Showing posts with label Beatles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beatles. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Friday, July 09, 2010
Book review: 'You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup' by Peter Doggett
John, Paul, George and Ringo split in 1970, but they were still in business together. It wasn't harmonious.
By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic
http://www.latimes.com
July 4, 2010
You Never Give Me Your Money
The Beatles After the Breakup
Peter Doggett
HarperStudio: 390 pp., $24.99
When exactly did the Beatles break up? For many years, conventional wisdom has offered two options: September 1969, when, on the way to his solo set at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival festival, John Lennon told fellow performers Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann that he was planning to leave the Beatles, and April 1970, when, shortly before the release of what would become their final album, "Let It Be," Paul McCartney went public (after a fashion) with his decision to leave the band. Whichever date you accept, both have an air of the definitive about them. Yet the truth, suggests Peter Doggett in his elegant and deeply researched "You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup," is more difficult to pin down.
"Imagine an alternative script," he writes of McCartney's announcement, which, coming in a promotional Q & A accompanying the release of his first solo album, was elliptical at best. (Asked if his break with the Beatles was "temporary or permanent," he responded, "Temporary or permanent? I don't know.") "The 'McCartney' album is released," Doggett continues, "and its creator merely issues a cryptic comment about the Beatles, along the lines of 'Who knows what will happen?' … Later in 1970, with the 'split' still not made public, Lennon undertakes one of the frequent changes of heart that litter his career and invites the Beatles to help him record the songs inspired by his experience with [psychologist Arthur] Janov. The Beatles stumble, or stride into a new decade, and then … ?"
"You Never Give Me Your Money" posits a nuanced afterlife for the Beatles, if "afterlife" is the right word. For Doggett, their breakup was a process, beginning in late 1967, after the death of longtime manager Brian Epstein, and dragging on in some form or another to the present day. His book is remarkable for many reasons, not least that 48 years after the release of "Love Me Do," he has found a new lens (and much new information) through which to consider the band. Yet even more striking is his sense of the textures, the delicate interplay of individual and collective history, that continued to define the members of the Beatles long after they had ceased to function as a cohesive entity.
For every fan who ever longed for them to reunite, it's tantalizing just how close that prospect often was. As early as December 1970, Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr booked studio time in an attempt to manipulate McCartney in a management dispute, but the bassist would not take the bait. Over the next few years, the former bandmates performed together in various configurations, live and in the studio. Perhaps the most famous of these near reunions were for Starr's 1973 album, "Ringo," on which all four Beatles played. Lesser known was the studio session Lennon and McCartney played together in Los Angeles in 1974.
There's a reason for that; Lennon was on his so-called lost weekend, estranged from Yoko Ono and living an excessive life. What they produced — a sloppy jam session revealing "no hint of the Beatles' magic, no rapport between the two men, merely a cocaine-driven Lennon berating and bullying the engineer before floundering through fragments of half-forgotten rock 'n' roll hits" — suggests the futility of looking back. Still, Doggett writes, this did not dissuade the pair from seeking other ways to collaborate, including a plan to write and record together in New Orleans at the beginning of 1975, which was scuttled after Lennon found his way back to Ono, who presumably frowned on the idea.
Of course, for all he has to tell us about the music, Doggett's main focus is on the money, and he deftly explicates the complexities of the Beatles' finances, which both bound them inextricably together and drove them irrevocably apart. The first part of the book deals with the rise and fall of Apple, the band's anti-corporate media corporation, which foundered on its own idealism. "Basically it was chaos," Doggett quotes Harrison. "We just gave away huge quantities of money. It was a lesson to anybody not to have a partnership."
It was precisely this partnership that trapped the Beatles in a series of claustrophobic legal battles, as Doggett documents. First, there was the 1969 fight over management, with Lennon, Harrison and Starr opting to be represented by New York music promoter Allen Klein, long regarded as a villain in the Beatles' saga, while Paul opted in favor of Park Avenue lawyer Lee Eastman, his new father-in-law. It's no stretch to suggest that this dispute is what destroyed the Beatles, alienating Paul from the others in ways that could never be repaired.
But equally disruptive was the group's partnership agreement, dismantled only at the end of 1974. Until then, all four Beatles shared equally in the proceeds of one another's albums, guaranteeing resentment from the bigger sellers (Harrison and McCartney, primarily) as well as an abiding feeling of being trapped. How could they be considered to have broken up, "You Never Give Me Your Money" asks, when for years after their final recording sessions, they were regularly brought together for lawsuits and contractual negotiations and maintained a financial stake in one another's work? It was only in October 1996, after McCartney, Harrison and Starr finished work on the final "Anthology" CD set of unreleased outtakes and alternative versions from the Beatles archive, that Apple released a statement declaring, "The end has finally arrived."
That's a long time for a breakup to go on, even longer when you consider that the Beatles have continued to authorize projects, including the Cirque du Soleil show "Love." As such, it's hardly surprising that "You Never Give Me Your Money" catalogs a lot of bad behavior, on the part of both the band and their entourage. Worst of all are Lennon and McCartney, who whine and snarl through these pages like a couple of spoiled brats. And yet, to Doggett's credit, we never lose our sympathy for complicated people hurt by what's gone on.
Certainly, as he writes, "[t]hese four men created music of such joy and inventiveness that it captured the imagination of the world," but it's equally true that they paid an enormous price. "I had so much in me that I couldn't express, and it was just very nervy times, very very difficult," McCartney said about his decision to leave the band. "One night I'd been asleep and awoke and couldn't lift my head off the pillow. My head was down in the pillow and I thought, Jesus, if I don't do this I'll suffocate."
david.ulin@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic
http://www.latimes.com
July 4, 2010
You Never Give Me Your MoneyThe Beatles After the Breakup
Peter Doggett
HarperStudio: 390 pp., $24.99
When exactly did the Beatles break up? For many years, conventional wisdom has offered two options: September 1969, when, on the way to his solo set at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival festival, John Lennon told fellow performers Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann that he was planning to leave the Beatles, and April 1970, when, shortly before the release of what would become their final album, "Let It Be," Paul McCartney went public (after a fashion) with his decision to leave the band. Whichever date you accept, both have an air of the definitive about them. Yet the truth, suggests Peter Doggett in his elegant and deeply researched "You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup," is more difficult to pin down.
"Imagine an alternative script," he writes of McCartney's announcement, which, coming in a promotional Q & A accompanying the release of his first solo album, was elliptical at best. (Asked if his break with the Beatles was "temporary or permanent," he responded, "Temporary or permanent? I don't know.") "The 'McCartney' album is released," Doggett continues, "and its creator merely issues a cryptic comment about the Beatles, along the lines of 'Who knows what will happen?' … Later in 1970, with the 'split' still not made public, Lennon undertakes one of the frequent changes of heart that litter his career and invites the Beatles to help him record the songs inspired by his experience with [psychologist Arthur] Janov. The Beatles stumble, or stride into a new decade, and then … ?"
"You Never Give Me Your Money" posits a nuanced afterlife for the Beatles, if "afterlife" is the right word. For Doggett, their breakup was a process, beginning in late 1967, after the death of longtime manager Brian Epstein, and dragging on in some form or another to the present day. His book is remarkable for many reasons, not least that 48 years after the release of "Love Me Do," he has found a new lens (and much new information) through which to consider the band. Yet even more striking is his sense of the textures, the delicate interplay of individual and collective history, that continued to define the members of the Beatles long after they had ceased to function as a cohesive entity.
For every fan who ever longed for them to reunite, it's tantalizing just how close that prospect often was. As early as December 1970, Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr booked studio time in an attempt to manipulate McCartney in a management dispute, but the bassist would not take the bait. Over the next few years, the former bandmates performed together in various configurations, live and in the studio. Perhaps the most famous of these near reunions were for Starr's 1973 album, "Ringo," on which all four Beatles played. Lesser known was the studio session Lennon and McCartney played together in Los Angeles in 1974.
There's a reason for that; Lennon was on his so-called lost weekend, estranged from Yoko Ono and living an excessive life. What they produced — a sloppy jam session revealing "no hint of the Beatles' magic, no rapport between the two men, merely a cocaine-driven Lennon berating and bullying the engineer before floundering through fragments of half-forgotten rock 'n' roll hits" — suggests the futility of looking back. Still, Doggett writes, this did not dissuade the pair from seeking other ways to collaborate, including a plan to write and record together in New Orleans at the beginning of 1975, which was scuttled after Lennon found his way back to Ono, who presumably frowned on the idea.
Of course, for all he has to tell us about the music, Doggett's main focus is on the money, and he deftly explicates the complexities of the Beatles' finances, which both bound them inextricably together and drove them irrevocably apart. The first part of the book deals with the rise and fall of Apple, the band's anti-corporate media corporation, which foundered on its own idealism. "Basically it was chaos," Doggett quotes Harrison. "We just gave away huge quantities of money. It was a lesson to anybody not to have a partnership."It was precisely this partnership that trapped the Beatles in a series of claustrophobic legal battles, as Doggett documents. First, there was the 1969 fight over management, with Lennon, Harrison and Starr opting to be represented by New York music promoter Allen Klein, long regarded as a villain in the Beatles' saga, while Paul opted in favor of Park Avenue lawyer Lee Eastman, his new father-in-law. It's no stretch to suggest that this dispute is what destroyed the Beatles, alienating Paul from the others in ways that could never be repaired.
But equally disruptive was the group's partnership agreement, dismantled only at the end of 1974. Until then, all four Beatles shared equally in the proceeds of one another's albums, guaranteeing resentment from the bigger sellers (Harrison and McCartney, primarily) as well as an abiding feeling of being trapped. How could they be considered to have broken up, "You Never Give Me Your Money" asks, when for years after their final recording sessions, they were regularly brought together for lawsuits and contractual negotiations and maintained a financial stake in one another's work? It was only in October 1996, after McCartney, Harrison and Starr finished work on the final "Anthology" CD set of unreleased outtakes and alternative versions from the Beatles archive, that Apple released a statement declaring, "The end has finally arrived."
That's a long time for a breakup to go on, even longer when you consider that the Beatles have continued to authorize projects, including the Cirque du Soleil show "Love." As such, it's hardly surprising that "You Never Give Me Your Money" catalogs a lot of bad behavior, on the part of both the band and their entourage. Worst of all are Lennon and McCartney, who whine and snarl through these pages like a couple of spoiled brats. And yet, to Doggett's credit, we never lose our sympathy for complicated people hurt by what's gone on.
Certainly, as he writes, "[t]hese four men created music of such joy and inventiveness that it captured the imagination of the world," but it's equally true that they paid an enormous price. "I had so much in me that I couldn't express, and it was just very nervy times, very very difficult," McCartney said about his decision to leave the band. "One night I'd been asleep and awoke and couldn't lift my head off the pillow. My head was down in the pillow and I thought, Jesus, if I don't do this I'll suffocate."
david.ulin@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Monday, September 07, 2009
Exclusive: John Lennon, the lost interviews
By Ray Connolly
From The Sunday Times
September 6, 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/
John Lennon did many brilliant things in his life, but arguably one of his most inspired acts was his deliberate destruction of the Beatles in 1969 — just 40 years ago this month. It didn’t seem that way then, not to tens of millions of devastated Beatles fans around the world, and not to Paul McCartney, who, feeling abandoned, went off to his farm in Scotland and into a deep depression.
But if Lennon, who’d started the group that evolved into the Beatles, hadn’t murdered his creation at that moment, if the band had somehow struggled on through their rows into the 1970s,
I doubt that you’d be reading this article today.
By killing the Beatles before they could disappoint us, as they inevitably would have done when music fashions changed and the band’s later albums didn’t quite live up to the ones we still love, Lennon froze them for ever at their peak.
John Lennon illustration by Erika Simmons
At the time of their break-up in 1969, I was an interviewer on London’s Evening Standard with the special task of covering rock music. Today, journalists are kept at arm’s length from stars by legions of publicists, but it was different then, for me anyway. Only now, looking back, do I fully appreciate the astonishing access to the Beatles
I had, from 1967, that Sgt Pepper high water of their careers, until 1972, when their dissolution was making its way through the High Court.
So I was at the Abbey Road studios in October 1968 to hear Yoko Ono be happily indiscreet about her affairs during her first two marriages, before ending the evening being given a personal concert by McCartney at the piano as he worked on a new song called "Let It Be" — while from down the corridor I could hear John Lennon and the producer George Martin mixing "Cry Baby Cry" for the White Album.
Almost every conversation I had during those final febrile Beatle days ended up in my new little Sony recorder, where intimacies and opinions were caught on cassettes, and then stored away, forgotten and uncatalogued in an old Pickfords packing case. And it’s those tapes, unplayed in decades (if ever, in some cases), that I recently unearthed — recordings that in some cases challenge views of the Lennon-McCartney relationship that have been held for 40 years.
Not all the interviews have survived. Cassettes were expensive then, and I’m mortified to admit that I have one on which the names McCartney, Jagger and Hendrix have each been successively crossed out as the interviews were recorded over. Nor was everything that was recorded published. Much was off the record. Time heals. Now it doesn’t matter that I write some of it here.
By 1969 there were rumours of strife in the Beatles camp, but on the surface it still seemed jolly enough. Then, while I was hanging around their Apple headquarters in Mayfair one day in September, I realised something was seriously wrong. There was a Beatles meeting in the boardroom that suddenly ended in a row, followed by much running up and down the stairs. But nobody was saying what it was about.
A few weeks later I got a call from John telling me he’d just sent his MBE back to the Queen. He was in a giddy mood,
I reflected, as I typed out my story. But he was also acting so separately from the other Beatles that two days later I wrote a piece headlined "The Day the Beatles Died".
At the time I was half-afraid I’d overstated my case, because to the outside world they were still very much alive. But no sooner was the article published than a white rose wrapped in Cellophane was delivered to my desk with the message "To Ray with love from John and Yoko".
From then on, when it came to covering Beatles affairs, my tape recorder and I would have the best possible source. And, just before Christmas that year, I would listen in astonishment (and some despair) as John, who’d flown me out to join him and Yoko in Toronto, gleefully let me in on the secret of how he’d destroyed the band.
"At the meeting Paul just kept mithering on about what we were going to do, so in the end
I just said, ‘I think you’re daft. I want a divorce.’"
He hadn’t planned to say that, but once spoken, and although news of the split wasn’t going to be announced until the Let It Be album came out the following May, the words were never withdrawn.
Of course, there are McCartney interviews on tape, too. While John was busy pulling the walls of the Beatles temple down around him, Paul eventually recovered from the setback enough to make his first solo album, McCartney. Usually astute with publicity, at this point he slipped up, putting out an ambiguous press statement along with his record in April 1970 that was interpreted as saying that he’d broken up the band. Headlines of blame ran around the world. "How could he?" distressed fans wanted to know. "It was all a misunderstanding," he told me a few days later. "I thought, ‘Christ, what have I done now?’ and my stomach started churning up.
I never intended the statement to mean ‘Paul McCartney quits Beatles’."
It was ironic. The Beatle who had most wanted the group to stay together, the biggest Beatles fan of all, was being blamed for its dissolution.
"Why didn’t you write it when I told you in Canada?" John demanded when he realised that Paul had accidentally got the dubious honour of ending the world’s favourite group. As he’d started it, he thought he should be the one to end it. "You asked me not to," I said. He was scornful. "You’re the journalist, Connolly, not me," he snapped.
What strikes me most, though, listening again to the tapes, is how prescient John was, how closely his ear was tuned to the changing mood of the times. As once he’d instinctively known which songs to write and what pithy comments would grab a headline, somehow, while in the middle of the whirlpool that was the Beatles, he’d seen the end approaching.
"The whole thing died in my mind long before all the rumpus started," he said in 1971 when I was spending a few days with him and Yoko in New York. "We used to believe the Beatles myth just as much as the public, and we were in love with them in just the same way. But basically we were four individuals who eventually recovered our own individualities after being submerged in a myth.
"I know a lot of people were upset when we finished, but every circus has to come to an end. The Beatles were a monument that had to be either changed or scrapped. As it happens, it was scrapped. The Beatles were supposed to be this and supposed to be that, but really all we were was a band that got very big.
"Actually, our best days were before we got that big, when we used to play for hours in clubs. My favourite number was always Elvis’s "Baby Let’s Play House". We’d make it last about 10 minutes, singing the same verse over and over.
I pinched one of the lines from it later to put in one of my own songs called "Run for Your Life" — something about ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to see you with another man’.
"Mick Jagger said we weren’t a good band as performers. But he never saw us at our best in Liverpool and Hamburg. We were the best bloody band there was. I know all the early rock songs much better than most of those I’ve written myself."
July 1968
This photograph was taken by the photographer Tom Murray of the Beatles whilst recording the Sgt Pepper album. They are part of a new exhibition The Beatles’ 11 Million Dollar Picture Show, at the Saint Giles Street Gallery in Norwich, opening on Thursday 10th September. www.sggallery.com
Tom Murray
During most of that time, however, John was in iconoclastic mode. It was as though, having made his decision, he couldn’t smash his Beatle persona quickly, or outrageously, enough. He didn’t want to be "one of four gods on the stage", he told me, so instead he invited the world’s press to his honeymoon bedside for a week "in aid of world peace". Then, not minding that he was being widely ridiculed, not to mention chastised by his formidable Aunt Mimi for "making an exhibition of himself", he appeared naked with Yoko on an album of electronic music called Two Virgins, before really chasing controversy with a series of erotic lithographs featuring Yoko, and sometimes himself too.
"Why do you draw so much cunnilingus?" I asked him during the trip to Canada, as I passed the lithographs for him to sign. "Because I like it," the one-time moptop grinned merrily. London’s Metropolitan Police would later close down his exhibition in a West End gallery. They didn’t like it.
At the time, Yoko was much publicly blamed for the Beatles’ demise, and she certainly might have played her part more tactfully. But she was only one of several catalysts. And John, as I’ve been hearing again on my tapes, was absolutely besotted by her, this sexy, mysterious artist who matched the zany dottiness in him.
"It was Yoko that changed me," he teases her during one conversation in 1970. "She forced me to become avant-garde and take me clothes off when all I wanted to do was become Tom Jones. And now look at me! Did you know avant-garde is French for bullshit?" Then, referring to how she’d begun to join him on stage, he goes on: "We’ve only got to play four bars and she grabs the microphone and she’s off? Aggghhh! Take her anywhere and she does her number for you." In the background, Yoko giggles. She was his pal.
The John Lennon I recorded was a very funny man who liked to paint himself ironically as the indignant butt of his own stories. "Did you see that Time magazine is saying that George is a philosopher?" he asked me one day. "And there’s an article in The Times, that I’ve actually thought about sending to Pseuds Corner [in Private Eye] — anonymously, of course — saying how Paul is this great musician. One a philosopher, another a great musician. Where does that leave me?"
"The nutter?" I hear myself suggest.
"Yes. I’m the nutter. F*** ’em all."
Today he would have been a star as a stand-up comedian with a line in self-mockery. And, having returned from a session of primal therapy in California in 1970, he was more loquacious than ever. He could have done a whole act on the subject of what made people like him want to become famous. "There you are up on the stage like an Aunt Sally waiting to have things thrown at you. It’s like always putting yourself on trial to see if you’re good enough for Mummy and Daddy. You know, ‘Now will you love me if I stand on my head and fart and play guitar and dance and blow balloons and get an MBE and sing "She Loves You" — now will you love me?’" It was a typical Lennon rant, but he was smiling all the time.
On another occasion, talking about his song "Not a Second Time" from the Beatles’ second LP, in a conversation devoted to his music, he says: "That was the one where that f***ing idiot Thomas Mann (he meant William Mann, the Times music critic) talked about the aeolian cadence at the end being like Mahler’s "Song of the Earth". They were just chords like any other chords. It was the first intellectual bullshit written about us." Then the knowing pause. "Still, I know it helps to have bullshit written about you."
Later, saying how a favourite of his songs, "You Can’t Do That", was his attempt at being Wilson Pickett, he becomes mock-anguished when admitting it was "a flip side because "Can’t Buy Me Love" [Paul’s song] was so f***ing good".
He was competitive with Paul, yes, and, when relations between the two were really bad, vituperative, as evidenced in a line in a song about his former partner on his Imagine album: "The sound you make is Muzak to my ears."
Paul had to have been hurt, and a few months later in New York even John would admit slightly ruefully: "I suppose it was a bit hard on him?" But, as he would so often say, "They were just the words that came out of my mouth at the time."
In truth, he always knew how good Paul was, without necessarily liking everything he did.
"I only ever asked two people to work with me as a partner," he would boast of his talent-spotting abilities. "One was Paul McCartney and the other Yoko Ono. That’s not bad, is it?" Indeed, I recall a writer from an underground magazine being snide about Paul’s song "Let It Be", presumably assuming John would agree. He didn’t.
"Paul and me were the Beatles," he would emphasise to me privately. "We wrote the songs." And on the subject of his debt to the young McCartney, he was actually generous. "I didn’t write much material early on, less than Paul, because he was quite competent on guitar.
Paul taught me quite a lot of guitar, really."
Those who see John as the towering greatest of the great should reflect on that: John Lennon quietly, happily admitting how much he owed to Paul McCartney. And while he could be flattering about some of Paul’s songs — he liked "For No One" particularly ("that was one of his good ones. All his semi-classical ones are best, actually") — he was disarmingly dismissive about several of his own. " 'I Am the Walrus' didn’t mean anything," he says, consigning to the pointless bin the work of a generation of Beatles anoraks who’d tried to interpret its lyrics, while he always hated "Yes It Is", didn’t think he sang "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" very well ("I was so nervous I couldn’t sing, but I like the lyrics"), and admits that he and Paul would give the lousy songs they wrote to George and Ringo to sing.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney
But "It’s Only Love" from the Help! album was the one that earned his greatest ire. "It’s the most embarrassing song I ever wrote. Everything rhymed. Disgusting lyrics. Even then I was so ashamed of the lyrics, I could hardly sing them. That was one song I really wished I’d never written," he says. Then, after another comic pause: "Well, you can say that about quite a few." And the ones he liked? " 'Across the Universe' was one of my favourites. I gave it at first to the World Wildlife Fund, but they didn’t do much with it, and then we put it on the Let It Be album. It missed it as a record but maybe the lyrics will survive. And "Strawberry Fields Forever" meant a lot. "Come Together" is another favourite. It started off as a slogan song for Timothy Leary’s wife, but I never got around to finishing it. Everyone takes it as meaning ‘come together in peace’, but there’s the other meaning too!" Actually, he was proud of quite a few — "In My Life", "I’m a Loser", "Girl?"
"When I was in therapy I was asked to go through a book of all the songs I’d written, line by line. I just couldn’t believe I’d written so many."
Interestingly, and it’s something I’ve only realised listening again to the tapes, no matter how much John publicly criticised Paul, in none of my interviews with Paul did he ever criticise John. Quite the contrary. "On Abbey Road I would like to have sung harmony with John, like we used to. And I think he would have liked me to. But I was too embarrassed to ask him."
I always wished I’d been involved in the Beatles’ early happier days, but my role was to cover the final act of their career, and to observe the fallout, mostly, though not totally, with John. There were some bizarre and revealing moments during those days. Visiting a Native American village in upstate New York the day after his
30th birthday, he showed that even he, in his enthusiasm, could get it wrong. "When I used to see cowboys-and-Indians films when I was a kid in Liverpool, I was always on the side of the Indians," he told the assembled group, not realising how patronising he sounded.
I’m sure when he said he wanted a divorce from the Beatles he never imagined how complicated, or expensive for all of them, it would be. But by October 1971, when he was living in New York, he was beginning to get a good idea. Asking me to be a go-between, he gave me a message to take to Paul suggesting that perhaps the two of them could solve at least one of their differences without either Allen Klein, his manager, or Lee Eastman, Paul’s manager and also Linda McCartney’s father, becoming involved. Back in London I delivered the message, but in the end it was inevitably lawyers who sorted out their problems.
Listening to the tapes, and hearing John’s singsong voice again after all these years, has led to some poignant memories. But what has stayed with me most from all the interviews is the vitality of the man, and that straight-faced, British, tongue-in-cheek delivery he had. A very generous person, he would say: "I can’t think about money. It rains in and rains out.
"I always wanted to be an eccentric millionaire, and now I am." John on his education made me laugh: "If I’d had a better education, I wouldn’t have been me. When I was at grammar school I thought I’d go to university, but I didn’t get any GCEs. Then I went to art school and thought I’d go to the Slade and become a wonder. But I never fitted in. I was always a freak, I was never lovable. I was always Lennon!"
Then there’s John, as forthright as ever when I suggested he might like to write a musical. "No. No musicals. I loathe musicals. I never did have a plan for doing one. My cousin made me sit through some f***ing musical twice. I just hate them. They bore me stiff. I think they’re just horrible. Even Hair. And they’re always lousy music." What he would have made of Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas show Love, an interpretation of the Beatles’ records, would have been interesting to know.
John, talking about a Hare Krishna group who’d been painting a little temple in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, which was briefly his home, was typical. "I had to sack them. They were very nice and gentle, but they kept going around saying ‘peace’ all the time. It was driving me mad. I couldn’t get any f***ing peace."
And finally there’s John in 1970 being ominously prophetic. "I’m not going to waste my life as I have been, which was running at 20,000 miles an hour. I have to learn not to do that, because I don’t want to die at 40."
He was 40 and two months when he was murdered by a mad fan in New York in 1980.
I was due to interview him for The Sunday Times the following day
From The Sunday Times
September 6, 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/
John Lennon did many brilliant things in his life, but arguably one of his most inspired acts was his deliberate destruction of the Beatles in 1969 — just 40 years ago this month. It didn’t seem that way then, not to tens of millions of devastated Beatles fans around the world, and not to Paul McCartney, who, feeling abandoned, went off to his farm in Scotland and into a deep depression.
But if Lennon, who’d started the group that evolved into the Beatles, hadn’t murdered his creation at that moment, if the band had somehow struggled on through their rows into the 1970s,
I doubt that you’d be reading this article today.
By killing the Beatles before they could disappoint us, as they inevitably would have done when music fashions changed and the band’s later albums didn’t quite live up to the ones we still love, Lennon froze them for ever at their peak.
John Lennon illustration by Erika Simmons
At the time of their break-up in 1969, I was an interviewer on London’s Evening Standard with the special task of covering rock music. Today, journalists are kept at arm’s length from stars by legions of publicists, but it was different then, for me anyway. Only now, looking back, do I fully appreciate the astonishing access to the Beatles
I had, from 1967, that Sgt Pepper high water of their careers, until 1972, when their dissolution was making its way through the High Court.
So I was at the Abbey Road studios in October 1968 to hear Yoko Ono be happily indiscreet about her affairs during her first two marriages, before ending the evening being given a personal concert by McCartney at the piano as he worked on a new song called "Let It Be" — while from down the corridor I could hear John Lennon and the producer George Martin mixing "Cry Baby Cry" for the White Album.
Almost every conversation I had during those final febrile Beatle days ended up in my new little Sony recorder, where intimacies and opinions were caught on cassettes, and then stored away, forgotten and uncatalogued in an old Pickfords packing case. And it’s those tapes, unplayed in decades (if ever, in some cases), that I recently unearthed — recordings that in some cases challenge views of the Lennon-McCartney relationship that have been held for 40 years.
Not all the interviews have survived. Cassettes were expensive then, and I’m mortified to admit that I have one on which the names McCartney, Jagger and Hendrix have each been successively crossed out as the interviews were recorded over. Nor was everything that was recorded published. Much was off the record. Time heals. Now it doesn’t matter that I write some of it here.
By 1969 there were rumours of strife in the Beatles camp, but on the surface it still seemed jolly enough. Then, while I was hanging around their Apple headquarters in Mayfair one day in September, I realised something was seriously wrong. There was a Beatles meeting in the boardroom that suddenly ended in a row, followed by much running up and down the stairs. But nobody was saying what it was about.
A few weeks later I got a call from John telling me he’d just sent his MBE back to the Queen. He was in a giddy mood,
I reflected, as I typed out my story. But he was also acting so separately from the other Beatles that two days later I wrote a piece headlined "The Day the Beatles Died".
At the time I was half-afraid I’d overstated my case, because to the outside world they were still very much alive. But no sooner was the article published than a white rose wrapped in Cellophane was delivered to my desk with the message "To Ray with love from John and Yoko".
From then on, when it came to covering Beatles affairs, my tape recorder and I would have the best possible source. And, just before Christmas that year, I would listen in astonishment (and some despair) as John, who’d flown me out to join him and Yoko in Toronto, gleefully let me in on the secret of how he’d destroyed the band.
"At the meeting Paul just kept mithering on about what we were going to do, so in the end
I just said, ‘I think you’re daft. I want a divorce.’"
He hadn’t planned to say that, but once spoken, and although news of the split wasn’t going to be announced until the Let It Be album came out the following May, the words were never withdrawn.
Of course, there are McCartney interviews on tape, too. While John was busy pulling the walls of the Beatles temple down around him, Paul eventually recovered from the setback enough to make his first solo album, McCartney. Usually astute with publicity, at this point he slipped up, putting out an ambiguous press statement along with his record in April 1970 that was interpreted as saying that he’d broken up the band. Headlines of blame ran around the world. "How could he?" distressed fans wanted to know. "It was all a misunderstanding," he told me a few days later. "I thought, ‘Christ, what have I done now?’ and my stomach started churning up.
I never intended the statement to mean ‘Paul McCartney quits Beatles’."
It was ironic. The Beatle who had most wanted the group to stay together, the biggest Beatles fan of all, was being blamed for its dissolution.
"Why didn’t you write it when I told you in Canada?" John demanded when he realised that Paul had accidentally got the dubious honour of ending the world’s favourite group. As he’d started it, he thought he should be the one to end it. "You asked me not to," I said. He was scornful. "You’re the journalist, Connolly, not me," he snapped.
What strikes me most, though, listening again to the tapes, is how prescient John was, how closely his ear was tuned to the changing mood of the times. As once he’d instinctively known which songs to write and what pithy comments would grab a headline, somehow, while in the middle of the whirlpool that was the Beatles, he’d seen the end approaching.
"The whole thing died in my mind long before all the rumpus started," he said in 1971 when I was spending a few days with him and Yoko in New York. "We used to believe the Beatles myth just as much as the public, and we were in love with them in just the same way. But basically we were four individuals who eventually recovered our own individualities after being submerged in a myth.
"I know a lot of people were upset when we finished, but every circus has to come to an end. The Beatles were a monument that had to be either changed or scrapped. As it happens, it was scrapped. The Beatles were supposed to be this and supposed to be that, but really all we were was a band that got very big.
"Actually, our best days were before we got that big, when we used to play for hours in clubs. My favourite number was always Elvis’s "Baby Let’s Play House". We’d make it last about 10 minutes, singing the same verse over and over.
I pinched one of the lines from it later to put in one of my own songs called "Run for Your Life" — something about ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to see you with another man’.
"Mick Jagger said we weren’t a good band as performers. But he never saw us at our best in Liverpool and Hamburg. We were the best bloody band there was. I know all the early rock songs much better than most of those I’ve written myself."
July 1968This photograph was taken by the photographer Tom Murray of the Beatles whilst recording the Sgt Pepper album. They are part of a new exhibition The Beatles’ 11 Million Dollar Picture Show, at the Saint Giles Street Gallery in Norwich, opening on Thursday 10th September. www.sggallery.com
Tom Murray
During most of that time, however, John was in iconoclastic mode. It was as though, having made his decision, he couldn’t smash his Beatle persona quickly, or outrageously, enough. He didn’t want to be "one of four gods on the stage", he told me, so instead he invited the world’s press to his honeymoon bedside for a week "in aid of world peace". Then, not minding that he was being widely ridiculed, not to mention chastised by his formidable Aunt Mimi for "making an exhibition of himself", he appeared naked with Yoko on an album of electronic music called Two Virgins, before really chasing controversy with a series of erotic lithographs featuring Yoko, and sometimes himself too.
"Why do you draw so much cunnilingus?" I asked him during the trip to Canada, as I passed the lithographs for him to sign. "Because I like it," the one-time moptop grinned merrily. London’s Metropolitan Police would later close down his exhibition in a West End gallery. They didn’t like it.
At the time, Yoko was much publicly blamed for the Beatles’ demise, and she certainly might have played her part more tactfully. But she was only one of several catalysts. And John, as I’ve been hearing again on my tapes, was absolutely besotted by her, this sexy, mysterious artist who matched the zany dottiness in him.
"It was Yoko that changed me," he teases her during one conversation in 1970. "She forced me to become avant-garde and take me clothes off when all I wanted to do was become Tom Jones. And now look at me! Did you know avant-garde is French for bullshit?" Then, referring to how she’d begun to join him on stage, he goes on: "We’ve only got to play four bars and she grabs the microphone and she’s off? Aggghhh! Take her anywhere and she does her number for you." In the background, Yoko giggles. She was his pal.
The John Lennon I recorded was a very funny man who liked to paint himself ironically as the indignant butt of his own stories. "Did you see that Time magazine is saying that George is a philosopher?" he asked me one day. "And there’s an article in The Times, that I’ve actually thought about sending to Pseuds Corner [in Private Eye] — anonymously, of course — saying how Paul is this great musician. One a philosopher, another a great musician. Where does that leave me?"
"The nutter?" I hear myself suggest.
"Yes. I’m the nutter. F*** ’em all."
Today he would have been a star as a stand-up comedian with a line in self-mockery. And, having returned from a session of primal therapy in California in 1970, he was more loquacious than ever. He could have done a whole act on the subject of what made people like him want to become famous. "There you are up on the stage like an Aunt Sally waiting to have things thrown at you. It’s like always putting yourself on trial to see if you’re good enough for Mummy and Daddy. You know, ‘Now will you love me if I stand on my head and fart and play guitar and dance and blow balloons and get an MBE and sing "She Loves You" — now will you love me?’" It was a typical Lennon rant, but he was smiling all the time.
On another occasion, talking about his song "Not a Second Time" from the Beatles’ second LP, in a conversation devoted to his music, he says: "That was the one where that f***ing idiot Thomas Mann (he meant William Mann, the Times music critic) talked about the aeolian cadence at the end being like Mahler’s "Song of the Earth". They were just chords like any other chords. It was the first intellectual bullshit written about us." Then the knowing pause. "Still, I know it helps to have bullshit written about you."
Later, saying how a favourite of his songs, "You Can’t Do That", was his attempt at being Wilson Pickett, he becomes mock-anguished when admitting it was "a flip side because "Can’t Buy Me Love" [Paul’s song] was so f***ing good".
He was competitive with Paul, yes, and, when relations between the two were really bad, vituperative, as evidenced in a line in a song about his former partner on his Imagine album: "The sound you make is Muzak to my ears."
Paul had to have been hurt, and a few months later in New York even John would admit slightly ruefully: "I suppose it was a bit hard on him?" But, as he would so often say, "They were just the words that came out of my mouth at the time."
In truth, he always knew how good Paul was, without necessarily liking everything he did.
"I only ever asked two people to work with me as a partner," he would boast of his talent-spotting abilities. "One was Paul McCartney and the other Yoko Ono. That’s not bad, is it?" Indeed, I recall a writer from an underground magazine being snide about Paul’s song "Let It Be", presumably assuming John would agree. He didn’t.
"Paul and me were the Beatles," he would emphasise to me privately. "We wrote the songs." And on the subject of his debt to the young McCartney, he was actually generous. "I didn’t write much material early on, less than Paul, because he was quite competent on guitar.
Paul taught me quite a lot of guitar, really."
Those who see John as the towering greatest of the great should reflect on that: John Lennon quietly, happily admitting how much he owed to Paul McCartney. And while he could be flattering about some of Paul’s songs — he liked "For No One" particularly ("that was one of his good ones. All his semi-classical ones are best, actually") — he was disarmingly dismissive about several of his own. " 'I Am the Walrus' didn’t mean anything," he says, consigning to the pointless bin the work of a generation of Beatles anoraks who’d tried to interpret its lyrics, while he always hated "Yes It Is", didn’t think he sang "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" very well ("I was so nervous I couldn’t sing, but I like the lyrics"), and admits that he and Paul would give the lousy songs they wrote to George and Ringo to sing.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney
But "It’s Only Love" from the Help! album was the one that earned his greatest ire. "It’s the most embarrassing song I ever wrote. Everything rhymed. Disgusting lyrics. Even then I was so ashamed of the lyrics, I could hardly sing them. That was one song I really wished I’d never written," he says. Then, after another comic pause: "Well, you can say that about quite a few." And the ones he liked? " 'Across the Universe' was one of my favourites. I gave it at first to the World Wildlife Fund, but they didn’t do much with it, and then we put it on the Let It Be album. It missed it as a record but maybe the lyrics will survive. And "Strawberry Fields Forever" meant a lot. "Come Together" is another favourite. It started off as a slogan song for Timothy Leary’s wife, but I never got around to finishing it. Everyone takes it as meaning ‘come together in peace’, but there’s the other meaning too!" Actually, he was proud of quite a few — "In My Life", "I’m a Loser", "Girl?"
"When I was in therapy I was asked to go through a book of all the songs I’d written, line by line. I just couldn’t believe I’d written so many."
Interestingly, and it’s something I’ve only realised listening again to the tapes, no matter how much John publicly criticised Paul, in none of my interviews with Paul did he ever criticise John. Quite the contrary. "On Abbey Road I would like to have sung harmony with John, like we used to. And I think he would have liked me to. But I was too embarrassed to ask him."
I always wished I’d been involved in the Beatles’ early happier days, but my role was to cover the final act of their career, and to observe the fallout, mostly, though not totally, with John. There were some bizarre and revealing moments during those days. Visiting a Native American village in upstate New York the day after his
30th birthday, he showed that even he, in his enthusiasm, could get it wrong. "When I used to see cowboys-and-Indians films when I was a kid in Liverpool, I was always on the side of the Indians," he told the assembled group, not realising how patronising he sounded.
I’m sure when he said he wanted a divorce from the Beatles he never imagined how complicated, or expensive for all of them, it would be. But by October 1971, when he was living in New York, he was beginning to get a good idea. Asking me to be a go-between, he gave me a message to take to Paul suggesting that perhaps the two of them could solve at least one of their differences without either Allen Klein, his manager, or Lee Eastman, Paul’s manager and also Linda McCartney’s father, becoming involved. Back in London I delivered the message, but in the end it was inevitably lawyers who sorted out their problems.
Listening to the tapes, and hearing John’s singsong voice again after all these years, has led to some poignant memories. But what has stayed with me most from all the interviews is the vitality of the man, and that straight-faced, British, tongue-in-cheek delivery he had. A very generous person, he would say: "I can’t think about money. It rains in and rains out.
"I always wanted to be an eccentric millionaire, and now I am." John on his education made me laugh: "If I’d had a better education, I wouldn’t have been me. When I was at grammar school I thought I’d go to university, but I didn’t get any GCEs. Then I went to art school and thought I’d go to the Slade and become a wonder. But I never fitted in. I was always a freak, I was never lovable. I was always Lennon!"
Then there’s John, as forthright as ever when I suggested he might like to write a musical. "No. No musicals. I loathe musicals. I never did have a plan for doing one. My cousin made me sit through some f***ing musical twice. I just hate them. They bore me stiff. I think they’re just horrible. Even Hair. And they’re always lousy music." What he would have made of Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas show Love, an interpretation of the Beatles’ records, would have been interesting to know.
John, talking about a Hare Krishna group who’d been painting a little temple in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, which was briefly his home, was typical. "I had to sack them. They were very nice and gentle, but they kept going around saying ‘peace’ all the time. It was driving me mad. I couldn’t get any f***ing peace."
And finally there’s John in 1970 being ominously prophetic. "I’m not going to waste my life as I have been, which was running at 20,000 miles an hour. I have to learn not to do that, because I don’t want to die at 40."
He was 40 and two months when he was murdered by a mad fan in New York in 1980.
I was due to interview him for The Sunday Times the following day
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Long and Winding Road, Newly Repaved
By ALLAN KOZINN
The New York Times
September 6, 2009
THE newly remastered CDs of the Beatles’ original albums and singles, which EMI and Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company, are releasing on Wednesday, have less of a gee-whiz factor than The Beatles: Rock Band, which hits stores on the same day. But for those of us for whom the music is paramount — and who will forever refer to Rock Band as “the toy” — the game is a plastic tail wagging a cartoonish dog. And though the compact disc, as a format, may be on its deathbed, these remastered CDs are really the main event.
The complete catalog, in mono and stereo, has been given a careful digital upgrade. These are straightforward transfers of the albums as they were released in Britain, rather than the American versions, which were reconfigured by Capitol Records (to the Beatles’ chagrin). Do not look for bonus tracks: the only extras are making-of documentaries on each of the stereo discs. And although the stereo and mono mixes could have fit together on single CDs, in most cases EMI is selling them separately.
The up side: In most cases this music has dimension and detail that it never had before, and the new packaging reflects each album’s musical and cultural importance. Over all, the new discs sound substantially better than the Beatles’ original CDs, which EMI issued in 1987. The most striking and consistent improvements are a heftier, rounded, three-dimensional bass sound, and drums that now sound like drums, rather than something in the distance being hit. But because each album has its own sonic character, due partly to developments in recording technology during the Beatles’ career, and partly to the growing complexity of their work, some discs are improved more radically than others, and some are hardly improved at all.
Probably the most revelatory of the new transfers is the stereo White Album. From the opening jet engine effects on “Back in the U.S.S.R” to the final orchestral chord on “Good Night,” this album now leaps from the speakers. Gentler songs like “Julia” and “I Will” have a lovely transparency, and hard rockers like “Yer Blues” and “Helter Skelter” — as well as John Lennon’s quirky vision of dystopia, “Revolution 9” — have a power and fullness unheard until now.
“Abbey Road” also benefits considerably. The clearer instrumental profiles serve this rich-textured album beautifully: “Sun King” and “Here Comes the Sun” are unusually supple; the vocal on “You Never Give Me Your Money” no longer has a shrill edge, and Lennon’s proto-Minimalist “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” has never sounded more mesmerizing. Nor has the group’s valedictory jam in “The End.”
And if you are cherry-picking among these reissues, the two-CD singles compilation “Past Masters” should be near the top of your list. The stereo mixes of these songs are often less hard hitting than the mono singles were, but the remastered versions, with their enriched bass, palpable drum sound and improved sense of vocal presence, no longer sound anemic. You find yourself discovering textural details (the percussion overlay in “She’s a Woman” is one such surprise) that show how imaginative the Beatles’ arrangements are.
It’s about time. In 1987 the elation of finally getting the group’s classic recordings on CD, four years after the format was introduced, quickly gave way to disappointment with the discs’ sound quality and presentation. Like many early CDs, several (though not all) of the Beatles’ discs had a harsh upper range. And except for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which was put in a deluxe package with liner essays and archival photos, the 1987 CDs came with minimal, slapdash artwork.
Collectors who had long prized both the mono and stereo mixes of the group’s albums, which have different attractions (and sometimes different vocal takes and instrumental details), and had hoped that EMI would find a way to release both mixes on CD, were upset that the 1987 series offered the first four albums only in mono and the rest only in stereo. In one sense all of the group’s music had made the transfer; in another, about half the catalog was missing.
In a way it still is: the stereo recordings are available either individually for $18.98; $24.98 for double albums, or boxed (as “The Beatles”) for $259.98. But the mono albums can be had only in a 13-disc boxed set, “The Beatles in Mono,” for $298.98, which covers up to the White Album (the last album the group mixed in mono) and includes a mono version of the “Past Masters” singles compilation that includes previously unissued mono mixes of “Across the Universe” and songs from the “Yellow Submarine” soundtrack.
The Beatles and their producer, George Martin, considered the mono mixes definitive, and you don’t have to be a Beatles completist to see why. “She’s Leaving Home,” which drags sappily on the stereo “Sgt. Pepper,” is faster on the mono album, which also has a decidedly more psychedelic sounding “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” a punchier “Good Morning, Good Morning” and a sizzling reprise of the title song. “Magical Mystery Tour” is far more solid and detailed in mono, and the White Album is packed with details you don’t hear in the stereo mix. But by making them available only in a collectors’ box, EMI has made it impossible for many listeners to sample one or two.
To produce the new CDs, EMI returned to the mono and stereo masters prepared for the group’s vinyl releases in the 1960s, which the label says have remained in pristine condition. These are the same tapes EMI used in 1987, but analog-to-digital technology has improved considerably since then, making it possible to get a much more fine-grained, high-resolution digital transfer. And where the 1987 transfers were done quickly, the new set was assembled over four years, with different teams working on the mono and stereo recordings. 
As in 1987 there are two exceptions to the “’60s masters only” rule: the stereo “Help!” and “Rubber Soul” discs use the remixes that Mr. Martin made for the 1987 CDs. It may seem inconsistent to present these remixes as the de facto standards, given that Allan Rouse, who oversaw the project, has said that the goal was to produce a series of CDs that sound as close as possible to the ’60s master tapes.
But Mr. Martin’s updates largely match the placements and balances of the originals, and because they were made from the multitrack session tapes, instruments and vocals sound strikingly fresher than in the 1965 versions (which are included in the mono box). Perhaps not surprisingly, given their digital origins, the new “Help!” and “Rubber Soul” CDs, though slightly louder than their 1987 counterparts — as all the new discs are — are identical in matters of timbre and definition. The group’s experimental “Revolver” and “Magical Mystery Tour,” and its back-to-basics “Let It Be,” if not as lapel-grabbing as the upgrades of the White Album and “Abbey Road,” nevertheless benefit from the more distinct instrumental and vocal profiles of the new transfers.
“Sgt. Pepper,” oddly, is a mixed bag. Instrumental textures are crisper and cleaner, and the bass is firmer. And songs like “Getting Better” have shed the piercing treble sound that afflicted the 1987 version. Yet several songs — “Fixing a Hole” and “She’s Leaving Home,” among them — now sound flatter, or less dynamically fluid, than they did on either the 1987 CD or a good British LP.
Among the early albums I have always loved the wide stereo separation of “Please Please Me” and “With the Beatles” — despite its vigorous condemnation by Mr. Martin (which is why they have not been available on CD) — because it lets you hear exactly what’s happening in both the instrumental and vocal arrangements. Those albums sound superb, as do the better-balanced “Hard Day’s Night” and “Beatles for Sale.”
Few listeners are likely to replace their CDs for the sake of new cover art, but it is a distinct attraction. The stereo discs come in three-panel (four for the “White Album”) laminated sleeves, with booklets that include the original liner notes and lyrics (if they came with the LP), contemporaneous photos and new essays about what the Beatles were up to when they made the album at hand and (more cursorily) how the recordings were produced. The discs are pressed on reproductions of the various Parlophone, Capitol and Apple labels on which the albums first appeared.
The video documentaries, embedded as computer-playable QuickTime files on the stereo CDs, draw largely on interviews recorded for “The Beatles Anthology” (1995) and offer a few surprises. With the exception of Mr. McCartney, for example, the group had an almost perversely dismissive attitude toward “Sgt. Pepper.” Ringo Starr says he preferred the group dynamic on the White Album (even though he quit in frustration during the sessions) and “Let It Be” (when the band was at its most fractious). The stereo box also includes a DVD compilation of these video clips.
The mono discs lack the documentaries (and the DVD) and are packaged as copies of the original albums. The covers are accurate down to the quaint way EMI LP jackets were assembled in the ’60s (with glued-down cardboard flaps on the back). Extras like the White Album poster and portraits, and the “Sgt. Pepper” cutouts, are included too, as is a 44-page book of historical notes and pictures.
In the 22 years since the release of the original, mediocre CDs, just about all of the Beatles’ great contemporaries — the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan among them — have had their catalogs upgraded as technology has changed. Beatles fans have been begging EMI to do the same, and although the wait has been long, the new transfers are so good that this thrice-familiar music sounds fresher than ever.
Now EMI should consider moving the catalog to a truly high-definition format, like Blu-ray DVD, adding newly remixed Surround versions like those on “The Beatles Anthology.” With the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first hit coming in 2012, there isn’t much time to waste.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Remastered Beatles catalog comes together, real soon
By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/
Friday, August 28, 2009
You say you want a revelation?
Listen to the intensified punch of Come Together, the majestic breadth of The Long and Winding Road, the modern sheen on Love Me Do and the renewed thrust in I Am the Walrus.
PHOTOS: A gallery of Fab Four album covers
The Beatles catalog, digitally remastered for the first time, is arriving in stores Sept. 9 amid a joyful noise from fans.
Audiophiles have long lamented the thin, shrill results of the music's 1987 transfer to CD, flaws magnified by advances in digital technology that enriched the recordings of peers with repeated remastering rounds.
"Even people listening on lower-quality ear buds and MP3s will hear a drastic jump in quality," says Beatles historian Matt Hurwitz, who heard a sampling of the new tracks. "We're hearing something a lot closer to the stereo and mono mixes produced in the '60s. This is the way The Beatles heard it."
Though frustrating for fans, the wait has heightened drama and value, says Beatles scholar Martin Lewis.
"Fans chomping at the bit felt that Apple was painfully slow responding to demand," he says. "But at least The Beatles haven't been overly repackaged like Elvis and The Who."
The collection includes 14 stereo albums, sold individually or in a box set, each with original U.K. vinyl track listings, artwork and liner notes, plus archival photos and added historical and recording notes. New QuickTime mini-documentaries are included in each CD except Past Masters, which combines the two 1988 single volumes into one set.
The Beatles in Mono, a box catering to completists, gathers 10 mono albums and two discs of mono masters. (Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and Let It Be are missing because they were recorded in stereo.) Monos won't be sold separately, and EMI has no plans to press more mono boxes when the first run sells out.
"That's smart, because people who want the mono mixes want all of them," Hurwitz says. "It's for hard-core fans like me who want to understand what it all sounded like back then. In 1963, kids didn't have stereos. That's why (producer) George Martin felt so strongly about releasing those (early) albums in mono. We're finally getting to hear the true excitement of those recordings."
Among the mono treats: Paul McCartney's vamping coda on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise), audible only on vinyl until now. And because bass was often suppressed on vinyl to prevent phonograph needles from jumping, expect more oomph from McCartney's Hofner.
The upgraded catalog "leaves the library pure," Hurwitz says. "It's now the definitive catalog, as close to the masters as technically possible."
The long and winding road to 09/09/09 began four years ago when Abbey Road engineers in London got the green light to transfer The Beatles tunes from analog tape to digital.
Though the original high-quality tapes showed no deterioration, the splicing-tape glue had dried up, causing segments to separate.
"It was slightly disconcerting on the first rewind of Please Please Me when the edits started coming apart," says Guy Massey, the project's senior recording engineer, during a playback session of remaster excerpts at Capitol Records.
Once tracks were ported one by one to digital files, engineers debated the extent of their scouring. Vocal pops, drop-outs, electrical clicks and bad edits were erased where possible.
"Some people argue that things like that should stay," says project coordinator Allan Rouse. "I don't agree. It's painful to listen to, and you would have dealt with it if you'd had the technology in the '60s. We've repaired those things to sound more pleasing."
Certain organic sounds, however, like Ringo Starr's creaky bass drum pedal on 1963's All I've Got to Do, stayed.
"In the piano chord at the end of A Day in the Life, you hear a squeaky chair," Massey says. "The Beatles probably would have removed it if they'd had the wherewithal. Unless they detracted from the performance, we've left things like that intact because they've become part of history."
Defying a trend toward excess, the team made modest use of "limiting," which shrinks dynamic range to make music sound louder. Only five of the 525 minutes of Beatles music was subjected to de-noising technology, used to reduce tape hiss.
Though the enhancements are subtle, fans will notice brighter, warmer sound and plenty of unearthed details. Engineers took greater liberties with the stereos than the monos.
"For the stereos, we haven't presented the original master tapes as they were, because we felt we could improve them," Massey says. "The monos are more representative of the master tapes. We've presented them in the best possible light."
Remastering significantly boosted sound quality, particularly on Revolver and The Beatles (aka the White Album). Remixing, the manipulation of separate tracks to alter the placement of vocals and instrumentation, could have yielded more dramatic results, but Apple has yet to green-light a catalog remix.
"That's the only thing that would make a massive difference," says Rouse, acknowledging that while some fans yearn for a full remix, purists regard it as retouching the Mona Lisa. "So far, some 120 Beatles songs have been remixed in 5.1 stereo for DVD, and they're great alternatives, but not replacements."
Fans who cry "revisionism" should seek out their old records or the mono set, McCartney says. "It's not like the originals have gone away. If you want what we consider an improvement, this is it, the stereo CDs. Our guys worked hard to get it faithful to the original."
John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, anticipates few objections to the retooled tunes, particularly since many consumers will be newbies.
"These songs aren't just old songs," she says. "They're new, too, because many people haven't listened to The Beatles yet."
http://www.usatoday.com/
Friday, August 28, 2009
You say you want a revelation?
Listen to the intensified punch of Come Together, the majestic breadth of The Long and Winding Road, the modern sheen on Love Me Do and the renewed thrust in I Am the Walrus.
PHOTOS: A gallery of Fab Four album covers
The Beatles catalog, digitally remastered for the first time, is arriving in stores Sept. 9 amid a joyful noise from fans.
Audiophiles have long lamented the thin, shrill results of the music's 1987 transfer to CD, flaws magnified by advances in digital technology that enriched the recordings of peers with repeated remastering rounds."Even people listening on lower-quality ear buds and MP3s will hear a drastic jump in quality," says Beatles historian Matt Hurwitz, who heard a sampling of the new tracks. "We're hearing something a lot closer to the stereo and mono mixes produced in the '60s. This is the way The Beatles heard it."
Though frustrating for fans, the wait has heightened drama and value, says Beatles scholar Martin Lewis.
"Fans chomping at the bit felt that Apple was painfully slow responding to demand," he says. "But at least The Beatles haven't been overly repackaged like Elvis and The Who."
The collection includes 14 stereo albums, sold individually or in a box set, each with original U.K. vinyl track listings, artwork and liner notes, plus archival photos and added historical and recording notes. New QuickTime mini-documentaries are included in each CD except Past Masters, which combines the two 1988 single volumes into one set.
The Beatles in Mono, a box catering to completists, gathers 10 mono albums and two discs of mono masters. (Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and Let It Be are missing because they were recorded in stereo.) Monos won't be sold separately, and EMI has no plans to press more mono boxes when the first run sells out.
"That's smart, because people who want the mono mixes want all of them," Hurwitz says. "It's for hard-core fans like me who want to understand what it all sounded like back then. In 1963, kids didn't have stereos. That's why (producer) George Martin felt so strongly about releasing those (early) albums in mono. We're finally getting to hear the true excitement of those recordings."
Among the mono treats: Paul McCartney's vamping coda on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise), audible only on vinyl until now. And because bass was often suppressed on vinyl to prevent phonograph needles from jumping, expect more oomph from McCartney's Hofner.
The upgraded catalog "leaves the library pure," Hurwitz says. "It's now the definitive catalog, as close to the masters as technically possible."
The long and winding road to 09/09/09 began four years ago when Abbey Road engineers in London got the green light to transfer The Beatles tunes from analog tape to digital.
Though the original high-quality tapes showed no deterioration, the splicing-tape glue had dried up, causing segments to separate.
"It was slightly disconcerting on the first rewind of Please Please Me when the edits started coming apart," says Guy Massey, the project's senior recording engineer, during a playback session of remaster excerpts at Capitol Records.
Once tracks were ported one by one to digital files, engineers debated the extent of their scouring. Vocal pops, drop-outs, electrical clicks and bad edits were erased where possible.
"Some people argue that things like that should stay," says project coordinator Allan Rouse. "I don't agree. It's painful to listen to, and you would have dealt with it if you'd had the technology in the '60s. We've repaired those things to sound more pleasing."
Certain organic sounds, however, like Ringo Starr's creaky bass drum pedal on 1963's All I've Got to Do, stayed.
"In the piano chord at the end of A Day in the Life, you hear a squeaky chair," Massey says. "The Beatles probably would have removed it if they'd had the wherewithal. Unless they detracted from the performance, we've left things like that intact because they've become part of history."
Defying a trend toward excess, the team made modest use of "limiting," which shrinks dynamic range to make music sound louder. Only five of the 525 minutes of Beatles music was subjected to de-noising technology, used to reduce tape hiss.
Though the enhancements are subtle, fans will notice brighter, warmer sound and plenty of unearthed details. Engineers took greater liberties with the stereos than the monos.
"For the stereos, we haven't presented the original master tapes as they were, because we felt we could improve them," Massey says. "The monos are more representative of the master tapes. We've presented them in the best possible light."
Remastering significantly boosted sound quality, particularly on Revolver and The Beatles (aka the White Album). Remixing, the manipulation of separate tracks to alter the placement of vocals and instrumentation, could have yielded more dramatic results, but Apple has yet to green-light a catalog remix.
"That's the only thing that would make a massive difference," says Rouse, acknowledging that while some fans yearn for a full remix, purists regard it as retouching the Mona Lisa. "So far, some 120 Beatles songs have been remixed in 5.1 stereo for DVD, and they're great alternatives, but not replacements."
Fans who cry "revisionism" should seek out their old records or the mono set, McCartney says. "It's not like the originals have gone away. If you want what we consider an improvement, this is it, the stereo CDs. Our guys worked hard to get it faithful to the original."
John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, anticipates few objections to the retooled tunes, particularly since many consumers will be newbies.
"These songs aren't just old songs," she says. "They're new, too, because many people haven't listened to The Beatles yet."
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Friday, June 15, 2007
McCartney, Almost Within Touching Distance
Paul McCartney performing at the Highline Ballroom.Music Review Paul McCartney
By BEN RATLIFF
The New York Times
Published: June 15, 2007
“I love you, Paul,” someone shouted, halfway through Paul McCartney’s unadvertised set at the Highline Ballroom on Wednesday night. Well, more than one: A lot of people were shouting that. They couldn’t help themselves. He was right in front of them.
Mr. McCartney struck a formal facsimile of intimacy: 90 minutes on stage in a 700-capacity room full of reporters, assorted V.I.P.s, contest winners and stand-in-line-for-a-long-timers who heard about the show only a day or two before.
“I love you too,” Mr. McCartney answered, but almost as a defensive block. He put on a Tony Soprano accent, and he kept a straight face. “It’s the beauty of these intimate shows, you know,” he followed, dryly. “You get to have intimate conversations with the audience. How ya doin’? You’re the man! Naw, you’re the man!”
Cheery, but essentially trying to get his work done, Mr. McCartney presided over a formal facsimile of intimacy: 90 minutes long, in a 700-capacity room full of press, assorted V.I.P.’s, contest winners and stand-in-line-for-a-long-timers who had heard about the show only a day or two before.
The gig was a promotion for his new album, “Memory Almost Full” (Hear Music), and he put on a similar show at the Electric Ballroom, a slightly larger club, in London last week. (He has not announced plans for a proper tour.) It’s not unusual these days for big acts to play a promotional show at clubs they’ve outgrown; the same night in New York Franz Ferdinand played a secret gig at the Bowery Ballroom, and ditto with Interpol last week.But for Mr. McCartney, who can sell out stadiums at hundreds of dollars a ticket, this was unusual. He used no pyro or video backdrop, and the audience stood close enough to its hero that it could hold nonconversations with him. He played beautifully, in tight control of his voice (even in high range) and his musicianship, through a clutch of new songs and some of the oldest Beatles repertory.
But some of what was special about hearing Paul McCartney in a place like this was counteracted by the glibness of his touring band, almost the same crew that backed him on his stadium tour last year. These musicians — two guitarists, a keyboardist and a drummer — were accurate, reliable, in the pocket and kind of flavorless.
Mr. McCartney is a fascinating alloy of raw and slick, eccentricity and efficiency. When you hear the tracks on “Memory Almost Full” in which he plays all the instruments — his drumming one step ahead of primitive, his bass lines so melodically inventive they’re almost evil — you wish he could just multiply himself for performances. When the band replicated old parts, touching on the tiniest details of Beatles songs like “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “Lady Madonna” and “Hey Jude,” the show felt something like a homage to composition and production, rather than the great thing that performances can be: two-way rituals between band and audience.
But something about the joy and simplicity of the new songs buoyed the set. There were five of them, including “Dance Tonight,” a naïvely sweet call for fun, with Mr. McCartney’s mandolin strumming as the through line; “Nod Your Head,” a slow, chugging rock song; and “That Was Me,” full of spry astonishment at looking back on a strange and notable life. (It went over big in the V.I.P. section, where people are often prone to similar thoughts.)
The onlooker’s stupid reflex, after decades of Beatleology and Paul-versus-John studies, is to scrutinize Mr. McCartney for honesty, whatever that is. But all he had to do was play two songs alone with guitar — “Blackbird” and “I’ll Follow the Sun” — and he seemed as guileless as the next guy. Later, alone at the piano, he sang “Here Today,” an elegiac song he wrote after John Lennon’s death, and dedicated it to “our fallen heroes: John, George and Linda.”
When he finished, he stopped the flow of his own efficiency and thought out loud. “It’s good to play that song in the town John loved,” he said. “And where Linda was born in. And where we played the Ed Sullivan show.”
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Interpreting the Beatles Without Copying
By ALLAN KOZINN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
Published: January 13, 2007
Lately I’ve been wondering why, as a more than casual Beatles fan, I’m not interested in note-perfect covers by Beatles tribute bands, even though, as a classical music critic, I happily spend my nights listening to re-creations — covers, in a way — of Beethoven symphonies and Haydn string quartets. What, when it comes down to it, is the difference?
Obviously, this is something of a comparison between apples and oranges: we first heard the Beatles’ music on their own recordings, whose sounds are imprinted on our memories and are definitive. Our first encounters with, say, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony were through performances that, however spectacular, have no direct link to Beethoven himself. Yet Beethoven’s score of the work is a detailed blueprint of how he expected it to sound, and any performance will be governed by that, allowing for interpretive leeway that may be subtle or dramatic. A cover band, hoping to reproduce the original recording, has less flexibility.
The Smithereens (from left, Dennis Diken, Pat DiNizio, Jim Babjak and Mike Mesaros) have recorded their version of the Beatles’ American breakthrough album.
But a new album by the Smithereens shows how much interpretive leeway a rock band can have, even when it intends to perform faithful covers. The disc, “Meet the Smithereens!” (Koch), which comes out next week, reproduces the track lineup and, to a great degree, the original arrangements (at the original tempos and in the original keys) of the Beatles’ 1964 American breakthrough album, “Meet the Beatles!” But it does more: the 12 songs are filtered through the Smithereens’ own crunchy New Jersey bar-band sound, a quality likely to come through even more strongly when the band plays the album live at the B. B. King Blues Club and Grill tonight.
The Smithereens made their name playing their own material, but they have recorded Beatles songs before, and they have always had a soft spot for the concision and zest of British Invasion bands. So they approach this music as fans who know it intimately, but also as composers who know what makes a great song durable.
They are hardly the first to cover a complete Beatles album. Big Daddy recorded a doo-wop version of the full “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in the early 1990s. Phish released a live performance of the complete “White Album” in 1994. In the late ’80s, the Slovenian art-rock band Laibach released “Let It Be,” a ponderous, reordered version of the Beatles’ album of the same name, albeit without the title track.
What makes “Meet the Smithereens” unusual is the degree to which, like a good classical performance, it balances fidelity to the original with a projection of the interpreter’s style. Typically, Beatles covers and pop covers in general are an interpreter’s art and emphasize the performer’s vision. After all, if you don’t have a distinctive perspective, even one as off the wall as Laibach’s, why should someone listen to your version instead of just playing the original?
Tribute acts, by contrast, are purely recreative. Their goal is to reproduce a band’s music rather than to make their own mark on it. The Smithereens acknowledge this world without quite joining it. These days, everyone from the Grateful Dead to R.E.M. has its own shadow specialists. But Beatles tribute bands have long been a global industry.
Many, though by no means all, borrow a page from the Elvis impersonators’ playbook and turn their performances into theater pieces. They dress up in period costumes, changing from short to long wigs, moving from collarless jackets to psychedelic outfits and affixing paste-on beards and mustaches as the show progresses. And they imitate the Beatles’ accents and jokey patter. (A band that takes this approach, 1964 the Tribute, is playing at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 27.)
I’ve never understood the appeal. When I saw “Beatlemania” on Broadway, in the late 1970s, I admired the stage band’s skill, but left the theater feeling I’d have been better off listening to the records and paging through old Life magazines. And watching other faux mop-tops trading on Beatles nostalgia over the years, I’ve always felt a little embarrassed for the musicians, who had clearly devoted significant effort to learning arrangements that in some cases were too complex for even the Beatles themselves to perform live, yet who were sublimating their personalities (and musicianship) to the business of role-playing.
Which is not to say that what they do is without merit; quite the opposite. For anyone who has listened closely to how the Beatles’ vocal and instrumental arrangements work, it’s hard not to admire the musicianship of bands that reproduce it accurately. Still, you could argue that at least some of the Beatles’ music — recorded layer by layer, carefully polished in the studio, and using tape loops, backward sounds and other innovations — is actually electronic music: the recordings are the score and the performance, self-contained, just as much as a tape work by Stockhausen is.
Even so, those recordings can be transcribed fairly precisely, as Tetsuya Fujita, Yuji Hagino, Hajime Kubo and Goro Sato demonstrated in “The Beatles Scores” (published by Hal Leonard in 1993), and those transcriptions can be learned and recreated live with startling exactitude, just as the score of a Shostakovich symphony can. And Glenn Gould’s manifestos about the death of the concert notwithstanding, there will always be something electrifying in a live performance that cannot be captured on a recording.
That live experience is something tribute bands offer that can no longer be had from the Beatles themselves (although Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr still perform their old hits on tour). For that matter, tribute bands offer something — quite a lot, actually — that the Beatles never did. Between late 1962 and the summer of 1966, the Beatles recorded 118 songs. But during their international touring years (starting in late 1963), they played a mere 33 songs in concert. The last album from which they played any material live was the 1965 LP “Rubber Soul”; thereafter, they recorded another 100 songs on six albums. With technology far beyond what the Beatles had (sampling keyboards, in particular), tribute bands can play them all.
That said, when a string quartet plays Haydn, it doesn’t set out to produce an unvaried copy of what’s in the score. The players make interpretive decisions about tempos, balances and tone color; ideally, a quartet’s reading will breathe differently from night to night, and will be distinct from a competing ensemble’s account. And except for the occasional misconceived children’s concert, quartets don’t don Haydn-era wigs and costumes, or adopt Austrian accents.
This is what I like about “Meet the Smithereens!”: it bridges the extremes of note-for-note fidelity and pure interpretation, offering the best of both worlds. The band has treated “Meet the Beatles!” as a symphony, a complete cultural artifact, to be heard intact. It barely matters that “Meet the Beatles!” was not quite the album the Beatles intended, but rather a compilation made by Capitol Records, using 9 of the 14 songs from the group’s British album “With the Beatles,” as well as three songs released as singles. For American listeners who discovered the Beatles at the time, as the Smithereens did, “Meet” has an emotional resonance that “With” does not.
The arrangements on “Meet the Smithereens!” have all the vibrant energy and directness of the originals, and even minor details like the keyboard glissandos in “Little Child” and the overdubbed handclaps on “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” are faithfully preserved.
Yet you wouldn’t mistake it for the Beatles, as you might with a tribute band. Pat DiNizio’s vocals have the dark, slightly flattened quality you hear on signature Smithereens songs like “Blood and Roses” or “A Girl Like You,” and if his guitar solos follow the contours of George Harrison’s, they aren’t slavishly identical.
Where the Beatles moved to acoustic guitars for “Till There Was You” — the only cover on “Meet the Beatles!” — the Smithereens opted to keep it electric, with a touch of distortion, and to abandon the saccharine quality that Paul McCartney brought to the vocal.
The guitar tone and effects, and the way the vocal harmonies are balanced on, for example, “This Boy” and “Hold Me Tight,” are the Smithereens’ own. And so are their accents. The album manages to scream Beatles 1964 and Smithereens 2007 all at once.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
Published: January 13, 2007
Lately I’ve been wondering why, as a more than casual Beatles fan, I’m not interested in note-perfect covers by Beatles tribute bands, even though, as a classical music critic, I happily spend my nights listening to re-creations — covers, in a way — of Beethoven symphonies and Haydn string quartets. What, when it comes down to it, is the difference?
Obviously, this is something of a comparison between apples and oranges: we first heard the Beatles’ music on their own recordings, whose sounds are imprinted on our memories and are definitive. Our first encounters with, say, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony were through performances that, however spectacular, have no direct link to Beethoven himself. Yet Beethoven’s score of the work is a detailed blueprint of how he expected it to sound, and any performance will be governed by that, allowing for interpretive leeway that may be subtle or dramatic. A cover band, hoping to reproduce the original recording, has less flexibility.
The Smithereens (from left, Dennis Diken, Pat DiNizio, Jim Babjak and Mike Mesaros) have recorded their version of the Beatles’ American breakthrough album.But a new album by the Smithereens shows how much interpretive leeway a rock band can have, even when it intends to perform faithful covers. The disc, “Meet the Smithereens!” (Koch), which comes out next week, reproduces the track lineup and, to a great degree, the original arrangements (at the original tempos and in the original keys) of the Beatles’ 1964 American breakthrough album, “Meet the Beatles!” But it does more: the 12 songs are filtered through the Smithereens’ own crunchy New Jersey bar-band sound, a quality likely to come through even more strongly when the band plays the album live at the B. B. King Blues Club and Grill tonight.
The Smithereens made their name playing their own material, but they have recorded Beatles songs before, and they have always had a soft spot for the concision and zest of British Invasion bands. So they approach this music as fans who know it intimately, but also as composers who know what makes a great song durable.
They are hardly the first to cover a complete Beatles album. Big Daddy recorded a doo-wop version of the full “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in the early 1990s. Phish released a live performance of the complete “White Album” in 1994. In the late ’80s, the Slovenian art-rock band Laibach released “Let It Be,” a ponderous, reordered version of the Beatles’ album of the same name, albeit without the title track.
What makes “Meet the Smithereens” unusual is the degree to which, like a good classical performance, it balances fidelity to the original with a projection of the interpreter’s style. Typically, Beatles covers and pop covers in general are an interpreter’s art and emphasize the performer’s vision. After all, if you don’t have a distinctive perspective, even one as off the wall as Laibach’s, why should someone listen to your version instead of just playing the original?
Tribute acts, by contrast, are purely recreative. Their goal is to reproduce a band’s music rather than to make their own mark on it. The Smithereens acknowledge this world without quite joining it. These days, everyone from the Grateful Dead to R.E.M. has its own shadow specialists. But Beatles tribute bands have long been a global industry.
Many, though by no means all, borrow a page from the Elvis impersonators’ playbook and turn their performances into theater pieces. They dress up in period costumes, changing from short to long wigs, moving from collarless jackets to psychedelic outfits and affixing paste-on beards and mustaches as the show progresses. And they imitate the Beatles’ accents and jokey patter. (A band that takes this approach, 1964 the Tribute, is playing at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 27.)
I’ve never understood the appeal. When I saw “Beatlemania” on Broadway, in the late 1970s, I admired the stage band’s skill, but left the theater feeling I’d have been better off listening to the records and paging through old Life magazines. And watching other faux mop-tops trading on Beatles nostalgia over the years, I’ve always felt a little embarrassed for the musicians, who had clearly devoted significant effort to learning arrangements that in some cases were too complex for even the Beatles themselves to perform live, yet who were sublimating their personalities (and musicianship) to the business of role-playing.
Which is not to say that what they do is without merit; quite the opposite. For anyone who has listened closely to how the Beatles’ vocal and instrumental arrangements work, it’s hard not to admire the musicianship of bands that reproduce it accurately. Still, you could argue that at least some of the Beatles’ music — recorded layer by layer, carefully polished in the studio, and using tape loops, backward sounds and other innovations — is actually electronic music: the recordings are the score and the performance, self-contained, just as much as a tape work by Stockhausen is.
Even so, those recordings can be transcribed fairly precisely, as Tetsuya Fujita, Yuji Hagino, Hajime Kubo and Goro Sato demonstrated in “The Beatles Scores” (published by Hal Leonard in 1993), and those transcriptions can be learned and recreated live with startling exactitude, just as the score of a Shostakovich symphony can. And Glenn Gould’s manifestos about the death of the concert notwithstanding, there will always be something electrifying in a live performance that cannot be captured on a recording.
That live experience is something tribute bands offer that can no longer be had from the Beatles themselves (although Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr still perform their old hits on tour). For that matter, tribute bands offer something — quite a lot, actually — that the Beatles never did. Between late 1962 and the summer of 1966, the Beatles recorded 118 songs. But during their international touring years (starting in late 1963), they played a mere 33 songs in concert. The last album from which they played any material live was the 1965 LP “Rubber Soul”; thereafter, they recorded another 100 songs on six albums. With technology far beyond what the Beatles had (sampling keyboards, in particular), tribute bands can play them all.
That said, when a string quartet plays Haydn, it doesn’t set out to produce an unvaried copy of what’s in the score. The players make interpretive decisions about tempos, balances and tone color; ideally, a quartet’s reading will breathe differently from night to night, and will be distinct from a competing ensemble’s account. And except for the occasional misconceived children’s concert, quartets don’t don Haydn-era wigs and costumes, or adopt Austrian accents.
This is what I like about “Meet the Smithereens!”: it bridges the extremes of note-for-note fidelity and pure interpretation, offering the best of both worlds. The band has treated “Meet the Beatles!” as a symphony, a complete cultural artifact, to be heard intact. It barely matters that “Meet the Beatles!” was not quite the album the Beatles intended, but rather a compilation made by Capitol Records, using 9 of the 14 songs from the group’s British album “With the Beatles,” as well as three songs released as singles. For American listeners who discovered the Beatles at the time, as the Smithereens did, “Meet” has an emotional resonance that “With” does not.
The arrangements on “Meet the Smithereens!” have all the vibrant energy and directness of the originals, and even minor details like the keyboard glissandos in “Little Child” and the overdubbed handclaps on “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” are faithfully preserved.
Yet you wouldn’t mistake it for the Beatles, as you might with a tribute band. Pat DiNizio’s vocals have the dark, slightly flattened quality you hear on signature Smithereens songs like “Blood and Roses” or “A Girl Like You,” and if his guitar solos follow the contours of George Harrison’s, they aren’t slavishly identical.
Where the Beatles moved to acoustic guitars for “Till There Was You” — the only cover on “Meet the Beatles!” — the Smithereens opted to keep it electric, with a touch of distortion, and to abandon the saccharine quality that Paul McCartney brought to the vocal.
The guitar tone and effects, and the way the vocal harmonies are balanced on, for example, “This Boy” and “Hold Me Tight,” are the Smithereens’ own. And so are their accents. The album manages to scream Beatles 1964 and Smithereens 2007 all at once.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Won't You Please Help Me? The Life and Death of the Beatles
April 06, 2006, 6:25 a.m.
By Timothy M. Thibodeau
http://www.nationalreview.com
In his epic saga of the four lads from Liverpool, The Beatles: The Biography, Bob Spitz delivers a jarring reappraisal of the supposed glory days of the band that spearheaded the British Invasion. The Beatles's earliest performances in the grimy clubs of Liverpool; their brutal drug and alcohol fueled gigs in Germany; the bedlam of Beatlemania; and the petty dismemberment of the most successful pop ensemble to that date are meticulously chronicled with unflinching candor. Whether intentional or not, Spitz has succeeded in deconstructing the official, blissful Beatles myth that was propagated by Paul, George, and Ringo in their meandering television pseudo-documentary, The Beatles Anthology (1995).
After hearing an upbeat interview with Spitz on Laura Ingraham's radio show, I expected his book to indulge us with a joyful celebration of Beatlemania. Instead, the heroic Mop Top myth quickly disintegrates into an often dark and tragic morality play that begins with the dysfunctional family life of an angry teenager named John Lennon, whose eventual stardom led him to declare that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. The irony, of course, is that one is hard pressed to find a more apt illustration of Jesus' saying "What would it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?" than the John Lennon of Spitz's biography. (As it turned out, Lennon's fame also quite literally cost him his life when a deranged fan murdered him).
A Sad Man
Beatles fans know that the band's founder was a restless and unconventional soul, that Lennon had a biting wit and predictably offered huge doses of sarcastic buffoonery to his audiences. Spitz highlights many of these colorful displays: torrents of profanity at German audiences; Nazi salutes from the balconies of hotels; and John's famous, much-rehearsed quip in which he invited the British royalty to "rattle their jewelry" during a Royal Command Performance.
Spitz deftly takes us beyond these antics to lay bare a tortured soul that found no comfort in fame, no respite from his inner demons. While avoiding the pitfalls of playing the role of armchair psychologist, Spitz documents the traumas of young Lennon's life that weighed him down with an often-debilitating melancholia. His father abandoned him when he was five; his mother was killed in a car accident when he was 18; he flunked out of art college; his best friend and idol, Stuart Sutcliffe, the bassist for the Hamburg version of the Beatles, died of a brain aneurysm.
The grown-up Lennon found little solace in his musical art; instead, this despondent artist acted out his pain in increasingly frequent verbal and physical confrontations with his closest friends and associates. When the Beatles finally bid good riddance to the deplorable conditions of their early gigs and began to live like royalty, Lennon's alcoholism, drug abuse, and self-destructive tendencies became even more pronounced (many readers will understandably be stunned by the magnitude of his chronic drug dependency). The people who loved him the most — Cynthia, his long-suffering wife, whom he treated with humiliating contempt; and Brian Epstein, the Beatles' gay manager with whom John reportedly had a sexual encounter in Spain — were vilified, mocked, and abused. Lennon was also a miserable father who subjected his young son Julian to the same emotional deprivations that he had endured as a child.
How the Other Half Lived
The other half of the fabled Lennon and McCartney song-writing team seems to have been more immune to the vicissitudes of his life. While it is true that Paul came from a more stable home environment, he too suffered the trauma of a lost parent; his mother died of cancer when he was a teen. Yet Paul seemed to carry little emotional baggage into adulthood, or if he did, he was remarkably adept at concealing it. The Paul that emerges in Spitz's account is an exceptionally intelligent young man; a brilliant and disciplined musician who was brimming with self-importance; the consummate entertainer and showman who thrived on being in the public eye.
Like the other Beatles, Paul was often overwhelmed with the virtual imprisonment that accompanied stardom. But unlike John, Paul enjoyed being a Beatle, and when the joy ride came to an end, he didn't demolish his legacy with the same sort of vituperation and public lunacy as his partner. Spitz forces us to conclude that Lennon's hostility towards the Beatles after their break-up was largely the result of his deep personal animosity towards Paul. Always jealous and suspicious of Paul, even when they were at their collaborative peak, Lennon bitterly resented the fact that after Brian Epstein's untimely death, John's band became Paul's band. But given Lennon's drug addiction, mental instability, artistic incoherence, and puerile behavior, it is hard to imagine any other scenario.
Paul introduced the Beatles's lead guitarist, George Harrison, to the band. A solid musician who always stood in the long shadow of Lennon and McCartney, George seems to have been much closer to John in his cynicism about Beatlemania and the legions of shrieking girls who drowned out their performances. While he feasted on endless orgies of babes, booze, and drugs with the other Beatles, George looked to the East for spiritual enlightenment, convincing the other band members to embark on an ill-fated trip to study with the Maharishi. Despite the disappointment with his initial foray into Eastern spirituality, Harrison seems to have continued his introspective quest through his close association with Indian musicians,
Ringo Starr (born, Richard Starkey) became a Beatle when John, Paul, and George decided that their strikingly handsome and popular drummer, Pete Best, was an impediment to their success. Their manager unceremoniously fired Best; he was stunned that they weren't man enough to deliver the news to his face, and he broke down in tears at the ruthlessness of this act of treachery. Ringo had no qualms about leaving his band and taking Best's place. Most observers agreed that he was a talented musician who worked his own kind of ugly-duckling charm with the band members and audiences alike.
Disbanding the Band
The demise of the Beatles, recounted with mind-numbing detail in the closing chapters of the book, seems less surprising and more inevitable in Spitz's reconstruction. In fact, given the perpetual conflict, chronic drug abuse, and chaos that engulfed the band, we can only wonder how they endured for so long. The Beatles were great songwriters and performers but had no aptitude for the business end of Beatlemania. As Spitz notes, they were the victims of a number of bungled business deals and scams that resulted from the shortcomings of their all-too-distracted manager, Brian Epstein. His grooming of the Beatles when he "discovered" them in the Cavern Club paved the way for unimaginable success. But Epstein's bumbling through the terra incognita of celebrity of such magnitude was compromised by his own inner turmoil. A life-long homosexual (when such behavior was both scandalous and illegal), Epstein, like Lennon, fell into a downward, inward spiral just as the Beatles phenomenon had hit a dramatic crescendo. His own self-destructive and hedonistic behavior, which paralleled Lennon's, culminated in death by a drug overdose at the age of 32. If only he had found the equivalent of a Yoko Ono to pull him back from the abyss.
The Beatles never recovered from their manager's death. As Lennon later declared, when Brian died, "I knew we'd had it." Their brilliant producer, George Martin, continued to work his magic in the studio with the band members (his magnificent production of Abbey Road is perhaps his greatest achievement), but he invested little emotional or spiritual capital in his personal relationship with them. He clearly admired them as musicians but not as people. In aggressively attempting to fill the gaping hole left by the loss of Brian, Paul only generated more strife among the band members. Critics panned his disastrous television project, Magical Mystery Tour, and another of his ill-fated schemes, the movie Let it Be, unwittingly became an embarrassing archive of the band's demise. Even Paul admitted, years later, that he had crafted the "Beatles' break-up on film."
The disbanding of John, Paul, George, and Ringo comes as a relief by the time we finish Spitz's narrative. He unblinkingly catalogues the drug-induced absurdity of their new commercial enterprises. The anarchy and corruption of their own record label, Apple — with its host of con artists, groupies, and gold-diggers (Spitz counts Yoko Ono among them), who fleeced the Beatles for untold sums of money — makes for painful reading. It is hard to imagine that the band would have been capable of even of a modicum of artistic achievement in such a Dionysian setting. The angry young man from Liverpool who founded the Beatles had "gained the world," but in the process was quite literally losing his mind, not to mention his personal fortune. It really had come time for the lads to go their separate ways and to Let it Be.
— Timothy M. Thibodeau is professor of history at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y.
By Timothy M. Thibodeau
http://www.nationalreview.com
In his epic saga of the four lads from Liverpool, The Beatles: The Biography, Bob Spitz delivers a jarring reappraisal of the supposed glory days of the band that spearheaded the British Invasion. The Beatles's earliest performances in the grimy clubs of Liverpool; their brutal drug and alcohol fueled gigs in Germany; the bedlam of Beatlemania; and the petty dismemberment of the most successful pop ensemble to that date are meticulously chronicled with unflinching candor. Whether intentional or not, Spitz has succeeded in deconstructing the official, blissful Beatles myth that was propagated by Paul, George, and Ringo in their meandering television pseudo-documentary, The Beatles Anthology (1995).
After hearing an upbeat interview with Spitz on Laura Ingraham's radio show, I expected his book to indulge us with a joyful celebration of Beatlemania. Instead, the heroic Mop Top myth quickly disintegrates into an often dark and tragic morality play that begins with the dysfunctional family life of an angry teenager named John Lennon, whose eventual stardom led him to declare that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. The irony, of course, is that one is hard pressed to find a more apt illustration of Jesus' saying "What would it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?" than the John Lennon of Spitz's biography. (As it turned out, Lennon's fame also quite literally cost him his life when a deranged fan murdered him).
A Sad Man
Beatles fans know that the band's founder was a restless and unconventional soul, that Lennon had a biting wit and predictably offered huge doses of sarcastic buffoonery to his audiences. Spitz highlights many of these colorful displays: torrents of profanity at German audiences; Nazi salutes from the balconies of hotels; and John's famous, much-rehearsed quip in which he invited the British royalty to "rattle their jewelry" during a Royal Command Performance.
Spitz deftly takes us beyond these antics to lay bare a tortured soul that found no comfort in fame, no respite from his inner demons. While avoiding the pitfalls of playing the role of armchair psychologist, Spitz documents the traumas of young Lennon's life that weighed him down with an often-debilitating melancholia. His father abandoned him when he was five; his mother was killed in a car accident when he was 18; he flunked out of art college; his best friend and idol, Stuart Sutcliffe, the bassist for the Hamburg version of the Beatles, died of a brain aneurysm.
The grown-up Lennon found little solace in his musical art; instead, this despondent artist acted out his pain in increasingly frequent verbal and physical confrontations with his closest friends and associates. When the Beatles finally bid good riddance to the deplorable conditions of their early gigs and began to live like royalty, Lennon's alcoholism, drug abuse, and self-destructive tendencies became even more pronounced (many readers will understandably be stunned by the magnitude of his chronic drug dependency). The people who loved him the most — Cynthia, his long-suffering wife, whom he treated with humiliating contempt; and Brian Epstein, the Beatles' gay manager with whom John reportedly had a sexual encounter in Spain — were vilified, mocked, and abused. Lennon was also a miserable father who subjected his young son Julian to the same emotional deprivations that he had endured as a child.
How the Other Half Lived
The other half of the fabled Lennon and McCartney song-writing team seems to have been more immune to the vicissitudes of his life. While it is true that Paul came from a more stable home environment, he too suffered the trauma of a lost parent; his mother died of cancer when he was a teen. Yet Paul seemed to carry little emotional baggage into adulthood, or if he did, he was remarkably adept at concealing it. The Paul that emerges in Spitz's account is an exceptionally intelligent young man; a brilliant and disciplined musician who was brimming with self-importance; the consummate entertainer and showman who thrived on being in the public eye.
Like the other Beatles, Paul was often overwhelmed with the virtual imprisonment that accompanied stardom. But unlike John, Paul enjoyed being a Beatle, and when the joy ride came to an end, he didn't demolish his legacy with the same sort of vituperation and public lunacy as his partner. Spitz forces us to conclude that Lennon's hostility towards the Beatles after their break-up was largely the result of his deep personal animosity towards Paul. Always jealous and suspicious of Paul, even when they were at their collaborative peak, Lennon bitterly resented the fact that after Brian Epstein's untimely death, John's band became Paul's band. But given Lennon's drug addiction, mental instability, artistic incoherence, and puerile behavior, it is hard to imagine any other scenario.
Paul introduced the Beatles's lead guitarist, George Harrison, to the band. A solid musician who always stood in the long shadow of Lennon and McCartney, George seems to have been much closer to John in his cynicism about Beatlemania and the legions of shrieking girls who drowned out their performances. While he feasted on endless orgies of babes, booze, and drugs with the other Beatles, George looked to the East for spiritual enlightenment, convincing the other band members to embark on an ill-fated trip to study with the Maharishi. Despite the disappointment with his initial foray into Eastern spirituality, Harrison seems to have continued his introspective quest through his close association with Indian musicians,
Ringo Starr (born, Richard Starkey) became a Beatle when John, Paul, and George decided that their strikingly handsome and popular drummer, Pete Best, was an impediment to their success. Their manager unceremoniously fired Best; he was stunned that they weren't man enough to deliver the news to his face, and he broke down in tears at the ruthlessness of this act of treachery. Ringo had no qualms about leaving his band and taking Best's place. Most observers agreed that he was a talented musician who worked his own kind of ugly-duckling charm with the band members and audiences alike.
Disbanding the Band
The demise of the Beatles, recounted with mind-numbing detail in the closing chapters of the book, seems less surprising and more inevitable in Spitz's reconstruction. In fact, given the perpetual conflict, chronic drug abuse, and chaos that engulfed the band, we can only wonder how they endured for so long. The Beatles were great songwriters and performers but had no aptitude for the business end of Beatlemania. As Spitz notes, they were the victims of a number of bungled business deals and scams that resulted from the shortcomings of their all-too-distracted manager, Brian Epstein. His grooming of the Beatles when he "discovered" them in the Cavern Club paved the way for unimaginable success. But Epstein's bumbling through the terra incognita of celebrity of such magnitude was compromised by his own inner turmoil. A life-long homosexual (when such behavior was both scandalous and illegal), Epstein, like Lennon, fell into a downward, inward spiral just as the Beatles phenomenon had hit a dramatic crescendo. His own self-destructive and hedonistic behavior, which paralleled Lennon's, culminated in death by a drug overdose at the age of 32. If only he had found the equivalent of a Yoko Ono to pull him back from the abyss.
The Beatles never recovered from their manager's death. As Lennon later declared, when Brian died, "I knew we'd had it." Their brilliant producer, George Martin, continued to work his magic in the studio with the band members (his magnificent production of Abbey Road is perhaps his greatest achievement), but he invested little emotional or spiritual capital in his personal relationship with them. He clearly admired them as musicians but not as people. In aggressively attempting to fill the gaping hole left by the loss of Brian, Paul only generated more strife among the band members. Critics panned his disastrous television project, Magical Mystery Tour, and another of his ill-fated schemes, the movie Let it Be, unwittingly became an embarrassing archive of the band's demise. Even Paul admitted, years later, that he had crafted the "Beatles' break-up on film."
The disbanding of John, Paul, George, and Ringo comes as a relief by the time we finish Spitz's narrative. He unblinkingly catalogues the drug-induced absurdity of their new commercial enterprises. The anarchy and corruption of their own record label, Apple — with its host of con artists, groupies, and gold-diggers (Spitz counts Yoko Ono among them), who fleeced the Beatles for untold sums of money — makes for painful reading. It is hard to imagine that the band would have been capable of even of a modicum of artistic achievement in such a Dionysian setting. The angry young man from Liverpool who founded the Beatles had "gained the world," but in the process was quite literally losing his mind, not to mention his personal fortune. It really had come time for the lads to go their separate ways and to Let it Be.
— Timothy M. Thibodeau is professor of history at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y.
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