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The Beatles Anthology

In February of 1963, The Beatles' song "Please Please Me" hit number one on the UK charts.  It was their second hit single after "Love Me Do" and also when Beatlemania truly began.  That was fifty years ago, and their popularity is still going strong to this day.

The Beatles have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, thanks to my dad being a huge Beatles fan.  He still has his copy of Yesterday and Today and I remember him playing it a lot when I was young.  I was also very fascinated by the cover the first time I saw it.  The story is pretty notorious by now - the Beatles did a photo shoot of themselves in butcher jackets with meat and baby doll parts surrounding them. The photo was deemed too offensive, and the album was pulled off the shelves to be repackaged.  But they didn't print out whole new sleeves; that would be too expensive.  They simply covered up the offensive cover with a new one, one that would ironically be later called one of the early clues for the "Paul is Dead" controversy, thanks to Paul sitting in that case. Because it's like a coffin!  Yeah, right.

My dad got one of the re-covered versions, but when he heard the original was worth a lot of money he thought he'd be slick and steam the re-print cover off it.  The end result is that you can now see the butcher cover, but it's not very pretty.   I mean that it's wrinkled and worn even beyond the actual ugliness of the cover itself.

So I grew up singing Beatles songs and being what I guess you could call a casual fan.  I was apparently dedicated enough that in third grade, when we were asked to draw our favorite band in music class, I chose them.  I did make a mistake, I drew five members instead of four, but my heart was in the right place.  It was also a pretty big sign in my youth that I was destined to not be like the other kids - most of the other girls in my class were drawing New Kids on the Block, and one of them chose to make fun of me for my choice.  Which is I guess why while loving the Beatles wouldn't normally be regarded as a geeky interest, I still feel like it's the perfect fit for me to talk about on this blog.  Well, that and the level of devotion I gained the moment I saw The Beatles Anthology on television.

I created the video below to tell you all about it.

There are so many more Beatles related topics I could cover, from their music and their movies to the numerous parodies and tributes that have been created since.  But I'm just going to have to save those for another time.
Posted by therealphoenixanew at 10:00 AM Labels: Beatles, book review, music, music review, tv reviews, video RSS Feed: