Category: Beatles

Abbey Road notes

A few Beatles-related items:

  • Mike Smith has passed away. He was the A&R man who, on January 1, 1962, signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes to Decca Records, instead of the Beatles.
  • Back in October I noted that EMI was going to be bought by the rich Russian who bought Warner Music. But a last-minute deal between EMI and Universal Music was worked out.
  • Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, co-authors of Recording the Beatles, have sold out four talks at EMI’s Abbey Road recording studios on the 80-year history of the facility.

Hunter Davies chats about the lads from Liverpool

BBC Radio 4 has this interview with Hunter Davies, who wrote the only authorized telling of the story of the Beatles, other than their own Anthology, and he did it while they were still together as the Beatles.

[audio:http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/openbook/openbook_20120101-1750a.mp3|titles=BBC Radio 4 podcast: Hunter Davies]

Pop and circumstance

A few minutes ago I made an edit to this page on Wikipedia, about the Buckinghams. It had said, “The group opposed the producer’s treatment of the song “Susan” by adding a psychedelic section that sounded very similar to the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life”, with an orchestral crescendo.”

http://youtu.be/aIacsdOfKAQ

I edited the article to note that the orchestral crescendo included a bit of Charles Ives’ Central Park in the Dark. Composed in 1906, it was, to say the least, ahead of its time and wasn’t performed publicly until 1946.

http://youtu.be/1qPZbHNuZzI

I love the song Susan, its production, the recording and, yes, the Charles Ives break too. In my opinion, the single coming after A Day in the Life is beside the point, because I think it’s far more significant that Susan came before Revolution 9.

http://youtu.be/LVf5Cr4M-F8

LIFE misses the Beat

LIFE Magazine, or what’s left of it, has an online George Harrison tribute. There’s also a print edition of the LIFE tribute to George, but it has an error that kept me from buying the issue. It’s a particularly annoying error, that was probably repeated from Bob Spitz’s useless, mistake-filled book, The Beatles: The Biography. The error is that Pattie Boyd appeared in A Hard Day’s Night with her sister Jenny. This is incorrect. Jenny “Jennifer Juniper” Boyd was not in AHDN. The girl with Pattie was, of course, my friend Prudence Bury. The paragraph below was scanned from Hunter Davies’ book The Beatles, in which Pattie mentions her two sisters (Jenny and Paula), as well as Prue.

A couple of years ago I said that Prue’s hair stylist was her friend Vidal Sassoon. Here is a picture of Prue sporting a Sassoon cut. Vidal is on the right, and the man in the middle is Alexander Plunkett-Green, husband of fashion designer Mary Quant.

Back in the former USSR

Unbelievable. The once-mighty Electronics & Musical Industries — EMI — is being bought by a rich Russian, who apparently now lives in NYC.

In other Beatle-related doings, there is still no official DVD release date for the Let It Be film, but director Michael Lindsay-Hogg says work is progressing on the project. He was interviewed on WNYC radio, and the podcast is on the audio player.

[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/soundcheck/soundcheck101711apod.mp3|titles=WNYC: Michael Lindsay-Hogg interview]