"A Quiet Competition to Define the Image of the Country for Over Half a Century"

"The arc of the Beatles' evolution from entertainers to counterculture leaders can be traced through their interactions with Elizabeth II. In November 1963, they were nice boys in smart suits playing a Royal Command Performance alongside other 'variety' acts, offering just a hint of cheek (Lennon famously urging the posh set to rattle their jewelry in lieu of clapping). A few years later, the Beatles trooped to Buckingham Palace to receive MBES (it stands for Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) as acknowledgment for their sales impact internationally, and, according to Lennon, smoked a joint in the lavatory to steady their nerves. Then, in November 1969, Lennon returned the award in protest against British interference in the Nigeria-Biafra war, the country's support for America in Vietnam, and, in a flippant final flourish, the sliding chart position of his heroin-inspired solo single 'Cold Turkey.'"

Simon Reynolds at Pitchfork discusses the "disgust and fascination with the monarchy became a British rock tradition over the course of Queen Elizabeth II's reign."

"The People Who Pushed Things Forward"

"That interwoven community included Brian Epstein (who brought the world the Beatles), Kit Lambert (who co-managed the Who), Simon Napier-Bell (the Yardbirds, and a young Marc Bolan), Robert Stigwood (Cream, the Bee Gees), Billy Gaff (Rod Stewart), Ken Pitt (David Bowie), Barry Krost (Cat Stevens), as well as Tony Stratton-Smith (who formed the visionary label Charisma for bands like Genesis). In fact, it was a gay man, Larry Parnes, who svengali-d Britain's very first rockers, from Tommy Steele to Billy Fury to Marty Wilde."

Jim Farber at The Guardian talks with Darryl W. Bullock about Bullock's new book, The Velvet Mafia: the Gay Men who Ran the Swinging Sixties.

The First Tycoon of Teen

"Spector cracked the top 20 in 1962 with the Crystals' 'There's No Other (Like My Baby)' and 'Uptown' but vaulted to No. 1 with the ode to teen outlawry 'He's a Rebel'—recorded with a then-background singer, Darlene Love of the Blossoms, on lead vocals, but released under the Crystals' name. By the time 'He's a Rebel' hit the apex, Spector had bought out Sill's interest in Philles and established his signature production sound—immense, percussive, densely orchestrated (usually by arranger Jack Nitzsche) and over-the-top." 

Chris Morris at Variety writes an obituary of Phil Spector.

And Chris Willman wrestles with Spector's legacy.

Untogether

"If John Lennon and Paul McCartney had never met at a school fete in July 1957, the history of British music would undoubtedly have been entirely different. But it is not hyperbolic to suggest that the history of Britain would have been an altered one, too; a more boring and less colourful one, devoid of the wit, gusto and, of course, unforgettable songs that the Beatles produced. Which is why Yesterday ultimately got it wrong, suggesting that the country would only have been slightly altered by their absence. We would all have been poorer for it."

Alexander Larman at The Critic marks the fiftieth anniversary of the break-up of the Beatles.

I Have Always Thought in the Back of My Mind

"From 1973 onwards his musical director was John Altman, who said: 'He really was a very talented guy. When you heard his songs for the Rutles, you'd think "This is as good as the Beatles." George Harrison became a huge fan and was always in the studio when we were recording.' He famously said he that he liked The Rutles better than he did the Beatles.'"

Chris Welch at The Guardian writes an obituary for Neil Innes.

"'It's Anti-War, and It'll Have a Big Effect on the War'"

"It was obvious that someone at Columbia felt Head had box office potential, because roughly a month out from the premiere, large, mysterious ads began appearing in the pages of the Voice. A thick-lipped young man sporting a dark comb-over and glasses gazes at the reader; in the first two ads to run, the only copy acts as a textual dopplegänger to the half-tone image. Other movies advertised on those same pages give a sense of the era's cultural tumult: Andy Warhol's Flesh, Jane Fonda exposing much of her own skin in Barbarella, Godard's visceral Weekend, Steve McQueen's careening Mustang in Bullitt arriving for an engagement at Radio City Music Hall."

R. C. Baker at The Village Voice looks back at the Monkees' movie, upon its fiftieth anniversary.

"The Zeitgeist of That Year"

"The truth is that the music's air of unease was locked in from the start, and endured long after such grisly associations had faded into history. The White Album eventually became a touchstone for such talents as Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Smiths, Radiohead, Blur, and the US musician and producer Danger Mouse, all of whom drew on its sense of nothing ever being quite right. In 2004 the Scottish author Andrew O'Hagan wrote that the record had 'a social and psychological resonance that people are still conjuring with today', an observation that feels even truer 14 years on: its songs may have been quintessentially of their time, but what’s striking about being immersed in them again is how pointedly they speak to ours."

John Harris at The Guardian listens to The Beatles fifty years later.

"Sanctified People Got More Fire"

"A single thread ties most of rock 'n' roll’s pioneers together: From Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to Little Richard and James Brown, many of the founding giants of rock grew up in Pentecostal churches. Pentecostal services were dramatic affairs. Worshipers shouted and danced until they fell to the floor, then sprang back up, healed of what had ailed them or speaking in tongues. Behind the hellfire preaching and general pandemonium was hot music: pianos and drums, tambourines and triangles, saxophones and trumpets, all whipping the congregation into ecstasy. Skeptical journalists and respectable Christians alike scoffed at the miracle cures and snickered at the 'thinly veiled eroticism of the devotees,' but as one black Pentecostal told a curious anthropologist, 'A lot of folks talk about getting too emotional. I wouldn't give two cents for a religion that wouldn't make me move.'"

Paul W. Gleason at The Hedgehog Review reviews Randall J. Stephens's The Devil's Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll.

"The Song Stubbornly Stands on It Own"

"Once again, interpretation has its limits. Still, searching for the roots of syncopated baby-talk, even if ultimately fruitless, reveals a fascinating chain of appropriations and reappropriations across races and cultures. Nonsense can contain its own historical sense, though the history may always be incomplete.
"I can't help seeking that sense in nonsense."

Ben Zimmer at The Atlantic looks at The Beatles' "I Am the Walrus," upon the song's fiftieth anniversary.

All Fell Down

"Primal therapy was an offshoot of cultural movements that began coalescing in the 1960s and surfaced in the 1970s. 'There was also a belief that repressive strictures of society were holding people back. Hence a therapy that was to loosen the repression would somehow cure mental illness. So it fit perfectly,' John C. Norcross, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, tells Fox."

Jason Daley at Smithsonian writes about the death and life of Arthur Janov.

I Went into a Dream

"After John's reprise, the orchestra returns for an even greater swelling of sound. It was like something blowing up, a tremendous wreck, the explosion of a gun inside a car. And then, after all the chaos and destruction, what next? George Harrison had suggested a fade to humming. But it didn't work. Paul thought that the song needed firmer resolution. Three Steinway pianos and a harmonium were rolled into action, and at every keyboard the players were instructed to hit the single chord of E major simultaneously and hard, with the sustain foot pedal down, letting it carry as long as possible. There were nine takes. The tone is so big, so capacious and resonant because Martin and Emerick thought to put the recorder on half speed. It's the sound of peace. Instead of love being all you need, here it's music that gets you through all the days and nights."

Nicholas Dawidoff at The Atlantic listens to the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" fifty years later.

Ned Rorem discusses the Beatles in a January 1968 article from The New York Review of Books.

But Kyle Smith at National Review argues that Sgt. Pepper is "not even the finest Beatles album released in 1967."

And Geoff Edgers at The Washington Post visits Richard Goldstein, "the critic who panned 'Sgt. Pepper.'"

"One of the Most Fruitful Band/Producer Relationships in Rock History"

"Not that he wasn't already forward-thinking before meeting the Beatles. His New York Times obituary quotes a 2003 interview where Martin said that when he first joined EMI, 'the criterion by which recordings were judged was their faithfulness to the original. If you made a recording that was so good that you couldn't tell the difference between the recording and the actual performance, that was the acme. And I questioned that. I thought, O.K., we're all taking photographs of an existing event. But we don't have to make a photograph; we can paint. And that prompted me to experiment.'"

Spencer Kornhaber writes an appreciation of George Martin at The Atlantic.

"The Element of Tragedy and Failed Promise Is a Crucial Factor"

"Wilson provides the link between pop and the undisputed greatness of Tin Pan Alley songwriters like George Gershwin, whom he idolised. The miracle of Brian's melodic gifts, like those of Lennon and McCartney, even prompts comparisons with Mozart and Schubert. As Tom Petty puts it in the documentary, 'I don't know if he's a genius or not, but I know that that music is probably as good a music as you can make... as you can write.' The particular appeal of his genius lies in the fact that the Beach Boys were the very obverse of hip - the unlikeliness of these songs growing out of disposable surf pop - and in the singular naivety and ingenuousness of his personality."

In a 1995 Independent article, Barney Hoskyns ponders Brian Wilson.

"Lysergically Enhanced Parlour Music"

"Its heyday ran from the tail end of psychedelia to the birth of punk and it made great use of string quartets, woodwinds, and summer-into-autumn melancholy. While it never grabbed the pop world as a chart-conquering genre, its velvety touch was never that far away. This was a sound informed by Paul McCartney's contributions to The White Album, the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, Scott Walker's weighty chamber pop, and a dash of Crosby, Stills & Nash harmony. Just add a harpsichord, a pot of tea, a ginger cat on the windowsill, and you've got the picture."


In a 2007 Guardian article, Bob Stanley praises 1960s baroque pop.

"A Half-Accidental Work of Surrealist Genius"

"Even more famous is the breakout scene set to 'Can't Buy Me Love,' when the four mop-tops flee from the TV studio where they're scheduled to perform and cavort in an empty athletic field that's obviously not in the same place. Lester shot them coming down a staircase from below, jumping off a construction ladder (in forward motion and in reverse), switched from normal speed to fast motion and back again, and included a 26-second helicopter shot. (It's the same helicopter the Beatles use to flee their fans in the final scene; at this budget level, if you hired one of those things for a day, you were damn well gonna use it.) Although it's sometimes claimed that this scene is edited to the beat of the song, the opposite is true: The cuts bear no relationship to the song’s rhythms and the images make no attempt to illustrate the lyric, a crucial lesson that MTV videomakers took years to catch up with."


Andrew O'Hehir in Salon watches the fiftieth-anniversary rerelease of A Hard Day's Night.

"The Beatles Were Thugs Who Were Put Across as Nice Blokes, and the Rolling Stones Were Gentlemen Who Were Made into Thugs"

"While carefully allowing for mutual respect and admiration between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he reveals that the competition between the perennial 'toppermost of the poppermost' and their scruffier, sleazier runners-up motivated the Stones to match the success of pop’s lads from Liverpool, who were then driven to keep ahead of those equally calculating London blues-rockers, during much of the ‘60s. McMillian examines the creation of the marketing images for both groups, and he demonstrates how they were both, despite denials by members, complicit in their Fab Four models and thug five poses."

John L. Murphy at PopMatters reviews John McMillian's Beatles vs. Stones.

As does Tyler McMahon in Salon.

And Newsweek publishes an excerpt.

Omni Rum Punch Man

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for writer Albert Murray, concert promoter Sid Bernstein, writer Elmore Leonard, actress Julie Harris, poet Seamus Heaney, record-store owner and actor Murray Gershenz, Kerouac muse Bea Kozera, and broadcaster David Frost.

Black Bonnie Showtime

The Los Angeles Times reports the deaths of musician Donald Byrd, screenwriter Richard Collins, jurist Ronald Dworkin, singer Mindy McCready, basketball-team owner Jerry Buss, and singer Tony Sheridan.

"Hand-Painted Monuments to Rock Gods"

"What became of McCartney's head? They found the culprit, who had kept his head, and brought the relic to the book's release party where it was presented Mario Rueda, the 94-year-old artist who had painted it."

Liesl Bradner in the Los Angeles Times discusses Robert Landau's new book, Rock 'n' Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip.

"Always Saw a Blank Piece of Paper, However Small, as a Challenge"

"The quirks of Lennon’s prose style were evident from an early age. He was given to mazy wordplay, absurdist humor and nonsense verse, often supplemented by marginal drawings. By age 12 or 13, he’d started drawing his own handmade newspaper (today we’d call it a zine), 'The Daily Howl,' which owed a fair share of its humor to the BBC radio program The Goon Show. In 1958, when John was 18, he made an adorable, modernist-flavored Christmas card for his girlfriend (later first wife) Cynthia Powell. '… I love you forever and ever isn’t it great? I love you like GUITARS,' he writes. In another letter to Cyn, he says he wishes he were on his way to her flat 'with the Sunday papers and choccies and a throbber.' (By 'choccies' he meant chocolate; a 'throbber,' Mr. Davies helpfully explains, is another word for a boner.)"

John McMillian in The New York Observer reviews Hunter Davies's The John Lennon Letters.