Tag: 60s Music

The Beatles Anthology 2025 (Disney+)

I’ve been a huge fan of The Beatles ever since I could listen to music. (It comes from having older brothers with good taste as well.) I watched the original broadcast on ABC and still have a VHS tape of the off-the-air broadcast around somewhere. I bought the DVD set a few years ago which has most of the “Threetles reunion” bits on the special features disc. My mom gifted me the book the Christmas it was published.

This new packaging of the Beatles’ official story doesn’t have a lot of new material in it, but the live recordings have all had the Peter Jackson “MAL” magic done to them.  In the process EVERY recording is leveled much higher than any speaking interview, which is jarring and annoying.

I have read that some bits were dropped from the original show and some new things inserted, but I can’t tell you which ones they were.

I enjoyed rewatching this show over several days.  Just like with “Eight Days a Week,” Ron Howard’s 2016 film, the renewed revelation is just how mesmerizing they were as a live band.  Someone like me has read all the minutiae about recordings and squabbles, but hearing and seeing them in their prime is just so darn good!

There’s a lot of grumbling in fan circles about the accompanying “Anthology 4” record–it doesn’t have much “new” in it, but the audio therein and for Anthology 1-3 has also had the “MAL” process on it.  If you listen carefully the new mix of “Real Love” also has gotten rid of a large portion of George’s guitar work, which is a very strange choice to make.

Overall, Anthology 2025 is still a must-watch for anyone new to the Beatles’ story, and it’s compelling for the rest of us, too.

 

The McCartney Legacy vol. 2 by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair (2024)

The McCartney Legacy vols. 1 and 2

Finally was able to get this book, which covers 1974-1980, out of an interlibrary loan request.  it follows the same format as vol. 1 except they added captions to the photos. 😉

I have been a McCartney fan since I could listen to music and with this book I was playing the albums as I was reading the section that dealt with them.  The first new McCartney music I was contemporaneously aware of was the London Town album, and I am one of the few people that really likes Back to the Egg.  It really was fascinating to finally read the detail behind both of them, as it’s been an era that gets glossed over. In much the same way I am looking forward to what I figure will be one more volume.

I realized in this book that all of the reviews quoted are taken from British music trade papers. Since Sinclair is from the UK I guess that makes sense but I was left wondering this time around what American critics were thinking.  A small quibble for an exhaustively researched book.

Originally Published on Facebook, August 10, 2023:

Long Take: Finished 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑴𝒄𝑪𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒏𝒆𝒚 𝑳𝒆𝒈𝒂𝒄𝒚 𝒗𝒐𝒍. 1 by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair. This book covers post-Beatles breakup to the release of ‘Band on the Run’. In the afterward they note that it was supposed to be a sessionography that morphed into a biography as well as they found it hard to separate the stories. They were trying to mimic the excellent Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn. I think they did a good job. They talked to everyone except McCartney himself (he declined) and the prose is OK. My two faults with the book were the sans serif font that was very hard to read and that pictures for the book had no captions. The hard part about these amazing detailed books is that it takes so long to write them. We have been waiting a long time for Lewisohn’s vol. 2 for the Beatles and I hope it’s not as long for vol. 2 in this series.

All You Need is Love: The Beatles in their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines (2024)

All You Need is Love coverI didn’t begrudge Peter Brown the 1983 book The Love You Make as I figure that a Beatles insider gets a chance to make some money off the association. THIS book, however, is just a compilation of the source interviews done for the book.

It’s sparingly typeset, and they couldn’t be bothered to make a real index or hyperlink the footnotes, or at least put the footnotes at the end of every interview section.  I also don’t think much of Steven Gaines as a coauthor…the projects he’s involved in tend to be “sensational”. (This was true of the published 1983 book.)

With all of those negatives, three things were apparent to sum up this aired research.

  1. They had an axe to grind, or at least a theory/thread they wanted credence for, against “Magic Alex”(Alexis Mardas). He comes up a LOT in their questions, much more than I would say he’s a part of their story.
  2. Maureen Starkey must have been a lovely person.
  3. Allen Klein really comes off as an unlikable character.

Unless you are a Beatles fanatic, skip this one.