It was 43 years ago today. . .

. . .that the Beatles shot their groundbreaking promotional film for "Strawberry Fields Forever":



My favorite Beatles commentator, Allan W. Pollak, beautifully captures the poetic breakthrough represented by this song:

Among the several new musical directions explored by The Beatles from mid-career onward, none was more astonishing at the time, nor is still so compelling today, as their emerging preoccupation with the existential joy, wonder, and sorrowful angst of self-discovery, childhood memory, and post-adolescent adjustment to the realities of the human condition.

More than anyone before them, the Beatles poeticized popular music, making it today's unchallenged venue for the development and expression of a poetic sensibility. That poeticization began as soon as John and Paul decided to record only their original compositions; but it was "Strawberry Fields Forever" that really announced their arrival as poets.

The Science of the Beatles

Which chord begins "A Hard Day's Night?" Now, with the help of Fourier analysis, we know:

Four years ago, inspired by reading news coverage about the song’s 40th anniversary, Jason Brown of Dalhousie’s Department of Mathematics decided to try and see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform to solve the Beatles’ riddle. The process allowed him to decompose the sound into its original frequencies using computer software and parse out which notes were on the record.

It worked, to a point: the frequencies he found didn’t match the known instrumentation on the song. “George played a 12-string Rickenbacker, Lennon had his six string, Paul had his bass…none of them quite fit what I found,” he explains. “Then the solution hit me: it wasn’t just those instruments. There was a piano in there as well, and that accounted for the problematic frequencies.”

So what's the chord? Gsus4/D.

Get Ready for Beatles Day in the State of Washington

I wonder if any other states have an official Beatles Day:

The anniversary of the Beatles legendary rooftop concert will be celebrated this Friday January 29, 2010, with former U.S. manager of Apple Records, Ken Mansfield, and Beatles cover band Crème Tangerine at Pike Place Market in Seattle at Pike Place Market.

In 2009, Crème Tangerine gave a blockbuster performance as thousands of fans filled the streets of Pike Place Market during their lunch hour. Seattle fans were the only city in the world to experience an actual rooftop tribute in honor of the 40th anniversary, which was January 30, 1969.

This year’s performance will be at the same place, on the rooftop balcony of the Copacabana Café in the Pike Place Market in Seattle at noon. They will perform the songs from that famous concert, such as “Get Back”, and John Lennon’s “Don’t Let Me Down”, and “One After 909.”

Here's my favorite snippet from the original concert, John forgetting the words to "Don't Let Me Down" (at 2:20):



Very tasty electric piano by Billy Preston throughout.

Beatles Data Analysis

I can't help myself--I find the Beatles "infographics" put together by New York graphic designer Michael Deal utterly fascinating:


Name another pop culture phenomenon that inspires this level of scholarly attention!

Ringo at 70 - It's the New 50

He looks great--Ringo will be 70 on his next birthday, which he will celebrate onstage:

Ringo Starr, who will celebrate his 70th birthday on July 7, will perform that night at Radio City Music Hall with the latest edition of his All-Starr Band, featuring Edgar Winter, Gary Wright, Rick Derringer, Richard Page of Mr. Mister and Wally Palmer of the Romantics.

Ringo is an outstanding musician, and seems to be an all-around great guy as well. He's a testimony to clean living, and the health benefits of happiness. Ringo's happiness was hard-won, though: after decades of alcoholism, he entered detox in 1988 and has been sober ever since. Here's a Ringo treat from 1990, "I Call Your Name" in tribute to the 10th anniversary of John Lennon's death:

Zemeckis Casts His "Beatles" in Remake of Yellow Submarine

Robert Zemeckis is in negotiations with four actors to portray the Beatles' cartoon stand-ins in the director's remake of Yellow Submarine:

It's "all together now" for the cast of Robert Zemeckis' upcoming Beatles feature.

Cary Elwes, Dean Lennox Kelly, Peter Serafinowicz and Adam Campbell are in negotiations to portray the members of the band in "Yellow Submarine," which the director is remaking for Disney.

So let me see if I have this right: the actual Beatles didn't appear in Yellow Submarine (except in a very brief filmed message at the end), but were drawn and then verbally imitated by voiceover actors. For the remake, actors will imitate the body movements of the originally animated characters (which were themselves representations of the actual Beatles). Do we really need this? Fourth-order re-creations of actuality?

I predict that the fad of motion-capture 3-D filmmaking will spawn yet another trend: 4-D Represented Actuality--that is, live actors on a stage.

Hail to thee, Alan W. Pollack!

More than 20 years ago, the distinguished American musicologist Alan W. Pollack began analyzing in-depth every single Beatles song (both originals and covers). It took him ten years to finish the project, which is posted here.

Many Beatles scholars have examined the Beatles' music, but none have done as exhaustive a job as Pollack. A few years ago, I spent several months reading Pollack's Notes. As a guitar player and bassist, I particularly appreciate Pollack's outlining of chord structures; but he's also aware of the non-musical, dramatic dimensions of some Beatles' performances, as in the conclusion to his discussion of "You're Going to Lose that Girl":

In the "Help!" film the Beatles appear as though performing this song live in the studio. The scene, for all its absurd, staged surreality — (Paul alternately playing bass guitar and sitting a grand piano, and Ringo alternately behind the drum kit or sitting on the floor with the bongos) — it provides a delightful fantasy of what the real recording sessions might have been like. The tobacco companies must have also like this scene. Ringo is shown drumming with a cigarette precariously clenched in his teeth. And we get a long close-up of Paul and George facing each other, hunched on opposite sides of a single microphone in order tightly execute the backing vocals. The scene is filmed with back lighting such that you can see the rhythmic thrust of their sung syllables punctuate like skywriting the generally smokey haze that builds up as the scene progresses. It's the kind of thing that looks cool enough to persuade a person of a certain mindset to want to start smoking as soon as possible, even if the thought has never before occurred to that person. So much for not particularly subliminal persuasion.

And here's the scene:



I agree--the Beatles even make smoking look cool.

Happy Birthday Elvis, Wherever You Are

Today would have been Elvis Presley's 75th birthday. If Elvis hadn't died on August 16, 1977 (or on any other date after that), he might look something like this today:



Elvis was a huge influence on the Beatles: their album of BBC transcriptions includes covers of four Elvis songs, and his jumped-up rockabilly style found its way into numerous Lennon-McCartney originals, including "I'll Cry Instead," "Can't Buy Me Love," "Run for Your Life," and "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party." Elvis's manager Colonel Tom Parker sent the Beatles a congratulatory telegram before their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, and the Beatles met Elvis in Los Angeles in during their American tour in the summer of 1965. Influence went in the other direction as well: in the early 1970s, Elvis frequently included "Yesterday," "Something," and "Get Back" in his live setlists.

I was walking across the parking lot of the Sea View Inn in Haleiwa, Hawaii on the afternoon of August 16, 1977, when a total stranger walked up to me and said, "Did you hear that Elvis died?" One of those moments when the headlong rush of time briefly slowed. . .I can still feel the heat radiating from the asphalt, and hear the tradewinds rustling through the palm trees.

The Beatles Go Global. . .Again

Thanks to Beatlemaniac Christine, I just heard about this:



Obviously, this song was chosen for this project on the basis of its simplicity, familiarity, and because it was Britain's contribution to the first worldwide television broadcast, Our World, on June 25, 1967:



Thank goodness for YouTube! This is the song as originally broadcast, not the more familiar colorized version created for The Beatles Anthology in 1995.

One detail I've never seen any comment on: why were John and Paul chewing gum while they sang?

"It's 'Ticket to Ride!'" "No, it's 'Ticket to Rye!'"

This story doesn't say which song prompted the argument, but a couple of Pennsylvania men got into a shoving match over a Beatles song:

Police say Paul Anderson, 34, pushed and shoved Shawne Manners, 28, because the two couldn't agree on the lyrics to a Beatles song while playing "Rock Band."

I wonder if the song was "Ticket to Ride," which John originally titled "Ticket to Rye"--a phrase he seems to sing on at least some of the verses of the that tune.

What's most interesting about this incident are the ages of the two men: both were born well after the Beatles broke up, and Mr. Manners was born after John Lennon's death. I've always contended that one of the Beatles' most amazing and unprecedented accomplishments is their ability to appeal to fans across the generational divide. Yet again, this funny little story of two Beatle fanatics whose fascination with the group can't be attributed to nostalgia supports that contention.

Yoko Autobiography in the Works

The London tabloid Daily Express is reporting that Yoko Ono plans to write an autobiography:

IN WHAT will be one of the most hotly anticipated pop autobiographies ever, John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono, the woman blamed by some fans for breaking up The Beatles, is finally set to write her memoirs.

Yoko has a lot to answer for: for example, ruining--with her hideous caterwauling (at 1:19 and 2:35)--John's much-anticipated opportunity to play "Memphis, Tennessee" with his boyhood idol Chuck Berry on the Mike Douglas Show in 1972:



As bad as this is, the break-up of the Beatles was not Yoko's doing. She may have helped John transition from being a Beatle to a solo artist; but the Beatles were bound to break up as soon as the titanic personalities at the core of the group--Lennon and McCartney--discovered each other. The creative energies that were unleashed by their partnership could not forever be contained in the group. Like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge--another pair of hugely influential English poetic collaborative competitors--Lennon and McCartney were able to sustain their partnership for only about ten years. After that, all the arguments, recriminations, and simmering resentments that destroyed their friendship and broke up the band were just symptoms of Paul's and John's irresistible drive for complete self-sufficiency. Ironically, their partnership gave each so much confidence in his own greatness that--after a while--each saw the other as an obstacle, rather than a means, of artistic self-fulfillment. The Beatles were destined to break up. For all her irritating pretensions and lame performance-art absurdities, Yoko was--in the final analysis--a bystander in the dissolution of the Beatles.

How the Beatles Knocked Down the Iron Curtain

I told this story in the Epilogue of my book, The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, so it's nice to see the Beatles' role in ending communist rule in Russia getting broader play in a new documentary that recently aired in Canada:



The filmmaker, Leslie Woodhead, shot the famous Cavern Club footage of the Beatles performing "Some Other Guy" in 1962:

The Beatles Live On

Yet another testimony to the endurance and ubiquity of the Beatles: travelers trapped under a security lockdown in Newark Airport yesterday engaged in an impromptu "Hey Jude" singalong:



Reminds me of the "flash mob" singalong staged in London's Trafalgar Square last spring by T-Mobile:

"First State" Butcher Cover For Sale

In 1966, London photographer Robert Whitaker guided the Beatles through a photo shoot titled "A Somnambulant Adventure," in which he posed the Fab Four in butcher's smocks, draping them with cuts of meat and dismembered baby dolls.

Capitol Records used one of the pictures from the shoot (which had been previously used in Britain for the sleeve of the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" single) as the cover art for the LP Yesterday and Today, pressing some 750,000 copies and distributing them to retailers across the United States.

The image--which Paul McCartney called "a comment on the [Vietnam] war"--aroused such controversy that Capitol recalled all unsold copies of Yesterday and Today, initially intending to destroy the covers. The company decided, however, to paste another cover over the offending image, and shipped the altered albums back to stores. Copies with the original cover art became, therefore, immediately collectible, prompting many to carefully remove (usually by steaming the cover) the pasted-on replacement image, revealing the original image underneath. Collectors identified these "butcher covers" as second state; first state, by contrast, are covers which never had the replacement photo, and are extremely rare.

Offered for sale on eBay: a rare, unopened, first state butcher cover, with the initial bid set at $9,200.

Beatle Families

Here's a magnificent music video of George Harrison's masterpiece, "Something," which he wrote for his wife Pattie Boyd. For the first and only time, this film prominently features the Beatles' wives and lovers (as well as Martha, Paul's sheepdog, immortalized in the song "Martha My Dear"):



Pattie Boyd Harrison, whom George met while filming A Hard Day's Night in 1964, is herself a rock icon: in addition to inspiring this song, she inspired Eric Clapton's "Layla" and "Wonderful Tonight." (And her sister Jennifer inspired Donovan's "Jennifer Juniper.")

All of the Beatles (so far) were twice married: John appears in this film with his second wife Yoko Ono, but the other three were still in their first marriages when this video was shot. George and Patti divorced in 1974; Ringo and Maureen split in 1975. Both married again: George to Olivia Arias in 1978, Ringo to Barbara Bach in 1981. Paul McCartney appears in the "Something" video with his first wife, Linda Eastman, who died in 1998. In 2002, Paul married Heather Mills; the couple divorced in 2008.

Beatles and Shakespeare

In my book The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, I argue that the Beatles phenomenon can be traced back to the great English Romantic poets William Blake, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This clip shows that perhaps I didn't go back far enough: here are the Beatles performing the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-a-play from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: