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. How Brian Epstein cut the deal is explained in a book, now out of print, called Beatletoons, by Mitchell Axelrod.
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. 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.
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.
Well, it seems that Abbey Road Studios aren’t up for sale, after all.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/FEB/TheWorldAbbeyRoad.mp3]Even if it were, Andrew Lloyd Webber promised over $50 million to buy the place.
Meanwhile, Paul McCartney will be playing Phoenix and Los Angeles next month.
Here’s a bit of Paul at the brand-new Citi Field in New York last summer, before we saw him at ancient Fenway Park in Boston.
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