I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

I deeply identified with Peter Sellers leaving after a few uncomfortable minutes of trying to deal with the Beatle banter.

lol the silly stuff was the stuff i liked the most! tough crowd

Paul on beards, 2012:
One of things about beards is that, when men reach a certain age, they'd like to see if they can grow one. It's a phenomenon I understand very well. After you get over the itchy face, you go, "Oh, I don't have to shave, that's cool." And then you move into the philosophical thing-- people say, "You look weird, you have a beard." And you say, "No, actually, it's weird to shave." Having a beard is natural. When you think about it, shaving it off is quite weird.

yes you can tolerate any beard you grow

god no kidding they're just dicking around xpost

the silly stuff, they were probably doing a lot of it so not as to have to think about the band they'd been in since they were kids was breaking up in front of their eyes

yeah def a lot of that

I've been in a lot of bands where the goofing off was the point, because the stakes were low - like, does anyone give a hoot if we play well or poorly, or if we get a gig in one month or six months? No they do not. But those bands were not the globally famous and quite talented Beatles.

To some extent the "we have to do this in three weeks" or whatever was artificially imposed - they could have just sat round their mansions and enjoyed owning absurd coats. But the world is ever-so-slightly richer for their having done this completely unnecessary thing, so.

I deeply identified with Peter Sellers leaving after a few uncomfortable minutes of trying to deal with the Beatle banter.

Poor Yoko asking, "Why are they laughing?" only made it funnier.

It's not even that the banter is unfunny or annoying, it's just the feeling of being dropped in some group with an impenetrable mode of communicating with each other and years-old in-jokes.

yeah i get that, but it totally worked for me. i don't think it was impenetrable. but I can see that some people feel that way, but it was delightful for me.

i learned a lot by googling and keeping captions on the whole time--at one point, in the 3rd ep, Lennon mentions he's had a few to George Martin and says "remember Bob Wooler." Who the hell is Bob Wooler I thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Wooler#:~:text=Famously%2C%20Wooler%20was%20physically%20attacked,trip%20to%20Spain%20with%20Epstein.

Yikes!

I didn't realize it was John doing the lead guitar on "Get Back". That's some smooth riffin'!

Mal Evans memoir coming out now:

https://www.vulture.com/2021/12/get-back-beatles-roadie-mal-evans-will-get-archive-memoir.html

oh cool

Today I learned that the band started working on three or four Abbey Road songs with leftover time from the Let It Be sessions, which is a curious bit of overlap. Let It Be, the album and sessions, were such odd outliers.

I think only four songs were new compositions during the Abbey Road sessions: You Never Give Me Your Money, Come Together, Here Comes the Sun and Sun King.

Which is so odd, because this movie depicts the band struggling for material, scraping the barrel even, when there were all these other songs apparently far enough along that they went to work on them immediately.

pretty grim reading about mal evans.

Maureen Starkey is a pretty brutal wiki read as well.

Maureen Starkey is a pretty brutal wiki read as well.

Very. "When the Harrisons were visiting the Starrs, Harrison confessed how much he loved Maureen, which led to an affair" - I remember this being a bombshell when I picked up Rolling Stone's special issue on George after he died. That issue didn't mention Starr's own infidelities and growing alcoholism, which may have helped push Maureen into it.

Zak Starkey reposted some of Rob Sheffield’s RS Get Back piece on his Instagram (@therealzakstarkey), along with a neat photo of Maureen with Zak’s “uncle” Keith Moon.

Nobody on the roof is a bigger fan than Mo. She was a screaming girl back at the Cavern Club — she’s the only person here who ever stood in line and paid money to hear this band. … She’s waited years for this gig.

Mo was the Beatle wife everyone loved. Even Ringo. Apparently he was by her side when she died.

Mo is the best

Yes you can vindicate any coat of Mo

And you gave me a hard time the other day for a bad pun, on a thread dedicated to suchlike?

?

Lads...

let it lie

Boys. Let's not fight about yesterday. Or every little thing. We can work it out. Dig it?

:)

Uh oh, wild Mike Love sighting

Love that Fender Bass VI that you see both John and George playing.

i quite liked that John still had an old setlist taped to his guitar

like it’s a nice detail & i like thinking that he was still somewhat sentimental & not just lazy lol

I'm going to close my eyes this evening and see in my dreams these beautiful golden faces in front of an amazingly azure sky...

Cyn...

Jane...

Mike Love....

yes you can tolerate any beard you grow

Underrated post.

Yes you can vindicate any coat of Mo

On its own, would have been a groaner. As a follow up to the previous post? Peerless.

Beard beatles ranking:

1. George
2. Paul.
3. Ringo
4. John

Paul
Paul
Paul
George

Mustaches:

Ringo
Paul
John
George

Muttonchops:

John

watched episode 1 last night and loved it. made me so happy to see them fucking around, switching instruments, doing silly voices while procrastinating writing songs. such a universal experience

it did kind of make me think that apart from the harmonies you know, i could have been in the beatles, why not, it doesn’t seem too hard

I think I could have been a Glyn Johns. Or maybe a Magic Alex.

glyn johns' stupid grin at banging on the hammer in 'maxwell's silver hammer' cracked me up

suddenly i sound like some kind of beatles pub bore so i apologise but that was mal evans not glyn johns

Being a master charlatan like Magic Alex seems really hard! I'm trying to picture seriously selling a proposal where the Beatles live on a Greek island (at that time under a military regime IIRC) in individual circular glass houses houses connected by a tunnels to a central house so they can be served by their staff such as Mal and Neil. And that's on top of the day job of selling vague audio-visual solutions that haven't yet been invented to individual Beatles.

It still amazes me that there were utterly no consequences for promising a 72-track recording studio, and delivering precisely nothing, plus a cartoonishly goofy "prototype" of a rotating double-necked guitar.

Like, I have a whole job where I tell people "We're going to do some cool things some time in the future." That is literally my job. It's how I can pay my mortgage and feed my children. But there is a whole structure of expectations. Standards of proof. Requirements to show past success. I wouldn't last six weeks - let alone months or years - on stuff that never panned out.

oh and hardcore dilettante, I confess that I have become unhealthily obsessed with that pony-digging linguistic formula of "you can (fancy verb) any (noun) you (verb)."

Like, just this morning I was getting a kid breakfast and found myself singing "yes you can accessorize your oatmeal, bro."

hopefully answered by a request for some toppings with good bite and texture, because "all i want is chew."

He invented vaporware - that's something.

re: I assume it’s down to something more than just studios moving to transistorized desks (as Abbey Road had just prior to Abbey Road), but I dunno.

for the beatles i think the big shifts that lead to that 70s feeling on abbey road are indeed the transistor desk - that really changes the colour of the recording - but also the addition of moog synths to their sound palette. not sure it's really any more than that

I read a book last month that is based around this idea, called Solid State