WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS
Producer’s new Beatles tribute, Let It Be, an act of love
In 1964, nine-year-old Jeff Parry received a copy of The Beatles’ first British album, Please Please Me, and became an instant fan of all-things Beatles.
Flash forward 40 years and the music promoter and theatrical producer was in Calgary booking artists and creating tribute shows through his Jeff Parry Promotions when he is approached to create a Beatles tribute band to help launch Q107 rock radio.
After much searching, Parry contacted a quartet in Nevada who called their show Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles.
Their appearance in Calgary was so successful, Parry decided to produce their show and take it on a tour that would eventually bring Rain to Broadway and to the United Kingdom. In 2007, Rain played Beatlefest in Liverpool. Later that night, the quartet played the legendary Cavern Club, where the Fab Four played in their early days.
“(I) never intended to create a Beatles tribute show,” says Parry. “I thought it would be sacrilegious but when Rain was dropped into my lap, I vowed to make it the best Beatles tribute I could.”
Like so many Beatles’ fans, Parry always wondered what a Beatles reunion concert would have been like.
“Rain featured the major songs from the Beatles’ playlist up to 1970 when they broke up,” he says. “I wanted to squeeze the highlights of that playlist into a single act and then create a second act featuring songs they created individually after the breakup.”
The new incarnation of his Beatles tribute show became Let It Be.
Like Rain, Let It Be had a run on Broadway and in London’s West
End theatre district and went on to play the Liverpool Empire in 2014.
In 2008, Parry had created a theatrical division for Jeff Parry Promotions called Annerin Productions with offices in both Calgary and London.
With his British producing partners in London, Parry set up a 2018 summer tour for his latest incarnation of Let It Be that included weeklong stops in such cities as Edinburgh, Manchester, Hull, Dublin, Cardiff, Nottingham and Liverpool.
Because a European leg of the tour will take Let It Be to Munich, Basel Cologne, Dusseldorf and Zurich, Parry set up a press junket for 16 journalists from Germany and Switzerland. I was invited to shadow Parry both in London and Liverpool and for a special tour of famous Beatles landmarks in Liverpool.
Ironically, Liverpool was a tough nut to crack. Advance ticket sales were not meeting the projections set for Liverpool.
“I always knew Liverpool was going to be a hard sell,” says Parry. “The Empire seats 2,300 people and we would be playing there for eight performances and Liverpool
has certainly seen it’s share of Beatles tribute shows.”
But Let It Be wowed the Liverpool critics, the Liverpool Daily Post acknowledged “the audience loved every minute of it. It received several standing ovations throughout the night.”
Word of mouth did the rest. The final four performances of Let It Be played to turn-away crowds.
At the performance the journalists attended were three of the special Liverpudlian friends Parry has made. That includes Freda Kelly, who was Brian Epstein’s original assistant and the first person ever to be in charge of the Beatles fan club; Roag Best, half brother of Pete Best, the original drummer for the Beatles; and Colin Hanlon, the drummer in John Lennon’s first band The Quarrymen.
Kelly told me she’d never seen a Beatles tribute band until Parry took her to Let It Be in 2007. Seeing those impersonators playing and singing later that evening in The Cavern Club really jogged her memory.
“I stood listening to them beside the door where I had spent so many nights listening to the lads at the beginning of their career,” said Kelly, whose career was documented in a 2013 film, Good Ol’ Freda.
When I asked if she could see the Beatles if she closed her eyes as she listened, she said that, “I can, but I don’t see them as most people do. I see the lads as they were when they were young and happy and foolish. I see them like they were in their first movie A Hard Day’s Night.
“John and Paul always wanted to be famous, but after they went to America and found real fame it frightened them and they were never the same again.”
Roag Best took the journalists through the basement of his family home, which is one of the mustsee stops on any Beatles tour. His mother, Mona Best, had turned it into a nightclub called The Casbah Club to reintroduce John, Paul, George and her son Pete after they’d returned from Hamburg.
When I asked Roag why they had all but adopted Parry, he said it’s because “he’s genuine. He really does love everything about The Beatles. He’s not here to exploit. He’s here to enjoy the nostalgia of everything we have to offer.”
This past August, Parry produced the new Foreigner musical Jukebox Hero, which had workshop productions at the Jubilee auditoriums in Calgary and Edmonton and is scheduled to open in Toronto in February.
He is eyeing London and the U.K. tour circuit and all the inroads Let It Be has given him for Jukebox Hero and several other projects he has in development.
“I’m determined to continuing creating the productions right here in Calgary,” Parry says.
“I think I’ve proven that it is possible and that the talent is here in Alberta.”
(I) never intended to create a Beatles tribute show. I thought it would be sacrilegious but I vowed to make it the best Beatles tribute I could.