Actors, musicians and self-proclaimed “Beatles fanatics” Nat and Alex Wolff joined host Kenneth Womack to discuss being introduced to Beatles music before they were born, their new album and tour and much more on “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.
The Wolff brothers were raised in a show business family and first became household names in the film (and later hit Nickelodeon TV show) “The Naked Brothers Band,” which was created and produced by their mother, actress Polly Draper of “thirtysomething” fame. Their father, jazz pianist Michael Wolff, taught them music early on, but Nat said that even before that “he would play Beatles music on a little tape recorder and hold it up to our mom’s belly” while she was pregnant with each son. As he told Womack, “As soon as I knew what music was, I immediately became obsessed with The Beatles. Within a few years we had completely outdone our parents in terms of fandom.”
Piano was Nat’s first instrument and Alex’s was the drums, since he “got excited about them because of Ringo [Starr]” in The Beatles’ 1965 movie, “Help!,” which both quote consistently. The many other Beatles aspects they agree on include, as they said, John Lennon’s rhythm guitar playing being underrated, that much of the ‘90s grunge sound is owed to early Beatles chord progressions as in “I’ll Be Back,” and that “The White Album” is endlessly listenable. For both brothers and their parents, they explained, “The Beatles were something that really connected the four of us. Something about it just felt really important to our development, and through that our parents also fell back in love with them.”
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More recently, the brothers released their latest album, the self-titled “Nat & Alex Wolff,” have set out on tour supporting Alex Warren, and also had the unique experience of seeing Paul McCartney play at one of his surprise, intimate shows at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles in March – an evening they described to Womack as “unbelievable . . . We were all in a flood of tears. There were all these famous rock stars and actors there and they were just sobbing. That’s the Beatle magic – they’ve always done that to people.”
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Listen to the entire conversation with Nat and Alex on “Everything Fab Four” and subscribe via Spotify, Apple, Google or wherever you’re listening. “Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin and the bestselling books “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles” and “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.” His latest book is the authorized biography of Beatles road manager Mal Evans, “Living the Beatles Legend,” out now.
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