The Fab Files, Pt. 2: Beatle Traces in the Mid-Atlantic Conference
“We’ve never seen the body.But we know he’s there.” DEVIN McKINNEY • Having written about the McCartney death rumor in Magic Circles, I knew that campus papers in the Middle West and Near East were the seedbed of the whole thing. For several weeks in the autumn of 1969, student editors, reviewers, lit majors, and budding gag-writers scrambled to co-opt, [...]
Admiral “Recovers” The Beatles; or, A Genre Waiting to Be Named
DEVIN McKINNEY • You have your cover versions of Beatles songs, and then you have your “recovers”—songs rendered as The Beatles would have done them, had they done them completely differently, or, in some cases, at all. One of the earliest and best entries in this imaginative and as-yet unnamed subgenre was It’s Four You (1994), by Australian soundalikes The Beatnix, which [...]
Beatles solo albums sell slowly: or, no escape from the Fab Four
NANCY CARR * The Beatles broke up over 40 years ago, but in the public’s mind they could never really stop being Beatles. The desperate efforts of all the band’s members (well, except Ringo) in the 1970s to escape its gravitational pull were doomed. If you want to see this reality in action today, check out the displays in a nearby record [...]
Paperback Writer mistakes
Dig the lineup on this EP. Way to confuse Portuguese fans, EMI. Eagle-eared commenter Bill Garrity writes to say: "I was just listening to 'Paperback Writer' and wondered if anybody noticed some flubs along with background noise — coughs, extraneous breathing, muttering, etc. Notable are the following: 0:08-0:10 extraneous breathing 0:57 cough 1:19-1:21 missed cue on background vocal 1:45-1:48 extraneous breath, sniffling or something [...]
Merch, Mind Games, and the Serious Proximity Buzz
JAMIE BRYAN • “It’s the center of the earth,” Lennon said famously. And so inevitably Beatlemania returned to New York, bringing 60s-era good vibes not only to the cavernous convention spaces of Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt, but even to its sterile, airport-style lobby bar. Where the locals were gleefully engaging in a quaint little custom they picked up from Peter Minuit, the fleecing [...]
Critics at Large reviews “The Fifth Beatle”
DEVIN McKINNEY • While the world waits for the sunrise, and Hey Dullblog for the opinion of honorary Brian Epstein Fan Club president Mike Gerber, take a look at David Kidney’s review of the fantastic-seeming graphic novel The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story, by writer Vivek Tiwary and artists Andrew Robinson and Kyle Baker. Posted over at my “other” blog outlet, [...]
Happy birthday, George!
HEY DULLBLOG • He’d have been 71 today. All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.
The Beatles and History
MIKE GERBER • Devin's excellent post on James Marcus' graceful, slightly Slate-only-smarter Letting Go of The Beatles spurred some thoughts, which were too long to put in a comment. I wrote this in haste and I can feel the dullness of my tools (doing a lot more business-stuff than writing-stuff these days), but I paste them below. It was fifty years ago today… [...]
I’m So Tired: Responsive Notes on the Phenomenon of Beatle Fatigue
There's no fatigue like Beatle fatigue. DEVIN McKINNEY • Beatle Ed points me to this most interesting, warmhearted, clear-eyed essay by James Marcus, “Letting Go of the Beatles,” posted yesterday at the Harper’s site. Even we, the besotted, must accept the validity, as we cough the exhaust fumes of the recent 50th-anniversary ballyhoo (which Hey Dullblog did its share to [...]