Cool Websites

Posts By solobeatles

Still The Greatest Nominated for the ARSC’s Best Research in Recorded Rock Music Award

September 1, 2013 · by solobeatles

Founded in 1966, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC). is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of sound recordings in all genres. Every year the ARSC gives out Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research.

This year Still the Greatest was nominated for Best Research in Recorded Rock Music. The winner is a great author whom I was fortunate enough to meet at the Fest For Beatles Fans last year — Robert Rodriguez for his book Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock ‘n ‘ Roll (Backbeat Books).

Also at the Fest last year was another ARSC nominee, Ken Scott, who wrote Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust: Off-the-record with The Beatles, Bowie, Elton and so much more (Alfred Music Publishing) with Bobby Owsinski.

The other nominees were:

Marc Dolan, Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ‘n’ Roll (W. W. Norton)

Michael Drewett, Sarah Hill and Kimi Karki, Peter Gabriel, from Genesis to Growing Up (Ashgate)

Mike Markesich, Teen Beat Mayhem! (www.priceless.com)

http://www.arsc-audio.org/awards/finalists.html

The Songs the Beatles Gave Away — My Article Today in Slate.com

April 23, 2013 · by solobeatles

When Lennon and McCartney skipped school to write songs as teenagers, they envisioned themselves becoming a great composing team like Leiber and Stoller or Rodgers and Hammerstein. In 1963 and 1964, they gave their best shot at it, not only writing songs for the Beatles but giving away 16 compositions to other artists, including the Rolling Stones. Half were originally written for themselves, and half they wrote for other artists under Brian Epstein’s management—such as Billy J. Kramer and Cilla Black—or for the pop duo Peter and Gordon.

In the U.K. two of the songs were No. 1s and ten more made it to the Top 40, while in the U.S. one hit the top spot and five more made the Top 40—an impressive record for any songwriting team. It’s true that they abound in puppy love clichés, but they also reveal the composers’ growing sophistication.

Please click here to continue to the article, complete with videos and Spotify playlist:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/04/22/the_beatles_give_their_songs_away_the_lennon_mccartney_originals_that_they.html

(Cilla Black pictured with Lennon and McCartney in home page photo)

“Looking For My Life” and the Night George and Olivia Saved Each Other

February 17, 2013 · by solobeatles

Harrison started smoking in 1957 and quit in 1992, but in 1997 he developed a lump on his neck and in his lung. But after undergoing two operations for cancer and radiotherapy, he was doing well. By mid-1999, he had completed most of the demos for his new album Brainwashed, with son Dhani often playing with him.

Then a horrible assault contributed to the cancer’s return. In 1999, thirty-six-year-old Michael Abram kicked his heroin addiction, but ironically that made his schizophrenia worse. His mother tried to get him back on medication, but the bureaucracy of England’s National Board of Health kept putting her off. Abram went through an obsession with Oasis, then switched his focus to the Beatles. As he later told his lawyer, he became convinced they were “witches,” with Harrison in particular being “a witch on a broomstick, who talked in the Devil’s tongue—an alien from Hell.” Perhaps the song he was referring to was “My Sweet Lord,” in which Harrison midway switches from singing “Hallelujah” to singing Hare Krishna chants. Abram believed that Harrison was possessing him, and that it was Abram’s mission from God to kill him.

On December 30, a young female stalker broke into Harrison’s home in Maui and was arrested. The same night in England, Abram went to Harrison’s Friar Park.

The main gates had security cameras, but on other parts of the estate the fence was falling down. At 3:30 a.m., the sound of breaking glass woke Harrison and Olivia. From downstairs, Abram yelled for Harrison. Harrison went to investigate in his pajama bottoms while Olivia called the police. In a scene reminiscent of that year’s box office hit The Sixth Sense, Harrison came face to face with Abram holding a long kitchen knife. Trying to calm Abram and himself, Harrison chanted the Hare Krishna Mantra—probably the words that made Abram believe he was a witch in the first place. Abram attacked.

Harrison later recounted, “I thought I was dying. I vividly remember a deliberate thrust of a knife and I could feel the blood entering my mouth and hear my breath exhaling from the wound.”

Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts told the Observer, “I spoke to Ringo about a month after it happened and he told me exactly what went on, and it was horrific. George was stabbed about forty times. It happened outside his bedroom on the landing. He would have been dead if he’d been lying in bed, he wouldn’t have been able to fight. The papers did say that one wound punctured his lung, but a lot of the others were just as horrific. The man was slashing him everywhere. George’s wife hit him again and again on the head with this brass lamp, but he just wouldn’t stop. There was blood everywhere.”

First Olivia hit him with a fireplace poker, then smashed the antique lamp on the head. Olivia later told Katie Couric, “George was coaching me, I have to say. And George was very brave and people don’t know that. Because he had already been injured and he had to jump up and bring him down to stop him from attacking me. You know, he saved my life too.”

Katie Couric: “You saved each other’s lives.”

Olivia Harrison: “Yes, we did. And that was an interesting experience. Because, you know, not a lot of people get tested like that, thank God.”

The lamp knocked Abram out, ending the fifteen-minute assault. The police carried him away. Harrison’s condition was critical for a day, then he was back home. Harrison said to the press, “He wasn’t a burglar and he certainly wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.”

Tom Petty said, “When I heard about it, I sent George a fax, and it just said, ‘Aren’t you glad you married a Mexican girl?’ Olivia really kicked ass. She is a beautiful person.”

Abram was acquitted of attempted murder due to insanity. He was treated then released after nineteen months in 2002.

Harrison got aggressive about finishing the album, and began giving Dhani detailed notes on how he wanted the sound and the artwork. For a while he said he planned to call it The World Is Doomed. Abram had punctured Harrison’s lung, and the cancer returned there. In May 2001, he had an operation at the Mayo Clinic, but it was discovered the cancer had spread to his brain. Harrison went to Switzerland for treatment, continuing to work on the album at a studio there.

In “Looking For My Life,” Harrison sings that he never anticipated that life could explode at any moment, as he’d been enjoying an idyllic existence in his garden for years. When he sighs that we’ve no idea what he’s been through, it’s as if Lennon has survived his shooting and is singing about it. When Harrison asks the Lord to listen to him and help him find his faith again, you know he truly does have something to plead about, like Job.

Featuring just Harrison with his son, Dhani, and producer Jeff Lynne, Lynne steps back and lets the guitars speak for themselves, with just a few deft touches, like giving the chorus’ drums a timpani-like depth for an epic feel.

Ironically, the song was written before the knife attack, perhaps in response to his cancer diagnosis or earlier eras of substance abuse. Still, as he strums intensely with his son, it’s hard to think of anything but that night at the end of 1999 that saw him on the floor soaked in blood next to Abram, finally knocked out by Olivia’s brass lamp.

McCartney Declares War Then Peace On Lennon In “Too Many People” and “Dear Friend”

February 17, 2013 · by solobeatles

No song by McCartney captures the loneliness and anger of the Beatles’ feud as intensely as “Too Many People,” in which all his vitriol spewed out like an infected zit. The lyrics read as the anti-Beatles version of Starr’s “Early 1970.” McCartney is getting pushed around by Lennon going underground and letting himself be a mouthpiece for the Communist party radicals. One of them, Yippie A. J. Weberman, even took a break from harassing Dylan to stage a protest in front of Linda’s father’s Park Avenue residence on Christmas Eve 1970.11 McCartney also slams Lennon for sinking into heroin with Ono, losing weight, and just eating cake, as junkies have a notorious sweet tooth. Not only was Lennon preachy politically, Harrison was religiously preachy to the max as well. And all of them were trying to grab McCartney’s cake: under the groups’ contract, all the profits of each ex-Beatles’ albums go to the company and then the total is divided among them. (Although, truth be told, Harrison was the biggest seller at the moment, so the set up benefited McCartney in 1971.)

McCartney vows that he’s not going to hold back his feelings anymore, though he did temper the opening line. Originally it was “Yoko took your lucky break and broke it in two,” but he changed “Yoko” to “you.”

The performance opens with a malevolent groan that could either be an effects-treated guitar, a harmonium, or far-off horns. The sense of physical space in the recording conjures the dread of walking into a deserted mausoleum in a horror film, underscoring the “lucky break” taunt. No doubt it is meant to instill the unease in Lennon and Co. that they will never be able to measure up in the future without McCartney. It perfectly captures the eerie foreboding when partners are divorcing, with one wondering privately if he is making a mistake even while trying to scare the other that he will regret it. When Lennon heard it, did he have an inkling that he would only have one more number one record in his lifetime?

McCartney whips himself into a war dance, dancing around Hugh McCracken’s guitar pyrotechnics with falsetto shrieks and whoops, banging the floor tom drum.

Lennon would counter on his next album with “How Do You Sleep,” which would also be magnificently played and produced. But it is so overtly about McCartney that its subject can’t be separated from the performance, making it difficult to enjoy beyond the context of Lennon’s character assassination. By being lyrically just vague enough and played within an arresting sound scape, “Too Many People” transcends the backdrop that inspired it.

Ram’s back cover included the subtle snapshot of one beetle screwing another. The front featured McCartney holding a ram by horns, so for Imagine Lennon inserted a postcard in which he holds a pig by the ears, grinning. Lennon also continued to be a loose cannon in the press. He sent an open letter to McCartney via the music mag Melody Maker in which he wrote that McCartney had said to him, “‘Ringo and George are going to break you John’ . . . Who’s the guy threatening to ‘finish’ Ringo and Maureen, who was warning me on the phone two weeks ago? Who said he’d ‘get us’ whatever the cost? As I’ve said before—have you ever thought that you might possibly be wrong about something?” He then slagged off McCartney’s father-in-law.

Obviously, fighting with the vicious Lennon in public was like dancing around gasoline with a match. And while Lennon forgot the fact whenever convenient, to McCartney they had been best friends, which was why he had overreacted and botched the whole “dealing with Yoko” thing in the first place.

McCartney began working on the song that would become “Dear Friend” during the Ram sessions. For many critics it was the sole redemption of the Wild Life album. It was the record’s last song, showing the continued primacy of the feud in his life, as “Too Many People” had been the first song on Ram.

The disconsolate piano brings to mind a man walking through a dark cavern, as McCartney faced the precarious decision of whether to up the arms race of mutually assured destruction. His voice strains at the high end of his register, like a guy who has been bullied but knows he must speak up though he’s also afraid. He can’t believe they’ve come so close to the edge, and he’s shocked it all means so much to Lennon. Perhaps he’s referring to the money and how they were forcing McCartney to stay in the company to avoid paying higher taxes. Perhaps he’s referring to Lennon’s need to yell his side of the story through the press at everyone else’s expense.

The song is famously known as a conciliatory make-up song. With surprising honesty, McCartney sings that he’s in love with his friend and wishes him the best with his marriage. But McCartney also asks Lennon if he’s a fool and if he’s afraid, which sounds like a bit of a provocation, even as his voice is timid in the gloom, a passive-aggressive Gemini as always. Probably it was hard for McCartney to be the guy stepping back saying, “I don’t want to fight,” even though he had been the one who started it.

McCartney plays the same ruminating piano chords for almost six minutes, mirroring the emotional obsession he couldn’t shake. But he uses what he learned on the Thrillington instrumental album to sustain interest through a subtle build in accompaniment with forlorn strings and foreboding horns until everything recedes except the quiet, lonely piano, and then it finally stops as well. Wild Life was released in the United Kingdom in November 1971 and in the United States in early December. At some point, McCartney called Lennon, and shortly afterward Lennon sent McCartney a Christmas gift, a bootleg of the group’s audition for Decca Records. A little after Christmas, the McCartneys dropped by Lennon and Ono’s Greenwich Village home, and the former bandmates stopped attacking each other in public. Eventually, the postcard in Imagine was changed to one of Lennon playing the panpipes.

I Will Be on The John Lennon Hour this Sunday with Host Jude Southerland Kessler Counting Down the Essential Solo Beatles Songs (1/6/13, 5:00 PM Pacific/ 7:00 PM Central)

January 3, 2013 · by solobeatles

Jude is the author of The Lennon Series, a 9-volume work on the life of John Lennon. The first book, Shoulda Been There, covers John’s life from 1940-Dec. 1961. The second book, Shivering Inside, details John’s life from Dec. 1961-March 1963. The third volume, She Loves You, will be out in October 2013 and will cover March 1963-Dec. 1965.

http://www.johnlennonseries.com/

Her terrific radio show The John Lennon Hour airs every Sunday night 5:00 PM Pacific / 7:00 PM Central on Beatles-A-Rama, an amazing internet radio station that plays a constant stream of music by the Beatles and the artists they inspired.

http://www.johnlennonseries.com/radio_home.html

http://www.beatlesarama.com/

A podcast will be on Jude’s website if you miss the show, and will also be available for free on iTunes.

Hope you can check it out! Happy New Year, everyone!

McCartney’s Anthem to Optimism “Hope of Deliverance”

December 30, 2012 · by solobeatles

The lyrics of the single from 1993’s OFF THE GROUND album recall the stiff upper lip of World War II–era Britain. They’re married to bossa-nova percussion, an accordion, and a twelve-string acoustic guitar vaguely reminiscent of Trini Lopez’s “If I Had a Hammer” or a relaxed take on the 1940s Latin hit “Besame Mucho,” an old standby of the Beatles in their Cavern days.

The storyline of McCartney’s 90-minute classical piece LIVERPOOL ORATORIO followed his own life, beginning with his childhood in Liverpool. When he returned to Liverpool to write it, he was flooded with memories from the 1940s. Perhaps the same memories informed this song as well. Maybe the 1987 feature HOPE AND GLORY also inspired him. The film was based on director John Boorman’s experience as a little kid in London during the Nazi bombings and how his family tried to hold together during the chaotic times. The film’s title came from the 1902 patriotic British song “Land of Hope and Glory.”

McCartney’s song expresses the same unsinkable determination not to give into despair despite the encroaching darkness. As it sprang from English history, the song resonated more in the United Kingdom, making it to number fifteen there but only number eighty-three in the United States. (It did reach number nine on the US adult contemporary chart.)

Despite the possible World War II connotations, it became the most played record on German radio ever. It was one of McCartney’s biggest-selling singles in Europe, with sales of over 4 million, helped by a colorful dance remix video in which it looks like the crowd is all on really good ecstasy.

Ringo Rebounds With a Vengeance in “Don’t Go Where the Road Don’t Go”

December 30, 2012 · by solobeatles

After being unable to get distribution for his 1983 album OLD WAVE in the States or the UK, Starr dropped out of the music business for the rest of the decade and narrated the children’s TV series Tommy the Tank Engine along with appearing in the occasional commercial.

By the late 1980s, Starr’s substance abuse was out of control and he was blacking out often. So in October 1988, Starr and wife Barbara Bach entered a detox clinic in Tucson, Arizona, for a six-week alcohol and cocaine treatment program, trying to ignore the press constantly flying overhead.

He realized he needed to get back in the game, so with producer David Fischof came up with the concept for his All-Starr Band. The idea was to assemble a team of musicians who were concert draws in their own right. Starr would sing some Beatles songs and some solo songs, and then he would take a backseat on the drums while the other artists sang their hits.

The first incarnation of the All-Starr Band featured regulars Jim Keltner, Billy Preston, and Joe Walsh, along with Dr. John, Levon Helm and Rick Danko of the Band, and E Street Band members Clarence Clemons and Nils Lofgren. They made their debut in Dallas on July 23, 1989, to ten thousand people and toured North America through the summer. New incarnations would follow every one to three years. By 2010, there had been eleven All-Starr bands featuring the likes of Sheila E., Jack Bruce, Edgar Winter, Zak Starkey (his son), Todd Rundgren, Billy Squier, Richard Marx, Randy Bachman, Peter Frampton, John Waite, John Entwistle, Howard Jones, Greg Lake, Felix Cavaliere (The Rascals), Eric Carmen, and many more. Starr released live albums like baseball programs, ten as of 2011, which are five more live albums than McCartney has issued.

The structure helped him get back on his feet. In 1990, Starr recorded a cover of the Beatles’ “I Call Your Name” for a TV special marking Lennon’s birth and death anniversaries. Featuring Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Walsh, and Keltner, the track was produced by Lynne, who went on to produce two of the best songs on Starr’s first album in nine years, TIME TAKES TIME, including “Don’t Go Where the Road Don’t Go.”

Lynne gives Starr a tougher drum sound and plays a louder, fiercer guitar than had been heard heretofore on a Ringo tune, like “In My Car” on steroids. Lynne layers in some Petty-esque acoustic rhythm guitars, then Suzie Katayama on cello where the lead guitar would typically be. Ringo jumps in, angry, bitter, recounting how he woke up from a nightmare, beaten up and alone in rehab with the walls closing in, and one’s first reaction is, “Whoa, this is a Ringo tune that truly rocks.”

As with much of the album, the lyrics are heavier than those on Starr’s previous work. He sings of once being at the epicenter of the world, but from what he can barely remember of the past, he blew it. Friends who used him when times were good have all disappeared. Still, he’s back with a vengeance and warning us to learn from him: don’t drive/live drunk, or you’ll end up driving where the road don’t go and end up nearly killing yourself. With this song he fashioned an anthem for anyone who has driven their life off a cliff but has rebuilt themselves and hit the road with reborn determination.

I Will Be On Chris Carter’s Breakfast With the Beatles This Sunday Talking About Still the Greatest (12/16, 9 AM-12 PM)

December 15, 2012 · by solobeatles

Breakfast With The Beatles is the nation’s longest-running Beatles radio program, heard weekly on 95.5 KLOS-FM in L.A. and on Little Steven’s Underground Garage on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio Ch. 21.

Host Chris Carter plays classic Beatles songs as well as rare B-sides, outtakes, live recordings and more.

Chris will be world premiering a big new Beatle-related song this Sunday during the news with Jackie DeShannon.

I’ve been a fan for years so it’s very exciting to have an opportunity to be on the show.

Chris has interviewed Paul, George, Ringo, and Pete Best, was a founding member and bassist of the band Dramarama, and wrote and produced the classic documentary “Mayor of the Sunset Strip” about legendary DJ Rodney Bingenheimer.

http://www.breakfastwiththebeatles.com/

Hope you can tune in!

Did Lennon Pinch a Lick From a Coke Commercial For His Final Political Song?

December 13, 2012 · by solobeatles

When Lennon and Ono co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show for a week in January 1972, they brought in friends ranging from radical political figures to Chuck Berry. When Lennon performed “Imagine,” he made the comment, “Only people can save the world.” With “save” switched to “change,” the phrase would become the chorus for this MIND GAMES (1973) track and be printed on the album’s inner sleeve.

The ebullient melody reflects the hopeful little boy part of Lennon’s personality in the same vein as tunes like “I Should Have Known Better” and “Oh Yoko!” With its skipping, folk/R&B swing, it almost sounds like something that could have been sung by the Brady Bunch.

As Lennon was adept at finding inspiration for songs in commercials (i.e. “Good Morning, Good Morning”), it would be unsurprising to learn that “Only People” owed something to the famous “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial from 1971, helmed by Medium Cool director Haskell Wexler.

The commercial made such a splash that the New Seekers (“Georgy Girl”) quickly released it as a hit single refashioned as “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Coke allowed the proceeds to go to UNICEF.

(What do you think? Am I hearing things?)

“Only People” was certainly Lennon’s least threatening attempt to use pop to sway the masses. For the ultraconservatives who wrote books like The Beatles, LSD, and Communism, no doubt this would have struck them as one of Lennon’s most insidious propaganda pieces, refashioning a Coke commercial for socialism.

Bouncing back from Nixon’s 1972 landslide, Lennon commiserates with his fellow idealists. He concedes they’ve cried a lot of tears, but now they’re wiser and ready to start again. He throws in his usual feminist reminder that if man and woman work together they are unstoppable, and vows to resist the Pig Brother scene, conflating the “Big Brother” that had put him under surveillance and slang for the cops.

Whooping like a cheerleader before a clapping gospel chorus, Lennon finished his final political song. He and Ono would mirror their generation by abandoning activism, and by the end of the decade, Ono would transform herself into an economic wheeler dealer like the yuppies.

But while it would be easy to slam the sixties idealists for selling out, they had won the war against conformity and ended the Draft. The right to liberated sex without marriage, long hair, and freedom of expression and religion progressively melded with the mainstream throughout the decade. The ex-Beatles could look around at the new, freer world and know they had played a central part in changing it.

Solo Beatles Event at L.A.’s Book Soup Dec. 4!

November 29, 2012 · by solobeatles

If you’re near the Sunset Strip on Tuesday, December 4 at 7PM, please drop by my reading at Book Soup and bring your own favorite solo Beatles songs to discuss!

What do you do when you need to hear new Beatle songs but you’ve just replayed all their CDs? Mix the best of their solo stuff into new Beatle albums! But with over 900 tracks over the last 40 years, where to start?

STILL THE GREATEST rounds up the crème de la creme, sharing the fascinating stories behind the songs and compiling them into The 12 Beatles Albums That Should Have Been (1970-2011). Rolling Stone.com ran excerpts from the book and USA Today recommended it.

Bring along your own suggestions for the best solo tracks (or guilty pleasures), and hear about the Post Fabs’ most pivotal moments, feuds, affairs, reunions, and comebacks.

Who was the house band of John, George, and Ringo? Was Jeff Lynne the 5th Solo Beatle? How did the Post-Fab Four fare against arch-rivals Dylan and the Stones in the 70s? What new genres did they tackle on their own? And what are the deep cut classics due for reappraisal? Meet other local Beatles maniacs and get a whole new perspective on the underrated Second Act of John, Paul, George and Ringo!

Admission: Free!

Book Soup link: http://www.booksoup.com/author-

8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, California 90069

310-659-3110

Page 7 of 12 « Previous 1 … 5 6 7 8 9 … 12 Next »