George Harrison – Prattling before the Pratfall

Back on a train of thought

It’s always a treat seeing pictures of Prue Bury for the first time. This one came from The Gilly on Tumblr. Prue was waiting for hairdresser Betty Glasow to take the pins out of her hair, and John pretended to cut it himself.

It’s interesting that John did that, in light of these comments by Prue:

John threw me by saying, “I hear you don’t like our singing!” Oops, what do I say to that? It is true that in one of the newspaper interviews I had said that I was impressed by their sharp repartee more than their singing! On reflection, a dumb thing to say. I plead nerves! Naturally I denied it and said the obvious, that one could never believe what one read in the press and wiggled out of it.

The boys were great fun on the train and kept Pattie and I laughing with their jokes. They were easy to get on with and natural in their behaviour, although John was the most reserved, and so when we were not shooting we sat and joked and smoked a lot… just cigarettes!! !! Ringo was mad about taking photos and snapped everything in sight, including me.

So even though John was the most reserved Beatle on that occasion, he was comfortable enough with Prue to play with her hair. But he didn’t get as silly as George did, wearing one of the hats the girls had — I assume it was Pattie’s. This picture is from the Yahoo group, Pattie Boyd’s Sixties Style.

All of these pictures were taken by Astrid Kirchherr, who signed this gallery print.

And here’s one of the snapshots that was taken by Ringo. I used it on Prue’s birthday last year. Lynn at Pattie Boyd’s Sixties Style did a great job of image editing to hide the page seam.

LIFE misses the Beat

LIFE Magazine, or what’s left of it, has an online George Harrison tribute. There’s also a print edition of the LIFE tribute to George, but it has an error that kept me from buying the issue. It’s a particularly annoying error, that was probably repeated from Bob Spitz’s useless, mistake-filled book, The Beatles: The Biography. The error is that Pattie Boyd appeared in A Hard Day’s Night with her sister Jenny. This is incorrect. Jenny “Jennifer Juniper” Boyd was not in AHDN. The girl with Pattie was, of course, my friend Prudence Bury. The paragraph below was scanned from Hunter Davies’ book The Beatles, in which Pattie mentions her two sisters (Jenny and Paula), as well as Prue.

A couple of years ago I said that Prue’s hair stylist was her friend Vidal Sassoon. Here is a picture of Prue sporting a Sassoon cut. Vidal is on the right, and the man in the middle is Alexander Plunkett-Green, husband of fashion designer Mary Quant.

Capitol-ism: from Bozo to The Beatles – 1

One of the the most controversial figures, and frustrating subjects, in the history of the Beatles is Dave Dexter, Jr. (1915-1990). Dexter hated the Beatles, both personally and professionally — as you’ll hear for yourself later — and yet he was in charge of their American releases on Capitol Records until the Yesterday and Today album, which was “prepared by Bill Miller” and was originally released with the infamous “butcher cover.”

Before I say anything more about Dave Dexter, Jr., listen to the recording on the player below. “The Chase” is exclusive to Dexter’s American version of “HELP!”, and it’s a noteworthy recording to be found on a Beatles record, but it isn’t by the Beatles.

“The Chase” is credited to Ken Thorne, who scored the soundtrack to “HELP!”, but it was performed by Pandit Shiv Dayal Batish (1914-2006). Click here to read his account of the recording session, and his subsequent involvement with George Harrison.

She’s a Prunette

George Harrison, Pattie Boyd, Prue Bury, Wilfrid Brambell, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney

Prue Bury was joking this week about something that I’ll be featuring later, and she said, “Spike Milligan had “I told them I was ill” put on his tombstone. Mine will be “I told them I was not a blond!” (Prue has kept her hair lightened for some years now.) Spike Milligan, along with Peter Sellers, was one of the Goon Show goons, a BBC radio program that was a favorite of the Beatles, and was one of the inspirations for the Monty Python troupe.

[audio:http://www.thegoonshow.net/downloads/mp3/54-09-28~s05e01~the_whistling_spy_enigma.mp3|titles=The Goon Show: The Whistling Spy]

As someone else on the Net says, commenting on Prue, “Real class tells. And this brunette is REAL class.” Indeed she is.

Prue Bury, George Harrison, Pattie Boyd

The pictures are courtesy of Lynn at Pattie Boyd’s Sixties Style on Yahoo!

A Beatle In Transit

Here’s a fab picture I found recently in a book that I hadn’t seen before. George Harrison with his parents, Louise and Harold, getting ready to fly to America for the second time. George had flown to the U.S. on his own in September ’63 to see his sister Louise. George’s father looked like George Orwell! The custom British European Airways logo was later seen in A Hard Day’s Night.