Tag Archives: beatles

Films to Quench Your 60’s Music Nostalgia

by HymanLeist Posted on December 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Beatles
Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years
Capitol/UMe

T.A.M.I. Show/The Big T.N.T. Show
Shout! Factory

Courtesy of Apple Corps Ltd./UMe

Nostalgic fans of a certain age who like to pontificate about how great music was in the ’60s can cite a couple of new home video releases to back up their argument. Directed by Ron Howard, documentary Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years offers a concise, 100-minute survey of the Fab Four’s career up to the point they stopped touring in 1966. Inevitably, it only skims the surface, but the music is (of course) terrific and the footage of the lads sending audiences into a hysterical frenzy captures the bizarre, sometimes frightening energy of the day. Extras on the two-disc edition include charming reminiscences by American fans and uncut performances of five songs that prove what a cooking live act they were. While The Beatles probably had to stop touring just to preserve their sanity, it’s hard not to conclude from this engaging film that a special spark left their music when they retired from the road, even as their artistic ambitions expanded exponentially.

T.A.M.I. Show/The Big T.N.T. Show pairs two mid-’60s concert films presenting rock and soul acts live on stage, each delivering a brief set in the style of multiple-artist package tours of the day. The previously available T.A.M.I. Show offers strong performances from the likes of Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, The Beach Boys, Lesley Gore and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, among others, as well as a few duds, but the centerpiece remains James Brown’s surreal, over-the-top display of genius. Writhing and shouting, yet always fully in control, the Godfather of Soul embodies performance art at its mind bending best, and makes the Rolling Stones, who follow him in the movie, seem like capable but callow little boys by comparison. (T.A.M.I. is “Teenage Awards Music International,” fyi, but there were no such awards.)

Long unavailable, The Big T.N.T. Show isn’t quite in the same league, but more than bears watching. Highlights include the sloppy and charming Lovin’ Spoonful, witty country songsmith Roger Miller and early rock’n’roll great Bo Diddley, laying down deep grooves (not to mention The Byrds, Ray Charles and The Ronettes). The weirdest moment occurs when folk queen Joan Baez fronts an orchestra for a faithful cover of The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” with Phil Spector, who produced the original, conducting the musicians. It’s as astounding in its own puzzling way as James Brown’s titanic “Please Please Please.” Those were the (strange) days.

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Films to Quench Your 60’s Music Nostalgia

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John Oliver Takes on the Error-Plagued World of Credit Reporting

by SOYTerri5434 Posted on April 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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John Oliver took on the dicey world of credit reporting, or as the Last Week Tonight host described it on Sunday, the “basis for the single most important three-digit number in your whole life other than 311—the Beatles of rap rock.”

Businesses use credit reports to determine whether to lend credit to someone. But as Oliver explained, nearly a quarter of every credit report contains inaccurate information, including critical errors that can block a person from getting hired at a job and even renting an apartment.

It’s an error-ridden process by which many important life events are effectively destroyed. Watch above to see how Oliver tries to get credit reporting companies to understand the gravity of these routine mistakes.

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John Oliver Takes on the Error-Plagued World of Credit Reporting

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Here’s the Music Candidates are Rocking Out to on the Trail

by LuigiLandseer Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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I was supposed to be writing a wrap-up piece about the South Carolina Republican primary this afternoon, but an attack of writers’ block led me to more inspiring territory: the compilation of the (mostly) complete music playlists of every candidate I’ve seen speak over the last two weeks, in New Hampshire and now South Carolina. Shazam: It’s every political reporter’s best friend.

This list is incomplete, and can change a lot depending on the candidate’s audience or the whims of the artist (heaven forbid Rachel Platten decides to endorse Bernie Sanders). I don’t ascribe any deeper meaning to these musical selections either, although suffice it to say there is a pretty big difference between Sanders and Hillary Clinton, and for that matter, between Donald Trump and everyone else.

See for yourself.

Hillary Clinton:

Jill Scott, “Run, Run, Run”
Mary J. Blige, “Real Love”
Katy Perry, “Roar”
Kelly Clarkson, “Stronger”
American Authors, “Best Day of My Life”
Bon Jovi, “We Weren’t Born to Follow”
Pharrell, “Happy”
Rachel Platten, “Fight Song”

Bernie Sanders:

Simon and Garfunkel, “America”
Janelle Monae, “Tightrope”
Pearl Jam, “Lightning Bolt”
Bob Marley, “Revolution”
Disco Infernor, “The trammps”
Muse, “Uprising”
John Lennon, “Power to the People!”
Tracy Chapman, “Talkin’ bout a Revolution”
Steve Earle, “The Revolution Starts Now”
Neil Young, “Rockin’ the Free World”

John Kasich:

Florida Georgia Line, “Round Here”
Zak Brown Band, “Jump Right In”
Darius Rucker, “Wagon Wheel”
Jake Owen, “Anywhere With You”
Diekes Bentley, “Free & Easy”
Rodney Atkins, “It’s America”
John Fogerty, “Centerfield”
Eric Paslay, “Friday Night”

Marco Rubio:

Kid Rock, “Born Free”
Montgomery Gentry, “This is My Town”
Darius Rucker, “Homegrown Honey”
MercyMe, “Greater”
Eric Church, “Springsteen”

Donald Trump:

Elton John, “Tiny Dancer”
The Beatles, “Hey Jude”
The Beatles, “Revolution”
Rolling Stones, “Can’t Always Get What You Want”
Rolling Stone, “Sympathy for the Devil”
Rolling Stone, “Brown sugar”
Adele, “Rolling in the deep”*
Twisted Sister, “We’re not Gonna Take It”
Danude, “Sandstorm”

Jeb Bush:

Of Monsters and Men, “Dirty Paws”
Blake Shelton, “Hillbilly Bone”
Billy Currington, “That’s How Country Boys Roll”

Ted Cruz:

*Pulled at request of the artist.

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Here’s the Music Candidates are Rocking Out to on the Trail

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Why Do Republicans Hate the Beatles?

by AbrahamCorbett Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Over at the Facebook Data Science blog, Winter Mason shows us how personal likes and dislikes line up with political ideology. Democrats like Maya Angelou, The Color Purple, and The Colbert Report. Republicans like Ben Carson, Atlas Shrugged, and Duck Dynasty. It’s all good fun, though I’m a little mystified about why the Empire State Building is such a Democratic-leaning tourist destination. Maybe Republicans just dislike anything related to New York City.

But it’s music that I want some help on. I get that country tends to be right-leaning and Springsteen is left-leaning. But what’s up with the Beatles being so distinctively associated with liberals? It’s no secret that I know squat about music, so help me out here. No snark. I thought the Beatles had long since ascended into a sort of free-floating state of pop elder statehood where they were beloved of all baby boomers equally—and pretty much everyone else too. What do I not know that accounts for continuing Republican antipathy toward the moptops?

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Why Do Republicans Hate the Beatles?

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Check Out This Amazing Collection of Iconic Photos of the 1960s Haight Street Scene

by Hilario0690 Posted on October 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Grateful Dead’s last free concert on Haight Street, 1968
All photos ©Jim Marshall Photography LLC.

Jim Marshall’s name is often accompanied by adjectives such as “indomitable,” “legendary,” “genius,” or “whirlwind.” And not without reason.

Apart from being in the right place at the right time—San Francisco’s music scene in the mid-1960s—Marshall had the right personality to get up close and personal with the bands who would provide the soundtrack to a generation. More importantly, he was simply a great photographer. As such, Marshall created some of the most iconic images in rock and roll history.

You know that famous shot of Johnny Cash flipping off the camera? Marshall. The Allman Brothers cover where they’re all sitting in front of their road cases? Marshall. The Beatles running across the field at Candlestick Park for their last concert? Marshall. Just about any photo of Janis Joplin that comes to mind. Jim Fucking Marshall. Hendrix. The Dead. The Who. The Stones. Zepplin. Little Richard. Chuck Berry. Neil Young. He shot ’em all, and many, many more.

Jimi Hendrix films Janis Joplin backstage at Winterland, San Francisco, 1968.

A new book, The Haight: Love, Rock, and Revolution (Insight Editions), thoroughly documents the genesis of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Marshall was there in the earliest days, when the Charlatans, the Great Society, the Warlocks/Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Jefferson Airplane, and other bands were just beginning to spin their wheels, and the SF acid/psych-rock scene was just getting rolling.

The Poets (Allen Ginsberg, Robbie Robertson, Michael McClure, and Bob Dylan) in the alley next to City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, 1965

The book, which goes on sale on October 14, includes lots of live concerts and behind-the-scenes photos of young rockstars with careers on the rise. There are also portraits, protests, reportage: Marshall shot it all. That’s what makes this book so great: the top-to-bottom, inside-out coverage of the entire scene. He gives us a real taste of what it was like to be in the midst of things.

Dancers in the Panhandle, San Francisco, 1967

The Human Be IN, Golden Gate Park, 1967

Starting from the scene’s origins, The Haight continues through the period when LIFE was doing regular features on the hippies and the bands were starting to get too big for the Panhandle, and concludes in 1968 with the Dead’s final street show: “One last time the band pulled out their gear, trundled down the hill, and played for free in the San Francisco sunshine.”

The musicians Marshall shot would go on to become staples of the American music landscape, and these photos are every bit as culturally important, They are as much a part of that landscape as the music itself.

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Check Out This Amazing Collection of Iconic Photos of the 1960s Haight Street Scene

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Welsh Rockers Catfish and the Bottlemen Aim "Right to the Top"

by HassanBlackweld Posted on June 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Van McCann, the gleeful 21-year-old frontman of Welsh indie-rock band Catfish and the Bottlemen, doesn’t appear to have a sarcastic bone in his body. We meet in a shady spot on Randall’s Island in New York City, at the Governor’s Ball music festival. Even among the Brooklynites jockeying to out-hipster each other, McCann’s bouncy rocker haircut and skinny pants stand out. He informs me that I have a face that makes him happy to look at, which is also how he feels about Scottish actor Ewan McGregor’s face. In fact, the band’s new video for the song, “Kathleen,” features almost three minutes of McGregor smiling on screen. McCann isn’t being ironic. “I just love him!” he exclaims.

McCann’s band, which debuted Kathleen and the Other Three, its new EP, in the US earlier this month, has the kind of back story a label might try to make up to draw buzz. (The UK’s Communion Records, which also works with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, signed Catfish and the Bottlemen in 2013). McCann says his mom couldn’t have children naturally, and he was born in the final in-vitro fertilization attempt. When he was a kid his family traveled around Australia, where he saw a busker named Catfish and the Bottlemen, hence the name. He met his bandmates—guitarist Billy Bibby, bassist Benji Blakeway, and drummer Bob Hall—in school back in Llandudno, Wales, and when McCann was 15, he got kicked out of school, not “because I was a little shit,” but because he was playing too many shows and missing exams.

Since then, Catfish and the Bottlemen have been busting their asses and playing a lot of gigs—including ones they’re not invited to. McCann recalls one time when the band couldn’t get on the opening slot of a show they wanted to play, so they rented a generator, revved it up, put on ninja masks in the parking lot, and waited for everyone to leave the gig before starting to rock out. “Everyone just went crazy; we got arrested for sound pollution!” McCann says. Last year, they played upward of 100 shows in 18 months. This summer, they’re scheduled to play more than 30 festivals.

Their EP’s title track is a catchy, sex-drenched rock song that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Arctic Monkeys record, or maybe the long-lost dirty Killers album. “It’s impractical, to go out and catch a death with a dress fit for the summer/So you don’t/Instead you call me up with a head full of filth,” McCann sings. The other songs aren’t quite as much fun, although “Homesick” reminds me of all the times I emo-ed out in my car to Dashboard Confessional as a teenager—which as far as I’m concerned, is a good thing. McCann notes that right now he’s listening to British indie group Little Comets and the National, but he’s also a fan of the Strokes, Van Morrison, and the Beatles, of course.

At the Governor’s Ball, the Bottlemen played around noon, long before fans flooded the park to see Skrillex and Jack White. But speaking with McCann, I got the sense that the band could cheerfully propel itself straight to world domination. McCann says his goal is to play giant stadiums, not just intimate indie-rock clubs. “Right to the top, all the way to the top. To me, I don’t see the point of doing it otherwise,” he says. He describes playing New York as, “Fucking ace, man. It’s amazing, I love it!” He adds, giddily, “When I was walking through the streets of New York the other day, this girl came up to me and was like, ‘Dude your band is awesome!’ I was like, ‘I’ve only been here a day!'”

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Welsh Rockers Catfish and the Bottlemen Aim "Right to the Top"

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How Conservative Brits Tried to Use the Beatles to Win Elections

by mlodyseo7 Posted on February 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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February 9 marks the 50th anniversary of The Beatles‘ historic performance on The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS. It was one of the opening salvos of the British Invasion of the mid-1960s, and the broadcast drew 73 million viewers. It is consistently hailed as one of the most influential and biggest (if not the biggest ever) televised moments for rock n’ roll and popular music.

“The Beatles are delightful,” Sullivan said shortly after the performance. “They are the nicest boys I’ve ever met.”

You can watch their 1964 Ed Sullivan performance of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (along with some other gigs) below, via Rolling Stone:

Many tributes and commemorative packages have been prepared for the anniversary. On Sunday, CBS will air a special all-star salute, featuring Stevie Wonder, Gary Clark, Jr., Katy Perry, and ex-Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, among others. The Ed Sullivan appearance was just one of many indicators of The Beatles’ immense popularity and influence. Concert promoters, cultural observers, and screaming teenage girls weren’t the only ones who understood this—British politicians did, too, and they weren’t shy about trying to exploit Beatlemania for electoral gain.

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How Conservative Brits Tried to Use the Beatles to Win Elections

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The KKK Leader Haunted-House Song the Late Phil Everly Never Got To Write

by euro9 Posted on January 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Phil Everly, who with his older brother Don made up the country/rock ‘n roll duo the Everly Brothers, died on Friday in Burbank, California, due to complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 74.

The Everly Brothers’ influence on popular music in the 1950s and 1960s was immense. The songs they strummed and sang (in legendary harmonies) were often big hits. During the height of their powers, they had almost three dozen hits on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, including “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love.” The Everly Brothers were among the first ten acts inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The duo influenced some of the best artists of the 20th century, such as The Beatles and The Byrds. “We owe the Everly Brothers everything,” Bob Dylan said. “They started it all.”

I’m not going to pretend that I’m capable of writing the definitive or the most comprehensive Phil Everly obituary. There are a lot of remembrances already out there, and plenty of rock historians who can tell you much more about Everly’s place in musical history than I ever could. But what I can offer is my favorite Everly story—one regarding perhaps the most brilliant song that Everly never wrote.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published in June 2013, he talks about his beautiful house outside of Nashville, Tennessee, in Maury County. It was built in 1846, and has this unique bit of history to it, according to Everly:

During the Civil War, a famous Confederate lieutenant general named Nathan Bedford Forrest had a violent argument with a lieutenant named A. Willis Gould. Words were exchanged, Gould shot Forrest in the hip, and Forrest wound up fatally stabbing him. Forrest recuperated in our bedroom. I suppose there’s a song in that story someplace.

I’m not sure if Forrest’s ghost is hanging around, but I have a theory about this house. It won’t let you do anything to the structure it doesn’t like. We had a roof leak a few years back, and the carpenter impulsively wanted to solve the problem by drilling a hole in the floor. But the bit snapped right off. The house wouldn’t let him do it. This kind of thing has happened several other times.

(For the record, Forrest died in Memphis, but let’s just say it’s plausible that this Confederate ghost could find its way back to this estate.)

The idea for a Nathan Bedford Forrest death-match / freaky haunted-house country-rock song is even more interesting when you consider that Forrest was also the first Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the namesake of Forrest Gump, and an accused war criminal. Under Forrest’s command, Confederate troops carried out the atrocity at Fort Pillow, where hundreds of surrendered black soldiers were slaughtered.

So who knows if he was being serious about this song. I hope so, since it would make for a terrific song. Sadly, it seems that Everly never got around to writing and recording it. But what he accomplished in life was, of course, already way more than enough. Some of the greatest rock music of the ’60s would not have sounded the way it did if it weren’t for Phil and Don. That’s a hell of a legacy to leave behind.

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The KKK Leader Haunted-House Song the Late Phil Everly Never Got To Write

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The CIA Trained Gitmo Detainees as Double Agents at a Secret Facility Named After a Beatles Song

by abram Posted on November 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Between 2003 and 2006, the CIA recruited and trained a small number of Guantanamo Bay detainees as double agents, according to an Associated Press report published on Tuesday. The program was run out of a clandestine facility near the military prison, and—according to US officials—was useful in gathering intel for targeting and killing Al Qaeda leaders. (CIA officers would typically meet with double agents in Afghanistan.)

“Jail time at Guantanamo is a new asset on the résumés of many double agents, security officials say—an ultimate sign of credibility that often makes them revered and trusted among senior operatives,” another AP story, from 2010, reads.

In 2009, President Obama ordered a review of the double agents recruited during the Gitmo program because the agents provided intel used in drone-strike operations, according to one of the officials interviewed. But perhaps the most attention-grabbing part of the AP‘s new investigation is that the CIA’s old double-agent facility was nicknamed after a Beatles song.

Here’s the relevant text from the AP (emphasis mine):

The program was carried out in a secret facility built a few hundred yards from the administrative offices of the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The eight small cottages were hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus.

The program and the handful of men who passed through these cottages had various official CIA code names.

But those who were aware of the cluster of cottages knew it best by its sobriquet: Penny Lane.

It was a nod to the classic Beatles song and a riff on the CIA’s other secret facility at Guantanamo Bay, a prison known as Strawberry Fields.

Paul McCartney, the principal songwriter for “Penny Lane,” did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how he felt about this.

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The CIA Trained Gitmo Detainees as Double Agents at a Secret Facility Named After a Beatles Song

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