Word: bbc
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...this is on the "new" Beatles album Live at the BBC, a two-disc CD of 56 songs the band played live on the radio. In its raw comprehensiveness, Live at the BBC (supervised by Beatles record producer George Martin) documents the group's vertiginous rise in a three-year period that marked both the birth of pop music's international era and a sweet autumnal bloom in rock's age of innocence...
...BBC exposure worked; it brought the Beatles radio celebrity first, recording stardom later. They made their BBC debut on March 7, 1962, three months before their first EMI studio gig and seven months before their first single was released. Nor did they desert the radio after Beatlemania became a benign worldwide epidemic. They continued to work hard and play hard on the BBC, recording 18 songs in one throat-strepping, fingernail-rending session. Up to June 1965, they appeared on 52 BBC broadcasts and played 88 different songs -- some their own compositions, but most the band's diligent imitations...
...that time, the British airwaves were calcified in good taste. The only rock 'n' roll reached England from the piratic Radio Luxembourg. But BBC welcomed the occasional pop group, and the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, knew it could make them. The band auditioned for producer Peter Pilbeam, who reported with guarded enthusiasm: "an unusual group ... with a tendency to play music." Rating the Beatles' singers, Pilbeam wrote, "John Lennon: yes; Paul McCartney: no." Anyway, they...
...Beatles' genius was best exhibited not in their glosses on archival rock but in Lennon's and especially McCartney's gifts for melody and harmony. In short order the Beatles' own compositions became more elaborate, and so did their studio technology, which the resources of the bbc could not meet. But the early songs still sound great. The full-note, three- part harmony ("Iiiiii'm sooooo glaaaad") in the bridge of I Feel Fine still seduces the listener into singing along. It's the expression of a pop- musical spirit eons removed from the rage and anxiety that replaced...
...years won't hit U.S. shelves until next week, but first-dibs stores in London -- where lines stretched around the block today -- report sightings of plenty of Americans who apparently didn't want to wait. Russians, Poles and Western Europeans also crowded among the Brits. "Live at the BBC," contains 56 songs recorded between 1962 and 1965, most before the Beatles' early stint in Hamburg, all available previously, but on scattered bootleg LPs. An extra: some Fab Four banter with BBC deejays.Post your opinion on theArts & Culturebulletin board...