The other night I watched ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
luminosity's majestic Scooby Road again, aka the portrait of Buffy the Vampire Slayer through seven seasons via the Beatles' Abbey Road. (If you are by any chance still unfamiliar with it and want a detailed rave, here's my original review.) It never fails to put me in awe of a) the show, b) luminosity's vidding skills, and c) the Beatles, in the process of falling apart, pulling it all together for one last album. It also makes me yearn for a BTVS rewatch which I can't afford, time-wise, until at least next year. It's good to read new meta of other people still discovering the show, though, like this review of The Body. Must...resist...rewatch....urge. Though I shall certainly watch Scooby Road one more time.
Incidentally, I also read Geoff Emerick's Here, There and Everywhere recently (Geoff Emerick started as assistant engineer for Love Me Do, became the chief engineer with Revolver, walked out on the White Album and, like producer George Martin, was lured back by Paul on the promise of good behaviour on the part of the group for The Ballad of John and Yoko and Abbey Road), so have a tragicomic anecdote from the making of Abbey Road. Poor Yoko, for once, not poor George. Background: the reason why Yoko had her bed in the recording studio wasn't just John not wanting to be parted but also because she had injured herself during an accident and was pregnant again after an earlier miscarriage. Emerick mentions the accident but not the pregnancy, which he doesn't appear to have known about; he didn't socialize with them outside work and reports studio-only observations. The other Beatles were no more thrilled by her presence than they had been ever since The White Album but fulfilling the "good behaviour" promise, and bearing the recovering-from-accident thing in mind, nobody said anything. Until...
We were working on the backing track to "The End" - the song desgined to conclude the album's long medley - when the four Beatles trooped upstairs to listen to some playbacks. Yoko stayed behind, stretched out languorously in the bed, wearing the usual nightgown and tiara. As we were listening, I noticed that something down in the studio had caught George Harrison's attention. After a moment or two he began staring bug-eyed out of the control room window. Curious, I looked over his shoulder. Yoko had gotten out of bed and was slowly padding across the studio floor, finally coming to a stop at Harrison's Lesley cabinet, which had a packet of McVitie's Digestive Biscuits on top. Idly, she began opening the packet and delicately removed a single biscuit. Just as the morsel reached her mouth, Harrison could contain himself no longer.
"THAT BITCH!!!"
Everyone looked aghast, but we all knew exactly who he was talking about.
"She's just taken one of my biscuits!" Harrison explained. He wasn't the least bit sheepish, either.
Oh, George. The other Abbey Road related thing that stuck in my mind in Emerick's narration is that despite upfront about his pro-Paul bias (to the point where you could call it a life long crush, especially as Emerick went on to be engineer for several McCartney solo projects, like Band on the Run (that chapter in his book could be called "Lost in Lagos"), he surprisingly sides with John on one particular matter, to wit, Oh! Darling. Quoth John in 1980, ten years after the fact: "'Oh! Darling' was a great one of Paul's that he didn't sing too well. I always thought I could have done it better—it was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he's going to sing it. But I should have." Geoff Emerick concurs with: "It was around this time that Paul started getting in the habit of coming in early every afternoon, before the others arrived, to have a go at singing the lead vocal to "Oh!Darling." Not only did he have me record it with fifties-style tape echo, he even monitored the backing track over speakers instead of headphones because he wanted to feel as though he was singing to a live audience. Every day we'd be treated to a hell of a performance as McCartney put his all into singing the song all the way through, nearly ripping his vocal cords to shreds in the process. (...) There was one other factor, and that was pride. It prevented him from ever giving John a stab at singing the lead on "Oh! Darling", despite the fact that it was a song that was better suited to Lennon's voice. "
While I'd love to have a Lennon-sung version of Oh!Darling in addition to the dozen existing McCartney ones (and btw, I wonder why he never did one if he liked the song that much - after all, he did sing I Saw Her Standing There with Elton John, explicitly drawing attention to the fact that it was a Paul song he'd never sung the lead to before in his opening "song by an estranged fiancé of mine called Paul" quip), I don't agree here. I mean, seriously, check this out. What is their problem? However, the Antholog releases include a light-hearted version of the song where Paul and John sing it as a kind of duet (complete with John breaking into jubilation that Yoko's divorce came through), and the two of them goofing around as if it were bff early Beatlemania days, making one wonder "weren't you two supposed to be in the last stages of break-up at that that point"?
Also on a lighthearted note and going back to early days, the reverse of that Beatles-doing-Shakespeare thing I posted a while ago. Peter Sellers did an incredibly funny parody of Laurence Olivier as Richard III, reciting the lyrics of A Hard Day's Night as if they were the opening Winter of our discontent monologue, which was broadcast as part of the The Music of Lennon and McCartney special the BBC did in 1965:
luminosity's majestic Scooby Road again, aka the portrait of Buffy the Vampire Slayer through seven seasons via the Beatles' Abbey Road. (If you are by any chance still unfamiliar with it and want a detailed rave, here's my original review.) It never fails to put me in awe of a) the show, b) luminosity's vidding skills, and c) the Beatles, in the process of falling apart, pulling it all together for one last album. It also makes me yearn for a BTVS rewatch which I can't afford, time-wise, until at least next year. It's good to read new meta of other people still discovering the show, though, like this review of The Body. Must...resist...rewatch....urge. Though I shall certainly watch Scooby Road one more time. Incidentally, I also read Geoff Emerick's Here, There and Everywhere recently (Geoff Emerick started as assistant engineer for Love Me Do, became the chief engineer with Revolver, walked out on the White Album and, like producer George Martin, was lured back by Paul on the promise of good behaviour on the part of the group for The Ballad of John and Yoko and Abbey Road), so have a tragicomic anecdote from the making of Abbey Road. Poor Yoko, for once, not poor George. Background: the reason why Yoko had her bed in the recording studio wasn't just John not wanting to be parted but also because she had injured herself during an accident and was pregnant again after an earlier miscarriage. Emerick mentions the accident but not the pregnancy, which he doesn't appear to have known about; he didn't socialize with them outside work and reports studio-only observations. The other Beatles were no more thrilled by her presence than they had been ever since The White Album but fulfilling the "good behaviour" promise, and bearing the recovering-from-accident thing in mind, nobody said anything. Until...
We were working on the backing track to "The End" - the song desgined to conclude the album's long medley - when the four Beatles trooped upstairs to listen to some playbacks. Yoko stayed behind, stretched out languorously in the bed, wearing the usual nightgown and tiara. As we were listening, I noticed that something down in the studio had caught George Harrison's attention. After a moment or two he began staring bug-eyed out of the control room window. Curious, I looked over his shoulder. Yoko had gotten out of bed and was slowly padding across the studio floor, finally coming to a stop at Harrison's Lesley cabinet, which had a packet of McVitie's Digestive Biscuits on top. Idly, she began opening the packet and delicately removed a single biscuit. Just as the morsel reached her mouth, Harrison could contain himself no longer.
"THAT BITCH!!!"
Everyone looked aghast, but we all knew exactly who he was talking about.
"She's just taken one of my biscuits!" Harrison explained. He wasn't the least bit sheepish, either.
Oh, George. The other Abbey Road related thing that stuck in my mind in Emerick's narration is that despite upfront about his pro-Paul bias (to the point where you could call it a life long crush, especially as Emerick went on to be engineer for several McCartney solo projects, like Band on the Run (that chapter in his book could be called "Lost in Lagos"), he surprisingly sides with John on one particular matter, to wit, Oh! Darling. Quoth John in 1980, ten years after the fact: "'Oh! Darling' was a great one of Paul's that he didn't sing too well. I always thought I could have done it better—it was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he's going to sing it. But I should have." Geoff Emerick concurs with: "It was around this time that Paul started getting in the habit of coming in early every afternoon, before the others arrived, to have a go at singing the lead vocal to "Oh!Darling." Not only did he have me record it with fifties-style tape echo, he even monitored the backing track over speakers instead of headphones because he wanted to feel as though he was singing to a live audience. Every day we'd be treated to a hell of a performance as McCartney put his all into singing the song all the way through, nearly ripping his vocal cords to shreds in the process. (...) There was one other factor, and that was pride. It prevented him from ever giving John a stab at singing the lead on "Oh! Darling", despite the fact that it was a song that was better suited to Lennon's voice. "
While I'd love to have a Lennon-sung version of Oh!Darling in addition to the dozen existing McCartney ones (and btw, I wonder why he never did one if he liked the song that much - after all, he did sing I Saw Her Standing There with Elton John, explicitly drawing attention to the fact that it was a Paul song he'd never sung the lead to before in his opening "song by an estranged fiancé of mine called Paul" quip), I don't agree here. I mean, seriously, check this out. What is their problem? However, the Antholog releases include a light-hearted version of the song where Paul and John sing it as a kind of duet (complete with John breaking into jubilation that Yoko's divorce came through), and the two of them goofing around as if it were bff early Beatlemania days, making one wonder "weren't you two supposed to be in the last stages of break-up at that that point"?
Also on a lighthearted note and going back to early days, the reverse of that Beatles-doing-Shakespeare thing I posted a while ago. Peter Sellers did an incredibly funny parody of Laurence Olivier as Richard III, reciting the lyrics of A Hard Day's Night as if they were the opening Winter of our discontent monologue, which was broadcast as part of the The Music of Lennon and McCartney special the BBC did in 1965:
