Beatles

Forty years ago this weekend the Beatles released their epochal concept album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Nearly everyone can tell you exactly where and when they first heard it. A second pop-cultural event called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band occurred 11 years later, in July. With its gloppy small-town-vs.-evil-city story line and Norman-Rockwell-on-acid imagery, it may be the worst rock film ever made. And almost no one remembers it. In 1977 and 1978, producer Robert Stigwood was riding high on the success of Saturday Night Fever.

Bungalow Bill Clinton, Lady Monica, Linda Day Tripper, Polythene Paula and all the other fools on the Hill certainly got into a mess this past year.And paperback writers Andrew Morton, Michael Isikoff and George Stephanopoulos all did their best to cash in with their own sordid chronicles of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga.But last week's cover of the New York Times Book Review was surely the most artful statement on the incident so far. A parody of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, it substituted scandal figures for the Fab Four and famous historical faces.

"This wasn't even going to be an album."It's just past 6 on an October Saturday evening, and Mariah Carey is in a room in Manhattan's Four Seasons Hotel, doing what she's been doing all day: Talking about her soon-to-be-released new album, "Rainbow" (arriving in stores Tuesday). Her ninth album in less than 10 years, it's sure to be one of the season's biggest sellers, as well as one of the most significant albums of the 29-year-old singer's career.But, as Carey explains, a new CD wasn't even on the drawing board a few months ago. Originally, she had hoped to spend the latter part of the year shooting "All That Glitters" -- "my long-awaited movie" -- and had started the summer writing songs for specific scenes in the film.

LIVERPOOL, England -- Decades disappeared in a ferocious 45 minutes of backbeat and melody, the calendar slipping right back to the 1960s as the bass player swayed and the old fans danced like teen-agers.Sir Paul McCartney rocked the Cavern Club last night.McCartney's return to his Beatles' basement club roots for the first time in 36 years proved an irresistible blend of nostalgia, marketing and musical magic.There was no reunion of Beatles' survivors, no slow dance down memory lane. This was straight ahead rock and roll, blasted in a tiny club and featuring a backing band that included Pink Floyd's David Gilmour.

AS THE American Century winds down, there's a rush to create lists of significant contributions. Looking at the music of the past 100 years is one such worthwhile effort. After all, few things so clearly help define who we were.Imagine the '60s without the Beatles. Or Peter, Paul and Mary for that matter. What about the black power movement without James Brown or Marvin Gaye? World War II without the big band sound?Of course it's hard to come up with a definitive list of the most important songs.

Down-under luxury trainThe Orient Express just added an Aussie accent. The luxurious Great South Pacific Express began limited service along Australia's eastern coast last month. The cooperative effort between the Venice Simplon-Orient Express (which operates the famous Paris to Istanbul train) and Queensland Rail plans to launch its complete schedule in April. The train travels from Sydney to Brisbane and on to Cairns in northern Queensland. While the full Sydney-to-Brisbane-to-Cairns trip takes four nights, the Brisbane-to-Sydney leg is a considerably shorter 18 hours.

What were the most significant news events of the 20th century? One year ago, the Newseum -- an interactive museum of news and news-gathering in Arlington, Va. -- and USA Weekend began a survey of journalists and members of the public to render that judgment, asking each to rank the top 100 news events of the almost-departed century.More than 30,000 nationwide cast their ballots, and according to the final results released this month, the public and journalists agree: The bombing of Hiroshima topped the list.

"Saturday Night Live" is old enough to have offered the Beatles -- all four of them -- the perfectly ridiculous sum of $3,000 to reunite for a one-night stand. Yet it's young enough to attract a new generation of viewers who know next to nothing about John Lennon."A pop-culture institution," says NBC, and that's no joke. "SNL," born Oct. 11, 1975, during Gerald Ford's presidency, enters its 25th season with nothing -- and everything -- to prove. It is the most analyzed, criticized, scrutinized show in television history.

Holly Cole is the sort of singer whose work is not easily categorized.When the Canadian singer began recording, reviewers reacted to her sultry, quietly swinging performances as if she were a jazz singer. "Which I don't think was accurate," says Cole of the assessment.Later, as her repertoire broadened, and her trio became a quintet, Cole began to be called a pop singer. "Which I don't think is accurate, either," she says, and laughs.So how, exactly, would Cole describe her music? "The only category I ever really liked was when somebody called the music 'romance noir,' " she says, over the phone from a tour stop inSan Francisco.

The day President Clinton is scheduled to become the first president to testify as the principal target of a criminal investigation. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr is investigating whether Clinton lied under oath when he denied having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. (1998)The day a federal grand jury indicted James and Susan McDougal, the Clintons' business partners in the Whitewater land deal. "The investigation is continuing," said prosecutorsfrom Kenneth Starr's office.

The Beatles' London: A Guide to 467 Beatles Sites Interlink Books, $20: It appears that the Beatles left their collective footprints on every inch of London. With this remarkable guide, authors Piet Schreuders, Mark Lewisohn and Adam Smith have certainly done their homework. From Soho and Islington to Chelsea and Kensington, as well as the outer regions, the guide features detailed information on where the Beatles lived and played and where some of their most well-known photographs were taken.

ALLEN KLEIN, 77 Managed Beatles, Rolling Stones Allen Klein, a cunning record executive whose clients included the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and who was known as the "toughest wheeler-dealer in the pop jungle," but whose ego and temperament also contributed to the breakup of the Fab Four, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan of complications from Alzheimer's disease. Mr. Klein was an accountant by trade and fell into musician and record company management by accident. Through his company, Abkco, Klein built his reputation on shrewd attention to financial detail.

HOLLYWOOD - - Michael Jackson was the first great pop star whose career was shaped by television - not merely showcased by it, like those of Elvis Presley and the Beatles - and inseparable from the medium. He was indebted to it and influenced it in turn. Across his four-decade career, he was often someone to listen to, but he was always - for better and sometimes for worse - something to see. A lifetime of pictures came back into focus Thursday, as cable news outlets ran bits of old videos and Facebook bloomed with links to YouTube clips.

A two-time Oscar winner and four lads from Liverpool will be on the big screen at Baltimore's Senator Theatre this week, as owner Tom Kiefaber continues to mark the coming end of his family's 70-year run as operators of the city's last vintage, single-screen movie house. John Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean stars Paul Newman as what, in the loosest of possible terms, could be called a frontier lawman. The 1972 farce turns the traditional notion of Western justice administered by tough, moral lawmen on its ear - Newman's Bean is a no-account crook until events in southwest Texas conspire to back up his whims and foibles with the force of law. (Roy Bean was a genuine historical figure who billed himself as "The Law West of the Pecos," but Huston's film makes few claims to historical accuracy.

On April 19, I went to see the Beatles' Help! at the Senator Theatre - a $5 matinee. In a sad way, Help! could be the Senator's theme song right now: Help, I need somebody, Help, not just anybody, Help, you know I need someone, Help! But that might be looking at the situation a little too optimistically. The Senator's one-screen business model suited the Beatles' era better than today's. Perhaps Requiem for a Dream or Bye Bye Birdie would be more thematically fitting. Fact is, our society is going through swift, cataclysmic change, and the Senator is just one of many victims, including newspapers, American car companies, video stores and land-line telephones.

I like the way Malcolm Gladwell thinks. Let me rephrase that. I like the way Malcolm Gladwell makes me think. The New Yorker essayist and frizzy-haired thinker of deep thoughts has just published his third book on how to look at the world from an unexpected angle. It is titled Outliers: The Story of Success, and in it Gladwell shoots down that particularly American theory that success is a Horatio Alger combination of brilliance and determination. Those qualities certainly help. But Gladwell uses his special brand of pop sociology and a collection of intriguing anecdotes to postulate that timing has as much to do with success as grit and brains.

Paul McCartney dips into the vault and pulls out a new (old) Beatles track LONDON: Paul McCartney says it's time an experimental Beatles track saw the light of day. McCartney says he wants to release "Carnival of Light," a 14-minute experimental track the Fab Four recorded in 1967 but never released. The band played the recording for an audience just once, at an electronic music festival in London. It reportedly includes distorted guitar, organ sounds, gargling and shouts of "Barcelona!"

George Michael After a 17-year hiatus, British rocker George Michael returns to North America on the third leg of his "25 Live" tour, his first visit to the States since 1991. Hits like "Faith" and "Monkey" made Michael a star, and his wild lifestyle kept him in the headlines for much of the '80s and early '90s. His newest release, Twenty Five, features new songs, including a duet with Beatles legend Paul McCartney, and old hits. Michael performs on Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Verizon Center, 601 F St. N.W., Washington.

Forever Plaid, the latest musical from Annapolis Summer Garden Theatre, is not a tribute to Scotland but a salute to 1950s pop music. While some in the audience will recall family Sundays with The Ed Sullivan Show, others will rediscover the pre-Beatles age when gentle guy groups like the Four Aces and Four Freshmen climbed to the top of the charts. Debuting in 1990 off-Broadway, Stuart Ross' Forever Plaid weaves '50s and '60s pop music into a story of four high school friends who sang at local celebratory events and dreamed of making it big. On their way to their first big gig on Feb. 9, 1964, their car was broadsided by a bus filled with Catholic schoolgirls on their way to see the Beatles' debut on the Sullivan show.

The South County Community Concert Association closed its season with a concert that rocked the walls of the Southern High School auditorium. Revolution: The Beatles Tribute packed in a large audience, some of whom were major Beatles fans while others concluded they were fans only when they realized how many of the songs they knew. "I loved seeing the joyful response to familiar Beatles music that the performers played and sang so capably. It seemed we were really hearing the Beatles play and appreciated the music even more from hindsight," said longtime SCCA volunteer Betty Knupp.