The long-running Breakfast With the Beatles radio show, currently airing Sunday mornings from 8 to 11 a.m. on KLOS-FM (95.5) hits a milestone this week, as host Chris Carter notches his 500th show.

What’s Carter got in store for the momentous occasion?

“All Rutles — three hours of Rutlemania,” he said, then laughed. “No, actually, I wasn’t planning on this. A listener alerted me to it. But I like that number:  500.... I’m not going to do much. I thought I’d take some requests, because it’s the people’s show. And I’ve put together a little highlight thing, which I’ll do, maybe toward the end of the show.

“The highlights for me,” he said, “have always been when an actual Beatle calls in. Sometimes they’ve called in on holidays. Ringo called in on his birthday, and on Easter."

"Breakfast With the Beatles" also now has a presence beyond Southern California as a component of Little Steven's Underground Garage channel on Sirius XM satellite radio. And although longevity in radio is the exception rather than the rule, Carter isn’t surprised at the ongoing interest in the music he’s been playing each week for nearly nine years, having succeeded the show’s original host, Deirdre O’Donoghue, who died in 2001. “The spirit of Deirdre O'Donoghue has been in the studio for all 500 of those shows,” Carter said, "and she did the show more than 500 times” from the time it began in 1983.

“I feel like a chef who’s working with really good ingredients," Carter said. "No matter what breakfast I serve up, I know it’s going to have really good things in it.”

 
Were it not an English hospital worker who used percussion instruments to help relieve boredom of patients undergoing long-term treatment, a 13-year-old kid battling tuberculosis named Richard Starkey might never have fallen in love with the drums, changed his name to Ringo Starr and become part of the biggest rock band on the planet.

“That’s where it all started for me,” Starr, 70, said Thursday morning a few minutes after briefly sharing a stage with 17-year-old drummer and brain cancer survivor Alexx Kipp, whose long-held wish to meet the Beatle was granted by the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Hard Rock International restaurant chain. The event was the kickoff of a new partnership between the two organizations designed to help Make-A-Wish accommodate even more requests than the 14,000 it grants in the U.S. each year, about 900 of those involving celebrities.

“You like those drums?” Starr asked Kipp as they stood behind a gleaming black-and-white set of Ludwigs, the brand long associated with him.

“Hell, yeah!” beamed Kipp, who also has Tourette's syndrome and punctuated the dialogue with his musical hero with joyful birdlike chirps and whistles.

“They’re yours,” Starr told him.

It took several minutes, and a few prompts from his mother, father and sister, who had accompanied him to Hollywood from their home in Arlington, Va., before it set in for Alexx that the event not only included meeting his favorite drummer from his favorite band, but also a new set of drums to boot. Or to bash.

Alexx sat on one of two adjacent black stools set up behind the snare drum and laid down a steady rock beat, then Starr pulled up next to him to add some accents on a floor tom and one of the cymbals.

“You say yes, I say no / You say stop and I say go, go, go / oh no / You say goodbye and I say hello, hello, hello” -– “Hello, Goodbye,” The Beatles 

Tackling selections from the Beatles’ catalog is still a relatively new concept to “American Idol.” 

Year in and year out, there are predictable themes that challenge the hopefuls during the live shows (disco, rock, country, etc.). Taking a page from the Lennon-McCartney songbook has been something the show has done only in the last few seasons -- around the same time "Idol" started allowing contestants to branch out and play their own instruments onstage.

The competition introduced the music of the Beatles early on this season -- making it apparent that they will bypass it as a theme night later on (well, we hope there won't be a repeat). In a series first, the show took the hopefuls to Las Vegas, as opposed to continuing in Hollywood for another round of cuts (because “the numbers were so big,” host Ryan Seacrest said) –- and in a too-easy-to-pass-up  cross-promotion, tied in the contestant performances of Beatles classics with Cirque du Soleil's the Fab Four-themed spectacle-tribute, “Love.” 

Hopefuls split into duos and trios and picked tunes out of a hat. Despite the Beatles easily holding the title as one of the best-known and most influential bands in music history, there were hopefuls who had no idea of who or what they were dealing with. It was shocking to see aspiring singers share sentiments such as, “I don’t know anything about the Beatles, I just know they’re amazing” or “I’ve never heard a Beatles song in my life.”

Is that even possible?

In the last few years, it's been tough to ignore the group, as another wave of Beatlemania seems to be swallowing a new generation. Be it in film (“Across the Universe”), video games (The Beatles: Rock Band), a slew of released remastered sets or the incredibly over-promoted addition of the band to iTunes. There have been more than a few opportunities to get well-versed with their melodies. 

Lady Gaga has snagged a piece of pop music history in landing the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 this week with her new single “Born This Way.”

Even more significant than posting the highest first-week digital sales by a female artist, with 448,000 downloads of the song, according to Nielsen SoundScan, Gaga scored the 1,000th No. 1 single on the Billboard chart since its inception in 1958.

In recognition of the milestone among chart watchers, Billboard has posted a chronological listing of all 1,000 chart-topping songs.

The first? Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool,” which beat all comers on that first Hot 100 chart dated Aug. 4, 1958. With that in mind, some might consider it a shame that America’s latest teen idol, Justin Bieber, didn’t land the No. 1 slot this week to bookend the half-century-plus period that began with pop music’s original teen idol. (Life magazine is credited with coining the phrase in a feature story on Nelson’s rise to stardom.)

Pop & Hiss thought we’d take the opportunity to scan through the years for some of the chart’s other high- and lowlights.

 
A night of full of upsets and other surprises started early with Grammy voters’ verdict in the pop collaboration with vocals category. In a field featuring tracks that teamed superstar combinations of Eminem, B.o.B. and Hayley Williams; Elton John and Leon Russell; Lady Gaga and Beyoncé; and Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg, the Grammy went to … Herbie Hancock.

Now, we know how much the Grammys love Herbie, most illustriously when he took the 2008 album of the year award for "River: The Joni Mitchell Letters” album of the celebrated singer-songwriter's music. This time, he trumped the pop, rock, rap and R&B heavy hitters with his version of John Lennon's "Imagine,” from his "The Imagine Project" collection, for which he was joined on the Grammy-winning track by Pink, India.Arie and a group of international friends.

The award also delivered yet another example of the Grammy night adage: Never underestimate the power of a Beatle.

The music industry's love affair with the Beatles surfaced two other times Sunday, with awards to Paul McCartney for solo rock vocal for his rendition of the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" from his “Good Evening New York City” live album, and the award for historical album for "The Beatles in Stereo," the 16-disc box set that packaged stereo versions of all the Fab Four's original studio albums.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Herbie Hancock at the Grammy Awards on Sunday. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times.

This week is the 47th anniversary of the Beatles’ first U.S. visit and their initial appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” that plunged the country into the deep end of Beatlemania.

Two days after that seismic telecast, the Fab Four played their first bona fide concert on U.S. soil at the Coliseum in Washington D.C., an event that was shown in movie theaters around the country in a closed-circuit telecast that has never been widely broadcast since.

In the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe,” John Lennon famously sang that “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,” and next year a slew of the former Beatle’s words that flowed onto paper in the form of his private letters will be collected in a volume to be published by London-based Orion Books, according to the Guardian in London.

Orion bought the rights from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, to about 150 letters filling hundreds of pages that Lennon wrote over the years to friends, fans and business associates. The physical letters have been in the possession of Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, but Ono controls the intellectual property rights to them.

"These letters have never been collected in one place before, and for the most part they have never been seen before," Orion Publishing Group executive Alan Samson told the Guardian. "The other reason people have gone crazy for it is the fact that there are half a dozen icons of the 20th century –- Marilyn Monroe, Kennedy, Elvis –- and Lennon is one of them."

Orion plans to publish them in October 2012 in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' first hit single, “Love Me Do.” The price Samson and Orion paid has not been specified, but is said to be between 500,000 and 1 million pounds, or between $800,000 and $1.6 million U.S. dollars.

"They are full of wonderful drawings,” Samson said. “They are funny, sad ... they are very human letters."

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of John Lennon in 1980. Credit: David Spindel/PBS

Pop & Hiss lends an ear to the tunes that play out on "American Idol" this season.

Sandwiched between the tear-jerky backstories, song butchering and Jennifer Lopez gawking, there was still time for a few songs to be belted out (for better or worse) on the highly anticipated -– and hyped -- premiere of the 10th season of “American Idol.”

With the addition of a new panel of judges, including superstars Lopez and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, more business-like hurdles for the contestants and the lowering of the age limit from 16 to 15 -– surely the result of the Justin Bieber zeitgeist –- the lingering question of what would hopefuls sing in a bid to secure the coveted golden ticket to Hollywood yielded a variety of answers.

Teenagers took center stage of the first night of auditions, which occurred in a state responsible for making Snooki and The Situation household names, New Jersey. 

“Idol” has always attracted teens full of unbridled enthusiasm ready to belt out a tune often bigger than themselves. Ten seasons later, this hasn’t changed.

Despite a year rife with ubiquitous pop melodies and hooks that could make for a standout showing –- Rihanna’s bitter chorus of “Love the Way You Lie,” the instant stickiness of Cee Lo Green's “Forget You,” Katy Perry’s surprising “Teenage Dream” and the harmony of Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are” quickly come to mind –- the teens dug deeper into the American songbook than perhaps necessary. And many leaned on the Beatles for source material.

Composer and artist David Barratt just wanted to inject a little ukulele into the Beatles catalog. And for nearly the past two years he’s been doing so — one track at a time.

For his weekly “Beatles Complete On Ukulele” series, Barratt has been tackling all of the original Beatles recordings (185 of them, in case you forgot) and pairing them with different artists and his beloved ukulele.

The idea for the project came to Barrett and music producer Roger Greenawalt after they organized a marathon benefit concert where all the Beatles' songs were performed over 24 hours. The money ("hundreds of dollars in a brown paper bag," he clarifies) was donated to Warren Buffett — the philanthropist billionaire who is the third-wealthiest person in the world according to Forbes — after he sustained a bit of a dent in his finances because of the economic crisis.

The concert business was hit in 2010 by some of the same tough economic times that have been gripping other factions in the music industry in recent years, but New Jersey rock group Bon Jovi has reason to pop the Champagne anyway.

The band posted the highest grossing concert tour of the year not only in North America, but across the globe, topping the $200-million mark worldwide, according to figures released Tuesday by Pollstar, the concert-tracking publication.

Bon Jovi posted total concert revenue of $201.1 million, a little over half that figure -- $108.2 million -- from the North American dates on its world tour.

Behind the group on Pollstar's worldwide ranking is AC/DC with gross ticket sales of $177 million, followed in the top 5 by U2 ($160.9 million), Lady Gaga ($133.6 million) and Metallica ($110.1 million).

Looking only at North American tour numbers, Roger Waters and his remounting of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" was second to Bon Jovi with a tour gross of $89.5 million, followed by the Dave Matthews Band ($72.9 million), Canadian pop crooner Michael Bublé ($65.7 million) and the Eagles ($64.5 million).

The big guns, however, couldn't bring up the entire concert business over last year's numbers. The top 50 North American tours combined for an overall take of $1.69 billion, down about 15% from $1.99 billion in 2009. The story was only marginally better throughout the world, where the top 50 total tour gross of $2.93 billion was off about 12% from $3.34 billion a year earlier.

Numbers were down almost across the board: total ticket sales dropped 12% in North America, from 29.9 million in 2009 to 26.2 million last year, and decreased 7% worldwide, from 45.3 million in 2009 to 38.3 million in 2010.

The only increase reported by Pollstar was in the average ticket price worldwide, which went up by $2.86 per ticket, or about 4%. Tickets in North America actually dropped by about $1.55 or 2%. Even Bon Jovi's field-leading $108.2 million for North America was the lowest figure in recent years for the No. 1 spot. The record high belongs to the Rolling Stones, who took in $162 million on their 2005 "A Bigger Bang" tour.

"Artists worked fewer shows in a tough business climate and those that overreached suffered the consequences," Pollstar editor Gary Bongiovanni said in a statement that accompanied the numbers. "In general, the international concert business was stronger than in North America, where overbooked and overpriced shows at outdoor amphitheater venues made it an especially difficult year for Live Nation," a reference to the world's largest concert promoter.

Former Beatle Paul McCartney has received consistent praise for his stamina, still typically delivering three-hour performances while touring at age 68. But he generally worked fewer nights for more money than most of his peers. His average gross of $3.86 million per night over 21 dates in 2010, and an average ticket price of $138.49, gave him the highest per-concert average in North America, followed by Bon Jovi ($2.85 million), Waters ($2.49 million), Alejandro Fernandez ($2.4 million) and Elton John-Billy Joel ($1.97 million).

Popularity-wise, however, Dave Matthews Band reigned, selling 1.27 million tickets in North America for the year. Bon Jovi was second with 1.18 million, Justin Bieber with 987,000, John Mayer with 894,000 and Brad Paisley with 880,000.

Rounding out the top 10 grossing North American tours were McCartney, who took in $61.8 million over 42 shows in 38 cities. Lady Gaga finished No. 7 with total ticket sales of $51 million, followed by the James Taylor-Carole King "Troubadour" reunion tour that nipped at Gaga's 6-inch spiked heels with a $50.7 million total gross, the Black Eyed Peas at $50.5 million and singer-songwriter guitarist John Mayer at No. 10 with $49.9 million.

Bublé also performed well around the world, finishing at No. 6 behind Metallica with $104.2 million, the "Walking With Dinosaurs" animatronics tour ($104.1 million), McCartney ($93 million), the Eagles (92.3 million) and Waters ($89.5 million).

"Walking With Dinosaurs" attracted more patrons than any other tour, logging almost 2.06 million visitors. But the spectacle's overall gross finished farther down the list because the average ticket price was a comparatively modest $50.56.

Billboard's concert business rankings, which cover a slightly different, non-calendar year -- Nov. 22, 2009-Nov. 20, 2010 -- and factor in worldwide tour revenues, also place Bon Jovi at the top of the heap, with a gross during that period of $146.5 million from sales of nearly 1.59 million tickets.

The rest of the magazine's top five touring acts were largely consistent with Pollstar's, with the No. 2 slot taken by U2 ($131.5 million, 1.31 million tickets), then AC/DC ($122.6 million, 1.16 million tickets), Lady Gaga ($116.2 million, 1.36 million tickets) and Black Eyed Peas ($81.6 million, 1.26 million tickets). U2 scored its penultimate finish with only 22 stadium shows, compared to 69 performances for Bon Jovi.

U2 was tops on Pollstar's list of 2009's biggest tours, posting $123 million and another 1.31 million tickets sold. The Irish quartet was the only act to top the $100-million mark last year, with Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band coming in second with $94.5 million, Elton John and Billy Joel's duo tour pulling in $88 million, Britney Spears at $82.5 million and AC/DC fifth with $77.9 million.

Among Pollstar's Top 100 North American tours, the crown for highest average ticket price of 2010 goes to Waters, who charged an average of $126.14 per ticket. That's considerably less than last year's high of $173.89 for Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks Live" tour.

Pollstar will release a full Top 200 early next month in its 2010 Year End Special Edition.

 -- Randy Lewis

Top photo: Jon Bon Jovi led the concert word with over $200-million in concert revenue. Credit: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images.

Bottom photo: Michael Bublé also had a good year, including finishing at No. 6 internationally. Credit: Associated Press.

Judging the market for big-ticket music box sets continues to be at least as much art as it is science.

Record company executives I spoke to recently said that even though the Internet has given labels unprecedented ability to target fans of specific artists, there’s still a lot of hope and guesswork that goes into these ultra-expensive projects such as the $1,199 Miles Davis 43-CD box set and the $749 30-CD “The Complete Elvis Presley Masters” box.

Seattle indie music store owner Mike Batt of Silver Platters, for instance, noted that when EMI/Capitol Records last year issued CD box sets with the remastered Beatles catalog — one in stereo that list for $259 and one gathering all the Fab Four’s albums that were originally mixed in mono carrying a $299 list price — the company ultimately created a quagmire for Beatles collectors.

“It takes a smart buyer to know the store audience and also the future market value of these items,” Batt told me by e-mail. “If played right they can make a profit, but they can also be a large cash hole." The Beatles' mono box from last year is a perfect example. 

“The Beatles in Mono” box originally was touted as a limited-edition set for which only 10,000 copies would be manufactured. Those quickly sold out by way of pre-orders, sending collectors into something of a feeding frenzy to get their hands on copies.

“Most retail never actually had any to sell to someone that had not already preordered it [by] the day of release. Not even Amazon,” Batt recalled. “This made the actual marketplace demand so cloudy that Capitol/EMI decided to press more a month later, which then flooded the market.

“Today there are hundreds and hundreds of people trying to sell it online and just get something for it. What actually cost retailers $190 each has had a low market value of $110 online so far. Add to that a group of bootleggers and pirates that tried to jump on the bandwagon early and are now trying to recoup their losses by selling the bootlegs in legitimate marketplaces, bringing the value and consumer confidence in the item even lower.”

What’s that line? “I read the news today, oh, boy …”

— Randy Lewis

 
 
When Apple Inc. announced last week that the Beatles’ catalog would at long last be available for legal downloading on iTunes, many skeptics groused that the two entities had come together too late: Everyone who cares about the group’s music long ago found a way to store it on their PCs, laptops or MP3 players.

Apparently not.

Apple announced Tuesday that 450,000 Beatles albums and 2 million individual tracks were downloaded during the first week they went up online. That translates to well more than $8 million spent on Beatles downloads out of the gate, using the single album download price of $12.99 and $1.29 per song. It doesn’t take into account several double albums priced at $19.99 or the digital Beatles box set that iTunes offers for $149.

At the same time the Beatles finally joined the digital world, Amazon began discounting the remastered physical CDs that were released last year, with individual albums now selling for $7.99, double sets for $11.99 and $12.99 and the 16-CD stereo box set priced at $129.99, making the tangible versions cheaper than the virtual ones. Consequently, six Beatles titles are in the Top 100 of Amazon’s ranking of its bestselling music titles as of Tuesday.

-- Randy Lewis