Tag Archives: The Beatles

The Beatles, Abbey Road Unused Alternate Cover Photos

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The Photos The Beatles Didn’t Use For The Cover Of Abbey Road

Abbey Road 01 photo Iain Macmillan 1938-2006

Abbey Road album cover outtake photo – Iain Macmillan

If you are a Beatles fan, and visit London there is a strong chance that if you venture just outside the Abbey Road studios you will find groups of Beatles fans recreating their own version of The Beatles famous walk across the street while someone photographs the scene. The Abbey Road cover is considered to be one of the best and most imitated album covers in rock history.

The photo session took place on August 8, 1969 and photographer Iain Macmillan was given ten minutes to photograph The Beatles. Macmillan perched himself on a ladder in the middle of the street and took only six photographs of the group, one of which became the final album cover.

Here are the other four photos that did not end up being used for the cover. Click on any photo to enlarge.

For The Beatles fan who owns everything you could purchase your own set of the photos, but you would have to spend some big bucks. A set of the five unused photos with one signed by Macmillan was auctioned Continue reading →

The Ed Sullivan Show Was Not First With The Beatles

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Jack Paar Featured The Beatles One Month Before Sullivan

The Beatles with Ed Sullivan 1964

Ed Sullivan, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and John Lennon

With Beatlemania nostalgia peaking this month, it is interesting to take note of something that seems to be a common misperception, that the Beatles made their prime time American TV debut on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964.

In fact the Beatles were noticed by Jack Paar when he was visiting England in the fall of 1963. A film crew captured them performing and the footage was shown on the Jack Paar Program on January 3, 1964, more than one month before the Ed Sullivan Show.

The big difference was for the Ed Sullivan Show the Beatles came to the United States for the first time and performed live on the program. Beatlemania had hit the United States and the impact reverberates to this day.

Many underestimated the staying power of the Beatles. After their first Sullivan appearance, McCandlish Phillips of the New York Times wrote, “At their present peak, the Beatles face an awful prospect of demise. They are a craze. Anyone at the center of a craze finds that everything he touches turns to money. But since a craze is a source of inflation, it may precede a crash.” He could not have been more wrong. Even Jack Paar thought the the Beatles would be a passing fad when he showed them on his program.

Here is Jack Paar reminiscing about the Beatles with a clip from the original 1964 program.