John Lennon or Paul McCartney, who’s the better songwriter? McCartney’s 20 best Beatles songs
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Ok, so it is about the songs, is it? Not John’s cockiness and dry wit, not Paul’s technical skill, not the fact that death is the best career step a musician can have. (John Lennon would have laughed and agreed, so shut the fuck up. ) The fact is that John Lennon’s death put a blanket over Paul McCartney’s reputation and legacy (especially his work in The Beatles) and he will not be taken seriously until they meet in rock’n roll heaven. It is only about the songs? yeah right…
Yes, I am saying that Paul suffered in critical regard because he didn’t get murdered. But…
He wasn’t really a very good musician. In fact, he wasn’t a musician at all until we talked him into buying a bass. We taught him to play twelve-bars, like Thirty Days by Chuck Berry. That was the first thing he ever learnt. He picked up a few things and he practised a bit until he could get through a couple of other tunes as well. It was a bit ropey, but it didn’t matter at that time because he looked so cool. We never had many gigs in Liverpool before we went to Hamburg, anyway.
~George Harrison (Anthology)
Nice tribute video:
It was John and Stuart who thought of the name. They were art students and while George’s and my parents would make us go to bed, Stuart and John could live the little dream that we all dream: to stay up all night. And it was then they thought up the name.
One April evening in 1960, walking along Gambier Terrace by Liverpool Cathedral, John and Stuart announced: ‘Hey, we want to call the band The Beatles.
~Paul McCartney (Anthology)
June 1: The Beatles released Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967
“A decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation” – Kenneth Tynan, The Times
“Sgt Pepper is one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right. We tried, and I think succeeded in achieving what we set out to do.” – John Lennon
The opening track:
We were fed up with being the Beatles. We really hated that fucking four little mop-top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn’t want any more, plus, we’d now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers. There was now more to it; not only had John and I been writing, George had been writing, we’d been in films, John had written books, so it was natural that we should become artists.
– Paul McCartney
I love Sgt. Pepper and it will always be in my top 5 Beatles album, sometimes at number 5 sometimes at the top spot. It’s a great Beatles album, and it’s one of the best album in Rock history. It is laid out as a concept album, but the idea held for two songs, the coda, and the album’s sleeve design.
The Beatles songs now did not sound practiced or rehearsed, and the reason for this is that they weren’t. They were studio snippets put together in sections and pieces. I think that’s the reason that the outtakes from the Sgt. Pepper sessions are so uninspiring, so unfinished. There are several bootlegs with alternative versions, and for Beatles-nerds they are of course something to seek out. That said, I think the best Sgt.Pepper outtakes are presented on Anthology 2, and, yes, they are put together in the same way as the original album, each song constructed from different takes and sound bites.
I’m guessing it would be a difficult record to play live.
I believe that this album represent a shift in popular music, we look at pop/rock music before and after Sgt. Pepper. Almost everything on the album was new. And it still sounds new and fresh.
Happy birthday, Sgt. Pepper!
The Making of Sgt. Pepper documentary made for the 25 year anniversary :
The Beatles were such a prolific album act that it’s sometimes hard to abstract their later singles; here, they ride their roots as a bar band in Liverpool and Hamburg to a new kind of glory.
~Dave Marsh (The Heart of Rock & Soul)
The opening circular riff, played on 12-string guitar by George Harrison, was a signpost for the folk-rock wave that would ride through rock music itself in 1965.
~Richie Unterberger (allmusic.com)
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
–
“John and I wrote She Loves You together. There was a Bobby Rydell song (Forget Him) out at the time and, as often happens, you think of one song when you write another.
We were in a van up in Newcastle. I’d planned an ‘answering song’ where a couple of us would sing ‘She loves you…’ and the other one answers, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ We decided that that was a crummy idea as it was, but at least we then had the idea for a song called She Loves You. So we sat in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it.” – Paul McCartney (Anthology)
“She Loves You” is a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and recorded by English rock group the Beatles for release as a single in 1963. The single set and surpassed several records in the United Kingdom charts, and set a record in the United States as one of the five Beatles songs that held the top five positions in the American charts simultaneously on 4 April 1964. It is their best-selling single in the United Kingdom, and was the best selling single there in 1963.In November 2004, Rolling Stone ranked “She Loves You” number 64 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In August 2009, at the end of its “Beatles Weekend”, BBC Radio 2 announced that “She Loves You” was the Beatles’ all-time best-selling single in the UK based on information compiled by The Official Charts Company.
