Well, the Grammy Awards are over and done for another
year. The Academy Awards aren’t until March
2nd and the Roll and Roll Hall of Fame 2014 induction ceremony follows that in
April. But there’s still plenty to
celebrate right now.
Sunday February 9th of this year marks the 50th anniversary
of The Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan TV show. 73 million viewers were glued to their black
and white TV screens watching John, Paul, George and Ringo do their thing. At this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony, The
Beatles were honoured with a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’. Paul McCartney and RIngo Starr did re-unite and
play together on Grammy night, but I doubt 73 million people were watching.
So let’s “Get Back”, grab your “Ticket To Ride” and celebrate
The Beatles worldwide phenomenon with 5, count ‘em 5, easy questions about the gear
days of the Fab Four.
QUESTIONS
1. At the 1964 Grammy
Awards held in April 1965, the title song from The Beatles first movie lost the
Grammy Award for ‘Rock and Roll Recording” to Petula Clark’s “Downtown”. Say WHAT?
The same Beatles hit lost the Grammy for ‘Song of the Year’ to “Hello Dolly”,
recorded by Louis Armstrong and written by Broadway composer Jerry Herman. What’s the name of this so called ‘losing’ Beatles
# 1 hit? (HINT ALERT: You shouldn’t have
to be ‘working like a dog’ to come up with the correct answer)
2. This documentary
shows The Beatles at work in the recording studio and ends with an impromptu
concert on the roof of the Apple offices on Savile Row in downtown London,
England. It has yet to come out on DVD,
even though the release has been promised for many years. The title song to this documentary lost ‘Song
of the Year’, ‘Best Contemporary Song’ and ‘Record of the Year’ Grammy Awards
to Simon & Garfunkels’ “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, written by Paul Simon.
What’s the name of the Beatles documentary,
the subsequent album and the # 1 hit single? (HINT ALERT: It’s the same title).
3. All four of The
Beatles have been married twice, but only one of the Fab Four has walked down
the aisle and said “Love Me Do” three times.
Which Beatle is it? a. Ringo Starr b. George Harrison c. Paul McCartney d. John Lennon
4. Several other
performers have played with The Beatles over the years. Jimmy Nicol filled in on drums for part of
The Beatles 1964 Australian tour while Ringo had an emergency tonsillectomy
back in England. Eric Clapton played lead
guitar on George Harrisons’ song, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” from ‘The
White Album’. Keyboard legend Billy
Preston played on several songs on “Abbey Road” as well as songs from the “Let
it Be” sessions. In fact, a 1969 # 1 hit
was credited on the 45rpm single to ‘The Beatles with Billy Preston’. It was the first time another performer got
label credit on a Beatles 45. The flip
side of this 45rpm record was “Don’t Let Me Down”, which climbed as high as #
35 on its own. Can you ‘Get’ (HINT
ALERT) the name of the hit ‘A’ side of this Beatles single?
5. This Beatles
album, released in 1967, won 4 Grammies the following year. The awards were for: ‘Album of the Year’,
‘Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts’, ‘Best Engineered Recording (Non Classical)’
and ‘Best Contemporary Album’. The
Beatles may be celebrating 50 years in 2014, but back then…”It was 20 years ago
today…” What’s the name of this classic
Beatles album?
ANSWERS
1. Believe it or not,
it was “A Hard Day’s Night”, which was # 1 for two weeks in the summer of
1964. The Beatles weren’t completely
shut out of the ‘64 Grammies. They did
win for “Best New Artist” beating out Petula Clark this time. Plus, “A Hard Day’s Night” took home the
Grammy Award for ‘Best Performance By A Vocal Group”. In an interesting twist, the Grammy for ‘Best
Engineered Recording, Special Or Novel Effects” went to Dave Hassinger (who
also engineered some of The Rolling Stones hits) for the album, “The Chipmunks
Sing The Beatles’ Hits”. ALLLLVIN!
2. “Let It Be’ is the
name of the song, the album and the documentary. “Let it Be” DID win a Grammy for ‘Best
Original Score Written For a Motion Picture’.
It also won an Academy Award (aka an Oscar) for ‘Best Music (Original
Song Score)’. After all of the recording
was originally completed, none of the Beatles, nor long time producer George Martin
wanted to bother putting an album together from the vast amount of recorded material,
so John Lennon gave the raw tapes of what became known as “Let it Be” to
legendary producer Phil Spector (now serving a sentence of 19 years to life for
the murder of Lana Clarkson), who added female choirs, strings and all kinds of
other things, bugging Paul McCartney so much that in 2003, Paul had the entire
album remixed and re-released as “Let It Be – Naked”, stripping out all of the
‘Spector touches’ from the original 1970 album.
3. That would be c.
Paul McCartney, who was married to first wife Linda (Eastman) McCartney from March
1969 until her death in 1998. In June
2002, Paul married Heather Mills. They
split four years later. Paul married
third wife Nancy Shevell in October 2011.
Ringo Starr married fellow Liverpudlian Maureen Starkey (nee Cox) in
1965. That marriage lasted until ‘75. In 1980, Ringo met his second (and current)
wife, actress Barbara Bach on the set of their movie “Caveman”. They were married on April 27, 1981. Ringo was also the first Beatle to become a
grandfather when his son Zak’s wife gave birth to a daughter in 1985. George Harrison married first wife, Patti
Boyd in January of 1966. Boyd had been a
successful model and had a small part in the film “A Hard Day’s Night”. Harrison and Boyd divorced in 1977 and the
following year, George married Olivia Arias.
That marriage continued for 23 years until George’s death in November 2001. John Lennon married first wife Cynthia Powell
in August of 1962. They had met in 1957
as students at the Liverpool College of Art.
The Lennons’ were officially divorced in November 1968. Yoko Ono came into John’s life in 1966 at one
of her London art gallery exhibits. John
and Yoko married in Gibraltar in 1969 and celebrated their honeymoon promoting
peace at the Amsterdam Hilton, then spent another week at the Queen Elizabeth
Hotel in Montreal. The Lennon anthem,
“Give Peace A Chance” was recorded in Montreal on June 1, 1969. The Beatles 1969 Top Ten hit, “The Ballad of
John And Yoko” describes the couples’ marriage and subsequent ‘Bed-Ins for
Peace’ in song. Even though that song is
credited to The Beatles on the record label, only two of them, John Lennon and
Paul McCartney, played and sang on it.
4. The 45 single that
was credited to ‘The Beatles with Billy Preston’ was “Get Back” with ‘Don’t Let
Me Down” on the flip side. The Beatles
had first met Billy In Hamburg, German in 1962 when Billy was playing keyboards
with legendary rocker Little Richard, one of the Fab Four’s musical
heroes. In 1969, Billy was signed to
Apple Records and released several solo albums and one hit single, “Outa-Space”,
which went to # 2 on Billboards’ Hot 100 chart in 1972. Billy performed at George Harrisons’ 1971 “Concert
for Bangladesh”at Madison Square Garden.
His most successful hits came during the years he was signed to A&M
Records. In the 1970’s Billy had two # 1
hits for A&M, “Will It Go Round In Circles’ (1973) and ‘Nothing From
Nothing’ (1974). Billy also co-wrote Joe
Cocker’s 1975 Top Five hit “You Are So Beautiful”. Billy Preston passed away on June 6, 2006 in
Scottsdale, Arizona.
5. “It was 20 years
ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play…” Yes, that four time Grammy winning album was
“Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. It
was The Beatles 8th studio album and has sold over 32 million copies since its
release in June of 1967. The initial “Sgt.
Pepper” recording sessions for the new album yielded three songs, “When I’m
64”, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”. EMI/Capitol Records and manager Brian Epstein
were pressuring The Beatles and record producer George Martin for a new single,
so “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” became that single and were therefore
not included on “Sgt. Pepper”. In 2005, Rolling
Stone magazine ranked “Sgt. Pepper” at # 1 on their ‘500 Greatest Albums Of All
Time’ list. The cover was art directed
by Robert Frasier (a London art dealer and close friend to The Beatles and The
Rolling Stones). It was conceived by
artist Peter Blake and his wife/artistic partner Jann Haworth. The actual cover photograph was taken by
Michael Cooper. The less said about the 1978
ill conceived “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” movie…the better.
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