#beatles podcast

[anotherkindofmindpod]

New AKOM series!!

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: An exploration of Paul and Yoko’s struggle for legacy after John Lennon’s death

Available wherever you pod (X)

[wrence]

https://beatles60.group/blog/towards-a-first-single

The summer of 1962 was heading towards autumn. The Beatles were heading towards the release of their first single. In this episode of The Beatles60 podcast we talk about the convoluted path ‘Love Me Do’ followed to be that first single. It included some drama for Ringo. We talk about what must’ve been going through his mind. By the time ‘Love Me Do’ was released, there was a feeling that the relationship between George Martin and the Beatles was starting to solidify. We talk about all that and we have a little discussion with author Jude Southerland Kessler about John’s mother, Julia. An episode packed with insights. Don’t miss it!

[foryouwereinmysong]

Here Today vs Too Many People Paul McCartney about John Lennon some transcribed quotes from the Podcast »Mccartney: A Life in Lyrics«

[mythserene]

Mark Lewisohn understanding Paul McCartney

Only Mark Lewisohn really understands the Beatles. Only he can comprehend their true motivations. Only he can see behind their veneers. Especially Paul McCartney's. He truly understands Paul.

I cut down this clip from an amazing new interview of Lewisohn repeating how if he doesn't write his books the Beatles' story will be “wrong forever” to just the bit where he says “it's only through my immersion in [the Beatles] that I can comprehend at least nearly right.” This is our thesis statement. 😏

“It's a drag”

Lewisohn: “I'm quite an astute watcher of Paul McCartney,” and so I know that his “It's a drag” line after John's murder was all about Paul's irritation at John Lennon's lionization. “John was being promoted and Paul was being relegated, and he didn't like it.”

Paul doesn't say his last name on the phone because he wants to screw with you and put you on the back foot. And definitely not because he just figures you'll know who he is.

(I've posted this one before, but it is needed here, with Lewisohn claiming he's the only one who can truly understand the Beatles and Paul.)

[crepesuzette2023]

I dont think I've ever heard the take that girl seems to be about Paul, I mean, it makes sense absolutely, but can you expand some more?

Gladly, Anon.

Rob Sheffield (Dreaming the Beatles) said he thinks Girl is about Paul in this episode of @anotherkindofmindpod. The episode is actually an in-depth discussion of In My Life, but Girl came up a number of times, since it's also on Rubber Soul.

I thought Sheffield's statement was interesting, and not in a silly “John saw Paul as a girl” kind of way.

Summarizing mercilessly, and taking a few steps back before returning to Girl:

RS argues that Rubber Soul marks a moment when the Beatles’ songwriting moved from a commercial/craft perspective towards a more open/confessional/personal tone, In My Life being an example of this, with John examining his feelings for all his friends and lovers, and singling out a new kind of love that transcends the loves he’s known before. According to RS and the hosts, In My Life is not only addressed to Paul (I personally feel it could also be about Julian, or about both; as someone who writes, I really feel the “a piece of art is never about just one thing” argument)— it also, by summoning a group of dear people and openly expressing his feelings for them, emulates Paul, who, in John’s eyes, is the more extrovert and socially comfortable of the two. The song is a two-fold tribute.

Girl, still according to RS, forms a matched pair with In My Life, because it, too, concerns complex and intimate emotions; in this case being unsettled by a complex, alluring and confusing person (Paul/the girl). It's a non-generic, specific, highly personal song you wouldn't have found on earlier albums. (You Won’t See Me is Paul’s reply to John.)

Whether you agree with these interpretations or not (by the way, instead of trusting my summary, it’s probably a better idea to listen to RS and the hosts in their own words), I’m happy to see the acknowledgment of the depth of John and Paul's relationship.

RS also makes a beautiful point about If I Fell (which, as we know, John saw as a continuation of In My Life): That John and Paul, as always, tell the truth about each other by the way they sing together.

(Cue the If I Fell/marriage vows quote from Gould’s Beatles bio).

Ian Leslie (no introduction needed) was more direct in his “Hidden Gems” episode on @onesweetdreampodcast. He stated he believes that If I Fell was written for Paul, commemorating their Paris ‘honeymoon’.

And look—people are free to go as far as they want in how they interpret all this, but I personally feel it liberates and elevates the discussion of their songwriting and relationships to include the romantic love or friendship or X or [redacted] or 'tender and tempestuous' but ‘not sexual as far as we know’ relationship between John and Paul as one of its many possible inspirations.

It just feels silly to me to ignore it or act all offended at the mere suggestion.

And when RS writes in Dreaming the Beatles “For John, Paul was the boy who came to stay; for Paul, John was the song he couldn’t make better,” it just feels right.

My two cents.

P.S. When I'm inclined to accept that Girl is about Paul, I immediately want to ask follow-up questions. Because this is a song about a fraught relationship, right? In what sense did John try to leave Paul? In what sense did Paul promise him the earth and cry? I know it doesn't have to be literally true, but some extrapolation, please? This didn't happen in the episode—obviously, since its focus was another song, In My Life. PPS: I wrote this in a bit of a hurry so feel free to get back to me for clarifications, etc.

[meandhisjohn]

All you need is love and a Podcast narrated by Beatles fan Martin Freeman.

Now on the blog:

[pie-of-flames]

That sad Get Back hug wasn't so sad

Remember this? This sad, moving moment from Get Back, episode 1, that made me all weepy about the break-up. I found out from a podcast, Something about the Beatles, that this is pure fakery on the part of the Beatles. Maybe everyone knows this, I don't know, but it was mind blowing to me. The podcast plays the actual dialogue from the Nagra Tapes. They were mumbling nonsense! No sad discussion about how to get George to come back after he "quit" that day. So Peter Jackson's editing here is completely misleading.

Wild.

I clipped the part of the podcast where they discuss this and play the Nagra tape original. It's pretty funny, what the three Beatles are saying, and absolutely consistent with their personalities. Jackson was making his own fan fic here. The entire podcast episode is worth listening to. It's a deep dive into Get Back as a secondary source–Jackson's interpretation, given his mission to make a work of entertainment that Apple would approve, rather than Truth. I found it fascinating.

"Stick it up your ass!" John Lennon

[thestarsarecool]

MARK ELLEN: I met [Paul McCartney] towards the end of 1982 and it was the first, I think it was the first interview he’d done after the death of John Lennon — as if I wasn’t already wound up about the idea of meeting McCartney, my great hero. I was then given the absolute fourth-degree by the PR, Bernard Doherty, who said “Do not mention John Lennon.” I said “Obviously, obviously I won’t!” “If you mention John Lennon, he’ll walk-”. I said “I understand that!”

Source: Word in Your Ear Podcast, Episode 241 - The McCartneycast

[javelinbk]

May Pang, interviewed for the Beatles Films Podcast, April 2023

May talks about driving John and riding on a bus

Int: So, you were the designated driver most of the time, then were you?

May: Oh... you know, it was great - when we were back in the States, when we were back in New York and you know, we had the car, we had this car, and we'd go out to visit, John was so thrilled at the fact that I would be the one driving, that it was just the two of us, there wasn't... he didn't go for the limos and all that. I mean, he understood it like if we're going to an opening, that's different, but you know on the daily basis he'd rather not deal with that, you know. And of course I took him on a New York City bus ride one Saturday morning and he was so shocked and all these people are sitting on the bus... getting on the bus and they see him and they're going... and you could hear the whispering, they're going "Is that John Lennon?", "No, it can't be!", "Yes, no I'm telling you, I think it is!". And then John's sitting there going like this with his finger holding onto his face and he's going "Tsk... it's the nose - it's giving it away, it's the nose." And then somebody finally yelled out and said "Hey, John! How you doing?" and he goes "Fine!" and he turned to me, "It's time to get off the bus."

[no-reply95]

“[All These Years] Tune In set a lot of things right about the early years, it really did set down what had occurred yet I still read to this day vast amounts of stuff that are patently wrong about those years… So therefore I think when Volumes 2 and 3 come out the same will happen, people who want to think that John and Paul were lovers will still think it and they’re probably gonna think that I didn’t put it in because I didn’t want to put it in but no… If I find that they’re lovers I shall put it in but I can tell you that I’m not gonna find that they were lovers, because they were not.”

Mark Lewisohn, Fans On The Run Podcast, 2022

[mydaroga]

Okay Beatle People

Now that my two favorite podcasts are pulling up stakes, and I am now an expert at making podcasts, having put out four whole episodes of one, what should my Beatles podcast be about and who wants to do it with me?

[anotherkindofmindpod]

Hi AKOM! Feel free to reply to this publicly, personally, or not at all; I'm doing this in a format to give you every option.

But I wanted to thank you profusely for what you've done with your Fine Tuning series. I hope that it engenders further conversation (not cancellation, necessarily) around Tune In and the increasing need Beatles fandom and scholarship have to do their due diligence, not least because of the precedent set by Lewisohn himself (both by his previous work and, frankly, the standard he's stated and not held himself to).

This series came at an oddly opportune time in my own journey; the past several months I'd finished the expanded edition of the book, and gone down not a few rabbit holes seeking confirmation of weird sounding quotes and attributions and become increasingly suspicious, but found not much interest from folks about what I was seeing.

So after finishing the book, and around the time you started airing Fine Tuning, I started The Beatles and the Historians, definitely hoping Torkelson Weber would have taken him at least somewhat to task. She didn't, and then I started Truant Boy, an examination of the way we talk about McCartney and art in general, and I feel like my reading/thinking/listening journey was almost cosmically perfectly timed, through no planning on my part.

I've not always agreed with your conclusions but I very much value your voices in the discussion. I'm specifying the first part of that not as a diss or a backhanded compliment but because I know you'll appreciate that we've all got our own opinions but we, ideally, operate in a space where we can hash those out. That's how we get better opinions, better history, better scholarship and better fandom. So I really, really am grateful for what you've done here and I genuinely hope it fosters better discussion in the future.

Thank you, and congratulations, and I hope you're both treating yourselves!

Thank you so much @mydaroga for your kind words and for listening! ❤️

[foryouwereinmysong]

Sir James Paul McCartney: »So you know the holes became… instead of holes in the road, it became a synonym for people.« Paul Muldoon: »Right… absence, kind of…« Sir James Paul McCartney: »No, just assholes.«

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, ep. A Day in the Life

[mythserene]

What is a Liberty Bell? 🤔 (Mark Lewisohn on Fab4Cast pod)

I don't think it's especially important that he didn't know, I just thought it was funny and needed a little video.

(The reason it's so low-res is I posted it on Twitter two years ago and forgot to save the original so I had to screen record it from there.)

[i-am-the-oyster]

Me, listening to two podcast dudes talk about Little Lamb Dragonfly being too long, structurally incoherent, needing an editor: have you no feelings? are emotions foreign to you?

[dangerliesbeforeyou]

was anyone gonna tell me john lennon wrote a disstrack about paul mccartney (how do you sleep) or was i supposed to just find that out listening to a podcast about the beatles myself?