Beatles FAQ

 John Lennon was later embarrassed about the source of one of his contributions to the Abbey Road medley. It was based on a newspaper story he read early in 1967.

On 29 September, I967, John Lennon worked with George Martin and the Abbey Road sound engineers on a potential new Beatles single.

The Beatles famously brought LSD to public attention. Less well known is that George Harrison became rapidly disillusioned about the effects of the drug on young people exposed to it. His last LSD trip was in the late summer of 1967. In Anthology , George confirms Derek Taylor's earlier revelation it that was a trip of the legal type that  changed his perspective.  In August 1967 he made an impromptu personal visit to Haight Ashbury, San Francisco. This was the epicentre of the supposed cultural revolution but what greeted was sordid and threatening.  We were expecting Haight-Ashbury to be special, a creative and artistic place, filled with Beautiful People, but it was horrible - full of ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains .    Source With the crowd building, Taylor began to fear for their physical safety: Read full story - 3 minute free read on Medium

He blew his mind out in a car  He didn't notice that the lights had changed A crowd of people stood and stared. They'd seen his face before Nobody was really sure. If he was from the House of Lords  A Day in the Life (Lennon & McCartney) While John Lennon was composing his section(s) of A Day in The Life, he had a copy of   The Daily Mail of 17th January 1967 open at the piano. This directly inspired the opening line .  I read the news today, oh boy. About a lucky man...   Lennon had a particular interest in the news that day through a personal connection to one of the stories. This concerned the coroner’s report on the death of  an Irish socialite, Tara Browne.  The Beatles had all known the young Guinness heir socially. He was a friend of Paul's brother, Mick and very close to Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones. The barbed reference to his wealth and privilege ('luck man') hints at an ambivalent attitude on the writer's part. On December 18 1...

The Walrus and the Carpenter  -  illustrator  John Tenniel Sexual suggestion is present in several early Beatles songs ( Please, Please Me, Norwegian Wood, I Wanna be Your Man, From Me to You). They liked to insert rude jokes (the tit, tit,tit  backing vocal on Girl being a blatant example) while leaving room for  plausible deniability. Two lines in  I Am the Walrus,  the first new song written after the death of Brian Epstein   stepped across the unacknowledged line. Crabalocker fishwife,  pornographic priestess Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your  knickers  down No knickers It was the precise form of words rather than the lewd overtones that caused problems. The Beatles might have got away with  pornographic priestess  as word play but   knickers  was strictly  verboten .  The  BBC had Victorian standards of prudery  when it came to that item of clothing. The 'ban' consisted of pla...

On 29 September, I967, John Lennon worked with George Martin and the Abbey Road sound engineers on a potential new Beatles single.

 It’s a throwaway, a piece of garbage...from a Kellogg’s cereal commercial. I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing and it came over ...{ i n this } song .  During his Weybridge years, John Lennon was a British version of Benjamin Braddock in  The Graduate  (1967). Though extraordinarily privileged in material terms he felt alienated: a rich, successful young man angry at the suburban world he found himself in. This anger was largely expressed through petty acts of passive aggression against those surrounding him.   In the conventional Beatles narrative, John Lennon was the wild man, with an artistic bent and a taste for the avant garde.  Paul, in contrast, was the son-in-law choice: cute, sensible and with the common touch.  In reality, the roles were reversed. McCartney spent his Beatle downtime careering around  Swinging London in his Mini Cooper, the pop world's Toad of Toad Hall. He was a fixture of the hip c...

Many of the best Beatles songs start and/or finish with a bang: the opening chord or A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, for example. The opening of A DAY IN THE LIFE is unusually muted in this respect, perhaps indicating shift into more subtle musical territory.  Where A DAY IN THE LIFE delivers its knockout blow is in its finale. Originally recorded as a modest  hummed  E Major vocal chord, it evolved into what Jonathan Gould describes as:  "a forty-second meditation on finality that leaves each member of the audience listening with a new kind of attention and awareness to the sound of nothing at all". [66] ByTom Swain www.tomswain.com CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11750716 This was achieved using absurdly primitive technology in today's term. Lennon, McCartney, Evans and Martin played the chord on three pianos. Each was then multi-tracked four times. For the final chord of  A DAY IN THE LIFE  Lennon had asked George Martin for a  'a ...

'Verse 1' consists of  the chorus from SPLHCB Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band   opens with the title track that establishes the concept (a reunion concert for the eponymous group). Crowd noise blends the sound of orchestral   musicians tuning-up to create the illusion of a live performance.  The song climaxes with the MC (McCartney) introducing 'the one and only Billy Shears' and the single chorus builds to a crescendo. Concept Arguably, the band reunion concept begins to fade at this point. Later Lennon would dismissively describe the album as 'a bunch of mainly Paul's songs'. This may be harsh but it was apparent during recording that the concept was not really sustained.  The Beatles road manager, Neil Aspinall, pointed  out that the fictional band appeared to disappear after the opening track. He suggested that listener needed to be reminded of the live performance on side two. The result was the penultimate track  " Sgt. Pepper's L...

Photo by  Fleur  on  Unsplash In March 1967 John and Paul were under pressure to produce the final tracks for Sergeant Pepper. They decided to have what would now be called a brainstorming session at John's house. According to Hunter Davies, this was a bewilderingly casual event in which they spent much of the time flicking through magazines. From time to time they would sing out phrases or pick out bits of tunes at the piano. Ian Macdonald speculates that there was some method at work in that 'both writers 'found inspiration in moments where their conscious minds had fallen into abeyance.' Whatever the strategy, it worked.  By the end of the day McCartney had a new song, 'The Fool on the Hill'. Lennon, meanwhile, plugged away at the chords to a tune with the working title Badfinger Boogie.  This reflection on on a minor injury would eventually became better known as 'With a Little Help From My Friends'

Which song did The Beatles sing on the first worldwide satellite broadcast? How many records have the Beatles sold? 

There are 87 people and props on the cover of Sergeant Pepper

John Lennon never showed much affection for The Beatles most celebrated album. Was this because the  Sergeant Pepper concept was Paul's?  Not according to what John says in this interview, recorded in 1971, at the height of his feud with his former song-writing partner: