This Day in Music
The Beatles remain a cut above the competition, audiences are swindled, and Elvis keeps making movies, on this day in music.
Releases
1970: The Beatles release the album "Hey Jude" on Apple Records. Though technically a compilation album of non-album singles, B-sides, and two tracks from "A Hard Day's Night," it plays somewhat like a studio album since the majority of the songs were all recorded in the band's late era.
The track listing is fabulous, including "Don't Let Me Down," "Lady Madonna," "Rain," "Paperback Writer," and "Revolution," all of which never appeared on an LP.
With the release of the “Red” and “Blue” compilation albums in 1973, "Hey Jude" became somewhat moot, with "Rain" being the only song that doesn't appear on a Beatles studio or soundtrack album, but does appear on the Past Masters Volume II compilation. “Hey Jude” has therefore been out of print since the late 1980's.
Though there are reviews and ratings of the album, as mentioned in an earlier discussion, ranking compilation albums isn’t valid since they were not conceived as a whole, therefore those ratings are not detailed here, but can be easily found through a Google search.
In the charts, as expected for a Beatles release, the record did a brisk commercial business, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, No. 2 on the Canada RPM Albums Chart, and in Australia, it went all the way to No. 1. It has been certified 4x Platinum in Canada and 3x Platinum in the U.S., and has total worldwide estimated sales of over 3.5 million copies.
1979: Punk pioneers Sex Pistols release the forgettable album, "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle," the soundtrack to the forgettable movie of the same name.
With Johnny Rotten, the band's eclectic frontman, and Glenn Matlock, the band's best musician, long gone from the group, producer Malcolm McLaren used vocal and bass tracks from a rehearsal session in 1977 along with newly recorded guitar and drum tracks by Paul Cook and Steve Jones to recreate the Rotten-era songs for the soundtrack.
The rest of the album is cover songs with the remaining members sharing lead vocals, including a good punk version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” by Sid Vicious, from a scene from the movie in which he pulls a gun at the end of his performance and begins murdering members of the audience.
In a horrific case of life imitating art, Vicious would kill his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in New York’s Chelsea Hotel on October 11, 1978, then died himself of a heroin overdose a few months later, on February 2, 1979 while on bail awaiting trial. Both deaths occurred before the release of the movie and soundtrack.
Reviews of the album were poor. Though it reached No. 7 on the U.K. Albums Chart, it has sold only 100,000 copies in its lifetime, which still good for Gold certification in the U.K.
Charging money for this album was the real Rock and Roll swindle.
The Daily Elvis
1964: Elvis arrives at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles to begin principal photography on the movie Roustabout.
Pictured: The Beatles in April 1969 gathered at the side of John Lennon's 1968 Rolls Royce Phantom V 100-C.
