I’m old enough to remember lying in my bed at night in my suburban New York home in February of 1967 (50 years ago!), with my trusty little transistor radio on the nightstand next to me, vowing not to go to sleep until the local AM radio station played the new Beatles single, “Penny Lane,” again. They were playing it once an hour and I couldn’t get enough of it. It was pretty much that way every time a new Beatles song was released. For me, anyway.
So I was very pleasantly surprised a year-and-a-half ago when I attended a local classical-guitar concert and the opening act, DuoSF (Christopher Mallett and Robert Miller), performed Leo Brouwer’s arrangements of both “Penny Lane” and another Beatles tune from the same era, “Fool on the Hill.” Several months later, DuoSF came by our offices to play a pair of Brazilian pieces for the second installment of our Classical Guitar Sessions series of online performance videos (you can watch that here), and since then, Chris has written a few articles for us, including this one about the balancing teaching and performing. He and Robert founded and teach at the California Conservatory of Guitar in Santa Clara, California, south of San Francisco.
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Our Video Pick this week is a new video (shot and edited by Mark Boyer) of the ” two lads” in DuoSF performing “Penny Lane.” —Blair Jackson
The original “Penny Lane” 45 sleeve:
