Hello all,
Not a huge week in terms of news (and knock on wood, deaths) but I am glad to have a new show out roughly coinciding with this newsletter. My conversation with Chris Purcell and Simon Weitzman was really enjoyable. Besides learning a bit about what went into creating Evolver ‘62, it was nice to talk about some of their other films. I'm guessing most of you have seen Miss O’Dell by now, but I hadn't seen A Love Letter To The Beatles and The Beatles and Us, so they're on the list for me personally and hopefully for you as well. (Looks like the former is currently available for free in the US on Tubi, and as for the latter, this.)
I can give you this one that I mentioned in the beginning of the show: Chris Purcell’s 2012 short, Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?
I know that Lewisohn has been making the rounds on other podcasts to publicize the film. I am certain that he has his reasons for not coming to this platform, but it doesn't really matter, because if he had, I likely wouldn't have talked to Chris and Simon and I'm very happy that this door has opened.
Also opened is the door to a conversation with Bruce Sugar, a producer and engineer who worked on the current and most recent Ringo albums. He also had a hand in “Now and Then,” and he has expressed his interest in coming on the show to discuss them in the coming weeks. April 24th has been given as the release date for Long Long Road.
NEWS
The big story has been the Jim Irsay collection auction. I've been talking about this in the newsletter for some time now, possibly beginning with when he unexpectedly passed away at 65 in May 2025. One would have hoped for a best case scenario, in which what took him decades to assemble would have been kept together by his heirs: probably the greatest collection of rock and roll artifacts (if that's the proper word to describe the very instruments with which some of our most revered records were produced) ever assembled by one person. And yeah, a lot of it was Beatles. He liked to joke that he had reunited them, in as much as he had instruments belonging to each. In a perfect world, his passing would’ve meant keeping the collections largely intact and if not housed in a permanent display somewhere (as he expressed to the media), maybe part of some kind of traveling exhibition.
The late Jim Irsay
But this was not to be: his heirs decided to cash out. This means if one didn't see his holdings during his lifetime, it's extremely unlikely they'll ever be seen in one place ever again. His collecting was bigger than rock and roll, and equally impressive were the things of a historic/political nature he had also managed to acquire. Therefore, when I see the celebratory coverage this week of all the records broken in terms of prices paid for specific instruments, it's hard for me to muster up the level of excitement I've been seeing when some insanely deep-pocketed individual acquires more stuff. This sure isn't on par with curing cancer or bringing an end to all armed conflicts, so I'm kinda baffled by it. Nonetheless, it is news and Beatles related, so here you go:
BEATLE ITEM AUCTION PRICE
John 1964 “1996” Rickenbacker guitar $1,270,000
John 1873 Broadwood upright piano $3,247,000
John 1966 Vox “Kensington” prototype guitar $609,600
John 1963 Gretsch “6120” Chet Atkins guitar $1,270,000
Paul 1968 “Hey Jude” handwritten lyrics $1,016,000
Paul 1979 Yamaha bass $228,600
George and 1964 Gibson SG $2,271,000
Pete Ham
George 1960 Maton Mastersound guitar $279,400
Ringo 1964 Ed Sullivan Show drum head $2,881,000
Ringo 1963 Ringo’s 1st Ludwig kit $2,383,000
Ringo 1964 Ludwig snare drum $95,250
For more on the auction and pictures of everything, see this. For the record, David Gilmour’s well-loved Fender Strat shattered all previous records for the most expensive guitar of all time by selling for an unearthly $14,000,000. No word if it was the same one he played here or here.
Other news: the Beatle-related theatrical releases keep coming. This one is a no-brainer: the restored and otherwise enhanced One To One concert film will be hitting theaters. Like Man on The Run, word is there will be two big screen showings around the world: on April 29th and May 3rd.
Of course we all know what the big question is, and of course, I think we also all know the answer to that. If history repeats, it means weeks of Sean ducking interviews till the controversy blows over once again.
I would be remiss not to mention that the Billy Preston doc, That's The Way God Planned It, has been playing at "select" venues around the country. No word on international distribution yet, but you can see the current schedule here.
HISTORY
For this upcoming week, these are the anniversaries of relevance (to varying degrees) that suggest themselves:
17 March 1944: Patricia Ann Boyd was born.
20 March 1958: Buddy Holly and the Crickets played in Liverpool.
22 March 1963: The Beatles’ debut long-player Please Please Me was released.
16 March 1964: “Can’t Buy Me Love”/”You Can’t Do That” was issued as a single in the US.
20 March 1964: “Can’t Buy Me Love” / “You Can’t Do That” was issued as a single in the UK.
20 March 1964: The Beatles made their second appearance on Ready Steady Go.
22 March 1965: The Early Beatles was released by Capitol.
21 March 1967: The Beatles worked on “Getting Better” and John accidentally took acid.
18 March 1968: “Lady Madonna” / “The Inner Light” was issued as a single in the US.
17 March 1969: Cream’s “Badge” - a Harrison-Clapton co-write - was issued as a single in the US.
20 March 1969: John and Yoko were married in Gibraltar.
16 March 1971: The Beatles won a Grammy for Let It Be.
22 March 1971: “Power To The People” was issued as a single in the US.
17 March 1972: “Back Off Boogaloo” was issued as a single in the UK.
18 March 1976: Jim McCartney died.
20 March 1978: “With A Little Luck” was issued as a single in the US.
22 March 1978: The Rutles’ All You Need is Cash aired in the US on NBC.
16 March 1979: Wings Over the World aired on US TV.
22 March 1982: Reel Music was released.
19 March 1984: “I’m Stepping Out” was issued as a single in the US.
18 March 1996: Anthology 2 was released worldwide.
16 March 1998: George Martin’s In My Life album was released.
SOME MORE HISTORY
Typically this is where I offer a write up on some historic event in Beatles history but this time I present a historic thing, an object recently discussed in episode 322. Universally it’s known as the “Nothing Box.” As described in the show and as is generally known, this was a box small enough to hold in your hand that was, at least on one side, covered with lights. When activated, these lights would blink in a completely random fashion, engaging the beholder in wondering which one would blink next. T’was the ‘60s, folks, and such apparently purposeless gadgets could quickly find themselves becoming all the rage, in the same way everything from mood rings to fidget spinners were in a later era.
Now in Beatles folklore, the item fitting this description has become irrevocably attached to “Magic Alex” Mardas, the purported electronics “genius” befriended by the group (and Lennon especially). He was ultimately put in charge of what was envisioned as an “electronics division” at Apple, but exactly none of his proposed “inventions” amounted to anything. His version of a hybrid bass/guitar prototype can be seen perplexing The Beatles in the Get Back film, and this came after the supposed 72-track recording set-up he was tasked with outfitting their new studio at Savile Row proved to be illusory.
Photos by Brian Duffy, 1965
But when one looks into the box - and this is something we can easily do, because John was photographed with one - one can very definitely follow a history trail that does not lead back to Alex; it in fact precedes his presence in their lives. Furthermore, nowhere in his extant interviews or writings does he claim the item as one of his accomplishments, suggesting that its connection to him was the result of a misremembering by someone, who naturally conflated such a useless, functionless thing with the person most fitting that general description…
The first instance of its existence came in 1962 (somehow this eluded mention in Mr. Lewisohn’s lecture). It was offered in the seasonal catalog by Hammacher-Schlemmer, and furthermore, gained notice so quickly that it was written up in New Yorker magazine. The article mentions that what was originally dubbed “the Nothing Box” was being re-branded as the “Something Box.”
In the show I had mentioned the photos of John taken with it and offered that they might have been by Richard Avedon (because they have that look and he did photograph The Beatles: most famously the 1967 series that were marketed as psychedelic images as well as in that landscape poster later reconfigured for Love Songs; also that 1966 shoot of Paul with the space suit, some alongside Jean Schrimpton). But no: they were actually shot in 1965 by Brian Duffy in London. The story is that the shoot took place after The Beatles returned from their North American tour. Before leaving the states, John is said to have picked up the nothing/something box in NYC (at a “novelty store,” which certainly fits the description of Hammacher Schlemmer). He purchased it, according to Duffy, on the pretext that it was a “UFO detector” and was so enamored with it that he brought it along to the photo shoot, where he happily posed with it. So there it is, pre-Alex, and with nothing solid to suggest that the future head of Apple’s Electronic Division had anything to do with it.
All best,
RR
www.somethingaboutthebeatles.com < (the site’s getting rehabbed!)
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