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Anniversary, Beatles, Music et al, Today in history

Beatles Shakespeare

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Beatles Shakespeare

April 28, 1963
Excerpt of Paul and John speaking parts of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from the Around the Beatles TV special.

The many roads musicians travel are not necessarily the weed, whites,  and wine-filled ones that fans imagine. The key to breaking through is exposure. Performances night after night can fine tune a group’s show and songs, but small venues provide small audiences.

True in the 60s as it is today, electronic media can reach far more ears and eyes than those nightly gigs. Given the chance, a group will jump, however reluctantly, onto whatever opportunity presents itself.

So it was for the Beatles.

Being able to perform songs was the obvious and key part. John, Paul, George, and Ringo did not realize that dressing up and performing Shakespeare was also part of deal.

Beatles Shakespeare

Around the Beatles

The morning of  April 28, 1963 the soon-to-be-Fab Four showed up at Rediffusion’s Wembley Studios, London.  They rehearsed and did a radio interview before the show’s taping.

The “story” was supposed to be set in the Globe Theatre in the round, thus the show’s name.

Jack Good was the director. He would later give us the TV show Shindig!.

From the Beatles Bible site: The Beatles took part in two segments in the show: a musical set and a spoof of Act V Scene I of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison also mimed a trumpet fanfare at the start of the show, before Ringo Starr appeared with a flag to set off a cannon ball. The group also introduced PJ Proby’s performance.

For the Shakespeare spoof, Lennon took the female role of Thisbe, McCartney played Pyramus, Harrison was Moonshine and Starr played Lion. Incidentally, McCartney later owned a cat he named Thisbe.

Beatles Shakespeare
Ringo setting off the cannon at the show’s start

The Beatles lip-synced Twist And Shout, Roll Over Beethoven, I Wanna Be Your Man, Long Tall Sally, Can’t Buy Me Love, and did a medley that included: Love Me Do, Please Please Me, From Me To You, She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand. They closed with their cover of the The Isley Brothers’ Shout, the only time their performance  of the song was recorded.

The show aired on May 6, 1964.

Beatles Shakespeare

PJ Proby

Ironically, the person who got the biggest immediate media bump was American singer PJ Proby who performed “Walking the Dog” and “Cumberland Gap.”  

Beatles, Music et al, Music of the 60s

John Paul Nerk Twins

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John Paul Nerk Twins

April 23 & 24, 1960 
John Paul Nerk Twins
From a Daily Mail article. “Rookie rockers: Paul McCartney and John Lennon in 1960, soon after their not-so-successful gig at the Fox and Hounds”

Les Paul and Mary Ford, “The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise”

John Paul Nerk Twins

Names

The Beatles went through several name and personnel changes before they became that group with that name that arrived on our US shores in 1964.

According to the “I Am the Beatles” site, here is the sequence of names:

  • The Black Jacks
  • The Quarry Men
  • Johnny and the Moondogs
  • The Nerk Twins
  • The Beatals
  • The Silver Beetles
  • The Silver Beats
  • The Beatles
  • The Silver Beatles
  • The Beatles
John Paul Nerk Twins

Any gig will do

Today  I’ll briefly explore those two nights in April 1960 that John and Paul were the Nerk Twins.

It is always good to keep in mind that the boys were simply young struggling musicians who found gigs however they could.

Fox and Hounds 

Betty Robbins was Paul’s cousin. Betty’s husband, Mike, and she ran the Fox and Hounds in Caversham on the outskirts of Reading, Berkshire.

John and Paul hitchhiked from Liverpool to the tavern and worked behind the bar  for a week. Mike Robbins, aware that they were musicians recommended that they play on Saturday and Sunday nights.

John Paul Nerk Twins

A Nerk

They made posters and the Nerk Twins were born. According to Bill Heckle, owner of The Cavern Club in Liverpool, “In Liverpool, a nerk is a derogatory term for somebody completely without street cred.” Knowing John’s sense of humor, perhaps it was his self-deprecating idea.

Professional advice

Mike Robbins had been an entertainments manager hosting talent contests and asked them what song they’d start with? Paul said “Be Bop A Lula.” Mike asked them if they could do anything more upbeat. Upbeat was the best way to start a show. According to Paul, they took that advice to heart and used it for arranging future shows.

So they decided to play a cover of Les Paul and Mary Ford’s “The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise.” It’s the Les Paul and Mary Ford version from 1953 that you hear at the top of today’s entry.

No relics

No one recorded the Nerk Twins. And the few patrons who heard them those April nights cared. According to Mike Robbins, one of the locals said, “They were a load of bloody rubbish but they brought a bit of life into the pub.”

What about those handmade posters? No one has ever found one and I suspect that if someone does it’ll be worth a few bob.

John Paul Nerk Twins
Anniversary, Beatles, Music et al, Music of the 60s, Today in history

John Paul George Ringo Breakup

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John Paul George Ringo Breakup

April 10, 1970

John Paul George Ringo Breakup

It was 1970. We American Boomers had watched them on Ed Sullivan  six years earlier.  Six years during which we witnessed  assassinations, wars, a cultural revolution,  fear, and loathing,

Or as John Lennon had playfully sang in 1969: Everybody’s talking about, Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism, This-ism, That-ism…

Many of us had literally grown up with the Beatles. We went from  innocent early teenage years to the brink of adulthood and its disruptive realities.

The Beatles had stopped touring in 1966. Getting to see them live was always too difficult anyway, so the fact that they weren’t appearing live wasn’t that  big a deal. We would always have their newest vinyl.

John Paul George Ringo Breakup

We’d had…

…Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour in 1967.

The Beatles–in 1968–but we were such good friends by then we all simply call it their “White” album. 

Yellow Submarine and Abby Road in 1969, though there were rumors of another album already recorded.

John Paul George Ringo Breakup

We also had rumblings…

Ringo had briefly quit the Beatles in August 1968 and George had done the same in January 1969.

They gave us some solo stuff like George Harrison’s Wonderwall (1968) but that wasn’t real Beatles stuff. Was it even real George Harrison stuff?

John and Yoko’s Two Virgins the same year definitely wasn’t Beatles.

On January 30, 1969 they played on the roof of their Apple Building in London as part of their movie Get Back. Not knowing it, the impromptu live performance was their last.

John Paul George Ringo Breakup

Marriages and divorces

John got divorced. Paul got married.  Yoko got married.

On August 22, 1969, photographer Ethan Russell shot the final photos of the the four together.

photo by Ethan Russell…The thrill looks gone.

John

On September 20, 1969, John Lennon told the others that he was leaving the band, but agreed to keep it quiet until albums were released and the time was right.

Then…

Daily Mirror headline
John Paul George Ringo Breakup

Paul spills the beans

April 10, 1970, Paul McCartney made the Beatles’ secret breakup public by issuing a press release to announce that he had left the group, done in the form of a fake interview:

“Q: Is your break with the Beatles temporary or permanent, due to personal differences or musical ones?

PAUL: Personal differences, business differences, musical differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family. Temporary or permanent? I don’t really know.”

John Lennon was furious, especially since Paul announced the breakup, already agreed upon by the group, just one week prior to the British release of McCartney’s first solo album. When a reporter tracked down Lennon for his thoughts, he replied, “Paul hasn’t left. I sacked him.“

While the lives of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison occasionally crossed after 1970, the crossings were sometimes cordial, sometimes not.

Life without a Beatles album went on punctuated regularly by many solo offerings.

A piece of the sixties ended on April 10, 1970

Whatever happened to the life that we once knew
Can we really live without each other?
Where did we lose the touch
That seemed to mean so much
It’s always made me feel so

 

Not Yoko

You will notice that I haven’t said that “Yoko broke up the Beatles” –the oft sung sad shibboleth. That is because she did not break up the Beatles, but that’s another story for another time.

And the final final legal legal breakup was still nearly five years away.

John Paul George Ringo Breakup