August 21:
♫ Welcome everybody to our 41st issue – the last ever newsletter of our first year. Expect lots of celebratory moments next week, but in the meantime we celebrate the spectacle that was Woodstock, a few years further back than that. Sadly now that the TV and Radio anniversaries of the event seem to have passed we’re back to having nothing to watch and very few news stories again (‘remember, on the BBC you’re never more than 72 minutes away from a repeat of ‘Coast’)
♫ Beatles News: Two small curios to let you know about this week. The first is that Cynthia Lennon’s planned exhibition of her husband John’s artefacts at Liverpool’s Beatles Museum gets ever nearer and made the news this week thanks to an unknown Lennon poem/lyric discovered in her possession. The untitled piece dates from 1967 – the year when Lennon’s prolific writing was beginning to run dry – and is a rare love song, possibly his earliest for Yoko Ono who he had just met at that stage in his life. The poem will be on display later in the year.
The other news from Liverpool is that a rare picture of a schoolboy-age Paul McCartney has been discovered. The shot, taken of boys from ***School, features the young Paul reading a comic (magneto and Titanium Man perhaps?!)
♫ Anniversaries (August 21st-27th): They AA its your birthday if your name is Keith Moon (drummer with The Who 1964-78) who would have been 63 on August 23rd; Paul McCartney collaborator Elvis Costello turns 55 on August 25th; Chris Curtis (drummer and singer with The Searchers 1963-66) would have been 68 on August 26th and Dennis Wilson and occasional Beach Boys collaborator Daryl Dragon turns 67 on August 27th. Anniversaries of events include: the American premiere of Beatles film ‘Help!’ (August 22nd 1965); John Lennon marries art student Cynthia Powell at a Liverpool registry office on August 23rd 1962 – Brian Epstein is best man and Paul and George attend but Ringo is such a new member of the group he isn’t even told about the wedding till afterwards; Security guards outside a Manchester TV studio are so worried about the antics of Rolling Stones fans waiting to see their idols that they end up throwing water at them – an event that further increases the band’s notoriety (August 23rd 1965); The first album by Crosby, Stills and Nash makes its rather delayed debut on the British charts 40 years ago this week (August 23rd 1969); Patti Harrison drags her husband George along to a lecture given by the Maharishi in London – an event that will have repercussions on his musical heritage right to the end (August 24th 1967); Mark David Chapman finally receives a life sentence for killing John Lennon some eight months after his death (August 24th 1981); Brian Wilson appears on stage with the Beach Boys for the first time in two years during a show in Hawaii – it’s also his last stage appearance till the mid-70s (August 25th 1967); Guitarist Henry McCullough becomes the first of many members to leave Paul McCartney’s band Wings over it’s seven-year history (August 25th 1973); inspired by the London lecture, George persuades the other Beatles to see the Maharishi in Bangor, North Wales (August 26th 1967); 10cc give their first ever live appearance on August 26th 1973 in the most prestigious of areas – the Isle of Man!; the Beatles meet Elvis at the latter’s Beverly Hills home on August 27th 1965; two years later on the same day Beatles manager Brian Epstein is found dead in his department, just two months after the band’s biggest album success with ‘Sgt Peppers’ and finally, a year later in 1968, the Beatles’ Apple label is officially launched with Mary Hopkins’ ‘Those Were The Days’ and their own ‘Hey Jude’ single securing the label top spot on the charts for the next seven weeks.
