I've recently been checking out a YouTube channel, titled Film Retrospective, that covers the making of different famous albums by sixties rock groups. The most notable ones are the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Each posting covers an album in a chronological order, discussing the different tracks in the order that they were recorded, with a lot of footage showing the band members, producers, sound engineers, or anyone else who happened to be in the picture. I am the most interested in how the Beatles went about developing songs and recording them, as well as how they got along with each other and others. With them, it seemed to me that the biggest change occurred over the years with John Lennon, who was very negatively affected by the torrid, whirlwind pace of concerts, public relations events and recording studio sessions that manager Brian Epstein imposed on him and the rest of the band. Lennon had for years been floating around the idea of quitting the Beatles...it's really amazing, especially seeing him in an unstable state on some of these videos, that he waited until near the end of 1969 before pronouncing himself "divorced". As for the Rolling Stones, they had their own problems with founding member Brian Jones, who like Lennon did not have the emotional constitution to handle the fame and limelight and allowed himself to become heavily dependent on mind-altering drugs. Watching these YouTube videos starkly exposes the frailty of human existence...these folks were the success stories that others only dreamed of becoming, yet there was a great amount of sadness and resentment with them that their striving never seemed to help with. I think that so far my favorite video in this series was the one about the Beatles' making of the Magical Mystery Tour album in 1967...click HERE to see it. I have a theory about Lennon's developing strategies of dealing with the stress placed on him, too. He, in my opinion, came to collect people around him like Yoko Ono, Yannis "Magic Alex" Mardas, and their second manager, Allen Klein, to shield him from the pressure and influence of others (such as Paul McCartney, George Martin and the media). But that's just my theory. Check out some of these videos, especially if you know and like the Beatles and Stones...
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