I suppose it has become my destiny to flog the coming of the Good Ol’ Freda documentary, which is to hit screens and iTunes on September 6. The trailer was released yesterday and offers a hint of why the film should be so special. Watching it, one understands why it was she who was chosen to be their secretary; her wit, intelligence, and tact are so readily apparent. My favorite part of the trailer is when she passes when asked if she ever went out with any of them. Watch the snippet and your day will be that much better.
I received the fab news that Magnolia Pictures has set the date of release for Good Ol’ Freda. The documentary about the former assistant to the Beatles will be released in New York City on September 6 and go wide shortly thereafter. I am pleasantly surprised because I somehow figured it would be later in the year. 2013 is shaping up to be a good year for Beatle historiography. Freda promises to be better than the pablum we usually get regarding the group from former “insiders.” It is no different with Elvis, Sinatra, or fill-in-the-blank with any other large and important musical figure. I guess that is the price we and they pay. Six weeks later, on October 29, is the release of volume one of Mark Lewisohn’s eventual three volume history of the group. I wish the significantly longer “author’s cut” was being released in the United States, but alas it is not. I am dying to see what happens when Tune In hits the stores.
I noted with pleasure earlier this week that the bibliographic information for volume one of Mark Lewisohn’s three-part history of the Beatles has just been released here in the U.S. (It had been on Amazon’s UK website for some time now.) It is titled All These Years: Tune In and brings the Fabs up to 31 December 1962, on the cusp of Beatlemania. Tune In has been in the works for nearly a decade now and is destined to be a huge deal in the Beatles’s historiography. As with Civil War historiography, there is much we have to unlearn about the Beatles before we understand their true history and significance. So much of what we “know” is simply the same self-serving narratives and folk tales told again and again until becoming accepted as fact. That will not be a problem with Tune In and the two volumes that come after it. Lewisohn is one of a handful of people who can pull off such a magnum opus. I would say Bruce Spizer and Allan Kozinn are probably the only two others.
Lewisohn has said that there will be an “official cut” and longer “author’s cut” with greater detail. Unfortunately it appears there are no plans to release the author’s cut in the United States for the time being, though the publisher is leaving its options open. The smaller version still logs in at 1,200 pages. Interested parties may want to pre-order from their online bookseller.
Reviews are starting to come in about the documentary Good Ol’ Freda. Freda was Freda Kelly, longtime head of the Beatles Fan Club. Since first hearing about this project a few weeks back, I have been surfing the internet to learn more about this amazing woman–just a girl of seventeen when she met John, Paul, George, and Pete in Liverpool over half a century ago. She seems a woman of tremendous grace and spirit. Working for the Beatles was exceptionally difficult, the workload intense and the employers entitled and demanding. John Lennon spoke in the Playboy interview about the sarcastic put downs and verbal abuse the band members frequently unleashed on Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, and other aides. I have no idea if they did this to their club secretary, but Lennon did fired her at one point; when he tried to recant she made him literally get on his knees and ask for forgiveness. He understood the power of a good woman. I have not seen it yet because the film has just now started the festival circuit, but I am glad she chose not to produce a tell all exposé. I have no interest in which ones, if any, she may have slept with, or what she may have seen during craziest moments of Beatlemania. And don’t kid yourself, Beatlemania had its tawdry underside. Like many in the inner circle, she seemed glad to serve and asked for little in return. There is something to be said for restraint. After the breakup Ms. Kelly had a trove of material that, instead of selling on the increasingly lucrative Beatle memorabilia market, she gave away piece by piece over the years to fans she thought worthy. Now she has given the rest of us this look inside one of the great phenomena of the 20th century. Look for it at your local art house this spring.
I had not heard until just a few days ago that a documentary is in the works about Freda Kelly. For those who don’t know, Ms. Kelly was the young woman responsible for running the Beatles Fan Club from its creation in the early 1960s until its dissolution in 1972. (They had not recorded since 1970, but for legal and financial reasons the band downplayed its breakup as long as it could.) Freda answered to Brian Epstein and was responsible for managing a great deal of the band’s public relations. And the film is not merely in the works, as of today it is in the can and will appear at South by Southwest on March 9. In one of the film’s just-completed final touches, the Beatles’s Apple Corps granted the filmmakers permission to use four cuts in the documentary, including “I Saw Her Standing There” and Love Me Do.” This is exceptionally rare; the Fabs hardly ever allow their catalog to be used in this way. The only instance I know of when a Beatle tune (not a cover) was used onscreen was when Mad Men’s Don Draper played “Tomorrow Never Knows” on his office turntable to better understand the younger generation. And that was after much bargaining and considerable cash–reportedly $250,000–was procured from Lionsgate for that bit of psychedelia. All you need is love, indeed. Still, one can’t blame the Stakeholders (Paul, Starkey, Yoko, Olivia) for controlling the legacy the way they do. Check out the film’s Facebook page.
Speaking of controlling, or not controlling, the Beatles legacy, the website for historian Mark Lewisohn’s upcoming three-volume opus, The Beatles: All These Years, is up and running. I was glad to hear Lewisohn say in an interview that he stopped doing liner notes and other such work for various Beatle-related projects in order to maintain his autonomy. I never held it against him or Bruce Spizer for writing content for Apple’s myriad reissues, but I always thought it compromised their scholarship if only to a small degree. Saying “no” would have been difficult, but they each lost a little something when they did such work. When you work for the Beatles, you work for the Beatles. This is not going to be a problem in what will certainly be the authoritative word on the band for the next 20-30 years. Lewisohn is following his own vision and is letting the facts lead where they may. He has said there will be quite a few interactive features on the book’s website. I am going to add The Beatles: All These Years to the blogroll and see what happens between now and October.
I just got back from my trip to Washington. I managed to visit the Library of Congress, National Portrait Gallery, and even sneak in a quick rendezvous to the Postal Museum while I was killing time this morning waiting for my bus. I was glad to see that the U.S. and International Stamps Gallery is again open to the public. When I was there about two years ago it was closed due to a leak in that part of the museum. It is good to see it up and running again. The stamps themselves are, after all, what the museum is all about.
The coolest thing I saw over the weekend was the Jedediah Hotchkiss map of the Shenandoah Valley, which was part of the Library of Congress’s sesquicentennial exhibit. According to this 1948 LOC document the Library of Congress owns over 600 hundred Hotchkiss maps from during and after the war. Major Hotchkiss was a cartographer who worked primarily for Stonewall Jackson. The one on display was from Jackson’s Valley Campaign. One does not have to be a Lost Causer to admire it as a work of art and engineering. I’m not sure how this one entered the collection, but apparently it was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1964. The how’s and why’s of how such documents get into various collections is fascinating in and of itself. In the case of the Civil War, collections were often donated to various repositories and museums by children or grandchildren well into the twentieth century, as late of the 1950s and 60s.
Catching up on my email and internet, I noticed that Beatle mentor Tony Sheridan died over the weekend. I always thought of him as being so much older than the Beatles but he was only 72, more or less the same age as Fabs. I mentioned just the other day that the Beatles and their inner circle are passing on. A few days ago Amazon UK posted the bibliographic details for volume one of Mark Lewisohn’s trilogy. As Lewisohn said there might be, there is to be an “author’s cut” and a “publisher’s cut.” Volume one for the author’s cut logs in at over 1,800 pages. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with that is new. The first volume ends in December 1962, so there will be a great deal on the late Tony Sheridan. Sad to know he’s gone.
It is hard to believe but yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the Please Please Me album recording session. On February 11, 1962 the Bealtes went into Abbey Road Studios–still called EMI Studios–and banged out ten of the fourteen songs that would appear on their first long playing record. (The other four songs had been recorded and released previously as singles.) Yes, the Beatles anniversaries are hitting the half a century mark. I am one of those people of the belief that the Beatles didn’t record a bad song. There are a few in the canon weaker than the rest (“Old Brown Shoe”?), but how many can be called truly awful?
I know it did not break ground the way Revolver and Sgt. Pepper would a few short years later, but Please Please Me has always been my favorite Beatles lp. For starters, it sounds different than the rest of their work. Basically it was the recording of live studio performances with little overdubbing or other studio gimmickry. This gives the record a fresh sound that it has never lost even after five decades. The great jazz records of the 1950s and 1960s, recorded in the same era with the same primitive recording equipment, have a similar freshness and vitality. The Beatles already understood the songs in-and-out because they had played them hundreds of times in Liverpool, Hamburg, and anywhere else they could land a gig. I often quip that the Beatles recorded Please Please Me in February 1962 and it was all downhill from there. In the thousands of times I have listened to it over the years, I have always better and more refreshed when the final chords of “Twist and Shout” fade away. It isn’t saying too much to call the album . . . life-affirming. It’s on my turntable right now.
I’m looking forward to volume one of Mark Lewisohn’s monumental trilogy, coming later this year. The wait has been frustrating but Lewisohn has been taking his time for the best reason: to tell the story properly. There have been other worthwhile, even essential Beatle books, but it is really a story only Lewisohn can tell in all its messiness, grandeur, and totality. It is almost now or never for the documenting of the Beatles story. Two of them are already gone; McCartney and Starkey are now in their seventies. It is hard to imagine, but in a few short years they and many of the people present during the creation will also no longer be with us to tell their part of the story. This book and its subsequent volumes are going to be a huge deal.
There has been much talk in the news recently about the possible closing of London’s Abbey Road Studios. This shouldn’t be a surprise given the tenuous financial situation of EMI, the record company that owns the studio. If anything, it is a wonder the facility has held on for eighty years. Even when the Beatles were recording there 40+ years ago the studio had a reputation for being cramped and technologically obsolete.
The Strawfoot 
