Thursday, April 15, 2010

“Vatican pays another tribute to The Beatles” plus 3

“Vatican pays another tribute to The Beatles” plus 3

Vatican pays another tribute to The Beatles

Posted: 15 Apr 2010 02:57 AM PDT

A newspaper recently commemorated the 40th anniversary of The Beatles' breakup with two articles and a front page cartoon reproduction of the 'Abbey Road' album cover.

It would have been one of those tributes if not for one small detail: the publication was Vatican City's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

"They (Beatles) took drugs, (and) swept up by their success, lived dissolute and uninhibited lives," the newspaper said. "They even said they were more famous than Jesus," it added, recalling John Lennon's 1966 comment that outraged Catholics around the world.

However, the article took a friendlier and almost reverential tone as it went on.

"But listening to their songs, all of this seems distant and meaningless," it said. "Their beautiful melodies, which changed forever pop music and still gives us emotions, live on like precious jewels."

L'Osservatore's recent feature says that the Beatles' songs have stood the test of time, and that the band remains "the longest-lasting, most consistent and representative phenomenon in the history of pop music."

This is just one of a series of acknowledgment for the band that came from the Vatican.

Two years ago, Vatican media hailed the Beatles' musical legacy on the 40th anniversary of the "White Album," and just a few months back, the Vatican paper included "Revolver" in its semi-serious list of Top10 albums.

L'Osservatore Romano's chief editor Giovanni Maria Vian said Monday that he loves the Beatles.

He said that at the time of Lennon's sensational statement, L'Osservatore commented "that in reality it wasn't that scandalous, because the fascination with Jesus was so great that it attracted these new heroes of the time."

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Ringo Starr Rejects Vatican Move to Forgive Beatles

Posted: 15 Apr 2010 03:27 AM PDT

Ringo Starr has rejected moves by the Vatican to 'forgive' the Beatles for John Lennon's notoriously controversial claim in 1966 that they were 'bigger than Jesus'.

As previously reported in Spinner, the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, had published an article sanctioned by Pope Benedict XVI in which the Beatles were praised for their "beautiful" music and absolved for their rock star decadence and experiments with drugs. In a front-page editorial, the paper described the band as a "precious jewel" as well as finally letting Lennon off the hook for his words to journalist Maureen Cleave.

The paper said the Beatles "said they were bigger than Jesus and put out mysterious messages, that were possibly even Satanic" yet admits, "what would pop music be like without the Beatles?"

Starr, however, is unimpressed, stating this week, "Didn't the Vatican say we were Satanic or possibly Satanic? And they've still forgiven us?"

He added, in a reference to the current scandal over paedophile priests in the Catholic Church, "I think the Vatican, they've got more to talk about than the Beatles."

This latest coverage of the Beatles in L'Osservatore Romano comes two years after the Vatican initially expressed their forgiveness for the band's hedonistic ways in the '60s, the 2008 article celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of 'The Beatles',' a record that according to the Vatican is a "magical musical anthology."

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Ticket 2 Ride and other Beatles tribute bands playing the area this weekend

Posted: 15 Apr 2010 12:39 AM PDT

WHO: Ticket 2 Ride.

WHAT: Beatles tribute band.

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday.

WHERE: Bergenfield High School, 80 S. Prospect Ave., Bergenfield; 201-385-8600 or bergenfieldhighschool.net.

HOW MUCH: $10.

Today's subject: the reproduction of Beatles.

And boy, do they reproduce. From the original four specimens – Ringo, Paul, John and George, genus superstar – have come swarms of tribute bands, moptop impersonators and "live" album re-creations, yeah-yeahing their way through clubs, street fairs, even Broadway theaters and arenas.

Just this month, four Beatles tributes will be vying for attention in North Jersey: Ticket 2 Ride (Friday, Bergenfield), Strawberry Fields (Saturday, Wayne), The Cast of Beatlemania (April 24, Mahwah) and "The Beatles' White Album" (April 24, Newark).

"I think it's about the music," says Lennie Del Duca Jr., co-founder of the band Ticket 2 Ride, coming to Bergenfield High School (Del Duca's alma mater) Friday in a fund-raising performance for the Bergenfield Volunteer Fire Department and the school's Renaissance program.

"This music is 40 years old and it holds up so well," says Del Duca, now a Hawthorne resident.

From the very beginning, the Beatles were said to be inimitable. But that hasn't stopped a lot of bands from trying – and a few from coming pretty close.

The Fab Faux, The Cavern Beat, 1964 the Tribute, A Hard Day's Night, Abbey Road Live, American English, the Backbeats, Brit Beat, the Britins, the British Invasion Band, the Eggmen, the Fab Four, The Fab Fourever, Instant Karma, Love Me Do and Meet the Beatles are just some of the bands that, for sheer numbers, threaten to leave the Elvis industry in the dust.

Then there's Strawberry Fields, another Beatles tribute that has a special claim to faux fame. This Long Island-based band, appearing at the YM-YWHA of North Jersey in Wayne on Saturday, actually played Shea Stadium (the real one).

"We played the exact set of music, with the exact costumes," says Tony Garafalo, the band's John.

That was on Aug. 15, 2005 — the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' famous concert at Shea Stadium – when they were invited by the Mets to do a pregame concert. And there was more: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr even introduced them on the JumboTron.

"This is everybody's chance to see the Beatles if they never got to see them," says Garafalo, who formed the band in 1991.

The fact that so few people got to see the actual Beatles in concert – the band spent most of its brief career sequestered in the studio – is one reason for today's bumper crop of Beatle clones. Another is musicians themselves. They love to play this stuff.

"It's so difficult not to play it," says Del Duca, a veteran Broadway actor-turned-musician. "It's just so good."

There were faux-Beatles almost as soon as there were real Beatles. Weeks after the Mersey mop tops arrived at Kennedy Airport in 1964, knockoff bands like the Buggs, the Liverpools and Beattle Mash were selling pseudo-Beatle albums on fly-by-night labels, while a New York area kiddie-TV host offered "The Fred Hall Beatles" – three guys in wigs lip-syncing Beatle hits, much to the confusion of savvy kindergartners who knew that there were in fact four Beatles.

But today's Beatles industry is probably a direct outgrowth of "Beatlemania," the 1977 Broadway hit that ran for 1,006 performances and went through performers like a hospital goes through Kleenex.

Not only were there multiple casts in New York (Marshall Crenshaw and Styx performer Glen Burtnik were two famous alumni), but "Beatlemania" launched bus-and-truck tours that fanned out into the hinterlands. Prospective cast members had to pass through a Beatles "academy," headquartered at SIR (Studio Instrument Rental) studios in New York, where they learned to shriek like John Lennon and shake their Beatle bangs like Paul McCartney.

When the show finally ran its course by the mid-1980s, a whole lot of Johns, Pauls, Georges and Ringos were left without work. Some of them formed bands – like Carlo Cantamessa, a John who teamed up with one of the unemployed Pauls, Lenie Colacino, and two other musicians to create The Cast of Beatlemania in 1988.

"We do consider it a band of brothers," says Cantamessa, a Connecticut resident, who views the ex-"Beatlemania" club as a kind of vast fraternal organization, linked by the Web (the key site is beatlemaniaalumni.com).

Both The Cast of Beatlemania and Strawberry Fields — which also has several Beatlemania alumni — follow "Beatlemania's" lead in presenting full-bore Beatle impersonations. Pitch-perfect song covers, yes, but also wigs, costumes, stage effects and performers who bear at least a passing resemblance to the Liverpool lads at various stages of their career.

Ticket 2 Ride, and the "White Album" show at NJPAC (every song on both discs in concert) take a different approach. These are simply savvy musicians who have studied every jot and tittle of the Beatles' songbook.

It's when you close your eyes that you'll see the Beatles.

"We're not an imitator act," says Ticket 2 Ride's Del Duca. "We don't pretend to be John, Paul, George and Ringo by any stretch of the imagination. … We're a sound-alike band."

E-mail: beckerman@northjersey.com

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Ringo Starr rebuffs Vatican's 'absolution' of The Beatles

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 09:34 AM PDT

Nick Squires in Rome
Published: 5:00PM BST 14 Apr 2010

Instead, the Beatles drummer suggested the Catholic Church should concern itself more with the clerical sex abuse crisis.

In an article sanctioned by Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican's newspaper absolved the Fab Four of their drug-taking and rock and roll lifestyle, describing them as a "precious jewel".

In the front page editorial, L'Osservatore Romano forgave Lennon for famously declaring, in an interview in 1966, that "Christianity will...vanish and shrink." But the olive branch from the Holy See did little to impress Starr.

"Didn't the Vatican say we were satanic or possibly satanic? And they've still forgiven us?" the 69-year-old said yesterday.

In an apparent reference to the scandal over paedophile priests that has shaken the Catholic Church worldwide, he added: "I think the Vatican, they've got more to talk about than the Beatles."

The Vatican has been battling for weeks to contain scandals which have broken out in one country after another, from Ireland and Germany to Brazil and New Zealand.

The controversy has inched close to the Pope, who turns 83 on Friday and will celebrate the fifth anniversary of his papacy on Monday.

He has been accused of being too lenient towards paedophile priests when he was archbishop of Munich in the 1980s and later, for more than 20 years, the head of the Vatican's doctrinal enforcement department.

The Holy See was forced onto the defensive again yesterday after the Vatican Secretary of State, Tarcisio Bertone, who is second in seniority only to the Pope, drew a link between paedophilia and homosexuality.

In an attempt to demolish the argument that clerical celibacy denies priests a normal sex life and may be a factor in abuse cases, he said during a visit to Chile: "Many psychologists, many psychiatrists have demonstrated there exists no relationship between celibacy and paedophilia, but many others have demonstrated... that there is a link between homosexuality and paedophilia."

The Vatican tried to distance itself from the gaffe yesterday, saying in a statement that "Church authorities do not deem it part of their responsibility to make general assertions of a specifically psychological or medical nature."

The Catholic Church in the UK issued a strongly worded condemnation of the secretary of state's remarks.

"There is no empirical data which concludes that sexual orientation is connected to child sexual abuse," said Father Marcus Stock, the General Secretary of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales.

"The consensus among researchers is that the sexual abuse of children is not a question of sexual 'orientation', whether heterosexual or homosexual, but of a disordered attraction or 'fixation'." The comments, the latest public relations debacle for the Vatican at a time of almost unprecedented crisis, were met with anger by gay rights groups around the world.

In Italy, where clerical sex abuse cases have also emerged, the gay rights group Arcigay called the comments "false, ignoble and anti-scientific".

The group's president, Paolo Patane, said Bertone had "confirmed the cynicism, lack of scruples and cruelty of the very same Catholic hierarchy which for years covered up sex crimes perpetrated on thousands of innocent children." Franco Grillini, a gay rights activist and former MP, said: "Because they have their own problems with the abuse crisis and don't know how to handle it, they are trying to pass their 'cross' from their shoulders onto ours." The French government said the cardinal's inflammatory claim tried to make an "unacceptable linkage that we condemn".

The Pope is under huge pressure to try to defuse the crisis by meeting with the victims of paedophile priests when he visits the world's most Catholic country, Malta, this weekend, but the Vatican has refused to say whether he will do so.

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