Read Chapter 22 of the new book, How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution, by Leslie Woodhead, a Cold War spy who filmed the Beatles in 1962.

Imagine a world where Beatlemania was against the law -- recordings scratched onto medical X-rays, merchant sailors bringing home contraband LPs, spotty broadcasts taped from western AM radio late in the night. This was no fantasy world populated by Blue Meanies but the USSR, where a vast nation of music fans risked repression to hear the defining band of the British Invasion.

In August, 1962, Leslie Woodhead filmed a two-minute cameo of four unknown kids bashing out rock ’n’ roll in a Liverpool cellar. Not long after, The Beatles were conquering the world.

How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin by Leslie Woodhead tells the improbable story of how the music of the Beatles helped bring down the Soviet Union -- plus eight never-before-seen photos of the Beatles from 1963.

Woodhead, a Cold War–era spy, compiles over three decades of research to demonstrate the group’s impact on the Soviet psyche. The music of John, Paul, George, and Ringo was forbidden, but their music was irresistible. It blasted open the door to Western culture, fomenting a cultural revolution.

How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin tells the unforgettable, wild, and unmistakably Russian story of Soviet kids who discovered that all you need is Beatles.

Read Excerpt | Buy How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution

Every week on Bedazzled, Derek presents some of his favorite 45 records. This time, he has a collection of five unusual and pleasant Beatles covers, including Day Tripper, Back in the U.S.S.R., Norwegian Wood, Across the Universe, and With a Little Help From My Friends.

Hailing from Baton Rouge, LA, John Fred had a MASSIVE hit with the amazing, Beatle-esque "Judy In Disguise" in 1967, but this veteran performer had a career in music stretching back to his teen years in the late '50s. One could easily be mistaken into thinking John was a black singer, as his heavy, deep south accent OOZES soul, and it's heard to great effect on this FUNKY cover of the song that opens The Beatles self titled 1968 LP, known forever as The White Album. The Playboy Band itself shows off how tight the group was, no doubt brought on by a decade of performing all over the south at Fraternities, sock hops, opening slots, and basically anywhere they could make a living as journeyman musicians.

Derek's Weekly 45's: The Covers File, Part Five (All Beatles covers)

The Beatles tune "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" was inspired by an 1843 circus poster that John Lennon purchased at an antiques store and hung in his music room. London designer and Beatles superfan Peter Dean recreated this poster in obsessive detail. He went so far as to collaborate with a wood-engraving artist and had the final poster letterpress printed. Now you can own it too, for £245.00 GBP. "Kite"

Michael Horowitz^*, Timothy Leary's longtime archivist, has permitted the Timothy Leary Archives website to publish a transcription of a tape recorded conversation between Dr. Leary and his wife Rosemary, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono, made during John and Yoko's Bed-In for Peace in Montreal, May 1969. Tim had given it to Michael, in 1984, as a present for finishing Tim's bibliography.

The conversation took place during John and Yoko’s week-long Bed-In, on May 29th, 1969. This is just a few months before John would leave the Beatles and move with Yoko to the U.S. where they were closely monitored by the FBI and threatened with deportation, and ten months before Tim would be put in prison for possessing a minuscule amount of marijuana, and Rosemary would be putting on benefits to raise money for his appeal.

This transcript was intended to be added to a previously published piece, “Thank God for the Beatles” (The Beatles Book, 1968), an essay about the Beatles as "evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with mysterious power to create a new human species," to be published in an anthology of Tim's shorter writings, but the project was abandoned.

The transcript, as far as we can tell, has remained unpublished until now.

^*Michael Horowitz was Timothy Leary's archivist, editor and bibliographer. He co-founded the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library and co-edited Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience and Sisters of the Extreme: Women Writing on the Drug Experience (with Cynthia Palmer). He currently operates Flashback Books, an online store, specializing in rare and out of print books on psychedelic science, history and literature.

All Together Now - Everything the Beatles ever did. by ramjac

Ramjac, a British DJ, has produced a mashup of the whole Beatles catalogue. Ramjac's mix, "All Together Now," layers every single Beatles song atop one another, in reverse order of length, so that for the first few seconds, all you hear is "Revolution 9" (the longest song in the songbook), then "Hey Jude" atop it, and "She's So Heavy," and then more and more, until it crashes all together at the last note, with 226 tracks all colliding.

It's more conceptually interesting than musically enjoyable. Hank Handy's 40-track Beatles mashup is a better choice if that's what you're after.

ramjac's sounds on SoundCloud (via DVICE)