Beatles '66

Author: Steve Turner
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062475592
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
A riveting look at the transformative year in the lives and careers of the legendary group whose groundbreaking legacy would forever change music and popular culture. They started off as hysteria-inducing pop stars playing to audiences of screaming teenage fans and ended up as musical sages considered responsible for ushering in a new era. The year that changed everything for the Beatles was 1966—the year of their last concert and their first album, Revolver, that was created to be listened to rather than performed. This was the year the Beatles risked their popularity by retiring from live performances, recording songs that explored alternative states of consciousness, experimenting with avant-garde ideas, and speaking their minds on issues of politics, war, and religion. It was the year their records were burned in America after John’s explosive claim that the group was "more popular than Jesus," the year they were hounded out of the Philippines for "snubbing" its First Lady, the year John met Yoko Ono, and the year Paul conceived the idea for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. On the fiftieth anniversary of this seminal year, music journalist and Beatles expert Steve Turner slows down the action to investigate in detail the enormous changes that took place in the Beatles’ lives and work during 1966. He looks at the historical events that had an impact on the group, the music they made that in turn profoundly affected the culture around them, and the vision that allowed four young men from Liverpool to transform popular music and serve as pioneers for artists from Coldplay to David Bowie, Jay-Z to U2. By talking to those close to the group and by drawing on his past interviews with key figures such as George Martin, Timothy Leary, and Ravi Shankar—and the Beatles themselves—Turner gives us the compelling, definitive account of the twelve months that contained everything the Beatles had been and anticipated everything they would still become.

Revolver

Author: Robert Rodriguez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1476813566
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Acquired wisdom has always put Sgt. Pepper at the head of the class, but it was Revolver that truly signaled The Beatles' sea change from a functional band to a studio-based ensemble. These changes began before Rubber Soul but came to fruition on Revolver, which took an astonishing 300 hours to produce, far more than any rock record before it. The making of Revolver – hunkered down in Abbey Road with George Martin – is in itself a great Beatles story, but would be nothing if the results weren't so impactful. More than even Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, Revolver fed directly into the rock 'n' roll zeitgeist, and its influence could be heard everywhere: from the psychedelic San Francisco sound (Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead); to the first wave of post-blues hard rock (Sabbath, Zeppelin); through movie soundtracks and pretty much everything that followed it – including every generation of guitar-based pop music and even heavy metal. More than any record before or after, Revolver was the game-changer, and this is, finally, the detailed telling of its storied recording and enormous impact.

Maximum Volume

Author: Kenneth Womack
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613731922
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description
Maximum Volume offers a glimpse into the mind, the music, and the man behind the sound of the Beatles. George Martin's working-class childhood and musical influences profoundly shaped his early career as head of the EMI Group's Parlophone Records. Out of them flowed the genius behind his seven years producing the Beatles' incredible body of work, including such albums as Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Abbey Road. The first book of two, Maximum Volume traces Martin's early years as a scratch pianist, his life in the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War, and his groundbreaking work as the head of Parlophone Records, when Martin saved the company from ruin after making his name as a producer of comedy recordings. In its most dramatic moments, Maximum Volume narrates the story of Martin's unlikely discovery of the Beatles and his painstaking efforts to prepare their newfangled sound for the British music marketplace. As the story unfolds, Martin and the band craft numerous number-one hits, progressing towards the landmark album Rubber Soul—all of which bear Martin's unmistakable musical signature.

The Beatles

Author: Steve Turner
Publisher: Carlton Publishing Group
ISBN: 9781847327130
Category : Rock groups
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Book Description
Steve Turner shatters many well-worn myths and adds a new dimension to The Beatles' rich legacy by investigating the events immortalised in the Fab Four's music and now occupying a special niche in popular culture's collective imagination.

The Unreleased Beatles

Author: Richie Unterberger
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879308926
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
A survey of the significant body of recorded works by the Beatles that were not released includes discussions on an array of live concert performances, home demo recordings, studio outtakes, and more, in a chronologically arranged volume that includes coverage of unreleased video footage. Original.

Dreaming the Beatles

Author: Rob Sheffield
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062207679
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
An NPR Best Book of the Year • Winner of the Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism “This is the best book about the Beatles ever written” —Mashable Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape offers an entertaining, unconventional look at the most popular band in history, the Beatles, exploring what they mean today and why they still matter so intensely to a generation that has never known a world without them. Dreaming the Beatles is not another biography of the Beatles, or a song-by-song analysis of the best of John and Paul. It isn’t another exposé about how they broke up. It isn’t a history of their gigs or their gear. It is a collection of essays telling the story of what this ubiquitous band means to a generation who grew up with the Beatles music on their parents’ stereos and their faces on T-shirts. What do the Beatles mean today? Why are they more famous and beloved now than ever? And why do they still matter so much to us, nearly fifty years after they broke up? As he did in his previous books, Love is a Mix Tape, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, and Turn Around Bright Eyes, Sheffield focuses on the emotional connections we make to music. This time, he focuses on the biggest pop culture phenomenon of all time—The Beatles. In his singular voice, he explores what the Beatles mean today, to fans who have learned to love them on their own terms and not just for the sake of nostalgia. Dreaming the Beatles tells the story of how four lads from Liverpool became the world’s biggest pop group, then broke up—but then somehow just kept getting bigger. At this point, their music doesn’t belong to the past—it belongs to right now. This book is a celebration of that music, showing why the Beatles remain the world’s favorite thing—and how they invented the future we’re all living in today.

And in the End

Author: Ken McNab
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 125080373X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Ken McNab's in-depth look at The Beatles' acrimonious final year is a detailed account of the breakup featuring the perspectives of all four band members and their roles. A must to add to the collection of Beatles fans, And In the End is full of fascinating information available for the first time. McNab reconstructs for the first time the seismic events of 1969, when The Beatles reached new highs of creativity and new lows of the internal strife that would destroy them. Between the pressure of being filmed during rehearsals and writing sessions for the documentary Get Back, their company Apple Corps facing bankruptcy, Lennon's heroin use, and musical disagreements, the group was arguing more than ever before and their formerly close friendship began to disintegrate. In the midst of this rancour, however, emerged the disharmony of Let It Be and the ragged genius of Abbey Road, their incredible farewell love letter to the world"--

A, B, See the Beatles!

Author: Jill Davis
Publisher: Hillcrest Publishing Group
ISBN: 0986116602
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 37

Book Description
Arguably the most influential band in history, the Beatles shaped an era and were the soundtrack of a generation. What better way to celebrate their influence than with a book that can be shared with the youngest generation of all?

Behind the Wall of Illusion

Author: Sean MacLeod
Publisher: CLAIRVIEW BOOKS
ISBN: 1912992469
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
The Beatles brought colour, joy, freedom and love to a grey, post-war world. But the most successful group in popular music history also harboured hidden, sometimes darker worlds and influences that are often downplayed by their biographers. In their career, the Fab Four were to cross paths with many spiritual movements, religious groups, esoteric philosophies and mystical teachings. Inevitably, their thinking was affected by the ideas they encountered. These ideas in turn helped shape their music and – given their vast popularity – the public consciousness. Behind the Wall of Illusion examines the spiritual inspirations that the Beatles brought to the changing cultural landscape of the 1960s. From the popularization of the new religion of rock ‘n’ roll, Beatlemania (the ‘new Cult of Dionysus’) and John Lennon’s explosive statement that the Beatles were ‘bigger than Jesus’, Sean MacLeod takes us on a tour of Indian ashrams, questionable gurus and hallucinatory drugs. He also studies the secreted ‘clues’ in the Beatles’ album covers and films; the growing rumours that Paul had been killed in a car crash and covertly replaced; and the tragic assassination of John Lennon and the unknown perpetrators behind the crime. This is an indispensable book for any lover of the Beatles.

The Beatles: I Was There

Author: Richard Houghton
Publisher: This Day In Music Books
ISBN: 1787591026
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Book Description
This book provides a fan's-eye account of the Fab Four as they conquered the world. From their skiffle days as The Quarrymen, their thrilling early gigs at the Cavern Club in Liverpool through to the Beatlemania of the Shea Stadium concerts in the USA. Share in the excitement of more than 400 first-hand encounters with The Beatles: the teenagers, kids, twenty-somethings, promoters and support bands who can all proudly say 'I was there!' Featuring fascinating anecdotes, stories, photographs and memorabilia that have never been published before, this book is a portrait of an amazing era. It's like being at your very own Beatles gig!