Throwing back to the week of February 8, 1964, we find a charming young quartet known as The Beatles reaching Billboard’s top spot for the first time with ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’
This song launched Beatlemania in the U.S., selling millions of copies and hanging on to #1 on the Hot 100 for seven weeks. It was eventually replaced by the band’s ‘She Loves You,’ which was already a hit in the UK.
I guess the Random iTunes Fairy is in a mischievous mood this weekend.
Out of more than 200 songs by the greatest rock band of all time, she has chosen to offer up The Beatles’ worst recording: ‘Revolution 9.’
To be fair, this is the 19th Beatles song to appear on a Random Weekend. I guess the l (bad) luck of the draw was going to settle on this one eventually.
I’ve covered the horror, international and animated films of 2023, and now it’s time to tackle pretty much everything else.
As I write this I’ve seen 96 movies released in 2022, the most I’ve seen from any recent year and yet still a couple of dozen short of everything I want to see. Some of the titles I’m still waiting to catch up with include Till, The Whale, To Leslie, and a handful of foreign language and documentary releases.
In the meantime, I’m going to write a few words about the movies between #11-40 on my list, minus the titles I’ve already covered this week.
Even the most basic and uninspiring Beatles songs have interesting back stories.
‘Hello, Goodbye’ is the sort of fluff that Paul McCartney could write in 15 minutes, and that’s kind of what he did. When Alistair Taylor, one of Brian Epstein’s assistants, asked McCartney about his songwriting process, Paul sat down at a harmonium and asked Taylor to do a call-and-response. Taylor would say the opposite of whatever word McCartney offered up, and Paul built the song around that framework.
I’ve always ranked The Beatles’ Let It Be in the lower half of their albums. That’s not saying too much, given the excellence of everything they released, but still, it’s never been a favorite.
I found a whole new appreciation for the album, however, after watching Peter Jackson’s Get Back mini-series, which documented the creation of Let It Be in fascinating detail. Now when I listen to it, I can picture the laughs, the fights, the creative chemistry that made The Beatles work.
