 | A Day In The Life |
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Beatles Concert Tape on eBay In August 1966, two Jackson, Mississippi, teens, Gloria Allen and Noreen Prouty, lugged a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder to the Beatles' Memphis show on what would prove to be the band's last tour ever. A few months before, John Lennon had made his infamous comment, "We're more popular than Jesus," prompting bonfires of Beatles records throughout America. In Memphis, the reaction was particularly bad. At the second of the Beatles' two shows that day, while George Harrison sang "If I Needed Someone," a fan threw fireworks onstage. "Each thought it was the other that had been shot," Lennon remembered. "That's when I knew: That was the last tour."
Now, Allen and Prouty's tapes of the shows will finally see the light of day, thanks to eBay. Allen rediscovered the tapes in 1996, gathering dust in her closet, and took them to a local recording studio. "I just wanted to see if they sounded like I remembered," she says. The engineer showed the grocery sack of reels to Chris Larkin, an aspiring songwriter who'd been a chef on the Jacksons' Victory Tour. Larkin called the London offices of EMI, the Beatles' label. Thirty-six hours later, Michael Heatley, general manager of EMI's International Catalogue Development, arrived in Nashville for a listen. Heatley's offer to buy the tapes was "insulting," according to Larkin. "It wasn't even six figures." Larkin contends that Heatley's only interest in the tapes was to put them in a vault and keep them out of the hands of bootleggers.
Rolling Stone listened to the tapes in Memphis. They offer a document of Beatlemania, but the fidelity is low, and the shrieking of teenage girls often drowns out the band. Those shrieks can be filtered out some with the help of Pro Tools, and Harrison's guitar cuts through clearly. When the explosion occurs, the audience reacts with intensified screaming, as if the boom was stage pyrotechnics. More Beatles Tapes Recovered The recovery was the second of its kind this year. On January 10th, British and Dutch police conducted separate raids in London and Amsterdam, uncovering 500 reel-to-reel tapes in the latter bust. Two British men were pinched in London and two Dutch men and a British man were arrested near Amsterdam for suspicion of theft and handling stolen goods. The latest raid resulted in the arrest of an unidentified man, who was later released without being charged.
According to reports, the Sydney tapes are thought to be either the original studio recordings for those two albums, or professionally made copies. Some album artwork was also discovered.
The fruits of the Amsterdam raid included tapes of the sessions that would eventually become the band's Let It Be album, along with hours of unissued music and conversations. Both the Amsterdam tapes and the Sydney tapes were thought to have been stolen from Abbey Road Studios, more than thirty years ago. This Day in Rock On this day in 1968, the Beatles win four Grammys for Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band including Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Album, Best Engineered Record and Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts.
Clapton, Willie Join Ringo Starr recorded most of the album, his first collection of new material since 1998's Vertical Man, in his own studio in England with producer Mark Hudson, with a few tracks done at Hudson's Los Angeles' studio. Among the songs included is "Never Without You," Starr's tribute (written with Gary Nicholson and Hudson) to his former Beatles band mate George Harrison. The track is one of two that features Clapton, a friend of Harrison.
"There's a lot of me in these songs," Starr said. "As time goes on, my personality is coming out more and more in the music. That's just what happens. On this album my drumming is more dynamic, I'm more to the front, I think I'm singing better and I believe we're writing better songs."
Starr and his All-Starr Band will tour behind Ringo Rama this summer. Meet the Beatles . . . Again If these books represent the drunken louts and henchmen who have taken up residence in the vulnerable little frontier town of Beatleville, then The Beatles Anthology is the hard-ass hardcover with the big iron on his hip, who in passing through town whips the wrong-doers and decides to hang his ivory-handled colt on the door and settle down. There's a new sheriff in town.
Leave it to the good folks at San Francisco's Chronicle Books to find that slim middle ground between substance and style that has eluded so many Beatle scribes thus far. Anthology is an event more than a book. The sheer visual quantity of the book is mind-blowing. Let's say you like cheese. Anthology is the Beatles equivalent of learning that the moon is actually made of Gouda, and your father works for NASA.
For those who feel saturated with the standard array of Beatle images, the book boasts more than 1,300 photos, a substantial number of which are from the musician's personal collections. They're both revealing (great early shots of the "cute" Beatles being not-so-cute with accompanying text about their physically taxing trips to Hamburg) and um, revealing (a buck nekkid John Lennon and Yoko Ono beneath the text, "She forced me to become avant-garde and take my clothes off, when all I wanted was to become Tom Jones"). The artwork also ranges from fun, funny and interesting candids to out-and-out photographic beauty when the eye behind the lens happened to belong to Linda McCartney.
The text presents the book's only glitch, though it's a dubious criticism. As the richest first-person account of the Beatles by the Beatles, this is one unwieldy sumbitch to swallow. The 370 pages are huge and the type is of a standard point size. If it took two semesters to get through the twin courses that make up basic Art History, expect the same time commitment should you try and read Anthology straight through. The sheer heft of it all raises the question of the book's necessity -- how much Beatles is too much?
Indeed, it's almost inconceivable to imagine a tome this exhaustive devoted to any other band. But the Beatles were never any other band. They were the most cultural of cultural phenomenon of the past century. Their appeal seeped into all mass media, from radio to Mr. Sullivan's "vurrry big show," from live performances at Shea Stadium to recordings that transcended death. Before Anthology, the sheer magnitude of Beatles fascination fueled a market that became saturated with chintzy riff-raff in the form of print and film and shoddy bootlegs of the Fab Four messing around in the studio in CD form. The Anthology CDs took steps towards amending the latter. But The Beatles Anthology is something new for book-minded fans: a new Beatles challenge.
"What can I tell you about myself which you have not already found out from those who do not lie?" Lennon asks on the book's first page. After describing his childhood, Lennon yields control to McCartney, Harrison and then Starr before striking into a chronological Beatles history starting in 1960. From that point forward the book weaves the voices of the four Beatles together with other principals including George Martin and Stuart Sutcliffe in a chronological, verbal history. Because the sources vary, there may be overlap here for those who breathe nothing but Beatle air: a healthy portion of the material is drawn from the Anthology television series. But the editorial progression is conducive to a fresh read for vets as well as novices.
As for the band's "shocking" split, Anthology's conclusion stands out as a high point. Perspectives abound, information overload ensues and no single theory fully explains what happened. Harrison best captures the rumor-filled period of Beatle history. "I don't remember John saying he wanted to break up the Beatles. I don't remember where I heard it. Everybody had tried to leave, so it was nothing new. Everybody was leaving for years." Harrison brings a suitable sense of dizziness that contrasts with Lennon's stark "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that."
Thus rather than fading away like the King, the history of the Beatles is a closed entity. Anthology wisely comes to a tasteful conclusion before each Beatle went his own way. Time has proven the Beatles to be bigger and better than the sum of its parts and Anthology is acutely aware of that. Their run was lightening quick (particularly by today's comeback standards), but their musical catalogue paired with this book serves as the key in the bottle.
Don't mistake Anthology as something to lug into the bathroom. At seven pounds it's capable of cutting off the circulation to your feet. And despite it's bulk, it isn't best served with a snooty display as a coffee table book; it is a handsome picker-upper, but there are far too many stories within its covers to do the book the disservice of reducing it to conversations about its dust jacket. |
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