V-J Day

Brow Beat is following the Beatles in “real time,” 50 years later, from their first chart-topper to their final rooftop concert. In our latest weekly installment, we check in with the group as they release their first No. 1 record, “ Please Please Me.”

Slate continues its Blogging The Beatles series with a post about Vee-Jay records, a black label that brought them to America:

Vee-Jay didn’t have much early success with the Beatles. Upon the initial release of “Please Please Me” in early 1963, the label sold only 5,650 copies. There may have been something to Capitol’s worries after all: Many of the Beatles’ subsequent singles would have similarly disappointing debuts on other independent labels. But these U.S. labels weren’t yet pushing the Beatles records very hard. The Beatles’ debut American single was such a small concern to Vee-Jay that they neglected to even notice that their packaging called them “The Beattles.” When Vee-Jay put out “From Me to You” in May, and DJs didn’t bother to play it, Capitol exec Dave Dexter declared the Beatles “stone-cold dead in the U.S. marketplace.”

Browbeat Beatles du Jour

It's never been a superslice of mine, I actually prefer the b-side Thank You Girl, but From Me to You was apparently the first of their songs to show they could write to order:

“From Me to You” demonstrates The Beatles’ pop professionalism, only the functionality of McCartney’s bass part betraying that less than a week had elapsed between writing and recording it. Echoing the wit they were displaying in their TV and radio interviews, their deftness and adaptability in the studio was already far beyond the reach of their immediate competitors.

Previous Slate Beatles Brow Beat joints HERE.

Who just cut one?

Beatles Browbeat

 Today's Beatles Browbeat over at Slate is about John Lennon keeping his marriage and son Julian secret:

That evening, on Aug. 23, 1962, Lennon spent his wedding night playing with the Beatles in Chester.

From that point on Cynthia lived what she called an “undercover existence,” leaving her wedding band at home and staying away from the band’s shows. She was even forced to deny her last name. On the rare occasions when John was home, they made sure not to go out in public together.
This was made somewhat easier by the press’ ready compliance with their demands. Beatles biographer Bob Spitz points to the transcript of a fall 1963 interview conducted by Judith Simons of the Daily Express. Simons politely asks, “We still can’t mention your marriage, can we, John?” Asking was just a formality.

On a side note, Julian just turned 50. I've always preferred his songs over the bullshit hype of Sean. Also, Hey Jude was of course written about him:

Imagined dialogue: Julian Lennon, on the eve of his parent's divorce, sits through a new song from Uncle Paul:

Jesus Christ on a crutch, HOW LONG IS THIS THING? Oh excellent, he’s forgotten the rest of the words, he’s just singing na-na-na-nahhhh. Maybe that means he’ll end it. Wait, what? Mum, please, no, don’t join in, you’re drunk. Oh fuck me, now they’re all doing it! I’m going to throw this fucking chair in a second. I am not clapping along. No. NO.

Previous Beatles Browbeat HERE

Please Please Me

Mark Lewisohn, writing in The Complete Beatles Chronicle, said: "There can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music."

Fifty years later, they're trying to recreate those magical 585 minutes:

On Monday 11th February 1963 the Beatles’ debut album was recorded in just one day. On the 50th anniversary of that 12-hour session at Abbey Road, leading artists attempt the same feat, in the same timescale, in the same studio. Acclaimed guitarist Graham Coxon, Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford from Squeeze and Manchester’s I Am Kloot join soul sensation Joss Stone, The Stereophonics, Gabrielle Aplin and Mick Hucknall for the event. The results are broadcast live in exact recording order and timing, as Abbey Road links up with Western House throughout the day on Radio 2, on Monday 11th February 2013. The event will then be broadcast on BBC Four at the end of that week in an hour long special.

Keep track in real time HERE.

Good luck to the fucker who's signed up for Twist and Shout:

The final track of the day Twist And Shout, held back to the end because of fears that John Lennon's already ailing voice could be wrecked if it was played any earlier, was captured in one take. Once it was recorded, the singers voice was so wrecked it was decided the record must stand. ''Trying for a second take, Lennon found he had nothing left and the session stopped there and then - but the atmosphere was still crackling,'' wrote Ian MacDonald, the late chronicler of Beatles recordings. ''Nothing of that intensity had ever been recorded in a British pop studio.''

Follow Slate's other "Beatles 50 years ago today" bits HERE.

Beatles Browbeat

Today's Beatles Browbeat over at Slate asks the question "what the hell WAS the Merseybeat?":

But what was that sound? If you asked the Beatles and their similarly-coiffed and -clad young friends at the time, they probably wouldn’t have had a good answer. These bands might have shared outfits and haircuts and an early affection for skiffle music, but was their sound really so distinctive? After all, much of their repertoire consisted of covers by rock, R&B, and doo-wop acts (their harmonies were often inspired by the latter). Lennon himself would later say, “We don’t think there is such a thing as the Mersey Sound. … It just so happened we came from Liverpool and they looked for the nearest river and named it.”

Previous Beatles in real-time 50 years ago stuff HERE.

Two of Us

Over 10 years ago I posted the 4-part article from Slate on the genius of the Lennon/McCartney relationship and the duality of genius.

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

Interesting bits, as per moi:

PART ONE:

Consider the moment Paul's brother Michael cited as an illustration of his "innate sense of diplomacy." It was in Paris in 1963. The Beatles' producer George Martin had arranged for them to record "She Loves You" in German. When the band missed their studio appointment, Martin came around to their suite at the George V hotel. They played slapstick and dived under the tables to avoid him.

"Are you coming to do it or not?" Martin said.

"No," Lennon said. George and Ringo echoed him. Paul said nothing, and they went back to eating.

"Then a bit later," Michael said, "Paul suddenly turned to John and said, 'Heh, you know that so and so line, what if we did it this way? John listened to what Paul said, thought a bit, and said, 'Yeah, that's it.' And they headed to the studio."

How would we chart the lines of authority for this decision? You could say Lennon made the call to refuse the recording session, then reversed himself—the band following him both times. But it was actually Paul who shaped the course the band took. His move to avoid a direct confrontation—to let John stay nominally in control—only underscores his operational strength.

Just as shorter people are more aware of height, Paul seems to have noticed the power dynamic more acutely. In a 1967 conversation about the band's Hamburg days, Lennon said that Paul had just recently told him about fights they had over who led the band. "I can't remember them," Lennon said. "It had stopped mattering by then. I wasn't so determined to be the leader at all costs." This is crucial. He had decided he didn't need to be the leader at all costs—itself a leadership claim. As the band rocketed to success, Lennon would increasingly acquiesce to Paul's ideas, much as a king in tumultuous times will defer to his counsel. But he never gave up the idea that he could, when he wanted, return straight to his throne.

PART TWO:

The favorite back-and-forth—who was the real genius in the pair?—looks to set one on a pedestal. But when we look closely at the back and forth, that debate's most cherished assumptions come into question—for example, that John charged ahead with the musical avant-garde while Paul nurtured traditional elements of melody and symmetry. It's true that John tended to stick his finger in the audience's eye while Paul usually preferred to coo to them. John's "Revolution 9" may be the oddest, most dissonant thing ever laid down on a big pop album and Paul's "Let It Be" and "Hey Jude" set a standard for sweetness and formal perfection.

But in some ways, it was Paul who forged the frontier and John who raced to catch and exceed him. From 1966 to '68, John lived a weird, sleepy, deeply interior life. He spent days on end dropping acid and watching television. Paul, meanwhile, threw himself into the London art world and its "happenings"—performances that blurred the boundary between artist and audience. In 1965, their music publisher Dick James gave them each a Brenell Mark 5 tape recorder. While John used his to record rough demos, Paul, immersed in the experimental work of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, jiggered the machine to disable the erase head and make tape loops of layered sounds. He brought these to the Beatles sessions to create the sound for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the famous "John" song. 

PART THREE:

But the joint credit also served as balm on the cuts of a constant, intense—though often joyful—competition. "Imagine two people pulling on a rope," said George Martin, "smiling at each other and pulling all the time with all their might. The tension between the two of them made for the bond." According to the conventional wisdom, their drift apart had begun.

But the increased distance sometimes functioned like the space between boxers in a ring—giving more room for a powerful shot. "He'd write 'Strawberry fields,' I'd go away and write 'Penny Lane,' " McCartney said. "If I'd write 'I'm Down,' he'd go away and write something similar to that. To compete with each other. But it was very friendly competition because we were both going to share in the rewards anyway."

Friendly, but with a sharp edge. "I would bring in a song and you could sort of see John stiffen a bit," Paul said. "Next day he'd bring in a song and I'd sort of stiffen. And it was like, 'Oh, you're going to do that, are you? Right. You wait till I come up with something tomorrow.'"

PART FOUR:

It's supremely odd how history would play the collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The result of one of the most intertwined partnerships in music history, their work would consistently be reduced to static roles. It's almost as if, faced with the bound pair, a culture obsessed with individualism found a way to cleave them in two.

Take, for example, the relentless focus on "John" songs versus "Paul" songs—or sections of songs, or single lines—as though that's the skeleton key to the Beatles' inner workings. Actually, this tradition has an impeccable source: John and Paul themselves. The irony is that the way they came to tell their own story, after their split, may speak less to the way they separated and more to the way that they remained connected.

Two years later, John would mix up his tenses when describing Paul in an even more revealing way. It was Thanksgiving night in 1974, when he joined Elton John at a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden.      Lennon wore a black silk shirt, a black jacket, and a necklace that dangled a flower over his chest. He had on his usual "granny" glasses with dark lenses. His thin, brown hair fell down past his shoulders. After storming through "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," Lennon came to the microphone to round out the set.

"I'd like to thank Elton and the boys for having me on tonight," he said. "We tried to think of a number to finish off with so I can get out of here and be sick, and we thought we'd do a number of an old, estranged fiance of mine, called Paul. This is one I never sang. It's an old Beatle number and we just about know it."

The song was "I Saw Her Standing There" [a "Paul" song.] Though he lived another six years, John Lennon never took the stage for a major show again. His strange words have a peculiar and lasting echo. By then, Paul and John had been the most famous exes in the world for four years. But somehow, they were still "fiances"—prospective spouses. As much as had passed, the energy between them was always in front of them—always, somehow, in the future.

It goes without saying: without one, there wouldn't have been the other. What a crazy, lucky thing that they met each other on that day back on July 6, 1957.

Two of Us, III

Yesterday I pointed out Slate's Part 1 of the discussion re: the collective genius of John and Paul; today's Part 2 brings up a point I've always thought to be more true than some magical, mystery explanation: sheer competition between young dudes:

But the joint credit also served as balm on the cuts of a constant, intense—though often joyful—competition. "Imagine two people pulling on a rope," said George Martin, "smiling at each other and pulling all the time with all their might. The tension between the two of them made for the bond." 

According to the conventional wisdom, their drift apart had begun. But the increased distance sometimes functioned like the space between boxers in a ring—giving more room for a powerful shot. "He'd write 'Strawberry fields,' I'd go away and write 'Penny Lane,' " McCartney said. "If I'd write 'I'm Down,' he'd go away and write something similar to that. To compete with each other. But it was very friendly competition because we were both going to share in the rewards anyway."

Friendly, but with a sharp edge. "I would bring in a song and you could sort of see John stiffen a bit," Paul said. "Next day he'd bring in a song and I'd sort of stiffen. And it was like, 'Oh, you're going to do that, are you? Right. You wait till I come up with something tomorrow.' "

Also, it's nice to see it acknowledged that despite being the "pussy, mawkish one," a myth I constantly seek to dispel, it was Paul who first dipped his toes into London's avant-garde scene of the day: 

The favorite back-and-forth—who was the real genius in the pair?—looks to set one on a pedestal. But when we look closely at the back and forth, that debate's most cherished assumptions come into question—for example, that John charged ahead with the musical avant-garde while Paul nurtured traditional elements of melody and symmetry.

But in some ways, it was Paul who forged the frontier and John who raced to catch and exceed him. From 1966 to '68, John lived a weird, sleepy, deeply interior life. He spent days on end dropping acid and watching television. Paul, meanwhile, threw himself into the London art world and its "happenings"—performances that blurred the boundary between artist and audience. In 1965, their music publisher Dick James gave them each a Brenell Mark 5 tape recorder. While John used his to record rough demos, Paul, immersed in the experimental work of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, jiggered the machine to disable the erase head and make tape loops of layered sounds. He brought these to the Beatles sessions to create the sound for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the famous "John" song.

In 1966, a far-out artist named Yoko Ono moved to London from New York City. Paul not only met her first; he had helped create the India Gallery where she and Lennon met. Though it took several years to ripen, Lennon eventually threw himself into the relationship—he literally asked people to consider them JohnandYoko. (Yoko made for the third person, following Pete Shotton and Paul McCartney, with whom he collapsed his name.)

 Xmastime back in August:

It's also of note that it was McCartney, who spent a lot of time before Revolver dicking around with tape loops he made from tapes of such avant-garde stuff as Stockhausen while Lennon laid on his couch getting fat in wedded suburban bliss, which led to the innovative, psychedelic hypersonic musical leap the album provided. Mythology will have you believe Lennon sat around coming up with weird, trippy stuff while McCartney whistled How Much for the Doggie in the Window? over and over.

Like Mickey Mantle, there is no moment of the Beatles' career that is not fascinating. It has everything.

John Lennon vs. Jesus, 50 Years Later

'Christianity will go,' he said. 'It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first-rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.'

On the 50th anniversary of its publication, Slate reminds us that while somehow John Lennon's "Jesus" comment has become part of pop culture lexicon, it wasn't even the worst thing they said in the interview:

Like an overplayed single that loses its punch, the “more popular than Jesus” line is a lot less shocking in 2016. But a return to the original series turns up several quotes that now read as seriously pungent. “Show business belongs to the Jews,” Cleaves quotes “The Beatles” collectively as saying, in a version of her reporting that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in July of 1966. “It’s part of the Jewish religion.”

Lennon also tells Cleave that he is considering sending his son Julian to a French lycée in London, but muses “I feel sorry for him, though. I couldn’t stand ugly people even when I was five. Lots of the ugly ones are foreign, aren’t they?” Ringo Starr, meanwhile, refers to the band as being so close they’re like “Siamese quads eating out of the same bowl.” He jokes of his wife, Maureen, that “I own her, of course.” She was 16 when they met—he was six years older—and “her parents signed her over to me when I married her.” Paul McCartney decries racism in America, “a lousy country where anyone who is black is made to seem a dirty nigger.” That line made it to the cover of Datebook, too, above Lennon’s Jesus quip.

Also funny: the KKK thinking Jesus would pick them over The Beatles.

Please Please Me

Starting today, Brow Beat will follow the Beatles every week in “real time,” 50 years later, from their first chart-topper to their final rooftop concert. We begin with the Fab Four’s first No. 1 hit, “Please Please Me,” recorded on Nov. 26, 1962.

 Last month I pointed out tat we should prepare for an 8-year onslaught re: 50-year anniversaries of everything The Beatles did, and today begins Brow Beat over at Slate, kicking things of with the great Please Please Me, which they recorded 50 years ago today and became their first #1 hit.

Everything you nauseatingly wanted to know about the song HERE.

My favorite thing about the song is in the final verse when John Lennon massively garbles the words, but the take is so exciting they say "fuck it" and leave it as is. Superslice!

Two of Us, II

Yesterday HERE I mentioned Slate's article on creative partnership, and today they're looking in-depth at the Lennon/McCartney example.

But no pair illustrates the fluidity of power—and the power of fluidity—better than John and Paul. At its worst, theirs was an alienating, enervating struggle. But at its best, the dynamic was playful and organic. 

Consider the moment Paul's brother Michael cited as an illustration of his "innate sense of diplomacy." It was in Paris in 1963. The Beatles' producer George Martin had arranged for them to record "She Loves You" in German. When the band missed their studio appointment, Martin came around to their suite at the George V hotel. They played slapstick and dived under the tables to avoid him.

"Are you coming to do it or not?" Martin said.

"No," Lennon said. George and Ringo echoed him. Paul said nothing, and they went back to eating.

"Then a bit later," Michael said, "Paul suddenly turned to John and said, 'Heh, you know that so and so line, what if we did it this way? John listened to what Paul said, thought a bit, and said, 'Yeah, that's it.'

And they headed to the studio."

How would we chart the lines of authority for this decision? You could say Lennon made the call to refuse the recording session, then reversed himself—the band following him both times. But it was actually Paul who shaped the course the band took. His move to avoid a direct confrontation—to let John stay nominally in control—only underscores his operational strength.

Just as shorter people are more aware of height, Paul seems to have noticed the power dynamic more acutely. In a 1967 conversation about the band's Hamburg days, Lennon said that Paul had just recently told him about fights they had over who led the band. "I can't remember them," Lennon said. "It had stopped mattering by then. I wasn't so determined to be the leader at all costs." This is crucial. He had decided he didn't need to be the leader at all costs—itself a leadership claim. As the band rocketed to success, Lennon would increasingly acquiesce to Paul's ideas, much as a king in tumultuous times will defer to his counsel. But he never gave up the idea that he could, when he wanted, return straight to his throne.

Two of Us, IV

Yesterday Slate continued it's series on the Lennon/McCartney connection, discussing the inner-workings of a partnership that never   really went away.

It's supremely odd how history would play the collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The result of one of the most intertwined partnerships in music history, their work would consistently be reduced to static roles. It's almost as if, faced with the bound pair, a culture obsessed with individualism found a way to cleave them in two.

Take, for example, the relentless focus on "John" songs versus "Paul" songs—or sections of songs, or single lines—as though that's the skeleton key to the Beatles' inner workings.

Actually, this tradition has an impeccable source: John and Paul themselves. The irony is that the way they came to tell their own story, after their split, may speak less to the way they separated and more to the way that they remained connected.
Two years later, John would mix up his tenses when describing Paul in an even more revealing way. It was Thanksgiving night in 1974, when he joined Elton John at a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden.

Lennon wore a black silk shirt, a black jacket, and a necklace that dangled a flower over his chest. He had on his usual "granny" glasses with dark lenses. His thin, brown hair fell down past his shoulders. After storming through "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," Lennon came to the microphone to round out the set.

"I'd like to thank Elton and the boys for having me on tonight," he said. "We tried to think of a number to finish off with so I can get out of here and be sick, and we thought we'd do a number of an old, estranged fiance of mine, called Paul. This is one I never sang. It's an old Beatle number and we just about know it."

The song was "I Saw Her Standing There" [a "Paul" song.]

Though he lived another six years, John Lennon never took the stage for a major show again. His strange words have a peculiar and lasting echo. By then, Paul and John had been the most famous exes in the world for four years. But somehow, they were still "fiances"—prospective spouses. As much as had passed, the energy between them was always in front of them—always, somehow, in the future.