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People! Gotta love these songs, right????
Here, there and everwere
Obladi
While My Guitar gently weeps!!!!
Whoop, whoop! Go Beatles!
THE founder of the Beatles Appreciation Society wants Crosby music-lovers to join the re-branded group as part of the Liverpool’s year as Capital of Culture. President of the organisation, now called the Liverpool Beatles Appreciation Society International 2008, John-James Chambers says the society is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and knows that many people from Crosby will have made their way into Liverpool in the heady days of the beat boom in the ‘60s. John said: “We started in 1978 and part of the society’s success so far has been to have roads on the Kensington Fields Estate named after the Fab Four – John Lennon Drive, Paul McCartney Way, George Harrison Close and Ringo Starr Drive.” ....more...
EXPERTS in Beatles memorabilia will be assessing fab four collectables at a road show this weekend. Enthusiasts are being asked to take items including those signed by band members to see if the autographs are genuine. Beatles collectables are reckoned to be the most faked in the world, with just 6% of them actually bearing real signatures. The BBC’s The One Show is bringing its memorabilia road show to the Hard Days Night Hotel on North John Street, Liverpool, on Saturday. Experts will be on hand from 11am until 4pm. They will see 150 collectors on a first-come first-served basis. Source:
John Lennon and Yoko Ono cut their hair short on 24 January 1970, declaring that 1970 would be ‘Year One’ for peace. Two weeks later, on the roof of the Black Centre in Holloway, north London, they swapped a bag of the shorn hair for a pair of Muhammed Ali’s blood-stained boxing shorts. The swap was made with Michael X, an English black power activist, who intended to auction the hair to raise money. It would have been worth a small fortune today if someone had held onto it, since a single lock of John’s hair went for £24,000 at auction in December 2007. Newsman: Mr Lennon, why did you decide to cut your hair?...more...
The fortieth anniversary of 1968 is upon us. What, with the wisdom of hindsight, should we think of that convulsive moment? Everywhere there are nostalgic backward glances: Youth! Freedom! Sex! Were not the Sixties the Last Good Time, an era of hope, idealism, the promise of emancipation from—well, from everything? Some think so. “Only a few periods in American history,” The New York Times intoned in an editorial, have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the American intellectual tradition. . . . The 60’s spawned a new morality-based politics that emphasized the individual’s responsibility to speak out against injustice and corruption. It seems so long ago, shrouded in a Day-Glo glaze of grateful recollection. But when it comes to the Sixties, Thomas Mann was right: “The past isn’t dead,” he wrote, “it isn’t event past.” Indeed, paroxysms of the 1960s, which trembled with gathering force through North America and Western Europe from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, continue to reverberate throughout our culture. The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog....more...
How to describe Les Paul's influence in the world of music? Well, the word massive comes to mind. Paul's not just a brilliant guitarist, he also pioneered overdubbing, tape delays, multitrack recording -- things that are now considered absolute basics in the world of studio recording. He's in several halls of fame (Inventors, for his insanely influential work on the solid-body electric guitar; Grammy; Rock and Roll), created a guitar used by some of the most famous guitarists on the planet and has drawn admirers from generations of musicians (he was born in 1915 and apparently has never paused; Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Eddie Van Halen and BB King all give Paul some love during the film). This movie's strength is its obvious affection and admiration for Paul and his restlessly, brilliantly inventive mind. There's so much good music here, you could watch this movie with your eyes closed and still be happy. But really, Les Paul's genius runs so deep and is so interesting, it's hard to imagine a dull movie on him. ...more...
OK, it goes without saying that you wouldn't really want to be Ringo Starr at any moment, unless you're into being recovering Scouse alcoholics who hit things for a living and sing songs about boning 16-year-olds. But, seriously, you wouldn't want to be Ringo Starr right now. He's stropped off Live With Regis & Kelly right before he was supposed to appear, you see. Ringo Starr hasn't had the best of years. He's watched Paul McCartney sign a clever new record deal and get lauded as a visionary. He's seen John Lennon get commemorated in a monolithic tower of light that will outlast us all. And he's seen George Harrison get crowned as the fourth-richest dead man alive. And what about Ringo?...more...
When it came to the Beatles, singer Rick Blaze always considered himself a John guy first, and then a fan of George. Then he gave Paul a chance. For the better part of two years, Blaze was ill and undergoing treatment for hepatitis C. During that time, he started listening to a lot of the music that Paul McCartney made after the Beatles broke up. Blaze took flight with Wings and savored the solo outings. “It was healing music,” Blaze explained. Then, sparked by a newspaper photo of McCartney looking lonely in a sailboat afloat in the Long Island sound, Blaze wrote Sir Paul a letter. Blaze told McCartney what his music had long meant to him, especially the “new” material inspiring the Worcester-based singer. Blaze said he wrote that he hoped McCartney was doing well, and that the knighted singer, who at the time was in the midst of his ugly break from Heather Mills, looked lonely. Amazingly, McCartney not only got the letter, but responded, particularly to Blaze’s idea of letting him assemble an album of McCartney songs performed by independent artists. ...more...
John Lennon once remarked, possibly with his tongue in his cheek: "Dylan got away with murder. I thought, I can write this crap too." Fuelled by LSD and withering disgust for the British establishment, he came up with I Am the Walrus, a surrealistic manifesto for a madman with faith in his own madness. A thread of sinister psychedelic <>mischief connects Lennon's walrus to Wire's troublemaking fly, spreading "more disease than the fleas". Some admissions are far from boastful. The benighted hero of Dick Burnett's Appalachian standard is a man of constant sorrow, although it's hard to feel bad listening to the spirited version recorded for O Brother, Where Art Thou? During the 1980s, UB40 experienced a precipitous decline in standards matched only by Simple Minds, but don't let the fatuous dreadlock-holiday karaoke of their later years deafen you to the power of this recession reggae classic, surely the only pop song ever written from the point of view of a statistic: "I am the one in 10/ A number on a list." ...more...
