10 Things You Didn’t Know About “I Am The Walrus”

by Scott Freiman, Culture Sonar: http://www.culturesonar.com/10-things-about-i-am-the-walrus/

This November marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus.” Written primarily by John Lennon for the TV movie Magical Mystery Tour, “I Am The Walrus” features a cryptic Lennon lyric with a bizarre chorus, an innovative arrangement from producer George Martin that includes sprechgesang (don’t worry, I’ll define it in a moment), studio trickery from engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, and an excerpt from Shakespeare’s King Lear. All of this adds up to create The Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece. Here are ten things you may not know about “I Am The Walrus.”

1. The song owes a huge debt to Lennon’s favorite hallucinogenic…
Lennon wrote the bulk of the song during several LSD trips. During one trip, he heard the two-note pattern of a police siren passing by. The sound morphed into the opening notes of “I Am The Walrus.” They are even mimicked in the two note motif in the verse (“Mis-ter ci-ty p’lice-man…”).

2. … And to Quarry Bank High School
“He has too many of the wrong ambitions and his energy is too often misplaced.” That was a description of John Lennon written by the headmaster of Quarry Bank High School in 1956. Just ten years later, a student at Quarry Bank wrote Lennon to tell him that they were analyzing Beatles lyrics in class. Lennon decided to give the students (along with music critics) something a little more difficult to analyze. So, he turned an old playground nursery rhyme that he sang as a child (“yellow matter custard/green slop pie/all mixed together with a dead dog’s eye”) into the line “yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.”

3. The Mysterious Eggman
The title of the song was based on the poem “The Walrus and The Carpenter” by one of Lennon’s favorite authors, Lewis Carroll. It wasn’t until later that John realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the poem! There is no “egg man” in the poem, although Humpty Dumpty does make an appearance in Through the Looking Glass. Surprisingly, Eric Burdon, lead singer of The Animals, stepped forward to claim that he was the egg man referenced by Lennon. Burdon was known as “Eggs” to his friends, due to his strange fetish of breaking eggs over naked women.

4. The Beatles Were Crying
At the end of each verse, Lennon sings “I’m crying.” The Beatles had been doing a lot of crying around this time, since their manager Brian Epstein had recently died. In fact, “I Am The Walrus” was the first song The Beatles recorded after Epstein’s death four days earlier. “I’m crying” could also be an allusion to one of The Beatles’ favorite singers Smokey Robinson who had sung the same phrase in the 1965 song “Oooh, Baby Baby”.

5. A Vocal from the Moon
Lennon, one of rock’s best vocalists, was always frustrated by the sound of his voice. For “I Am The Walrus,” he asked engineer Geoff Emerick to make his voice sound like it was coming from the moon. As always, Emerick turned Lennon’s strange request into the perfect effect. Violating EMI’s strict rules, Emerick had Lennon record his vocals using a low-fidelity talkback microphone (typically used by an engineer in the control room to “talk back” to musicians in the recording studio). This helped create one of rock music’s first distorted lead vocals.

6. The Human Click Track
The recording of “I Am The Walrus” was incredibly complex, ultimately taking 25 takes to complete. On one of the earlier takes, Lennon was playing an electronic keyboard called a Hofner Pianet (some sources say it was a Wurlitzer electric piano) and was making a lot of mistakes. Ringo was having trouble keeping a steady tempo — understandable, considering the song was long with a slow tempo. On top of all this, emotions were high due to Epstein’s recent death. George Martin was getting frustrated and his temper was beginning to show. McCartney jumped into action and saved the day by playing tambourine next to Ringo, acting as a human click track to keep Ringo in sync with Lennon’s keyboard.

7. What the Hell Am I Supposed To Do With This?
When Lennon first performed “I Am The Walrus” for George Martin, he asked Martin for the producer’s opinion. “Well, John, to be honest, I have only one question,” Martin said. “What the hell do you expect me to do with that?!?” Luckily, the always inventive Martin came up with an innovative orchestral arrangement that fit the song perfectly. It features eight violins and four cellos, three French horns, and a contrabass clarinet — a rare member of the clarinet family that was a favorite of Frank Zappa. In fact, Zappa loved “I Am The Walrus,” and played it often in his concerts.

8. Stick It Up Your Jumper
Martin’s arrangement didn’t stop with the orchestral instruments. He clearly felt that Lennon’s song needed something more. So, he hired the Mike Sammes singers, known for their work on Disney films and TV themes. Rather than create a standard vocal arrangement, Martin took advantage of the singers’ excellent score reading skills and created a sprechgesang arrangement. Sprechgesang, which means “spoken singing”, is a vocal technique halfway between singing and speaking. In his score to “I Am The Walrus,” Martin had the Mike Sammes singers make whooping sounds, laugh, snort, and shout phrases like “Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper!” Nothing like this had ever been heard on a popular music recording.

9. Thou Hast Slain Me
At the end of the very complicated mixing sessions for “I Am The Walrus”, Lennon had an idea that made Martin roll his eyes — mixing a live radio broadcast into the recording. It took some engineering work from Geoff Emerick (plus some paperwork to get permission from his bosses at EMI) to patch an AM radio into the console. During the mix, Ringo manned the radio while John instructed him when to turn the knobs. Coincidentally, Ringo stumbled on the BBC production of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear. The broadcast was at the point of Act IV, Scene VI, where the steward “Oswald” is killed.

10. Walruses in White Satin?
Many artists have claimed that they were part of a Beatles recording even though no proof exists. A few years ago, Ray Thomas of the Moody Blues claimed that he and Mike Pinder sang backing vocals on “I Am The Walrus.” This claim is not backed up by any other source. (Thomas also claimed that it was his idea to put harmonicas on “The Fool on the Hill” and that an adventure with a groupie inspired McCartney to write “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window.”)

Bonus: Who IS the “Walrus?”
When John wrote and recorded “I Am The Walrus,” it was weeks before he donned the costume for the famous sequence in Magical Mystery Tour. Mysteriously, the soundtrack album included a comment below the song listing: “’No, you’re not!’ said Little Nicola.” John confused things even more when he sang, “The walrus was Paul” in the White Album song “Glass Onion.”

Some conspiracy theorists claimed that the walrus was a symbol of death in Greek and Eskimo mythology. The fact that this was blatantly false didn’t matter. It was one of the clues (along with the King Lear death scene) that helped to create the “Paul Is Dead” myth.

Eventually, Paul had the last laugh when he wore a walrus mask for the video to George Harrison’s 1988 song “When We Was Fab.” Finally, he was the walrus.

–Scott Freiman

PS. He was invaluable in shaping one of their most colorful albums.  Plus, read more about the legends, stories and tall tales behind many Beatle tracks.

Photo: Keystone, courtesy Getty Images

10 Best Guest Performances on Beatles Records

by Jim Beviglia, Culture Sonar: http://www.culturesonar.com/beatles-records-guest-performances/

They were known as the Fab Four, and it usually took only John, Paul, George and Ringo to create musical magic. But, every once in a while, The Beatles looked outside the core four for others to help them out. Occasionally they didn’t know how to play whatever instrument the song required. Other times it was a matter of improving band dynamics by bringing in an outside artist as a kind of special guest. Many of the names on this list may be obscure to all but the most hardcore Beatle fans, but all of their contributions were essential to some of the most memorable songs in the band’s esteemed catalog.

1. Andy White on “Love Me Do” (1962)
Even though Ringo Starr was already a band member, session drummer White handled the skins on the recording of the band’s first-ever single release as The Beatles. It’s not the most complicated song for drummers — and Starr played it just fine on the album version — but White, at the very least, didn’t get in the way of it becoming a Top 20 hit in Britain, assuring the band would get another shot in the studio. They would turn that shot into the smash hit “Please Please Me,” starting Beatlemania in earnest.

2. Johnnie Scott on “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” (1965)
John Lennon’s beautiful, bereft ballad from the Help! soundtrack received an integral instrumental assist from an unlikely source when Scott added a flute part at the song’s end. That little bit of the exotic took the song from being just a typical acoustic waltz with Dylanesque tendencies and transformed it into something a bit more mysterious and unique.

3. George Martin on “In My Life” (1965)
This classic ballad caused a stir in later years when both Lennon and McCartney claimed to have done the bulk of the writing. What can’t be denied is that the baroque piano solo played midway was a bit more involved than any of the group members could handle. Martin couldn’t quite do it either, but his idea to play the solo half-speed and then speed up the tape was just what the song ordered.

4. Alan Civil on “For No One” (1966)
One of McCartney’s most heartbreaking slow ones on Revolver gets a big boost from the French horn played by Civil in the instrumental break. Civil reportedly chafed at McCartney’s insistence on extra takes, but it paid off; his part captured the wounded dignity of the song’s hapless protagonist, who seems to be the last one to know that his love is imploding and there’s nothing he can do about it.

5. David Mason on “Penny Lane” (1967)
During the early sessions for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, McCartney was mesmerized by a high-pitched trumpet one night while watching a television performance of a Bach piece. He decided then and there that it would be just the thing to embellish this song detailing childhood memories of Liverpool, so Mason added the majestic flourish of the piccolo trumpet.

6. Anna Joshi, Amrit Gajjar, Buddhadev Kansara, Natwar Soni on “Within You Without You” (1967)
Harrison’s lone composition on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band brilliantly melded his fascination with Eastern music with his grasp of Western song structure. The Indian musicians listed above managed to create a hypnotic rhythmic foundation from which Harrison’s wending melody springs, creating an aural experience unlike anything most Beatle fans had encountered up to that point.

7. Eric Clapton on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (1968)
Harrison was apparently fed up by bickering between band members and brought in Clapton, already a legend on electric guitar, to do the weeping guitar bit in this brooding standout off The White Album. Clapton managed to deliver an anguished bit of guitar commentary on Harrison’s enigmatic lyrics and did so without pulling the song out of The Beatles’ comfort zone.

8. Chris Thomas on “Piggies” (1968)
Thomas was deputized as temporary band producer while George Martin took a brief vacation during the sessions for The White Album. He also stepped in to play the harpsichord on Harrison’s satire of greed and excess. The Victorian feel of the instrument is the perfect counterpoint to Harrison’s story of swine that turn on their own and need a “damn good whacking.”

9. Billy Preston on “Get Back” (1970)
Here was another situation where Harrison tried to make the other Beatles play nice by bringing in a respected musician from outside the group to defuse some of the tension. The group loved Preston’s work so much that he ended up playing keyboards all over the songs from the Let It Be sessions. Perhaps his most memorable and soulful turn comes on McCartney’s boogeying hit single.

10. Brian Jones on “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)” (1970)
Jones had already passed away by the time this long-in-gestation, comic B-side was released in 1970. But his squawking saxophone solo is a fitting way to end this list. After all, his ability to play a variety of unusual instruments, including marimba, sitar and flute, meant that The Rolling Stones, The Beatles’ chief rivals for British Invasion supremacy, rarely needed guest musicians for the special flourishes in their songs.

– This is Jim Beviglia‘s first post for CultureSonar. Welcome!

PS. Some of the above names are in the mix in our post In Search of The Real Fifth Beatle. What do you think? Plus, you may also enjoy our posts The New “Sgt. Pepper” Box Set Is Truly Super-Deluxe and Ringo’s Replacement Gets a Big Screen Treatment.

Photo credit: Keystone/Stringer (courtesy Getty Images)

Jimi Hendrix Plays “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for The Beatles, Just Three Days After the Album’s Release (1967)

There are many ways to celebrate a new album from a band you admire. You can have a listening party alone. You can have a listening party with friends. You can learn the title track in a couple days and play it onstage while the band you admire sits in the audience. That last one might be overkill. Unless you’re Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix was so excited after the UK release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 that he opened a set at London’s Saville Theater with his own, Hendrix-ified rendition of the album’s McCartney-penned title song. In the audience: McCartney and George Harrison.

It’s a loose, good-natured tribute that, as you might imagine, made quite an impression on the Beatles in attendance. “It’s still obviously a shining memory for me,” McCartney recalled many years later, “because I admired him so much anyway, he was so accomplished.”

To think that that album had meant so much to him as to actually do it by the Sunday night, three days after the release. He must have been so into it, because normally it might take a day for rehearsal and then you might wonder whether you’d put it in, but he just opened with it. It’s a pretty major compliment in anyone’s book. I put that down as one of the great honours of my career.

McCartney frequently reminisces about that night. See him do so in the clip above from an August, 2010 concert. Macca gushes over Hendrix’s solo, then tells the audience how Jimi—having thrown his guitar out of tune during the solo with his whammy bar dive-bombing—asked Eric Clapton to come onstage and retune for him. Clapton, who McCartney says was actually in the audience, demurred. It’s a story he continues to tell–in fact, as recently as this weekend at Oldchella.

One lingering question is whether or not Hendrix knew there were Beatles present that night. NME and the BBC both say he did not. In a recreation of the moment, above, from the 2013 fictionalized biopic Jimi: All is by My Side, Hendrix (played by André Benjamin) knows. Not only that, but he decides to open with “Sgt. Pepper’s” right before the gig, with no rehearsal, over the strenuous objections of Noel Redding, who thinks the Beatles might be insulted. It’s highly doubtful things went down that way at all. (The scene takes other licenses—note the Flying V instead of the white Stratocaster Hendrix actually played). But it makes for some interesting backstage drama in the film.

In any case, I’d guess that Hendrix—“the coolest guy in the world,” as Benjamin called him—would have pulled off the cover with panache, whether he knew McCartney was watching or not. There may be little left to say about Hendrix’s brilliant guitar theatrics, completely innovative playing style, onstage swagger, and powerful songwriting. But his “Sgt. Pepper’s” cover is an example of one of his less-discussed, but highly admirable qualities: his genuinely awesome rock and roll collegiality.

Related Content:

Jimi Hendrix Opens for The Monkees on a 1967 Tour; Then After 8 Shows, Flips Off the Crowd and Quits

Jimi Hendrix Plays the Delta Blues on a 12-String Acoustic Guitar in 1968, and Jams with His Blues Idols, Buddy Guy & B.B. King

Jimi Hendrix Wreaks Havoc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From BBC (1969)

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Interview on September 11, 1970: Listen to the Complete Audio

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Beatles' Rubber Soul: From Zero-to-Masterpiece in 30 Days

by SCOTT FREIMAN, Culture Sonar:
http://www.culturesonar.com/beatles-rubber-soul/

By 1965, The Beatles had already rocked the world with their music and films. They maintained a punishing schedule in order to stay at the top of the proverbial heap. Their lives were a predictable but chaotic cocktail of concert touring, press appearances and recording. They had little time to think, much less write new music.

Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager, put the group on a schedule of two albums and two singles a year. In 1963 and 1964, The Beatles’ fans had been rewarded with albums like Please Please Me and A Hard Day’s Night and singles like “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” This pace continued in early 1965 with the release of their fifth album, Help!, and the single “I Feel Fine.”

By the time October rolled around, The Beatles had still not begun work on their second album for 1965 — an album that would need to be in the stores by mid-November for the Christmas season. Moreover, The Beatles’ grueling schedule was taking its toll. Their list of new songs to record was shorter than it had ever been.

Most groups would probably have churned out a covers album for Christmas. The Beatles knew hundreds of songs that they could have easily recorded in no time at all. But The Beatles weren’t just any group. They set about creating one of the greatest albums ever, Rubber Soul, an album full of spectacular songwriting and equally magnificent performances.

Trivia question:  The title Rubber Soul was taken from which song lyrics?
A) “The Word”
B) “Think For Yourself”
C) “What Goes On”
D) None of the above.

Answer: D.  The lyrics was a take off on a derogatory phrase used by black musicians, “Plastic Soul.”

Rolling Stone ranked it #5 of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” Within the same thirty days in which Rubber Soul was recorded, they also recorded and released the first double A-side single, “We Can Work It Out” backed by “Day Tripper.” How did The Beatles manage to write, record, and mix this remarkable album in only thirty days?  That’s the subject of the next film in the Deconstructing the Beatles series, Deconstructing Rubber Soul.

Here’s the trailer:

Trivia question: The music on which Rubber Soul song was written before Ringo joined the group?

A) “Michelle”
B) “What Goes On”
C) “Run For Your Life”
D) “Wait”

Answer: A. Paul used to play it as a faux French song to impress girls at parties.

In Deconstructing Rubber Soul, you’ll be watching the days tick by as The Beatles somehow managed to beat the clock and create a masterpiece. A splendid time is guaranteed for all!

You can take the rest of the Rubber Soul trivia quiz here.

– Scott Freiman  (photo: Getty Images)

PS. For more Deconstructing The Beatles, check out our posts on Sgt. Pepper, Revolver, “Penny Lane,” “A Day In The Life,” and “P.S. I Love You.”

PPS. We’ve received many requests (thank you) to release the films on DVD or streaming. We’re working on that, but it’ll take some time. We’ll let you know when we have news…

PPPS. If your local theatre isn’t playing the film, please ask them to do it. It really does help. You can point them here.

Guitarist Randy Bachman Demystifies the Opening Chord of The Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

by Mike Springer, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/guitarist_randy_bachman_demystifies_the_opening_chord_of_a_hard_days_night.html



You could call it the magical mystery chord. The opening clang of the Beatles’ 1964 hit, “A Hard Day’s Night,” is one of the most famous and distinctive sounds in rock and roll history, and yet for a long time no-one could quite figure out what it was.

In this fascinating clip from the CBC radio show, Randy’s Vinyl Tap, the legendary Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive guitarist Randy Bachman unravels the mystery.

The segment (which comes to us via singer-songwriter Mick Dalla-Vee) is from a special live performance, “Guitarology 101,” taped in front of an audience at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto back in January, 2010. As journalist Matthew McAndrew wrote, “the two-and-a-half hour event was as much an educational experience as it was a rock’n’roll concert.”

One highlight of the show was Bachman’s telling of his visit the previous year with Giles Martin, son of Beatles’ producer George Martin, at Abbey Road Studios. The younger Martin, who is now the official custodian of all the Beatles’ recordings, told Bachman he could listen to anything he wanted from the massive archive - anything at all.

Bachman chose to hear each track from the opening of “A Hard Day’s Night.” As it turns out, the sound is actually a combination of chords played simultaneously by George Harrison and John Lennon, along with a bass note by Paul McCartney. Bachman breaks it all down in an entertaining way in the audio clip above.

You can read about some of the earlier theories on The Beatles Bible and Wikipedia, and hear a fascinating account of one scholar’s mathematical analysis of the component sounds of the chord from a few years ago at NPR.

VIDEO: Discovered: Conversation with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Timothy Leary at Montreal Bed-In (1969)

by Colin Marshall, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/john_lennon_yoko_ono_and_timothy_leary_1969.html

On May 26, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko One began their second “Bed-In,” a form of anti-Vietnam War protest that combined the media impact of a press conference with the comfort of hotel sheets.

Their first Bed-In, which happened in various rooms of the Amsterdam Hilton in late March of that year, saw them grant interview after interview about peace all day long without moving from the bed in which they had ensconced themselves.

They’d scheduled its follow up in New York City, but Lennon found he couldn’t enter the United States due to a previous conviction for marijuana possession.

They relocated it to the Bahamas, where the heat soon prompted them to move again to the entirely cooler Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.

There they recorded the song “Give Peace a Chance,” aided by such visitors as Tommy Smothers, Dick Gregory, Murray the K, and psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary.

But Leary didn’t just come to provide a backing vocal. With his wife Rosemary, he recorded a conversation with Lennon and Ono about … well, about a variety of subjects, but they’d all fall under the broad heading of Leary’s one great pursuit, “consciousness.”

Only recently did Leary archivist Michael Horowitz discover the transcript of this session in “an unmarked envelope in a box of miscellaneous papers,” and this week the Timothy Leary Archives made it available to the public for the first time ever.

The conversation begins with the finer points of teepee life, moves on to the effects of place on one’s state of mind, touches on both couples’ having found themselves on the wrong side of drug law enforcement, and ends with Lennon and Leary comparing notes on how they use the media to convey their message:

TIMOTHY: John, about the use of the mass media ... the kids must be taught how to use the media. People used to say to me - I would give a rap and someone would get up and say, “Well, what’s this about a religion? Did the Buddha use drugs? Did the Buddha go on television? I’d say, “Ahh - he would’ve. He would’ve …”.
JOHN: I was on a TV show with David Frost and Yehudi Menuhin, some cultural violinist y’know, they were really attacking me. They had a whole audience and everything. It was after we got back from Amsterdam … and Yehudi Menuhin came out, he’s always doing these Hindu numbers. All that pious bit, and his school for violinists, and all that. And Yehudi Menuhi said, “Well, don’t you think it’s necessary to kill some people some times?” That’s what he said on TV, that’s the first thing he’s ever said. And I said, “Did Christ say that? Are you a Christian?” “Yeah,” I said, and did “Christ say anything about killing people?” And he said, “Did Christ say anything about television? Or guitars?”

To learn more about Lennon and Ono’s Bed-Ins, you can visit the 70-minute documentary Bed Peace (below), previously featured on Open Culture and still freely viewable on YouTube:

VIDEO: The Beatles: Unplugged Collects Acoustic Demos of White Album Songs (1968)

by Josh Jones, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2013/01/ithe_beatles_unpluggedi_collects_acoustic_demos_of_iwhite_albumi_songs_1968.html

Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently finished a dissertation on land, landscape, and labor.



I am a child of Beatles fans; we owned nearly every album in original mono vinyl pressings. But somehow there was a hole in our collection - a whale-sized hole, it turned out - because we didn’t have a copy of the White Album.

I was introduced to it later by a friend, who shared its secrets with me like one would share the favorite work of a favorite poet - reverently.

We delved into the history and learned that recording sessions were notoriously fractious - with Ringo stepping away for a while and Paul stepping in on the drums, and with the others recording solo, sometimes with session players, rarely in the same room together - a situation reflected in the tracking of the record, which feels like a compilation of songs by each Beatle (but Ringo), rather than the usual smooth affair of Lennon/ McCartney, and occasional Harrison productions.

That ranginess is what makes the White Album special: it’s feels so familiar, and yet it’s not like anything they’d done before and presages the genius to come in their solo careers.

So imagine my surprised delight at stumbling across a bootleg that die-hard completists have surely known about for ages (though it only saw release in 2002): The Beatles: Unplugged is a recording of acoustic songs, most of which would appear on the the White Album, played and sung by John, Paul, and George at George’s house in Esher - hence the bootleg’s subtitle, the Kinfauns-Sessions (Kinfauns was the name of George’s home).

Here are the close vocal harmonies that seemed to mark a group of musicians in near-perfect harmony with each other (but without Ringo, again). And here are some of the Beatles’ most poignant, pointed, and vaudevillian songs live and direct, without any studio tricks whatsoever.

Of course these were recorded as demos, and not meant for release of any kind, but even so, they’re fairly high-quality, in a lo-fi kind of way.

Listening to the songs in this form makes me think of the folk/ psych revivalism of the so-called New Weird America that hearkened back to so much sixties’ trippy playfulness, but mostly eschewed the major label studio sound of sixties’ records and welcomed prominent tape hiss and single-track, bedroom takes.

Given the rapid pop-culture recycling that is the hallmark of the early 21st century, The Beatles: Unplugged sounds strangely modern.

The Unplugged session includes a wonderfully airy rendition of “Dear Prudence,” which like so many of these songs, was written during The Beatles’ sojourn in India, about Mia Farrow’s sister (a complete tracklist is here).

The compilers of the release have tacked on three additional songs: “Spiritual Regeneration India” (also a birthday tribute to The Beach Boy’s Mike Love), an oddly upbeat studio run-through of “Helter Skelter,” and a free-form acoustic medley of traditional songs called “Rishikesh No. 9” (also called “Spiritual Christmas”).

In addition to the slew of White Album songs, the recording session also features McCartney’s “Junk,” which later appeared on his 1970 solo album McCartney and John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” (here called “Child of Nature”), which surfaced on 1971’s Imagine.

As Allmusic’s Bruce Eder writes, Unplugged is a bootleg so good, “the folks at Apple and EMI ought to be kicking themselves for not thinking of it first.”

Track List

The Beatles - The White Album - Unplugged - demos
--
0:00 Intro
0:15 Cry Baby Cry
2:42 Child of Nature (Jealous Guy)
5:25 The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
8:15 I'm So Tired
11:24 Yer Blues
15:00 Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey
18:00 What's the New Mary Jane
20:39 Revolution
24:49 While My Guitar Gently Weeps
27:29 Circles
29:47 Sour Milk Sea
33:22 Not Guilty
36:36 Piggies
38:42 Julia
42:47 Blackbird
45:02 Rocky Raccoon
47:49 Back in the U.S.S.R
50:50 Honey Pie
52:54 Mother Nature's Son
55:09 Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
58:05 Junk
1:00:46 Dear Prudence
1:05:27 Sexy Sadie
1:07:52 Spiritual Regeneration
1:10:22 Spiritual Christmas

VIDEO: Deconstructing The Master Track of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”

by Josh Jones, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/deconstructing_the_sgt_peppers_lonely_hearts_club_band_.html

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness


There are several versions of the story of how The Beatles’ most highly-acclaimed album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club came to be.

In one, John gives the full credit to Paul, who, inspired by “America and the whole West Coast, long-named group thing” - of bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company - came up with the concept.

According to Lennon, Paul “was trying to put some distance between the Beatles and the public”:

"And so there was this identity of Sgt. Pepper … Sgt. Pepper is called the first concept album, but it doesn’t go anywhere. All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with the idea of Sgt. Pepper and his band; but it works ‘cause we said it worked, and that’s how the album appeared. But it was not as put together as it sounds, except for Sgt. Pepper introducing Billy Shears and the so-called reprise. Every other song could have been on any other album".

Lennon’s typical mix of grandiosity and self-deprecation probably sells the album short in any fan’s estimation (certainly in mine), but I  believe that Paul cooked up the goofy personas and marching-band look. It is, after all, as Lennon says, “his way of working.”

Paul himself has said of Sgt. Pepper’s: “I thought it would be nice to lose our identities, to submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group. We could make up all the culture around it and collect all our heroes in one place.”

Despite the complex of personalities (both real and imagined) in the writing and recording of what many consider the band’s masterpiece, the recording process was incredibly simple, at least by today’s standards.

Today’s digital recording enables bands to record an unlimited number of tracks - either live or, more often, in layers upon layers of overdubs - leaving mixing engineers with sometimes hundreds of individual tracks to integrate into a coherent whole.

In 1967, during the age of tape and the tracking of Sgt. Pepper’s, engineers were limited to four tracks at a time, which they could then “bounce,” or merge together, to free up room for additional recording.

This is how the title song “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” was made, and you can hear the four final master tracks “deconstructed” above.

First, in green, you’ll hear the original rhythm tracks, with drums, bass, and two guitars, all recorded on two tracks.

The red line represents tracks 3 and 4 - all of the vocals.

The blue portion is the horns and lead guitar, and yellow is the audience sounds.

You’ll hear each track individually, then hear them all come together, so to speak. The description below of the recording process comes from that inerrant (so I’ve heard) source, The Beatles Bible:

"The song was recorded over four days. On 1 February 1967 The Beatles taped nine takes of the rhythm track, though only the first and last of these were complete. They recorded drums, bass and two guitars - the latter played by McCartney and Harrison. The next day McCartney recorded his lead vocals, and he, Lennon and Harrison taped their harmonies. The song was then left for over a month, until the French horns were overdubbed on 3 March. McCartney also recorded a lead guitar solo, leaving the song almost complete. On 6 March they added the sounds of the imaginary audience and the noise of an orchestra tuning up, a combination of crowd noise from a 1961 recording of the comedy show Beyond The Fringe and out-takes from the 10 February orchestral overdub session for A Day In The Life. For the segue into With A Little Help From My Friends, meanwhile, they inserted screams of Beatlemaniacs from the recordings of The Beatles live at the Hollywood Bowl".

VIDEO: The Beatles - "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window"

by tehblckdeth

VIDEO: George Harrison in the Spotlight: The Dick Cavett Show (1971)

by  Dan Colman, Open Culture:


This week, HBO will air George Harrison: Living in the Material World, a two-part documentary dedicated to The Beatles’ guitarist who long played in the shadow of John and Paul.

While George slips back in the spotlight, we should highlight his vintage interview with Dick Cavett.

Recorded 40 years ago (November 23, 1971), the conversation starts with light chit-chat, then (around the 5:30 mark) gets to some bigger questions - Did Yoko break up the band? Did the other Beatles hold him back musically? Why have drugs been so present in the rock ‘n roll world, and did The Beatles’ flirtation with LSD lead youngsters astray? And is there any relationship between drugs and the Indian music that so fascinated Harrison? It was a question better left to Ravi Shankar to answer, and that he did.

The rest of the interview continues here with Part 2 and Part 3. Also, that same year, Cavett interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and we have it right here.

The Beatles' "LOVE" by Cirque du Soleil

by Sixties Beat: http://sixtiesbeat.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/the-beatles-love-cirque-du-soleil.html

Last week, my husband took me to see The Beatles' Love Cirque du Soleil production at The Mirage in Las Vegas.

The French-Canadian contemporary circus company is known for fantastic shows, but this 2006 theatrical production combines the re-produced and re-imagined music of The Beatles with the interpretive, circus-based artistic and athletic stage performance.

A joint venture between Cirque and The Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd, the music directors are Sir George Martin (producer of nearly all of The Beatles' records) and his son, record producer Niles Martin.

I had heard rave reviews of the show, but we were truly amazed at the unbelievable acrobatic and aerial performers paired with the perfect soundtrack.

The show samples 130 songs from The Beatles' catalog to create 26 musical pieces, and the songs are mixed so that the lyrics and instrumentation blend from one song to the next.

The loose storyline traces the band's biography in board strokes and incorporates characters inspired by their songs including Sgt. Pepper, Eleanor Rigby, Her Majesty, Lady Madonna, Lucy, Nowhere Men, and so on.

For Beatles fans, this stellar production is a must-see, and even for the non-Beatles fan, the awesome sights and sounds will entertain for the entire 90 minutes.

Enjoying the colorful entrance to the theater.

 

Stock photo from the show.

Here's the show's trailer, just to give you a taste of the impressive circus with Beatles-inspired costumes and psychedelic sets.

As someone who knows the music of The Beatles by heart, I was very impressed with the re-working of certain songs. One of my favorite moments was hearing a new version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," which matches the first studio demo from 1968 with a new string arrangement written for Love by George Martin. In contrast to George Harrison's original blues rock song, here's the hauntingly beautiful version used in the show. 

My husband hanging out with a Blue Meanie (from the Yellow Submarine film) in the gift shop.

Definitely a groovy night of astounding sights and sounds!