We saw Paul McCartney at Fenway Park in Boston last August, and he’s still out there touring, doing clusters of cities. In April he was at the Hollywood Bowl, playing for nearly three hours. But back in ’64 and ’65, when the Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl they were on stage for a lot less time.
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(Audio from Beatles Source)
On November 1 and 2, 1965, the Beatles taped a TV programme in, and for, England called, The Music of Lennon & McCartney. Aired in December, and coinciding with the release of Rubber Soul, the show featured songs performed by the boys themselves, as well as some by special guests. Thanks to YouTube user nyrainbow, here’s pretty much the whole thing. Pay attention to Paul’s introduction of Henry Mancini in part 6, and to the way that Mancini replies.
Last weekend, I caught a few minutes of Beatles outtakes and studio chatter that was playing on one of the best Beatles radio stations on the Internet, Beatles-A-Rama.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/MAY/Beatles-A-Rama.mp3]There are several Beatles stations on the Net that I have set on the Logitech Squeezebox Radio in the bedroom. You’ll find a comprehensive list by clicking this link to SHOUTcast.
Sony’s new Internet appliance, the Dash, looks very slick, and Sony’s using a Beatles song to promote it. They can do that because they own the publishing rights to most of the Beatles catalog, but not the performance rights to the EMI/Apple recordings.
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Discussions about flexible-yet-limited Net appliances, like the Chumby and the Sony Dash, include a lot of naysayers. They call them glorified alarm clock radios, and for now they’re right, but in the big picture they’re wrong. Eventually you’ll see touch screen devices like these built into refrigerator doors.
Ah, Saturday morning TV in the 1960’s. A sublime mixture of awful-to-pretty good cartoons. During the Summer of Love, 1967, Marvel Comics featured this centerfold ad for ABC-TV’s “America’s Best TV Comics”. The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man were being introduced, having not been a part of the syndicated Marvel Super Heroes cartoon series from the year before.
The Beatles first appeared as cartoon characters on US TV in 1965. I don’t know exactly how Brian Epstein cut the deal. It’s explained in a book called Beatletoons, by Mitchell Axelrod, that I have on order. I have a fondness for the cheaply-produced Beatles cartoons, but it’s been said that John Lennon, persistent curmudgeon that he was, disliked them. This photo of Lennon contemplating some layout drawings seems to back that up.
The third season of the show would be the last to include some new material. The video player has a healthy helping of ‘Beatoons’ from the second and third seasons. Use the scroll bar to see the playlist.
Two of the titles — Eleanor Rigby and Nowhere Man — were later animated again, with strikingly different interpretations, for Yellow Submarine. It’s hard to believe that some of the people who worked on the Saturday morning cartoons were also involved with Yellow Submarine, but you’ll find some fab bits of surreal creativity in there.
By 1967 the Beatles looked nothing like they had in 1964-65, yet their character designs didn’t change. The producer of the series, Al Brodax, more than made up for that with Yellow Submarine.
One of the animators was Ron Campbell, who sells new renderings of Beatles cartoons. In this video clip, Campbell is interviewed by Joe Johnson, who hosts the Beatles Brunch radio show.
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Happy birthday to Prudence Bury, my all-time favorite Beatles girl. After many years of curiosity and sporatic searching, I got serious about using the Internet to find Prue, and with the help of Lia Pamina I finally did. Prue and I began corresponding last year, and an in-person introduction is tentatively scheduled for this coming September.
Having wondered about Prue since seeing a 10th anniversary screening of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, I had built up a rather idealized image of her in my mind. I wasn’t prepared for how easily she breezed past that ideal, totally knocking me out with her charm, humor, warmth, and sincerity.
Independent of her Beatles connection, Prue Bury is impressive and accomplished, and she is the very definition of a true Class Act. It is my great privilege to know her in a small way.
