In the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were not happy with Paul McCartney. They complained publicly about his desire to get his way, but they also were embroiled in a legal battle with him. McCartney did not like Allen Klein, who the other band members had hired as their manager, and sued the group so Klein didn’t have complete control over their music. On top of speaking negatively about McCartney’s personality, his former bandmates slammed his solo music. Starr said it made him sad.
When The Beatles broke up, some members, like Harrison and Lennon, felt a sense of relief. Starr, however, was left with feelings of resentment that would linger for the next two decades.
“I was mad,” he said, per the New York Daily News. “For 20 years. I had breaks in between of not being.”
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In 2011, Martin Scorsese released a documentary about George Harrison, and Paul McCartney’s daughter Stella felt it was an important watch. Her father and Harrison didn’t always get along, due in part to the fact that Harrison believed McCartney and John Lennon overlooked his contributions to The Beatles. She thought it was good for audiences to get to know Harrison through the documentary, as he didn’t get as much attention as Lennon and McCartney.In 2011, Scorsese released the two-part documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World. The Harrison family specifically reached out to Scorsese because they wanted a capable filmmaker who could portray Harrison’s music and his spiritual life.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
George Harrison had some conflicting thoughts on his legacy. Mostly, the former Beatle didn’t think people would remember him years after he died. If anyone did remember him, he didn’t want them to think of him as one thing. He wasn’t just a lead guitarist, record producer, or Beatle.
For some reason, George didn’t think many people would remember him years after his death. He spoke about his legacy with his wife, Olivia. She was surprised by what her husband said.
Olivia told the LA Times that George knew his music, especially his triple album, All Things Must Pass, “meant things to people. He knew it helped people in their lives — people wrote to him, they told him. And he said, ‘Even if it’s one person, even if it helps somebody, then that’s great.’ But he wasn’t concerned about how he would be remembered,” Olivia said.
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles are known for shattering records with several albums and hit songs that dominated the charts and sales. One of their albums holds the record for the fastest-selling album. However, this album wouldn’t debut until years after the band already disbanded. 1 debuted in 2000 and is a compilation album of all of The Beatles’ number one hits. The album debuted 30 years after the band broke up but was still able to capitalize on the band’s everlasting popularity. 1 is a massive catalog of Beatles’ hits, consisting of 27 songs, including “Let it Be,” “Hey Jude,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Eight Days a Week,” “Yellow Submarine,” “All You Need Is Love,” and “Yesterday.”
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
A five-disc set reveals a band awash with musical and sonic ideas, having fun and making breakthroughs.Imagine — or if you’re young or distant enough, enjoy — a moment when Beatles songs weren’t bone-deep familiar, weren’t canonical, weren’t thoroughly embedded in succeeding generations of rock and pop. A moment when the band that had worked its way up to becoming the most popular act in the Western world was still just four guys knocking songs around in a room and keeping themselves loose and whimsical. The room, however, was a well-equipped recording studio — creating what were then state-of-the-art four-track master tapes — and for all their joking around, the Beatles were also pushing themselves to evolve while applying ruthless quality control.
Source: Jon Pareles/nytimes.com
John Lennon said The Beatles were “more intellectual” than the Bee Gees. In the same vein, he revealed what he thought about songs from the 1970s in general. Notably, both bands had many No. 1 hits in the United States.“Try to tell the kids in the ’70s who were screaming to the Bee Gees that their music is just The Beatles redone,” he continued. “There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees. They do a damn good job. There was nothing else going on then.”
John contrasted The Beatles to the Bee Gees. “The Beatles were more intellectual, so they appealed on that level, too,” he said. “But the basic appeal of The Beatles was not their intelligence. It was their music.”
John discussed why the Fab Four were seen as intellectual. “It was only after some guy in the London Times said there were aeolian cadences in ‘It Won’t Be Long’ that the middle classes started listening to it — because somebody put a tag on it.” John was asked if the song actually included aeolian cadences in the track. “To this day I don’t have any idea what they are,” he said. “They sound like exotic birds.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
YES! The Beatles’ Revolver has been rereleased as a box set, and with it comes surprises, treasures and joy beyond belief. It’s a return to all the music that filled my angst-ridden 16-year-old rubber soul and raised me up every time I played it and stared at Klaus Voorman’s intriguing album cover. (What an amazing departure in style and tone for music graphics. It made me want to draw and do collage, too.)
From The Guardian: “A bonus disc on the new, expanded, remixed and remastered box set of 1966’s Revolver offers an even more transformative experience: a jaw-dropping sequence of ‘Yellow Submarine’ work tapes traces the song’s evolution from a fragile, sad wisp sung by John Lennon to its later iteration as a Ringo Starr-directed psych-pop goof. That the band steered ‘Yellow Submarine’ from morose folk trifle to boisterous stoner singalong seems improbable, but the tapes don’t lie: Through a combination of focused acoustic woodshedding and whimsical studio risks, the band arrived at the more familiar, upbeat ‘Yellow Submarine.'”
Source: printmag.com
In the 1970s, John Lennon’s girlfriend, May Pang, warily agreed to stay in a beach house with a number of other musicians to work on Harry Nilsson’s album. To her, the idea of staying in the house sounded like chaos, and she wasn’t wrong. The musicians spent their evenings drinking and partying and their days recovering from the night before. Pang even began referring to Ringo Starr’s room as the “den of darkness” because he didn’t want to let even a sliver of sunlight in.
Nilsson, one of Lennon’s close friends, was working on an album, and Lennon had the idea to lock a number of musicians up to ensure it was completed.
“There should be an asylum somewhere for aged rock ‘n’ rollers,” he told Pang, per her book Loving John. “Then we can all be put in padded cells where we belong. Let’s open an asylum. We should all rent a house and live together. Then we can watch Harry, save money, and make sure all the musicians get to the studio on time when we begin to work on Harry’s album.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
George Harrison didn’t have the easiest time being a Beatle, but at least being one of the Fab Four heightened his awareness of the world. Then, he took that awareness and used it for something good.
George didn’t have the easiest time as a Beatle. John Lennon and Paul McCartney treated him like a glorified session man and pushed him and his songs aside. He realized early on that he didn’t enjoy fame or adulation.
During a Rolling Stone interview in 1979, George said he “never” thought of being a Beatle again. “Not in this life or any other life. I mean, a lot of the time it was fantastic, but when it really got into the mania it was a question of either stop or end up dead.
“We almost got killed in a number of situations – planes catching on fire, people trying to shoot the plane down and riots everywhere we went. It was aging me.”
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
John Lennon taught George Harrison something important in the songwriting process. George used the technique for years until he began working with ELO frontman Jeff Lynne in 1987 on his album Cloud Nine. Lynne showed the former Beatle that he didn’t have to write songs as John taught him.
In Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, fans found out that John taught George something potentially valuable to the younger Beatle’s songwriting process. George began writing songs in 1963; his first was “Don’t Bother Me.” After that, George tentatively increased his songwriting. Whether he could get those songs on Beatles albums was another issue.
To help his bandmate, John taught George always to finish a song once he started writing it.
In Jackson’s documentary, George tells John that he went to bed late. He had to finish writing a song. George explained that he kept hearing John’s voice “from about 10 years ago, saying, ‘finish ’em straight away, as soon as you start ’em, finish ’em.'” John replied, “But I never do it, though. I can’t do it, but I know it’s the best.”
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com