Blogpost #13

Hello, Beatle people! You say it's your birthday? Well, it's Paul's birthday too, yeah! He was born June 18, 1942 (as every Beatle fan knows) and in celebration of Sir Paul's 67th, this week's show is a complete broadcast of his hard-to-find 1980 interview with Vic Garbarini for Musician Player & Listener magazine. It marked the first time Paul had agreed to discuss the Beatles since the 1970 breakup. Vic would later interview Ringo for the February 1982 issue.

The interview was taped in Paul's London office in May 1980 on a portable stereo cassette machine. It was published in Musician's August 1980 issue along with articles from noted music critics Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs. It was edited down to about an hour and issued to radio stations as a double LP with a copy of the magazine. Deejays were given permission to use the material freely to promote his McCartney II LP, so it got a lot of airplay. Some deejays failed to notice that there was an obscene word on Side 2, and they were reprimanded for letting it get out on the air.

After positive response from deejays and listeners, Columbia Records pressed 10,000 copies of the LP and released it as a limited edition on December 4, 1980. John Lennon's tragic death came only a few days later, and the LP quickly sold out. Another 47,000 copies were pressed, and it sold enough to reach # 158 on the Billboard album charts. It was later nominated for a Grammy award as Best Spoken Word Recording of 1981. It lost out to an hour-long 1944 radio sci-fi drama starring Orson Welles titled "Donovan's Brain". (Obviously, the recording academy hadn't heard Orson's LP when they voted for it, or else they would've known it wasn't a recent recording.)

The LP is currently unavailable on CD, if you don't include unauthorized pirated versions. Copies are available from used record dealers all over the world. My copy is the rare white label deejay version with a letter from Columbia along with the August 1980 magazine. For a list of topics discussed in the interview, here's a track listing from a Paul McCartney fan site.

Next week: another show for Beatles fans! I'll be celebrating the anniversary of the their first studio session in June 1961. Beatles expert Geoffrey Giuliano hosts a documentary on their early Hamburg days titled "The Savage Young Beatles".