The Beatles - Pt. 1, Vol. 1 - All These Years - Extended Special Edition - Tune In
Note: The graph above shows only your linear progress through the book. In this book, you also browsed around for an additional 5 minutes.
214 tracks recorded in seven crowded years in a kaleidoscope of styles.
George Harrison’s cautionary words are a constant companion – ‘In their bid to tell what they know, sometimes people tell more than what they know’
‘possessions don’t bring happiness but they make misery a lot easier’
These were their comings and goings:
Take a Dublin accent, thicken it up, add adenoids, and a dash of Welsh, and you have Scouse.
Paul McCartney’s father, James McCartney, known to all as Jim, was the fifth born but only the third to live beyond seventeen months. It was simply not expected that every child would survive.
After shows he would scan the stalls and dress circle for any discarded programmes and take them back to Solva Street where Gin or Mill would iron them; he’d sell them next performance and pocket the penny proceeds.
Andrew Doran
An entrepreneur!
This was ragtime, dance music that originated in the red-light districts of New Orleans and St Louis. It had actually been around a while – one of the first Edison cylinders, precursor of the gramophone record, was a rag entitled (without any sensation in its day) All Coons Look Alike To Me, which sold a million copies as sheet music.
Andrew Doran
Crikey.
Jim McCartney would be modestly performing a little piece of music he’d made up, the first ever McCartney composition, an instrumental piano shuffle for the dance band which he called Eloise.
Andrew Doran
From books I’ve previously read I have seen this referred to as ‘Walking In The Park With Eloise’.
Danielle Zahn
Hey
a major part of the family diet would have been scouse, a thick stew made from onions, carrots, potatoes and cheap cuts of lamb.
Well, it wasn’t so much that he was quiet as that my mum was so rambunctious. She was bright and funny and witty, vital, alive. I always imagine her like a firework on Bonfire Night, exploding, the fun, the sparkles that go across the sky. And I imagine my father as a lighthouse, standing on the rocks, strong and firm, saving you from the roughness of the sea.
Andrew Doran
What a beautiful description. A great parenting combination!
the physical resemblance of French to his grandson George Harrison about sixty years later is quite fantastic.
Andrew Doran
It is! See http://thateventuality.tumblr.com/image/51855111908
Mr Hannay was involved in a moment of fame in 1927, gaining a mention in The Times when he became the first Liverpool businessman to make a deal over the transatlantic telephone. Hannay called Albany, Georgia, and bought eight hundred bales of cotton from the Georgia Cotton Company, and he informed Times readers that transactions conducted by phone prevented the need for half a dozen cables (telegrams) and that this saving of time was most important to business.
Andrew Doran
We’ve come a long way.
Liverpool people learn to read between the lines before they learn to read,
most extraordinary of all is the Trivial Pursuit board-game question ‘Which British city did Adolf Hitler study art in?’ to which the answer is ‘Liverpool’ – thereby suggesting that Hitler was enrolled for a brief spell at Liverpool College of Art. The college admission register confirms no such thing.
Andrew Doran
The research in this book is extraordinary!
Contrary to most published accounts, however, Julia Lennon didn’t give birth to her baby in an air raid.
Four Tune Tellers,
Andrew Doran
Great band name.
‘I couldn’t possibly read that rubbish,’ she says. ‘If I read a book I want to be wiser afterwards.’
Brian tried to shut it out, but who knows what was shaking his mind when, here at Wrekin, he inked this dramatic howl of pain in his 1949 pocket diary: Help me. I am lost. Help me. I am lost. Help me [if] I am to stop. Give me peace, rest. That world, it’s too big for me. O lord God, I’ve asked these questions before. Where is the answer? Why am I here? Help me. What am I to do? O Lord God tell me where is my faith? Give guidance. This is a hell. A hell of madness.
Andrew Doran
Poor boy.
‘I’m going to love you more and more / The kids are at school till four’
For most British children, school uniform was holiday-wear too, and photos show John in his Dovedale Road blazer, shirt, tie, jumper, short trousers, socks and sandals, but with the bulging pockets of a boy adventurer.
Andrew Doran
I did not know this! Was this to be smart or because other clothes were too expensive? The latter sounds like a false economy.
One game they played was in the darkened narrow jigger leading to the back entrance of the house. They would flatten their backs, push their legs on the opposite wall, slowly inch up towards the roof, wait for visitors and then drop on them, screaming.
Andrew Doran
Brilliant.
The scene would be a pub – perhaps the Empress, yards from the house at the end of Admiral Grove.45 Elsie, Harry, relations, friends and workmates would drink and sing through the evening until closing time, and then, well bevvied, tumble into Elsie and Richy’s tiny terraced house where the party would carry on – more singing, more drinking, more swearing, Johnny and Annie Starkey on banjo and mandolin, the steam rising ever higher into the night.
Andrew Doran
This is missing from (my) modern life!
Many a Liverpool party included a good punch-up; without one, it just wasn’t memorable.
Andrew Doran
Reminds me of one of Steinbeck’s novels where he celebrates a fight as a sign of a good party. Raising hell.
And they all listened to the half-hour comedies, like Life With The Lyons,
Andrew Doran
Similarly named to one of John’s later albums.
This is so sad. Must be many stories like this with so many children born and tragically lost.