#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.

[mckinleygirl98]

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]

This Is Not Here exhibition in Syracuse, October 1971

The whole story in a nutshell is that we were having a meeting in 1969, and John showed up and said he’d met this guy Allen Klein, who had promised Yoko an exhibition in Syracuse, and then matter-of-factly John told us he was leaving the band. That’s basically how it happened. It was three to one because the other two went with John, so it was looking like Allen Klein was going to own our entire Beatles empire. I was not too keen on that idea.

(Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, 2021, about Too Many People)

Ram (piss off cake, that was your first mistake and whatever John heard) released 17 May 1971 Imagine (with HDYS?) released 9 September 1971 (US) and 8 October in UK

This Is Not Here Press Conference at Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY (October 8, 1971)

Q: What do you think of Paul, John? A: I’ve changed, you know, he’s still the closest friend I’ve ever had except for Yoko. So I mean I’m still close to him whatever goes on.

On 9 October 1971, John Lennon’s 31st birthday, a retrospective exhibition of artworks by Yoko Ono opened at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.

The show looked back over 10 years of her career, and was billed as “A show of unfinished paintings and sculpture”. It ran until 27 October 1971.

The exhibition catalogue took the form of a collage in the shape of a newspaper, and was compiled by Lennon and Peter Bendry. The back cover featured a sequence of photographs of Lennon and Ono which morphed their faces from one to another. The sequence was later used on the labels for ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ and Some Time In New York City.

Guests for the opening night included Ringo Starr and his wife Maureen Starkey, Allen Klein, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Frank Zappa, Spike Milligan, Jack Nicholson, Dick Cavett, John Cage and Dennis Hopper. Lennon gave all visitors a silver necklace to mark the occasion. (x)

This Is Not Here

The main title “This is Not Here” recalls an experience during a gallery show in 1961, at which an ugly cabinet that was interfering with the exhibition space was tagged “this is not here,” in the spirit of Magritte’s famous painted image “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” <…> The ground floor of the museum housed pieces like Painting to Shake Hands Through, Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through, and a clear plexiglass labyrinth called Amaze, whose central cubicle was a two-way mirror-walled chamber containing a toilet! Although it is not a very difficult puzzle, the structure forces you to take part in a Conceptual event by making you arrive at something as familiar as a toilet. <…> A number of pieces in the show reiterate the theme of small, diverse parts in relation to a larger, cumulative unity. <…> Sizes (1964), a transparent box with mirrors and lenses embedded in its sides, converts the same needle into six different sizes; while Shadows encloses objects with different silhouettes, all casting shadows of the same size and shape. It is intended that Broken Vase Piece will be reassembled in ten years by those who gathered its shattered fragments.8 Film No. 4 (365 naked British bottoms, recorded as peace petition signatures in London, in 1968) is a bizarrely hypnotic and fixed-camera view of that number of moving buttocks. Of course, 365 units of anything could have been employed just as easily—days in a year, degrees of rotation around one’s head, stars, leaves, etc.—to demonstrate that although everything is an individual entity, sheer accumulation has the effect of dissolving the unique into the universal. <…> The second floor contained imaginary pieces such as those in the Weight Room, in which objects defied their normal density or gravity factors when lifted; indications like “imagine flowers in the (empty) museum planters”; and some cooperative pieces where John Lennon responded to older works of Yoko’s like an amiable Zen dialogue. Water Room was a collection of projects contributed by guests, to which the artist had promised to add only the water. (In its final stages, it turned out to be Conceptual, rather than actual water.) <…> During the month that the Everson show was in progress, WNET, Channel 13, aired an hour of Yoko Ono’s work on its Free Time series, October 14th. The program was largely excerpts from past pieces: Grapefruit in the World of Park (mind music), film shorts, Think/Feel/And/Do/Tank, Bag Piece, or Fly performed by John Lennon and others, and several events and paintings.

(“This Is Not Here” - A Report on the Yoko Ono Retrospective at Syracuse by Emily Wasserman, January 1972)

Much of the show consisted of Miss Ono's ephemeral concepts and word ‐ plays given slightly less fragile embodiment, A huge letter “T” made of ice melted in an outdoor courtyard„ for instance (“Iced Tea”), and indoors there were such objects as “Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through,” a clear Plexigiass sheet that Mr. Lennon said was his favorite work; “Imagine the Flowers,” a row of empty flower pots, and “Cloud Piece,” a water bed on which the viewer could “lie down and watch until a cloud passes from right to left.” “Total communication can mean peace,” declared Miss Ono, clad in a black velvet hotpants suit, at a preview of the show on Friday. “The artist can change the world and values in the world.” Stressing the importance of viewer participation in her work, she said, “We're all audience and we're all artists. You're all involved.” (Before the press preview was over, there was a good deal of participation: the apple was eaten to its core, a Venetian vase sent by Peggy Guggenheim as a “watercontainer” was smashed, and an antique eyeglas case and a set of false teeth were missing from their vitrines.) Modestly insisting that his role in the show was subordinate to Miss Ono's, Mr. Lennon, whose 31st birthday was marked by the show's opening, explained, “She thinks up beautiful pure concept things, and I come up with a gimmicky reaction.” For his guest stint, he contributed such works as a wardrobe of edible clothes, and a number of films and pieces “in dialogue” with Miss Ono, among them a huge “Baby Grand Guitar” next to which she had placed only the neck of another guitar and the legend, “Imagine the body.”

(The New York Times, October 11, 1971)

John and the guests of his birthday party drunkly sang many old and new songs including What’d I Say, Yellow Submarine, Goodnight Irene, Take This Hammer, He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands, Bring It On Home To Me, Yesterday, Maybe Baby, Peggy Sue, My Baby Left Me, Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes, Crippled Inside and Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey

Also during the party, a Japanese reporter interviewed Lennon and Ono. The recording, which featured a high degree of tension between the couple, became known as The Argument Interview, and was later aired on the US radio series The Lost Lennon Tapes. (x)

In the fall of 1971 Connolly travelled to the US to cover Yoko’s show in Syracuse. During this trip, John pulled Ray aside and asked him to do him a favor. He asked Ray to get in touch with Paul when he was back in London — with a message to call him. Apparently John wanted to talk to Paul and he believed if he called Paul himself it would devolve into a screaming match.  Ray did as requested when he returned to London. He went to Paul’s home and though he wasn’t able to connect with Paul, he did leave him a message in his letterbox. When he followed up a few days later, it was Jim McCartney that answered the phone and he shut Ray down, telling Ray not to get involved, that things had moved on. 

(onesweetdreampodcast about interview with Ray Connolly) (x)

[mckinleygirl98]

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.” 

[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

[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)