Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 1:40 pm
by Indy
It was great yesterday, as the local powerhouse rock station played every single Beatles song, from A to Z...all Beatles, all the time
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 1:50 pm
by Indy
My Beatles Collection on the hard drive:
The UK releases:
The US releases:
It's interesting to listen to the different mixes of the same song between the US and UK versions...
Re: Remembering The Beatles, 40 years ago..
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 1:56 pm
by Spicer
Originally posted by downhill
Man it doesn't seem like that long ago....I can remember their first apperance on Ed Sullivan...Does that show my age?
Well....I had a Beatle Haircut,A 3" Wide Black Leather Belt,Platform Style Shoes and Black Bell Bottoms...LOL!
Lemme Tell Ya.....*Can't Buy Me Love*...Did it for all the young ladies in my Grade Five Class...
...
Spice
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 5:26 pm
by Indy
From a Rolling Stone magazine article:
Shortly after 8 p.m. on Sunday, February 9th, 1964, a short, stiff man with rubbery bloodhound features -- Ed Sullivan, the host of the highest-rated variety hour on American television -- addressed his New York studio audience and the folks tuned in at home over the CBS network.
"Yesterday and today, our theater's been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation," Sullivan said in a nasally chuckling voice. "And these veterans agreed with me that the city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool." He droned on for a few more seconds. Then the sixty-two-year-old Sullivan uttered the nine most important words in the history of rock & roll TV:
"Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles! Let's bring them on!"
No one in Studio 50, the 728-seat home of The Ed Sullivan Show, at 53rd Street and Broadway, heard anything else for the next eight minutes, except a monsoon of teenage-female screaming. The Beatles -- guitarist John Lennon, 23; bass guitarist Paul McCartney, 21; drummer Ringo Starr, 23; and lead guitarist George Harrison, two weeks shy of twenty-one -- opened their U.S. debut performance with a machine-gun bouquet of twin-guitar clang and jubilant vocal harmonies: "All My Loving," "Till There Was You" and "She Loves You." Forty minutes later -- after songs and routines by Frank Gorshin, British music-hall star Tessie O'Shea and the Broadway cast of Oliver! -- the Beatles returned to tear through both sides of their first U.S. Number One single, "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
"But you could not hear them playing anything," says John Moffitt, associate director of The Ed Sullivan Show, who was vainly calling out cues to the cameramen shooting the band. "The noise was incredible. Nobody could hear a thing except the kids in the audience, screaming. They overpowered the amplifiers. The cameramen couldn't hear. Even the kids couldn't hear anything, except each other screaming."
Production assistant Vince Calandra had been a cue-card boy for Sullivan back in 1957, when Elvis Presley made the last of his three appearances on the show. "The reaction from the kids then," Calandra claims, "was nothing close to what it was for the Beatles. I remember the producer, Bob Precht, who was an audio freak, just going, 'Jesus Christ!' "
"It was deafening," says Harrison's older sister Louise, now seventy-two, who sat in the seventh row, surrounded by shrieking. Lennon's then-wife, Cynthia, stood at the back of the studio, stunned by the reaction. "They're more enthusiastic here than at home," she raved to Beatles roadie Mal Evans.
Lennon himself couldn't believe the din and devotion, even after playing to hysterical crowds and being chased by ecstatic mobs in Britain throughout 1963. "They're wild, they're all wild," he said of the Americans. "They just all seem out of their minds. I've never seen anything like it in my life."
Meanwhile, more than 73 million people were watching the Beatles' Sullivan performance on television -- then the biggest audience ever glued to a single program and, forty years later, still one of the largest ever. And they got the whole show, including the music.
On TV, the snap and sizzle of Starr's drumming and the crisp electric attack of Harrison's and Lennon's guitars cut through the female squall. Also, Moffitt notes, the group's two vocal mikes were wired directly into the control room's mixing desk, "so we didn't lose that much singing on the air." Viewers heard every "Yeah, yeah, yeah!" in "She Loves You" and high, wild "Woooo!" in "I Saw Her Standing There," while Sullivan's cameras cut back and forth between the Beatles' magnetic poise -- the cocky smiles and deep bows after each song -- and kinetic shots of young women leaping in their seats and sobbing with delight.
Rock & roll was, by 1964, an established, sanitized presence on network television: on **** Clark's afternoon dance party American Bandstand; in Ricky Nelson's singing cameos on the sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. But Sullivan delivered the nation's first blast of Beatlemania in extreme close-up, an unprecedented display of the liberating, openly sexual ferocity of live, loud rock & roll. In one hour and five songs, the hottest rock act in Britain became the biggest pop group in America, immediately transforming the character and future of a generation. In Studio 50, at one point in the broadcast, a musician in Sullivan's house orchestra turned to a colleague in grim shock. "These are the people," he asked, "who are going to be running the country twenty years from now?" The answer, of course, was: Yes.
"We knew we could wipe you out -- we were new," Lennon crowed years later, in his famous 1970 Rolling Stone interview. "When we got here, you were all walking around in ****in' Bermuda shorts, with Boston crew cuts and stuff in your teeth."
"John and I knew we were writing good songs," McCartney told the magazine in 1987. "You had to be an idiot to listen to what we were writing and not say, 'Hey, man, this is good. . . . We could even do well in America.'
"One of the cheekiest things we ever did," McCartney added, "we said to [manager] Brian Epstein, 'We're not going to America till we've got a Number One record,' because we knew it would make all the difference."
Yet the Beatles could not have achieved so much, so fast, without Sullivan's Sunday-night might. The Beatles actually appeared on American television for the first time in November 1963 -- to little avail -- in NBC and CBS news reports about the group's British success. (The CBS segment aired on the morning of November 22nd, a few hours before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.) On January 3rd, 1964, Jack Paar featured on his NBC talk show a BBC clip of the Beatles playing "She Loves You."
Sullivan, however, had been a prime-time institution since 1948. A former sports reporter and Broadway gossip columnist, he combined a catholic booking policy -- opera singers, ventriloquists, stand-up comics, acrobats, rock & roll pioneers such as Bo Diddley and LaVern Baker -- with a golden gut for ratings. He was in London, at the airport with his wife, Sylvia, on October 31st, 1963, when the Beatles returned from a Swedish tour to a tumultuous reception. At first, Sullivan thought everyone had turned out to greet the queen mother. But by November 11th, he was back in New York, negotiating with Epstein.
Technically, Sullivan refused the Beatles top billing. He reserved that honor for himself every week. But he granted the Beatles an extraordinary amount of airtime: opening and closing segments on February 9th and 16th -- the latter on location from the Deauville Hotel in Miami -- plus an appearance to be taped early on the 9th for broadcast on February 23rd. It was headlining status in all but name for a group without a U.S. hit. (Previous Beatles singles on Vee-Jay, Swan and Tollie had stiffed; Capitol would not issue "I Want to Hold Your Hand" until late December.) In return, Epstein accepted a total fee of $10,000, far less than the $7,500 Sullivan often paid big acts for a single show.
"I remember the reaction in the audience," says Calandra, "when Ed started promoting the Beatles on the show, telling people they were coming. The first two weeks in January -- nothing much. The third week, that's when you heard the reaction from the kids."
By the weekend of February 9th, he says, "We were told not to drive our cars into the city: 'We're going to barricade the streets.' And normally Sullivan never came to rehearsals on Saturday. He would show up on Sunday for the rundown. But he came to rehearsal that Saturday for the Beatles. That was a sign: This was special."
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 5:56 pm
by downhill
Shortly after 8 p.m. on Sunday, February 9th, 1964, a short, stiff man with rubbery bloodhound features -- Ed Sullivan, the host of the highest-rated variety hour on American television -- addressed his New York studio audience and the folks tuned in at home over the CBS network.
"Yesterday and today, our theater's been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation," Sullivan said in a nasally chuckling voice. "And these veterans agreed with me that the city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool." He droned on for a few more seconds. Then the sixty-two-year-old Sullivan uttered the nine most important words in the history of rock & roll TV:
"Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles! Let's bring them on!"
Oh man.....the noise....girls screaming their heads off...passing out...unbelievable. The invasion was on.........The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits....What an era..
Indy, nice to see your using the "proper" cover for the American release of Yesterday and Today.
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 5:59 pm
by Indy
Originally posted by downhill
Indy, nice to see your using the "proper" cover for the American release of Yesterday and Today.
But of course
Now if I only had the original vinyl issue of Yesterday...& Today with the Butcher cover...
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 6:02 pm
by downhill
Originally posted by Indy
But of course
Now if I only had the original vinyl issue of Yesterday...& Today with the Butcher cover...
I hear you. I found a poor quality pasted cover and now I do wish I had bought it.
Keep in mind that in the near future, the pasted cover will be the one to own as people jump on the bandwagon to get theirs peeled..
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 6:05 pm
by Indy
Originally posted by downhill
I hear you. I found a poor quality pasted cover and now I do wish I had bought it.
Keep in mind that in the near future, the pasted cover will be the one to own as people jump on the bandwagon to get theirs peeled..
Yep, wouldn't mind having a copy of both...was just perusing ebay last night looking at vinyls to possibly pick up...it's been 15 years or more since I've last played an LP as opposed to a CD...
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 6:19 pm
by downhill
Originally posted by Indy
Yep, wouldn't mind having a copy of both...was just perusing ebay last night looking at vinyls to possibly pick up...it's been 15 years or more since I've last played an LP as opposed to a CD...
Oh? Maybe you might be interested in Japanese vinyl? They've just released all of the British originals on 180 gram virgin vinyl.....
The collectors who like that format are going nuts..
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 6:23 pm
by Indy
Originally posted by downhill
Oh? Maybe you might be interested in Japanese vinyl? They've just released all of the British originals on 180 gram virgin vinyl.....
The collectors who like that format are going nuts..
Hmm...got any links?
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 6:28 pm
by downhill
Originally posted by Indy
Hmm...got any links?
Of course!!
Keep in mind that these are expensive in the first place, and imports also....so there is a sticker shock. Also keep in mind that they are quite collectable.
http://www.redtrumpet.com/beatles/?sid=1037197808
Or get all of em for a measly $650..
http://www.redtrumpet.com/software/item ... 1037197808
You may find them cheaper somewhere else.....There is a Japan version for Amazon but I can never make out how to order anything from it.
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 6:35 pm
by downhill
Indy, these are limited but imho...there are really only 4 or so that most will want to collect as the cost of them is a factor. You may want to just wait for the hi rez versions that sooner or latter are going to come out. I've heard rumors that the process has already been started.....
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 6:36 pm
by Indy
Originally posted by downhill
Indy, these are limited but imho...there are really only 4 or so that most will want to collect as the cost of them is a factor. You may want to just wait for the hi rez versions that sooner or latter are going to come out. I've heard rumors that the process has already been started.....
I certainly hope so...the cd releases of the Beatles catalog hasn't exactly been spectacular as far as the potential quality goes...
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 11:32 pm
by Dakota
Just to let you all know, there is a new Beatles DVD on the shelves to commemorate this 40 year anniversary. Also, David Letterman is planning a special event since he operates from the Ed Sullivan Theater.
SACD and/or DVD-A Beatles discs would be outstanding! I would have no problem recollecting every single disc.
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 11:39 pm
by ScottE
Help! I need somebody.
It's another Beatles thread.