Yoko’s lack of knowledge of the Beatles

I clearly remember my husband telling me about some new English band that was causing quite a stir back in February, more or less, of 1962. I remember because I went over how they spelled the name and how it might be pronounced in the shower and we only lived in that house with that particular shower for a few months. We were both art majors and members of the old Bohemia that immediately preceded the famous 60s counter culture. Not quite Beat Generation – that has mostly petered out and not completely a part of the foundation for the next. At any rate it was a group that paid attention to what was happening in politics, in the arts and letters, and in entertainment. I remember only that they were English, in England and that there was something different about them.

I relate this because while we were in Nashville, Tennessee and Yoko was in NYC we were essentially members of the same little group. We heard about the antics of her general artistic movement though I doubt we heard of her in specific – she didn’t make a very big splash at that time. I remember that there was a review in the underground newspaper on the University of Tennessee campus the fall of that year. My point is that her crowd must have heard of the Beatles if that knowledge had filtered down to US in Tennessee. Knowing what was going on was one of the base lines of that movement!

One does remember that HM also claimed ignorance of who the Beatles were as well as calling the fans “Beatle nutters” – roughly the same attitude that Yoko seemed to have at that time. I assume they both thought it would make their “falling in love” with a famous man seem to be simply an ordinary person falling in love with another ordinary person and that it had nothing to do with their fame and fortune. Umhmmm.

What if Decca had signed the Beatles?

I just heard the complete tapes the Beatles made on New Years Day, 1962 for Decca. I have to strongly suspect that Brian Epstein chose the songs because it’s a straight pop set with barely a hint of rock and strongly featured Paul’s undeniable abilities as a crooner. So what if Decca had liked the audition? Well, first, we’d have had Paul McCartney and the Silver Beatles. So there’d be no real Beatles. Second, the time of the crooner was not 1962! They would have had a small success in Britain and that would have been that.

It’s not that they didn’t do pop very well indeed. And it’s certainly not that Paul didn’t have the looks and the voice. Four or five years earlier he could have been another Vic Damone or Eddy Fisher! One could have an excellent nightmare out of the knowledge that we only just missed having another out of date crooner with a pretty good backup band instead of millions of screaming girls and some of the most innovative music on the planet. (and some bad stuff as well but that’s ok) In that case, John Lennon wouldn’t have been John Lennon but just some dude that played rhythm guitar.

I really can’t see any A & R man giving a group as much freedom as George Martin did the Beatles. Anyone else would have told them to shut up and do How Do You Do It. Nobody else would have listened and tried to find out what was in their minds, nobody else would have hired half a symphony to do 24 bars!! They would simply have been fed into the machinery and come out looking just like everyone else. Almost worse, the Rolling Stones would have turned out looking, and probably sounding, like the Dave Clark Five!

Pepper Pot

Sgt. Pepper’s Pot Plants

One of the most irritating things I know of is when a complete error is repeated ad nauseum! If you think the flowerbed on the Pepper cover looks like an “open grave” I suppose that’s your choice. Having seen a good many open graves in my life, it looks like an odd flower border to me. (I do think the floral clock in Paul’s design would have looked a great deal better.) However, it’s the endless repitition about the “pot plants” shown on the album cover that makes me want to recommend that the writer change his focus to George W. Bush where mythology is a requirement.

Of course, I suppose city people may never have actually seen a marijuana plant and therefore be unable to recognize the leaves, but a very little research of T-shirts could quickly amend that ignorance! For one thing, cannabis is a rather tall, rangy plant; one as fully leafed-out as those on the album would be two or three feet tall. For a final thing, these plants in no way resemble pot.

The first photograph at the head of this entry is of a marijuana plant; the center graphic is an enlargement of one of the plants on the Pepper cover; the third photo is of Aluminum Plant, Pilea cadierei, a popular house plant originally from tropical Southeast Asia. There are a couple other common houseplants that might be the ones we see on the cover but they are far less common and a good deal less likely.

I’m sorry to disappoint all you heads out there but this is one of the stupidest Beatle myths going, possible even less rational then the Paul Is Dead hoorah. At least this one is so very easily shown to be mistaken while proving that someone is alive is difficult unless you can arrange to meet them face to face – and Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people actually have met Paul face to face since 1967 (or whenever) there seem to be a few people who still treasure the idea.

In the case of the pot plants on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, please remove it from your mind. No doubt the living adults in the room at the time the photograph was taken would have liked the idea of using cannabis plants, but they didn’t.

Of Years And Coffee

There’s a “fearful symmetry” in Paul’s life at this particular moment. In gray Liverpool of the 50s one day a nervous entrepreneur rented a disused building and sought riches in the latest fad: a coffee bar. Located a few blocks from the art college and both a boys’ and a girls’ grammar school (high school to the US) his chances of moderate success were good. It was a cheap enough project with the impressive steam-boiler-in-miniature, an espresso machine, representing the major investment. A few tiny tables and a lot of mismatched chairs from the street market and a few cans of paint completed his start-up costs.

Indeed it appears that the Jacaranda was one of Allan Williams few really successful projects as students in numbers found it the perfect hangout – as American students found theirs in the soda shop. These were near-revolutionary changes from their parents who spent their free time in pubs or bars choosing the sedation of alcohol to the stimulation of coffee. (In America coffee houses were popular in the late 50s as “Beat Generation” hangouts.)

Wheeling and dealing in his little coffee bar, dreaming dreams of a hundred get-rich-quick schemes, he gave 5 young men with an undistinguished beat group and more ambition then any other local group a few gigs he’d promoted up out of practically nowhere. The Beatles got these gigs more out of their persistence then any belief Williams had in their chances of stardom. In fact, one way or another he let his one good chance at serious fame and fortune escape him because they were too hard to deal with. (He did in the end make quite a lot of fame and fortune out of his failure.)

50 years from the day the Jac made its first cup of espresso, coffee is again a mad fad and thousands of street-front espresso coffee bars not all that different have opened around the world. And this summer of the 50 year anniversary of the afternoon John met Paul and the Beatles began their hegira, these coffee bars echo with the sound a Beatles music and the fortune Allan Williams lost is being made by others following his plan for glory.

50 Years Ago Today (well, yesterday but who’s counting?)

I’ve lived through this feeling a lot of times since June 16, 1990—50 years since Hitler rode in triumph through the streets of Paris—the day of my birth and also the day my father was supposed to MC the boat races (he made it, I came at noon and he was back at the mike by 2.) Yesterday marked 50 years since two teenage under-achievers met in a church hall in a second rate English city. It’s more then a little odd comparing all those world-shaking events that have one by one slid past me for 17 years with so obscure an event. The fall of Paris changed the world forever, what has that got to do with a couple of third-rate juvenile delinquents?

Did the Beatles change the world? That’s hard to say and impossible to prove. They certainly changed the way a lot of kids saw the world and many of them didn’t forget it when they reluctantly grew up.

I honestly don’t think we would enjoy being nostalgic about the 60s without the Beatles. The 60s were actually a really horrible decade with war, societal upsets, prejudice, lynchings, assassinations, giant disruptive protests—non violent and otherwise—riots, police rampaging out of hand, brutality, and loss and blood, don’t forget lots and lots of blood. Only the music; the music that gave laughter and joy and even hope and the four young men, that particular four young men, who were having so much fun bringing their music to the world, to us.

Oh, soon there were other people, young also, with a girl or two among them, bringing more and more music. Music that empowered, music that could put small troubles out of mind. Even music that could make life seem worth living again. Music that never stopped being new.

Did the Beatles change the world? They changed the colors of the world we saw and that is no small thing!

In The End

The bottom-most of the bottom lines of who broke up the Beatles is that we killed the Beatles.

We killed them because we couldn’t be satisfied with what they had given us. We wanted more; louder, happier, sadder. We wanted more music, more movies, more concerts. We wanted to know every thing about them, more photos, more intimate moments when their true feelings showed – or we thought they did.

Not believing that they were ordinary humans who had limits we asked them to solve the world’s problems, put a man on the moon (oh, I’m sorry, someone else did that) and comfort us when nour boyfriends acted like idiots. We had literally eaten them down to their skin and bones and,  not being Jesus after all, they declined to let us go any further.

But we continue to want them, more of them. Their songs do as much for us noe – or nearly – as they did then but every out-take, every sneeze or sniffle on tape is treasured. I expect one day there’ll be a bidding war on Ebay for possession of a genuine John-fart with authenticating certificates – at which point we’ll have succeeded in consuming him utterly with our need, our love.

So go now and light a candle for your memory of all they did and continue to do just for us. Beatle Paul gave a concert last night for about 1,000 people and those lucky few tell us of it in words as broken and emotional and transfigured as any of the classic “15 year old girls” could have uttered.

Many people on the various Beatle and McCartney lists I’m on and many of the reviewers and commentators on Memory Almost Full mention their surprise (or admiration or whatever) that Paul could produce an album like this when he’s almost 65/retirement age/drawing his pension. Obviously to these people, 65 is the end of everything useful, interesting or creative in live. Actually after 60 or so there are a number of factors that affect what an individual can or can’t do and none of these factors are their age.

First and most important is what the individual thinks they can do. Keep in mind that most women become grandmothers between 35 and 45 (not 70 as the illustrations and advertisements would have it) and it’s pretty easy to be a great grandmother-father before 65. Even the person who is 65 can limit their activities by believing, as I suppose the majority of younger people do, that they can’t do anything worthwhile after 65. Obviously, if you KNOW you are too old to do it you aren’t going to try.

Those who haven’t fallen victim to that supposition are limited by mobility, health, energy levels and opportunity. These factors basically govern what they are likely to do or will attempt to do in their 60s or their 90s. It isn’t as if every one hadn’t seen a multitude of examples of this running from the late George Burns to somebody’s great grandfather down the block. Being over 60 changes you and changes what you are interested in doing and usually changes the methods you choose to use in order to do it, but it certainly doesn’t end your productive life. There is no cosmic switch that turns you off when the magic number comes up!

Do You Hear What I Hear?

The noisiest fights in my childhood home were about my father’s high fidelity sound system (stereo wasn’t pioneered until I was in my teens). The Hi-fi was a collection of speakers, from woofer to tweeter, Pa placed in one of the kitchen cupboards built into the interior wall between the kitchen and the living room. The cupboard drawer hid them from the kitchen side and the square grand piano was in front and above so whatever he did there was invisible. The amplifiers and pre-amplifiers were in the bookshelves behind the door between the kitchen and study and the turntable and radio receiver were located in the study. The majority of these components Pa had built himself using Heathkits.

The arguments were not about what was being played or even that it was being played; they were about what Pa called “room volume.” He said, and it was true, that the quality of the reproduction of the original instruments was better at a higher volume. (I suspect that the loss of cupboard space in the kitchen had been included in the arguments in the early days.)

As little as 15 years ago most stereos didn’t do as good a job on the sound at low volumes, I know because I don’t like to listen to music at a high volume and it was almost impossible to find one I could afford that performed adequately for me. (Because of Pa’s great interest in the best possible sound, I’m pretty unforgiving about poor sound with truncated highs and buzzing lows.

This morning someone on one of the Beatles mail-lists I subscribe to posted the URL to an article about tricks to increase the loudness of popular music by messing with it during the process of recording an mixing and the fact that listening to them isn’t good for people.  http://tinyurl.com/26kvz5 I have always disliked loud sounds, as well as heavy odors even if they are pretty ones and it was nice to find out that perhaps I’m not really a complete nervous-Nellie.

Paul McCartney’s new CD has not, I’m sure, been subjected to this process, and the sound quality over my computer with my speakers that are a lot better then the ones usually shipped with a computer, is as expected very good. Even the extreme low notes at the opening of House of Wax (it really sounds like a didgeridoo but may of course be electronically generated) may be distinctly heard and the high harmonics of the electric guitar in the same song are pure and undistorted. It is quite an accomplishment to  have a wild and emphatic guitar solo without either feedback or distortion and I am deeply grateful to whoever is responsible for it.

Smart Listening

I’ve read quite a few reviews of Paul’s solo albums – both contemporary with their release and retrospective. When reading them, particularly hose written at the time of release, my reaction to their mostly negative criticisms is that the crime Paul’s committed was to fail to fulfill the critic’s expectations. For McCartney (I) and Ram he failed to write a “Beatle albums.” Each subsequent album disappointed whether it wasn’t rock enough or pop enough or sentimental enough, because it didn’t directly build on whatever the critic had come to like in a previous album.

These failings for me underline in the most explicit way possible that Paul’s albums, as a solo artist and as the leader of Wings, carried on the Beatles’ legacy – by not sticking by a winning formula, not stopping with what worked last year, but always carrying us to new ideas and horizons. Ironic that what many critics came to value most in the Beatles received endless criticism when it was Paul’s work.

It’s not easy to approach a new album by Paul without your mind flashing on particular past albums or songs that you particularly like. I’d like Memory Almost Full to have a lot of songs like Monkberry Moon Delight – but I strongly suspect that Paul isn’t going to give it to me. I’ll be working hard not to think of all the songs he’s done that I love when I open up the package and put the new disk on.

I’ve noticed another quality that most of Paul’s albums seem to have for me. The first time I listen to one I’ll find that I like one or two songs and I think a couple will turn out to be songs I don’t like. I noticed that in Chaos and Confusion in the Back Yard. In that album I loved Jenny Wren and English Tea but Riding to Vanity Fair seemed to me to be over-arranged and too elaborate. By the third time through I began to find more and more to like in most of the songs, particularly in Riding to Vanity Fair, made the difference but mostly it was the dense tapestry he creates behind the words that ends up winning my heart.

Then I managed to prove to myself that dumping assumptions and expectations and repeating my listen absolutely must be my practice with McCartney music. I was given a copy of the “lost McCartney II album,” which was the original version but it was not in released. I didn’t like it much. Then one day I was actually really paying attention when it came on and I realized that I’d wanted it to be a continuation of McCartney (I) – and it certainly isn’t that. In reality, II is like I only in being highly experimental. In a sense it’s Paul’s Revolution #9.

When I really listened to it I recognized that it was related to I only because each was, for its time, highly experimenta. I began to get really interested in what was going on. My father happened to be a fan of early electronic music so I’d heard quite a lot of it in the late 50s and early 60s. For me, and I’m pretty sure for my Pa, it was more “interesting” then enjoyable. McC II is “avant guarde” music McCartney style – meaning that you don’t have to move completely into weird-space to actually enjoy listening to it. (Though I’ll agree with the commonest American Bandstand criticism “you can’t dance to it!”

So when Memory Almost Full comes into my hot little hands, I’ll be doing my best to hear it with new ears and I’ll play it 3 or 4 times all the way through before I’ll share my opinions with anyone so I won’t have to eat my words publicly. Whatever is on the new album, it won’t be like Chaos and Creation and it won’t be like Ram either. It will, however, be very much like Paul McCartney.

Was Paul a Social Climber?

If you read any of the published biographies of the Beatles sooner or later you are very likely to run into the comment that Paul was a “social climber.” It is true that Paul’s family hovered on the line between working class and middle class and that his parents wanted very much for him to “better himself.” Certainly they didn’t think that was social climbing. Meanwhile the family lived in council houses (what in the US would be called public housing) provided at little cost as a part of the pay for Mary McCartney’s job as a nurse. They moved several times to better and safer locations and the last house was so “modern” for Britain at the time that it had an indoor bathroom.

John Lennon, as most of us know, grew up in a good neighborhood in a nice, middle-class home (also with an indoor bathroom) despite his later claim of being working class. Both John and Paul were urged to study hard so they would be able to get good jobs and were constantly pressured to avoid using the Liverpool accent but to speak more correctly. Once John hustled his Aunt Mimi out of an art exhibit where Stu’s winning painting was hung when she said, “What’s that supposed to be?” Both John and Paul spoke with a scouse accent deliberately and both were easily able to assume a more posh accent.

I feel that the best way to look into the question of whether or not Paul was a social climber is to examine his record in contrast to John the self-declared workingman.

Paul’s first serious girl friend seems to have been Dot Rhone. Dot lived in a good neighborhood only because the house had been left to her parents and living there was less expensive then renting a place. There seems to be no doubt that Paul knew of the family’s problems including her father’s drinking.

At about the same time, John began dating Cynthia Powell, who lived in quite a good neighborhood. Her father had been quite well off although after his death she and her mother had little money to spare. Cyn dressed very well and spoke posh.

John hung out with Stu at art school and followed him in admiring the American “Beat Poets” and other intellectual activities. Paul occasionally joined them at parties where he tried to disguise his youth and inexperience by projecting a “French” air.

George, in Anthology [Tape 1, 37:300] “We didn’t have uniforms and Johnny Gentle had this posh suit…” The band also bought matching jackets before leaving for Hamburg for their first gig there. Earlier, the Quarrymen had a prescribed outfit that included white sport coats for John and Paul. Brian’s switching them into suits was not as major a change as John later makes it sound.

John, as well as Paul and George, thought that Brian Epstein’s air of the upper class (and his money) would be good for the Beatles.

Astrid, who became Stuart’s fiancé (John was also very interested in her) came from a good family and lived in a good neighborhood. She was another art student and her good taste and interest in the modernist movement in Europe gave her a very elegant air in herself.

I believe that the first surfacing of the accusations that Paul was a social climber came when he began dating Jane Asher (and living in her house though this wasn’t widely known). The Asher’s did live in a nice neighborhood particularly favored by doctors, very middle class. Every member of the family worked but they don’t seem to have lived in a particularly expensive manner. Mrs. Asher cooked though they no doubt had someone come in to do the housework. Dr. Asher used the house as his office as well as the family home. Their friendships appear to have ranged very widely from middle class “country” to London intelligencia (Peter Asher, the son of the family and a good friend of Paul’s was very much a part of this crowd.) Jane and Paul went to theatrical first nights and stayed with friends of the family in the country but the aristocracy doesn’t seem to have been a feature of their life.

All the Beatles knew Marianne Faithful and Tara Brown who had aristocratic connections but who were part of the club scene in London.

John, George and Ringo all bought houses in what was called the stock-broker belt – in other words the new rich making up part of the upper middle class. John and Ringo’s houses were decorated professionally in “early rock star.”

Paul’s house in London is in an area called “St. John’s Wood.” It appears to have been a nice but not particularly upscale neighborhood. I’m sure that now it’s very, very expensive now due to its location. It’s my impression that the house was a good buy although it did need work before Paul could move in. Paul and Jane chose the furniture that is described as good but neither expensive nor necessarily in matched sets. Most biographers mention that Paul kept a lace cloth over the dining table; a custom not usual in the middle or upper classes. If Paul failed to realize the class distinction of this I’m sure it would have been noticed and mentioned by Jane.

Paul’s farm in Scotland was at least in part an investment and tax advantage. It remained unimproved until late 1969 when he and Linda stayed there for several months. I believe it is on the plain side still.

Linda Eastman’s father was a self-made man who lived very well on his earnings as a lawyer specializing in representing artists and musicians. Her grandfather immigrated to the US from Poland. Linda’s mother was one of the heirs to a department store chain and died when Linda was in her teens. Linda may have had an allowance, in any case her father expected her to either go to school or support herself, which she did, becoming a free-lance photographer. Some time after they married, Paul bought a home outside the city, feeling it would be more suitable for their children. It was neither large nor fancily decorated.

Yoko Ono, on the other hand, was the daughter of a wealthy samurai family and in school she was friends with the son of the Emperor pf Japan. After their marriage, John bought a very large manor called Tittenhurst Park and spent a great deal of money in alterations. After he and Yoko moved to the US they owned several houses in various parts of the country, a yacht, and as many as 6 apartments in the very expensive luxury Dakota complex.

None of the Beatles appear to have used their fame as an entry into a posh social life – the primary goal of most social climbers. While Paul was inarguably impressed with the Asher’s lifestyle, it wasn’t their social lives but the way they organized their day and their interest in what was new and interesting that most caught his attention. Although if any of the Beatles had been interested in social climbing, John appears to be well in the lead, it’s my conviction that they retained their earlier focus on money enough to support personal choices and lifestyle without any thought of achieving some special rank in society. They turned down invitations to star at Royal Command Performances after the first and totally avoided invitations from ambassadors and the like. They did once accept an invitation to attend an event connected with the university at Oxford. Barry Miles’s impression of Paul’s social life shows him primarily participating in the club scene like many of the other British rock musicians and with the people involved with the Indica bookstore and gallery.

” Bettering yourself” unavoidably has some tinge of social climbing although the immediate rewards in more money and a better home in a less violent neighborhood are the more important. True social climbing tends to be about going to fancy parti es and hobnobbing with the rich and famous. The Beatles were the rich and famous but they show no signes of seeking to mix socially witih either the aristocracy or old money — which they certainly could have done if they wanted to.

I suspect the whole thing about Paul’s alleged social climbing began with one of the early magazing or biography writers making the comment and everyone from there on out copying it without a thought of whether there was any evidence to support it or not.