WHAT: CITIZEN TALKS - “Getting Back to The Beatles: Two Weeks in January ‘69" - A Talk by Bill Kopp with Rich Nelson

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WHEN: Thursday November 11th 2021 from 7-9:00pm
***DOORS OPEN AT 6pm***

*** We are monitoring the ongoing Covid variants and will follow protocols that keep our community and staff safe. Guests will be updated as the event date approaches; vaccination cards and/or negative test results within 70 hours are required to be shown at the door for admission to the event ***

ABOUT:
Everybody knows the Beatles. In the space of just over seven years, they changed the face of music. And even as their creative collective was coming to an end, the indelible qualities that made The Beatles special was very much in full flower. Peter Jackson’s upcoming Get Back documentary is an attempt – more than a half-century after the fact – to set the record straight, to demonstrate that The Beatles were still a significant creative force, even at the end.

The group gathered for two weeks in January 1969 to rehearse, write songs on the fly, and generally hang out. First at Twickenham Film Studios then at their Apple Records headquarters on Savile Row, the band played, jammed, joked – and yes, sometimes bickered – while cameras and tapes rolled. Thousands of feet of film and audio tape captured their most intimate moments.

There was, of course, the 1970 LP Let it Be. A few tracks from the sessions have shown up on subsequent releases: Let it Be...Naked, Anthology 3 and the new Super Deluxe edition of Let it Be. But there’s much, much more. And – outside of fanatical bootleg collectors – most of the world has never heard the majority of the recordings from those January ‘69 sessions.

By the 21st century, an 83CD set of those recordings circulated among collectors. That’s not a typo: eighty-three compact discs. Those unauthorized recordings document the Beatles running though dozens of classics, songs that inspired them. But the sessions also captured the group at work on new material that they’d never release...at least not as The Beatles.

In fact, many new songs – variously written by John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison – were rehearsed during those January ‘69 sessions. And the finished songs themselves would indeed eventually be recorded and released as solo tracks. Those songs showed up on Paul McCartney’s self-titled solo debut, Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram, John Lennon’s Imagine, George Harrison’s epic All Things Must Pass, and even on an obscure Portuguese-only 45 r.p.m. single.

For the latest installment of Citizen Vinyl’s talks, Bill Kopp will present selections from the original sessions featuring the Beatles playing early versions of songs that would show up on solo albums. With minor exceptions, none of this material has been released officially. The recordings provide an additional window into the creative process of the Greatest Band in History, very near the end of their time together.

Asheville-based music journalist, author, collector and historian Bill Kopp, joined by co-host Rich Nelson, will guide attendees through a listening session and conversation focusing on these rare recordings. This special evening is an opportunity to peer into a musical window and experience the creative process of the Greatest Band in History.