#peter asher

[repairingahole]

more twt requests + a jane asher

[cleopatragirlie]

𝐉𝐚𝐧𝐞 𝐀𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐬 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐚 𝐢𝐧 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐞'𝐬 '𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫'𝐬 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞' (𝟏𝟗𝟔𝟔)

[beatleswings]

Paul’s post about Marianne (x).

[gardenwalrus]

Paul and Linda McCartney with Peter Asher and Linda Ronstadt, photographed by Robert Ellis, 1976

[groovybananastarfish]

[ljblueteak]

Robert Fraser’s interview with Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, All You Need is Love

Some highlights:

Robert Fraser: Peter Asher was Jane’s brother. I think he brought Paul over to my place. He made me sorry because he saw a sculpture in my apartment and said, “I want that.” It was quite a lot of money for those days, it was like 2,500 quid. Paul never asked the price until he decided to buy something. If he liked it, he wanted it.

Steven Gaines: I guess they didn’t have to think about the price

Robert Fraser: No, but most people, even if they don’t have to think about it, they want to know the price. Paul was very, very open-minded, but he was also more…Well, John was too, but I mean John was sort of very difficult to…He was more difficult to…He was very shy in a way, and it comes out in an aggressive way.

Steven Gaines: It’s an odd decision Paul made to live at his girlfriend’s home with her parents.

Robert Fraser: Paul was a very domestic sort of personality. He liked the idea.

Peter Brown: I didn’t think twice about it, but looking back on it now, it was pretty ahead of its time to move in with your girlfriend’s family.

Robert Fraser: Even now, he’s done exactly what he wants. He’s not really like…He never really lived a rock star’s life.

[undying-love]

“That’s very hard to delve into [John and Paul's relationship]. They were great friends, and had great mutual respect, but they were also quite different from one another. I don’t know. Human relationships are tough to analyze. It’s like trying to talk about someone else’s marriage.” — Peter Asher (Jane's brother)

[tavolgisvist]

Soon after the Beatles created the company, there was a man on staff for a while called Magic Alex. His full name was Alexis Mardas, and his is an interesting story. I believe he was a friend of John’s initially, and George liked him as well. He was a scientist, and he was, to some degree, a real scientist as far as I could tell. He had some great ideas and was very up to date on a lot of cool new research. But in the end, he got a bit beyond himself and was talking about things that might happen as if they really existed already. Some of them eventually did exist. I remember him talking about voice recognition technology and face recognition technology. He was telling the Beatles he could create speakers that were made like wallpaper that you’d just stick on the wall. Such things are starting to happen now. So I don’t think Alex was a complete fraud, but I do think he was substantially over-optimistic about what he could actually build and when he could build it. I remember him talking about a problem in the studio that has always existed—the sound from one instrument leaking into other microphones in the room beyond the one specifically intended for that instrument. For example, the drums would leak into the vocal mics and things like that, and we would put up big wooden barriers called baffles to try to prevent this. Alex was telling us, “Oh, you won’t need those—we can create invisible barriers that will prevent the sound waves from leaving that area and entering another area.” Again, something that may happen in the future, but it doesn’t work yet, and it certainly did not work then. Anyway, in the end everyone lost confidence in Alex. He was kind of a half scientist with a considerable hint of con man perhaps in there as well. I liked him personally. He was a cool guy. He was charming and eloquent, and I was sad to read recently that he died. Alex Mardas was a significant part of the Apple team—as Magic Alex, he was a close friend of the Beatles and certainly a relevant part of our letter A, but not (I am sorry to say) actually magic! As I recall, Paul might have been the least credulous when it came to Alex’s extravagant pseudoscientific claims…

(The Beatles from A to Zed by Peter Asher, 2019)

Derek Taylor about Magic Alex

[ludmilachaibemachado]

January 28, 1968 - Paul McCartney and Jane Asher were among the many celebrity guests attending a party in honor of the Supremes who had finished a successful run at London's Talk of the Town nightclub. The Supremes had just come from topping the bill on Sunday Night At the Palladium to attend the party held at John Bull's Restaurant in Chelsea. Paul posing with Cindy Birdsong, Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, Jane and Peter Asher🌺🌺🌺

Via Something About the Beatles' Girls FB🌵

[ladyjaneasherr]

Beautiful Jane Asher alongside her brother Peter Asher as she helped to set up the Indica Bookstore which was opened on January 28th, 1966. Jane had made a donation of a vintage till that she used as a child and Paul designated the logo for the bags. 🌻

[underthecitysky]

I have Eyes of the Storm and just started to leaf through it and am totally overwhelmed.. it’s way more than I was expecting. I won’t be able to really go through it until tomorrow but just look at how he photographed Jane ..

I kind of love that she’s included .. and the comment about her hair (wonder what she thinks)

And Peter and the view from the back of Wimpole Street .. living for every crumb of detail about the life at the Asher’s.

[beatlepaul4ever]

So there’s Peter Asher, standing with a scantily-clad buxom Bunny girl on his arm and he has eyes only for the male bunny there.

[cleopatragirlie]

❀ꗥ～ꗥ❀ 𝐉𝐚𝐧𝐞 𝐀𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐫 ❀ꗥ～ꗥ❀

[tearyourpetals]

Courtney Love and Peter Asher photographed by Chris Cuffaro, 2004

[gardenwalrus]

The view from Wimpole Street, London, 1964 © Paul McCartney

The Ashers’ house in Wimpole Street. A very small attic room with one window. A garret. Perfect for an artist. There wasn’t any room for me to keep my records — many of which had been mailed to me from the US before they were available in the UK — in there. They had to be kept on the landing. But somehow I had a piano in there — a small, sawn-off piano that stood by my bed.

— Paul McCartney, The Lyrics (2021)

+

The [Asher] family lived in a large town house in Wimpole Street in the West End of London. It was a Georgian terrace house with six floors, including a rambling basement. On the top floor, in the old servants' quarters, were Peter's bedroom and a little music room. Sometimes, late at night, Paul would be invited to stay over rather than go back to Green Street. Then one day, in the course of conversation, Jane suggested that he could live at Wimpole Street if he hated the Green Street flat so much. Her mother would let him have the attic room. [...] Paul's room was next to Peter's, in the back of the house, next to the top bathroom. It was a small, square room with a single window overlooking Browning Mews, where horses and carriages were once kept. The view of rooftops and chimneys gave him a sense of living in an artist's garret. A large brown wardrobe and a single bed occupied most of the room. There was a wall shelf with some bric-a-brac in a jumble - a couple of Jean Cocteau Opium drawings, one in a cracked frame, a stack of first editions - while the space under the bed rapidly filled with a haphazard pile of gold records and trophies to which was added his MBE, awarded to the Beatles by the Queen at an investiture at Buckingham Palace on 6 October 1965. There was little to show that the room belonged to anyone much richer than the servants it had been originally designed for, despite Paul's rapidly accumulating wealth. [...] PAUL: 'I eventually got a piano of my own up in the top garret. Very artistic. That was the piano that I fell out of bed and got the chords to "Yesterday" on. I dreamed it when I was staying there. I wrote quite a lot of stuff up in that room actually. "I'm Looking Through You" I seem to remember after an argument with Jane. There were a few of those moments.'

— Barry Miles, Many Years From Now (1997) II

[harrisonarchive]

Photo 1 (from the arrival back in London) by Watford/Mirrorpix via Getty Images; photo 2 cross-posted at This Lovin' Time.

“First social call was to Peter Tork’s house. When we arrived Peter was wearing a string of beads and very little else, since it was far too hot to be anywhere but a swimming pool that day. Dave Crosby (Byrds) was there, too, and we had a good get-together. […] I suppose the highlight of L.A. this time for us was the session we had at Peter Tork’s place. Peter Asher joined us there — he played bass, Peter Tork was on piano, George and Dave Crosby on guitars and Ringo drumming.” - Mal Evans, The Beatles Monthly, August 1968

“Ringo Starr and George Harrison dropped by the Studio City home, Tork recalled. ‘We went swimming for a while in the pool.‘“ - The News Journal, July 16, 1989

“Just relaxed, just played what you could play. […] I played with Ringo Starr, Ringo, and George once, played with those guys. Same thing: bam, everything settles down, everything’s in order, everything is taken care of, and play what you can play.” - Peter Tork, Musicgroups, 2007

“Steve [Stills] was there [too], and he was embarrassed; he shook hands with George and kind of turned his back on him, the way shy guys will do. [...] We all jammed, Stephen and George and Ringo, and I was on keyboards, and I don’t remember who played bass. It was fabulous to hear Ringo play. My God, what a drummer. God, he was good. He was so solid, and the authority was astounding. I learned so much just by playing with him for five minutes; it was a wonderful experience.” Q: “It’s a bummer it didn’t get recorded.”
 PT: “It is too bad, nobody thought to record it. The best we had at the time was cassettes, but even so, that would have been a wonderful jam.” - Peter Tork, Rolling Stone, 2007; published 2019 (x)

(In connection with today's post: July 1967, post 1, July 1967, post 2, and January 1968.)