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How Did the Beatles Get Their Name?

Saturday Mystery from NeatORama:

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website. 

I must have read, in my life, a fair estimate of around 500 or 600 books on the Beatles. I have read each and every one worth reading. I will give most any Beatles book a fair chance, but if I spot more than two or three errors or obvious mistakes, I will just stop reading it and go on to another book.

(As an interesting side note, of these hundreds of actual bios, autobiographies and memoirs, I have only found a handful that did not have some kind of a mistake, error, wrong date, or omission- at least one.)

Many questions involving their fascinating history are undisputed, but many are still debated and are a bit foggy, even to this day. One of these is: how did the Beatles get their name? Okay, let's go back to Liverpool, England in the mid-1950's and do some investigating.

In 1956, John Lennon, a loud-mouthed, but talented teenager, started a group called “The Blackjacks.” This original rock "skiffle" band consisted of John and a few of his close pals. Skiffle groups were groups who played on improvised instruments, such as tea chest bass, washboards, etc.

Though this was the group's very first name, the briefly-named Blackjacks never performed under this name. Lennon soon changed his group's name to “The Quarrymen" (in honor of his current school Quarry Bank High School.) It was as The Quarrymen (sometimes spelled as Quarry Men) that John Lennon and his band actually started singing in public.

This was the band Paul McCartney watched the day he met John on July 6, 1957. This is the band Paul McCartney joined in October of 1957. On February 6, 1958, another local lad, George Harrison, also joined the Quarrymen.

The Quarrymen

It was during this late 1950's period that name changes became frequent. Once, all the members of the group showed up in different colored shirts, so they called themselves “The Rainbows.” At a talent show the boys entered in 1959, they dubbed themselves “Johnny and the Moondogs.” In May of 1960, John and Paul did two small shows by themselves and dubbed themselves “The Nerk Twins.”

In 1960, reputedly, John and his best friend at art college, Stu Sutcliffe, came up with the name “The Beatles.” The story goes that the band loved Buddy Holly and his group "the Crickets.” So the two went through several insect names and finally arrived on “Beetles".

Stu thought of “The Beetles,” but then John, who loved puns and wordplay, thought of changing the spelling to “Beatles,” as they were a beat group. As John was to later elaborate in a 1964 interview: “It was beat and beetles and when you said it, people thought of crawly things, and when you read it, it was beat music.”

Ironically, Paul recalls everyone telling the band what a lousy name “Beatles" was and urging them to change it. Paul himself says he remembers John and Stu running up to him and anxiously telling him how they had thought of the name “Beatles" the previous night.

In the interim, during the first half of 1960, from officially deciding on the Beatles, the group morphed through "the Beetles,” "the Silver Beetles,” "the Beatals,” "the Silver Beets,” and "the Silver Beatles" -in no particular order. John recalled once being introduced onstage as “Long John and the Silver Beetles.”

(Historical note: in May of 1960, the group did their first tour, a brief series of gigs in Scotland. It was during this tour that the boys changed their individual names: Paul became “Paul Ramon" and George became “Carl Harrison.” John was reputed to have changed his name to “John Silver,” but he always denied this and his version seems to be correct. “I always liked my own name too much,” explained John.)

The “John invented the name Beatles" version was accepted for decades, but two other explanations were to surface after his death in 1980.

In the 1995  documentary Beatles Anthology, George explained that the Beatles came from the 1953 Marlon Brando film The Wild One. In this film, Brando plays a character called “Johnny" and he has a motorcycle gang called "the Beetles" in it.

Beetles. Johnny. Get it? A perfectly logical fit.

This sounds good, except that the film The Wild Onewas banned in England until 1968. This would seem to discount this much-after-the-fact revisionist theory. Curiously, although George first mentions The Wild One genesis theory as early as 1975 in an official interview, he is on record many times in the '60's being asked the question about how the group got their name and he never once mentions the Brando film.

As I see time after time in studying the Beatles, one of the biggest sources of false data in the Beatles' history is the Beatles themselves. Incredibly, in his later years, George once cited the wrong date for his own birthday.

Later, an obscure beat poet named Royston Ellis came forth and claimed he had thought up the Beatles name. Ellis had spent the night hanging out with John and his friend Stu in June of 1960. The fact of this get-together is confirmed and undisputed. On the night in question, during a chat, Ellis asked John about his group's name and John replied “The Beetles.” He asked john how he spelled it and john said “B-E-E-T-L-E-S.”

According to Ellis, he thought of the changing of the spelling to "B-E-A-T-L-E-S" because he was a "beat" poet, beatniks were the rage at the time, and John and Stu fancied themselves part of "the beat scene.”

When John wrote a 1961 comical article for a local paper about how he came up with the name “Beatles,” he jokingly said, “It came in a vision- a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them 'from this day on you are Beatles with an a’.”

Even this explanation gives rise to debate, because Royston Ellis further claims that the night he gave John and Stu the name Beatles, he heated them a chicken pie for dinner, and the pie caught fire in the oven. Thus, Ellis was "the man on a flaming pie.”

Royston Ellis with the Beatles in 1963

Now, John Lennon was well-known to put actual autobiographical occurrences into his songs and his writings throughout his career. Could Royston Ellis actually be the guy who thought of the name the Beatles?

The band went to Hamburg, Germany, to do several months of shows in August of 1960. It was there that they "officially and forever" changed their name to the Beatles.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention one final Beatles name-derivation theory. John's wife, Yoko Ono, claims that john actually thought of the name completely alone, without anyone else's help. According to Yoko, John literally "had a vision of the man on a flaming pie" and that he, alone, thought of the name from this alleged incident.

Which theory do you believe?

John Lennon's Famous Victorian Era 'Mr. Kite' poster perfectly re-created

from DangerousMinds

(click to enlarge)

Pablo Fanque, today best known for being mentioned in The Beatles song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” on the Sgt. Pepper’s album was the first black circus proprietor in Britain. For over three decades, his circus, in which he himself was a featured performer, was the most popular n Victorian-era Britain. Circus historian George Speight wrote that Fanque’s big stunt was leaping on horseback over a coach “placed lengthways with a pair of horses in the shafts, and through a military drum at the same time.”

From the Smithsonian website:

While true Beatlemaniacs will know that Mr. Kite and his companions were real performers in a real troupe, however, few will realize that they were associates of what was probably the most successful, and almost certainly the most beloved, “fair” to tour Britain in the mid-Victorian period. And almost none will know that Pablo Fanque–the man who owned the circus—was more than simply an exceptional showman and perhaps the finest horsemen of his day. He was also a black man making his way in an almost uniformly white society, and doing it so successfully that he played to mostly capacity houses for the best part of 30 years.

The song that lent Fanque his posthumous fame had its origins in a promotional film shot for “Strawberry Fields Forever”—another Lennon track—at Sevenoaks in Kent in January 1967. During a break in the filming, the Beatle wandered into a nearby antique shop, where his attention was caught by a gaudy Victorian playbill advertising a performance of Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal in the northern factory town of Rochdale in February 1843. One by one, in the gorgeously prolix style of the time, the poster ran through the wonders that would be on display, among them “Mr. Henderson, the celebrated somerset thrower, wire dancer, vaulter, rider &c.” and Zanthus, “well known to be one of the best Broke Horses in the world!!!”—not to mention Mr. Kite himself, pictured balancing on his head atop a pole while playing the trumpet.

Something about the poster caught Lennon’s fancy; knowing his dry sense of humor, it was probably the bill’s breathless assertion that this show of shows would be “positively the last night but three!” of the circus’s engagement in the town. Anyway, he bought it, took it home and (the musicologist Ian MacDonald notes) hung it in his music room, where “playing his piano, [he] sang phrases from it until he had a song.” The upshot was a track unlike any other in the Beatles’ canon—though it’s fair to say that the finished article owes just as much to the group’s producer, George Martin, who responded heroically to Lennon’s demand for “a ‘fairground’ production wherein one could smell the sawdust.” (Adds MacDonald, wryly: “While not in the narrowest sense a musical specification, [this] was, by Lennon’s standards, a clear and reasonable request. He once asked Martin to make one of his songs sound like an orange.”) The Abbey Road production team used a harmonium and wobbly tapes of vintage Victorian calliopes to create the song’s famously kaleidoscopic wash of sound.

Guaranteed to raise a smile, the 1843 letterpress-printed circus poster from 1843 that John Lennon owned has been recreated using antique wooden and metal type and wood engravings.

Each print is hand-pulled on a Victorian press and individually numbered in a limited edition of 1,967 via the artist behind the project, Peter Dean, who writes:

As a lifelong Beatles fan I found myself simply wanting to hang a copy of this poster on my wall. As a designer, however, I couldn’t accept the many poor imitations I found – all of which use jarringly incorrect fonts (like Futura and Helvetica) and low-quality copies-of-copies of the illustrations.

So I set about doing it properly. What I thought might be a few weeks of work became several months, where sometimes the prospect of one day owning this poster seemed far away. But we got there in the end and I’m truly delighted with the end result.

I can see why he’s so happy, this looks amazing.

It’s worth pointing out that “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” was one of three songs on the Sgt. Pepper’s album to be banned by BBC radio. The lyrics referring to “Henry the horse” were thought to be slang for heroin. Clearly this was not the case. Imagine writing and creating such an amazing piece of childlike music only to find some small minds ready to ban it.

Filmmakers Nick Esdaile and Joe Fellows made a great short film about how it all came together. You can win a copy of the limited edition “Mr. Kite” print yourself by signing up for the Kite newsletter.

Beatles singing Dead Kennedys’ California Über Alles.

Thanks Tara at DangerousMinds

Deconstructing "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band'

It’s probably the most famous pop album in the world, and here is its title track, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” broken down into its constituent parts.



and a BONUS, Documentary "Making Of..."













Best to you in the New Year, Brothers and Sisters!

thanks, DangerousMinds

Beatles "Strawberry Fields" cartoon gets a stereo remix

more Beatles! From DangerousMinds:

Alan on Youtube has taken the ‘Strawberry Fields’ episode of the Beatles cartoon television series and added a stereo mix of the song to the video. Quite nice

From 1967, with the song dubbed in a new stereo remix I made to expand the orchestral section! (...unlike the newly remastered “Magical Mystery Tour” CD!) This episode was inspired by the fact that the “Strawberry Field” of the song had been based on a real-life Salvation Army orphanage in Liverpool. When the Beatles stop by a dilapidated orphanage, the hostile attitude of the children (who are drawn in muted colors like the downtrodden Pepperlanders in “Yellow Submarine”) is explained by the Beatles’ driver, James, as being being due to their “sociological environment”. So the Beatles set about to create an Elysian playground with song! John’s “Musketeer Gripweed”, of his film “How I Won the War”, has a cameo!

the fucking BEATLES! 1st show in America.

This mini movie, that you can see for free in it's entirety, is incredible. The entire show from start to end, the film never stops rolling.

The Beatles, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, I am proud to say was the very first album i ever owned. I've always been a fan, and this film whether you love them or not is an incredible piece of history. Not to mention, i was never made so aware in any other video i've seen, of what a bad ass drummer Ringo really was until i saw this. And, for the record, my favorite Beatles album is Abbey Road.


Here's the story from DangerousMinds:

With all the Apple fanboy media attention paid this past week to the fact that the Beatles catalog was finally showing up on iTunes—like this is some kind of big deal to the man on the street—one nifty lil’ bit of news that most certainly was worth perking up for, got left out of a lot of the coverage: Until the end of the year, you can watch, for free on iTunes, the most amazing complete Beatles show you’ve ever seen. A show that was literally their first American concert, shot just two days after their Ed Sullivan TV debut, at the Washington Coliseum on February 11, 1964.

It’s amazing to see this. As the story is told, when they began to play, they had no idea what to expect. Recent concerts in Paris were played to unenthusiastic audiences. The between song banter assumes that the audience is not familiar with certain numbers, although this is seen to be demonstrably untrue, as the band, of course realize. And they are lovin’ it. The energy is palpable, and the entire set is one big 35-minute long adrenaline shot, as exciting to watch today as was then, but the added meta-historical layer of seeing the Beatles do an entire concert the very week they went from being up and comers to the most important musicians of the later half of the 20th century and beyond, is kinda cool, too.

The performance here is way better than the one captured in color at Shea Stadium a year later. That film was more about the insanity of Beatlemania than the music, anyway. Here, musically, they are tight as hell. This has been bootlegged forever, but never seen in good quality like this. Trust me, if you’re a Beatles fan, this will blow your mind… out in a car.

When you go to iTunes, you’ll be confronted with a box of Beatles related information. Click on “Play the Concert.” Do it. Do it now.

Ringo Starr Blows Off VaticanEmbrace of Beatles

Ringo Starr is saying “who cares” to the Vatican’s late embrace of The Beatles. Starr rolled his eyes at the Catholic Church, which praised the group and expressed forgiveness to John Lennon for his comments that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

“Didn’t the Vatican say we were satanic?” Starr said during an interview with CNN. “And they still forgive us?”

“I think [the Vatican] has more to talk about than The Beatles,” he added, alluding to the child sex abuse scandal that continues to plague the church.

The Vatican offered its latest peace offering to The Beatles in its recent issue of L’Osservatore Romano, its official newspaper, on Monday.

“It’s true they took drugs, lived life to excess because of their success, even said they were bigger than Jesus and put out mysterious messages that were possibly even satanic,” the newspaper said.

But, “what would pop music have been like without The Beatles?” it reasoned, describing the band’s music as “beautiful.”

The Vatican doesn’t appear to be extending the same kind of olive branch to other popular bands, such as Pink Floyd, Queen, Black Sabbath and The Eagles.

In 1996, those groups were among several - including The Beatles - that Pope Benedict XVI warned youth against listening to when he was still a cardinal, claiming their music contained “subliminal” satanic influences.

Lennon’s full quote was “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” We suspect the late Beatle would feel the same about the Vatican’s volte-face as Starr does.



Ringo Starr tells Vatican to ‘Get Back’; dismisses effort to ‘forgive’ The Beatles (NY Daily News)

Thanks again, DangerousMinds

Enter The Magical Mystery Chambersby Wu Tang Vs The Beatles

This Wu-Tang Beatles mash-up clearly shows off the greatness of the Wu's lyrical abilities. The Beatles samples are there, but not quite as obvious as i was expecting, but i'm still feeling this whole (now downloadable for free!) album of 27 cuts more than any WU-TANG album ever, not to diss the 36 Chambers, which is the last Hip-Hop LP i actually BOUGHT, and is a landmark hip-hop album, but this shit here, is TIGHT!

Enjoy!

Thanks to Xeni at BoingBoing for pointing this out.

BONUS: if you really feel like getting a bit more into the Beatles today, check this out:

Exploration of Beatles music through infographics:

These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording sesion notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings. Join this project here.

"I Met the Walrus"

In 1969, 14-year-old Beatles fan Jerry Levitan tracked his idol, John Lennon, from a Toronto airport to his room at the King Edward Hotel. Inside, he convinced Lennon to do an impromptu interview. Thirty-eight years later, Levitan teamed with director Josh Raskin to create and edit a five-minute short film entitled I Met the Walrus based on the interview. Amazing, right?

Using the interview as the actual dialogue for the film, the pair hired illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina to do a pen art work that plays off the interview as the background for the film. Raskin later told the EyeOpener.com, "I just wanted to literally animate the words, unfurling in the way I imagined they would appear inside the head of a baffled 14-year-old boy interviewing his idol."

The film went on to premiere at a nightclub in Toronto and has since played at several festivals, ending with a 2008 Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short. Over the summer, the film popped up on YouTube, and you can watch it in full below:

from truthout.org

I love the Beatles, and just don't play video games.

But this video game "trailer" released about the upcoming Beatles "Rockband" looks cool as hell. I can't imagine the game itself being this cool and dynamic, but what the fuck do i know about video games? (not much if anything-someone clue me in if you feel like it).

If you're one of those people who enjoys the music of the Beatles, then prepare for your head to explode. This gorgeous animated video is the one that'll play when you put upcoming video game The Beatles: Rock Band into your Xbox, Playstation, or Wii this September (watch it bigger here). You know how every fall they blame low TV ratings on people skipping shows to play video games? That will definitely happen again this year.

(hit the full screen view button on the right to watch it here or got to the link above and see the sharper version there)

(from New York magazine - nymag.com - Thanks, Luke)