hey dullblog

McCartney sings the standards

2012-02-01T17:16:00.000-08:00

You can listen to Paul McCartney's new album, "Kisses on the Bottom," free for a limited time here:

http://www.npr.org/series/98679384/first-listen

I was skeptical when I learned McCartney was planning an album of covers, and when I heard the title, I did a facepalm. But after an initial listen, I'm liking it much more than I thought I would.

Take a listen and see what you think!

Stripes

2012-01-14T20:37:00.000-08:00

Who took this photo?

Christmas Never Knows

2011-12-25T11:00:00.000-08:00

Just heard this on KLOS' Breakfast With The Beatles...

As Kate and I perform the annual ritual—opening presents to The Beatles Christmas records—I will be thinking of the people who read this blog, and especially the ones who comment. Our conversations mean a lot to me. May you be strong, well, and happy this day, this week, and this year.

What do you want to hear?

2011-12-18T18:01:00.000-08:00

Randy Bachman unlocks the secret of that most enticing of opening chords...

Randy reveals how he was invited into Abbey Road Studioes by Giles Martin, son of the famous Beatles producer George Martin. Martin told Bachman he had all the Beatles source tapes saved onto a computer running Pro Tools. The master of the tapes then asked, "What do you want to hear?"

Thankfully, Bachman asked himself one of the most famous mysteries in all of the Beatles songwriting history: What the hell did they all play on the opening chord in "A Hard Days Night?"

Click to hear.

(Via Dylan Hicks on FB)

Why I love our commenters so much...

2011-12-18T17:27:00.000-08:00

This, just received today from commenter "Otto Didact," capping our conversation on the true/hidden meaning of "Norwegian Wood":

I've heard from a very, very reliable source - literally the horses mouth - that "Norwegian Wood" was just a play on words as Lennon loved to do. It sounds an awful lot like "knowing she would" doesn't it. As in isn't it a nice knowing she would/will put out. Think about it. Much more clever and subtle, as The Beatles were, than burning down a house. How ridiculous. And Lennon at that time in his life wasn't getting blown off much. As in never. Of course he got laid and that's what he's writing about and wanted to hide from Cynthia. Pretty simple and simply brilliant when you think about it. Case closed.

Closed? Perhaps, perhaps not—but I love this. It should be true. Thanks, Otto.

Isn't it good?

2011-12-06T17:53:00.000-08:00

I should (clone myself and) reread Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood, possibly my favorite of his books.

The blog Night RPM (Linden Park) translates, in two parts (1 and 2), Murakami's afterword to the book. Here's a nice bit:

The first part of Norwegian Wood was written in Greece, the second part, in Sicily, and the final part, in Rome. There weren’t tables or chairs in the cheap hotel room that I rented in Athens. So I went to a taberu (* bar) every day, repeatedly listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on my Walkman about 120 times, and wrote continuously. In that sense, it could be said that this novel received a slight assistance from Lennon and McCartney.

"All Together Now"

2011-11-28T11:29:00.001-08:00

Via WFMU's Twitter feed: Every Beatles song played at once, the longest starting first, all of them ending at the same time.

Just wanted to bring this to readers' attention...

2011-11-11T18:01:00.000-08:00

An anonymous poster (tell us who you are!) left a comment on my post of Juliette Tang's John-Yoko restaging pic:

I hope this is not too far off topic, but so often we concentrate on the legend of John Lennon without considering what he physically did as a performer. I came across this video, How To Play Guitar Like John Lennon:

Perfect if you plan on joining the cast of Beatlemania, or if you just want to appreciate the techniques of the world's most underrated guitarist.

The affable, edifying instrumentalist is Michael Sokil ("MJ Sokes"), whose YouTube channel is compellingly watchable:

Our anonymous poster also brings this piece, written by Sokil, to our attention. We learn at the end that he's taught himself the guitar, drum, bass, and piano parts for every Beatles song!

Who is this guy?!

McCartney as the Dickens of Rock

2011-11-03T07:19:00.000-07:00

Macca and Boz

[If you've ever wondered why Paul McCartney writes story songs and loves performing, or why his sentimentality sometimes runs away with him, I hope you'll enjoy these ruminations on his links to a Victorian forebear. -- Nancy]

Looking at Paul McCartney’s personal and artistic similarities to Charles Dickens helps explain a lot of things. It illuminates why McCartney is hugely popular but often critically reviled, why he is driven to make money despite his great wealth, and why he tirelessly performs live. Most importantly, it brings his particular gifts into focus.

Often McCartney is compared to John Lennon and criticized for being less confessional, poetic, or political than his songwriting partner. But appreciating Lennon’s variety of excellence shouldn’t entail dismissing McCartney’s. Lennon was a lyric poet in the vein of Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats: his work is powerfully personal, often transparently so. McCartney is a storyteller and performer, as Dickens was.

Dickens and McCartney share a surprising number of character traits. They determined early to achieve financial security, after childhood brushes with poverty. They idealized children and domestic life even during their years as roving London bachelors. They approached their artistic fields as crafts to be mastered, ardently pursuing popular success. Their ambition and desire to run things were sometimes admired and sometimes resented by colleagues.

From the first, both men were also compulsively productive. For much of his career, Dickens combined writing stories, novels, and the occasional play or travel book with public readings and with managing, editing, and contributing to his own periodical (Household Words, followed by All the Year Round). In the Beatles years McCartney’s productivity sometimes exasperated Lennon, who felt pressured to keep pace. Since the breakup, McCartney has regularly released solo albums while also finding time to write a movie, score a ballet, compose and play music in a range of genres, and run his own corporation, MPL.

Unsurprisingly, for both men producing at such a rate resulted in works of varying quality. This reality, combined with Dickens’ and McCartney’s investment in audience response, led to ego-bruising encounters with criticism. Despite popular success, both men were stung by accusations of sentimentality and shoddiness, and both constructed a public persona as a screen for this vulnerability. Dickens cultivated his image as “Boz,” the friendly champion of the common folk, and McCartney has usually played the role of upbeat performer still in touch with everyday people. These personas are not lies, I would argue, but selective presentations of their real personality traits and values. Born performers, Dickens and McCartney strove to combine getting the audience and acclaim they needed with protecting a private life genuinely important to them.

This desire to perform but to shield the private self helps explain why Dickens and McCartney love telling stories. Rather than speak in first person, both often communicate obliquely through characters. Dickens was first known and most widely celebrated for creating indelible characters like Mr. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Scrooge. In a few words, Dickens could create a character with a distinctive look, attitude, and way of speaking. When he died, one periodical memorialized him with a drawing of his empty chair, surrounded by a cloud of his immortal characters.

McCartney shares Dickens’ fascination with characters, and has said Nicholas Nickleby is his favorite book. In the Beatles years McCartney wrote many short stories in song, including “Eleanor Rigby,” “Lady Madonna,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” “Penny Lane” is a Dickens novel in miniature, with its large cast of characters and distinctively English setting. It’s artfully narrated, too: that repeated “meanwhile” underlines the simultaneity of the characters’ actions, adding motion and breadth as the multiple plots in Dickens’ novels do. McCartney has continued to write narrative songs throughout his solo career, with “Another Day,” “Jenny Wren,” “She Given Up Talking,” and “Mr. Bellamy” as leading examples.

Both Dickens and McCartney wanted not merely to write about, but to perform their characters. While writing, Dickens would often jump up, make faces, and try out speech mannerisms. He gave sensationally successful public readings from his work, touring both England and the U.S. One of his favorite pieces, the brutal murder of the prostitute Nancy in Oliver Twist, was so intense that women sometimes fainted and had to be carried out. Other selections regularly moved huge audiences to laugh or cry. Dickens kept giving readings even as he grew ill, and his performance schedule probably hastened his death. How much he was driven by money and how much by love of the stage is a continuing point of debate.

As a live performer, McCartney is just as persistent and driven as Dickens. McCartney’s sometimes hectoring insistence, in the Beatles’ last years, on getting the group to play live again contributed to its meltdown. When he formed Wings, McCartney was willing to drive a van around the countryside and play small university halls to get back on stage. The 70s, 80s, and 90s all saw successful McCartney tours, and the last several years have featured some of his most impressive shows. He’s clearly giving audiences what they want, with setlists that cover the highlights of his entire career, and has been charged with doing it mainly for money. His enjoyment of performing is palpable, however, and it’s hard not to admire his dedication: at 69, he’s giving concerts that last three hours without an opening band or a break. It seems probable that, like Dickens, McCartney will go on performing until disability or death prevents him.

This pattern of similarities makes me think that time will improve McCartney’s artistic reputation. His poorer work will be justly forgotten, as Dickens’ lesser productions have been. Who is now beating up on Dickens for Master Humphrey’s Clock, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Uncommercial Traveler, or his play The Village Coquettes, not to mention dozens of fair-to-middling articles and stories? Just as we now appreciate Dickens’ higher-quality work and leave the rest largely alone, so may McCartney’s best work endure. Perhaps one day, like Dickens, he will get a biographer able to regard his faults and excesses with some sympathy and appreciate his artistic fertility and performing tenacity.

The Ballad of...

2011-10-30T18:25:00.000-07:00

From Juliette Tang—check out her pitch-perfect photos of books.

Happy birthday John

2011-10-09T12:15:00.001-07:00

Living In The Material World: review roundup

2011-10-08T12:05:00.000-07:00

Just finished watching it myself. While I'm collecting my thoughts, I thought it might be helpful/fun to provide a list of some notable/thoughtful reviews. Enjoy, and suggest others.

Salon—Matt Zoller Seitz
Uncut Magazine
Roger Ebert
Richard Corliss
Matt Blick (Beatles Songwriting Academy)

...and since the editing of the film seems to be one of the few areas of contention about it, here's an interview with the editor himself, David Tedeschi.

Robert Whitaker, 'Butcher' photographer, dies at 71

2011-09-27T11:13:00.000-07:00

Nice obit from the blog Ironic Photos.

Self-reference

2011-09-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

Can we attempt a complete catalogue of Fab Four self-referentiality? By which I mean things like:

1. "Glass Onion": "The Walrus was Paul"

2. John singing "She loves you" toward the end of "All You Need Is Love"

3. "I Am the Walrus": "...like Lucy in the Sky..."

Interview with Lennon biographer Tim Riley

2011-09-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

It's Lennon-mas again, and there's a new bio out by Tim ("Tell Me Why") Riley. The Christian Science Minotaur has a nice little Q and A with him. Will somebody finally acknowledge the scar of drug abuse that disfigured Lennon's life? I hope so.

Double coverage

2011-09-17T20:11:00.000-07:00

Via Douglas Wolk on Twitter: "Alvarius B. covers 'You Only Live Twice,' arranged/recorded to sound EXACTLY like John Lennon's White Album demos."

No jacket required

2011-09-16T18:26:00.000-07:00

During this period he met Paul McCartney, who hired him to design the cover for the Beatles’ next album. Surprisingly, Mr. Hamilton proposed an all-white jacket.

“To avoid the issue of competing with the lavish design treatments of most jackets, I suggested a plain white cover so pure and reticent that it would seem to place it in the context of the most esoteric art publications,” Mr. Hamilton told Rolling Stone in 1991.

—NYT obit for Richard Hamilton

Review of "Living In The Material World"

2011-09-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

Pal o' Dullblog Shirley Wicevich was lucky enough to catch an advance screening of Martin Scorsese's new George Harrison documentary, "Living In The Material World." Here are her thoughts.

HD: Where'd you see the movie, Shirley?

SW: At the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day Weekend; I've volunteered there for 6 years. First Ken Burns came out, and gave the prelude to what the audience was about to experience. Then he introduced the film's co-producers, George's widow Olivia and David Tedeschi. That night was the first time that Olivia watched the documentary at a public viewing.

HD: So how was it?

SW: Compelling, poignant, funny—from the first moment to the end. And it's not short, either. It begins at the beginning, in Liverpool, and goes straight through for 3 1/2 hours. I remember at the end, Olivia said, "He lit up the room for a long time."

HD: I remember "No Direction Home" being fascinating to look at, too. How is "Material World" visually?

SW: There are so many wonderful images, both still pictures and film. Especially of George's early days with The Beatles. I was transfixed by George’s search for self-discovery, how it stayed with him for his entire life. His early music with the Beatles, and his post-Beatles stuff, never sounded so good or made so much sense. The early Rock and Roll songs, the iconic Beatles tunes...they filled the audience with joy. When the audience heard "My Sweet Lord," it was really powerful.

HD: Who does Scorsese talk to?

SW: There are the people you'd expect—Paul and Ringo, George Martin, Pattie Boyd and Eric Clapton, Astrid and Klaus, Yoko Ono and Phil Spector. And of course fellow Wilburys Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. George's son Dhani says some interesting things, but it was Olivia who gave some of the best insights into George Harrison, the man. His relationships with his friends are to envy; they still miss him and have such wonderful, human stories to tell. But George wasn’t without flaws.

HD: Let me guess: groupies.

SW: Olivia says, “he loved the ladies and the ladies loved him”! They were together for 30 years, so she seemed to handle it all with grace and dignity. But even that temptation fits with the theme of the film. Martin Scorsese says, “The more you’re in the material world, the more there is a tendency to search for serenity.”

Many thanks, Shirley. I may have to get HBO for that month—is there something like Beatle Ticket? "Living In The Material World" premieres on HBO Wednesday, October 5th and Thursday, October 6th. Here's the trailer.

"Dear Boy"

2011-09-13T19:05:00.000-07:00

David Cloyd covers Paul's "Dear Boy." What do you think?

Why I love John Lennon

2011-09-10T00:37:00.000-07:00

So okay, as many of you have noticed, I do an awful lot of armchair psychoanalyzing of John Lennon, sometimes not to his advantage. But as I was browsing YouTube tonight, I saw this press conference (I think LA, 1966) which reminded me why he's my all-time favorite guy.

Watch to the end.

I Forgot to Remember "I Forgot to Remember"

2011-09-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

Thinking about favorite unreleased Beatles songs, my mind like most people's went right for the studio outtakes. But I was walking across town yesterday with iPod in ears and shuffled right into George's BBC rendition of "I Forgot to Remember to Forget," one of the songs recorded by Elvis Presley at the legendary Sun Sessions. Elvis's version is lachrymose, a tear-in-the-beer downer to break up the honky-tonk monotony. But the Beatles do it light, and light, it turns out, is right.

George tosses off the lost-love lyric with the callow elan of a boy skipping through mud puddles: he's so young, so innocent, with so much world to discover, you know this sorrow won't break his stride for longer than it takes to sing it away. The band plays like a single body with eight arms, wasting not one bar constructing a graceful groove but seeming to pluck it from thin, clean air. George's guitar solo, one of his very best, is heartbreakingly sweet, melodic, succinct. There's even a little shift into ska (!) for the middle eight: Memphis meets Kingston by way of Liverpool.

Not a drop of sweat or hassle on this recording. I played it twice through, just grinning.

As far as anyone knows, they taped this song just once. And I thought, damn, they were good, if they could craft a thing to such perfection, only to throw it away on a radio show one-shot...

Technically, "I Forgot" is not unreleased (it was on "Live at the BBC"). But there needs to be at least one post on this blog extolling it.

Favorite unreleased Beatles track?

2011-09-03T00:26:00.000-07:00

I'm spending incredible amounts of time on another web project, but in the moments before collapsing into bed this evening, I realized how much I like this song:

Which unreleased Beatles song do you like best? "Leave My Kitten Alone" is equally great, a worthy addition to Lennon's "I am destroying my throat" catalog. And then there's McCartney's demo for "Come And Get It"—a Number One, sure, but not meaningful enough.

Am I off my nut? Could it be that these were the songs that my generation discovered, the ones that were new in the 80s when I was a teenager? Or am I just a romantic, half-enchanted by what might have been...?

So 'fess up—which ones do you like? (And yes, you can say "What's the New Mary Jane"...but I'm not sure I'll believe you.)

Excellent photos of the Fabs...

2011-08-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

...can always be found at the blog If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger. Just thought I'd pass it along.

I just noticed Ringo putting his hand over his face

2011-08-10T20:28:00.000-07:00

I am pro-Yoko, more or less, but this did make me laugh:

—"If Famous Photographs Were Off By One Second," Cracked.com

"The Beatles and Black America"

2011-08-05T03:29:00.000-07:00

Today at 2 p.m., WNYC's Soundcheck is doing a show on "The Beatles and Black America." The website's description:

The early sound of the Beatles was shaped by African American musicians like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Today, guest hostElliott Forrest looks at how The Fab Four influenced - and were influenced by - the music of black America.

Introducing...the Indian Beatles!

2011-08-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

Boing Boing pointed me to this post at Bolus which shows just what 1964 wrought. It's not pretty. Are you ready for a Bollywood version of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"? I DON'T THINK YOU ARE.

Wherever he is, George just threw up in his mouth...Still, I just listened to it twice, and may go back for a third.

What is this?

2011-07-20T05:48:00.001-07:00

My love does it good

2011-07-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

The Bonnie Benrubi Gallery in NYC is showing an exhibit of Linda McCartney's photographs through the end of the month. It looks very worth a visit, in person or online: pictures of the family, some great behind-the-scenes Beatles shots, and some portraits of other luminaries. The image they're using to advertise the show -- titled "My Love" -- is pretty terrific:

Ram's Resurgence

2011-06-21T13:45:00.001-07:00

[After the millionth insightful comment by our indefatigable Nancy, we asked her if there was anything Beatley burning a hole in her well-furnished brains. This is what she wrote; give her a warm Hey Dullblog welcome.--MG]

When it was released in 1971, Ram was hated—really hated, to the point of practically being crushed and melted—by many rock critics. Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau inveighed against it as “the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far,” calling it “incredibly inconsequential” and “monumentally irrelevant.” Robert Christgau was kinder, giving it a C+ and sniffing “If you’re going to be eccentric, for goodness’ sake don’t be pretentious about it.” Ram was dismissed—its being credited to “Paul and Linda McCartney” didn’t help—as a bunch of chirpy domestic tunes.

Yet over the years Ram’s reputation has risen, as Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s changing opinion illustrates. In 1997’s All Music Guide to Rock (2nd edition) he gave the disc three stars for being mostly “filler,” adding that “while it’s enjoyable filler, it prevents the record from being much more than a pleasurable diversion.” Sometime since, however, Erlewine got Ram religion: the online All Music Guide awards the album five stars. “[T]hese songs may not be self-styled major statements, but they are endearing and enduring, as is Ram itself, which seems like a more unique, exquisite pleasure with each passing year.”

And to that I say, “amen.” Ram’s distance from the 1971 rock orthodoxy’s serious-statement aesthetic has kept it sounding fresh and undated. Forty years on, Ram’s unabashed delight in melody, harmony, and musical inventiveness sounds timeless, not throwaway.

It’s hard for me to fathom how any rock fan can resist this record. Its songs recall the Beach Boys (“Dear Boy,” “The Back Seat of My Car”), Buddy Holly (“Eat at Home”), and John Lennon (“Ram On,” and yes, I will attempt to justify this claim). On Ram McCartney cuts loose, exploiting his full vocal range (high, sweet singing on “Heart of the Country,” falsetto and precise harmonies on “Dear Boy,” flat–out screaming on “Monkberry Moon Delight”), and the full range of his feelings, from love to anger. Yet even the angriest songs are hooky and bouncy. Maybe that’s why so many critics in 1971 overlooked the often personal lyrics: the songs are so damn catchy they breeze right by.

With the exception of “Ram On”, Side 1 is all response to adversity and criticism, comprising accusation (of Lennon, in “Too Many People"), mock self-defense (“3 Legs”), mock commiseration (with Linda’s ex-husband, in “Dear Boy”), mock apology (“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”) and defiance (“Smile Away”). Side 2 is all love, delight, and passionate release. It’s about finding a peaceful place to live (“Heart of the Country,”), having delirious family fun (“Monkberry Moon Delight”), making love (“Eat at Home”), falling in love (“Long-Haired Lady”), and reveling in teenage lust (“The Back Seat of My Car”).

“Ram On”’s importance to McCartney is indicated by the album’s name and by his including two versions of the song, one on each side. It’s the Lennonesque song on the album, a McCartney version of Plastic Ono Band’s “Hold On.” McCartney being McCartney, the lyrics of “Ram On” aren’t “Hold on, Paul” but “Ram on / Give your heart to somebody / Soon, right away.” But like Lennon, McCartney reassures himself that having found love, he can survive. “Ram On” also recalls McCartney’s early stage moniker, “Paul Ramon,” perhaps as a way of reminding himself of his continuing identity as a performer.

•••

The last few years have produced three complete cover versions of Ram. Though totally unrelated, the compilations RAM on L.A. and Tom (after WFMU disc jockey Tom Scharpling, who masterminded it) were released the same week of March 2009. RAM on L.A. is fascinating and maddening by turns. You’ll either love Le Switch’s gypsy-inflected “Monkberry Moon Delight” or run screaming from the room, while Amnion’s psychedelic “Long-Haired Lady” is deeply odd but oddly winning. To my ears, Earliment’s “Too Many People” and the Bodies of Waters’ “Dear Boy” strike the best musical balance.

Loaded with big-name talent, Tom is impressive throughout. Aimee Mann does “Too Many People,” Death Cab for Cutie takes up “Dear Boy,” and The Morning Benders cover “Ram On.” Every track works, but Ted Leo’s “The Back Seat of My Car” is brilliant. The beginning drags a bit, but the last 2½ minutes are amazing. Leo’s “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. . . . WOOOOO!” before he screams “We believe that we can’t be wrong” over and over, more desperately each time—well, you just have to hear it.

Dave Depper released his cover of Ram this year, playing all the instruments (a female friend supplied Linda’s harmonies). Depper decided to cover the album when he was at a creative low ebb, unable to write original songs, and set out to reproduce McCartney’s originals as faithfully as possible. He comes pretty close, an impressive feat that also limits the album’s artistic value. Because it doesn’t reimagine anything, The Ram Project is fun but not very illuminating.

I’ll give Depper the last word. In an interview he explained his decision to cover Ram this way: “I felt like I just discovered this big secret—that Paul McCartney actually did a bunch of badass stuff, and I had spent my whole life trash–talking him. So it felt like a debt of honor to this guy to bring this to light.”

Nancy Carr is a writer and editor based in Chicago.

A box of LPs from the States.

2011-06-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

From this lovely series of photos. (h/t Boing Boing)

"They had thrown away something special"

2011-06-04T15:21:00.000-07:00

"I've never come across a story that fascinated or moved me more than this particular one. The end of the Beatles was convoluted and acrimonious, but it was also transcendent."

Read this if you haven't. It resonates nicely with discussions that have gone on here, mainly between Michael and various of our correspondents, about why the Beatles broke up. It's by Mikal Gilmore, journalist and critic for Rolling Stone among others, and author of Shot in the Heart, one of the best books I've ever read.

It is an excerption from Gilmore's 2009 Rolling Stone article, as well as prologema to his planned 2013 release,
The Winding Road: The Real Story Behind the Breakup of the Beatles. Some of it you'll agree with, some of it you won't, all of it you will find worth your head space.

What's going on

2011-05-18T05:15:00.000-07:00

Recently, reader Michael posted a comment that linked to a recent paper/story he wrote at Brown, done in the voice of John Lennon. The next day I happened to come across a story called "Later," from Lynne Tillman's new collection, Someday This Will Be Funny. (You can read the story (and the rest of the book) at innovative publisher Red Lemonade's site.) It imagines a meeting in 1979 between Lennon and...Marvin Gaye!

More vinyl bootleg memories...

2011-04-19T18:32:00.000-07:00

After my earlier post, a commenter over at my Facebook page joggled my memories a bit more. I thought it might be fun to ask everybody, "What were your favorite Beatles boots?" Not necessarily the best, but the ones that played the biggest role in your fandom?

In my teenaged years (1980-87), my most beloved vinyl boots were The Beatles at the Beeb 3-lp set, Hahst Az Son, Beatles Not For Sale, Strawberry Fields Forever, File Under: Beatles, and a version of Sessions (the abortive Anthology precursor). (The links go to the album's pages at Bootleg Zone, where they exist. The covers are different; my Hahst Az Son had a nice color cover.)

My bootleg frenzy abated a bit in college and after, mainly because I didn't have the cash to indulge. By the time I did, the glorious second wave of material had emerged. A friend burned me copies of Stars of '63, Unsurpassed Demos, and Free As a Bird. Then it all started again, as all the tracks that I'd lusted after as a kid were finally flooding out. Every time I'd travel to New York on business, I'd head down to this little record store and just LOAD UP.

My teenage years in handy YouTube format

2011-04-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

I spent about ten years of my life holed up in an attic obsessively listening to bootlegs (that's what we had to do, back in the days before Anthology, BBC, and remasters) on vinyl (that's what we had to do, back in the days before mp3s and Purple Chick torrents). I studied them like Torah; not only did they satisfy my lust for new Beatle music, bootlegs were one of the few things that sounded perfectly fine on my JC Penney stereo.

None of my pals really understood why I did this, and I never understood why they DIDN'T. Listening to a bootleg was like hanging out with The Beatles, and who wouldn't want to do that? Add to this the rarity, the need to hunt, and the expense of collecting them, and it became almost intolerably awesome. Even now--put it this way, probably the best Christmas of my adult life was the year Kate bought me 20 LPs worth of downloads from some site in Brazil. I spent two days deciding which ones I wanted, then making homebrewed CDs out of them. Fantastic.

Hanging out at a Beatles session, listening to them screw up and make jokes, and make all the little decisions that add up to genius? God, it entertained and heartened me so much as a kid, when I really, really needed it. And those years are what I thought of when I listened to this bit of YouTubery. Years spent counting the minutes until college, and hanging out with The Beatles.

The Beatles, 1,000 years later

2011-04-15T18:31:00.000-07:00

(Via the Boston Globe.)

Holes

2011-04-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

The title of John Luther Adams's concerto Four Thousand Holes, and Alex Ross's praise of it, make me curious...Some description here:

In spite of this skepticism, Four Thousand Holes is my own effort to re-appropriate and reclaim for myself something of my own musical past. For the first time since my days as a rocker, I’ve chosen to restrict myself to major and minor triads—those most basic elements of Western music (both pop and classical). But I’ve tried to assimilate them fully into my own musical world. Approaching these simple chords as found objects, I’ve superimposed them in multiple streams of tempo, to create darker harmonies and lush fields of sound.

2011-03-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

I'm not a Doctor Who fan myself, but if you are, this will be the cat's whiskers:

Courtesy of
Archie McPhee's Endless Guyser of Awesome!.

The Golden album

2011-03-21T19:10:00.000-07:00

(Via Deface Value)

Indiana, Indiana, Indiana

2011-03-19T17:17:00.000-07:00

This is some of what the Beatles did on their trip to the heartland (see Ed's audio post of the Indiana State Fair show below). John's laugh looks a bit, er, phony. Derek Taylor looks forward to one day quipping this moment in priceless memoiristic prose. Miss Indiana looks taller than all of them (milk: it does a body good). Where is Paul? Probably off securing a private room for himself and M.I.

Folk feelings

2011-02-25T11:14:00.001-08:00

I was fascinated by this letter from (in lieu of interview with) the singer Cass McCombs, which led me to this song, "County Line," well worth a listen, not least for some surprising/familiar/great Lennonish inflections.

From the letter:

The greatest art of any era comes from anonymous sources. The Folk who sacrifice themselves by passing on what has been taught to them so that it will live. In this sense, the future is Folk. We must not sell out our Past, but teach the Future. This is how I relate to influences, that Bob Marley, Kurt Cobain, Jerry Garcia, John Lennon, Darby Crash, Merle Haggard, Ritchie Valens, etc. are all 20th century figureheads for Folk feelings, Folk heroes, and the entire 20th century was an exercise in Celebrity. What if someone said that in the future we will return to the Folk, that Celebrity will be an impossibility by virture of technology? Well who knows and who cares.

(Via Stereogum)

Happy birthday, George!

2011-02-24T17:03:00.000-08:00

Today (or yesterday, depending on when you asked him) would've been George Harrison's 68th birthday. Don't think about that too hard, because you'll suddenly remember all the really shitty people who made it to 68 and are still going strong. Henry Kissinger. Charles Manson. Oh well. I guess God doesn't want to be around those guys any more than we do.

Thanks to commenter Gabriel McCann for unearthing this video.

Indiana, Indiana

2011-02-19T20:38:00.001-08:00

The Beatles, live at the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis, Sept. 3, 1964, at Heavy Sugar Radio.

"Love"

2011-02-15T19:09:00.000-08:00

What do you think? I could listen to Priscilla Ahn sing the phone book. (I like her cover of VU's "Afterhours," found about 5:30 into this vlog post.)(And remember her cover of "Julia"?)

You need to see this concert!

2011-02-12T14:11:00.000-08:00

Last night, I was lucky enough to see the closed-circuit film of The Beatles' first American concert, given February 11, 1964, in Washington, DC. The film was broadcast in March, 1964, to movie theaters all across the country--then languished in somebody's basement until the mid-90s, when it was handed over to an archivist. I don't know why it hasn't enjoyed a proper release; my guess is wrangles over rights and royalties.

But whatever: WOW. You NEED to see this film.

When my friend Grant, the programmer for the Egyptian, asked me if I was planning on hauling ass over to Hollywood (a two hour, two bus endeavor), I told him no. I have the DVD "First US Visit"—I guess its Maysles footage?—and while charming enough, the concert didn't seem like anything special. "This is special, Beatleboy," Grant said. "Just watch the preview--the picture is great, and the audio is great, too."

It's The Beatles like you've never seen them: young and ROCKING. Forty-eight hours after Ed Sullivan, they're in peak form. This concert is the absolute opposite of the usual "we can't hear ourselves/we're so bored/line 'em up Mal" 19-minute set they usually ladled out, and a hell of a lot closer to what they must've been like in Hamburg.

Even though half the songs are ballads, the raw power of the band is simply incredible. Imagine the last seven minutes of "Hard Day's Night," but real, and for nine or ten songs in a row. All I can say is, thank Christ they didn't have a wall of Marshalls behind them—if they'd been any more immersive an experience, people would've launched into a full-on Dionysian scene. The film proves John Lennon absolutely, utterly right: "Nobody could touch us." (BTW, the crowd shots also prove him right about Americans circa 1964: not an attractive people.)

Where to begin?

2011-01-30T19:26:00.000-08:00

Caption contest

2011-01-27T20:13:00.000-08:00

The Fab Four as you've never seen them before!

Thoughts on "Paperback Writer"

2011-01-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

Thinking about "Paperback Writer" — it's a thousand pages, give or take a few?!

Heard this one with fresh ears recently and began thinking about 1,000-page debut novels (paperback or no): Are there any?

Not sure. But then I thought about that scene in Wonder Boys (the film based on the Michael Chabon novel), in which novelist Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is typing a number on a page of his manuscript...and then adds a fourth digit.

Wonder Boys the novel was inspired in part by Chabon's experience writing and abandoning a novel called Fountain City. (More info here; an excerpt, with annotations, has just been published.)

*

Also: Why is our paperback writer basing his book (presumably a novel) on a "novel by a man named Lear"? Who's Lear? (Don't say nonsense maestro Edward Lear—he didn't write any novels.)

(I'm not saying these are "bad" lyrics, vis-à-vis the very fun earlier thread; I like these lyrics!)

So he's writing a 1,000-page cover version of a (presumably shorter) novel? Are there any real-life examples of this happening?

*

I also like the Escher-like moment when the singer declares, "My son is working for the Daily Mail, it's a steady job but he wants to be a...paperback writer" as well?!!

Your friend,
Ed
a/k/a THE PAPERBACK WRITER

PS What if the narrator/father is named Lear, and the son, aspiring to be a paperback writer, writes a thousand-page version of his father's (unpublished) novel? Though the first novel would also be a thousand pages...indeed, the son might simply be copying his father's novel, word for word!

The Black album

2011-01-16T13:22:00.000-08:00

You'd think "Eleanor Rigby" would not be an ideal song to cover...but I dig my former student Casey Black's rendition:

More than once, one of Casey's originals has popped up on the ipod and I've thought: some Springsteen song I forgot? Check out this one: "The Sarge." (At the very least, he finds something to rhyme with "hippocampus.")

POSTSCRIPT: Just noticed via FB that there's a stop-motion video for "The Sarge," the aforementioned Casey Black original—check it out ("hippocampus" occurs around the 1 minute mark):

Nilsson's "Isolation"

2011-01-14T13:39:00.001-08:00

Brother/good influence Jack Gerber just sent me this great cover of John Lennon's "Isolation" by JL's close friend/bad influence Harry Nilsson.

Lennon covers almost never come close to the original; Lennon's paramount gift was to make his material feel so personal, indubitably his. It bothered him, especially post-Beatles, that nobody covered his songs, but you can understand why. This version of Isolation probably pleased him.

Any other Lennon covers of note? Bryan Ferry's Jealous Guy, what else?

Talkin' Beatle books (and our Dev!)

2011-01-12T18:42:00.000-08:00

This afternoon, while trolling the internet for something to listen to while I was in the bath, I stumbled upon this podcast from rockcritics.com, which proved to be a very interesting roundup of Beatle tomage by Tim Riley, author of Tell Me Why (and a bio of John Lennon which I will doubtless purchase and read).

Our own D. McKinney is singled out and glorified, rightly so. Anybody reading Dullblog who hasn't read Magic Circles should go do so immediately.

I move we should assemble a essential Beatle Bookshelf. Any seconds?

PS--In finding the photo for this post, I stumbled across this blog. No communication is safe from this kind of thinking. It's totally insane, which is why I feel perfectly safe inserting no less than 180 hidden references to Satan, sun worship, freemasonry, and the occult into this post. (Hint: #1 is "Dev" in the title; you only THINK it's short for "Devin." #2 is also "Dev," a male Indian name, Indians being pagans and thus Satan-worshippers.) Why 180 clues? 6+6+6+0=number of the Beast! Or is it "the Beats"?

Pillow talk

2011-01-08T13:04:00.000-08:00

I must confess, I did not own the album A Hard Day's Night until fairly recently. So when I finally did get a copy, I discovered with pleasure that there were still a few new-to-me Beatles songs out there, namely "Any Time at All" and "When I Get Home" (which didn't make it into the movie).

The latter pops up on my iPod Shuffle now and then, and every time I hear it, this lyric makes me snort:

When I get home tonight
I'm gonna hold her tight
I'm gonna love her till the cows come home

What I love about these lines is that, while the content is quite sexually forward, the image is about as unsexy as you can get. "Till the cows come home"? No wonder the girls used to faint! And I would also like to note that it doesn't rhyme with anything (the next part goes "And then I'll love her more / Till I walk out that door again"), so he could have come up with something else. "Till the break of day," perhaps, John? No thanks, mate, I'll stick with the cows.

I think this is my candidate for worst Beatles lyric -- although "I know that she's no peasant" is very hard to top. Other nominations? And can you come up with a less sexy (non-Spinal Tap) lyric about sex?

Her master's voice...

2011-01-05T19:27:00.000-08:00

Happy new year, Beatle peedles! Just watch it, you'll laugh.

Me on Lennon on Huffpo

2010-12-05T20:59:00.000-08:00

Guys, just wanted to let everybody know that an essay I wrote on the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's murder--and what I plan to do to commemorate it--is up at The Huffington Post.

Welcome fellow Dullblogger Devin McKinney to The December 8th Project!

Kate Powers on McBroom Photo

2010-11-28T11:41:00.000-08:00

[This morning, as we were listening to Breakfast with the Beatles, my wife Kate launched into a long analysis of the Beatles photo that Apple has been using for its campaign, the McBroom session of April, 1969. I thought what she said was really funny and interesting, so I asked her to share it.--MG]

Thanks to the combination of the Apple/iTunes Beatle campaign and the fact that I was reloading the Apple site every five minutes on Thanksgiving night (looking for the Black Friday discount that made it possible to buy the spiffy new laptop on which I am writing this email), I have gone eye to eye with that late 60s photo of the Beatles a lot lately -- you know the one. Black and white, most of them turned away from the camera, all of them weeks overdue on a haircut.

It's actually kind of an amazing document. You've got Lennon doing the full fuck you Jesus -- shoulder length hair, beard, granny glasses -- but combined with a wry shirt and tie combination. McCartney, on the other hand, is like a boyfriend showing up to meet the parents for the first time -- he can't help wanting to win you over. So he's a little rumpled, and his hair is way past his ears, but he's clean shaven and appealing.

That in and of itself is fascinating, but then you see how this dynamic plays out on George and Ringo. George's hair is long -- almost as long as John's -- but you can see he can't quite figure out how to mimic John's edgier taste. Whereas Paul's look is so easy and approachable, so hard to screw up... And then you look at Ringo. Oh dear, Ringo. His hair parted in the center, in a badly-cut velvet jacket, he seems to be trying to echo John's look, and it's not working at all. Suddenly, you understand why George decided to play it safe and go with jeans and a work jacket.

Then you stand back and you realize: How ambitious John's music was. How poppy and approachable Paul's was. How they complimented each other so perfectly. How much George admired John, and how often he felt like he couldn't quite measure up to John's expectations, so he'd end up going along with whatever Paul wanted. And how often Ringo was left on the outside, looking in, not really getting why the others worked, but loving them and wanting to take a piece from each.

And then you realize: This is a hell of a photograph.—Kate Powers

Are you the Fifth Beatle? Or the 16,928th?

2010-11-28T11:14:00.000-08:00

Dullbloggers, I made these t-shirts for myself a while back and thought that some of you might enjoy them, too. I'm still figuring out which service to use for all these ideas--CafePress, Zazzle, Printfection, or others. Any opinion?

A brief interlude...

2010-11-17T19:32:00.001-08:00

I hope our Dear Leader, Mike, will excuse me for posting this...

I was flipping through a recent-ish New Yorker and came across an article about parodies, written by Louis Menand. Reviewing the anglocentric new Oxford Book of Parodies, Menand cites Bret Easton Ellis and continues: "Many other Americans could receive nominations: Framk Cammuso for 'Glengarry Glen Plaid'; Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwarz, for 'What We Talk About When We Talk about Doughnuts'..."

What a great piece that was! It appeared in The New Yorker's pages; here is the "abstract" from the magazine's archives. It is pretty hilarious even in this abbreviated form—a must for all readers of Raymond Carver and Michael Gerber!

ABSTRACT: SHOUTS & MURMURS parody of Raymond Carver (title refers to Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”)... Narrator describes sitting in a kitchen talking with Jim Forrer, a professional fish measurer... The two couples were pointedly drinking and smoking... Their main discussion point was doughnuts. Jim thought that real doughnuts were nothing less than spiritual doughnuts... Describes a fight between Jim and Lisa about whether he ate doughnuts at lunch. When I met Jim he was still married to Nancy, his forty-fifth wife. They had been very much in love, but one day she inhaled too much helium and just floated away... “Hold on a second, hon,” Carol said to Lisa. She turned to me. “Do you want to get divorced?” “O.K.,” I said. Carol and I left and got divorced. Then we cam back with our new spouses, Dave and Terri. We all sat there talking, the six of us in the dark. We went on talking and talking, even after the gin ran out. Talking about doughnuts. Talking about doughnuts in the dark.

Prove Violence Doesn't Work: Do Good in John Lennon's Name This Dec. 8th!

2010-11-16T15:15:00.000-08:00

This morning I had a great idea: "Wouldn't it be great if everybody who loved John Lennon and The Beatles did something nice in his name on December 8th? Something that he might've done, if he were still here with us...like donating to the ACLU; eating organic (or even macrobiotic) for a day; spending some extra time with a kid; making some art that showed love for people and hope for the world...Wouldn't it be wonderful to turn a tragic anniversary into something awesome? And wouldn't that show, once and for all, that violence doesn't work unless we allow it to?"

Like all contemporary great ideas, it involves a Facebook page, which is here (and also in the sidebar). I'm no great whiz with Facebook, so any tips on how to make it work better are much appreciated.

I've been chewing these thoughts over for a while, as shown by this passage from Life After Death for Beginners:

“Do whatever you think that person would’ve done. A million people doing one good act—it’s as if your hero lived many lifetimes. That’ll drive the bad guys barmy. They’ll learn that violence doesn’t work. But the best thing is, you’ll have done it yourself. You didn’t wait for Mommy or Daddy to make things better. Be your own hero. That’s what I want you to do. That’s what they’re afraid of.”

I'll probably do a couple of small things, but one will definitely be giving money to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, which was the Yoko-approved charity in the years after John's death. "Like" the page, share your own ideas, and spread the word!

Anyone remember this?

2010-11-13T05:52:00.001-08:00

"Weird Al" Yankovic recorded a parody of this song in late 1981 called "Pac-Man", during the height of the game's popularity.
—Wikipedia

I have an admission...

2010-11-11T10:17:00.000-08:00

...I love Magical Mystery Tour. Love love LOVE it.

Maybe it was seeing the movie as an impressionable 12-year-old at the Tivoli Theater in St. Louis, wreathed in pot smoke and surrounded by kids from Wash U.; or maybe it's the fact that most of the LP is singalong singles; or maybe it's the shimmery quality of the production (Elliot Smith was trying to recreate the MMT sound in his home studio when he died); or maybe it's the fact that the group still seems to have the "free from touring but still interested in being Beatles" vibe going... For whatever reason(s), it's the Beatles album that I listen to the most.

In a related heresy, I always cringe a bit when people call the White Album their favorite. They're free to, of course, but it's a bit alienating because I wonder what they're hearing. I hear all the great raw material of India filtered through a brutal six months of international bloodshed, heroin paranoia, rockstar hubris and internal discord. I suppose what I hear is the conditions that allowed The Beatles to arise—in the Buddhist sense of this phrase—beginning to dissipate. White has some superb tracks and I enjoy those, but it's one long bad vibe for me. I hear the group starting to sicken and die, and it's the group that I love most about The Beatles.

MMT's the anti-White Album, short instead of long, happy instead of tense, pot and LSD-infused instead of sodden with smack. MMT always makes me feel good—to me, it's Pepper with better songs. If that makes me lesser as a listener, so be it. In my not-so-humble, White is pop music consciously attempting to be art, while MMT is pop music so good it is art. Perhaps that's why critics love White and dis MMT; MMT resists cultural critique, while White wants it (especially Lennon's work).

Whew. Felt good to get that off my chest. Anybody else got any shocking divergences of Beatle taste they'd like to share? While you're thinking, here are some home movies taken from the filming of the movie.

Eht Seltaeb

2010-11-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

The Beatles from jordan stempleman on Vimeo.

(Via Poetry Foundation)

The littlest Beatles fan asks:

2010-11-05T18:29:00.001-07:00

Why don't they just let Ringo play?

The new Lennon £5 coin

2010-10-29T21:10:00.000-07:00

Nice our boy made it onto a coin and all, but it doesn't look like him to me. More like Queen Victoria.

Somewhere, John is looking down and saying, "Couldn't they have made me a little skinnier?"

Oh my God, Beatles sketch comedy

2010-10-21T13:14:00.000-07:00

I owe commenter Tony (aka Pismotality) a pint, a kidney or something even more important for bringing this into my life. From the British sketch show "Harry and Paul":

I particularly enjoyed the banter on the bus--somewhere Alun Owen is smiling. And the bit with Lennon and the Germans..."Harry and Paul" is now more popular than Christ, at least in this household.

Dullblog people, you are the greatest!

Another Innovation in Guerilla Marketing: The Photo-Blurb!

2010-10-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't know, our own Mike Gerber has published a fanciful and fantabulous fantasy novel re: the Beatles, John Lennon, murder, mystery, memory, and the whole meshugas. Here is another plug of support from a fellow co-founder of this blog (cropped above and below to honor the subclause of our bylaws requiring co-founders to maintain facial anonymity as we walk among our subjects).

Kudos, Mike, on—as JL often referred to a PM song he particularly liked—a damn good piece of work.

Real or fake?

2010-10-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

I've been wrong before, but the man doesn't look like Lennon to me, I've never seen any other shots from this shoot, there are no historical markers to check, and the woman's hair seems to hide her face rather too conveniently. But then again, I'm a big believer in the awesome power of Photoshop (see below).

"We think there's something in the air that's going to pick us all up again."

2010-10-08T19:02:00.000-07:00

"TV to me is like the fireplace used to be..."

Read a Talk of the Town visit with John and Yoko in New York, 1971.

Preview of LENNONYC: Jack Douglas

2010-10-06T18:55:00.000-07:00

Friend Jamie Bryan turned me on to these unedited interviews from the upcoming "American Masters" program, "LENNONYC." I haven't listened to them all, but I just finished this one with Double Fantasy producer Jack Douglas, whom we have featured previously on Dullblog.

It's spellbinding, especially beginning at around the 41:00 mark, where Douglas talks about the plans that John and Paul had to perform on Ringo's 1981 album. Douglas believes that would've become a full-fledged Beatles reunion, and given the context he provides, it's difficult to argue. (By the way, the first 4:45 is low-key hype from the people behind the show—pleasant enough, keep listening. You won't be disappointed.)

Nowhere Boy: The first Mid-Atlantic Beatles biography?

2010-10-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

If you love The Beatles, the idea of a movie based on John Lennon's teenage years is guaranteed to cause mild discomfort, as your leaping heart presses against your rising gorge. (Of course, we all agree that a comedy/mystery based on Lennon's later life is completely OK. By the way, thanks to the hundreds of people who downloaded Life After Death for Beginners yesterday. I hope you all enjoy it.) Faced with Nowhere Boy then, the logical left-brain is definite: "The world does not need John-Julia slash." At the same moment, however, your right hemisphere is screaming, "I GOTTA SEE THIS."

Well. I saw the West Coast premiere of Nowhere Boy last night, and YOU GOTTA SEE THIS.

I admit: Me digging Nowhere Boy is like a bee giving two antennae up to Chrysanthemum porn. Very few people who plunk down ten clams to watch this will have spent the previous three years trying to get inside John Lennon's head, and those who have, are incarcerated. But for me, last night, Nowhere Boy was probably the best non-Beatle Beatle movie ever.

First, the casting is superb—Aaron Johnson is completely believable as the young Lennon. Let me say that again, because for me it was like winning the Irish Sweepstakes: you absolutely believe that this is what the 16-year-old John Lennon was like. Smart, but wide-eyed; more bluff than tough; tender and violent and completely confused about which is right when; and saddest of all, utterly unequipped by his time and place to deal with any strong emotion. Nowhere Boy's Lennon is a kid ready to explode, and whether in a good way or a bad one, is completely up to Fate. Lennon himself often mused about what might've happened to him if not for The Beatles. Prison or the army were his guesses, and Johnson's characterization shows that. The young actor's features, accent, mannerisms—really good. As you might expect, the whole movie hangs on his performance. Fortunately, it's superb.

Kristin Scott-Thomas isn't given much to do—“Okay, for this take, read angrier"—but she's rock-solid as Mimi, the brittle battleaxe with the heart of gold (or at least plating). Even more important is Anne Marie Duff's Julia. The high-strung, divided character could've easily been unsympathetic, but she pulls it off with a sort of blowzy intensity that rings true with the facts of Julia's life. Relatives often talk about how magnetic Julia was, how attractive, how talented—but then we look at her life and see one catastrophic decision after another. Nowhere Boy hints at Julia's probable manic-depression, something that Lennon almost certainly suffered from himself. Certainly he inherited Julia's talent for emotional car crashes, along with her charisma.

Like his brain chemistry, the circumstances of Lennon's childhood—the mixture of abandonment and helicopter parenting, repression and license, truth and lies—are the key to understanding him as an artist, and a person. Ignoring this stuff because it's unprovable, unpleasant, or both, is the reason so much of what's been written about Lennon feels like gussied-up PR. In the case of semi-authorized biographers Ray Coleman and Philip Norman, I chalk it up to British reserve—products of a certain age, these guys seem to wish not to pry. And so we're left with respectful portraits that feel airbrushed at best, and at worst actually retard our understanding of the man. There was a time to respect John Lennon's privacy, and it was called "when he was alive." We cannot expiate Mark David Chapman by airbrushing his victim. Now is the time where we must try to understand Lennon, now before the primary sources die, and his world becomes forever locked in history. This may discomfit his widow—who was also raised in complicated circumstances on an emotionally restrained, class-ridden island—but it is nevertheless the case.

One cannot make sense of Lennon's ability to encompass opposites (the political activist who didn't vote until 1968, or the pop genius who thought The Beatles should put out "Revolution #9" as a single, or the devoted househusband who smacked Yoko and yelled in Sean's ear so loud they had to take him to the ER), none of this makes sense without investigating his psychology. That is, his childhood. As the Jesuits say (or was it the Hitler Youth?), "Give me the child until seven, and I will give you the man."

American writers on Lennon, drenched as they are in our culture of TMI, generally do better at getting inside his head. Albert Goldman's Lennon is a tormented demon, but also someone with the ruthlessness, self-preservation, and drive that it took to make The Beatles happen, and then survive once they had. Unfortunately, Goldman lacks sympathy towards his subject, and so in the end his Lennon remains a puppet, or at best, a cartoon. It takes compassion to delve into someone's mental state. (That's why therapists rarely punch their patients.)

Sympathetic but unflinching, Nowhere Boy is a very British attempt at Lennon that feels very American, and because it pulls off this balance, it will give Beatle fans a really precious gift: a "John Lennon" that actually makes sense. The screenplay was written by Matt Greenhalgh who wrote the Ian Curtis biopic Control. The details of Northern life in the straightened 40s and 50s are sketched flavorfully but not overstated. For a special occasion, Julia makes vanilla buns; she serves exactly four of them, each no bigger than a half-dollar, one for each child plus herself. Message received: sugar rationing ended in '53, but three years later, money's still tight. In Nowhere Boy, houses are dark, and small. People walk, or bike, or ride the bus. Clothes are wool. It's no wonder Lennon's generation idolized America, and once they'd conquered the world, made the Sixties happen as they did. What is Swinging London but the reverse of Liverpool ten years' before?

There were certain aspects of the film that rang a bit false. The Oedipal nature of John and Julia's relationship is, uh, right out there in a way that seemed like a convenience of the screenplay. The mother-as-lover meme was encouraged by John's late-70s tape describing how he wanted to feel his mother's tit, and that she probably would've let him. But Lennon also remarked on many occasions about how physically repressed his upbringing was, how it took until the 70s for him to realize "touching is good." (This from a man who had more groupies than I've had hot dinners.) All of this is to say, the scenes where John and Julia were cuddly seemed like a sop to the modern sensibility.

So too the blue language, which to the modern ear is necessary to connote "teenage rebel." Rebellious teenagers circa 1956 Liverpool were different than ours today; next time you watch Rebel Without a Cause, for example, notice how well-behaved all the kids seem. One of the most profound legacies of The Beatles generation was a great opening-up, emotionally speaking—a shift from reserve and repression to extroversion and sharing so decisive that now, anything but that strikes us as unreal. Nowhere Boy's Lennon uses the f-word with Mimi, and I don't think that happened in 1957. In fact, I don't think the 40-year-old Lennon would've sworn at Mimi. That's not the kind of man he was, and forgetting that turns him into one of us—ie, a creature of the world he helped create. That's incorrect. As a boy, John Lennon hated school, but as a man, he slept with a picture of Quarrybank over his bed. His last New Year's Eve, he wore his old Quarrybank tie; one, he still had it, and two, he liked it. Avatar of the new era, Lennon was quite literally old-school, and we should remember that.

Mimi, too, is made to "come around" regarding John's choice of career in a way that, while it makes her more appealing to modern audiences, isn't really supported by the historical record. In Nowhere Boy, for example, she's seen smiling approvingly at John during the famous Woolton fete, when in reality she "watched [John] cavorting around... I wasn't amused...I wanted to pull him offstage by his ear." (Thanks @thedailybeatle.) By making Mimi support Lennon's music, the movie avoids that eternal Beatlefan question, "Why the heck does he love her?"

That I found myself expecting this degree of accuracy is a credit to the overall verisimilitude of Nowhere Boy. I saw the care they took with it, and you will, too, so even if you don't like it as much as I did, you'll admire the movie as something worthy of the real people it is based upon. I was genuinely moved during the scene when all the family laundry is aired, once and for all.

A Liverpudlian transplanted to New York, by the time he died, John Lennon was a Mid-Atlantic Man. He is the patron saint of the coming together of British and American culture which started with The Beatles and has gathered steam ever since. From where I'm sitting, I could get a Cadbury Flake bar in five minutes. I'd pay for it with money I made transforming a very British children's book in a very American way. Your life might not be as Mid-Atlantic as mine, but you can certainly flip on BBC America—or if you're in the UK, buy a Snickers bar, or watch "30 Rock" on Hulu. Nowhere Boy embraces this cultural melding, which is probably why it feels so accurate. John Lennon could get a Flake bar five minutes from where he lived. And he'd pay for it using money he made transforming a very American music in a very English way.

I was visiting Oxford the night Diana was killed, and for the week after that. The way people mourned, what they did and said, and the way the mass-media shaped all of it (from the wall-to-wall TV coverage to Elton John singing "Candle in the Wind") struck me as, well, American. I didn't expect British people to leave stuffed animals and say they felt as if they knew her personally; and I doubt anybody older than John Lennon's era would've said that. American emotionality and egalitarianism is new in UK culture, and John Lennon did as much as anyone to create that. In 1980, when John Lennon died, Britain and America mourned differently; in 1997, they really didn't.

Whatever one thinks about this change—whether it's a good thing, a bad one, or somewhere in between—it allowed Nowhere Boy to succeed in a new way. The movie feels both thoroughly British, and emotionally aware. It gets both the facts and the feelings 99% right. That's a great thing, and augurs very well for future Beatle media. YOU GOTTA SEE IT.

Reminder: Mike's book is FREE today!

2010-09-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

Hey folks! I'm happy to say that hundreds of you have taken advantage of my catastrophically bad business sense, and downloaded Life After Death for Beginners. Even better, I'm already getting emails from people telling me how much they're enjoying it. THIS IS AWESOME

(no punctuation, for extra breathlessness)

Seriously: Life After Death for Beginners would not have turned out as nicely as it did without all the things I've learned from the posters and commenters here at Dullblog. It is such a pleasure to be able to say thanks in this way. Please take me up on it!

And now, off to see "Nowhere Boy" and The Quarrymen (sans J/P/G, of course).

(Two more downloads since I started this post.)

Thursday, 9/30/10: Imagine Mike's book for free!

2010-09-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

Because I am still not quite clear on the whole "capitalism" thing, I'll be offering my satirical Beatle noir mystery, Life After Death for Beginners, as a free download this Thursday, September 30. While I'm off watching a preview of "Nowhere Boy" at the Egyptian, you can get three years of my freakin' life in convienent .epub or .mobi format without paying a red cent.

The softcover lists for $14.95, and the ebook for $4.99, but not for you, and not this Thursday. To quote the press release:

LADFB stars Tom Larkin, an impossibly famous rock icon who dies tragically at the hands of a deranged fan—or so the world believes. In reality, Tom narrowly escapes with his life. As he recuperates in a secret hospital for the super-rich, his loving but imperious wife Katrinka becomes convinced that it’s safer for everyone if the musician stays dead. Reluctantly, Tom agrees to live out his days in obscurity… until an old enemy reveals that his life is still in danger. Stripped of his former fame and access, Tom has to figure out who tried to kill him without publicly revealing his survival. His search leads him back to his old life, to the manager who made him a star; to the other three members of The Ravins, each dealing with his legacy in their own way; to his estranged daughter and the son who thinks he’s dead and of course, to Katrinka, the eccentric, devoted, public face of the Larkin myth.

On September 30th, go to my website (mikegerber.com) or the book's site (lifeafterdeathforbeginners.com), select the format you want, and enter the coupon code "FREEDAY". Then, instead of charging you $4.99, you should get it for the glorious sum of zero dollars and zero cents. The coupon's only good for 24 hours, but I'm telling everybody now so that they set their iCals/Google Calendars/Zeo alarm clocks/trained housecats. The coupon activates at 12:00:01 on Thursday morning, and ends at midnight that night. After Thursday, prices will revert to normal, which is still a pretty good deal if you ask me. I would be really happy if a lot of people downloaded it, so tell your friends.

I love Life After Death for Beginners—it's the best book I've ever done, by far—and I couldn't have pulled it off without the support of a lot of friends, many of whom read Dullblog. This is just a small token of my thanks to them, and my affection for the lovely little community that's sprung up here.

Comment from A Tiny Revolution

2010-09-21T09:54:00.000-07:00

(Above: Ringo's letter from Queen Elizabeth II, 1965, h/t to Kenwood)
Folks, just in case it's interesting, I'm pasting a comment I just left over at A Tiny Revolution. As expected, the thread on Lennon/McCartney is interesting, and well worth adding to, if you're so inclined. Enjoy--MG

Right on, AndyC. 1000% agree about Paul and Linda's impact on those two issues--especially in the UK--and the observation that the McC's impact has been specific, while Lennon and Ono's impact has been conceptual. I personally prefer the former approach.

I'm skeptical of artists as agents of genuine social change (and that goes for satirists, too), but each of us uses the gifts we have for good or ill, and I can't slag John Lennon much. The guy was conflicted, flighty, and prone to taking bad advice, but he was intelligent, extremely well-read, and (I think) genuinely looking for wisdom. That he couldn't live up to what we think we would do in his uniquely weird situation, says more about us than him. Just as there are some people who buy the St. Lennon myth, others are compelled to go the other way. Here's what I know for sure:
a) Lennon was shot a few days before flying (with his family) to San Francisco to march in support of some Japanese-American workers.
b) I spend my days typing comments on a blog.

As far as the "was Lennon assassinated" question, we'll never know. You give busy cops an open-and-shut case, and they shut it. Add to that Chapman's change of plea (which prevented a trial), and there simply isn't the mass of timely data that would be necessary to unravel anything. The NYPD's records would be interesting to look at, though.

But the "why shoot a rock star" rationale is foolish; there's no question that Lennon was considered to be a political actor by the US government since 1972 if not earlier--Operation CHAOS, anyone?--and once that happened, he stopped being treated as a musician and started being treated much more roughly. Why surveil a rock star? Why harass a rock star? Why spend millions trying to deport a rock star? You got me; I think it's all silly. But if somebody surveils/harasses/attempts to deport somebody, it's reasonable to entertain the possibility that, once back in power, they would go further.

Even from the outside, we can see that as the guys at the top changed—Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter--how Lennon was treated shifted markedly; therefore it's far from absurd to suggest that Lennon was the first casualty of the culture war. The election of Reagan/Bush was perceived as a profound shift, and ushered in the particularly muscular reptiles we're still battling today. I'm not saying that's what happened, just pointing out that we're not wondering if the Shriners murdered Bootsy Collins.

The other thing that I think is particularly important for us to remember--especially commenters on THIS blog--is that the power of leaders comes from the people who pay attention to them. A lor of people paid attention to John Lennon in 1980, including in a political sense; one personally may think they were idiots for doing so, but they did. Rightly or wrongly, The Beatles were perceived as a socio-political force almost from the beginning. This made the four of them uncomfortable--to J/P/G/R it was just a haircut--but that's what many people demanded from them, and eventually J/P/G became more comfortable giving it...in politics, in diet, in religion. To think of them as empty-headed moptops crooning pop tunes may feel pleasingly hard-bitten, but it's not really accurate, either in who they were, how they acted, or how society reacted TO them. The Beatles always claimed they were simply riding a wave, and that is true; but to deny that they were part of that wave, and helped make that wave, is factually incorrect.

In interviews, Lennon always denied "The Beatles as leaders" meme, but he recognized that it was there, and used it, with varying degrees of comfort, until he was shot--in circumstances that hadn't ever happened before then (except in "Stardust Memories"!) and really haven't happened since. That could mean it was a random act. Or it could mean that it was the final move in a political game particular to that time and place--just as MLK's assassination was. To be scornful of that possibility seems a bit callow, but YMMV.

I guess what I'm trying to say is no matter what WE think of Lennon or The Beatles' politics, or activities in the political realm, it is simply factual that he/they were considered to be political actors, especially from 1965-80. Whether this is appropriate, a good idea, distracting, infantile or absurd is an individual opinion--but to deny it, in the face of all we know, is a fashion statement. It's no deeper an opinion than saying, "Who the fuck cares about Rosa Luxemburg, what a weirdo."

I personally don't need The Beatles or John Lennon to inform my politics--the music's plenty, thanks--but I know guts when I see 'em. John Lennon faced the possibility of death over his opinions (during the entire '66 US tour, for one thing), and yet kept saying what he believed. That's a genuine commitment to honesty and truth, and one needn't go along with the canonization crowd to admire the hell out of that.

More on Lennon and McCartney

2010-09-19T13:21:00.000-07:00

Shenk's series in Slate provoked this interesting post from my good friend, the progressive pundit Jonathan Schwarz. Check out the comments section, too--I left one, and it's usually very vigorous.

BTW, enjoy the thematically appropriate "Mad Day Out" pic.

Mike's post reminded me...

2010-09-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

...of this video for "I'm Steppin' Out," which I just saw a few days ago for the first time...

Page Six on Sean Lennon

2010-09-17T18:31:00.000-07:00

If I could give Sean Lennon one single gift in his life, it would probably be to never appear in a gossip column. The hand he's been dealt has got to be so surpassingly alienating and weird, that seeing himself reflected in the media's funhouse mirror must make it even more difficult.

What did George once say? “The nicest thing is to open the newspapers and not to find yourself in them.”

So why am I posting this Page Six piece touting Sean and model Charlotte Kemp as "the new John and Yoko"? Mostly because I like Sean's prepster shirt and knit tie. If I ever make real money, I'm going to ask the dude where he shops. Lennon pere had an eye for threads, too.

The thing about John and Yoko--the reason we're still talking about them--is that they were so incredibly unexpected...especially in the fairly narrow, showbiz-bounded world of gossip columns. To steal a phrase from McCartney, if Sean and Charlotte are lucky, they won't become "a John and Yoko," but "a Sean and Charlotte," whatever that might be. And happy couples are by definition beyond the ken of gossip columns; they make for exceedingly poor reading.

Shenk on Lennon/McCartney

2010-09-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

My favorite photo ever of John and Paul, taken by David "Blow Up" Bailey in January 1965. Speaks volumes.

In analysis that is almost Dullbloggian in its grain of detail, Joshua Wolf Shenk addresses the Lennon/McCartney collaboration in this multi-part series in Slate. Take a look; if you're reading this blog, you'll really enjoy it.

This article--part of a series on famous collaborations--was forwarded to me by my own dear collaborator Jonathan Schwarz. Jon and I wrote a bunch of humor back in the 90s. You can read Jon's own "Yesterday" (or "Help!" depending) in Fierce Pyjamas, The New Yorker's collection of its best humor since 1925.

But back to Macca and Lenny: Let the analysis of the analysis begin!

PS—My Beatle book, Life After Death for Beginners, is done; I'm just waiting for it to go live on Amazon, then I'm planning on offering a free download day on Hey Dullblog as a thanks to all the wonderful Beatle peedles here. So watch this space!

You know my name

2010-09-11T08:15:00.000-07:00

You've probably seen the Experimental Jetset T-shirt design with the Beatles' first names written in Helvetica. It is "an attempt to create an archetypical shirt by stripping down the concept of a rock band to its bare essentials," according to the creators, and I own it in limited-edition tote-bag form (as seen here), thanks to my fashionable friend Betz. I carry it around the city a lot, because it's a perfect just-in-case-I-buy-something bag (holds a lot; folds up small). And because it's attention-getting, people tend to stare at me, or rather at it, which is slightly unsettling until I realize they're just admiring the way my bag "underline[s] the inner logic of graphic design itself" (again, per the designers).

Yesterday I was standing at the corner of 57th Street waiting to cross and I noticed a woman admiring the bag. She seemed pretty excited about it -- excited enough, in fact, that she approached me to say, "I love your bag!" That's when it got weird.

If it helps you imagine the following dialogue, which I swear is real, I'd say the woman was about 45 and probably South American, based on her accent. So:

ME: Thank you.
HER (pointing at the bag): Do you know those names?
ME: ...
HER: They're from Crime Spree! You know that movie?
ME: ...Uh...no?
HER: Oh, it's a good movie! Italian. It has those names (pointing again): John, Paul, Ringo, George...
ME: Oh, I...didn't know that.
HER: Yes! That's where those names are from.
ME: Crime Spree, huh? I will have to check that out.

And then, thank God, the light changed, because I had no idea where to take the conversation from there. What would you do if you met the only person in Manhattan who had never heard of the Beatles? And you were carrying a bag designed to capitalize and comment on the fact that the Beatles are so well-known that you can reference them by their first names alone? And this person wanted to have a conversation about that bag? Would you break down and try to explain the primary reference? Would you be able to explain to her that not only has she somehow missed out on this thing called "the Beatles," but she also doesn't actually understand a joke from what must be her very favorite obscure movie?

I looked up Crime Spree -- a 2003 heist movie starring Gerard Depardieu and Harvey Keitel. (It's French, not Italian, but whatever.) On a site called DailyScript.com I found the purported "first draft" of the script, which includes this exchange:

SAMI: We've got to be careful not to use our real names while we're in here.
DANIEL: Good idea.
SAMI: I'll be Elvis and you--
MARCEL (overlapping): -- I want to be Elvis.
SAMI: It's my idea.
MARCEL (whining): C'mon, I look more like Elvis than you do.
SAMI: Okay. You can be Elvis.
(Marcel smiles happily.)
SAMI: And the rest of us are... John, Paul, George and Ringo.

And that's it, as far as I can tell. The best part about the whole thing, I decided when I'd had time to reflect, is that she probably walked away thinking, "How weird is that? She's carrying around a bag that references a movie she's never even heard of!"

Funnily enough, not long ago I saw someone wearing a T-shirt parody of this design just about a block south of that intersection. His said "Dre & Eazy & Cube & Ren." It's one of the many, many parody versions collected at this site. Every band you can think of, plus a few geeky grad-student jokes. My favorite is the one with the Twelve Apostles.

Socal Dullbloggers: Beatles on the Pier!

2010-08-27T12:16:00.000-07:00

[Photo: The Beatles in LA, 1964.]

The Santa Monica Pier has just turned 100, and as part of a summer-long music series, they're running a three-day festival of all things Beatle. Sound-alike bands, booths, hints of karaoke, they say there are movies...all on the Pier, which is gorgeous and great fun. I really hope this tradition takes root.

I cruised by the venue yesterday, and talked to some very nice memorabilia vendors ("Flip Your Wig" game, anyone? Yours is worn out by now, I'm sure) and Gillian Lomax. Gillian used to run the news department of our local "Breakfast With the Beatles"; now she does something called "A Magical History Tour," where she squires you around all the Beatle-related sites that pepper LA.

I'll try to sneak into the reception tonight, and take photos if possible. It's going Friday and Saturday, 10am-7pm, so anybody in the nabe should definitely check it out. (PS—Saturday night, there's a musical playing at Santa Monica High's Barnum Hall: "Ticket to Ride," which is the Beatles' story as told by your narrator, Brian Epstein. I'll see if I can get to that, although if I do the cognitive dissonance may make me black out. If only it had been written by Peter Brown...)

New Beatle pix from the attic

2010-08-20T13:24:00.001-07:00

A documentary filmmaker named Paul Berriff has discovered some great photos of The Beatles he took as a 16-year-old assistant on the Yorkshire Evening Post. The pix are going on permanent display in Liverpool. Here's the site.

This is now my favorite picture of Paul.

Why People Love John Lennon

2010-08-17T13:48:00.001-07:00

Friend Jon just forwarded me this news article detailing a letter that John Lennon wrote a young songwriter in early 1970. The letter never reached the songwriter--it was intercepted and sold. Which I think is quite a neat metaphor for both Lennon's fundamental decency, and how the circumstances of his life conspired to make it difficult for him to express that.

What other Beatles blogs do you read?

2010-08-04T19:55:00.000-07:00

Folks, I'm trying to assemble a list of the best Beatles blogs out there, so we can link to them. What are your regular stops? Put your faves in the comments.

Attention Harry Nilsson fans!

2010-08-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

Good news! The Wrap.com reports that the 2006 Nilsson documentary, “Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?” has finally found a distributor. The article says that the film will be at NYC's Cinema Village on September 10th, and be released on DVD before year's end. Folks, if I wasn't so sick these days, I'd fly out and lead a peaceful takeover of Cinema Village for an evening. I expect you to do Dullblog proud.

I was lucky enough to see this film when it premiered at The Aero here in Santa Monica in 2006 (not The Egyptian, as the article says). The venue was appropriate, Santa Monica being Nilsson's home for the last years of his life. Richard Perry was there for a Q and A, along with the filmmakers. I found the film really, really interesting--Nilsson's story is ultimately quite tragic. First his awesome and beautiful talent was obscured by alcoholism, and then, just as he seemed to be rebounding a bit, his money was stolen by a crooked financial advisor. The stress of this, combined with decades of hard living, hastened the heart attack that killed him in 1994.

Nilsson's a really interesting figure for any Beatles fan, because he is the only person I know who was both an unabashed Beatlefan, and genuinely respected as a musician by the Fabs themselves. (The only people who come close are Cheap Trick, who are fans, but too young to be equals.) Nilsson was even mentioned, half-jestingly I bet, as a replacement after McCartney "quit" in 1970.

When I was writing my Beatle Noir, Nilsson's friendship with Lennon (one of the very few friendships of JL's post-Beatle life) became a key insight past the Lennon Myth and into the man. Nilsson was a classic alcoholic, and that Lennon chose someone like that as his primary running-buddy says a lot about who Lennon was and how he worked, at the bone. I had a Nilsson-manque in there, but it got left on the cutting room floor. Maybe it was the documentary, or maybe the fact that I spent my childhood marinating in The Point!, but I feel a lot of affection for Harry Nilsson, and wish he were still here, writing songs, going to Beatlefests, and being Our Man inside the Beatles Bubble.

That was your first mistake

2010-07-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a simple/brilliant/catchy thing by Geoff Geis: FAST RAM. Which is exactly what it sounds like: Ram played at 45 rpm.

Geis writes:

I’ve listened to Ram on 45 a whole lot, but I’ve barely listened to it on 33. And while my initial love affair with it was a few years ago, I’ve gotten back into it pretty hard lately. Coincidentally, the other day it was the topic of conversation at a party; fortunately it was a party with a turntable and a copy of Ram. My friend Kyle S said that he had a natural aversion to things that sounded “chipmunky” because of some bad experiences with Christmas records when he was a kid. My buddy Dan C proposed that people in the era of Ram were so drugged-out that slow music appealed to them more, and he used Paul’s own “Helter Skelter” as an example. Both of them really dug Ram when it was played fast. Kyle even said that he wasn’t that interested in listening to the record at 33. I nodded my head to that. Ram on 33 sucks compared to Ram on 45!

What do you think?

(Via Rob Sheffield on FB, author of the new book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran)

(Bonus: Here's what Devin had to say about Ram On, the recent cover album by L.A. bands.)

Jack Douglas in Beatlefan, 1999

2010-07-20T09:29:00.001-07:00

(Folks, in the process of answering a comment from stalwart commenter Nancy, I stumbled across this excerpted Beatlefan interview with Jack Douglas, the producer on "Double Fantasy." I found it interesting--perhaps you will, too.--MG)

Lennon's Last Sessions

Producer Jack Douglas on Recording 'Double Fantasy.'

When John Lennon and Yoko Ono decided to return to the recording studio in 1980, they enlisted an old cohort to produce the sessions. In this revealing conversation, he tells Ken Sharp what it was like ....

Producer-engineer Jack Douglas was known primarily for his work with Aerosmith and Cheap Trick before he got a mysterious phone call in 1980 that launched him into John Lennon's 'comeback' recording sessions - also his final sessions, as it turned out. Contributing Editor Ken Sharp talked with Douglas recently about those sessions and Lennon's work with Cheap Trick- one track of which is included in the new 'John Lennon Anthology' box set ...

Q: I want to get into the Lennon "Double Fantasy" sessions, but I didn't realize that you'd worked with John prior to that on, was it, the "Imagine" album or the song "Imagine"?

A: The "Imagine" album.

Q: You engineered some of that?

A: Yeah. Well, I was second engineer. Roy Cicala was first engineer but that was where I met John.

Q: What was that like working with John back then?

A: It was amazing and it's so weird because we got to be friends. I was working in one studio; I was doing editing while he was tracking in another room and doing vocals. I mean, there was no way I was allowed to do vocals with him. I was way too young but he came in and I was putting stuff together and editing and he said to me "How ya doing?" You know, I'd met him earlier in the day but this was the first day and I said "OK, OK.' I wanted to be nervous but like I said, he wouldn't let you be. And he lit up a smoke and I said to him "I've been to Liverpool" and he looked at me and said "why the hell would you have been to Liverpool?" and I said well, you want to
hear this story?

Q: Is this the one on the boat? [As a young musician, Douglas and a friend stowed away on a boat In order to get to Liverpool, only to be caught and written up in British newspapers.]

A:Yeah. I told him that story. And he, like, cracked up, he was cracking up 'cause they'd read the papers about these idiots who were held captive on this boat ... after that, he said "What are you doing?" I said, "Well, after this?" He goes, "Yeah". I said "Nothing." He goes, "You can come with me.' So we went out, you know, and he took me to a party and he was like - see, I told him I was born and raised in New York, and he would say to me, "See that guy over there?" "Yeah" and if I knew him, he'd say, "Well, who is he? What is he?" I'd say, "Well ... that guy's an asshole. Don't even go near him. He'll fuck and suck your blood." "Thanks, man." It was like one of those kind of things.

Q: So you continued the friendship through the' 70s?

A: Yeah, all through it. And, in fact, I was staying with him out in L.A. during the crazy period (the so-called 'Lost Weekend") while I was producing Alice Cooper.

Q: Oh, okay "Muscle Love"?

A: "Muscle Love", yeah. And so I was hanging, I was hanging with him and I was doing Yoko records. All those crazy records with Yoko during which John was most of the time not allowed in the studio.

Q: Really.

A: Yeah. You know, I never let those two…very rarely when I did "Double Fantasy" did I ever have them in the room at the same time.

Q: Why?

A: It just didn't work. John always wanted to get in to Yoko's stuff and she could not bear it. It was already . . . there was already too much competition between those two.

Q: You really think there was, even then?

A: Yeah. Absolutely. And so it was, it just was when John came in and heard what she did after it was done, it was like 'Yeah!" he'd get really excited. But if he was there ...

Q: Would she be excited, conversely, with what he did?

A: Nah, "That's good, John", you know. But, yeah, he was always good. For her, getting her part done was the biggest challenge, you know. And I mean, he was just ... I mean, for me, he was the ultimate guy to produce because he was such a true professional. He always left his ego outside the door when he came into work.

Q: What was he like as a player?

A: He was a great rhythm player. He could not play lead to save his life. Very small hands, so he had no reach at all. But man, rhythm ...

Q: How did you get enlisted to produce "Double Fantasy" and wasn't It a secret for awhile? If you can talk about how it was kept hush-hush ...

A: Yeah. How did I get ... I think I ran into John about six months before we did that record, maybe almost a year. I was in a health food store over on the East Side and in comes John and Sean, who was maybe 3. And the nanny and they were just coming from the YMCA where they'd been swimming. And John comes up and goes 'Hey, Jack' and I hadn't seen him in years. "Jack, how ya doing? What's happening? Oh, you're a big producer now.' He was always kidding me, or goofing with me. And I was goofing back with him. And he told me, 'Why don't you call me?" Gave me his number, and he said "Come on over to the Dakota and hang out' and I just, I took the number and I stuck it
in my pocket and my wife said to me, 'Wow, that s great, he wants you to come over and hang out and stuff, 'And I said 'Yeah, I'll do it, you know, but, you know, maybe he was, I mean, he's so involved with his family now and he's kinda out of the business. I'll call him sometime.' I never did. I never did. Stupid, too, isn't it?

Q: Damn, If John Lennon gave me his phone number ...

A: And I never, I never called him. I always felt like 'I don't want to really bother him," you know and It turns out he would have liked to have gotten that call and it was really stupid of me not to do it but anyway the thing was John was - we had a relationship and it was a good, trusting relationship and also I had that same relationship with Yoko. She also trusted me; she knew that I respected her work. And that I was a trustworthy person and John, I once asked him, I said -well into the album, we're sitting there and mixing and I said to him "I meant to ask you, why am I doing this record with you?' I said, "I just wanted to know..."He said, "Because you
have good antenna and that works for me because you always can read me, you know what this is about' and that s pretty cool because I always felt that was one of my strong points but it was very important to him to be able to so easily communicate with his producer. And again, like I said, because he was so without ago when he was working, he would just take a direction- If I told John, 'For this vocal, I need you to stand on your head," he'd say, 'if you think that's better, I'll do it.' I mean, he was like that.

Q: Were there any tracks that took a bit more time for him to nail?

A: I don't remember. Sure ... they all took about an equal amount of time. "Beautiful Boy" maybe took a little bit longer because of the chorus. Then he would double. He would double track his vocal, like in Beautiful Boy, like he would double. First shot. He loved doubling. Yeah, he was the perfect doubler. But you know, he doubled because he hated the sound of his voice. And I used to tell him, 'John, you don't have to double." I mean, when he sent me the demos from Bermuda - you have to understand that these are recorded on a boom box, right, a Panasonic, and it was just acoustic guitar or in one case, piano on 'Real Love' and him and I think, Fred Seaman,
banging on pots and pans, and he actually took the time to play those from one Panasonic to another one and double his vocal because he couldn't bear that - I would hear these things with a single vocal.

Q: What did you think of Seaman, by the way? He's now like this vilified character.

A: Fred, was like, you know, he just got hammered, man, I mean, there was no - John loved him and he was hired to be John's assistant. I mean, wherever John went, he brought Fred, you know? And, I mean, Fred, he probably made a couple of mistakes. But what he got nailed for was like really off the wall. John - and I was there - John used to get things sent to him, not just one thing, he'd get a boom box, or a cassette machine, they'd send him two, three of them, or they'd just send him one - he just didn't want all the stuff that he used to get from companies. Everybody would just want him to say "I use this,' you know. And he was getting complimentary stuff all the time and he told Fred one day, 'Take that," he says, "Go in the room, Fred, and take whatever you want, man, you can have it." And Fred went in and he took stuff and he brought it home and it was practical stuff he could use but Yoko had somebody always keeping an inventory of everything that was in that room and so, I mean, you know, Fred never, like, signed this stuff out. John told him, 'Keep it Take it, I don't want that crap' and when Fred finally got nailed it was because they said, well, you know, there's this stuff missing and you might find it at Fred Seaman's house. And once they went there, they matched the serial numbers, it was like a grand larceny rap. And so, that's what he got taken down on and it was really like, you know, he was there to keep a journal for John ... and whatever John ever asked him to do, Fred was like right there. It was a bum rap.

Q: Tell me about the secretiveness of the sessions.

A: Well, I'll go back a little bit here ... You probably already know the story that I got flown out in a sea plane to Glen Cove to the big house out there and a seaplane right onto the beach, hush-hush, and I already knew I was being asked to do a record because I had already gotten the phone call from Yoko and John. He's going back, he wants to talk to me about making this record; 'Don't say anything to anyone; just go to 34th Street, get on a seaplane and come out.' And I came out and Yoko said to me, she handed me the envelope 'For Jack's Eyes Only. Or was it 'For Jack's Ears Only'? Maybe it was both. And she said, "John is going to call you in a few minutes.' She said, 'But I just want to tell you, he's going to ask you to do a record." I went, 'Cool, that's great.' 'You would produce it with us.' 'Cool.' She said, I'm going to have a few songs on it and John doesn't know yet.' "OK.' She said, 'You can't tell him.' 'All right; you tell him.' So I had opened the tape; there was one cassette from John. And Yoko said, 'Now here's some of the songs' so she handed me a thing, like a stack ...

Q: Of her songs?

A: Yeah, a stack. I mean, she'd been in the Record Plant with Elephants Memory, doing demos ... I wonder where those demos are; some of them were very cool. And just a stack of not cassettes, of 5-inch reels, of seven and a half, dozens and dozens of songs. And I was like shook up, 'You gonna have a couple of tunes on this record?' Handing me stacks and John finally called me and he said, you know, "I don't really think I have that much stuff, you know.' He eventually sent me another one. He said, "I think if s kind of the same old shit' and actually that is on the tape, him saying that. 'Most of it, I think we'll give to Ringo" and 'The deal is, I don't know if this is really going to come off.' He said, 'I'm going to give it a try but, Jack, I've been out of it for a while and I don't even know what's going on. . So the deal was put together a band, arrange the songs any way I thought would work, I mean, as you know, if you've heard any of those things that are out around, you know, that things like ... 'Watching the Wheels" was like boom-jang, boom-jang, it was like fast, and almost Dylany and stuff. And he wrote me a letter saying, 'Can you make it sound circular?' You know, it was all these instructions I got from him and the deal was 'Don't tell anyone this is happening.' We put together the band.

Q: I was curious about why you chose some of those players.

A: I wanted guys that were - well, he knew Hughie [McCracken), anyway. And he knew (Andy Newmark] and he'd played with him. So these were guys who were his contemporaries. So the important thing for me there was if John made a reference to something that was maybe from the early '60s, or even the '50s these were guys who would know what he was talking about.

Q: Quick.

A: Yeah, quick was very important. I did not want guys who went "duh' and I also needed guys who could read. You know, the only guy who couldn't read was Ed [Slick]. And I brought in Ed because he'd done such fine work with David Bowie.

A: Let me just go back a little bit ... now the band didn't know, had no idea who they were - Tony Davilio and I did all the charts for all the songs except for 'Starting Over, which did not exist at that time, just didn't exist. So I'm singing all of the songs to the band at rehearsal an octave lower than he would sing 'am. And they're like 'Wow, great songs, Jack, but really, the vocals, I mean, who's singing these things?" Apparently, a couple of the guys had guessed but didn't say anything because I told them, you know, this is a secret session. They all loved it. The pay was good.
They're all getting double.

Q: Of the scale?

A: Yeah. The same with the studio. I booked the time but they didn't know who for.

Q: The Hit Factory, right?

A: It was way out west. . . it was out of the way. No one would know. We could go in and out of there without ever being seen.

Q: So what was it like when he first walked In?

A: Well, there was one more rehearsal, the last, the night before the sessions, the last rehearsal was at the Dakota. He sits down at the Fender Rhodes and he plays "Starting Over" and I said, "Where'd that come from?" He said, "Oh, I dunno, it just kinda came.' He said, "You think it'll make it to this record?" I said, "Make it? " I said, "It's gonna be the first single." I said, "It's gotta be the first song on the record. You know, come on, it's perfect." So we recorded that, we went in and rehearsed that in the studio...

Q: It's the first track you recorded?

A: The first track we recorded. And it just went down. Now, all this time, we're in there, we were in there a month before there was any acknowledgment that these sessions were going on. Here was the deal: If word got out that these things were happening, it was over; it was gonna end. So, I mean, I'd tell that to the musicians ...

Q: Why was it so secretive?

A: Because he wasn't sure if he could do it. You know, he was very, very insecure about this stuff. He didn't think he had it any more, you know. He thought he was too old, he just couldn't write, he couldn't sing, he couldn't play, nothing.

Q: Do you think once he started playing again with the band ...

A: It took awhile, it took awhile, there were some moments there where yeah, he was like, "I don't know. . ." I used to have breakfast with him every morning, he insisted at 9 a.m. I'd come to the Dakota and he was always so punctual. 9 a.m., he came out his door and we would walk from the Dakota to La Fortuna on 71st Street, a little cafe. We'd sit in the back, in the garden, and have chocolate iced cappucinos and talk over what happened last night, what was gonna happen, what was going on with Yoko, everything. And then, he'd go back and he'd like take a nap and by 11 o'clock I'd working with Yoko. But we'd sit there couple of hours and talk through every and there were moments at La Fortuna when I had to say, "John, really, I swear, it's good know, it's good, I'm telling ya. Even the vocals, everything, you sound great.'

Q: What do you remember about the last thing you said to John or what did he say to you?

A: The last thing I said to him and he said to me was "I'll see you in the morning at 9 a.m.' The usual. We were going to meet and then we were mastering that next morning. We were going to master 'Walking on Thin Ice". It was done. We'd finished the mix so, I mean, I said goodbye to him. I saw him with this huge, with this big smile on his face and his new leather jacket that he'd gotten at The Gap a few weeks earlier which he loved, and there's just this big smile on his face, "I'll see you in the morning."

Q: How long after did you hear [that he'd been shot]?

A: About 45 minutes later.

Q: How did you hear about it?

A: My wife came in and told me. We lived only a few blocks [away].

Q: You must have thought you were hallucinating ...

A: I absolutely did that. I thought I was hallucinating for a good six months, good six months, it was like, gone - it wasn't a good six months, a bad six months.

Q: Yeah, of course, of course.

A: I mean, I just flipped out.

Q: What happened after, there was a lawsuit at some point because you weren't paid royalties? Did that get straightened out? You got paid finally.

A: Yeah, yeah. Boy, what that was. 'Cause I waited like, two years, three years. I had a contract. I waited like three years then I finally said to Yoko, you know, 'It's like really like a lot of royalties probably accruing here. You know, I think it's time like we maybe have ... accountants, have somebody, you know, you don't have to deal with it, let's just sort it out, let our people sort it out.' And I got like a nasty letter. Almost like "Fuck you, you're not getting anything." And it was like "What? I don't get this." And, I mean, all kinds of nasty business went down after that, you know, being followed and having people offered money to say bad things about
me. None of which, even if they had succeeded, I mean, Cheap Trick was approached, none of those things ...

Q: To say bad things about you?

A: Yeah, yeah.

Q: By her? By someone in ...

A: Yeah, someone In her camp, ex -FBI guys, Elliot Mintz.

Q: What do you think of him?

A: Ugh. I'm not an Elliot fan. You doesn't like me; I don't like him ... weird because John, you know, didn't have one good word for Elliot. Sorry, Elliot. It's like, if Elliot was coming, John was like 'ugh'. He was more Yoko's friend. Yeah. I can remember Elliot coming by r place, you know. Someone brought him their not knowing that it was not a good idea but I came up and it was a house I had in the Hollywood Hills ... I was doing some records out there. And I so treasured these great pictures that I had, of John and 1, that I would take them with me when I was traveling. I was going to spend six months in a house in Los Angeles so in my little office I had pictures of John and 1. Amazing picture of John and I listening to 'Starting Over' for the first time, [while finishing up 'Double Fantasy'] somebody from the maintenance shop, because we released it as [an advance] single. Somebody from maintenance said 'Hey, they're playing 'Starting Over on the radio." John and I went running into the maintenance shop and we're both standing like dumbfounded, like with these stupid smiles, like kids, listening to 'Starting Over" and there's a little radio, me and John leaning over it, unopposed just like kids and somebody took a snap of it and so I had all these pictures and someone brought Elliot by and Elliot saw these
pictures around my place ...

My place was burglarized and you know what they stole? Pictures. That's all. All the pictures were gone. Every picture I had. There must have been a dozen, really beautiful. That's strange.

I mean, all my gold and platinum records ended up in a closet at Yoko's. I never got them! Well, somebody [took] one out and gave it to me as a birthday present. They gave me a platinum single and a platinum record.

Q: But you worked on the record, you were very loyal.

A: One day, I asked someone, I'm not gonna mention the name because he's still working, a loyal employee, who was also a good friend, and I asked him, "What's the story up there?" and he said, 'I don't know, Jack, for some reason you are on the enemies list.' And all I could ever think of was that I knew too much. And that it would be better - she suspected that everyone who knew a lot over the years was gonna write a book, you know, and that I would be one of these people who wrote a book and like tried to make money off it.

Q: And you still haven't.

A: You know, I made enough just in the royalties, [they] were like 3 million bucks. It was like ridiculous and she really lost a good friend because I was really a friend to her and I really respected her art. And she always knew that, so she really lost a good friend. I pleaded with her over and over again every time that we could see each other where I could get a word in, 'Yoko, don't go to court. This is so silly, let's not go to court. And when we did, it was a big public to-do. And she really was, I mean, it was a jury trial, six in the civilize, and the jury was out five minutes, came back in and the judge screamed at her, and it was like all this. Like how can you do - it was a matter with the contract. Like she tried to say the contract was a forgery, all this really weird stuff, brought in people to say that I ... people like [Rolling Stone publisher] Jann Wenner to say that I was a nobody, that they'd never heard of me ... and then my lawyer said "Can we talk about how many times you've mentioned him in your magazine?"... He made Jann read those on the stand.

Q: John was talking about touring?

A: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Q: What was his plan?

A Oh, tremendous production, including and these have to be on some of the "Lost Lennon Tapes" or whatever they call them his arrangements of songs that he said 'we never got right,' which were "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand".

Q: He was gonna do them?

A: Yeah, he was gonna do them. He was going, "You know, we never - we always wanted to do something like ... but it never got done exactly the way we wanted to do it."

Q: You remember how he wanted to do some of those songs?

A: He played them on guitar.

Q: And how were they different?

A: Maybe the tempo was a little different but it was more like ideas he had for what the rest of the band was gonna do. But that was gonna -be in the show.

Q: He was gonna do some Beetle songs?

A: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Q: I heard that McCartney or Harrison called the studio during the sessions and Yoko didn't allow the call to be placed through.

A: No, it was McCartney.

Q: What happened?

A: Well, from what I heard and from what I heard from John as well, he was looking to get. like, hooked up with Paul before Paul went o t' Japan, to do some writing.

Q: They were going to write together?

A: Yeah. And ... after the sessions, John never left immediately, he'd always sit in the control room and usually took a little grass. He had this old opium pipe, it was probably 500 years old, and he'd say to me, "is it all over?" 'Cause he would never do anything if we were working. And I'd say, "It's over, John." And he'd sit back and put his feet up on the console and he'd load up the pipe and sit back and light up and a few of us - I'd ride home with him because I only lived two blocks from him. And he'd start talking, you know, reminiscing about things, we'd listen to the radio and if
a Beatles song came on, he'd talk about it. But the one thing - the overwhelming feeling about the things that he was saying was that he loved the guys in that band more than anybody else, you know? He was pissed off at George because George's book had come out and didn't mention John. You know, like, "How can he write a book about his life and not mention me? I'm the most important…" Yeah. But he loved the guys in The Beatles. He loved them. And he loved that band. And, you know, it was like his band. And I mean, the way he went on about it ...

Q: And he was gonna write with Paul?

A: He was looking to get hooked up with Paul" yeah. But yeah, that call came through and that didn't happen. And Paul went off and got in trouble. And when he got in trouble ...

Q: He didn't get the message from anyone?

A: No.

Q: Who kept him away?

A: I think Yoko probably thought ... I can't speak for Yoko. Maybe she thought it'd be a distraction. I don't think it would have been...Who knows what would have happened. But when Paul got busted for pot in Japan, we were in the studio, when that call came in that he was in trouble, man, you oughta see John flippin' out.

Norman and Goldman and Sentimentality

2010-07-18T10:16:00.000-07:00

As part of my Twittering (@thedailybeatle), every so often I have to dig through my bookshelf o' Beatles, looking for interesting quotes. Yesterday evening, I was perusing Shout! and, as ever, thought it was a really great, fluid, surprisingly no-nonsense large-grain history of the group. I'm looking forward to comparing it with Davies, as soon as I can lay my hands on that book. (It's not really fair to compare Shout! with Spitz, as Spitz's book came after a couple of decades of further research, and is much less impressionistic.)

Anyway, Shout! led to Norman's John Lennon bio, a beach I'd attempted to storm more than once without success. It always seemed like the story we'd all heard a million times before, albeit fleshed out with some pretty awesome new quotes (which I suspect come from tapes Lennon made in the late 70s, as he prepared to write an autobiography). The book's history with The Estate--first smiled upon, then not--made me highly skeptical about its objectivity, and lo and behold, that was the primary complaint when it appeared. Cooperation is a great way to guide a manuscript--to keep pressure on an author--and withdrawing support after the manuscript is finished is a great way to keep the power. There is simply no need for this kind of behavior; if John Lennon's important enough to merit an 817 page book, he's important enough for everybody to shelve their egos for a bit and GET IT RIGHT. Unless that's not the point. It may not be, at least from The Estate's point of view.

Every page of John Lennon: The Life seems to emphasize certain Estate talking-points: John as rebel, Paul as authority; John as genius, Paul as sidekick. This simplistic view has been refuted by so many works it's simply not defensible any more. Worse than that, it's totally unnecessary, stoking a fatuous feud that does nothing but diminish everybody concerned. After all this, the section with Sean turns the poor guy into just another talking-point: Sean as Brand Extension, which demeans the father and stunts the son. Who knows what neat things Sean might do, if he could actually exist in the context of himself? He has that right, and I hope he gets it someday.

All this having been said, last night's dipping in to John Lennon: The Life was altogether more successful; I started around the end of the first Hamburg trip, and spent the rest of the evening reading. I think perhaps Norman's slightly operatic writing style only works once The Beatles' story is exciting enough to merit it.

Last night I read about Stu Sutcliffe's death; this morning I read about John and Brian's trip to Spain, and Lennon's subsequent punch-out of Bob Wooler. In each of these instances--some of the most hotly debated in Lennon's life--I was struck by how little Norman's portrait of Lennon deviates from Albert Goldman's.

Whatever one might say about The Lives of John Lennon, its primary revelations in the case of these three events are not strongly refuted in Norman. While Goldman assumes the worst, Norman tries to put the least controversial face on it. Of course I wanted the issues resolved, and Norman simply does not do that.

The source for the "John kicked Stu in the head" story is revealed to be Stu's sister Pauline, who says her brother told her during his last visit to Liverpool. That seems like a pretty heavy source. Here's how Norman handles it:
1) Paul, who was supposedly there, says it's possible that John attacked Stu, but doesn't remember it. Of course, the question any biographer should then ask is, "Would Paul admit it if it HAD happened?" There is NO WAY Paul would do this; it would be tantamount to calling his ex-partner a murderer. This would be massively damaging to McCartney's own career. People get pissed when the guy credits songs he wrote to "McCartney-Lennon"!
2) Astrid, who was supposedly the cause of the fight, doesn't think it happened, because "Stuart would've told me." Hmm. If your best friend beat you senseless because he wanted to steal your girlfriend, would you tell her? Probably not--and if you thought there was any chance she'd reciprocate, you definitely wouldn't.
3) Then "other people close to them both at the time are reluctant to believe" that John attacked Stu. Without attribution this is impossible to judge, but in any case it's almost meaningless. What purpose would speaking ill of the dead possibly serve?

If you're reading this blog you are--like me--really hoping that John didn't attack Stu, or if he did, did not contribute to his death. But our hopes aside, there is a vast swath of self-hatred in John Lennon, as well as a fierce desire to prove, achieve, outrun, defeat; the knowledge (or belief) that he contributed to his friend's death would explain those traits quite succinctly. It's not the only thing that would--Julia's death and his parents' neglect might, too. But as a motivation, it feels human, not like PR.

Any reasonable discussion of The Beatles' story has got to start from the point that these guys were human beings; when they were insecure teenagers, they acted like insecure teenagers. When they took drugs, they experienced the same effects--negative and positive--that other people do. The tendency to gloss over this reality is, to my mind, one of the most damaging aspects of The Beatles' mythology. Harrison famously said that one day he realized that "anyone could be Lennon and McCartney," and he would know. To marvel at their singularity, and stop there, takes an opportunity to learn about life and ourselves and turns it into...showbiz.

Of course the difference between Goldman and Norman is Goldman's palpable glee in destroying the Lennon myth for destruction's sake. I don't have much use for that, and think it mars the book horribly, making Goldman's primary contribution--his research--seem less valuable than it has proven to be. It's a shame that Goldman had no compassion for his subject, because it's Norman's fundamental sympathy towards Lennon which makes the portion that follows Stu's death simply heartbreaking. He quotes a letter from Astrid to Stu's mother, Millie:

"One day [John] showed me and Klaus [Voorman] his little room. Every piece of paper from Stuart he have [sic] on the wall and big photographs by his bed."

Does Norman want us to come to our own, dark conclusion? I wonder, and I wonder it regularly throughout the book, as Norman trots out this or that example of Lennon's bad behavior. But it must be said, in each of these three cases, the source for the darker portrait is Lennon himself. For Wooler, Norman turns Lennon's "I could've killed him" into "bruised ribs and a black eye." For Spain, Wooler refutes both Lennon's admission to Pete Shotton and Peter Brown's version (Brian gave John a blow-job) in favor of Yoko's version (nothing happened). But if nothing happened, why do you beat up Bob Wooler? And if you're swinging at Bob Wooler over nothing, doesn't that make you the kind of dude who, jazzed on speed, might coldcock your best friend? It's troubling. Here's a quote from Lennon's interview with Andy Peebles two days before his death:

“I mean the Beatles first national coverage was me beating up Bob Wooller, at Paul’s 21st party because he intimated I was homosexual. I must have had a fear that maybe I was homosexual to attack him like that and it’s very complicated reasoning. But I was very drunk and I hit him and I could have really killed somebody then. And that scared me.”

The question I keep expecting, but never hear, is this: were John and Stu lovers? As with the trip to Spain, it wouldn't really change what we know about the people involved, but would explain the intensity of the emotions in a simple, human way. As long as biographers hide behind the "extraordinary man" tactic--stories of sentiment and showbiz--we'll never get a proper understanding of their subjects. Violent or pacifist, straight gay or bi, the important thing about John Lennon was/is the music he made. Period. Thirty years on, it's not too much to ask for a minimum of squeamishness. Gimme some truth!

John Lennon's life was exhaustively chronicled, not least by himself, and this profusion of source material gives us average folks an opportunity to pierce the veil of celebrity in a rare, maybe even unique, way. That the fellow himself professed a love of truth and hatred for cant always makes me cringe extra hard when sentimentality creeps into his life story. I guess that's my big bone to pick with the Estate: the ballad of John and Yoko is nothing if not sentimental, and both John and Yoko do not seem like sentimental people to me. They seem primarily smart, which makes me suspect that sentimentality is in there to fool the rubes. And that turns Lennon's life from an object lesson on flawed greatness, into a dehumanizing exercise in 21st Century branding. He deserves better, and so do we.

UPDATE, the next morning: but of course John didn't have to have kicked Stu to feel responsible for his head injury. Without John, Stu wouldn't have even been playing with the band, in a position to get beaten up. I've never read a Lennon quote saying that he felt responsible, but it wouldn't be all that surprising if he did.

NANCY & OTHER COMMENTERS: People who try to comment on this post are, for some reason, getting the dreaded "bX-oyj254" error. So I've moved comments over to my personal blog, mikegerber.com. I'll move 'em back once Blogger's fixed.

Smiles await you

2010-07-14T13:35:00.001-07:00

Juggling to side two of Abbey Road.

Great pic!

2010-06-30T17:33:00.001-07:00

"Genius Is Pain"

2010-06-28T20:31:00.001-07:00

(All words from Lennon interviews.)

(Via Jonathan.)

All your life

2010-06-18T20:37:00.001-07:00

Sort of Beatle-related

2010-05-22T19:25:00.000-07:00

Janelle Monáe sings some of "I Want to Hold Your Hand"...

...just a tease for the best thing I heard this week: "Tightrope."

The best thing I heard last week was a wonderfully satisfying album from the '90s called Powerbill, by a group called the Semantics. Deliriously great, slightly Southern-fried power-pop, along the dB's/Matthew Sweet axis, with healthy dollops (sez Euge, & I concur) of XTC and Big Starry goodness. You can find it by Googling around—maybe starting here. Why am I posting it on this blog? Because the drums are played by...Zak Starkey!

After I tipped off John, one of the "silent Dullbloggers," he sent me this message:

In case you were curious, and in case you haven't already tracked down the reference -- I am proud to say that I actually own "The Ultimate Power Pop Guide," Shake Some Action [...], and the #181 reviews goes as such:

(1996) "Released only in Japan more than three years after it was recorded (and after the band was defunct), Powerbill features the ample singing, songwriting and performing talents of Will Owlsley [sic] and Millard Powers, along with Zak 'Son of Ringo' Starkey on drums. It contains the dreamy 'Coming Up Roses' (later to be re-recorded by Owsley for his debut album), as well as other meaty slabs of Southern power pop such as 'Jenny Won't Play Fair' and 'Sticks and Stones.' Produced by Peter Asher, the CD has become quite the collector's item."

* * *

The sad footnote is here and here.

Listen to this album!

I want to hold your hand...

2010-05-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

...just maybe not when you're thirty-five.

Albert Goldman and Hunter Davies on Beatles Biographies

2010-04-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

[crossposted from mikegerber.com]

This is a two-part news program from 1989, where the author of the muckraking "The Lives of John Lennon" (just released at that time) debates Hunter Davies, the author of "The Beatles" authorized biography from 1968. Davies is very charming, and makes some very good points about Goldman's tendency to veer off into—well, the nicest thing to call it is "creative writing." I think that's exactly how any sensible person should read it; at points Goldman stops writing about the real John Lennon, whoever he was, and begins crafting a character he's calling "John Lennon." Meticulous research aside, Goldman presumes; he invests his personal impressions with the weight of conclusively proven facts, and any reader with the tiniest pinch of sympathy resists that. Goldman bios, whether of Lenny Bruce or Lennon (I haven't read Elvis), are a type of New Journalism that, while valuable, isn't quite successful.

Goldman counters by saying that Davies' book was authorized and thus sanitized. This is beyond debate; Davies was compromised, and while it's naive to blame him for it, it is a flaw. The human folly is that at the time everybody's still alive and everything is fresh and "the real story" is still possible to be pieced together, the forces working against truth are at their strongest. Davies is a bit disingenuous in his defense, but one can understand why he (and his publisher) did not want to cede the field entirely to Goldman's new book. As a lover of history, biography, and The Beatles, I was fascinated. Apart from the rest, there is the issue of personality: while both men make fair points, Goldman presents himself in such an off-putting way—so arrogant, overbearing, and dismissive—that any agreement is painful. Explains a lot why people hated his books so much. (Though not everyone; I recall reading somewhere that both John and Paul had read his bio of Elvis, and liked it.)

POSTSCRIPT: I watched a whole OTHER documentary for this post, one from BBC4 in the late 80s called "Lennon/Goldman: The Making of a Bestseller," which promised to examine the issues of celebrity, biography and commerce in-depth. I'm really interested in all those issues, but the doc ended up being underwhelming (probably because Goldman pulled out at the end). Look it up on YouTube if you're interested; Bob Spitz (a friend of Goldman who would later write a large biography of The Beatles) makes some interesting points about how rock journalists cannot risk telling the truth about their heroes; Robert Christgau also has some compelling things to say about Goldman's biases and the nature of popular culture. And there's a psychic—and a flamboyantly gay interior decorator—that are both great set-pieces, too.

More on the breakup...

2010-04-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

A great comment from Nancy in the comment thread...

Here's another thought, prompted by your post and the responses to it: both John and Paul reacted to Brian Epstein's death in ways predicted by their reactions to their respective mothers' deaths. John learned from his whole childhood that he couldn't really trust anyone (from his p.o.v., both his parents abandoned him), and that if you loved someone, he or she would vanish or change beyond recognition (his Uncle George, his mother, Stu Sutcliffe, and from his perspective, Cynthia). Paul learned from his childhood that when the worst happened (his mother's death), you pulled together and worked harder.

So Brian Epstein dies, and John reacts by withdrawing his emotional investment from the Beatles, and in particular withdrawing from Paul. Paul reacts by getting more frenetic and anxious, trying to keep things moving and everyone together. John reacts to THAT by increasingly seeing Paul as a parental figure rather than a peer, someone who's trying to take over a la his Aunt Mimi, and gets more resentful and less willing to cooperate. Paul reacts to this by getting angrier and less tolerant of John -- here's Paul doing all this work, trying to keep the band together, and John doesn't appreciate it at all! --and the whole cycle continues until the group splits apart.

Of course all this is vastly complicated by money, Apple, Yoko, etc. etc., but it seems to me to be part of the story. Once Paul went from peer to parent, in John's eyes, it was all over. The fact that Yoko became "Mother Superior" is another twist . . . .

I think Nancy's analysis is shatteringly perfect. Add your 2c, Dullbloggers!

A Momentary Lapse of Reason

2010-04-22T17:22:00.001-07:00

Shirley Tilloch over at Beatles Til I Die has written a very interesting post originally inspired by one over here at Dullblog. This post of mine began as a lengthy comment to her post...until I got to the point where it was too long and went off in too many directions. So apologies in advance if what I'm about to say is a bit (or a lot) scattered. I think it's sufficiently original to be worth saying anyway.

Briefly—and Shirley, please correct me in the comments if I mischaracterize you—Shirley writes that the presence of a 1969 memo by George asking the other three not to break up the group changes her perception of the whole breakup period. I share Shirley's surprise, and that's why I drew attention to the auction in the first place. (For those of you who haven't read the memo, gardener George writes, "A flower on its own is pretty; a flower in a garden is beautiful.")

In the conventional narrative, it's George who wants out of the group most badly—"I won't play if it pleases you"—the person most annoyed by the group's fame, and the party most injured by "the Lennon-McCartney carve-up." In forty years of debate, from "Yoko did it" to "we all got married," Harrison's negative stance on late-period Beatles has never been questioned, and is consistent throughout The Beatles Anthology, as well.

In an effort to put the memo into proper context, Shirley looked at what George was doing between September 1969 (when Lennon secretly announced that he was leaving the group) and April 1970, when McCartney made his public announcement. Here's what Shirley found:

The very first item I came across was that on 2nd December 1969 [George] took to the stage for the first time since The Beatles played their last ever official concert at Candlestick Park in August 1966, forming part of the backing group for Delaney & Bonnie (alongside his good friend Eric Clapton). George ended up doing 6 consecutive gigs with them (the pic at the top of this page is taken from a gig in Denmark after these 6 UK dates), staying in local hotels along the way, very much like the package tours the Beatles played on from 1963-65.

Okay, George certainly wasn't the only Beatle striking out on his own during this time, but I just can't reconcile the George of this period, gigging again as part of a large band, as having written that memo.

After thinking about it a bit, Shirley, I can—but I don't much like the answer.

The Harrison memo is, apart from being prescient about their solo careers, an excellent reminder not to put too much trust in the official story. For example, Shirley writes that, unlike George, she could see Paul writing such a memo, because "outside of Brian Epstein, he was the biggest fan of, and believer in, the Beatles right from the start."

That is the usual view for a lot of good reasons, not least Paul's Mr. Showbiz demeanor (which includes snuggling up to his Beatle past on record and in concert). But I recall reading somewhere that (for example) Lennon and Epstein were so much of the same mind about The Beatles—so integral to each other's thinking and planning for the group—that for all intents and purposes, they represented a single driving force determined to conquer the world. While it's clear that John had found other pursuits by '69, I think it's good to remember just how much of a Beatle backer he had been at other times--and the nostalgia he felt as early as '75, long before the others shared it.

John Lennon loved The Beatles. He got the same thrill we all get, only infinitely more so—if The Beatles were and are a spirit, John Lennon was the medium, and he knew it. Whenever there was no pressing commercial reason to distance himself from the group, Lennon embraced it. His major anti-Beatle statement, the 1970 screed in Rolling Stone, was designed to sell records, specifically Plastic Ono Band, which was to hard-headed myth-busting what Rubber Soul was to pot. It should be read in that light. (Lennon himself downplayed it; when George Martin confronted him years later over some things he said, Lennon demurred. "You know me, I say whatever pops into my head.")

The other Beatles had similarly complex relationships with the group. George's gigging with D&B isn't necessarily at odds with somebody wanting to keep The Bestles making music. Nobody wanted to go back to 1966, that's for sure, but otherwise it was totally up to the four guys in the band. One can read George's actions as "I can have fun working with other musicians, so screw J/P/R"--or perhaps, "Oh! I can work with other musicians without breaking up The Beatles...so why close that door?"

As Shirley alludes, by '69, every Beatle had released an LP without the others (Family Way, Wonderwall, J&Y's various). John and George had performed in public with other groups. At least Paul and George had produced other groups, and played on other people's records. And, with Clapton and Preston, other people were increasingly being let onto Beatle sessions. There was simply no external reason for any split to be permanent. "Paul tried to take over the group" feels very much like a Klein-era legal gambit; I highly doubt that "Let It Be" Paul was much different in the studio than "Sgt. Pepper" Paul had been. Then as now it benefits some people financially for the Beatles' breakup to be seen as inevitable, but that simple story doesn't really wash, and that's why it constantly has to be reinforced, re-told.

So if the conventional story isn't quite true, why doesn't the "truth" come out, whatever it is? Because the breakup of the group took place inside John Lennon's mind. Lennon acted; the others re-acted. However much the other Beatles might've changed incrementally from 1966-69, that same period tracks a monumental shift in manner on Lennon's part. How much of that is due to heavy drug use? How much to Yoko? How much to the overheated rhetoric of the times? After Rishikesh, in Lennon's mind The Beatles change from refuge and vehicle to threat and hindrance. "Why?" can longer be answered. But forty years later, some other questions can be resolved.

Was The Beatles a hindrance to Lennon's political activity? No—exactly the opposite. Whatever he wanted to accomplish as a spokesman, his bully pulpit was significantly bigger as a Beatle than as a solo star. As an activist, most of what we remember "JohnandYoko" for happened while Lennon was a Beatle. Compare the impact, freshness, and coverage of the "Bed-In" (Beatle period) with "Nutopia" (solo period).

Was the group a hindrance to Lennon creatively, or as a recording artist? Absolutely not. Even if it had been an either/or choice, which it wasn't, Lennon's solo work did not match his Beatle days—with the possible exception of Plastic Ono Band and Imagine (some of which dates back to the Beatle era).

Was the pressure and attention of being a Beatle psychologically more difficult? Once again, the rest of Lennon's life suggests "no." From the outside at least, my rather exhaustive (and at times exhausting) reading of Lennon sources reveal that the things that seemed to give Lennon true joy—living in NYC, having a son—had nothing to do with whether or not he was a Beatle. And the things that seemed to really torment him—creative difficulties, a tendency towards isolation—had been much more manageable problems during the Beatle years than after. Looked at this way, leaving The Beatles was the worst thing John Lennon ever did to himself...and he was too smart not have realized that.

It's impossible to make sense of The Beatles' split as a rational act. It was rational to get off the teenybopper treadmill, and they'd done that. It was rational to record less frequently, and work with others in-between, and they were doing that. Had they toured, it would've been vastly different than before, not only in terms of comfort, but also technology, security, and audience behavior. All four of them knew this. Performing in an amphitheater in Tusinia was a stupid idea, but it was 1969, there were a lot of stupid ideas floating about. That didn't mean it was time to break up the group.

The breakup was irrational; it stemmed from John Lennon's personal psychodrama, and has all the earmarks not of a natural parting of the ways, as the Official Version insists, but of an impulsive decision by a person then too proud to back down. It wasn't Yoko's fault, any more than it was heroin's fault, or Klein's fault, or Brian Epstein's fault, or McCartney's fault. It was John Lennon the rejected child rejecting back. What was the precise trigger? Who knows? All these "reasons" were trotted out after the fact, as Lennon's mind tried to explain what his heart had done.

As long as The Beatles were a job, Lennon was fine with it. However, Lennon's family relationships were always a mess—as a kid, then with Cynthia, and then later with Yoko—and so as soon as the other three changed from co-workers into "the in-laws," the group was doomed.

So what changed his mind? Chronology points to Yoko, but that may be too easy. From 1968 onwards, Lennon was a serious junkie, with all the paranoia and antisocial behavior that comes with that. All four had their moments—I'm thinking of Macca buying extra shares of Northern Songs—but I suspect the historical record will eventually settle upon the scenario of three essentially sane people who realized what a great (not perfect) thing they had, versus one person in a lot of emotional pain, with a difficult, controlling spouse, addicted to a heavy drug.

In this reading, the breakup of the Beatles is tremendously sad. Everybody lost, John Lennon most of all—not because of all the great Beatle tunes he might have written, but because he impulsively laid waste to his creative life in the vain hope that doing so would bring him some peace. It did not, and when he realized that, I think he had a tremendous amount of shame, embarrassment and regret. That explains his behavior towards Paul a lot better than "Too Many People."

Perhaps that is why Beatles, Inc., continues to pump out the conventional story: because the truth is much, much sadder. That such a splendid happenstance should dissolve into lawsuits and self-indulgence is bad enough. That it was a mistake, a miscalculation, something John Lennon longed to take back, but didn't have the courage to do so (yet)...well, that is almost too sad to bear.

Attention Millionaires: Beatles for Sale!

2010-04-19T09:38:00.001-07:00

[Cross-posted from Mikegerber.com.]

Roger over at WogBlog has an excellent head's-up on a massive collection of Beatle personal items/memorabilia from Beatle author Geoffrey Giuliano and one-time Beatle designers The Fool. (A lot of this stuff—which is really mind-blowing—seems to have originated with Derek Taylor, or directly from George and John.)

I don't know what I think about memorabilia. On the one hand, I definitely feel the attraction of it—what Beatles fan wouldn't want a letter from George to the other Beatles asking them not to break up the group? On the other hand, memorabilia also gives off a very weird vibe. I'll explain what I mean in a moment, after this snip from the auction's Facebook page. Read it and you'll see why I was moved to post about this collection.

John Lennon Yoko Ono Personal Home Recording Concerning Their Sex Lives Before And After They Began Their Relationship (A Sexual History Of Both Of Them)
An unheard original tape of John Lennon speaking to his wife amend at times is disbrued with her answers [garbled, but you get it—MG]. A HISTORY changing tape. Originally the property of John Lennon. Lennon gave a copy to Derek Taylor at Tittenhurst Park telling Taylor, “Keep it we might need it later if I ever decide to break up with Yoko.” Original cassette and CD listening copy. With history and COA from Geoffrey Giuliano. Formerly the property of John Lennon. From the collection of Derek Taylor.

Wow. I kinda can't wait to find out what's on that, and kinda really absolutely DON'T WANT TO KNOW. Can you imagine John and Yoko in the era of cell cameras and sexting? Running TMZ would be even easier than it is now.

As roughly one billion people have noted before me, memorabilia is essentially a religious relic. The modern replacement of religion with celebrity is also a common thought—John Lennon might've caught hell for comparing the popularity of a pop combo to the Prince of Peace, but that was before fifty more years of TV. Like it or don't, among certain generations Lennon could wear the nickname "Prince of Peace" as easily as the late J.C.

I love me some Beatles, but there's a thing that keeps me from getting too nutty about Beatles memorabilia, and it's not just the lack of any spare millions. It's the sense of a relationship, however tenuous and unspoken, between desiring something once owned by a Beatle, and wanting to own a piece of them as people. As Lennon said, "The postman wants an autograph. The cab driver wants a picture. The waitress wants a handshake. Everyone wants a piece of you." For those Beatles that are dead, this can't hurt them anymore—but while they were alive, I think it alienated them terribly, and was so crazy for so long they became fed up. It was precisely the kind of pressure that broke up the group; and precisely the kind of thinking that got George and John attacked by fans. Certainly it encouraged misperceptions in their own minds that made their lives much more difficult. Put it this way: lot of people in 1969 got high on acid and announced they were Jesus. When John Lennon did it, he had reasons besides the lysergic. What The Beatles were then (and what they've come to mean since), is as close to religion as you can get without founding churches. Lennon knew that; he felt it; he lived it.

Apart from the religious aspect, there's a simple commercial truth at work, too. When John Lennon wrote his name on something, it became worth more money. That value had to come from somewhere, and Lennon suspected that it was drawn from him. There's a "quote" in Dakota Days, I believe, where Lennon speaks of the toll thousands of autographs and millions of photos must've taken upon his elan vital. But I don't think you have to get all woo-woo to explain this. Whether or not it's a "transfer of energy" from the star to the fan, the creation of monetary value is real, and in a world where so much comes down to those little green pieces of paper, it's inevitable that people who can create money by associating with an object will get no peace. Can you imagine the pilferage that John, Paul, George and Ringo must've suffered over the years? I suspect that kind of thing is part of the huge downside of Beatledom, which is so hard for the rest of us to see, much less understand.

If you ask me, the British government oughta give the four estates a massive tax writeoff and put everything—master tapes, personal papers, and historically important memorabilia—into a museum. Not only for its protection, but to preserve the integrity of the historical record. I've been reading and thinking about The Beatles for 36 years (I'm 40) and never have I come across that Harrison memo, which changes my picture of the breakup significantly. Now that they're gone, God knows how much our perceptions of John and George have been shaped by what's been revealed and what hasn't, and if The Beatles are authentic historical figures (which they obviously are) accuracy is paramount.

Meanwhile: what do I hear for George's genuwine prayer beads? Do I hear thirty? Thirty-five! Forty! Forty-five...

The Daily Beatle

2010-04-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

Do you ever have a day without enough Vitamin B in it? I sure do--but no longer! Thanks to the internet, you can have a steady stream of semi-useless information pushed into your brain, any flavor you want, as often as possible. That's why I've created The Daily Beatle, a Twitter account where I'm putting up Beatle quotes, anniversaries, snarky links to Beatle news stories (did you realize Sid Bernstein is 91 freaking years old?), and whatever else I can get my hands on. I'll also try to set it up so that every Hey Dullblog post is tweeted automatically.

A BRIEF FAQ
1. Is this another way to procrastinate?
Yes.
2. Is this an excuse to re-read stuff like Many Years From Now, God knows why, and call it "working"?
Yes.
3. Do you want people to comment, submit links, or their own Beatle tweets for retweeting?
Absolutely. I'm just doing this for fun, to help gather the Beatle Tribes and see what happens next. I started collecting quotes last night and it was a kick. Then I watched Sid Bernstein yammer at about twelve people from New Jersey.
4. Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney become an active songwriting partnership again?
No.

So, my brothers and sisters in Twitter, Go follow The Daily Beatle!

Side by side

2010-03-22T10:40:00.000-07:00

"On Feb 9, 1964 The Beatles Performed I Want To Hold Your Hand two times for Broadcast. At around 4:30pm they taped the song, to be shown Feb 23, 1964. On the 8:00pm Broadcast, they sang it again LIVE on the Ed Sullivan Show. Here the two videos are shown side by side. Left Audio is Feb 9th, Right Audio is Feb 23rd. Some slight editing was done to keep them in sync. Less than one second removed."

(Via Don)

Why Beatles > Commercials.

2010-03-08T16:45:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from mikegerber.com)

Spontaneous "Hey Jude" in Times Square subway station, 3/6/10

Hey Jude Times Square Subway Station from 39forks on Vimeo.

The hits just keep on coming...

2010-03-04T10:46:00.000-08:00

What's with the dubbing? It makes him sound like that guy from The Beatles cartoon.

I've written some thoughts on this at my magablog, mikegerber.com. (Someday, I'll investigate cross-posting.)

Yoko in Cyberspace

2010-02-26T18:37:00.000-08:00

Yoko Ono's on Twitter, how awesome is that? To celebrate this I tweeted (mgerber937) the following: "So I went to her Twitter feed, and it said, '...' Nothing else, just '...' and I thought, 'Wow, that could be anything. Could be 'yes,' 'no', 'piss off', whatever you wanted it to be. It reflects your own internal monologue--you're Twittering yourself. And that's really quite brilliant, because that's what cyberspace is all about."

An inelegant three tweets, but the run-on quality is a big part of it, I think.

Covering "Julia"

2010-02-23T10:16:00.000-08:00

From Priscilla Ahn's blog:

Today was a beautiful, crisp, windy day. When I looked outside there was a big morning moon hanging so delicately in the sky. It made me think of my favorite Beatles' song, "Julia". I realized I didn't have the song in my computer though, and crazy enough, The White Album isn't available to purchase on itunes! (There's something I sort of like about that though)

So I decided to cover it. It only took me 30 minutes, and it was simply to satisfy the "fix" I needed to hear, sing, and play this song. You can hear a lot of lip smacking, and a lot of unfinished 'ideas' of harmonies....

(More here.)