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Alistair Begg is critical of Christians in the 1960’s who rejected the Beatles without looking deeper into their music. However, Francis Schaeffer did not shy away from the Beatles music but actually studied up on it. Nancy Pearcey noted, “This small, intense man from the Swiss mountains delivered a message unlike any heard in evangelical circles in the mid-1960s. At Wheaton College, students were fighting to show films like Bambi, while Francis was talking about the films of Bergman and Fellini. Administrators were censoring existential themes out of student publications, while Francis was discussing Camus, Sartre, and Heidegger. He quoted Dylan Thomas, knew the artwork of Salvador Dali, listened to the music of THE BEATLES and John Cage.”
(Nancy Pearcey below)
The Beatles Help ! | Subtitulada
The Beatles Money (That’s What I Want) (Live) [HD]
The Beatles – Can’t Buy Me Love (Live)
The Beatles – From Me to You
The Beatles “Help” Live 1965 (Reelin’ In The Years Archives)
Alistair Begg on The Beatles
The author and pastor talks about the Fab Four’s cry for Help and why no one answered it.
APRIL 1, 2003
In the last several years, writers and academics have begun to seriously analyze what pop culture icons say through their worldviews. Books have explored the philosophy of The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Seinfeld and the gospel according to Tony Soprano and The Simpsons.
Alistair Begg, pastor of Ohio’s Parkside Church and the author of Made For His Pleasure (Moody), has been a longtime fan of The Beatles. He doesn’t suggest the band had a solid theology or an admirable worldview. Instead, he feels the band is important to look at now because it asked a lot of pertinent question in its music—and too many of those questions went unanswered.
Why is it important to understand what The Beatles were saying during their era?
They were on the forefront of a generation’s thinking. At the same time, they were able to articulate things and were given a voice. Without fully understanding it themselves, originally, they found themselves the mouthpiece of a generation. They were actually interpreting some of the angst, the hopes, and the fears of teenagers with mothers and fathers who didn’t understand.
Did The Beatles simply reflect culture or did they shape it?
For good or for ill, they were shaping culture. That’s true if you take the development of the music alone. Everything that they did pushed the frontiers out. This wasn’t only true in terms of the way in which they were recording material or the way in which they were writing melody lines, but it was actually in the lyrical content as well. Think about what Elvis Presley was singing about, or about what Chuck Berry was doing. It was all about love and different things like that. The Beatles got into a whole new business the further they went.
The Beatles first said money was everything (in the song “Money“), then they said that love could give you anything you want on “From Me to You“, and then they record “Can’t Buy Me Love“. What do you see in this progression?
An American journalist asked Paul in 1966 if “Can’t Buy Me Love” was actually about prostitution. There is this morbid fascination with the idea that these guys were coming from the bottom level of everything. It is a shame. It carried over into fundamentalist/evangelical response to their music at that time.
I’m not suggesting that The Beatles had a wonderful theology, or that their worldview was perfect. It clearly wasn’t. It left them high and dry on just about every front, eventually. But they weren’t simply writing cute little tunes. They were beginning to take seriously the platform that they’d been given. That’s why so many people found them offensive; it was because of the things that they were prepared to tackle.
What do you see when looking closely at what The Beatles were saying or looking for in their songs?
If you take Lennon’s “IN MY LIFE,” you have the tender side of John Lennon coming out, a side that many people missed completely.
When they went in and got Lennon’s belongings after his untimely death, one of the closest family friends found a huge notebook, which contained virtually all of Lennon’s handwritten lyrics for everything he’d done, including this song. It was clear that what had happened to Lennon is that as the fame thing had come, a sense of nostalgia crept into his life. He started to remember the places in the past.
It was always sad to me that people couldn’t see that he was crying out for something. I just always felt that in Lennon you had this guy who every so often would open the door to himself ever so slightly. Every time he opened up, it never seemed to be a Christian response to say, “Hey, we’ve got an angle on that. We’d love to talk to you about that.” It was always, “Hey, get out of here, you long-haired nuisance. You’re destroying the youth of Great Britain and corrupting the life of America.” We did this in the ’60s and, frankly, we’re doing it again now.
Speaking of the religious community’s reaction to Lennon, there was a huge fervor after his comment that The Beatles were bigger than Jesus. But in an interview after that event, he said, “I wasn’t saying The Beatles are better than Jesus or God or Christianity, I was using the name Beatles … as an example. But I could have said TV or cinema or anything else that’s popular. Or motor cars are bigger than Jesus.”
It’s a shame that it served the agenda of certain people to misunderstand the quote. What Lennon was saying is what people might justifiably say today about all kinds of idols and icons in relationship to young people in particular. He was in some ways bemoaning the fact. He was honest enough to say what has happened here is a phenomenon that is way beyond anything that we could ever have conceived. The response, of course, was not particularly attractive—such as when the band hit Dallas and all those youth pastors came out to welcome them with bonfires.
While there were things that needed to be addressed in pop culture—and there always will be—I think we missed an opportunity. Later on, we see them involved with a maharishi yogi. You see Harrison’s interest in mysticism. While we can’t lay the charge at the feet of the Christians, nevertheless it is a sad thing that there was nobody there who had gained a platform to them at a time when they were willing to listen. The interviewer asked about the song “Help.” He said, “I wrote “Help” in ’65, and people hailed it as another advance in rock & roll. It was the cry of my heart and nobody came to answer.”
This is just a picture of what we’re dealing with every day in all of our lives. Lennon, the drummer in Smashing Pumpkins, and Kurt Cobain are only big, dramatic examples of the interaction that all of us have with kids. I want to encourage Christians to get serious about being real about Jesus Christ. Listen to music so that you can talk to people about it rather than sloganeering and banging the drum for the same old stuff.
_______________
Francis Schaeffer did not shy away from appreciating the Beatles. In fact, SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND album was his favorite and he listened to it over and over. I am a big fan of Francis Schaeffer but there are detractors that attack him because he did not have all the degrees that they have. However, even many of them give Schaeffer credit for inspiring many young people to further their education and to engage the culture. Professor Barry Hankins of Baylor University noted concerning Francis Schaeffer:
George Marsden had been following Francis Schaeffer’s career since the sixties, having visited L’Abri himself. Marsden’s first occasion to write about Schaeffer came in 1968, during one of Schaeffer’s lecture tours, when Marsden was a young assistant professor at Calvin College. Marsden covered Schaeffer’s visit for an underground newspaper called The Spectacle, where he wrote: “For a Calvin Faculty member the most startling aspect of this achievement is that Mr. Schaeffer, without displaying any particular academic credentials and with an apparent disregard for the usual academic standards and precautions, did exactly what we always have hoped to do-make Christianity appear intellectually relevant to the contemporary era.”14 Noting the strengths and weaknesses of Schaeffer’s style, Marsden compared his lecture to a person sketching a map of the world in five minutes. There would be many erroneous details, but the general outline would be quite helpful. “
“Within a typical hour,” George Marden wrote, “he may present the thought of Antonioni, Aquinas, two Francis Bacons, the Beatles, Bergman, Berstein, Camus, Cezanne, Cimabue, Francis Crick, Leonardo Da Vinci, Eliot, Fellini, Gauguin, Giotto, Hegel, Heidegger, several Huxley’s, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Leary, Henry Miller, Picasso, Rousseau, Marquis de Sade, Sartre, Terry Southern, Siessinger, Tillich, and Zen Buddhism. Intellectual modesty is not Schaeffer’s long suit. One might sympathize if in the audience another scholar who had spent most of his adult life trying to understand, for instance, Kierkegaard, was appalled.” In contrast to Calvin College at the time, which had censured the official school newspaper for suggesting that students go to movies, Schaeffer, in Marsden’s words, “has seen the dirty movies, read the dirty books, and even heard the dirty words, yet for all that he is a better Christian. Doubtless such evident empathy for the contemporary culture accounts largely for Schaeffer’s remarkable appeal “
In Robert M. Price’s book BEYOND BORN AGAIN we read the reason that many Christians had avoided Beatles’ music:
Bob Larson warns, ” Lyrical content which is directly opposed to Biblical standards and accepted Christian behavior should definitely be avoided. For teenagers listening to the Beatles sing NOWHERE MAN or ELEANOR RIGBY would stop to realize the philosophical implications of the lyrics of these sayings. Nevertheless, the philosophical outlook conveyed will influence their thoughts.”
Cinema & New Media Arts | On Apr 05, 2013
Jake Meador writes on Edith (and Francis) Schaeffer over at Mere Orthodoxy.
Without the Schaeffers, I sincerely wonder if we’d have magazines like Relevant and Cardus or journals like Books & Culture or the Mars Hill Audio Journal. I know that the nonprofit Ransom Fellowship, run by two very dear friends of mine, would not exist as it does. And even as some of the work they inspired has fallen out of favor in recent years (most notably the Christian worldview movement spearheaded by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey), I suspect its critics would not be nearly so well equipped to address the movement’s shortcomings were it not for the trailblazing work of the Schaeffers. After all, the worldview movement’s most astute critic, Jamie Smith, is drawing from the same (reformed) theological well as the Schaeffers.
The Schaeffers made it possible in a way it had not been before to be thoughtfully engaged with (and even delighted by) much of popular culture while still holding to Christian orthodoxy. That is a tremendous accomplishment when one considers that today’s evangelicals are, by and large, the theological descendants of fundamentalists who emphasized separation from the world. When Francis Schaeffer first came to Wheaton in 1968, he spoke on the music of The Rolling Stones and THE BEATLES and Pink Floyd. He talked about the films of Bergman and Antonioni–and at a time when Wheaton’s honor code forbade students from seeing any movies at all! That the Schaeffers accomplished such an enormous cultural work while also modeling a tremendously generous, sacrificial hospitality at L’Abri that imaged the Gospel to thousands of guests over nearly 30 years is nothing short of remarkable.
Saving Leonardo: Book Trailer
Take a look at Nancy Pearcey’s story:
I became acutely aware that I had no answers to the most basic questions: Where did I come from? Was life just a chance accident of blind forces? Did it have any purpose? Were there any principles so true and so real that I could build my life on them?
Eventually I embraced RELATIVISM AND SUBJECTIVISM and several of the other popular “isms” of modern culture. For I was determined to be ruthlessly hon-est about the logical consequences of unbelief. IF THERE IS NO GOD, THEN WHAT CAN BE THE BASIS FOR OBJECTIVE OR UNIVERSAL TRUTH? I REALIZED THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO STEP OUTSIDE OUR LIMITED EXPERIENCE–OUR INSIGNIFICANTLY SMALL SLOT IN THE VAST SCOPE OF THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE–IN ORDER TO GAIN ACCESS TO UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE, VALID FOR ALL TIMES AND PLACES.
AND IF THERE IS NO GOD, THEN WHAT CAN BE THE BASI FOR UNIVERSALLY VALID MORAL STANDARDS? Once, when a classmate described someone’s action as “wrong,” I shook my head and began arguing that we cannot know right or wrong in any ultimate sense.
Eventually I began to wonder whether I could even be sure about any reality outside my own head. I began doodling little cartoons of the entire world as nothing more than a thought bubble in my mind. When I graduated from high school, I wrote a senior paper on the topic of “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Later I would discover that Bertrand Russell had written a famous essay by that title (which I had not read yet)–but this was my own manifesto of unbelief.
It was a few years later, when I was attending school in Germany and studying violin at the Heidelberg Conservatory, that I stumbled across L’Abri in Switzerland, the residential ministry of Francis Schaeffer. I was stunned by this place. It was the first time I had ever encountered Christians who actually answered my questions–who gave reasons and arguments for the truth of Christianity instead of simply urging me to have faith. When I arrived, the most obvious thing that struck me was that most of the guests were not even Christian. The place was crowded with hippies sporting long hair, beards, and bell-bottom jeans. At the time, it was extremely rare to discover Christian ministries capable of crossing the countercultural divide to reach alienated young people, and my curiosity was sparked. Who were these Christians?
Schaeffer himself used to strike people as somewhat odd, with his goatee and knickers. (Though when you were actually at L’Abri, it didn’t seem odd at all: After all, this was the Alps–and he dressed like a Swiss farmer.) But when he opened his mouth and began to speak, people were transfixed: Here was a Christian talking about modern philosophy, quoting the existentialists, analyzing worldview themes in the lyrics of Led Zeppelin, explaining the music of John Cage and the paintings of Jackson Pollock. You must remember that this was in an era when Christian college students were not even allowed to go to Disney movies–yet here he was, discussing films by Bergman and Fellini.[34]
[Footnote 34: “This small, intense man from the Swiss mountains delivered a message unlike any heard in evangelical circles in the mid-1960s. At Wheaton College, students were fighting to show films like Bambi, while Francis was talking about the films of Bergman and Fellini. Administrators were censoring existential themes out of student publications, while Francis was discussing Camus, Sartre, and Heidegger. He quoted Dylan Thomas, knew the artwork of Salvador Dali, listened to the music of THE BEATLES and John Cage” (Michael Hamilton, “The Dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer” [Christianity Today, March 3, 1997], at www.antithesis.com/ features/dissatisfaction.html).]
Seeing Christians who engaged with the intellectual and cultural world was a complete novelty. In fact, it was such a novelty that I was afraid that I might make a decision for Christianity based on emotion instead of genuine conviction, and so, after only one month, I returned to the States. (To be honest, I fled back home.) And I thought, “I’m going to test these ideas in my college philosophy classes, and see how well they stand up in a secular university setting.”
The most dramatic response came almost immediately. Signing up for my first philosophy course, I discovered it was a huge introductory class, with some three hundred students. Pretty intimidating. For the first major assignment, I took out my copy of Schaeffer’s Escape from Reason and wove some of its themes into my paper. A week or so later, the professor said, “I have your papers to hand back … but first I would like to read one of them to the entire class.”
It was my paper.
Needless to say, I was astonished. And even more so when the professor went on to say, “I have never seen such mature thought in an undergraduate.”Of course, it wasn’t really my thought–it was the Christian worldview analysis I had been learning through L’Abri.Again and again, I tested these ideas in my university classes, and I saw that Christianity really does have the intellectual resources to stand up in a secular academic setting.
While still at L’Abri, I had once accosted another student, demanding that he explain why he had converted to Christianity. A pale, thin young man with a strong South African accent, he responded simply, “They shot down all my arguments.”
“Total Truth” – Nancy Pearcey Book Talk 2006
The Beatles- In My Life-HQ
Uploaded on Oct 30, 2011
THE BEATLES
“In My Life”
(Lennon/McCartney)
There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I’ve loved them all
But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
In my life I love you more
In My Life – Sean Connery
________________
Featured artist today is Klaus Voorman
Klaus Voormann
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (November 2009)
Klaus Voormann
Tom McGuinness, Dave Berry, Klaus Voormann, Mike Hugg, Manfred Mann, Mike d’Abo (Schiphol Airport, 1967)
Background information
Born
29 April 1938 (age 77)
Berlin, Germany
Origin
Hamburg, Germany
Genres
Rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm and blues
Occupation(s)
Musician, record producer,graphic artist
Instruments
Bass guitar, upright bass, guitar, flute, saxophone, keyboards
Years active
1964–present
Labels
Apple, EMI, Fontana, Zapple,Epic, Sony, RCA Victor
Associated acts
The Beatles, Paddy, Klaus & Gibson, Manfred Mann, Plastic Ono Band, George Harrison,Badfinger, Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, Carly Simon
Website
www.klaus-voormann.com
Klaus Voormann (born 29 April 1938) is a German artist, musician, and record producer. He designed artwork for many bands including the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Wet Wet Wet and Turbonegro. His most notable work as a producer was his work with the band Trio, including their worldwide hit “Da Da Da“. As a musician, Voormann is best known for being the bassist for Manfred Mann from 1966 to 1969, and for performing as a session musician on a host of recordings, including many by former members of the Beatles.
His association with the Beatles dated back to their time in Hamburg in the early 1960s. He lived in the band’s London flat with George Harrison and Ringo Starr after John Lennon and Paul McCartney moved out to live with their respective partners, and designed the cover of their album Revolver,[1] for which he won a Grammy. Following the band’s split, rumours circulated of the formation of a group named the Ladders, consisting of Lennon, Harrison, Starr and Voormann. This failed to materialise, outside of all four Ladders (plus Billy Preston) performing on the Ringo Starr track “I’m the Greatest“, although Voormann did play on albums by Lennon, Harrison and Starr, and was for a time a member of the Plastic Ono Band.[1] In the 1990s, he designed the artwork for the Beatles Anthology albums.
In 2009, he released his debut solo album A Sideman’s Journey, which featured many notable musicians, including the two surviving members of the Beatles, performing as “Voormann and Friends”.
Contents
[hide]
1 Early years
2 London
3 Bassist
4 Retirement
5 Discography
6 Notes
7 References
8 External links
Early years[edit]
Klaus Voormann was born in Berlin, Germany, and raised in the suburbs of North Berlin. His father was a physician and he was one of six brothers. In his July 2010 interview on “Talking Germany”, Voormann discussed his dyslexia.[2]
The Voormann family were interested in art, classical music, and books, with a feeling for history and tradition. His parents decided that instead of studying music it would be best for Klaus to studycommercial art in Berlin at the “Meisterschule für Grafik und Buchgewerbe.” He later moved to Hamburg to study at the “Meisterschule für Gestaltung,” but before finishing his education in thegraphic arts, Voormann started work as a commercial artist, graphic designer and illustrator, spending eight months in Düsseldorf working for magazines.[3]
Hamburg poster for Rory Storm and the Beatles
It was in Hamburg that Voormann first met Astrid Kirchherr. After an argument with her and Jürgen Vollmer one day, Voormann wandered down the Reeperbahn, in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, and heard music coming from the Kaiserkeller club. He walked in on a performance by Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. The next group to play was the Beatles. Voormann was left “speechless” by the performances. Voormann had never heard rock ‘n’ roll before, having previously only listened to traditional jazz, with some Nat King Cole and Platters mixed in.[4] Voormann invited Kirchherr and Vollmer to watch the performances the next day. After joining Voormann at a performance, the trio decided upon spending as much time as possible close to the group and immersing themselves in the music.[5]
The St. Pauli district was a dangerous section of town with typical illicit behaviour commonplace; an area where prostitutes were to be found, and anyone that looked different from the usual clientele hanging about took a risk. As a trio, Voormann, Kirchherr and Vollmer stood out in the Kaiserkeller, dressed in suede coats, wool sweaters, jeans and round-toed shoes, when most of the customers had greased-backTeddy boy hairstyles and wore black leather jackets and pointed boots.[6] During a break, Voormann tried to talk (in faltering English) to Lennon, and pressed a crumpled record sleeve he had designed into Lennon’s hands. Lennon took little interest, and brushed Voormann off, suggesting that he talk to Stuart Sutcliffe, who, Lennon said, “is the artist ’round here”.[6]
Sutcliffe did not share Lennon’s attitude, and was fascinated by the trio, who he thought looked like “real bohemians“. He later wrote that he could hardly take his eyes off them, and had tried to talk to them during the next break, but they had already left the club.[6] Sutcliffe managed to meet them eventually, and learned that all three had attended the “Meisterschule für Mode,” which was the Hamburg equivalent of the Liverpool art college that both Sutcliffe and Lennon had attended. Lennon dubbed the trio the Exies, as a joke about their affection for existentialism.[4]
Voormann was in a relationship with Kirchherr at the time, and lived just around the corner from her parents’ upper-class home in the Altona district of Hamburg. Kirchherr’s bedroom, which was all in black, including the walls and furniture, was decorated especially for Voormann. After the visits to the Kaiserkeller their relationship became purely platonic, as Astrid started dating Sutcliffe, who was fascinated by her, although she always remained a close friend of Voormann.[7]
London[edit]
In the early 1960s, Voormann decided to leave Germany and move to London. George Harrison invited him to live in the Green Street flat in London’s Mayfair, formerly shared by all four members of the Beatles, Lennon and McCartney having moved out: Lennon to live with his wife Cynthia Lennon, and McCartney to live in the attic of the home of Jane Asher‘s parents. Voormann lived with Harrison and Ringo Starr for a time before finding work as a commercial artist and renting an apartment of his own. He returned to Hamburg in 1963, where he founded a band with Paddy Chambers (guitar/vocals), Voormann (bass/vocals) and Gibson Kemp (drums) called Paddy, Klaus & Gibson.[8]
In 1966, Voormann returned to London and was asked by Lennon to design the sleeve for the album Revolver. Klaus had a style of “scrapbook collage” art in mind. When showing his efforts to the band and their manager, Brian Epstein, the band loved it, although Voormann’s payment for the album cover was £40.[citation needed] For this work, Klaus won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts. Voormann later designed the cover art for Harrison’s 1988 single, “When We Was Fab“, which included the image of Harrison from the cover of Revolver along with an updated drawing in the same style.
Around the same time, another group was about to release their international debut album. The Bee Gees had recorded their first album, Bee Gees 1st, and Klaus was hired to design the cover for that album. The album cover featured all five group members standing above a colourful, psychedelic collage painted by Voormann. The following year, artwork by Klaus graced the front cover of the American edition of The Bee Gees‘ album Idea. In 1973, Voormann created the album sleeve and booklet artwork for Ringo Starr’s album Ringo, on which he also played bass.
Bassist[edit]
In 1966, at the same time that he was designing the cover of Revolver, Voormann became a member of the 1960s band Manfred Mann,[9] having turned down offers by The Hollies and The Moody Blues.[10][11] Voormann did substitute for Eric Haydock on a couple of TV shows (see List of The Hollies band members). He mentions his negotiations with the group in his biography: Warum spielst Du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John? Voormann played bass and flutes for Manfred Mann from 1966 to 1969, appearing on all their UK hits from “Just Like a Woman” (July 1966) to their final single “Ragamuffin Man” (April 1969) and including the 1968 international hit “The Mighty Quinn” (#1 UK, No. 10 US).[9]
After that, he became a session musician, playing on solo projects by Lou Reed, Carly Simon, James Taylor, and Harry Nilsson amongst others. Voormann was a member of Yoko Ono and Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, with Ono, Alan White(future Yes drummer) and Eric Clapton, which played on the Live Peace in Toronto 1969 album, recorded in Toronto on 13 September 1969 prior to the break-up of the Beatles.[12]
In 1971 he moved to Los Angeles. In an interview with EMI about his album Walls and Bridges, Lennon was asked who was playing bass on the album. Lennon answered with a hard German accent: “Klaus Voormann. We all know Klaus, ja“. He also played in Harrison’s assembled band at the 1971 The Concert for Bangladesh; Harrison fittingly introduced him to the audience by saying, “There’s somebody on bass who many people have heard about, but they’ve never actually seen him – Klaus Voormann.”[13] After Harrison died, Voorman played bass as part of the supporting band on the song “All Things Must Pass“, in the Concert for George on 29 November 2002.
After the Beatles disbanded, there were rumours of them reforming as the Ladders, with Voormann on bass as a replacement for Paul McCartney.[14] An announcement to this effect filtered out of the Apple offices in 1971, but was ultimately withdrawn before it got very far.[14] This line-up (Voormann, Lennon, Harrison and Starr) did perform in various combinations on Lennon’s albums, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) (Voormann, Lennon, and Starr) and Imagine (1971) (Voormann, Lennon & Harrison) as well as on Ringo Starr’s eponymous album Ringo, in 1973, and Yoko Ono’s Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970) (Voormann, Lennon, Starr, and Ono). Starr’s album features the Lennon-penned “I’m The Greatest“, which is the only song on which all four musicians appear together, joined by Billy Preston. He also played on Lennon’s “Instant Karma!” single.[1]
In 1979 Voormann moved back to Germany; he had a cameo as Von Schnitzel the Conductor in the 1980 film adaptation of Popeye. He produced three studio albums and a live album by the German band Trio. He also produced their worldwide hit “Da Da Da”. After Trio broke up in 1986, he produced the first solo album by their singer Stephan Remmler and played bass on some songs of the album. The following year he produced a single by former Trio drummer Peter Behrens.
Retirement[edit]
Voormann retired from the music business in 1989, spending time with his family. He lives at Lake Starnberg,[15] near Munich with his second wife Christine and their two children, born in 1989 and 1991. From time to time he appears on TV shows, mainly when the shows are about the 1960s in general or the Beatles in particular, or when he is asked to talk about his famous album sleeve for Revolver. In 1995 Klaus was asked by Apple Records to design the covers for theBeatles Anthology albums. He painted the covers along with his friend, fellow artist Alfons Kiefer. In the 1994 movie Backbeat, about the Hamburg days of the Beatles, Voormann was portrayed by the German actor Kai Wiesinger.
In April 2003, Voormann designed the cover of Scandinavian Leather for the Norwegian band Turbonegro. In October 2003, Voormann published his autobiography, Warum spielst du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John? Erinnerungen an die Beatles und viele andere Freunde (Why Don’t You Play “Imagine” on the White Piano, John?: Memories of the Beatles and Many Other Friends). The book gives special focus to the 1960s and 1970s, and covers Voormann’s close friendship with the Beatles and other musicians and artists, as well as his private life. A 2005 BBC documentary, Stuart Sutcliffe: The Lost Beatle features interviews with Voormann and shows drawings he made of the Beatles in Hamburg. Also that year his book “For Track Stories” which contains his experiences with The Beatles during the Hamburg days, and stories narrated both in English and German, and pictures made by him. In 2007, Voormann designed the sleeve for the album Timeless by Wet Wet Wet. In 2008 he recorded the song “For What It’s Worth” with Eric Burdon and Max Buskohl.[citation needed]
On 17 July 2009 Klaus released his first solo album called A Sideman’s Journey. It was credited to “Voormann & Friends” and featured Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens), Don Preston, Dr. John, The Manfreds, Jim Keltner, Van Dyke Parks, Joe Walsh and many others. The album has been available in a limited number of audio CDs, vinyl LPs, and deluxe box sets with original (and signed) graphics by Voormann. It included new versions of old songs such as “My Sweet Lord“, “All Things Must Pass”, “Blue Suede Shoes“, “You’re Sixteen” and Bob Dylan‘s “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”. A bonus DVD of Making of a Sideman’s Journey was released with the album.
On 30 June 2010 Franco-German TV network ARTE released a 90-minute documentary called “All You Need is Klaus” which features footage from the “Voormann & Friends” sessions as well as interview footage with Voormann and some of the artists he had collaborated with in his storied career.
In 2014, Voormann designed the cover to Japanese rock band Glay