PEPPER DAYS

The Beatles groundbreaking album, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was release fifty years ago in the States on June 1st. To celebrate the anniversary, the group has released a new deluxe edition with a stereo re-mix by Giles Martin (son of George Martin), as well as bonus CDs of studio outtakes and promo and documentary films. With renewed attention this weekend on radio and the internet, it feels like people are invited to take a momentary break from the chaos and enter the fabulous and imaginative world of Pepperland. The contrast might be more apt than you realize. In the great 20th anniversary doc below we saw reflections on the summer of 1967, when SGT Pepper's blasted from open windows, poets and protesters challenged society, and the war raged on. Check out some chapters below (most are blocked due to content). The highlight that has stuck with me these past thirty years is seeing poet Adrian Mitchell read To Whom it May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam) during his Albert Hall appearance in 1965. If the world ever needed the inspiration and respite of a Sgt. Pepper, it was then... and now. Spy Vibers, have you heard my new radio show with Cocktail Nation? Episode #4 is coming up. Here are info links for Episode #1 (Danger Man) and Episode #2 (The 10th Victim), Epsiode #3 (On Her Majesty's Secret Service). Don't forget: James Bond screenings this Sunday. Enjoy!

Selected Spy Vibe Posts: Roger Moore R.I.P., Spy Vibe Radio 3, Sgt Pepper 50th, Satanik Kriminal OST, 60s Overdrive, Make Love in London, Spy Vibe Radio 2, Spy Vibe Radio 1, James Bond Strips, Propaganda Mabuse, Fahrenheit 451 50th, Interview: Police Surgeon, XTC Avengers, 1966 Pep Spies, Batman Book Interview, Exclusive Fleming Interview, Avengers Comic Strips, Robert Vaughn RIP, UNCLE Fashions, Thunderbirds Are Pop!, Interview:Spy Film Guide, Lost Avengers Found, The Callan File, Mission Impossible 50th, Green Hornet 50th, Star Trek 50th, Portmeirion Photography 1, Filming the Prisoner, Gaiman McGinnins Project, Ian Fleming Grave, Revolver at 50, Karen Romanko Interview, Mod Tales 2, Umbrella Man: Patrick Macnee, New Beatles Film, The Curious Camera, Esterel Fashion 1966, Exclusive Ian Ogilvy Interview, 007 Tribute Covers, The Phantom Avon novels return, Ian Fleming Festival, Argoman Design, Sylvia Anderson R.I.P., Ken Adam R.I.P., George Martin R.I.P., The New Avengers Comics, Trina Robbins Interview, The Phantom at 80, 007 Manga, Avengerworld Book, Diana Rigg Auto Show, The Prisoner Audio Drama Review, David McCallum novel, Andre Courreges R.I.P., Who's Talking on Spy Vibe, UFO Blu-ray, Avengers Pop Art.

MAKE LOVE IN LONDON

To celebrate the HD restoration of the 1967 cult-classic movie Tonight Let's All Make Love in London, the film is scheduled to appear on the big screen at the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, May 1st. The screening and Q&A will be hosted by distributor Tim Beddows, DeMonfort professor Steve Chibnail, music writer Jon Savage, and Peter Whitehead Archive curator Dr. Alissa Clarke. Don't miss it if you are in London! The film, named after a poem recited at the Hall by Allen Ginsberg, is driven by the pulsing psychedelia of early Pink Floyd and punctuated by interviews with the likes of Michael Caine, David Hockney, Mick Jagger and other Sixties ‘faces’. It also captures a moment when the Rolling Stones’ concert at the Hall in 1966 was interrupted by a rioting audience. More info about the screening event here. I've had a CD of the soundtrack for years and have enjoyed the piece as an interesting time capsule. Parts of the film and soundtrack are a window into one of the most important happenings of the decade- The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream (April 29, 1967). This event was organized by Barry Miles, John Hopkins, Mike McInnerney, and Jack Henry Moore as a fundraiser for the counterculture paper, International Times. The multi-artist line-up included Pink Floyd, Arthur Brown, Soft Machine, The Move, The Pretty Things, Pete Townshend, The Creation, Yoko Ono, and film screenings by Peter Whitehead. Experimental and innovative days indeed! Whitehead also filmed parts of the event and then used the Pink Floyd footage to create structure for his experimental film, Tonight Let's Make Love in London. News of the May 1, 2017 Albert Hall screening comes via UK distributor Network, who will release a Blu-ray edition of the movie. From the press release: "Featured here as a brand new restoration, Peter Whitehead's celebrated film probes the myth and the reality of "Swinging London" presenting an intimate, impressionistic collage of rare concert and studio performances, interviews with key figures from the worlds of music, art and cinema, and images of Sixties counterculture. John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, Vanessa Redgrave, Lee Marvin, Julie Christie (Billy Liar, The Saint, Fahrenheit 451, Petulia), Allen Ginsberg, Edna O'Brien, David Hockney and Michael Caine (Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Alfie) are among those captured on film and in sound; bookended by a performance of Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive, the soundtrack features songs by the Rolling Stones and Eric Burdon. Made when many young people saw politicised hedonism as the logical response to global uncertainty, Whitehead's "Pop Concerto for Film" taps into both the confidence and the confusion of an iconic moment in time." To help Spy Vibers place these events in context: The Beatles innovative masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out on June 1st, 1967. Pink Floyd's first album for EMI, Piper At the Gates of Dawn, was released on August 5th, 1967. Whiteheads Tonight Let's All Make Love in London was originally shown at the New York Film Festival on September 26th 1967. The culture was truly about to change forever. Enjoy! Spy Vibers, Episode 2 of my new radio spot on Cocktail Nation is live! This time I talk about the 1965 film, The 10th Victim. More info here. 

Selected Spy Vibe Posts: Spy Vibe Radio 2, Spy Vibe Radio 1, James Bond Strips, Propaganda Mabuse, Fahrenheit 451 50th, Interview: Police Surgeon, XTC Avengers, 1966 Pep Spies, Batman Book Interview, Exclusive Fleming Interview, Avengers Comic Strips, Robert Vaughn RIP, UNCLE Fashions, Thunderbirds Are Pop!, Interview:Spy Film Guide, Lost Avengers Found, The Callan File, Mission Impossible 50th, Green Hornet 50th, Star Trek 50th, Portmeirion Photography 1, Filming the Prisoner, Gaiman McGinnins Project, Ian Fleming Grave, Revolver at 50, Karen Romanko Interview, Mod Tales 2, Umbrella Man: Patrick Macnee, New Beatles Film, The Curious Camera, Esterel Fashion 1966, Exclusive Ian Ogilvy Interview, 007 Tribute Covers, The Phantom Avon novels return, Ian Fleming Festival, Argoman Design, Sylvia Anderson R.I.P., Ken Adam R.I.P., George Martin R.I.P., The New Avengers Comics, Trina Robbins Interview, The Phantom at 80, 007 Manga, Avengerworld Book, Diana Rigg Auto Show, The Prisoner Audio Drama Review, David McCallum novel, Andre Courreges R.I.P., Who's Talking on Spy Vibe, UFO Blu-ray, Avengers Pop Art.

WHEN I'M 68

Happy Birthday to Paul McCartney from Spy Vibe! McCartney's friend and collaborator, Barry Miles, summed up their early years by saying, "I think of the 60s as a supermarket of ideas. We were looking for new ways to live." If Swinging London in the 1960s represented a hurricane of cultural revolution, McCartney was in the eye of the storm.


Paul McCartney was born sixty-eight years ago today. His mother Mary (as in "mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom") was a nurse. His father, James, was an amateur musician. He had his own "Jim Mac's Jazz Band" back in the hot jazz days, and he brought Paul and younger brother Mike up with an appreciation for all kinds of music. The family listened closely to old 78 records and the radio, and McCartney developed a keen ear and passion to make music of his own. After a brief interlude with a trumpet that his dad gave him, he was inspired by the skiffle craze to pick up the guitar. He swapped his horn for a Framus Zenith acoustic model. It wasn't until he saw an image of Slim Whitman that he realized he could restring the instrument backwards for easier playing as a lefty. As Lonnie Donegan belted out Rock Island Line and other skiffle hits, McCartney wrote his first tunes, including When I'm Sixty-Four. In 1956, Paul found his "messiah" Elvis Presley. With Elvis, the floodgates of Rock came rushing in with the likes of Fats Domino, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers.

McCartney's childhood friend, Ivan Vaughan (also born on June 18th), brought him to the Woolton County Fete on July 6, 1957, where he formally met John Lennon for the first time. The two of them shared a love for Rock n Roll, especially two rockabilly cats that would tour England quite a bit in those early years, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent (Vincent seen below with Paul and John in matching leather gear). As the story goes of that first meeting, McCartney impressed Lennon with Cochran's Twenty-Flight Rock and Lennon played Vincent's Be-Bop-A-Lula for the first time on stage. McCartney joined Lennon's band, and history followed with Hamburg, Liverpool's Cavern, world tours, Sergeant Pepper, and beyond.


Although the movie A Hard Days Night created an on-screen persona of McCartney as the cute, crooning Beatle, history shows that McCartney and Lennon belted out rockers and ballads equally. McCartney's musical background did broaden his pallet to include jazz and show tune-influenced songs, which Lennon called "granny music" in his vitriolic years. And although Lennon embraced avant-garde projects in the later 1960s, it is not as well-known that McCartney was a cultural trailblazer for the group in the mid-1960s. While his band mates moved out to the suburbs, McCartney stayed in Swinging London to feed his appetite for new avenues of creativity. McCartney's lead Epiphone riff is featured in his song Paperback Writer, mimed by the band for this promotional video.

McCartney helped Barry Miles start the underground London paper, International Times and they attended happenings at the Roundhouse with performances by Beat Poets and The Pink Floyd. McCartney began to attend film screenings and to make experimental films. He also became fascinated with John Cage and the creation of tape loop, sound collages, which he called "electronic symphonies." He facilitated Lennon's contribution of his hand-written lyrics to The Word to Yoko Ono's score book for John Cage. McCartney helped to renovate and set up the Indica Gallery (Miles and McCartney shown below at Indica- where Lennon later met Yoko Ono). A true renascence man, McCartney's experiments fed many Beatles projects, including the seagull-sounding tape loops on Tomorrow Never Knows, Sergeant Pepper as a concept album, a subsidiary record label devoted to poetry (including William S Burroughs) and experimental music, and the Magical Mystery Tour film.


Paul McCartney has continued to explore mainstream and experimental projects each year since his first, famous group disbanded in 1970. In the last twenty years, he has released many classical music compositions, new electronic experiments, an anthology of poetry (including a memorial to childhood pal, Ivan), and he exhibited a large body of work as a painter. How does he manage it? If lifestyle is any clue to his output, jogging, family, laughter, music, and being meat-free seem to be the top of the list. Spy Vibers will, of course, celebrate McCartney's addition to the world of James Bond with his theme to Live and Let Die. Others may also applaud him for his Swinging London style. It all comes back, however, to his deepest roots- music. He's a charismatic powerhouse on stage, which Spy Vibers can see for themselves during his current tour. I look forward to seeing him again next month in San Francisco!


Check out 68 years of McCartney on Pop Matters. Sir Paul was recently awarded the George Gershwin Award by President Obama. Photos from Getty Images, Richard Avedon, Mike McCartney, and press archives. If you are interested in seeing more of Paul McCartney's experimental work or historical projects, here are the essentials.


CDs
Working Classical (1999)
Run Devil Run (1999)
Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest (1993)
Rushes (1998)
Liverpool Sound Collage (2000)
Electronic Arguments (2008)
Ballad of the Skeletons (Allen Ginsberg/1996)
Hiroshima Sky is Always Blue (unreleased/Yoko Ono/1995)
Good Evening New York City (2009)

DVD/VHS
Live At the Cavern Club (2001)
Wingspan (2001)
The Real Buddy Holly Story (2004)
My Old Friend (1998)
Paul McCartney Live in Red Square (2005)
Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
Music & Animation Collection (2004)

Books
The Unknown Paul McCartney (2002)
Many Years From Now (1998)
The Complete Beatles Chronicle (2010)
Paul McCartney Paintings (2000)
The British Invasion (2009)