the beatles

Across The Pond: The Fab Four Turn Fifty in Liverpool

by Reb Stevenson on June 11, 2012

You’d never know it, to look at Sir Paul’s boyish brown locks (‘boyish brown locks’ – there’s a product name for you, Clairol), but it was 50 years ago this August that he, Ringo, John and George played their first tune together.

Little did they know then how many girls would swoon, how many albums would sell, and how many agonizing minutes “Revolution 9″ would ultimately drone on.

You don’t need me to tell you that Liverpool is where it all began. That knowledge is as much of a given as the fact that a frustrating number of people will sing “When I’m Sixty Four” to you, with varying levels of competence, on your 64th birthday.

One does wonder whether true Liverpudlians, such as the ones above, dining at Albert Dock, have any tolerance for The Beatles after five solid decades of mania. They’re still huge. Mythical, even. Are they more popular than Jesus? Not gonna go there. But they’re definitely bigger than the bug. I mean, this is a band so famous that it has almost certainly compromised many peoples’ ability to spell.

Regardless of whether they feel like crying “Help!”*, Scousers are celebrating the anniversary this year with a lineup of events.

*you can insert a Beatles song title into virtually every sentence, it’s such an easy out for a writer.

Sleep with The Beatles – it sounds pretty corny, the idea of a Beatles-themed hotel. And I personally wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink if I were surrounded by the characters from The Yellow Submarine movie (a horror flick, if you ask me). But Hard Day’s Night Hotel gets it right. In short: it knows when to stop. John Lennon picture above bed? Yes. Ringo-shaped soap? No.

Hear “The Beatles” live - if you listen closely, you may be able to pick out an echo (a really, really lazy echo) of the 300 shows The Beatles played at The Cavern Club. Or, if your hearing isn’t quite so sensitive just check out a tribute band – one is featured every Saturday in 2012. And for the die hards (the ones who know exactly what condiment Paul spread on his toast the morning of October 22, 1964, for instance), The Cavern Club is hosting International Beatles Week from 22-28 August.

Bone up on your minutiae - The Beatles Story is the place you might be able to learn what condiment Paul spread on his toast on October 22, 1964, if you weren’t already privy to this information (you amateur!).

Lennon, re-imagined: On December 8, The Liverpool Philharmonic and guests will perform a lineup of John Lennon’s best songs. Yep, you can snob it up and tell friends you “attended the orchestra last night” but really you were tapping your toe to Strawberry Fields. Schneaky.

Let It Be(gin): Okay, I’m breaking the rules because this isn’t in Liverpool at all. But I’m sure Beatlemaniacs won’t mind if I just swoop down to London for a second to mention Let It Be, the West End musical running from September 2012 to January 2013. Sort of ironic name, isn’t it?

For a complete description of all the Beatles events happening in Liverpool this year, click here.

For information on travelling in Britain in general, click here.

And don’t forget to visit my Across the Pond homepage!

Travel arrangements courtesy of Visit Britain.

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The Rewind Button: The White Album

by Reb Stevenson on May 20, 2012

The Rewind Button is a group blogging project instigated by Rachel Tynan. As part of her New Years’ Resolutions for 2012, she set out to listen to Rolling Stone’s top 50 albums of all time. I thought it would be fun if a group of bloggers listened to the same albums at the same time, then posted their reactions. Starting today, we’re going through the Top 40 and will be continuing with a new album every Thursday. Want to join in? We’d love to have you. Email me if you have a blog, or just offer up your two cents in my comments area below.

This week: The White Album (1968)

The cover of The White Album, as pure and clean as a freshly bleached bedsheet, is pure irony. Because behind the simple facade lies total chaos, both emotional and aural. It’s like the covers for Sgt. Pepper and The White Album were accidentally switched.

The dysfunction that would ultimately destroy The Beatles asserted itself during the recording sessions for this album – at one point Ringo quit, leaving Paul with the drumsticks. John and Paul regularly recorded in separate rooms. The cohesion of the band was slipping away. And of course, Yoko started hanging out.

But I have to say, after a few monotonous albums (Exile on Main Street and What’s Going On), The White Album read as an exciting grab-bag. Granted, some of it was unbearable (Revolution 9 = someone with ADD flipping through radio stations, none of which are in tune) but much of it was sheer brilliance, spanning a full range of emotions and taking twists and turns you weren’t expecting. From the cartoonish quality of Rocky Raccoon to the softness of Blackbird, it was a musical odyssey.

I got the feeling that, by this stage, The Beatles had truly arrived at the “Don’t Give a F–k” stage, wherein they were exploring their art as honestly as possible. There was no pandering to the audience, no desperation to be at the top of the charts. They’d been there done that. Now they were searching for something new, which is why they found themselves in an ashram at the time this album was germinating.

The White Album sealed it for me: The Beatles really are the best band of all time, partially due to sheer talent, but also because they never settled into complacency – they were driven to change, to evolve. Even if it meant evolving into Wings.

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The Rewind Button: Rubber Soul

by Reb Stevenson on April 13, 2012

The Rewind Button is a group blogging project instigated by Rachel Tynan. As part of her New Years’ Resolutions for 2012, she set out to listen to Rolling Stone’s top 50 albums of all time. I thought it would be fun if a group of bloggers listened to the same albums at the same time, then posted their reactions. Starting today, we’re going through the Top 40 and will be continuing with a new album every Thursday. Want to join in? We’d love to have you. Email me if you have a blog, or just offer up your two cents in my comments area below.

This week: Rubber Soul (1965)

It’s changing me. The blogging project, that is.

Because, six weeks ago, I would have done some kind of overly confident wave in the air and declared that Rubber Soul is easily the best Beatles album. Now, having given both Sgt. Pepper and Revolver more consideration than I ever thought possible, Rubber Soul seems…blander.

It’s like eating only plain angel food cake. It’s good, it’s fluffy, it’s consistent. You could eat it every day. But one day someone gives you a taste of black forest cake. It’s so rich and complex, full of rogue cherries and dollops of cream. You may not want to eat it on a regular basis, but the mere knowledge that it exists changes how you view angel food.

Rubber Soul was my first true foray into the fab four. I strayed from Nine Inch Nails, Jane’s Addiction and the other bands my quasi-goth friends claimed were cool and picked it up during the big mid-nineties re-release that some of my fellow bloggers have alluded to. While I may have pretended to legitimately like Hole in public, in private I had a thing going with Rubber Soul (and Alanis Morrissette, too…would’ve been social suicide to admit how much I loved Ironic).

I got to know it inside out; it became a comfortable old friend. For me, Rubber Soul is one of those albums where I can hear the last few bars of any given song and know which tune is coming next because they belong together.

Unlike Sgt Pepper and Revolver, the songs on Rubber Soul seem as coordinated as Martha Stewart’s bathroom. The presence of the sitar in Norwegian Wood is novel but doesn’t make you wonder whether an Indian folk music album accidentally tripped on its sari and fell into the CD changer.

Nonetheless, for all its playability, I now realize that Rubber Soul lacks the excitement and daring that The Beatles would embody in their following releases. Maybe Rubber Soul is like puberty for The Beatles – you can detect wisps of manhood in the sitar, the darker subject matter and unusual recording effects but it’s mostly just peach fuzz.

Most satisfying lick: The “nowhere man, please listen, you don’t know, what you’re missin’ verse in Nowhere Man

Lyric I relate to most right now: “So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.” (I just moved)

Worst song: What Goes On

Make a donation to your local womens’ shelter whenever you hear: Run For Your Life

Who else rewound Rubber Soul?