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      Gen Z Beatles Fans Come Together on TikTok

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      “Can’t believe it’s 2023 and I get the joy of hearing a new Beatles song for the first time ever,” a 23-year-old says in a video post.Eloise Smith, 23, posted a reaction video on TikTok immediately after listening to “Now and Then,” the Beatles song released on Thursday.“Can’t believe it’s 2023 and I get the joy of hearing a new Beatles song for the first time ever,” Ms. Smith, who has a forearm tattoo rendering of the band’s “Abbey Road” album cover, wrote in the video’s caption.In an interview, she added that she was a third-generation fan: Her grandmother introduced her father to the Beatles, and her father introduced them to her.“I was 1 when George Harrison died,” Ms. Smith said.Ms. Smith, a civil servant who lives in Manchester, England, said she was “thrilled” weeks ago when she heard about “Now and Then.” The ability to immediately react and connect with other fans of the band through social media has made the experience of hearing a new Beatles song richer, she added.“Rather than just being in the kind of bubble of your friends, you can speak to people all over the world about it,” she said.The Beatles came late to digital media. The group did not sell downloads of its songs at Apple’s iTunes store until 2010, seven years after it had opened for business. When streaming became the main medium for music fans, the Beatles held out once more, waiting until 2015 before making the band’s work available on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms.The decision to go digital allowed new generations of listeners to more easily discover a group that had won the adoration of mobs of screaming fans in the 1960s. Now, Gen Z listeners regularly post Beatles-related videos on social media platforms.

      @earlgreylou i am having a big ol’ emotional moment rn #nowandthen #thebeatles ♬ Now And Then – 2023 Mix – The Beatles “This song is my Roman Empire,” one listener wrote in a TikTok post, referring to a meme claiming that men think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. In the comments of the video, several people replied that the video was making them teary. “Sobbing,” they wrote. Others said that they were excited to listen to the song with their grandparents.Skylar Moody, 24, said she spent most of Thursday trying to avoid “Now and Then” spoilers. A superfan whose social media presence is almost entirely devoted to all things Beatles, she wanted to record her reaction to her first listen, which meant waiting until she was finished with work. She kept her phone on silent all day, lest she accidentally hear a snippet of “Now and Then” while scrolling online.Ms. Moody, who lives in New Jersey and goes, fittingly, by @lucyinthesky.lar on TikTok, said she became a Beatles fan after watching “A Hard Day’s Night,” the group’s 1964 film, during a music history class in high school. She described the Beatles’ online fandom as “very diverse and also unified.”“No matter what age or demographic you’re in,” she said, “we can all come together in one agreement that we love the Beatles.”She continued: “This is where we find our people now. It’s so easy to go on social media and find a fan community of people to talk to that will understand you.”Late on Thursday afternoon, she made a reaction video of herself listening to “Now and Then” in her car. “I’m listening to the Beatles! In 2023!” she exclaimed, clutching her face through a two-minute clip in which she describes what she’s hearing.The Beatles’ company, Apple Corps, has billed “Now and Then” as the group’s “last song.” It’s the third Beatles release since John Lennon’s death in 1980, after “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” in the mid-1990s. All three were built on home demo recordings made by Mr. Lennon.“My heart feels so heavy right now, but in a good way,” Ms. Moody said in another TikTok video, adding, “We are experiencing their last song together, and this is going to go down in history. I’m so happy that we get to share it all together and that we’re able to share our thoughts like this online with people who get it.”Ms. Smith, the civil servant in England, said that she would try not to wear out “Now and Then” in the coming days. “I’ve been kind of listening to it every once in a while, to savor it,” she said, “because it’s such a big deal.” More

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      Beatles’ ‘Now and Then,’ Billed as ‘Last Song,’ Due Nov. 2

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      “Now and Then,” an unfinished composition from the late 1970s, was completed using technology that separated John Lennon’s vocal from a piano track.“Now and Then,” a recently finished recording from the late 1970s that is being billed as the “last song” by the Beatles, will be released on Nov. 2, more than half a century after the group broke up, thanks to advancements in audio technology, the band’s remaining members announced Thursday.The track — along with two other songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” that were released in the mid-1990s — was initially recorded by John Lennon as a demo with piano and vocals at his home in Manhattan’s Dakota building not long before he was killed in 1980.After receiving those recordings from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, in 1994, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr worked on the tracks, but found that the home recording of “Now and Then” could not be properly mixed with the tools of the time.Last year, according to the announcement, McCartney and Starr worked to complete the song, using the same audio technology — WingNut Films’ MAL — that the director Peter Jackson used to isolate instruments, vocals and chatter for his 2021 documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back.”“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” McCartney said of “Now and Then” in a statement on Thursday. “It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”Starr added: “It was the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room, so it was very emotional for all of us. It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.”McCartney previously caused confusion and consternation among purist Beatles fans earlier this year when he said that they had used “A.I.” technology to finish a final Lennon track. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this A.I., so then we could mix the record, as you would normally do,” he said at the time.But rather than any artificially created sounds meant to reproduce Lennon’s voice or playing, the official announcement makes clear, the technology was used to preserve “the clarity and integrity of his original vocal performance by separating it from the piano.” The same technology was used for last year’s rerelease of the 1966 album “Revolver,” which included a new mix sourced directly from the four-track master tape recordings.“Now and Then,” which will be preceded by a 12-minute making-of documentary the day before its release and a music video the day after, includes “electric and acoustic guitar recorded in 1995 by George, Ringo’s new drum part, and bass, guitar and piano from Paul, which matches John’s original playing,” according to the announcement. McCartney also added a slide guitar solo inspired by Harrison, as well as backing vocals with Starr in the chorus.The track will also feature a string arrangement by Giles Martin, the son of the former Beatles producer George Martin, who died in 2016, along with McCartney and the composer Ben Foster, plus backing vocals from three other Beatles songs — “Here, There and Everywhere,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Because” — as a nod to the Beatles’ stage show and album, “Love.”The release of “Now and Then” will be paired with the Beatles’ 1962 debut single “Love Me Do” as a double A-side single with an original cover by the artist Ed Ruscha. The song will also be included in the expanded reissue of the Beatles’ greatest hits collections, “1962-1966” (known as “The Red Album”) and “1967-1970” (“The Blue Album”), due out Nov. 10. More

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      Have You Seen Paul McCartney’s Lost Bass Guitar? Tips Welcome.

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      For decades, mystery has surrounded the fate of the missing bass that accompanied the Beatles as they rocketed to fame. A new campaign is trying to find it. Before Beatlemania, there was the distinctive Höfner violin bass — the first guitar that Paul McCartney bought after becoming the bassist for the Beatles.That bass can be heard on some of the band’s most famous hits, including “Love Me Do,” “She Loves You,” and “Twist and Shout.”Mr. McCartney picked up the instrument in a Hamburg music store in 1961, and it accompanied the Fab Four as they rocketed to stunning success, becoming the most famous band in the world. But the guitar vanished eight years later.A new campaign is seeking to find the missing instrument, and hundreds of people have responded, hoping to help solve the decades-old mystery: Where is Paul McCartney’s missing bass guitar?“It’s a hugely significant instrument in its own right,” said Nick Wass, a semiretired consultant for Höfner, the guitar’s manufacturer, who has joined forces with two journalists to try and track the guitar down. “It’s the bass that made the Beatles.”“The bass was absolutely at the heart of the origins of the Beatles sound,” said one of the journalists, Scott Jones, who worked for the BBC. “The smallest pieces of information can often lead to the biggest breakthroughs,” he said of their appeal for tips on its fate.Mr. Jones’s wife, Naomi, is the other journalist behind what they are calling The Lost Bass Project.The three Beatles fans have urged members of the public to come forward with any information that might help. No tip is too small, they say, and they are promising to keep sources confidential. They say they have already received several credible leads since the project was launched on Saturday.The instrument’s treasured place in Beatles mythology is intertwined with the band’s story. After the departure of their original bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, Mr. McCartney, who had been playing guitar, switched instruments to replace him during a residency in Hamburg in 1961. For that, he needed a new bass guitar.“I got my Violin Bass at the Steinway shop in the town center. I remember going along and there was this bass which was quite cheap,” he said in a 1993 interview with Guitar Magazine, adding that he had not wanted to go into debt and could only afford the Höfner, 500/1 guitar at the time. It cost about £30 pounds, or $38, he recalled. “And once I bought it, I fell in love with it.”Paul McCartney performing in 2017.Kamil Krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. McCartney took the guitar back to Britain, where it accompanied the Beatles through hundreds of gigs — from the band’s early concerts at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where they were spotted by Brian Epstein, who would become their manager, to the recording of their first two albums. It was repaired in 1964, according to the team behind the new search, and then used along with other bass guitars.But the last confirmed sighting of the instrument was in London in 1969, in video footage of the band members writing their final album, “Let It Be.” Rumors have percolated ever since about what happened to the instrument: The Lost Bass Project suggests that it could have been stolen or lost either from the basement of Abbey Road Studios, or from the Apple Corps recording studio on Savile Row.A representative for Paul McCartney declined a request for an interview. But Mr. Wass said he understood, from previous communications with Mr. McCartney, that he was keen to be reunited with the instrument. “He calls it the ancient one,” Mr. Wass said.Among the leads they had received, Mr. Jones said, were suggestions that the instrument could have traveled to the United States or Japan. But he added that all the leads need to be vetted. “Somewhere among that information there is going to be the answer,” he said.Other iconic instruments have been lost and found over the years — one close example being a Gibson acoustic guitar belonging to John Lennon, which was bought in 1962 and then lost the following year. Half a century later, it re-emerged and was sold at auction in 2015 to an anonymous buyer for $2.4 million.It is unclear what the market value of Mr. McCartney’s missing guitar would be, but the team behind the search insists that the effort is not for monetary gain, calling the guitar “priceless.”“We just want to know where it is,” said Mr. Wass. More

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      An Exclamatory Playlist!

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      Wham! Neu! “Oh! Darling” and more artists and songs that make a statement.George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley in “Wham!”NetflixDear listeners,If you’re looking for something light, fun and full of ridiculous ’80s fashion, I can’t recommend the new Netflix documentary about the pop group Wham! enough — it’s basically the documentary equivalent of a beach read.As someone who wasn’t around for Wham!’s heyday, the movie allowed me to live vicariously through its rise and appreciate things about Wham! I’d never considered before. Like how confident a producer and songwriter George Michael was from a young age. And also that Michael and his immaculately coifed bandmate Andrew Ridgeley really knew how and when to break up a band. They announced their imminent demise in 1986, and then played one epic final show at Wembley Stadium. “Wham! was never going to be middle-aged,” Ridgeley says in the movie, “or be anything other than an essential and pure representation of us as youths.”That sentiment made me realize how uncommonly perfect a band name Wham! was for this group. Goofy, youthful, monosyllabic, here-for-a-good-time-but-not-a-long-time and above all things — exclamatory! Adults, “serious musicians,” newspaper style guidelines: All of them tell you that exclamation points should be used sparingly. Wham! was having none of that. The duo said, “We’re going to make you write or speak an exclamation mark every time you use our name.”It got me thinking about the art of using exclamation marks in band names and song titles. Which, of course, calls for a playlist.Sometimes the musical exclamation point almost mimics percussion: “Turn! Turn! Turn!” or “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” Sometimes it helps you hear the voice of a particularly emotive singer, as I can only hear the phrase “Everybody Wants Some!!” in David Lee Roth’s wail. But more often than not, the musical exclamation point is simply a way to raise the stakes, to indicate (at the risk of overcompensating) that there is something ecstatic about the sound that accompanies it.Like Wham!, I’ll now make my graceful exit. All that’s left to say: Listen up!Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Wham!: “Everything She Wants”This is one of my favorite Wham! songs, perhaps because it sounds, uncharacteristically, a little sinister. As my colleague Wesley Morris put it in his great review of “Wham!,” “there is a kind of desperation in the average Wham! song, a crisis about either being trapped in lovelessness or excluded from love — a crisis audible, even to my young ears, as a wail from the closet.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Abba: “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”Famously sampled in Madonna’s 2005 dance-floor reinvention “Hung Up,” this lusty 1979 Abba classic also boasts some excellent parentheses use. (Listen on YouTube)3. Van Halen: “Everybody Wants Some!!”A double exclamation point? That’s bold. Then again, Eddie Van Halen’s solo in the middle of this 1980 track is, like any Eddie Van Halen solo, basically the sonic equivalent of a double exclamation mark. When Richard Linklater paid homage to this song by naming his (hilarious) 2016 movie “Everybody Wants Some!!,” he knew enough to honor the band’s punctuation. (Listen on YouTube)4. The Beatles: “Oh! Darling”The Beatles certainly knew how to employ the exclamation point: “Help!,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” and, if you expand the framework to their solo careers, John Lennon’s “Instant Karma!” I love the first-syllable exclamation in “Oh! Darling,” though: Its clipped agony contrasts with the way Paul McCartney stretches out that “daaaarling” and effectively captures the raw-throated desperation of his vocal. (Listen on YouTube)5. The Byrds: “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)”I confess that this song — and the Byrds’ lush, fluid delivery of that titular phrase — never really screamed “exclamation” to me. But given that it was written by Pete Seeger and known as a quiet folk ballad before the Byrds made it a No. 1 hit in 1965, those three typographical lightning strikes, though present in Seeger’s original title, now convey the excitement of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” gone electric. (Listen on YouTube)6. Sly and the Family Stone: “Stand!”Also the name of Sly and the Family Stone’s great 1969 album, “Stand!” is a command, an invitation and a call to action, bringing the listener right into the reality of the song. Its punctuation also effectively communicates the energy of the track’s ever-ascending chorus and frenzied, gospel-influenced final section. (Listen on YouTube)7. Los Campesinos!: “You! Me! Dancing!”There was a coy, sometimes run-on exuberance about many indie bands in the aughts, though few encapsulated that as expressively as the Welsh group Los Campesinos! Bonus points, of course, for exclamation points in the band name and song title! (Listen on YouTube)8. Neu!: “Hero”The name of the legendary krautrock group Neu! — German for “New!” — was, in a sense, a sendup of the consumer culture pervading the band’s Düsseldorf home in the early 1970s. As the wildly influential drummer Klaus Dinger said in a 2001 interview with The Wire, “‘Neu!’ at that time was the strongest word in advertising.” (Listen on YouTube)9. George Michael: “Freedom! (‘90)”In 1984, Wham! released a bright, buoyant single called “Freedom.” Michael chose to revisit that title — though now with a time-stamp, and an exclamation! — for this hit from his second solo album, “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1.” The lyrics revisit the image he cultivated back in those Wham! days, and reject it in favor of something truer to Michael’s authentic self: “Today the way I play the game is not the same, no way,” he sang. “Think I’m gonna get myself happy.” The exclamation mark sells it: This song was Michael’s liberation. (Listen on YouTube)Gotta have some faith in the sound,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“An Exclamatory Playlist!” track listTrack 1: Wham!, “Everything She Wants”Track 2: Abba, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”Track 3: Van Halen, “Everybody Wants Some!!”Track 4: The Beatles, “Oh! Darling”Track 5: The Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)”Track 6: Sly and the Family Stone, “Stand!”Track 7: Los Campesinos!, “You! Me! Dancing!”Track 8: Neu!, “Hero”Track 9: George Michael, “Freedom! (’90)”Bonus tracksRIP Tony Bennett, who was such a musical institution that part of me thought he might actually live forever. Rob Tanenbaum put together a playlist of 10 of his best-known songs, and Jon Pareles wrote a lovely appraisal that begins with quite a musical brainteaser: “Has there ever been a more purely likable pop figure than Tony Bennett?” I’m still mulling it over. More

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      Paul McCartney Says A.I. Helped Complete ‘Last’ Beatles Song

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      The song was made using a demo with John Lennon’s voice and will be released later this year, McCartney said.More than 50 years after the Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney said artificial intelligence helped create one last Beatles song that will be released later this year.The song was made using a demo with John Lennon’s voice, McCartney said in an interview with BBC Radio 4 that was released on Tuesday. He did not give the title of the song or offer any clues about its lyrics.“When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had, that we worked on,” McCartney said. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this A.I., so then we could mix the record, as you would normally do.”Holly Tessler, a senior lecturer on the Beatles at the University of Liverpool, said in an interview on Tuesday there was speculation that the song might be “Now and Then,” a song Lennon composed and recorded as a demo in the late 1970s.Lennon was fatally shot outside his New York apartment building in December 1980. His widow, Yoko Ono, gave the tape to McCartney as he, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, who died in 2001, were working on “The Beatles Anthology,” a career-retrospective documentary, record and book series.Two other songs on that tape, “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” were later completed by the three surviving Beatles using Lennon’s original voice recording and were officially released in 1995 and 1996.It is unclear exactly how McCartney was using the latest demo and whether any new lyrics would be incorporated.The use of A.I. technology to create music with the voices of established artists has raised a number of ethical and legal questions around authorship and ownership in recent months.This spring, an A.I.-produced song called “Heart on My Sleeve,” which claimed to use the voices of Drake and the Weeknd, became popular on social media before it was flagged by Universal Music Group. Similarly created tracks, including one using A.I. versions of Rihanna to cover a Beyoncé song and another using A.I vocals from Kanye West to cover the song “Hey There Delilah,” continue to rack up plays on social media.Other artists are embracing the technology. Grimes, the producer and pop singer, put out a call in April for anyone to make an A.I.-generated song using her voice. The results were mixed.Proponents of the technology say it has the power to disrupt the music business in the ways that synthesizers, sampling, and file-sharing services did.McCartney’s use of A.I. technology may recruit new fans, but it may also alienate older fans and Beatles purists, Tessler said.“We have absolutely no way of knowing, creatively, if John were alive, what he’d want to do with these or what he’d want his contribution to be,” she said, adding that it creates an ethical gray area.Over McCartney’s career, he has been quick to engage with new creative technologies, whether talking about synthesizers or samplers, she said.“I think he’s just curious to see what it can do,” Ms. Tessler said of McCartney. “I mean, it gives us some insight into his mind and what his creative priorities are, that given how much of the music industry is at his fingertips, that what he chooses to do is finish a demo with John Lennon. In a way, it’s very poignant.” More

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      Henry Grossman, Photographer of Celebrities and Beatles, Dies at 86

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      He was best known for his formal portraits of prominent politicians and entertainers. Less famously, he took thousands of candid shots of John, Paul, George and Ringo.Henry Grossman, a photographer who was best known for his formal portraits of celebrities and other public figures — but who also, less famously, immortalized the Beatles on film in thousands of unscripted antics while juggling a side career as a Metropolitan Opera tenor and a Broadway bit player — died on Nov. 27 in Englewood, N.J. He was 86.His son, David, said he died in a hospital several months after sustaining injuries in a fall.Mr. Grossman produced paradigmatic portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt, Richard M. Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor, Martha Graham, Leontyne Price, Leonard Bernstein and Nelson Mandela. He photographed new Metropolitan Opera productions for Time magazine and was the official photographer for many Broadway shows.His portraits of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were published on the front page of The New York Times on Nov. 23, 1963, accompanying the news that the young president had been assassinated in Dallas and succeeded by his vice president the day before.The Nov. 23, 1963, front page of The New York Times featured two formal portraits by Mr. Grossman: one of President John F. Kennedy, who had just been assassinated, and one of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had just been sworn in to replace him.Mr. Grossman’s sensitivity to classical portraiture’s interplay of shadow and light was inspired by his father, the artist Elias M. Grossman, an immigrant from Russia whose etchings were acquired by numerous institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.By the time Henry graduated from Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1958, he had compiled an impressive portfolio of portraits of guest speakers on campus and photographs of stage productions there. His fledgling second career as a singer would imbue him with an empathy for performers that helped him establish an unusual bond with celebrity subjects.He was only 27 — barely older than the Beatles themselves — when he was commissioned by Life magazine in 1964 to cover the band’s American television debut, on the popular CBS variety series “The Ed Sullivan Show.”Mr. Grossman photographed the hirsute quartet juxtaposed against a jungle of television cameras, amplifiers and other backstage impedimenta, and he shot from the balcony to capture their electrifying effect on the audience. His creative eye would be reflected in an archive of some 7,000 photos he would take of the Beatles over the next four years.That only a few dozen were published or even printed at the time — most famously a 1967 portrait for Life of the newly mustachioed band members — left other photographers (among them Robert Freeman, Dezo Hoffmann, Astrid Kirchherr, Jürgen Vollmer and Robert Whitaker) more closely associated with the Beatles than Mr. Grossman was.Only a few dozen of Mr. Grossman’s Beatles photos were published at the time he took them. The best known was this one, seen on the cover of Life magazine in 1967. Henry Grossman/Grossman Enterprises. All rights reserved.But Mr. Grossman’s archive of intimate moments at home, at private parties and during overnight recording sessions amounted to more images of the band taken over a longer period than any other photographer’s, according to his publisher, Curvebender Publishing.In 2008, Curvebender released “Kaleidoscope Eyes,” a limited-edition book of Mr. Grossman’s photographs documenting an evening at Abbey Road Studios in London as the Beatles were recording the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” In 2012, the company published “Places I Remember,” a hefty volume that included 1,000 of his Beatles photographs.The Beatles’ “Ed Sullivan Show” debut did not transform Mr. Grossman into a fan overnight. But during the band’s American tour that summer, he befriended George Harrison.“After that,” Mr. Grossman told The Times in 2012, “anytime I went to London, I’d check into my hotel, call their office to find out George’s phone number du jour — they had to change them, because the fans would find them out — and I’d arrange to spend a day with them.”“They were accustomed to seeing me with a camera, documenting everything that went on around me,” he explained in “Places I Remember.” “It was simply part of me, part of who I was. More than that, I had become a friend.”“I was first a friend and second a photographer,” he added. “So when I pulled out my camera, no one thought twice about it. No one cared. It wasn’t seen as invasive.”Among the many public figures Mr. Grossman photographed was Eleanor Roosevelt in 1960. Henry Grossman/Grossman Enterprises. All rights reserved.Henry Maxwell Grossman was born on Oct. 11, 1936, in Manhattan. His father died when he was 10, and his mother, Josephine (Erschler) Grossman, helped support the family by selling her husband’s etchings.After graduating from Metropolitan Vocational and Technical High School in Manhattan at 16, Henry earned a scholarship to Brandeis, where he received a degree in theater arts and did graduate work in anthropology — and where he first made a mark as a photographer.After returning to New York City, he began his career as a freelance photographer for Life, Time, Newsweek and Paris Match, among other magazines, and for The Times.His marriage to Carol Ann Hauptfuhrer in 1973 ended in divorce. He is survived by their children, David and Christine Grossman, who are both professional musicians, and his sister, Suzanne Grossman.While in his 20s, Mr. Grossman studied at the Actors Studio. After touring in the 1960s with the national company of the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Grossman, a tenor, made his New York singing debut at Carnegie Hall in 1973 and went on to appear with the Washington Opera Society and the Philadelphia Lyric Opera. In the 1980s, he performed in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Riccardo Muti, and in the next decade he sang in three productions at the Metropolitan Opera.He also did some acting. He made a brief appearance in the 1978 movie “Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?” while on location in Italy as film photographer, and he played a scullery worker in the original cast of the Broadway musical “Grand Hotel” for its full run, from 1989 to 1992.Jacqueline Kennedy in 1967. Mr. Grossman waited to be invited rather than insinuating himself into his subjects’ private lives.Henry Grossman/Grossman Enterprises. All rights reserved.Mr. Grossman was gregarious but largely unassuming, waiting to be invited rather than insinuating himself into his subjects’ private lives. That was how he managed to take photos for Jacqueline Kennedy of her children at home, and to accompany George Harrison on his “Dark Horse” tour of North America in 1974.“I learned a lot from the Beatles,” he was quoted as saying in the 2012 Times article. “I was interested in how they took to fame, how they used it. It wasn’t easy for them.“One night in Atlantic City, I asked Ringo how he liked seeing America. He took me to the window of his hotel room, pointed to a brick wall across the parking lot, and said, ‘That’s what we’ve seen.’ They were trapped.”“I guess one reason we got along so well was that they knew I wasn’t trying to get anything from them,” Mr. Grossman said. “And I think I got the pictures I got because I wasn’t posing them. I wasn’t injecting myself into the scene as a participant. I was just watching.“I was like a fly on the wall. I got what was there.” More

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      Book Review: ‘The McCartney Legacy’ by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair

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      “The McCartney Legacy” follows the superstar from the last gasp of the Beatles to “Band on the Run.” It’s 700 pages — and only the first volume planned.The MCCARTNEY LEGACY: Volume 1: 1969-73, by Allan Kozinn and Adrian SinclairAre the world’s libraries adequately stuffed yet with literature about the Beatles, still the best-selling band of all time, and their diaspora?Nah.Volume 1 of “The McCartney Legacy,” by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, arrives like a well-planned encore a year after the publication of “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” by Paul McCartney, edited by the poet Paul Muldoon. The latter volumes were packaged in Kermit green, presumably a nod to the two Pauls’ Irish heritage. The new book is a saucy red, as if inviting customers to stack it atop “The Lyrics,” stick on a bow and cue up the bouncy seasonal synth of “Wonderful Christmastime.”Peter Jackson’s documentary, “Get Back,” also released at the end of 2021, changed the way many people thought about McCartney: always popular but wrongly blamed for the Beatles’ breakup, and often critically drubbed as a middle-of-the-roader given to sappiness or, worse, insincerity. There has always been blatant ageism and sexism in the dismissal of certain McCartney tunes as “granny music” — and this is a problem why? — likewise the idea that his ease with children and nursery-rhyme dabblings made him less of a rocker.Watching McCartney in “Get Back,” his boyish face solemnized by a beard, show up consistently (and at least once tear up), urging “a serious program of work” as his bandmates sulked or even stalked off, rebranded him as a devoted boss who brought his whole self to the office. Seeing him pull the film’s title song out of the air, soaring on bass and guitar before sinking into pillowy ballads at the piano, reminded viewers that, oh yeah, that guy who could be kind of corny and hammy in MTV videos is a musical genius (“about the only one that I am in awe of,” Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone); while his confidence in a sweater vest made even lesbians of my acquaintance swoon. At 80, McCartney continues to fill stadiums with screaming, lighter-hoisting fans.Kozinn, a former reporter and critic for The New York Times, and Sinclair, an English documentarian, were influenced by the methods of Mark Lewisohn, the exacting Beatles historian currently at work on the second volume of a trilogy about the group (the first was 900 pages, and that was an abridgment). In a way “The McCartney Legacy” out-Lewisohns Lewisohn, taking almost 700 pages to cover only five years, from the dying embers of “The End” (1969) to the Duracell bolt of “Band on the Run” (1973), by the star’s new group, Wings.McCartney with his wife, Linda, in 1971. Despite limited experience, she joined him as a keyboardist in Wings.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesDescribed in minute detail are McCartney’s legal troubles with the Beatles manager he didn’t want, Allen Klein, and his retreat to rural Scotland with his new wife, Linda. Also the bumpy formation of Wings, which integrated the game but inexperienced Linda on keyboards and backing vocals — and his decision to go high (and get high, high, high) when his longtime writing partner, John Lennon, went low.But the text, dotted with tour ephemera and recording session recaps, reads less like a pop-rock “Power Broker” than a set of extended liner notes, a devoted document dump, assembled from diaries, court papers and reporting fresh and reconstituted. Seemingly finished with biographies since he authorized his friend Barry Miles to write “Many Years From Now,” published in 1997, the man himself was not interviewed for this project (though Kozinn has sat with him on other occasions) but gave the thumbs-up to other sources.The result is aptly patchwork, considering that McCartney — even as he became a billionaire — is constitutionally a saver and joiner of disparate parts, in life and art (listen to “Junk” for a meditation on waste in capitalist society). But it’s deft patchwork, the seams between old and new tucked away in the neat drawer of its index.Inevitably, too, “The McCartney Legacy” is a graveyard of the once-robust music print press: Melody Maker, Disc, NME — “Enemy!” McCartney once exclaimed. His jousts with journalists give the book some of its best points of tension. Displeased with a negative profile, he and Linda once wrapped up a turd made by their baby daughter Stella (now a major fashion designer), according to Wings’ former drummer Denny Seiwell, and sent it to the reporter responsible. “Hold your hand out you silly girl,” McCartney telegrammed one music critic, Penny Valentine, quoting the Beatles’ “Martha My Dear,” after she called his first solo album “a bitter disappointment.” She was just wrong, he told her. “It is simple it is good and even at this moment it is growing on you.”And you gotta love the aghast reaction of Clive James to the McCartneys’ somewhat cringey (though intermittently adorable) foray into television variety: a “monstro-horrendo, superschlock-diabolical special,” James wrote, that “burgeoned before the terror-stricken eye like a punctured storage tank of semolina.”Trivia, the coin of the realm in pop culture writing, is spilled here in abundance. Lots of it feels relevant or at least redolent, like that Seiwell once played at Mount Airy Lodge, the place in the Poconos known for heart-shaped tubs, and also at Judy Garland’s last performance. Other facts, like the exact dimensions and cost of the luxury liner that took the McCartneys from Le Havre to New York, might be superfluous.Most notably in a book that is all notes — both musical and literary — is how much its subject, in between eponymous albums, is forever trying to escape being Paul McCartney. The “man of a thousand voices,” as Valentine called him, is also a man of a thousand faces: writing songs for others under the fusty nom de plume “Bernard Webb”; checking into hotels under the alias “Billy Martin”; pretending to be a socialite named “Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington”; producing as “Apollo C. Vermouth”; signing his own sleeve copy as “Clint Harrigan”; even titling a song and album — his greatest, in my opinion — after a preferred pseudonymous surname, “Ramon.”There will be thousands more pages written about Paul McCartney, and yet, he seems to be taunting, we will never catch him.THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY: Volume 1: 1969-73 | By Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair | 720 pp. | Illustrated | Dey Street Books | $35 More