Saturday, May 8, 2010

“Geek The Beatles: 'Let It Be' Recombined Reality Bites” plus 3

“Geek The Beatles: 'Let It Be' Recombined Reality Bites” plus 3

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Geek The Beatles: 'Let It Be' Recombined Reality Bites

Posted: 07 May 2010 09:23 PM PDT

Let It Be

Forty years ago, Let It Be closed out a decade of The Beatles' artistic and technological influence. It's a period that has yet to be matched in popular culture. Wired.com will explore the band's lasting impact in a new occasional series called Geek The Beatles, anchored to the band's momentous anniversaries in 2010.

Let It Be, released May 8, 1970, shortly after the band members called it quits, transformed The Beatles from a functioning band into a dysfunctional multimedia brand. The songs on what became the group's last official full-length album were vault-raided and controversially remixed by mad producer Phil Spector from a heap of discarded and bitterly divided sessions, and featured little to no input from band members John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.

A Beatles documentary, released a week after the album, was similarly retconned, conceived as a "bioscopic experience" that would help sequence the genes for the intrusive reality television we take for granted in the 21st century. In the last gasp of the optimistic but lethal '60s, however, reality film killed the pop radio stars.

"By the time we got to Let It Be, we couldn't play the game anymore," Lennon said in the exhaustive biographical series The Beatles Anthology. "We'd come to a point where it was no longer creating magic, and the camera being in the room with us made us aware of that. It was a phony situation."

The original concept for the Let It Be film would sell instantly today: Inconspicuous but ever-present cameras document the greatest pop band of all time as it composes, rehearses and then performs and records its next album in front of a live audience. "You can glide in with your cameras," an earnest but frustrated McCartney said in the film. "Go places that TV cameras don't go."

But the film bowed to the Beatles' momentous reality: The band, like the decade that it so thoroughly informed, was finished.

What remained after The Beatles' recombined Let It Be killed on the charts but flopped in theaters was not a band, but a brand. That evolution heralded a coming, contentious age of creator-owned businesses, increasing copyfight litigation, remix culture, band-brand revolutions, crappy tech and more.

Here are nine — number nine, number nine — ways the breakup of The Beatles, as well as the twin iterations of Let It Be, hallmarked tectonic shifts in media culture, using the album's song titles as points of departure. You know, just to twist the anniversary knife a little.

Furious at Phil Spector's orchestrated remix of Let It Be, McCartney remixed his own with Let It Be... Naked in 2003.
Images courtesy Apple

Dig It:
For all its uneven moments, Let It Be is a pioneering example of remix culture at work. Producer Phil Spector went crate-digging through The Beatles' sonic back pages, with the permission of Lennon, who called the turbulent recording sessions the "shittiest load of badly recorded shit" the band ever dropped.

Spector recombined what he found and heard, and produced a hit album. But Let It Be's overwrought orchestration, spliced in by Spector, so angered McCartney that the bass player eventually remixed his own version of the sessions, resulting in the stripped-down 2003 release, Let It Be… Naked.

The Long and Winding Road: Spector's orchestration on the piano ballad "The Long and Winding Road" particularly pissed off McCartney. The swollen strings and choral accompaniments marred The Beatles' musical style so egregiously, McCartney argued, that he cited Spector's "intolerable interference" as one of six reasons he gave Apple Corps. for dissolving the band shortly after the album and film's release. Nevertheless, the single sold more than a million copies in a few days, and eventually topped the charts in May.

Let It Be: Like the rest of The Beatles' immeasurably influential catalog, the songs from Let It Be have been covered by more bands than you would probably want to count, unless you were a serious Beatles geek.

Bands like The Replacements and Green Jello released their own albums called Let It Be, while Laibach covered The Beatles' final album in its entirety. Julie Taymor anchored her periodic musical drama of the same name to Lennon's philosophical chant "Across the Universe," one of Let It Be's finest songs. Let It Be's title track alone has been revised by a score of artists as different as Nick Cave and Chevy Chase. And what looks like a chorus of Russian sailors simply murder the tune in what YouTube user Attmay calls the "worst cover of a Beatles song ever" (embedded right).

The song — a woeful tale of anxiety over the Beatles' breakup — has also become a convenient regular on reality-programming phenomenon American Idol. Kris Allen performed "Let It Be" on the show's ninth inexplicable season, and the song was later ported to iTunes, with proceeds going to the disaster-relief effort following Haiti's catastrophic earthquake. Oscar-winning singer Jennifer Hudson did the same thing with the same song. Instant karma is going to get somebody.

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(What's the Story) Movie Glory? - Beatles film planned by Oasis star

Posted: 08 May 2010 12:32 AM PDT

Liam Gallagher is set to make a film about the final years of The Beatles.

The former Oasis frontman is planning to adapt The Longest Cocktail Party, a memoir written by the Beatles' "house hippy" in the 1960s, Richard DiLello.

The biopic is about the "wild rise and fall" of the band's record company Apple between the heady days of 1968 and the break-up in 1970.

The singer's older brother Noel is also said to be a fan of the book, describing it as "brilliant".

Liam Gallagher's film company, In 1 Productions, will work with UK Independent Revolution Films.

A spokesman for In 1 Productions said: "This will be a film with humour and affection, providing an insider's look at what it meant to be a young man caught up in the wild swirl of the music business, celebrities and the tail end of the swinging 60s in London."

The Gallagher brothers have made no secret of their love for The Beatles.

For their album The Masterplan, the band covered the popular Beatles hit I Am The Walrus and to celebrate 40 years since the release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, they recorded a version of Within You Without You.

While promoting that album, Noel said: "The Beatles were of their time... you can't compare a band from today with one from the 1960s. Music doesn't mean as much today as it did in the 1960s."

Oasis broke up in 2009 after Noel quit the band, saying he could no longer work with Liam.



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Oasis frontman to make Beatles film

Posted: 07 May 2010 09:41 PM PDT

Liam Gallagher is to make a movie about the final years of The Beatles.

The former Oasis frontman's new film production company is developing a biopic based on a book by the Fab Four's 'house hippy' in the late 1960s.

Richard DiLello's memoir The Longest Cocktail Party tells of the 'wild rise and fall' of The Beatles' company Apple between the heady days of 1968 and the band's break-up in 1970.

The Oasis singer's older brother Noel is also a fan of the work, first published in 1972, which he described as 'brilliant'.

Gallagher's film company, In 1 Productions, will collaborate on the project with leading UK independent Revolution Films, it has been confirmed.

A spokesman for In 1 Productions said: 'This will be a film with humour and affection, providing an insider's look at what it meant to be a young man caught up in the wild swirl of the music business, celebrities and the tail end of the swinging 60s in London.'

It is understood that further details will be announced at the Cannes Film Festival later this month.

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With Beatles biopic, Oasis' Liam Gallagher will take a long and winding road

Posted: 07 May 2010 03:58 PM PDT

Beatles

Brit-pop's most iconic supergroup, Oasis has never been shy about its moist-eyed worship of the Beatles.

Brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher – respectively, Oasis' frontman and chief songwriter -- have been widely panned for cribbing the Fab Four's guitar solos, bass lines and piano parts in their songs; composing lyrics like "I'll ride with you in your BMW/You can sail with me in my Yellow Submarine"; and they've been needled by no less than Paul McCartney for being so blatantly "derivative."  Liam even went so far as to name his son Lennon. (It's worth noting that Noel is, as of last year, no longer part of the band...for now.)

So when the "Champagne Supernova" singer decided to take a stab at making movies, his first project (touted Friday in an exclusive in London's Daily Mail) came as a surprise to precisely no one. Gallagher will announce at the Cannes Film Festival later this month that his first film as a producer is a biopic chronicling the Beatles'  1967 to 1970 heyday, culminating in the group's break-up.

Liam The source material: Richard DiLello's 1972 rock history, "The Longest Cocktail Party: An Insider's Diary of the Beatles, Their Million Dollar Apple Empire and Its Wild Rise and Fall," written by a self-described "house hippie" and former publicist for the group's Apple Corps record label. DiLello was privy to all the stoned conversations and insane behavior surrounding the Beatles' penultimate years together and the book is said to be a Gallagher brothers favorite, once described with characteristic Cockney brio by Noel as "[expletive] brilliant."

Produced in conjunction with Revolution Films (prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom's U.K. production company), the announcement of Gallagher's as-yet untitled movie arrives on the heels of first-time filmmaker Sam Taylor Wood's John Lennon biopic "Nowhere Boy," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival but never landed Stateside distribution and faded from global cineplex screens having earned a meager $2.5 million.

Of course, to make a proper Beatles biopic, it stands to reason that Gallagher will need no small amount of Fab Four music -- the licensing for which is controlled by the Sony/ATV catalog, a massive trove of hit music co-owned by the estate of Michael Jackson. The King of Pop famously outbid McCartney to acquire the publishing rights to the Beatles' music in 1985 for $47.5 million.

It might all seem, as McCartney says, "derivative," but if Liam could bring some of the same showmanship and energy to his filmic imitations of the Beatles that he does in his musical efforts, we could be in for an entertaining, um, magical mystery tour.

In the meantime, let the parlor games about future casting begin! Sam Worthington as Paul? Cillian Murphy as John? James Franco as Ringo?

-- Chris Lee

Photos: The Beatles. Credit: Apple Corps; Liam Gallagher. Credit: David Fitzgerald

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