BeatleTracks Band: The Beatles: Ultimate Album-by-Album Guide
Once again blogsters, the Rolling Stone Magazine has published a Special Edition issue ( August 2011)dedicated to The Beatles. this Special Issue is a compendium of all the Beatles’ original UK LPs with comments, critiques and some very cool trivia that your humble correspondent will share with you. Let’s see what was so “special” about it:
There is alot to like in this issue. in truth however, there isn’t a lot that’s all that new or revelatory either. What I liked about it were the short essays/short stories by a number of special guests such as Steve Van Sandt and Graham Nash. It does walk the reader through the history of the Beatles UK LPs and intererstingly has a section at the end of the issue dealing with all the non-LP singles. One of the coolest aspects of this issue is the very last page: it features a whole list of stats concerning the Beatles sales, chart positioning and such. We’re also treated to some extremely rare photos that even I haven’t seen before. all in all, it’s fun and enjoyable to read through, just don’t expect any new and shocking revelations. here now, a few of my favorite passages from the body of the text: 1) Reviewing “Money” from “With The Beatles:” “Playing multiple live sets night after night, the Beatles developed a knack for personalizing and overhauling other artist’s hits. Harrison remembered encounering Barret Strong’s original while browsing in manager Brian Epstein’s NEMS record store; the band gave it a Merseybeat spin and added it to the live show. The third Motown cover on this album, the song has a lock-step rhythm, providing the perfect support for Lennon’s delightfully loose lead vocal – as well as McCartney’s near delirious upper-register harmony.” 2) “A Completely new Thing” by Steven Van Zandt: . . . . . “Then we all saw them on The Ed Sullivan show. they were original-looking and – sounding, intelligent young kids, well versed. But what we were mostly responding to was the fact that it was a band, which was a completely new thing to my generation. Before the Beatles, there was no such thing as a rock & roll band.” *Your correspondent found this particular quote fascinating. consider that the Beach Boys were already out and had some hits. But other than them, there really weren’t “bands” as such running around. It was all about Pat Boone, Fabian, Bobby Rydel and other solo singers at the time. It took The Beatles to hammer the “band” concept home to kids like Van Zandt. Vincent Furnier (aka Alice Cooper) was just one more kid (of thousands) who watched the Beatles spectacle on The Ed Sullivan show and decided then and there; that’s what they all wanted to do – be in a band.3) “A Hard Day’s Night” Review: “By the beginning of 1964, ‘I want to Hold your Hand’ and ‘She loves You’ were mammoth international hits, and Beatlemania was an out of control missle. Says George Harrison in The Beatles Anthology -’In 1964, we seemed to fit a week into every day.’ The Beatles weren’t just musical stars – they were telegenic and willing to do whatever it took to promote themselves. The logical next step was to do what Elvis Presley had done years earlier, and make a movie – and with a movie, of course, there would be a soundtrack.” 4) “Garage Band Pop” by Stephen Malkmus: . . . . . . . ”There’s alot of group singing on A Hard Day’s Night (LP), which makes the vocals really powerful. later, their sound became more solo voices with backing vocals, not singing all together at once. The Beatles were a vocal group first and foremost, and pop is about vocals in the end – and they were a pop band, even if they were defining what a pop band could be in a rock & roll context.” 
5) Reviewing the song “HELP!” : “Never has such a brilliant batch of songs emanated from such a scattershot movie. The working title of the Richard Lester -directed movie was eight Arms to Hold you, but after it was changed, Lennon wrote this song in his new home in Weybridge, England. ’I was crying out for help,’ Lennon told Playboy in 1980 about this frenetically poppy ode to fear and alienation. ‘I was singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was.’ “ 6) Reviewing the song “Yesterday:” “McCartney spent nearly two years with this melody rattling around in his head until it finally snapped into place during a trip to Portugal in may, 1965. Weeks later, he entered the studio without the rest of the band and cut the song in just two takes. later that day, George Martin dubbed in a string quartet. in 2001, McCartney revealed to Rolling Stone that he resents the fact that Yesterday gets credited to Lennon & McCartney, when Lennon played no role in the creation of the song.” 7) “When anything Was Possible” by Wayne Coyne: “I can’t imagine what my life would be without the Beatles. . . . . you can’t underestimate how druggy and original and mind-blowing “Tomorrow never Knows” is. if a new group did that today, you’d say, ‘F***, that’s amazing!! ‘ to think that it was the Beatles, and it was 1966 -something like that is so timelessly wicked, it’s just uncanny.” 8) General text review of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP: “After the 1966 Tour, the Beatles went on hiatus, for the first and last time of their career. on November 24th, the band members reconvened at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in London. in the months since their final concert, they had in fact considered disbanding, but ultimately they were excited by the creative opportunities that studio time now afforded them. John Lennon had written a song during the break, “Strawberry Fields forever,” which was full of odd, disjointed lyrical and structural associations, and it grabbed all of the band instantly – it was a new direction. The Beatles worked on it for weeks – which they had never done before – and in the end, they created something haunting and abstract, as well as the single greatest leap forward in popular music history.”
9) Review of “A Day in The Life:” “Sgt. Pepper’s epic closing song features some of Martin’s most awe-inspiring studio sculpture – those dizzy orchestral crescendos, that endlessly reverberating final chord. It’s arguably the greatest song the Lennon/McCartney team truly wrote together. they describe morning routines that might as well be taking place on separate planets: Lennon drowns in spaced-out dread as he pages listlessly through a newspaper, McCartney rolls out of bed and hops on a bus wearing an audible grin. That contrast captures the essence of their creative partnership – why it was so special, and why it couldn’t last.” Cool Trivia: regarding “Cry Baby Cry” from the White Album, Lennon apparently began this recording borrowing from a nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” It was at this session that engineer Geoff Emerick quit due to the tension and arguing going on. Finally, Lennon cribbed the key lyric of this tune from a TV add no less that went like this, “Cry, baby cry, make your mother buy.” Beatles by the Numbers: A) LP with most weeks on the Charts: 1) Sgt. Pepper (175 weeks!!!) 2) White Album (155 weeks!) 
Most Guest Musicians: 85 on Magical Mystery TourC) LP that spent the most weeks at #1: 15 -Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band *that’s in the US; it spent 22 weeks at #1 in the UK! nearly half the year. D) Total Record Sales as of 2004: 1.3 BILLIONThere was much more to this issue but you get the idea. It’s a fun compendium. Considering the vast archives that the Rolling Stone magazine has including pivotal interviews, this special issue could have been even more fascinating. But as it is, it’s great fun. by John Haberstroh (Bassist for BeatleTracks) find us and more great blogs at beatletracksband.com