A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

In 1984, Paul McCartney starred in what amounts, basically, to an overlong and unremarkable music video titled Give My Regards to Broad Street , which centered upon the theft of the master tapes to Paul's newest album and the musician's resulting efforts to retrieve them. And just like  The Magical Mystery Tour  film a decade-plus or so earlier,  Give My Regards to Broad Street  failed to follow in the celluloid footsteps of  Help! ,  A Hard Day's Night,  or even  Yellow Submarine.   Of course, sometimes even failed films come with a soundtrack album, and  Give My Regards to Broad Street lends itself well to having its spinoff record -- and of course, because it  was  a Paul McCartney project, the powers that be did release an album that is a mix of songs from Paul's Beatles career to his solo/Wings years.  Although I didn't care much for the film (which I've almost totally forgotten), I do like this album, considering that I'm a Beatles fan and thus appr

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the evolutionary, nay, revolutionary 1967 album by The Beatles, is one of the best, if not THE best, rock recordings ever. From the fantastic and iconic cover art by Peter Blake to the interesting idea of the "concept album," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band broke away from The Beatles' previous "I Want To Hold Your Hand"-styled songs and took the Fab Four into new musical territory. According to the liner notes included with the booklet, the conceit of the album was that The Beatles had morphed into an entirely new and different band, hence the title "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Geoff Emerick, the group's recording engineer, explains: "The Beatles insisted that everything be different, so everything was either distorted, limited, heavily compressed or treated with excessive equalization." This pure "studio album" was definitely avant garde for its mid-1960s e