Paul McCartney: Good Day Sunshine
Did you know Paul McCartney used to have a mustache? Actually, I think he spelled it “moustache” since he’s English. Here I’ve redrawn Paul with the mustache/moustache… this look & style for Paul would have been somewhere around 1968 I guess.
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In a related story – I was watching some footage of the Beatles last night… it was from their first American tour, where they played that concert in-the-round… where Ringo Starr kept hopping down off his drum kit every so often… so he could spin the little circular drum-riser to face a new part of the crowd… and John Lennon, Paul McCartney & George Harrison kept pushing their amplifiers around and moving the mic stands… all the while vamping and interacting with a crowd of screaming teenie-boppers who would periodically pelt them with jellybeans.
What a head trip… watching the soon-to-be-immortal Beatles schlepping their own equipment around onstage while being thwacked in the head with little hard bits of candy… pretty funny stuff.
When They was Fab: a drawing of The Beatles (finally finished)
I think I’ve finished this drawing… it’s always hard to tell. I know I could keep working on bits and parts of it… probably forever.
But for now, I think this is what I will call “done.”
It took a long time to get back to this, but here is the finished (for today anyway) version of my Beatles drawing “When They Was Fab”. I’d posted this earlier as a work-in-progress… you can see here.
The full-sized, full-resolution print of this image is 25 inches wide x 19 inches high. Now that it’s finished, I’m really excited to have it framed… although it’s gonna cost me an arm and a leg, for sure! I plan to hang it up in my man cave… whenever I finally get a man cave…sigh* Until then, it will go in my family room, alongside a nice print of a mural I painted in college, and comical collection of photos of me and my girls.
One of the characteristics I really like about this drawing, is that it reminds me of a diorama.
You remember dioramas – right? Back in grade school, you would get an assignment to create a 3-dimensional scene depicting George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, and you were to build the whole thing in a shoebox using crayons, magic markers, bits of construction paper and a LOT of Elmer’s glue. You remember – right?
So it occurs to me that if I had any gumption (yeah, I said gumption) I would print out the separate elements of this drawing, and construct an actual 3D diorama out of them. I could frame it in a glass box and light it from behind. That would be cool… I wonder if I’ll ever do it ;)
* MORE ENTRIES *
When They was Fab… (work in progress)
The Beatles are a great story… ever since I was a kid I’ve had a fantasy about being there with Paul, Ringo, George & John scrappin it out on stage way back in those early days in Hamburg. Here is my interpretation of that fantasy.
This is a scaled-down version of the work in progress – the actual drawing is 19×25 inches… looking forward to having a print made and framed.
Here are some close-ups of the Boys (where you can see a little better how unfinished this is just yet)…
SIR
PAUL McCARTNEY
THE INIMITABLE
RINGO STARR
YOUNG GEORGE
HARRISON
JOHN
EFFING
LENNON
.
George Harrison: Something in the Way…
Here’s another commission for Craig @ www.Cuttingedgedjs.com/blog
They called George Harrison “The Quiet One”. Well you know the saying “You’ve got to watch out for the quiet ones… they’re the ones that will get you.” – or something like that… whatever. The point is, that while I was working on this drawing, I learned something about “Quiet George”. It seems that under the quiet exterior, the youngest Beatle really didn’t like to be screwed with.
Have you ever heard of a Beatles tune called “Only a Northern Song”? I hadn’t… at least not as far as I can remember. And if I had heard of it before, I’d obviously forgotten.
While working on this drawing, I looked up a list of Beatles songs written by George Harrison [used as background in an earlier version of this pic] and I saw that song title and couldn’t place it. So I went over to YouTube and and looked it up. You can listen to the song and read along with the lyrics here.
So, the point of the story – apparently The Beatles were under contract with Northern Songs Ltd. And, one day George actually read his contract. He found out that although John Lennon & Paul McCartney were contracted to receive song-writing royalties, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were contracted as mere session musicians. In other words George & Ringo got paid to show up and play, but that was it.
Ooof…! Hard shot to the ego…
So a pissed-off George Harrison wrote this stinking train-wreck of a song in protest. The lyrics are pretty clear… “Ill never see any royalties, so I don’t have any reason to make this a good song”!
I think people who know me would say that is the kind of thing I would do in the same situation… so there you go. One reason for me to like George Harrison. Maybe I will read about him…
-Sean Gallo
Sean Gallo Designs 