Category: Music

What if We’d Been Beatless?

“I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did’.” – Kurt Vonnegut, 1997

I’ve always been as much amazed as amused by the British comedic thread running from the Goon Show with Peter Sellers, to the Beatles, then to the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and Monty Python.

Michael Palin has said there wouldn’t have been Monty Python without the Bonzos. Would the comedy troupe have existed if the Beatles hadn’t first changed the world? Palin talks about what the Beatles made possible for others in their wake, in this 2012 interview.

Return to Downtown and Back to Mono

Andrew at Parlogram talks about one of the most significant Pop records of all time. Petula Clark’s “Downtown”.

It was a record that everyone of all ages loved hearing. This video of “Downtown” was made by somebody who knows his Sixties-era mono-mix 45 rpm singles. He played it with a mono Ortofon cartridge.

Andrew demonstrates the difference a quality, lateral-tracking mono cartridge can make for purists of original, mono-mix Sixties records.

A Beatles Cellarbration

Yesterday’s Jeopardy! made me wonder how much longer Beatlemania will continue to linger in the public’s collective consciousness. In the Double Jeopardy round, under the category of “In Da Club,” the $1600 answer was, “You went down eighteen stone steps to enter this club, the home of the Beatles, at 10 Mathew Street, in Liverpool.”

Kudos to yesterday’s winner Tom Devlin for his interesting, but incorrect, guess. “What is the Quarrymen’s Club?” With no glimmer of recognition from the other two contestants, host Ken Jennings explained, “They played a lot of early gigs in the Cavern Club.”

The Cavern was demolished only three years after the Beatles broke up, when I was graduating from high school. Today’s Cavern in Liverpool is, like Fort Ticonderoga and the Star Trek Tour, also in Ticonderoga, a recreation.

https://www.cavernclub.com/history/

Beatles bonus: Walter Cronkite remembers the Beatles.