Anti-Beatles thread

[Steve]

Gotta be one right. Equal time,I say.

Great to be here btw,you cnuts.

[floorbird]

What's the point?

[david]

If the posts here have to have a point, I'm going to quit . . .

[Steve]

floorbird,are you Yoko. Is she really having a sex change operation?

[dino]

ha! 0 posts everybody... good choice

todd haynes film is plain stupid but thats because todd haynes is plain stupid.... good music tho

[Steve]

Adam Raised A Cain and Cynthia from Bruce last night. Cool.

[cripes]

From the Backstreets website:

Can't say the same of the Jersey crowd, though. "Take 'Reason to Believe,'" says one guy who saw both shows. "In Philly, everyone was singing along. Tonight, they were sitting on their asses." Later in the show Bruce needled his fellow New Jerseyans, "Philly was much louder than this!"

[manho]

that's the difference between bruce and boby. bruce likes the thickos to sing along with him.

[dino]

if the jerseyans dont like brooce anymore, thats the end of the world as we know it

or esle they were too drunk to stand up on their asses

[manho]

the one good thing you can say about boby is that he hates people singing along with him. it's probably why he changes the arrangements every week.

can you imagine sinatra saying, "ok, i'm gonna do, 'my way', now and if i don't hear you jersey guys helping me out..."

[owen]

you cant sing along with boby coz you dont know what song he's singing

[Steve]

ah, hes one of ours,we dont have to impress him. by all accounts the crowd on night 2 was better.

[dag]

[Cat Stevens]

that pic freaked me out to no extent

[owen]

is that lou reed and ringo starr's love child?

[dino]

www.facade.com/biorhythm/relationship/?Celeb=Bob_Dylan&Celeb2=Paul_McCartney

[manho]

i would normally leave this to the norwegians to post but expecting rain hasn't been updated since karl erik left john erik in charge of the shop:

"I will be away for the rest of the week, John Erik will take care of the updates. See if you can trace a different editorial perspective. Please don't flood him with tips, just the best ones! "



The power and the glory

What's it like being Bob Dylan right after Queen Elizabeth I? Cate Blanchett tells Patrick Barkham about fame, sleep deprivation and losing weight to play a man
Patrick Barkham
Friday October 26, 2007
Guardian

One week she was gliding across cold stone halls in peacock-featured finery as the fiftysomething monarch of 16th-century England. The next she had swapped her orange wig for tousled black to become a frazzled twentysomething American on the most sensational rock tour of the 1960s. To become two such different people in such a short space of time is almost sinister. And then Cate Blanchett in the flesh is so different again from her two latest turns - as the queen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age and as one of six Bob Dylans in I'm Not There - that you might wonder if she was some kind of changeling.

While other characters in the sequel to Elizabeth betray their 21st-century status with a flash of whitened tooth or oddly contemporary haircut, there is something about Blanchett's Queen that seems not of this time and not of this world. Her Dylan, too, which she plays at his famous folk-renouncing moment in 1965-6, is also strange and strikingly alien. So, plonked in a hotel room with the air conditioning wafting around a smell of pastries, it is surprising to find her sounding so normal and sensible and real.

These latest films will be Blanchett's fourth and fifth major roles this year. She must have spent every week stuck in hotel suites promoting them. "Not really," she says. "What's come out? I lose track." Babel was released in January, Notes on a Scandal in February and The Good German in March. "Oh my goodness, I apologise," she says. I'm not sure what she is apologising for, but it is typically disarming: when called a "Hollywood A-lister" she makes a face, and despite her prodigious output she makes no claim to work especially hard. "Babel or Dylan is three weeks' work," she says. "When they are released in the way that they are in England it seems like I'm working 24/7, but I'm actually not."

Her depiction in 1998 of the young Queen Elizabeth struggling with self-denial and a rapacious court of male plotters was her breakthrough role. A relatively humble film with a stellar cast, it led to her first of three Oscar nominations (she won best supporting actress in 2005 for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator). Although again directed by Shekhar Kapur and starring Geoffrey Rush - the nearest thing to a regular Blanchett collaborator over the years - Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a very different beast, not only in its depiction of an ageing Queen but also in its knowing jokes about potatoes and its Spanish Armada CGI battle scenes. Blanchett was reportedly reluctant to reprise her role in the big-budget sequel, but says that she simply needed persuading that she could delve deeper into Elizabeth I. "It's indisputable that she's incredibly complex. If you look at the long legacy of actresses who've played her and will continue to play her, it's a little bit like the female Hamlet."

In the film, her mature Queen wrestles with war and hopeless romance while continuing to insist that she could still bear children - some feat, given that the film is set in 1585, when Elizabeth was 52. Blanchett is 38. What was it like playing an older woman? "I am an older woman," she laughs. Her Elizabeth is intended to look about a decade older, she thinks. So she's no longer of childbearing age? "Well no, but I think she kept marital negotiations alive well beyond the point of possibility. It was part of her diplomatic arsenal that she remained attractive and fecund. Her fertility was always a big question, as was her gender; that's why she's so fascinating." She does not think that the lack of historical realism - at one point she turns warrior-Queen, all shining armour and flowing Celtic hair, to holler a pep talk at cheering troops - matters. "It's a very accessible film. And Shekhar plays loose and fast with history. It's very dreamlike," she says tactfully.

She admits that she "panicked" at having to jump immediately from Elizabeth to Dylan for Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. In a long, surreal film, her performance alongside Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Richard Gere stands out; she has already won the best actress award at the Venice film festival. She plays Jude, a rock star and one of six fictional characters who represent different parts of Bob Dylan's life. Jude directly corresponds to the Dylan who plugged in and toured England in 1966, meeting the suspicion of the media and then the open hostility of audiences via that famous "Judas" heckle at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester.

Haynes says that he did not want a woman playing Dylan to be a "cinematic stunt". At a simple level, though, the physicality of Blanchett's performance - skipping, hunched and skinny, frazzled by acid and amphetamines - is remarkable. "Dylan was quite spiderlike," she says, taking delivery of her breakfast, a plate of tiny pineapple chunks, a couple of strawberries and a blackberry. Blanchett "lost an awful lot of weight" for the role. She now looks glamorously slim (or "Queen of the Curves", as one tabloid had it this week), but earlier this year there was press speculation about how she appeared "painfully thin". "Because I'd made a film," she says sharply. "Who. Cares. There's a lot more going on in the world than me losing weight for a role."

After watching the important Dylan documentaries and studying the press conferences he held during his 1966 tour (the footage supplied by Dylan's manager Jeff Rosen), Blanchett turned the singer into an asexual, creative imp. "He was a creature. You see him jumping around in Don't Look Back [the 1967 documentary] and he's completely androgynous." She was captivated by his defiant, occasionally cruel playfulness, behaving "like a cat with a mouse, with this girl in a French hotel room" and drawing a fake moustache on his own face. She realised, she says, that Haynes wanted her to "inhabit the silhouette" of 1966 Dylan. "That's why he's cast a woman, because it's the most iconic silhouette of his musical career. It was a really ironic gesture and also very clever. If a man played the role, people would have assessed it in a different way, whereas they've been able to get into the strangeness of what Dylan must have been like in that period by the very fact that I'm a woman. I don't think it's anything I've necessarily done."

Jude/Dylan speaks in strung-out, elongated vowels, seemingly random emphases and clipped stops. "You never know how the past will turn ouTTTT," Jude says in the film. "It was all about jumping into a scEEEEne." But Blanchett didn't swallow loads of drugs to become as edgy as the sleep-deprived, paranoid Dylan. "I've got two kids, so that was out of the question. That's your job as an actor. You imagine your way into those things. I have also never murdered anyone, but that's the fun of the job. You enter into dangerous territory, safely." Did you go without sleep? "I'm always without sleep. I've got two kids. I understand sleep deprivation on a profound level."

After a long period in London, she has become that rare thing: an Australian actor who lives in their home country. Born and raised in Melbourne, she returned with her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, and their two young sons. Did she find it difficult returning to a country governed by the conservatism of John Howard's administration? "There's very little reason in politics these days," she says. "That's where Elizabeth is inspiring. She was such an incredible diplomat in an age where diplomacy is sadly lacking." Blanchett has obviously been taking lessons: she is far too tactful to openly criticise the Australian prime minister ahead of next month's election. "Whoever gets in will have to deal with this climate of paranoia. We're so in America's back pocket it's embarrassing. We have to claim our individualism, but also reconnect to the world in a better way. We've really isolated ourselves from Asia. I think that's politically and culturally very foolish. The problem with Australia is that it's uranium- and coal-rich, so whoever gets in needs to be really responsible."

In January, she and Upton take over as artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company for three years - she hopes longer. "You can't really achieve anything in three years," she says. She intends to work less on films ("I've had an amazing few years but I couldn't work at the same pace"), though her theatre deal gives her three months a year to pursue other projects, which should include a role with George Clooney in an animated version of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox. She's been reading Dahl to her eldest son.

Blanchett may have inhabited a bewildering range of characters in a short space of time, but both Elizabeth and Dylan/Jude share a quality that she has highlighted in a number of roles - from the teacher in Notes on a Scandal whose beauty elevates her into a trophy for teachers and pupils alike, to Galadriel the elf queen in Lord of the Rings. All are idolised and put on a pedestal, lonely and somewhat remote, powerful yet vulnerable. Blanchett agrees that both Elizabeth and Dylan were isolated and that both, in different ways, stretched "the boundaries of possibility".

"It's interesting that Elizabeth had absolute power, being ordained by God, whereas Dylan was given absolute power, which I think happens in the music industry. They give people in the public eye absolute power and then are furious at them at the same time for having it. Dylan is constantly saying, 'I didn't ask for this'."

Without being overt about it, Blanchett seems to identify with Dylan's battles with an intrusive press. Does she envy the way he confronted his hopelessly square media interlocutors with elliptical taunts in the 60s? "He was incredibly brave. I'm not talking about public policy, I'm talking about a creative life. I really admire Dylan saying, 'I don't owe you the truth, and anyway the truth isn't a static thing, and how do I know what motivates me?' They asked him what it was like to feel famous and how that influenced and affected him, and he said, 'Well, I've never had to struggle for that, so I don't think about it. The songs are what I do. I think about what I do' - not this other stuff that had just arrived in his life.

"There's this sense that of course you want to be famous. When you're a performer, of course you want an audience, but it's very, very different from courting fame."

· Elizabeth: The Golden Age is released on November 2, and I'm Not There on December 21

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

[manho]

Is that my bassline I can hear?

Stand By Me is in the charts again. In fact, Ben E King's hit hasn't stopped influencing the pop charts for the past 100 years, says Marcus Gray
Marcus Gray
Friday October 26, 2007
Guardian

What's been the smash of the autumn? Ben E King's 1961 hit Stand By Me, of course. It's distinctive bass-line has been the hook of Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls, which has been loitering around the charts for the best part of two months. But Kingston's appropriation of Stand By Me is in the spirit of the song - the tale of which is one of borrowing and stealing dating back 100 years.

King's might be the best-known version of Stand By Me, but the Christian hymn of that name was written in 1905 by Pastor Charles Tindley, as a plea to the Lord for support and guidance in times of doubt and suffering. It was directly inspired by verse 4 of the far, far older Psalm 23: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me."

Stand By Me became an enduringly popular gospel song, recorded by Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1941 and the Staple Singers in 1955. In the late 1950s, Sam Cooke amped up the drama in the verses by throwing in extra biblical references - to Samson and Daniel - and, with the group's manager JW Alexander, claimed co-authorship of the resulting Stand By Me, Father. "I took Stand By Me from an old gospel song that was recorded by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers called Lord I'm Standing By, or something," Ben E King told Radio 2's Sold On Song. When his band the Drifters turned down his suggestion to record a secularised version, he took it to songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had previously collaborated with him on the Drifters' hit There Goes My Baby. The composing team again split the credits with King, and gave Stand By Me a pop sheen, with Stoller devising the instantly recognisable bassline.

"Stand By Me was a love song that went way beyond being a love song," said King on BBC2's Soul Deep in 2005. "It has a meaning for people that I never thought it would." That was partly because the inspiration of Psalm 23 is still evident. Something else the song retains from its gospel incarnation is a political subtext. There's an acknowledgment that, even by the early 1960s, the long walk from slavery to freedom was by no means over. That Stand By Me was one of the most powerful songs of its time is attested by the fact it was covered by Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding - and Sam Cooke. Cassius Clay also recorded it in 1963 and released it as a single the following year, just before changing his name to Muhammad Ali. The song was a tough act for King to follow, and in 1962 he gave in to the temptation to play the familiar ticket with I'm Standing By, which peaked at number 111 in the US.

Pop music was still considered ephemeral in those days. Even as he revived Stand By Me and took it to No 20 in the US and No 30 in the UK in 1975, John Lennon helped nail it as pure nostalgia by including it on his contractual obligation covers album, Rock'n'Roll. In 1986, the song took a far more significant role in a Rob Reiner movie. Set in 1959, the film records a journey undertaken by four 12-year-old boys to see the dead body of another youth. Tested along the way, they have to pull together to get by. Ben E King's song not only plays over the closing credits, but also lends the film its title: Stand By Me.

That wasn't the only reason the single was re-released that year. The song was also chosen as the soundtrack for the latest instalment in the hugely successful series of Levi's advertisements that had already dramatically boosted sales of the jeans and made massive second-time-around hits of Sam Cooke's (What a) Wonderful World and Jackie Wilson's Reet Petite. The combination of the film and the ad campaign took Stand By Me to No 9 in the US and No 1 in the UK.

Having transcended nostalgia to reclaim the zeitgeist, the song found itself back in demand, going on to be covered by such political and roots-conscious artists as U2, the Fugees and Green Day. In 1999, BMI named it as the fourth most-performed song of the 20th century, with approximately 7m performances. King's version even turned up on the soundtrack of some late-1990s Pokemon video games.

Stand By Me hasn't just echoed through the years in cover version, though. It's been an unspoken part of the DNA of other ostensibly completely separate songs. In 1968, its sentiment had at least a subliminal influence on Tammy Wynette's Stand By Your Man, not least when the song evokes "cold and lonely" nights. Whereas the support King advocates is anything from two-way to universal though, Wynette's is decidedly one-way. No matter how much your man lets you down or betrays you, forgive him, stick by him, comfort him and "keep giving all the love you can", because, "after all, he's just a man".

Tammy Wynette became a country superstar on the back of Stand By Your Man. In the wider world, though, response was mixed. The values expressed in Wynette's song might have been comforting to those who had been brought up in a world where women supported, suffered and sacrificed, but in 1968 many people found them either hilariously or embarrassingly reactionary.

But it took 11 years for that thread to be reflected in song. In 1979, the Slits released their highly idiosyncratic avant-punk dub single Typical Girls. The titular girls worry about clothes, spots, fat and smells, and conform to one of two stereotypes: either they're femme fatales or they're downtrodden drudges who "stand by their men", a reference to the Tammy Wynette song.

Typical Girls stalled at No 60 in the UK, but one man paying attention was Mick Jones of the Clash. His volatile relationship with Slits guitarist Viv Albertine had recently come to an end, leaving him distraught. His band's third album, London Calling, was nearly complete, but he was inspired to write a last-minute addition. It opens with the line, "You say you stand by your man ..." - a misreading of Typical Girls, wilful or otherwise - and its oft-repeated chorus is, "You didn't stand by me, no, not at all." Lyrically, then, it follows a chain of reference back to both Wynette and King, and offers a negative echo of both: the "walls come tumbling down", and the jilted protagonist can't be happy or keep "the wolves at bay" without the woman's love and support.

In order to sidestep the obvious, the song was named Train in Vain after the insistent, percussive rhythm driving the song. In spring 1980, the band's US label Epic chose it to be the first single from London Calling, and stepped right back into the obvious when they released it as Train in Vain (Stand By Me). Decidedly atypical, it reached No 27 in the chart and helped make the Clash more palatable for an American audience. Former Eurythmics member Annie Lennox was among those who covered the song for her 1995 album Medusa, named after the female gorgon whose face, when glimpsed, could turn a man to stone.

When Nirvana producer Butch Vig and friends started the new musical project they eventually named Garbage, one of their earliest collaborations was jammed over the sampled drum rhythm of Train in Vain. Honourably, they acknowledged as much by crediting it to Garbage/Strummer/Jones. Recruited to front the band, feisty Scottish punk Shirley Manson wrote the lyric and took the song right back into Typical Girls territory. Addressed to a woman with no values and no beliefs, Stupid Girl offers the sarcastic advice: "Pretend you're bored/ Pretend you're anything/ Just to be adored." Released in 1996, it became the band's biggest hit.

By now, we've stepped far away from Stand By Me's starting point, musically or lyrically. But in 2006, Sean Kingston heard Ben E King's song on the radio while he was recording. "It just had a feelin' to it like it was a hit," he told Film&Music's Angus Batey earlier this year. Too young at 17 to know it already had been a hit several times, he asked producer JR Rotem to build a backing track based on the chord progression, percussion and opening bass riff, and Kingston wrote the lyrics to Beautiful Girls in a matter of minutes.

His instincts about both the borrowed tune and the universality of the sentiment expressed were proved right when the song topped the US chart just seven weeks after being recorded, and then took pole position in the UK.

With what would have been remarkable speed (if she didn't happen to be another JR Rotem protege), 16-year-old JoJo Levesque's opportunist answer song Beautiful Girls Reply was leaked to the internet for download. It appropriates most of Kingston's lyric, but twists it around so the girl addressed in his song is exulting in the misery she has every intention of causing him. Not content with refusing to stand by her man, JoJo is apparently determined to stand on his neck while he drowns.

Walking through the valley of the shadow of death is in danger of losing its appeal. <

· Marcus Gray is author of The Clash: Return of the Last Gang in Town

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

[dino]

After watching the important Dylan documentaries and studying the press conferences he held during his 1966 tour (the footage supplied by Dylan's manager Jeff Rosen), Blanchett turned the singer into an asexual, creative imp. "He was a creature. You see him jumping around in Don't Look Back [the 1967 documentary] and he's completely androgynous." She was captivated by his defiant, occasionally cruel playfulness, behaving "like a cat with a mouse, with this girl in a French hotel room" and drawing a fake moustache on his own face. She realised, she says, that Haynes wanted her to "inhabit the silhouette" of 1966 Dylan. "That's why he's cast a woman, because it's the most iconic silhouette of his musical career. It was a really ironic gesture and also very clever. If a man played the role, people would have assessed it in a different way, whereas they've been able to get into the strangeness of what Dylan must have been like in that period by the very fact that I'm a woman. I don't think it's anything I've necessarily done."

most of the people, including my wife, didnt even understand she was a woman; after it was over, my wife asked: "that actor seems like a woman" - "SHE IS A WOMAN!" - another todd haynes failure

todd haynes also said that he wanted a woman to do the 66 dylan, to show the gay side of that period dylan

dylan half gay in 1966? - yes, another todd haynes failure

[cripes]

Oh the pain....

So I downloaded that Harrison '74 partial soundboard. Now we can hear its awfulness in decent quality. I'm thinking that George was trying to do a boby ala his tour earlier that year. Like he's trying to be ironic or something. Check it out:

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

But that's a walk in the park compared to what he does to In My Life. I nominate this as the very worst thing ever done by an ex-Beatle.

That's what happens when you mix Krishna and coke.