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Posts Tagged ‘John Lennon’

Don’t you just love that movie ‘High Fidelity’ where the hero is constantly making lists of his top 5 all time favorite records, girl friends, meals and whatever. I save all the concert tickets from the concerts that I have been to and I can’t help but make up my top five classic concerts and wish I had the concert tickets to go with the memories.

Classic concert ticket number 5: U2 plays on an L.A. liquor store rooftop, March 27, 1987. They were atop a liquor store rooftop, Los Angeles. It may not have had The Beatles’ originality, but Bono and the guys surely enjoyed their 20 minutes on top of the LA world nevertheless. The Irish super group was about four songs into the gig on an L.A. liquor store rooftop when the city police decided to end their impromptu performance and spoil the fun for the fans that had gathered below. Strictly speaking this wasn’t a concert with proper concert tickets but I love the video “Where The Streets Have No Name”, which was the point of the whole exercise.

Classic concert ticket number 4: George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, August 1, 1971 at Madison Square Garden, New York City. What had initially been conceived as a small political fundraiser aimed at bringing humanitarian relief to the refugees in breakaway Bangladesh quickly turned into one of the biggest rock fundraisers of the 1970s. Although Lennon and McCartney never ended up signing on to Ravi Shankar’s cause, many other stars did, including George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Billy Preston, and Eric Clapton, who actually collapsed onstage as a result of his protracted bout of heroin addiction but still managed to proceed with the concert. The 40,000 or so fans who crowded New York’s Madison Square Garden witnessed some rare performances, including a 25-minute Indian recital by Ravi Shankar, Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy.”

Classic concert ticket number 3: Pink Floyd break visual barriers with The Wall shows between February 1980 and June 1981. It was a World tour. Pink Floyd’s visual theatrics took a turn for the legendary with their infamous The Wall concerts, which were the last shows Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Dave Gilmour, and Nick Mason performed together before the Live 8 show in July 2005. Each show required timed performances and unprecedented cooperation between the musicians, concert crew, lighting engineers, and computer programmers. In fact, extended instrumentals and Roger Waters’ impromptu introductions often served to cover up stage fires and other technical difficulties, which seemed inevitable when putting together a show that included a 30-foot-high teacher puppet, a scorpion wife and other such animated characters.

Classic concert ticket number 2: Jimi Hendrix wows Woodstock, August 18, 1969 at Woodstock, New York. After plowing through three days worth of rain, mud, minbending drugs, and music, the 30,000 or so diehard fans who chose to brave one more night for Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock closer were not disappointed. In fact, those who stuck around to witness Hendrix’s mind-blowing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” cannot deny its importance on the festival’s soundtrack; it became the eternal anthem of a generation of civil rights crusaders, anti-war protestors and music lovers everywhere. Now I know this was a ‘free’ concert but it didn’t start out that way and there were actual concert tickets issued for Woddstock.

Classic concert ticket number 1: The Beatles sell out Shea Stadium August 15, 1965 in New York City. After a thundering welcome at JFK airport, the American release of Help! And an electrifying appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles’ success at Shea Stadium, the first-ever stadium concert of its kind, was all but guaranteed. In fact, the sell-out crowd of 55,600 was so deafening that the The ‘Fab Four’ could barely hear themselves play throughout their 30-minute set. Instead, The Beatles’ grand armored van entrance, John Lennon’s ‘Jerry Lee Lewis’ onstage freak-out and the event’s record-setting gross revenues stole the show.

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This is the first of a series of articles which will be trying to delve a little deeper into the life and times of the Beatles.

We will be looking at their history, their time in Hamburg, their time at the Cavern Club, their time in America, and the time they spent in the Studio, together with other fascinating little known facts that have come to light over the years.

Without doubt the Beatles are an iconic group, a one off, and although it is getting on for 40 years now since they broke up, their fame and influence is still as strong now as it was back in the 1960′s and early 70′s.

I grew up during the Beatles era, and everywhere that I have travelled around the world they are known, and loved. I remember being in a small nightclub in Thailand where there was a Chinese Beatles tribute band playing, and although I personally did not appreciate the sound that they produced, particularly the singing, they were immensely popular with the locals.

On another occasion I was on holiday in Peru, and half way up a mountain I came across a bunch of Peruvians playing their type of music, on pipes, but the song they were playing was Love Me Do.

So, who were The Beatles?

Well let me begin by telling you the basics, something which many of you reading this will know, but to many of our younger readers this basic information may be something which they have never got a handle on.

The Beatles were a pop group ( as they were called in those days) and they came from a city in the north of England known as Liverpool.

The group consisted of John Lennon who played rhythm guitar and vocals, Paul McCartney who played bass guitar and vocals, George Harrison who played lead guitar and vocals, and Ringo Starr who played drums and vocals.

Two other names were former members ? Pete Best, drums, and Stuart Sutcliffe, bass.

I think if you had asked The Beatles what was their style of music in the early days they would probably have told you that they were strongly influenced by rock and roll, and skiffle. Later on this style did change quite a bit, but that was their early influence.

Now it is true to say that not only were they influenced by many earlier groups and styles of music, but they were quite an influence on many groups that came after them.

Their music, the clothes they wore, the things they did and said, all had an enormous influence on the young people of the day, 1n the 1960′s.

When eventually the group broke up in 1970, John, Paul, George and Ringo all pursued their own solo careers, and we will be looking at those careers in more details in forthcoming articles.

If you would like to be kept updated on future articles then please go to my website and near the bottom of the page you will find my email address. You simply need to email me and ask to be kept updated.

Author Bio: John Charles is a guitarist who has met all The Beatles. Please visit my website at http://www.GuitarPlayingMadeEasy.com to be kept updated.

Many of you reading this will know that some months ago, after playing a few gigs in Liverpool, I was shown by a local guide a tombstone in a churchyard which had the inscription to Eleanor Rigby.

This aroused my curiosity and I decided that I would try and find out a bit more about this person whose name was on the tombstone, and also about the other people mentioned on the same tombstone.

I did indeed find out some information and I wrote an article about my findings. If you would like to read a copy of this article then please go to my website mentioned at the bottom of this article, and there you will find my email address and you can simply email me and request a copy.

I did say in that letter that as and when I could find out some more information, I would be writing another article, and this is the reason for these writings.

Now in case you cannot remember who Eleanor Rigby was, let me give you a few verses of the song, by The Beatles, which made her famous.

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for,

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear
No one comes near
Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there
What does he care?

Do you remember that, a great song with a haunting melody.

Well now, soon after I had written my first article on what I had found out about Eleanor, I received an email telling me about a fascinating auction that was shortly about to happen in the UK.

What led up to the auction was this. A charity in the UK had written to Paul McCartney asking for a donation, nothing surprising in that you might think.

This charity did not hear back from Paul McCartney for 9 months, and then, right out of the blue, they received a letter which included a document.

The document was a Liverpool City Hospital salary register, showing the signature of an E. Rigby.

Eleanor Rigby apparently worked there as a scullery maid and the custom was to sign for your monthly salary.

Eleanor earned the princely sum of £14 per month back in 1911 when this salary register was signed.

This document gives us one of the clearest clues yet as to the identity of Eleanor Rigby, the woman in the song of the same name who dies alone with no one to mourn her.

Well I have more to say on this, and more research to carry out, so if you would like to be kept updated then please go to my website where you will find my email address. Simply send me a message asking to be kept updated.

Author Bio: John Charles is a guitarist who has met and spoken with all of The Beatles. Click Here to be kept updated.

Do you remember that haunting song by the Beatles, the one with the line “Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name, nobody came”?

A very sad song, and at the time it was rather out of keeping with the type of songs that we had come to expect from the ‘fab four’.

Just to remind you, here are a couple of verses of that song.

“Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved

So, who was Eleanor Rigby, and was she a real person or was she just a figment of the imagination, something like ‘lovely Rita, meter maid’?

Well, I was playing some gigs recently in Liverpool, and although my evenings were busy, the rest of the day was free and so I decided to use my spare time to do some research into this and to try and find out if there really was an Eleanor Rigby.

I looked up a few points of reference in the local library, donned my Sherlock Holmes hat, and set off for a suburb of Liverpool known as Woolton.

In the Anglican church there you will find a typical English churchyard, surrounding the church, and you will find many tombstones, but one headstone in particular caught my attention.

Wait for it. The headstone is dedicated to an Eleanor Rigby.

Having located such an interesting gravestone I then began to ask myself if any of the Beatles lived anywhere nearby. And guess what? As a child John Lennon used to live in Menlove Avenue, which is very close to the church.

This made me think back to my childhood, and I remember as a young boy I and my friends would often play in our local churchyard, playing hide and seek and other games behind the headstones.

Therefore it is not unreasonable to assume that John Lennon also probably often went into this churchyard, and would have seen the headstone dedicated to Eleanor Rigby.

Now unfortunately I only had a couple of days in Liverpool so I was not able to dig any deeper into this, but I intend to return soon and continue my research.

I want to spend some time going through the church records, and I would like to see what I can find out about the other people mentioned on Eleanor,s headstone.

If you would like to be kept posted on this, and kept up to date with my research, then please click on the following link. You will be taken to a page and near the bottom you will find my email address. Just send me a note saying keep me informed or something like that, and I will email you whenever I have found out some fresh information.

Click on Eleanor Rigby to be kept updated.

Author Bio: Click on Eleanor Rigby to be kept updated.