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happy its like you and me are lovers 24th of january

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Paul McCartney in Get Back

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Having returned home to England, Harrison had a few comments to make about the three surviving Beatles chances of ever performing together and their relationship. He said that, although the three get along better now, there is no plan to ever get together again, and that was because Paul McCartney is too moody.

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I always was interested in finding out what have happens on the photo. What gave them the idea of depict Paul's funeral: why the funeral, why Paul? Well…I have an answer, I suppose

More legendary than most, however, were a band briefly signed to Brian, the Big Three. Other musicians on the scene seemed to regard this band with awe. They were the original power trio, real sonic bruisers who’d built themselves the biggest amplifiers - nicknamed Coffins - that anyone had ever seen.

(Liverpool - Wondrous Place by Paul Du Noyer, 2002)

Epstein made his way to the Cavern club to see the group perform at a lunchtime session on November 9th. He wrote later that he had never seen anything like The Beatles on any stage. <…> "I loved their ad libs and I was fascinated by this, to me, new music with its pounding bass beat and its vast, engulfing sound." <…> The "pounding" bass that Epstein described was due in part to a new addition to The Beatles' equipment line-up. In the early 1960s there was really no such thing as a proper bass amplifier. Most bass players would use the most powerful guitar amplifier that they could get their hands on. But these were not designed for bass guitar, and did not provide the deep, throbbing bass tones that bass guitarists wanted. As The Beatles evolved their sound and Best perfected his "atomic beat" the group were searching for a stronger and more solid bass sound.

The band considered by many to be the loudest and most aggressive in Liverpool was The Big Three. They bad started out as Cass & The Cassanovas, a four-piece until leader and frontman Brian Casser left during the beginning of 1961. The remaining members stayed together to form The Big Three: Johnny Gustafson on bass, guitarist Adrian Barber, and Liverpool's loudest drummer, Johnny Hutchinson, on the skins.

Barber says that when they became a trio there was an instant problem: he and Gustafson weren't loud enough to project over Hutchinson's drumming. Even the relatively punchy Selmer Truvoice amp was not enough. Barber, however, had an interest in electronics from his days in the merchant navy. <…> Barber went out and bought a book about loudspeakers produced by G A Briggs, who owned the British Wharfedale speaker company, and inside he found construction details for various sizes of cabinets. "I decided on one, and Denis Kealing said he could get me a 15-inch speaker," recalls Barber. "I built a set-up for the bass guitar and for the vocal, in a cabinet about five feet tall by about 18 inches square. <…> I used that and mounted it in a metal ammunitions case, so we could carry it around without killing it. Johnny Gustafson used it as his bass amp, and it was very successful. "When we carried it we bad to lower it on its side, because it was long and skinny. The first time we took it down to the Cavern, we struggled down the tiny stairs there. As we carried this black-painted thing across the room it looked just like a coffin - and that's how it got its name: the Coffin. Now, the Cavern was the underground basement of a warehouse, with three vaulted brick-built archways. Over the years water had seeped down and brought calcium deposits with it, which had settled in the ceiling bricks. So when Johnny plucked that first bass note it was like a shower of snow corning down. People went, 'Wow look at that … and listen to that.' So we were really impressed, and I got ambitious at that point." <…> Other bands began to notice the relative sophistication of The Big Three's amplification, especially the bass gear. "Liverpool wasn't a competitive scene, before it got commercial," explains Barber. '"All the bands co-operated with one another and backed each other up. It was a cool scene, and I started to build these things for other people. Paul McCartney asked me to make him a Coffin. It had a single 15-inch speaker in a reflex-ported cabinet, with two chrome handles and wheels on the side."

McCartney started to use a Barber Coffin speaker cabinet during the late part of 1961. <…> McCartney himself recalls, "Adrian made me a great bass amp that he called the Coffin. And, man! Suddenly that was a total other world. That was bass as we know it now. It was like reggae bass: it was just too right there. It was great live." Pete Best too remembers the Coffin. "Neil Aspinall and I used to carry it. Every couple of shows there'd be a flight of stairs which you had to carry this thing up, and it was then we'd wonder why he couldn't have got something smaller. We'd have sweat streaming off us. But the beauty of it was, with all the laughing and joking aside, it did produce a great sound. The first time Paul plugged it in and used it, we just said my god, this is incredible. It added to The Beatles sound."

(Beatles Gear: All the Fab Four's Instruments from Stage to Studio Hardcover by Andy Babiuk, 2010)

So, I guess, Paul is lying on his bass amp that they called the Coffin - and it's the reason of the pantomime on the photo.

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So after I posted those photos of Linda and Paul yesterday, taken by Allen Ginsberg, I started doing some digging into their relationship with Allen. Maybe this is all old news to everyone, but I found some cool stuff, so thought I'd share!

So Allen first met the Beatles on his 39th birthday, although at this point it was just John, Cyn, George and Pattie (x):

"At the party Allen got completely drunk and stripped off his clothes, putting his baggy underpants on his head and hanging a hotel ‘Do not disturb’ notice around his cock. It was at this moment that two of The Beatles arrived: John with Cynthia, and George with Pattie. John and George quickly checked that no photographers were present. Allen kissed John on the cheek, and John told him that he used to draw a magazine at art school called the Daily Howl [in reference to Ginsberg’s poem Howl]; they were friendly enough and accepted drinks, but then made quickly for the door. I asked John why he was leaving so soon. ‘You don’t do that in front of the birds!’ he hissed in my ear." 

Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

Despite this interesting first meeting, it looks like they went on to be friends with all of them, including Paul. In 1967 Allen gifted Paul an early copy of his book 'TV Baby Poems', with the following inscription:

“For Paul McCartney That all fantasies harmonise sweetly & also Hari Krishna!”

(x)

In the same book, Allen actually name drops John and Paul, in the poem Middle of a Long Poem on These States: Kansas City to St. Louis.

You can read the full poem here, but also... here's the section that they're mentioned in:

Paul later goes on to use the phrase 'Electric Arguments' as the title of his 2008 The Fireman album. And I'm just gonna... leave that there.

It seems like they became closer friends in the 90s, and Allen talks about his friendship with Paul in this interview:

I had been talking quite a bit to [Paul] McCartney, visiting him and bringing him poetry and haiku, and looking at Linda McCartney’s photographs and giving him some photos I’d taken of them.

And around this point, Allen and Paul collaborated on an accompanied version of Allen's poem The Ballad of the Skeletons.

Here's Paul talking about how he got involved, but the TLDR is that Allen called him asking if he knew a guitarist that would accompany him at the Royal Albert Hall, and after recommending a couple of people, Paul assumed it was Allen's round about way of asking him.

The performance is so so good, you can watch the full thing here:

Paul just looks so happy doing it!

They also went on to record a version of this as well, which had a more complicated instrumental composed by Paul and then recorded with Allen on vocals, Philip Glass on keyboards, Paul on guitar, drums, Hammond organ and maracas, Lenny Kaye on bass, Marc Ribot on guitar and David Mansfield on guitar. - you can read more about it here.

And I just love this quote from Allen about working with Paul (from this interview again):

He reacts to the words in an intelligent way. You can hear it on the tape. Like if I say on the recording, “What’s cooking,” all of a sudden he brings in the maracas to get that really funny excitement. When I say, “Blow Nancy blow,” he blows on the Hammond organ. He added a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of interpretation. And sometimes, when I made a flub, he covered it. He left his lead sheet in his guitar case, so we had to share my lead sheet [at Albert Hall], which was fun.

I just love finding out all these random little things Paul has been involved in, he gets everywhere!

Allen also (tried) to give Paul advice on his poetry (x), and Allen's comments about Eleanor Rigby were one of the things that lead Paul to publish his own poetry in Blackbird Singing.

I used to hang out a bit with Allen Ginsberg in the Sixties, and later on during the last couple of years of his life we became good friends. And he said to me “That Eleanor Rigby is a f- good poem, man.” So I thought, well, he’s no slouch, and so, with Adrian pushing me, I looked at them again, and thought, yes, some of them could be read.

(x)

Allen Ginsberg unfortunately passed away on the 5th April 1997, about a year before Linda, but it seems like those last few years of Allen's life included a really beautiful, collaborative friendship with them!

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Photo by Mike Salisbury.

“There was a beautiful rock garden, with a waterfall and boulders as big as a Volkswagen. And there was a lake that flowed over a 3-foot waterfall onto another lake. Olivia told me that Paul would come by once in a while. She said he [George] and Paul would leave the house and go down by the lake. She’d see them, chattering away and walking with their arms around each others’ necks.” - Duane Eddy, The Tennesseean, December 1, 2001

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Paul McCartney on the set of "A Hard Day's Night" | July 1964

"Mop violence...Getting "away from it all," Beatle Paul McCartney gazes wistfully into space while dangling from a stage rope on the set of United Artists' A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles' first full-length movie. Meanwhile, director Richard Lester was searching everywhere on the set below for the missing Beatle, who was "hanging around" far above the commotion below. The stunt set the mood for the riotous days of shooting that followed. Some of the real-life pandemonium created by the Beatles and their fans has been kept in the film as a touch of realism.

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PAUL MCCARTNEY in The Beatles GET BACK

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It’s weird how narratives stick around, even after they’ve been debunked. Philip Norman’s Shout!, hugely influential as the first “serious” Beatles bio, is now seen as biased. Norman himself has climbed down, admitting that as a John stan he was unfair to both Paul and George. (I don’t think he’s apologised to Ringo yet, but no doubt that will come when he needs the money and decides to do a Ringo biography.)

So when Norman writes Paul joining the Quarrymen, he’s bitchy about it: carefully deploying quotes to say that Paul was big-headed, he was catty, he bitched about how the others played, he was a Machiavellian plotter. When you compare it to interviews or memoirs from the surviving Quarrymen, it becomes clear that Norman was cherrypicking; they’ve got good and bad things to say about John, Paul, George, and each other, including plenty of positive memories of Paul. I’ve certainly seen posts debunking Norman by comparing sources (or just by giggling over his image of Paul as bossy baby diva.)

But that still frames the early days in Norman’s terms: it’s still asking Precisely How Annoying Was Teenaged Paul McCartney? The story you don’t get, and which is surprisingly rare in Beatle narratives, is this one: Paul joined the Quarrymen, and transformed its musical standards (not least by bringing in George). He joined a ramshackle skiffle group whose lead singer couldn’t tune his guitar and whose two guitarists could only play in banjo chords. Next thing you know, they’re the kind of band whose members will go on multi-bus odysseys across Liverpool in search of a new chord.

Acknowledging that isn’t belittling John. Just the opposite: it shows just how exciting and inspiring he must have been. Paul and George were music nerds, and Liverpool was full of baby skiffle and rock’n’roll groups. They had plenty of other options. But no, John’s was the band they wanted to join. John’s charisma was enough to make Paul rebel against family expectations, and George accept a leader who was quick and slapdash about things that George would devote long, hard hours to getting exactly right. Paul and George’s talent and dedication were enough to make John buckle down and rehearse. And they all thought it was worth it.

It also set up a pattern for how they would work together. Just as they’d sought out that B7 chord, George and Paul went right on exploring new sounds - Indian music for George, electronic music for Paul. And having found them, they offered them to John. So George’s sitar first appears in Norwegian Wood, Paul’s tape loops in Tomorrow Never Knows.

Later still, when John’s insecurities kicked in, he was uncomfortable with that. He insisted to interviewers that he’d written the Norwegian Wood riff, or complained that he should have stuck with his original idea of chanting monks for Tomorrow Never Knows. But again, it doesn’t devalue John to recognise the others’ contributions. It shows how he inspired them, how the Beatles worked as a unit, how they made each other better. (Can you imagine George offering the sitar to Paul first, or Paul suggesting the tape loops made their first appearance on a George song? I can’t.) Ignoring what Paul and George gave John is to ignore a big chunk of what made John special.

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[Yoko] told me that it was my job to “keep John happy” by buying whatever he asked me to get and by generally keeping him company when he was lonely or bored. If he made any unusual requests or behaved strangely, I was to bring it to her attention. She also warned me that all kinds of people would try to contact John, and she made it very clear that I was never to put anybody through to him without her permission. She specifically cautioned me about taking calls from John’s teenage son, Julian, or the boy’s mother, Cynthia, as well as from Paul McCartney and the other ex-Beatles. (...) The next day, George Harrison called the Dakota and left a message for John. Winnie, the concierge, handed me a piece of paper on which she had written: “PLEASE CALL GEORGE – HE’S VERY ANXIOUS TO TALK TO YOU AFTER AN ABSENCE OF TEN YEARS!” When I gave John the message, he was less than thrilled. “Well, it’s kind of George to call after forgetting to mention me in his book,” he snickered. He gave me back the note and told me to “let Mother deal with it.” (...) Also around this time, there was a message from Paul McCartney wishing John luck [with the Double Fantasy sessions]. When I told Yoko that Paul had called, she looked alarmed. “You better not tell John,” she said, worrying that Paul would want to get in on the session.

John Lennon: Living on Borrowed Time, Frederic Seaman (1991)

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lol

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pure goofassing

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Hello,

can you tell more about which award it was that Yoko accepted and made a dig at Paul at? You mentioned it in your (very well founded imho) answer to the Yoko and Sean ask.

Thank you!

Hi anon,

It was from the Q awards in 2005. John won a special posthumous award given on his 65th birthday and that Yoko accepted. The audio and probably video of it is floating around somewhere but when accepting the award Yoko recounted a story of John waking her up in the middle of the night to ask her "Why do they cover Paul's songs but never mine?" According to Yoko she responded by telling him that "You're a good songwriter. It's not just June with spoon that you write. You're a good singer and most musicians are probably a little bit nervous about covering your songs," She would then make him a cup of tea and he’d go back to sleep. She apparently “missed moments like that”.

I’ve heard people saying that it wasn’t a dig at Paul but really come onnnn. Paul is the comparator she’s using here and it’s not like she’s not said similar shit before. Salieri anyone? Paul being the ‘practical’ leader who booked the studio whilst John was the magical leader on a much higher level? (I try to respect most peoples spiritual beliefs but fucckkk right off with that bollocks that John was residing on the spiritual plane in Get Back and not just high off his tits). This was intentional.

Ngl this is a moment that makes me properly angry. Really think about what she’s saying and doing. It’s taking this moment, this moment about John’s work on his 65th birthday to make a dig at Paul. I feel awful for Paul to find out something this sad and uncomfortable about John this way. Yoko knows Paul loved John and using John‘s vulnerability to hurt and dismisss him is wrong. More to the point though I’m more angry at her on John’s behalf. Do you think that John who despised showing this side of himself would have ever wanted this revealed in public? This intimate vulnerable moment broadcast to everyone so that Yoko can point score? On his mf birthday no less? It feels like a betrayal of his confidence. I could understand it if she had framed it at showing that we all feel insecure sometimes but putting Paul in it and framing it as a bonding moment between her and John this way shows that this was not her main motivation.

And is this what she missed? She missed him being vulnerable and insecure and her comforting him by feeding his superiority complex? I’m trying to think of all my dearest relationships and my favourite moments would be them happy or having a sweet moment, not their sadness and jealousy. This should have been a celebratory moment of John’s life but Yoko used it to feed her own power moves. It was deeply selfish and I find it tough to defend.

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Wait what is the dead rat story?

Ah the dead rat story, gather round children as Jack Douglas regales us with the tale of the time Yoko brought a dead rat into the studio to record.

Douglas began hanging out with Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono. He helped produce some of Ono's music, heavy on experimentation.

That's putting it kindly. The strangest moment involved a track called Dead Rat. In the middle of the song, Ono left a 20-second gap. "I had a bad feeling about that hole - I kept thinking of it as the dead rat solo," he says.

Sure enough, he recalls, when all the tracks were cut, Ono's assistant showed up with a shoe box. Inside was a dead rat. Ono wanted it incorporated in the recording. So Douglas had his assistant place it on a stool and set up an expensive mike inches away.

"Yoko wanders in like nothing, and says, "I see you have the rat ready to go - let's get right to it,"' he says. "When the 20-second dead spot comes, I push up the fader. I'm listening. There's no noise, and I stop tape, and say to Yoko, "It's not quite right, is it?' And she says, "No, Jack, there's something wrong.' "

Douglas had his assistant, stifling laughter, move the mike closer to the rat. "We do it again. I push the fader up, this time with a little smile and I say, "I think that's much better.' And she says, "That's a take.

-- Interview with Jack Douglas

Jack Douglas told Richard Buskin of the SATB podcast that John was in the background of this absolutely pissing himself laughing which lead me into an absolute tailspin of 'how much of all of this has just been a massive joke to John? How much is this a joke to Yoko? Does John really respect Yoko's work or does he mostly appreciate it as one big wind-up?' I don't know the answer to those questions but they made me mad at John on behalf of literally everyone lmao.

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'I didnt mention this in the book but from time to time John would say to me ''I wonder what Paul is thinking about, right now.'' I said John, I've only met him a couple of times in my life you know ... I have no idea. And John would ask ''Do you think he thinks about me at all?'''

Elliot Mintz about his 70s conversations with John Lennon, Beatles Podcast 2024

“Also not obvious is that McCartney [for the Liverpool Oratorio] has penned a gorgeous black-spiritual-like piece for mezzo-soprano that intones the last words spoken to John Lennon as he lay dying of gunshot wounds in the back of a New York police car – "Do you know who you are?” McCartney gets a bit choked up at one point when he reveals, “Not a day goes by when I don’t think of John.”

Interview with Paul McCartney, 1991

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saw a picture of Julia Lennon and thought "hey she kinda looks like a woman version of Brian Epstein" immediately followed by "oh... oh no"

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“WHITE: ‘Not Guilty’, on George Harrison, written during the sessions for the Beatles’ White Album, was a pointed barb at your old bandmates. GEORGE: It was me getting pissed off at Lennon and McCartney for the grief I was catching during the making of the White Album. I said I wasn’t guilty of getting in the way of their careers. I said I wasn’t guilty of leading them astray in our all going to Rishikesh to see the Maharishi. I was sticking up for myself, and the song came off strong enough to be saved and utilized.”

— George Harrison, interview w/ Timothy White for Musician: The quiet Beatle finally talks… about everything. (November, 1987)