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Post by Ish Kabbible on Mar 5, 2016 5:51:21 GMT -5
I'm sure most of you CCFers were not around while the Beatles were recording as a band. Still, it would be interesting to hear your observations, critiques, trivia and whatnot. Recently a new video disc has come out with most of their musical videos. Thats right, among other things the Beatles pioneered the music video. They stopped touring by the end of 1966, unhappy with the sound systems in the large arenas back then and also due to security concerns from the massive crowds they attracted. So they would film a music video of their latest single and send them to select TV shows to be aired. I recall, in the USA, The Smothers Bros show as well as Ed Sullivan would play them.
YouTube has a bunch of Beatles clips now from rhis new disc as well as older live performances. Don't know how long these will be up, they have been forcibly removed in the past. Enjoy them while they are still available
Besides the clips, lets hear what your thoughts are. I'm an oldtimer. I followed them from their 2nd appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964 and bought all their recordings as they were released. I'll come back from time to time to share my experiences.
Have you seen any of them as solo artists? Own any Beatles memorabilia? If there is any musical entity deserving its own thread, I would think it would be them
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Mar 5, 2016 5:51:55 GMT -5
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Mar 5, 2016 5:52:39 GMT -5
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Mar 5, 2016 5:53:42 GMT -5
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Mar 5, 2016 5:54:58 GMT -5
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Post by Phil Maurice on Mar 5, 2016 9:31:30 GMT -5
Had an uncle who was obsessed with them from the start. He gave me the Hey Jude/Revolution single on Apple in 1973 when I was 5. I destroyed it playing it over and over on my Winnie The Pooh record player.
Strangely, it was the insipid Sgt. Pepper movie, the one with Frampton and the Bee Gees, that really pushed my interest in the Beatles into overdrive. I began buying the reissued Capitol singles and requesting the albums for birthdays and Christmas. When Lennon was killed in 1980, I had just turned 13. It hit pretty hard, and I was an obsessive Beatles fan for the next couple of years, reading everything I could about them, pestering older relatives, etc. Looking back, it must have made me very punchable.
I never went in much for memorabilia. Couldn't afford it at the time. I have an early American pressing of Magical Mystery Tour on Apple which includes the 64-page booklet, but that's really it.
Of more interest to me are the various studio outtakes, demos, and live recordings (official and bootlegged) that I've collected over the years. Live at the BBC, for example, is a real treasure, as the band plays live in the studio. Their reputation as a tight, monstrously-talented live act is revealed as being well-deserved, a powerful rebuttal to their largely unlistenable live concert recordings of the period. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2016 10:36:14 GMT -5
My oldest Brother was a huge Beatles fan and from 1964 (5 years old, at the time) to 1973 (14 years) - I heard nothing but Beatles songs all afternoon long when he played their music at reasonable sound levels and his favorite song is Hey Jude and sometimes I just can't get that song out of my head. That's song became my favorite along with Let it Be, Yellow Submarine, and countless others that remains a constant reminder of well this legendary group performed in the back in the 60's at their height of their popularity. My oldest brother had a thrill of his lifetime of where around mid 60's he attended their concert at the Hollywood Bowl and actually shook the hands of one Paul McCartney who later became a Knight.
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Mar 5, 2016 13:49:33 GMT -5
When the White Album came out in the winter of 1968 I heard a rumor that if you peeled off the plain blank cover of the album, underneath was a picture of John and Yoko totally nude. I couldn't resist. I had to see if that was true. So I dug my nails into the album cover and slowly started to peel it off from the lower corner. All I saw was brown cardboard. Got about 20% of the way thru before I was convinced the rumor was BS. I was cursing myself for ruining the cover and since it was a double album it was extra expensive to boot. So for many years, that was the condition of the album in my collection. Still played that record about 1,000 times
Turns out that the nude Lennon/Ono cover was actually to be found on an extremely limited edition album called Two Virgins. Never did find or buy that release. It was avante garde tape loops. Some copies are on Ebay for sale for over $100. Lennon and Yoko eventually posed nude for a Rolling Stone magazine cover that was much easier to find. If you really needed to have a picture of them in that condition
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Post by Action Ace on Mar 5, 2016 17:42:49 GMT -5
I'm not much of a music fan, but they are my all time favorite band. I think the first time I saw them may have been on an afternoon movie playing of "Yellow Submarine." I don't recall much of their music in the 1970s, but I hit my teens during the ""Big Chill" era and I became a big fan of The Beatles and Motown. I own two CDs by rock n roll bands, The Beatles (The 1 Album) and The Police. I prefer songs of the front half of their career to the back half.
"Live and Let Die" and "My Sweet Lord" are the only two songs I recall that I like by the members as solo artists.
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Mar 6, 2016 23:43:34 GMT -5
1966-The Yesterday And Today Album Cover ControversyThe Beatles were releasing albums in their homebase of England for over a year before doing so in the USA. Therefore, the albums produced in the US were different versions of what was already released in Europe. The English versions usually had 2 or more songs than the American kind. And since America was "catching up", there were USA albums that were a hodge podge of various songs. The 1966 American Yesterday And Today albim was such a hodge podge, concicting of songs from various UK Beatles records like Help, Rubber Soul and recent Beatle singles. These types of American records annnoyed the Beatles because they put thoght into the song sequence of the UK albums. At the same time, they were getting tired of all the photography sessions they had to attend and the forced "cuteness" they were asked to pose, So when it was time to shoot the album cover for Yesterday and Today, both Paul and John agreed it was time to do something different, something naughty, something even shocking. Something that can be taken as their commentary about the Vietnam war (which their manager Brian Epstein forbade them to express their views in fear it would agitate a segment of their fans). The Beatles album cover thus came out as this  750,000 copies were produced and shipped to radio stations and distributors for the 1st printing. The media criticism was so strong that Capitol records quickly issued a recall and had them all destroyed. Surviving copies fetch a very pretty penny on EBay. Capitol Records quickly reissued the album with an inoculous cover:  An interesting bit of Beatle history and an incident that would serve to convince the group to wrest more control over their material from Capitol Records. Eventually due to their world wide poularity and money making potential, Capitol Records had to treat them as partners and give them their own record label, Apple Records. A piece of the pie is better than none
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Mar 7, 2016 8:54:58 GMT -5
Great idea for a thread, Ish! I am a MASSIVE Beatles fan. An absolutely obsessive Beatles fan, with an encyclopedic knowledge of their songs and related Beatles trivia. They are my all-time favourite band ever and, let's be honest, they really are the best band of all time. They were so far ahead of the curve musically, for the eight years that they were recording for EMI, that almost every album they released pushed the envelope of what could be done in rock and pop further and further, while upping the songwriting/production ante ever higher. All anyone else in the '60s could do was play catch up really. I'm too young to have been around when the band were together making records, but I became weirdly obsessed by them as a very little kid -- and I'm talking 3 or 4-years-old here. This was even before I'd heard their music! At that tender age I remember asking my Mum and Dad who the best band in the world was and they both said "The Beatles". Now, obviously that's a very subjective opinion (although, let's face it, they were right), but when you're a little kid you just take your parent's answers to those sorts of questions as gospel. I can also remember over the next couple of years desperately trying to memorise the individual names of the members of the Beatles and asking my mum to repeat the band line-up again and again, so that I could learn it. And I still hadn't knowingly heard a note of the band's music at this point, but I was already fascinated by them. I remember seeing a clip of the Beatles on TV singing some song or other when I was around 5-years-old (this would've been in the late '70s) and then, a couple of years later, I discovered the Beatles' 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 compilations (a.k.a. the Red and Blue albums) in my parent's record collection. I was already spending my pocket money on records by the time I was 7-years-old, and I loved the music on those two Beatles' albums and played them over and over again as I grew up. For many years, I thought that those 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 albums represented the entirety of the Beatles output, but at 14 I met a guy at school who had the Abbey Road album on a cassette tape...  I was amazed to see the titles of songs on it that I had never heard -- "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Because", "You Never Give Me Your Money" and "The End", for example. Realising for the first time that there were Beatles albums out there that featured untold numbers of songs that I hadn't yet heard, I went to my local library and in the referance section I found a book called The Beatles Album File and Complete Discography by a guy called Jeff Russell. This book, in fact...  Inside was full details of every song that the Beatles had released on all of their albums and I can vividly remember marvelling at exotic song titles like "Tomorrow Never Knows", "Within You Without You", "I'm Looking Through You" and "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey", imagining how they might sound. Starting on my 15th Birthday, I began to ask relatives for Beatles LPs as presents, since, on my limited paper round wage, albums were still a little beyond my reach financially. I was also careful to ask for the albums in strictly chronological order, so that I got Please Please Me first, then With The Beatles, followed by A Hard Day's Night and so on. The reason I did this was because I wanted to experience those albums in the order that they were originally released in. Yeah, I was already a bit of a Beatles obsessive by then.  By the time I left school, I had all of the Band's albums and also all those hard to find b-sides and non-album singles on the two Past Masters compilation albums. From there, I went on to collecting Beatles' bootlegs in the early '90s, with amazing collections like the Ultra Rare Trax series of outtake compilations coming out at that time. These were expensive and elusive additions to my Beatles collection, but I remember making many trips up to Camden market in London in the early '90s to acquire these treasures. These days, I have somewhere in the region of 55 different Beatles bootleg albums in my record collection.  Of course, I'm pretty obsessive about music generally and I love lots and lots of music from all different eras and genres, but anyway you slice it -- songwriting chops, musical innovation, melodic inventiveness, chart success, cultural impact -- the Beatles trounce all comers. Edit: I saw Paul McCartney live at Earl's Court in London, back in 2003, and it was amazing. I was very skeptical about how good it would be, but I needn't have worried: it was easily the best and most emotionally rewarding gig I have ever been too. Simply a fantastic concert and worth every penny of the, not inconsiderable, ticket price. |
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Mar 7, 2016 9:00:37 GMT -5
I adored the Beatles in my youth, so much so that I'm a little tired of them these days. Still, there's no doubt of their range and the sheer amount of influence they carry in the music world. I still explain to my students who roll their eyes over The Beatles that the band created BOTH rap (Come Together) and heavy metal (Helter Skelter).
I asked my wife out for the first time with a bouquet of flowers and the lyrics to Dear prudence.
The first song I ever sang to my first daughter was In My Life and, to this day, I sing it to both girls every night at bedtime.
So yeah, the Beatles are pretty important to me. I have seen Paul in concert, but it wasn't a great concert, and George is my favorite. All Things Must Pass is the greatest post-Beatles Beatles album of all time.
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Post by DE Sinclair on Mar 7, 2016 9:27:42 GMT -5
My experience was a little different with my parents and the Beatles. I was born in 1961, so I was pretty young during their performing years. And my parents pretty well disapproved of them, so I never really got to hear them and assumed their opinion that they were crap was correct. So most of what I heard at home was country western, which I didn't like, but that was all I got. Later as I got older, I started hearing some songs on the radio, and notably "A Hard Day's Night" on the rare school bus that had speakers and a non-ancient bus driver. We gradually started hearing more, and started getting old records from Goodwill, including "Magical Mystery Tour". Things took off from there, and now I've got digital or cd copies of all their US albums. Some of the younger folks kind of sneer at the idea of them being the best rock band ever, but they'll never convince me they're not.
Also, in Navy boot camp, getting news was pretty difficult as we were intentionally cut off from the outside world. But one bit of news did get through. That was the day John Lennon was killed. Nearly everyone was affected and it made for a very somber day. |
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
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Post by Confessor on Mar 7, 2016 9:36:51 GMT -5
The Beatles were releasing albums in their homebase of England for over a year before doing so in the USA. Therefore, the albums produced in the US were different versions of what was already released in Europe. The English versions usually had 2 or more songs than the American kind. And since America was "catching up", there were USA albums that were a hodge podge of various songs. Another reason for the different song configurations of American Beatles' albums was that the standard '60s British record contract usually asked for two albums a year, of no less than 30 minutes in length. While in America, the standard record contract specified that albums be no less than 25 minutes in length and sometimes groups were asked to deliver up to three albums a year (see The Beach Boys' early '60s discography for further details!). So, Capitol records also saw the "butchering" of Beatles' albums as a way to get more product on to the shelves. For example, by taking the tracks found on the British With The Beatles and A Hard Day's Night albums and mixing them up with a-sides or b-sides of British non-album singles or tracks that appeared on EPs, Capitol were able to get three albums onto the shelves of U.S. record stores, with Meet The Beatles!, The Beatles' Second Album and Something New. Also, just to be pedantic, it's not strictly true that America was always playing catch up with Britain, in terms of new Beatles material. The infamous Yesterday and Today album that you mentioned, which was issued in June 1966, featured three songs ("I'm Only Sleeping", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "Doctor Robert") that wouldn't be released in Britain until August 1966, when they appeared on the Revolver album. |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Mar 7, 2016 9:43:33 GMT -5
(...) they really are the best band of all time. Can't disagree with that! The sheer creativity of the band when they were at their best is flabbergasting. The word "genius" is very often overused, but in this case it is fully warranted. |
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