#hdys

[good-to-drive]

My favorite comments on How Do You Sleep

[tavolgisvist]

Paul on Eat At Home

Nobody was writing simple and easy-to-follow recipe books for meat free home cooking. So, eating in bed was something we both really liked to do. There were a couple of other things we really liked to do, but that’s for another day. It’s a very different take on domesticity from that ‘Bed-In for Peace’ that John and Yoko had in a hotel room in Amsterdam in 1969. Right from the start, he and I were always bouncing off each other when it came to subjects for songs. But the world represented here is certainly much quieter, conducted without the world’s press. You have to remember that Linda and I were newly married, with a baby, and we were desperately trying to escape the hurly-burly and just find time to be a family. We were completely cut off on our farm in Scotland, a place I’d bought a few years before but Linda really fell in love with. So we just made our own fun. We drew a lot. We wrote a lot. We inspired each other. <many beautiful and touching words about lovely life with lovely Linda> From a musical perspective, ‘Eat at Home’ owes much to the example of Buddy Holly, a huge influence on The Beatles when we were growing up and starting to write our own songs. One of the aspects I rather enjoy is that I modified Buddy Holly’s tendency to mimic a speech hesitation by introducing a sheep’s baa into the phrase ‘eat in be-e-e-ed’. I was proud of that!

(Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, 2021)

I know, it's just regular coincidence but it's so funny.

[adambadeau]

hey so i didn't really advertise how do you sleep but you guys should read it it's my ongoing assassins fic and it's really long it's almost 8 thousand words so far

chapters 1 and 2 are both up, i just posted 2

[eppysboys]

a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure

[anotherkindofmindpod]

George, who played lead guitar on How Do You Sleep?, tried to mend fences during the October 3 (1971) opening party for the finally completed € 500,000 (S1.200,000) studios in the basement of Apple's Savile Row offices and distanced himself from the song in the process. "It's a bit sad now that Apple is in the position all four of us planned three years ago. l just wish Paul would use the studio if he wants. It's silly not to. I can't see the four of us together again. But I'd like us at least to be friends. We all own this business and it's doing well and I'd like all four of us to enjoy it now."

Asked about How Do You Sleep?, he said, "It doesn't help at all. I'm glad it wasn't about me. I said to John as we were recording it, 'It's pretty hard on him!'”

-McCartney Legacy Vol 1 (2022)

[pwordmccartney]

i can’t get over how insane how do you sleep is if you think about it for more than ten seconds. the grievances that john allegedly has with paul according to the lyrics— making cheesy music and being too conservative (neither of which are really even true 😭)— are like diss-track ass grievances. You Suck Haha ass lines. mean for no reason.

HOWEVER you can tell how genuinely hurt and angry john is, from the way he sings it, from the demos, from the line “how do you sleep at night.” some of the more specific lines, like the one about Yesterday, the stuff that’s just straight up mean, have been attributed to klein and yoko. that makes sense, both of them were john’s yes-men at the time and if john was mad at paul, they were gonna back him up on that. but i keep coming back to the demos where john will sing “how do you sleep, babe” or “brother.” both words indicate a DEEP connection and thus a deep hurt. making ““““‘muzak”””””” is not a personal slight to john. neither is being attractive, having death rumors, or……. loving your mother???? all these things are is, in john’s eyes, kind of lame and/or funny.

“how do you sleep at night” is not the kind of thing you say to someone who you think makes corny music. it’s not the kind of thing you say to someone who you think is too square. it IS, however, the kind of thing you say to someone who you feel has betrayed you, who you feel has something to apologize for. my question is simple: what did john consider paul’s great infraction, the thing he hoped paul would lose sleep over, the thing he clearly wanted a resolution to?

[bambi-kinos]

The worst thing that John could come up with was calling Paul a cunt.

90s diss tracks put out hits on other rappers who shot each other in drive-bys. The fact that this white bread song got any traction is a stunning indictment on the boomer generation and John himself. Completely unserious.

[mermaidinthecity]

Boy, you tried to make a mess of me. Tear me down and make me believe. Thank God I didn't fall too deep. Why'd you try to make a mess of me? There was something about the things you said just to try to get into my head. Go lie in that empty bed. Boy, you know now just what you did. So tell me why you're trying so hard, well, just to break my heart? Kept on pulling me in. Thought I would give in. So tell me, tell me, before, tell me, I leave, tell me, how do you sleep?

How Do You Sleep by Orianthi

[the-black-oaks]

I had such a ridiculous argument with this total idiot who kept insisting that George hated Paul from India till the very end (and only did anything with him afterwards for the money) that the only way to soothe my nerves was to make these so I could watch and rewatch grumpy old man George squeezing him tight and reaching out to grab his jacket and touching his hair and grinning at him like that all the time throughout Anthology, no matter how awkward the whole situation was.

No one annoys him like Paul and no one knows him like Paul and there’s no one he loves like Paul and it’s all so painfully and wonderfully real that when I think about it for too long I have to go lie down in a dark room for a while.

[good-to-drive]

There's something very monkey's paw about Paul trying to provoke John into some kind of mild, deniable reaction just to get a little attention and instead getting the harshest diss track he's ever heard with like half their mutual friends tacitly endorsing it, and also in John playing Paul's action-reaction game like he's in it to win it and ending up looking like some petty instigator Paul had rightfully washed his hands of. With very few tweaks that story could be on the alfred hitchock hour and I would probably think it was incredible.

[tavolgisvist]

'Regardless of his intentions, McCartney would have known that lines such as “When I thought you was my friend/But you let me down/Put my heart around the bend” and “My dog he got three legs/But he can’t run” would be analysed by legions of Beatles-watchers the world over. And he cannot have failed to recognise that the lines would be interpreted as a commentary on his former band.'

They're so funny. Why “When I thought you was my friend/But you let me down/Put my heart around the bend” and “My dog he got three legs/But he can’t run”? Why not “When I thought you was my friend/(When I thought I could call you my friend)/But you let me down put my heart around the bend”?

'Perhaps ironically, Lennon professed a liking for the song, listing it as one of the better recordings on RAM. […]'

Well, maybe Lennon knows what he says?

But I'm not that about.

First, Paul recorded RAM and 3 Legs: 'You can knock me down - with a feather, but you know it's not allowed'

Then John writes his HDYS.

And Paul answers on the question about it: “I think it’s silly. If he was going to do me he could have done me, but he didn’t. That didn’t phase me one bit. ‘You live with straights’. Yeah, so what? Half the f-king world’s straight; I don`t wanna be surrounded by hobnailed boots. I quite like some straight people, I’ve got straight babies. ‘The only thing you did was Yesterday’. That doesn’t bother me. Even if that was the only thing I did, that’s not bad, that’ll do me. But it isn’t, and he bloody knows it isn’t because he’s sat in this very room and watched me do tapes, and he’s dug it.”

Also

John about RAM:

I thought it [Ram] was awful! McCartney was better because at least there were some tunes on it, like Junk*. I liked the beginning of Ram On, the beginning of Uncle Albert and I liked some of My Dog’s Got Three Legs. I liked the little bit about ‘Hands across the water’, but it just tripped off all the time. I didn’t like that a bit!

and Paul about Imagine:

I liked ‘Imagine,’ I didn’t like the others much. But really, there’s so much political shit on at the moment that I tend to play them through once to see if there’s anything I can pinch.

Good boys, lovely.

*It's interesting that he mentioned exactly Junk

[adambadeau]

Art for my assassins fic! The placement of objects around it was deliberate. Song lyrics are from How Do You Sleep by John Lennon, of course! I couldn’t have written the fic (or titled it) without this lovely diss track

Here it is without the objects (boring)

I made it using brand new art supplies my best friend from school gave me for Christmas. This was a largely experimental piece and it went SO MUCH HARDER than I was expecting it to

anyway. https://open.spotify.com/track/7xsr2OppItxPB4whucYr2G

Chapter III is coming very soon

[menlove]

I've seen breakup album polls but songs specifically...

[tavolgisvist]

I need more John's comments on RAM

like this

and this

or this

btw, Paul's comment on How Do You Sleep?

Melody Maker interview, November 11th, 1971

(add to this)

1971 / 1990: John makes a case for writing ‘How Do You Sleep’ as self-defence, and implores everyone to listen to 'Too Many People’. Years later, Paul comments wryly. (Note: Unfortunately I haven’t figured out the original source for John’s interview, but I do like how seamlessly the BBC engineers overlay the actual track of 'Too Many People’ with John singing it. You can listen to an alt. copy of John’s clip here which is edited down but doesn’t have an overlay over “You took your lucky break”.) 

JOHN: Oh, hell’s bells. Well I mean, uh – listen to Ram, folks. The lyrics weren’t printed. Just listen to it. I’m answering Ram. We believe that we can’t be wrong… Well, I believe you could possibly be wrong. When I heard Ram, I immediately sat down and— 

YOKO: And then “that was your first mistake.” 

JOHN: That was your first mistake, doo-doo… You took your lucky break and broke it—  Whose lucky break?

…

PAUL: Yeah, we were digging at each other. I mean, I was in a High Court case here, and they were all trying to sell me down the river, you know. I had to actually sue them, and they were telling me I was stalling. “Too many people preaching practices, don’t let them tell you what you want to be.” Yeah. That’s what John and Yoko were doing to the world. “You must be like this, you must be like this.” So I was kind of talking to kids, “You don’t have to listen to them.” 

[passerine2019]

something I like to talk to beatles moots about

if we’re talking about how deep of a cut the insults go, How Do You Sleep? wins. nearly immediately

If we’re talking about song replay-ability and just the quality of it, Too Many People wins. (I have NOT listened to 3 legs don’t kill me)

I can’t in good faith say that there’s a winner between the Paul and John “distracks” because they’re both good in their own special way (but if I had to choose it would be too many people)

[bytedykes]

[ID: post by civvic edited to say, "enough about me being noble consort!!!! the fucking drought is coming" in all caps. /end ID]

episode 4 of how dare you!? outtake