Boardwalk Bar part 12

 The plan for today was to start with the band, and then see how far I got.  So that's what I did.  I arrived in the late morning and went directly to my space.  I cleared the table and got started.   First I did the three band members, moving from left to right.  I had more time left, so I went ahead and started working on cutting the figures adjacent to the band.   I did at least some of everyone who was bordering the band, considering the amount of black left behind as I went.  When I got done with all those, I decided I had enough, and cleaned up and packed up for home.  I left the block there as I had for the last few weeks, though this time I added another layer to the boards on either side, before setting the clamp.  My goal is to get these boards to give up their slight bends.  All my work was on one side today, so I'm giving you a photo of that panel:

I am also posting a photo of the whole block, so you can see the progress of the whole thing.  That is below:

For music today I went back to the alphabetical discs in my storage box one last time, for the last two Beatles albums I have there that haven't been listened to yet, which happen to be their first and what might have been their last, though the two have some things in common.  I started with their first album, Please Please Me, recorded in a single day in 1963.  The album includes four songs already recorded (A and B sides of the first two singles), but they were only given a day to do the rest of it.  So the rest of their first album is a mix of originals and covers, but songs they knew well and had probably played hundreds or thousands of times, ideal for straight recordings of the band playing live in the studio.  Most songs were done in two takes, the best used for the album.  By 1969, things had changed for the band, but it was decided to do an album the old fashioned way, filming them writing and recording it, again the band recorded live straight to the record.  This time they gave themselves a month to get it done, and all this was done on a film set instead of a recording studio.  The project was called "Get Back" and was almost the end of the band.  Sometimes they were playing together in the studio, or on the roof of their building in London, and it was like old times.  However, often there was a lot of tension.  The band members had grown apart, and doing dozens of takes of each song trying to get it perfect live didn't help.  When it was all ended, the band was ready to never see each other again.   Maybe it was just pride, but they decided to get together one more time, record an album the way they wanted, and let George Martin produce it.  That album, Abbey Road, (named for their studio) came out in late 1969, and they called it quits after that.  All the "Get Back" footage was later edited into the movie "Let It Be" and that and an album of the same name came out in 1970.  Both had some great music, but the film was edited in a way that emphasized the problems the band was going through.  My second disc of the day was that Let It Be album, which like their first, was essentially recordings of the band playing live (except the new version of "Across the Universe" a resurrected song first recorded in 1967), and produced (some say overproduced) by Phil Spector.  So two albums the same and yet very different from each other, and both excellent music to work to.