Beatles – Prattling Before the Pratfall

At the NCS conference last August, Colleen Doran and I discussed how, generally, comic book people are more familiar with comic strips than comic strip people are familiar with comic books. Today’s Jumble has an exception to that generality.

Boomer boy that I am, Marvel Comics from the Sixties are one of my favorite things. Another is, of course, the Beatles.

LBJ was notorious for strong-arming legislators into voting his way. What if he had been a flat-out authoritarian president, like Trump? Could he have kept the Beatles out of America?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/could-president-deploy-wartime-law-203749200.html

Small Records With Big Rabbit Holes

Looking at the charts Denro provided in the previous post, I see ‘Nothing But a Heartache’ by the Flirtations. A powerful, catchy record that deserved to do better, it peaked at #34, even lower than ‘Will You Be Staying After Sunday’.

How did a 1968 Psychedelic UK record that didn’t chart in America (was it even released here?) …

… get reworked into the Soul Pop sound of ‘Nothing But a Heartache’?

Here’s the explanation. Its history starts with a former Beatle.

Five years later came this Sugar Pop classic.

Parlez-vous Bed-in?

A few posts ago, Petula Clark explained a personal crisis she experienced in 1969. Performing a bilingual show in Montreal she tried, and failed, to please both the French and English speakers in the audience.

Reduced to tears, on a whim Petula visited with John and Yoko at their infamous Montreal bed-in. She explained the cause of her distress and John’s advice was, “fuck ’em!”

John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Sally “Petula” Clark, June 1, 1969, Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal

The split between French and English language music in Quebec in mid-1969 can be heard in the two most recent ’88 Rewound’ programs on WMBR, the MIT radio station.

French Playlist
https://www.track-blaster.com/wmbr/playlist.php?id=59020

English Playlist
https://www.track-blaster.com/wmbr/playlist.php?id=59104