Tag: Beatles

Pretty ballerina

This Easter Sunday is Prue Bury’s birthday, and for it I’ll be posting a very special photograph of her, taken by a Beatle on the set of A Hard Day’s Night. Prue’s on the right in this photo, age 17, at the Royal School of Ballet in London.

In 1958, Antony Armstrong-Jones, later titled the First Earl of Snowdon, was appointed the court photographer for the Royal Family. That same eventful year, Armstrong-Jones took this portrait of Prue.

Prudence Bury, age 17

Soon afterwards, Prue would meet Mary Quant and Vidal Sassoon, and be a witness to, and a part of, the start of what later came to be known as Swinging London.

http://youtu.be/uyIZtrvzGEM

The Troubadour door

The image that’s borrowed the most from this site is of my dear friend, lovely Prue Bury sitting between John Lennon and Pattie Boyd. My second most popular pictures are of John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, immediately after they’d been shown the door at the Troubadour nightclub, for abusively heckling the Smothers Brothers.

So in 1974, when Tom and Dick decided to revive their stage act, they booked their first shows at…the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Nilsson, being a good friend, decided to surprise Tom again, and this time bring along a friend who was in town having a very long “lost weekend”: John Lennon.

“It was horrendous,” Tom recalls, laughing at the memory. “They came in pretty ripped to see our show, and, as Harry later explained to me, he told John, ‘He needs some heckling to make this thing work.'”

Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, David Bianculli, 2009, p.333

This is where I originally posted the pictures, and here is a higher-res scan of the page they came from. Click to enlarge.

They’re in a magazine called John Lennon: A Man Who Cared, published by Paradise Press shortly after Lennon was murdered in December, 1980. The credits are: Editorial Consultant Jeremy Pascall with material compiled by Robert Burt.

British brass band themes

“Come and Get It: The Best of Apple Records” has some real surprises on it, from the never-released “King of Fuh” (can you say Fuh King?) to this 1968 gem by Paul McCartney, the theme song to a TV show called “Thingumybob”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlV6A_7ZSV0

The Black Dyke Mills Band dates back to 1855, long before John Philip Souza, who wrote the “Liberty Bell March”, that is best known as the theme for “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yfm2HSoD50

Years later, Julian Nott wrote the delightful brass band theme for Nick Park’s wonderful “Wallace & Gromit” series.

Prue Bury in Astrid’s new book

I have Astrid Kirchherr – a retrospective, a new book that’s a companion to Astrid’s exhibit at the Victoria Gallery and Museum in Liverpool, that runs through the end of January. I am very pleased to see that the book includes a photo with my dear friend, Prudence Bury.

Lon Van Eaton and Friends

I’m hoping Santa will bring me the new Best of Apple Records compilation. It includes ‘Sweet Music’, a track from ‘Brother’, Lon and Derrek Van Eaton’s album on Apple that certainly deserves a CD release. The credits for ‘Brother’ include many familiar names — George Harrison, Klaus Voormann, Ringo Starr, Jim Gordon (drums), Phil McDonald (engineer), and Clive Arrowsmith (photos).

Tonight, Lon Van Eaton will be appearing in his home state of New Jersey, at The Record Collector.

It’s nice to see that Apple Records has added a web page about Lon and Derrek.

Lon & Derek Van Eaton

Lon and Derrek van Eaton were one of the last acts signed to Apple Records and the first to record at the newly built Apple Studios. The brothers had previously been in a band called Jacobs Creek, who issued one self-titled US album on Columbia Records in 1969.

After that band split up, Lon and Derrek made a demo of ‘Sweet Music’, which they sent to Apple in New York. John Lennon heard it and was impressed. George liked it too, and it was George who called the van Eatons to ask if they would like to record for Apple.

A couple of quibbles. They’re inconsistent about the spelling of “Derek” vs. “Derrek,” and ‘Sweet Music’ is cited as the demo that was sent to Apple’s New York office. Apple’s original promotion for Lon and Derrek says they submitted a home recording, and based on the liner notes for ‘Brother’, the song would have been ‘Warm Woman’. Here’s that recording.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/DEC/WarmWoman.mp3|titles=Warm Woman|artists=Lon and Derrek Van Eaton]

Fresh Air for John Lennon

Friday’s installment of the radio series Fresh Air had a tribute to John Lennon. The most interesting part is a 1985 interview with Cynthia. Click here to listen. There’s also a segment about the hassle that Nixon put Lennon through. This past week, after all these years, the FBI seized Lennon’s fingerprints before they could be auctioned.