Eric and I got the leaves raked up this weekend, it’s a Sunday Autumn evening, I’m in a contemplative mood, and this recording evokes a strong feeling of nostalgia in me.
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Nov/MR1.mp3|titles=Moon River by Henry Mancini]Category: Music
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]K3 fans fly united
K3 fan Theo Hendriks in the Netherlands writes…
Hello Doug,
This is Theo, I’m on your blog with a picture of me and K3 and I would like to add to the comment that K3 including Josje, and very especially Kristel, have been very supporting to me in the transistion to a K3 without Kathleen. I still see K3 regularly, and I’m still a big fan.
I lost some weight (well 25 kg), so I look a bit different now, but could you add this picture to your story? It’s Kristel and me end of august 2011.
Greetings Theo.
Netherlands.
Thanks, Theo! I’ll add a link on the earlier blog post pointing to this one. You know how to make a fellow jealous! And on top of that you’re reminding me that for the first time in decades I need to lose weight myself. I’ll make myself even more jealous by grabbing this other photo of you with lovely Kristel. It looks like it was cold there for late August!
P.S. Adjusting to change isn’t easy, but I agree with Theo that Josje is great, although I’m still not sure how they can be K3 with two K’s and a J. 😉
Likin’ Lenka
It’s time for another singer who I didn’t know existed ten minutes ago, with a song I liked instantly. Lenka, from Australia. I just love this sort of song, and the sound it makes. Forget the cow bell, give me more bells! This may be the only song by Lenka I like. I don’t know yet, because it’s all I’ve heard so far.
Lenka came up on my Lily Allen channel on Pandora. I think Allen’s The Fear is a superb piece of work. It’s a perfect expression of sentiments, both sincere and ironic. It’s also an exceptional example of how essential the producer is — Greg Kurstin in this instance — to giving a recording a certain effect and feeling.
[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/2011/Oct/LilyAllen.flv 640 360]
Running off a Cliff with the Beatles
Last week, TCM showed the movie Summer Holiday, with Cliff Richard. Directed by Peter (“Bullitt”) Yates, released in early ’63 and shot on location in widescreen and color, Summer Holiday is cute and silly fun. It has inspired bits of comedy, solid songs with Cliff and the always excellent Shadows, and great production numbers, but it can’t be called a Rock and Roll movie by any stretch.
Each [Cliff Richard] film inevitably also employs the ideological underpinning of the Hollywood musical. A genre such as the musical is not just a film type; it brings with it certain spectator expectations, certain structures, codes and conventions which combine in the musical to indicate its function as, in Richard Dyer’s phrase, a ‘gospel of happiness’. A Hard Day’s Night: The British Film Guide, by Stephen Glynn, Turner Classic Movies, 2005, p.7
http://youtu.be/Gbajf_rHzys
With four healthy, fun-loving boys driving a red London double-decker bus across Europe, and picking up four pretty, spirited girls along the way, I spit up my Trader Joe’s three buck chuck wine when one of the girls suggested, “Gosh, the boys have been so good to us, we should think of a way to show them our thanks.” But Summer Holiday isn’t that sort of movie, so off to dinner they all go, where everybody dances to choreography by Herbert Ross, who later directed Petula Clark in the remake of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
Summer Holiday has a devoted following, and I enjoyed it a lot, but what interests me the most is that the movie premiered in London in February ’63, the same month that the Beatles’ second single, Please Please Me, was released in the UK.
‘The Young Ones’ and ‘Summer Holiday’ both proved the second top box-office earner at British cinemas for 1962 and 1963 respectively, and garnered much critical praise. By the time ‘Wonderful Life’ was premiered at the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, on 2 July 1964, however, the spontaneity and freshness was judged to have gone. Ibid.
A Hard Day’s Night premiered at the Pavilion Theatre in London only four days after Wonderful Life, to universally rapturous critical praise and financial success.
What precipitated the sudden fall from grace? In truth, Cliff’s time had passed; there were new kids on the block and the boy from Lucknow, India, together with his traditional pop musicals, were about to be drowned out by the twist and shout emanating from Mersyside. Ibid.
I’m a Cliff Richard fan, and as I said before I really enjoyed Summer Holiday. The older I get the more I am able to appreciate things for what they are, rather than pay attention to what they are not, like that $3 Charles Shaw wine from Trader Joe’s. 😉 I feel the same way about another movie that provides a good contrast to the Beatles. In fact, it’s a Beatles movie itself, except it’s really a Bee Gees movie with Peter Frampton — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. The movie is as much an artifact of its year, 1978, as Summer Holiday is representative of 1963.
http://youtu.be/bFRt5TQdQCI
Thanks to a nudge from tastewar, I watched Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band on DVD, and if nothing else I’m not surprised the songs were produced by George Martin and engineered by Geoff Emerick, because the sound is really excellent. The story is ridiculous, but the songs are worth the visit. The Bee Gees and Frampton were huge stars when they agreed to make this movie. I don’t know if Robert Stigwood had a contract that forced them to do it, or if they simply wanted to be proxy Beatles, but the Bee Gees really nail a lot of the songs, although Frampton’s singing is a bit weak in spots.
When watching this movie it must be remembered that it was made only a few years after the wild and crazy Tommy, and there’s also no avoiding a comparison with Across the Universe, Julie Taymor’s generally well-received 2007 film. This clip is I Want You (She’s So Heavy).
[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/2011/Oct/AcrosstheUniverse.flv 563 240]
Is that version better than, or even as good as, the same song as presented in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band?
[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/2011/Oct/BeeGeesFrampton.flv 563 240]