A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On October 9, 2012, 50 years and four days after the premiere of Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli's production of Dr. No, Capitol Records released Best of Bond...James Bond: 50 Years - 50 Tracks, a two-CD compilation of title songs and other music from the first 22 EON films based on Ian Fleming's iconic British Secret Service agent with a license to kill: "Bond...James Bond."  Dropped to coincide with the premiere of director Sam Mendes' Skyfall - even though Adele's rendition of the eponymous title song was not included - this album (which was made in collaboration with MGM Music and EMI Records) is an update of 1999's 19-track disc Best of Bond...James Bond, an album that only presented the "main title" songs of the series up to director Roger Spottiswoode's Tomorrow Never Dies even though Michael Apted's  The World is Not Enough was released that same year. For Bond's 50th Anniversary, Capitol and MGM Music went b...

Album Cover Design: Tom Wilkes. Photo by: Angus McBean. (C) 1973 Apple Records On April 2, 1973, Apple Records released two double-LP compilation albums by The Beatles: The Beatles: 1962-1966 and The Beatles: 1967-1970. Known respectively as the Red and Blue Albums (a reference to the colors of the album packaging), the two sets presented 54 of the Fab Four’s best-known songs from their eight-year reign as rock’s premier performing act. Produced by George Martin and Phil Spector, the Red and Blue Albums were compiled by The Beatles’ (and The Rolling Stones’) infamously sleazy agent Allen Klein in response to the bootleg collection Alpha Omega , which was being sold without permission via television marketing. Per Klein, Martin, and Spector’s design,   The Red Album covers the first half of The Beatles’ career, featuring 26 songs written and performed by the “lads from Liverpool” between 1962 and 1966. For various reasons – some artistic, some financial – Klein decreed...

Album Cover Design: Tom Wilkes. Photo by: Angus McBean. (C) 1973 Apple Records I became a Beatles' fan when I was 17 years old. That’s rather late in life, relatively speaking, in part because my taste in music tends to veer to the classical/orchestral film score end rather than rock. I was less than a year old when the Fab Four made their American TV debut in February 1964. Then I lived in South America from 1966 till 1972 in an environment where I didn’t mix with too many rock and roll fans. That’s why I wasn't really exposed to The Beatles' music until the 1980s, by which time the group had split and John Lennon had been taken away by a madman's bullet. My fascination with the "lads from Liverpool" began in my sophomore year at South Miami High, when a fellow journalism student took the time to write down the lyrics to Paul McCartney's ode to Julian Lennon ("Hey, Jude"). In chorus class I learned the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby...

Cover art for The Baroque Beatles Book by Roger Hane (C) 1965. 2009  Elektra Nonesuch Records In November of 1965, Nonesuch Records – a budget classical label founded by Elektra Records’ exec Jac Holtzman one year earlier – dropped The Baroque Beatles Book, a tongue-in-cheek crossover album featuring 11 of the Fab Four’s hit singles and a recitation based on John Lennon’s writing, including excerpts from In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. The Baroque Beatles Book was, as the 2009 reissue edition’s liner notes explain, conceived by Nonesuch founder Holtzman. The Beatles’ popularity was climbing to insane levels at a time when music from the Baroque era (c. 1600-1750) of art and music was also enjoying a resurgence in popularity (although that , perhaps, was not as intense as the wave of Beatlemania that swept over Western civilization in the mid-Sixties). As Joshua Rifkin, the (then) 21-year-old musicologist, pianist, and arranger, writes in his 2009 ess...

On February 15, 1993, the Minnesota-based classical music record label Pro-Arte released Bach Meets the Beatles: Variations in the Style of Bach, an album of piano pieces that blend the music of John Lennon and Paul McCartney and the Baroque composition style of Johann Sebastian Bach. Conceived and performed by pianist John Bayless, Bach Meets the Beatles presented 15 hit songs by the Fab Four, including All You Need is Love, Hey Jude, Something, And I Love Her, and Nowhere Man.  Official Video by Entertainment One Distribution: Imagine (John Lennon) A sequel to Bayless’ earlier Bach on Abbey Road, Bach Meets the Beatles was just one of many Beatles-classical music mashup recordings; Joshua Rifkin had done a more ambitious take on the Lennon-McCartney canon in his 1965 bestselling LP The Baroque Beatles Book, and Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra covered the “lads from Liverpool” in Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra Play the Beatles. Both records...