George harrison

Tuesday

Anne Margaret Daniel

The photographer who connects Bob Dylan and the Beatles

MAX JONES: “What do you think of the Beatles as artists and people?” BOB DYLAN: “Oh, I think they’re the best. They’re artists and they’re people.” —Melody Maker, March 1965 For more than 60 years, people have been fascinated by the connections between Bob Dylan and the Beatles. All were born during World War Two. All loved the music of Little Richard and Elvis Presley and Eddie Cochran; all were blues fans swept off their feet by rock and roll. Dylan was a Minnesota boy who early in his life became the avatar of the American folk scene, and then a protean man containing multitudes, both musically and otherwise.

bob dylan

Thursday

Alexander Larman

‘Now and Then’: the Beatles are back

In the Sixties, the rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones  — even if it was more of a hype battle dreamt up by their respective publicity departments — meant that whenever one band released an album or single, the other was never too far behind. Sometimes, they even explicitly referenced their competitor’s work; the Stones’s 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request was “inspired” by the Beatles’s LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released earlier that year. Yet after the Beatles split up in 1970, the rivalry seemed to be at an end, and the deaths of John Lennon in 1980 and George Harrison in 2001 apparently put paid to any possibility of the Liverpudlian band continuing in any form. Oh, how wrong we were.

beatles

Friday

Robert Dean Lurie

George Harrison at eighty

All I got to do is to, to love youAll I got to be is, be happyAll it’s got to take is some warmth to make it blow away That’s the chorus of George Harrison’s bubbly 1979 single “Blow Away,” an update of sorts to his Beatles hit “Here Comes the Sun.” At the close of the 1970s, the respite from the “long, cold, lonely winter” had become less assured. There is a pleading tone in Harrison’s voice as he sings “be happy” that infuses “Blow Away” with pathos. That, plus his cavernous stare in the otherwise goofy video, indicates that summiting Mount Everest might have been easier than the chorus’s stated goal.

Harrison

Tuesday

Arsalan Mohammad

The rising cost of remembering the Fab Four

If you’re a diehard Beatles fan, it’s been a pricy year. And it’s going to get much worse. Within the last 12 months, those of us unable to resist new or repackaged product from John, Paul, George and Ringo have wrestled with sense and reason over whether to splash out on one of the numerous limited-edition, pre-release colored vinyl copies of McCartney III, the mega-box set reissue of Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band from 1970 or even, dear old Ringo’s recent EP, ‘Zoom In’. And there’s more to come; expect a cascade of marketing hoopla around August’s Get Back, the Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson’s reworking of the band’s 1969 misery-memoir movie Let It Be, as well as a lavish tome of McCartney lyrics and memoirs in November.

beatles george harrison

Friday

Luke Haines

They say it’s your birthday? It’s my birthday too, yeah!

The White Album is one the greatest works of 20th century art, executed by the greatest exponents of the 20th century’s greatest popular and unpopular art: pop music. Which is why connoisseurs of this work of high magik know that there is nothing new to say about The Beatles, which, as everyone also knows, was The White Album’s official title. The minutiae of The Fabs’ mind-boggling State Of The Universe address from 1968 have been dissected and analyzed so completely that armies of middle-aged divorced male White Album necrophiliacs now roam the pub and bars of the West, clashing over the rallying cry, ‘But should it have been a single album?

white album