Oh fuck yes, they are going to release the Beatles’ 1967 TV special Magical Mystery Tour on Blu-ray, with a new 5.1 surround soundtrack. Having my appetite whetted for more Beatles in surround by the excellent Love 5.1 special DVD edition and the great 5.1 mix on the new Yellow Submarine Blu-ray, I’m all over this one, too.

For me, the jewel in this particular crown will be getting to hear a surround sound mix of “I Am The Walrus,” one of my top favorite songs of all time. Can you imagine?

Several well-known Beatles bootlegs have let the multi-tracks for this song escape over the years and there is a “naked” mix of just the guitar, bass, drums and vocals floating around out there (no orchestra or sound effects) that sounds just like a Niravana demo (seriously). (Think about it, the guitar part is really monotonous, almost punky):

In September 1967, The Beatles loaded a film crew onto a bus along with friends, family and cast and headed west on the A30 out of London to make their third film, this time conceived and directed by The Beatles themselves.

“Paul said ‘Look I’ve got this idea’ and we said ‘great!’ and all he had was this circle and a little dot on the top - that’s where we started,” (Ringo)

In the wake of the extraordinary impact of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album and the One World satellite broadcast of “All You Need Is Love,” The Beatles devised, wrote and directed their third film, Magical Mystery Tour, a dreamlike story of a coach day trip to the seaside.

The film features a fabulous supporting cast of character actors and performers, (including Ivor Cutler, Victor Spinetti, Jessie Robins, Nat Jackley, Derek Royle, and the inimitable Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band).

Apple Films have fully restored the long out-of-print, classic feature film for October 8th release worldwide (October 9th in North America) on DVD and Blu-ray with a remixed soundtrack (5.1 and stereo) and special features.

In the DVD extras there is also going to be material featuring Ivor Cutler and Traffic (doing “Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush”) that was shot for Magical Mystery Tour but not included in the final edit

On a weird personal side note, when I was 11, during a double bill screening of Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine at the local library in 1977, I went blind for about an hour. True story.
 

 
Thank you, ifthenwhy!

 
I wonder if anyone has ever seen this film, The Beatles Meet Star Trek, which opened November 5th, 1976 at the Uniondale Mini Cinema in Uniondale, N.Y. From what l can gather, over at Temple of Schlock, this was either a mix of Star Trek bloopers and Beatles’ performances; or a cartoon fest of clips from the Trekkies and Fab Four’s separate animated series. Whichever, it would be good to find out if anyone has seen The Beatles Meet Star Trek, whether it was any good? and was it the first pop cultural mash-up?
 
Bonus: fan made slash clips of Beatles and Star Trek, after the jump…
 

 
This ridiculously literal Beatles tribute (guess what happens when the line “Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head” is sung? Go on, take a guess…) is from a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine TV special.

Featuring Broadway’s original “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Ted Neeley , Yvonne Ellman (JCS’s “Mary Magdalene”), Richie Havens, Patti LaBelle and a dancing Nixon and Kissinger, this will make your flesh crawl after a while… and it goes on forever.

“A Day in the Decade” was a good title for this awfulness. The YouTube poster writes that he found this on an unlabeled Betamax tape at a flea market. Fitting!
 

 
Via Nerdcore

 
It’s like being attacked by a giant swarm of Beatles.

1. Love me do
2. From me to you
3. She loves you
4. I want to hold your hand
5. Can’t buy me love
6. A hard day’s night
7. I feel fine
8. Eight days a week
9. Ticket to ride
10. Help!
11. Yesterday
12. Day tripper
13. We can work it out
14. Paperback writer
15. Yellow submarine
16. Eleanor Rigby
17. Penny Lane
18. All you need is love
19. Hello, goodbye
20. Lady Madonna
21. Hey Jude
22. Get back
23. The ballad of John and Yoko
24. Something
25. Come together
26. Let it be
27. The long and winding road
 

 
If, like me, you get just a bit tired of The Cult Of Beatles (™) then consider this the perfect antidote.

The Better Beatles were a post-punk outfit from Nebraska who released one 7” single in 1981 and quickly disappeared without trace. The Better Beatles did to the Beatles what The Residents did to Elvis, and what the Flying Lizards did to Barrett Strong (which was quite distinct from what the Beatles did to Barrett Strong.). The original songs were just creaky old foundation blocks that they destroyed, then re-built on top of. Often with wondefully misshapen new forms.

Was this a joke? No. It was deadly serious, a reverse hex aimed at tearing down an overbearing edifice. From the Better Beatles Wikipedia page:

Dave Nordin [synthesizer] has stated that he considered the Beatles “an oppressive influence,” and Jean pSmith [vocals] has said their goal was to “[strip] the songs of their sacred status.”[3] After a handful of shows, they recorded an album’s worth of material in late 1981. They broke up shortly before their debut single “Penny Lane”/“I’m Down” was released on Woodgrain Records, leaving the bulk of their music unreleased.

Unreleased until five years ago, that is, when Hook Or Crook Records released the complete works of the Better Beatles as an album called Mercy Beat (available to buy here, where you will also find lots more info on the band.)

Who knows, maybe some Beatles fans can even appreciate the genius of The Better Bealtes? (Probably not, though. Po-faced plonkers!)

The Better Beatles “Penny Lane”
 

 
In April 1970, as rumors spread of Paul McCartney quitting The Beatles, news reporters hurried to Apple HQ, hoping to make their assumptions fit the story when interviewing Beatles’ Press Officer, Derek Taylor, and the band’s recently appointed manager, Allen Klein. This rare little news clip, seemingly missing a linking voice-over, captures the moment the rumors of a Beatles split were confirmed.
 

 
With thanks to Nellym
 

 
The Beatles got top billing!

Via Brad Laner’s FB

 
Long before there was “Love,” Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas spectacular set to a score of Beatles mash-ups, and even before there was Danger Mouse’s illegal Grey Album,—a meeting of the minds between The White Album and Jay-Z’s’s Black Album—an earlier and far more radical deconstruction of the Beatles’ oeuvre was done by the Residents.

This was not The Residents first stab at the skewering the Fab Four—their 1974 debut album, Meet The Residents, featured a demented pastiche of the first Beatles album cover that John Lennon was apparently quite fond of. Knowing of course, that they were foolishly risking an expensive lawsuit for copyright infringement this time out, The Residents released the song on a 7-inch record, in a limited edition of just 500 singles, as “The Beatles Play The Residents & The Residents Play The Beatles,” in 1977.

The A-side, “Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life,” contains about twenty Beatles samples, one from John Lennon and a line from one of their fan club only Christmas messages. The B-side was the Residents cover of “Flying” which they chose because it was one of the only Beatles songs (along with “Dig It”) attributed to all four members.

Folklore at the time imagined the Residents as the Beatles reformed undercover, making a mockery of their back catalog. The two songs were available at one point as CD extra tracks, but now it looks like they’ve been withdrawn.
 

 
The Beatles uniquely comic embellishment—it’s very “Goon Show”, isn’t it?—of Rossini’s “Barber of Seville Overture.” I’d rate this up there with the Bugs Bunny cover version!

From the end credits of Help!
 

Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin hangin’ out
 
Oregon -based artist Kay Petal makes these whimsical sculptural needle-felted rock star dolls. Kay says, “Using single, barbed felting needles I sculpt wool fibers into solid felted wool characters with heart and soul. My characters are soft and flexible yet strong and durable.”

And guess what? Kay will even make one of YOU! You can contact her on the website Felt Alive for more information.
 

Johnny Cash
 
More after the jump…

 
We all know that writer, William S. Burroughs is one of the “people we like” on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album cover, but did you know that Burroughs was around when Paul McCartney composed “Eleanor Rigby”? Apparently so. Over the weekend, I noticed the following passage in the book With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker by Victor Bockris:

Burroughs: Ian met Paul McCartney and Paul put up the money for this flat which was at 34 Montagu Square… I saw Paul several times. The three of us talked about the possibilities of the tape recorder. He’d just come in and work on his “Eleanor Rigby.” Ian recorded his rehearsals. I saw the song taking shape. Once again, not knowing much about music, I could see that he knew what he was doing. He was very pleasant and very prepossessing. Nice-looking young man, hardworking.

The connection here was, no doubt, author Barry Miles. Miles started the Indica Bookshop in London with McCartney’s financial backing. Miles states in his book In the Sixties that Burroughs was a frequent visitor to the shop. When the Beatles started their experimental label Zapple, with Barry Miles at the helm, the idea was to release more avant garde fare, such as readings by American poets Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautugan and comedian Lenny Bruce. McCartney set up a small studio that was run by Burroughs’ ex-boyfriend, Ian Sommerville, who also lived there, and this is why Burroughs would have been around.

It’s always thought that John Lennon was the far-out Beatle, but it was Macca who was obsessed by Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Morton Subotnick, not Lennon (he got there later via Yoko).

 
Songs by The Beatles re-interpreted by The London Jazz Four, from their rare 1967 album of fab covers, Take A New Look at The Beatles. The London Jazz Four were assembled by Steve Race (yes, he of the dummy keyboard fame from quiz show Face the Music), and consisted of Mike McNaught (keyboards), Jim Philip (flute), Brian Moore (bass), Mike Travis (drums). The quartet original cut a couple of vanity tracks, which proved so popular that an album soon followed. The following tracks manage to improvise on the Lennon/McCartney originals, with use of harpsichord, marimba, glockenspiel, and vibraphone, creating a light swinging versions of the songs, which at times develop (“Rain”) and improve (“Michelle”) on the originals.
 

“Paperback Writer”

“The Things We Said Today”

“Rain”

“Michelle”

“Norwegian Wood”
 

Bonus: Jerry Fielding and the Hollywood Brass take on The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
 
With thanks to Simon Wells
 

 
He blew his mind out in car, he didn’t notice that the lights had changed. These are the lyrics from The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”, which immortalized the death of sixties socialite Tara Browne.

On the night of December 18th 1966, Browne, together with his girlfriend, Suki Potier, drove through the streets of South Kensington in his Lotus Elan. The couple had just left a friend’s apartment at Earls Court around 1am, and were now in search of food. Browne sped through a stop signal at the corner of Redcliffe Square and Redcliffe Gardens. As he swerved to avoid an oncoming vehicle, Browne crashed his car into a parked van. His last minute actions saved Potier from certain death, but left Browne fatally injured, and he died in hospital the following day. 

Browne was 21-years-of-age, a member of the Irish aristocratic family Oranmore and Browne, and heir to the Gunness fortune. He looked like a cross between Paul McCartney and Peter Cook (more of which later), was said to be barely literate - having walked out of a dozen schools, lived with his mother, Oonagh Guinness and her boyfriend a “show designer” Miguel Ferreras, drank Bloody Marys for breakfast, smoked Menthol cigarettes, and according to his friend Hugo Williams lived the life of a “Little Lord Fauntleroy, Beau Brummell, Peter Pan, Terence Stamp in Billy Budd, David Hemmings in Blow-Up.”

‘Tara could hardly have failed to be a success in Swinging London. While I was wandering around the globe in ’63 and ‘64, he embarked on the second and last phase of his meteoric progress. He got married, met the Stones and the Beatles, opened a shop in the King’s Road and bought the fatal turquoise Lotus Elan in which he entered the Irish Grand Prix. He let me drive it once in some busy London street: ‘Come on, Hugo, put your foot down.’ I had just got my first job and our ways were dividing. His money and youth made him a natural prey to certain charismatic Chelsea types who turned him into what he amiably termed a ‘hustlee’.

He reputedly gave Paul McCartney his first acid trip. The pair went to Liverpool together, got stoned and cruised the city on mopeds until Paul went over the handlebars and broke a tooth and they had to call on Paul’s Aunt Bett for assistance. There is still a body of people — and a book called The Walrus is Paul — who believe that Paul is dead and is now actually Tara Browne with plastic surgery.’

A month after his death, January 17th 1967, John Lennon was working on a song when he read a newspaper article on the coroner’s report into Browe’s death:

‘I was writing “A Day In The Life” with the Daily Mail propped in front of me on the piano. I had it open at their News in Brief, or Far and Near, whatever they call it. I noticed two stories. One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash.’

Lennon further explained his inspiration in Hunter Davies’ biography of The Beatles:

‘I didn’t copy the accident. Tara didn’t blow his mind out. But it was in my mind when I was writing that verse.’

However, more recently, in the authorized biography, Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, Paul McCartney added his tuppence worth:

‘The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together. It has been attributed to Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, which I don’t believe is the case, certainly as we were writing it, I was not attributing it to Tara in my head. In John’s head it might have been. In my head I was imagining a politician bombed out on drugs who’d stopped at some traffic lights and didn’t notice that the lights had changed. The ‘blew his mind’ was purely a drugs reference, nothing to do with a car crash.’

Whichever version is true, Tara Browne is still the man best associated with lyrics. Here is Tara, and his Lotus Elan, in some incredibly rare footage from a short French TV feature, where the aristocrat drives around London and mumbles in French about his car, art, fashion, music and life. There are no English subtitles, but they’re not really necessary as the film is easily understandable. Appearances from Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull and famed gallery owner Robert Fraser.
 

 
With thanks to Simon Wells
 

 
This is so unbelievably bad, it’s…bad. From the 1968 album Bill Cosby Sings Hooray for the Salvation Army Band! Zip zop zoobity bop!
 

 
Via Cynical-C

 
Looking like an advert for Swinging London, Joe Massot’s 1965 short Reflections on Love mixes pop documentary with scenes devised by writer Derek Marlowe and (apparently) an uncredited, Larry Kramer. Though everything looks rather beautiful, it is such a terribly straight film, and considering the talent involved, and doesn’t really offer much love for the audience to reflect on. Then, this was the Sixties, when everything was new and exciting, and getting hitched in a registry office was daring and rad. O, how innocent it all seems. Massot went on to direct George Harrison’s Wonderwall and later, Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains the Same. Kramer went on to script Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), and Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), before writing his novel Faggots in 1978. As for Marlowe, he wrote the classic double-agent spy thriller, A Dandy in Aspic, and followed this up with a series of idiosyncratic and stylish novels (from crime to Voodoo to Lord Byron), which are all shamefully out-of-print, and not even available as e-books - publishers please note.

The original version was twenty-one minutes long, and this is the revamped, re-scored (by Kula Shaker), re-edited (12 minutes) re-release from 1999, and still watchable pop-candy.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

A Dandy in Aspic: A letter form Derek Marlowe

Wonderwall: The Ultimate Sixties Flick?

Wonderwall Music: George Harrison’s little-known 1968 solo album