re: Beatles obsession thread

Lol

I met Pete back in 2001. Nice guy

quote:

---

Lennon said they were at their best as a band in Hamburg (with Pete), but there's no way he could have provided them with the kind of drumming Ringo did. George Harrison said it best: they could handled his sacking better, but history proved Ringo entered the scene at the right time.

---

With Anthology back in the news, I've been hearing many of the very old tracks. It's very obvious that Pete didn't have "it". He played very straight line, uninventive "of the day" drum parts. Ringo turned the kit into an instrument in and of itself.

Sorry, not sorry.

Even Lennon said something along the lines of "no Ringo, no Beatles".

Has there been a single reference to Anthology 4 in this thread?

the NY Times talks Beatles Anthology vs a lost documentary

quote:

---

Many of the film’s fans (including me) think the objectivity of “The Compleat Beatles” — the fact that it’s unauthorized while still drawing fully upon the group’s recordings and appearances — is one of the factors that makes it superior to the Beatles-approved “Anthology.” It’s clearly made by people who love and respect the group, and it walks through their rise to fame and their time at the top with clarity and precision. It also explains their dissolution with simplicity but sadness, and mostly eschews personal relationships and similar gossip to focus on the music and its cultural impact.

---

quote:

---

Free of the imprimatur of the band members, Montgomery and his collaborators also didn’t feel pressured to sand down the rougher edges of the group’s story, or to minimize their personality conflicts, particularly in the later years. Their longtime producer George Martin, for example, specifically calls out McCartney’s “bossiness” — the kind of candor that is markedly lacking in his “Anthology” interviews.
“I think if we’d actually interviewed any of the Beatles, it would have made a different film entirely,” Montgomery said. “I think maybe because they weren’t involved, some of the people felt more free to talk to us than they might have.” And those who did were able to shed light on aspects of their music that were largely unexplored at the time. The Martin interview, which Montgomery called “the backbone of the film,” offers keen insights into their process in the studio, breaking down the specifics of their collaboration while detailing the curiosity and openness to experimentation that led to some of their most durable songs.

---

quote:

---

“The Compleat Beatles” has other virtues as well: the evocative yet concise narration by Malcolm McDowell; the ingenuity of Pamela Page’s editing, particularly a late, hard cut from McCartney singing “Let It Be” to screaming Beatlemania-era fans and a young Lennon saying that “we’ll be lucky if we last three months”; and a crisp, brisk pace that manages to tell their story evenly in under two hours. The film avoids the long-windedness and narrative lopsidedness that nearly sinks the multipart “Anthology” (which spends multiple episodes on the early days, then smashes the band’s last two years — their messiest and arguably most fascinating period — into a single installment).

---

I've mentioned my preference for Compleat here before. It's the doc I would show a newb who wanted to learn about the band.



Watch The Compleat Beatles at archive.org

is the new material worth the purchase?
I need to reactivate Disney+ to watch the series and then “get back” again

quote:

---

The new Anthology that Disney is showing is not worth watching.

---

say more

The Disney+ version is a lot shorter than the original. Each episode runs about 55 to 60 minutes compared to the original episodes' average of 74 minutes. Overall it's shortened by about 3 hours. ...but they added one additional episode that's about the 1994 and 1995 meetings of the surving members with the recordings of Real Love, Now and Then and Free as a Bird.

Don't get me wrong, it's the Beatles, so it's going to be good, but I would wait for the Blu Ray release that would, or should include the footage that was cut along with the new episode 9.

quote:

---

The Disney+ version is a lot shorter than the original. Each episode runs about 55 to 60 minutes compared to the original episodes' average of 74 minutes.

---

You must be referring to the original British version? All I ever saw - and when it aired - was the ABC special. And that was only 6 hours of broadcast TV, which means there was likely less than 5 hours of aired material. The Disney+ offering is 9 episode, seemingly pushing an h our each.

Demo - date unknown to me



Even though he screws up the lyrics, this is an amazing cover of the Everly Bros hit. Like Elvis Costello's "Withered & Died" or Warren Zevon's "Back In The High Life", he finds regret/melancholy not in the original. I'd like to hear Costello do the song in this way.

Still shocking 45 years later. Completely numbing at that time.