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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Head to hivehome.com to find out more. Subject to survey and suitability. Hive app compatible with selected technology. Paid for surplus requires SEG tariff. Hello everyone and welcome back to a Rest Is History Beatles themed special and this is part two. It's the blue album to the red album of part one. We left you on an absolute cliffhanger
John Lennon has made unwise comments about Jesus and provoked outrage in the Bible Belt in the United States. The problem for him is that the Beatles are due to go on a tour to the United States. Conan O'Brien, who has replaced Dominic on this show because Dominic refuses to talk about the Beatles. What we didn't perhaps go into in great detail in the first episode was the actual music.
Before the Beatles go on the tour that will bring them to America and all the Jesus kerfuffle, they have recorded an album that many now see as their greatest album, Revolver. Are you a particular fan of Revolver? Huge fan of Revolver. Revolver is very interesting because the Beatles are now recording music that would be very difficult to perform live.
And live performance is a huge part of the Beatles engine. Eleanor Rigby. Tomorrow Never Knows. Tomorrow Never Knows. Which is kind of playing things backwards.
Turn up your mind, relax and float downstream. This is not dying
These are all very difficult, if not impossible. Now it could be done with modern technology, but they've become real recording geniuses and artists and it's taking them in this other direction. So they finished Revolver and enough time has gone by because I think people used to say, well, Sergeant Pepper or Abbey Road is their greatest and those are obviously fantastic.
But Revolver, I think if you asked one of the Beatles, they might have the greatest fondness for Revolver. And there's a kind of tension between now what they can do in a studio but not reproduce on a stage. And the fact that they are starting to get a bit fed up with touring. Because it's not only that they can't reproduce the musical effects that they've got on Revolver on stage.
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Chapter 2: How did John Lennon's comments about Jesus impact the Beatles' tour in America?
And it's kept off the top spot by Engelbert Humperdinck. So they're not having it all their way, but it is a transcendent achievement, isn't it? And it takes them back to Liverpool. So both Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields are locations in Liverpool. Yeah. I think Strawberry Fields Forever might be my favorite Beatles song. Penny Lane for me with the trumpet, but they're both so incredible.
They also show you both sides of this incredible songwriting team and their perfection.
Yeah. It's hard to be someone when it all works out It doesn't matter much to me Let me take you down, cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields Nothing is real And nothing to get hung about And so this is how good the Beatles have become.
You take these two songs and you don't even put them on the Watershed album, Sergeant Pepper. You take them off and issue them as a single. That would be unheard of today. I mean, the only track I think that transcends it is A Day in the Life, which is the last...
song on sergeant pepper and perfectly fuses the best of john and paul yeah um and is designed to be a kind of overwhelming symphonic experience they here we are in abbey road they invited you know
vast orchestra to come in and play all kinds of mad tunes and you know it crashes out and you're left with this incredible silence which continues on the album and it's all very groovy and it's all very counter-cultural and you do get the sense with sergeant pepper that the beatles are starting to as the queen put it go a bit odd so it's not just that the music is more radical and edgy and kind of
exploring new ways of of developing but they're all you know the facial hair is starting to develop and the hair is getting even longer yes i know that you and dominic have uh beard obsessions and the beards start to show up the mustaches um and soon beards but it's a concept album It really isn't. Paul had this idea that it would be a whole album done by a fictional band called Sgt.
Pepper's, but they stick with that idea for maybe one or two songs. And then they give up. And then they give up, but it doesn't matter. It's really about that amazing cover.
It's called the first concept album. It doesn't go anywhere. Mr. Kite, all my contributions have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt.
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Chapter 3: What makes the Beatles' album 'Revolver' significant in their musical evolution?
Pepper and his band. But it works because we said it worked and that's how it appeared.
They're dealing now with their work as real art. To own that album is to own a piece of art. And it's seen as exemplifying the Summer of Love and this radical developments that are taking place in San Francisco, particularly Haight-Ashbury, as well as in kind of Carnaby Street and swinging London. And there is a track on Sgt.
Pepper called Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which people point out, well, the initials of that song, LSD. And this is the time when the Beatles, even Paul, who'd been very reluctant to take it, starts taking LSD. I mean, they always deny that it was, but it's kind of hovering in the atmosphere. And that sense of drugs is opening the mind. You know, you can...
tune in and discover new things about yourself. That is also part of the excitement for people who are listening to Sergeant Pepper of what is going on, isn't it? The sense that new opportunities are opening up. There's this new idea that drugs can provide all these positive benefits. And this is a number of years before we start losing people to drugs. And John tends to overdo things.
So he goes- He's all in. He's all in on LSD to the point where he's positively green from it.
I was aware of them smoking pot, and I wasn't aware that they did anything really serious. In fact, I was so innocent that I actually took John up into the roof when he was having an LSD trip and not knowing what it was.
Paul takes LSD because John is out, you know, off his face and he wants to kind of, you know, accompany John in his, you know, this terrible kind of experience. Which I was finding kind of very touching, moving illustration of that. Yeah, he felt the need to, I've got to do this too so that I can know what he knows, but he never goes as far as John. But this opens up a lot in their music.
And of course, John is so influenced already by Alice in Wonderland imagery. So that's... That's the other thing, isn't it? That even as they are kind of pushing at the limits in a kind of Timothy Leary kind of way, they are still drawing on the traditions of their childhood. So we meant Alice in Wonderland, but even Sergeant Pepper.
I mean, they're kind of dressing up in Edwardian style uniforms and there's the fairground noises in The Benefit of Mr. Kite, which was a kind of fairground poster. There's a kind of Edwardian vibe there, even as the hippies are crowding in. I have a theory that... And many artists get lost in the 60s because you start to think, if I think of it and I do it, it must be good.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did the Beatles face during their world tour in the Philippines?
He would say, look, it was shot in color. It was aired by the BBC on Boxing Day and in black and white on little screens. That's not the way it was meant to be seen. And it holds up if you really look at it. And there are a bunch of good things in it, but at the time it's seen as a disaster. It gets panned by the critics. People think the Beatles have lost their minds.
It's another big bump in the road for them. But I shouldn't say that. In their way, terminal. Not at all. I think the I Am a Warris sequence, one of John's great songs, kind of ends up with King Lear muttering in the background. They're all goo-goo-goo-jooing in the background. And it's, I think, one of their great moments. I love the video they made in Magical Mystery Tour for I Am The Walrus.
They seem to be at some kind of military complex. And it looks like they spent all of seven minutes setting up the scene with a piano and impromptu goofy masks. And bald cap wigs that are just applied with no glue. But it's fun and it's them having fun and goofing around, which is infectious.
So the goofing around has, you know, that's been fundamental to the Beatles right from the very beginning, you know, right back to the days of the quarry man or whatever. What is slightly newer is the idea of very earnestly going off and getting enlightenment in the Himalayas, which is what then happens early in 1968, isn't it?
And the Maharishi reappears because he's got a big place out in Rishikesh. And he says, come on out and sit at my feet. Learn wisdom. When the Maharishi died several years ago, someone wrote a really thoughtful piece which said, he's an important part of the Beatles story because after Brian's death, they've all had it. They're fraying. Their lives are chaotic.
And they do a very unusual thing for the biggest stars on earth. They go to a retreat. They don't bring electric guitars. They bring these acoustic guitars, I think these Martin guitars, and they sit around and there's quiet and peace and there's nothing to do except chant. And they start writing songs. And essentially most of the White Album was written during that period.
Like anything else, they take a moment and they make it work to their advantage. So even though they didn't find enlightenment and spirituality, they wrote a ton of songs they might not have written otherwise. Well, they kind of respond in different ways, don't they? So Ringo has gone out with baked beans. He has a suitcase filled with Heinz baked beans. Yeah, because of his stomach.
He's worried about his stomach. Paul is... I mean, he's kind of into it and kind of not really. John has a massive bust up. I feel, you know, he writes an excoriation of the Maharishi, which he titles Sexy Sadie. He's worried about, you know, whether the Maharishi will be too cross with him or whatever. For George, Indian spirituality opens up entire...
you know, portals through which he goes and will never come back. I mean, it's a massive, massive experience for him, a life-changing experience. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people don't know Sexy Sadie, the original title was Maharishi. They made it a song. It's almost as if lawyers showed up and said, you have to change that. You'll get yours yet.
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