The Beatles

i am old and saw the "wings over america" show at the nassau coliseum and of course memory could be playing tricks but that was easily the best *sounding* arena show i have ever seen. like, not even close.

ringo should have filmed douglas adams' spec script for "goodnight vienna", that's my opinion

also god the security situation there is not just "exhausting" but fucking scary, they could _very easily_ be mobbed in a situation like that, i'd have fucking quit touring too

it looks like a horror movie, like theyre being held hostage & forced to play against their will

I would watch a true horror movie about the ecstasy of beatlemania gradually turning into something really fucked up and scary

we'll see whether paul or ringo turns out to be the final girl

now I've made myself too sad and angry thinking about britney spears again

for George, Beatlemania was fucked up and scary.

TSF, I didn't see the WOA show on the tour but I did win a copy of the triple album along with the accompanying songbook from the Long Island Press because I correctly answered a Beatles trivia question posed by Lou O'Neill Jr. based on knowledge gleaned from the copy of ALL TOGETHER NOW in the Womrath bookstore near the Bloomingdales in the Fresh Meadows Shopping Center (I wonder if I ever unknowingly crossed paths with Will Hermes in those parts). My dad drove me to the LIP office in Jamaica so I could pick it up. Lou was not at his desk when I arrived but eventually he strolled in looking very rock and roll journo, like Joey Ramone in Almost Famous drag, and told me he was going to (the) Eagles show that night and asked me "do you have tickets?" or maybe even "do you have tix?"

Here's some less scary footage from a couple weeks before Candlestick, playing the Olympia in Detroit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBIfn0LjCFg

...and here they are at the same venue in '64:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXkmpSmpeKU

Left there's this guy named Charles Manson you may want to look into...

yeah I saw charlie says

but like what if the beatles did that and wrote the songs for it on purpose

it would have been so much bloodier

or if they had been literally engulfed and eaten by a swarming mass of fans. one or the other

the beatles in the philippines sounds like a nightmare, i haven't read this but here's a longread:

https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/notes-and-essays/remember-the-beatles-nightmare-in-manila-a1542-20170524-lfrm10

I approve of all this speculation

Why was Manson hanging out with the Beach Boys but getting all his secret messages from the Beatles? Couldn't Wild Honey or Friends have inspired murders too?

in the candlestick park footage, are the only on-stage monitors the two little gray boxes in the front corners, and maybe a larger speaker to ringo's left pointing at him? that seems like a nightmare in terms of being able to hear on stage even before all the screaming. the monitors are so far away from john/paul

(xp) Smiley Smile probably could.

i mean if "transcendental meditation" wasn't enough to inspire a man to kill i don't know what song could

and i _like_ transcendental meditation

ringo should have filmed douglas adams' spec script for "goodnight vienna", that's my opinion

i totally forgot about that, I see the script finally got published a few years back. b-ark is in it apparently (which got recycled twice!)

I did win a copy of the triple album along with the accompanying songbook from the Long Island Press

nice! long island press was a queens thing? i don't recall seeing it around me. in nassau county it was "good times."

Apparently so! Never thought about that before, made assumptions since it had "Long Island" in the title. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Island_Daily_Press

I believe at one point Lou O'Neill Jr. migrated to the NY Post along with his soulmate Headphone Dan Aquilante

Surely you read Wayne Robins in Newsday back in the day?

Heh, further discussion of Lou O’Neill Jr. here, including me telling a version of the same story I just recounted upthread: The end of Circus Magazine

And some further hilarious Beatles-related Lou O’Neill Jr. anecdotes on another borad: https://iorr.org/talk/read.php?1,1495183

#onethread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU79J--YFcE

Surprisingly informative interview with Giles Martin:

https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/music-stage/2024/07/06/giles-martin-beatles-producer-george-love/

In relation to the Beatles' current projects, it mentions this:

It wasn’t until his father died that Martin was approached to begin remixing the Beatles albums starting with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a project he initially turned down.

“I said no. Why would you want to remix an album that doesn’t sound bad? They said they thought it could be interesting. So I agreed to do a few songs, and The Beatles liked them, so I kept going.”

Martin’s relationship with McCartney has made him a witness to a constant war with ‘good enough’.

“I mean, he’s a musical genius, obviously, but it’s more than that. I’ll work with the guy on a horn arrangement, and we’ll finish, and it will be good. And then we’ll play it and Paul will say, ‘yeah, but it just sounds like a horn arrangement. What’s different about it? How about this?’

“And it’ll be really annoying, but it will be a really good idea. It’s always a challenge, that’s how it should be. It feels like most people today are scared of being challenged.”

Martin is far from done with The Beatles catalogue. Next, there’s Rubber Soul, Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine and, because of the AI techniques that he’s been using to separate individual strands of the recordings, he’s excited about the opportunity to dive back into the band’s early material in a way that was previously impossible.

"So I agreed to do a few songs, and The Beatles Paul liked them, so I kept going.”

Lennon rolls over in his grave

roll over Johntoven

George scowls from above

Harrison, that is

Ringo: "I'm just happy to be here!"

"I think there’s a lot to be said for not having a clue what you’re doing. I’m 54 years old and I still feel like I’m making it up as I go along."

Just amazing what one can accomplish when you're the son of George Martin.

Just for once I would love it if the interviewer picked up on that chestnut. The old "I don't know what I'm doing, it just falls into place" chestnut. It's supposed to be self-effacing, but it just gives the impression that the interviewee relies heavily on their interns. Or they're the kind of CEO who claims to work sixteen hours a day, but actually spends most of that time updating their LinkedIn profile or attending luncheons. Or at the very least they believe that hard work is for morons, and natural brilliance will win the day.

If only the chap who was put in charge of rescuing everybody from the cruise liner conducted light entertainment interviews. You know. Captain De Falco. The Costa Concordia bloke:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16599655

"And what, do you want to go home, Schettino? It's dark, so you want to go home?" That's the kind of tone that's missing from light entertainment news.

I remember that Gerry Anderson used to say the same thing. He used to almost boast that his successes had been accidental. Every fibre of my being wanted to respond with "is that why Terrahawks and Space Precinct were massive flops, then? Is that why you've been unable to get a show off the ground for the last twenty years? Is that why your entire Century 21 empire is dead and gone and forgotten, and you're an old man surrounded by stupid little puppets that mock you with their silence, mock you, laugh at you, laughing at you, little puppets laughing at you, also you were adopted".

I remember staring at the pages and mouthing those words with my mind. But it's too late. He escaped. He fled down the tunnel of death, ahead of me. Beatles Beatles something about the Beatles. Insert something about the Beatles here. The Beatles. Imaging beating a man called Les. You would literally beat les.

No denying the Beatles, the Stones, etc. are big names, but in terms of the actual technical work on their archival releases, it's a really their own tiny operation, and you see this reflected in the interviews with Giles and anyone else on these projects - it's usually very few people doing the actual work and making the decisions before running it by "the Beatles" (Paul, Ringo, the Lennon and Harrison estates) for approval.

The Love anecdote suggests this as well - he has access to Abbey Road, but it's him alone fiddling on a computer in a small room with no speakers. So I don't doubt he's got technical skill, but when he's kind of on his own and he's never had oversight or worked his way up in a rigid organization like his father did at EMI (i.e. there's no mentoring, no procedural workflow he has to learn and follow each step of the way), I can see why he would say "I'm making it up as I go along." It's a big difference compared to a newly recorded album by someone like the Stones or McCartney where they're bouncing through numerous studios, sending stuff to different artists (and presumably engineers, maybe even producers), etc.

idk maybe too much agonistes but i don't know what the hell i'd say if someone asked me how i accomplished what i accomplished. "what are you, daft? my dad's george martin, if it wasn't for him, i'd probably be working retail"? i genuinely don't think i'd be able to live with myself if i believed that.

Happy Birthday to Ringo Starr, who won the internet back in the day with this pic.twitter.com/KDfG6NCalD

— Eric Alper 🎧 (@ThatEricAlper) July 7, 2023

I forgot to say "Peace and Love" at noon, sorry

yeah, I mean, Giles was attending sessions as a little kid. He was definitely being trained by his dad. You could say it is kind of true that he is making it up as he goes along as far as the de-mixing stuff, that technology is so new and Beatles are so high profile. I think they would have to be the first major artist doing that kind of intense software tweaking to process separate elements of an old tape.

Greg, on the other hand…

I think they would have to be the first major artist doing that kind of intense software tweaking to process separate elements of an old tape.

Yeah, but back in the day i felt like I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

Jim Hoberman reviews TWST / Things We Said Today, a new essay film that "treats the Fab Four’s Shea Stadium concert as a window into the dreams and nightmares of the summer of 1965." (The film recently opened at the NYFF.) Hoberman was also a resident of Queens when the Shea Stadium concert happened, and his memories of that time are wonderful to read. For example, he recounts seeing the enormous crowd around the Warwick on 54th and 6th (where the Beatles are staying), one street over from MoMA where he was regularly attending films, and he also points out that merely three days later, Bob Dylan & the Hawks would take Dylan's newly electrified show to Forest Hill Stadium, also in Queens and not far from Shea.

*Forest Hills

I should've fact checked, but most reports say Dylan played Forest Hills on August 28, not August 18. Forest Hills Stadium's own website says the 18th, but I'm guessing this was a mistake or typo. It's possible Hoberman was going by their claim, not actually remembering the exact date. Still, his point stands - for two weeks, I can imagine that far end of Queens seeming like the center of the universe.

Another Disney+ Beatles film coming produced by Scorsese: https://variety.com/2024/film/news/beatles-documentary-martin-scorsese-disney-release-date-1236176871/

Sounds like a new edit of The First U.S. Visit using previously unused footage.

Cool, maybe he'll interview Hoberman and some others from neighborhood.

Here'a a work tape setlist---haven't run it by Paul and Ringo yet, but see what yall think: adds, deletions, re-sequences?

The Beatles---White Pepper Spray Tour:

1. Dear Prudence
2. Good Morning Good Morning
3. Paperback Writer
4. Rain
5. Fixing A Hole
6. Getting Better
7. Rocky Racoon
8. She Said She Said
9. Yer Blues
10.Julia
11.For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite
12.Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
13.A Day In The Life
(minus final chord---instead, 10 seconds of abrupt silence)
12. Tomorrow Never Knows
13. Taxman
14. I Am The Walrus

Good -

Ronnie Spector
Concert recordings sound better, the original footage looks and sounds good
All the 'on the street' interviews are fascinating. Amazing, beautiful faces! Could have been a separate documentary of its own

Bad -

Contemporary interviews, who gives a shit about Jack Douglas travelling to Liverpool? Also Sananda Maitreya???
Billie Eilish's hackneyed, Netflix film trailer version of All My Loving
Way too much Murray The K
Poorly constructed and generally disparate

I haven't seen the Maysles' film in ages, but I wish they'd give that a proper deluxe Blu-ray release. (They could've added all the additional footage used in the new Disney doc as a bonus feature.) Hopefully that'll happen soon, I'd definitely get it.