The U.S. Library of Congress is awarding Paul McCartney its third Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.
Librarian of Congress James Billington announced the prize Monday. An all-star tribute concert is planned for early 2010, though the library has not announced who will perform.
The 67-year-old former Beatle recently completed a five-week summer tour of the United States, including a stop in the Washington area.
Billington says it is hard to think of another performer and composer who has had a more transformative effect than McCartney.
Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon previously won the Gershwin prize. The library houses the manuscripts of the songwriting duo George and Ira Gershwin.
Moviemaker Robert Zemeckis wants surviving BeatlesPaul McCartneyand Ringo Starr to play themselves in his planned remake of the Fab Four’s animated classic Yellow Submarine.
Zemeckis and Disney bosses have brokered a deal that would allow them to rework the 1968 film and create a performance-capture 3-D digital production.
And Zemeckis – the man behind The Polar Express and Jim Carrey’s new animated version of A Christmas Carol – wants to get the Beatles involved.
He tells MTV, “We haven’t gotten the word yet on the two surviving Beatles, whether they’re interested in doing it or not.”
Please don’t make a mess of a classic movie from a classic band. Please. This is sacrilegious.
“American Idol” judge Simon Cowell has been the one stung by criticism from Beatles fans since remarking on CBS’ “The Early Show” last week that were the group to come before him in a talent competition, “We would have said, ‘We’ll take those three [John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison] but probably lose the drummer.’ Ringo, I’m afraid we would have said, is ‘bad news’.”
“I said it as a joke,” Cowell told The Times over the weekend. “It was a tongue-in-cheek interview. But the sensitivity surrounding the group shows how much the public still loves them. You make a joke about them and people get really upset.”
Cowell, for the record, was a die-hard Beatles fan growing up in England.
“’She Loves You’ was the first record I ever bought,” he said. He hasn’t, however, rushed out to get copies of the sonically upgraded Beatles CDs released last week. “I never saw them, but I bought most of their records…..They always sounded perfect to me, so I haven’t gotten caught up in having to hear the new ones.”
And what would Cowell, one of today’s key arbiters of what works and what doesn’t in pop music, have counseled a group that offered up a single that runs more than seven minutes, a ballad in which the refrain is sung 19 times during the final four minutes, as the Beatles did in “Hey Jude”?
“They wouldn’t hear a peep from me,” he said. “The one group worldwide I always wish I had signed was the Beatles.”
Sir Paul McCartney still can’t believe he and his fellow BEATLES survived the swinging sixties – because they took so many drugs and often couldn’t even think straight.
The Yesterday singer admits the Fab Four overused narcotics during their heyday and often fell asleep recording musical masterpieces they composed while high.
In an exclusive interview with U.S. news show Entertainment Tonight, he says,
“(We were) overdoing substances and really getting crazy, as we all were… (We’d be) falling asleep – the kinda thing when you can hardly get your head off the pillow. You go, ‘Woah, I’d better get my head off this pillow.’”
But one drug-induced state inspired McCartney to write Beatles classic Let It Be. He adds,
“I had a dream, where my mother, who had been dead, by then, 10 years came to me in the dream and was very sort of helpful and very calming, and it was lovely just to see her… and she said, ‘Don’t worry about it… Let it be.’ “I went, ‘OK’, and I felt so good… and I woke up and wrote Let It Be. I thought, ‘That’s a good idea for a song.’”
Big shocker here, thought this has been common knowledge for 40 years now?
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