Salon.com > Beatles

The ballad of John and Yoko — and Paul — continues more than 40 years later

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

In 2000, a New York-based architect named Cass Calder Smith was helping his father move into a new apartment, when he discovered a tremendous inventory of interview tapes — hundreds of hours of conversations with the biggest rock legends. His journalist father, Howard Smith, had enviable gigs as both a New York City radio personality (for WABC, later WPLJ) and a star columnist at the Village Voice during its heyday, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when every revolution — sexual, anti-war, civil rights, gay liberation— was not only at its height, but converging. Unflappable, immensely knowledgeable, and sharp-witted, he earned the confidence of his subjects — people like Mick Jagger, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda (freshly returned from Cannes, after the premiere of "Easy Rider"), Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, Lou Reed, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Jerry Garcia (though Howard admits to John Lennon in an interview that he's not a fan of the Dead) — who spoke with him, on repeat occasions, often at a crucial juncture in history, or in their lives, and opened up at length and with rare candor. These original reels from the interviews, which were conducted for Howard Smith’s column and radio show, were packed away in boxes, untouched for 40 years, in the back of his West Village loft. Howard Smith, now 76, and fighting cancer, confessed to Ben Sisario in the New York Times in November that he’d kept them around, half-hoping to use them for his memoirs, thinking they would be “a good memory jogger. Things were happening every day that were just incredible.”

Rare color photos of The Beatles to go up for sale

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 14:40:00 +0000

LONDON (AP) — Unpublished early color photographs of The Beatles' first U.S. tour will be sold at a U.K. auction.

The photos were taken during the rock band's 1964 visit to the U.S., when color film was expensive and most images of the group were in black and white.

The collection of 65 slides contains many stage shots, including George Harrison with his legendary red Rickenbacker guitar and close-up portraits from a Las Vegas Sahara Hotel press conference and Las Vegas Convention Centre gig.

The images were taken by Dr. Robert Beck, who died in 2002 and left them in an archive of photographs and slides in his Hollywood home.

Omega Auctions said Sunday the images will be sold March 22 — exactly 50 years after The Beatles released their first album.

Paul McCartney to front Nirvana reunion

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 16:15:00 +0000

The Sun newspaper is reporting that Paul McCartney will replace Kurt Cobain and lead a Nirvana reunion this evening at the Hurricane Sandy benefit concert in New York.

It would be the first show that the surviving members of the pioneering alt-rock band in almost 20 years, since Cobain's 1994 suicide. They will reportedly debut a new song.

McCartney told the paper he called Grohl recently, and the Foo Fighters frontman invited him to “jam with some mates.”

According to the Sun:

Macca had suggested they “just make something up” and found himself playing with Grohl on drums, bassist Krist, 47, and unofficial fourth Nirvana member Pat Smear, 53.

He said: “I didn’t really know who they were. They are saying how good it is to be back together. I said ‘Whoa? You guys haven’t played together for all that time?

“And somebody whispered to me ‘That’s Nirvana. You’re Kurt.’ I couldn’t believe it.”