The website for the book Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles' Solo Careers
Beatles expert extraordinaire Robert Rodriguez had me on his super podcast Something About The Beatles to talk about the ex-Beatles during the era of my new book 1973: Rock at the Crossroads. Against a backdrop of AM vs. FM – 60s giants vs. emerging upstarts – mainstream vs. underground, the four issued five albums of all new material, all of which made the Top Ten (while three scored US number one hit singles, two of them back-to-back).
It’s episode 187 at https://somethingaboutthebeatles.com/
The solo Beatles appear quite a bit in the book — as it was the year of Band on the Run, Mind Games, Living in the Material World, and Ringo.
Here’s a link to a review of the book from NPR:
At www.facebook.com/1973book I’ve got stories, videos and playlists. And please feel free to post your own!
The Pandora podcast can be found at http://bit.ly/1973AGJ
You can order it at Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, and many other places listed here: http://bit.ly/the1973book
1973: the year rock peaked, began to die, and was reborn.
It was the last blockbuster year where all the ‘60s giants released classics at the same time: the former Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, the Who, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Neil Young, Elvis.
Five mid-level veterans shot to the front of the pack: Pink Floyd, Elton John, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Marley.
An amazing crop of new superstars released their debut albums: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Queen, Aerosmith, the New York Dolls, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Tom Waits.
But when radio programmers created the Album Oriented Rock format for FM radio, the music began to homogenize, and whose who weren’t mainstream white rockers began to get squeezed out.
Under the radar, however, new movements started percolating that would eventually rise up to rejuvenate popular music: punk, disco, hip hop, reggae, techno, and outlaw country.
Thanks!
Andrew
www.facebook.com/1973book
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https://www.facebook.com/whereselvisbook/
Hosts Ryan and Chris of the excellent McCartney podcast TAKE IT AWAY and I recently discussed THE SONGS THE BEATLES GAVE AWAY TO OTHER ARTISTS.
We play Paul and John’s unreleased demos and compare them with singles by the Stones, Peter and Gordon, Badfinger, Cilla Black, Billy J. Kramer and more.
If you want it, here it is, come and get it!
Episode 22 – Songs Paul Gave Away
From Thunder Press, it’s a take off on Where’s Waldo with twenty double-page illustrations packed with Beatles trivia in which you have to find Ringo and other Beatles-related people and things, and fifty pages of text.
The artwork by Oliver Goddard, Takayo Akiyama, and David Ryan Robinson is beautiful, each with their own inimitable style: from childlike whimsy to outrageous psychedelia.
With the prose I did my best to cover all the bases from the boys’ early days in Liverpool to their final album, Abbey Road, all told from Ringo’s perspective.
You can look inside at Amazon here:
Richard Linklater’s terrific film Boyhood has a great sequence where the father, Ethan Hawke, gives his son a mix of solo Beatles tracks. Buzzfeed printed Hawke’s playlist along with his heartfelt note about how coming to terms with the Beatles’ breakup echoed coming to terms with his own divorce. Thanks to Hawke and Linklater for reminding the world that the great Beatle music didn’t stop in 1970!
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ethanhawke/boyhood-the-black-album?bftw=main#3f36lx9
For the first time, Apple and iTunes released a compilation of solo songs featuring cuts by all four Beatles last month. Perhaps they are running out of ways of repackaging the ’60s catalog and are testing the waters for a whole new era in (solo) Beatles collections, if all the estates can get on the same page regarding the licensing issues. Obviously, I think that would be fantastic, though personally I think they could have chosen stronger songs to make a splashier statement for this first effort. Still, it must be said that George’s “Let it Down” and Paul’s “Call Me Back Again” were pretty out-of-the-box choices, so you have to give them props for that. John’s “Love” is a near-standard, and Ringo’s “Walk With Me” is a reunion with Paul, so those are more obvious choices for what will hopefully become a new tradition. Here’s a recent article on the e.p.:
http://ultimateclassicrock.com/beatles-free-itunes/
Here’s a great website with all the daily Beatle news:
solobeatles 