Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude claims that every small-group dynamic found in fiction or in life is comprehensible via the Beatles model of organizational relationships: “The Beatles thing is an archetype, it’s like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into [...]
POV
From Dullblogger Hua: "She's Leaving Home" from the perspective of a girl leaving home. (Anyone know anything about Kathy McCord?) http://youtu.be/ETiDNME4tMA
Some vinyl to complete your collection
It's amazing how many men used to wear horn-rimmed glasses, isn't it? For those of you with a little extra scratch, two Beatles vinyl rarities are up for sale: number A0000001 of The White Album, and a copy of Sgt Pepper with various Capitol execs dotting the crowd in the background. The White Album, which was purchased in 1989 for $1000 (seems [...]
Full of turtle thoughts
As mentioned before, my introduction to a new edition of Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary compares it to "Eleanor Rigby." A version of the essay can now be read at Slate.
These happy days are yours and—?!
DEVIN McKINNEY • This comes by way of Tom Sutpen's If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, which I've more than once called "the best blogsite there's ever been, ever." It appears under the heading "When Legends Gather." (For the irredeemably trivia-minded, I'm pretty sure that's Jerry Paris with half of his face cut off [...]