February 9, 1964

I was going to name one of those the Noodle Vague Option, but I’m not sure which of the last two it is.

Not interested in Macklemore or Pitbull being involved with this. yeesh.

Clarification: I made up my own guest list. But there is a TV special.

Well, I really love the Beatles, so it'll be nice to have this, even though they are already super, ultra, mega-famous and definitely don't need the exposure. Still, if it introduces some kids to the great wealth of wonderful music from the 20th century, then that can only be a good thing.

I probably won't watch it though.

Mildly interested. It'd be nice if they could come up with some new behind-the-scenes stuff for this special, but it'll probably be just the same old "we put the band in the middle of the set with loads of huge arrows pointing at them to signify that The Beatles are HERE!!!" worn flat trivia.

The involvement of Klaatu is the thing that elevates me from little/no interest to mildly interested.

I mention the TV show in passing; I should have been clearer that I mean level of engagement in general, the anniversary itself as an Event (or event, or "event," or non-event). I fall somewhere between fairly and very--I'll hold back a bit because I understand enough-already exasperation, and I'm sure there'll be some overly precious nostalgia and unreasonably hyperbolic claims of significance to contend with. But I do think it was a significant performance, and I don't begrudge anyone who was watching feeling strong emotions 50 years later. (Not sure if I was watching or not...don't think I ever asked my parents, and I'm not sure they would have remembered anyway.)

Klaatu will be borrowing Daft Punk's wardrobe to keep the rumours of their true identity alive.

That they're really The Residents?

It would've been cool if CBS just ran the Sullivan show as it aired that night, commercials and all.

Also, the Beatles played five songs that night. I can't remember the last time I've seen any artist do more than two on a network show.

It would've been cool if CBS just ran the Sullivan show as it aired that night, commercials and all.

srsly! who needs some bullshit tribute when the real thing is actually still pretty exciting and charming.

Here they are on Sullivan in '65, baked to the gills:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNA4yi5v5Ok

Klaatu
Pitbull
Adele
Billy J. Kramer
Beatles
Macklemore

I would pay money and go without food for several days to prevent this from happening so in that sense I have an interest

i actually heard 'sugar shack' for the first time a while back and it's not bad at all. i remember greil marcus said something in his famous beatles essay about how it was one of the 4-5 most noxious things ever heard on the radio.

Yeah, that was a Marcus reference. I find it cloying, but far from the worst thing ever recorded. He'll sometimes fixate on certain records with a very private intensity that puzzles me--they don't seem to warrant it--but that is also part of why he's great ("Little Miss Can't Be Wrong," "Every Rose Has It's Thorn," etc.).

Aka, "Every Rose Has It Is Thorn."

yeah i caught that. huge lol at the guest list. the hubbub over the 20th anniversary is my earliest concrete memory of the beatles as 'the beatles' per se (i can remember the fallout from lennon's death and 'silly love songs' is one of my earliest memories of a pop music), my stepfather at the time was a huge beatles nut so the beatles were a part of that first serious interest in pop music (as opposed to just random obsessions w/ various records - 'queen of hearts', 'jesse's girl', '9 to 5' - when i was a very small child). interest a degree below what it was for 50th anniversary of jfk assassination or mlk's march on washington. there's a residual anti-boomer gen x part of me that wonders 'man are we gonna do this for every thing that happened in the 60s?' but there's a part of me that also knows this is the last time we're doing this dance so i don't really mind.

i became a Beatles fan in '68 so really 46 years is enough

'always thought these guys sucked before but this rocky raccoon song is a fucking jam'

I first heard the early stuff in '68 on the cartoons, troll

zero interest/aero otm

that performer list looks like it was generated by a bot:

hot right now male artist
hot right now female artist
old band with mild beatles connection
old guy with mild beatles connection
guy who will appear on any track for a subway sandwich

Clarification: I made up my own guest list. But there is a TV special.

― clemenza, Monday, January 27, 2014 5:29 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

seriously guys, how much are we going to talk about the made up performer list

The real list:

http://www.grammy.com/news/performers-announced-for-beatles-special

Which is...pretty much interchangeable with the one I made up off the top of my head, minus Klaatu (evidently ineligible because they never won a GRAMMY).

damn you some dude, i was enjoying this

Still, though: Klaatu!

It would've been cool if CBS just ran the Sullivan show as it aired that night, commercials and all.

this times 100 million.

(even if cbs somehow wanted to, though, they'd need the beatles' permission, and it's far from guaranteed the beatles would say yes. rather unlikely, actually.)

I'm curious about what will happen on Letterman.

no interest. sick of latter-day beatles fetishism, particularly sick of mccartney at this point.

thank you

The special was taped last night. SPOILER ALERT THEY PLAYED "HEY JUDE"

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/5885504/paul-mccartney-ringo-starr-reunite-for-beatles-tv-special

Are they going to show any footage from Sullivan? That would seem to be the point of all the hype, no?

I like the Beatles, but I have searched my soul and genuinely detect no interest whatsoever in this.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

This poll was devised as a Zen riddle. If "zero interest" wins with 25 votes, that would be evidence that there's zero interest. If "zero interest" wins with three votes, that would be overwhelming evidence that there's zero interest.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lol

finally some back-up

phony beatlephobia has bitten the dust

I would pay money and go without food for several days to prevent this from happening so in that sense I have an interest

― joe perry has been dead for years (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, January 27, 2014 7:48 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sums it up well: a healthy interest in expressing zero interest. (I voted "fairly," and will watch at least some of the broadcast...an overly earnest Annie Lennox performance or something like that will drive me away.)

http://beatlephotoblog.com/photos/2010/03/142.jpg

Larry, Curly Joe, Paul

I love the Beatles and even bought a bootleg VHS of the Ed Sullivan show and if they showed that, it's the only reason I would watch so I have zero interest. Frank Gorshin does a great act in it, btw!

The show was well-meaning but hard to stay with--I ducked in and out. There were good stories from some of the technical crew who worked on the original broadcast. The performances were completely uninteresting, starting with the obviousness of almost every song. (There was one choice that was somewhat imaginative: Dave Grohl going with "Hey Bulldog." The problem there was that I don't like Dave Grohl and don't like "Hey Bulldog.") Wish I could say that Paul and Ringo redeemed the all the rest, but they didn't--a bit of "A Little Help from My Friends" found its way through, otherwise nothing.

Stevie Wonder and the Eurythmics were completely uninteresting? I think the performances have been really good, but the whole program is very long and there are lots of commercials.

Peter Frampton playing without mention throughout a show where joe Walsh got two spotlight moments was weird. Did they just forget frampton was kind of a big deal once or did they straight up not want to bring up the sgt peppers movie?

Walsh is Ringo's brother in law, which helps in a "Well, yeah" kinda way.

I'd rather it were me defending the show and you criticizing it, Tim, but no, I didn't find Stevie Wonder or the Eurythmics any more interesting than anyone else. (Especially the Eurythmics--I've always found "The Fool on the Hill" very bland, ditto them.) When I expressed some mild negativity about the show on a FB friend's thread last night, someone I didn't know came on and said "You must not like the Beatles very much." I had to decide whether I wanted to have my first-ever Facebook argument. Wisely passed.

I tried to think of some people who I would have rather seen up there instead, and I came up blank. I've mentioned before all the Beatles covers I've collected online--over 5,000, I think--and it's so random as to what makes a good one. (Not that I've actually listened to everything I have--maybe 5 or 10%.) The biggest obstacle last night was the song selection. Instead of "Tell Me What You See" or "Martha My Dear" or "The Two of Us," it was "Yesterday" and "Get Back" and "Something."

The best idea by far was something suggested upthread: air the original broadcast in its entirety. But they have to sell some Magic Dragon records, and there'll undoubtedly be a CD put out of last night. I was thinking that showing the original broadcast would make a lot of money down the road, by sparking an interest in the Beatles among really young people watching with their parents, but whoever decides these things knows a lot more about marketing than I do.

That slimey Grammy producer guy Ken Ehrlich was involved in putting this together. Ugh. I'm getting tired of Dave Grohl too, although that could be just cuz I was seeing his name popping up on Facebook as he's in my W. DC area now recording at Dischord fave studio Inner Ear with Foo Fighters.

dude's both Gen X's Paul McCartney and Don Henley, an impressive feat when he contributed exactly zero lead vocals to the group that made him famous.

Wasn't too keen on the usual cast of characters, but I dug the old footage and agree with clemenza that the interviews with Sullivan's old production team were pretty interesting. Letterman was kind of annoying; he kept interrupting, and when Ringo started talking about the American music that inspired them, Dave changed the subject. Also, it would've been great to hear Ringo as the only drummer; Aaronoff drowned him out. McCartney was meh, but Abe Laboriel, Jr. kept me watching.

When I expressed some mild negativity about the show on a FB friend's thread last night, someone I didn't know came on and said "You must not like the Beatles very much." I had to decide whether I wanted to have my first-ever Facebook argument. Wisely passed.

Ha, my fb feed was about evenly split between uncritical/undying love and devotion for everything Beatles ("'Martha My Dear' is the apogee of sound"), and reactionary "Dig this...they're overrated! But you're too SQUARESVILLE to handle my edginess!" posts.

The Flaming Lips performed "Lucy in the Sky" a few days ago on Letterman with Sean Ono Lennon and that was enough Beatles covers for me. This concert reads like it has some cool performances, but I won't be sitting through Maroon 5 and John Mayer.

Yay for Eurythmics reunion!

I'd never seen Stevie do his "We Can Work It Out" with the clavinet (with what sounded like a distortion pedal on). Thought it was incredible.

Katy Perry's "Yesterday" was the biggest surprise for me. Eurythmics too, but her version of "Yesterday" really worked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwGIZGQzfG8

Yay!

but Abe Laboriel, Jr. kept me watching
Anyway, gave this a pass but would have watched for him.

It was weird seeing Eric Idle do Rutles bits last night, partly because of the film's relative obscurity, and partly because (iirc) Paul hated All You Need Is Cash.

i loved seeing stevie do "we can work it out." he was great.

two weird things:

1) john's mic was barely on for many of the sullivan show clips! paul occasionally appeared to be singing harmonies to nonexistent lead vocals.

2) paul sitting in the audience while ringo plays beatles songs and ringo sitting in the audience while paul plays beatles songs. are the two of them that inflexible, or just generally opposed to fun? or to each other? when they finally got together at the end, i found it odd that the director stayed on a closeup of paul for most of "hey jude" when there was a very available (and barely used) two-shot of paul singing and ringo drumming behind him.

I think Ringo's miffed that Paul never asks him to play with him -- at Live 8, Paul played "Sgt. Pepper's" with U2, and Ringo said something like, "What the hell? He didn't even call me!"

I think it's just one of those situations where they can hang out and be friends as long as they're not playing together.

Did anyone count how many times Sean Lennon rolled his eyes or looked visibly bored?

Hold the phone: I'm hearing reports Perry set Twitter aflame last night because she dared to adjust the lyrics of "Yesterday" so they were gender-appropriate for her.

http://media.giphy.com/media/12FfNKPlSR5k2c/giphy.gif

I don't remember Sean Lennon rolling his eyes or looking visibly bored once. You can make arguments about hyper-focus on the Beatles, but I don't know which performances on this show merited boredom or rolling of the eyes (although I didn't see them all - I did see most of them).

Maybe he was rolling

if the maroon 5 set didn't merit boredom, i don't know what boredom is.

He actually seemed to enjoy that one.

I actually missed them, so I don't know.

I mean, who do you want to accuse of not being hip enough? The guy that did "In My Life?" Imagine Dragons? They played the songs well. I didn't have a problem with it, personally.

on mute stayed tuned for shots of the broad sean lennon was with

I'm not accusing anyone of not being hip enough.

always a good look for ilx to use "broads" though, definitely. glad we're making that choice.

They played the songs well.

This is opinion as assertion, Tim. I didn't think the songs were played well at all, unless you mean in a dry technical sense. I didn't hear any spark or joy or spontaneity in any of it. (If you want to say those things were there for Stevie Wonder, fine.) I can even understand this, with two of the Beatles sitting right in front of you--I'm sure the younger performers just wanted to get the songs right. But I personally wouldn't try to get someone interested in the Beatles via any of those versions last night.

http://20poorandfabulous.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/models-rockers11.jpg

http://scriptical.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/scriptical-wordpress-charlotte-kemp-muhl.jpg

they look like fun people, what with their fun hats

opinion as assertion

Well right, but isn't that the old thing about criticism? That I shouldn't be forced to say, "Marvin Gaye was awesome, but hey that's only my opinion?"

I know, and I do that (add in the qualifier) way too much. Just making the point, though, that whether or not the songs were played well is a very subjective call.

My opinion as assertion is that I did not like how the Imagine Dragons played.

Sean Lennon making a fashion audition for the Flaming Lips or something

$45 tonight to see a Beatles cover band in the Washington Coliseum where they did their first American concert 50 years ago. The building later was used as an ice rink and hosted go-go shows, but in recent years it has just been a parking garage for DC trash trucks.

when did they first drink tea with Bob Dylan?

august 64