Happy Birthday, George!

Had he not succumbed to cancer in 2001, today would have been George Harrison's 67th birthday. Here's George on his 21st, just after returning from the triumphal series of appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show:



George's only child, Dhani, is 31, and looks hauntingly like his father:

Abbey Road Studios for Sale

The Beatles' original record company, EMI, has put its Abbey Road Studios up for sale:

The record label of Norah Jones and Coldplay has spoken to potential buyers during the past few months and talks have not led to a solid offer, said the person, who didn’t want to be identified because the talks are private. The studios are worth tens of millions of pounds and are not an essential asset for EMI, the person said.

EMI, owned by Guy Hands’s Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd., this month posted a 1.5 billion-pound ($2.35 billion) annual loss and said its liabilities exceeded assets by 408 million pounds as of March 31, 2009. Terra Firma may inject as much as 120 million pounds into EMI to prevent the London-based music company from breaching debt levels, two people familiar with the matter have said.

The Beatles recorded 90 percent of their songs at the studios, which are the world’s oldest, according to the Abbey Road Web site.

I've been to London almost every summer since 2000, and always make a pilgrimage to the famous zebra crossing, site of one of the most iconic and frequently parodied photos in world history:





Every time I've been to Abbey Road--night or day, rain or shine--there have been at least a dozen other Beatlemaniacs there, some trying to replicate the famous image (putting their lives and limbs at risk: it's a busy street).

Abbey Road Studios has set up a webcam on the other side of the zebra crossing. The photo was taken from a spot just to the right of the granite column in the upper left of the webcam image.

Just for fun. . .

And here they are. . .THE LEGO BEATLES!

My Fifteen Minutes of Fame (well, really, 2 1/2 minutes)

My employer made this video--shown on the local ABC affiliate--about me and my book, The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles:

February 9 in Context

A must-have for Beatlemaniacs is The Complete Historic Ed Sullivan Shows featuring the Beatles and other Artists. Everyone's seen the Beatles break into "All My Loving" after Sullivan's intro is drowned out by screams. But to appreciate how genuinely revolutionary the Beatles were, you need to see them in the show business context of their time. This DVD includes everything--even commercials for Lipton tea and Excedrin--but most important, it illustrates what show business was like in 1964, and how different the Beatles were. Here, for example, from the first show on February 9, is comedian and impressionist Frank Gorshin:



With his cheesy tuxedo and slicked-back hair, Gorshin's right out of the Borscht Belt (though he was only seven years older than Ringo and John).

Here's Georgia Brown and the cast of Oliver!--including the future Monkee Davy Jones--singing "I'll Do Anything":



Brown was also only seven years older than the oldest Beatles, but a world away in show business terms: she belonged to the tuxedoed, sequined, flowing headdress tradition of the music hall gently parodied by the Beatles at the beginning of this clip from A Hard Day's Night:



Forty-six years ago today, something genuinely new and breathtakingly modern emerged. The modern world exploded with the suddenness of a genie escaping from a bottle, never to be put back.

The Beatles Come to America

When did the Beatles first appear on television in the United States? Most would say February 9, 1964, on the Ed Sullivan Show. But that's wrong! That was their first live performance, but not their first appearance. Their first musical performance on American television came on the Jack Paar Show--in a filmed clip, during which this late-night talk show host mocked them and their British fans--on January 3, 1964:



What a difference three years make! Here are the Beatles performing "Hello Goodbye" in a filmed performance, shown on the Ed Sullivan Show in early 1967:

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.