One-Page Schoolhouse: The Beatles

BeatlesTube is this great site of aggregation that has Beatles-related footage that's freely avaiable all over the Net - which is exactly the problem - it's all over the place. BeatlesTube puts everything in order. Obviously a labor of love.

There are some covers mixed in with the originals and there is actual Beatles video /film footage mixed in with user-generated content, but all-in-all it's a tremendous resource.

I use the the site Blip.fm too and that does the same kind of thing - pulling YouTube and other content - but across all musical groups.

But BeatlesTube.net is all Beatles-related and has a nice homegrown feel to it.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Remastered)

There is an A-Z song titles listing. So, if I click on their link for "A Day in the Life" <http://www.beatlestube.net/video.php?title=A+Day+in+the+Life> , from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), I also get some information about the song.

JOHN 1967: "I was writing the song with the 'Daily Mail' propped up in front of me on the piano. I had it open to the 'News In Brief' or whatever they call it. There was a paragraph about four thousand holes being discovered in Blackburn Lancashire. And when we came to record the song there was still one word missing from that verse... I knew the line had to go, 'Now they know how many holes it takes to --something-- the Albert Hall.' For some reason I couldn't think of the verb. What did the holes do to the Albert Hall? It was Terry Doran who said 'fill' the Albert Hall. And that was it. Then we thought we wanted a growing noise to lead back into the first bit. We wanted to think of a good end and we had to decide what sort of backing and instruments would sound good. Like all our songs, they never become an entity until the very end. They are developed all the time as we go along."

JOHN 1968: "'A Day in the Life' --that was something. I dug it. It was a good piece of work between Paul and me. I had the 'I read the news today' bit, and it turned Paul on. Now and then we really turn each other on with a bit of song, and he just said 'yeah' --bang bang, like that. It just sort of happened beautifully, and we arranged it and rehearsed it, which we don't often do, the afternoon before. So we all knew what we were playing, we all got into it. It was a real groove, the whole scene on that one. Paul sang half of it and I sang half. I needed a middle-eight for it, but Paul already had one there."

JOHN 1980: "Just as it sounds: I was reading the paper one day and I noticed two stories. One was the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash. On the next page was a story about 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. In the streets, that is. They were going to fill them all. Paul's contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song 'I'd love to turn you on.' I had the bulk of the song and the words, but he contributed this little lick floating around in his head that he couldn't use for anything. I thought it was a damn good piece of work."

PAUL 1984: "That was mainly John's, I think. I remember being very conscious of the words 'I'd love to turn you on' and thinking, Well, that's about as risque as we dare get at this point. Well, the BBC banned it. It said, 'Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall' or something. But I mean that there was nothing vaguely rude or naughty in any of that. 'I'd love to turn you on' was the rudest line in the whole thing. But that was one of John's very good ones. I wrote... that was co-written. The orchestra crescendo and that was based on some of the ideas I'd been getting from Stockhausen and people like that, which is more abstract. So we told the orchestra members to just start on their lowest note and end on their highest note and go in their own time... which orchestras are frightened to do. That's not the tradition. But we got 'em to do it."

PAUL 1988: "Then I went around to all the trumpet players and said, 'Look all you've got to do is start at the beginning of the 24 bars and go through all the notes on your instrument from the lowest to the highest-- and the highest has to happen on that 24th bar, that's all. So you can blow 'em all in that first thing and then rest, then play the top one there if you want, or you can steady them out.' And it was interesting because I saw the orchestra's characters. The strings were like sheep-- they all looked at each other: 'Are you going up? I am!' and they'd all go up together, the leader would take them all up. The trumpeters were much wilder."

A Hard Day's Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Songs, New And Updated Edition

There's also a video section. It's also a mixed bag but there's plenty of "real" Beatles footage like the classic "Get Back" on the Apple rooftop in London (below).

Oh, but stop reading and go listen!

ALSO

A similar site for The Rolling Stones at http://www.stonestube.net

and one for Elvis Presley at http://www.elvistube.net

How is it possible that The Beatles album that became known as The White Album is now 40 years old?

It was released in November 1968 and was their ninth album. It was exactly five years from the November 22 release of their second album With the Beatles. Not a long time, but a lot of changes in them, rock music, America, the world. I would have missed the anniversary but for a great podcast episode on NPR's All Songs Considered. Host Bob Boilen talked with Bruce Spizer, author of The Beatles On Apple Records, about how it came to be.

This is when The Beatles were dissolving and had gone to India and gone transcendental. (Ringo didn't like the food and left India. That Ringo...)

I remember it being released. I first heard the tracks on the radio where it was a release event.

Double albums were quite rare then. The list price then was $11.79. I didn't like the non-cover, but I did like the 4 photos inside (see above) and the poster and the lyrics. Everyone calls it "The White Album" but it really is simply titled "The Beatles" and that is embossed slightly below the middle of the album's right side. The vinyl albums had the serial number 2960203.

This was the first Beatles album that was released in America only in a stereo version. Before this, you could buy mono versions of albums and they were a bit cheaper and sounded better if you only had a crappy record player instead of an actual stereo.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released the previous year. That album had commercial success, critical success and was so influential that the follow-up had to be something different. (Time magazine said in 1967 that Sgt. Pepper was a "historic departure in the progress of music—any music."

It kicks off with that airplane landing and a Beach Boys style rocker (Beach Boy Mike Love was in India with them), and then dissolves into Prudence. That one is about Mia Farrow's sister from their India mediation period. That was a trip that generated a number of songs here. "Sexy Sadie" is a disguised attack on the Maharishi who they suspected was using his position to seduce women.

I liked the softer tracks ("I Will," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "Mother Nature's Son," "Blackbird," "Julia") and the rockier tracks ("Back in the USSR," "Birthday," "Helter Skelter"). It took me longer to get anything from some of the others - 8 minutes of "Revolution 9," "Wild Honey Pie," "Why Don't We Do It in the Road."

I have read that the only western instrument available to the group during their Indian visit was the acoustic guitar. That probably explains the folky feel of so many of the songs written there that stayed that way on the album.

This was the album that was their formal transition from 4-track to 8-track recording which explains lots of the collage effects. I always loved that Paul sings the bass line on "I Will" - the same way my friends and I would sing the bass, guitar and drums of songs thinking we sounded pretty darn good.

I still have a "Paul Lives. WMCA Swings" button from the "Paul is Dead" rumor period that was fueled by some studio games they were playing on these tracks.

Eventually, I liked everything on the album in some way or another. I always tended to like Paul's pop tunes, so Martha & Rocky became friends. I figured out how to pick out some songs on the guitar though I never did get "Blackbird" right.

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, The Beatles is The Beatles' best-selling album at 19-times platinum and the tenth-best-selling album of all time in the United States. Technically, that's a cheat because they count each sale as 2 records, so ohers like Abbey Road probably has sold more.

Listen to the November 24, 2008 podcast if you're a fan. Lots of new info there - even more in Spizer's books.

This was the first recording session where a girlfriend/wife was always there (Yoko Ono), though Paul's girlfriend at the time showed up too.

When they were recoding in August, Ringo left the studio session for two weeks because he felt he was playing less and less of a role in the process. McCartney played drums on "Back in the U.S.S.R." and "Dear Prudence" had all the others did some bass and drums.

George's friend, Eric Clapton, played lead on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". (Harrison played on Cream's "Badge" for their last album Goodbye.

After the album was finished, Harrison and Lennon left the band, but I mark Paul's public departure in 1970 as "the end" officially.

How strange is it that on the 40th anniversary of the album's release the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano published a lengthy article which said:

"Forty years later, this album remains a type of magical musical anthology: 30 songs you can go through and listen to at will, certain of finding some pearls that even today remain unparalleled."

I guess the Vatican has gotten past John Lennon's comment that The Beatles are "more popular than Jesus" from the 1960's.

Great album and a good book to read as you listen to it. 1968 was not a great year for me, but music definitely helped me get through it. After 40 years, a lot of the bad stuff has fallen away. This album has remained.

Noe The White Album is available in all formats.

Disc: 1
1. Back in the U.S.S.R.
2. Dear Prudence
3. Glass Onion
4. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
5. Wild Honey Pie
6. Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
7. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
8. Happiness Is a Warm Gun
9. Martha My Dear
10. I'm So Tired
11. Blackbird
12. Piggies
13. Rocky Raccoon
14. Don't Pass Me By
15. Why Don't We Do It in the Road?
16. I Will
17. Julia

Disc: 2
1. Birthday
2. Yer Blues
3. Mother Nature's Son
4. Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey
5. Sexy Sadie
6. Helter Skelter
7. Long, Long, Long
8. Revolution 1
9. Honey Pie
10. Savoy Truffle
11. Cry Baby Cry
12. Revolution 9
13. Good Night

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The White Album: 40 Years On