“You guys are the brothers I never knew I had. I love hearing these stories on different Beatles radio shows.”
That was one of the listener comments on Three Beatles Hosts Come Together, a roundtable of three longtime Beatles specialty show hosts. The 40-minute video chat, available on the YouTube channel of Every Little Thing host Ken Michaels, covers the history of their shows, the long-term prospects for Beatles fandom, favorite guests, dealing with publicists, finding bootlegs and obscurities, and many more radio stories.
Michaels, whose now-syndicated show was previously heard on SiriusXM satellite radio, celebrated his fortieth anniversary as a Beatles host in March. He is joined here by Andre Gardner, PM driver of Classic Rock WMGK Philadelphia, who wound up his Sunday morning Breakfast with the Beatles earlier this year, and by WLRN Miami morning host Joe Johnson, whose Compass Media syndicated Beatles Brunch turns 30 this year. (His shows are also available as on-demand content here.)
One topic that didn’t make the cut in the YouTube video was The Beatles: Get Back, the three-night special that aired last year. That special on the making of a 53-year-old album reminded many of the Beatles’ currency, although the hosts themselves have more realistic views. Gardner no longer sees every young listener going through a Beatles phase, while Johnson is concerned that playing The Beatles will eventually be like “playing ‘A String of Pearls’” by Glenn Miller.
But what did they think of the show itself?
“Too short,” says Gardner. “It should have been a 16-hour directors’ cut.”
“You have to watch it with a real Beatle fan,” says Johnson. When the Anthology came, I brought a new TV, I brought a Super VHS recorder. All my friends were wondering why I didn’t have them over. I said ‘because I don’t want you talking while I’m watching this show. This time, he says, I couldn’t have somebody who’s not a Beatles fan watching it with me and wanting to put on Survivor.”
“’Get Back’ has been such a revelation,” says Michaels. The big thing for me was that it was a great character study of the four Beatles, watching them up close throughout this one-month period of time and seeing what they could do with all this pressure on them. They were going to have a TV show. They were going to record a full album’s worth of material. They were going to do a concert. Could they pull it off? From scratch? Just that storyline alone is fascinating.
“For many years, having watched ‘Let It Be,’ and people have gotten the impression that the Beatles broke up because Paul was so domineering and bossy and really tough to deal with. You watch this and you realize that he’s the one guy of the four feeling the most pressure” as the group faces a blank page, Michaels says.
“All of us have listened to the interviews around 1970,” adds Johnson, particularly Lennon’s harsh take on McCartney’s solo music. He’s glad that ‘Get Back’ wasn’t “a six-hour version of them hating each other . . . The smile that you saw on Ringo’s face when Paul went into ‘Get Back’ for the first time and you could tell [the song was going to be something significant].
