Paul’s touching speech inducting John into the 1994 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Browsing Category News
The Last Unfinished Beatle Song
In the early ‘90s, Harrison and Apple Records manager Neil Aspinall asked Yoko Ono if she had any unreleased Lennon demos the other Beatles could use as the basis for possible new Beatle songs. When McCartney came to New York to induct Lennon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Ono gave him two cassette tapes that featured demos of “Free as a Bird,” “Real Love,” “Now and Then,” and “Grow Old With Me.”
The reunited Beatles did not gravitate towards “Grow Old With Me,” perhaps because it was strongly linked to Ono, and had already been prominently released on 1984’s Milk and Honey. The group tackled “Free as a Bird,” then “Real Love,” and McCartney was keen to tackle the final and most incomplete of all the Lennon demos, “Now and Then.” However, Harrison didn’t like that one. He and McCartney tried to write a song together called “All for Love” in the spring of 1995, but the session ended in fierce argument. “It’s just like being back in the Beatles,” Harrison cracked dourly, and the threesome never recorded together again.
McCartney loved harmonizing with Lennon on “Now and Then,” and has since expressed a desire to do a version with Starr. While he has never formally attempted to do a version himself, he may have also borrowed a moment of drama from Lennon’s performance for the final song of his 2005 album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, “Anyway.” The pregnant pause of “Anyway” at 1:40 sounds vaguely reminiscent of the haunting piano passage Lennon plays 4:30 into “Now and Then” …
Yes? No? Not buying it? Well, anyway, when arranging “Anyway,” McCartney pretended he was a Southern Randy Newman, with a little Curtis Mayfield thrown in. From the earliest days McCartney would imagine himself to be the artists he loved when writing a new song, like when he pretended to be Ray Charles and Little Richard while composing “She’s a Woman” on the way in to Abbey Road Studios. Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich gave McCartney a pure, classy piano sound, then upped the emotion even further at the bridge with the addition of the Millenia Ensemble strings, a Moog synth, and harmonium mixed just right.
McCartney and Starr Reunite for Transcendental Meditation
A short film about McCartney and Starr’s reunion on April 4, 2009, for a benefit concert for David Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation foundation. The foundation seeks to have meditation taught in American schools.
Blue Jay Way For Sale
The L.A. pad where George wrote the eerie Magical Mystery Tour track “Blue Jay Way” is available for $4.6 million. (The address is 1567 Blue Jay Way, to be exact.) Not too far from Elvis’ place in Bel Air where the group visited in ’65 (525 Perugia Way). Or the house at 2850 Benedict Canyon Drive the band was staying in later that year, where Peter Fonda freaked them out by saying he knew what it was like to be dead (thus inspiring “She Said, She Said”).
Songs of the Break Up
The video playlist for the songs the Solo Beatles wrote venting about the group’s acrimonious split. To play the mix continuously, please go to the YouTube playlist below and select “Play All”.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4A03B06E33001F52
In 1969, the Beatles’ Apple Records label was hemorrhaging money due to the idealistic hippie chaos that defined its operation for a year, with many employees stealing. Lennon wanted to bring in manager/accountant Allen Klein to clean it up, since Klein had succeeded in getting the Rolling Stones the best record deal in the business. But Klein also ended up owning the copyrights to all the Stones’ songs written before 1971 — not Jagger and Richards — and McCartney didn’t trust him. His wife Linda’s father Lee Eastman was a successful New York music lawyer, so McCartney pushed for him. But the other Beatles naturally did not want to be managed by McCartney’s father-in-law. Why they didn’t all choose a third, neutral manager is a tragic mystery. In the end, Lennon, Harrison and Starr went with Klein and McCartney went with his in-laws. (By the early ‘70s, Lennon, Harrison, and Starr would grow disenchanted with Klein themselves and file lawsuits to split with him.)
Whereas Lennon had once been the leader of the group, he now often felt like a sideman to the increasingly perfectionist McCartney, and began turning to Yoko Ono as his new collaborator. The other Beatles resented her presence in the studio and finally, in the summer of 1969, Lennon snapped and told the Beatles he was leaving. Klein was in the midst of negotiating a better contract for the group that would impact their future royalties, so he convinced Lennon to keep it a secret from the press. Thus the Beatles existed in a strange limbo for almost a year. Devastated, McCartney retreated to his Scottish farm and disappeared so completely the rumor spread that he was dead.
In April 1970, McCartney emerged from isolation with his first solo album, McCartney. In the press release accompanying the LP, McCartney stated that he no longer foresaw a time that the Beatles would record together, effectively announcing the end of the group. Lennon was enraged at McCartney “scooping” him on the demise of the Beatles, yet also admired his P.R. acumen in using it to hype his record release. However, the move backfired on McCartney, as he became known as the one who “broke up the Beatles.”
To promote his own debut album, Plastic Ono Band, Lennon gave a legendary interview to Rolling Stone magazine’s Jann Wenner that pulled the curtain back on everything that had been censored about the Beatles over the previous decade: the groupies, drugs, and bribery on tour, all the backbiting of the last few years. He was out to bury the image of the lovable moptops forever.
He railed against how McCartney and Harrison – “the most big headed uptight people” — treated Ono, regretting he didn’t punch Harrison when he told Ono she had a “bad vibe” reputation.
“I don’t forgive them for that,” he simmered. Then he laughed, remembering all the incendiary things he’d said over the course of the session. “This is gonna be some fucking thing. I don’t care, this is the end of it.”
He permanently alienated George Martin and the rest of the Beatles’ support team — Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, and Derek Taylor – for saying that they had the gall to think they were actually Beatles themselves. He couldn’t even stop himself from saying his good friend Starr’s first album embarrassed him.
Someone who felt especially lacerated was McCartney. Shortly after the interview, he started the court case to dissolve the partnership they had all signed on August 19, 1967. McCartney had wanted the group more than anyone, but he was such a dominant control freak that none of the others wanted to work with him anymore — yet they didn’t want to end the Beatles’ company because then they’d each get taxed individually at a much higher rate. They wanted him to stay stuck in the same company with them even though they didn’t like him, release his albums by their schedule, and deal with their manager — who McCartney thought was probably crooked.
McCartney never truly let loose in the press back at Lennon, because, as he admitted, he knew Lennon would verbally destroy him. Instead he began a not-so-subtle assault through his music. Even though he changed the words of “Too Many People” from “Yoko took your lucky break and broke it in two,” Lennon soon blasted back with “How Do You Sleep.”
Harrison also chronicled everything from his walk out during the Let It Be sessions in “Wah Wah,” the endless court cases in “Sue Me, Sue You Blues,” and his sadness at their crumbling brotherhood in “Run of the Mill.” And Starr was still smoldering over the time McCartney shoved him out of the house with “Back Off Boogaloo.”
It was a dark two years in Pepperland until McCartney called a ceasefire at the end of 1971 with “Dear Friend,” and the healing gradually began.
Ringo on His Last Visit with George
A clip from the Martin Scorsese documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World.
The 1971 Beatles Album That Should Have Been
The video playlist for the songs profiled in chapter two.
Unfortunately, the George Harrison tracks from All Things Must Pass are not available on YouTube so alternate takes have been substituted.
To play the mixes continuously, please go to the YouTube playlist links below and select “Play All” in the upper left corner.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4FFF0077CDC98851&feature=view_all
Link To Amazon to Purchase It Don’t Come Easy
Link to Amazon to Buy Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey
Link to Amazon to Buy Wah Wah (Studio Version)
Link To Amazon to Buy Another Day
Link To Amazon to Buy It’s So Hard (Studio Version)
Oh Woman Oh Why Currently Not Available On Amazon
Link to Amazon to Buy Apple Scruffs
Link to Amazon to Buy Oh Yoko!
Link to Amazon to Buy Early 1970
Link To Amazon To Buy Back Seat of My Car
The Heather Mills Story in Song
With Heather Mills as his muse in the 2000s, McCartney wrote and performed with a startling new level of honesty and vulnerability. From the euphoria of early passion to love’s bitter implosion, McCartney chronicled the full story as starkly as Bruce Springsteen had in his own album of a crumbling marriage, Tunnel of Love.
Please go to the YouTube playlist below and select “Play All” in the upper left corner.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9AA668ECC5686CD4&feature=edit_ok
John and Paul Mirror Each Other With First Solo Releases
1970: Not the happiest year for either of them.
Even though they had just split up as a band, Lennon and McCartney’s debuts were very similar — dark, stripped down albums. They were both extensions of what the Beatles had tried to achieve with the Get Back/Let It Be sessions, which had been inspired by Bob Dylan. In 1967 the orchestral grandeur of Sgt. Pepper had stunned the public, and most of the rock community slavishly attempted to imitate it. Dylan, however, went in an entirely different direction with John Wesley Harding, a rustic, folksy album that featured just him, a bassist, and a drummer. The Beatles realized they had lost connection with the raw power of their roots and made their own back-to-basics album with Let It Be. Both Plastic Ono Band and McCartney continued this approach. Plastic Ono Band featured just Lennon, Starr, and Klaus Voormann on bass. McCartney went one better by playing every instrument on his album. Along with the minimalist sound, both albums share a theme of isolation.
Lennon chronicled the feelings unleashed by the Primal Scream psychotherapy he was undergoing at the time. During the recording sessions, Lennon would sometimes break down crying, but found the process to be one of the most empowering experiences of his life.
But while Lennon was excited to face a new era, a heavy depression pervades McCartney. The album’s cover features “life’s cherries” scattered outside the bowl.
Released just half a year after Abbey Road, half of McCartney’s tracks are instrumentals, since McCartney had not generated enough new songs to fill an album. Thus his album continues to receive mixed reviews, while Lennon’s is now recognized as a classic, though it was mercilessly spoofed at the time by National Lampoon as “Magical Misery Tour.”
In marked contrast to the minimalist Lennon and McCartney solo albums, Harrison stood out with the explosive bombast of his triple album set All Things Must Pass, just as he once stood out from the others through his use of Indian music. Its Phil Spector-produced Wall of Sound was the perfect backdrop for a musician who had been ignored and was now determined to make as big a splash as possible. (Though Harrison would later regret using so much echo.)
solobeatles 