Concert in Atlanta

I attended Paul’s concert in Piedmont Park, Atlanta, GA last night via the cell phone of a friend who had volunteered to help in setting up the park for the concert. The volunteers were given special passes to the show and I asked him to let me “attend” the concert briefly through his phone. My thought when word of the concert first came out that it would be cool to just be somewhere around the edge of the park to overhear it — but Atlanta is a couple hundred miles away and doing that sort of thing in a wheel chair means a lot of effort particularly for whoever is pushing the chair.

My friend was pleased at the idea. I mentioned it on one of the McCartney mail lists and Steve Marinucci read it and asked if I would let him publish my report in his Examiner column. So if you want to read about my concert experience as I “live blogged” it, visit his column at http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2082-Beatles-Examiner~y2009m8d15-Paul-McCartney-Atlanta-report-1–concert-report–by-phone

I had a wonderful time and still have a contact high from it.

Paul in Atlanta

Reviews — Again

I just finished reading The Beatles; Off the Record by Keith Badman and I recommend it heartily to serious Beatle students. There’s quite a lot there that I haven’t found elsewhere. One thing I like is that he gives the questions and answers before and after bits that have been quoted by everybody and frequently it puts a different spin on it then it had when presented as a stand-alone. It’s a ‘heavy’ read in both length and information content and also has some very nice photos that you don’t see everywhere.

I thoroughly enjoyed a page-plus on the Mad Day Out photo session. They were/are interesting photos and the commentary from one of the photographers involved was interesting. There’s simply too much in the book to light on specifics and each of us will find diffferent things to be delighted with in any case.

I also recently got the DVD Composing the Beatles Songbook http://www.blastmagazine.net/dvd%27s/dvd%20reviews/composingthebeatlessongbook.html

They picked a dozen people, mostly musical folks and discussed John and Paul as composers. I have really fallen in love with it. I’ve played it twice, paying very close attention each time and I expect to watch it several times more. One thing that really turned me on is that one of the participants, Chris Ingham (musicologist, author, Beatles Academic) chose to really look at For No One, a Paul song that I had some time ago identified as an extremely insightful and serious song that has been completely overlooked.

You may not agree with everything on it, I certainly don’t but it does really add to an understanding of the music.

I apologize yet again. It’s obvious that I’m not going to be able to post regularly. This time it was health, family concerns and computer complications. The computer problems seem to be completely solved — at least as much as such are ever solved — and hopefully that will help keep the other things from having such a negative effect on my work.

A few quick book reviews.

The Beatles Literary Anthology; Mike Evans, Ed. I enjoyed this collection ofserious and not so serious writings about the Beatles; balanced, occasionally insightful and occasionally amusing. Worth bothering with by serious Beatles students.

Band on the Run: A History of Paul McCartney and Wings; Garry McGee. I give this a VERY low score on accuracy. More then a sentence here without acknowledgement are taken verbatim from either Solewicz or Flippo (neither of whom are more then occasionally accurate as well as being more hostile to Paul then not. It does have a few nice Photos. The chart statistics gathered in the back are interesting as his analysis of them. Very light weight and a good 20 years out of date.

Paul McCartney; 20 Years on His Own; Edward Gross. Except for a few nice quotes I havn’t seen elsewhere, copy the above review.

In My Life, Encounters with The Beatles; Edited by Robert  Cording, Shelli Jankowski-Smith and EJ Miller Laino. Another collection that in no way stands equal in interest to the above Anthology nor Read the Beatles. The ONLY book about the Beatles that plunged me into immediate and rather deep depression! A true loser in my opinion. Worn to transparency, they are the lost surviving examples of late-blooming pseudo intellectualists with sad, blurred pretensions of cool.

Paul McCartney; Behind the Myth; Ross Benson; The accurate subtitle would be “How Paul Destroyed the Beatles and Was A Failure Alone.” Possibly the ugliest of all the carefully chosen photos of Paul on the cover. The author is obsessed with the idea that Jim McCartney was what was wrong with Paul — a theory that gets old fast. his antipathy for Paul hints at a personal grudge. Among other problems, like ‘edited’ material offered between quotation marks and some untruths that appear to be the author’s own, it’s an inept hatchet job considered against similar books.

McCartney, Christopher Sandford.  It would be far easier to mark the true statements rather then the errors. Unflattering photographs abound He combines the prose of a WWII war correspondent for Hustler with the hysterical hatred as intense as the Pope’s toward Martin Luther. All in all, I wonder what the name of his failed garage band was.

Meet the Beatles, A Cultural History of the Band That Shook Youth, Gender, and the World; Steven D. Stark.  I strongly disagree with some of his sociological theories and many of the quotations  are grossly time-shifted — without acknowledgement of that fact. He attributes most jointly composed songs to John alone. Included are several weird “what ifs” that are completely pointless. He greatly overrates the “sexless” image of the early Beatles — which is NOT the way he came over to most young females! Not a bad read and he does have some interesting theories. Of the lot I reviewed this morning, only this and the Literary Anthology seem to me to be worth reading.

Will the Real Penny Lane Please Stand Up?

I have been reading and interesting Beatles website: http://beatlesite.blogspot.com

When I got to the review of Paul’s Penny Lane the reviewer comments that he finds it too sweet. He goes on to say that if Paul had written in a little darkness it might have thrown all the sunlight into sharp relief and given the song a little more punch.  May I remind him and you that Paul has mentioned that the song is surreal.  One of the main keys to understanding surrealism is to remember that what you see (or to hear) is not all that is there. A trout can look like a monk and an apple becomes part of a simple gambling game.

We must assume that Penny Lane contains more than a charming suburban street. While John’s lyrics can containe implied meanings and portamento words requiring you to think through what he is saying, many of Paul’s best lyrics are very dense.  We can see Eleanor Rigby and Father McKensey; we know what they look like and how they live.  In Penny Lane the pictures are even clearer.  In fact that clarity I suspect is what makes it difficult to penetrate the shiny surface and see Paul’s surrealistic picture beneath it.

That first character introduced is the banker who refuses to wear a raincoat thus causing children to laugh at him.  I’m not sure what is so funny about not wearing a raincoat but in the late ’60s raincoats became associated with a passtime known as “Streaking”.  In other words our dignified banker discards his raincoat and goes flying down Penny Lane stark naked–surely enough to make the children laugh particularly as we suspect .. well nevermind.

The barber is quite easy.  One sees him as slightly camp and gesturing with his shiny steel scissors while in the window one see heads without bodies–severed and impaled.

The chorus of course is lovely but when pray tell me did Liverpool present present its citizens with blue skies?

It’s easy to see that the firemen is just a trifle strange with his picture of the Queen and obsession with “A clean machine. ” The nurse for me as rather Delta Dawn figure dressed perhaps in a World War one uniform humming to herself waiting for her young man with a mustache to return.

Not quite thin blue suburban sky anymore because just as in real life beneath the sunny surface lie human beings in all their strange variety.

Set List for Paul’s New Tour!!

Actually I certainly do not mean to tell Paul what he should do particularly since I’m unlikely to be able to attend any of his concerts. I might buy the video though so I’ll make some suggestions just in case he’s interested in suggestions from fans.

I do not say that these are in appropriate order!

Things We Said Today
For No ONe
Why Don’t We Do It In The Road
Two Of Us
Ram On
Monkberry Moon Delight
Sing Along Junk
Hope of Deliverance
Off The Ground
Songs We Were Singing
Picasso’s Last Words
Feet In The Clouds
How Kind Of You
If You Wanna
Pipes Of Peace
The World Tonight
Penny Lane
London Town

Paul’s divorce

[Please note: the following is a spoof, sarcasm! It is not fact, it is not a prediction for the future, it’s a JOKE!]

Paul McCartney and Heather Mills have had their days in court and all that’s left for them is to wait for the judge to sort out the money. We’ll get a huge number of newspaper and tabloid guesses about how much, none of which are all that likely to be accurate.

HM’s appeal was turned down on the grounds that if she chose to spend her entire settlement on a “victory party” that’s her problem, not his and that she failed to produce medical evidence that she suffers from Tourettes and therefore cannot be held to a gag order. She also failed to prove that a victim of that syndrome is per se unable to keep their mouth shut. The offer from her ex-husband to provide a full-time special minder to gag her any time she slips and starts to talk about their relationship was refused.

HM then appeared on Good Morning to the Whole World accusing Paul of errantry, barratry and rolling an old lady in a barrel as well as referring impolitely to her wooden leg. Oddly enough, the News of the World has joined The Mail, The Globe and The Mirror in a lawsuit filed against Ms. HM alleging barratry in that she threatened those papers, together and separately more then 150 times in one 12-hour period. Leading barristers have opined that it’s an open and open case.

In separate suits HM also claims the royalties from Paul’s new #1 hit album titled After the Ball is Over saying that she actually wrote and sang all the songs in it as well as playing all the instruments.We expect a statement from MPL as soon as the laughter dies down.

The tell-all book for which HM received a $1 million advance on royalties has after 18 months failed to earn the cost of printing and the publisher advises us they will sue her to recover the advance as the book sold only 423 copies – all to her dearest friends. The book is now available on half.ebay.com, new, for $0.25 plus postage.

Bea goes to boarding school so her mother can spend at least nine months of the year someplace other then Great Britain. Paul’s world concert tour enjoys unprecedented success although he breaks and returns to England for every school holiday.

HM suit appealing for a restraining order preventing her former personal trainer from telling reporters about their relationship (even though, of course there was no personal relationship between them) is scheduled for next week. This follows upon her earlier attempts to get such gag orders to cover five former nannies, 12 dismissed security guards, 14 chauffeurs, three bike mechanics and a trash collector.

HM’s dearest friends report that she is happy and delighted to be free from all the hubbub and also to be free of “that dreadful old man” and that she is seriously depressed, on vast amounts of medication and a suicide watch must be provided by her ex-husband.

 

Seriously for a moment–Point 1: could be please forget about the accusation that it’s all Paul’s fault for letting his little willie overrule his head and lead him to marry this woman. If there’s one fact about HM’s past that is completely beyond dispute it’s that she is world class as convincing men, whether old or young, that she is the most desirable female they’ll ever get a chance at. Every single man who has spoken of his relationship with her emphasizes that at first she’s absolutely perfect and that it takes quite a while to realize that it’s all a scam. She’s fooled plenty of men who didn’t have Paul’s romantic outlook and made major fools out of them as well.

Point 2: “They” haven’t been battling in the press; HM’s been battling in the press. Paul’s issued a very few statements, mostly direct, simple denials. He did change the locks on the two houses he was living in. Considering that he’d had his phone tapped and that we now have her “word” that she had secretly taped and video-taped him before she moved out, I personally think it was a minimally smart move.

Review – The McCartney Years

I read a number of reviews before I could afford to order my copy of Paul’s 3-disk videos and concerts and, despite knowing that rarely does a reviewer cut him any slack, I was a little afraid I’d be disappointed. Well, I wasn’t. Sure, I don’t doubt that some of the video isn’t absolutely tops in every single video and no doubt they were right that the sound quality here and there isn’t perfect – I’ll never know since I don’t have an expensive “home theatre” attached to my inexpensive and far from new TV. (My computer speakers, however, are top notch just in case you’re interested.)

Sure, one or two of the videos appear dated in a way that isn’t fun and I don’t love absolutely every song but all in all, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had from the collection.  Some are just plain fun, some are thought provoking, some wonderfully illustrate the song and some are utterly off the wall – If I’d thought about what I wanted them to be, those are the words I’d have used. Most of them look like they were fun (as well as hard work) to do and many of them go to very odd and unusual places, mostly places in Paul’s head. It helps that I’ve always enjoyed surrealism.

I’d end up with a rather long list if I named my favorites but I can mention a few: Fine Line, computer “reduced” and animated in … fine lines; Push, with lovely relaxed ride on the underground, Brown-Eyed Handsome Man with the most inventive collection of line dancers ever conceived; Hope of Deliverance with the torches in the dark and of course Coming Up with Paul and Linda taking all the roles. Not to mention that it’s fascinating to watch the years go by – Paul’s years and the changing band but my own years as well.

So maybe there are imperfections; frankly I’ve found perfection to be more then merely rare in this world. My personal opinion is that if you can’t find something to be entertained by on these disks, you’re working awfully hard at being a party-pooper! Don’t miss the “easter eggs” at the beginning and end of each menu choice!! I think that they are repeats on the credits but there’s a lot of film and music lurking on those disks. For instance, Calico Skies plays on the Setup menu of disk 2 with Paul sititng by a fire in the woods with an acoustic guitar. Not, perhaps, a formal video but an enjoyable illustration of one of my favorite songs.

The concert footage I enjoy as well although I notice that by the time they filmed Rockshow, Paul was tired and perhaps worried; strain is very obvious in his face. He must have been tired as well for the performance at Glastonbury but there’s far less strain apparant. The Unplugged footage is completely different with neither wear and tear or worry burdening Paul’s expression. Watching the videos of the original Wings I do feel that Paul was really pushing to bring the band to real success — I’m not going to examine his reasons as they are pretty obvious — and my research indicates that he succeeded quite well. The videos helped me realize that Wings really was a very different band from the Beatles and I can’t help feeling a good bit of respect that Paul could manage to do it without coming across as something synthetic.

Give My Regards To Broad Street

Broad St. is quite a nice movie musical, particularly if you’re old enough to remember Danny Kaye as well as Gene Kelly and Fred Astair. Yes, the Eleanor Rigby picnic scene grown more then slightly odd but so does the ballet in American In Paris. I know perfectly well that if it had been John wandering around to variations on Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds all the critics would have swooned over it. Because for some reason John is the “rocker” and Paul only some slick pop singer, nothing he does can be right. So It’s a double dream sequence, what’s wrong with that?
It’s obvious, of course, that practically none of the reviewers was actually watching the movie – otherwise they could have subtracted 10 AM from Midnight and not come up with 24 hours. I haven’t actually tried to count the number of sight gags (as opposed to witty fun) in the movie but from the Scotland Yardman’s dropped pants when he hears how much the tapes were worth to the busker near the end, the movie is loaded with both “public” jokes and those accessible only to Beatle fans.
I consider it shameful that none of the critics caught that Paul was playing a joke with his highly orchestrated version of The Long And Winding Road. Use your ears, people, Paul’s not only out-Spectorized Phil Spector, he also did a great recording of the song without turning it into something drippy as Phil did. I’m quite sure Phil noticed.
I do wish I could figure out if there’s a joke connected to the brown document envelope that keeps turning up though. I’ve tried slo-mo, tilt and pause with no luck. And I can feel smugly that few people realized that the Victorian sequence began in around 1865 and ended up in 1890 with appropriate changes of clothing – and that Linda had borrowed George Sands’ outfit.

I have no problem with someone simply disliking this movie, it’s the obvious fact that they didn’t bother to actually WATCH the movie with any real attention and then criticize it for things that didn’t happen or for the lack of things that actually are in the movie that irritates the fool out of me! Of course, Broad St. makes the mistake of not really being a “rock movie” — perhaps because Paul didn’t set out to make a “rock movie” — he made a McCartney movie and one that isn’t anywhere near as bad as the reviewers make it sound.

Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?

Here’s my picture; Paul and somebody. Just somebody, not necessarily a girl friend, somebody like the caretaker of his Scottish farm, his aunt, his brother, one of the roadies, want five lousy minutes to have a ciggy and talk about something that isn’t anybody else’s business. So they duck into the men’s toilet and there are two apple scruffs giggling maniacally. How about the basement entrance? Nope, there’s a bobby there trying to hold back a gaggle of the press waving cameras and notepads. How about the roof? John and Yoko are up there, starkers, worshipping the sun or something requiring them to whisper in each other’s ears. “Hell and damnation,” someone explodes. “We might just as well do it in the road!” Think of the yearning feeling the words “No one will be watching us” must raise in Paul’s heart. How much might he have been willing to pay for ten minutes of it? Enough said.

I’ve read tons about where this or that song came from, who was this or that love song written for, what do these lyrics really say. There are real dangers in doing this. For one thing, you are second guessing the lyricist. I’ve observed a lot of pseudo-intellectuals in my days. They write something that doesn’t make clear sense, publish it and a lot of other intellectuals, pseudo or not, discover elaborate meanings in it while the author, whether or not he acknowledges them as matching his meanings, basks in the glory of having said something so meaningful.
PS: I understand that the immediate inspiration for Why Don’t We Do It In The Road actually came from the Beatles retreat to Rishikesh where Paul observed two monkeys doin’ it in the road. Reality loves to bite a good idea but who cares, not me.

Remember that John had a hard time remembering lyrics, even of his own songs and he delighted in wordplay. Therefore, looking for meaning in his songs is at least as much an exercise of your own imagination as it is a search for his meaning. He may have had NO meaning. He tended to see the words as a part of the arrangement and the important thing was that the sounds of the words worked as if they were another instrument.

It’s taking a chance if one over analyzes Paul’s lyrics. He is perfectly capable of writing totally from his imagination. Like my explanation above, it’s certainly possible that the lyrics were stimulated by a moment such as I describe — except we happen to have Paul’s explanation which is quite a different situation.

This Is Not A Chair

Paul has done it to us again and slipped it right by us all and nobody’s said a damn word! I mean, when we saw the album with that chair on the front we should have known we were missing something. But no, we just toddled along bitching to ourselves about “that stupid damn chair” and somebody wondered if maybe it was Linda’s favorite chair but nobody even took them up to argue about it.

I got my album two or three days ago (I’d heard the songs, I just didn’t have my own copy) and of course I read every word in the “liner notes” –and even then it took my brain several hours to suddenly sit up and say, “WOW.” I got up and grabbed the box and yes, sure enough the front of the chair on the front of the box and the back of the chair on the back of the box aren’t photos of a chair but paintings of chairs.

But the chair Paul is slouching on and standing behind and doing gymnastics around isn’t the same chair that someone Photoshopped a photo of Paul onto. The chair in the photos that include Paul is covered with brocade that resembles the childlike drawings on the painted chairs.

I have long since noticed in Give My Regards To Broad Street that the man adores very VERY subtitle jokes – some of which I haven’t yet managed to decipher – and this joke damn well is subtitle – I think Magritte would be pleased.

This is not a chair but this is not a painting.

Paul is one wicked funny man !