In January 1969, George Harrison was at tenterhooks. Life with the Beatles was becoming increasingly too much to bear. Harrison had spent the past few months producing an album by Apple recording artist Jackie Lomax, as well as hanging out with Bob Dylan and the Band, who had developed enormous respect for Harrison’s musicianship. It […]
Everything Fab Four: Ray Connolly’s “Being John Lennon”
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 […]