The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club album’s vital stats: Recorded December 1966 through April 1967. Released 2nd June, 1967. Weeks at #1 27 (UK) and 15 (U.S.), with 175 week on the charts. And NYT critic Richard Goldstein labeled it “fraudulent”. What can I say, he was definitively and for all-time, wrong.
The Beatles Revolver album, their seventh, was released in early August 1966. It followed closely on the heels of Rubber Soul, yet the group had embarked on something altogether different.
With this month’s release of The Beatles U.S. albums by Capitol Records and my ongoing re-appreciation of the group’s library of songs, I’ve decided to reprise a series…
Hoping lightning would strike twice, emulating A Hard Day’s Night, Help! (released on 6th August, 1965) contained the songs from the ’65 film on side one of the album, with the other side devoted to other new material. Moreover, prodded by others’ success, The Beatles began to push at fans’ and critics’ expectations.
The group’s more somber Beatles For Sale album, coming off their hectic touring/filming/appearance schedule, set a more cynical tone for its 4 December 1964 release. Still, it represented a maturing work, and another highly successful LP in the UK (eleven weeks at #1).
The Beatles A Hard Day’s Night album was the third album in eighteen months to be released by 10 July 1964. Timed to coincide with the release of their first movie. One that completed the catapult to worldwide superstardom. The album reached #1 in the UK charts and was cemented there for 21 of the 38 weeks spent in the Top Twenty. The U.S. soundtrack LP spent 14 weeks at the top of our album register.
The With The Beatles album was going to make an impression no matter what. The important sophomore release for the newly in-demand group would gather attention from fans and critics eager to catch more of the British Invasion. Witnessing the expansion of Pop music, in the bargain. That it was released on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, would be its counterpoint.
The Beatles Please Please Me album was rush-released by Parlophone on 22nd March, 1963 to capitalize on the enormous success of the title track that had been the group’s second single and their first no. 1 on most UK charts.
This is the next entry in Best Album Covers, a series begun right here. The first successful long-playing microgroove record for the phonograph was introduced by Columbia Records back in June of…
Back to the vital things in life. Besides movie-watching and reading, it’s music for me. A shared facet that my colleague Kevin highlighted last week. Though I’ve put a turntable back into my life (thereby forcing me to re-collect those LPs I thoughtlessly let go more than two decades ago, to my wife’s consternation), listening to my Compact Disc collection has taken up much of my non-work-movie-book listening time.
If there’s one often demanding mission some of my fellow Beatles fans undertake, it’s tasking themselves with the supreme labor of ranking their songs. The numbers…
This is the next entry in Best Album Covers, a series begun right here. As has been referred to, the first successful long-playing microgroove record for the phonograph…
It Rains... You Get Wet 