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Sunday marked 55 years since the fab four made a whole lot of Winnipeggers twist and shout without singing or strumming a single note during their little visit to the city. George Harrison waves, upper left, as he and Ringo Starr, right, John Lennon, lower left, and Paul McCartney, not pictured, descend the steps of their plane after landing at the Winnipeg airport on Aug. 18, 1964. (CBC)
The Beatles landed at the Winnipeg airport on Aug. 18, 1964. Their brief stopover on the tarmac was punctuated by screams and cries from the droves of young fans who flocked to the airport to greet them.
"It's the first place that they ever set foot in Canada," said music historian John Einarson. "They didn't come and play, they didn't come and perform, but they came for the fans ... and fuel."
Source: cbc.ca
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When The Beatles received their MBE awards from Queen Elizabeth in 1965, they still hadn’t hit their creative or commercial peak. That would come a few years later with Sgt. Pepper’s, The White Album, and Abbey Road.
But they’d already started their march up the ladder of British society, as far as royal honors are concerned. At the time, John Lennon wasn’t all that impressed with his MBE, and a few years later he returned his to Buckingham Palace with a cheeky note addressed to the queen.
As for the other Beatles, they seemed to have more respect for the honor — especially drummer Ringo Starr. “I was never giving mine back,” he said later. “It meant a lot.”
The same went for Paul McCartney, always the less disruptive half of the Lennon-McCartney alliance. That attitude likely served Paul well when his name came up for knighthood in the 1990s. For a while, it appeared he’d be the only Beatle who’d ever be addressed as “sir.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
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It was an acid trip with Peter Fonda, who has died at the age of 79, that inspired John Lennon to write one of The Beatles’ classic album tracks.
In 1965, the actor – who would go on to co-write and star in counterculture classic Easy Rider four years later – was enjoying a night out with the Fab Four when George Harrison, high on LSD, feared he would die.
Fonda, who survived a near-fatal shooting accident as a child, told The Post in 2000: “I was saying, ‘Don’t worry George, it’s OK. I know what it’s like to be dead. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
These words of encouragement, though, confused Lennon. Fonda recalled: “Lennon looks over and says, ‘You know what it’s like to be dead? Who put all that s*** in your head? You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born.'"
Source: Jacob Stolworthy/independent.co.uk
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After recording the groundbreaking Revolver (1966) album, The Beatles realized they’d given everything to the music but still didn’t have a name for the record. So they nearly used a goofy titles like Fat Man and Bobby or After Geography (Ringo’s idea, as a send-up of the Stones’ Aftermath).
Later, the Fab Four continued its run of uninspired album titles. The 1968 double record known as The White Album actually went out as a self-titled release (The Beatles). For their final album, they simply used the name of the street where their studio was located (Abbey Road).
In brief, The Beatles were much better at writing music and titling songs than they were as naming albums. If they weren’t using a pun like Rubber Soul or Revolver, they were barely giving the record a title at all.
Source: cheatsheet.com
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It was 50 years ago tomorrow, Sergeant Pepper told the band to stop playing. And with the final C-major from their last song, prophetically titled The End, still ringing in the air, the four greatest popular musicians Britain has ever produced packed up their instruments and walked away. They’d been together since John Lennon was 17 and Paul McCartney 15 – 12 long years of furious creativity, forged in the dank cellar of The Cavern and the grubby dives of Hamburg, and ending up on top of the world. In that time they’d recorded a staggering 213 songs. But for The Beatles, August 18, 1969, was the day the music died.
To the outside world there was no warning, no hint of the earthquake to come. The sun-splashed month had started with a photoshoot resulting in the most iconic picture in the history of pop music.
It ended in an uneasy truce between the four warring members, each desperately looking for a way out of their magic circle.
Source: Christopher Wilson/express.co.uk
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Attention Beatles fans: we’ve found a loophole to Paul McCartney‘s pricey concert tickets. The music icon will be celebrating his new children’s book, Hey Grandude! with a book signing at Waterstones bookstore in London – and the tickets are surprisingly cheap.
Alternative Nation reports that the tickets are on sale for £14, which equals about 17 U.S. dollars. Considering that fact that McCartney’s concerts typically sell for a few hundred bucks, this is quite the bargain. Customers will not only have the chance to meet McCartney, but can bring up to two children or grandchildren and walk way with a signed copy of Hey Grandude! Guests will also have the chance to meet the book’s illustrator, Kathryn Durst. There’s a strict no-access policy for non ticket holders so guests should make sure they’ve secured a ticket before arriving. The announcement also states that all bags, cameras and mobile phone devices must be placed in a bag drop prior to entering, so it’s not known if guests will be able to get photos with the Beatles icon.
Source: Catherine Santino/fatherly.com
It took a half-century, but Ringo’s rockin’ a rooftop again — and he’s doing it in New York.
Fifty years after he and his fellow Beatles played atop London’s Apple Corps headquarters, Ringo Starr will be performing a rooftop concert with his All-Starr Band Sunday at Manhattan’s Pier 17 to wrap up a three-day weekend of Empire State shows.
The drummer-singer, 79, is still getting by with a little help from his friends — and loving New York, where the Beatles introduced themselves to America in 1964 when they touched down at JFK airport.
“No one will understand the emotion of us landing in America,” Starr told the Daily News. “But it was New York, and all of the music we loved came from there. It was just far out.
Source: Peter Sblendorio/nydailynews.com
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The Mersey Beatles, a Liverpool-born Beatles tribute band and the house band for over a decade at the world-famous Cavern Club, will perform Oct. 11 at Benton Civic Center.
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of "Abbey Road," the band will play the entire album live followed by a set of greatest hits.
Julia Baird, John Lennon's sister and the director of the Cavern Club, will be in attendance selling and signing copies of her book "Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother John Lennon" at the general merchandise table before, during and after the show.
"The Mersey Beatles have been playing the Cavern Club for over 15 years and are one of the best you will see," Baird said.
The Mersey Beatles are no ordinary tribute band. They are the official Beatles tribute band representing the city of Liverpool, and from 2002 to 2012 they were the resident tribute band at The Cavern Club, the nightclub in Liverpool, England, where The Beatles perfected their act before launching a global rock music revolution in the 1960s.
Source: Benton News/carbondaletimes.com
A book described as an “extraordinary visual memoir” is coming from perhaps the most famous muse of all time, Pattie Boyd. The model, photographer and author is, of course, the former wife of both George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Pattie Boyd: My Life Through a Lens, is being published April 7, 2020, via Simon and Schuster’s Insight Editions imprint.
It’s available for pre-order below.
Born in England on March 17, 1944, Boyd pursued a successful modeling career before meeting the Beatles’ George Harrison on the set of the 1964 film, A Hard Day’s Night. The two married when she was just 21, on January 21, 1966, and Boyd became a source of inspiration for Harrison’s songwriting, sparking his interest in meditation and Eastern philosophy.
Source: Best Classic Bands Staff
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By the end of the Beatles’ great run as recording artists, George Harrison was writing and performing on the level of bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney. But it definitely didn’t start out that way.
In fact, John and Paul considered George something of a lesser Beatle in the early 1960s. Part of it was his age (George was the youngest band member), but it also had to do with the quality of his original tunes. Later, John spoke of an “embarrassing period when George’s songs weren’t that good.”
Though John was likely referring to the time around 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night (on which George had zero songs), another rough patch for him popped up during the recording of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As many fans know, George only has “Within Without You” on that album.
George did introduce another song earlier in the Sgt. Pepper sessions, but it didn’t make the cut. In the studio, it was greeted with apathy from John and a lot of negative feedback from producer George Martin and his team.
Source: cheatsheet.com
The Fab Four were just a group of music-loving teens from Liverpool before becoming cultural and musical icons.
Before John, Paul, George and Ringo became The Beatles, they were simply four teenagers from Liverpool. Never could John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr have imagined they would go on to form one of the most successful groups in modern history, influencing the popular culture in not only music, but also fashion, film, and global representation.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was difficult to imagine a band hailing from the relatively poor northwest port city of Liverpool, England, could get a gig in the thriving London music scene of the south, let alone export their eventual homegrown success to a world eagerly opening up to the counter-culture movement of the 60s and the burgeoning phenomenon that was called rock 'n' roll.
Source: biography.com
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While there are more brilliant Paul McCartney tracks than you can count, a few songs stand out a half-century after he recorded them with The Beatles. At or near the top of the list is “Hey Jude,” the 1968 smash that continues to inspire singalongs wherever it plays.
That track, which Paul wrote for John Lennon’s son Julian, became the first release on the band’s Apple record label. But by then, Paul had already penned a number of eternal classics. The list includes “Yesterday,” which became one of the most-played songs in radio history.
Then there is “Penny Lane,” a song which couldn’t have come from any other band or been written by anyone other than Paul. The 1967 single, released with John’s stunning “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the B side, ranks as one of the finest recordings of the band’s career.
Source: cheatsheet.com
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The Beatles Abbey Road gets the expected 50th anniversary treatment on September 27th UMe announced today, which coincidentally is the 50th anniversary of the famous walk across the street photo shoot that became the iconic album cover.
There will be new stereo, 5.1 Surround and Dolby Atmos mixes presented on multiple formats including a "Super Deluxe" 4-disc box set, 3LP box set and 1LP picture disc. 17 tracks have been newly mixed by producer Giles Martin and mix engineer Sam Okell, accompanied by 23 session recordings and demos, most of them previously unreleased. These are presented on the Super Deluxe and Deluxe vinyl box sets in chronological order of their first recording dates. The three-track ‘Something’ EP, featuring the 2019 Stereo Mix, the Studio Demo and Take 39 – Instrumental – Strings Only, can be streamed here now.
Source: Michael Fremer/analogplanet.com
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When it comes to the Beatles’ landmark Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, most people think of 1967. After all, the album hit record stores in June of that year, and you could hear the sounds of “A Day in the Life” coming through open windows all summer long.
But work on the record began much earlier. Following the Beatles’ final tour in the summer of ’66, the band took a much-needed break and met up in the studio with plans to try something completely different.
For starters, it meant creating music they could only play in a studio (as opposed to a stage). And they’d spend as much time as it took to get it right. If that meant going for two weeks on a single song, that didn’t faze them.
However, Beatles manager Brian Epstein wanted to keep the cash flowing as it had in previous years. When John Lennon and Paul McCartney produced masterpieces early in the Sgt. Pepper sessions, saving them for the album seemed pointless. So Epstein sent them out together as an epic single.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Linda McCartney left this world more than 20 years ago, and yet for many she’s—at best—a harmless rock ‘n’ roll footnote. At worst, she’s the hated woman who had the damnable gumption to marry Beatle Paul. In the annals of Beatles history, only Yoko Ono has suffered a more dismal fate.
As the recent rerelease of Linda’s posthumous solo album "Wide Prairie" powerfully reminds us, her legacy was none of those things. Anyone who’s familiar with her backstory knows that she was so much more: a gifted photographer with an eye for finding the everyday nuance in her subjects; a devoted wife and mother — she and Paul were married for 29 years — an eternity in the entertainment business and a goodly number, quite frankly, for any couple; and a musician and singer who struggled to hone her craft in spite of the avalanche of critics she faced whenever she had the gall to perform with her husband, which amounted to several hundred times.
Source: Kenneth Womack/salon.com
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“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is one of The Beatles most famous songs and arguably one of George Harrison’s masterpieces, amongst a host of increidble songs. It was recorded in 1968 as part of the White Album sessions. The song was written as an exercise in randomness where he consulted the Chinese I Ching or the Classic of Changes book.
Whilst the sessions went ahead for the White Album, Harrison, McCartney, Lennon and Ringo’s relationship was beginning to really swell. Arguments were rife and Harrison felt his song was getting overshadowed from the main songwriting of Lennon & McCartney, he looked elsewhere for inspiration after struggling with inspiration for his guitar parts for over a month.
Harrison, instead of turning to his bandmates, asked close friend Eric Clapton for help. On the 6th September Clapton turned up at Abbey Road Studio to do just that. In a 1987 interview with Guitar Player magazine, Harrison was asked whether it had bruised his ego to ask Clapton to play on the song.
Source: Nathan Ellis/faroutmagazine.co.uk
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Over the years, George Harrison built up quite a following as “the quiet Beatle.” Fans loved his style as the Beatles’ lead guitar player and his occasional songwriting effort, starting with “Don’t Bother Me,” which he penned in 1963.
That track appeared on the second album by the Fab Four. By the mid-’60s, George’s skills as a songwriter had grown to the point that one of his tunes (“Taxman”) led off the classic Revolver album (1966). Beatles producer George Martin had definitely begun to believe in him by then.
Though George still struggled with technical aspects of his guitar playing, there was no questioning the maturity of his songwriting by ’66. Meanwhile, his explorations of Indian music and meditation expanded the band’s musical palette and made the Beatles stronger for it.
While Revolver was a great showing for George, his song-count fell off a cliff with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. On that landmark album, George only had one track. But he roared back the following year, posting his highest song total on any Beatles album.
Source: cheatsheet.com
And they say legends don't do signings
Paul McCartney is going to be signing copies of his new picture book Hey Grandude! in London, it has been revealed.
Read more: The wisdom of Macca: what Paul McCartney told students at the college he founded
The Beatle will take part in a rare signing at the Piccadilly branch of London’s Waterstones alongside illustrator Kathryn Durst to celebrate his new children’s book on September 6.
During the special appearance, McCartney will read the story of ‘Grandude’ – “a super-cool Grandad who takes his grandchildren on a whirlwind magical mystery tour, from tropical seas to Alpine mountains, all before bedtime!”
The news was shared from McCartney’s official Twitter account today (August 8), on the same day as the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ iconic ‘Abbey Road’ photoshoot.
Source: Will Lavin/nme.com
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‘Something’ was the one and only time The Beatles ever allocated George an A-Side. When I spoke to George in 1994 he told me that as a songwriter it frustrated him that be was given a lower priority than Paul and George. “It wasn’t so much the “A” side of a single but it was frustrating at times when we had to wade through millions of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’s” before we could get to one of mine. You know because I think now that when you look retrospectively that there were a couple of my tunes that were good enough, or better, than one’s that Paul or John had written occasionally. But you know, that’s just how it was. It doesn’t bother me really. I was just on hold for a while”.
George also confirmed that ‘Something’ was not written about his then wife Patti. He was thinking of Ray Charles when he wrote it. “I just wrote it and then somebody put together a video and what they did, was they went out and got some footage of me and Patti, Paul and Linda, Ringo and Maureen, it was at that time, and John and Yoko and they just made up a little video to go with it, so then everybody presumed I wrote it about Patti, but act details
On the morning of Friday August 8th, 50 years ago, The Beatles were photographed walking across a pedestrian crossing in London.
The image of George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and John Lennon striding across the road outside EMI studios in St John's Wood became the cover shot of their Abbey Road album and probably the most iconic photo of the Fab Four.
It was taken by the late Scottish photographer Iain Macmillan who stood on a ladder in the middle of the street while a policeman blocked the traffic. The whole thing was done in roughly 10 minutes.
Glasgow-based author Ken McNab, author of And in the End: The Last Days of the Beatles, told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme that relations between the band members were strained at the time and it was just weeks before they split up entirely.
He said: "They were professionally and personally exhausted".
Mr McNab said Macmillan, who died in 2006, was very modest about the picture.
Source: Douglas Frase/bbc.com
Photographer Iain Macmillan fired off just six snaps of John, Paul, George and Ringo — The Beatles — striding single-file across a zebra crossing while a police officer stopped traffic on Abbey Road.
Key points:
- The image was taken at 11:35am on August 8, 1969
- It became the cover image of Abbey Road, The Beatles' 11th studio album
- Less than a year after the album was released on September 26, 1969, the band had split up
Fifty years on from that moment on August 8, 1969, it is estimated the suburban crossing in London, England, is photographed at least six times every hour, as thousands of fans seek to imitate what became one of the most enduring images in pop culture.
That count surged yesterday as fans gathered, some travelling from across the globe, to celebrate the milestone anniversary.
Source: abc.net.au
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The Beatles detailed expanded 50th anniversary editions of their classic 1969 album, Abbey Road. The new editions will be available on September 27 and feature a remixed version of the LP along with previously unreleased outtakes and demos from the recording sessions.
Each of the new Abbey Road 50th anniversary editions come with the updated album remixed from the original eight-track session tapes. The Super Deluxe Edition comes with 23 outtake and demo tracks, including “The Long One” rehearsal of the Abbey Road side two medley, and a Blu-ray disc containing a Dolby Atmos mix of the record, a 5.1 surround mix of the album and a hi-res stereo mix of the album. Also included is a 100-page hardback book containing never-before-seen photos, track-by-track analysis and session notes, a foreword by Paul McCartney and more.
Source: Andy Kahn/jambase.com
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The Beatles' upcoming expanded box set of 1969's Abbey Road promises another treasure trove of previously unheard music. But with no track listing available yet, eager fans are left to guess about just what will be included on the reissue.
Will we finally get an officially released version of the medley in its intended order? George Harrison's lost guitar solo on "Here Comes the Sun"? The extended version of "Carry That Weight"? "Her Majesty" with John Lennon on slide?
Until the official news arrives, it's all conjecture. But here's a deeper look at some of the most intriguing leftovers from the sessions that produced Abbey Road.
First, note that many of these songs began their lives well before the album's main recording dates in the summer of 1969. The Beatles' initial run-throughs of "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam" actually date back to the White Album demo sessions on May 29, 1968, at George Harrison's Kinfauns estate in Esher.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
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Why did The Beatles cross the road 50 years ago? Abbey Road, to be exact?
It wasn’t to create an iconic image, though they did. Nor did they intend to spark conspiracy theories that Paul McCartney was dead. (He’s barefoot and out-of-step with his bandmates on the “Abbey Road” album cover. What else could that mean?)
The reality is much more practical. On Aug. 8, 1969, The Beatles simply needed a cover photo for their next album.
But the significance, though unknown at the time, would be much greater. “Abbey Road” was the band’s final album together. And the last time all four band members worked together was Aug. 20, 1969. They broke up the following year.
Source: Steve Hartsoe/today.duke.edu
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In the 60s, the Beatles wowed thousands of people all across the planet with their music. Four trendy men made themselves living legends and their songs became well-known by all generations…
The Beatles, the group that shook up the crowd. A group of four guys, adored by their thousands of fans all around the world. A group that rocked us for a decade before they split up. Ten years together that bonded them for life. Unfortunately, the friendship between these four men was shattered when John Lennon was killed by a deranged fan on 8th December 1980. 20 years later, George Harrison passed away as a result of lung cancer on 29th November 2001.
Source: Anna Wilkins/gentside.co.uk
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