A Beatle related drawing a week for a year... That's
how I started this blog. If you are looking for my Beatle related posts, check the buttons below from February 9th 2010 through
February 9th, 2011. Now I just draw what I feel. Check out my upcoming book, Amglish, coming from Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers on October 16th. Here's our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Amglish-in-Like-Ten-Easy-Lessons-a-Celebration-of-the-New-World-Lingo/112425802177825
|
|
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
At base camp on Mount PoppermostFrom the end to a beginning; last week it was the threetles. This week it's the beginning
of the studio Beatles (not counting the My Bonnie , etc. with Tony Sheridan). Lennon regularly would rally the
other Beatles with his chant that they were going to “Toppermost of the Poppermost”. Looking through the Anthology
I found this pic from an early (perhaps the first?) recording session. They had attained their goal of getting a contract,
but had not yet garnered their first UK hit, much less the international acclaim that would soon follow.
Though
they are wearing the Epstein mandated shirts with ties, note that both John & George have loosened theirs in a quiet rebellion
against this conformity. George looks like he is recovering from a bad haircut. John is uncharacteristically in the background.
Ringo is the pensive “new guy”. And of the four of them, Paul seems to be wearing the trappings of success in
show biz the most comfortably, and time has borne that out. |  |
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
And then there were Threetles...Since the Beatles broke up in 1970, many fans were driven by the idea of a reunion. No live
reunion ever occurred of the four Beatles, though all four contributed to various songs on Ringo’s 1973 album. Paul,
George and Ringo attended Eric Clapton’s wedding to Pattie Boyd Harrison in 1979, and they did indeed play some songs,
though no tapes of this jam have emerged. Reportedly, the songs played included “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band”. Within a year and a half, John Lennon had been murdered, but the dream of a Beatle reunion continued, and
in 1994, the three survivors got together for a brief informal jam as well as the two Lennon demos they finished , “Free
As a Bird” and “Real Love”. One irony is that Lennon in “FAAB” was writing about the freedom
he felt when he ultimately got a his US green card, and could give up the struggle to stay where he wanted, in New York City.
In the finished lyric, Paul & George sing about how being a Beatle, presumably made them feel “free”, whereas
Lennon is on record repeatedly that it was more of a gilded prison than freedom. He much preferred the freedom he had to walk
the streets unmolested in NYC, at least until his fame caught up to him in the psychopathic assassin who tracked him there.
But, as part of the Anthology process, in 1994, after noodling for a bit on some of George’s
ukeleles, they moved to a proper studio jam. They played “Raunchy” which was the song that was 14 year old
guitarist George Harrison’s ticket into the band; “Thinking of Linking”, a very early unrecorded Paul song
derived from a radio commercial for furniture, and “Blue Moon of Kentucky”. Carlin’s recent bio of Paul
suggests that that was plenty for George, who was beginning to chafe at the brief renewed collaboration with Paul.
In the end, this long sought collaboration of the surviving three ended with a whimper, not a bang, and that makes some sense,
I guess. The dream was over. I’m happy they finally got the Anthology together before George left this mortal coil. | | |
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
'72 Johnandyoko Charm Offensive | In 1971 and 1972, John & Yoko began a charm offensive with many TV appearances, probably as part
of John’s campaign for a green card. They were on Dick Cavett twice, and co-hosted a full week of The Mike Douglas Show.
In this drawing, (taken from a clip on the Anthology), John is describing meeting Yoko in 1966, at her Indica gallery opening,
and how he enjoyed her “Ceiling Painting” which involved walking on a stepladder to use a spyglass to view a tiny
typed word “YES” on the ceiling.
Over the weekend, I attended a concert of two acts that peaked in
the 70s: Jonathan Edwards and Aztec Two-Step. Both have big Beatle influences. Edwards did a great, almost melancholy cover
of “She Loves You”. Aztec Two-Step has long been a favorite of my wife’s, but I am only just beginning
to appreciate them. They seem very Beatle influenced, and one of the duo that is their core, Rex Fowler, has a new record
out that is a collaboration with Tom Dean, and all Lennon covers (Lennon Imagined: http://www.johnlennonsongproject.com/imagined-credits.html).
In it, they use a mashup approach of doing bits of Lennon songs from any period and mixing them with other bits, but all played
in studio rather than cut & pasted.
|
Monday, August 9, 2010
It's Getting Hard to Be Someone, But It All Works Out... If there is a “Rosebud” song in the Beatles catalog, a Rosetta Stone that
explains it all for us, I would nominate “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Why did John lead them in their regular
chant in the shabby early days, that they were going to the “toppermost of the poppermost”? What drove John Lennon
to become a creative artist, to pick up a guitar?
I say that his biggest private pain, the abandonment by his
parents, was also his greatest blessing as an artist, in terms of giving him a hole in his self he could never fill. He tried
repeatedly, by writing songs that buoyed the world and made him one of the most admired people on the planet, even before
his horrible murder.
Oddly, the rightly much loathed Albert Goldman in his bio hit job on John, wrote some of
the best analysis that I’ve read about Strawberry Fields Forever. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, I guess:
“ ‘There was something about the place that always fascinated John’ recollected Aunt Mimi. ‘He
could see it from his window, and he used to love going to the garden party they had each year’...
...it
is highly characteristic of John Lennon that his nostalgic recollection of childhood should turn on a symbol of pain even
more than of pleasure. He knew perfectly well that the little girls in blue and white dresses, their straw boaters tied with
red ribbons about their chins were orphans, like himself. Strawberry Field...was his spiritual home. For the drifting, groping,
marginally depressed mood in which he spent much of his life was the product of his early orphaning, which had cut the ties
that bound him to normal life and set him adrift in the existential limbo that was his native element.”
So John, though growing up in the relative suburban comfort of Aunt Mimi’s house Mendips, was the richest of the fab
four in creature comforts, but the poorest in family, at least in nuclear family. Though she made a better mother for John
than Julia could manage, Mimi was not Julia, and that wound would never heal.
And that was what drove Lennon,
and John drove the rest of them. Here’s 11 year old John, in his bedroom at Mendips.
|  |
9:19 am edt
Jerry Garcia, Not Fade Away!If you know me only through this blog, you might think I only enjoy the music of the Beatles.
But my other big musical enthusiasm is the good old Grateful Dead. It's 15 years since the death of Jerry Garcia,
and I'm now a year older than Jerry ever got to be, (and on the face of it a whole lot healthier than he was). Of course,
I've had this sort of experience in real life with people I actually knew, too: immensely talented people, charming, funny,
genial people who checked out far too soon through either open self-destruction or through neglect of their health; talented
in every way but surviving.
And I've been an enthusiastic follower of many post GD formations, and
of Phil Lesh's bands. Part of doing that is the idea that "when the world
is running down, make the best of
what's still around". Louis Jordan
has a funny song about food shortages during WWII, where he compares
the lack of bacon and sugar to the lack of available strong young men
for the ladies, called "You can't get that
no mo' ". So I couldn't
get it no mo'....
Jerry left a body of work that continues to surprise
me. I'm still
unearthing shows with moments of virtuosity or even whole runs with
different lineups supporting
him in non-GD outings. But gone are the
days we'll read a new interview with that great mind that continued to surprise
me with his insights and wit, that were every bit as nimble as his fingers on the frets.
love is real/ not fade
away! |  |
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
My Friend Came to Me, with Sadness in His Eyes...  | On August 1st, 1971, George Harrison & friends played two shows as a benefit for the newborn country of BanglaDesh,
suffering from the effects of a cyclone and the ravages of war.
George had called John Lennon, who had agreed
to a stipulation that he perform without Yoko. After a fight with “Mother”, John bugged out of NYC two days before
the event. Ringo made it, along with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and a host of other rock performers.
Although benefit rock concerts had been happening for years, this was the first big mega benefit, the granddad
of Live Aid , Farm Aid, Live Eight, etc. Within a year, the movie was released, giving us a sustained glimpse of at
least two of the Beatles in live performance where they were not constantly drowned out by audience screams for a change.
Clapton was struggling with cold turkey from his heroin addiction, and barely made it, playing without rehearsal.
Dylan was making his first stage appearance in two years, since three of the semi-intact Beatles had seen him at the Isle
of Wight Festival in ’69. There was some controversy about Allen Klein “recouping” advertising costs, which
some allege exceeded his actual costs. By 1985, $12 million in relief funds had made it to Bangla Desh, and there is now a
permanent “George Harrison Fund for the benefit of UNICEF", into which proceeds for DVD and album sales go. Good
on yer, George! (depicted: George, Bob & Leon) |
|
|
|
