anotherkindofmindpod

[anotherkindofmindpod]

The Kids are Alright!

SUMMARY: Phoebe and Daphne’s discussion of a recent BBC interview with Sean Lennon spurs a conversation about Yoko, the Lost Weekend and the ongoing Beatles Empire as inherited, shared and managed by the Beatle children.

This episode is the first of several shorter, fun-sized AKOMs on single topics.

Listen HERE

[anotherkindofmindpod]

'I look in the mirror'

At the Cavern, 1963, photo by Michael Ward

Photo by Mike McCartney

August 13, 1966, photo by Bob Bonis

We wrote with two guitars, John and I. And, as I’ve mentioned previously, the joy of that was that I was left-handed while he was right handed, so I was looking in a mirror and he was looking in a mirror. We would always tune up, have a ciggie, drink a cup of tea, start playing some stuff, look for an idea. Normally, one or the other of us would arrive with a fragment of a song. ‘Please Please Me’ was a John idea. John liked the double meaning of ‘please’. Yeah, ‘please’ is, you know, pretty please. ‘Please have intercourse with me. So, pretty please, have intercourse with me, I beg you to have intercourse with me.’ He liked that, and I liked that he liked that. This was the kind of thing we’d see in each other, the kind of thing in which we were matched up. We were in sync.

(Paul McCartney, about Please Please Me in The Lyrics, 2021)

gifs by javelinbk

A lot of what we had going for us was that we were both good at noticing the stuff that just pops up, and grabbing it. And the other thing is that John and I had each other. If he was sort of stuck for a line, I could finish it. If I was stuck for somewhere to go, he could make a suggestion. We could suggest the way out of the maze to each other, which was a very handy thing to have. We inspired each other.

(Paul McCartney, about Eight Days A Week in The Lyrics, 2021)

gifs by nikidontsurf

When John and I met, the first year of our friendship was spent talking about these cover versions, the records we loved, and then playing them again and again. As we got to know each other, we practised these various covers until one day the conversation went, ‘You know, I’ve written one or two songs.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, so have I.’ That gave us something in common that was itself wholly uncommon. I went to a school of a thousand boys and I’d never met anyone who said he’d written a song. Mine were just in my head. So were John’s. We took each other by surprise. And then the logical extension was, ‘Well, maybe we could write one together.’ So that’s how we started. And we became versions of each other.

(Paul McCartney, about The Other Me in The Lyrics, 2021)

gifs by stewy

Q: "Can I ask you about Lewis Carroll?" A: "Oh, Lewis Carroll. I always admit to that because I love 'Alice In Wonderland' and 'Alice Through The Looking Glass.' But I didn't even know he'd written anything else. I was that ignorant. I just happened to get those for birthday presents as a child and liked them. And I usually read those two about once a year, because I still like them."

(John Lennon, June 16, 1965, interview for BBC)

Paul McCartney in his garden at Cavendish Avenue, 7; photo by Barry Lategan (for Observer magazine, July 1968)

I think of the imagined world of Lewis Carroll [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There] that John and I both loved so much.

(Paul McCartney, about I’ll Get You in The Lyrics, 2021)

We’d been together so much that if you had a question, we would both pretty much come up with the same answer. [about their hitchhike to Spain by way of Paris] <…> It’s a bit crude, but it’s fair to say that, in general, I’d had a good life and John hadn’t. His life had been tougher, and he had to develop a harder shell than I did. He was quite a cynical guy but, as they say, with a heart of gold. A big softy, but his shield was hard. So that was very good for the two of us. Opposites attract. I could calm him down, and he could fire me up. We could see things in each other that the other needed to be complete.

(Paul McCartney about Ticket To Ride in The Lyrics, 2021)

Sometimes I look in the mirror Is nobody there? But I just keep on staring and staring No Can it be? Can it be? Can it be? And if I look in the mirror And nobody´s there But I just keep on staring, and staring No Is it me? Is it me? Is it me?

(John Lennon, circa 1977)

[anotherkindofmindpod]

“Paul McCartney had a special look for his wife, Linda. It’s a look that is kinda wide-eyed, kinda relaxed, kinda goofy. It’s a look that shows a guy who’s really in love. Millions of photographs have been taken of the former Beatle, the most popular living songwriter of the rock ‘n’ roll era. But only one photographer captured that look on film – Linda McCartney. Paul McCartney laughs as he remembers how she did it. “I would start posing, doing those things the photographers tell you to do like `look over your shoulder’ or `look over there’ and she would say, `Oh, stop doing that. Just be natural,’” he said, calling from his recording studio in southern England, where he is wrapping up production on a new album. “I would say, `What? You don’t want my gorgeous look into the camera?’” McCartney continued. “And she would say, `No. No, thanks.’”

— An interview with Paul, 1999.

[anotherkindofmindpod]

(moment in question starts 2:22)

I didn't get chance but wanted to post this yesterday on the anniversary of John's murder, not just because of how beautiful a tribute it is but because it's one of the best pieces of media to show the personal impact of gun violence.

The moment is, as I said, lovely beyond words. It's Glastonbury 2022, Paul McCartney is on stage headlining in his eighties and has used his moment in the spotlight to reveal the fruition of his unlikely hope: to use technology to simulate performing on stage with his long deceased bandmate. It's a roaring success, the crowd is going wild, yet Paul spends most of his time with his back to them, focused on the image of John on screen. The whole thing is notionally the wish-fulfillment of every fan but in reality they are merely the backdrop, the props to Paul's 'impossible dream' to be with John again.

It's wonderful, it's breathtakingly emotional, it's a testament to Paul's undying love for John ... but this should not have happened. Paul's only option of performing with his once-and-future best friend should never have been to wait for technology to catch-up with his grief. Whether they ever would have performed together if John hadn't been murdered is neither here nor there, the point is that they should have had the choice. Instead, this choice was suddenly and violently wrenched from them by a glory-seeking religious fanatic: a total stranger to both of them who inexplicably was allowed access to the weaponry that would enable him to end the life of a man he had never met. Without any option of natural severance or unification, Paul is left to deal with the permanently frayed nerve endings of where his connection with the living John used to be.

And no matter how joyful this moment is, it is impossible to extradite it from the raw vein of pain that lies at it's undercurrent. It had been 42 years since John Lennon died. 42 years and the loss is still so great that Paul feels the need to find a way to get John back performing with him in any way he can. Not two years prior to this, Paul talked about how the pain of John's death is still so bad that he remains in denial over his passing and is surprised about how he doesen't break down and cry every day. This performance is also coming off the back of the previous year where he bought lots of John's lyrics and art to hang round the house 'to look at all the time'. It's love, unbearable love but it's also shrapnel from the pain inflicted by a random stranger almost 50 years prior. When someone dies to gun violence, there is always lip service about the victims friends and family. Sometimes you might see said loved ones interviewed, dazed and bewildered, before they're packed off with the rest of yesterdays news cycle. But here in this moment is the living proof of how permanent those wounds and that pain is, borne witness to by thousands upon thousands at Glastonbury and millions online. The what-ifs of an interrupted life are infinite and every single one felt by those left behind. What Paul is experiencing on stage in this performance is only one of those infinite grains of grief experienced by so many others still to this day; The ones who have to make do in a shadow of the life they could and should have had with their murdered loved ones. And this will keep happening in America again and again and again until gun control stops being used as a nonesensical existential threat by right-wing groups and becomes the question of safety that it always should have been.

[anotherkindofmindpod]

The Surrealist

— Not to be Reproduced (La reproduction interdite), by René Magritte (1937).

–

I don’t examine myself that way. I just am. I just go through it. I just wake in the morning and go to bed at night and whatever happens during the day just happens. I don’t really know how I am.

— Paul McCartney, in Music Express: ‘Paul McCartney Wings It Alone’ (April/May 1982).

–

“In an attempt to explain the significance of surrealist art, René Magritte expressed the view that surrealist images emerge spontaneously, as in dreams, and only after that are the images given meaning. As a result, the genre has the power to convey important ideas even if the artist does not consciously set out to do so.”

–

This series – I just woke up one morning and I had a germ of an idea, which is all I want really. I don’t want too formed an idea, it’s just not who I am. This little series comes from this image I got of someone scratching three fingers down a wall. I woke up with this thing and I thought it would be just a black canvas and these three-fingered scratches, like someone in prison and they’re either trying to get out or they’re trying to mark the dates. I woke up with this thing and I thought it would be just a black canvas and these three-fingered scratches, like someone in prison and they’re either trying to get out or they’re trying to mark the dates. It’s like graffiti. That set me off on a little bunch of paintings. And things happen, like I didn’t want it to just be black, so I was going to make it blue-black. So I threw some blue on the canvas and was going to blend it. But then a shape emerged with this blue, and I still don’t know what it is. It looks vaguely phallic, or somebody’s ass bending away from you. But that’s what started to fascinate me. It’s probably an accident, but also what I like about that is the inner content, that I have no idea what my dreams are about. I’ve no idea, yet they’re every bit as real as sitting here with you. But my interior world, I think it’s not a bad idea to try and tap it.

My view is that these things are there whether you want them or not, in your interior. You don’t call up dreams, they happen, often the exact opposite of what you want. You can be heterosexual and be having a homosexual dream and wake up, and think, “Shit, am I gay?” I like that you don’t have control over it. But there is some control – it is you dreaming, it is your mind it’s all happening in. In a way my equation would be that my computer is fully loaded by now. Maybe in younger people there’s a little bit of loading to go, but mine’s loaded pretty much, so what I try and do is allow it to print out unbeknown to me. And I’m interested to hear what it’s got in there.

I think we must be interested as musicians as often our music arrives that way. I dreamed the song Yesterday. It was just in a dream, I woke up one morning and had a melody in my head. so I have to believe in that.

— Paul McCartney, in “Luigi’s Alcove” by Karen Wright, for Modern Painters (August 2000).

–

John: Now whether he’s – [Paul] was expressing himself because whether we plan it to express our innermost feelings, or sort of surreal it like Dylan, or – Paul, you could say, his lyrics are very sort of… non-specific – if one knows the person, one knows what is coming down. You know, you can read what’s being said—

Yoko: Between the lines.

John: Between the lines. Because people’s expressions and feelings come out in their work whether they want it to or not. So I always express myself directly, or [in the] language of the streets, and other people don’t. And that’s what it was all about. And I don’t go ‘round thinking, “how do you sleep?” the same as I don’t go, “imagine there’s no heaven,” you know. Because it’s 1973 now, and it’s a different world. And as you’ve probably heard, or people have read, Paul and I have communicated […].

— John Lennon, interview with DJ Elliot Mintz (16 April 1973).

–

I think everything that comes out of the songs – even Paul’s songs now, which are apparently about nothing – the same way as calligraphy shows and your handwriting shows you everything about yourself. Or [Bob] Dylan too. Dylan might try to hide in a subterfuge of clever, Allen Ginsberg-type words, or hippie words, but it was always apparent, if you look below the surface, what is being said. Resentfulness, or love, or hate. And it’s apparent in all work. It’s just harder to see when it’s… written in gobbledy-gook.

— John Lennon, interviewed by David Sheff for Playboy (August 1980).

–

McCartney has written some of the world’s most famous love songs, but has he ever worried about revealing too much of himself? “Yes, but you’ve got to get over that feeling quickly, because that’s the game.” Some songs turned out to be more personal than he realised when he was writing them. The Beatles’ Yesterday will be 50 years old in August. McCartney famously dreamed the melody. But its opening line was originally, “Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby, how I love your legs.” McCartney followed his own advice and “bombed through”, ending up with a universally known song about loss and regret. But its initial spur was more prosaic. “There are a lot of mindsets when you’re writing a song – and one of them is commercial,” he admits. “It’s like any job, where if you do a certain thing you’ll progress in that job. In songwriting it’s an unspoken thing, but I recognise it. I remember hearing somewhere that people like sad songs, so I thought, ‘OK, I’ll write a sad song.’ I knew what I was getting into…” So, in a way, you were acting when you wrote it? “Yes. I wrote from the point of view of someone who was sad. But when you’re taking on a part, it’s usually you you’re writing about. Your psychiatrist would say it’s you.”

— Paul McCartney, interviewed by Mark Blake for Q: Songs in the key of Paul (May 2015).

–

John: There’s no comparison for me. ‘Cause we’re—

Hilburn: You mean comparing artistically, or you mean comparing sales-wise and stuff?

John: Oh, sales-wise, forget it. [Paul] always had more fans than me, in the Cavern… So there’s no comparison on that level. And on the other level, I don’t think it counts. I think it’s like comparing… I don’t know, Magritte and, er – Picasso, if you want to put it on that level. Or whatever. How can you compare it?

Hilburn: Was there ever any sense of competition when you—

John: It’s like trying to compare Gaugin and Van Gogh. They were friends, as well.

— John Lennon talks with Robert Hilburn from The LA Times (10 October 1980).

–

In the beginning, art was what we talked about. [John] told me he thought he was like [surrealist painter René] Magritte. Why? Because, you know, you have the image of Magritte with the bowler hat and the suit, looking very square, but really his work was very surreal and far out. John was living in suburbia, and he was very embarrassed about that, because he felt as if he was not very hip. When he invited me to his house the first time, the first thing he said when I got there was, “I think of myself as Magritte.”

— Yoko Ono, interviewed for The New York Times (7 October 2004).

–

The dream is over Yesterday I was the dream weaver But now I’m reborn I was the Walrus But now I’m John

–

I told you about the walrus and me, man You know we’re as close as can be, man Well here’s another clue for you all The Walrus was Paul

–

I’ve always loved Mr Magritte’s work and have admired him since the 1960s when I first became aware of his work. I love his paintings so much that I once took a trip to Paris to visit Magritte’s art dealer Alexander Iolas and had a very pleasant meal in his apartment above the gallery. We then went downstairs to see the paintings and I was able to select three pictures.

Robert [Fraser - art dealer and friend] also brought me other interesting Magritte’s pictures over the years and one of them became the inspiration for the original Beatles Apple Records label: the big green apple was inspired by Magritte.

We were amongst the many people who have been hugely influenced by this great artist’s work.

— Paul McCartney, in Paintings On The Wall - René Magritte (1898 - 1967) (March 2015).

–

— Le Jeu de Mourre (The Game of Mora), by René Magritte (1966).

–

I had this friend called Robert Fraser, who was a gallery owner in London. We used to hang out a lot. And I told him I really loved Magritte. We were discovering Magritte in the sixties, just through magazines and things. And we just loved his sense of humour. And when we heard that he was a very ordinary bloke who used to paint from nine to one o'clock, and with his bowler hat, it became even more intriguing. Robert used to look around for pictures for me, because he knew I liked him. It was so cheap then, it’s terrible to think how cheap they were. But anyway, we just loved him … One day he brought this painting to my house. We were out in the garden, it was a summer’s day. And he didn’t want to disturb us, I think we were filming or something. So he left this picture of Magritte. It was an apple - and he just left it on the dining room table and he went. It just had written across it “Au revoir”, on this beautiful green apple. And I thought that was like a great thing to do. He knew I’d love it and he knew I’d want it and I’d pay him later. […] So it was like wow! What a great conceptual thing to do, you know. And this big green apple, which I still have now, became the inspiration for the logo. And then we decided to cut it in half for the B-side!

— Paul McCartney, interviewed by Johan Ral (1993).

–

Linda bought me these for my birthday once [he produces the paint-spattered spectacles of surrealist painter René Magritte which he keeps in a Perspex box on his desk]. Georgette, his wife, was selling the contents of his studio and Linda bought me the easel and his spectacles and some small linen canvases which I didn’t dare paint on. I’m such a huge fan that was just mega. I was intimidated for weeks about painting on the canvases but in the end I just went, “Agghhhh!” and I did. Then I tried on the glasses which are a very powerful prescription; they’ll give you a headache! What I love about Magritte is he turned the world upside down and inside out in terms of meaning and significance. Science and philosophy and religion are starting to converge on this idea that, whatever hat you put on, you are still you. Dickens writes Little Dorrit but he still comes through in her character. Burroughs and Ginsberg show through in their writing. Magritte’s specs are a reminder: the world is a jungle of crazy interpretations.

— Paul McCartney, interviewed by Michael Odell for The Guardian (29 November 2008).

–

— Son of Man, by René Magritte (1964).

–

If I was to shout, “NAME A SURREALIST PAINTER!” at you, the name you many might reach for first, is one of his contemporaries: Salvador Dalí.

Based in Paris for the early part of his career, Dalí was a flamboyantly dressed dandy, with a manically upturned moustache, a colossal ego (who writes a whole book dedicated to their moustache?) and a propensity to drive around in his white Rolls Royce with 500kg of cauliflowers stuffed in the back, as he liked their shape. Fellow Paris-based artist, and founder of surrealism, André Breton kept and bred praying mantises – on account of how the female of the species rapaciously devours the male after mating.

Magritte could not have been any more different. He looked like a banker, dressed in a sober black suit and a bowler hat. […] But once you come face to face with his paintings, you realise that the bowler hat was merely a front.

Magritte was, in many ways, far more subversive than the flamboyant Dalí. While it’s fair to say that no one painted better scenes of tigers-escaping-out-of-fish-mouths-while-simultaneously-mid-pounce-onto-a-naked women-on-an-iceberg, Dalí’s hallucinatory dreamscapes didn’t anchor in reality. Magritte’s work did: he made ordinary objects shriek.

[…]

He liked to obscure the views of faces – particularly his own - as well as places. Hiding objects over other objects was one of his parlour tricks: like placing a perfectly aligned painted canvas in front of a window and simulating the real view from it.

Magritte was always hiding behind something, whether language or class, or bathing in the anonymity of dozens of faceless salary men. Perhaps all that levitating in his 1953 work ‘Golconda’, was how Magritte saw himself: conducting extraordinary feats of ordinariness.

— Golconda, by René Magritte (1953).

He wasn’t the only artist who, through the cracks of a quiet, clean-cut image, you can glimpse subversion: like all the lonely people, his work stood slightly behind from his public persona.

— by Adam Jacques, on Paintings On The Wall - René Magritte (1898 - 1967), as suggested by Paul McCartney.

-

More on the painters series:

The Painter of Sunflowers and The Man in a Red Beret | Lennon-McCartney VS Gauguin & Van Gogh

[anotherkindofmindpod]

John not meaning what he says

You know, we all say a lot of things when we don’t know what we’re talking about. I’m probably doing it now, I don’t know what I say. You see, everybody takes you up on the words you said, and I’m just a guy that people ask all about things, and I blab off and some of it makes sense and some of it is bullshit and some of it’s lies and some of it is — God knows what I’m saying. I don’t know what I said about Maharishi, all I know is what we said about Apple, which was worse.

John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview, Part One

“It’s sort of complicated but sometimes you say things, but it’s not really what you meant to say. If I say something to you and you hear it different from what I’ve said it, and you answer back and we’re not really getting down to it. I’m really talking like that you know. Like somebody says ‘do you want ice cream?’ and I’ll say no, and actually I meant yes. You find yourself saying the opposite of what you mean. This happens to me quite a lot. I speak a lot, but what I say is not always what I mean.“

John Lennon, 1973.

‘I was told recently by Yoko that one of the things that hurt John over the years was me going off and doing The Family Way,’ Paul says. The filmmaking Boulting brothers had approached him via George Martin. ‘I thought this was a great opportunity. We were all free to do stuff outside the Beatles and we’d each done various little things.’ When he mentioned it to John, Paul said, ‘He would have had his suit of armour on and said: “No, I don’t mind.”

Paul McCartney, c/o Ray Coleman, McCartney: Yesterday and Today. (1995)

SHEFF: But you didn’t compose your stuff separately, as other accounts have said? JOHN: No, no, no. I said that, but I was lying. [Laughs.] By the time I said that, we were so sick of this idea of writing and singing together, especially me, that I started this thing about, “We never wrote together, we were never in the same room.” Which wasn’t true. We wrote a lot of stuff together, one-on-one, eyeball to eyeball.

John Lennon, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)

PLAYBOY: "When you talk about working together on a single lyric like "We Can Work It Out,' it suggests that you and Paul worked a lot more closely than you've admitted in the past. Haven't you said that you wrote most of your songs separately, despite putting both of your names on them?" LENNON: "Yeah, I was lying. (laughs) It was when I felt resentful, so I felt that we did everything apart. But, actually, a lot of the songs we did eyeball to eyeball."

John Lennon, 1980

“No, no, no,” he answered and he meant it. “I’m going to be an ex-Beatle for the rest of my life so I might as well enjoy it, and I’m just getting around to being able to stand back and see what happened. A couple of years ago I might have given everybody the impression I hate it all, but that was then. I was talking when I was straight out of therapy and I’d been mentally stripped bare and I just wanted to shoot my mouth off to clear it all away. Now it’s different. “When I slagged off the Beatle thing in the papers, it was like divorce pangs, and me being me it was blast this and fuck that, and it was just like the old days in the Melody Maker, you know, ‘Lennon Blasts Hollies’ on the back page. You know, I’ve always had a bit of a mouth and I’ve got to live up to it. Daily Mirror: ‘Lennon beats up local DJ at Paul’s 21st birthday party’. Then we had that fight Paul and me had through the Melody Maker, but it was a period I had to go through.

John Lennon, interview w/ Ray Coleman for Melody Maker: Lennon – a night in the life. (September 14th, 1974)

GEORGE: I remember the day when John did an interview with a certain magazine and said certain things, and then I remember the day when he disagreed with what he’d said, but the man who interviewed him denied him the right to change his mind and, even though it was two and a half years, later still went ahead and published something which John said he no longer agreed with himself on. Which means the dream was over, yet certain people wouldn’t allow him to have his dream... over. Nudge nudge wink wink, say no more. [inaudible] JOHN: In other words, imagine if somebody or if you accidentally bang your head and you shout, “Ow!” – that’s the end of it. [self-conscious; laughs] Right? GEORGE: And he said that too. JOHN: I mean, it doesn’t go on for the next five years, right? And we all did that.

December 21st, 1974 (New York)

INT: It seem that you did minimize a little bit, what the, what the effect was on the, value and lifestyle and all that. You said that there was almost nothing left of Beatles. JOHN: Well I get bitter too, you know. And uh, also it was always the insistence that the Beatles led something, you know. And if anything they were figureheads, you know. And, I put it more succinctly later on when I thought about it. When I said those statements A) I was bitter and upset; emotionally upset cause we just split up, you know. I call it a divorce right. But when I think about it, obviously…you know, I can change my mind.

John interviewed by Jean-François Vallée in April 1975.

Underground journalist Felix Dennis watched the session. ‘I remember Ringo getting more and more upset by this… I have a clear memory of him saying, “That’s enough, John.”’ Lennon and Ono competed to come up with the most insulting lines, Dennis said. ‘Some of it was absolutely puerile. Thank God a lot of it never actually got recorded because it was highly, highly personal, like a bunch of schoolboys standing in the lavatory making scatological jokes.’ ‘John would forgive himself, and expect Paul to forgive him,’ Derek Taylor recalled.

Peter Doggett, You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles. (2009)

I went through a period of trying to encourage Paul by writing and saying things that I thought would spur him on. But I think they were misunderstood. That's how "How Do You Sleep?" (on the "Imagine" album) was intended. Although I suppose it was a bit hard on him.

John Lennon Talks To Ray Connolly May 18th 1972 Radio Times

“At the moment he is cut off from the three of us. The last time I saw him was in December.” Asked whether he thought John Lennon’s recent unkind references to Paul on his “Imagine” album, had deepened the rift, George replied: “Maybe John felt like that about Paul at the time he was writing the song, but he doesn’t feel like that all the time. The song doesn’t represent what he really feels. It’s just John – people don’t really understand. “I think John’s record is great – though that track about Paul is a bit hard. But it’s only something felt at the time . . . ”

George Harrison, interviewed by Mike Hennessey for Record Mirror (October 16, 1971)

JOHN: (smiles) You know, I wasn’t really feeling that vicious at the time. But I was using my resentment toward Paul to create a song, let’s put it that way. He saw that it pointedly refers to him, and people kept hounding him about it. But, you know, there were a few digs on his album before mine. He’s so obscure other people didn’t notice them, but I heard them. I thought, Well, I’m not obscure, I just get right down to the nitty-gritty. So he’d done it his way and I did it mine. But as to the line you quoted, yeah, I think Paul died creatively, in a way.

John’s Playboy interview as published in the magazine’s January 1981 issue

He turned to me and told me that he had been equally vicious about Paul during the same period and that Paul had got it right when he had declared that the only person John was hurting with his vitriolic behavior was himself. It was not exactly an apology, more like an explanation.

Glyn Johns, Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Eric Clapton, the Faces… (2014)

“I have to ask you, what was all that stuff in the telegraph about?... And he’s gone oh yeah, look, speak to Paul about that, I wasn’t in a good place mentally at the time. Just speak to Paul about it…. I thought it was a real cop out because he had hurt me, he’d said something unfair, and rather than just apologise, what he basically said was I’ve apologised to Paul, and Paul’s accepted my apology for for my behaviour in that period, the immediate aftermath of the Beatles, and therefore speak to him and he will explain to you why you should forgive me”.

I am the EggPod guest Sam Delaney talking about a Get Back screening Q&A with Glynn Johns

“I’m trying to be mad at you, but you’re so nice, it isn’t easy,” Glyn replied. Then he explained that he had been upset by John’s comments about him in the “Lennon Remembers” interviews. John had said that Let It Be, which had been re-mixed by Glyn, had wound up sounding awful, and Glyn, a true professional, had been very offended by John’s comments. John did not remember saying it at all and he was very embarrassed. He explained, “I had just done primal therapy. I was just lettin’ off steam. That interview was just a lot of anger.” Glyn stared at John. John’s words had hurt him, and he had never expected that John would not remember what he had said, nor had he perceived that the comments would be dismissed as “just lettin’ off steam.” Like everyone else, he believed everything the public John said and took him very seriously. John repeatedly apologised to Glyn, and eventually the matter was dropped.

Loving John

At the time, we at Apple weren’t feeling good anyway, because Apple had failed; and here was one of our friends telling everyone who reads Rolling Stone that we were bastards. In the end we had to say, ‘Well, we’re not.’ John later retracted some of it, and we became friends again. And I forgave him. He would forget he’d said it, and expect to be forgiven, as he always was.

Derek Taylor, interview w/ Peter Doggett for Record Collector. (August, 1988)

John had gone through a tremendous upheaval in his private life, and he was a very odd person at times; he wasn’t at all himself. There was the famous interview he did for Rolling Stone, which has been reprinted many times, in which he says many unfair and untrue things, slagged everybody off, including me. I took him to task over it later on, asking him, “Why did you say all those things? It wasn’t very nice.” He said, “Oh, I was just stoned out of my head.” That was his only apology, really. Unfortunately, that has become history now; it’s accepted as the Bible.”

George Martin, interview w/ Howard Massey for Musician. (February, 1999)

“If you look at interviews and stuff with John, from around about that time he was in Imagine [documentary] he kind of admits that he’s having problems with himself. So, well, the first thing you do when you’re having problems with yourself is you bitch about someone else. And the closest person was me…He had a real go at me. I personally think it was ‘cause he was trying to clear the decks for Yoko. He’s got a new love, he’s trying to say to her, “Look, baby, I love you. I hate those guys.” And I think—you also have to remember John was going through a lot of problems. And you know, as they say, people, when they’re going through problems, come out with that kind of stuff. You know that, we all know that. When you’re in a bad mood, the first thing you do is badmouth somebody else. You don’t want to badmouth yourself…Some of the times, he was having other sorts of problems…So—like most of what John said, I take it with a pinch of salt. I love him still. I don’t care what he said, you know. Even if he badmouths me, I still know that he was a great guy, and that he loved me.”

Paul McCartney

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A bit obsessed with this article.

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what do you think of sean ono lennon's recent interview on the BBC Sounds show? he answers a question about lennon's relationship with yoko ono and his songs about her.

I didn't hear it!

Would love a link, or better yet a transcript/recap from someone!

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"John Lennon's complete sketch of Now And Then"

(© shared by Mariana Stanley Smith on twitter)

can anyone decipher john's handwriting?

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Phoebe and Daphne share the AKOM playbook of what they would ask if given the opportunity to interview Paul McCartney. 

We feel Paul’s responses would be illuminating and for the sake of Beatles history we encourage all media personnel to please STEAL THESE QUESTIONS! Listen Here

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NEW AKOM ON ITS WAY!!!

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Paul McCartney drawings and lyrics(?), dated 1958

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sexy as hell. some people just don't get it

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“When we sang together,” Lennon told Mintz in one of their conversations, “Paul and I would share the same microphone. I’d be close enough to kiss him. Back then, I didn’t wear me specs onstage – Brian Epstein said they made me look old. So we’d be playing these concerts, in front of thousands of people, but the only thing I could see was Paul’s face. He was always there next to me – I could always feel his presence. It’s what I remember most about those concerts.”

(x)

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Strong

Driven, open to everything, honest, absolutely, dedicated workman, very hardworking, an artist. 

What people get wrong:  Alot.  That he’s a breadhead, when he’s actually very generous; that he’s petty, small-minded.  You know, all the battering that he took [after the Beatles’ breakup] he’d have to be a very strong man to take that and carry on. 

Author Chris Salewicz, discussing Paul McCartney

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What’s up with the Podcast??? Has it ended 😔

Hi and thanks for the ask!

The podcast is definitely not over, and we ARE actively working on an episode we are very excited about (we promise!). It's honestly just a matter of finding time to work on it amidst the hectic intensity of our IRL situations at the moment. We are doing our best though, and we hope to deliver our next episode ASAP. Please stick with us! 🙂

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