As compilations of Paul McCartney’s work go, Wings Greatest, released in November 1978, is pretty strange. Arguably, it doesn’t even include the totality of McCartney and Wings’ greatest hits at the time, omitting the number-one 1975 single “Listen to What the Man Said,” as well as a trio of top-10 hits in Band on the […]
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Everything Fab Four: Paul McCartney’s “Thrillington”
Last month saw the reissue of Thrillington, arguably one of the strangest episodes in Paul McCartney’s musical corpus. The Thrillington album, a collection of 11 instrumental cover versions of the original songs from McCartney’s RamLP, offers a whimsical, even ephemeral turn on the former Beatle’s gritty, homespun sophomore solo effort. At this relatively late date—nearly […]
Everything Fab Four: The Beatles As “Plagiarists Extraordinaires”
The evidence of the Beatles’ musical borrowings was hidden in plain sight. There may be no more influential—and, at times, vexed—musical relationship than the Beatles’ artistic debt to Chuck Berry, who recently passed away at age 90. As John Lennon remarked way back in 1972 as he introduced the legendary guitarist on the Mike Douglas […]
50 Years of Beatles: The Fab Four’s Historic High-Five
Penn State Laureate Kenneth Womack’s essay series, “50 Years of Beatles,” continues with a look at the week the Fab Four occupied the top five chart positions in America. As popular music’s most resounding commercial success, the Beatles havesold more than 2.3 billion albums, while earning six diamond, 24 multi-platinum, 39 platinum and 45 gold albums in […]
From the Penn State Laureate: Remembering the Restaurant at the End of the World
In April 2009, Congress designated Sept. 11 as Patriot Day and as a National Day of Service and Remembrance. And while most Americans have little difficulty recalling precisely where they were and what they were doing on that terrible morning in 2001, the fate of the restaurateurs in the Windows on the World complex atop […]