Available online until Saturday from BBC Radio 2 is The Songs The Beatles Gave Away. Of particular interest, I think, is Cilla Black and her explanation of how she came to have such a “big voice.”
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/DEC/SongsBeatlesGaveAway.mp3]Today, former Monkee Peter Tork is at the BEATexpo Beatles show in Connecticut. Last weekend, along with Mickey Dolenz, Peter was at the SuperMegafest show in Framingham, MA, west of Boston. Peter took the stage Saturday night, first solo and then backed by a local Monkees tribute band called Loose Salute, named after a Mike Nesmith album. Mickey joined Peter during the concert to do a set, and here is Mickey’s entrance…
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Denro was quick to point out to me that Mickey was stretching the truth about hearing “Oh, Darling!” at Abbey Road studios. Mickey hung out with the Beatles at EMI in ’67, but there’s no way he was there two years later. I’d neglected to swap the nearly-full SDHC card in my camera, so I missed the rest of the song, but somebody else who was there has posted the whole thing.
Tech note: That thin column in the middle of the stage is probably a Bose L1 speaker. The Bose corporate headquarters is right behind the Sheraton hotel where the convention was held.
The History Channel is showing “The Beatles on Record,” an official Apple Corp. documentary. It’s sort of a mini-Anthology, focused solely on their studio work. Parts of it appear as the mini-documentaries on the remastered Beatles CD catalog. For a knowledgeable Beatles fan there’s nothing new in “The Beatles on Record,” but the movie clips are in the best possible quality, and there are some fun studio audio outtakes.
If I’d been paying better attention, I would have noticed that back in September somebody posted the program as it had appeared on the BBC. The American version is exactly 45 minutes without commercials, whereas the British version is a smidgen under one hour. Once again we Americans get an abridged version of a Beatles product! When will it end? I’ve collected the parts into a single YouTube player. It’s window-boxed within a letterbox, but the quality is otherwise excellent.
For comparison, here’s how it looked on the History Channel. This segment covers the middle period, from “Beatles for Sale” through “Sgt. Pepper.” Along the way, the title of Engineer was passed from Norman Smith, whose stint ended with “Rubber Soul,” to Geoff Emerick, who took over the console starting with “Revolver.”
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Donovan, at full flower, with Pattie Boyd’s kid sister Jenny and Graham Nash.
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Happy Birthday, Petula Clark!
Petula says she’ll continue to work and perform as long as there’s an audience. Judging from this appearance in France a few months ago, she still has an audience.
It was 40 years ago, on Petula’s birthday, that BBC One TV broadcast its first programme in colour. BBC Two had been transmitting in colour for some months. The first colour show on BBC One was, “An Evening With Petula.”
