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All Things Must Beat. Share Anything Beatles!!

This should make everyone feel good about their choice of instruments...this young lady’s grandfather was a drummer, her father was a drummer, but no, she had to take up the bass...
9DA561A1-722F-43B6-BA9F-D82CD5557303.jpeg

...and recently made grandpa a great-grandpa.
 
While, yes, the Fabs were part of my life, probably changed my life, etc, etc, I can’t say I ever fetishized them like some of my contemporaries have. Still, I have this penchant for trivia, and that’s served me well for decades in record wholesale/retail and related side jobs. I’ve seen some stuff, did some things, and eventually ended up at the ultimate record store gig. Still, my unsurpassed day at work involved this guy(who, after being an occasional customer, actually asked us if he could play at our joint)...

Nothing like working and listening to him do soundcheck.
Ended up watching the performance standing next to(and chatting a bit with)this lady...
924A56B7-77D2-4B8A-9A9E-3D852E57E680.jpeg
...so, yeah, surreal doesn’t begin to cover it.
 
While, yes, the Fabs were part of my life, probably changed my life, etc, etc, I can’t say I ever fetishized them like some of my contemporaries have. Still, I have this penchant for trivia, and that’s served me well for decades in record wholesale/retail and related side jobs. I’ve seen some stuff, did some things, and eventually ended up at the ultimate record store gig. Still, my unsurpassed day at work involved this guy(who, after being an occasional customer, actually asked us if he could play at our joint)...

Nothing like working and listening to him do soundcheck.
Ended up watching the performance standing next to(and chatting a bit with)this lady...
View attachment 4033231
...so, yeah, surreal doesn’t begin to cover it.



Wow! Mich, that is just fantastic! Take it from one who admittedly idolized, though not fetishized, The Beatles. So many Starrs in the audience, too! Wonder if Tatia was there?

I've linked your post to the All Things Must Beat. Share Anything Beatles! Wiki page at the bottom of the Posts section.

Thanks for sharing.
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Wow! Mich, that is just fantastic! Take it from one who admittedly idolized, though not fetishized, The Beatles. So many Starrs in the audience, too! Wonder if Tatia was there?

I've linked your post to the All Things Must Beat. Share Anything Beatles! Wiki page at the bottom of the Posts section.

Thanks for sharing.
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I just saw Ringo, Barbara, a woman who I assumed to be her sister, and then of course Joe Walsh. What I was hoping for(but alas didn’t happen)was that, during the soundcheck(when he was wearing the Von Dutch T-shirt), the band ran through “Matchbox”, so you’d think Ringo would be getting up and doing a guest bit, but they never got to it. The event was promo for Memory Almost Full; he did something similar at a ballroom in NYC. We(the staff) had two days notice, and then it was announced to the public the night before. Those “instore” shows were a weekly happening(many are on Youtube), there was a permanent stage/PA, but his people brought in extra equipment overnight. Encountering notable movie/music people was pretty much a daily occurrence, just went with the territory. I helped Jimmy Page look for a jazz album once.
Later on, Macca played a pop-up show at a roadhouse out in the desert near me, a place that I’ve played at, as well as friends and aquaintences(well known and not-so-well known). I didn’t go that time, I already had my shot, and I knew it would be a mob scene, plus nothing could top hanging with Twiggy:D...


 
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Intended to con a gullible, uninformed public, all of that stuff was made up of older existing recordings that were repackaged and exploited. VJ only had rights to Please Please Me, their first UK album that Capitol passed on releasing in the US. They issued that(as Introducing...)actually a week before Meet The Beatles came out and then used various repeated songs reconfigured with other material, like the Ifield(a British country-flavored singer)and Four Seasons tracks, along with a rag-tag collection of interviews that featured percussion interjections by Hal Blaine. ...


I thought, at the time, that my "... Fabulous ..." covered VJ album was their original American release because it looked so cheap with the hand-drawn faces compared to the "Introducing..." cover. It wasn't until decades later that I learned which actually came first. Yes, the label on my "... Fabulous ..." covered LP says "Introducing..." on it. (sigh)

IntroducingtheBeatles.jpg beatles-songs-pictures-front.jpg
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... Capitol sued to stop all of it, and then issued the PPM album, in an altered form, as The Early Beatles. Meet... is an altered version of their second UK album, With The Beatles. ...


By the time "The Early Beatles" came out I'd already absorbed the "... Fabulous ..."/"Introducing ..." album and advised all gift givers to skip that one, as far as I was concerned. But, somehow, sometime, I got one and still have it. I've got two of most of their other American albums.
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... That green MGM album only featured six true Beatle related tracks (the rest being American session player filler). I don’t know what you might have expected, but those are historical recordings, even if the band was primarily backing Tony Sheridan. Their first professional studio experience, they did get a spotlight with the surfy instrumental, “Cry For A Shadow”(the only Lennon-Harrison composition, and the record that led to them being discovered by Brian Epstein), and “My Bonnie” does rock even though it was a showcase for Sheridan’s Elvis/Gene Vincent mimicry. The recordings were supervised by German MOR band leader Bert Kaempfert, who had a number of international easy listening hits of his own.


One listen and this naive teenager was not impressed with the Tony Sheridan album. Of course, I was expecting something like the "Meet ..." album. But, instead, it sounded to me more like a "Beach Party Movie" youth-sploitation soundtrack, which left me cold. My friends and I thought "My Bonnie" was the cheesiest thing we'd ever heard, next to "The Saints". Just sped up 'old folks music'! It drew the disdain we had previously reserved for folk and country music! (-sigh- Time has certainly tempered my appreciation for all forms of music as the local 'Bluegrass Jams' are now some of my favorite activities!)

My mom managed a greeting card/camera/record store and brought home anything with The Beatles name on it after I got hooked on the "... Hand" single and the "Meet ..." album. But she soon warned her customers that this album may not be what they expected and even used it as one of her very few demos in the store, since I didn't want it. She eventually brought it home, since she had paid for it, and I had it for decades, but can't find it now.
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I thought, at the time, that my "... Fabulous ..." covered VJ album was their original American release because it looked so cheap with the hand-drawn faces compared to the "Introducing..." cover. It wasn't until decades later that I learned which actually came first. Yes, the label on my "... Fabulous ..." covered LP says "Introducing..." on it. (sigh)

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By the time "The Early Beatles" came out I'd already absorbed the "... Fabulous ..."/"Introducing ..." album and advised all gift givers to skip that one, as far as I was concerned. But, somehow, sometime, I got one and still have it. I've got two of most of their other American albums.
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One listen and this naive teenager was not impressed with the Tony Sheridan album. Of course, I was expecting something like the "Meet ..." album. But, instead, it sounded to me more like a "Beach Party Movie" youth-sploitation soundtrack, which left me cold. My friends and I thought "My Bonnie" was the cheesiest thing we'd ever heard, next to "The Saints". Just sped up 'old folks music'! It drew the disdain we had previously reserved for folk and country music! (-sigh- Time has certainly tempered my appreciation for all forms of music as the local 'Bluegrass Jams' are now some of my favorite activities!)

My mom managed a greeting card/camera/record store and brought home anything with The Beatles name on it after I got hooked on the "... Hand" single and the "Meet ..." album. But she soon warned her customers that this album may not be what they expected and even used it as one of her very few demos in the store, since I didn't want it. She eventually brought it home, since she had paid for it, and I had it for decades, but can't find it now.
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I came to all that German/first album stuff later on; I had read that earliest bio by Hunter Davis, so I had historical perspective. Plus I understood that all that early 60’s so-called rock’n’roll was cheesy; I mean, Elvis doing “Wooden Heart”? Much worse than “My Bonnie”. That kind of Ventures/Beach Boys stuff did appeal to me, and I thought it was amusing later on that they did the tune as a rocker. As a tyke, I just didn’t get what the deal was with “Elvis” as he then was well into all that movie crap. Of course my perspective changed later when I learned more and heard the Sun Records sides. When the Beatles hit, my parents got me Meet... since it was the ‘new thing’; I liked it OK, but it didn’t really effect me that much, I just went back to my Man From UNCLE stuff. I think I was more taken with the Byrds when I got a taste of them a year later, but I didn’t really listen to all that much ‘teen beat’ radio at the time. Eventually I did come around to all of it, just when things were really getting interesting...the Yardbirds with “Over Under” and “Happenings” were impressive.
 
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I came to all that German/first album stuff later on; I had read that earliest bio by Hunter Davis, so I had historical perspective. Plus I understood that all that early 60’s so-called rock’n’roll was cheesy; I mean, Elvis doing “Wooden Heart”? Much worse than “My Bonnie”. That kind of Ventures/Beach Boys stuff did appeal to me, and I thought it was amusing later on that they did the tune as a rocker. As a tyke, I just didn’t get what the deal was with “Elvis” as he then was well into all that movie crap. Of course my perspective changed later when I learned more and heard the Sun Records sides. When the Beatles hit, my parents got me Meet... since it was the ‘new thing’; I liked it OK, but it didn’t really effect me that much, I just went back to my Man From UNCLE stuff. I think I was more taken with the Byrds when I got a taste of them a year later, but I didn’t really listen to all that much ‘teen beat’ radio at the time. Eventually I did come around to all of it, just when things were really getting interesting...the Yardbirds with “Over Under” and “Happenings” were impressive.


I had been occasionally picking out tunes on an cheapo acoustic guitar (missing the G string) in the early '60s. Started out of boredom, but grew into a curiosity, then an obsession. I liked some of Elvis' rock songs but did not understand the life-sized poster of him in the gold lamé suit my slightly older female cousin had in her room! (I did later.) I learned some folk and country tunes, but they got boring fast. My first guitar friend and I played Ventures and surf instrumentals (I got an electric by then) 'cause we were too shy to sing in front of each other, though that changed when we met a drummer. I picked out TV themes, too, like Bonanza, Wild, Wild West, etc. But "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" seemed like nothing I'd ever heard before! Then the "Meet..." album just excited me musically no end!
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Girls found Elvis sexy. Scotty Moore told a story about Elvis wearing thin gabardine pants and no underwear. The girls would crowd the front of the stage and he would swing back and forth, driving them crazy. Their parents hated it.

When I started playing in bands in the early 60's, for most of us, it was about playing the hits that were on the radio. There wasn't any snootiness about the complexity of the songs or different styles. We were entertainers trying to impress the girls clamoring at the front of the stage. When the British Invasion hit, misic became more important. Kids wanted to hear all those songs live. When a new Beatles album was released, the band had to learn it quickly. Everyone wanted to hear those songs. They also wanted to get caught up in the emotion of the times. If you had a guitar, you were cool. Yes, girls did pretend that we were like the Beatles and chased us while screaming. They wanted to live a part of what they saw on TV and the teen magazines.
 
Agreed. They capture the spirit on this one too. I bet Paul is proud, Lennon would be too.




Don't make the common mistake of thinking this is an original Beatles song. It's not. Paul, being the quintessential vocal harmonizer, may appreciate this vocal arrangement, since it was a strictly solo vocal for him when The Beatles covered it in 1963. John just probably thought of it as more of that "old granny music" that Paul, and certain audiences, liked.

It was written in 1950 by Meredith Wilson and covered by many, not the least of which was a pre-Partridge Family Shirley Jones in the 1962 movie The Music Man, after Barbara Cook sang it on Broadway in the 1957 musical stage play, and Anita Bryant had a Top 40 hit with it in 1959.

Aside from the jaunty rhythm, I think it's George's absolutely stellar guitar treatment that makes this "old standard cover" such a memorable Beatles rendition. That's what grabbed me when I was looking for new rock & roll, and to learn some hot guitar licks, from these new guys. It was a very fun tune to try to pick out!
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While, yes, the Fabs were part of my life, probably changed my life, etc, etc, I can’t say I ever fetishized them like some of my contemporaries have. Still, I have this penchant for trivia, and that’s served me well for decades in record wholesale/retail and related side jobs. I’ve seen some stuff, did some things, and eventually ended up at the ultimate record store gig. Still, my unsurpassed day at work involved this guy(who, after being an occasional customer, actually asked us if he could play at our joint)...

Nothing like working and listening to him do soundcheck.
Ended up watching the performance standing next to(and chatting a bit with)this lady...
View attachment 4033231
...so, yeah, surreal doesn’t begin to cover it.

I can only imagine how amazing this was to witness.
Thanks for sharing!
 
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