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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 […]

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 […]

As the Beatles whiled away the summer of 1968 recording The White Album, they briefly interrupted the proceedings to record their landmark single “Hey Jude” b/w “Revolution.” When it was released in August, the single was a watershed moment in many respects. In addition to being the first 45-RPM release by Apple Records—with its familiar […]

For many readers, the most ambitious literary project of the past few decades has been J.K. Rowling’s bestselling Harry Potter books. I’m here to tell you that they’re wrong. For my money, the most daring project in letters has been, hands down, Jude Southerland Kessler’s John Lennon Series. A painstaking effort to present Lennon’s life […]

The most notorious song during the Beatles’ sprawling sessions associated with The White Album was, bar none, the tension-riddled recording of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” The song would require some 42 hours to record, with Paul McCartney leading his bandmates through numerous takes of the composition in a host of different styles. The elaborate recording sessions for […]