A Hard Day’s Night is a landmark album for the Fab Four. Ostensibly it was their first “soundtrack album”, featuring seven songs from their debut film of the same name (or eight, depending on how you look at it). More importantly, it was the first Beatles album that consisted entirely of original songs from the…
Help! kicks off a period of unparalleled creativity, innovation, songwriting and musicianship in The Beatles’s history. The dark, folksy yearnings of the previous (and wholly underrated) Beatles For Sale lead to more experimentation with Dylanesque folk, country, and balladeering, while not sacrificing the pure pop craftsmanship that has earmarked much of The Beatles sound up to this point. 1965 was in…
The five Beatle movies are not only essential threads in the entire Fab Four tapestry, they hold a deep personal connection to me and my experience with the band. Having been born in 1971, I wasn’t even alive until nearly a year after my favorite Liverpudlians had disbanded. Therefore the concept of “The Beatles” during…
(All photos courtesy of the lovely Boots and her amazing skills, considering we were all the way back in Row T and she wasn’t using any flash…) It’s not exactly a groundbreaking revelation that, as a near-lifelong Beatles fan, I’m sick to death of Beatles tribute bands. I’m explicitly referring to the Wigs-n-Costumes bands in…
Rating: Are you kidding me? I don’t think you have really lived until you’ve watched the Bee Gees engage in a disco kung-fu battle against poorly choreographed nurses while Steve Martin, gyrating in the corner and performing a rather freakish Peter Lorre impression, dodges blows from a silver cane swung by Peter Frampton. But let’s not get ahead…
I like being born into the last generation that was able to appreciate vinyl LPs in a non-retro, non-ironic manner. I got my first CD player in 1988 and that was just the beginning of the end of vinyl for me (and for vinyl as a whole, which gave up the ghost to CDs soon…
That’s a rather somber, slightly chilly album cover, isn’t it? You can’t blame the band though… the album came out at the tail end of 1964, THE hallmark year of Beatlemania. They broke huge in America after their legendary Ed Sullivan appearances, toured the world, filmed a classic motion picture along with a host of…