I recently posted on getting a promo copy of Ringo Starr’s Ringo the 4th LP.
Now the fabulous Chained and Perfumed has discovered that the “power” ring that Ringo is seen wearing for the album’s cover shot is up for auction shortly:
Turns out the ring was commissioned as a Christmas gift for him by the lady who is sitting on his shoulders in the cover shot (front and back). She was also the photographer and Ringo’s then-girlfriend – Nancy Andrews. So, a self-portrait of sorts.
Paul McCartney’s official blog currently has an article about Paul attending the opening of a Linda McCartney photographic retrospective at the Kunst Haus Wien Museum in Vienna, Austria. 
This is very similar in scope to a previous exhibition which premiered in New York in June, 2011.
The museum site includes an interesting extract from a documentary about Linda made for Austrian television:
As one fan puts it on the McCartney website: “I love that you are keeping Linda’s legacy alive. Her art and her spirit.”
All photographs © Paul McCartney / Photographer: Linda McCartney
Just when you were recovering from the release of Wings Over America (in deluxe box set, triple vinyl, and standard CD), and Rockshow on DVD and Blu-Ray, comes news of yet another Paul McCartney release to track down.
This time he’s teamed up an Italian dance punk outfit which goes by the name of The Bloody Beetroots. Using some of the basic vocals from a song called “Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight” (from the 2008 Fireman release Electric Arguments performed with Youth – a.k.a. Martin Glover) they’ve just issued a pretty crazy remix single called “Out Of Sight“.
Here’s the teaser clip from June 10th:
Then the single came out as a digital download on June 14.
Rolling Stone magazine says of the song: Out of Sight (which also features Youth) finds the old Beatle appealing to the stadium EDM crowd in a heavily thumping, airily melodic track on which he wails in his finest Little Richard mode. There’s an interesting background article on how the song came about here.
If you want to hear it: [audio https://beatlesblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/01-out-of-sight-feat-paul-mccartney-youth.m4a]
I’m not sure if there’s going to be a physical version on CD or vinyl. If anyone knows that can they please let us know? The only thing I can find is that the track will appear on The Bloody Beetroots’ album Hide, out on Ultra Music in September.
Meantime it’s on the web at Soundcloud, on iTunes and on YouTube:
UPDATE: On July 8 this official film-clip was added to YouTube:
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…..)
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.
I have found an interesting second-hand record store not far from my local area which I didn’t even know existed.
It is called Audiomania. It’s a bit oddly located in a semi-industrial area and, unusually, is only open two day’s a week for four hours at a time! On one side of the shop there’s an extensive selection of good quality vinyl (pop, rock, blues, lots of jazz and a bit of a specialty of the store – reggae). On the other side of the space they have vintage hi-fi (amps, turntables, CD players, etc.) and – wait for it – restored motor cycles….
It is the most eclectic record shop I’ve come across in some time.
My son and I descended on Audiomania on the weekend a couple of weeks ago. He was on the hunt for jazz vinyl, and me in search of the Beatles (or anything else Beatle-related).
I ended up with three items. An Australian copy of Paul McCartney’s Red Rose Speedway; a copy of his Give My Regards to Broad Street; and Ringo Starr’s Ringo the 4th.
I wanted the McCartney LP’s because the Red Rose Speedway (Australian pressing) had a cover which didn’t have the Braille writing on the back, and the Broad Street was a US copy on the Columbia label (in Australia this LP came out on Parlophone).
Like I said in the previous post, I seem to moving from not having much of Ringo solo on vinyl to now having quite a few of his releases all of a sudden. I didn’t have this LP at all in my collection. Despite the ringwear on the cover (which you cane see below), this one being both a US pressing and a promo copy, it seemed worth the A$5.00 asking price:
As you can see it has a big black and white Atlantic Records “Promotional Copy” sticker on the front containing a track-listing with composers, song publishers and running times (for use by radio stations I guess), plus a gold-embossed stamp on the upper left-hand side saying “Promotional Copy NOT FOR SALE”.
You can see the rear cover above (pardon the pun). I don’t know who that is sitting on his shoulders or why they are there….if you know please drop us a line. There is also a paper inner sleeve with a photo of Ringo and his co-writer of many tunes on the album Vini Poncia:
The album came out in 1977 on the Atlantic label and has a cast of top session players and guest artists of the day including David Spinozza (guitar), the great Steve Gadd on drums, Chuck Rainey (bass), Michael and Randy Brecker (horns), and Bette Midler, Melissa Manchester, Jim Gilstrap and Luther Vandross (background vocals). 
So, one more Ringo Starr for the collection – and a promo copy at that.
I had a goooood Record Store Day last weekend.
For starters I managed to pick up copies of the Wings 12″ 45 of “Maybe I’m Amazed“, and I also scored the Ringo Starr three x 7″ box set. I got the Wings at one of Sydney’s longest-running, best-known and best-stocked independent record stores – Red Eye Records. We had to queue up in pouring rain outside the shop from opening time (9.00am Saturday) to get in. There were so many people hunting for RSD product it was a bit nerve-wracking wondering if they’d sell out of the Wings title. But, no problems. They still had some left when I finally got to the sales counter.
The Ringo box-set was another matter though. Red Eye hadn’t been able to secure any copies at all, and a quick phone around to just about every other likely outlet in town was the same story. I don’t think any copies of this actually made it into the country. So then it was a matter of just waiting for RSD to roll around in the USA and some copies to begin appearing on eBay. Which, due to the time difference between here and there, they eventually did late on Saturday night.
The Ringo Starr Singles Collection is three 7” vinyl singles in a lift-top box. You get “Photograph” b/w “Down And Out” / “It Don’t Come Easy” b/w “Early 1970” / “(It’s All Down To) Goodnight Vienna” b/w “Oo-Wee”, presented with replicated original picture sleeve artwork, a poster, and a bonus custom record spindle adapter.
Meanwhile….the rest of Saturday was taken up largely by attending the Glebe Record Fair. This is one of the big second-hand record fairs on the Sydney calendar and this year it did not disappoint. The heavy rain on Saturday did not deter people coming out in their droves:
Crate digging at the Glebe Fair I actually found quite a lot of things. First was a Beatles eight-LP box set I’ve been seeking out for some time – The Beatles Box – From Liverpool:
It’s the Australian edition from 1981 on the Parlophone label, and it came with the original poster too! I already had the Readers Digest Australian edition of this set (with different labels) – but having a mint copy on the orange Parlophone label has been an aim for a very long time:
From the same dealer I also got what I think is a quite rare Ringo Starr LP from 1983 called Old Wave. You can read the story of why there aren’t a lot of copies of this one around on Wikipedia. Because I’d purchased The Beatles Box – From Liverpool set he sold this one to me for A$10 – which I think was a bargain:
This copy is on the Australian gold RCA label:
I seem to be going from having hardly any Ringo Starr solo to now having quite a few. At the Glebe Fair I also spied a reasonable copy of the budget Music For Pleasure edition of his Blast From Your Past:
This “best of” compilation originally came out on Apple in 1975. In fact it was the last record to be released on Apple (before the label re-emerged in the 1990’s). This MFP re-issue comes from 1981. See the post Budget Beatles for more info on this and other budget labels which feature the Beatles as a group and as solo artists.
On the topic of budget Beatles, my final purchase for the day was a copy of The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl on the Australian EMI budget label Axis:
This LP came out in 1987 in a single sleeve (as opposed to the original EMI/Capitol issue from 1977 which had a gatefold cover). This is nice copy in very good condition.
So, a really productive (if somewhat expensive) Record Store Day.
Sometimes you don’t go looking for Beatle records. Sometimes, Beatle records come looking for you. That was my experience about three weeks ago when an old friend asked me if I was still interested in collecting the Beatles because she had a couple of records and would I like them?
Well, yes of course I would! Always open to donations. She dropped them in a couple of days later, and you’d have to say it’s a mixed bag of goodies….
The first one wasn’t even the Beatles. It was Wings. Well, not even Wings really, just an obscure band called P.K. and the Sound Explosion doing covers of Wings:
I think there are only two saving graces about this one. One is the daggy cover design featuring a (poorly) stylised version of the official Wings logo of the time. This is what the real thing looks like: 
The other saving grace is that this copy is still sealed in protective plastic and is in mint condition. This is a US copy that came out on the Pickwick Records budget label back in 1977. It is so bad, it’s good! (P.K. and his group have also done a Disco Christmas LP, the Beach Boys Songbook, a Paul Williams Songbook, and the Bee Gees Songbook).
Next came three of the real thing, some it has to be said in better shape than others. For instance this very well-used example of the Australian-only cover of Beatles For Sale:
You’d have to say this is a copy that has had a good life. I’m not sure about you, but it has so much patina of age that I’m tempted to keep it just because it looks so pre-loved and lived-in. There was one other intriguing thing. When I took out the vinyl it’s the mono pressing, but not the Australian version. Here’s what I got:
This is what it should look like:
Clearly the original Aussie pressing has been played to death and someone, over the course of the long history of this particular copy of the album, has sought out another to replace it – that being the UK mono we see above….
There was another Australia-only cover in the four records my friend donated. It’s the 1972 release The Essential Beatles on the Apple label. This is a “best of” compilation and as its catalogue number suggests (TVSS 8), it was associated with a TV advertising campaign by EMI in Australia:
This copy of The Essential Beatles has a well-used cover but the vinyl inside is actually in pretty good shape.
Finally a double LP of the soundtrack to the documentary movie Imagine John Lennon:
This is a gatefold album of twenty-one Beatles and Lennon songs. It is in what I would describe as good (G) to very good (VG) condition. The Internet Movie Database says of the film: This “biography” evolves around the nearly 240 hours of film and videotape fortuitously taken by Lennon of his life. The archive footage is transformed into a fascinating life story of one of the most complex and fascinating men of the modern music era….Includes some very personal and insightful footage, never before made available to the public.
The gatefold has some nice photos:
This is the Australian pressing, on the black and silver Parlophone label:
So, some varied, interesting and unusual donations from a friend. Sometimes you don’t have to go looking too far. Beatle records just come to you.
You might have heard recently about the signed copy of Sgt Pepper which sold at auction for US$290,500. It made headlines around the world because it shattered the previous record for such an item.
The album was purchased by an unnamed buyer from the Midwest USA. An anonymous seller parted with the album through the Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, which ahead of the bidding estimated the album would sell for $30,000.
The album was a U.K. Parlophone copy with a high gloss cover and gatefold:
Now comes news of another perhaps even rarer copy of Sgt Pepper that will be auctioned by the same auction house.
I got an email last week from a guy named Tony Gillespie alerting Beatlesblogger to this one. Its a copy of Pepper on the Capital label – but the cover has a major difference to what you are used to. Many of the faces on the famous shot have been superimposed with the faces of Capitol Records sales executives from the day. I first came across talk of this unusual item this back in 2009. Its estimated that only 40-50 copies were ever made for internal company distribution. Now, one is coming onto the market. Tony Gillespie is helping the owners of this extremely rare LP to publicise the auction – and so I asked him to provide me with some more details. His response is printed below:
Here’s a quick history of the “Doctored” Sgt Pepper’s cover:
Earlier this year, I received a message from a friend of mine named Chad, a prominent local buyer and seller of collectibles and antiques. He purchased a set of Beatles records, and since records aren’t his forte, he contacted me, Tony Gillespie, owner of Gillespie Records, because he knew of my extensive Beatles record collection, which has been called one of Indiana’s finest. (www.facebook.com/gillespierecords) He mentioned a “weird Sgt Pepper’s cover with different faces on it.” I asked him to send a photo of that record first.
I recalled reading an article that was generated from a story in Record Collector magazine (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/the-beatles-album-artwork-worth-70000-276691) about a “doctored” Sgt Pepper’s cover. I found the article and waited for the photo. When I opened the attachment, my knees buckled. There it was, the Holy Grail! The article estimates the cover to be worth 70,000 pounds (equvalant to $100,000+ US dollars, roughly).
I called the owner (Chad) and his wife (Kimberly), and told them to sit down. I revealed what the article said, and the roller coaster ride began. The three of us formed a partnership, with them owning the record, and me acting as their representative and got to work on finding the best home for the record. We contacted Perry Cox, the leading authority on all things Beatles, and he agreed to have us to his home (we flew from Indiana to Arizona) to personally authenticate the record. It was the first time he had ever held the “doctored” cover in his hands.
Perry estimated there were only 40-50 copies of the record produced (a claim mirrored by Bruce Spizer in his book, “The Beatles Story on Capitol Records, Part 2) for a Sales Executive meeting held in late 1967 in Florida. One cover is thought to have been made for each of the executives featured on the cover, but only 3-5 are known to still exist, and NONE have ever been sold on the open market, making the true value of this cover unknown. We were able to successfully tie the record to an executive on the cover, which Perry says could double the value!!
Perry also gave me this quote for promotional purposes…he has given his permission to me to print it:
“Among the rarest and most interesting artifacts produced during the original era of the Beatles classic Sgt. Pepper’s LHCB”, was an extremely rare U.S. stereo album cover version prepared exclusively for a Capitol Records party in honor of the landmark album in late 1967. The front cover of the album featured photos of noted Capitol Records employees amongst the many noted famous images we’ve now become so familiar with. Today, this has become one of the most sought after albums by collectors and fans all over the world. With only about 40+ examples made, I rank it one of the top 10 all time collectible albums by the Beatles in the world.”———Perry Cox, April, 2013.
We settled on Heritage Auctions of Texas to handle the first public sale of the “Doctored” Sgt Pepper’s cover, which will be held on August 10. They gave an auction estimate of $25,000-$30,000 but admitted the estimate in this case was hard to pinpoint due to the record’s obscurity. Chad, Kimberly and I have set up a Facebook page dedicated to the record www.facebook.com/rarestbeatlesrecord , a Twitter account @Beatlesrarist and a website www.rarestbeatlesrecord.com. We also made a You Tube video to detail the story a bit better here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hhg4XzjCN0E
Summer in Australia is great. It’s warm, holiday time, Christmas (yes, its hot here while it’s cold in most other places celebrating Christmas around the world).
It’s also a bad time of year – we get frequent floods, bushfires and cyclones (the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of hurricanes).
This year has been particularly bad for flooding rains, and that got me thinking about the value of my Beatles collection, and how I’d feel if my house got flooded. What could I do to protect it? I guess I also had in mind those confronting images which went around the world after the “super storm” – Hurricane Sandy – hit the east coast of the USA last year…What if your precious collection was inside this place?:
The photo above was taken at Fairfield Beach, on Long Island Sound in the US in the wake of Sandy. And there were people there who did indeed have their record collections affected:
This poor lady, Carla Strobel (at left above), is attempting to dry out her record collection which was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in Fairfield, Connecticut on November 11, 2012. (Photos: Brian A. Pounds). It’s even worse if you own a record label with masses of stock in a warehouse that gets trashed by a hurricane. Check out these poor folk at Norton Records in New York who also suffered massively at the hands of Sandy.
Truly soul-destroying. Of course it could be something a lot more simple and plainly domestic that gets you. This poor guy just had a water heater burst upstairs. Over a period of just forty-five minutes several hundred gallons poured on the floor and eventually made its way to his record collection down in the basement:
Or this poor record store flooded by a blocked drain that wasn’t even on their property. It slowly seeped into storage area though…
All this leads me to an email I received from an organisation called Home Insurance. They wrote an article for Beatlesblogger which I reproduce here as it may just have some information for you about whether or not you should insure your collection against loss or damage:
When you’re collecting memorabilia from a band whose influence still makes a limited edition Bazooka Bubble Gum Wax Box go for more than $4,000 on eBay (despite being broken up now for five times longer than they ever existed in the first place) – you’re bound to rack up a sizeable bill. If any of your prized Beatles possessions are ever stolen or damaged in a fire, how will you recover all of the big investments you made in your collection?
A limited edition Beatles Bazooka gum color cards Box.
Even if you’ve already purchased a smart homeowners insurance policy, chances are your Beatles collection won’t be fully covered. Consider the fact that most standard policies include a limit of only $200 for high-value items. That’s nothing when you’re talking about collectibles from the Fab Four.
Do you own a blue Aladdin 1965 Lunchbox? You could be sitting on almost $700, depending on its condition. A cork stopper branded by Paul McCartney is worth more than $500. Even if you’ve just held on to a pair of original Beatles concert tickets from 1964, you’re likely already way over your insurance policy’s coverage limit. So how can you affordable and adequately protect these items?
One option for serious Beatles collectors is to purchase additional coverage on their homeowners insurance policies by scheduling an endorsement. An endorsement is a quick and convenient way to increase coverage limits for valuable collections under an existing policy. It’s important to have your collection appraised by an expert in order to make sure you’ve insured it to its full value.
Another option is to invest in a personal articles floater from a provider that specializes in insuring collections like yours. This option is more expensive than scheduling an endorsement and may increase your premiums anywhere from 1-20% (depending on the value of your personal collection), but it also comes with peace of mind that your claim will be handled by someone with expertise in collectables.
Whether you’re just starting out or if you’re the proud owner of The White Album no. 0000005 – the first LP given to anyone outside of the band and last valued at $31,000 – it’s important to take steps to protect your Beatles collection. Contact an expert or licensed insurance agent as soon as possible if you’re not 100% sure you’ll be able to get help recovering your investment if something ever happens to your prized possessions.
(This article was contributed by Kelly McMurtrie, a writer for HomeInsurance.com. Kelly has been writing content for HomeInsurance.com and other major brands since 2011 after graduating from the University of South Carolina with a B.A. in Media Arts).
For one other sad collection damage story click here. I also came across some info from the University of Iowa on how to professionally salvage records, CD’s and DVD’s affected by flooding.
I’d be interested in your thoughts and comments on this one. Have you insured your collection? Or (like me) do you take the risk and hope for the best? Can an insurance payout bring back a lifetime of collecting anyway? So many items would be so difficult to find and replace. And how do you put an accurate value on a big collection?
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