With his recent book Being Elvis: A Lonely Life, veteran British journalist Ray Connolly offered a rare glimpse behind the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s dizzying highs and soul-crushing lows. His latest work, entitled Being John Lennon: A Restless Life, affords the Beatles legend with similar treatment, reminding us about the powerful, always wavering spirit […]
Everything Fab Four: Meet “The Beatles” on the Jersey Shore!
Released in November 1968, The Beatles (popularized as The White Album) remains the most complex, most beguiling of the Fab Four’s masterworks. Where Revolver is pop music’s reigning tour-de-force and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is its multicolored, phantasmagoric cousin, The White Album exists as a strange admixture of beauty and terror, a work of portraiture […]
Everything Fab Four: To Remix or Not to Remix?—That Is the Question
In May 2017, Apple released a remixed version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to mostly critical acclaim. While a slew of audiophiles adored the expanded soundscape, die-hards took issue with any suggestion that twenty-first-century hands might trifle with the Beatles’ masterpieces. After all, you can’t improve on the Mona Lisa, right? Well, it turns […]
Everything Fab Four: “Good Vibrations” and the Beatles
The Beatles’ final American tour in the summer of 1966 was a harrowing experience, to say the least. Having begun under the cloud of John Lennon’s widely-criticized remark about the band’s popularity relative to Jesus Christ, things had gone from bad to worse, culminating in a spate of staged Beatles record burnings and, later, their […]
Everything Fab Four: Teaching the Beatles
In rock ‘n’ roll’s nascent years—when Bill Haley was giddily rocking around the clock and later, as the Who’s Roger Daltrey screamed “hope I die before I get old!”—the notion that popular music had any lasting cultural value was almost uniformly dismissed. Fast forward seven decades, and college courses on Popular Music have become the […]