Paul and Hunter Davies, 1981
Hunter Davies in 1980 In the Allen Klein thread, @Ruth mentioned an interview Beatle biographer Hunter Davies conducted in 1981 with Paul McCartney, in which Paul expressed some more caustic feelings about John, rather than his usual "butter-doesn't-melt-in-my-mouth" persona. Though things apparently improved between Paul and Hunter Davies, McCartney was apparently pretty angry that the author chose to publish it [...]
Allen Klein Playboy Interview, 1971
"Scuse us, folks. It's the 70s." Ladies and gents, I have a treat. It seems the proprietor/tress of the wonderful Beatles tumblr Amoralto was reading our comment thread, and shot me a link to the entire scan of the Allen Klein Playboy interview. This link will take you to a site where you can download it. (A natural word of [...]
Allen Klein
Commenter @ChelseaQW sent in this interesting tidbit this morning, which I just had to share. It's from Allen Klein's November 1971 interview in Playboy magazine: VETTER: You make it sound as if they [John and Paul] were never really close. KLEIN: I can only tell you what John said when I asked him who he would call among the Beatles if he [...]
“These Paper Bullets!”: The Fabs Meet the Bard
For everyone who's wondered what might have happened if Shakespeare had met the Beatles, These Paper Bullets! delivers "a modish rip-off of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing with a serious backbeat." I saw one of the last scheduled performances of the play, by New York's Atlantic Theater Company, and it was a delight. Despite a few wobbly bits, it stands on its own as [...]
The Beatles and Class open thread
Saturday Evening Post, August 15, 1964. Beatles as City gents; two British stereotypes for the price of one! Over the past several months there's been a topic in the wind here on Dullblog — no, not just Beatle-boinking -- but the impact of class on the Beatles story. We've talked about it might've shaped their relationships with each other (particularly [...]
Bowie and The Beatles
Love you, too, Dave. Impossible, folks, to let a full Earth's rotation pass without a post on the late, great David Bowie. Bowie has always seemed to me to be a performer whose rise to fame would've been impossible without the Beatles coming first, preparing the way. The seven years of Fabdom were essential in priming the audience for what [...]
David Bowie, Shine On
The news that David Bowie has died at age 69 has saddened people worldwide. He profoundly influenced musicians, fashion designers, and countless teenage kids who felt they were "weird" until they encountered his work. And he collaborated successfully with many other artists, including Brian Eno, Mick Jagger, and John Lennon, Bowie and John joined forces on the song "Fame," released in 1975, and were [...]
Why We Still Love The Beatles?
"You love us because you are anxious." The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik has a theory, and apparently it's something like, "modern life makes people anxious, and in their anxiety they cling to certain things, and discard other things." Which is not really an answer -- why the Beatles and not, say, Queen? -- but the real reason makes for bad [...]
The Beatles on Spotify
"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 [...]