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Deanie Parker, former publicist for Mecca Stax, now claims in Mojo magazine that the Beatles had booked two weeks at the Memphis, Tennessee-based studios in April, 1966 to record their seminal Revolver album. The plans were reportedly nixed over well-founded security concerns. Indeed, John Lennon’s infamous “bigger than Christ” comments to British journalist Maureen Cleave would cause a violent backlash in the South when they were reprinted in an American teen magazine a few months later. "I was seeing dollar signs,” Parker said. “I talked to [Stax founder] Jim Stewart and said, 'If the Beatles do come, will you give me permission to take the carpet up, cut it into squares and sell it?'" With the exception of Let It Be and a few other isolated sessions late in their career, all of Fab Four’s epochal recordings were made at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in London. It’s also claimed that the Fabs were offered secure accommodations in Memphis from another famous local musician—none other than Elvis Presley. —Jerry McCulley

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An upcoming photography exhibit featuring the work of the late Linda McCartney was announced last week. Paul McCartney, his photographer daughter Mary, and curator James Hyman went through thousands of Linda’s photos—many of them family snapshots, landscapes, and celebrity portraits. Also in the mix, of course, are photos of the Beatles.
“Hyman, my daughter Mary, and I have worked on it for three years,” Paul McCartney told the Guardian Unlimited. “The result is a sensitive selection of works that really demonstrates Linda’s prodigious output. The photographs not only illustrate her incredible talent as an artist, but as someone who was very much connected to the culture of the times, and wasn’t afraid to challenge herself, or her subject.”

The exhibit will open at the James Hyman Gallery in London sometime between April and June. It will be the first major exhibit of Linda McCartney’s work.

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The history of Beatles-inspired media projects is a decidedly spotty one, a canon that stretches from the shrewd, burnished nostalgia of Beatlemania! to outright cheese (ABC-TV’s 1977 Beatles Forever) and the mega-miscalculations All This and World War II and The Bee Gees as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Yet that didn’t stop director Julie Taymor from bringing the visual sense that’s enlightened work as diverse as her wildly successful Broadway adaptation of The Lion King and Oscar-honored Frida to a Beatles’-centered narrative Across the Universe, which is being hailed as one of the year’s most artistically ambitious films.

But for all its stunning and imaginative imagery, the director shrewdly rooted the soundtrack covers of 33 Beatles songs in a gambit that often evokes the essence of the epochal original recordings, yet informs them with subtle new emotional resonance via the mostly unfamiliar voices of her young, journeyman cast, seasoned by key performances from a few well-chosen recording stars. That tack essentially inverts the formula of the ubiquitous all-star tribute album, with Jim Sturgess’ opening performances of “Girl” and “All My Loving” contrasting the fiery, emotion-charged covers of “Hold Me Tight” and “It Won’t Be Long” that introduce romantic foil Evan Rachel Wood. Yet as Wood and Sturgess prove on later versions of “Blackbird” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” respectively, they can just as capably evoke the originals’ fragile, enduring sense of melancholy.

The grounded, quasi-theatrical sensibility of Taymor’s cast only makes the soundtrack’s handful of star turns all the more memorable. Bono teams with Secret Machine (who also provide savory renditions of “Flying” and “Blue Jay Way”) to issue a surprisingly forthright cover of “I Am the Walrus,” then teams with U2 bandmate Edge to channel some suitably Floydian ambiance into “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” while old hand Joe Cocker delivers a haunting, Delta-fied “Come Together” that once again underscores why the veteran English singer has long been one of the most consistently successful interpreters of the Lennon-McCartney catalog. Taymor’s artistic vision also evokes heavy doses of ‘60s iconography that not-so-obliquely pays tribute to the era’s other stars – and inspires Dana Fuchs to a manic performance of “Helter Skelter” that suggests Janis Joplin wailing from some undetermined sublevel of Hell.

"It was very organic," Taymor said of the film’s soundtrack in a BBC interview. "Where you become spontaneous is where you see what the performers can do, and where there's freedom I really go for the freedom. Like with Eddie Izzard in the recording studio he said, 'I'm not a singer', and I said, 'That's fine – learn the song (“Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite”) as best you can and then improvise.' So we cut his track from ten extraordinary improvisations, and on set he did it live. Ninety percent of this movie is sung live on film, it's not lip-synced."

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