You never knew where a John Lennon lyric might take you. Even in the early, simple days of The Beatles, John could threaten a lover that he’d “let you down and leave you flat” for disappointing him.
Within a few years, John would take listeners upstream on psychedelic journeys (“Tomorrow Never Knows”) or paint “like a watercolor” (“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite“). By the mid-’60s, John had become a master of lyric-writing.
With “I Am the Walrus” (1967) and his White Album (1968) tracks, he stretched the bounds of Beatles lyrics further. In ’69, while recording music for Let It Be and Abbey Road, John took a turn back toward raw, simple lyrics.
After “Don’t Let Me Down” (the B-side to “Get Back”), John went even simpler and rawer with “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” In fact, you’ll only find a total of 15 different words when you check the lyrics.
Source: cheatsheet.com
detailsThe end of The Beatles came in 1970 when Paul McCartney announced he was leaving the group, but 50 years later the music of The Beatles lives on and will be performed by The Return, an American Beatles tribute band. The show will be 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Egyptian Theatre, 135 N. Second St.
Founded in 1995, The Return is a tribute to the Fab Four and stars Georgia natives Richard Stelling, Shane Landers, Michael Fulop and Adam Thurston as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, respectively. For the first half of the two-hour performance, the band will be dressed in 1964 “A Hard Day’s Night” themed costumes and will perform early hits from the touring years of 1963 to 1966, Fulop said.
This will include hits like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “A Hard Day’s Night,” as well as songs that influenced The Beatles such as “Twist and Shout” by The Top Notes and “Roll Over Beethoven” by Chuck Berry, according to The Return website.
Source: Parker Otto/northernstar.info
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of “Let It Be” and the official end of The Beatles when Paul McCartney publicly announced he was leaving the band in April of 1970. All throughout the 2010s, Beatle fans saw deluxe remasters of their favorite albums, from 2017’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” to “Abbey Road” in 2019. Not only was every song remastered, but demos, outtakes and alternate versions of the classic Beatles’ tunes were also included.
These remastered albums prove The Beatles’s music today is as relevant as it was from 1962-1969. In the 1960s, the group’s songs were about peace and love, while the civil rights movement, war and a generation gap were the new norm in the United States and in the world. Today’s world is still plagued with issues, including tensions between the U.S. and Iran, climate related crises around the world and terrorist attacks.
Source: Stephen C. Leverton II/theappalachianonline.com
detailsWhile John Lennon was never did a lot of bragging about his Beatles-era guitar playing, he did take pride in his innovations in the studio. That included the backwards vocals on “Rain” as well as the work with tape loops he did on “Revolution 9.”
But an even bigger point of pride for John revolved around his use of feedback. During the October 1964 sessions for Beatles for Sale, John pushed to get the sound of his guitar/amplifier feedback on record. Producer George Martin agreed, and John considered it a major accomplishment.
“The record with the first feedback anywhere,” John said in his 1980 Playboy interviews. “I defy anybody to find a record – unless it’s some old blues record in 1922 – that uses feedback that way.”
Though not everyone agrees it was the first, the song in question became the Beatles’ eighth single and was released in November ’64. And it became a No. 1 hit in both the U.S. and UK.
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detailsFreddie Mercury’s Queen is one of the great rock bands, but its musical style could swing from light pop to heavy metal. Now Brian May has spilt the beans on the band’s biggest influences, including The Beatles. Speaking with Guitar World last year, May said: “By that time I’d been exposed to Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and that was life-changing.”
The 72-year-old continued: “To us, Hendrix was the great god.
“I still can’t understand where that stuff came from. It’s like he came from another planet.
“I mentioned harmonies — I came from Buddy Holly and the Crickets, the Everly Brothers, the Beatles.
“The Beatles built our bible as far as musical composition, arrangement and production went.”
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
detailsJohn Lennon’s son Julian has revealed he recently had a cancer scare that saw him rushed to hospital and in need of an emergency operation.
The musician, 56, had to have a mole removed from his head, after being told the growth, that he’d had for all his life, had turned cancerous according to the results from a biopsy.
Within 48 hours, the mole was removed following emergency surgery and while the operation was a success, Julian revealed in a candid Facebook post that he is now waiting to receive more results back from further testing.
He admitted that the whole experience left him ‘shaking inside’, as the scare appeared to come from nowhere.
Julian wrote: ‘The trouble is… you think you have time. A few days ago, I went to visit my dermatologist here in LA when she noticed a little bump on my head that was actually a mole that had been there, along with a birthmark, for the last 57 years.’
Source: Katie Storey/metro.co.uk
detailsGeorge Martin, who died in March of 2016, was, of course, the producer of The Beatles. He was not only the man guiding the creation of their records, but also the one responsible for getting them signed to the label at which he was employed, EMI – the UK company of which Capitol is an American wing.
But all labels, both in the UK and the US, initially rejected them, based on the erroneous assumption that solo artists, not bands, were all the record-buying public wanted.
George Martin, a classically-trained musician who was beloved by The Beatles, and others, for his comedy recordings with The Goon Show starring Peter Sellers, usually saw things in accord with the company. Yet he heard something singular in the music of this band.
Source: Paul Zollo/americansongwriter.com
detailsJohn Lennon’s iconic, psychedelic 1965 Rolls-Royce Phantom V is on display in the main lobby of the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria through mid-March.
The Beatle ordered the car through R.S. Mead Ltd. in Maidenhead in December 1964, without having a driver’s licence. He got his L before the vehicle arrived in June 1965. The custom-made car, with all the bells and whistles of the day, was probably purchased through NEMS Enterprises, the joint management company that their manager Brian Epstein and The Beatles formed to run their business affairs. The same year, NEMS also purchased a Bentley S3 for Epstein and a Beatles “company car,” a 1965 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III LWB Limousine known as CEL89.
Source: John Goodman/nsnews.com
detailsWhen John Lennon wanted to pursue an outlandish vocal sound for the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows,” it presented young engineer Geoff Emerick with the chance to show off what he could do.
The sessions for the group's 1966 album Revolver were Emerick's first interactions with the Beatles. The band decided to give up trying to record music it could perform live and instead explore the full potential of the studio environment, as the late Emerick once told Uncle Joe Benson on the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show.
“We started doing ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,'and John wants this magical Dali Lama vocal sound,” he said. “And there’s the revolving speaker, the Leslie speaker from the Hammond organ. So, ‘Wow, let’s put John’s voice through that!’”
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
detailsThe moment when Phil Collins thought he’d been fired by ex-Beatle George Harrison…
When the Beatles had split following their final album, Let It Be, and each member started to pursue solo ventures, George Harrison started work on his album All Things Must Pass – and Phil Collins was drafted in to help.
At the time Collins was in Flaming Youth – a British rock band from the ‘60s – when their manager got a call from Ringo Starr’s chauffeur who was looking for a percussionist, and Collins was put forward for the job.
“So I went down to Abbey Road and Harrison was there and Ringo and Billy Preston and Klaus Voormann and Phil Spector, and we started routining the song,” Collins recalled in an interview with Classic Rock.
Source: Sian Hamer/smoothradio.com
detailsIf you favored bands with a number of lead guitar gamers, The Beatles actually match the invoice within the 1960s. On data as early as A Hard Day’s Night (’64), you possibly can hear John Lennon taking the solo on “You Can’t Do That.”
The following yr, followers of the Fab Four heard Paul McCartney out in entrance along with his piercing work on “Drive My Car.” During the recording of Revolver (1966), Paul once more jumped in to play a imply solo on “Taxman,” a track George Harrison had written for the event.
Though George argued in any other case, these current for Beatles recording periods recalled the band’s lead guitarist being sad about getting solos taken from him. (“I’ll Follow the Sun” was one instance.”)
Source: Jeremy Spirogis/sahiwal.tv
detailsThe first footage from Peter Jackson’s forthcoming The Beatles documentary has been shown to journalists at a Universal Music showcase in America, and it could change the way we view the Fab Four forever.
The Lord of the Rings director has been working on the film for a year now, remastering hours of unused footage from Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary film Let It Be, with a process similar to his work on 2018’s WWI doc They Shall Not Grow Old.
Jackson has editing the previously unreleased footage into a new film that promises to bust the myth that the sessions were fraught with tension between band members John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
Variety reports that the first clip showed the band in recording sessions for their penultimate album: “joking around, making fun of each other, singing in silly accents and generally indulging in vintage Moptop hijinks.”
Source: Tom Butler/yahoo.com
detailsIf you have been in search of a political assertion from The Beatles, you didn’t hear something within the band’s early years all over 1967. After coming back from their ’68 journey to India, John Lennon deliberate to vary that.
The first time the Fab Four obtained collectively within the studio, the band ran via John’s new track, which he’d referred to as “Revolution.” After Beatles followers had digested “Hello, Goodbye” and “Lady Madonna,” the track John proposed as the subsequent single was going to be completely different.
“I wanted to put out what I felt about revolution,” he informed Rolling Stone in 1971. “I thought it was time we f–king spoke about it, the same as I thought it was about time we stopped not answering about the Vietnam war.”
Source: Jeremy Spirogis/sahiwal.tv
detailsBy 1968, The Beatles featured three premiere songwriters vying for space on the band’s records. If you didn’t deliver your best work, there was a good chance your song would get bumped. That happened to George Harrison on Sgt. Pepper a year earlier; then it happened again on The White Album.
Indeed, even on a double album, The Beatles didn’t have room for George’s “Sour Milk Sea” or “Not Guilty.” So it’s safe to say there was some stiff competition at this point in the band’s run. That’s going to happen with Paul McCartney and John Lennon writing songs for the same records.
But the competition didn’t end with songwriting. Since these three Beatles all played guitar, bass, and keyboard, you also had jockeying for who might play what on a particular track. Hence Paul taking a guitar solo on “Taxman” and John doing the same on “Get Back.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
detailsWhen Paul McCartney looks back at his days in The Beatles, he’ll note the friendly rivalry he and John Lennon had when it came to songwriting. In Paul’s mind, the “amazing competition” he and John had pushed the two to produce their best work in the peak Fab Four years.
“It was a great way for us to keep each other on our toes,” Paul told Uncut in 2004. “I’d write ‘Yesterday’ and John would go away and write ‘Norwegian Wood.’ If he wrote ‘Strawberry Fields’, it was like he’d upped the ante, so I had to come up with something as good as ‘Penny Lane.’”
It didn’t start out that way. Before Paul and John began writing on their own, they often worked together “face to face” and “eyeball to eyeball.” That’s how we got early hits like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You.”
Most Beatles writers see the competition really kicking off in 1964, around the time the pair composed songs for A Hard Day’s Night. After Paul won the A-side of a single with “Can’t Buy Me Love,” John went on a tear that made him the driving fo details