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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 […]

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 […]