Defunded PBS is fundraising with ‘Deconstructing the Beatles’.
Category: Beatles
HELP! Pythons!
When starting this bloggy, with its 19th anniversary coming up on 9/5, I added a gallery section that is no longer working. The first thing I put in there were scans of a fumetti (photo comic) from the May, 1965 issue of Harvey Kurtzman’s HELP! magazine.
Not to be confused with the 1965 Beatles movie HELP! that had not yet been named when the January, 1965 issue of HELP! was published.
“Christopher’s Punctured Romance” starred John Cleese as a man with an unhealthy interest in his daughter’s Barbie doll. It starts on page 17.
Terry Gilliam started at HELP! when Gloria Steinem — yes, her — was leaving. Gilliam was the art director at HELP! when he met John Cleese in New York, and “Christopher’s Punctured Romance” was the result.
When Gilliam followed Cleese to England, he recruited Robert Crumb to be his replacement. Crumb arrived just as HELP! publisher James Warren was shutting it down.
I first heard about this amazing sequence of events from Harvey Kurtzman at a Boston NewCon, in 1975 or ’76. Maybe Denro remembers better than I do.
Kat Claws Her Way In
I was fifteen when my friend Kathei Logue told me how, a mere seven years before then, she had met the Beatles.
You’ve read the blog post, now see the movie! 😉
The Worst Beatles Song
Nashville, 1954
Memphis, 1955
London, 1965
Liverpool by Way of Asbury Park
Across the pond, a few nights ago.
Kray-Kray
Cambridge Dictionary
CRAY-CRAY meaning: 1. stupid or not reasonable 2. things that someone says or does that seem stupid, without meaning
I first heard Monty Python’s very funny ‘Ethel the Frog’ in high school, on WBCN-FM, the station that broke the Pythons in America. The mockumentary told the story of the criminal Piranha Brothers.
What I didn’t know at the time was, the Piranha Brothers were based on the all-too-real Kray brothers of London. In Boston there was Whitey Bulger, and Cape Cod had Melvin Reine. They were violent and, in a word, crazy. Compared to the Krays, the notorious Whitey was a misunderstood businessman.
Tom Hardy, perhaps the finest actor of this or almost any generation, portrayed both of the insanely dangerous Kray twins in 2015’s Legend.
After watching that, listen to this story, as told to me by Prue.