The Beatles Channel, which recently celebrated its one-year anniversary on SiriusXM, has an expansive mission, according to Rolling Stone magazine. First and foremost, it hopes to broaden the Beatles’ narrative to encompass nearly everyone whose orbit they touched in any way. History is written by the winners, so how did the singers who were swept off the charts by the Beatles’ British Invasion fare? You knew that John Lennon was murdered, but did you know that James Taylor lived just a block away and heard those fatal shots from his window?
“I think that even the intense fans, you can never know all,” adds Bill Flanagan, host of the show called Northern Songs. “You can’t know everybody’s perspective.” Listen to the Beatles Channel, though, and you’ll start to get close.
But any single-artist programming endeavor presents a challenge: How do you keep generating new content based around a finite catalog of 206 usable titles? Even Flanagan was initially skeptical that a weekly program would be able to keep Beatles fans hooked. “Really, two hours a week?” he remembers thinking when presented with the idea of co-hosting a call-in show. “You don’t think we’re gonna run out of ideas? They’re like, ‘Nope.'”
Flanagan has experimented with several through-lines. “Just yesterday, one of the producers said to me, ‘People don’t realize how many non-Beatles records Ringo has been the drummer on,'” he recalls. “So that sent us off on a show about, Ringo played on this Clapton record, this Joe Walsh record, this Howlin’ Wolf record. There’s a show I don’t think anybody has heard before: 16 or 18 songs by various famous artists from Stephen Stills to T Bone Burnett to Tom Petty where the drummer is Ringo Starr.”
Some shows are organized around grander themes. “One of my favorites was called the ‘Let It Be’ moment,” Flanagan explains. “It was about the fact that at the same time that ‘Let It Be,’ a secular hymn, came out, Simon and Garfunkel did ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water, ‘ James Taylor did ‘Fire and Rain,’ then George [Harrison] did ‘My Sweet Lord,’ Billy Preston produced by George did ‘That’s the Way God Planned It,’ and then John answered the whole thing with ‘God,’ which was kind of a hymn for atheists. Suddenly you have a show that’s basically a theological argument from the Beatles in 1970 and 1971.”
After a year working on the Beatles Channel, Flanagan now understands how “you can do the Beatles 24/7 and not run out of subjects.” “It’s just an endless well,” he explains. “It’s kind of the Big Bang that a million planets were formed from. So you have all these planets that you can reflect on — how the Beatles shaped them, their relationship with the group.”
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