My Beatles Speech
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings." Paul and John liked Alice in Wonderland and took ideas from that
In 1967 at school we had lessons on Classical Music Appreciation and at the end of the year the class suggested to the teacher that he should listen to the music the kids like and he was prepared to listen to the Beatles. I though at the time he was informed on music but Leonard Bernstein in 1965 said that they are the Schumann of today.
Liverpool, Merseyside and the Cast Iron Shore and speakers of "scouse" Why was it that Liverpool created the Beatles.
Starting in 1981 we spent several summers in Liverpool the Cavern which was in an old ware house surrounded by the market was a run down part of the city and had just been demolished. Had Liverpool understood how important the Beatles would be in future they would have refurbished the Cavern and kept it in the same way that every childhood home of the Beatles is now visited.
Liverpool has a long history as a port from where ships went out to the slave and sugar trade later in the great migration years in was the place where you got the cheapest ride to New York and immigrants came from all over Europe to get passage to the New World including Jew and many stayed in Liverpool forming a very solid community. Liverpool is close to Manchester and their is a ship canal to Manchester and the worlds first railway line ran from Manchester to Liverpool 1831
My wife's family lived in Woolton which was middle class and I would take our sons around Woolton where you have the red sandstone quarry on one side and quarry street, quarry road and John Lennon first band was the Quarrymen. I walked with the stroller to Calderstones park past Strawberry Field an institution of sorts and we would get a bus that ran along Penny Lane to get to the city.
Liverpool was the most cosmopolitan of cities in England after the war. Most dockworker like in London had fled the Irish Famine of 1843. The first Chinatown in Europe was in Liverpool.
Every working class family had somebody in the merchant navy who would return with American records and comics. Interesting my wife's cousin learned Spanish at school there and afterwards I read that they needed Spanish as so many sailors were on ships to and from South America.
Liverpool was statistically the worst hit in the battle of Britain and by the end of the war 4000 Liverpudlians had died the greatest number of destruction to any city. This is well documented in Nicholas Monserrat book "the Cruel Sea" where returning from the war time convey the sailors return home to Bootle and they hardly have families left all they found of their homes was rubble.
The city instead of rebuilding, demolished whole neighbourhoods and rebuilt new one like Speke. Liverpool in the late 50s had over 300 bands and people could get around the city on a very good and cheap public transport with busses, trains their was a big demand for dance halls and night clubs for young people and the "scouse" had very different music from the rest of the country.
Also the British musicians union made sure that a very limited amount of recorded music was played on the radio and only live music played so except for pirate radio like Radio Luxemburg you never heard American music.
Before the war Nazis had destroyed or kicked out all the "decadent" artists and musicians as well as Jews, so they basically destroyed German music. People like Kurt Weil, Erich Korngold etc. ended up in Hollywood and had to reinvent themselves. After the war kids in Germany were not taught singing it was a totally taboo subject as this was all Nazi songs.
Night clubs in Hamburg wanted to bring American musician there but could not afford the strong $, so got the idea to bring musicians from Liverpool (who were used to earning weak pounds) and brought a number of groups including the Beatles.
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1966 August after playing 10 concerts in front of noisy stadium audiences in the States, the Beatles were exhausted from travel and moved out of the public eye and into making records in the studio, as their newer songs were not suitable for playing in public. The last concert was at Candlestick Park SF. Johns comment that they were more popular than Jesus made they unwelcome in the South. Klu Klux Klan threats. There were Beatle record burnings. They now hated the mop boys who wanted to reinvent themselves. George Harrison had had enough and threatened to leave the Beatles if they had to continue this Beatlemania in front of audiences.
1966 Eleonor Rigby this song was a move away from Pop music to more serious song writer. Paul as a scout had visited old people who talked to him about the war years and was thinking about their bereavement and loneliness. They decided they wanted to get away from the image of bushy haired boys and worked on this LP presenting themselves as a Victorian Circus band.
They never had a deadline to meet and were confident that the cost of producing this album would be recouped so had plenty of time to experiment with the modern recording possibilities available at the time
Up till this stage even though the Beatles were a 4 way democracy John was the leader now Paul became the day facto leader
1967 June Sargent Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band the typical working class brass band very Victorian. John had a poster that he bought in an antique shop advertising a circus in Rochdale in 1843 for the Benefit of Mr. Kite and Mr Henderson and pictures of hoops trampoline, horses and typical circus, with very old fairground music that George Martin provided. This was a band within a band.
Not only the songs and uniforms were unique but the Album was cover designed at the cost 3000 pounds when normally that would would cost 25 to 50 pounds. They also did the new thing of putting the lyrics into the sleeve. This album with its cover set the scene by which the psychedelic 60s is remembered. On the cover are over 70 portraits including the Beatles in Circus Band Uniforms as well as their wax images as well as Lewis Carol. By 2011 it had sold 32 million copies. This was the first of the concept albums. They could experiment as they knew they would not play this type of music in public.
Up till this time the definitive part of music was the printed score and the words.. From now on the recorded record became the definitive form the money was no longer in selling the printed songs, They also included the lyrics printed with the album. They were the only ones who could do this as they owned the lyrics as opposed to most bands that paid for songs.
This became known as the Concept Album. "the most important and influential rock-and-roll album ever recorded" We also have to understand that the technology was capable of doing this type of thing was relatively new and the Beatle were up to date, they had multi track recording..""epitome of the transformation of the recording studio into a compositional tool" The had no limit of time of deadline and they had no budget problem. It cost 25 000 pounds to produce instead of the first album instead of 400 pounds for Please Please Me. Songs just merged into each other as if a continuous live concert. An important work of British psychedelia, the album incorporates a range of stylistic influences, including vaudeville, circus, music hall, avant-garde, and Western and Indian and uses orchestral overdubs. Paul after resisting drugs eventually took LSD so we have the psychedelic effect.
Strawberry Fields was a Salvation Army hostel. Penny Lane a main bus junction in Liverpool. During this time they were out of the limelight and Brian Epstein wanted a single made so that the public would not forget them Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane were made.
Sgt Peppers was the last work where the Beatles worked cohesively.
Legacy
1996 Paul's old school becomes Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts.
1997 March, Paul was knighted Sir Paul McCarthy.
They were the first band to play at soccer stadium the Shea Stadium 1965 which paved the way for others and improved equipment to deal with that. Never has any decade afterword's seen the equivale of Beatlemania.
Adelle recently got 2 singles on the chart at the same time first since the Beatles.
Singers used to sell singles and then make up an album of them. With the Beatles song on albums never appeared as a single.
The Beatles were always open about the drugs they had used, their thoughts on religion and their opinion on the war in Vietnam. In the United States, they refused to play for segregated audiences. Their attitude or disregard for entrenched values caused the youth to become very politically active.
Over 300 books have been written about the Beatles and their lyrics.
What later became the music video of today was started by the Beatle movies especially "Hard Days Night"
The Eastern religions from India was brought to the west and church attendance was affected.
British Invasion - American woke up to England being "cool" and not stodgy old fashioned.
They became Rock Stars with a social conscience.
They led the way in changing music. They were in the right place at a time when music technology was changing and led the way using classical music as a background also.
The End
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Note the 60s started with the unbanning of Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence and this changed the social atmosphere. Military conscription also ended other wise the Beatles would not have met each other as they were a variety of ages.
The lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman1988 699pg Feb.2019
John Lennon was born during the war while Liverpool was being bombed. The father was a seaman and away while his mother neglected him and flirted. His father disserted his mother who then had lovers and 2 more children and John was sent to live with Aunt Mimi. She strived to be middle class and saw to his physical and educational needs but never gave him motherly love. Later in life he discovered he had a form of dyslexia.
Luckily he had an aunt and cousins in North Scotland where he was sent every summer vacation. 1956 Elvis Presley became an example of a truck driver to superstar. A white American singing black rhythm. Mimi's husband died when John was 17 Johns and mother was run over. His girlfriend Cynthia also had no mother. He never passed his O level but Mimi managed to get him into art school and paid for him. He in the end dropped out of that to run his band. In the US the dance hall period ended with the end of the big bands the Music Hall still continued in Britain but in Liverpool there was a need for cheap dance halls at City Halls or church hall and up to 350 amateur bands were providing the Mersey Beat with the bus service bringing in people from Mersey side. In Hamburg they had to keep playing a time for 8 hours a day and so they learned to take a song and keep it going for 20 minutes and get the audience into a trance like a black preacher. There they were supplied with drink by the audience and John learned to do everything in a drunken state, girls came to them and they had orgies continuously. The Beatles returned from Hamburg and Brian Epstein got them on a tour of the country and they would spend a night in each town with 2 shows an evening, Helen Shapiro was a big name then she travelled with their bus and was attracted to John. When they became big her style of singing was out of date. 1962 Married Cynthia when she was pregnant and divorced 1970 John's marriage was kept a secret as Brian wanted the image of the Beatles to be attractive to girls it took 18 months before it came out. Cynthia gave birth to their son Julian during the tour. John was attractive to everyone including Brian who took him to the gay club as an experience. So many girls were attracted to him and he took full advantage of them including his wife. John was a violent person and had to pay compensation to a number of people he beat, he even understood that his Kama meant that he would die violently. 1963 Oct Performance at the London Palladium in front of the Queen watched by 15 million on TV. This was the start of Beatlemania word coined by the press. The movie Hard Days Night portrayed the Beatlemania and became a successful album. Parents who went with their children to see it got the impression they were 4 nice boys while in the evening girls were brought to their hotel rooms and some boasted they had slept with all 4 in 1 night. After the Beatlemania period Paul started having a lot more input and it was mostly studio recording where George Martin a professional musician does a lot of the arrangement but the Beatles did not want a 5th Beatle not from Liverpool. Very few others got their names on the titles of Beatle works. The book gives us details of Yoko Ono's background that she was a dominating type was married twice and had a daughter Kyoto, before she forced herself onto John was a weird artist and producer whose father was a wealthy Japanese banker who she hardly saw as he was always abroad. She was education both in the States and Japan. Magical Mystery Tour was Paul's idea but John got stuck in and wrote most of the songs. The Press tracked down Johns father who worked as a dishwasher in restaurants and he came to visit the filming of Hard Days Night. John was not keen to meet Freddie as Mimi had given him such negative views of him but his uncle Charles convinced him that his mother was at fault and John gave his father a weekly stipend. They were in India at the luxury hotel of the Maharashtra learning meditation etc. While they were there they had a chance to write 30 songs in a very relaxed state. There songs made up the White Album but after some time they realized that the great teacher was not celibate and was a womanizer and left. They had trouble getting a taxi as the locals did not want to antagonize the great man and ended up going with clapped out old cars one of which broke down and they had to wait on the side of the road for a taxi to be sent for them. Soon after the white Album came out John and Joko brought out an album called 2 Virgins with their nude bodies on the cover. EMI refused to market it so it was marketed on an Apple label. The cover was not allowed in the US and the LP was transferred to a brown paper cover. This did a lot of harm to the Beatles reputation, and this was followed by John being arrested for being in possession of pot the other drugs he never managed to destroy. He was fined and told next time he would be jailed. The Beatles finances were in a bad way and their Apple Co. was a money looser. Allen Klein was brought in to sort this out. Brian Epstein had initially signed contracts: a new unknown group has to accept low % but once their records sell they renegotiate and get a better deal also their taxes are high and singers, go on spending sprees and later have to pay. Most of their money was made in the States and he arranged that would remain their as British taxes were higher In January 1969 they made a recording and the situation was very tense with Yoko stuck to Johns arm it ended by them going onto the roof and playing which brought that part of Saville Row to a standstill with traffic blocked and everyone climbing onto the roof to watch. This was the last time the Beatles played together. John then married Yoko Ono 1970 till his death in 1980.------------
With the Beatles by Alister Taylor 248pg 2003 21/2/19
The author was Brian Epstein's personal assistant and worked with him at NEMS. which became a legend for its ability to get hold of any record wanted. Brian Epstein would listen to a new record and could predict how many to order and the record companies would watch his ordering closely. ordering. He was the type who brightened any room he walked into. The unusual thing of the Beatles was they could perform songs but also write them, something unusual. When Brian saw them he knew that he could mould them into a group that could conquer the world and be greater than Elvis.
Brian was the type who became enthusiastic on a thing and suddenly lost it but the Beatles he was 100% convinced that had the greatest thing of the 20 Century.
Brian was old enough and rich enough to be taken seriously and the 4 were convinced. He immediately got them better rates at the Cavern and discovered that they had debts at the musical instrument shop and paid that. He took them to Beno Dorn a little Jewish tailor to get them decent suits. In Liverpool there were over 300 rock groups in the 60s and all wanted recording contracts.
Allen Williams was the one who organised sending the Beatles to Hamburg and he told Brian they are not worth dealing with, but Brian believed in them. 6 months after Brian had walked into the Cavern he was put onto George Martin by EMI as he was threatening to stop selling EMI records and NEMS. This was just meant to be a ploy to keep him happy but George Martin saw the potential.(He had been involved in the Goon Show , Spike Williams and Matt Munro.
Brian was the one who had to do the dirty work of sacking Pete after George Martin felt he was unsuitable and Ringo was brought in, Brian already had recognised that Pete wasn't the type of drummer. Jan 1963 the record were a big hit in Liverpool, but not the rest of the country.
The boys toured with Helen Shapiro who was lead before they became the great hit. However the National Press remained uninterested in them.
The story of Brian and John had a fantastic relationship but not a sexual one it was just rumours. Brian showed John bullfighting in Spain. Brian honestly thought people didn't know he was gay and Marion Faithfull was very keen on him. John got a young girl Jennifer pregnant and Brian arranged a stipend for her till the kid turned 16, the girl promised to keep this out of the press and John didn't know about this. In Britain youngsters showed the were prepared to wait hours to see the Beatles. He dealt with airlines and had to arrange to smuggle them directly to the plane but BOAC were too snooty to deal with pop singers so Pan Am got the business.
The press were so involved with the Profumo Affair and Great Train robbery that the Beatles provided light relief. Besides the Beatles NEMS managed Gerry and The Pacemakers, Billy Kramer and the Dakotas, Cilla Black, The Fourmost and Tommy Quickly. Sometime John and Paul songs were sold to them. By the beginning of 1964 the Beatles were some of the most sort after humans in the world. Brian was not keen to take the Beatles to the States as he felt you had to get the timing right for example Cliff Richard had gone to the States and nobody noticed. He turned down the Ed Sullivan show.
Eventually he agreed to Ed Sullivan and charged then the lowest fee as long as the Beatles go the top billing. The American reporter regarded the Beatles as a new Marx Brothers.
First time Carnegie Hall hosted a Pop group. The visit to the British Embassy reception they heard snooty remarks and were insulting.
The police were asked to take them in a police vehicle and they also wanted autographs. With the change in the recording industry whole lifestyles changed.
Beatles met Jane Asher in 1963 she was a reporter and Paul took to her. Making Hard Days Night was a novelty to the boys but the movie Help was boring and so Yellow Submarine was animated so that they never had to suffer it.
When it was announced that the Beatles were to receive the MBE from the Queen it was very controversial in the Labour Party and Alister had to speak to the Buckingham Palace constabulary to get them in at a side gate.
The plane to Japan was diverted and landed in Anchorage, Alaska where out of nowhere 400 fans arrived at the airport. The last US tour was the most stressful and George was the first to want to leave the Beatles but Brian managed to cajole him back in. The very last performance the Beatles gave was at Candlestick Park, San Francisco 29 August 1966. The "More popular than Jesus " statement had made life dangerous there and Brian never recovered and became dependant on his pills. Now that the Beatles were only doing studio work Brian was not involved with them and he felt at a loose end even though the money was simply pouring in.
Although the Beatles claimed there was no leader they all regarded John as the leader, he had a presents and power over he group but Paul was a great public relations man. One should not dismiss either George's whole song writing talent developed towards the end of the Beatles or Ringo who did have great influence. John and Mick Jagger were great buddies. At one stage Ronnie Scott (Shatt) played the saxophone for the song "Lady Madonna"
Sergeant Pepper Lonely Heart Club Band was considered the greatest album ever made, it took ages to make and the poured the greatest effort into it. The words are more innocent than many believe eg. Lucy in the Sky with Diamond is based on a picture by Johns baby son of a picture of his girlfriend. It took time and work to get permission for every photo used.
George Martin was the one able to interpret what they wanted. "They have a gift and I want to help them give it to the world" Paul was at home with another women and Jane Aston walked in and she broke their engagement leaving him devastated and he relied on Alisters moral support during this period. Linda Eastman was out to get Paul and became the solid support he needed but wanted to remove every trace of Jane. She was also jealous of any close to Paul
The last Beatles going out with a bang was done on the roof because they loved defying authority at the end of the movie "Let it be"
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