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Posts Tagged ‘Paul McCartney’

Sir Paul McCartney is in a bind. He wants to release “Carnival of Light,” arguably one of the Beatles’ most experimental tracks, but he needs permission from the other living Beatle, Ringo Starr, and from the estates of George Harrison and John Lennon. The 14-minute “Carnival of Light” was recorded in early 1967 and McCartney recently told BBC Radio 4 that “the time has come for it to get its moment.” The recording has never been bootlegged and McCartney continued to cite his reasons for wanting the world to hear the song, saying “it would be great to put this on because it would show we were working with really avant-garde stuff.” “Carnival of Light” was only released for public play in early ’67 after being recorded for the electronic musical festival the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave. One Beatle who may not grant McCartney’s wish (alive or deceased) is George Harrison, who vetoed Paul’s request to include “Carnival of Light” on the Beatles’ Anthology in the late 1990s.

For those who stick to the pop anthems that made the Beatles famous and don’t deviate into the experimental realm of the Fab Four’s 1967 album Sgt. Pepper may be shocked by “Carnival of Light” should it ever be released. McCartney described the song more to the BBC: “I said all I want you to do is just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it, it doesn’t need to make any sense. Hit a drum then wander on to the piano, hit a few notes, just wander around. So that’s what we did and then put a bit of an echo on it. It’s very free.” Although a few lucky Beatles aficionados claim to have heard the song, McCartney supposedly owns the master tape. Author Mark Lewisohn, who is widely regarded as the globe’s leading authority on all things Beatles, described “Carnival of Light” as “distorted, a distorted lead guitar, the sound of a church organ, various effects (water gurgling was one), and perhaps the most intimidating of all, John Lennon and McCartney screaming dementedly and bawling aloud random phrases like ‘Are you alright?’ and ‘Barcelona!.’” Beatles biographer Barry Miles also weighed in on the unreleased track, describing it as similar to Frank Zappa’s “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet.”

McCartney was most recently in the news when he played a historic performance in Tel Aviv on September 25. The concert came 43 years after the Israeli government banned the group from playing in fears that they would corrupt the youth population with their music. McCartney performed Beatles favorites like “Hello, Goodbye” and 31 other hits chronicling the Beatles career as well as John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” While you wait for McCartney to make another pop moment that will go down in the history books, don’t miss your chance to see him perform live. You can find Paul McCartney tickets at http://www.stubhub.com to see him perform live!

Author Bio: This article is sponsored by StubHub.com and was written by Kirby Brooks. StubHub.com is a leader in the business of selling Paul McCartney tickets, sports tickets, concert tickets, theater tickets and special events tickets.

Yes! Yes! I know “All You Need Is Love” is a John song, but I thought it sounded better than “Let it Beet” or “The Long and Winding Rutabaga.”

All this vegetable talk is in regards to Sir Paul McCartney’s recent appeal for everyone to go meatless on Mondays.

The ultimate goal of these meatless Mondays is to cut down on the amount of gaseous emissions from farm animals and thus slow down the effects of global warming. Apparently farm animals “emit” more greenhouse gases than all the world’s cars combined-sounds like we need hybrid cows not hybrid cars.

While it sounds a little odd to ask people to give up their Whoppers in order to stop bovine flatulence, Sir Paul has been a vegetarian for decades. Besides, this type of culinary activism certainly hasn’t hurt the sale of Paul McCartney tickets.

Sir James Paul McCartney was born on June 18th, 1942 and is a former Beatle. McCartney is a multiple Grammy Award-winning English singer-songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist, entrepreneur, film producer, record producer, painter, and animal rights activist. He gained worldwide fame as a member of The Beatles, alongside John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.

This summer Paul is everywhere.

Just announced, the former Beatle is selling New York tickets for an added third show. This new date, the last of three Big Apple performances (July 17th and 18th), is scheduled for July 21st at the New York Mets’ new ballpark, Citi Field.
These dates continue McCartney’s tradition of performing at the Mets’ home stadium. In 1965, the Beatles were the first music act to perform in the Mets’ former home, Shea Stadium.

During Billy Joel’s “Last Play at Shea,” Sir Paul joined “Soused Billy” for one last sing-a-long before they tore the place down.

Now, Paul McCartney will be the first music act to perform at the Mets’ new digs.

While it’s definite that McCartney will play at the new Citi Field, rumors are swirling about Paul McCartney Boston tickets for two shows at venerated Fenway Park. Just imagine combining two great things, McCartney and Fenway!

The park’s management has filed for a license to host two concerts, both with pyrotechnics, for August 5th and 6th. Those dates just happen to coincide with a Red Sox road trip.

Insiders believe Fenway management is waiting to reveal McCartney’s first ever Fenway concerts until a June 22nd public hearing.

Fenway and Shea aren’t the only historic North American performances Sir Paul has on his schedule in 2009. Paul McCartney Halifax tickets are on sale for a July 11th performance-his only concert in Canada in 2009.

Sir Paul’s gig in Halifax overlaps the famous Tall Ships Nova Scotia Festival. Promoters are expecting 60,000 fans to see McCartney rock the ‘Fax.

Even at 67, Sir Paul McCartney is still delighting fans with his legendary music and he’s still making rock and roll history. And just like when he was a Beatle, he’s still trying to change the world, only now it’s one meatless day at a time.

Author Bio: Ryan Hogan writes for Best Show Tickets, a website that sells all kinds of sports, theater and concert tickets like Paul McCartney tickets.

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.

Paul McCartney’s newest album was released in November of 2008 but it’s not exactly a Paul McCartney album. It’s officially an album by the experimental music group called The Fireman. Hopefully you are now intrigued and are wondering what in the heck I’m talking about. And you should be intrigued if you enjoy interesting music that stretches the boundaries of “normal” song arrangements.

So who is The Fireman and what do they have to do with Paul McCartney? The Fireman is a duo consisting of a producer who goes by the name Youth (his real name is Martin Glover) and a former bass player for a certain influential 1960s band named Paul McCartney (ah yes, how did you guess?)

If you haven’t heard of The Fireman before that’s because they have only released two previous albums which haven’t gained much widespread attention. One of which was basically a remix album (1993′s Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest) and a second that was a psychedelic, almost entirely instrumental, ambient album (1998′s Rushes which I highly recommend.) Neither of these albums were very publicized and neither made the charts in the UK or the US.

Their newest album, Electric Arguments, is a shift for the group in that it has been more heavily promoted (and it did enter the charts in the US and the UK although only at #67 & 71) and in that it includes songs with vocal melodies & lyrics rather than pure instrumentals (in fact every song on the album features vocals.)

This is very exciting for McCartney fans like myself who have greatly enjoyed McCartney’s more experimental tendencies (such as the tape loops on “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the second album from The Fireman (Rushes,) or The Liverpool Sound Collage.) Finally we get to hear the combination of McCartney’s songwriting & singing talents (and his vocals sound amazing on this album) combined with his experimental musical ideas.

It’s a thrilling ride especially when you consider the rather psychedelic notion that this is the same man who basically gave birth to many of the musical styles of today. This 66 year old man who has seen the music he helped give birth to develop into many different styles of music. And here he is in 2008 still producing inventive original music. It’s truly a beautiful thing if you are into music for the art of it and not for the scene (yes I’m looking at you Pitchfork Media.)

One of the really great things about this album is the way that McCartney stretches his vocals. On each song they sound completely different than the song before (or just about any song he’s ever released in the passed.) There’s a rawness to his vocals that is really exciting to listen to.

There’s a lot of different styles of music on Electric Arguments from ragged rock (track 1 opens the album with a noisy Led Zeppelin-esque rocker) to quiet acoustic music (Track 2 “Two Magpies”) to spaced out hard to describe electronica inspired music.

One of the highlights for me is track 6, “Light From Your Lighthouse” which features probably the weirdest vocal on the album (and that’s saying quite a bit.) It’s also probably the catchiest song on the album. It actually reminds me a great deal of Ween which is a very good thing. I don’t think a lot of people realize how inspired by McCartney Ween actually are. It was Paul, after all, who was behind of the “genre pastiches” with The Beatles (“Rocky Raccoon,” “Honey Pie,” “When I’m 64,” “Back In The USSR.”) By the way, if you are more of an old school classic rock fan and you’ve never heard Ween, I recommend you check them out. Start out with something like White Pepper so you don’t get scared away!

All said, I think Electric Arguments is sure to go down as one of the best albums of 2008 and as one of the most essential albums in Paul McCartney’s solo career.

The author Johnny Moon says you should go to http://www.MusicByDay.com for more music magic.