YOU CAN'T DO THAT

There's a few that didn't appear on the Wiki list I used as reference, that's why I stuck a bracketed question mark when I wrote "all".
One that sprang to mind last night was probably one of the biggest hits of all for their offloaded songs, and that was Ob-la-di (Marmalade).
But it was late and my cocoa was getting cold, so I went to bed.

Cocoa went home an hour later....

Written by John Lennon......... about Mia Farrow's younger sis, apparently.

Dear Prudence.




Lennon/McCartney......

You'll find this amusing.
When I lived in Wales in the late 60's, the Marmalade were wildly popular.
Here in the States I'd be hard pressed to find anyone that had ever heard of them.

Twist and Shout - Paul and Bruce ... the music lives on!

You'll have heard of Lennon's lost weekend with Harry Nilsson - here's Nilsson talking about those infamous drinking sessions - quite interesting.

This was a very small irony there--apparently, they had just played Nilsson's cover of "You Can't Do That" just before the interview began.



A very strange cover . . .

It was a strange cover!

Here's John with the Plastic Ono Band in Toronto, 1969 -

George - on Eric Clapton!

George - on Paul!

One of YouTube's many blessings is that you can watch a song grow all the way from early, home-recorded demos to studio jams to serious recording sessions to the final version. For example, here's a one-hour compilation showing the evolution of Strawberry Fields Forever. Not for the faint of the heart! One hourful of a three-minute song means you'll have lot of repetion. I love it anyway.

I clicked on the link below the embedded video in your post, to watch it at Youtube. On the sidebar was a documentary about the "Bigger than Jesus" brouhaha. I thought that was pretty typical, but there was a remark in there by one of the members of the band that was touring with the Beatles in 1966. He said that he sat down on the plane next to George and said to him how awful it must be, all of the hostility, all of the pressure. Then he said that George told him, look, this is what we wanted, this is where we wanted to be. We worked hard to get to the top, we wanted to be the biggest rock and roll band. That's a thread which runs through all of these interviews (the serious ones, not the silly ones from the 1960s) and these documentaries. They wanted to be big, they wanted to be successful, and they worked very hard to get there.

That's something we forget sometimes.
These four amiable lads were ruthless when it came to clawing their way to the top.

You know. ]i]Rolling Stone[/i] decided that the Rolling Stones were the greatest rock group ever. But no one worked harder than the Beatles, and no one had such a profound influence on culture--not just music, but culture. Thomas and i were looking at this thread the other day, and he was watching one of those documentaries that Lordy posted. The one about Liverpool in the 1960s was talking about a 30% unemployment rate--and it was the busiest port in England. The Beatles, as a group--and i'm certainly not saying that they intended this--single-handedly lifted the UK out of the economic slump that had prevailed since the end of the second world war. It was not just the money they brought in, although that was considerable. But suddenly, if you were a UK group, you had a shot that such groups had never had before. Song-writers could now reasonably expect to have one or more hit songs. It went further than that: Carnaby Street, where groups such as Small Faces, The Who and the Rolling Stones played in the mid-60s, became a fashion hub for more than just London, and that would not have happened without the Beatles. People wanted to wear the hair style (originally, i was just a typical greaser's DA, but Epstien made them wash their hair and comb it out), people wanted to wear the clothes, and they wanted anything Liverpoool or English. No other single popular music group has ever had the same impact.

Here's a track from Revolver, She Said She Said. Good video footage.

It was fifty years ago today
George martin taught the band to play...

They've been going in and out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile
So let me introduce to you
The one and only Billy Shears
And Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

A rare accoustic version of a great song . . .

I watched that again, and it looks as though, every time George approaches the mike for the "yeah, yeah, yeah" chorus, he's ready to bust out laughing . . .

Here's a George Harrison song, and the video shows George with his women.

yeah right?