I realized a bit late that Julia Stanley Lennon’s birthday was March 12th (same week as Pattie Boyd --see below, 3/16). So here’s Julia, still in her birth month of March.

They say every picture tells a story, and this one of the few we have of her speaks volumes. Young John Lennon, wincing in the sunshine of his auntie’s garden, could well be wincing at the rare display of maternal love as his birth mother blows in for a visit. When the sun hardly ever shines, it’s hard to open your eyes when it does. Julia clutches her firstborn, though she couldn’t hold onto him for too long.

The lack of sufficient maternal love left John Lennon with a wound that would never heal. He seems to have come closest in filling that hole in his life was his marriage to Yoko, but even that satisfaction was fleeting and intermittent.

And because of that missed love, John craved the spotlight and grew up to form the Beatles.  It reminds me of Van Gogh. People say if he was on prozac, he would not have shot himself in the head in that cornfield in France. Yeah, but maybe he wouldn’t have painted either. ;-)

So I think Lennon’s pain was the engine of so much of his genius. One sad coda to all of this is that illegitimacy (and I assume, more missed parental connections) is one of the worst outgrowths of the whole 60s experiment. I am a pro 60s kind of guy, but I think realistically we have to see the bad with the good.

And John himself certainly repeated the pattern with his first son Julian, in denying him the parental love that Julia denied him.

Well, I was flipping through my “Complete Beatles Chronicle” (Lewisohn), looking for some synchronicity in the history around this date, and whoomp, there it was: the Amsterdam Bed In For Peace.

‘Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton,
Talking in our beds for a week.
The newspaper said, "Say what you doing in bed?"
I said, "We're only trying to get us some peace".’

This was a nice use of the ever present paparazzi. They were going to be dogging them all the time anyway, why not take that spotlight & shine it on the cause of peace?

Peace out!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1964, George Harrison met model Pattie Boyd on the train set of “A Hard Day’s Night”. The first thing George said to her was “Will you marry me? And if not, will you have dinner with me tonight?” Pattie was “semi-engaged” at the time and said no. She then promptly dumped her boyfriend and when called back for filming the next day accepted George’s invitation. She married George in late 1965, and later Eric Clapton fell hard for her, eventually marrying her after she split from George. There was “Something” about “Layla”, and her “Bell Bottom Blues” that made them feel “Wonderful Tonight”, I guess. Pattie Boyd Harrison Clapton, born March 17th, 1944.

 A Boston Irish guy like me can’t let St. Patrick’s Day pass without noting that the “English” group the Beatles was very Irish indeed. Liverpool is often referred to as “The Capital of Ireland”, and both Lennon & McCartney are Irish names. In fact, Ringo is the only Beatle without Irish roots, but he, too would have grown up knowing the Celtic beat. As Tony Bramwell noted in his book on the Beatles: “Irish music, with the sound of the fiddle, Uilleann pipes, tin whistle, a handheld drum called the bodran and Celtic harmonies, could be heard in almost every home and bar...”.

And though John’s Aunt Mimi famously reacted John’s choice of a name “Sean” for his son with “Don’t brand him!”, in fact her family line of Stanleys were also Celts, originally from Wales.

Further details of the Beatles’ Irish roots here:
http://www.iol.ie/~beatlesireland/Irish%20Heritage/irishheritageindex.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After drawing young Paul in the Hamburg railway with the “ghost of Stu” in soft focus behind him last week, I was intrigued by all the great photos in the Anthology of the early Beatles. As John Lennon often said , he wanted to “show the world the band with their trousers off”, which translated from the Lennon, I think meant “warts & all”. This was before Brian was managing them, and they were dressed more “rude boy” than the later coordinated, cleaned up look Brian devised. This image is a drawn from a couple pics: the Lennon is from the railway photos of Astrid’s and the Harrison & McCartney are from a gig in the UK. I took the clothes they are wearing from that gig. I think Lennon went mop top around the same time as Paul, but I wanted to draw this rockabilly  look, which Lennon noted he was sporting again just before his murder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I just drew this in the last hour: probably a total of 45 minutes for pencil sketch, ink, and further pencil for background (someone had asked how long these take-- the paintings take hours more).

A few years ago I enjoyed the film “Backbeat” which tells the story of the Beatles before they hit it big. In the film, McCartney is sort of the “villain” of the piece, as he maneuvers to get Stuart Sutcliffe out of the band. The film implies that Paul was a bit threatened by  Lennon’s connection with his art school chum Stu.

I think Paul was always the best businessman in the Beatles (not to demean his writing & bass playing skills which I love), and even if he was the villain of the movie, he was right about Stu, who from what we read was a much better painter than bass player. It's worth noting that Klaus Voorman thought Stu was a good bass player, according to Wiki.

Stuart, of course, died tragically of a brain hemorrhage just as the band was hitting it big in the UK. This photo is from the Anthology-- no credit here but it sure looks like the work of Stu’s girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr.