Four Beatle Books for a Song…

Posted on June 19, 2013 by beatlesblogger

Made the mistake of walking past my local discount book store today…..haven’t been near the place for weeks and it’s always a bit of a lottery to go in. They turn over discontinued and surplus titles very quickly and at very cheap prices so you never know what you might find. Today, in ten minutes, I came away with not one but four new Beatles titles for the collection.

This first one is a ripper and comes from 2010. It documents what is now a legendary photo shoot by the band in July, 1968 otherwise known as “The Mad Day Out”. Photographer Don McCullin shot about fifteen rolls of film over the course of a day out in the streets of London and back at Paul McCartney’s house at St John’s Wood.

Many of the photographs had until now remained largely unpublished. If you have the Beatles “1962-1966” or the “1967-1970” double LPs or CDs you’ll have seen at least one photo from this same photo shoot. It’s the black and white one inside the gate-fold album cover, or in the very centre of the CD booklets, labelled (incorrectly as it turns out) “St Pancras Old Church, 22 July 69”. Here’s two other photos from the book: This edition is in a smaller format than what I recall seeing in shops when this book first hit the shelves, but it is a very nice book to have none-the-less.

Here’s the rear cover:I already had a copy of this next one, but not in the same format. The book I found in the discount shop today is a very small paperback copy. It’s Ringo’s Postcards From the Boys, and for just $4.99 how could I resist another copy?

Postcards is a collection of 51 postcards sent to Ringo from John, Paul and George. Each card (displayed front and rear) is accompanied by brief reminiscences from Ringo:

This book first came out as a hardback in 2004 after originally being released in a very limited and expensive edition by Genesis Publications. This one I found today is at the other end of the scale – a small-format, budget re-issue from 2005:

(If you want to see the absolute deluxe version in minute detail, check out this lengthy YouTube clip).

Next find was a what looks to be a very interesting study of the Beatle money trail, how they got ripped off, and lost and made fortunes:

Beatles For Sale – How Everything They Touched Turned to Gold is by John Blaney, the author of a number of Beatle-related books (including this one). It was published back in 2008. I have always been interested in the Beatle money matters (especially around the formation and eventual demise of their Apple Corporation) and so this one looks like it will be a very good read. Here’s the rear cover:

Finally, a book about Beatles books.

Beatle Books – From Genesis to Revolution is an extensive compendium detailing all the books written about the band, by the band members, and about them as solo artists too.

There was only one copy of this on the shelf, and it has been pretty beaten up. It looks like its been dropped, or something heavy has been dropped onto it. But it’s a really handy reference book and one I have never seen before. The guy gave me an extra discount because of the damage – so I paid the princely sum of $5.99….

If you’re interested this came out in 2008, is manufactured in Canada, and was published by Collectors Guide Publishing in Ontario. Strange to find one copy floating around a discount bookshop in Sydney, Australia.

Never-Before-Seen Photos of the Beatles

Posted on June 10, 2013 by beatlesblogger

This coming Wednesday sees the release of Ringo Starr’s new e-book, Photograph.

It features over 100 never-before-seen images of John, Paul, George and Ringo – some of them from their last days together as a band, some from their first trip to India, and some taken during their first U.S. tour.

Ringo says he completely forgot that he took a lot of photos of the Beatles during the 1960s. He apparently discovered the images by accident after his mother had died, tucked away in boxes at her house.

Other photos featured in the book are from Ringo’s childhood in Liverpool and family gatherings.

The e-book was previewed at a press-only event at Apple’s headquarters in London last week and is set for release worldwide on June 12. It allows readers to pick up, play with and zoom in on Ringo’s photographs while scrolling through. Photograph features 69 audio stories and 11 exclusive videos, with music, animation and new interviews from Ringo Starr. Here are some screenshots:

Photograph is available for pre-order now at www.RingoPhotograph.com. A limited-edition, hand-bound version by Genesis Publications is due in December:

Fundraiser Book and CD Fair – Some Good Beatle Finds

Posted on June 8, 2013 by beatlesblogger

Almost a year ago to the day I posted on a big book and CD fair where I found a couple of Beatle-related items of interest. This fair is held by a local classical music/jazz radio station (2MBS-FM) as a much-needed fundraiser. It has now become a well-established annual event.

This week saw the opening of the 2013 fair and again I got in on the very first day. Once more there was a huge selection of CDs and books on offer, especially good quality music books. This time around I tackled the CD tables first and after just a minute or two of browsing the first Beatle item I found was this:

The Best of George Harrison was released in 1976 and is a CD I don’t have. It’s one I’ve been on the lookout for for some time though so the evening was definitely off to a very good start. It was released in a number of countries, and has a unique cover. This one is the Australian pressing:

Next came George Martin’s In My Life, from 1998. I’ve been aware of this CD since it was first released but, until now, I didn’t have a copy in the collection:

In My Life is very much Beatle-related. Their producer invited into the studio a wide range of what he describes as his “heroes and friends” to record versions of Beatle songs. It has to be said the results are patchy at best, but at just $5.00 it seemed like a good time to finally get it.

The final two CDs I found I already have four versions of….

The Beatles 1 gathers together 27 of their number one singles. It was originally released in 2000, and I have a UK CD copy, a Taiwanese CD version, a copy on vinyl, and it was remastered and re-issued again in 2011 in a gatefold cardboard cover. However, at the fair I found two Australian pressing CD’s of the disc (the jewel case version) from 2000. One had a black sticker on the front, the other had a white variation:

Of course I had to have both. I know. Do I really need another two copies? Call me crazy. Enough CDs already!

From there it was over to the book section of the fair and as 2MBS-FM is a classical and jazz music station their book stall always seems to have a wide selection of music books on offer. This year did not disappoint. They had stacks of sheet music too, and in one of the piles I found some practically mint copies of two Beatles songbooks – one large thick one for the Beatles “blue” album, The Beatles 1967-1970:

No, I didn’t pay $41.99 for this!

The other find was a much slimmer songbook, one which I’d never seen before. It was published only in Australia and New Zealand by Northern Songs. The Colourful Beatles – Souvenir Song Album contains the sheet music for twelve of their songs and, despite its age, was in near-new condition:

Here’s the index page:

Next it was across the room to the books proper, and this one caught my eye immediately. It’s a really thick paperback called Can’t Buy Me Love – The Beatles, Britain and America by US author Jonathan Gould. It was published in 2007.

Again, I didn’t pay $45.00, or anywhere near it. The New York Times book review of Can’t Buy Me Love says in part: “Gould aims to meld the three primary, often distinct strands of Beatle bibliography — biography, music appreciation and pop sociology — into a single volume, a mother ship of Beatles books, with, as the subtitle implies, a special emphasis on the divide between the country that gave them birth and the country that arguably loved them best….Happily, the effort paid off: Gould has written a scrupulous, witty and, at times, appropriately skeptical study, which drew me back into a subject I thought I was sick of. The book lacks the intimacy of a full-fledged biography — if you want to know who John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr really were, you’ll do better elsewhere — but it compensates with an imaginative intelligence and a lively breadth of knowledge.” You can do one of those Amazon “Look Inside” reads to get a taste of Gould’s style and insights if you want.

Well, that was just about it. I was headed to the counter to pay, already thinking I’d probably gone overboard a bit on the purchases, when I saw this 1993 large-format book.

Inside are lots of great photos of George Harrison, including many unusual ones:

I tossed up whether to get this book as I know author Geoffrey Giuliano has a mixed reputation amongst Beatle and other fans (see his entry in Wikipedia for more). In the end it was the broad and eclectic photo selection which did it for me.

So, a successful Thursday evening trawling for Beatle treasure. Even by my standards I probably went a bit overboard this time – but how could you leave this sort of quality behind? And they were all at fantastically low prices (well, thats what I keep telling myself…..)

A Big Beatles Garage Sale Haul

Posted on June 3, 2013 by beatlesblogger

In my previous post I was bemoaning the scenario where you make the effort to get out and about early on a Saturday morning on the hunt for Beatles vinyl – and return frustrated and empty-handed.

Not so this last weekend which produced a wealth of great Beatles treasure, including one LP I’d not seen before. My son has taken to joining me on these forays into others people’s garages and front lawns. He calls it “crate digging“. He’s on the lookout for jazz plus wide range of other artists he might be able to take samples from to load into his computer. He then uses short grabs from these to mix into new songs he’s creating himself.

Anyway, we go to this one house early Saturday morning and the lady says yes, she has some records, but as she hasn’t gone through them she doesn’t want to put them out right now. If we could come back after lunchtime she’d find them (somewhere up the back of a very packed garage) and we could have a private look through to see if there is anything we want. We like the sound of an exclusive “crate dig” and so return at the appointed time. By this time four very large plastic bins filled with records have been located and we begin to look through….

First out of the crate comes an Australian copy of Sgt Pepper. It is in the old-style gatefold cover with the fold-over tabs, plus it has the original paper inner and the “cut out” insert. Things are looking good. This one is on the old Parlophone black and silver “Stereo Banner” label. Jaesen Jones, the author of “An Overview of Australian Beatles Records“, says this label was used on some pressings of Pepper by EMI here between between the years 1967-1969: Nice. Next find was an Australian copy of Let It Be. It’s not an original issue, but one of the many, many re-issues of this disc. This one is on the Apple label and is in pretty good condition – near mint. Here’s the rear cover and label:

While flipping through the boxes we got talking to the lady and it turns out this collection of records (which was literally a couple of hundred discs across a wide variety of genres – but mostly rock and pop) came from a very well-known Sydney radio and TV personality. He was an old family friend and years ago when moving house asked the lady if she wanted his records…

Next I find, in quick succession, a Beatles White Album and an Abbey Road (both re-issues on Apple and probably about the same vintage as the LIB above). The White Album even has the poster and all four photos and is in very good condition:

Further digging then reveals a red The Beatles/1962-1966, again an Australian copy, with the Apple label and a red background. It has both lyric sheet inserts and is in reasonable condition. Not mint, but OK:The final Beatles treasure to come out of these crates is a bit of a rarity. It’s an album I’ve not seen before The Beatles – Birth of Legend. A New Zealand release from 1983 on the budget Music World Records, it features twelve songs from the famous Decca audition tapes:As the liner notes on the rear cover say, the Decca audition refers to the now-famous audition by the Beatles for Decca Records before they reached international stardom. In what was considered one of the biggest mistakes in the music business ever, Decca decided to reject the band selecting instead a band called Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.

So, after a weekend before of nothing, this time around it is a different story.

Two Garage Sale Books

Posted on May 28, 2013 by beatlesblogger

Sometimes when you go out to garage or yard sales hunting specifically for vinyl records you never actually see any. Not one. No Beatles records. No records at all. It can be very disheartening.

That was the case a couple of weekends ago for me. There seemed to be something of a drought of vinyl for some reason. None of the four or five places I called into that morning had a thing.

However, I did mange to get two quite interesting and collectable books – one of which I know is controversial, but more on that later….

Starting with the non-controversial book first. The guy selling it didn’t have it out on display. Because I couldn’t see any records at his sale I asked (as I always do): “You don’t have any records or CD’s do you?”. This is just in case they have some discs, but haven’t thought to put them out. It happens more than you think….

“No,” he replied. “What are you looking for?”

“I’m after anything to do with the Beatles. I’m not a dealer, I’m just a collector,” I said.

“Well, I do have a Beatles book if you’re interested”, and with that he shot off inside the house and emerged again with this:

The Beatles Forever is a vintage Beatles picture book and it was in really good condition. It’s a British publication dating from 1981. The author is Helen Spence, and as you can see from the front cover image above it has a foreword by legendary US disc jockey Alan Freedman. It is a loose chronology of the band’s journey from unknowns to super stardom and contains lots of great colour photographs on every page:

The basic premise for the book is detailed on the inside flap of the dust jacket:

It begins “The Beatles Forever is an outstanding collection of photographs dating back some twenty years to the beginning of a phenomenon which changed the face of the sixties and the sound of popular music for all time. These photographs, many published here for the first time, have been carefully gathered together to present a scrap-book of the Beatles”. And that’s a pretty acurate description:

And here is the rear cover:From this garage sale I moved on to another. These people didn’t have any vinyl or CD’s either….but they also had a book. A very thick book. A book about John Lennon:

This was a US hardback, a first edition of Albert Goldman’s much-maligned work which came out in 1988. As Wikepedia says, “The book is a product of several years of research and hundreds of interviews with many of Lennon’s friends, acquaintances, servants and musicians. Notwithstanding, it is best known for its criticism and generally negative representation of the personal lives of Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono. [It is] controversial because of its portrayal of Lennon in a highly critical light. Lennon was presented in the book as a talented but deeply flawed man who manipulated people and relationships throughout his life, flinging them aside when they were no longer useful to him. Goldman also suggested that Lennon was an anti-Semite and a heavy drug-user and that he was dyslexic and a schizophrenic. The author even went into detail about the long-rumored homosexual affair between Lennon and the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, as well as alleging a number of liaisons by Lennon with other men, including a claim that he solicited underage male prostitutes in Thailand. This latter assertion greatly angered Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney. The book was criticised by Lennon fans for allegedly containing much unsubstantiated conjecture, and tending to present worst-case scenarios when doing so.”

I had a paperback copy of this book, but a first edition hardback in excellent condition was tempting despite it’s critical reputation. Like I said, it is very thick:

And so I bought it. I like the cover, too. A great Iain Macmillan photograph of John Lennon. If you don’t think you know Macmillan’s work, you do. He’s the guy who took the famous photos for the cover of Abbey Road. He also did a lot of other work for John and Yoko including:

The cloud on the album cover for Live Peace in Toronto
Photos on the album Some Time in New York City
The wedding cake in the Wedding Album
The merging heads label of John and Yoko’s vinyl single “Happy Xmas (War is Over)“

On the rear cover of the Goldman book Macmillan’s portrait of John his is presented simply like this:

The Beatles “20 Greatest Hits” – plus an Australian “23 Number Ones”

Posted on May 20, 2013 by beatlesblogger

I scored a couple of copies of the Beatles’ 20 Greatest Hits LP the other day – but not the typical British or US versions. One is Korean, the other from Brazil.

20 Greatest Hits was released in 1982 to mark the 20th anniversary of the group’s first record release “Love Me Do” in the UK. It was the last Beatles album to be released with different variations for the US and UK markets (because some Beatle hits in the US were not released as singles in the UK and vice-versa, such as “Eight Days a Week” and “Yesterday”).

The Korean and Brazilian versions I got both have the US artwork and the same running order of songs. First up the Korean cover, front and rear:

The Korean copy has a plastic “Oasis Records” inner sleeve. Oasis manufactured Parlophone records in South Korea:

And here is the label:

I don’t know if you can make out the small print around the outside, but is says: “Approved by the K.E.C.P.P. Ministry of Culture and Information Registration 16”. (Click on the image to see a larger version)

Next up, the pressing from Brazil:

The Brazilian copy comes with a nice printed cardboard inner sleeve:

And it’s on the EMI label, not Parlophone:

Meanwhile, in Australia a very similar album with practically the same cover art came out a year later (in 1983) – but with a completely different title and running order of songs to both the US and UK versions. Here it was called The Number Ones, and our version contains twenty-three hit songs, not twenty. The extra three songs came on a special three-track 45rpm single included only with the set. Here’s the Australian cover, front and rear:

And here’s the label of the LP:

And this is the unique extra 3-track single:

It came in two different variations. One with a printed sleeve with a cut-out (above) to show the label, and one variation (below) without the cut out:These are the labels of the bonus Australian single, A and B sides:

And some copies in Australia came with a bright neon-orange sticker on the front:

Help! – Coming on BluRay in June

Posted on May 17, 2013 by beatlesblogger

Help!, will be the next Beatle film to be released on Blu-ray. It will join last year’s releases of digitally restored copies of the Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour feature films on Blu-ray, DVD and on iTunes. Presumably, as this is a Blu-ray only release, the 2007 DVD release of Help! remains current.

The group’s second feature film makes its June 24 Blu-ray debut as a single-disc package, pairing the digitally restored film and 5.1 soundtrack with an hour of extra features including an introduction by the film’s director, Richard Lester, and an appreciation written by Martin Scorsese to be included in the booklet.

The Beatles official site has the full press release with details.

Pre-order details will be published shortly.

The Beatles – The Uncut Ultimate Music Guide

Posted on May 16, 2013 by beatlesblogger

I know. I’m always a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to getting on top of the latest Beatle magazines.

I literally stumbled across this one today on the shelf at one of my local newsagent stores. I genuinely hadn’t seen it before, but it looked pretty impressive and so I bought it.

I get home, look it up, and it turns out it was actually released back in January….

It’s a 148-page Beatles special edition, published by the UK’s highly respected Uncut magazine. The magazine traces the rise of the band, its massive success, and then the eventual demise. It features interviews from the archives of Uncut, NME and Melody Maker. Looking back, the levels of access and revelation contained in the archives of these three journals is quite impressive. Their journalists sat in on meetings with Elvis Presley, travel round the United States with the Beatle touring party during the first tour, and are there as the band starts to fall apart. Alongside all these features Uncut’s current team of writers contribute in-depth new analyses of every Beatles album.

Here are some page scans from the mag, which includes unusual photos and great information on the band and their releases:

And this great photo of Beatle manager Brian Epstein – which should qualify for our Beatles With Records series of posts as well:

Beatles Books – Hardcover….and Electronic

Posted on May 13, 2013 by beatlesblogger

The general consensus from Beatle fans so far is unanimous: the cover art for Mark Lewisohn’s first volume in his series of three books is really quite amateur-looking, and I agree:

This is a very disappointing cover, one that doesn’t do justice to the high expectations surrounding the release of this long-awaited Beatles book. Someone of Lewisohn’s standing should get better than this. It comes out later this year.

Meanwhile, the Linda McCartney book Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs has been released in electronic/digital form on iTunes.

Linda McCartney – Life in Photographs features:

over 170 photographs selected from Linda’s archive of over 200,000 images—most of which users can pinch to zoom
forewords by Paul, Stella, and Mary McCartney, texts by Annie Leibovitz and Martin Harrison, and excerpts from interviews with Linda from BBC’s highly acclaimed 1994 “Behind the Lens” profile
a bonus video interview with Paul McCartney and his daughters, Stella and Mary

The collection was produced in close collaboration with Paul McCartney and his children. When it first came out in hard copy the McCartney family released a YouTube video talking about the book.

George Harrison and Hamilton Island

Posted on May 9, 2013 by beatlesblogger

Apologies for the long delay in posting anything on Beatlesblogger but I’m on vacation.

As it happens I’m on a resort island off the coast of Australia – and funnily enough there is actually a Beatles connection to this place.

I’m sitting on beautiful Catseye Beach on Hamilton Island off the Queensland coast and it occurs to me (dredged from somewhere deep in the back of my mind) that George and Olivia Harrison once had a luxury holiday home on this very island….and here it is:

A quick search on Google confirmed that vague memory and led me to this comprehensive article in Architectural Digest outlining the full story of how George ended up owning a little piece of Australia. The article is penned by writer and Harrison family friend Paul Theroux – who contributed the Introduction to the book “Living in the Material World“, and whose work also appears in the very limited (and expensive) Genesis Publications anniversary book about the “Concert for George“. The Harrison home was sold in 2008, apparently for $8 million – setting a new sales record for the island at that time. I just wish George was still around to enjoy this very beautiful part of the world….

You can see a Google Map satellite image of the house here.

Beatles Blog

Adventures in collecting Beatles music

Yearly Archives: 2013

Never-Before-Seen Photos of the Beatles

A Big Beatles Garage Sale Haul

Two Garage Sale Books

The Beatles “20 Greatest Hits” – plus an Australian “23 Number Ones”

Help! – Coming on BluRay in June

The Beatles – The Uncut Ultimate Music Guide

Beatles Books – Hardcover….and Electronic

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: