Great Magazine Reads: How Let It Be really finished off The Beatles

Classic Rock Magazine digs deep into history, and the cover story for Issue 276 puts all of the The Beatles’ final album, Let It Be (even though it was recorded before Abbey Road), into perspective. Here are some of the doozy need-to-knows:

• John Lennon was at the height of his heroin addiction and the others didn’t know how to help him.
• John wanted little to no production from George Martin, hoping for a raw recording of the band jamming in the studio, which is what happened to a degree, not that one can tell in the Phil Spector-produced version of the album.
• John suggested replacing George Harrison with Eric Clapton at one point. And the two of them were probably the chummiest of the four during the sessions!
• Nobody even introduced George Martin and Yoko Ono to each other.
• Being constantly filmed at early-morning sessions didn’t help anything either.
• Midway through, they made Billy Preston an honorable member of the band and everything calmed down. They hit their old stride and made great songs with Preston, like “Get Back.”
• “Two of Us” is about Paul and Linda McCartney but it can be interpreted as about Paul and John.
• “I’ve Got a Feeling” is probably the last genuine collaboration between Paul and John.
• The band didn’t bother to help produce the album, for the first time since Please Please Me.
• George Martin and Paul really disliked Spector’s production, agreeing he made The Beatles try to sound like other bands instead of themselves.

My take: I definitely love the album Let It Be, but it’s because of the songwriting, not because of Spector’s production.

5 things I learned about John Lennon from his first wife's book

Surprisingly, John Lennon's first wife offers up a lot of interesting nuggets (it seems like they must have all been noted by now) about The Beatle's early life. For Beatles' lovers, this is definitely worth a quick read, and here are five nuggets to whet your appetite.

1. When John was murdered in December 1980, Cynthia Lennon, his first wife, was running a little bistro with a friend (the ex-wife of Paul McCartney's brother James) in North Wales. This was more than a decade after their divorce, the breakup of the Beatles, and the beginning of John's relationship with Yoko Ono. When she heard the news, she was visiting Mo Starkey, Ringo Starr's first wife who had a brief fling with George Harrison after their divorce. Ringo called and told her. Cynthia's son, Julian Lennon, lost his dad at the age of 17, the same age both John and Cyn each lost a parent.
2. John died on December 9 (December 8 by U.S. time), which was eerie because of all the significant dates in his life that had to do with the number, not to mention his songs "One After 909," "Revolution 9," and "#9 Dream." Yoko was happy to have Julian fly immediately to New York, where John was shot, but was blunt in telling Cynthia to stay away.
3. Some of the early chapters are a little unexciting, as they detail the bad guy John falling in love with the nice girl Cynthia at art school. But it picks up when she meets Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Stuart Sutcliffe, whose place John and Cynthia would borrow for their sexual encounters. She got along particularly well with Paul and Stuart, and one day after Stuart and Cynthia had innocently danced, John hauled off and hit her hard. She determined she would leave him then but clearly didn't.
4. At age 5, John's aunt Mimi took him away from living with his mother Julia because Julia was living married with someone else and Mimi thought it was unfit for John.
5. When Stuart Sutcliffe died of a brain hemmorage at the age of 22 in 1962, John always acted like he did when someone close to him died. He laughed uncontrollably. Then he would not talk about it for weeks or months and keep his emotions bottled up inside.

Best Magazine Reads: 10 Groovy Tidbits About “How the Beatles Took America”

Rolling Stone’s January 16 cover story by the always-fabulous rock storyteller Mikal Gilmore amazingly offered plenty of perspective to the vents f late 1963/early 1964 that one would think we already long-ago knew about The Beatles.  

1. Manager Brian Epstein, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney made a bet on the plane over the ocean that “the Beatles would take America by storm," while Ringo Starr and George Harrison – who had visited his sister in Benton, Illinois in 1963 – said “they don’t know us, it’s going to be hard.”
2. The group stepped in at a time when rock n’ roll seemed to be dead. Buddy Holly had died, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry were blacklisted, Elvis had joined the Army, and rock DJ Alan Freed had been kicked off the radio.
3. By the end of 1963, The Beatles had five singles in the UK, three hit number one, and debut LP Please Please Me had been number one for 30 weeks, only to be replaced by With the Beatles.
4. Capitol Records in America had representatives who were not impressed. Newsweek, Time, and CBS Morning News all blasted the band without really knowing much of anything about them and before America had heard them. But a scathing commentary by CBS happened to air the same day that John F. Kennedy later got shot, and it was quickly forgotten. In England, With the Beatles was also being released on that busy November 22.
5. Gilmore makes a compelling argument that The Beatles stepped into the dark void left by Kennedy’s assassination to offer America another hope of youth and happiness.
6. Capitol soon had to give in and planned to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as a single in mid-January 1964 and would retitle With the Beatles as Meet the Beatles! When a 15-year-old girl from Silver Spring, Maryland saw a rebroadcast of the earlier CBS show, she requested that a local radio station play the song. The station got ahold of a British copy and aired it, and soon other U.S. station’s were getting mass requests. Capitol had to bump up the single’s release to December 26. By February 1, it was number one in America.
7. Bob Dylan heard it while driving in California and said he knew this was no teeny-bopper phase and that The Beatles were for real.
8. Two nights after landing in New York, Lennon’s microphone barely worked on The Ed Sullivan Show, so he and Harrison played to the audience while McCartney winked and smiled at the camera, perhaps making America initially think he was the sole lead singer of the band.
9. Their next show in America was in a boxing-arena-like setup at the Washington Coliseum in D.C. (which I pass not far from Union Station when riding the Metro’s Red Line to work). The band played with much more punk abandon than they had on the Sullivan show, with Starr in particular playing in a way (heavy on the cymbals) that helped the others keep beat through the torrents of crowd noise.
10. The exhaustion was starting to set in by the summer of 1964, when both the movie and LP of A Hard Day’s Night were released. Starr missed the first 10 dates of the tour due to tonsillitis, and his fill-in, Jimmy Nicol, said McCartney secretly disliked the crowds and focused on blonde women, Lennon drank so much his head swelled and he sweated profusely, and Harrison joined them all in having sex and partying every night.

The Beatles Live in 1966 Concert is Online and Hot!

Considering how much I love The Beatles, it's amazing how infrequently I've watched really good footage of the band playing live. Most of what I've seen has been them playing in black-and-white to loud crowds that almost completely drown out the performance. I happened upon this stunning half-hour video of a full concert in 1966 at Budokon Stadium in Tokyo.


 
Check out this incredible setlist, and watch the band, with a couple of lead vocal performances from George and even one from Ringo:

Rock and Roll Music (John)
She's a Woman (Paul)
If I Needed Someone (George)
Day Tripper (John)
Baby's in Black (John and Paul)
I Feel Fine (George)
Yesterday (Paul)
I Wanna Be Your Man (Ringo)
Nowhere Man (John)
Paperback Writer (Paul)
I'm Down (Paul)

Arias With a Twist Turns Woolly Mammoth Into DC Drag City

It's great to know that the last play at Woolly Mammoth appears to have been an anomaly of awfulness. After Civilization (All You Can Eat), it is very comforting to see my favorite DC theater return in force with Arias With a Twist.

This is a very strange drag show featuring a queen named Joey Arias. She is a one-piece firecracker who is absolutely impossible to stop watching, unless of course you were one of the few people who walked out (but why would you walk out? didn't those people have an inkling if what they were getting themselves into?).

In the title, Arias stands for her last name and Twist stands for master puppeteer Basil Twist, whose grand designs of aliens and devils and everything devious matched with stunning light projections make this show true eye candy.

The story, which doesn't really matter, is about Joey Arias, who is captured by aliens that perform an untoward surgery upon her. She is banished to an isolated forest. Later, she makes her way back to civilization and stomps all over Manhattan ala King Kong.

Arias belts out classic rock favorites by Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and others. She not only does a great job of singing nearly non-stop for 90 minutes, but adds strange and captivating originality to all of it.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is one of my favorite movies (I admittedly have never seen the stage production). Arias With a Twist is no Hedwig, but it is the second best thing in the drag/cabaret category.

**** out of ***** stars