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| Elvis Presley sent Ringo the belt. "I bought the guns at Woolworth's." says Ringo. |
Above is my own scan from a clipping I have from the British newspaper The Daily Mirror, this particular clipping published 16 November 1964. I have many vintage clippings and am slowing beginning the task of scanning them all in for this blog. I don't necessarily promise anything we haven't seen before, but I will be including all articles and I also feel even the yellowed paper adds something special to these pictures even if we have seen them in better quality before. It makes me think of the fan that preserved these clippings all of those years ago.
Below is a colour image from the same photoshoot and I have written out the article that accompanied the above images.
THE BEATLES GO WEST...
And they're headin' for a bonanza on the '65 trail
by Patrick Doncaster
Ringo totes a six-gun. Paul and John, astride their nags, look baddies enough for a posse to be close behind. And George puts on the tough hombre pose. It's the Beatles way out west, pardners - a collection of exclusive pictures from their American scrapbook. They were taken on a ranch at Alton, Missouri, where Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr hid up briefly from the posses of fans that hunted them during their 33-day tour that grossed 2,112,00 dollars (about £750,000).
But any other suggestion that the Mersey mopheads might be going West can be dropped in the dust with all the speed of a bullet. Their new single, "I Feel Fine," due on November 27, must leap to the No. 1 spot with its 750,000 advance order. Their new LP, "Beatles for Sale," has broken all previous advance order figures in the vast EMI disc empire, with a total so far of half a million. This is due in the first week in December.
Their Christmas season at Hammersmith, London, is a sell-out already. And it's a hit trail for 1965. Their next film - so far untitled - is going through it's birth pangs.
Comedy
It starts shooting on February 22 - and it will most probably be in colour, so American producer Walter Shenson (he produced "A Hard Day's Night") tells me. "The film will be a mad, zany, wild comedy thriller and definitely not like the first film," he said. "We've got a scriptwriter at work on an original story - we hope," he laughed. "But that's all there is at the moment. There will be at least six new songs in the film. No other casting has been made - but it will all fall into place when we start. The boys are pretty good at this sort of thing."
One report has it that Ringo will be the intended murder victim in this Beatles thriller. But Paul McCartney tells me he knows of no plot yet. Paul and John Lennon will turn out between now and February some ten songs for the film, and possibly two more for a single to follow "I Feel Fine." They wrote more than was necessary for the last film - but there's no waste. They all go on to the LP of the film.
Do Paul and John study the film script first before setting out to write songs? "No," said Paul. "We just write songs and they are fitted into the film. That's what we did last time." I suggested that lines in scripts frequently inspire film songwriters. "We don't work that way," said Paul. "Sometimes we write tunes first without even having a title. We'll get that later. And we don't write all the songs together, although our names always appear jointly." But what seems a gigantic task of producing doesn't appear to present any problems to these conveyor-belt tunesmiths.
Holiday
"Course," Paul grinned, "we're always looking for time off and wanting to know when we're getting a holiday." They are due a holiday before Christmas. They expect another break before beginning the film, too. "But we'll probably be writing songs," said Paul with the resigned look of a man who would like to get away from it all - for a minute.
