Collect all three Chris Montez posters!

Chris Montez, the man the LA Weekly calls "the great, underrated pop-rock legend" performs Friday night at El Camino College in Torrance California, along with a preview of the upcoming musical feature, El Viaje Musical de Ezekiel Montanez: The Chris Montez Story (and a special performance by the great lost Seventies pop band, Help Light).

This is the third in our series of collectible posters.

Collect all three (find the others here and here)!

And come to the show!

The concert is a fundraiser for the El Camino College Foundation and the Friends of the El Camino College Library’s Living Archives Project.

Showtime is Friday, November 19 at 8:00 pm in Marsee Auditorium on the El Camino campus. General admission is $25, plus $2 for parking. For tickets call: 310 329-5345 (toll free at 800 832-ARTS), or visit the Marsee Auditorium box office, Monday – Friday, 10 am to 6 pm.

Collect another Chris Montez concert poster!

Collect all three!

And see Chris perform along with a special preview of the movie and special guests at El Camino College in Torrance, California on Friday November 19th.

Click here for details.

And click here, then click the image to enlarge, hang it up or pass it around!

Bobby Hebb and The Beatles

Beatles songs for Schmucks

Patrick Goldstein writes a heartwarming story in The Los Angeles Times about how director Jay Roach got permission to use the Beatles song "Fool On The Hill" in his movie, Dinner for Schmucks.

We've condensed the inspirational piece to the crucial lines:

How did Jay Roach get a Beatles song
for 'Dinner for Schmucks'?

"...Jay Roach did what filmmakers do best. He wrote a long letter to Paul McCartney, making it clear that there was no possible substitute for having 'Fool on the Hill.'

"...Roach sent McCartney footage of the opening sequence, with the song playing over it, and--voila--permission was granted."

Punchline:

"Paramount/DreamWorks reportedly paid $1.5 million for its usage."

70!

Israel Baseball League crashes Beatlesfest!

Among the Beatles memorabilia vendors at the marketplace of the NY Metro Fest for Beatles Fans in Secaucus, New Jersey was Art Shamsky, member of the 1969 miracle Mets and Manager of The Year of the sole year of the lamented Israel Baseball League, the coverage of which, led by Our Man Elli In Israel, led to a much-publicized Pulitzer Prize nomination that was rejected out of hand by that schmuck Sig Gissler. The Beatles played Shea Stadium and Art was signing baseballs and copies of his book, The Magnificent Seasons. (Last year's New York Metro Beatles Fest odd man out booksigner was Butch Patrick, known to you as Eddie Munster.)

EXCLUSIVE! THIS JACKET IS THE MISSING LINK IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE BEATLES!

This jacket is the missing link in the secret history of the Beatles.

This is the jacket that inspired the collarless suits the Beatles wore as they took the world by storm in the first flushes of Beatlemania, immortalized onstage and on the cover of the smash I Want To Hold Your Hand/I Saw Her Standing There single.

According to the official history of The Beatles, the famed collarless suits they were made by London tailor Dougie Millings, inspired by similar suits created by French designer Pierre Cardin.

That is wrong. Millings did not get his inspiration from Cardin.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon got their inspiration from a man they brought to Millings' shop in 1963. It was here that McCartney informed him that they would be appropriating the style of the jacket he wore, and which had been designed for him exclusively in Hollywood.

Pictured above is the actual jacket that inspired them. This jacket was discovered in recent days in Los Angeles by our pals at Frozen Pictures. It will be on display and the story behind it will be revealed by filmmakers Burt Kearns, Brett Hudson and Joachim Blunck at the 36th annual NY Metro Fest for Beatles Fans at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Secaucus, New Jersey on Saturday, March 27th.

Joining them will be the man who wore it-- the man the Beatles copied.

"Beatles history will be rewritten," says Frozen partner Kearns.

"This is monumental, and Beatles fans will be a part of this," adds Hudson.

Developing...

THE MISSING LINK IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE BEATLES!

The day John Lennon played dead

In a flash of good taste the Daily Mail writes that the photo above "appears to forsee the moment twelve years later when Lennon would be gunned down in New York by crazed fan Mark Chapman."


It's one of a batch of unseen photos from "The Beatles' Mad Day Out,' the group's last official photo shoot, that surfaced today. Society photographer Tom Murray, who took the shots on July 20th, 1968 in London, says he'd found the originals in an envelope.


He's selling copies for £325 each or £425 with a frame but experts believe the originals are worth £100,000 each.


Click here to see more of Murray's famed photos.

Plastic Ono Band last night in Brooklyn

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Chris Montez to star at Beatles Fan Fest

The official poster for the NY Metro Fest for Beatles Fans has been released, along with word that legendary rocker and pop singer Chris Montez wil be among the special guests performing live at the three-day fest beginning March 26th at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Secaucus, NJ, a tunnel away from Manhattan.

A special Beatlescentric preview of El Viaje Musical de Ezekiel Montanez: the Chris Montez Story, the new Montez documentary from our pals at Frozen Pictures, was a surprise hit of the Fest for Beatles Fans in Chicago last summer. The film will also get free screenings this time around, with a special twist: Q&A and performance from the man himself.


The Fest for Beatles Fans is the original and longest-running Beatles celebration (since 1974). Ticket information here.

Montez doco information here.

The curse of The Knack

The curse of The Knack, of course, was that they wrote and played catchy, smutty pop tunes that took their first album to the top of the charts, but were almost universally hated by punk rockers and power poppers alike for their perceived arrogance and Beatles pretensions when they arrived in 1979 from the lame skinny tie LA "New Wave' scene with an obnoxious push from Capitol Records. Doug Fieger, who died of cancer today at 57, was in the end just another Beatles-obsessed rocker who wasn't half so bad sitting in with Art Fein on his Poker Parties and whose brother gained just as much prominence as the attorney for Doctor Kevorkian. Drummer Bruce Gary, who makes an unbilled cameo appearance in The Seventh Python, the Beatles-related Neil Innes film from our pals at Frozen Pictures, died of lymphoma three and half years ago, going to his grave complaining that he never got the credit or the royalties for the distinctive drumbeat he created for My Sharona, which topped the charts for six weeks in 1979.


Death has struck The Knack twice now, taking two rockers too young. Now there are two original members of The Knack still alive.

Just as there are two surviving Beatles.

Love means never having to say Erich Segal is dead

The spirit of Erich Segal hung over our coverage of the events surrounding the final days and cancer death of Farrah Fawcett. After all, he wrote the book and then the film that gave Farrah's on-again, off-again contentious lover Ryan O'Neal his defining role. Along with Love Story, Segal also co-wrote the screenplay to The Beatles' Yellow Submarine animated film, which is getting a remake this year and has figured into our coverage of all the Beatle Fan Fest activity. And of course, he is another, along with novelist Robert B. Parker, person of note who would figure into our Death of The Day category today, were it not so crowded. Erich Segal wqs 72. he suffered from Parkinson's Disease for the past 25 years. Parker, who wrote the Spenser crime novels, was 77. Robert Urich, who played Spenser in the TV series, died of cancer, too. And Tabloid Obits is what we have become...

Beatles remasters: "Oh, f*cking hell!"

We've been working our way through the Beatles remasters, and although we'd have preferred that the cleaned-up, brightened, state-of-the-art recordings had been released ten years ago when people were still buying CDs and we were still listening to music on big Spicas with tweeters and woofers and pre-amps and tubes instead of earbuds, car stereos and computer speakers, the tracks sound great and there are more than a few revelations:

* Paul McCartney does say "Oh, fucking hell!" at around 2:58 of Hey Jude (sound engineers Ken Scott and Geoff Emerick have said that Paul blurted it after hitting a clunker and that it was Lennon's idea to leave the mistake in the final mix-- buried low enough so no one will hear it-- turn up the treble and crank it and you can hear it now).

* Ticket To Ride is actually "Ticket to Rye," after all. Legend has it that someone mislabeled the tape box.

* Listen to the countdown on I Saw Her Standing There and tell us what you hear...

* And the winner is... Ringo! The remasters place his drumming loud and clear, front and center and reveal his work to be as masterful, innovative and wondrous as anyone's in the band.

We've still got to track down Magical Mystery Tour to hear what Lennon really shouts in Baby You're A Rich Man.

9.9.9: Remastered Beatles albums sold out at Amazon.com? No worries. They're on sale at Starbucks.

We were surprised to find Help!, Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper's and Abbey Road at the counter this morning.


Click here to check out the Beatles' remastered website.

The more they saw Chris Montez at the Fest for Beatles Fans in Chicago, the more they wanted to call him

The Chicago Fest for Beatles Fans is winding down tonight-- if "winding down" is the right description for an all-star rock 'n' roll blowout capping a weekend that starred the likes of Ronnie Spector, Earl Slick and two of The Hudson Brothers, among others with longstanding Beatles connections.


As thousands of fans passed through the O'Hare Hyatt Regency Hotel on the most humid day of the summer, the name most talked about as a future Fab Fest fave was that of Chris Montez, featured in a preview of Frozen Pictures' new project, El Viaje Musical de Ezekiel Montanez: The Chris Montez Story, that opened the Fest on Saturday with a grand screening in the Grand Ballroom and created more buzz this afternoon with a more intimate encore showing followed by a lively Q&A with producer Brett Hudson and director Burt Kearns.


Montez' winning personality, guileless honesty and brilliant talent as a singer and musician were equalled by the surprising story of his experiences headlining over the Beatles on the UK tour that coincided with the release of their first album and the first stirrings of Beatlemania.

Q&A

The duo promised the film will debut at a Fest for Beatles Fans in 2010, and there's already talk of Chris Montez appearing along with it.

At The Fest for Beatles Fans in Chicago: Artist captures Fab Four's British teeth

Details from full-size portraits by Shannon, known as The World's Greatest Beatles Artist.