Sleeveface: Change your head
DEVIN McKINNEY • Probably more enterprising net-cruisers than I already know the British website Sleeveface, which since early 2006 has been making a small, pleasant fuss on the Internet, and latterly in the British press. According to Wiki, the concept originated, according to the BBC, in Cardiff, Wales, according to a guy who lives in Cardiff. Anyway, click on over: Beatles entries are surprisingly few (in fact, they are zero—not many large, isolated head shots on their LP jackets), but there are some solo Ringos, a slew of John & Yokos, many McCartney IIs, and a ton of [...]
Pizza, Pooh & Magpie
This just begs for a funny caption. DEVIN McKINNEY • The following was spotted recently in the liner notes of Peter, Paul & Mary's LP See What Tomorrow Brings, released December 1965, simultaneous with Rubber Soul. The notes spend needless time defending PP&M for not being "hip" like Dylan, or "electric" like the Beatles; and then assuring us it doesn't matter 'cause they do their own thing anyway. Then you get to this: Their message is the same as that of any artist through the centuries, a sermon of truth and beauty in the context of their times. And the [...]
“Revolution 1” In The Head
If only you were here to confirm or deny... DEVIN McKINNEY • Mike asked what I thought of the “Revolution 1” Take 20 RM1, so called, that's been burning up Beatleland. I’ve been loving and chewing on this piece of mystery meat since the weekend, and at first assumed it was genuine. Why not: Remember the stripped-down masters of those four Sgt. Pepper songs that appeared almost a year ago? Those were just as crisply digitized, just as thrillingly intimate in their four-track nudity, and no one has credibly claimed they are not genuine. So I figured it was more [...]
But who knows where or when
Sweaty John and Paul DEVIN McKINNEY • Reach into cyberspace and you'd swear you have a magnet hand. Things just fly into your palm. Like this great shot of two of our best boys in full gorgeous sweat. It just came to me off a Spanish website and bears the legend, Lennon e McCartney em seus melhores momentos. [MG: "In English: 'Sweaty John and Paul'."] I've never seen the picture before and cannot place its provenance. I therefore pose a puzzle: can anyone devise a plausible guess, from the minimal evidence, as to when, where, and what occasion in the [...]
Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starr & Young
DEVIN McKINNEY • Another addition to the growing video library here at your favorite YouTube annex: Neil Young performing a Beatles classic to wind up a recent Dublin date. http://youtu.be/Od5MaiiUjtY Though Neil has never done much to associate himself with the Fabs, this song choice makes sense in at least one regard: I have always felt that the Young-Nitzsche "Expecting to Fly" (from the 1967 Buffalo Springfield Again) was a direct homage to/steal from Sgt. Pepper, particularly its royal finale. (And what about "Broken Arrow," from the same album? Or "Country Girl," from CSNY's Deja Vu? And pretty much the whole of [...]
The Vision of Joe Orton
DEVIN McKINNEY • The missing piece in the Beatles’ movie puzzle, the wild card in their deck, is Joe Orton. This enfant terrible of the British theater, in between epatering the ‘60s bourgeoisie with the likes of Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot, wrote a screenplay for the Beatles at the commission of producer Walter Shenson. Adapted from an early, unpublished novel and suggestively titled Up Against It (Brit-speak for “under the gun”), the script was violent, sexually transgressive, defiantly sui generis—part Fellini freakshow, part black Ealing Studios farce, part prophecy of every late ‘60s anti-establishment decadence-and-destruction fantasy from How I Won the [...]
Beatlespooks, Ch. 1: The Phantom Guardsman of Strawberry Fields
Frames from the “Strawberry Fields” promo film, shot January 30, 1967, in Knole Park, Sevenoaks, Kent. DEVIN McKINNEY • At first, Paul is sanguine, at his ease, perhaps even lofty on teasmoke. But what does he spy, reflected in the varnished piano of a Kentish night? A Beatle aide caught in pass, or a vigilant spirit on eternal watch? May we say, you or I, what so widens his eye?
Book Review: “The Beatles’ Second Album”
The Beatles’ Second Album by Dave Marsh 186 pp. Rodale Books, 2007 DEVIN McKINNEY • I’ve been reading Dave Marsh for many years, starting with his dozens of thumbnail critiques in the first two editions of The Rolling Stone Record Guide and his artist essays in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll; on through the reviews and journalism collected in Fortunate Son; uncollected pieces in old issues of Rolling Stone; and the massive compendium The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles of All Time (one of my favorite music books, mainly because it anthologizes so many [...]