From the New York Times, the day after the famous Shea Stadium concert by the Beatles….
Love the line: “During the two days since the group’s arrival from London there have never been more that 2,000 Beatle addicts racing about the midtown, making shrill noises and in general irritating the police.” Only 2,000 fans on the streets of NYC for two days:
And this is what 55,600 fans were there for:
Thanks for Andrey in Russia for the scan.
The Beatles’ first recording contract, part of a just-concluded New York auction of items from the Uwe Blaschke Collection, has sold for an impressive US$93,750. It went to an unknown internet bidder, but fell short of the predicted US$150,000 target.
The 1961 contract, signed by all four members of the group at that time (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best), was for a recording session with the Polydor company in Germany and produced the single ‘My Bonnie’. It was credited on the label to “Tony Sheridan & The Beat Brothers” because there was a stipulation in the contract allowing Polydor to use a different group name. They felt the name “Beatles” wouldn’t be readily accepted in the German market. Never-the-less, the group was making it’s very first professional recording for commercial release by an actual record label.
While ‘My Bonnie’ achieved only modest success in Germany, back home in Liverpool Beatle fans who knew about the recording began asking for it in record shops, including the store owned and managed by Brian Epstein. When he learned that the requests were for a local group, he paid a visit to the Cavern club to see what the fuss was about, and the rest is history….
Also in this auction was the 45 single ‘P.S. I Love You’ (the B-side to ‘Love Me Do’) – signed by all four Beatles and which we wrote about last month. This was the next most expensive item to go under the hammer yesterday. It fetched a substantial US$25,000 from a bidder in the room at the New York auction. This was well above the expected US$10,000: 
The third most expensive item on the day was a framed, signed Beatle fan card photo from 1962. On the back is printed “With Best Wishes from Paul, Pete, John, and George. The Beatles. April 5th 1962”. Around that text are a number of signatures: “für Christa von George Harrison”, “für Christa von Paul McCartney”, “Roy Young” (a British Rock singer and pianist), “für Christa von John Lennon”, “Best Wishes from Pete Best”, and “Best Wishes from Bernard Boyle” (the founder of the Beatles Fan Club). These fan cards were given out at a Cavern Club concert on April 5 honoring the Official Fan Club. This sold for US$12,500: 
This is the answer to the mysterious countdown on thebeatles.com for the last few days:
Yes, it is the video version of the Beatles “1” CD, plus a bit more, newly restored and expanded in multiple configurations for global release on November 6.
At first glance it is a little confusing (see the full press release below) – but this is it in a nutshell:
The single CD:
The single DVD (or BluRay), plus CD:
The Deluxe 2 DVD (or 2 BluRay), plus book and CD:
The single BluRay:
The single DVD:
How they did the video restoration, repairs and remastering:
A “before” and “after” comparison:
And a short example of how “Strawberry Fields Forever” (only available in the Deluxe set) will look:
THE BEATLES’ VIDEOS AND TOP HITS COME TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME
All-New Editions of The Beatles 1 Pair Beautifully Restored Promotional Films and Videos with Brand New Stereo and Surround Audio Mixes
Beatles 1+ Deluxe Edition Celebrates the Sight & Sound of The Beatles in 50 Films & Videos
London – September 15, 2015
After The Beatles stopped touring, and because travelling around the globe to promote new releases was impossible, the band increasingly made what could be described as “mini movies”. These pioneering promotional films and videos helped to define the way we have come to watch music, not least because The Beatles approached filming with the same ease and innovative spirit they brought to the recording studio, exploring new creative possibilities with infectious delight. Showcasing the band’s filmed work to accompany their 27 No.1, U.K. and U.S. singles, The Beatles 1 is newly restored and expanded in multiple configurations for global release on November 6 by Apple Corps Ltd/UMG.
The 27-track CD/DVD and CD/Blu-ray pairs beautifully restored videos for each song, with new stereo and 5.1 Dolby Digital and DTS HD surround audio mixes. The brand new Beatles 1+ celebrates their career in over 200 minutes through 50 promotional films and videos. This includes the 27 No.1s, with the restored videos, along with a second disc of 23 videos, including alternate versions, as well as rarely seen and newly restored films and videos; all include new audio mixes in deluxe CD/2-DVD and CD/2-Blu-ray packages. The 27-track audio CD is also being made available with new stereo mixes. A 2 LP, 180-gram vinyl package will follow.
TThe new editions of The Beatles 1 have been made possible following extensive research, and restoration of the original promo films, classic television appearances and other carefully selected videos spanning the band’s history. Apple Corps dug deep into The Beatles’ vaults to select a broad range of films and videos for their rarity, historical significance and quality of performance. An 18-person team of film and video technicians and restoration artists was assembled by Apple Corps to undertake painstaking frame-by-frame cleaning, colour-grading, digital enhancement and new edits that took months of dedicated, ‘round-the-clock work to accomplish.
The result is a visual run down of The Beatles’ number one records, as well as the additional tracks on the bonus disc of Beatles 1+ that show the band in previously unseen standards of clarity and quality; many of the films and videos have never before been commercially released, in whole or in part.
Beatles 1 and Beatles 1+ offers the restored films, including 35mm negatives scanned in 4K and digitally restored with new stereo and 5.1 surround audio remixes, produced from the original analogue tapes by the GRAMMY® winning team of Giles Martin with Sam Okell at Abbey Road Studios. For four of the videos, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have provided exclusive audio commentary and filmed introductions, respectively. The 1+ Deluxe Edition, presented in an expanded 124-page illustrated hardcover book includes ‘an appreciation’ of The Beatles’ ground-breaking films and videos by music journalist and author Mark Ellen and extensive, detailed track/video annotation by music historian and author Richard Havers.
“These videos and films are spectacular reminders of the era we lived in. They also rock!”
Paul McCartney
“II think it’s really interesting to see the videos we made, some of them incredible and some of them really incredible. How else would we have got to sit on a horse?”
Ringo Starr
Between 1962 and 1970, The Beatles released 27 No.1 hit singles in the U.S. and the U.K. In 2000, these timeless songs were collected for The Beatles 1, which topped the charts in 35 countries and became that decade’s bestselling album worldwide. 15 years later, 1 is revisited for this entirely new, visually-inspired presentation.
It’s The Beatles, as you’ve never seen them before.
The dearth of information in today’s mystery teaser announcement on the Beatles official page leads fans inevitably to snooping around the web trying to find something, anything, on what it might all be about.
Truth be told, there’s not much around. Word has it that there’ll be more official news on Tuesday….
But what is with that address given at the bottom of the image in the email sent out to subscribers of The Beatles.com? You can see it here:
If you search in Google Maps for 1538 20th Street, Santa Monica, California 90404, and then go to Street View, you’ll see this very non-descript building:
Does that look like the US headquarters of a multi-million dollar Beatle empire? No, we didn’t think so either. Check out that hand-written wooden sign propped on the right-hand-side windowsill, with the 1538 street number.
The email image also credits a company called Topspin, and a service called The Topspin Platform. That’s an online, direct-to-fan sales and marketing tool used by a wide range of bands to promote their product, make online sales, sell tickets to gigs, etc. Check out the video on the page to find out more. They’ve done a lot of work with the Concord label in marketing Paul McCartney’s releases over many years, so it’s not that surprising that Universal and/or Apple and the Beatles have used the company to kick off this campaign. But Topspin isn’t at 1538 20th Street, Santa Monica either. Their address is 3120 W. Empire Ave., Burbank, California 91504 – in a much more salubrious part of that city.
So what is going on? The mystery deepens…..
The official Beatles website has emailed subscribers overnight teasing what could be the long-promised Beatles “1” DVD/BluRay – which has been rumoured to be in preparation for over a year now and will contain official versions of all the band’s promo videos and film-clips.
There’s precious little other information apart from the Twitter hashtag #THEBEATLES1…..and a 16 second video on the Beatles official YouTube channel:
The Beatles website has been given over to a holding page with the countdown clip as well.
It’s all very cryptic, but must surely be leading up to the announcement of a video equivalent of the top-selling “1” CD and vinyl.
We were digging around in a cupboard the other day and came across a long-forgotten stash of Beatle sheet music collected from a variety of places over the years. Thought you might like to see the front covers. Most are printed and published for the Australia/New Zealand market. Some are books with numerous songs, others are single titles. As you’ll see, they’re in far from pristine condition, but interesting none-the-less.
Here they are in (roughly) chronological order: 
We’ve run an occasional series on Beatle album covers that have possibly been, well, borrowed as inspiration by others…..(see here, here, and here).
The Melbourne-based band The Paper Kites have just released their latest. It’s called Twelve Four:
Remind you of anything?
That’s not to say Paul McCartney was entirely original either, using as his inspiration for the cover of New the works of American artist Dan Flavin.
For more in-depth information about Flavin and his neon art visit the artsy.net website.
Quite a few new Beatle or Beatle-related books have just been announced or recently released, and so we thought we’d mention a few worthies. Here’s a round-up:
The Beatles Lyrics by Hunter Davies was released as a hardback book last year. It’s now slated for a paperback release this October:
The book features analysis of the Beatles song catalog and images of the Beatles’ hand-written song lyrics. If that is actually the new cover (above) we reckon it looks cool. For any record collector or Beatle fan it definitely says”Pick me up and look inside”. If you, do we can assure you that you won’t be disappointed. We got the hardback edition last Christmas and have been dipping in and out of it all year.
Here’s one we stumbled across on the web. We haven’t read it yet but there’s a great review on The Daily Beast about a new book called Allen Klein – The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll. Yes, it’s a very long title, but also a fascinating re-think by author Fred Goodman of the impact and influence of one of the music industry’s bad boys of management – the late Allen Klein. Klein was brought in to run the Beatles’ Apple company and very soon became the lightening rod that split the band, with Paul McCartney on one side and John, George and Ringo siding with Klein on the other. This is very much a business book with lots of financial details, but Goodman makes the nuts and bolts really interesting, linking them to the seismic shift in music-industry economics that Klein instigated. This book is out now and there’s a “Look Inside” on Amazon if you are interested to read more:
Here’s another that we don’t own and haven’t read yet. We were just walking through a large bookshop the other day and accidentally spotted this one on the shelf:
The inside cover says See Hear Yoko was conceived expressly for Yoko Ono as a gift between friends on the occasion of her eightieth birthday. It’s a visual portrait of her as an artist, activist, wife and mother, from her days with John Lennon through to the present. Legendary rock and roll photographer Bob Gruen was welcomed into the lives of John and Yoko during their years in New York City, when Gruen served as their personal photographer. He continues to document Yoko today. Approached by his friend Jody Denberg, who had logged twenty-five years of interviews with Yoko, Gruen collaborated with him to create an extraordinary birthday gift. Gruen selected more than three hundred classic color and black-and-white photographs—accompanied by text by Denberg—to illuminate the story of Yoko Ono. Again, Amazon has a “Look Inside“. There are some truly great images here.
The Zapple Diaries: The Rise and Fall of the Last Beatles Label. This one should be very interesting. Due for release on September 28 in the UK (but not until March 1, 2016 in the US) this book is written by Beatle insider Barry Miles and, as the publishing blurb says, it’s the first full-length illustrated examination of the Zapple label—an Apple Records off-shoot and Beatle experimental label:
On Zapple the Beatles hoped to release a range of spoken word and avant garde recordings – all part of their “…ambition to be leading members of the counterculture movement”. As it turned out Zapple was short-lived, surviving for just six months or so in 1969, and only had two official releases (Lennon and Ono’s Unfinished Music No.2: Life With the Lions, and George Harrison’s Electronic Sound). Author Barry Miles ran Zapple, so this should be an interesting insight – especially on the closing down of the label by one Allen Klein (see above). The Amazon UK and Amazon US sites both have a bit more info, and you can pre-order the book there too.
Finally, a new children’s picture book from Macmillan that introduces the next generation of fans to the story of John, Paul, George and Ringo. Focusing on the early years, Fab Four Friends: The Boys Who Became the Beatles shows how four boys from Liverpool became the bestselling band in history:
Written by award-winning children’s author Susanna Reich with fantastic illustrations by Adam Gustavson, this book traces the Beatles’ roots through each boy’s childhood and teen years. Evocative language and richly-detailed paintings tell the story of the band from its earliest days as a skiffle group to its explosion onto the world stage. Amazon has a “Look Inside” for more. This is out now. We think you (and your kids!) will love it.
Just as they did prior to the release of the Archive Collection editions of Venus and Mars and Wings At The Speed of Sound last year, Paul McCartney’s website has begun to issue some promotional free download tracks which won’t be on the forthcoming reissues of Tug of War and Pipes of Peace.
The first is an exclusive free download of Paul’s ‘Take It Away [Single Edit] (2015 Reissue)’. The track does not feature on the remastered Tug of War reissue and is only available as a download through PaulMcCartney.com (you’ll need to register on the site and give your email address to get access).
In Australia this single edit was originally released (in 1982) through EMI on the Parlophone label:
And this reminded us that the Tug of War album came out during McCartney’s brief but somewhat ill-fated career with CBS Records in the US. ‘Take It Away’ therefore came out on the Columbia label: 
The B-side to the single, ‘I’ll Give You a Ring’, will be included as part of the re-issued Tug of War – which is due out in early October.
If you don’t want to sign up to the Mccartney site and just want to hear the track, it’s available as a Soundcloud file at rollingstone.com
Uncut magazine is also saying they have the Soundcloud file to listen to, but we can’t see it on their page anywhere…..maybe they’ll rectify that soon.
If you are into Beatle autographs – and you have very deep pockets – Heritage Auctions in the US has an original copy of the single ‘Love Me Do/P.S. I Love You’ coming up as part of their Entertainment and Music Memorabilia Signature Auction in September.
The Heritage website says this is a genuine UK first pressing 45, and one of the first-ever signed Beatle records.
The Beatles’ first single for EMI was released on October 5, 1962. The very next day they traveled the short distance from Liverpool to Widnes in Lancashire for a 4:00 official autograph signing appearance (the first of only three in their career) at Dawson’s Music Shop. For thirty minutes, the Beatles signed copies of their brand new single for fans. This is one of the records signed that day, on the “B” side (P.S. I Love You) in black ballpoint.
(click on the image to see a clearer version)
The record comes mounted alongside a vintage black and white glossy photograph of the group taken during a January,1963 appearance at Brian Epstein’s NEMS record store in Liverpool, with three young ladies offering up singles for autographs (although what these are is not clear as ‘From Me To You’ was the first Beatle 7″ single released using the plain green Parlophone paper sleeves they are holding – see The Beatles With Records Part Fifteen):
According to Bruce Spizer and Frank Daniel’s reference book Beatles For Sale on Parlophone Records the autographed disc for auction is one of the “few thousand” pressed for the October 5, 1962 release with the very first version of the record label. The main indication is that “the initial labels have the Ardmore & Beechwood publishing credit left-aligned and slightly indented so that the ‘B’ is above the ‘XC’ in the matrix number prefix 7XCE.” All the other “tells” match including the tax code pressed into the trail off area, being “ZT”.
Bidding kicks of at US$5,000, and the disc is expected to fetch somewhere closer to US$10,000.
The record is just a small part of what is on offer – Heritage have gathered together roughly 300 lots from one of the biggest and most important Beatle memorabilia collections in the world – the Uwe Blaschke Collection.
You can seen more about other items to be offered – including the Beatles’ very first signed contract (expected to fetch a stunning US$150,000) here:
Beatles Blog 