Friend Levi points me to his friend's blog, "They May Be Parted." I like how particular it is—it's devoted to the Get Back sessions.
Read entire post
Monday, March 5, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Dullblog Book Report
Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles and Bournemouth
Nick Churchill
Natula Publications, 2011
The swelling and significant subgenre of Beatles literature dealing with Beatles and place includes tourist guides like The Beatles’ London and The Beatles’ Liverpool that tell you where they walked and drank and sang, what alley, pub, or park backdropped a famous photo. There are books devoted to tours, like Larry Kane’s Ticket to Ride (North America, 1964), Barry Tashian’s Ticket to Ride (ditto, 1966), and Robert Whitaker’s mostly-photographic Eight Days a Week (Germany, Tokyo, Philippines, 1966)—in each of which, the cultural and commercial peculiarities of successive cities give detail and drama to the grind of jet engines and bus tires.
[MORE]
In town after town, they came, they played, they left. But the Beatles were really only the centering second act in a weeks-long drama that gripped each city. First act, the frenzies frothed up by fans, detractors, media, local hucksters; third act, the dazed aftermath, teenagers dreaming pillow dreams and promoters counting ticket stubs as the ringing in the town’s ears fades. This story is told in the small group of books about the Beatles’ hurricane effect on a single city. The first and best is still Eric Lefcowitz’s Tomorrow Never Knows, about the last concert, Candlestick Park ’66, the work of a self-described “pop archeologist” who, with the aid of Jim Marshall’s photography (the best backstage-onstage rock series, I daresay, ever), places the Beatles in their San Francisco context while retrieving the shreds of mystery and meaning that remind us the past never dies. Bill Carlson’s One Night Stand in the Heartland, about a 1965 visit to Minneapolis, is an attractive, impersonal photo album in which, among other goings-on, an odd Phil Spector look-alike seeks to crash the gate (the Midwest is not so predictable). I am curious to see Dave Schwensen’s The Beatles in Cleveland, if only because on the night of August 14, 1966, Cleveland Stadium saw the biggest Beatles riot ever.
They passed through so many cities, most of which they never got to see, and which never got to see them. The exceptions were mostly in the UK. In 1963, in their modest Mal-driven van, they blanketed England, Scotland, and Wales, from Elgin in the north to Bournemouth in the south. The mania was intense that year—not since the war had the sceptered isle been so consumed by a single invasive entity—yet there was still a hometown or at least home-counties quality to it. Fans were thrilled but not cannibalistic; venturing out in public, the Beatles feared for their hair, not their limbs. John Lennon later called this “the best period fame-wise. … We didn’t get mobbed so much.” Only when that same craze was loosed upon the world at large, exported to nations with entirely different inhibitions, freedoms, and native insanities, did the word “mania” assume its full implications.
Bournemouth, a 200-year-old resort city on Britain’s mid-southern coast, was one of the few towns lucky enough to have an intimate relationship with the Beatles, we find from Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles and Bournemouth, Nick Churchill’s pretty-much-every-conceivable-angle examination. Intimacy like most concepts is relative, however, and here it means that the Beatles got many good looks at the city and its people, knew it as performers and as private citizens, and were photographed chomping its rock candy on the balcony of its biggest hotel. According to Churchill, formerly a reporter with the Bournemouth Daily Echo, this spot of earth is considered by most Britons to be “a retirement centre that only comes to life with the arrival of bucket-and-spade holidaymakers in the summer.” Churchill thinks that’s nonsense and so writes a book which “establishes the connection between the pop group that defined a decade and the part played in their story by a seaside town that’s not as quiet as it seems.”
Such Romantic-Decadent precursors to the Beatles as Wilde, Verlaine, and the Shelleys spent time in Bournemouth, finding rejuvenation in its breezes, inspiration in its proximity to water and cliffside. As the town grew into an affordable middle-class resort, it offered stage performers a lucrative stop on the touring trail; during and between the wars, many of the big names in middlebrow entertainment (Chevalier, Montovani) made their way to the local palladia. There was little or no indigenous rock ‘n’ roll scene, but package pop tours always came through and fans got to see most of the American heavies and British lightweights.
The Beatles went boom in early ’63, sending tremors to every corner of the UK, and for the rest of the year they worked their asses off to nurture tremors into quakes. Bournemouth got more of them than most places: The Beatles did a week’s residency at the Gaumont Cinema in August, during which a sick and crabby George Harrison wrote his first solo song, “Don’t Bother Me,” and the cover of With the Beatles was snapped in an empty hotel dining room, illuminated only by salty seaside sunlight pouring through enormous windows. They returned to headline at the Winter Gardens in November, and again the next year, while touring with Motown’s Mary Wells. In September 1965, John bought Auntie Mimi a harbor’s-edge bungalow. Harry Epstein died in Bournemouth, of a heart attack, a mere six weeks or so before his son Brian caught the last ferry himself.
Nick Churchill’s depiction of the Gaumont week is particularly, and admirably, thick with detail, and from it come at least two nuggets of Beatle-historical interest. The first is the claim of several in attendance that, as Beatlemania had not quite yet hit its earsplitting pitch, it was still possible in summer ’63 to hear most of what the group sang and played. Unfortunately, we will probably not know for ourselves, which leads to nugget number two. A soundboard recording of one gig was made by the man in charge of sound for the Gaumont, a tape said by the few who have heard it to be first-rate. It was many years later sold at auction by the sound man’s daughter—sold, says Churchill’s witness, to an anonymous bidder representing Apple Corps. If that is true, the precious tape is now in a corporate vault from which, given Apple’s eyedropper release policy on unheard music, it will not escape until you and I have returned to dust, if even then.
In other eyewitness action, there is a nice story of a very young Al Stewart (a fave of your reviewer) talking his way into the Beatles’ dressing room by pretending to be a Rickenbacker representative. Churchill incorporates interviews with such previously untapped sources as Louise Cordet, a singer who appeared with the Beatles in Bournemouth; Tony Crawley, entertainment reporter for the Bournemouth Times; Eileen Denton, president of the local Beatles Fan Club branch; Howie Casey, who as leader of Howie and the Seniors shared the Beatles’ bills in Liverpool and in Hamburg, and years later recorded and toured with Wings; and any number of fans and functionaries whose recollections, frankly, tend to blur after a bit, partly from being pointlessly punched up with exclamation marks.
Churchill’s book is certainly justified by the frequency of Bournemouth recurrences in the Beatles’ chronicle, but its scope is necessarily specific, even granular. Were I reviewing it anywhere else I’d be required to note that its readership is the definition of niche, even more so than the London and Liverpool guides, for those cities’ claims on Beatle history don’t need justifying. Churchill has to tell us why Bournemouth particularly matters to Beatle fans, because we likely don’t know. But these are the Beatles, this is Hey Dullblog, and we, reader—you and I—are the niche. Let it be assumed that, if you are reading this, we both care about what a book like this offers.
That said, limits on scope likewise limit varieties of pleasure and interest. Churchill is not a critic or academic and ventures no new thoughts on the Beatles’ musical achievement or cultural meaning. He is a journalist and wants to assemble a narrative of past events from documentary and living evidences—news articles, photographs, interviews. That is fair, but even journalism can have personality, and Churchill’s prose is self-effacing to the degree that the text becomes only one production element among several. The others include photos, reproductions, captions, and text blocks full of info-bites you may either snack on along the way or consume as a batch, though the latter method is likely to leave you feeling bloated. Visually the book resembles a souvenir package, its margins crammed with record labels, handbills, posters, programs, stubs, and other ephemera. Anyone who grew up on the Carr-Tyler Illustrated Record will know the look, and like it at once.
Yeah Yeah Yeah will probably please you much as it did me, and it may leave you wishing, as it did me, that it were better. More interesting writing would have been welcome—wit, style, an ethic of surprise not just in the revelation of obscure information but in the grain of the wording itself. When there is nothing Bournemouthy going on, Churchill, seeking to construct a linear history rather than merely jump between highlights, fills in the gaps with potted Beatles history (albums, movies, breakup)—precisely what is most redundant for the highly-informed niche-dwellers who are his audience. But these are regrets, not active irritations, and Yeah Yeah Yeah really irks me in only one respect, which it shares with more books than can easily be counted. Writers on the Beatles must cease at once to name chapters (let alone books) after Beatle song titles, or lines of Beatle lyric. Must, but never will: Well-known lyrics are too ready a refuge, too easy a source of instant meaning or emotion for writers unconfident of producing those sensations on their own.
All quibbles and qualifications noted, there are none but positive observations left to make of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles and Bournemouth:
The book has an “Appendix” composed partly of Churchill’s brief descriptive appraisals of the acts that supported the Beatles on their Bournemouth shows. Here he gets some pop into his voice, some pith and opinion, and it’s the most entertaining writing of the book, as well as the most quirkily informative. On hapless Billy Baxter, a Liverpool comic who played the Gaumont during Beatles week: “The vast majority of fans ignored him.” Apparently a local duo, Gary and Lee, sought to piggy-back on two dance hits at once with their “Twistin’ to the Locomotion.” (Now that is what you call a lack of inspiration.) Another act was the Vernons Girls (sic), a vocal group revealed by YouTube to have been more or less an English Angels (“My Boyfriend’s Back”), and utterly awful; so who’d have imagined the haunting, wailing backup on Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” was theirs?
I noted only three factual errors: “It’s the Same Old Song,” not “I Can’t Help Myself,” is the Four Tops record referenced in the 1965 Christmas disc; Yellow Submarine, the movie, was released in July 1968, not January 1969 (that’s the soundtrack album); and the Wings drummer was Denny Seiwell, not Danny. Three mistakes is a damned small number for any book (and the last might even be a typo).
Many of the photographs were taken by Harry Taylor, freelance shutterbug for Bournemouth papers. Most have been unpublished until now, and they are without exception wonderful, especially those with Beatles in them.
Read entire post
Don't judge by its disturbing cover . . .
“Lennon and McCartney: Together Alone” (2007) is an in-depth look at the solo careers of both men that is comprehensive, well-written and illustrated, and refreshingly free of bias. It’s changed the way I think about some of Lennon's and McCartney's solo music. For example, I’ll never hear “Watching the Wheels” the same way again.
I can hardly stand to read anything biographical about either Lennon or McCartney anymore, since so many writers moved to compose book-length works on them are grinding an ax of some variety. Reading John Blaney’s book was, for me, like opening a window and letting welcome fresh air into an overheated room...
Read entire post
Thursday, February 9, 2012
The King Features' version of "Tomorrow Never Knows"
The Beatles cartoon is wince-worthy, for sure, but have a little sympathy for the animators. As the years passed, they had to shoehorn what The Beatles were becoming—that is, overtly weird-ass—into the family-friendly Fabs from 1964. After watching the clip below, the following scene popped into my noggin....
Read entire post
I just found this randomly on YouTube and fell in love with it. All due respect to J and P, George Harrison is the one Beatle whose work continues to open and open to me. Gotta dig out 12 Arnold Grove.
Read entire post
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
McCartney sings the standards
You can listen to Paul McCartney's new album, "Kisses on the Bottom," free for a limited time here:
http://www.npr.org/series/98679384/first-listen
I was skeptical when I learned McCartney was planning an album of covers, and when I heard the title, I did a facepalm. But after an initial listen, I'm liking it much more than I thought I would.
Take a listen and see what you think!
Read entire post
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Christmas Never Knows
Just heard this on KLOS' Breakfast With The Beatles...
As Kate and I perform the annual ritual—opening presents to The Beatles Christmas records—I will be thinking of the people who read this blog, and especially the ones who comment. Our conversations mean a lot to me. May you be strong, well, and happy this day, this week, and this year.
Read entire post
Sunday, December 18, 2011
What do you want to hear?
Randy Bachman unlocks the secret of that most enticing of opening chords...
Randy reveals how he was invited into Abbey Road Studioes by Giles Martin, son of the famous Beatles producer George Martin. Martin told Bachman he had all the Beatles source tapes saved onto a computer running Pro Tools. The master of the tapes then asked, "What do you want to hear?"
Thankfully, Bachman asked himself one of the most famous mysteries in all of the Beatles songwriting history: What the hell did they all play on the opening chord in "A Hard Days Night?"
Click to hear.
Read entire post
Why I love our commenters so much...
This, just received today from commenter "Otto Didact," capping our conversation on the true/hidden meaning of "Norwegian Wood":
I've heard from a very, very reliable source - literally the horses mouth - that "Norwegian Wood" was just a play on words as Lennon loved to do. It sounds an awful lot like "knowing she would" doesn't it. As in isn't it a nice knowing she would/will put out. Think about it. Much more clever and subtle, as The Beatles were, than burning down a house. How ridiculous. And Lennon at that time in his life wasn't getting blown off much. As in never. Of course he got laid and that's what he's writing about and wanted to hide from Cynthia. Pretty simple and simply brilliant when you think about it. Case closed.Closed? Perhaps, perhaps not—but I love this. It should be true. Thanks, Otto.
Read entire post
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Isn't it good?
I should (clone myself and) reread Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood, possibly my favorite of his books.
The blog Night RPM (Linden Park) translates, in two parts (1 and 2), Murakami's afterword to the book. Here's a nice bit:
The first part of Norwegian Wood was written in Greece, the second part, in Sicily, and the final part, in Rome. There weren’t tables or chairs in the cheap hotel room that I rented in Athens. So I went to a taberu (* bar) every day, repeatedly listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on my Walkman about 120 times, and wrote continuously. In that sense, it could be said that this novel received a slight assistance from Lennon and McCartney.
Read entire post
Monday, November 28, 2011
Friday, November 11, 2011
Just wanted to bring this to readers' attention...
An anonymous poster (tell us who you are!) left a comment on my post of Juliette Tang's John-Yoko restaging pic:
I hope this is not too far off topic, but so often we concentrate on the legend of John Lennon without considering what he physically did as a performer. I came across this video, How To Play Guitar Like John Lennon:
Perfect if you plan on joining the cast of Beatlemania, or if you just want to appreciate the techniques of the world's most underrated guitarist.
*
The affable, edifying instrumentalist is Michael Sokil ("MJ Sokes"), whose YouTube channel is compellingly watchable:
*
Our anonymous poster also brings this piece, written by Sokil, to our attention. We learn at the end that he's taught himself the guitar, drum, bass, and piano parts for every Beatles song!
Who is this guy?!
Read entire post
Thursday, November 3, 2011
McCartney as the Dickens of Rock
 |
| Macca and Boz |
Looking at Paul McCartney’s personal and artistic similarities to Charles Dickens helps explain a lot of things. It illuminates why McCartney is hugely popular but often critically reviled, why he is driven to make money despite his great wealth, and why he
Often McCartney is compared to John Lennon and criticized for being less confessional, poetic, or political than his songwriting partner. But appreciating Lennon’s variety of excellence shouldn’t entail dismissing McCartney’s. Lennon was a lyric poet in the vein of Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats: his work is powerfully personal, often transparently so. McCartney is a storyteller and performer, as Dickens was.
Dickens and McCartney share a surprising number of character traits. They determined early to achieve financial security, after childhood brushes with poverty. They idealized children and domestic life even during their years as roving London bachelors. They approached their artistic fields as crafts to be mastered, ardently pursuing popular success. Their ambition and desire to run things were sometimes admired and sometimes resented by colleagues.
From the first, both men were also compulsively productive. For much of his career, Dickens combined writing stories, novels, and the occasional play or travel book with public readings and with managing, editing, and contributing to his own periodical (Household Words, followed by All the Year Round). In the Beatles years McCartney’s productivity sometimes exasperated Lennon, who felt pressured to keep pace. Since the breakup, McCartney has regularly released solo albums while also finding time to write a movie, score a ballet, compose and play music in a range of genres, and run his own corporation, MPL.
Unsurprisingly, for both men producing at such a rate resulted in works of varying quality. This reality, combined with Dickens’ and McCartney’s investment in audience response, led to ego-bruising encounters with criticism. Despite popular success, both men were stung by accusations of sentimentality and shoddiness, and both constructed a public persona as a screen for this vulnerability. Dickens cultivated his image as “Boz,” the friendly champion of the common folk, and McCartney has usually played the role of upbeat performer still in touch with everyday people. These personas are not lies, I would argue, but selective presentations of their real personality traits and values. Born performers, Dickens and McCartney strove to combine getting the audience and acclaim they needed with protecting a private life genuinely important to them.
This desire to perform but to shield the private self helps explain why Dickens and McCartney love telling stories. Rather than speak in first person, both often communicate obliquely through characters. Dickens was first known and most widely celebrated for creating indelible characters like Mr. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Scrooge. In a few words, Dickens could create a character with a distinctive look, attitude, and way of speaking. When he died, one periodical memorialized him with a drawing of his empty chair, surrounded by a cloud of his immortal characters.
McCartney shares Dickens’ fascination with characters, and has said Nicholas Nickleby is his favorite book. In the Beatles years McCartney wrote many short stories in song, including “Eleanor Rigby,” “Lady Madonna,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” “Penny Lane” is a Dickens novel in miniature, with its large cast of characters and distinctively English setting. It’s artfully narrated, too: that repeated “meanwhile” underlines the simultaneity of the characters’ actions, adding motion and breadth as the multiple plots in Dickens’ novels do. McCartney has continued to write narrative songs throughout his solo career, with “Another Day,” “Jenny Wren,” “She Given Up Talking,” and “Mr. Bellamy” as leading examples.
Both Dickens and McCartney wanted not merely to write about, but to perform their characters. While writing, Dickens would often jump up, make faces, and try out speech mannerisms. He gave sensationally successful public readings from his work, touring both England and the U.S. One of his favorite pieces, the brutal murder of the prostitute Nancy in Oliver Twist, was so intense that women sometimes fainted and had to be carried out. Other selections regularly moved huge audiences to laugh or cry. Dickens kept giving readings even as he grew ill, and his performance schedule probably hastened his death. How much he was driven by money and how much by love of the stage is a continuing point of debate.
As a live performer, McCartney is just as persistent and driven as Dickens. McCartney’s sometimes hectoring insistence, in the Beatles’ last years, on getting the group to play live again contributed to its meltdown. When he formed Wings, McCartney was willing to drive a van around the countryside and play small university halls to get back on stage. The 70s, 80s, and 90s all saw successful McCartney tours, and the last several years have featured some of his most impressive shows. He’s clearly giving audiences what they want, with setlists that cover the highlights of his entire career, and has been charged with doing it mainly for money. His enjoyment of performing is palpable, however, and it’s hard not to admire his dedication: at 69, he’s giving concerts that last three hours without an opening band or a break. It seems probable that, like Dickens, McCartney will go on performing until disability or death prevents him.
This pattern of similarities makes me think that time will improve McCartney’s artistic reputation. His poorer work will be justly forgotten, as Dickens’ lesser productions have been. Who is now beating up on Dickens for Master Humphrey’s Clock, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Uncommercial Traveler, or his play The Village Coquettes, not to mention dozens of fair-to-middling articles and stories? Just as we now appreciate Dickens’ higher-quality work and leave the rest largely alone, so may McCartney’s best work endure. Perhaps one day, like Dickens, he will get a biographer able to regard his faults and excesses with some sympathy and appreciate his artistic fertility and performing tenacity.
Read entire post
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Living In The Material World: review roundup
Just finished watching it myself. While I'm collecting my thoughts, I thought it might be helpful/fun to provide a list of some notable/thoughtful reviews. Enjoy, and suggest others.
Salon—Matt Zoller Seitz
Uncut Magazine
Roger Ebert
Richard Corliss
Matt Blick (Beatles Songwriting Academy)
...and since the editing of the film seems to be one of the few areas of contention about it, here's an interview with the editor himself, David Tedeschi.
Read entire post
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Self-reference
Can we attempt a complete catalogue of Fab Four self-referentiality? By which I mean things like:
1. "Glass Onion": "The Walrus was Paul"
2. John singing "She loves you" toward the end of "All You Need Is Love"
3. "I Am the Walrus": "...like Lucy in the Sky..."
Read entire post
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Interview with Lennon biographer Tim Riley
It's Lennon-mas again, and there's a new bio out by Tim ("Tell Me Why") Riley. The Christian Science Minotaur has a nice little Q and A with him. Will somebody finally acknowledge the scar of drug abuse that disfigured Lennon's life? I hope so.
Read entire post
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Double coverage
Via Douglas Wolk on Twitter: "Alvarius B. covers 'You Only Live Twice,' arranged/recorded to sound EXACTLY like John Lennon's White Album demos."
Read entire post
Friday, September 16, 2011
No jacket required
During this period he met Paul McCartney, who hired him to design the cover for the Beatles’ next album. Surprisingly, Mr. Hamilton proposed an all-white jacket. “To avoid the issue of competing with the lavish design treatments of most jackets, I suggested a plain white cover so pure and reticent that it would seem to place it in the context of the most esoteric art publications,” Mr. Hamilton told Rolling Stone in 1991. —NYT obit for Richard Hamilton
Read entire post
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Review of "Living In The Material World"
HD: Where'd you see the movie, Shirley?
SW: At the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day Weekend; I've volunteered there for 6 years. First Ken Burns came out, and gave the prelude to what the audience was about to experience. Then he introduced the film's co-producers, George's widow Olivia and David Tedeschi. That night was the first time that Olivia watched the documentary at a public viewing.
HD: So how was it?
SW: Compelling, poignant, funny—from the first moment to the end. And it's not short, either. It begins at the beginning, in Liverpool, and goes straight through for 3 1/2 hours. I remember at the end, Olivia said, "He lit up the room for a long time."
HD: I remember "No Direction Home" being fascinating to look at, too. How is "Material World" visually?
SW: There are so many wonderful images, both still pictures and film. Especially of George's early days with The Beatles. I was transfixed by George’s search for self-discovery, how it stayed with him for his entire life. His early music with the Beatles, and his post-Beatles stuff, never sounded so good or made so much sense. The early Rock and Roll songs, the iconic Beatles tunes...they filled the audience with joy. When the audience heard "My Sweet Lord," it was really powerful.
HD: Who does Scorsese talk to?
SW: There are the people you'd expect—Paul and Ringo, George Martin, Pattie Boyd and Eric Clapton, Astrid and Klaus, Yoko Ono and Phil Spector. And of course fellow Wilburys Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. George's son Dhani says some interesting things, but it was Olivia who gave some of the best insights into George Harrison, the man. His relationships with his friends are to envy; they still miss him and have such wonderful, human stories to tell. But George wasn’t without flaws.
HD: Let me guess: groupies.
SW: Olivia says, “he loved the ladies and the ladies loved him”! They were together for 30 years, so she seemed to handle it all with grace and dignity. But even that temptation fits with the theme of the film. Martin Scorsese says, “The more you’re in the material world, the more there is a tendency to search for serenity.”Many thanks, Shirley. I may have to get HBO for that month—is there something like Beatle Ticket? "Living In The Material World" premieres on HBO Wednesday, October 5th and Thursday, October 6th. Here's the trailer.
Read entire post
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
