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Questions About A Beatle Photo

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The figure I have read is 1200 or more.  That’s the number of times it’s estimated that The Beatles had performed together (anyway, John, Paul & George) by the time they appeared, relaxed and confident, on that first Ed Sullivan Show, 49 years ago this Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013.

But their appearance three days later in Washington at the Washington Coliseum stands out from every other Beatle appearance I’ve ever seen.  Used as a venue for boxing matches, the Coliseum was likely the first time The Beatles had ever played in such an enormous venue, completely surrounded by a huge, enraptured but well behaved crowd and it was the first time that they had to rotate so they’d face everybody in every direction.  It provides some perspective on what The Beatles did for the stature of rock & roll to see Ringo himself struggling to tug his drum set around to play to a new sea of faces.

This is the only Beatle performance I’ve seen where The Beatles are in as tumultuous a mood as their audience, the first I’ve ever seen where The Beatles seem on the verge of being washed away by the sea of screams and cheers and contagious (even the performers caught it) excitement. The film shows constant little furtive flicks of light, like meteors, whizzing across the camera lens.  Jelly beans.  The hard shelled American kind, not the soft gummy sort the English kids would throw.  Ringo’s drum sticks visibly split and shatter as he plays.  Ringo was especially worked up for the concert.  He said afterwards he would have played all night for that crowd.  As a final reminder that it wasn’t until The Beatles’ success that rock & roll reached the heights of big time entertainment, the black and white concert footage ends, “bang” like that, abruptly in mid-song.  The movie camera had run out of film.

Last year a gentleman named Mike Mitchell emerged with a series of photographs he’d taken as, I believe, an 18 year old amateur photographer, when he attended the Coliseum concert.  He apparently moved freely around the perimeter of the stage snapping pictures of The Beatles performing without anyone shooing him away… if true, another indication that rock & roll was still in its “this too shall pass” stage.

Jump ahead 48 years. Mike Mitchell discovers the roll of film he’d shot, develops it and plans to auction the resulting pictures off at Christies.  The Wall Street Journal covers this story and runs one of the photos.  It’s this photo. John and Paul, plugged in and fancy free, dapper and spiffy, from the Coliseum concert.

beatles

Having seen the Coliseum concert in it’s entirety—at least everything the Maysles’ brothers captured—many times, and having watched the significant segment that The Beatles included in their Anthology DVD’s many times, something about the showcased photograph didn’t seem right.  Reviewing the filmed footage with this single photograph in mind, several things seem to be amiss.

  1. John Lennon is, in real life, slightly taller than Paul McCartney. He’s noticeably smaller than Paul in this photo, even taking into account the fact that he’s standing slightly back from Paul.
  2. The round stage at the Coliseum was ringed with mikes and mike stands. No mikes in this photo. John would occasionally wander away from a mike and step forward to sing his bit, but not Paul and not both of them.
  3. John Lennon is clearly actually singing in the photo and not merely mouthing a lyric but he’s singing into a void. Again, no mike.
  4. Where is the background in the photo? It’s a black void.

Perhaps someone can clarify or explain the photo and what it all means.

Civil War Q&A with High School Students–Questions 3, 4, 5

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How long does it typically take you to create a map of a famous battle?

 It typically takes six to eight months to do the research, draft the map, and then ink in the data and watercolor the whole concern.  In the midst of that process, I also work out the information and secure the images for the reverse side of the map.  That six or eight months means seven days a week, morning, noon and night.  The maps are great fun but they’re also a lot of work.

 What interests you most about the Civil War?

The most interesting thing about the Civil War is the participants. The panoply of characters, Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, JEB Stuart, and more obscure characters like Richard Ewell (he married a widow and always introduced his wife as “Mrs. Brown”), Confederate general Joe Johnston who hated president Jeff Davis so much that you wouldn’t know from his memoir that he was fighting the Yankees, he’s always fighting Davis.  Then George B. McClellan, Union general whose reputation collapsed because the stupid, vainglorious letters he wrote to his wife revealed him to be a supercilious jerk.  There was General George Custer (of Little Big Horn fame) who was a brilliant cavalry leader who perfumed his flowing locks and designed a uniform that made him look like a circus performer.  It was a wild bunch of characters.  England had Dickens’ characters.  We had these guys.  Some of the most noble people in history, and some of the most ignoble, made up the cast of our Civil War.

Also, most wars are futile. For example, the First World War led directly to the Second World War and the Second World War wasn’t even over when the Cold War got underway.  In contrast, the Civil War was fought to end slavery and preserve the United States.  When the Civil War was over, slavery was dead and the United States lived.  Success!

Who do you think was the greatest Confederate General?

I think Stonewall Jackson was the South’s great general but he had the advantage in that regard of dying too early in the war to confront the best Union generals.  But I also think there was something vaguely—for want of a better term—autistic, about him.  He seems kind of blank in terms of personality and he was a bewildering figure to his fellow generals.  And his successes came in the first half of the war when the south fought with the immense advantage of a friendly population and in familiar countryside.  His Valley Campaign, upon which his fame primarily rests, would not have been possible once Union forces knew the roads and topography as well as he did.  But circumstances are what they are and he was, in my mind, the best in the 1861-1863 timeframe.

What is the oldest battle that you mapped?

The oldest battle I’ve mapped is the Revolutionary battlefield of Saratoga in NYS.  It was fought in 1777.  The oldest Civil War battlefield I’ve mapped is Manassas or Bull Run, VA.  Two battles were fought there, 1861 and 1862.

Civil War Q&A With High School Students–Questions 1 & 2

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Time did not allow me to answer all of the questions of the American History Class at Olean High School, but I did respond to them by e-mail.  The first and second question were:

What information do you use to draw the maps?  Do you use photos along with studying the landscape?  What else do you use?  How do you decide if the information is reliable or legitmate?

I had to give a rather long answer to the question:

  1. I use contemporaneous photographs, taken within days of some of the major battles (Antietam, Gettysburg e.g.).  I got a Cornell agronomist (a crop expert) to study the panoramic photos of these fields to determine the crops in the fields. It was easy to figure out what type of fencing there was, where the orchards were, the extent of the woodlands etc. Essential to the use of these photographs was the 1970’s work of William Frassanito, who painstakingly determined the point-of-view and location of each extant wartime photograph of Gettysburg and Antietam.
  2. Then I used regimental histories – each regiment would occupy a small sector of the battlefield and their accounts and maps  would show their particular sector in great detail. The soldiers’ diaries and letters (this was probably the most literate war in history) also contain many references to their immediate surroundings. Many of them were themselves farmers and they would frequently comment on the crops and fields, fences, barns and orchards. The most poignant research items were “burial” maps. Dead men were often buried right where they had fallen by their fellow soldiers, who were usually their townsmen, friends, even relatives. They would then send the family a very detailed map so they could journey to the battlefield, locate the body and bring it home for burial.
  3. On the major battlefields such as Gettysburg, Antietam, Stones River in Tennessee, the National Park Service has tons of data that they gladly make available to a researcher.
  4. As I mentioned in the class, aerial photographs are very revealing if you know what you’re looking for. If I have a reasonably good Civil War era map and it shows a road or a lane that’s vanished, or a barn or a house, if you look very carefully, you can find a footprint or a trace of it. Also, the skeleton features in the landscape – the rivers, streams, hills, principal roads etc. – are obviously extant features on todays extremely accurate USGS maps. So those features are immediately drawn on my map so I immediately have a framework to go by. And the maps drawn and used by the actual Civil War armies, while not terribly accurate in terms of exact distances etc., are full of the sort of information the armies needed. They needed the name of residents along the roads because there were no route markers and there were not normally formal names for a given road or lane so the surest way to get reliable directions was to get pointed toward the Smith’s house or the Jones farm. Documenting the residents also gave the armies a idea of the local population. The more residents there were, the more resources there were for the armies to live off. (Union General Sherman set off across Georgia on November 16,1864 saying, “Where a million Georgians can live, my army will not starve.) The armies also had to know where they could find corn fields, wheat fields, orchards, hay fields, wells, springs etc. because an army on the march needed to feed 30, 40, 50 thousand men  and thousands of horses and mules. A typical mule would drink 10 gallons of water a day. Multiply that by 10,000! A Civil War army (and it didn’t matter whether they were friends or enemies, Union or Confederate) would devastate any countryside they marched through. They would take all the food for themselves and all the forage for their animals, drink the wells dry, destroy the fields they camped on, empty the barns, clear out the larders, tear down all the fences (to make their camp fires to brew their coffee) and raise havoc generally. But the armies need to live off the land is great for mapmakers because their military “route” maps detailed this sort of food and forage information so the armies knew where they could march and fend for themselves.
  5. A great aid in mapping Gettysburg was the work of John Bachelder, who arrived in Gettysburg immediately after the battle. Bachelder marched up and down the field, mapping it, and he had as a resource the thousands of wounded soldiers, Union and Confederate, remaining behind, who he interviewed. His map, a birds-eye view of the field, was very reliable and valuable.
  6. There were also quite accurate published county maps available of some areas, including Gettysburg, published prior to the Civil War that I could make use of. (They were also made use of by the armies and the generals.) Also, soon after the war, the U.S. War Department prepared surveys of many of the major battlefields. These maps were much more detailed and accurate than the maps made under wartime conditions. (The U.S. hired former Confederate mapmakers to work on these surveys. One Rebel named Blackford, who’d sworn he would die rather than live again under the stars and stripes, found himself, within a month of Appomattox, working for the U.S. Army mapping the battlefields.)
  7. Finally, most every Civil War battlefield has people who have devoted their lives to studying “their” battle. They know every nook and cranny of the field and like nothing more than to guide someone around the field, point out sites, recommend books and resources, provide access private lands and to other knowledgeable locals, and in some cases they fix parking tickets.
  8. There are other resources but the above provides a pretty good idea of what’s out there. I decide on the reliability of the information based on the resource I used. Photographs, for example, are irrefutable – at least back then they were, before photoshop – and other data would often be corroborated by some other data. And then you have to wonder why anybody would mislead about the existence of a stone wall or the presence in their front of a rye as opposed to a wheat field.

 

 

The Civil War: Some Suggested Reading

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I prepared a reading list of Civil War volumes to hand out to an Olean High School junior year American history class as part of a Civil War presentation on Jan. 15, 2013. The list is short and sweet and my basic premise was that, for the most part, none of the students had read much, if anything, about the Civil War. My intention was to suggest some books that would be scholarly but entertaining and informative at the same time.  Also the list had to fit on one page. This is the list I came up with. My feeling is that if any of the students read even one of these volumes they will probably be drawn to read others as well.

  •  Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Civil War, which includes The Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat, is a very dramatic and beautifully written set. It’s accurate history but it reads with the verve of a novel.  A pretty long novel though.
  • Bruce Catton also wrote a terrific little book entitled U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition. It’s one of my absolute favorite Civil War books. And it’s short!
  • There are two excellent one volume biographies of Abraham Lincoln.  Stephen B. Oates’s With Malice Toward None and/or Benjamin P. Thomas’s Abraham Lincoln.  Another really neat little book is this same Benjamin P. Thomas’s Lincoln’s New Salem.
  • The best single volume account of the overall Civil War—it’s pretty long and quite detailed but extremely worthwhile—is James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.
  • There are all sorts of truly fascinating first person accounts of being a soldier in the Civil War.  These books are America’s Victorian literature.  We don’t have a Dickens, a Trollope, a Thackery, an Eliott…but we do have these.  And they’re not only thrilling and entertaining but they’re also true.  There are dozens of these but two of the best are: War Years with JEB Stuart by W.W. Blackford and I Rode With Stonewall by Henry Kyd Douglas.
  • The Blue and the Gray, edited by Henry Steele Commager, is a chronologically arranged collection of excerpts from contemporary accounts of the Civil War.  The entries are usually short.  They’re like intellectual snacks.  But the selections were chosen because they gave the illuminating sense of “being there.”
  • If you’re feeling really ambitious, there’s a fabulous set of volumes by Carl Sandburg (he’s the poet)—2 volumes entitled The Prairie Years, and 4 volumes entitled The War Years.  Together they constitute a superlative biography of Lincoln and the American cultural and political environment in which he lived and governed. Make yourself a promise to read these volumes some time in your life.
  • Finally there is an ongoing series The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It, which will consist of four volumes published by Library of America.  McElfresh Map Company prepared the endpaper maps for each volume.

Paul McCartney, Lyricist

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Paul McCartney, in spite of characterizing himself as a composer of “silly love songs,” is in fact a superlative lyricist. In my opinion, McCartney’s best lyrics set very comfortably in the company of John Lennon’s and Bob Dylan’s. And perhaps in some ways they’re even better than his two contemporaries.

The acclaimed lyrics of Dylan and Lennon don’t usually survive contact with an unadorned piece of paper. Dylan’s phrasing of his lyrics on the recordings make them valid but they sure sound nutty when someone like Joan Baez covers his songs respectfully and pronounces the lyrics carefully. Ditto for John Lennon. Strawberry Fields, A Day in the Life, Across the Universe…lovely and meaningful songs but what we’re talking about is lyrics here. Isolate John’s lyrics and all you’ve got is gobbledygook.

In no particular order, here are a few Paul McCartney lyrics–coherent, evocative and quotable–that surpass Bob Dylan’s and John Lennon’s.

From I’m Looking Through You: I’m looking through you/ Where did you go? / I thought I knew you/ What did I know?

From Rocky Raccoon: Her name was Magill/ And she called herself Lil/ But everyone knew her as Nancy.

From Back in the USSR: Show me round your snow peaked mountains way down south/ Take me to your daddy’s farm/ Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out/ Come and keep your comrade warm.

From Get Back: Wearing her high-heeled shoes and a low neck sweater/ Get back home Loretta.

From Maxwell’s Silver Hammer: P.C. Thirty One/ Says we’ve caught a dirty one.

From Helter Skelter: You may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer.

From Her Majesty: I want to tell her that I love her a lot/ But I gotta get a bellyful of wine/ Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl/ Someday I’m gonna make her mine.

From Two of Us: You and I have memories/Longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

From I’ve Got a Feeling: All I was ever looking for/ Was somebody who looks like you.

From She Came in Through the Bathroom Window: And so I quit the Police Department/ And got myself a steady job/ And though she tried her best to help me/ She could steal but she could not rob.

From You Never Give Me Your Money: One sweet dream/ Pick up the bags and get in the limousine.

From Lady Madonna: Friday night arrives without a suitcase/ Sunday morning creeping like a nun/ Monday’s child has learned to tie his bootlace/ See how they run.

From Hello Goodbye: You say yes/ I say no/ You say stop/ And I say go – go – go/ Oh no/ You say goodbye/ And I say hello.

From Let It Be: And when the night is cloudy/ There is still a light that shines on me/ Shine until tomorrow/Let it be/ Let it be.

From The End: Oh yeah !/All right !/ Are you gonna be in my dreams/ tonight?

Do you see what I mean? These are phrases that can punctuate casual conversations. They’re useful hi-lights for everyday use. They have a classic touch. You’d be surprised how handy it can be to drop “You may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer” into some cocktail party chit chat. Or get folk’s attention by an impromptu quoting of “Her name was Magill, and she called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy.”

Remember, you heard it here first.

Beatle Cover Songs

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The Beatles, among their other numerous qualities, often managed the rare accomplishment of surpassing the original artist(s) when they did a cover version of someone else’s songs. The most obvious example is their version of Twist and Shout. They literally created a new song out of the Isley Brothers’ goof-off rendition. The Isleys did a thin, tinny, high pitched, almost a novelty take on the song. The Beatles instrumental line-up and John Lennon’s vocal transformed the song into one of the all time great rock numbers, a surging instrumental and vocal performance…rock & roll with no holds barred and the floodgates open.

Other bands and singers may have made more noise or screeched higher but I’m still incredulous when I listen to the Please Please Me album version of the song and still more taken with the rendition performed at the 1963 Royal Variety Show after John’s “… the rest of you just rattle your jewelry…” quip. It’s a stunning performance before probably the worst possible rock and roll audience. These weren’t screaming teenagers and shrieking girls out front. These were the Royals and their ilk if you can imagine it.

My fictional rock and roll group The Sparrows in Sidereal Days, The History of Rock & Roll, A Romance, are enthralled by both the song and the performance when they see The Beatles perform it live on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1963. The Sparrows are conditioned to the frantic, gimmicky antics of the stars of the day, the Jerry Lee Lewis’s and the Little Richards, who kicked and screamed and careened around the stage during their wild numbers. The Beatles and John Lennon stood literally stock-still and let loose the massive barrage of controlled shock waves that was Twist and Shout. It was the sedate stage presence of The Beatles while launching into this staggering song that leaves the fictional Sparrows limp with admiration.

(In a hundred years, if it becomes necessary to explain rock and roll to generations as yet unborn and unknowing, I would suggest that the last living fan dust off Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode, Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue and The Beatles’ Twist and Shout and stand back to see what happens.)

Less successful – in fact I would have to say, unsuccessful compared to the original – was The Beatles’ take on the American girl group The Cookies’ song Chains. The original is a perfect acoustic rhythm guitar arrangement with classic hand claps (credited in Sidereal Days to the fictional Sparrows grateful for any excuse to be in a recording studio) and the great vocals by the Cookies. It’s a nice easy swaying song with its spare instrumentation accompanied by the innocent but helplessly sensuous vocals of the Cookies.

The Beatles offer up the weakest track in what I still consider just about my favorite of all their albums, Please Please Me. They forgo the steady strum that paces the Cookie’s version and they replace the Cookies’ sultry voices with their bright British vocals. On this cover, Chains, The Beatles prove once again the old adage that nobody but nobody is perfect. Even The Beatles.


The Greatest Beatle Article Ever

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The best, and I mean the absolute best article I know of on The Beatles, appears in the August 27, 1966 Saturday Evening Post. It’s entitled “The Monarchs of the Beatle Empire.” The author, James Morris, clearly gives the impression that he is an older, slightly sniffy Brit, distinctly posh and old school, who has been reluctantly and gradually charmed by The Beatles. (The Beatles after all had been household names in Britain since early 1963.)  His article is a vaguely aloof, slightly snobby effort to explain how and why this happened to him and what he thinks of them. This generational and class distance that he maintains from his subjects, this sort of ironic affection combined with a wry and witty writing style fit perfectly with his subjects. The Beatles are perfect subjects for James Morris’s approach, being, themselves, rather ironic characters who never took themselves too seriously.

A photo of The Beatles standing together holding up their MBE’s for photographers is given a perfectly appropriate caption, “Standing in a Beatle version of attention, Ringo, John, Paul and George…” It’s the Fab Four casually holding out their awards, unabashedly bored.

Another accompanying photograph is of The Beatles onstage but it’s a shot of them as seen from above. We see them from directly overhead, the amplifiers, a piano, the drums, the pre-amps, chairs, microphones, spare guitars set on the stage floor behind the amps. What catches the attention of the author, and startling to the reader, is the profusion of electrical cords and cables that are strewn about the stage as The Beatles perform. The cords and The Beatles throng to the microphones, to the amplifiers, to pre-amps, to the guitars. The Beatles perform amid a swirl of electrical spaghetti. The photo caption cheerily observes, “Plugged in and fancy free, The Beatles cut loose during a concert inParis.”

A third photo is of John Lennon and Harold Wilson. The caption, “Standing beside Prime Minister Harold Wilson, John Lennon, somewhat a head of state himself, gives an enigmatic ‘V’ sign.”

The clever impishness of the captions rather successfully matches the knock about, off-the-cuff humor of The Beatles themselves. The author manages a literary tightrope of being both erudite and hip.

Morris writes, “No history of the 1960’s will be complete without a Beatle footnote, and, above all, no future history of England will be true to itself unless it has a paragraph, fond or scathing, frivolous or profound, about these irrepressible scions of what Winston Churchill loved to call “The Island Race.”

This is good stuff. Not the pap of the fanzines, not the au courant pop-dash of the Rolling Stone type magazines.

Morris writes knowledgeably of the place of Liverpoolin post-war Briton and notes that The Beatles released the humor, the brash and bouncy irreverent interior monologue that characterized the denizens of what the rest of Briton considered a dreary cultural backwater. The Beatles “…Mersey accent, which not long ago would have seemed to most Englishmen barbaric, now falls with an attractive bite upon the ear.”

Though sick and tired of the “disrespect” so prevalent in post-war Briton, in plays, in novels, in protests, “…The Beatles’ disrespect has been of a different kind. It is eminently genial. Somehow or other it does not often give offense.” Morris goes on to say that The Beatles “…have expressed something that most of us inEnglandhave instinctively felt – that the old values did need a cheerful dust-down. Why should we all be manly? Why should life be quite so real, quite so earnest?”

James Morris brings back the marvelous fun of those early Beatle days and makes it perfectly clear once again what cheerful avatars they were before their immense fame began to encrust them and the cultural vultures broke through their delightful and astonishing nonchalance.

My Butcher Album Cover

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Beatle fans in 1966, maybe especially the ones who lived in small upstate NY towns, had a very remote connection with the band, no matter how fanatical their devotion. Especially perhaps upstate 16-year-old fans whose family didn’t own a television. That would be me.

I had all the albums and the singles, generally two of each, so I could go to sleep at night with one side playing and the flip side ready to drop off the changer and play. News of The Beatles was seldom in the newspapers, occasionally there’d be something in Life, Look or The Saturday Evening Post, the large format picture-type magazines, and sometimes in Time or Newsweek.

Without a TV, it was easy to miss The Beatles occasional appearances on American television. I recall once standing in the lobby of a local restaurant waiting to see the band on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1965 when a lightning strike knocked the transmission off the air. Otherwise, if I knew they were going to be on television, I’d have to go to watch them on my grandparent’s TV.  I’d be concentrating every atom of my being on their bewilderingly brief appearance and fending off my grandparent’s observations. “They look like girls. Look at that hair.” “They must be wigs. Men can’t grow their hair like that.” “How can you tell the songs a part. They all sound alike.” “Which one is Ringo?”

Adults all knew about Ringo. They didn’t know John, Paul, George.

So for me, The Beatles existed almost entirely in still photographs and magazine articles. (The best article I’ve ever read about The Beatles, accompanied by the best photograph I’ve ever seen, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and will be the topic of my next blog!) A wonderful enthusiast, fan and editor was Gloria Stavers of 16 Magazine. Invariably there were Beatle photos (“pix” they were called) and interviews (made up I’m sure) and gossip about the Fab Four. “Paul married?” “John divorced?” “George leaving?” “Ringo quitting to run a beauty salon?” More mature but still a fan magazine with more in-depth coverage, was Datebook. Datebook became notorious for innocently reprinting the interview John Lennon had given months earlier in England to Maureen Cleave, a confidante of the group. It caused no stir in England but his remark that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus caused a serious controversy in America. The Beatles had been wanting to break with their “four mop tops” image and this, at least, adroitly accomplished that.

Which brings me to my story. Also on deck was the new Capitol Records Beatle album. Yesterday and Today. As usual, for the American buyers, Capitol had patched together an album consisting of tracks from the British LPs Rubber Soul and Revolver, singles, flip sides of singles and British EPs (extended play records, a format little known in the U.S.) and a couple of tracks intended for future release in the UK. Suddenly, a rumored Dadaist-like Beatle album cover that the group had pushed for—with the obvious intention of breaking the mop top image—had become superfluous and counterproductive. John’s “Jesus” remark had done that in spades and now there was need for some American damage control. No further provocation necessary.

The “fanzines” carried this news. A few copies of the album with the offending cover had actually been released and then pulled from the shelves. Other already printed copies were unpacked from the shipping boxes and had the initial cover removed and replaced. The replacement cover, incidentally, featured four deadbeat, bedraggled, slovenly Beatles standing around a sort of footlocker/packing case staring deadpan and bleary-eyed at the camera. Paul sits in the trunk, John sits cross-legged on top of it, George and Ringo stare blankly. In and of itself rather an extraordinary album cover for the pop music phenomenon of the 20th Century. However, in the hurry to get Beatle product to insatiable fans, Capitol in a few cases simply pasted the new cover over what became known as “The Butcher Album” cover photograph.

The photographer, whom John described while stinting as a deejay on WPLJ in NYC as “a bit of a surrealist,” was Robert Whitaker. Robert Freeman had been the photographer whose soft focus images of The Beatles had graced most of their album covers (With The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles For Sale, and Rubber Soul) and it was Freeman’s evocative photographs that fixed the early image of the group. It was this “image” that John especially was out to break. He resented the rebellious image cultivated by the Rolling Stones and felt that it was gained at the expense of The Beatles. (Insiders were later to say that the Rolling Stones were gentlemen passing themselves off as thugs while The Beatles were thugs passing themselves off as gentlemen.)

Furthermore, The Beatles, and Paul especially, were upset with the liberties Capitol took with Beatle product in the US releases. The group sequenced the running order of the tracks on the UK releases with great care. Capitol, as already noted, scavenged through the available material and repackaged the album tracks as they saw fit. Irksome as this was to the group, the final straw for Paul was on the Capitol release of Rubber Soul. Here, the quick warm-up strums that preceded the opening chords of Paul’s I’m Looking Through You were inadvertently included on the track as it was presented on the US album. Paul was aghast and annoyed at Capitol’s carelessness. (Personally, and Paul notwithstanding, I greatly prefer the offending track on the American LP. I n a way, it’s the first bootlegged Beatle song!)

The Beatles decided to register their complaint that Capitol had “butchered” their Rubber Soul album. They decided that the cover photo they supplied for the next Capitol compilation album would depict the group in white butcher smocks with doll parts and cuts of meat draped around them while the band smiled maniacally at the camera. Paul merely looks innocently bemused. That was the intention of the photo but circumstances, including John’s “Jesus” remark, seemed to indicate that this time, The Beatles had quote—gone too far.

Assiduous fans of The Beatles, even those of us in remote upstate NY were aware of the controversy and followed it carefully. It came out that a few of the albums had been shipped with a replacement cover simply pasted over the offending cover. It was revealed that it was possible to identify these rare specimens because Ringo’s black turtleneck on the “Butcher” cover was could be dimly seen coming through on the upper right hand corner of the replacement cover.

Ah hah!

Mr. Gabriel was the wonderful man who ran Olean’s local record store, Melody Corner, at 235 N. Union Street. Mr. Gabriel had a listening booth lined with salmon colored acoustic tiles and he would allow us high school kids to listen to records to our hearts content. He appreciated his steady clients and I was one of them. After all I bought two copies of all The Beatle (and Bob Dylan) albums as part of my sleeping arrangements. I informed Mr. Gabriel about this rare chance that a “Butcher” cover might slip through. He said, “I’ll tell you what. My new shipment of albums comes in on Thursdays and the new Beatle album is scheduled to come in this week. You go down to the Blue Bird bus depot and pick up the package and you can be the first one to go through it and see if we get one.”

I was at the bus depot. I picked up the shipment, brought it back to Melody Corner. Mr. Gabriel opened it and I began my inspection.

It wasn’t looking good and I was getting down to the last few Yesterday…and Today albums when I saw it. A small V-shaped black smudge showing through the upper right hand corner of the replacement cover. I paid my $3.97 and prepared to set off with my prize. Mr. Gabriel said, “You plan to steam it off and see what’s underneath?” I said “Yes.” He said, “Remember to take the record out of the sleeve before you steam it. Otherwise you’ll warp it.” That was excellent advice and I took it. The cover, held a foot or two away from the steaming spout of a tea-pot, slipped easily off and there it was. The fabulous “Butcher album cover.” The cover was beautiful. The paper it was printed on had a grainy, fabric-like texture. The only other album I ever owned like it was Bob Dylan’s The Times Are Changing Album.

Like the majority of albums at that time (1966) my copy was in mono. The rarity of stereo copies makes them worth considerably more to collectors (a Wall Street Journal article indicated that there are only seven stereo covers known to exist.) The steamed off “steam trunk cover” is also safely preserved.

All of this just goes to show that being a knocked out Beatles fan is not all fun and games.

 

Thinkin’ of Lincoln

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McElfresh Map Company will be watching a new movie coming to town with more than a little interest.

We received a phone call at our office on the afternoon of August 26, 2011 from Terry Alford, a professor at Northern Virginia Community College.  He wondered if we’d be willing to share some information about Civil War map making with some folks making a Lincoln related Civil War movie.  I said certainly.

Very shortly thereafter I got a telephone call from a woman named Leslie McDonald. She was with a company called “Office Seekers.”  She was interested in having someone with a Civil War map background to answer some questions.  She was with a movie company.   I said I’d be quite prepared for that eventuality.

We talked back and forth a bit, I answered some general questions.  She said she would like to e-mail a detailed set of questions if that was all right. I said that would be fine. She also asked if I’d be willing to suggest additional questions that “they hadn’t asked but should.” That impressed me. She wanted to get things right. “So,” I said, “This is a real movie, a TV movie, or what?”

She told me it’s a movie based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals.  The director of the movie was Steven Spielberg. I  said, “Ah, this is a real movie.” She laughed. “Oh yes.”

She had some general questions regarding reference material, Civil War map resources, sample Civil War era maps and the preparation and use of maps before, during and after a battle.

That evening (6.06 PM) a list of 12 questions was e-mailed to me. The questions were mostly map specific:

How would they update troop movements and how would they do this for the President?

How did they track movements on maps?

What type of writing instruments did they use to update maps, i.e. pen, pencils, colored pencils?

How would maps in the White House differ from the field maps?

Some of the initial questions also regarded the treatment and handling of battle casualties and soldiers killed in battle:

Did they write down who died right away or after the war was over?

As per Leslie McDonald’s request, the next day I e-mailed her a brief overall perspective of the who, what, when, where, why and howof Civil War mapping.  How important maps were, especially to Union forces operating on unfamiliar ground in unfriendly territory.  I told her where to find examples of Civil War maps and descriptions of how they were prepared and used and to what effect.

I also emphasized what an immense affair the Civil War really was and how magnificently a ramshackle government inWashingtonmanaged the whole affair.  The various departments were casually organized, the army and navy operated in a very off-the-cuff manner compared to the hidebound rigidity of the modern military.  The President throughout the war never travelled more than 100 miles from Washington, wrote his own speeches, and ran the nation and the war with the assistance of two secretaries.

To provide perspective, I noted that the death rate of soldiers in the Civil War, if adjusted to the present population of theU.S.would be 3,000 soldiers killed and dying every day for four years.

I also described the topographical challenges faced by road bound, foot and horse-powered armies.  How a slight grade or a three foot deep creek could stop 50,000 men dead in their tracks. How the marching armies lived off the land and had to keep moving or starve.

I also assessed the capabilities of the Union and Confederate armies and pointed out that Union forces faced a far greater challenge than the Confederates because they had to march, fight, capture, hold, occupy, supply, and continually advance through the southland.  The Confederates didn’t have to fight pitched battles around Detroit, or Chicago or New York.  The Union had to capture and hold New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, Savannah, Vicksburg et al.

Over the next days and weeks I answered questions:

How would maps be carried in the field?

Answer: Sherman, e.g. carried them in his saddlebags. Others in map canisters. Cavalrymen stuck the maps in their pockets.

What sort of maps did the President have in the White House?

Answer: Most likely Lincoln’s office contained U.S. Coast Survey maps (this organization is the predecessor of the modern National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and standard commercially printed maps (Colton’s e.g.) The maps specifically, historically, known to have hung in Lincoln’s office were a U.S. Coast Survey map of KY and TN  and a “statistical” slave map, showing by lighter and darker shading the slave population of the different regions of the country.

What sort of maps were in the War Department’s telegraph office?

Answer: What’s described as “a common U.S. map” on the wall (meaning a commercially printed U.S. map) and then there were map files, filing cabinet-like wide drawers in which maps could be laid flat and stored.

I also described the various instruments the mapmakers would be using: the Schmalcalder compasses, plane tables, field glasses, the watercolor paints that would come in blocks rather than tubes. I further informed the moviemakers that there was no way for Lincoln or Secy of War Stanton to interfere in the actual progress of a battle. I told them Lincoln or Stanton might urge the generals to “put all of your men in” but they’d have no way of knowing what was happening on the actual battlefield.

My last e-mails in early October with the “Office Seekers” crew was to supply names and contact information for locating the appropriate topographical instruments to “decorate” the movie set.

Note the a map displayed in Lincoln’s office in the trailer below.

 

A Really Big Show

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The “behind the scenes” look at the Ed Sullivan Show in Sidereal Days is based on photographs and descriptions supplied by such informed “we were there,” rock & rollers as Ringo Starr and Jerry Allison, the great Cricket (Buddy Holly and the…) drummer. The various biographies of Buddy Holly provided written and photographic documentation of his two appearances on the show, and The Beatles Anthology is rich with similar data and accounts of their first appearance on the show. (The 73 million viewers in 1964 would be the equivalent of 146 million viewers in 2012. Even the viewership of the Superbowl doesn’t come close to that.)

Ed Sullivan himself is a vivid and familiar figure but a great plus for me in researching the Ed Sullivan material for the book was to see in person appearances by Ed Sullivan and his number 2 man, son-in-law Bob Precht, in the movie Bye, Bye Birdie.  I had to scrub the initial description of Precht I’d written because I’d made it up.  Figured no one would know or care what he actually looked like.  Bob Precht’s brief, fortuitous appearance was the only good thing about that otherwise execrable movie.

The dilapidated state of the production equipment used on the show and described in the book is accurate. Most of it, painted in clumsy khaki, was military surplus. The high drum riser that makes it impossible, during the rehearsals, for Billy Tuck to hear his band-mates actually happened to Jerry Allison when Buddy Holly and the Crickets appeared on the show. The Crickets appeared and performed with that handicap. The Sparrows explain things to the set designer (who was the actual set designer) Bill Bohnert.  Bohnert muses aloud about an earlier drummer whose complaints about the same issue were disregarded.  He’s thinking of Jerry Allison.

All the incidents and preparations described in Sidereal Days were fact-based and realistic.  The man who chauffeured the Sparrows around, “Louis Savarese” was a real person and an actual chauffeur.  His appearance in Sidereal Days and his claim to fame is the fact that in February 1964, it was Louis Savarese who chauffeured The Beatles aroundNew York.

Speaking of The Beatles… While their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show is pretty familiar to most of us and has been seen by most of us somewhat recently, it’s a real education to see a rerun of the ENTIRE Ed Sullivan Show. We hear what a jolt the appearance of The Beatles was to the culture of the day. But to see their performance in the context of the rest of the show—including the TV ads and the other acts—is to witness one era being snapped shut like a cheap suitcase and carried out the door.  An amazing and instantaneous transformation.