Michael Gerber • Hey Dullblog, the Beatles fan blog

The Beatles on Spotify

By Michael Gerber|2015-12-31T13:51:16-08:00December 31, 2015|Beatles on the Web|

"We make it up in volume." Finally! A band that can live on 0.006 per song! As you might have heard, the Beatles' catalog became available for streaming on December 24th, and users took to it with a will, streaming 70 million Beatles songs in the first three days. Commenter @Hologram Sam posted the following lists of the ten most -- and least -- popular Beatles tracks on Spotify. They puzzled and enchanted me, and so I decided to write the single most internetty piece in the history of Hey Dullblog. And in the spirit of the internet, my goal [...]

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Dullblog’s Top Posts of 2015

By Michael Gerber|2015-12-30T11:52:00-08:00December 30, 2015|Housekeeping|

The Fabs look very strange on this, right? George looks like Brian Jones As everybody is still busily digesting their Beatle-related gifts (how many of you got "1+"? Anything else to review?), I will confine myself to a quick check-in/roundup. I'm happy to report that 2015 was a banner year for Hey Dullblog. Traffic was up over 43% from 2014. We are reaching more Beatle people than ever before, and will nestle to a stop just under 150,000 pageviews. I am sure that much of that reader interest was due to our playful, informed, incisive-yet-respectful comments, so thank you, thank [...]

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Beatles Ashram is Now Open!

By Michael Gerber|2015-12-09T11:11:43-08:00December 9, 2015|1968, India|

By law, this photo must accompany any article regarding the Beatles in India. It's always sorta been open to the public -- if you wanted to give a local five rupees and sneak over the wall -- but now the Indian government has made the Maharishi's old compound in Rishikesh a tourist attraction. In 1968, the Fab Four wrote most of the White Album while staying at the ashram located in the Rajaji national park, besides the river Ganges. Since the Maharishi left in the 1970s it has been overtaken by forest, but on Tuesday, 35 years to the day [...]

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My Yoko Problem… and yours?

By Michael Gerber|2022-07-25T11:38:38-07:00December 5, 2015|Wives and girlfriends, Yoko Ono|

"Me and Yoko and a backing group…" In the thread regarding Ruth's excellent review, longtime Dullpal @Sir Huddleston Fuddleston wrote this: "I guess what I’m saying is, whatever the problem, it’s Yoko’s fault. A failed 'concept artist' took the most successful popular musician in history, by a long way, and made him think his work was shit. By comparison, it’s nothing to make him hand the keys to Klein." To some degree, I agree with this. John's self-appraisal post-Yoko is so woefully off that you want to check him for a skull fracture. "Mr. Lennon, did you get hit on [...]

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Allen Klein biography review by Ruth

By Michael Gerber|2015-12-03T13:04:50-08:00December 3, 2015|Reviews|

No, no, he was really a nice guy, says the authorized biography Frequent commenter and house historian Ruth has sent in her review of Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, Made the Rolling Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll. Written with Ruth's trademark incisiveness and interest in Beatles historiography, it is posted below -- with our deep thanks. By the way: there is much too much Beatle-related content being produced for us to keep up. I am growing mildly alarmed at the many worthy books, reissues, etc, that come and go without our making any comment. Any [...]

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Four In Hand by John Lennon

By Michael Gerber|2015-12-02T17:35:51-08:00December 2, 2015|John Lennon|

This musical was brought to you by Purell. With all this talk of certain male sexual practices, I couldn't help but remember Four In Hand by John Lennon, the sketch he wrote for Kenneth Tynan's erotic revue "Oh! Calcutta!" First mounted (so to speak) in 1969, "Oh! Calcutta!" was a massive success — long runs on both sides of the Atlantic, an even longer run as a revival — but you don't hear about it a lot today. Tragically, a lot of the hijinks of the late 60s and early 70s went down the Memory Hole as soon as Reagan was elected, [...]

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The Beatles Forever?

By Michael Gerber|2019-08-07T01:39:10-07:00November 29, 2015|fans|

I read this book until it fell apart. I still have the pieces on my bookshelf. Commenter @ChelseaQW said something in our gargantuan thread today that really resonated with me. I wanted to surface it in a post, on the off-chance it resonated with some of you. "Traditional Beatles fandom (and 'journalism') is SO dominated by straight white male baby boomers and — with all due respect to everyone involved — I am soooooo tired of hearing that stale perspective, over and over again." The editor in me is very, very proud of this comment; much of my interest in [...]

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ELO is back

By Michael Gerber|2015-11-27T22:35:54-08:00November 27, 2015|Beatle-inspired|

Since we're talking about Jeff Lynne, I wanted to pause for a moment and take Dullblog's temperature on Electric Light Orchestra. Because ELO is back with their first album in 14 years, and I just listened to this catchy little tune. https://youtu.be/uy0oWuhTzh8 Commercially -- for the moment -- ELO is back, but for a lot of Beatles fans, they've never left. Their greatest hits spend a lot of time on my iTunes playlist, for sure. The overlaps between Jeff Lynne and his four Liverpudlian heroes are well known, and too numerous to list here. But before they snuggled up together in the [...]

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Free As A Bird: Pro or Con?

By Michael Gerber|2015-11-26T12:04:24-08:00November 26, 2015|Anthology|

The act you haven't known... I awoke this morning to begin my American Thanksgiving, and the first song I heard on KCRW was "Free As A Bird." (Droll, young hip DJ, very droll.) FAAB is that rarest of B's: a Beatles song you don't hear very often. And rightly so? I remember being delighted by "Free As A Bird" when it emerged in 1995 -- not due to the song itself which, then and now, sounds a bit spindly to me, and seems to emphasize the loss of Lennon, rather than celebrate the group. But I loved how it brought [...]

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Beatlebone review by Karen

By Michael Gerber|2016-02-28T17:05:18-08:00November 17, 2015|Beatles fiction, Reviews|

One of the few perks of Hey Dullblog (in addition to being able to converse with all of you, which is pleasure enough) is receiving the occasional Beatle-related item in the mail. Earlier in the fall, a nice man at Doubleday reached out and asked if we'd review the Irish novelist Kevin Barry's Beatlebone, a fantasy starring a late-Seventies John Lennon. Of course we said yes, first because we love all things Beatle here, and second because I personally know how difficult it is to nudge any novel's sales into the high two figures. The written word? We're all for it, here [...]

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About Michael Gerber