The Beatles

[theclown74]

50 Years Ago Today: The Beatles Premiere Their Second Film, ‘Help!’

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

After the runaway commercial and critical success of their first film, A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles were given the opportunity to make another one. Their second movie, Help!, had its world premiere in London on July 29, 1965.

According to Beatles Bible, it took place at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus, with Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, in attendance. It was not the group’s first brush with royalty. In November 1963, they played the Royal Command Performance, where John Lennon famously introduced the Beatles’ closing number, “Twist and Shout,” by saying, “Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And for the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.” And in June 1965, Queen Elizabeth II had controversially named all four Beatles to her Birthday Honors list as the first pop stars to be awarded MBEs.

Because of his breakout performance in A Hard Day’s Night, the plot for Help!, which had the working title of Eight Arms to Hold You, centered around Ringo Starr. An Eastern cult needs one of his rings in order to ritually sacrifice one of its members, but it’s impossible to remove, which puts Ringo’s life is in jeopardy. On top of that, a pair of scientists who think the ring will allow them to rule the world enter into the picture. After a series of madcap adventures, which includes trips to the Austrian Alps and the Bahamas, everything is sorted out.

Seven new Beatles songs — “Help!,” “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” “Ticket to Ride,” “I Need You,” “The Night Before” and “Another Girl” — made their debut in the movie, but it also helped point the way toward their musical future. In one scene, the Beatles go into an Indian restaurant, which is where George Harrison was first introduced to the sitar.

As with A Hard Day’s Night, Help! was directed by Richard Lester and included Victor Spinetti in the cast. Although it has some very funny scenes and great music, it lacks the tightness of its predecessor. Part of that was because the script wasn’t as good, but also because, as Lennon said in Anthology, “[W]e were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period. Nobody could communicate with us, it was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time. In our own world. It’s like doing nothing most of the time, but still having to rise at 7AM, so we became bored.”

After the premiere, the Beatles, Lester, Princess Margaret, Lord Snowden and the other cast members attended a party at the Orchid Room of the Dorchester Hotel.

*Edit by Gina Marie to display properly

[Gina Marie]

50 Years Ago: Beatles LSD Party Inspires ‘She Said She Said’
By Frank Mastropolo August 24, 2015 9:33 AM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gEm5nHWXnc

At a drug-fueled party on Aug. 24, 1965, during a break in the Beatles‘ North America tour, John Lennon and George Harrison each took his second LSD trip. Ringo Starr tried the psychedelic drug for the first time, but Paul McCartney, wary of its effects, chose to abstain.

Before the day ended, Harrison would learn more about Indian music. He had started to develop an interest in it during the filming of Help! He would soon incorporate into his music and popularize in the West. Lennon would be inspired to write “She Said She Said,” the iconic song from Revolver.

The crush of fans and police around the Beatles’ rented Beverly Hills mansion made it difficult for the band to leave. Instead, celebrities like Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds and actor Peter Fonda came over and spent the day tripping with the three Beatles. (In 1965, LSD was still legal in California.)

Harrison and Starr discussed the band’s drug use in The Beatles Anthology. Though they had been smoking marijuana for a year after being introduced to it by Bob Dylan, LSD was unknown to half of them. A few months earlier, Harrison and Lennon had taken their first acid trip at a dinner party thrown by Harrison’s dentist, who had slipped it into their drinks. The two were profoundly changed by the experience.

“John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid, because we couldn’t relate to them any more,” said Harrison. “Not just on the one level — we couldn’t relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much. It was such a mammoth experience that it was unexplainable: it was something that had to be experienced, because you could spend the rest of your life trying to explain what it made you feel and think. It was all too important to John and me. So the plan was that when we got to Hollywood, on our day off we were going to get them to take acid. We got some in New York; it was on sugar cubes wrapped in tinfoil and we’d been carrying these around all through the tour until we got to L.A.”

“I’d take anything,” added Starr. “It was a fabulous day. The night wasn’t so great, because it felt like it was never going to wear off. Twelve hours later and it was: ‘Give us a break now, Lord.’”

“Paul felt very out of it, because we are all a bit slightly cruel, sort of ‘we’re taking it, and you’re not,’ Lennon told Rolling Stone. “But we kept seeing him, you know. We couldn’t eat our food, I just couldn’t manage it, just picking it up with our hands. There were all these people serving us in the house and we were knocking food on the floor and all of that. It was a long time before Paul took it.”

McGuinn told the Daily Telegraph that a conversation he had with Harrison would influence the development of psychedelic rock. “We went in and David, John Lennon, George Harrison and I took LSD to help get to know each other better,” he said. “There was a large bathroom in the house and we were all sitting on the edge of a shower passing around a guitar, taking turns to play our favorite songs. John and I agreed ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ was our favorite ’50s rock record.

“I showed George Harrison some Ravi Shankar sounds, which I’d heard because we shared the same record company, on the guitar. … You can hear what I played him from the Byrds’ song ‘Why.’ I had learned to play it on the guitar from listening to records of Ravi Shankar.”

Harrison has said, however, that it was Crosby who first mentioned Shankar’s music. With the amount of drugs consumed, it’s easy to understand the confusion.
Though the Kinks and the Yardbirds also experimented with the sitar at the time, the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” which was recorded in October 1965, was the first Western rock song released to feature the sitar.

“I went and bought a sitar from a little shop at the top of Oxford Street called Indiacraft — it stocked little carvings and incense,” said Harrison. “It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit. We were at the point where we’d recorded the ‘Norwegian Wood’ backing track and it needed something. We would usually start looking through the cupboard to see if we could come up with something, a new sound, and I picked the sitar up — it was just lying around. I hadn’t really figured out what to do with it. It was quite spontaneous: I found the notes that played the lick.”

In 1965, four years before his starring role in the film Easy Rider, Peter Fonda was hardly a household name. It was his friendship with the Byrds that allowed Fonda to attend the party, and he unintentionally influenced a future Beatles song.

“This was the second time they had taken LSD, and George was having a tough time,” Fonda tells Empire magazine. “David Crosby comes up to me, and I don’t know why Crosby thought I wasn’t loaded, but he said, ‘You have to go down and help George.’ Why am I the tour guide? I went down and I said, ‘George, don’t worry about it. This is a drug that makes you feel like dying and your brain doesn’t want to do that, so it’s trying to stop and that’s the conflict so just let it go and ease out.’

“Then I said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead, because a month before I turned 11, I shot myself in the stomach by accident and I died three times on the operating table while my heart stopped, so I’m still here to tell you the story.’ I was trying to tell George, ‘Don’t worry about it, just let, let the drug take you down the trip.’ And John was sitting right there, looking at me as I told George several times, ‘It’s okay, George, I know what it’s like to be dead.’

“We didn’t want to hear about that!” Lennon told Playboy. “We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and ’60s, and this guy — who I really didn’t know; he hadn’t made Easy Rider or anything — kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead,’ and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! And I used it for the song, but I changed it to ‘she’ instead of ‘he’. It was scary. You know, a guy… when you’re flying high and [whispers] ‘I know what it’s like to be dead, man.’ I remembered the incident. Don’t tell me about it! I don’t want to know what it’s like to be dead!”

Read More: 50 Years Ago: Beatles LSD Party Inspires 'She Said She Said' http://ultimateclassicrock.com/beatles-she-said-she-said/

[Gina Marie]

OMG OMG OMG OMG OHMYFUCKINGGOD!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-h9qvPrTeE

[Gina Marie]

Andy White, early Beatles drummer, dies aged 85

Andy White, the Scottish studio session musician who played the drums on Love Me Do and other early tracks by The Beatles, has died in New Jersey.
According to his family, the 85-year-old died on Monday following a stroke.

White was chosen ahead of Ringo Starr in September 1962 to play drums on the single version of Love Me Do and its B-side, P.S. I Love You.

White, who was born in Glasgow in 1930, is also believed to have played on the album version of Please Please Me *Beatle Facts From Gina: You can tell the difference from the Andy White and Ringo versions by the percussion... on the single version, Ringo is playing the tambourine, and on the LP version, there IS NO tambourine!

He could therefore legitimately claim to be one of the so-called "Fifth Beatles", alongside the likes of Pete Best, Stuart Sutcliffe and others.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-34785987

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

[Gina Marie]

50 Years Ago Today: December 24, 1965 (Friday)

[watcher1]

Gina, KB's resident Number One Beatle fan -

Today, Christmas Eve, the band's music - 224 songs across 13 albums - will be added to nine streaming services, including Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Amazon Prime.

[Gina Marie]

Gina, KB's resident Number One Beatle fan -

Today, Christmas Eve, the band's music - 224 songs across 13 albums - will be added to nine streaming services, including Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Amazon Prime.

[watcher1]

I bought a copy of this for daughter and her children, since she is a Beatle's fan.  The book has Ringo hiding in pictures of many of their hit songs.

[Gina Marie]

Short, but to the point...

The First Beatles Appearance On The Ed Sullivan Show Was The Day Pop Music Changed Forever

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/beatles-british-invasion

[Gina Marie]

Happy Birthday George!

George, who gave us an incredible amount of beautiful music and wisdom, would've turned 73 years old today. But George is still here.

As he said: "You automatically have to succumb to the illusion that 'I am this body.' I am not George. I am not really George. I am this living thing that goes on, always has been, always will be."

To celebrate, play his music, share his words, and remember what makes him so special.

And don't forget, "All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece but not too much."

[vinney]

A "Holy Grail" original recording by The Beatles that spent years in a loft will go on sale next month.

The 1962 record of Till There Was You and Hello Little Girl is expected to fetch around £10,000 amid worldwide interest from Beatles fans.

The disc was pressed at the HMV record store on Oxford Street, before the group's manager Brian Epstein handwrote the title tracks and presented it to record producer George Martin in 1962.

Despite Martin's initial scepticism about the band from Liverpool, he offered the Fab Four a recording contract from EMI - and the rest is history.

Ian Shirley, Record Collector Rare Record Price Guide editor, said: "This is one of those Holy Grail items, like the original Quarrymen acetate that the band recorded themselves.

"This acetate is a unique item that, in many respects, helped Brian Epstein to start the ball rolling to musical world domination.

"It will fascinate Beatles collectors worldwide and no doubt attract bids from those with deep pockets."

The record is being sold on behalf of Les Maguire of Gerry And The Pacemakers, who was given it by Brian Epstein in 1963 after the disc had been returned to him by George Martin.

The valuable recording has been locked away in Mr Maguire's loft until now.

The 10-inch, 78rpm record will go up for sale at Omega Auctions in Warrington on March 22.

[Gina Marie]

  WOO!

[watcher1]

The death of George Martin.

George Martin passed away last week.  He was often called the fifth Beatle, since he produced so many of their songs.  He was grounded in classical music who thought the Beatle's music was not that good but knew they had charisma. Martin produced the following Beatle's hits"

Please Please Me (1962)

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

Yesterday (1965)

Michelle (1965)

In My Life (1965)

Strawberry Fields Forever (1967)

With a Little Help From My Friends (1967)

Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds (1967)

All You Need is Love (1967)

Hey Jude (1968)

Here Comes the Sun (1969)

Let it Be (1970)  The Beatle's final single before breaking up.

[MintJulie]

Being a Beatles fan, I was aware of George Martin.   What I had not realized is that Ringo was sick for a time and Martin filled in for a week or so.   I don't recall if it was on recordings or in concert.   Tried getting specifics on it but couldn't find it.   I had heard this on one of the radio stations last week as they were honoring him.

Jules

[Cats_Whiskers]

Don't know if this has been posted before, (apology's if so), but check this out...

h**ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M9US-cXJMo

Edited due to the still for the video. Sorry!

[watcher1]

Where has KB's Number One Beatles fan been lately?  We miss you.

[MissBarbara]

Where has KB's Number One Beatles fan been lately?  We miss you.

I was just thinking the exact same thing...

[TinyDancer]

Happy Birthday Ringo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Gina Marie]

John Winston Lennon
Born: October 9, 1940, Liverpool, United Kingdom
Assassinated: December 8, 1980, New York City, NY

[watcher1]

Another talented life wasted by a nut with a gun.