“Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane” is a 2-sided Beatles hit with both songs based upon childhood memories. But I think “Help!” and “I’m Down” can also been thought of as a single with both sides having related ideas.
Both songs are about feeling bad, but I think John’s is more heartfelt. It’s almost a follow-up to “I’m a Loser,” while Paul’s song seems more like the flip-side it is.
John’s sons were born to two different, and very different, mothers. They had different relationships with their father, and they have different memories of him, but with similar feelings.
Perhaps taking their cue from the Beach Boys #5 hit “Fun, Fun, Fun” in February ’64, nine months later the Gestures made it to #44 with “Run, Run, Run.”
How could a perfect single like “Fun, Fun, Fun” not make it to #1 on Billboard? What could have held it back? Oh, right. February, 1964.
David Bianculli comments on the “you are there” documentary, The Beatles: Get Back. David repeats Disney’s white lie that the documentary is only six hours long. It’s almost eight.
I’ve read other reviews that say the second part drags a bit in the middle, but for me it’s the first part that becomes tedious and should have been kept to no more than two hours. There’s a discussion that goes on for much too long, about Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s inane idea of putting on a show in Tripoli. Music publisher Dick James showing up and talking to George is a curious surprise, because Harrison wrote “Only a Northern Song” as a dig against James.
Get Back makes it very apparent that Lindsay-Hogg actually underplayed the Beatles’ internal troubles in the Let It Be film. They were undergoing a full-blown existential crisis. George quits at the end of part 1, and at the opening of part 2 Paul genuinely appears to be on the brink of a nervous breakdown. He snaps out of it when he’s told that John is on the phone. It’s an amazing moment.
George’s abrupt departure is very revealing. They’re all clustered at one end of Twickenham Studio, where interior scenes of A Hard Day’s Night and HELP! had been filmed. They’re struggling to get in a groove, and then Paul and John manage to do it. Standing face to face, with their guitars pointing in the same direction because Paul is left-handed, they’re having a blast, and their spirits pick up. By contrast George is morose, having been cut out yet again. After enduring more than ten years of being in the shadow of Lennon-McCartney, he knows it’s never going to change, and he walks out.
Two difficult meetings, private and unseen, bring George back. The move to the Apple Building basement studio, made possible by the removal of the fraudulent Magic Alex, is much more conducive to the Beatles feeding off of each other in a positive way. This is helped immensely by the impromptu and upbeat presence of Billy Preston. Having met the Beatles shortly after Ringo was brought in, Preston is a reminder of the time the Beatles are trying to get back to, when they were a live band. John is so pleased that, in perhaps an unintended display of asserting his authority as leader, he makes Billy a Fifth Beatle.
Get Back confirms what I already knew from hearing many Beatles studio outtakes. Their strength is creativity, not musicianship. Lyrics are seen to be a struggle for all of them, even John, and George admits he’s been working on “Something” for six months. It’s no wonder George Martin had doubts about them at the start.
As revealed by Mark Lewisohn in Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, it wasn’t Martin’s idea to sign the Beatles, he was ordered to do it by his EMI bosses. (Extended Edition Vol. 2, starting at pg. 1179.) By pure happenstance, the head of EMI’s music publishing division heard the songs from the Decca demo session that John and Paul had written. He saw their potential not as recording artists, but as songwriters. (Extended Edition Vol. 2, starting at pg. 1107.)
Where the Beatles come together with the material that becomes the Spector-produced album Let It Be a year later, is with George Martin tactfully guiding the proceedings, without seeming to take over from engineer Glyn Johns. This is very nicely covered in Jason Kruppa’s outstanding “Producing the Beatles” podcast.
From the basement of the Apple Building to its roof, the unlikely transformation of what began as a dispirited and disorganized jam session into a tight and energetic live performance, is almost startling. The fact they were able to regroup to not only make that happen, but to finish up with Abbey Road, makes their inevitable breakup seem almost glorious.
This is a blog post about cassettes, with no mention of the Sony Walkman, except here. The Compact Cassette was developed by a Belgian team of engineers at Philips, and introduced under the Norelco brand in 1963. Two years later, to promote the new format, Philips gave portable cassette decks to EMI for the Beatles to try.
Upstairs at EMI Studio 2, 1965. Engineer Norman “Hurricane” Smith is on the left.
Christmas, 1969, I received a Panasonic RQ-204S cassette deck. It was rugged, with very good sound that could be played loud without breaking up, even at full volume.
I used the Panasonic deck to record WBCN radio and some records, but especially to exchange voice letters with my friend Greg, back in Connecticut. Long distance phone calls were out of the question, but a cassette could be mailed with a couple of stamps.
Norwalk, Connecticut, January, 1969
I first learned about cassettes as a computer software medium upon meeting one of my college roommates, named Brad. Before starting at Westfield State, Brad spent a year aboard the Atlantis II research ship, out of Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
The Atlantis II is best known for hosting the Alvin deep-ocean submarine, and for being used to locate the Titanic. The year when my friend Brad was aboard, scientists were conducting the early research into Continental Drift. I recall the project ended up being featured in National Geographic.
Brad was a math whiz just out of high school, working as a Fortran programmer on the Atlantis II. Cassettes were used to load programs and for data storage. When we met, Brad had a large collection of cassettes from the ship that he had mostly repurposed from data to music, with his very expensive, high-end portable Sony deck. Ten years later, working with Brad at a software company, the sound of the 300 baud modems we used was indistinguishable from what I heard playing data cassettes.
Which brings me to what this blog post is really about — Radiolab’s Mixtape series, and their Cassetternet segment from a month ago. The first part is about cassettes used for software. The second part returns to cassettes as a means of human communication; specifically, their influence in bringing about the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Majestic Ballroom, Birkenhead, Merseyside – Saturday, December 15, 1962
The online magazine Slate.com has a Beatles blog. They’re late getting to the party, and I don’t how long they’ll keep it going, but it’s always good to see general media outlets showing interest in the boys, now that we’re fifty years into Beatlemania.
A few posts ago I mentioned Ringo’s Premier brand drum kit — the one that predated his famous Ludwig drums. The kick drum had a squeaky pedal, as can be heard quite clearly on the Please Please Me album, especially in the twin-track stereo recording.
In the picture above is Ringo’s original drum kit, with his name on it, from his days playing with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. A couple of months later, as seen below, the first official Beatles logo, as originally designed by Paul, was introduced. It didn’t last long, however, because a few months later it was replaced with the classic Beatles logo that was designed by Ivor Arbiter, and delivered with Ringo’s Ludwig drum kit.
‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’ – Sunday, February 17, 1963
Denro has taken me to task for failing to note the birthday of Sir George Martin, who turned 87 years old yesterday. Some Beatles fans love to speculate on what would have happened without Brian Epstein, or George Martin. I’m just glad everything turned out the way it did. From 1980, when he was 54, here is the life of George Martin.
