Celebrity Vinyl Platter Party

Is it only nostalgia, a little too much of the romantic in my blood
that makes these images of people with their records seem so
intimate... so human... like this simple thing we once shared
in our relationship with music?

Albert Einstein

Audrey Hepburn

Lester Bangs

Catherine Deneuve

Jimi Hendrix

Oh you know... what's her name...

John Lennon

Lauren Bacall

Natalie Wood

Brigitte Bardot





























Roger Daltry






*

one day on Abbey Road - the Paul Cole story

For decades, music historians and Beatles fans have wondered
about the shadowy figure standing just down the road from the Fab Four
on the cover of the Abbey Road album.







Who was this enigmatic figure?



Was he the legendary "fifth Beatle"?
Or perhaps a Rolling Stone?
A run of the mill stalker
or maybe a KGB assassin?

None, as it turns out, of the above....

He's Paul Cole, a retired salesman living in Florida
who thought those fellas walking back and forth
across the street were just "a bunch of kooks"!

.

The Beatles - early days

bad habits, great music...

we've come a long way, baby!
there was a time when the best music
could only be heard in the worst places.

it might be down a flight of stairs in Athens
or in a cave on the edge of Malaga.
it could be in a shebeen
in Belfast or Johannesburg,
or in a juke joint down a dark country
road in Mississippi...

   a sleazy bar in Hamburg,
a whorehouse in the Big Easy
or a hole in the wall after-hours club
   on the south side of Chicago...

bad Beatles! bad! Bad! BAD!

   

it was in these and so many other places
of ill repute where you'd find people playing
their music like their lives depended on it,
and sometimes they did...

Billie Holiday on fire, in a bad way!

     

      they were dangerous places,
chock a block with people making
very dubious lifestyle choices.

Bob lighting up- indoors!?!

       people would be drinking liquor
of uncertain provenance, often to excess,
and maybe looking for some kief,
or a stick of reefer and so many smoking
       tobacco that you couldn't see across the room.

not just tobacco, either.

       when disagreements arose,
they were often settled with a razor
or a pistol or a knife.

Sorry Charlie- a free country doesn't include cigars.

      

in Europe, in North America,
such places are either extinct
or gone so far underground
as to be invisible...

it's the law, Mr. Berry.

butt it, Thin White Duke!

is there any relationship between these dubious
and even self-destructive lifestyle choices
and the incredible, passionate music and poetry
these artists and so many others have created?
        

not even if you were King Ellington.

yes.

too bad about your pipes, Frankie.

no more "smokin' solos", Mr. Zappa!

those cigs could kill you, Janis.

the same applies to you, Jerry.

no more haze, Jimi- purple or otherwise!

while you're playing? think of the children, Louis!

sorry, no smoking in the studio, John.

you heard me...

if you don't mind, Ms. Mitchell.

is that supposed to be "grungy"?

"poetry" is no excuse, Mr. Cohen

"poetry" is no excuse for you either, Patti.

very artistic, Ms. Ciccone.

Marvin, think of the long-term health issues!

there are bylaws, Miles. Bylaws!

you could have been a great singer, Otis. too bad.

no one read Mr. Charles the warning on the pack.

that Iggy is a bad influence on you, Tom.

cigarettes are bad for you, Woody!

Thank You For Smoking



Theme Park Radio



Just smokin' nigs

!

the Birth of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

 

Sgt. Pepper - the back story

On August 29th 1966, The Beatles performed for 33 minutes
in front of 25,000 people at Candlestick Park in San Francisco
and although no one knew it then, it was their last live concert*.

It was the last gig of their third tour of North America.
They had done 19 concerts in 14 cities in 18 days.

The tour was an economic success, but aside from the
rigours of travel, they were virtual prisoners in their
hotel rooms, surrounded by legions of psychotic fans.







They were given to incessant, high-pitched screaming
whenever the lads appeared. Vox had developed new
100 watt amplifiers** for the tour, but monitors had not
yet been invented so even when they finally got to play,
 they couldn't hear themselves or each other.


When we started to get famous and did our own songs
more it was very exciting. Then we started doing these
big tours and we had to play our records to promote them
and sing our hits and stuff.
By the time of our last tour, we were in a rut... It got boring.
…Worst of all, we became terrible musicians because we
couldn’t hear ourselves and we didn’t really care anymore.

            GEORGE HARRISON

There was also controversy. During an interview in March,
Lennon had remarked that "We're more popular than Jesus
now". It had passed almost unnoticed in the UK, but in
America there was some serious umbrage, especially
in the deep South (of course) .





In Memphis, the city council wanted to cancel the concerts,
conservative groups staged public burnings of Beatles
records and the KKK nailed a Beatles album to a wooden
cross, vowing "vengeance".

At the evening concert, an audience member threw a lit
firecracker onstage. In one of those curious correspondences
that can make one go "Hmmmm", when the firecracker went
off,  Beatles' press agent Tony Barrow recalled that
"everybody, all of us at the side of the stage, including
the three Beatles on stage, all looked immediately
at John Lennon".







As they flew back to England, the four mop tops were not happy.
They were the biggest band in the world but they didn't
feel like musicians anymore. They weren't even sure
they still wanted to be Beatles.









Five months later, on December 8, the Fab Four would
meet up with the Other George in the EMI Studios
at 3 Abbey Road to start work on their eighth studio album.







Since they'd last seen each other:
- George Harrison had traveled to India to continue developing
   his sitar playing at the invitation of Ravi Shankar.
- Paul McCartney, along with George Martin, wrote the
  music for the film The Family Way
- John Lennon acted in How I Won the War, and attended
  art galleries, where he met his future wife Yoko Ono.
- Ringo Starr spent time with his wife and children.


Now, it was time for the biggest band in the world
to make beautiful music together.








Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- the concept

During a flight back from a holiday in Kenya with his girlfriend
Jane Asher and tour manager Mal Evans, McCartney had
the first idea for the concept of an alternative Beatles band
-  fictitious characters - that would become the Sgt Pepper's
Lonely Heart's Club band.

The album would be a performance by that fictitious band.
This "alter-ego group" would give the band the freedom
to experiment with songs.




The album opens with the title song, introducing Sgt. Pepper's
band and segues into an introduction for bandleader "Billy Shears"
(Ringo) who performs "With a Little Help from My Friends".
There is a reprise version of the title song that appears on side
two just prior to "A Day in the Life".

While many point to Pepper as the dawn of the concept album,
the Beatles effectively abandoned this one after recording
the first two songs and the reprise. John Lennon said nothing
really tied everything together and that aside from the title
and reprise "Every other song could have been on any other album".

True, as far as it goes, but the concept wasn't dead.
Oh no. It would be back.




Sgt. Pepper's - the album

On that first day, they fired up the four track tape machine
and laid down take one of When I'm Sixty-Four.





The last track - the violins and cellos for Within You
Without You - was recorded on April 3, 1967, and mixing
was completed April 20.
Over the course of 129 days, they'd finished and sequenced
13 songs...  39 minutes and 42 seconds of music that
would literally rock the world.

They'd also started work on the cover.











Sgt. Pepper's - the cover... concept

The cover photo was taken on March 30, 1967.






The Grammy Award-winning album packaging was art-directed
by Robert Fraser, designed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth,
his wife and artistic partner, and photographed
by Michael Cooper.

The photo was taken at Chelsea Manor Photographic
Studios on March 30, 1967.







There are more than 70 famous people, including writers,
musicians, film stars, including an image of the original
Beatles’ bassist, the late Stuart Sutcliffe.

George Harrison requested the four Indian gurus,
who appear in the final image. John Lennon requested
images of Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ, who do not.







Mae West initially refused, famously asking, "What would
I be doing in a lonely hearts club?" but she relented after
The Beatles sent her a personal letter.

Leo Gorcey of the Bowery Boys was supposed to be in there,
but in an early assertion of copyright control he demanded
to be paid for the use of his image and was not included...





On the back cover were all the lyrics. Black ink on a red
background meant they were not too readable in low-light
(drug-friendly) situations, but thanks to the catchy melodies
and repeated playings, they would soon be committed
to memory, where many of them reside to this day.

Open up the the gatefold sleeve, and a 24 inch photograph
of the Beatles on a bright yellow background wham-bams
your retinas.







For my friends and I and other young music lovers in Ontario,
this experience was complicated by the crest on Paul's left sleeve.
Where others might have seen one more splash of colour,
we saw the insignia of the Ontario Provincial Police,
an organization we preferred to avoid.
The eye candy continued in the form of a printed insert...



...which i don't remember anyone ever caring about much.

When all was said and done, the final bill for the cover
was £2,868 5s 3d (equivalent to £38,823 today). It may not
seem like much for an album that would chart for months,
let alone become an icon, but the going price for album art
at the time was about £50.

With Pepper's cover, the Beatles had smashed yet another
glass ceiling and laid the groundwork for a graphic
revolution and a marketing explosion.



SPLHC Band - the product

Pepper came out on June 1, 1967.

In Britain, it was number #1 with a bullet. Between June,
1967 and February, 1968, it spent a total of 27 weeks at
the top of the charts and it would stay on the charts for
a total of 148** weeks. In the US, it was number one for 15
weeks and on the charts for 88. Released in both mono and
stereo, it was the first Beatles' album released with
identical track listings in the UK and US.

People clearly liked it. Critical reaction ranged from
"a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization"
to "like an over-attended child, Sergeant Pepper is spoiled.
It reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted
animal noises, and a 41-piece orchestra".




Sgt. Pepper's - epilogue

In another one of those curious correspondences that can
make one go "Hmmmm", two years to the day after the
release of Sgt. Pepper, John Lennon and a few friends
would record "Give Peace A Chance".




In Room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal,
with John and Tommy Smothers on guitar, Timothy Leary,
Joseph Schwartz, Petula Clark, Dick Gregory, Allen
Ginsberg, Murray the K and Derek Taylor would join
with dozens of journalists in creating an anthem.







*   their last public performance was an unannounced concert
on a London rooftop in January 1969. They performed "Get Back,"
"Don't Let Me Down," "I've Got a Feeling," "One After 909," and "Dig a Pony".

** the standard amp at the time was 20 watts.


*** 148 weeks being like almost 3 years.



the Beatles last concert


the Beatles last tour


the greatest album cover of all time?


taking the famous cover shot