Preview: Beatles Music Scholar to Publish New Book

Full-time Beatles music scholar Aaron Krerowicz is set to publish his next book, Days in the Life, in July 2016. The story chronicles his travels while on a Beatles presentation tour of the U.S. alongside his travel companion, his father John Krerowicz. Below is the foreward to this journal-style publication. (Content copyright ©Aaron Krerowicz. Reprinted here with permission.)

FOREWARD

Not often do parents and their offspring get chances to spend time together after the young escape the elders' influence. And many times they don't want to.

But this is a story about a father and son who did want to spend time together, sharing a road trip as well as an appreciation for a band that has influenced global pop culture for more than half a century: The Beatles.

After earning advanced degrees in classical music theory and composition, Aaron Krerowicz (30) turned his analytical ears to pop music. Since 2012, he has worked as a Beatles scholar, lecturing extensively throughout the United States and England and authoring several books. Twice he combined lecture tours with family vacations: to Colorado in 2014 and to Missouri in 2015.

The Missouri trip was in a 2012 Jayco travel trailer that his parents purchased several months before. That trip went so well that Aaron proposed a follow-up. His mother had to work, but father John
Krerowicz (62) was retired. The two traveled through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in March 2016, with Aaron delivering programs along the way.

During the trip, Pop and the pop music aficionado kept journals meticulously documenting their travels, and regularly posted their writings on Aaron's Beatles blog. Those blogs, supplemented with additional anecdotes and recollections, form the basis for this book. All of the events and conversations here are real, though some minor details (such as dates and names) have been altered.

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Bill Harry Interviews 'Get Back' Author Donovan Day

Author Donovan Day ('Get Back') was recently interviewed by legendary Mersey Beat founder and Livepool native Bill Harry. The following is reprinted here with permission from Mr. Harry himself.

"Interviewing Donovan Day about his novel Get Back in which a young man travels back in time to prevent the assassination of John Lennon, I asked the following questions:

Bill Harry: You studied creative writing. Does that mean you were interested in fiction, writing novels, or is that a description of a writing course? I'm interested in pursuing the thought processes of a person writing a first novel: When you decided you wanted to write a novel, which ideas came into your head? Did you consider several possible themes to write about? How long did it take before you decided on exactly what you wanted the novel to be about? Why John? Why science-fiction? It is a basic theme to go back in time to alter the past, but there are consequences, some call it the butterfly effect. You mention people who helped you regarding the complexities of time travel (what happens if you go back and kill your grandfather, for instance), what exactly did they advise you? Were you aware of Stephen King’s novel about the man who travels back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Why is the book described as being for 'young adults'? This seems to be a new trend with novels such as 'Twilight'. Exactly what does it mean, that the novel will particularly resonate with people of a certain age?

Donovan Day: I took a number of fiction writing courses at Columbia University in New York and, yes, I definitely had an eye toward writing fiction. It's fairly typical in the U.S. and Columbia is considered one of the best of the best, up there with Harvard and Yale, probably the two best universities in the USA. Many novelists here have MFAs (Masters of Fine Arts ) -- advanced degrees -- that they believe give them the inside track with publishers. I don't think I'll be going that far.

I was aware and influenced somewhat by Stephen King's '11-22-63' about the assassination of JFK. But I read that a few years ago. What prompted this book was a dream. I'd been reading a lot about The Beatles because I had met Diz Gillespie and he was telling me about his times hanging out with Brian [Epstein] and The Beatles. That spurred my interest so I began reading and then I had this dream where I was in the studio with the boys and jamming with them. They knew I was from the future and all went well until John asked me specifically about HIS future. I couldn't answer him, and then I woke up.

Well, the dream was so vivid that I began writing. Time travel books are tough because one must be careful that what you do in one section makes sense in another. For instance, John meets Lenny at various times in the book...the '60s and then 1980. Obviously, John had to remember him. Early readers kept pointing this out to me so I was as careful as possible.

I'm aware of the butterfly effect but I wanted to take a different approach in this novel because, while the butterfly effect sounds good, how does anyone know? No one to my knowledge has time traveled so in this novel, I decided I would change the past so, for example, Jim Morrison lives on. John could not live on -- not because of the butterfly effect -- but because Yoko's mother perished and thus Yoko would never be born.

I think time travel by its nature is science fiction. Why young adult? That's a tough one. The main character is a teenager so I guess that's the main reason, and I wanted to introduce younger people to the '60s and The Beatles. That said, a number of people have told me that they think I should target baby boomers -- those over 50 years old now -- because they will relate more to the music. That could very well be. I think there is an innate interest there.
I had to take some license but tried to stay true to the 'facts' of The Beatles, and worked hard to get their characters to speak as the real flesh and blood people."

Donovan Day's novel is available on Amazon here.

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Five Fun Facts about Sgt. Pepper

If you're a Beatles fan, I probably don't even need to tell you that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1, 1967, which means we're fast approaching the 49th anniversary of the album's debut. Still less do you need to be reminded what a landmark album this was, and how it changed the direction of rock and roll history forever. 

(Barry Miles, in his Paul McCartney biography Many Years From Now, even went so far as to say that Pepper basically broke Brian Wilson's competitive spirit: "The release of Sgt. Pepper finally destroyed his ambition to produce the greatest rock 'n' roll album ever. He abandoned his current project, Smile, and spent the next two years in bed.")

Here are five fun facts about the Sgt. Pepper album that you may not have known:

1. The whole concept began with food seasoning

No, really. Paul was ready to tackle a new project where The Beatles could be anonymous (Paul always did enjoy recording anonymously -- hello, Thrillington), and while eating with Mal Evans, he hit upon an idea:

We were having our meal and they had those little packets marked 'S' and 'P'. Mal said, 'What's that mean? Oh, salt and pepper.' We had a joke about that. So I said, 'Sergeant Pepper,' just to vary it, 'Sergeant Pepper, salt and pepper,' an aural pun, not mishearing him but just playing with the words. (Barry Miles, Many Years From Now)

The Digbees took the concept to the next logical place with their parody song "Sgt. Pepper Spray."

2. John wanted Hitler on the album cover

The Pepper album cover is an icon above all icons in rock music history. Some sixty-plus famous figures are depicted in the cover art, including Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, and former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe.

But John, being John, wanted to add a bit of controversy, and according to Bill Harry's The John Lennon Encyclopedia, Lennon requested that Adolph Hitler be included among the famous faces. (He also thought it would be a good idea to have Jesus on the cover, despite the fairly recent dust-up over his "bigger than Jesus" comments, because WHY NOT?)

Can you imagine if Hitler had been on the front cover? It would have been a completely different look.

3. George Harrison was barely involved in the album

Just as Paul McCartney was deciding that doing an anonymous album was a good idea, George Harrison was discovering a central idea behind Indian music and religion, that music could and should help you discover your true self. Needless to say, these two directions couldn't have been more opposite, and George's apathy towards the album concept is quite apparent.

George's one composition for the album was an eastern-style meditation ("Within You Without You") that includes a lyric lamenting "the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion." He couldn't have been too thrilled with the idea of dressing up in a costume for the album cover and pretending to be a member of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

Paul McCartney played lead guitar on the title track, as well as "Good Morning Good Morning," while the album's watershed moment -- "A Day in the Life" -- found George doing nothing more than shaking the maracas. (He managed to play some harmonica for "Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!" as well.)

4. "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" were originally intended to be on the album

Arguably two of the strongest compositions written by either Lennon or McCartney during their pre-Pepper hiatus, "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields" were among the first to be recorded when the band convened to work on the Pepper sessions. 

The suits-and-ties who ran the business, however, needed a new Beatles single for a hungry marketplace who were starting to worry if The Beatles were going to release any new music ever again, and so these two dynamite songs were released as singles and not included on the final album. 

But just try to imagine the alternate universe where Pepper also included those two tracks. It might have ended existence itself.

5. Paul sang the "ahhh" transition on "A Day in the Life" (unless it was John)

Want to get into a fight with a fellow Beatles fan? Just suggest that, in between Paul's "dream sequence" ("woke up, fell out of bed") and John's final verse ("I read the news today, oh boy"), it's actually Paul singing the "ahhhs" and not John.

Geoff Emerick in his book Here There and Everywhere says John sang those vocals, and Geoff was there, so he should know. Of course, this is the recollection of a man reaching back decades to remember a single point among thousands of hours of studio details, so maybe he's wrong.

John C. Winn in his book That Magic Feeling says that on February 3, 1967, Paul and Ringo worked on Take 6 of the song, with Paul "adding some soaring 'aahs' over the circle-of-fifths segment that linked back to the final verse."

Yes, it sounds like John. Until it sounds like Paul. Here's Paul, singing a line from his song "One of these Days" with the same vocal "color" found in "A Day in the Life." You be the judge!

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Octopus' Garden Review of Donovan Day's 'Get Back'

Adapted with permission from Octopus' Garden fanzine, Volume 25, Issue #3, March 2016. Review by Tom Aguiar.

Welcome to another journey through the literary world of The Beatles. On this trip we’re going to look at Donovan Day’s 2015 book Get Back: imagine…saving John Lennon, an exciting fiction story that poses the question: what if you could have saved John Lennon?

So turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream because the bus is about to leave the station.

Get Back: imagine…saving John Lennon by Donovan Day. Park Slope Publishing, Brooklyn, New York.

Imagine that you have the opportunity to go back in time and save the life of John Lennon. Would you do it? Would you risk changing history? And would it be for the better? Time travel is a question that has been discussed by scientists for ages because changing one thing in history will change another, and so on. And what effect would it have on the time traveler’s own life? Furthermore, is it even possible?

Donovan Day tackles these very questions in this, his first book, and does so in a way that answers many of the questions. It is not the first time that someone has written about changing the past through time travel. Some books have treated this topic either from a horrifying point of a view or as a light-hearted comedy. It’s a tricky challenge to tell the story without slipping into the sci-fi genre but Day is successful at accomplishing the task.

The story revolves around Lenny Funk, a 17-year-old spending the summer in New York City with his grandparents. To make some spending money, Lenny takes his guitar down into the subway station and sings. He is attacked by some punks who beat him and steal his guitar. The resulting concussion, along with listening to his grandfather’s old iPod Nano loaded with songs from the 1960s and 70s while falling asleep, transports young Lenny back in time to meet one of his heroes, James Taylor.

There are a number of twists and turns within the story and the first comes when a girl he meets on the subway named Yoko (named after the Yoko) listens to the story and tells Lenny that her grandmother, who died when Yoko was four years old, actually knew The Beatles. Lenny then takes another solo trip back to the 1960s where, posing as a reporter, he actually meets the band. It isn’t long before John Lennon suspects the truth about Lenny and the two become friends.

Lenny then takes further trips back in time with Yoko and the journey ramps up into an exciting ride of “what ifs,” as Lenny begins to change events that happened in the past as we know it. Upon each return trip, Lenny checks to determine whether he was successful but soon discovers that many of the events of his own history have also been affected, resulting in changes in his life and of the lives of the people close to him in 2015.

There are characters throughout the book with names reminiscent of Beatles songs, but it is never overdone. In fact, it enhances and adds to the story. You can accept the names as the coincidences that they are intended to be. Day is a fan of The Beatles and the other musicians portrayed in the story and he gets their attitudes and mannerisms “spot on.” Day’s vision of what John would be like in 2015 is intriguing and very believable.

The unintended consequences of his actions become real and present problems in Lenny’s life, some extremely painful, and Lenny is soon faced with the serious question: were the changes he made worth it? Was changing history the right or wrong thing to do? Lenny is faced with some difficult and heart- breaking decisions as his ability to return to the past is decreasing and will soon be gone.

There are many twists and turns that will keep the reader immersed in the story, but the final twist will surprise you.

Get Back:imagine…saving John Lennon is Day’s first book but it won’t be his last, as his talent with a challenging topic like time travel presents an exciting and dramatic story that will surprise and satisfy.

A great story by a talented author. I give this book a grade of A+. 

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3 reasons why George Martin deserves the "Fifth Beatle" title

By now you have probably already heard the sad news of George Martin's passing, on March 8, 2016. As the first record executive to "discover" The Beatles, as a mentor, as a collaborator, as a schoolmaster/father-figure, and as a friend, George Martin has long been considered "the Fifth Beatle." And rightly so. Here are three reasons why he deserves that honorific title.

He signed the Beatles

When so many record executives weren't willing to take a chance on this unpolished, scruffy group from Liverpool/Hamburg, George Martin saw the potential in their energy and in their charisma. He correctly understood that the raw talent could be polished up and made into something wonderful, so he took the chance and signed them to a record deal. Approaching George Martin and Parlophone was a last gasping effort, it's probably fair to wonder if The Beatles would have ever broken onto the professional music scene if he hadn't followed his instinct.

He let The Beatles be The Beatles

The story goes that George Martin really wanted The Beatles to record "How Do You Do It?" as their first single, because he correctly identified that song as a hit. They didn't like the song, so he did what any good mentor would do: he challenged them to write something better. When they showed him a lethargic, plodding version of "Please Please Me," he didn't dismiss it out of hand, he saw the potential in the song and showed them how to make it more commercial: speed it up, add some harmonica, change the harmonies, back off on the lead guitar. In the end, legend has it that George Martin recorded the song and told the lads, "you've just recorded your first number one song." He was right.

He let The Beatles be more than The Beatles

Some producers would have been tempted to forever freeze The Beatles in their lovable, mop-top image once they proved to be an international sensation. Why change a wildly successful formula? But when Paul McCartney wrote songs like "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby," or John Lennon wrote songs like "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "I Am the Walrus," George Martin helped them break the mold by actively getting involved. Would "Yesterday" have been the hit that it was without George Martin writing the string arrangement? Probably not.

Rest in peace, Sir George. Your name liveth for evermore.

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Five Awesome Beatles Bass Lines that Weren't Played by Paul McCartney

When The Beatles quit touring and began focusing more on creating music in the studio, track by track, their musical roles became less clearly defined. Sometimes Paul McCartney played drums ("Back in the U.S.S.R."). Sometimes Ringo Starr played the comb and paper ("Lovely Rita"). Sometimes John Lennon played Yoko ("Revolution 9").

One role that remained fairly well established, however, was Paul as the bass player. He had arguably the greatest command of the instrument, and knew exactly how to weave bass lines into songs in such a way as to make the bass part memorable (see, for example, "Nowhere Man," "Michelle," or "Paperback Writer").

Here are five Beatles songs where you'd swear Paul was playing the bass, but he's actually not. (Thanks to our friends at The Beatles Bible for supplying the well-researched data on these songs!)

Carry that Weight

A memorable part of the so-called "Abbey Road Medley," it's hard to imagine "Carry that Weight" without that driving, arpeggiated bass line thumping away. It sounds a lot like Paul's style, but in fact, he was busy pounding away at the piano and supplying rhythm guitar for the track. The bass part is actually played by George.

Two of Us

This sweet acoustic duet between John and Paul does feature a lower guitar part (heard especially in the outro of the song) that sounds like a bass guitar being played in its higher register, but what we have here is the perfect setup for a Beatles trivia question. There actually isn't a bass guitar on this track, but George did supply some low-note riffs throughout the song on his electric guitar, so technically, George played "bass" on this song.

She Said She Said

The bass part in this song is so McCartney-eqsue that it's practically impossible to believe it isn't Paul playing the part. The continual movement of the bass line, the classic "passing notes," and the overall prominence of the part all suggest a McCartney performance, but as Paul himself recounted to Barry Miles in Many Years from Now:

"I'm not sure but I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on. I think we'd had a barney or something and I said, 'Oh, [bleep] you!' and they said, 'Well, we'll do it.' I think George played bass."

It was indeed George playing the bass on this song.

Old Brown Shoe

The bridge of this song showcases a rollicking bass line that practically begs the listener to envision Paul playing the part, but in reality, he supplied the more prominent piano part on this song, as well as some lead guitar parts that double the bass line in the bridge. But the bass is being played by George, not Paul.

I Will

This may be something of a technicality, much like "Two of Us," in that there is no actual bass part being played on this track. But you can hear the bass throughout the song, right? Especially in the transition to the bridge, there is a very obvious set of low notes dancing around and moving up the melodic line, but the only stringed instrument being played in this song is an acoustic guitar, supplemented by some percussion supplied by John and Ringo. Those low notes? That's Paul, using his voice on syllables like "dum" and "doo" to provide a "scat" bass line.

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What does Paul McCartney's "Take it Away" have to do with The Beatles?

As Paul McCartney prepares to release the next two remastered albums in his "Archive Collection," the highly acclaimed Tug of War and its follow-up, Pipes of Peace (both due out on October 2, 2015), our friends over at WogBlog have posted a link to a new 2015 remix of the single "Take it Away."

Aside from being a catchy tune with a very McCartney-esque hook in the chorus, "Take it Away" is actually a not-so-subtle tip of the cap to The Beatles and the beginnings of their career. The lyrics tell the story of an "important impresario" who happens to hear a band on the radio while driving, "with a hundred miles to go." He decides to hear the band live ("in the audience, watching the show"), and offers them a contract ("with a paper in his hand").

While the lyrics may not explicitly give the story away, the music video goes a bit further, and Paul's own explicit commentary -- "It's basically The Beatles' story, I think" -- found in the DVD collection The McCartney Years makes everything clear. British actor John Hurt plays the part of the "impresario," and as Paul comments, "So here's John Hurt, who's kind of playing a Brian Epstein type character ... When we were looking for motivation for John, I'd say, 'What about Brian Epstein? Your character is sort of Brian-ish,' and he, I think, knew Brian, so that was one of the things that interested him in playing it."

Another fun connection between The Beatles, John Hurt, and Brian Epstein? Paul explains, "John had been a friend of ours for a long time, since, originally ... funnily enough, with Brian Epstein we went to the theater to see him appearing in Little Malcom's 'Struggle Against the Eunuchs,' which was a favorite play of ours at the time."

The lyrics of the song may not follow The Beatles' story precisely -- Brian Epstein didn't discover them in his car while randomly hearing them on the radio, for example -- but, in the words of Paul, "there was a loose connection with our story of how we'd ... how most bands kind of made it in those days, from the front parlor to things like radio, the stage, getting signed, and, if you're lucky, being a success."

Just remember: you never know who may be listening to you!

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