"I remember hearing the song 'Please Please Me' on the car radio, from the Beatles' debut album, and thinking, 'Wow — that’s different. That’s different from the usual crap we hear on the radio.' And it really was. It was very different to all the pretty boy Fabian or Frankie Avalon-and-a-bunch-of-back-up-musicians thing. Hearing the Beatles for the first time, I remember thinking, 'These guys are tight, and exciting!'
"They got a sound that was unique in a way, because Lennon and McCartney used to just double up the melody sometimes — they would sing together and it wouldn’t sound like either one of ‘em, it would sound like the most perfect white voice [laughs] there was in music. It was just a different sound on the radio when they came on — completely different thing. It was just, like, in your face.
"Production came fairly naturally to me, the whole idea of working in different genres. I felt that as a musician you had to have that capacity. The Beatles were, whether self-consciously or not, one of the most eclectic musical acts ever, and they were evolutionary in that, at a certain point, all of their records started to sound different from each other. I grew up listening to them, so I thought that's what the best musicians were supposed to do: be like musical sharks, constantly moving and incorporating new influences.
"The reason [my] band was called Utopia was because I thought that you could actually accomplish things socially through music. That was another thing that I got from the Beatles. Every time the Beatles came out with a new record, the world was awaiting it. The youth of the world were saying, 'What do we do now? Tell us what to do now. Should we take acid? All right, we’ll take acid. Sleep in a bed for peace? Yeah, let’s do that.' I miss the time when music had the power to polarize, for better or worse, the entire planet.
"Everything about the whole Beatles concept was appealing, you know. Because it was a shortcut to ecstasy . . . I don’t think any other artists I desired as much to have lived their musical life."
--#ToddRundgren
#Utopia #Runt #Genius #Songwriting #HallOfFame #TheBeatles #Influence #Innovation #GOAT
Sources: Rock Cellar Magazine, 2012; Interview with Chris Carter, 2012; Mojo Magazine, 2008; Interview with Jann Uhelzski, 2014
Charlamagne tha God: “All you do when you bring the Obamas up is remind people what is currently missing from the White House. The Obamas set a standard for decency and class and poise and intelligence. That no longer exists now. Now that bar is in hell. Satan and his demons use that bar to limbo”
🚨 MIND-BLOWING HYPOCRISY JUST EXPOSED.
Trump is out here popping champagne over a brand new Iran “deal”…
…centered on Iran’s sacred promise that they will NEVER obtain a nuclear weapon.
Sound familiar?
Because ABC’s Jonathan Karl just dropped the bomb: That exact same promise was in the very first paragraph of Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal.
Let that sink in.
Obama makes the deal → Trump rips it up, slaps on “maximum pressure,” starts a war, costs lives and billions…
…only to crawl back and celebrate the exact same core commitment like it’s some historic genius move.
Same promise. Different body count.
History is laughing. The cycle is complete.
What a time to be alive.
🔥 Quote. Repost. Ratio.
"I first saw the Beatles in Manchester of all places. They were scheduled to play that night. They came through the front door about three in the afternoon to set up their equipment, and every girl in there stopped dead in their tracks. It was like four Marlon Brandos had walked in. They had an innate, primordial swagger. Aside from the raw energy they put out, they looked fantastic. A total coolness emanated off them, like a Young Riders kind of vibe. You know, they’d swing the door open and they’d all be standing there while the dust settled around them. They hadn’t even played a note, and the girls would swoon and faint. Fuckin’ fantastic . . .
"In general, that band was flat-out amazing, and everybody knew it. They played a molten, scruffy brand of rock ‘n’ roll. And they had attitude in spades. They’d swear and smoke onstage, tell off the audience, all of which just added to their mystique. The Hollies didn’t have that kind of power.
"They were very protected by a filtering system between the four of them. They were always together, even if there was a room full of people and they were all separated. I got to see it all unfolding before my eyes. And I was aware that it was historical. It was almost spiritual. When you saw the Beatles, and saw the effect they had on people, you knew something special was happening.
"I don’t think there’ll ever be another Beatles. I think that the universe put those four kids in the right place at the right time, and gave them the right talent, to be able to move the hearts and minds and spirits of billions of people. The Beatles were the best band in the world, there’s absolutely no question about it."
--#GrahamNash
#Hollies #CrosbyStillsNash #CSN @TheGrahamNash #Songwriter #OBE #HallOfFame #TheBeatles #Influence #Charisma #GOAT
Sources: "Wild Tales," Nash; Interview with James Rosen on "The Foxhole," 2015
Happy Anniversary to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . . .
#MikePortnoy: "Sgt. Pepper is not only the landmark and groundbreaking album for the Beatles, it’s the landmark and groundbreaking album for rock and roll. This is the album that changed everything — no album had ever sounded anything like this. You have 'Within You Without You' which is like Indian music, and then you have 'When I’m 64' which is almost like old '40s music, and then 'Sgt Pepper (Reprise)' which is hard rock.
"And then beyond the music, the Beatles look completely different, with long hair and mustaches for the first time, they come out with this album cover that nobody had ever seen anything like, it had the lyrics on the back which nobody had ever done. On every level it just took the idea of an album to another level.
"I mean, that was the thing: it felt like an album, that you listened to from beginning to end . . . up until then albums were just collections of songs, but this was the first time that it felt like you were watching a movie from start to finish.
"To me, it’s not only my number one Beatles album, it’s my number one album of all time. It is literally, I think, the greatest album ever made."
#DreamTheater #SonsOfApollo #WineryDogs #HeavyMetal #HardRock #ProgRock @mikeportnoy #OnThisDay #SgtPepper #TheBeatles #GOAT
Source: 2017 Interview with #EddieTrunk, The Volume Channel, SiriusXM
"When I think about the rock bands that really moved me, in entirety, I would have to go with the Beatles above any other band.
"In high school, I was making very thrashy, punky, hardcore music, but in college, I started becoming more sophisticated in my tastes, and I listened to a lot of the Beatles.
"The White Album really went above and beyond experimentation for a band of their size and scale. They were so enormous, ubiquitous — like, everyone knew the Beatles — and then they do this album where they’re like, ‘F*** the rules. We don’t have to do anything that defined us in the past.’ They made ‘Revolution 9,’ which is just stream of consciousness, almost like an acid trip? And I love that they went and did that, in a period of time when they were at their peak. They were like gods, you know? [It's influential for me] that they made that statement — or I wouldn’t call it a statement, so much as it was a big middle finger to conformity and the rule book . . .
"I wouldn’t exist without the Beatles, as a musician. They inspired me to become a producer, songwriter, DJ, all that stuff.
"I miss listening to artists that deliver an entire album of just greatness. Not many people know that my favorite artist of all time is the Beatles. You think, oh a DJ, it must be something else. But the Beatles are the greatest in existence."
--#SteveAoki
Sources: Yahoo Entertainment, "The 7 Albums That Changed My Life," 2017; SiriusXM, "My Fab Four," 2024
#DJ #Producer @steveaoki #GuinnessWorldRecords #BillboardAwards #ElectronicDanceMusicAwards #TheBeatles #Influence #Innovation #GOAT
Freedom this holiday weekend has zero to do with president Liar. America and her constitution need protecting and honored, in the most sincere sense of the word.
"Overnight, it changed. Graeme Edge, our drummer in The Moody Blues, he was in a band called Gerry Levene and The Avengers, they were like one of the top bands in Birmingham. And they went up to The Cavern to play. And literally within a month they came back and they’d changed their whole set and they’d learned all these new songs. Because the vibe was different, what the Beatles were doing. It was the group. It had to be the group. And I think that’s what happened in England, everybody realized that the days of the center man at the front and then everybody else — no, you had to have a band, you had to have a group.
"Small Faces. The Kinks. The Who. It just went on and on and on. I think it made everyone look at it and say hey, come on, we’ve got to change. We gotta stop being this AM music, Top 40 band, you know, bubble gum and all that — which is great, you know, I’m not knocking it — but if you want to be creative you’ve got to do something different . . .
"[And] the Beatles were different — totally different. I think it really sort of ignited the bands and artists in Birmingham to go looking for themselves at different ways of playing music. I think that’s why in Birmingham we had such a wide variety of music. You know, ELO; Black Sabbath; Duran Duran; Moody Blues of course; Spencer Davis; Stevie Winwood. It was a huge, different way of looking at music. And I think the Beatles ignited that."
--#JohnLodge
#MoodyBlues #Moodies #RhythmAndBlues #ProgRock #Songwriters #HallOfFame #TheBeatles #Impact #Influence
Sources: "Fab Fourum," SiriusXM, 2019; Ken Dashow's Beatles Revolution podcast, 2017
"I didn't grow up on the Beatles. My tastes expanded a bit when I was in college, but the Beatles were always this huge group that I just thought couldn't be all that interesting if they were so popular. However, as I got more into music, and even started making music, I started to hear more and more about how the Beatles had been a huge influence on much of the music I was discovering. I had some research to do . . .
"I bought the albums, read books and watched any documentaries I could find. What an unreal story.
"The thing that really spoke to me was that at the peak of their career — with anything and everything a band at that time could have possibly wanted — they made a change: they stopped playing live. The decision allowed them to make music that wouldn't have to be replicated at a concert. They could experiment in the studio in ways no one making popular music had ever really done. They pioneered countless recording techniques that are now standards today . . . even sampling. All of these things had influenced much of the music I loved, and now it made me really look at creating music as an art form.
"In a five-year span the Beatles released Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles (the White Album), Abbey Road, and Let It Be — arguably the greatest span of consecutive albums put together by anyone. Here was a band who had achieved the ultimate fame and fortune and instead of basking in more adoration, they veered away from millions of screaming girls to do something more challenging and meaningful to them. Of course, they didn't really lose much of the fame and fortune after all, but that's not the point.
"The point was that sometimes it's not what you have, but what you choose to do with what you have that can change the world, and inspire other people to do the same."
--#DangerMouse
#GnarlsBarkley #BrokenBells #TheGreyAlbum #BrianBurton #ProducerOfTheYear #Grammys #GoldenGlobes #HipHop #AltRock #TheBeatles #Innovation #Influence #GOAT
Are NBA fans blind? 😭 Cavs fans should be mad as hell that this game even went to OT.
1. Ausar reaches over the shoulder for the swipe down strip.
2. Ausar clearly pushes off Allen going for the loose ball.
3. Ausar then trips over his own foot.
"[My housemate] Clem walked in one afternoon with that first Beatles album, Meet the Beatles!. He put it on, and I just didn't know what to think. It absolutely floored me — 'Those are folk music changes, but it's got a rock and roll backbeat. You can't do that, but they did! Holy yikes!'
"I ate it for breakfast. Most new musical forms are created that way; the synthesis takes place by two disparate streams of stuff, you know, hitherto unrelated, being mushed together. They did synthesize a new music. ‘Cause rock 'n' roll didn’t have those kinds of chord changes and melody-to-chord relationships prior to the Beatles. It just didn’t.
"Up to that point, rock 'n' roll had been pretty much four chords — almost entirely, as a matter of fact. That was the standard thing that came out of the Brill Building. Well, here were these guys from England, they were playing much more complex chord changes — much better musically, but with that backbeat. And there was room to do harmonies. Good ones, interesting ones. That was a mixing of two streams that created a new thing.
"I was amazed by the sheer musicality of it, and also the Beatles' ability to project what a confident, joyful and beautiful band they were. I'd never seen anything like them before — or since.
"You know, it's always about the music. Those guys could really play and sing. They had the goods. And they really had the songs. Up till then, I was a devotee of Pete Seeger's, bless his soul. I wanted to be a folkie. But seeing the Beatles made something else click. It changed my life. They changed my life. Let's be very specific about that."
--#DavidCrosby
#TheByrds #CSN #CSNY #Songwriters #FolkRock #HallOfFame #TheBeatles #Influence #GOAT
"'Strawberry Fields Forever' was a song that was the ideal imagery for this Utopian place where we could all escape to and get out of the mess that the world was in. It was like a movie on a record. A fantasy that we could actually visit through music . . .
"You know, I’ll never forget hearing the Beatles for the first time, won't forget it as long as I live. I was alone, actually, at home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Third Street and Avenue B — East Village, they called it. I was in the living room and my radio was on the refrigerator in the kitchen. I heard this music coming into the room and I went 'Uh-oh. Everything’s changed now.' That was my basic statement to myself: Everything’s changed now. Something has happened! It was 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.'
"And I realized, having played music all through the fifties, that this was not just the new teenage music, but it had actually advanced from what we were doing in the fifties, to a real clarity of sorts.
"I realized right then that the Beatles had started something different."
--#RichieHavens
#Folk #Soul #Woodstock #Freedom #Richie #TheBeatles #Relevance #Influence
“From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce delivered these haunting words on October 5, 1877, in Montana’s Bear Paw Mountains — after a 1,170-mile fighting retreat with his people, just 40 miles from the safety of Canada.
Exhausted, freezing, starving, and surrounded, he surrendered with quiet dignity:
“I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead.
It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death.
I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.
Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
One of the most moving statements in American history — a leader’s grief, resilience, and final resignation. The Nez Perce War and Joseph’s eloquence deserve to be remembered.
History, loss, & a call for understanding
#ChiefJoseph