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  • billyshakesbillyshakes NoVA✭✭✭ Park Avance - Dupont Nomade - Dupont DM-50E
    Posts: 1,402

    And no, I have never heard of either OMC or Pauly Fuemana, sorry.

    The name didn't mean anything to me either so I had to look him up. While I didn't know his name, I sure knew this song. You probably do, too. Especially as he is your fellow countryman and this hit #1 on NZ charts!


  • Posts: 4,960

    Yeah, I was supporting what you said, Chris, at least was my intention. I didn't lay it out well. I mentioned mastering only because it reminded me of it and what I mentioned is the only thing I know about its purpose. But main point was to corroborate about what you said about making sure the mix sounds as good as it can on the cheapest of systems is as important.

    It's amazing though this recording exists. I was wondering this morning how the heck did anyone have equipment to make a bootleg recording 1957. So I read in the comments about how a member of the church was a tape recording enthusiast and recorded the set, or part of it, that day. Also, apparently John and Paul met on the day. So that in itself sounds like a good enough reason to release the whole thing regardless of the sound quality.

    Every note wants to go somewhere-Kurt Rosenwinkel
  • billyshakesbillyshakes NoVA✭✭✭ Park Avance - Dupont Nomade - Dupont DM-50E
    Posts: 1,402

    @Buco It's amazing though this recording exists. I was wondering this morning how the heck did anyone have equipment to make a bootleg recording 1957.

    Bill Savory was a hobbyist/enthusiast recording radio broadcasts off the air as early as 1935. But your point is well taken, certainly a fortuitous set of circumstances led to this recording being made on this day. That or Marty McFly and Doc went Back to the Future to capture the moment. Hope they didn't need to use a Hot Tub Time Machine!

    rudolfochristBillDaCostaWilliamsBuco
  • ChrisMartinChrisMartin Shellharbour NSW Australia✭✭ Di Mauro x2, Petrarca, Genovesi, Burns, Kremona Zornitsa & Paul Beuscher resonator.
    Posts: 959

    Ah, yes, vaguely remember that.

    A quick Google reveals he was a New Zealander, but nothing to do with being a 'fellow countryman'. Just to confuse further I am a Brit living in Australia for the last 18 years, I used to spend a lot of time moving around in Europe and considered myself a European but it seems the government of my old country decided otherwise for me and since Brexit I am no longer that either, so I no longer have much of an identity at all. I think that song may have been successful over here in the '90s but I have only a vague memory of it being on British radio.

    (Or maybe I just was not listening that week)

  • billyshakesbillyshakes NoVA✭✭✭ Park Avance - Dupont Nomade - Dupont DM-50E
    Posts: 1,402

    I stand corrected. We'll have to settle for the Commonwealth as your commonality in the Venn diagram of identities. For what its worth, it reached #5 on the UK Singles charts. Then again, with Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, and the Macarena above it in the charts, no one can blame you for switching off the radio that summer! I always enjoyed BBC2 over BBC1 while I was living in the UK anyway.

    ChrisMartin
  • ChrisMartinChrisMartin Shellharbour NSW Australia✭✭ Di Mauro x2, Petrarca, Genovesi, Burns, Kremona Zornitsa & Paul Beuscher resonator.
    edited October 2021 Posts: 959

    Anyway, not wanting to be too picky but this may have been a couple of hours AFTER John first met Paul !

    On the day of the fete, July 6th 1957 ( my 2nd birthday !! ) John's group The Quarrymen were booked to play in the church hall at St. Peter's church Woolton in the evening but before that they played a few songs while being driven around the town on a flatbed truck. Accounts vary slightly, I guess all concerned did not realise at the time they were witnessing one of the most important cultural events in history so did not take notes, but it seems when the truck arrived back at the church they either played on a small stage in the church grounds, or more likely, stayed on the back of the (now stationary) truck. This is supposedly where Ivan Vaughn brought Paul to see his friends rock 'n' roll group for the first time. After a few songs, Ivan introduced Paul to John and his bandmates and they started talking. The festivities continued through the afternoon and evening with other attractions and a more typical 'fifties dance band, but Paul hung around as The Quarrymen did perform again later inside the church hall.

    That recording definitely sounds like it was recorded inside, so this must have been the later performance.

    It was after this later show that they retired to a corner of the hall where there was a piano. Paul borrowed John's cheap Gallotone guitar, retuned it, turned it upside down (to play left-handed) and played a word perfect version of 'Twenty Flight Rock' for a suitably impressed John, followed by a switch to piano for 'Long Tall Sally'. John immediately had an idea to ask him to join the ever-changing line-up of the Quarrymen but it was not until October later that year that they appeared on stage together for the first time.

    BucobillyshakesLango-Django
  • Lango-DjangoLango-Django Niagara-On-The-Lake, ONModerator
    Posts: 1,868

    Thank you Chris!

    Your diligent attention to detail tells me that you must be a fellow boomer!

    I’m glad a few of us here have some reverence for this terrible recording, which is a bit of a Holy Grail for Beatle worshippers.

    Now, can you imagine the auction price if somebody were to dig up Julia Lennon’s banjo?

    Paul Cezanne: "I could paint for a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing."

    Edgar Degas: "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.... To draw, you must close your eyes and sing."

    Georges Braque: "In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that can’t be explained."
  • ChrisMartinChrisMartin Shellharbour NSW Australia✭✭ Di Mauro x2, Petrarca, Genovesi, Burns, Kremona Zornitsa & Paul Beuscher resonator.
    edited October 2021 Posts: 959

    Ok, I have another confession. Yes, I am a 'fellow boomer' as I said above that fateful day was also my second birthday.

    So I grew up with that Beatles soundtrack right through my formative school age years which seemed to fit ok, at the age of eight or nine I could sing along the simple early songs; 'Love Me Do', 'From Me To You' etc and as I learned more about music as I got older, partly from my Dad's very varied record collection, partly through radio I grew with The Beatles so Sgt Peppers was an instant fit in '67 and even as I had grown out of 'BubbleGum' pop by '69 Abbey Road was exactly what I wanted to hear.

    BUT... as a precocious teenager I was drawn into the tail end of the 'Swinging Sixties' in London and already running a club putting on rock groups in our local sports hall dressed in my finest Carnaby Street rags when by the age of sixteen I left school and lucked a job at Apple Records as a general 'gofer' at their Savile Row HQ. That was the time when The Beatles were falling out and splitting up but it was still a magical place to be; the centre of the universe for any music fan.

    So yes, I do have some solid memories and deep felt ties to that music and that time.

    Much water has flowed under the bridge since but part of me has stayed way back there. (Another part of me was left at a Grateful Dead show, but that IS another story).

    I have been writing that book ever since; might get it done one day.

    1971

    WillieBucoBillDaCostaWilliams
  • ChrisMartinChrisMartin Shellharbour NSW Australia✭✭ Di Mauro x2, Petrarca, Genovesi, Burns, Kremona Zornitsa & Paul Beuscher resonator.
    edited October 2021 Posts: 959

    As for Julia's banjo, I doubt that survives, but I did have another 'close encounter'.

    I actually held Lennon's Rickenbacker and nearly got to keep it!

    While I was working for Apple I was sent to clear out Magic Alex's old Apple Electronics workshop at Boston Place in Marylebone. Alex had long been exposed as another fraud and they had sent him packing, but the workshop had been kept as somewhere to store a lot of the equipment accumulated down the years. I think the accountants decided they no longer needed any extra real estate and as far as Mal Evans and anyone else knew everything in there was just unwanted old junk. First time I went there I found John's 1964 Rickenbacker 325 the black one with the white scratchplate, it was sat on the stairs with a pickup missing, wires hanging out and only three strings. There was a lot of old junk and busted gear that was just being thrown away - I know of at least one Fender Twin Reverb that was saved by one of the drivers, but most of it was treated as garbage. We had hired a skip (the English word for a dumpster to any American readers ) which was on the street outside and told to throw everything in it. It was the only suitable fate for lot of the broken unidentified electronic detritus lying around but I asked Mal Evans if nobody wanted the guitar could I have it?  Mal initially thought that would be ok, "I don't see why not, it is all rubbish anyway" but then he thought it might be best if he asked John first. John of course was stuck in New York at that time fighting that green card visa problem but I kept on at Mal until a week or so later he said "no sorry, John wants it". I understand Sean Lennon now has custody of both of John's Rickys. Of course if I had just walked off with it, as happened to a lot of the Beatles gear, nobody today would believe it anyway - I don't know if the serial number was on record at that time, but with John and Mal no longer with us who would authenticate it anyway? Still, I was THAT close and I'll always remember strumming those three strings sitting on the stairs.

    One of the few guitars that would probably be worth even more than Selmer 503 if both were up for sale today.

    billyshakesBucoWillierudolfochristLango-DjangoBillDaCostaWilliamsadrian
  • billyshakesbillyshakes NoVA✭✭✭ Park Avance - Dupont Nomade - Dupont DM-50E
    Posts: 1,402

    Chris, maybe that guitar held the "secret" to the magic intro chord in Hard Day's Night! Those 3 strings. If only guitars could talk!

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