Category Archives: Beatles

Beatles, Music of the 60s

Beatles Lie Over Ocean

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Beatles Lie Over Ocean

Beatles Lie Over Ocean
Photo by Gerd Mingram.

It was June 22, 1961 and The Beatles [John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best] continued their stay in Hamburg, Germany. The trip had been more successful than their first and they would leave in July with no arrests or deportations [Beatles deported] .

Tony Sheridan was a British musician who also found work in Hamburg. It was there that he and the Beatles met, sometimes shared a bill, and sometimes played together.

Beatles Lie Over Ocean

Bert Kaempfert

Bert Kaempfert, an orchestra leader and Polydor agent, asked The Beatles to back Sheridan on some recordings.

The recording took place over three days, the first two at Friedrich-Ebert-Halle in Hamburg. It was not a regular recording studio, but because of the venue’s acoustics, a place Polydor had occasionally used for recording. The final day’s recording (June 24) was done in Studio Rahlstedt, a professional studio. On that day they recorded “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Nobody’s Child,” and “Take Out Some Insurance On Me, Baby.”

Beatles Lie Over Ocean

Beat Boys record

The Beatles [the The Beat Boys for these sessions] and Sheridan recorded four songs over two consecutive days: “My Bonnie,” “The Saints,” “Why,” and “Cry For A Shadow.” “Shadow” was an instrumental; Sheridan did lead vocals on the others.

Sheridan sometimes played lead guitar, John Lennon rhythm, George Harrison the other lead, Paul McCartney bass, and Pete Best drums.

The first song they recorded was “My Bonnie.” It started slowly, but soon went into an upbeat version. According to the Beatles Bible site, “The Beatles were given 300 marks for the sessions.”  [Beatles Bible site]

Beatles Lie Over Ocean

“My Bonnie” was released in October 1961 and reached #5 on the German charts.

Beatles Lie Over Ocean

20 Years Later

20 years later, on June 22, 1981, Mark David Chapman pleaded guilty to the murder of John Lennon on what he said were instructions from God.

Beatles Lie Over Ocean
Beatles, Music et al, Music of the 60s

Controversial Beatles Yesterday Today

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Controversial Beatles Yesterday Today

Released in the USA on June 20, 1966

Controversial Beatles Yesterday Today

Controversial Beatles Yesterday Today

Sort of new

Every once in awhile there would be a new Beatle album. Sort of. Yesterday and Today was a new Beatle album. Sort of.

I was one (of the legions of) American kids who didn’t realize that Beatle albums we bought  were different than the Beatle albums UK kids bought. Perhaps the reverse was true as well.

Controversial Beatles Yesterday Today

Backlog

The Beatles UK releases typically had 14 songs, not like the 12 on American releases. As a result there was a backlog of Beatles songs that didn’t reach American kids on their Beatles albums.

It doesn’t take much actuarial thinking to figure out that releasing an album with those backlogged songs and a couple of others made all kinds of business sense. The Beatles themselves did not like the idea of releasing two different versions of their albums. The UK version with 14 songs was the one they wanted. They took time deciding the sequence of songs. By 1965, they designed their albums as a whole, not a collection of single songs.

Controversial Beatles Yesterday Today

USA Yesterday and Today

In any case, here’s the breakdown of the Beatles Yesterday and Today:

  • from the UK LP Help!, “Act Naturally” and “Yesterday” 
  • from the UK LP Rubber Soul, “Nowhere Man” and “What Goes On”  “Drive My Car” and “If I Needed Someone”
  • the single “Day Tripper”/”We Can Work It Out”
  • from the not-yet-released UK LP Revolver, the tracks “I’m Only Sleeping”, “Doctor Robert”, and “And Your Bird Can Sing.”
Controversial Beatles Yesterday Today

Controversy

And as was often the case the Beatles stepped in some controversy. The original album cover, nowadays known as the “butcher cover” barely saw the light of day.

The photo was part of a shoot by Robert Whitaker. The Beatles were tired posing for typical group shots and Whitaker’s idea of putting them in butcher smocks, holding pieces of meat, and broken doll parts seemed a good change of pace.

John Lennon later joked, My original idea for the cover was better–decapitate Paul. [from Anthology]

Controversial Beatles Yesterday Today

Backlash

It seemed a good enough idea for Capital Records to print 750,000 copies of the record and send them out. Immediately some critics, radio stations, and fans (lucky enough to get a copy) complained. Insensitive. Gross. Inappropriate.

Keep in mind that in 1966, a band had a toilet removed from its cover!

Capital recalled all. Some covers went to a landfill. Some had the new cover pasted over the old.

Controversial Beatles Yesterday Today

Defense

John Lennon and Paul McCartney defended the decision saying that at a time when so many defenseless men, women, and children were dying in Vietnam, such a cover spoke to that senselessness.

George Harrison later said in Anthology: “I thought it was gross, and I also thought it was stupid. Sometimes we all did stupid things, thinking it was cool or hip when it was naïve and dumb, and that was one of them. But again, it was a case of being put in a situation where one is obliged, as part of a unit, to cooperate. So we put on those butchers’ uniforms for that picture.”  

Bad idea or not, the refurbished album reached #1 on the US Billboard charts by 30 July 1966 and certified gold soon after. It stayed at number one for five weeks.

My Lai Massacre

635 days later was the My Lai Massacre. 1,295 days later Americans could view those pictures.

 

Controversial Beatles Yesterday Today
Beatles, Music of the 60s, Today in history

Beatles Let It Be

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Beatles Let It Be

&
“The Long and Winding Road”
June 13, 1970

The Beatles were essentially no more in 1970. Only a few recordings and slim hopes remained.

Apple had released the Let It Be album on May 18. It had the highest number of advance orders for any album in the US record industry, with an astonishing 3,700,000 orders placed. The album retailed at $7, creating a gross sales figure of $25,900,000 before it was even released. [Beatle Bible article]

Despite crushed hopes, on June 13, 1970 we fans gave our musical brothers two #1s: a single and an album.

Beatles Let It Be
YouTube “Long and Winding Road”
Beatles Let It Be

Long and Winding Road

Their last #1 single.

“The Long and Winding Road” single seemed to say it all. Especially when Paul sang, “The wild and windy night that the rain washed away/Has left a pool of tears crying for the day/Why leave me standing here, let me know the way.”

Wasn’t he singing what we were thinking?

Beatles Let It Be

Tells the story

In an ironic twist, the song reflects the progression of the Beatles’s demise. First, Paul McCartney did have the Beatles’s disharmony in mind when he wrote it. They (and Billy Preston) first recorded it in January 1969. It was a simpler version than the one that Phil Spector produced in April 1970. Those orchestral embellishments upset and maddened McCartney. So much so, that later, in his legal citations for the break up, he used those embellishments, done without his permission, as one of the reasons.

Allan Pollack says this (and much more) about the single:  in spite of his [McCartney’s] unabashed and sometimes even shameless sentimentality, he comes up with an affecting, durable torch song with “The Long And Winding Road”. The secrets of his success are to be found in the manner in which novel approaches to form and harmonic structure underscore the emotional core of the song, and belie whatever curbside surface clichés it has which may initially turn you off.

Beatles Let It Be

Let It Be

The Let It Be album was released on May 8, 1970. The Beatles last release. They had already broken up. The date most often used for that breakup is Paul’s public announcement on 10 April 1970.

They had actually recorded the album before the previous one, Abbey Road, thus forever creating fodder for fans to argue that Let It Be is the penultimate and Abbey Road the last.

Horseshoes and hand grenades.

Get Back was Let It Be’s original title  and intended, like its name suggested, to be a return to their musical roots. The single Get Back certainly gave that impression. A proposed album cover echoed their first album’s cover:

Beatles Let It Be

Disruption after dissension delayed and delayed again the completion of the album.  Abbey Road intervened.

As they say in baseball, “You need a scorecard.”

Let It Be was not a critical success. However as I said previously about John and Yoko’s Some Time In New York City,  the Beatles on a bad day were always better than any critic on any day.

Beatles Let It Be