Yesterday....

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鬼殺し wrote:

'cliched love songs'...seriously? They *created* the cliche, genius. And that was just their early phase.

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Moridin79 wrote:

Good post. Totally agree, as far as preferences go. Even in my hardcore classic rock phase as a kid, I never really touched the Beatles. I felt liking them was akin to rooting for the Yankees or something. Yeah yeah they're the greatest, whatever blah blah blah.....

lol

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鬼殺し wrote:

Do your research, please. They were the first of their kind. In so many ways. Malmsteen? Vai? That whole early metal bunch? A natural evolution from the psychedelic rock era...and where do you think THAT came from?

Anyway, off for the weekend. Hope yours is wonderful too. And full of not saying ignorant things. ^_^

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The story of Revolver began in a night of hell and illumination.

“We’ve had LSD,” John Lennon told George Harrison.

It was spring 1965...

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鬼殺し wrote:

I made sure to do my research before the otherwise simple task of taking someone comparing Yngwie Malmsteen's shred ability to The Beatles' pioneering contributions. It was enlightening because I'm primarily a metal-head, but even I know that early metal was hardly a huge step away from its psychedelia/rock roots.

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Who's surprised it was Paul, the closest The Beatles had to a functioning adult, who staunchly resisted the drug influence? :)

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...

Musically, the Beatles were already changing, taking increasingly daring risks. They had inspired countless British and American bands – the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, the Beach Boys – with their uncommon chord changes, their curving, often sharp-cornered melodies and their commitment to writing their own songs. Lennon, for his part, envied the Stones’ permission to make dirtier and angrier music than the Beatles. But it was Dylan whom the Beatles heeded most. Dylan’s new electric music was majestic, in particular “Like a Rolling Stone,” and some wondered if hallucinogens had helped stimulate his surreal, stream-of-consciousness imagery. In December 1965, the Beatles upped the ante with Rubber Soul, seen as a major step in their artistic growth. McCartney leaned into his songs more: “Drive My Car” was feisty and witty; “You Won’t See Me” and “I’m Looking Through You” were surprisingly angry, like some of Dylan’s more acerbic songs. Lennon’s songs, though, were a whole new thing: “Nowhere Man” and “Girl” showed vulnerability; “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” was vengeful and musically unusual, featuring the first use of sitar on a pop record.

McCartney was aware of the growing competition and intended to keep the Beatles at a creative edge. Despite his reluctance about psychedelics, he was in some ways the most progressive Beatle. “All the other guys were married in the suburbs,” he said. “They were very square in my mind.” Remaining in London, he kept his tastes open, not just to cutting-edge popular music, but also to unorthodox ideas in the arts, politics and philosophy (Bertrand Russell turned him against the Vietnam War; McCartney, in turn, says he educated Lennon on the subject).

McCartney took an interest in the groundbreaking electronic music of classical composers and experimentalists Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Edgard Varèse, and in the free jazz of saxophonist Albert Ayler. “I’m trying to cram everything in,” McCartney said, “all the things I’ve missed. People are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great, and I must know what people are doing.” In early 1966, McCartney and his girlfriend, Jane Asher, helped her brother, Peter, and his partners John Dunbar and Barry Miles prepare the opening of Indica Books and Gallery, a site for counter-cultural interests. McCartney was also the shop’s first customer: He would pore over new books at night and had the shop send on copies of what intrigued him to the other Beatles...


McCartney took LSD for the first time within the year, though it wasn’t in the company of the other Beatles. The drug, he said in a 1967 interview, “opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God… It is obvious that God isn’t in a pill, but it explained the mystery of life. It was truly a religious experience.” He also said of LSD’s effect, “It started to find its way into everything we did, really. It colored our perceptions. I think we started to realize there wasn’t as many frontiers as we’d thought there were. And we realized we could break barriers.”


In the coming months, the Beatles would forswear LSD. Lennon, though, who had consumed it the most – frequently, sometimes to a degree that worried others (“We didn’t realize the extent to which John was screwed up,” said Harrison) – wasn’t always true to that word. One day in 1968, following a night of psychedelics, Lennon summoned some intimates to Apple Records and announced he’d had a revelation: He was Jesus Christ, come back to Earth, and he wanted a press release issued to that effect.

Two days after finishing recording and mixing Revolver, the Beatles set off on a summer world tour. In Germany, they heard the finished product. McCartney was briefly alarmed: He worried that the whole thing sounded out of tune. The Beatles had been so successful at achieving something unfamiliar that it even disoriented McCartney, who had the most precisely attuned ears in the group.

From the beginning, the tour was a comedown. The four young men had just spent three months making music that could not be translated to the stage; now, they were confined to playing older material that felt a million miles away to them. But worse lay ahead. In Manila, Philippines, Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, declined an invitation from the country’s first lady, Imelda Marcos, to a presidential-palace garden party, and the Beatles had to flee the country after public sentiment turned vehemently against them. At a press conference back in London, the group seemed badly shaken. “We’re going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate,” said Harrison, “before we go and get beaten up by the Americans.”

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鬼殺し wrote:

Despite his reluctance.

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Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now is a 1997 biography of Paul McCartney by Barry Miles. It is the "official" biography of McCartney and was written "based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews undertaken over a period of five years", according to the back cover of the 1998 paperback edition. The title is a phrase from McCartney's song "When I'm Sixty-Four", from the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The book was first published in the United Kingdom in October 1997 by Secker & Warburg.