Girls dancing to The Beatles

From episode four of The Beatles Anthology

Filed under: girls

Ringo for president

My brilliant friend Julien Devereux responds to the “Who is Paul McCartney?” thing.

Another great response came from @diss1:

Who is Paul McCartney? why, only the guy who wrote “Temporary Secretary”!

This week’s spirit animal. (Pinched from this clip of George Harrison: Living In The Material World.)

While My Guitar Gently Beeps - The Beatles - Rock Band - NYTimes.com

I took this snapshot of a NYTimes pullquote a few years ago. Here’s Paul McCartney on Rock Band, emulating his heroes, and why The Beatles started writing their own tunes:

“Miming was always fun. When I was growing up, there was always, on TV, people who mimed to records. It was a thing people did. I always admired the way they had to learn every little nuance.” McCartney’s own musical beginnings weren’t too different from picking up Rock Band and pretending to be a star, he pointed out. “I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did.” The group might have kept going that way, he said, except that they’d find themselves backstage, “and we’d hear our complete set being played by the band before us.” That’s the reason, he said, he and Lennon started writing their own songs. “It’s grown to something so big, but it really just started as a way to avoid the other bands being able to play our set.”

I have vivid memories of making a fake guitar out of cardboard and a yardstick and playing along to Genesis records when I was a kid…and it’s funny, but I consider that part of learning to play the guitar! I mean, when you want to play an instrument so bad that you’ll make a fake one and pretend to play it…that’s when you know you’re on to something. (I did the same thing for drums with gallon tubs of ice cream and wooden spoons…)

John Lennon on being accused of “ripping off” black music:

…we loved the music and wanted to spread it in any way we could. in the ’50s there were few people listening to blues - R + B - rock and roll, in America as well as Britain. People like - Eric Burdons Animals - Micks Stones - and us drank ate and slept the music, and also recorded it, many kids were turned on to black music by us.

It wasnt a rip off.
it was a love in,

Reminds me of Stravinsky’s quote: “You ‘respect,’ but I love.”

Photo of The Beatles composing in the George V Hotel, Paris, January 1964, taken by Harry Benson. Benson was recruited to follow the then relatively unknown Beatles on tour, and ended up taking a ton of iconic photos of the boys. The photo is actually the cover of Benson’s book of Beatles’ photographs, Once there was a way…

minorjive:

I love how on Tumblr I keep seeing Beatles photos that I’ve never seen before.

Great photo. But where the fuck is the attribution? Who took it? Where are they? I went to wickedcurling’s site, but all I found were tags and a bunch of half-naked women, which, come to think of it, describes most of my failed attempts to track down sources on Tumblr.

***UPDATE: Many thanks to harharhar, who after my attribution rant tracked down the photographer with TinEye.com. Then, with a little bit of Googling, I found the photo on Benson’s website.