The Beatles are asked by the princess of a neighboring kingdom to find the missing Prince of Kropotkin because they were to be married. But now, if he is not found, she must marry the wicked prime minister.
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Here are some Amazon links to read more on, or purchase, some Beatles-related music: The Beatles
Welcome to this week’s Beatles Rarity of the Week. One of the artists that was introduced in 1968 when The Beatles formed Apple Records was Mary Hopkin. Paul McCartney took an enthusiastic interest in the Welsh folk singer and her first single “Those Were The Days” was one of four that were among the first releases on the Apple label. Produced by Paul McCartney, 18-year old Mary had a #1 hit in the U.K (#2 on the Billboard chart in the U.S) with the record for five straight weeks during October and November of 1968. Paul went on to produce her debut album Post Card and write her follow up single “Goodbye”. When it came time for her to record it the following year, Paul acted as producer and also plays on the record as detailed below.
“Goodbye” was written by Paul and credited to Lennon-McCartney. On March 1-2, 1969, Paul accompanied Mary at London’s Morgan Studios for the recording session. Mary sang and played acoustic guitar, changing a few words in Paul’s final verse (from “sound of lonely drums” to “song of lonely love”). She also raised the key from ‘C’ to ‘E’ to better fit her vocal range. Paul added an acoustic guitar intro, bass, and slapped his lap as a percussion technique learned from Buddy Holly). He also put some drums on the record. Additional strings, horns and backing vocals were also overdubbed in. Mary’s recording of “Goodbye” is most easily found on the compilation CD Come And Get It – The Best Of Apple Records Get the whole story
This week instead of the the VOW, I’m continuing with a new series called Record Roundup, which made it’s debut last week, showcasing the U.S. Capitol “I Want To Hold Your Hand” single. This week the featured record is the British Parlophone “Love Me Do” single, which as many of you know is The Beatles very first record other than the recordings where they were only backing up Tony Sheridan. Just like last time, I’ll give a quick talk about the record before spinning it up on a real honest to goodness portable turntable, just like it was done in the sixties. You can think of this as sort of an infomercial made back in the day to promote the 45. Enjoy!
Click the image above to play the video.
Here are some Amazon links to read more on, or purchase, some music related to this post:
1) Past Masters (Remastered)
2) The Beatles 1
3) Please Please Me (Remastered)
4) More Amazon links for any of your favorite Beatles-related music: The Beatles
Ringo loses his singing voice, so the other Beatles take him to a haunted house to scare it back.
Click the image above to play the video.
Here are some Amazon links to read more on, or purchase, Beatles-related music: The Beatles
Welcome to this week’s Beatles Rarity of the Week. I’m responding to a request this week for George Harrison’s recording of “I Don’t Want To Do It, ” but since this is BROW, don’t expect to hear the most familiar account of the song.
“I Don’t Want To Do It” was a track penned by Bob Dylan in early 1970 and was very little known until George Harrison covered it in 1985 for inclusion on the March 1985 Porky’s Revenge soundtrack. It was also released on a single the following month, which is similar but not the same as the soundtrack version. The single mix has additional guitar in the instrumental break to accompany the organ solo and also has a different lead vocal track. The song was certainly not new to George in 1985 as is shown by a widely bootlegged demo of him performing it (on acoustic guitar only) much earlier during the sessions for All Things Must Pass in 1970. Get the whole story
TheBeatlesRarity is gearing up for a new feature beginning in May called #askNat and I am getting excited about it already! This is where I will invite site readers to send me their Beatles-related questions to answer and open for discussion. I will select a few of these to address and share with everyone on the site each Thursday (beginning on May 3rd). I’m hoping this will go over well and be a good way to get people that follow TheBeatlesRarity to get involved and create added interest by having some control over what is covered on the site. Ask me whatever you want to ask (well…you know what I mean! ) and there is a few ways to get the questions to me so here is how it will work:
1) There is a designated form that you fill out right on the website where you can give your name, location, email address and submit your question. The form is right here and is the same form used to submit requests for BROWs (Beatles Rarity Of The Weeks), but modfied to do both BROW requests and #askNat questions.
2) If you are a Facebook user, you can submit your question right on TheBeatlesRarity FB wall at www.facebook.com/beatlesrarity. If you think about it, try to remember to flag your question with “#askNat”.
3) Similarly, if you are a Google+ user, you can submit your question on TheBeatlesRarity Google+ page at www.gplus.to/beatlesrarity. Google+ supports hashtag searchability so it will be helpful if you preface your question with “#askNat” here too.
4) For you Twitter users, www.twitter.com/beatlesrarity gets you to the right place. Post your question and be sure to add “#askNat” somewhere in the tweet.
I will go through these questions and beginning in the first week of May, select a number of them each week to post on the site and answer them as best I can. I will also invite further discussion from other readers. So get involved and send me your questions! If your question gets missed one week, it could still show up later. I’ll get to as many as I can.
The Video of The Week (‘VOW’) posts will be discontinuing after this month and will be something I miss doing, however, it has been getting more and more difficult because of all the attention that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) have received lately. Media companies have been seriously clamping down, causing YouTube posted videos to lose their access without warning. Since the video content on TheBeatlesRarity is embedded from my own YouTube channel, this has an affect on what remains viewable on the site. Rather than risk ending up with a lot of video posts that have their content removed, I’ve elected to keep a tighter control on the posts here and preserve the content as much as possible. Existing VOWs that become unplayable on the site will likely be removed. This doesn’t mean that all video content on the site will cease, as there will still be things like the “VOW alternative” that I’ve called Record Roundup, that made it’s debut yesterday (check out Record Roundup here).
The Beatles cartoon clips that have been posted on Wednesdays will also be discontinuing after May 2nd (2012) because at that point, all of them will have already been posted on the site. These have been going up every week since January 2010. At present, there are no plans to remove them from the site.
If you are on the mailing list (add your email address to the sign up in the right sidebar to get on it), beginning this week, I’ve opted to start sending out once-weekly email notifications on Fridays instead of every time a new post is made. This is to keep from sending out so much email and I will only send out more than one message a week if something really exciting that bears immediate notification is going on. BROWs will still be coming out on Mondays so you are welcome to catch them on the site then while they are still “fresh” if you like.
Finally, you are likely to see a few changes in the existing navigation on the site to accommodate the other changes.
As always, thanks for being a part of TheBeatlesRarity!
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