The Beatles

This week's Beatle's (related) rarity focus's on John Lennon who would've been 68 years old yesterday. I had a request last week for his pseudo-biographical Watching The Wheels and was hard pressed to decide which representation of it to use. I have a good many demos and session recordings for this one and some sound quite different than the finalized version we are most familiar with. In the end I elected to go with an alternate take that was a contender for the master ye... MORE

I've  always had a thumbnail theory about the distinction and  differences between The Beatles and the Stones songs (based on my own eye witness evidence from family parties during the seventies) - The Beatles make people sing, the Stones make people dance - or put another way The Beatles are about the tunes. The Stones are about the groove. 

This isn't set in stone or tried and tested under strictly controlled conditions,  it's just a rough rule of thumb, and as these fa... MORE

A new Beatles DVD is due on October 21^st. Sadly, its not a long lost performance of the band at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, where they had a summer residency before they hit it big.  Instead All Together Now, a feature length documentary following the Beatles-inspired Cirque Du Soleil show LOVE, currently playing at the Mirage in Las Vegas, will be sold exclusively at Best Buy. The documentary will also open a at select theaters a day earlier. All Together N... MORE

  There's an excellent article in the new Mojo about the evolution of The Beatles' White Album, and on my way to work one morning, I listened to the acoustic demos that John, Paul and George made in preparation for that project. They had just come back from India, they each had a batch of songs, and they ran through them, putting them on tape, at George's house. A band, with three songwriters, running down about two dozen new tunes.  It wasn't yet "the White Album.... MORE

Welcome to this week's Beatles Rarity Of The Week. This track was requested by a subscriber a few weeks ago. Back in 1966 while The Beatles were working on their Revolver LP, Capitol Records in the U.S. were putting together a compilation album of singles tracks that had yet to appear on a U.S LP plus some leftover songs that were on the British Rubber Soul album but left off of the U.S. Rubber Soul album. It came up three songs short of being a typical length so they pres... MORE

  Tagged as the "world's most famous drum skin," the drum skin featured on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt Peppers album sold for $1.1 million, or the price of a really nice house. Also selling for the price of nice house ($834,000,) were handwritten John Lennon lyrics for "Give Peace a Chance." According to auctioneer Christie's the lyrics were given to comedy writer Gail Renard, who in 1969, at the age of 16, sneaked into Lennon's and Yoko Ono's "Bed-In" at Montreal'... MORE

"What could it be Paul? Something in the way she moves..." with that one question begins my favorite outtake from the tumultuously infamous Get Back/Let it Be sessions.

I've always said that I would have loved to have been in the room or a fly in the wall while The Beatles were in the recording studio. With this rehearsal outtake of "Something" we get the opportunity to eavesdrop on an early session in the recording of one of the most popularly successful songs in the whol... MORE

Jai guru deva om ... Does NASA hope that these soothing lyrics by Paul McCartney and John Lennon are going to prevent an alien invasion? In an unprecedented event, today, Monday, February 2nd, 2008 at 7PM EST, NASA will beam the Beatles' song "Across the Universe," literally across the universe to Polaris. A trip that will take the MP3 some 431 years to reach the North Star, 2.5 quadrillion miles away. But why? Have they found life out there that's requesting Beatles cla... MORE

This weeks BROW takes us back to the infamous Get Back sessions at Twickenham Film Studios in London on January 9, 1969. Only two days before an embryonic version of Get Back had been performed for the first time. Now, with energy levels increased by a lunch break, The Beatles decide to bash out a hard series of "Get Back Jams"  and what you are hearing is an excerpt from them. At this point Jo-jo has yet to even be written into the lyrics. Paul improvises various place-na... MORE

 
John Lennon's killer Mark David Chapman was up for parole again this month (Crazy how someone can kill someone in the US of A and someday be released from prison.) It was Chapman's fifth time in front of a parole board. He was denied and will remain in New York's Attica Correctional Facility for at least two more years, where Chapman, now 53, has already served 28 years behind bars.

While the parole meeting happened back on August 12th, the transcript of the meeting w... MORE

This week's Beatles Rarity Of The Week is special because this is the week that BROW is one year old. The Beatles were always big on birthday celebrations as can be felt through this medley of happy and rare birthday recordings that I have assembled for this week. The medley includes: 1) Whit Monday - from the BBC program From Us To You. It was recorded on May 1, 1964 and aired on May 18, 1964 (just a few days after my first birthday). 2) Birthday - The Beatles' classic ... MORE

Reports stating that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have blocked the release of The Beatles Let It Be DVD are completely untrue. Steve Marinucci from Beatles site AbbeyRd`s Beatles Page has confirmed with Apple that there are plans to release the long awaited movie, but just not right now. Marinucci pointed out in an email that the story circulating last week claiming McCartney and Starr were blocking the release came from a blog at the Chicago Tribune. After the origin... MORE

Never has a giggly conversation been worth so much money. A british auction house are planning to sell a recording of The Beatles recording session that features chatting and giggling from the band members. The tape is from 1964 and was unearthed by a man cleaning his fathers attic recently. On the tape you'll hear John Lennon and Paul McCartney bursting into laughter as they try to finish the ballad "I'll Follow The Sun". Also included are versions of the songs "I Feel ... MORE

Clips of a Scottish TV interview with the Beatles have been recovered after being forgotten for 44 years in a rusty film can in a garage in South London. It was stacked among 64 other unmarked cans and presumed lost. In the interview, recorded back in April 30th, 1964, John Lennon and Paul McCartney talk about the first time they met and how they record songs. "Normally we try to sit down and bash things out," McCartney explains in the interview. The entire nine and h... MORE