Greetings Fab SATB people,
In the states outside Chicago it is chilly but otherwise sunny, and we have been experiencing recent Northern Lights sightings at night. We’re sliding into end-of-year activities, with seasonal yard decor springing up post-Halloween and the rumblings of the coming holidays soon upon us. This year is aligned with many a past year (beginning in 1962), inasmuch as there is “new” Beatles product en route to stir some excitement (though YMMV).
To that end, SATB 314 (coming very soon) features my discussions with both Doug Sulpy and Chip Madinger; two authors who happen to be authorities on The Beatles/ex-Beatles recordings. They have - individually and together - chronicled details known only to few outsiders exactly what exists on tape (or purports to) and how it varies from what has been offered up officially. So our discussion concerns itself with what could be, has been and is, and more importantly, how it compares to what’s out there from other artists/labels. Doug, who you may know, co-wrote the bible/road map to the Let It Be sessions, Drugs, Divorce and a Slipping Image, an absolutely essential tool for anyone interested in the January 1969 sessions. Chip is the co-author of two other essential deep dive volumes: Eight Arms To Hold You, covering all the solo recordings through 2000, and Lennonology: Strange Days Indeed - A Scrapbook of Madness detailing John(and Yoko’s) lives from 1966 through the end of 1980. You can see everything currently available from both of my guests at their respective sites: https://www.dougsulpy.com/ and https://lennonology.com/
Oh - did I mention a recent Sgt Pepper conversation….?
NEWS
Word came while I was en route to NJ that drummer Gilson Lavis, best known for his work with Squeeze, had passed away at 74. He’d been in declining health of late, but it was still sad to hear; he was active on Facebook and had in recent years during his downtime (drumming behind another ex-Squeeze Jools Holland on his UK TV show) taken up painting rock star portraits. Here’s one of Sir Paul, and it’s worth noting that back in the early ‘70s, when Wings was forming, Gilson - then a session player - took time out to audition. He did not get the gig of course, and when Squeeze issued their debut single in 1978, he made rather a critical remark about Paul’s music in the UK press. I’m certain the 70-something Gilson might have amended his take from the 20-something one, but in any event, he will be missed. (Between Gilson and Clem Burke, it’s been a tough year for drummers…)
Speaking of drummers, Ringo has just announced a new round of All Starr dates in 2026. Absolutely incredible….
Clarification: recall last week when I said something about the Gretsch Country Gentleman once owned by John being up for auction? Something about the details as given didn’t sit exactly right with me but as I am not a guitar hound, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Turns out one of the listeners could: Michael DeLeon noted “John Lennon did have a 6120 double cut Gretsch guitar but it is incorrect to call it a Country Gentleman. The CG is a 6122 and has a 17” body size and is dark brown walnut color. The 6120 became a double cut, but has a 16” body and the orange colored body. Both are Gretsches but are different models in the Chet Atkins line of Gretsch guitars.” So there!
One more thing: another sample track from Anthology 4 came this past week and next time someone on Team Beatles tells you that there are no more treasures to be had from the EMI vaults, don’t believe them.
RELEASES
I got a ton of positive response to the recent Ron Griffiths of The Iveys conversation, which only shows once again that SATB is as good as its guests and he is pure gold. Right on the heels of this, yet another Iveys demo collection is coming, Miniskirts and Rainbows. Details here. My side talk with Mark Strothmann - part of the reissue team - should be up in the feed this week. 🤞
HISTORY
On the heels of the new release coming on Friday November 21, and SATB 314, a deep dive into what’s coming, what has already come, and what should come, let’s take a look at what we got thirty years ago on November 20, 1995…
Anthology 1
Post-1970, The Beatles gave us a steady stream of “gateway drugs” - those points of entry into their music and story that connected with people who don’t qualify as 1st-gen fans: Hey Jude - the “Red” and the “Blue” albums - Rock ‘n’ Roll Music - Love Songs - Rarities - Reel Music - 20 Greatest Hits - Beatles 1, and so on. For them, The Beatles’ music may have been something of vague awareness but it wasn’t something they were steeped in and these gateway drugs were exactly the thing to set them on a path of discovery.
There are probably few Beatles fans born during the time they were a thing in real time or after that actually got to experience The Beatles in anything resembling chronological order; in other words, plenty might have first seen A Hard Day’s Night on TV after already hearing Abbey Road. These people - the majority of living fans today - didn’t experience their evolution, or the anticipatory allure of “what are they going to do next?” For them, the story was over and it was time to catch up with what the earliest devoted followers had already absorbed into their own lives.
This isn’t a major point, just an observation, because surely their fervor is no less. So therefore for anyone coming into the story after it had already come and gone, The Beatles’ catalog represented a buffet dinner; one could pick and choose what to digest according to one’s own tastes. (There is also the phenomenon of choosing a favorite Beatle and how it too may change over time as one matures, but that’s a topic for another day…)
So for anyone sucked into The Beatles’ gravitational pull in 1995 with Anthology - the TV series and/or the first release - there is undoubtedly a nostalgia for its relaunch this year, as well as perhaps a deja vu and maybe even the joy of seeing one’s own progeny discover (and for you, re-live) the experience of shiny and new Beatles product 90s-style, and a compelling story like no other.
Anthology 1 arrived in stores two days after the premiere on TV of the “Free As A Bird” video; the unveiling of a “new” Beatles song, though the single itself was not issued as a stand-alone release until the first week of December. (I am sure there are plenty of people reading this who were among the intrepid who trekked out to retailers for the CD’s midnight release, for the bragging rights but also the sheer joy thought to be gone forever after 1970 for later generations of fans to buy a new Beatles release the day of issue.)
The Anthology series represented a rare clearing of the vaults (the US Rarities album and the BBC releases being others) that gave the public material that was really of interest to a hardcore niche audience; had a single disc best-of been issued (not unlike the aborted 1985 Sessions collection) that hewed to the strongest unheard recordings or variations, it might’ve sustained interest and repeat plays through the years. Instead, once the novelty of unheard Beatles recordings (plus the “new” performances) wore off, one was left with CDs that the majority of owners would rarely play for pleasure, if the sheer amount of used copies found in mint condition to this very day in used media shops is anything to judge by.
If one were to quantify the music, the first installment may be the weakest of the three issues, if only because 1) its documentary nature, with too many spoken interludes disrupting the listening experience and 2) the uneven quality of some of the tracks, being of course archival and of historic interest. Great to have (for the hardcores), but a bit of a slog for anyone NOT curious about the pre-Ringo band. All that aside, it’s great to have this important material freely available, given Apple’s penchant for acquiring and then suppressing other historic recordings known to exist (Cavern tapes, Star Club, Woolton Fete, etc).
In 2025, we have the remastered version arriving. Given that Apple showed uncharacteristic responsiveness to consumer complaints with 1994’s BBC collection (regarding noise reduction and cross-fading) that volume 1 was actually tweaked in response when reissued concurrently with volume 2 in 2013, it is baffling that no effort was made this time around to not address similar issues here (like deleting all the spoken word segments).
November 19, 1977 - Love Songs was released in the UK.
To anyone who wasn’t there at the time, this double album compilation must seem like a bit of a mystery item because it was deleted from print during the late 1980s and was, at the time, regarded as something of an under-performer. In context, it was the next obvious step of collating a vinyl playlist: having collected the uptempo material for 1976’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, a collection that, in the states, spawned a bona fide hit single with “Got To Get You Into My Life,” on paper at least Love Songs did everything right. It brought together 25 ballads (more or less) with romantic themes (more or less) and was presented in a much more elegant fashion than the roundly pilloried earlier set was. (With its emphasis on 50s culture: Marilyn Monroe - Coca Cola - cars with fins - etc, it was derided by everyone from the public as too inexplicably Happy Days to the ex-Fabs themselves as “cheap.”)
Love Songs, by contrast, was, in initial pressings at least, housed in a textured faux leather gatefold jacket, The Beatles represented by their 1967 Richard Avedon portraits. Something evident to fans in 1977 was that the imagery wasn’t as they knew it; there had been a Beatles poster in circulation during the ‘70s, available at any record (and head) shop, and it looked like this. Love Songs, on the other hand, looked like this. In this case, two pictures spoke a thousand words, but to be brief: the “Mt. Rushmore” poster was in fact composed of four individual portraits shot separately (hence the perfect focus for each face despite their apparent various distances from the lens). One thing made clear from the poster: Paul’s face, smaller in size than Ringo’s, would have to be tweaked.
Art director Kenneth Anderson was charged with revamping the design, and what you see was very much a corporate political move: Paul, the best selling-artist of the four of them (and the only one still under contract to Capitol) was enlarged. George, with whom there was some bitter blood, was reduced in size. He’d defected to A&M and then Warner Brothers for his Dark Horse label; Capitol’s initial reaction in 1976 was to issue the insulting Best of George Harrison collection (comprised by half with Beatles recordings) simultaneously with his Dark Horse debut Thirty-Three and 1/3rd. Ringo was a non-entity, under contract to Atlantic/Polydor, but perhaps EMI held out hope that the inactive John, without a label at the time, might be persuaded to return to the fold, and he was resized accordingly.
The package also contained a libretto: the lyrics to all the songs presented in a calligraphy-style script on simulated parchment. For all the thought and care put into the presentation, as well as its release pegged so close to gift-giving season, it was not the blockbuster that its creators intended. In the UK it did well enough, peaking at 7 on the album charts, but in the states, it stalled at 24 - subpar for Beatles. “Girl,” backed by “You’re Going To Lose That Girl,” was intended as a single release, with sleeves and labels printed up. But the issue was canceled, showing the label was cutting its losses before seeing the embarrassment of having a “new” Beatles single stall in the charts. The concurrent Wings single, “Girls School,” peaked at a limp 33, so their fears were not unwarranted. “Got To Get You Into My Life,” by contrast, had peaked the year before at 7, coming during a year that saw two McCartney top 5 singles plus a North America tour.
All of this backstory is really just set-up for this: a nice video companion to the album that someone put together. The imagery varies from the real thing to AI-generated but just put it on as background music and enjoy. (It’s the bloody Beatles - shut up!)
SEEDERMAN’S SIMPLE CHRONOLOGY
For anyone joining the newsletter in progress, beginning with issue #1 (November 11, 2024), I began a monthly file share of this wonderful video compilation series, each running over five hours in length; a trove of Beatles, solo and Beatles adjacent material you will not find anywhere else through official channels. It was compiled pre-COVID by someone named “Seederman,” and has been in circulation off and on. I had to stop my monthly share with the 7th installment after discovering that I could not open the remaining five volumes from the compressed files on a hard drive; this brought us up to December 1980. I wasn’t very happy about this, but recently the series got into circulation again and now the monthly share can resume, as it did with volume 8 in #53.
This all sounds mighty mysterious to the uninitiated, so here is a guide to what we’ve shared here so far. I will update it each month until we get through all twelve volumes. For those playing catch up, here you go…
For anyone wondering, “what’s the rest look like?” - you’ll just have to stick around! Beatles fans are nothing if not patient.
BABY I’M A RICH MAN
Sometimes I process things slowly over time, being too consumed in the moment with doing what I’m supposed to be doing to take a step back and see forest and the trees. But in part at least, I was very conscious in the moment about how special the time was at the recently concluded Everything Fab4 Fest, in that it was an uncommon occasion to reconnect with old friends, make new ones, and interact with folks who support your work. The fact that I came away learning something from the assortment of presentations I took in was a nice bonus.
For Beatle people, these events are to be savored, because there is something inherent about these guys and what they have always projected that seems to bring out the best in the true believers. One measure of this came with the dinner conversation, where the observation was made about how everyone there seemed to support each other: you go to presentations and it’s like seeing your kid’s school play - you want to see people succeed, you get joy from it, and that’s when you know the vibe is good. Believe me when I can say from personal experience that this is not always the case, and I have witnessed some familiar names perform less than handsomely at such times. So I am grateful that this inaugural offering went well, and look forward to this and other similar gatherings, because as the point has been made for many of us, during tough times you want to grab onto any pocket of joy that you can find and enjoy it while it’s there.
That goes for ongoing work outside such events. Here are a couple, both involving friends who’ve guested a number of times on the show.
The doctor is IN!
Allison Bumsted’s work focusing on teen fan magazines is ongoing (and if any SATB listeners at any era were consumers of them and are willing to talk to her, drop me a line…). She delivered a fab presentation there, but it also came to my attention that she’d been asked to write an obituary for former teen idol Bobby Sherman. This may strike you as a slight, ephemeral topic for an academic to spend any time on, but in that, you fall right into the trap of dismissing fan literature in one fell swoop and miss something critical about understanding the nature of the relationship between artists, their fans, and the machinery supporting and promoting it. It’s all of a piece, as her work makes crystal clear. Anyway, I thought this was a fine piece of writing (and this video is a hoot besides. The 1960s were different….)
Then there's Carol Tyler. We first met her through her memoir, the wonderfully evocative Fab4Mania, and from there I discovered her past incredible work, including the astonishing Soldier’s Heart: My Campaign To Understand My WWII Veteran Father - A Daughter's Memoir. She and her late husband, cartoonist Justin Green, were the subjects of a recent documentary film, Married To Comics. Anyway, Carol’s been on the show a number of times, and recall that a couple of newsletters ago I posted the NYT review of her newest work.
Just got my copy this week of The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief and it’s staggering. There’s no one producing work like this, but in any event, I am not here to shill books; what I am putting on the table instead is the conversation she had (on the heels of mine) with comics artist Stephen DeStefano on his not-a-podcast YouTube series. The biggest thing I loved about it is: when I have had Carol on the show, it’s been pretty much Beatle-specific all the way. But while Beatles informs a good deal of her life and work, with this talk, you get to hear a lot about the creative process as well, which is always a compelling listen. I quite enjoyed it and I think you will too.
Till next time…
All best,
RR
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