June 9, 2022
1962 Was The Final Year We Didn't Know The Beatles. What Kind Of World Did They Land In?

Indeed, it's tempting to frame the Beatles as messianic — reams of ink have made their debut performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" to reinforce that narrative. Everybody remembers "All My Loving," "She Loves You" and the rest; few remember that they were followed by a desperate-looking magician doing salt-shaker tricks. (As Rob Sheffield put it in Dreaming the Beatles: "Acrobats, jugglers, puppets — this is what people did for fun before the Beatles came along?")

Through that lens, the Beatles can look like the product of divine intervention, meant to restore brilliant hues to a monochrome culture, Wizard of Oz-style. Why not ask Tune In author Mark Lewisohn about it? He's almost universally regarded as the foremost global authority on the Fab Four. And to that point, he lists some names.

"Otis Redding, James Brown, Little Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, Freda Payne, Randy Newman, Ike and Tina Turner, the Supremes, Wilson Pickett, Gladys Knight, P.J. Proby, Barbara Streisand, Glen Campbell, Patti LaBelle, and Dionne Warwick" were all waiting in the wings or as established stars in 1962, he tells GRAMMY.com.

"They're all making records before the Beatles," Lewisohn continues. "So, anyone who says the Beatles fashioned the entire scene doesn't know what they're talking about." Rather, the Beatles entered an already-fecund landscape 60 years ago — and reshaped it forever.

Flashback: Derek Taylor writes on the passing of Beatles Manager Brian Samuel Epstein


June 8, 2022
Today it was a hat trick on Special Magazine Editions

June 7, 2022
Paul McCartney’s Brother Recalls the Beatles’ Early Years

Mike McCartney, brother of Paul McCartney, on ferry on the Mersey shooting pictures with Rollei camera Paul bought him in 1962.

On June 6, 1962, 60 years ago this week, the very nervous, almost-Fab foursome of John, Paul, George and Pete entered EMI’s studios on Abbey Road in the St. John’s neighborhood of London for their first recording session under the recording contract that the already legendary producer George Martin had offered their rather green manager, Brian Epstein, on the label he was then managing, Parlophone, when the pair had met the previous February. But the group — who were tearing up the pub and club circuit in the north of England after a long, grueling stint in Hamburg, Germany, where they’d played eight hours a day, six days a week, honing their craft and becoming one of the tightest and rawest bands in the country — nearly didn’t make the cut during that first session.

Paul McCartney’s bass amp was found to be so inadequate that a replacement was cobbled together from speakers pilfered from the famed studio’s echo chamber, and John Lennon’s tiny Vox amplifier had to be held together with string to keep it from rattling, as the engineer Norman Smith recalled to me during an interview in 2007. Finally, Smith, who went on to produce the legendary recordings by the early, Syd Barrett-fronted Pink Floyd, was able to get a suitable sound on tape.

Still, amplifiers were the least of the Beatles’ problems that day. As they ran through “Besame Mucho,” the 1940s hit written by Mexican songwriter Consuelo Velázquez, plus their originals “Love Me Do,” “PS I Love You” and “Ask Me Why,” it became clear to all in attendance that, while it was far from a sure thing that guitar groups would be the next big thing, this group surely wouldn’t make the cut with their current drummer supplying the backbeat.

“There Pete Best was coasting along, a good-looking lad in a great group, and that could’ve been it forever,” recalls Mike McCartney, the photographer, recording artist and, of course, Paul McCartney’s brother. “But for the decisions that were made, which were necessary, of course.”

A couple of the tracks from the day were included on Volume 1 of the Beatles’ Anthology compilation, released in 1995, and the evidence is plain: Handsome fan-favorite or not, Best couldn’t keep a beat to save his life.

“I always felt sad for Pete, until the Anthology,” McCartney says. “Then, for the first time, he saw some real money, which was important to me, because he was never looked after. And to lose that crew, and to lose out on fame too, that was awful.”

It’s all recounted in rich reminiscences and stark, candid photographs by the brother of one of the world’s most famous men in Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool, recently released by Genesis Publications in a gorgeous, limited-edition deluxe book. But McCartney recalls the time of Best’s firing, in the summer of 1962, particularly vividly.

“Brian Epstein came along and thought, ‘Okay, I love you in your leathers, but this is a business, and if you want to make a million, then you’ve got to change your look,’” he says. “I remember John Lennon, particularly, but certainly heard, ‘if you want to make a million.’ They went to the tailor Dougie Millings and bought those first suits, and I remember my brother coming home with a box, and I opened the tissue paper and there was a mohair suit. I said, ‘What are you doing? We said we’d never go along that route.’ And he’d already worked it what to tell people. He said, ‘Look, ours have velvet collars.’ Oh, dear God. And so, there’s a photo in the book at the Tower Ballroom, and there’s Pete in his suit. And then, in the next photograph is Ringo, in the same suit the next week. Poor Pete had been let go. And he had to pay for the suit!”

Of course, Martin heard something on those tapes, and he recalled to me during a conversation in the early ’90s that, while there was no sign of the songwriting prowess Lennon and McCartney possessed, he was, more than anything, enamored with the band’s quick wit and camaraderie. And so, just 90 days later, they were given a second chance. With a new drummer in tow and a fresh batch of songs — picked by Lennon and McCartney, rather than Epstein — with which to impress Martin, the rest, as they say, is history. 

As obvious as the band’s trajectory all seems now, in hindsight, Mike McCartney remembers 1962 as a fraught rollercoaster of a year, one that saw the Beatles nearly splinter apart more than once, if not for an enormous amount of tenacity and a large helping of Liverpudlian luck.

“Fate could have been different,” he says. “They might’ve gone down to London, done the record with George Martin, and then what if nothing happened and it didn’t sell? Ringo would have gone back with [his pre-Beatles band] Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and the rest of the Beatles would have had to get jobs and maybe gone on doing music in their spare time or whatever.”

As McCartney sees it, whatever came before, 1962 was the true beginning of the Beatles, at least as popular culture now knows them. As he was learning his craft of photography in his spare time, his brother was making leaps and bounds as a musician and songwriter — the result, as he sees it, of doing nothing but learning to be a Beatle. It was a year that the band kept up a grueling live schedule, made the first of several hundred BBC radio appearances, signed that all-important record deal with George Martin (who would go on to become a crucial collaborator for the band) and ditched Best for the man who put the beat in the Beatles, Ringo Starr. But they also lost the man who McCartney recalls as the soul of the early Fabs.

“Stu Sutcliffe was John’s mate,” he remembers. “I knew him because I wanted to go to art college, too, where he and John were studying. He had a style to him. And a real presence about him. He looked cool, and when they started the group, he was trying to play but he just couldn’t. My brother was trying to trying to teach him. But that’s hard, trying to learn an instrument like that. But John wanted him in, and so he had to learn. Then, when they went over to Hamburg he met Astrid [Kirchherr, the photographer] and fell in love. He told them, ‘Well, you get on with it. Paul can go on the bass. I’m staying here doing me art.’ But he was really important to the group up to that point.”

Later, not long before he died in April 1962, Sutcliffe visited his former group in Liverpool, with Kirchherr on his arm.

“He was looking thin and pale, and he must’ve been taking medication, because, like the letter from him reproduced in the book, which is very James Joyce-y and surreal, he was sometimes just floating, and then all of a sudden, he wasn’t,” McCartney recalls. “There’s a picture in the book of Astrid, with her very short, Mia Farrow-type hair, John and Stu outside the Cavern. Not long after that, we were all down there, in the Cavern, and I remember Stu and Astrid walking in, and Stu had this ordinary jacket, but without the collar. We all pissed ourselves laughing. He was not happy, because we didn’t get it, the style. But then, when he died, those famous Beatles collarless jackets, they’re in homage. They weren’t Beatles jackets. They were Stu’s jacket.”

The Beatles took his death hard, says McCartney, most especially John Lennon, who he recalls had a unique bond with his former art school classmate.

“He was a nice bloke, and very quiet,” he says. “Even onstage, he just stood there, in these very dark, beautiful shades. He couldn’t have seen a bloody thing. But he looked so good. And I always remember how cool he was to be around.”

It’s all there in Early Liverpool, from family photos and Teddy Boy poses from his teenage brother Paul, to run-ins with the actress Jane Asher when his brother brought her to Liverpool for the weekend in 1965, and much more — both mundane and astonishing, but all of it chronicling a time and place that now seems so magical because of its inhabitants.

“All they were was my brother and me mates,” McCartney says with a laugh, as he flips through the photos he took all those years ago now reproduced in a massive book. “That’s all they were. It was just me learning photography, and my brother doing the same thing in music. Really, that’s all it was.” 

Nipper and the Liverpool connection!

June 5, 2022
How Bob Dylan's masterpiece changed The Beatles' songwriting forever

It’s 1965, John Lennon is the king of the world as The Beatles continue their unwavering dominance of the pop culture explosion. He is fresh from recording Help!. It is the ‘Fab Fours’ best work to date and further fame, fortune and frenzied adulation surely await. However, that isn’t on his mind as he sits at home in Weybridge with a record endlessly spinning on repeat. He rings Paul McCartney and says something along the lines of, ‘You have to come around here and listen to this new Bob Dylan single.’

When Paul McCartney arrives, he is greeted with the wail of the greatest counterculture anthem ever written: ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. “It seemed to go on and on forever,” McCartney recalls. “It was just beautiful.” A year earlier, they had met the man behind this furiously unfurling song and it had proved just as impactful. 

As ‘Macca’ said of their famed meeting at the Delmonico Hotel in 1964, “I could feel myself climbing a spiral walkway as I was talking to Dylan. I felt like I was figuring it all out, the meaning of life… I was going ‘I’ve got it!’ and wrote down the key to it all on this piece of paper. I told [Beatles roadie Mal Evans] ‘You keep this piece of paper, make sure you don’t lose it because the meaning of life is on there. Mal gave me the piece of paper the next day, and on it was written ‘There are seven levels.’ Well, there you go, the meaning of life…”

That piece of reverential-sounding nonsense might remain a mystery, but the penny would soon drop when it came to Dylan’s music by the time ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ came around. “Dylan is a fantastic composer,” McCartney told Flip Magazine in 1966. “At first, I didn’t understand. I used to lose his songs in the middle but then I realized it didn’t matter. You can get hung up on just two words of a Dylan lyric. ‘Jealous Monk’ or ‘Magic Swirling Ship’ are examples of the fantastic word combinations he uses. I could never write like that and I envy him. He is a poet.”

With ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ Dylan revolutionised the way that people look at songwriting, the mighty Beatles included. With the glowering track “he showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further,” McCartney told Clinton Heylin. The collision of rock ‘n’ roll with lyrical poetry, and societal sagacity was a portent force that sent heads wobbling. Now songs didn’t have to be structured with a one-track mind. Only a few years earlier if your song was longer than three minutes it wouldn’t be played on the radio, then suddenly Dylan had a hit that went “on and on” for over six minutes.

The song was such a pandora’s box moment that the radiowaves had no choice but to make room for it. The swirling welter of everything it contained was a revelation for artists still thinking on conventional terms. The Beatles were now set to pair introspect and profundity with pop. “I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that,” Lennon declared with love. “I had a sort of professional songwriter’s attitude to writing pop songs, but to express myself I would write ‘Spaniard In The Works’ or ‘In His Own Write’ —the personal stories which were expressive of my personal emotions.”

Continuing: “I’d have a separate ‘songwriting’ John Lennon who wrote songs for the sort of meat market, and I didn’t consider them, the lyrics or anything, to have any depth at all. Then I started being me about the songs… not writing them objectively, but subjectively.”

Rubber Soul, The Beatles’ next album following ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ would feature tracks like ‘Norweigian Wood’ a track that even had Dylan stating, “What is this? It’s me, Bob. (John’s) doing me!” And Lennon himself would even say of songs in this period, “That’s me in my Dylan period again. I am like a chameleon… influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can. Same with Dylan.”

The band might have assimilated his influence a bit less obvious in future, but they were now looking to stretch their songs to new limits—everyone was. After all, the song crucified the crux of counterculture’s exposed Achilles heel—and it did it with such rafter ratling disdain that the clouds of the commercial ceiling were shifted and people could see past the boundaries towards what a rock song could be.

The world would simply never truly be the same when Dylan’s cutting intellect, stirring poetry and the brilliance of the soaring melody all mingled into one pop culture opus that still delivers a cognisant dose of adrenaline to this day.

June 4, 2022
Tell Me Something Good: Bob Eubanks and the Beatles

June 3, 2022
Beatles legend Ringo Starr honored in Boston with honorary doctorate from
Berklee College of Music

BOSTON — Former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr received an Honorary Doctorate degree from the Berklee College of Music in a special ceremony held Thursday in Boston.

Starr was unable to attend the initial ceremony earlier in May, though he addressed the graduating class in a recorded statement.

He spoke again at Thursday's in-person ceremony, sharing a story about how he decided to become a drummer.

"It was my big dream. You know, it's still unfolding. I get to play with great guys," he said. "It's just a great life I lead."

The ceremony also featured a tribute concert celebrating Starr's success in the music industry and remarks from Drummer Gregg Bissonette, who is a close friend of Starr and the drummer for Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band

 

The question of what to do after you’ve been in the biggest band of all time was approached in many ways by The Beatles, but George Harrison provided one of the most fascinating answers: start your own film production company, and make films you like, even when they court controversy. Although it had its fair share of flops (such as Shanghai Surprise and Water), Harrison’s Handmade Films was a genuine British success story in the 80s. This was a decade when financial support had fallen through due to the collapse of local studios and the rise of the Thatcher government, which did not see arts funding as a priority. Fewer films were produced locally and dominated by “prestige” releases, such as Gandhi and A Passage to India, that were increasingly bankrolled by Hollywood.

In this environment, Handmade’s best films stand out for their contemporary themes and ability to punch above their weight. Harrison’s company nurtured a generation of actors and provided rising directors the space to do some of their best work. So, let’s look at George Harrison’s contribution to British cinema through five key films and what makes them so great.

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)

Born out of the friendship between Harrison and Eric Idle (who had made The Beatles parody, The Rutles), Handmade was formed specifically to fund Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Support from EMI Films had fallen through at the pre-production stage after the board members read the script and objected to the religious content. Idle went to his famous (and very rich) friend for help. Counter-culture icon Harrison had no issues with the satirical take on Judaism and Christianity and he created Handmade to finance the film.

Helmed by Terry Jones (with his Holy Grail co-director, Terry Gilliam, concentrating on the visuals), Life of Brian is a typically anarchic comedy from the Monty Python team. The story follows the efforts of Brian (Graham Chapman) against the Romans, drawing parallels with the life of Jesus along the way. It contains many of the team’s most enduring skits (What have the Romans ever done for us?), lines (“He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”), and absurdities (the pure Gilliam moment when Brian falls from a tower and is carried by aliens into the midst of a space battle).

The risk that Harrison took with Life of Brian (re-mortgaging his house to help raise the $4 million budget) paid off. The film was a hit, taking in over $40 million and paving the way for Handmade to be more than just a one-shot deal. Given the extreme reactions to come in the 80s to other religious-themed works, such as Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ and Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses, perhaps it was the last time that such a satire could be made. The dark humor of the film’s final scene, where the crucified Judeans sing the jaunty “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life,” is an effective cover for the bleak suggestion that religion is indeed the opium of the masses.

The Long Good Friday (1980)

 

Cinemagoers would have missed the full power of The Long Good Friday were it not for Harrison’s company being ready to take another risk. The completed movie was languishing at Black Lion Films, which had got cold feet over its graphic violence and politically touchy depiction of the IRA. The studio was calling for drastic cuts, including the complete re-dubbing of the lead actor Bob Hoskins because it thought his cockney accent was too strong for the US market. Handmade acquired the rights and released the film uncut.

The film tells the story of a London gangster, Harold Shand (Hoskins), whose ambitions to go legit with a Docklands development deal are thwarted by an inexplicable wave of violence. Hoskins became an unlikely star with his bullish performance (New Yorker critic Pauline Kael affectionately described him as “a testicle on legs”). Whether barking at rivals strung upside down in a meat locker or dressing down a Mafia delegate (“Shut up, you long streak of paralyzed piss,” is one choice insult), Hoskins is a force of nature. As Shand’s girlfriend, Helen Mirren is equally great in one of her meatiest roles up to that point. She’s Lady Macbeth to his tyrant in crisis, in one scene (following the brutal glassing of a traitorous lieutenant) urging on a blood-drenched Shand to more acts of mayhem.

The Long Good Friday’s depiction of London at the turn of the 80s and its aspirational protagonist captures a key point in recent British history, prefiguring the rise of Thatcherism and the yuppie creed of “greed is good.” Shand sees no irony in courting the US mafia to become a genuine businessman, because money equals legitimacy, whatever the source. He’s undone by a failure to understand the forces of religious and political dogmatism attacking his empire, made real in the film’s devastating final scene. It’s hard to contemplate a censored version of the film, lacking both the politics and Hoskins’ verbal brilliance, that would have resulted without Handmade’s intervention.

Time Bandits (1981)

 

Having contributed to Life of Brian, this was Gilliam’s second chance (after 1977’s Jabberwocky) to let loose as solo director on a feature. It’s a uniquely British phantasmagoria, drawing inspiration from 1970s Doctor Who, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Arthurian legend. Trapped in a stultifying suburban household, eleven-year-old Kevin (Craig Warnock) encounters the Time Bandits, who are on the run from the Supreme Being, and joins them on an adventure through history. While Gilliam uses a host of Python regulars and some big names (most notably Sean Connery as Agamemnon), the real stars of the film are the Time Bandits.

These are a cast of actors with dwarfism who were familiar faces of the time, particularly David Rappaport (a staple of UK children’s TV) and Kenny Baker (Star Wars’ R2-D2), although they were more often seen in incidental or heavily disguised roles. Or, more perniciously, in mainstream sketch show comedy of the 70s, where any person of difference was the butt of a joke. In Gilliam’s fantasy, they’re as ragtag as the adventure itself, referencing characters from mythology (magical in their “otherness”) but steadfastly modern by taking center stage. They defy their place in the Supreme Being’s order of things.

With Harrison listed as an executive producer and providing the closing credits song, Time Bandits was another big hit for Handmade, grossing almost ten times its budget. This was due to Gilliam’s skill as a director, creating the look and feel of a more expensive movie through some clever scenes (the knight on horseback running through Kevin’s room is a standout) and the ambition to tell a grand story. The theme of imagination as an escape from the mundane cruelty of the real world is one that he would return to again and again. However, Gilliam provides one of his sweetest moments at the end of Time Bandits, when Kevin’s lost surrogate father from the adventure (Connery) appears briefly as a fireman outside the burning suburban house, suggesting that adventure can exist outside those dreams.

Mona Lisa (1986)

 

Mona Lisa’s striking opening shot, tracking close on Bob Hoskins as he strides across Waterloo Bridge, recalls the ending of The Long Good Friday and its long take of Harold Shand. It's like he's walking out of one movie and into the next, although he's a very different character here. George (Hoskins) is a small-time gangster, disconnected from the world after seven years in prison. He takes a job from his former boss, Denny Mortwell (Michael Caine), as a bodyguard and driver for a high-priced sex worker, Simone (Cathy Tyson). He falls in love with her, causing a dangerous conflict of loyalty.

Neil Jordan, who had previously directed Angel and The Company of Wolves, made his best film with Mona Lisa. It digs beneath the veneer of 80s London to a seamy underworld where an idealized and fetishized version of women is up for sale to the most unsavory characters. George’s odyssey through the sex industry takes him from the nightclubs of the West End to mansions in the country, where the worst crimes are secretly perpetrated and filmed. The subject matter recalls Caine’s earlier Get Carter, except here, he’s a truly loathsome facilitator of abuse.

The film’s title references Nat King Cole’s song and its lyrics of male yearning for an ideal played out in George’s schlock romantic description of the situation to his friend, Thomas (Robbie Coltrane). In his telling, it’s a “tart with a heart” story where he’s the savior. George is one of Jordan’s archetypical heroes (like Stephen Rea in both Angel and The Crying Game) who is blinded by false perception, even putting on a pair of cheap, star-shaped sunglasses at one point and insisting that Simone loves him. Rose-tinted spectacles indeed. Mona Lisa was Handmade’s last major commercial and critical hit of the 80s, cementing Hoskins’ reputation as a performer. He won Best Actor at Cannes but lost out on the Oscar to Paul Newman (for The Color of Money, so no shame there).

Withnail and I (1987)

 

A fine example of a film having to wait to find its audience, Withnail and I was both a commercial flop and critically dismissed on release. By the time its cult (generated by word of mouth and “midnight movie” status at the art house) crossed into the mainstream in the mid-90s, Harrison had sold Handmade. This was following a string of commercial disappointments and the discovery that his co-owner, Denis O’Brien, had been mismanaging funds. It’s a bittersweet footnote for the company that one of its films rose again, becoming one of the most beloved British comedies of its generation. Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and I (Paul McGann) are struggling actors living in the squalor of 1969 London. Escaping to the country house of Withnail’s rich uncle, Monty (Richard Griffiths), the pair engage in a booze-and-drug-fueled weekend that becomes more farcical when Uncle Monty pays an “unexpected” visit.

It's no big surprise why Withnail and I didn’t find an audience during the 80s. At first sight, the film is formless, more a collection of skits (Withnail getting threatened in a pub, the pair drunkenly crashing a tearoom) than a cohesive whole. The tone is all over the place too, veering from Hendrix-scored drug binges to the kind of farcical sex comedy last seen in the dated Carry On… movies. However, the power of the film lies in its performances and its ability to grow richer upon repeat viewing. Grant is brilliant as Withnail, whether smearing Deep Heat over his naked torso to beat the cold or trying to weasel out of a beating. McGann’s cooler 60s slacker is his perfect foil. The script, by director Bruce Robinson, has more quotable lines than a dozen films, perfectly capturing the dramatic pretensions of the characters. “So, you’re a thespian too!” Uncle Monty exclaims upon meeting I for the first time, making no effort to disguise his sexual interest.

To end the Handmade story with Withnail and I seems doubly fitting because of the elements of Shakespearean tragedy that underpin its broad comedy. Uncle Monty is a modern Falstaff, isolated in the 60s because of his homosexuality but putting a jovial face on things. I is Prince Hal, slumming it for the experience until he is called on for greatness (significantly, he lands a film role on their return to London, requiring him to cut his hair and head off like Henry V to redeem himself in battle). And Withnail is Hamlet, brilliantly delivering a rain-sodden soliloquy from that play to an audience of zoo animals at the end of the film. He’s too outré to ever be part of the mainstream, but Withnail and I only gets better with every viewing. It's the jewel in Handmade's crown and ensures Harrison's enduring legacy in film.

June 2, 2022
On this date: Sir Paul McCartney Salutes The Queen's Platinum Jubilee on the Beatles Official
Facebook page

John Lennon’s lawyer turns paperback writer to recount little-known case

In March 1975, Jay Bergen stepped off an elevator on the seventh floor of the Dakota, New York City’s famed luxury co-op on the Upper West Side. He was met by a young man who escorted him into an apartment. Bergen was in John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s living room. A white Steinway grand piano sat across the space. The view of Central Park was spectacular.   A few minutes later, Ono entered, and the two introduced themselves. For the next hour, Bergen tells me, he was “politely grilled” by the former Beatle’s wife.   Bergen’s partner at Marshall, Bratter, Greene, Allison & Tucker was Lennon’s counsel in the dissolution of the Beatles. Bergen recently had been tapped to represent the musician in unrelated breach of contract litigation.   It was an “audition,” Bergen recalls of his meeting with Ono. She wanted to be sure he was the right lawyer to handle the case. “If she didn’t like me,” he explains, “I would have been out.”   Bergen passed the test, and for the next two years had a ticket to ride as Lennon’s lawyer in the matter. The representation included a lengthy bench trial in the Southern District of New York and culminated with a published opinion from the New York City-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.   Lennon and Bergen parted ways after that, and Bergen went on to a long career as a litigator for various Manhattan firms. He retired in 2008. While his representation of Lennon always made for a good story, last month the Long Island native shared the case on a grander scale. He published Lennon, the Mobster & the Lawyer—The Untold Story, which recounts his representation of Lennon in this little-known case.   In a phone interview from his home in Saluda, which is in southwestern North Carolina, Bergen, 84, discussed his five-year effort as a paperback writer to share Lennon’s story.   Copyright kerfuffle   Lennon’s troubles began in 1973, after his settlement of a case alleging that his song “Come Together” had infringed the copyright in four words of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.” The rights to the song were the property of Big Seven Music Corp., a publishing company owned by Morris Levy, a music industry executive with alleged Mafia ties. For Levy, the situation wasn’t so Johnny be good, and he sued Lennon.   In resolving the copyright claim, Lennon agreed to include a trio of Big Seven-owned songs in a compilation album that he was making in which he performed rock ‘n’ roll hits from the 1950s. Levy was to receive certain royalties. Lennon shared a work-in-progress copy of the record with Levy. Despite it being a demo—a so-called rough mix—that was not yet record-release quality, Levy proceeded to sell it through television ads with mail-order fulfillment.

Bergen’s work is a mix of litigation play-by-play—including excerpts from the 5,000-page trial transcript—and anecdotes of his many encounters with Lennon that led to a close personal relationship between the two.

Bergen describes himself as a “big Beatles fan,” including seeing the Fab Four when they appeared at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens in 1964. Lennon was also one of the most famous people in America at the time. Surely there were challenges to having a client of this sort.

“Once I got over the shock of John Lennon walking into the conference room and sitting there and talking to me,” Bergen says, recalling their initial meeting, “it evolved that he was a client. And I treated him just like every other client that I’d ever had.”

A cool client

Bergen has much to say about the devotion that Lennon gave to the case. “John was really determined not to let Morris bully him,” Bergen tells me, explaining the reason behind his client’s intense interest in the matter. “I think he realized that he had made a mistake when he settled the ‘Come Together’ case. He’d now gotten into Morris’s clutches, and I think he decided ‘I’m not going to settle this case. We’re really going to be involved.’”

“John and Yoko were [in the courtroom] every day,” Bergen says of the weeks-long trial before Judge Thomas Griesa.

Bergen also calls Lennon “the best witness I ever represented or put on the stand in my 45-year career.” He describes Lennon as “very comfortable on the witness stand,” adding “I don’t think he was even slightly nervous.”

“I can’t think of one mistake he made,” Bergen recounts. “Witnesses get nervous. They start volunteering. We went over that. John did not volunteer. If he was asked a question, either on direct or cross examination, he answered the question. And that was it.”

Judging with an ear for music

Bergen gives credit for part of his success in the case—no contract found to exist between Lennon and Levy (affirmed on appeal); Lennon awarded contract damages on his counterclaim (reduced on appeal)—to Judge Griesa being a musician who played the piano and harpsichord in a classical music group.

Lennon also sought damages from Levy for injury to his reputation caused by the release of the shoddy Roots album. As a musician, according to Bergen, the judge had a trained ear and appreciation for Lennon’s creative process—which he testified to in detail.

After an open court playing of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame”—both the Roots and Rock ‘N’ Roll versions—the judge drew the following conclusion:

“I don’t think there is any comparison. The Rock ‘N’ Roll is so much clearer; the voice was very poor and indistinct on Roots, it was almost hidden there. I could not tell it was John Lennon singing or anybody singing; it was a voice. The elements, whatever they are, were all fuzzed up in Roots, and I don’t know whether you call it surface noise or what kind of noise, but it was fuzzy, and I would not get anything much out of it. Now, the Rock ‘N’ Roll, it seems to me, the voice was clear and distinct, and every other element was distinct.”

In later awarding Lennon $35,000 for damage to his reputation (affirmed on appeal), the court observed that “Lennon has attempted a variety of ventures both in popular music and avant-garde music. Lennon’s product tends to be somewhat more intellectual than the product of other artists. What this means in my view is that Lennon’s reputation and his standing are a delicate matter and that any unlawful interference with Lennon in the way that Levy and the Roots album accomplished must be taken seriously.”

On Dec. 8, 1980, Lennon was killed by a gunman outside the Dakota. Early the next morning, Bergen headed to the scene of the tragedy. “I passed places where John and I had walked together,” Bergen says. “I didn’t linger to reminisce. I felt an urgency to be where John had last spoken, breathed, laughed, where he had most recently been alive.”

Bergen’s work comes nearly a half-century since he put Lennon’s creative process on display in a lower Manhattan courtroom. The numerous bankers’ boxes of the file could have stayed buried in the lawyer’s garage. But Bergen just couldn’t let it be.

They arrived at India’s ‘spiritual capital’, Rishikesh, 54 years ago. The Beatles went on to explore India’s rich spiritual heritage, passionately practising meditation in a perfect Himalayan setting—a deep forest on a small hillock on the eastern banks of the Ganges. 

They played their guitars, wrote 48 iconic songs and sent countless postcards to their overseas friends. Their presence put India on the top of the world tourism map. 

At least one of them—John Lennon—gave the finishing touches to his romance, with the Japanese multimedia artist Yoko Ono.  

They wore Indian clothes, while the women accompanying them, including Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, donned saris and bindis all through their stay at the sprawling 14-acre ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—known worldwide for his movement called Transcendental Meditation. They ate vegetarian food and sat for long meditation sessions. Yogi is said to have invited the band to change the West’s attitude toward Indian spirituality and his Transcendental Meditation. 

The event caught global media attention as Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr arrived in February 1968 at the Maharishi’s ashram. Many recall that Rishikesh was little more than a village then, with a population of 20,000 or 30,000, which has now bloated up into an overgrown township. 

‘Chaurasi Kutiya’ (84 caves)—the bungalow where the Beatles stayed inside the erstwhile ashram, now part of Rajaji National Tiger Reserve—is in ruins, decayed by time. Most of the landmark buildings, living spaces, and meditation caves—igloo-shaped enclosures, built using sand and stones lugged from the Ganga’s banks—have crumbled. Shrubs, bushes and uprooted/fallen trees have overrun the complex—a sign of neglect and poor upkeep. 

Recently, when award-winning British photographer Michael Donald exhibited his photographs during a trip to Rishikesh, in which he captured the Beatles bungalow in its utter neglect, the legacy of the Beatles returned to haunt the town. Donald was on his first visit to Rishikesh when he came to know of the Beatles bungalow.

The splendour of the buildings, which were once a hub of activity, music and spiritual teachings, is now bereft of doors, windows and fittings. Few have signages on the large awnings, declaring them to be unsafe. 

Admits Dehradun-based journalist Raju Gusain, “Neither the UP government nor its heir, the Uttarakhand government, ever made any attempt to save this heritage. It’s in complete neglect. Right now, it’s looked after by the forest department but it has no plans for its conservation.”  

Dilapidated Beatles house at Rishikesh. Virender Singh Negi.

Gusain, whose curiosity about the Beatles’ stay at Rishikesh took him all the way to England, has a treasure trove of trivia. It has led many top filmmakers, like two-time Emmy Award-winning Canadian Paul Saltzman, to him and the Beatles’ stay at the ashram. 

“Many people may not be aware that Cynthia Lennon’s arrival and her stay with John Lennon at the bungalow were aimed at saving her marriage. Evidently, she failed. After initially sharing a room with John, she shifted to a separate room,” Gusain claims. 

Meanwhile, John’s love story with Yoko Ono blossomed. He used to write letters to her, mainly postcards, almost regularly. He also kept receiving her responses. 

Some of the rare and valuable coloured photographs of the Band are displayed here. Virender Singh Negi.

The post office, another landmark building at the ashram, is witness to their story. 

Being allergic to most of the food served at the ashram, Ringo Starr left early, while other members stayed over for 5-8 weeks. 

There is an interesting twist to their stay at the bungalow, especially when Prudence Farrow, actress Mia Farrow’s sister, arrived. She used to do long meditation sessions that lasted for hours, in complete seclusion. The famous Beatles song, Dear Prudence, was dedicated to her. It was written by John Lennon to coax her out of her seclusion. 

Some other songs written at the meditation centre include Let it go, as well as much of the albums White Album and Yellow Submarine. 

It was due to the effort of Gusain, along with Paul Saltzman, Tony Ellis, Raja Richard Ross, Anand Shrivastava and Laxman Shrivastava, that a photo gallery based on the Beatles’ stay was set up in 2018, during the 50^th year of their arrival at the ashram.  

“There are 22 photographs, all of the rare value, on display at the galley. The building where the galley is located was restored to its original form to give a decent look and is now visited by tourists, mostly foreigners, every day,” Gusain says. But many other iconic buildings are on the verge of collapse. 

The Beatles, during one of their trips to Dehradun, also visited the music store Pratap Music House, and befriend its owner (late), Ajit Singh, a fine Vichitra Veena player, whom they invited to their home for a musical retreat, recalls his sister Brijpal Aneja, who now looks after the store. 

The most fascinating places in the entire complex are 84 Kutiya and an adjacent hall. Half of the latter is underground and contains private mediation caves made of small stones and concrete. 

The bungalow with seven rooms where the Fab Four stayed used to have running water, electricity and proper ventilation, though they reportedly used to take daily dips in the Ganga. 

At the Artist’s Studio, one can see paint peeling off, broken cement patches and fading life-size graffiti of the band members with the Maharishi, amidst broken windows, doors and a cracked roof. Brightly coloured murals on the walls are partially disfigured. The printing press, where Maharishi used to get all his publications printed, has disappeared. A bathroom at the Beatles’ bungalow with a ceramic bathtub, is abandoned. Maharishi’s own bungalow and the Dnyanpeeth are also in ruins. 

Rajender Nautiyal, the forest officer who was instrumental in getting the 84 Kutia opened to the public in December 2015, says, “A great deal of effort had been put in to save the world heritage site.”  

The ashram’s lease expired in 1981. In 2003, the complex came under the jurisdiction of Rajaji National Park. “After the lease expired and it got notified within the tiger reserve, the forest department shut down its gates, refused entry to visitors but took no steps to preserve the land, buildings artefacts and assets. Anyone could sneak into the place from nearby villages and take away whatever they found. From doors and windows, even valuable furniture and rare photographs and books were stolen,” he recalls. No one bothered to stop the loot and destruction.  

Murals at the wall of Artist hall, Beatles Bungalow, Rishikesh. Virender Singh Negi

"Serving as a Forest Range Officer, it was painful to see the relics disappearing," says Nautiyal. Most international celebrities, filmmakers, foreign dignitaries and people associated with the band used to come searching for the place, but returned disappointed, he adds. 

“I somehow motivated them to write emails to the government, asking it to intervene and save the legacy. Finally, the Uttarakhand government decided in 2015 to open the bungalow to the public. I involved several foreign writers and filmmakers to write and erect proper signages for each building, for the benefit of visitors,” he recalls. 

Nautiyal, having already been posted out to Tehri, wonders if any further effort has been made to take things forward from where he had left. 

The opening of the bungalow became a huge event, attracting media attention the world over.  

During the Beatles’ stay over, a tiger was shot within the ashram, an act the band members totally disapproved of. The incident inspired their song “Continuing story of bungalow bill”, Nautiyal claims.

Uttarakhand tourism minister Satpal Maharaj tells Outlook that he has written a letter to PM Modi, seeking his attention for promoting ’84 Kutia’ as a world heritage site. “Within the government, I’ve discussed the issue with forest minister Subodh Uniyal, for working out a plan to develop it as a tourist destination, apart from undertaking necessary preservation works,” he says. 

Forest officials claim the department earns around Rs 1 crore a year from the entry fee. Foreigners are required to pay a higher Rs 600 per person compared to Rs 150 for Indians. 

Murals at the wall of Artist hall, Beatles Bungalow, Rishikesh. Virender Singh Negi

I made my first visit to Chaurasi Kutiya, now popularly known as the Beatles Ashram, in Rishikesh way back in 2003. The simple idea of my trip was to write a piece for the Hindustan Times, where I was working as a reporter. The visit took me to the erstwhile Ashram of spiritual Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and I was stunned by the landscape of the area, architect of the buildings and could feel the vibration.

To make my report interesting and insightful, I began searching for local persons who would provide me with details about the 1968 tour of the musical group and the Ashram history. But, I failed to locate any such person in the pilgrimage town. I extended my search through the internet and established contact with two time Emmy award-winning Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman, photographer Ram Panjabi and other persons who had stayed at Maharishi Ashram or visited there during the Fab Four stay.  

The process of obtaining information about the visit of the boys from Liverpool in the Indian Himalayas and other facts about Chaurasi Kutiya still continues. In fact, it has turned into an obsession.

After visiting all the old photo studios of Rishikesh and failing to trace old photographs of the Maharishi Ashram and the Beatles, I fixed my search outside Rishikesh. Adventure tour expert Avinash Kohli, considered a pioneer in river rafting in Rishikesh, was the only local tour operator who had some photographs of the Beatles and Maharishi at his camp near Shivpuri. Searching for veteran photographer Ram Panjabi in Bangalore and motivating him to track 1968 negatives and make some prints took almost seven years. In a similar fashion, I collected news clippings and documents from 1968 from different places.
 

Raju Gusain

These days I enjoy a new role of conducting tours of the Ashram. Call it a heritage guide or tourist guide. After hosting tours of friends, journalists and dignities, in 2017 I got the opportunity to host a tour of a team of the Beatles Story, a Beatles themed museum based in Liverpool (England). Walking with Diane Glover and Clare Ireland and narrating my stories was thrilling as I interacted with a team who conserves artefacts, and memories, and promotes the Beatles' legacy. With time I developed friendships with Maharishi followers- including Tony Ellis, Raja Richard, Tim Jones, etc- and family members and it has provided a booster dose to my search. Maharishi’s nephew Anand Shrivastava and his son Laxman Shrivastava were very cooperative and helpful. The duo extended help in reviving the Maharishi Ashram.

With time people are expressing interest in doing something for the revival of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ashram. This is a good sign! And we expect the old glory of the Ashram to return soon. 

(The author is a journalist based in Dehradun. He is also serving as a brand ambassador of the Beatles Story, Liverpool)  

May 31, 2022
Ringo Starr gets by with a little help from his friends at Rama tour launch

Winter was the first All-Starr up with the rocker Free Ride and while he was the MVP in terms of number of instruments played like during crowd fave, Frankenstein (during which Starr left the stage for a 15-minute break), it was Hay who proved to be the strongest vocalist on such Men At Work hits as Down Under, Overkill and Who Can It Be Now.

Stuart, meanwhile, brought the funk with Average White Band’s Pick Up The Pieces and Cut The Cake, and The Isley Brothers’ Work To Do.

Starr excelled again during I Wanna Be Your Man, Octopus’ Garden, Photograph and the two-hour show ending With A Little Help From My Friends/Give Peace a Chance, which included him doing a set of jumping jacks.

It was the fifth time the Fab Four timekeeper had launched a tour at the casino after a week of rehearsals,
and he explained why at a Thursday press conference at Casino Rama.

“It’s loose,” said Starr of the atmosphere. “For a week we live here, and we just go to the same stage. It’s good being in the same vicinity as where we’re rehearsing.”

During the COVID-19 downtime, of course, Peter Jackson released Get Back: The Beatles, which was a reworking of the 1970 Let It Be documentary that showed a much happier Fab Four working together than the original film.

“I’m sure it’ll show some interest, but we all have our core fans, they’ll be coming,” said Starr, who rotates the All-Starr lineup.

“What I’ve noticed with Ringo and the All-Starrs, when we first started (32 years ago), a lot of the audience was sort of my age and over the years it’s sort of gotten younger. The kids are coming in.”

Starr was also asked about The Beatles breakup and if he wanted a few more years with his Liverpool pals.

“We were lads when we started and as it went on we had wives and children, and we stopped touring and made great records,” he said. “And we all played well together, and we got on with each other and that’s just how it was. It came to a point eight years later — that blows me away, we did all that in eight years — it was time to leave.”

And despite his advancing age, he said he’ll never retire.

“I only ever wanted to be a drummer from 13. And it’s still there. I love to play. I’m a musician, I don’t have to retire. As long as I can pick up those sticks, I’ve got a gig.”

FRIDAY NIGHT SET LIST:
Matchbox
It Don’t Come Easy
What Goes On
Free Ride
Rosanna
Pick Up the Pieces
Down Under
Boys
I’m The Greatest
Yellow Submarine
Cut the Cake
Overkill
Africa
Work to Do
I Wanna Be Your Man
Johnny B. Goode
Who Can It Be Now
Hold the Line
Photograph
Act Naturally
With a Little Help From My Friends/Give Peace A Chance

Paul McCartney - 'GOT BACK' Tour begins in Spokane, Washington

May 30, 2022
Beatles roadie Mal Evans was born to play the befuddled Channel Swimmer in "Help!"

Had he lived into old age, Beatles roadie Mal Evans would have been 87 now. In August 1963, the 28-year-old giant of a man began the adventure of a lifetime when he joined the British band's cozy entourage, which included manager Brian Epstein and fellow roadie Neil Aspinall. With the release of their "She Loves You" single, the Beatles were poised to shift from a regional to a national sensation. And Mal would be right alongside them as they conquered the world, a jack of all trades who was willing to take on any duty — no matter how big or how small — in their service.

In February 1965, as the Beatles and director Richard Lester alighted in the Bahamas, Mal took on his famous role as the befuddled Channel Swimmer in "Help!," the group's second feature film. It was a bit part, to be sure, but a cameo appearance that never fails to warm the hearts of Beatles fans across the globe.

It was a role, in many ways, that Mal had been born to play. In his teen years, he had toned his large frame through a dedicated regime of swimming and cycling. He had been known to bike for hours — full days, even — on the rural outskirts of Liverpool. And when it came to swimming, there was scarcely a body of water that he didn't — simply couldn't — pass up. From the frigid Irish Sea to a serene country lake to the modest dimensions of a chlorinated motel pool, Mal lived to swim. And no mere soak would do. For Mal, thrashing about and playing in the shallows was for amateurs. He preferred the vigorous exertions of a breaststroke to the comparatively pedestrian aquatic ministrations of ordinary folk.

When it came to "Help!," Lester and his production team couldn't have dreamt up a better role for him to play. Humble to a fault, Mal couldn't wait to take his place on the set. When Lester called for action, Mal was treading water just off the beach at Nassau. As the wayward Channel Swimmer, he was clad in a bathing cap while searching in vain for the White Cliffs of Dover. As it turned out, Mal's first day on the set would be anything but amiable.

"As the scene is finalizing on the beach," he later wrote in his memoirs. "I had to swim out to sea for one-half mile and tread water until the scene is ready to be shot. The film crew are situated higher up on the beach and suddenly, Dick Lester is shouting at me saying, 'Come in Mal. Come back Mal!' And so, just thinking they weren't ready for the scene, I swam leisurely to shore, not knowing at the time there was a huge stingray chasing me!"

Safely standing with the crew back on the beach, Mal spotted the giant fish, which in his estimation was more than 15 feet long. But his hair-raising experience didn't end there. In mid-March, Lester's production shifted a continent away to Austria, where Mal reprised his role.

As with the Bahamas, what should have been a simple cameo appearance turned into something much more harrowing. Beatles press officer Tony Barrow would never forget the sight of Mal, clad only in his bathing suit against the bitter cold. "Poor Mal must have been absolutely frozen," Barrow wrote in a column for "The Beatles Book." "All he was wearing was an old fashioned swimming costume with cap and goggles and a very thick layer of grease to protect him from the cold. Everyone was a bit concerned that he would freeze to death before the scene was over."

Working amidst the snow-covered mountains, the scene called for the Beatles to be engaged in a good-natured curling match, when one of the film's villains substitutes a bomb for a curling stone, which blows a hole in the ice and allows the Channel Swimmer to surface. "This scene had to be shot three times," Mal recalled, because "I was so cold, I just couldn't speak! Going down again and coming up, I spoke my lines, but on submerging again, could not stay down and kept popping to the surface."

At this point, "somebody had the bright idea of putting a large weight in the bottom of the hole for me to hang onto, with the instructions from director Dick Lester, 'Stay down as long as you can Mal so we can finish the shot.' Being a real trooper, after I said my lines I submerged, took hold of the weight and stayed down holding my breath."

And that's where he stayed, holding out as long as he possibly could. Unbeknownst to Mal, the director had been shouting — with increasing desperation — "You can come up now. Mal, come up now!" Meanwhile, the roadie was nestled below the surface, pushing himself to the limit in order to land the scene.

"Finally, self-preservation brought me up for air," Mal wrote. "Wrapped in a towel, I walked in my bare feet about 400 yards to the local police station, while the whole crew stood up and cheered. I spent two hours in the hottest bath with a bottle of rum, thawing out. It was pins and needles from head to toe, but the cheers and the clapping made it all worthwhile."

Mal's bravura turn as the Channel Swimmer was a highlight, to be certain, in the roadie's storied career with the Beatles. But coming fewer than two years into his tenure with the band, it was still early days yet. By the mid-1960s, he had proven his mettle among the entourage for his ability to lug gigantic amplifiers onto some far-flung stage. And he prided himself on being able to assemble Ringo Starr's drum kit in a matter of seconds.

But the quality that would see him through, that would ensure his place among their tightly knit circle, was far less tangible than his capacity for hoisting heavy objects with minimal complaint. By the time that Help! enjoyed its gala premiere at the London Pavilion that July, as he and his wife Lily mingled with the Beatles and their friends and relations, he knew that he had made it. 

Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography of the life and work of Beatles producer George Martin and the host of "Everything Fab Four," a podcast about the Beatles distributed by Salon. He is also the author of "Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles," published in 2019 in celebration of the album’s 50th anniversary, and "John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life." His newest project is the authorized biography and archive of Beatles road manager Mal Evans, due out in 2023.

Beatles Roadie Mal Evans Diary: Read by his son Gary

Beatles Autograph Update: Mal Evans Handwritten Partial Song Lyrics

 

Ronnie Hawkins, the big, boisterous Southern rockabilly singer who called Canada home and helped mentor the first band from this country inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has died.

His wife, Wanda, confirmed to The Canadian Press that Hawkins died Sunday morning after a long illness at age 87. "He went peacefully and he looked as handsome as ever," she said in a phone interview with CP.

The musician known as The Hawk didn't make his reputation in the studio. His highest charting single in the U.S. reached No. 26, and, not a natural songwriter, most of his recorded work consisted of covers. But his stage shows were raucous affairs, characterized by his booming voice, humorous stage patter and acrobatic moves like his "camel walk."

Hawkins, born and raised in Arkansas, got wind of steady work available on the Canadian bar circuit from Conway Twitty, among others. He began touring in Ontario in 1958, and by the time he was featured in a CBC Telescope documentary nine years later, he was ensconced in Canada.

"You know, I don't know anything about Canadian politics, the price of wheat or Niagara Falls," he said in the documentary. "But I sure do know one thing: I sure dig it up here."

Hawkins's band over the years included musicians and performers who went on to have their own success, including Roy Buchanan, Beverly D'Angelo, David Foster, Lawrence Gowan and Pat Travers.    But it was a specific five who would cement Hawkins's reputation in music lore as an elder statesman. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson eventually left Hawkins en masse for the United States. They backed Bob Dylan and then made their own mark as the Band, with critically hailed albums and hits such as The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Up on Cripple Creek and The Weight.   "We should thank Ronnie Hawkins in being so instrumental in us coming together and for teaching us the 'code of the road,' so to speak," guitarist Robertson said when the Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.   For reasons that have been debated — his love of Canada undoubtedly playing a part — Hawkins couldn't fully grasp the brass ring or allow U.S. music industry heavyweights to mould his career. The larger-than-life character seemed content carving out a reputation north of the border.   "I brought the first blues here. Nobody had ever heard of Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, B.B. [King] or anyone in Canada," he once boasted, perhaps dubiously, to music journalist Larry LeBlanc.   Hawkins, often called Rompin' Ronnie, won a Juno Award for country male vocalist of the year in 1982 and received lifetime achievement awards from both the Junos in 1996 and the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) in 2007. Always retaining U.S. citizenship, in 2014 he accepted an honorary appointment as officer of the Order of Canada.   As described in Helm's autobiography This Wheel's On Fire, Hawkins often had to charm a young musician's parents to fill out his band. His recruitment pitch to prospective band members was less G-rated and usually included the promise they'd get more sex "than Sinatra," though in less euphemistic terms.   Hawkins may not have sold millions, but he did well enough to reside at a sprawling multimillion-dollar property in Stoney Lake in Ontario's Kawarthas region. As recently as 2016, he was hosting longtime friends Gordon Lightfoot and Kris Kristofferson for a session at his home studio there.   His was a life filled with colourful experiences. He recorded with everyone from the great Duane Allman to The Happy Hooker author Xaviera Hollander, portrayed Bob Dylan in Dylan's widely panned film Renaldo and Clara — while also acting in another notable box office flop, Heaven's Gate — and was among the Canadian contributors to the famine benefit song Tears Are Not Enough in 1985.   John Lennon and Yoko Ono guesting at his farm during an extended Toronto stay in 1969 was a particular favourite Hawkins story. He would tell more than one CBC host over the years of a pot-smoking session that included both Lennon and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.    True or tall tale? One often didn't know with Hawkins, but he definitely performed at inauguration parties in Washington, D.C., in 1993 for the first U.S. president from Arkansas.   "If the world had more people like Ronnie Hawkins, we'd do less stupid things to each other, we'd hurt fewer people, we'd have a lot more laughs," Bill Clinton said in the 2004 documentary Hawkins: Still Alive and Kickin'. "I've never met another one like him." John and Yoko at Ronnie Hawkins farm during 1969

Hawkins was born on Jan. 10, 1935, in Huntsville, Ark., his family moving to Fayetteville when he was a child. He made it to university and enlisted in the National Guard and the army, but for the most part his main interests were cars, girls and, as early as age 12, music.

Hawkins began playing in local bars in 1953, with young Arkansan Levon Helm joining the fold about five years later. In 1959, Hawkins scored a deal with Roulette Records, leading that year to minor hits Forty Days and Mary Lou and an appearance on American Bandstand.

Robbie Robertson, a 16-year-old from Toronto, joined weeks after that TV appearance. The rest of the members of what became the Band were found in southwestern Ontario in 1961-62: Rick Danko from Simcoe, Richard Manuel from Stratford and the classically trained Garth Hudson from London.

Hawkins, Helm wrote in his autobiography, "molded us into the wildest, fiercest speed-driven bar band in America."

Hawkins favoured fast, blues-based material but tried to adjust as music trends changed, recording folk and country albums, though they didn't translate into mass success.

By mid-decade, his band was chafing at Hawkins's control and the skint life of backing musicians. Hawkins also had a family life now, after meeting wife Wanda at Toronto's Concord Tavern.

"We wanted to explore a deeper musicality," Robertson told CBC in 2011. "Loved him, but we needed to go and find out what was around the corner."

Hawkins travelled to San Francisco for the live swan song of the Band's original lineup, a 1976 concert captured on screen in Martin Scorsese's iconic rock documentary The Last Waltz. Performing Who Do You Love?, Hawkins was on the bill with the likes of Dylan, Van Morrison and Canadians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.

Hawkins enjoyed that bit of revelry and recognition, as the early 1970s hadn't always been kind. For his ever-touring band, it had been a period of much turnover. He was an avid drinker then, and those years also included a failed club venture and a marijuana possession rap. 

Hawkins would eventually be feted himself at benefit shows. For his 60th birthday at Toronto's Massey Hall, performers included Danko, Helm and Hudson, as well as Sylvia Tyson and Jeff Healey. After quadruple bypass surgery in 2002, the same year he was honoured on Canada's Walk of Fame, a tribute concert featured the Tragically Hip and Tom Cochrane, among others.

Glastonbury and Stella McCartney team up to release upcycled vest for charity

The limited edition T-shirt (Glastonbury Festival/PA)

Glastonbury Festival and fashion designer Stella McCartney have teamed up to release an upcycled vest in support of War Child’s Emergency Fund.

The funds raised from the sale of the limited edition T-shirt, which features a blue sky, green field and psychedelic rainbow, will help children caught in Ukraine and other conflicts.

The vest is a repurposed version of a design McCartney created for the festival in 2007, which was inspired by the 1970s airbrushed T-shirts her parents Linda and Sir Paul McCartney used to get made.

The item became a rare collector’s piece, but a recent warehouse audit has unveiled several boxes of vests which had not been sold.

As part of McCartney’s drive to reduce our impact on the planet, the original vests have now been upcycled with a new mushroom artwork to celebrate “fungi as the future of fashion and our planet”.

The limited edition vests are on sale via Glastonbury’s official online shop, with all proceeds going to War Child’s Emergency Fund.

The highly anticipated festival returns in June after being cancelled for the past two years due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It boasts a star-studded line-up which sees Sir Paul, Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish headlining across the weekend.

Eilish, 20, will headline on Friday, becoming the festival’s youngest ever solo headliner, and former Beatle Sir Paul will front Saturday night – the second time he has headlined the Pyramid Stage after a performance in 2004.

American rapper Lamar will make his debut at the festival while closing proceedings on the Sunday, while Diana Ross will play the legends slot.

Glastonbury 2022 is scheduled to take place from June 22 to June 26 and tickets are sold out, organisers have said.

May 28, 2022
Michael Sokil's excellent cover of "A Day In The Life"

"Ottawa, Ont.: Beatles in the snow"


American comedian Dick van Dyke visits the film set for "A Hard Day's Night"




May 27, 2022
Ringo Starr kicks off North American tour at Casino Rama
'

Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band answered questions from the media ahead of their weekend performances at Casino Rama. The shows will kick off Starr's first North American tour since 2019. Greg McGrath-Goudie/OrilliaMatters

Following a two-year hiatus due to the global pandemic, Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band are touring North America for the first time since 2019.

The tour begins with two shows at Casino Rama on Friday and Saturday. This weekend’s performances mark the fifth time Starr has kicked off a tour at Casino Rama.

Starr and his bandmates held a news conference this afternoon to discuss their return to live performances, as well as their recent projects.

“In 2019 we played a tour, and in February of 2020 I was getting ready for the tour in May, and then by early March, it’s all gone,” Starr said. “That’s what it’s all about, is playing and having an audience … A long time ago, we’d play anywhere just so we could play.”

Starr released his most recent album, What’s My Name, in October 2019 and his most recent EP, Change the World, was released in September 2021.

Aside from his own work, Starr continues to collaborate on other musicians’ projects. He also spent considerable time painting during the pandemic. He released a book on his artwork, Painting Is My Madness Too, in 2020, as a follow-up on a 2008 book about his art.

“In the pandemic, I had to do something, and one of them was going to the gym nearly every day, and then I started painting,” Starr said. “It just unfolded that some people said, ‘You can have your own art gallery on its own. How crazy is that?’”

In 2021, a Peter Jackson-directed documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, was released, featuring unseen material on the making of the 1970 album Let It Be.

“Jackson did a great job,” Starr said. “I mean, I was stunned at first because we thought it’d be a two-hour show. It’s six hours, but easy to watch, you know, even if you weren’t in the band.”

Starr said he has noticed new waves of fans being drawn to his work through his music and projects such as Jackson’s documentary.

“When I first started, a lot of the audience was sort of my age. Over the years, it’s got younger,” he said. “The kids are coming in, and the documentary, I thought, was so great.”

When asked what keeps him going forward after such an illustrious career, Starr, 81, simply cited an undying love for music and performing.

“People are saying, ‘Well, you know, what about retirement?’ I’m a musician. I don’t have to retire. As long as I can pick up those sticks, I’ve got a gig,” he told OrilliaMatters.

“I was inspired at 13, and that has never left me — the dream and the joy,” he said. “It’s still there; I love to play. My mother had this great line … she said, ‘You know what, son? I always feel like you’re happiest when you’re playing,’ and deep inside I am.”

The current members of Starr’s All-Starr Band include Steve Lukather, Edgar Winter, Colin Hay, Hamish Stuart, Warren Ham and Gregg Bissonette.

Drummer Alan White plays his drums in this undated photo. White, the longtime drummer for progressive rock pioneers Yes who also played on projects with John Lennon and George Harrison, has died. He was 72. (Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times via AP)

SEATTLE (AP) — Alan White, the longtime drummer for progressive rock pioneers Yes who also played on projects with John Lennon and George Harrison, has died. He was 72.

White’s death was announced on his Facebook page by his family. The post said he died at his Seattle-area home Thursday after a brief illness. Just days earlier Yes had announced that due to health issues White would not take part in the band’s upcoming tour of the United Kingdom to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the iconic album “Close to the Edge.”

White joined Yes in 1972, replacing original drummer Bill Bruford. In a band noted for frequent lineup changes, White was a constant and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Yes in 2017.

Though he didn’t play on “Close to the Edge,” he performed on every subsequent Yes studio album over nearly five decades, including the band’s latest release, “The Quest,” which came out last year.

White stayed with the band through its many iterations. A trailblaizing act in the progressive rock scene in England that grew in popularity in the early 1970s alongside bands like Genesis, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, Yes was especially known for its intricate arrangements and the musical skill of its individual members.

When progressive rock fell out of fashion in the late 1970s many of the bands associated with the genre struggled.

Following another lineup change, Yes, with White still behind the drum kit, reinvented itself in the 1980s as a harder edged band that appealed to younger listeners more attuned to heavy metal and the visual cues of music videos. In 1983 Yes released the smash hit album “90125."

A longtime Seattle-area resident, White was born in Pelton, County Durham, England, in 1949. His family said he began piano lessons at age 6 and playing the drums when he was 12.

White played with bands in England throughout the 1960s. In 1969, he was asked by John Lennon to join his Plastic Ono Band. In an interview with The Seattle Times in 2021, White said he thought the call from the famous Beatle was a prank.

“A voice announced, ‘Hello, this is John Lennon,’” White said. “I thought it was a mate pulling my leg, put the receiver down, and went back to the kitchen."

White played a 1969 concert in Toronto with Lennon's band, which also included guitarist Eric Clapton. White also played with another Beatle, contributing drums to George Harrison's 1970 solo album “All Things Must Pass.”

In the statement announcing his death, his family wrote: “Alan was many things to many people: a certified rock star to fans around the world; band mate to a select few, and gentleman and friend to all who met him.”

Chris Grygiel, The Associated Press

The Beatles star Paul McCartney has been very open about how he has written songs for the band throughout his career. From composing Yesterday in his sleep to writing Hey Jude for John Lennon's son, Julian, McCartney has done it all.   But one of the most surprising came when he was struck by the words of a touching poem.   McCartney based the composition of a song on the poem "Cradle Song", which originated from Thomas Dekker's play, Patient Grissel. The Liverpudlian star reportedly saw the play when he was a child with his father.   The play, and poem, were originally published in 1603, hundreds of years before McCartney was even born.   As revealed in the 1997 book, Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, the star confessed: "I liked the words so much."   But there was one problem.   McCartney could not play the song as it was written, because he lacked the skills necessary.   He said: "I thought it was very restful, a very beautiful lullaby - but I couldn’t read the melody, not being able to read music." So, he did the next best thing. "I just took the words and wrote my own music. I didn’t know at the time it was four hundred years old.   With the poem's words ringing in his ears, McCartney penned the Abbey Road song Golden Slumbers.   McCartney revealed the slow and thoughtful track was derived from the epic 17th-century poem.   He said: "I remember trying to get a very strong vocal on it, because it was such a gentle theme, so I worked on the strength of the vocal on it, and ended up quite pleased with it."   McCartney wasn't the only person in the Fab Four who enjoyed the track. George Harrison also praised the song, calling the album as a whole "pretty good".   The Quiet Beatle said in the book George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters that "Because" was his favourite track. He added: "Just because I like three-part harmony. We’ve never done something like that for years, I think, since a B-side, ‘If you wear red tonight', and 'what I said tonight.'”   He went on: "So I like that. I like, I dunno - I like lots of them. I like ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ and ‘Golden Slumbers’ and things."   Golden Slumbers was never released as a single, but it has gained a lot of popularity as the years have gone on.

In recent decades, punk has come to represent a totalitarian attitude to music that I doubt ever really existed. Sure, groups like The Ramones and The Sex Pistols hated on prog bands and rarely diverged from their three-minute, four-chord mentality, but the bulk of the groups we associate with the punk era were far less absolute. Blondie is the perfect example. While associated with a movement that supposedly reviled pop music, their output was always pretty radio-friendly. It’s little wonder, then, that Debbie Harry and Company, were unashamed fans of The Beatles, a group who reinvented pop music with nearly every album they released.

Chris Stein once opened up about how The Beatles influenced one of Blondie’s most beloved hits: “Even ‘Heart Of Glass’ was a subversive thing for a so-called punk band,” he told The Sun. “But, at the same time, our role models were Bowie and The Beatles,” he said, before adding: “You never really knew what to expect from them. The Ramones had their sound and identity and they stuck to it. That’s not what we set out to do. We have a broader musical palette… but the punk attitude prevails!”

As a tribute to The Beatles, Blondie took on a cover of one of the group’s earliest recordings, ‘Please Please Me’. Dripping with the pearlescent guitar lines that made Blondie so famous, the rendition appeared on 2011’s Panic of Girls, the group’s first album of new material in eight years. Recorded between October and December 2009, in Hoboken, New Jersey, it was one of only two albums Blondie recorded outside of Manhattan, the first being 1980’s Autoamerican, which was recorded in Los Angeles. It was also the first Blondie LP not to feature original keyboardist Jimmy Destri, who decided not to take part in the project.

‘Please Please Me’ was originally written by Lennon and McCartney in the style of Roy Orbison on September 11th, 1962, and was recorded shortly afterwards. Initially, it was a sultry ballad, but George Martin suggested that it would sound better at a higher tempo. Speaking to The Observer Muisc Monthly in 2006, Martin said: “The songs the Beatles first gave me were crap. This was 1962 and they played a dreadful version of ‘Please Please Me’ as a Roy Orbison-style ballad. But I signed them because they made me feel good to be with them, and if they could convey that on a stage then everyone in the audience would feel good, too. So I took ‘Love Me Do’ and added some harmonica, but it wasn’t financially rewarding even though Brian Epstein bought about 2,000 copies. Then we worked for ages on their new version of ‘Please Please Me,’ and I said: ‘Gentlemen, you’re going to have your first number one.'”

Stream Blondie’s effort, below.

May 20, 2022
Fab Four performs "She Loves You" at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California

And now here they are, The Beatles performing "You Can't Do That" at the Festival Hall,
Melbourne, Australia




May 19, 2022
‘The Beatles: Get Back’ Documentary Blu-Ray/DVD Release Date

Acclaimed director Peter Jackson’s stunning docuseries The Beatles: Get Back will now be available to own on a Blu-ray Collector’s Set and DVD. The series offers unprecedented access to the world’s most iconic band as they prepare to record the Let It Be album.

Fans and critics everywhere have celebrated the “mesmerizing” (Kenneth Womack, Salon.com), “epic” (Tim Glanfield, RadioTimes.com) and “extraordinarily intimate” series (Sheila O’Malley, RogerEbert.com).

A winner at both the Producers Guild of America and American Cinema Editors Awards, The Beatles: Get Back is also Certified-Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes™. Travel back in time and witness the creative process of the Fab Four by adding The Beatles: Get Back to your collection on Blu-ray and DVD July 12.

Directed by Peter Jackson, The Beatles: Get Back is a three-part documentary series that takes audiences back in time to the band’s intimate recording sessions. The documentary showcases the warmth, camaraderie and creative genius that defined the legacy of the iconic foursome, and is compiled from 60 hours of unseen footage shot in January 1969 (under the supervision of Michael Lindsay-Hogg and his director of photography Tony Richmond) and more than 150 hours of unheard audio, all of which has been brilliantly restored. Also featured – for the first time in its entirety – is The Beatles’ last live performance as a group: the unforgettable rooftop concert on London’s Savile Row, as well as other songs and classic compositions featured on the band’s final two albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be.

Cast includes John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.

Directed by 

Peter Jackson

Produced by 

Jonathan Clyde

Clare Olssen

Peter Jackson

Producers 

Paul McCartney

Ringo Starr

Yoko Ono Lennon

Olivia Harrison

Executive Produced by 

Jeff Jones

Ken Kamins

Drive My Car - The Beatles - Full Instrumental Recreation (4K) - Featuring Sam Popkin

May 18, 2022
Here is Paul McCartney recently performing "Love Me Do" at the Oakland Arena

The four finalists with Mike McCartney outside 20 Forthlin Road

The four finalists will be performing live in the front room on 17 June

Dullan in Sir Paul's childhood bedroom in Forthlin Road

On this day in 1967, The Beatles begin recording sessions for
"You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)"


Culled from Facebook



May 16, 2022
Is The Beatles '1' Their GREATEST Greatest Hits Album?

Once, in the early days of her relationship with John Lennon, someone told Yoko Ono how to be happy. She should stick to the background, and not talk too much. Maybe give up her work — the art career she had, by that point, spent almost a decade building. In the background she might have been a more perfect muse. “The artist absorbs an element from their muse that has nothing to do with words,” Pattie Boyd, who was married to George Harrison when Ono met Lennon, told Taylor Swift in 2018, “just the purity of their essence.” Boyd would know — ranker.com puts her first in its list of “The All Time Greatest Muses in the Music World.” Ono only manages eleventh.

Ono tells the story of how she was supposed to be happy in a spoken intro to a live version of “Coffin Car,” a song on her 1973 album “Feeling the Space.” She describes the feeling of those first years with Lennon, when a whole society called her ugly (she’d always thought of herself as an attractive woman), hurled racist insults at her and told her that they wanted her to die. She developed a stutter. “She likes to ride a coffin car,” Ono sings on the track. “People throwing kisses for the first time / Showering flowers, ringing bells / Telling each other, how nice she is.” Under her voice, the piano bounces along. Maybe this is what they meant by background. Everyone loves you after you’re dead. 

“Who is Yoko Ono?” the critic and journalist Donald Brackett asks. For a long time, the answer seemed clear: She was the girlfriend who broke up the Beatles, the celebrity-by-marriage who dabbled in art and music. Brackett’s biography of the conceptual artist, songwriter and activist, “Yoko Ono: An Artful Life,” tries to weave together a more comprehensive answer from narrative threads that form a dense knot of life. Is she a neglected society child, shuttled between Japan and San Francisco, seeing her father only by appointment? A rebellious art student teaching calligraphy to pay the rent and setting fire to her paintings in a downtown loft? An avant-garde outsider, a mother, a lover, earnest or ironic, one half of the most famous couple in the world? “Why is it such a perennial youthful rite of passage to misunderstand, to underestimate, even to hate her?” Lindsay Zoladz wanted to know in a 2015 essay for Vulture.

Brackett’s book is part of a rehabilitation of Yoko Ono’s public image that has been taking place in recent years. There is Zoladz’s piece, which came out the same year Ono was the subject of an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art of 125 works from her early career. There is the MoMA catalogue and many more like it, from smaller galleries (her first North American retrospective toured to the AGO in 2002). There are interviews and profiles from the same magazines that had at one time viciously mocked her and accused her, over and over, of ruining John Lennon and breaking up the Beatles (Yoko Ono did neither of these things). There is a book, “Reaching Out with No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono” by the post-punk musical and performance artist Lisa Crystal Carver, and writings by Ono herself, including numerous reprints and translations of her 1964 book of instructions, “Grapefruit.”

The American artist David Horvitz recently produced a T-shirt edition that proclaims, in finely lined caps, JOHN LENNON BROKE UP FLUXUS. Ono and Lennon show up regularly on fashion and bridal blog posts with headings such as “Great Outfits in Fashion History.” A 2014 Huffington post piece about Ono having a well-documented good time listening to Daft Punk perform “Get Lucky” ran with the headline “Sorry Taylor, Yoko Ono’s the Grammys Real Dancing Queen.” Ono had already written the perfect song to go with it — 2013’s “Bad Dancer.” “Place your bet, watch your step,” she tells us. “I’m a bad dancer with no regrets.”

We live in a cultural moment that is interested in wives and muses, in the women not heard from, the people cropped out of the picture. We marvel at the enigma and ingenuity of Véra Nabokov and admire Lee Miller for her experiments with Man Ray and her own groundbreaking photography. Yet Ono challenges us. Even when we adore her we struggle to see her.

Yoko Ono is, Brackett argues in his prologue, as much a brand as a person — “an esthetic phenomenon — admired, vilified, and profoundly misunderstood in each role.” She emerges and retreats behind a public persona not fully within her control. Is she a witch, as her album title proclaims? Her early life has elements of a fairy tale. Child Yoko was a princess in a gilded cage, surrounded by servants and starved for attention. She watched the city in which she was born bombed to near oblivion. She bartered for food on a country road, conjuring ice cream dinners from summer clouds. She is, Brackett says, “a global apostle of wonderment.” When she met Lennon, lost and disillusioned in his life as a Beatle, she became not simply his lover or even his collaborator but the agent of his re-enchantment.

The central argument of Brackett’s book is that Ono is not a malevolent force, or a muse with an art career on the side. Instead she is a profound source of influence: for Lennon as a songwriter and human being, for a generation of shrieking, wailing, punk singers, and for the Fluxus scene that grew around her early loft parties.

To see her influence, we need to understand what she’s influencing, the raw material she finds. We need to witness the warring egos of the Beatles’ last days, Lennon’s destructive streak, and the alchemical potential of his need meeting hers. To those who still insist on seeing in Yoko the death of the Beatles and all that was good, Brackett offers a portrait of Ono as “mentor and inspiration,” Lennon’s “actual reason for living, or at least surviving.”

The narrative oscillates between foreground and background, Yoko and everyone around her. The longest of its three sections is the one in the middle, which charts Ono’s relationship with Lennon from their first encounter in a London gallery to his murder in 1980. But the consequence of this focus on Lennon, necessary as it may be to make Brackett’s point, is that Ono’s story recedes into the background as she becomes the reflection of her husband’s world.

It’s hard at times not to think of one of Ono’s instructions from her 1964 book “Grapefruit”: Don’t watch Rock Hudson. Only watch Doris Day. When the two briefly separate in 1971, just before their move to New York, Brackett quotes a moment of ambivalence from Ono about the relationship that defined her life. “Suddenly my brain, which had always tried to make myself so small in this relationship, opened up.”

Why is it so hard to see the full force of Ono’s influence? It was there from the beginning, in her relationship with Lennon most of all. Even when she was making herself small, even when she was stuttering. “Imagine,” Lennon’s biggest solo hit, is all her. In the music video it says “This is not here” over the door to the couple’s house. That’s Ono. The all-white living room is Ono, too, and the cover art, and the quote on the back of the album (“Cloud Piece,” from “Grapefruit”). “Imagine was inspired by Yoko’s ‘Grapefruit,’” Lennon later recounted. “But I was selfish and unaware enough to take her contribution without acknowledging it.”

As her notoriety grows, Brackett gives us Ono as an artist exerting her influence, stretching the limits of her voice on the albums she records, with John and without him. “I was dying to scream,” Ono tells us. “I wanted to throw blood.” Brackett connects her vocal experiments and signature scream to the techniques she learned studying kabuki and opera as a high school student in Tokyo after the war. He argues — successfully, and with no shortage of examples — for her importance as a precursor to punk and as an enduring favourite of DJs, remixes of her songs hitting No. 1 on the dance charts in the 21st century. He reminds us that the New York Times said in 2016 that she sounded like the future and that Lennon told an interviewer, unequivocally and with an expletive to make it clear, “She’s taught me everything I f--ing know.”

Did we come around to Yoko only after John died? Was his the coffin car that set her free? She hasn’t escaped criticism as a widow, even from those who love her. “How could she sell John Lennon socks and ties with Kmart,” Carver wants to know. How can she be both profoundly open-hearted (to the world at large) and plain mean to people in it (Lennon’s ex, Cynthia, and his son Julian after John died?) She surely has her reasons, but she hasn’t given them to us. She is, she told the Guardian in 2016, still careful about what she says. “Oh Yoko Ono,” writes Carver, “you trouble me so.”

“Is Ono’s art any less subversive when we’re living in a world that loves her?” Zoladz wants to know. Is the prospect of a dozen celebrities earnestly singing “Imagine” more cringy or less when it’s a Yoko Ono song (she received an official writing credit in 2017)? On YouTube, the video for her performance of “Voice Piece for Soprano” at her MoMA show has 1.7 million views and 4.3K likes, but the comments are turned off. What might people have said that was so awful?

Ono, for her part, has always followed a different impulse. Visitors coming to the piece at MoMA encountered only the microphone and speakers that Ono uses in her video clip, and three simple instructions: “Scream 1. against the wind 2. against the wall 3. against the sky.” Ono, in her version, screams like the virtuoso she is. You can try your version anywhere you’d like. Go ahead, take a breath. Scream into the wind, the wall, the sky. Yoko Ono would love to hear you.

May 14, 2022

The Beatles Discovering the Moog on Abbey Road

Moog Modular

Bernie Krause, 1971

During the Jackie Lomax session Bernie Krause was overdubbing strange sounds while fussing with his electronic machinery. Harrison, ever on the lookout for new sounds, was mesmerized. He asked Krause to stay after the session and play the instrument for him. He also instructed the sound engineer to keep the tape rolling, Krause unaware of that detail. Pieces from that recording found their way into the track No Time or Space from Harrison’s early 1969 album Electronic Sounds on the Zapple label, an offshoot of Apple geared towards Avant-garde and experimental music. If 25 minutes of what amounts to a synth sound effects demo is your thing, here it is:

Moog Modular with Ribbon Controller

On the afternoon of that August day that started with the cross walk photo shoot, Lennon used only one component from the array of modules that comprised the Moog Modular 3. It was the white noise generator, starting at 5:15 into ‘I Want You’ and building up, with George Harrison controlling the knobs, for two and a half minutes to the end of the song and then, poof. Nothing. End of side 1.

That poof materialized almost two weeks later on August 20, a date that holds significance in Beatles history: it marks the last time all four were in the studio at the same time. Lennon remembered how that abrupt ending to the song came about in his less-than-scientific description: “It’s pretty heavy at the ending, you know, because we used the Moog synthesizer on it, and the range of the sound is from minus whatever to way over…Well, you can’t hear it.  That instrument, the Moog synthesizer, can do all the sounds, you know, all ranges of sounds, and we did that on the end.  If you’re a dog, you can hear a lot more.”

As usual, the most accurate account is by sound engineer extraordinaire Geoff Emerick: “And then there was the matter of how the song would end. When they recorded the backing track, The Beatles had just played on and on, with no definitive conclusion, so I assumed I would be doing a fade-out.  John had other ideas, though.  He let the tape play until just twenty seconds or so before the take broke down, and then all of a sudden he barked out an order:  ‘Cut the tape here.’”

“’Cut the tape?’ I asked, astonished.  We had never ended a song that way, and an abrupt ending like that didn’t make any sense unless the track was going to run directly into another one.  But that wasn’t the case here, because it had already been decided that ‘I Want You’ would close side one of the album.  My protestations had no impact on John:  his decision was absolute.  ‘You heard what I said, Geoff; cut the tape.’  I glanced over at George Martin, who simply shrugged his shoulders, so I got out the scissors and sliced the tape at precisely the point John indicated…and that’s the way side one of ‘Abbey Road’ ends.  At the time, I thought he was out of his mind, but due to the shock factor it ended up being incredibly effective, a Lennon concept that really worked.”

Here is the song in all its white noise glory:

May 12, 2022
‘Electronic Sound’: George Harrison’s Epic Musical Exploration
‘

In his introduction to the George Harrison: The Apple Years 1968-1975 box set, Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers says that Electronic Sound “hangs on the wall of my studio, just next to my own Moog modular, beaming inspiration straight to my brain.” Rowlands had bought a second-hand copy of the LP from a Japanese record shop in the mid-90s and was amazed by what he heard.

Released on May 9, 1969, George Harrison’s Electronic Sound was the second – and final record released on The Beatles’ Apple Records subsidiary, Zapple Records, and was yet more proof that George was ahead of his time and, in many respects, the most musically inquisitive of the four Beatles.

Avant Garde exploration

Electronic Sound is made up of two long pieces of music, originally one on each side of the LP, that are performed on the Moog Synthesizer IIIP, purchased by George from its inventor, Robert Moog. The record was made against a background of musical exploration that characterized London and Los Angeles in 1968. Avant-garde ideas were everywhere.

Side Two of the album, titled “No Time Or Space,” was the first to be recorded and was done in Los Angeles in November 1968. George had finished work on The Beatles (aka “The White Album”) and had flown to America’s West Coast to produce Jackie Lomax’s Apple album, Is This What You Want?, at Sound Recorders Studio in Hollywood.

Lomax’s album featured a Moog that had been brought to the studio by Bernie Krause, who, along with musical partner Paul Beaver, had recorded The Nonesuch Guide To Electronic Music earlier in 1968, and was acting as something of a salesman for Robert Moog’s invention. It was following work on the Lomax album that George, with Krause’s help, recorded the 25-minute piece.

Side One of the LP, “Under The Mersey Wall,” is an 18-minute piece that references the river on which Liverpool is built, and it was recorded at Kinfauns, George’s home in Esher, Surrey, in February 1969. The title also refers to a weekly column in The Liverpool Echo, written by another George Harrison (no relation), entitled “Over The Mersey Wall.” In 1970, white noise from this track was used on “I Remember Jeep,” one of the jams included on Harrison’s monumental solo album All Things Must Pass.

The album’s cover was a painting by George. Many years later, his son Dhani asked his father if he could have the painting, which had been left leaning against a wall, somewhat neglected, at home in Henley, to hang in his bedroom. A few years later, George explained to Dhani what the painting was all about: “That’s Derek [Taylor] holding on to all of Apple’s aggravation and problems that are looming over everyone.

That’s Neil [Aspinall] frowning and Mal [Evans] smiling with him in the chair. That’s Eric [Clapton] on the right there and the green guy on the front is Bernie [Krause], with his bow tie and pocket square, patching everything through the board. That’s me making the tea [small blue face smiling] and that’s the cat, Jostick, the small green demon-like figure on the front cover.”

The album, and George’s Moog itself, play an important part in The Beatles’ story, as it was taken to Abbey Road studios in the summer of 1969 and used in the recording of The Beatles’ Abbey Road album. As George later recalled, “The Moog synthesizer was enormous, with hundreds of jack plugs and two keyboards. But it was one thing having one, it was another thing making it work. When you listen to the sounds on songs like “Here Comes The Sun,” it does some good things, but they’re all very kind of infant sounds.”

Electronic Sound is a musical marker, one that George Harrison laid down during a period of intense inventiveness in a world where everything and anything were possible.

George's painting

Electronic Sound notes

The Moog

OBS footnote: Photo culled from the Official George Harrison Facebook pages

May 11, 2022
Marmalade - Ob La Di, Ob La Da (1968)

The title of his latest tour may be “Got Back” but Paul McCartney was in a mood to give back at Oakland Arena on Sunday night. 

The former Beatle paid tribute to two of his former bandmates (sorry Ringo, no mentioning of the drummer) as well as to Jimi Hendrix, civil rights, George Martin, his wife Nancy Shevell and the citizens of Ukraine, as well as people who “have birthdays this year.”

And since it was Mother’s Day after all, McCartney dedicated the song “Women and Wives” from his 2020 album “McCartney III” to “all the mothers in the world.” 

At the age of 79, McCartney was spry in a pair of blue jeans and an iridescent clouds-in-the-sky collared shirt tucked behind a posh black vest. Between numbers, he’d shimmy a bit, charmingly gesture towards the crowd with whimsical pantomimes. McCartney appeared just as excited to see us as we were to see him. 

Shuffling into the Oakland Arena before the show, folks of various ages exchanged glee in their Beatles hats or Wings shirts. The pre-show soundtrack that played over the public address system featured a swath of Beatles or solo songs which suggested McCartney is perhaps the only artist who can play his own recorded music before the show and — just like his mullet haircut — successfully pull it off. 

The two-hour-forty-five minute set kicked off with a bombastic rendition of “Can’t Buy Me Love” before McCartney addressed the crowd and said to expect “old songs, new songs and between songs.” 

He also noted that his backing band had their official debut 20 years ago nearly to the month when they played Oakland Arena in April 2002. Flanking McCartney on each side were Rusty Anderson (guitar), Abe Laboriel Jr., (drums) Brian Ray (bass) and Wix Wickens (keyboards and musical director). 

The second date in Oakland, following a Friday performance, featured a set list that did not veer far from other dates on this tour but McCartney has a knack for refreshing old tunes or stories into genuine performances. He’ll drop amazing anecdotes about songs or other musical legends with a kind of sly wink, as though he’s revealing this story for the first time.

After ripping into the iconic guitar riff for “Let Me Roll It” with his left-handed Gibson Les Paul, McCartney and his band morphed into an fiery instrumental cover of “Fox Lady.” McCartney told the crowd how Jimi Hendrix was a “humble guy” who impressed McCartney by learning to play “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” just days after the song was released. 

“We released ‘Sgt. Pepper’ on a Friday and he learned it by Sunday,” McCartney said. “Everyone was buzzing about the album — Jimi was too.” 

Later, when he swapped his Hofner bass for a petite ukulele, McCartney commemorated George Harrison by beginning “Something” with sparse strums, then the band joined in for a dazzling finish. McCartney spoke to how George was a great player of the ukulele and it seemed like he was divulging unheard details; however, he apparently said the exact same comment 20 years ago.

McCartney conveyed vulnerability elsewhere by admitting how he was so nervous to sing on the early Beatles track “Love Me Do” that he can still hear his voice quivering in the recording. And he concluded the piano ballad “My Valentine” by making a heart-shaped sign with his hands directed to his wife Nancy Shevell who was somewhere in the sea of faces. 

In one of the more unique stage moments of the show, McCartney stood alone towards the front of the stage and took a cue from his one-time collaborator Kanye West. The stage gradually elevated some 15 feet into the air and he presided over the crowd. Acoustic guitar in hand, he played “Blackbird” with precision atop digital projections of birds soaring into the galaxy.