2009 Beatle News

Let me check a calendar -- is it 2009 or 1969?


I've spent the afternoon rounding up news on the Beatles (with full awareness of the irony that there even is news about a band that broke up nearly 30 years ago, half of whose members are dead).

Burning up the Internet in advance of the re-released, remastered Beatles albums (16 available in stereo, 13 in mono) and the Beatles Rock Band game are these little tidbits.

The first full-length clip of a song from Rock Band is "Birthday" and you can see it here.

Matt Hurwitz gives an early review of the sound quality of the new remasters (h/t to Steve Marinucci on Examiner.com.)

Beatlenews.com reports that a "new" Beatles song is ready to be released. When the three surviving Beatles were finishing the Anthology project in the 1990s, Yoko Ono gave them demos of three John Lennon songs. Two -- "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" were reworked with additional instrumentation and vocals from Paul, George, and Ringo and released on the first two Anthology CDs. The third track "Now and Then" was worked on, but not finished. Reportedly, McCartney has been working on the track off and on for the past two years and really wants it to be released.

And finally, there's this: the possibly fake, long rumored "Revolution (Take 20)" -- a much stronger, gentler, and more accessible pastiche than "Revolution #9" leaked onto the Internet a few months back and is available here on YoutTube:


Thinking your August won't be complete without 5,400+ words on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but don't know where to go? Drop by Then Play Long, where Marcello Carlin is reviewing every #1 album in the U.K. from July 1956 on. (It's hard not to love a blog that takes on such a single-mindedly obsessive task, then sticks to it -- so far for nearly a year.)

And finally, because if you love something enough you have to be willing to risk destroying it, here's Dead Lazlo's Place doing a punk cover of "Eleanor Rigby." Yeah, baby.