Reviews — Again

I just finished reading The Beatles; Off the Record by Keith Badman and I recommend it heartily to serious Beatle students. There’s quite a lot there that I haven’t found elsewhere. One thing I like is that he gives the questions and answers before and after bits that have been quoted by everybody and frequently it puts a different spin on it then it had when presented as a stand-alone. It’s a ‘heavy’ read in both length and information content and also has some very nice photos that you don’t see everywhere.

I thoroughly enjoyed a page-plus on the Mad Day Out photo session. They were/are interesting photos and the commentary from one of the photographers involved was interesting. There’s simply too much in the book to light on specifics and each of us will find diffferent things to be delighted with in any case.

I also recently got the DVD Composing the Beatles Songbook http://www.blastmagazine.net/dvd%27s/dvd%20reviews/composingthebeatlessongbook.html

They picked a dozen people, mostly musical folks and discussed John and Paul as composers. I have really fallen in love with it. I’ve played it twice, paying very close attention each time and I expect to watch it several times more. One thing that really turned me on is that one of the participants, Chris Ingham (musicologist, author, Beatles Academic) chose to really look at For No One, a Paul song that I had some time ago identified as an extremely insightful and serious song that has been completely overlooked.

You may not agree with everything on it, I certainly don’t but it does really add to an understanding of the music.

I apologize yet again. It’s obvious that I’m not going to be able to post regularly. This time it was health, family concerns and computer complications. The computer problems seem to be completely solved — at least as much as such are ever solved — and hopefully that will help keep the other things from having such a negative effect on my work.

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