"Come Together" is a song by The Beatles written primarily by John Lennon and credited to Lennon/McCartney. The song is the lead-off track on The Beatles' September 1969 album Abbey Road. One month later it also appeared as one of the sides of the group's twenty-first single (it was a double A-side, the other side being George Harrison's "Something") in the United Kingdom, their twenty-sixth in the United States. The song reached the top of the charts in the U.S., while becoming a Top 10 hit in the UK.
Origin
The song's history began with Lennon writing a song for Timothy Leary's failed gubernatorial campaign in California against Ronald Reagan, one which promptly ended when Leary was sent to prison for possession of marijuana.
Lawsuit
"Come Together" was the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Chuck Berry's music publisher, Morris Levy, because one line in "Come Together" closely resembles a line of Berry's "You Can't Catch Me": (i.e., The Beatles' "Here come ol' flattop, he come groovin' up slowly" vs. Berry's "Here come up flattop, he was groovin' up with me"). After settling out of court, Lennon promised to record three other songs owned by Levy. "You Can't Catch Me" and "Ya Ya" were released on Lennon's 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll, but the third, "Angel Baby," remained unreleased until after Lennon's death. Levy again sued Lennon for breach of contract, and was eventually awarded $6,795.
Recording
Lennon played rhythm guitar in addition to singing the vocal. It was produced by George Martin and recorded at the end of July 1969 at Abbey Road Studios. Lennon says "shoot me" while Paul McCartney covers it up with a bass riff. The famous Beatles "walrus" from "I Am the Walrus" and "Glass Onion" returns in the line "he got walrus gumboot," followed by "he got Ono sideboard." Bluesman Muddy Waters is also mentioned in the song.
Release and acclaim
"Come Together" was released as a double A-side with "Something" and as the opening track of Abbey Road.
For a time, the song was banned by the BBC, as they believed the song's reference to "shoot[ing] Coca-Cola" could be construed as either a cocaine reference or an advertisement.
Rolling Stone ranked "Come Together" at #202 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
On the compilation album Love, "Come Together" is the 19th track. Sections of "Dear Prudence" and "Cry Baby Cry" fade in at the end of the track.
The song is used in the film A Bronx Tale during the fight scene at Sonny´s bar. It also serves as a recurring motif in the Nora Roberts' novel Public Secrets, a story about a 1960s rock band (not unlike The Beatles) and their rollercoaster journey through 3 decades of rock music as told through the eyes of the lead singer's daughter.
Personnel
* John Lennon: lead and backing vocals; rhythm guitar; electric piano; hand-claps and tambourine.
* Paul McCartney: bass.
* George Harrison: lead guitar.
* Ringo Starr: drums and maracas.
Covers
American hard rock band Aerosmith performed one of the first and most successful cover versions of "Come Together." It was recorded in 1978 and appeared in the movie and on the soundtrack to the film Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which the band also appeared in. The single was an immediate success, reaching #23 on the Billboard Hot 100, following on the heels of a string of Top 40 hits for the band in the mid-1970s. However it would be the last Top 40 hit for the band for nearly a decade.
A rare live demo of the song was also released months later on Aerosmith's live album Live! Bootleg. The song was also featured on Aerosmith's Greatest Hits, the band's single-disc compilation released in 1980. The song has also surfaced on a number of Aerosmith compilations and live albums since then, as well as on the soundtrack for the film Armageddon.
The Aerosmith version is still frequently heard on mainstream and album rock radio stations. Aerosmith still occasionally performs "Come Together" in concert.
Since 2006, New Zealand telecommunications company Telecom used a cover of this song for its "Come Together" campaign.
The song has since become one of the most covered songs of all time:
* Eurythmics covered the song in 1987, but it was not released until 2005 as a Bonus Track on the digitally remastered version of Savage.
* Mystic Siva,an American psychedelic rock band covered the song on their album "Under The Influence" (1969-70)
* Labyrinth covered the song on their album "6 Days to Nowhere" released 2007
* Tina Turner covered the song for the 1976 ephemeral musical documentary All This and World War II. Prior to that,her cover was featured on her and then husband's Ike's album of the same name. This version peaked at #57 on the U.S. Hot 100 and #21 on the R&B charts in 1970.
* Do As Infinity performed a live cover of a metal version of the song in Japan during a Beatles celebration event.
* Michael Jackson, who owns the rights to the song, also covered "Come Together" for the concert film Michael Jackson: Moonwalker. A different recording (essentially the same version in a different key) appears on Jackson's studio album, HIStory.
* Axl Rose and Bruce Springsteen later played "Come Together" before John Lennon's induction into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
* Soundgarden covered the song on the "Hands All Over" single, giving it a very grunge sound. The band's cover also appeared on its Loudest Love EP.
* Robin Williams and Bobby McFerrin recorded a unique version for the Beatles tribute album In My Life in which McFerrin performs the characteristic bass and guitar intro with his voice, and Williams sings
* Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller played with Paul McCartney on a version of the song for the 1995 HELP charity record, under the name The Smokin' Mojo Filters. This version made #19 on the British chart in December. In 2005 Weller recorded a new version of the song as part of a double-a side single.
* The Lynne Arriale Trio recorded a jazz version of the song, which was the title track of their album Come Together
* Sugababes covered the song as a B-Side for their single, "Ugly".
* There is also an instrumental version by Marcus Miller on his album Tales.
* Elton John covered the song as a tribute to Lennon during his "One Night Only: The Greatest Hits" concert.
* Victoria Beckham and Damon Dash sampled the song as an intro to one of Dash's mixtapes.
* Enrique Bunbury made a cover of the song and published it in his 1997 single "Planeta Sur".
* Craig David, performed a live version on Top of The Pops 2 in 2003.
* The Supremes (post-Diana Ross) covered the song on their 1970 album, New Ways But Love Stays.
* Chairmen of the Board covered the song and is on one of their first LPs.
* Toxic Audio covered the song on their album Captive Audience.
* Diana Ross covered the song on her 1970 album Everything Is Everything.
* The Punkles did a Punk cover version on their fourth album "For Sale".
* Tom Jones released a live version of "Come Together" on his album Reload, albeit with a new, faster arrangement.
* The Brothers Johnson released a cover of the song on their 1976 album Look Out For #1, altering the bass-line in their mid-tempo funk rendition that also includes a harmonica/guitar solo.
* Hip hop group The Roots sampled this song on their 2006 Best of The Roots mixtape produced by J. Period. The chorus of the song is repeated clips of Lennon singing "one thing I can tell you is you've got to be free," and "come together, over me."
* The band Gotthard recorded "Come Together' on their 1994 album Dial Hard.
* Marilyn Manson performed a cover of "Come Together" at the release party for Portrait of an American Family.
* The jazz-funk band Defunkt covered "Come Together" on the 1992 album Downtown Does the Beatles Live at the Knitting Factory.
* The rock band Zero Nerve Response frequently covers this song live using "Drop D" guitar/bass tuning, giving the song a unique low rumble.
* Zakk Wylde's band Pride and Glory covered this song on their album "Pride & Glory".
* The John Butler Trio also covered the song while touring, never released.
* The Cool Calm Collective regularly play 'Come Together' in live performances.
* A segment of this song was used to close several commercials for Nortel Networks. One version of the commercial featured a businessman reciting the song, omitting the lines "He one holy roller" and "He shoot Coca-Cola."
* "Come Closer Together," an unauthorized mashup of Nine Inch Nails's "Closer" with "Come Together" is widely available on YouTube and other Internet sites.
* The Plague recorded the song in the late 1970s. It remained unreleased until their compilation album "The X Tapes" was released in 2005.
* Christos Dantis remixed and covered the song on his 1994 album 4.
* Joe Cocker covers the song on the 2007 soundtrack to the film Across the Universe.
* Barbara Feldon performed a version of the song while rolling around on a water-bed in an episode of The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine in 1971.
* Pop-Rock singer, Carly Smithson, performed "Come Together" on American Idol season 7 top 12 contestants as her selection for the first Beatles-themed week.
* Michael Hedges released his version on the 1987 album, Live on the Double Planet.
* Shalamar covered the song in a distinctly 90s R&B style on their 1990 album "Wake Up".
* Milwaukee alt-rock band The Gufs like to play the song towards the end of live performances.
* Boris Grebenshchikov & Joanna Stingray released their version and its video in the 90s.
* Bob Weir and Ratdog have also covered the song while touring.
* Mookie Morris from Canadian Idol Season 6 performed this song on "Beatles/Judges Choice" Night. He was eliminated the next night and after performing the song again, he smashed his favourite guitar on the stage.
* Jon McLaughlin covered the song on the New York City stop of his Salute to 2009 Tour.
* Kris Allen performed "Come Together" on American Idol season 8, top 4, as his selection for Rock Week.
A-side: "Something"
Released: 31 October 1969 (UK)
Format: 7"
Recorded: Abbey Road Studios, 21 July 1969
Genre: Blues rock
Length: 4:18
Label: Apple Records
Writer(s): Lennon/McCartney
Producer: George Martin
Wikipedia
Showing posts with label timothy leary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label timothy leary. Show all posts
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
John Lennon: 1980
By David Sheff / September 8-28, 1980
A candid conversation with the reclusive couple about their years together and their surprisingly frank views on life with and without the Beatles.
To describe the turbulent history of the Beatles, or the musical and cultural mileposts charted by John Lennon, would be an exercise in the obvious. Much of the world knows that Lennon was the guiding spirit of the Beatles, who were themselves among the most popular and profound influences of the Sixties, before breaking up bitterly in 1970. Some fans blamed the breakup on Yoko Ono, Lennon's Japanese-born second wife, who was said to have wielded a disproportionate influence over Lennon, and with whom he has collaborated throughout the Seventies.
In 1975, the Lennons became unavailable to the press, and though much speculation has been printed, they emerged to dispel the rumors -- and to cut a new album -- only a couple of months ago. The Lennons decided to speak with Playboy in the longest interview they have ever granted. Free-lance writer David Sheff was tapped for the assignment, and when he and a Playboy editor met with Ono to discuss ground rules, she came on strong: Responding to a reference to other notables who had been interviewed in Playboy, Ono said, "People like Carter represent only their country. John and I represent the world." But by the time the interview was concluded several weeks later, Ono had joined the project with enthusiasm. Here is Sheff's report:
"There was an excellent chance this interview would never take place. When my contacts with the Lennon-Ono organization began, one of Ono's assistants called me, asking, seriously, 'What's your sign?' The interview apparently depended on Yoko's interpretation of my horoscope, just as many of the Lennons' business decisions are reportedly guided by the stars. I could imagine explaining to my Playboy editor, 'Sorry, but my moon is in Scorpio -- the interview's off.' It was clearly out of my hands. I supplied the info: December 23, three P.M., Boston. "Thank my lucky stars. The call came in and the interview was tentatively on. And I soon found myself in New York, passing through the ominous gates and numerous security check points at the Lennons' headquarters, the famed Dakota apartment building on Central Park West, where the couple dwells and where Yoko Ono holds court beginning at eight o'clock every morning.
"Ono is one of the most misunderstood women in the public eye. Her mysterious image is based on some accurate and some warped accounts of her philosophies and her art statements, and on the fact that she never smiles. It is also based -- perhaps unfairly -- on resentment of her as the sorceress/Svengali who controls the very existence of John Lennon. That image has remained through the years since she and John met, primarily because she hasn't chosen to correct it -- nor has she chosen to smile. So as I removed my shoes before treading on her fragile carpet -- those were the instructions -- I wondered what the next test might be.
"Between interruptions from her two male assistants busy screening the constant flow of phone calls, Yoko gave me the once-over. She finally explained that the stars had, indeed, said it was right -- very right, in fact. Who was I to argue? So the next day, I found myself sitting across a couple of cups of cappuccino from John Lennon.
"Lennon, still bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and scruffy from lack of shave, waited for the coffee to take hold of a system otherwise used to operating on sushi and sashimi -- 'dead fish,' as he calls them -- French cigarettes and Hershey bars with almonds.
"Within the first hour of the interview, Lennon put every one of my preconceived ideas about him to rest. He was far more open and candid and witty than I had any right to expect. He was prepared, once Yoko had given the initial go-ahead, to frankly talk about everything. Explode was more like it. If his sessions in primal-scream therapy were his emotional and intellectual release ten years ago, this interview was his more recent vent. After a week of conversations with Lennon and Ono separately as well as together, we had apparently established some sort of rapport, which was confirmed early one morning.
"'John wants to know how fast you can meet him at the apartment,' announced the by-then-familiar voice of a Lennon-Ono assistant. It was a short cab ride away and he briefed me quickly: 'A guy's trying to serve me a subpoena and I just don't want to deal with it today. Will you help me out?' We sneaked into his limousine and streaked toward the recording studio three hours before Lennon was due to arrive. Lennon told his driver to slow to a crawl as we approached the studio and instructed me to lead the way inside, after making sure the path was safe. 'If anybody comes up with papers, knock them down,' he said. 'As long as they don't touch me, it's OK.' Before I left the car, Lennon pointed to a sleeping wino leaning against the studio wall. 'That could be him,' Lennon warned. 'They're masters of disguise.' Lennon high-tailed it into the elevator, dragging me along with him. When the elevator doors finally closed, he let out a nervous sigh and somehow the ludicrousness of the morning dawned on him. He broke out laughing. 'I feel like I'm back in "Hard Day's Night" or "Help!"' he said.
"As the interview progressed, the complicated and misunderstood relationship between Lennon and Ono emerged as the primary factor in both of their lives. 'Why don't people believe us when we say we're simply in love?' John pleaded. The enigma called Yoko Ono became accessible as the hard exterior broke down -- such as the morning when she let out a hiccup right in the middle of a heavy discourse on capitalism. Nonplused by her hiccup, Ono giggled. With that giggle, she became vulnerable and cute and shy -- not at all the creature that came from the Orient to brainwash John Lennon.
"Ono was born in 1933 in Tokyo, where her parents were bankers and socialites. In 1951, her family moved to Scarsdale, New York. She attended Sarah Lawrence College. In 1957, Yoko was married for the first time, to Toshi Ichiyanagi, a musician. They were divorced in 1964 and later that year, she married Tony Cox, who fathered her daughter, Kyoko. She and Cox were divorced in 1967, two years before she married Lennon.
"The Lennon half of the couple was born in October 1940. His father left home before John was born to become a seaman and his mother, incapable of caring for the boy, turned John over to his aunt and uncle when he was four and a half. They lived several blocks away from his mother in Liverpool, England. Lennon, who attended Liverpool private schools, met a kid named Paul McCartney in 1957 at the Woolton Parish Church Festival in Liverpool. The following year, the two formed their first band, the Nurk Twins.
"In 1958, John formed the Quarrymen, named after his high school. He asked Paul to join the band and agreed to audition a friend of Paul's, George Harrison. In 1959, the Quarrymen disbanded but later regrouped as Johnny and the Moondogs and then the Silver Beatles. They played in clubs, backing strippers, and they got their foot in the door of Liverpool's showcase Cavern Club. Pete Best was signed on as drummer and the Silver Beatles left England for Hamburg, where they played eight hours a night at the Indra Club. The Silver Beatles became the Beatles and, by 1960, when they returned to England, the band had become the talk of Liverpool.
"In 1962, John married Cynthia Powell and they had a son, Julian. John and Cynthia were divorced in 1968. Later in 1962, Richard Starkey -- or Ringo Starr -- replaced Best as the Beatles' drummer and the rest -- as Lennon often says sarcastically -- is pop history."
A candid conversation with the reclusive couple about their years together and their surprisingly frank views on life with and without the Beatles.
To describe the turbulent history of the Beatles, or the musical and cultural mileposts charted by John Lennon, would be an exercise in the obvious. Much of the world knows that Lennon was the guiding spirit of the Beatles, who were themselves among the most popular and profound influences of the Sixties, before breaking up bitterly in 1970. Some fans blamed the breakup on Yoko Ono, Lennon's Japanese-born second wife, who was said to have wielded a disproportionate influence over Lennon, and with whom he has collaborated throughout the Seventies.
In 1975, the Lennons became unavailable to the press, and though much speculation has been printed, they emerged to dispel the rumors -- and to cut a new album -- only a couple of months ago. The Lennons decided to speak with Playboy in the longest interview they have ever granted. Free-lance writer David Sheff was tapped for the assignment, and when he and a Playboy editor met with Ono to discuss ground rules, she came on strong: Responding to a reference to other notables who had been interviewed in Playboy, Ono said, "People like Carter represent only their country. John and I represent the world." But by the time the interview was concluded several weeks later, Ono had joined the project with enthusiasm. Here is Sheff's report:
"There was an excellent chance this interview would never take place. When my contacts with the Lennon-Ono organization began, one of Ono's assistants called me, asking, seriously, 'What's your sign?' The interview apparently depended on Yoko's interpretation of my horoscope, just as many of the Lennons' business decisions are reportedly guided by the stars. I could imagine explaining to my Playboy editor, 'Sorry, but my moon is in Scorpio -- the interview's off.' It was clearly out of my hands. I supplied the info: December 23, three P.M., Boston. "Thank my lucky stars. The call came in and the interview was tentatively on. And I soon found myself in New York, passing through the ominous gates and numerous security check points at the Lennons' headquarters, the famed Dakota apartment building on Central Park West, where the couple dwells and where Yoko Ono holds court beginning at eight o'clock every morning.
"Ono is one of the most misunderstood women in the public eye. Her mysterious image is based on some accurate and some warped accounts of her philosophies and her art statements, and on the fact that she never smiles. It is also based -- perhaps unfairly -- on resentment of her as the sorceress/Svengali who controls the very existence of John Lennon. That image has remained through the years since she and John met, primarily because she hasn't chosen to correct it -- nor has she chosen to smile. So as I removed my shoes before treading on her fragile carpet -- those were the instructions -- I wondered what the next test might be.
"Between interruptions from her two male assistants busy screening the constant flow of phone calls, Yoko gave me the once-over. She finally explained that the stars had, indeed, said it was right -- very right, in fact. Who was I to argue? So the next day, I found myself sitting across a couple of cups of cappuccino from John Lennon.
"Lennon, still bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and scruffy from lack of shave, waited for the coffee to take hold of a system otherwise used to operating on sushi and sashimi -- 'dead fish,' as he calls them -- French cigarettes and Hershey bars with almonds.
"Within the first hour of the interview, Lennon put every one of my preconceived ideas about him to rest. He was far more open and candid and witty than I had any right to expect. He was prepared, once Yoko had given the initial go-ahead, to frankly talk about everything. Explode was more like it. If his sessions in primal-scream therapy were his emotional and intellectual release ten years ago, this interview was his more recent vent. After a week of conversations with Lennon and Ono separately as well as together, we had apparently established some sort of rapport, which was confirmed early one morning.
"'John wants to know how fast you can meet him at the apartment,' announced the by-then-familiar voice of a Lennon-Ono assistant. It was a short cab ride away and he briefed me quickly: 'A guy's trying to serve me a subpoena and I just don't want to deal with it today. Will you help me out?' We sneaked into his limousine and streaked toward the recording studio three hours before Lennon was due to arrive. Lennon told his driver to slow to a crawl as we approached the studio and instructed me to lead the way inside, after making sure the path was safe. 'If anybody comes up with papers, knock them down,' he said. 'As long as they don't touch me, it's OK.' Before I left the car, Lennon pointed to a sleeping wino leaning against the studio wall. 'That could be him,' Lennon warned. 'They're masters of disguise.' Lennon high-tailed it into the elevator, dragging me along with him. When the elevator doors finally closed, he let out a nervous sigh and somehow the ludicrousness of the morning dawned on him. He broke out laughing. 'I feel like I'm back in "Hard Day's Night" or "Help!"' he said.
"As the interview progressed, the complicated and misunderstood relationship between Lennon and Ono emerged as the primary factor in both of their lives. 'Why don't people believe us when we say we're simply in love?' John pleaded. The enigma called Yoko Ono became accessible as the hard exterior broke down -- such as the morning when she let out a hiccup right in the middle of a heavy discourse on capitalism. Nonplused by her hiccup, Ono giggled. With that giggle, she became vulnerable and cute and shy -- not at all the creature that came from the Orient to brainwash John Lennon.
"Ono was born in 1933 in Tokyo, where her parents were bankers and socialites. In 1951, her family moved to Scarsdale, New York. She attended Sarah Lawrence College. In 1957, Yoko was married for the first time, to Toshi Ichiyanagi, a musician. They were divorced in 1964 and later that year, she married Tony Cox, who fathered her daughter, Kyoko. She and Cox were divorced in 1967, two years before she married Lennon.
"The Lennon half of the couple was born in October 1940. His father left home before John was born to become a seaman and his mother, incapable of caring for the boy, turned John over to his aunt and uncle when he was four and a half. They lived several blocks away from his mother in Liverpool, England. Lennon, who attended Liverpool private schools, met a kid named Paul McCartney in 1957 at the Woolton Parish Church Festival in Liverpool. The following year, the two formed their first band, the Nurk Twins.
"In 1958, John formed the Quarrymen, named after his high school. He asked Paul to join the band and agreed to audition a friend of Paul's, George Harrison. In 1959, the Quarrymen disbanded but later regrouped as Johnny and the Moondogs and then the Silver Beatles. They played in clubs, backing strippers, and they got their foot in the door of Liverpool's showcase Cavern Club. Pete Best was signed on as drummer and the Silver Beatles left England for Hamburg, where they played eight hours a night at the Indra Club. The Silver Beatles became the Beatles and, by 1960, when they returned to England, the band had become the talk of Liverpool.
"In 1962, John married Cynthia Powell and they had a son, Julian. John and Cynthia were divorced in 1968. Later in 1962, Richard Starkey -- or Ringo Starr -- replaced Best as the Beatles' drummer and the rest -- as Lennon often says sarcastically -- is pop history."
Monday, October 12, 2009
The Maharishi and Me
Allen GinsbergI saw Maharishi speak here January 21st and then went up to Plaza Hotel that evening (I'd phoned for tickets to his organisation and on return telephone call they invited me up, saying Maharishi wanted to see me) . . . so surrounded by his disciples I sat at his feet on the floor and listened while he spoke.
Yelling C.I.A.
At a previous press conference I'd not been at I heard he'd said all sorts of outlandish things like poverty was laziness and I saw in "IT" his equatory communism = weakism. So after I was introduced I sat at his feet and literally started yelling at him . . . . spoke for half an hour almost, challenging, arguing . . . all in good humour though his business managers and devotees gasped with horror occasionally. But I never got impolite and he stayed calm and rather sweet so no harm. He'd been discussing U.S. 'dis-satisfaction' as Johnson's phrase had been quoted to him earlier, so I said that specific dis-satisfaction was among young people over the Vietnam war, and it was a problem troubling everyone in his audience that day, at least of the young people; that though the US was as he said Creative, its creations were massively negative as Vietnam at this point and that's why people were restless and looked for spiritual guidance from him and that he, Maharishi, hadn't covered the problem satisfactorily. He said Johnson and his secret police had more information and they knew what they were doing. I said they were a buncha dumbells and they don't know and his implicit support of authoritarianism made lots a people wonder if weren't some kinda CIA agent. He giggled 'CIA?' His devotees began screaming so I said it was a common question so it should be proposed and they shouldn't stand around silent and fearful to speak.
Hari Krishna L.S.D.
Then I asked what about draft resistant kids, going to war and murder? He said either way meditate. I asked about Hari Krishna. He said one mantra won't fit everybody. As he'd put down drugs I said there wouldn't have been anybody to see him if it hadn't been for LSD. Devotees gasped. He said, well, LSD has done its thing, now forget it. Just let it drop. He said his meditation was stronger. I said excellent, if it works why not? I said I would be glad to try; can't do anything but good. Then he said that 'acid' damaged Hippies nervous systems, he had six hippies visit him in a room in LA and had to take them into the garden, they smelled so bad.
Hippies smell
I said WHAT? you must have been reading the newspapers. He said he didn't read newspapers. I said he likely had a misconception from his friends (at that point, I guess I said acid hippies were the largest part of the day's audience). He insisted that hippies smelled. I must say that was tendentious. His final statement on war was he didn't want to get into that, he wanted only to emphasise meditation, meditation, meditation. I said that's fine. I'll meditate.
All in all I thought his political statements not so evil as dim and thoughtless, somewhat sucking up to the establishment so as not to cause opposition and trouble. But judging from voicetone of his business manager -- a sort of business man western square sensitive -- sounds like he is surrounded by a conservative structure and he would come on unsympathetic in relation to social problems. I told him major cause US youth dis-satisfaction was increasing military police state tendency in US and spoiling everyone's normal life and feelings which I think is a statement partially accurate and something to him to consider since he makes social generalisation as apparently he does.
Avoid the authorities
In a sense his position is not far from Krishna-murti or Leary -- stay out of politics, 'avoid the authorities, get into meditation and inner peace etc.' His division of the peace problem into parts . . . . individuals solve their own . . . is real enough. I don't suppose he's built or required to be a social utopian structure messiah. But in as much as he does stray into political generalisations he sounds inexperienced or ignorant and unfamiliarly authoritarian.
So anyway that's what I could come to listening and talking. He was nice to me, didn't know who I was, asked at first what I did. I said Kovie -- poet. There's an element of too much mesmerised politeness at his darshans (public viewings) -- a guru is someone who you should make it with, learn from, listen to, enquire -- otherwise it's mere 'religion' which Maharishi himself puts down as a failure.
Definitely dim-witted
The main burden that everyone should meditate half hour morning and night makes sense. His blank cheque claims that his extra special meditation form is more efficient than any other is something I haven't tried so I can't judge. His high powered organisation method of advertising meditation is getting, like Pyramid club of people meditating and massive enthusiasm application which would certainly tend to accomplish general peacefulness if it caught on massively and universally. His political statements are definitely dim-witted and a bit out of place.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The Dream Is Over
By Peter McCabe and Robert Schonfeld / September 5, 1971
Int.: So the dream is over, the Beatles have split up and you're now a separate entity from Paul McCartney. How does it feel?
John: Well, it's not over yet. With the court case, it could go on for years. And I guess every time I put a record out they'll compare it to Paul's.
Int.: Does that bother you?
John: Sure. What's the fucking point? You might as well compare me with Grand Funk Railroad or something.
Int.: You've been especially vocal lately about the way the Beatles' business was run in the past.
John: Well, look what happened. With Northern Songs, we ended up selling half our copyrights forever. We lost 'em all and Lew Grade's got 'em. It was bad management. We have no company. That's where Brian Epstein fucked up. Who got the beneift? Not us. I mean, since you ask, in retrospect he made mistakes. But to us he was the expert. I mean, originally he had a shop. Anybody who's got a shop must be all right.
Int.: People say it was Epstein who kept you together as the Beatles. What was the mood like among you all after the Beatles stopped touring and before Brian died?
John: Well, after we stopped touring, it always seemed embarrassing. Should we have dinner together? It always got so formal that none of us wanted to go through with it anymore.
Int.: How come it got so formal?
John: Because when you don't see someone for a few months, you feel stilted and you have to start again.
Int.: So things were breaking down before you met Yoko, and before Paul met Linda?
John: It had broken down before that. There was a Liverpool clique thing, and everybody who worked for us was from Liverpool. But that togetherness had gone a long time before Yoko. We were really all on our own, just living in separate vacuums.
Int.: So let's talk about the Beatles' breakup, and the falling out between you and Paul. A lot of people think it had to do with the women in your lives. Is that why the Beatles split up?
John: Not really. The split was over who would manage us, Allen Klein or the Eastmans, and nothing else really, although the split had been coming from Pepper onwards.
Int.: Why, specifically?
John: Well, Paul was always upset about the White Album. He never liked it because on that one I did my music, he did his, and George did his. And first, he didn't like George having so many tracks, and second, he wanted it to be more a group thing, which really means more Paul. So he never liked that album, and I always preferred it to all the other albums, including Pepper, because I thought the music was better. The Pepper myth is bigger, but the music on the White Album is far superior, I think.
Int.: That's your favorite, of all the Beatle albums?
John: Yeah, because I wrote a lot of good shit on that. I like all the stuff I did on that, and the other stuff as well. I like the whole album. I haven't heard it in a long time, but I know there's a lot of good songs on it. But if you're talking about the split, the split was over Allen and Eastman.
Int.: You didn't like Lee Eastman, Linda's father, nor John Eastman, Linda's brother, and the Eastmans didn't like you bringing in Allen Klein to manage you. . . .
John: The Eastmans hated Allen from way back. They're from the class of family . . . like all classes, I suppose, they vote like Daddy does. They're the kind of kids who just think what their fathers told them.
Int.: But for a while you got along with Linda.
John: We all got along well with Linda.
Int.: When did you first meet her?
John: The first time I saw her was after that press conference to announce Apple in America. We were just going back to the airport and she was in the car with us. I didn't think she was particularly attractive, I wondered what he was bothering having her in the car for. A bit too tweedy, you know. But she sat in the car and took photographs and that was it. And the next minute she's married him.
Yoko: She's not the kind of woman who would antagonize other women. She is a nice person who is uptight like her brother, John, but not that uptight. There was a nice quality about her. As a women she doesn't offend you because she doesn't come on like a coquettish bird, you know? So she was all right, and we were on very good terms until Allen came into the picture. And then she said: "Why the hell do you have to bring Allen into it?" She said very nasty things about Allen, and I defended Allen each time she said something about him. And since then she never speaks to me.
Int.: Yoko, you weren't with John the first time he met her?
Yoko: No. The first time I met her was when she came to the EMI studio. And you know, when Beatles are recording, there's very few people around, especially no women. If a young woman comes into the room, everybody just sort of looks at her. So I was there, and the first thing Linda made clear to me - almost unnecessarily - was the fact that she was interested in Paul, and not John, you know? So I thought that was nice. She was sort of presupposing that I would be nervous. Not that I showed I was nervous at all. She just said, "Oh, I'm with Paul." Something to that effect.
I think she was eager to be with me, and John, in the sense that Paul and John are close, we should be close too. And couple to couple we were going to be good friends. We went to their house. . . .
John: We stayed there. We lived there.
Yoko: Well, that was not when Linda was around.
John: Oh, that was before Linda, yes.
Yoko: And Linda cooked for us. We had nice dinners together, things like that. And she was pregnant, so it was hard for her to cook. She had a big tummy and all that. But she was doing it, and it was nice.
Int.: Did you think she was a good photographer, Yoko?
Yoko: I never judged her, or even observed her, from that point of view. I'd never really seen any of her photographs.
John: We had heard stories aobut her hanging around - what was it? - Ramparts and Life magazine. Always trying to get in, and nobody wanting her because they didn't think she was a particularly good photographer. . . .
Yoko: They were sufficient photographs. And really, it's unfair to ask me about them because I'm a perfectionist about artists, and there are very few artists that I respect anyway. It has to be someone really special for me to say that I admire his or her art.
Int.: So what was Paul's attitude to you as you got to know him, as things progressed?
Yoko: Paul began complaining that I was sitting too close to them when they were recording, and that I should be in the background.
John: Paul was always gently coming up to Yoko and saying: "Why don't you keep in the background a bit more?" I didn't know what was going on. It was going on behind my back.
Yoko: And I wasn't uttering a word. It wasn't a matter of my being aggressive. It was just the fact that I was sitting near to John. And we stood up to it. We just said, "No. It's simply that we just have to come together." They were trying to discourage me from attending meetings, et cetera. And I was always there. And Linda actually said that she admired that we were doing that.
John: Paul even said that to me.
Int.: So did all this contribute to the split, to Paul leaving the group?
John: Well, Paul rang me up. He didn't actually tell me he'd split, he said he was putting out an album [McCartney]. He said, "I'm now doing what you and Yoko were doing last year. I understand what you were doing." All that shit. So I said, "Good luck to yer."
Yoko: So there really was a lot of misunderstanding, you know.
Int.: And the family thing was a factor? Things you'd said about the Eastmans?
John: Yeah, it's like anybody. If there's anything to say about my family, I'll say it myself. But don't you.
Int.: And Linda didn't like this?
Yoko: I didn't know that. I thought she was one very unusually obedient daughter who was completely controlled by her father, you know?
Int.: Was it the suddenness of Linda's arrival on the scene that disrupted things?
John: Well, Paul had met her before [the Apple press conference], you see. I mean, there were quite a few women he'd obviously had that I never knew about. God knows when he was doing it, but he must have been doing it.
Int.: So, John. You and Paul were probably the greatest songwriting team in a generation. And you had this huge falling out. Were there always huge differences between you and Paul, or was there a time when you had a lot in common?
John: Well, we all want our mummies - I don't think there's any of us that don't - and he lost his mother, so did I. That doesn't make womanizers of us, but we all want our mummies because I don't think any of us got enough of them.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there - but Paul always wanted the home life, you see. He liked it with daddy and the brother . . . and obviously missed his mother. And his dad was the whole thing. Just simple things: he wouldn't go against his dad and wear drainpipe trousers. And his dad was always trying to get me out of the group behind me back, I found out later. He'd say to George: "Why don't you get rid of John, he's just a lot of trouble. Cut your hair nice and wear baggy trousers," like I was the bad influence because I was the eldest, so I had all the gear first usually.
So Paul was always like that. And I was always saying, "Face up to your dad, tell him to fuck off. He can't hit you. You can kill him [laughs], he's an old man." I used to say, "Don't take that shit off him." Because I was always brought up by a woman, so maybe it was different. But I wouldn't let the old man treat me like that. He treated Paul like a child all the time, cut his hair and telling him what to wear, at seventeen, eighteen.
But Paul would always give in to his dad. His dad told him to get a job, he fucking dropped the group and started working on the fucking lorries, saying, "I need a steady career." We couldn't believe it - my Aunt Mimi reminded me of this the other night - he rang up and said he'd got this job and couldn't come to the group. So I told him on the phone, "Either come or you're out." So he had to make a decision between me and his dad then, and in the end he chose me. But it was a long trip.
So it was always the family thing, you see. If Jane [Asher] was to have a career, then that's not going to be a cozy family, is it? All the other girls were just groupies mainly. And with Linda not only did he have a ready-made family, but she knows what he wants, obviously, and has given it to him. The complete family life. He's in Scotland. He told me he doesn't like English cities anymore. So that's how it is.
Int.: So you think with Linda he's found what he wanted?
John: I guess so. I guess so. I just don't understand . . . I never knew what he wanted in a woman because I never knew what I wanted. I knew I wanted something intelligent or something arty, whatever it was. But you don't really know what you want until you find it. So anyway, I was very surprised with Linda. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd married Jane Asher, because it had been going on for a long time and they went through a whole ordinary love scene. But with Linda it was just like, boom! She was in and that was the end of it.
Int.: Did Paul put Jane off for many years, when she wanted to get married?
John: I have no idea. We never discussed our private lives like that. I never asked him. We'd got over "did you get a bit of tit?" and "what's happening?" All that scene. We didn't talk about it.
Int.: So Paul split, and your falling out was essentially with him?
John: Right.
Int.: So what made you decide not to participate in the Bangladesh concert with George and Ringo at Madison Square Garden? I mean, you were rather conspicuously absent.
John: Well, Allen [Klein] was putting it around that I ran off to England, so I wouldn't be there for the concert. But I told George about a week before it that I wouldn't be doing it. I just didn't feel like it. I just didn't want to be rehearsing and doing a big show-biz trip. We were in the Virgin Islands, and I certainly wasn't going to be rehearsing in New York, then going back to the Virgin Islands, then coming back up to New York and singing. And anyway, they couldn't have got any more people in, if I'd been there or not. I got enough money off records and I don't feel like doing two shows a night.
Int.: So what did you think of the concert?
John: I didn't see it. I mean, I haven't seen the movie. It seemed like a great success, you know. It seemed like a great success, you know. Newspaperwise it turned out great, and it seems like they got a lot of money. So it seemed all right, and from the reports of people there it seemed fine too. I didn't think much more about it really.
Int.: So when you say you don't feel like doing two shows a night, does this mean we've seen the end of live performances from John Lennon?
John: Oh, no. I want to do a big show. I feel like going out with Yoko. It's possible that a museum show of Yoko's, which is going on in Syracuse this October, will tour America, and it's possible that we'd be in the same town. The museum show is a really far-out scene, so if we do that, and if we are playing in the same place, we really could blow the town out.
See, George came up with a good idea after the concert, which I heard from Allen - I haven't talked to George about it - which was to take a big tour out, and do one show for free and one show for money, in each city. I thought that was good. Then I thought; "Well, fuck it. I don't want to earn any more money. I get enough off records. I don't want to do a big Apple/Beatle tour," because the thing I didn't like about the Bangladesh concert was that it was "the Beatles playing," and whatever it was they played, it wasn't the Beatles. So then I thought, "I'll go out on me own and take me own people with me."
Int.: So who would you take on tour with you ideally?
John: Well, I'd like to go on the road with Jim Keltner, Klaus Voormann, Yoko, and Eric Clapton, if I can get him out of his house. And maybe when we've got it together, we'd decide if we'd want any saxophones or any kind of jazz like that. Or we might just play village squares or a nightclub.
Int.: Do you have any regrets about not doing the Bangladesh concert?
John: Well, in a way I regretted it. It would have been great, you know. And at first I thought: "Oh, I wish I'd been there. You know, with Dylan and Leon [Russell]. . . . . they needed a rocker, and everybody was telling me, "You should have been there, John." I mean, Leon's a good rocker, but people were telling me, "You should have been there to weigh it up." But I'm glad I didn't do it in a way, because I didn't want to go on as the Beatles. And with George and Ringo there it would have been that connotation of Beatles - now let's hear Ringo sing "It Don't Come Easy." And that's why I left it all, so I wouldn't have to do all that. I don't want to play "My Sweet Lord." I'd as soon go out and do exactly what I want.
Yoko: Because we want to give them reality, you know. Not . . . "Oh, God."
John: And that is a conflict with George.
Int.: Since you mentioned that you'd go out ont he road with Jim Keltner, a drummer, is that any reflection on Ringo's drumming?
John: Oh, no. I love his drumming. I think Keltner is technically a bit better, but Ringo is still one of the best drummers in rock.
Int.: John, you've said a couple of times already that you "get enough off records," yet not too long ago you were saying that you weren't anything like as rich as people thought you were. Are you rich enough finally?
John: Well, I do have money for the first time ever, really. I do feel slightly secure about it, secure enough to say I'll go on the road for free. The reason I got rich is because I'm so insecure. I couldn't give it all away, even in my most holy, Christian, God-fearing, Hare Krishna period. I got into that struggle: I should give it all away, I don't need it. But I need it because I'm so insecure. Yoko doesn't need it. She always had it. I have to have it. I'm not secure enough to give it all up, because I need it to protect me from whatever I'm frightened of.
Yoko: He's very vulnerable.
John: But now I think that Allen Klein has made me secure enough, it's his fault that I'll go out for free.
Int.: Well, I thought I can't really go on the road and take a lot of money. (A) What am I going to do with it? And (B) how could I look somebody in the eye? Why should they pay? I've got everything I need. I've got all the fucking bread I need. If I go broke, well, I'd go on the road for money then. But now I just couldn't face saying, "Well, I cost a million when I sing. It costs that much for me to sing for you."
Yoko: It's criminal.
John: Which is bullshit, because I want to sing. So I'm going out on the road because I want to this time. I want to do something political, and radicalize people, and all that jazz, and this would be the best way. So now I feel like going out on the road. I feel like going out with Yoko, and taking a really far-out show on the road, a mobile, political, rock and roll show, a mobile, political Plastic Ono Bandshow. . . .
Yoko: With clowns as well.
John: . . . and have something going on in the foyer, and something going on in the audience, and not just everything on stage.
Int.: When you say political, what do you mean exactly?
John: Well, I mean political, because everything I do is political. I would take people with me who could speak to the kids, who could speak to them in the foyer, catch them on the way out. Panthers. Weathermen. They can hand all their gear out.
Int.: You want to create a riot in each town?
John: No, I don't want to create a riot or a fight in each town, but I just really want to paint it red.
Int.: So would these be big dates?
John: I don't know. I really haven't thought how to do it. You know what I was thinking - I know I've told you this before - when Paul's going out on the road, I'd like to be playing in the same town for free next door! And he's charging about a million to see him. That would be funny. And of course he's going to think that I'm going out on the road because he's said he's going out on the road, but it'd be a natural thing after Bangladesh.
Yoko: The point is, I really believe that whatever you have, if you don't do as much as you can or have, then you're guilty of not giving. Like, our position is, I come from the East, he comes from the West, a meeting of East and West, and all that. And to communicate with people is almost a responsibility. We actually are living proof of East and West getting along together. It's very important. We are responsible to give whatever we have, or whatever we know.
John: That's why I thought, I can't really go on the road and take a lot of money.
Yoko: No, we can't do that. If you have a lot to give, you have to give. Also, think of the laws of nature. In economic and political and all situations, high water falls low, you know. And if our cup is full, it's going to flow. It's natural for us to give because we have a lot. If we don't give, in a sense that's going against the laws of nature. And in order to go against the laws of nature, you have to use tremendous energy, unnecessary energy, in order to keep it like that, in order to keep that money. That would be very bad for us, and we're not going to do that. If we have more than we need moneywise, we'd rather let the money flow out naturally, you know.
Int.: That's a pretty generous sentiment.
Yoko: It's just wisdom, you know.
John: The wisdom of the East.
Yoko: And if people don't have that wisdom - well, what I mean is - if you're using all that unnecessary energy, it's going to get back at you one way or another. You're going to get cancer or something. And it just isn't worth it.
Int.: From what we've been reading, you are still asked regularly for a lot of money from various underground and leftist causes. Do you always give?
John: Well, I always take care of the underground, whatever I'm doing. And if they get in trouble, I lend them money or invest in them or whatever, because I think they're important. I get asked every two days for at least five thousand pounds, and I usually give it because it's usually somebody that I want to help. So I'm going to try to set up a foundation that can be small, a John and Yoko one, and we might take a dollar a head or anything that's donated at concerts. That would go to this. And then I can pay all these Oz undergrounds, and Clydeside workers, and Timothy Learys, that all want money out of me. And I might be able to fix it up taxwise.
George wants to do a foundation, too, but we'll keep it separate because he might want to give it to Hare Krishna, and I won't.
Int.: So you're going to tour for free, and you're going to give a lot of money away. How is your manager, Allen Klein, reacting to all this generosity?
John: I said to Allen, "You're going to get twenty percent of nothing." And I want him to run the tours because he knows how to do it. I said, "Look, I hope you won't mind, but you know George's idea about the concerts? Well, I've decided to do it all for nothing. And I'm sorry, but you're getting twenty percent of nothing." He said, "Oh, I don't mind." I don't know whether he did or not. Maybe he thinks he'll sell some comics on the side. He'll have thought of something.
Int.: Let's talk about Allen Klein because, as you said, the big factor in the Beatles' breakup was the question of who would manage you, Klein or the Eastmans. You, George, and Ringo wanted Klein, and Paul wanted his in-laws. What made you opt for Klein?
John: Well, Allen's human, whereas Eastman and all them other people are automatons. Sure you can hurt Eastman's feelings, or anybody's feelings, but you can tickle Allen, and I can't imagine tickling Eastman.
Yoko: No sense of humor, Eastman's lot.
John: And when Allen's not doing his bit, he's one of the lads, you know. I would go on holiday with Allen, because he's a lad, he pisses about. When him and his crew go on tour, they piss about like school kids, pretending to be deaf and dumb, whatever kind of crazy thing. He's always having fun, trying to go into hotels with the wrong clothes, wearing crazy clothes. Just games like that. So he's good fun to be around, you know.
Yoko: Actually, he's shy and quiet.
John: And so insecure. He was an orphan. How insecure can you get, with nothing to hang on to?
Yoko: Can you imagine? He has to be a genuis to make money. He was a penniless orphan.
John: And it's so easy to hurt him. It's just like Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol is a very sensitive guy, and if your tone of voice isn't right on the phone, he can get very upset and hurt, and think you're attacking him. Well, Allen's just as bas as Andy Warhol. If you don't say it right, he gets very upset, he thinks you don't like him anymore. And I say, "That was a joke. I didn't mean that."
Yoko: But aside from that, he's a shy guy, very quiet inside. He talks a lot, but inside he's very quiet.
John: And like I say, he likes haivng a laugh with the lads, that sort of thing, whereas you can't imagine them others doing anything but playing golf or crushing beetles.
And one of the early things that impressed me about Allen - and obviously it was a kind of flattery as well - he went through all the old songs we'd written, and he really knew which stuff I'd written. Not many people knew which was my song and which was Paul's, but he'd say, "Well, McCartney didn't write that line, did he?" And I'd say, "Right," you know, and that's what really got me interested [in him], because he knew what our contributions were to the group. Most people thought it was all Paul, or all George Martin. And he knew all my lyrics, and he understood them, not that there's much to understand, but he was into it, and he dug lyrics. So I thought, "Well, anybody who knows me this well, just by listenings to records, is pretty perceptive."
Yoko: Very perceptive.
John: Because I'm not the easiest guy to read, although I'm fairly naive and open in some ways, and I can be conned easily. But in other ways I'm quite complicated, and it's not easy to get through all the defenses and see what I'm like. Klein knew me quite well, without even meeting me. Also he knew to come to me and not to go to Paul, whereas somebody like Lew Grade or Eastman would have gone to Paul.
So he knew that to get in he'd have to come through me. Mind you, he'd been sounding out Mick Jagger and Keith, and all them, saying, "Who runs what?"
Int.: So it's been a few years now since Allen Klein took over managing you and George and Ringo. What's your opinion of him as a manager?
John: Well, I love him, you know. I mean, he really has made me secure enough. I do have money for the first time ever, really. Sometimes he makes me very angry, like when he's pissed off, or pretends he's busy. At any rate, apart from that, I like him, you know. He's a great guy, highly sensitive, highly intelligent. He's not avant-garde or anything like that, he doesn't know from Adam. And it irritates me sometimes when I try and sing him a song before recording, and he can't hear it until it's a finished record. Or if I show him some rushes from a film, and he can't see it until it's a finished film. But apart from that I like him. I don't think he's robbing me, you know. I think he deserves twenty percent because that's his price.
Yoko: He's very creative.
John: He's a creative artist in the way that he will put people together, like Phil Spector and me, which was initially his doing. He tried to create a Rolling Stones/Beatles empire, which might have been a good thing in the early days.
Yoko: Not now.
John: Yeah, but it might have been a good thing. And that's the kind of thing he likes doing, you know. I believe him when he says he looks after Sam Cooke's old father. [Klein managed Sam Cooke, who was shot to death in a motel room.] I think he's a sentimental Jewish mommy, you know. He's got his bad points. He'll be there, and then he's gone, things like that. But he's got a lot of responsibility, and a lot of shit in his head. And it's people like him, or even Brian Epstein, who wasn't quite as clever as Allen, who can't delegate in a way. I know because even if I have a very intelligent assistant, if I piss off, it never gets done.
Int.: Let's talk a bit about Paul's aversion to Klein. From what we've read it seemed as if this wasn't there in the beginning, even though Paul wanted the Eastmans to run things. But it came on later as things progressed. And yet despite this, we gather that Klein was still hoping that Paul would return to the group.
John: Oh, he'd love it if Paul would come back. I think he was hoping he would for years and years. He thought that if he did something, to show Paul that he could do it, Paul would come around. But no chance. I mean, I want him to come out of it, too, you know. He will one day. I give him five years, I've said that. In five years he'll wake up.
Int.: And yet Paul did pretty well from a number of deals Klein negotiated before Paul filed suit to dissolve the group partnership. And not the least of these was the renewed recording contract with EMI, which gave you all much higher royalties. What else was Klein doing to try and lure Paul back?
John: [laughs] One of his reasons for trying to get Paul back was that Paul would have forfeited his right to split by joining us again. We tried to con him into recording with us too. Allen came up with this plan. He said, "Just ring Paul and say, 'We're recording next Friday, are you coming?' " So it nearly happened. It got around that the Beatles were getting together again, because EMI heard that the Beatles had booked recording time again. But Paul would never, never do it, for anything, and now I would never do it. I'm not going to go on a concert tour with Paul, George, and Ringo, because I'm not going to resurrect that.
Int.: But Klein is still hoping?
John: He said to me, "Would you do it, if we got your immigration thing fixed? Or if we could get rid of the drug conviction?"
Yoko: And people don't understand, you know. There're so many groups that constantly announce they're going to split, they're going to split, and they can announce it every year, and it doesn't mean they're going to split. But people don't understand what an extraordinary position the Beatles are in, you know. In every way. They're in such an extraordinary position that they're more insecure than other people. And so Klein thinks he'll give Paul two years Lindawise, you know. And John said, "No, Paul treasures things like children, things like that. It will be longer." And of course, John was right.
Int.: We've heard that Klein has said that Linda and you, Yoko, were a large reason for the Beatles' breakup?
Yoko: Yeah, I don't like it when Allen insinuates that Linda and me, being women, didn't get along, and that this was the cause of the split. It just isn't true.
John: Allen tries hard to understand Yoko and her work, but it's a struggle for him. He doesn't understand it. And it's taken him a long time to come around and realize she just isn't another chick, you know.
Yoko: Can you imagine that? John had a fever once and was asleep upstairs, and Allen visited us and was talking to me. And he said, "Well, you know, if I get to manage John and all that, if it works out that way, then I don't mind if John has a little fun on the side with you." He took me as a groupie chick, you know.
John: Because all the women he'd ever met with the groups were chicks.
Yoko: And I'm a Japanese girl, you know. That bit. So I thought, "What the hell. He didn't discover me yet."
John: He realizes she's intelligent. I think he knows you're proud. Now he's realizing she's not a chick. And if anything, at least his equal.
Yoko: I was laughing. I wasn't insulted. I thought, "My God, I must look young." I was almost flattered.
Int.: Still, in regard to Klein, there had been a tremendous outpouring of negative publicity about him, especially in the English press. And this went on for some time, as he was going after the Beatles. Didn't that bother you, or at least give you cause for reservation?
John: Well, he's a businessman. I feel sorry for him in the way I have some sympathy for Yoko, because it's difficult with all the attacks in the press. And the English do hate Americans and Jews, especially ones who are going to come in and make money in their little Wall Street, you know. They already beat Allen out once when he was trying to buy a music-publishing company. They clubbed together and got rid of him. So okay, he's probably cut many peoples' throats. So have I. I made it too. I mean, I can't remember anybody I literally cut, but I've certainly trod on a few feet on the way up. And I'm sure he did. I don't think he deserves the shit he gets thrown at him, and if time proves me wrong in the end, so be it. I think he deserves what he earns, and I do have more money.
Int.: You were making comparisons earlier between Klein and Brian Epstein. I want to talk more about Epstein later, but could we go on with the comparison?
Yoko: Well, Klein has this reputation as a whacky businessman, but I tell you, he's too conservative in many ways. That may surprise people but it's true. Klein's attitude is, he goes for the top people, right? He doesn't go for anybody but the top . . . Rolling Stones, Beatles, et cetera. Which is all very good, but at the same time that means he doesn't take any risks.
John: He wouldn't have recognized us at the Cavern. And like the film El Topo . . . we talked him into buying it, but he took our word that it was a good film.
Yoko: He would have been the guy who turned down the Beatles. . . .
John: No, he wouldn't. He can spot a good song when he hears it.
Int.: Aren't you really saying that he can only see the dollar signs?
Yoko: Right.
John: That's what it is.
Int.: Let's go back to that comparison with Epstein. You mentioned something about delegating.
John: Yeah. Well, Brian couldn't delegate, and neither can Allen. But what I was sawing was, I understand that because when I try and delegate it never gets done properly. Like with my albums and Yoko's, each time I have to go through the same process: check if it was sent to so-and-so. Did this happen? Get the printing size right. I want it clear and simple and all that. Like for an advert. I have to go through the same jazz all the time. It's never a lesson learned.
Int.: Let's get back to talking about the group, and the four different personalities involved. When we've asked about the split, people give many different reasons for it. Neil Aspinall, you old Liverpool friend and managing director of Apple, said you were like guys going through war on those tours, and when you came back, you found out you were very different people. I asked Lee Eastman for his view of the split, and what it was that prompted Paul to file suit to dissolve the Beatles' partnership, and he said it was because John asked for a divorce.
John: Because I asked for a divorce? That's a childish reason for going into court, isn't it? Have you talked to Lee Eastman for your book?
Int.: Yes.
John: Did he get angry and yell at you?
Int.: He got pretty heated once on the phone.
John: Good; that's shows I'm not making it up. Because I'm the only one who's ever talked about it.
Int.: What was it like for you when the court case was on, with all the publicity?
John: Well, when it first started, I got on a boat and went to Japan for two weeks, and nobody could get in touch with me. They got me in Miami, then I got to Japan and I didn't tell anybody I'd arrived. We just pissed off up in the hills and nobody could find us. Then suddenly I get these calls from the lawyer, fucking idiot. I didn't like his voice, as soon as I heard him, you know. A sort of upper-class Irish-English voice. Fuck. And then he insisted I come home. I could have done it all on the fucking phone. And I came home and we were having meetings all the time with these counsels, every other day, and it went on for weeks and weeks. George and Ringo were getting restless and didn't want to do it anymore. And then George would say, "I've had enough. I don't want to do it. Fuck it all. I don't care if I'm poor." George goes through that every now and then. "I'll give it all away." Will he fuck? He's got it all charted up, like monopolo money.
Int.: Let's talk a bit about George. He's perhaps the most enigmatic Beatle. Are you saying George is more conventional than he makes himself out to be?
John: There's no telling George. He always has a point of view about that wide, you know. [John places his hands a few inches apart.] You can't tell him anything.
Yoko: George is sophisticated, fashionwise. . . .
John: He's very trendy, and he has the right clothes, and all of that. . . .
Yoko: But he's not sophisticated, intellectually.
John: No. He's very narrow-minded and he doesn't really have a broader view. Paul is far more aware than George. One time in the Apple office in Wigmore Street, I said something to George, and he said, "I'm as intelligent as you, you know." This must have been resentment, but he could have left anytime if I was giving him a hard time.
Int.: So the dream is over, the Beatles have split up and you're now a separate entity from Paul McCartney. How does it feel?
John: Well, it's not over yet. With the court case, it could go on for years. And I guess every time I put a record out they'll compare it to Paul's.
Int.: Does that bother you?
John: Sure. What's the fucking point? You might as well compare me with Grand Funk Railroad or something.
Int.: You've been especially vocal lately about the way the Beatles' business was run in the past.
John: Well, look what happened. With Northern Songs, we ended up selling half our copyrights forever. We lost 'em all and Lew Grade's got 'em. It was bad management. We have no company. That's where Brian Epstein fucked up. Who got the beneift? Not us. I mean, since you ask, in retrospect he made mistakes. But to us he was the expert. I mean, originally he had a shop. Anybody who's got a shop must be all right.
Int.: People say it was Epstein who kept you together as the Beatles. What was the mood like among you all after the Beatles stopped touring and before Brian died?
John: Well, after we stopped touring, it always seemed embarrassing. Should we have dinner together? It always got so formal that none of us wanted to go through with it anymore.
Int.: How come it got so formal?
John: Because when you don't see someone for a few months, you feel stilted and you have to start again.
Int.: So things were breaking down before you met Yoko, and before Paul met Linda?
John: It had broken down before that. There was a Liverpool clique thing, and everybody who worked for us was from Liverpool. But that togetherness had gone a long time before Yoko. We were really all on our own, just living in separate vacuums.
Int.: So let's talk about the Beatles' breakup, and the falling out between you and Paul. A lot of people think it had to do with the women in your lives. Is that why the Beatles split up?
John: Not really. The split was over who would manage us, Allen Klein or the Eastmans, and nothing else really, although the split had been coming from Pepper onwards.
Int.: Why, specifically?
John: Well, Paul was always upset about the White Album. He never liked it because on that one I did my music, he did his, and George did his. And first, he didn't like George having so many tracks, and second, he wanted it to be more a group thing, which really means more Paul. So he never liked that album, and I always preferred it to all the other albums, including Pepper, because I thought the music was better. The Pepper myth is bigger, but the music on the White Album is far superior, I think.
Int.: That's your favorite, of all the Beatle albums?
John: Yeah, because I wrote a lot of good shit on that. I like all the stuff I did on that, and the other stuff as well. I like the whole album. I haven't heard it in a long time, but I know there's a lot of good songs on it. But if you're talking about the split, the split was over Allen and Eastman.
Int.: You didn't like Lee Eastman, Linda's father, nor John Eastman, Linda's brother, and the Eastmans didn't like you bringing in Allen Klein to manage you. . . .
John: The Eastmans hated Allen from way back. They're from the class of family . . . like all classes, I suppose, they vote like Daddy does. They're the kind of kids who just think what their fathers told them.
Int.: But for a while you got along with Linda.
John: We all got along well with Linda.
Int.: When did you first meet her?
John: The first time I saw her was after that press conference to announce Apple in America. We were just going back to the airport and she was in the car with us. I didn't think she was particularly attractive, I wondered what he was bothering having her in the car for. A bit too tweedy, you know. But she sat in the car and took photographs and that was it. And the next minute she's married him.
Yoko: She's not the kind of woman who would antagonize other women. She is a nice person who is uptight like her brother, John, but not that uptight. There was a nice quality about her. As a women she doesn't offend you because she doesn't come on like a coquettish bird, you know? So she was all right, and we were on very good terms until Allen came into the picture. And then she said: "Why the hell do you have to bring Allen into it?" She said very nasty things about Allen, and I defended Allen each time she said something about him. And since then she never speaks to me.
Int.: Yoko, you weren't with John the first time he met her?
Yoko: No. The first time I met her was when she came to the EMI studio. And you know, when Beatles are recording, there's very few people around, especially no women. If a young woman comes into the room, everybody just sort of looks at her. So I was there, and the first thing Linda made clear to me - almost unnecessarily - was the fact that she was interested in Paul, and not John, you know? So I thought that was nice. She was sort of presupposing that I would be nervous. Not that I showed I was nervous at all. She just said, "Oh, I'm with Paul." Something to that effect.
I think she was eager to be with me, and John, in the sense that Paul and John are close, we should be close too. And couple to couple we were going to be good friends. We went to their house. . . .
John: We stayed there. We lived there.
Yoko: Well, that was not when Linda was around.
John: Oh, that was before Linda, yes.
Yoko: And Linda cooked for us. We had nice dinners together, things like that. And she was pregnant, so it was hard for her to cook. She had a big tummy and all that. But she was doing it, and it was nice.
Int.: Did you think she was a good photographer, Yoko?
Yoko: I never judged her, or even observed her, from that point of view. I'd never really seen any of her photographs.
John: We had heard stories aobut her hanging around - what was it? - Ramparts and Life magazine. Always trying to get in, and nobody wanting her because they didn't think she was a particularly good photographer. . . .
Yoko: They were sufficient photographs. And really, it's unfair to ask me about them because I'm a perfectionist about artists, and there are very few artists that I respect anyway. It has to be someone really special for me to say that I admire his or her art.
Int.: So what was Paul's attitude to you as you got to know him, as things progressed?
Yoko: Paul began complaining that I was sitting too close to them when they were recording, and that I should be in the background.
John: Paul was always gently coming up to Yoko and saying: "Why don't you keep in the background a bit more?" I didn't know what was going on. It was going on behind my back.
Yoko: And I wasn't uttering a word. It wasn't a matter of my being aggressive. It was just the fact that I was sitting near to John. And we stood up to it. We just said, "No. It's simply that we just have to come together." They were trying to discourage me from attending meetings, et cetera. And I was always there. And Linda actually said that she admired that we were doing that.
John: Paul even said that to me.
Int.: So did all this contribute to the split, to Paul leaving the group?
John: Well, Paul rang me up. He didn't actually tell me he'd split, he said he was putting out an album [McCartney]. He said, "I'm now doing what you and Yoko were doing last year. I understand what you were doing." All that shit. So I said, "Good luck to yer."
Yoko: So there really was a lot of misunderstanding, you know.
Int.: And the family thing was a factor? Things you'd said about the Eastmans?
John: Yeah, it's like anybody. If there's anything to say about my family, I'll say it myself. But don't you.
Int.: And Linda didn't like this?
Yoko: I didn't know that. I thought she was one very unusually obedient daughter who was completely controlled by her father, you know?
Int.: Was it the suddenness of Linda's arrival on the scene that disrupted things?
John: Well, Paul had met her before [the Apple press conference], you see. I mean, there were quite a few women he'd obviously had that I never knew about. God knows when he was doing it, but he must have been doing it.
Int.: So, John. You and Paul were probably the greatest songwriting team in a generation. And you had this huge falling out. Were there always huge differences between you and Paul, or was there a time when you had a lot in common?
John: Well, we all want our mummies - I don't think there's any of us that don't - and he lost his mother, so did I. That doesn't make womanizers of us, but we all want our mummies because I don't think any of us got enough of them.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there - but Paul always wanted the home life, you see. He liked it with daddy and the brother . . . and obviously missed his mother. And his dad was the whole thing. Just simple things: he wouldn't go against his dad and wear drainpipe trousers. And his dad was always trying to get me out of the group behind me back, I found out later. He'd say to George: "Why don't you get rid of John, he's just a lot of trouble. Cut your hair nice and wear baggy trousers," like I was the bad influence because I was the eldest, so I had all the gear first usually.
So Paul was always like that. And I was always saying, "Face up to your dad, tell him to fuck off. He can't hit you. You can kill him [laughs], he's an old man." I used to say, "Don't take that shit off him." Because I was always brought up by a woman, so maybe it was different. But I wouldn't let the old man treat me like that. He treated Paul like a child all the time, cut his hair and telling him what to wear, at seventeen, eighteen.
But Paul would always give in to his dad. His dad told him to get a job, he fucking dropped the group and started working on the fucking lorries, saying, "I need a steady career." We couldn't believe it - my Aunt Mimi reminded me of this the other night - he rang up and said he'd got this job and couldn't come to the group. So I told him on the phone, "Either come or you're out." So he had to make a decision between me and his dad then, and in the end he chose me. But it was a long trip.
So it was always the family thing, you see. If Jane [Asher] was to have a career, then that's not going to be a cozy family, is it? All the other girls were just groupies mainly. And with Linda not only did he have a ready-made family, but she knows what he wants, obviously, and has given it to him. The complete family life. He's in Scotland. He told me he doesn't like English cities anymore. So that's how it is.
Int.: So you think with Linda he's found what he wanted?
John: I guess so. I guess so. I just don't understand . . . I never knew what he wanted in a woman because I never knew what I wanted. I knew I wanted something intelligent or something arty, whatever it was. But you don't really know what you want until you find it. So anyway, I was very surprised with Linda. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd married Jane Asher, because it had been going on for a long time and they went through a whole ordinary love scene. But with Linda it was just like, boom! She was in and that was the end of it.
Int.: Did Paul put Jane off for many years, when she wanted to get married?
John: I have no idea. We never discussed our private lives like that. I never asked him. We'd got over "did you get a bit of tit?" and "what's happening?" All that scene. We didn't talk about it.
Int.: So Paul split, and your falling out was essentially with him?
John: Right.
Int.: So what made you decide not to participate in the Bangladesh concert with George and Ringo at Madison Square Garden? I mean, you were rather conspicuously absent.
John: Well, Allen [Klein] was putting it around that I ran off to England, so I wouldn't be there for the concert. But I told George about a week before it that I wouldn't be doing it. I just didn't feel like it. I just didn't want to be rehearsing and doing a big show-biz trip. We were in the Virgin Islands, and I certainly wasn't going to be rehearsing in New York, then going back to the Virgin Islands, then coming back up to New York and singing. And anyway, they couldn't have got any more people in, if I'd been there or not. I got enough money off records and I don't feel like doing two shows a night.
Int.: So what did you think of the concert?
John: I didn't see it. I mean, I haven't seen the movie. It seemed like a great success, you know. It seemed like a great success, you know. Newspaperwise it turned out great, and it seems like they got a lot of money. So it seemed all right, and from the reports of people there it seemed fine too. I didn't think much more about it really.
Int.: So when you say you don't feel like doing two shows a night, does this mean we've seen the end of live performances from John Lennon?
John: Oh, no. I want to do a big show. I feel like going out with Yoko. It's possible that a museum show of Yoko's, which is going on in Syracuse this October, will tour America, and it's possible that we'd be in the same town. The museum show is a really far-out scene, so if we do that, and if we are playing in the same place, we really could blow the town out.
See, George came up with a good idea after the concert, which I heard from Allen - I haven't talked to George about it - which was to take a big tour out, and do one show for free and one show for money, in each city. I thought that was good. Then I thought; "Well, fuck it. I don't want to earn any more money. I get enough off records. I don't want to do a big Apple/Beatle tour," because the thing I didn't like about the Bangladesh concert was that it was "the Beatles playing," and whatever it was they played, it wasn't the Beatles. So then I thought, "I'll go out on me own and take me own people with me."
Int.: So who would you take on tour with you ideally?
John: Well, I'd like to go on the road with Jim Keltner, Klaus Voormann, Yoko, and Eric Clapton, if I can get him out of his house. And maybe when we've got it together, we'd decide if we'd want any saxophones or any kind of jazz like that. Or we might just play village squares or a nightclub.
Int.: Do you have any regrets about not doing the Bangladesh concert?
John: Well, in a way I regretted it. It would have been great, you know. And at first I thought: "Oh, I wish I'd been there. You know, with Dylan and Leon [Russell]. . . . . they needed a rocker, and everybody was telling me, "You should have been there, John." I mean, Leon's a good rocker, but people were telling me, "You should have been there to weigh it up." But I'm glad I didn't do it in a way, because I didn't want to go on as the Beatles. And with George and Ringo there it would have been that connotation of Beatles - now let's hear Ringo sing "It Don't Come Easy." And that's why I left it all, so I wouldn't have to do all that. I don't want to play "My Sweet Lord." I'd as soon go out and do exactly what I want.
Yoko: Because we want to give them reality, you know. Not . . . "Oh, God."
John: And that is a conflict with George.
Int.: Since you mentioned that you'd go out ont he road with Jim Keltner, a drummer, is that any reflection on Ringo's drumming?
John: Oh, no. I love his drumming. I think Keltner is technically a bit better, but Ringo is still one of the best drummers in rock.
Int.: John, you've said a couple of times already that you "get enough off records," yet not too long ago you were saying that you weren't anything like as rich as people thought you were. Are you rich enough finally?
John: Well, I do have money for the first time ever, really. I do feel slightly secure about it, secure enough to say I'll go on the road for free. The reason I got rich is because I'm so insecure. I couldn't give it all away, even in my most holy, Christian, God-fearing, Hare Krishna period. I got into that struggle: I should give it all away, I don't need it. But I need it because I'm so insecure. Yoko doesn't need it. She always had it. I have to have it. I'm not secure enough to give it all up, because I need it to protect me from whatever I'm frightened of.
Yoko: He's very vulnerable.
John: But now I think that Allen Klein has made me secure enough, it's his fault that I'll go out for free.
Int.: Well, I thought I can't really go on the road and take a lot of money. (A) What am I going to do with it? And (B) how could I look somebody in the eye? Why should they pay? I've got everything I need. I've got all the fucking bread I need. If I go broke, well, I'd go on the road for money then. But now I just couldn't face saying, "Well, I cost a million when I sing. It costs that much for me to sing for you."
Yoko: It's criminal.
John: Which is bullshit, because I want to sing. So I'm going out on the road because I want to this time. I want to do something political, and radicalize people, and all that jazz, and this would be the best way. So now I feel like going out on the road. I feel like going out with Yoko, and taking a really far-out show on the road, a mobile, political, rock and roll show, a mobile, political Plastic Ono Bandshow. . . .
Yoko: With clowns as well.
John: . . . and have something going on in the foyer, and something going on in the audience, and not just everything on stage.
Int.: When you say political, what do you mean exactly?
John: Well, I mean political, because everything I do is political. I would take people with me who could speak to the kids, who could speak to them in the foyer, catch them on the way out. Panthers. Weathermen. They can hand all their gear out.
Int.: You want to create a riot in each town?
John: No, I don't want to create a riot or a fight in each town, but I just really want to paint it red.
Int.: So would these be big dates?
John: I don't know. I really haven't thought how to do it. You know what I was thinking - I know I've told you this before - when Paul's going out on the road, I'd like to be playing in the same town for free next door! And he's charging about a million to see him. That would be funny. And of course he's going to think that I'm going out on the road because he's said he's going out on the road, but it'd be a natural thing after Bangladesh.
Yoko: The point is, I really believe that whatever you have, if you don't do as much as you can or have, then you're guilty of not giving. Like, our position is, I come from the East, he comes from the West, a meeting of East and West, and all that. And to communicate with people is almost a responsibility. We actually are living proof of East and West getting along together. It's very important. We are responsible to give whatever we have, or whatever we know.
John: That's why I thought, I can't really go on the road and take a lot of money.
Yoko: No, we can't do that. If you have a lot to give, you have to give. Also, think of the laws of nature. In economic and political and all situations, high water falls low, you know. And if our cup is full, it's going to flow. It's natural for us to give because we have a lot. If we don't give, in a sense that's going against the laws of nature. And in order to go against the laws of nature, you have to use tremendous energy, unnecessary energy, in order to keep it like that, in order to keep that money. That would be very bad for us, and we're not going to do that. If we have more than we need moneywise, we'd rather let the money flow out naturally, you know.
Int.: That's a pretty generous sentiment.
Yoko: It's just wisdom, you know.
John: The wisdom of the East.
Yoko: And if people don't have that wisdom - well, what I mean is - if you're using all that unnecessary energy, it's going to get back at you one way or another. You're going to get cancer or something. And it just isn't worth it.
Int.: From what we've been reading, you are still asked regularly for a lot of money from various underground and leftist causes. Do you always give?
John: Well, I always take care of the underground, whatever I'm doing. And if they get in trouble, I lend them money or invest in them or whatever, because I think they're important. I get asked every two days for at least five thousand pounds, and I usually give it because it's usually somebody that I want to help. So I'm going to try to set up a foundation that can be small, a John and Yoko one, and we might take a dollar a head or anything that's donated at concerts. That would go to this. And then I can pay all these Oz undergrounds, and Clydeside workers, and Timothy Learys, that all want money out of me. And I might be able to fix it up taxwise.
George wants to do a foundation, too, but we'll keep it separate because he might want to give it to Hare Krishna, and I won't.
Int.: So you're going to tour for free, and you're going to give a lot of money away. How is your manager, Allen Klein, reacting to all this generosity?
John: I said to Allen, "You're going to get twenty percent of nothing." And I want him to run the tours because he knows how to do it. I said, "Look, I hope you won't mind, but you know George's idea about the concerts? Well, I've decided to do it all for nothing. And I'm sorry, but you're getting twenty percent of nothing." He said, "Oh, I don't mind." I don't know whether he did or not. Maybe he thinks he'll sell some comics on the side. He'll have thought of something.
Int.: Let's talk about Allen Klein because, as you said, the big factor in the Beatles' breakup was the question of who would manage you, Klein or the Eastmans. You, George, and Ringo wanted Klein, and Paul wanted his in-laws. What made you opt for Klein?
John: Well, Allen's human, whereas Eastman and all them other people are automatons. Sure you can hurt Eastman's feelings, or anybody's feelings, but you can tickle Allen, and I can't imagine tickling Eastman.
Yoko: No sense of humor, Eastman's lot.
John: And when Allen's not doing his bit, he's one of the lads, you know. I would go on holiday with Allen, because he's a lad, he pisses about. When him and his crew go on tour, they piss about like school kids, pretending to be deaf and dumb, whatever kind of crazy thing. He's always having fun, trying to go into hotels with the wrong clothes, wearing crazy clothes. Just games like that. So he's good fun to be around, you know.
Yoko: Actually, he's shy and quiet.
John: And so insecure. He was an orphan. How insecure can you get, with nothing to hang on to?
Yoko: Can you imagine? He has to be a genuis to make money. He was a penniless orphan.
John: And it's so easy to hurt him. It's just like Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol is a very sensitive guy, and if your tone of voice isn't right on the phone, he can get very upset and hurt, and think you're attacking him. Well, Allen's just as bas as Andy Warhol. If you don't say it right, he gets very upset, he thinks you don't like him anymore. And I say, "That was a joke. I didn't mean that."
Yoko: But aside from that, he's a shy guy, very quiet inside. He talks a lot, but inside he's very quiet.
John: And like I say, he likes haivng a laugh with the lads, that sort of thing, whereas you can't imagine them others doing anything but playing golf or crushing beetles.
And one of the early things that impressed me about Allen - and obviously it was a kind of flattery as well - he went through all the old songs we'd written, and he really knew which stuff I'd written. Not many people knew which was my song and which was Paul's, but he'd say, "Well, McCartney didn't write that line, did he?" And I'd say, "Right," you know, and that's what really got me interested [in him], because he knew what our contributions were to the group. Most people thought it was all Paul, or all George Martin. And he knew all my lyrics, and he understood them, not that there's much to understand, but he was into it, and he dug lyrics. So I thought, "Well, anybody who knows me this well, just by listenings to records, is pretty perceptive."
Yoko: Very perceptive.
John: Because I'm not the easiest guy to read, although I'm fairly naive and open in some ways, and I can be conned easily. But in other ways I'm quite complicated, and it's not easy to get through all the defenses and see what I'm like. Klein knew me quite well, without even meeting me. Also he knew to come to me and not to go to Paul, whereas somebody like Lew Grade or Eastman would have gone to Paul.
So he knew that to get in he'd have to come through me. Mind you, he'd been sounding out Mick Jagger and Keith, and all them, saying, "Who runs what?"
Int.: So it's been a few years now since Allen Klein took over managing you and George and Ringo. What's your opinion of him as a manager?
John: Well, I love him, you know. I mean, he really has made me secure enough. I do have money for the first time ever, really. Sometimes he makes me very angry, like when he's pissed off, or pretends he's busy. At any rate, apart from that, I like him, you know. He's a great guy, highly sensitive, highly intelligent. He's not avant-garde or anything like that, he doesn't know from Adam. And it irritates me sometimes when I try and sing him a song before recording, and he can't hear it until it's a finished record. Or if I show him some rushes from a film, and he can't see it until it's a finished film. But apart from that I like him. I don't think he's robbing me, you know. I think he deserves twenty percent because that's his price.
Yoko: He's very creative.
John: He's a creative artist in the way that he will put people together, like Phil Spector and me, which was initially his doing. He tried to create a Rolling Stones/Beatles empire, which might have been a good thing in the early days.
Yoko: Not now.
John: Yeah, but it might have been a good thing. And that's the kind of thing he likes doing, you know. I believe him when he says he looks after Sam Cooke's old father. [Klein managed Sam Cooke, who was shot to death in a motel room.] I think he's a sentimental Jewish mommy, you know. He's got his bad points. He'll be there, and then he's gone, things like that. But he's got a lot of responsibility, and a lot of shit in his head. And it's people like him, or even Brian Epstein, who wasn't quite as clever as Allen, who can't delegate in a way. I know because even if I have a very intelligent assistant, if I piss off, it never gets done.
Int.: Let's talk a bit about Paul's aversion to Klein. From what we've read it seemed as if this wasn't there in the beginning, even though Paul wanted the Eastmans to run things. But it came on later as things progressed. And yet despite this, we gather that Klein was still hoping that Paul would return to the group.
John: Oh, he'd love it if Paul would come back. I think he was hoping he would for years and years. He thought that if he did something, to show Paul that he could do it, Paul would come around. But no chance. I mean, I want him to come out of it, too, you know. He will one day. I give him five years, I've said that. In five years he'll wake up.
Int.: And yet Paul did pretty well from a number of deals Klein negotiated before Paul filed suit to dissolve the group partnership. And not the least of these was the renewed recording contract with EMI, which gave you all much higher royalties. What else was Klein doing to try and lure Paul back?
John: [laughs] One of his reasons for trying to get Paul back was that Paul would have forfeited his right to split by joining us again. We tried to con him into recording with us too. Allen came up with this plan. He said, "Just ring Paul and say, 'We're recording next Friday, are you coming?' " So it nearly happened. It got around that the Beatles were getting together again, because EMI heard that the Beatles had booked recording time again. But Paul would never, never do it, for anything, and now I would never do it. I'm not going to go on a concert tour with Paul, George, and Ringo, because I'm not going to resurrect that.
Int.: But Klein is still hoping?
John: He said to me, "Would you do it, if we got your immigration thing fixed? Or if we could get rid of the drug conviction?"
Yoko: And people don't understand, you know. There're so many groups that constantly announce they're going to split, they're going to split, and they can announce it every year, and it doesn't mean they're going to split. But people don't understand what an extraordinary position the Beatles are in, you know. In every way. They're in such an extraordinary position that they're more insecure than other people. And so Klein thinks he'll give Paul two years Lindawise, you know. And John said, "No, Paul treasures things like children, things like that. It will be longer." And of course, John was right.
Int.: We've heard that Klein has said that Linda and you, Yoko, were a large reason for the Beatles' breakup?
Yoko: Yeah, I don't like it when Allen insinuates that Linda and me, being women, didn't get along, and that this was the cause of the split. It just isn't true.
John: Allen tries hard to understand Yoko and her work, but it's a struggle for him. He doesn't understand it. And it's taken him a long time to come around and realize she just isn't another chick, you know.
Yoko: Can you imagine that? John had a fever once and was asleep upstairs, and Allen visited us and was talking to me. And he said, "Well, you know, if I get to manage John and all that, if it works out that way, then I don't mind if John has a little fun on the side with you." He took me as a groupie chick, you know.
John: Because all the women he'd ever met with the groups were chicks.
Yoko: And I'm a Japanese girl, you know. That bit. So I thought, "What the hell. He didn't discover me yet."
John: He realizes she's intelligent. I think he knows you're proud. Now he's realizing she's not a chick. And if anything, at least his equal.
Yoko: I was laughing. I wasn't insulted. I thought, "My God, I must look young." I was almost flattered.
Int.: Still, in regard to Klein, there had been a tremendous outpouring of negative publicity about him, especially in the English press. And this went on for some time, as he was going after the Beatles. Didn't that bother you, or at least give you cause for reservation?
John: Well, he's a businessman. I feel sorry for him in the way I have some sympathy for Yoko, because it's difficult with all the attacks in the press. And the English do hate Americans and Jews, especially ones who are going to come in and make money in their little Wall Street, you know. They already beat Allen out once when he was trying to buy a music-publishing company. They clubbed together and got rid of him. So okay, he's probably cut many peoples' throats. So have I. I made it too. I mean, I can't remember anybody I literally cut, but I've certainly trod on a few feet on the way up. And I'm sure he did. I don't think he deserves the shit he gets thrown at him, and if time proves me wrong in the end, so be it. I think he deserves what he earns, and I do have more money.
Int.: You were making comparisons earlier between Klein and Brian Epstein. I want to talk more about Epstein later, but could we go on with the comparison?
Yoko: Well, Klein has this reputation as a whacky businessman, but I tell you, he's too conservative in many ways. That may surprise people but it's true. Klein's attitude is, he goes for the top people, right? He doesn't go for anybody but the top . . . Rolling Stones, Beatles, et cetera. Which is all very good, but at the same time that means he doesn't take any risks.
John: He wouldn't have recognized us at the Cavern. And like the film El Topo . . . we talked him into buying it, but he took our word that it was a good film.
Yoko: He would have been the guy who turned down the Beatles. . . .
John: No, he wouldn't. He can spot a good song when he hears it.
Int.: Aren't you really saying that he can only see the dollar signs?
Yoko: Right.
John: That's what it is.
Int.: Let's go back to that comparison with Epstein. You mentioned something about delegating.
John: Yeah. Well, Brian couldn't delegate, and neither can Allen. But what I was sawing was, I understand that because when I try and delegate it never gets done properly. Like with my albums and Yoko's, each time I have to go through the same process: check if it was sent to so-and-so. Did this happen? Get the printing size right. I want it clear and simple and all that. Like for an advert. I have to go through the same jazz all the time. It's never a lesson learned.
Int.: Let's get back to talking about the group, and the four different personalities involved. When we've asked about the split, people give many different reasons for it. Neil Aspinall, you old Liverpool friend and managing director of Apple, said you were like guys going through war on those tours, and when you came back, you found out you were very different people. I asked Lee Eastman for his view of the split, and what it was that prompted Paul to file suit to dissolve the Beatles' partnership, and he said it was because John asked for a divorce.
John: Because I asked for a divorce? That's a childish reason for going into court, isn't it? Have you talked to Lee Eastman for your book?
Int.: Yes.
John: Did he get angry and yell at you?
Int.: He got pretty heated once on the phone.
John: Good; that's shows I'm not making it up. Because I'm the only one who's ever talked about it.
Int.: What was it like for you when the court case was on, with all the publicity?
John: Well, when it first started, I got on a boat and went to Japan for two weeks, and nobody could get in touch with me. They got me in Miami, then I got to Japan and I didn't tell anybody I'd arrived. We just pissed off up in the hills and nobody could find us. Then suddenly I get these calls from the lawyer, fucking idiot. I didn't like his voice, as soon as I heard him, you know. A sort of upper-class Irish-English voice. Fuck. And then he insisted I come home. I could have done it all on the fucking phone. And I came home and we were having meetings all the time with these counsels, every other day, and it went on for weeks and weeks. George and Ringo were getting restless and didn't want to do it anymore. And then George would say, "I've had enough. I don't want to do it. Fuck it all. I don't care if I'm poor." George goes through that every now and then. "I'll give it all away." Will he fuck? He's got it all charted up, like monopolo money.
Int.: Let's talk a bit about George. He's perhaps the most enigmatic Beatle. Are you saying George is more conventional than he makes himself out to be?
John: There's no telling George. He always has a point of view about that wide, you know. [John places his hands a few inches apart.] You can't tell him anything.
Yoko: George is sophisticated, fashionwise. . . .
John: He's very trendy, and he has the right clothes, and all of that. . . .
Yoko: But he's not sophisticated, intellectually.
John: No. He's very narrow-minded and he doesn't really have a broader view. Paul is far more aware than George. One time in the Apple office in Wigmore Street, I said something to George, and he said, "I'm as intelligent as you, you know." This must have been resentment, but he could have left anytime if I was giving him a hard time.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Abbey Road
Abbey Road is the eleventh official U.K. album and seventeenth U.S. album released by The Beatles. Though work on Abbey Road began in April 1969, making it the final album recorded by the band, Let It Be was the last album released before the Beatles' dissolution in 1970. Abbey Road was released on 26 September 1969 in the United Kingdom, and 1 October 1969 in the United States. It was produced and orchestrated by George Martin for Apple Records. Geoff Emerick was engineer, Alan Parsons was assistant engineer, and Tony Banks was tape operator. It is regarded as one of The Beatles' most tightly constructed albums, although the band was barely operating as a functioning unit at the time. Rolling Stone magazine named it the 14th greatest album of all time.Genesis
After the near-disastrous sessions for the proposed Get Back album (later retitled Let It Be) Paul McCartney suggested to Martin the group get together and make an album "the way we used to" free of the conflict that began with the sessions for The White Album. Martin agreed, stipulating that he must be allowed to do the album his way. In their interviews for the Beatles Anthology series the surviving band members stated they knew at the time this would very likely be the final Beatles' product and therefore agreed to set aside their differences and 'go out on a high note'.
With the Let It Be album partly finished, the sessions for Abbey Road began in April, as the "Ballad of John and Yoko"/"Old Brown Shoe" single was completed. In fact recording sessions of John Lennon's "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" had started already in February 1969 in Trident studios with Billy Preston at organ—only three weeks after the Get Back sessions. Photos from these sessions are included in the book Get Back which came along with the Let It Be album but not in the Let It Be movie. Paul is shaved and John has started to let his beard grow.
Most of the album was recorded between 2 July and 1 August 1969. After the album was finished and released, the Get Back/Let It Be project was re-examined. More work was done on the album, including the recording of additional music (see Let It Be). Thus, though the bulk of Let It Be was recorded prior to Abbey Road, the latter was released first, and Abbey Road properly was the last album started by The Beatles before they disbanded. In September 1969, just shortly before the release of the album, Lennon was on hiatus from the group with the Plastic Ono Band, effectively being the first official sign of dissolution.
The two album sides are quite different in character. Side one is a collection of single tracks, while side two consists of a long suite of compositions, many of them being relatively short and segued together. The main impetus behind the suite approach was to incorporate the various short and incomplete Lennon and McCartney compositions the group had available into an effective part of the album.
Success
Abbey Road became one of the most successful Beatles albums ever. In the UK the album debuted straight at #1. Abbey Road spent its first 11 weeks in the UK charts at #1, and then was knocked off just for 1 week to #2 by the Rolling Stones debuting at the top with Let It Bleed. However, the following week—which was the week of Christmas—Abbey Road returned to the top for another 6 weeks, completing 17 weeks at the top. In all it spent 92 weeks inside the UK Top 75, making a big re-entry after over 16 years in 31 October 1987, when it was released for the first time on CD and reached #30. In the UK Abbey Road was the best-selling album of 1969 and the fourth best-selling of the entire 1960s, and the eighth best-selling album of 1970.
Reaction in the U.S. was similar. The album debuted at #178, then moved to #4 and in its third week to #1, spending 11 non-consecutive weeks at the top, but was not the best-selling album during the Christmas week. Abbey Road spent a total of 129 weeks in the Billboard 200, re-entering the charts at #69 on 14 November 1987 when it was released for the first time on CD. It was the 4th best-selling album of 1970 in the US and is now certified 12x platinum by the RIAA.
Song information
Side one
"Come Together"
The album opener "Come Together" was a Lennon contribution. The chorus was inspired by a song Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary's campaign for governor of California titled "Let's Get It Together." A rough version of this can be heard in outtakes from Lennon's second bed-in event in Canada. It has been speculated that the verses, described by Lennon as intentionally obscure, refer cryptically to each of the Beatles (e.g. "he's one holy roller" allegedly refers to the spiritually inclined George Harrison.)[citation needed] The song was later the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Morris Levy because the opening line in "Come Together" - "Here come old flat-top" - was admittedly lifted from a line in Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me." "Come Together" was later released as a double A side single with "Something". In the liner notes to the Love album Martin described the track as a personal favorite.
"Something"
"Something," the second track on the album, later became Harrison's first A-side single. Originally written during the White Album sessions, the first line is based on the James Taylor song "Something in the Way She Moves" (Taylor was signed to Apple at the time). After the lyrics were refined during the "Let It Be" sessions (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), "Something" was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road. "Something" was Lennon's favorite song on the album, and McCartney considered it the best song Harrison had written. Frank Sinatra once commented that "Something" was his favorite Lennon/McCartney song (sic) and "the greatest love song ever written." The song was released on a double-sided single.
Harrison was rapidly growing as a songwriter, and with Abbey Road, he made his most significant contributions to a Beatles album. "Something" became the first Beatles number one single that was not a Lennon/McCartney composition—it was also the first single with songs from an already released album; "Here Comes the Sun" has received significant radio airplay despite never having been released as a single. At the Concert for George on the first anniversary of Harrison's passing, "Something" was sung by McCartney, who performed the first part of the song solo while playing ukulele. After the first chorus, the song shifted to its traditional arrangement, with other musicians joining in, and Eric Clapton sharing vocals with McCartney.
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer," McCartney's first song on the album, was first performed by the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions (as can be seen in the Let It Be documentary).
According to Geoff Emerick's book, Here, There and Everywhere, Lennon said the song was "more of Paul's granny music", and refused to participate in the recording of the song.
"Oh! Darling"
When recording "Oh! Darling," McCartney attempted recording only once a day, so that his voice would be fresh on the recording. Lennon was of the opinion that was the type of song that he would've sung the lead on, remarking that it was more his style. On the Anthology 3 album, Lennon can be heard singing the lead on an ad-libbed verse regarding the news that Yoko Ono's divorce from her first husband had just come through.
"Octopus's Garden"
Ringo Starr wrote and sang one song for the album, "Octopus's Garden," his second (and last) composition released on a Beatles album. It was inspired by a trip to Sardinia that occurred when Starr left the band for two weeks with his family during the sessions for The White Album. While there, he composed the song, which is arguably his most successful writing effort. While Starr had the lyrics nearly pinned down, the song's melodic structure was partly written in the studio by Harrison (as can be seen in the Let It Be film), although Harrison gave full songwriting credit to Starr. (Harrison and Starr would later collaborate on Starr's solo single "Photograph," and Harrison also probably collaborated with Starr in writing "It Don't Come Easy").
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)"
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)," is a combination of two somewhat different recording attempts. The first attempt occurred almost immediately after the "Get Back/Let It Be" sessions in February 1969 and featuring Billy Preston on keyboards. This was subsequently combined with a second version made during the "Abbey Road" sessions proper, and when edited together ran nearly 8 minutes long, making it The Beatles' second-longest released song ("Revolution 9" being the longest). Perhaps more than any other Beatles song, "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" reveals a pronounced progressive rock influence, with its unusual length and structure, repeating guitar riff, and "white noise" effects; the "I Want You" section has a straightforward blues structure. It also features one of the earliest uses of a Moog synthesizer to create the white-noise or "wind" effect heard near the end of the track. During the final edit, as the guitar riff continues on and on, Lennon told engineer Emerick to "cut it right there" at the 7:44 mark, creating a sudden, jarring silence which concluded side one of Abbey Road. The final overdub session for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" would be the last time all four Beatles worked in the studio together.
Side two
"Here Comes the Sun"
"Here Comes the Sun" is Harrison's second song on the album and one of his best-known songs, written in Eric Clapton's garden while Harrison was "sagging off" from an Apple board meeting, which he considered tedious. It was influenced by the Cream song "Badge", which was co-written by Clapton and Harrison. While not released as a single, the song has received frequent radio airplay since its release. Joe Brown would later sing it at "Concert for George."
"Because"
"Because" features a Moog synthesizer, played by Harrison. The chords in "Because" were inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," which Lennon heard Ono play on the piano, after which, according to Lennon, he played the chord progression backwards. "Because" features three-part harmonies by Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison, which were then triple-tracked to sound like nine singers. The results of this have been compared in sound to the Beach Boys.
The medley
The climax of the album is the sixteen-minute medley consisting of several short songs, both finished and unfinished, blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. Most of these songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for The Beatles and the "Get Back"/Let It Be sessions.
"You Never Give Me Your Money" is the first song of the Abbey Road suite. It was written by McCartney and based loosely on The Beatles' financial problems with Apple. (Paul had refused signing Allen Klein as their new manager.) It slowly and quietly follows into "Sun King" (which, like "Because", showcases Lennon's, McCartney's, and Harrison's overdubbed harmonies), "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during The Beatles' trip to India), and "Polythene Pam" (all of these Lennon compositions). These in turn are followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window," "Golden Slumbers" (based on lyrics but not the music of Thomas Dekker's 17th-century song of the same name), "Carry That Weight" which features chorus vocals from all four of The Beatles, although Lennon was in hospital at the time of the primary recording due to a car accident with Ono, his son Julian and Ono's daughter Kyoko (he recorded his vocals at a later date), and the climax, "The End". The latter is notable for featuring Starr's only drum solo in The Beatles catalogue. (The drums are recorded in "true stereo" with at least two separate microphones—even though mixings were in stereo drums were otherwise recorded with only one "mono" microphone in the middle of the stereo view.) Starr hated solos and had to be persuaded to do it. It was even edited down several bars from its original recorded version. Toward the end of the song, immediately prior to "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make" line played over piano chords, are eighteen bars or measures of guitar solo: the first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, then the sequence repeats. Each had a distinctive style which McCartney felt reflected their personalities: McCartney's playing included string bends similar to his lead guitar work on "Another Girl" from the Help! album; Harrison's was melodic with slides yet technically advanced and Lennon's was rhythmic, stinging and had the heaviest distortion. Immediately after Lennon's third solo, the piano chords of the final line "And in the end...." begins.
An alternate version with Harrison's lead guitar solo played against McCartney's (with Starr's drum solo heard slightly in the background) appears on the Anthology 3 album. The song ends with the memorable final line, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."
"Her Majesty"
"Her Majesty," tacked on the end, was originally part of the side two medley, appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he had the medley re-edited to remove it. However, second engineer John Kurlander had been instructed never to throw out anything, so after the group left the recording studio that day, he picked it up off the floor, spliced 14 seconds of red leader tape onto the final mix reel, and then spliced in "Her Majesty" immediately after the leader tape. The box of the album's master reel had a notation stating to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when Malcolm Davies at Apple received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty." The Beatles liked this effect and left it on the album. On the first printing of the LP cover, "Her Majesty" is not listed, although it is shown on the record label. "Her Majesty" opens with the final, crashing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard," while the final note of "Her Majesty" remained buried in the mix of "Polythene Pam." This was the result of "Her Majesty" being snipped off the reel during a rough mix of the medley. The cut in the medley was subsequently disguised with further mixing although "Her Majesty" was not touched again and still appears in its rough mix.
Production notes
Abbey Road was the only Beatles album mainly recorded on an 8-track tape machine, rather than the 4-track machines that were used for prior Beatle albums starting with the single I Want To Hold Your Hand in 1963 and the album A Hard Day's Night in 1964. This is noticeable in the better sound separation and mixing of the drum kit. EMI's conservative management had not yet approved the use of their then-new 8-track Studer deck, and that accounts for why this was one of the rare Beatles albums to be recorded at three different studios (Trident, Olympic, and Abbey Road). The album was also the first to be recorded and mixed entirely on a solid state sound board, giving the album's sound a noticeably different "feel" from its predecessors; Harrison later remarked that the new sound was too "harsh" for his liking. Also, the Moog synthesizer is featured on the majority of tracks, not merely as a background effect, but sometimes playing a central role, as in "Because" where it is used for the middle 8. It is also prominent on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Here Comes the Sun". The instrument was introduced to the band by Harrison after a stay in Los Angeles where he was introduced to the instrument. (The first landmark pop song to employ the Moog was "Daily Nightly" by The Monkees.) Earlier in 1969, Harrison had released Electronic Sound, which featured dissonant sounds entirely made from a Moog, on Apple's short-lived experimental label Zapple.
One of the assistant engineers working on the album was a then-unknown Alan Parsons. He went on to engineer Pink Floyd's landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon and produce many popular albums himself with The Alan Parsons Project. John Kurlander also assisted on many of the sessions, and went on to become a successful engineer and producer, most noteworthy for his success on the scores for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Album cover photograph
"At some point, the album was going to be titled Everest after the brand of cigarettes I used to smoke," recalls Geoff Emerick. The idea included a cover photo in the Himalayas but by the time the group was to take the photo they decided to call it Abbey Road and take the photo outside the studio on 8 August 1969. The cover designer was Apple Records creative Director Kosh. The cover photograph was taken by photographer Iain Macmillan. Macmillan was given only ten minutes around 11:30 that morning to take the photo. That cover photograph has since become one of the most famous and most imitated album covers in recording history. McCartney is bare-footed and out of step with the other three. The man standing on the pavement in the background is Paul Cole (1911 ? - d 13 February 2008) a US tourist unaware he had been photographed until he saw the album cover months later. The zebra crossing today remains a popular destination for Beatles fans.
The Beetle
The Volkswagen Beetle parked next to the zebra crossing belonged to one of the people living in the apartment across from the recording studio. After the album came out, the number plate was stolen repeatedly from the car. In 1986, the car was sold at an auction for $23,000 and is currently on display at the Volkswagen museum in Wolfsburg, Germany.
Imitations and parodies
In music
Many record covers have imitated the cover of Abbey Road, many using photographs shot at the same zebra crossing. Some of the best known are Red Hot Chili Peppers' The Abbey Road EP in which the band appear nude apart from tactfully placed socks, McCartney's live album Paul Is Live, Beatles parody The Rutles's Shabby Road, The Shadows's Live At Abbey Road, Booker T & the MGs' McLemore Avenue, Kanye West's Live Orchestration DVD (recorded at Abbey Road studios) and Sttellla's A.B. Rose (recorded live at the Ancienne Belgique with the band dressed in rose). The Smithereens' 1988 video "Drown In My Own Tears" from their Green Thoughts LP has a brief clip of the band in the crosswalk.
In film
In Danny Boyle's Trainspotting the four main characters walk towards a climactic drug deal processing the "wrong" way across the famous crossing. The 1998 Walt Disney movie The Parent Trap featured a brief imitation - including a freeze frame to make it obvious. The very final shot of the Spanish movie El factor Pilgrim (The Pilgrim Factor) by Alberto Rodriguez and Santi Amodeo features the four main characters crossing Abbey Road in procession. I am Sam, which features covers of Beatles songs as its soundtrack, features a scene in which several characters walk across a zebra crossing carrying pink balloons.
In television
In the opening titles of the 2006 series of Grumpy Old Men, Rick Wakeman, Tim Rice, Rory McGrath and Arthur Smith are walking across the crossing when they get run over by a speeding chav talking on his mobile while driving. In the television show The Simpsons, Homer's successful barbershop quartet The Be Sharps' second album Bigger Than Jesus included a parody of the cover with the four band members walking on water. There is an episode of The Powerpuff Girls called Meet the Beat-Alls, where four of the main villains unite as a super group of villains. At one point in the cartoon, they cross a street in Abbey Road cover art fashion. The 2003 Japanese tokusatsu series Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger features the 4 main Abarangers during the first part of the closing credits walking in a slow fashion across a street similar to Abbey Road. The comedy programme Absolutely Fabulous also used the crossing in an episode in series 5. The boyfriend of character Edina 'Eddy' Monsoon is working on a 'lost' Beatles tape in the studio at Abbey Road. Both Edina and Patsy ridicule Japanese tourists for posing on the crossing. Most recently, it was parodied by the characters of the Nicktoon Kappa Mikey during the opening and closing song of the Karaoke Episode. Just like the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, the song that parodies it is sung in both its main theme and a reprisal. The back cover of the album was parodied in the title card of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Krabby Road", and the episode's title parodied the album's title. In the Drake & Josh episode, "The Battle of Panthatar," Drake gets an autographed Abbey Road record which he gives away as a gift, but he and Josh try to retrieve it after it does not succeed in getting them into a party. An American Express commercial features a brief shot of four men crossing the road, one of them comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who is allegedly roaming London and speaking to its citizens so he can incorporate British slang into his stand-up routines (the ad opened with Jerry onstage, but no one in the London audience was getting his jokes).
A lighting display in Liverpool
Other
Bob and Tom's second comedy album, Shabbey Road, released Christmas 1987, parodied Abbey Road in both title and hand-drawn cover art-as opposed to photographed. The cover depicted a faithful re-creation of the Abbey Road cover, complete with VW bug parked askew, and traversing the crosswalk are the radio show's titular stars Bob Kevoian and Tom Griswold, along with Richard Nixon and an unknown male of short stature at the back of the line (a member of the B&T troupe, named "Hadji"). Griswold wears a white armband lettered "IBB", standing for "I Buried Bob", and Hadji wears one lettered "HSBD", or "Hadji Says Bob's Dead." This is the second of two Bob and Tom compilations to be named after or parody Beatle albums; their first album was named The White Album.)
The promotional photo of the 2004–2006 Reebok home shirt of Liverpool FC is a deliberate homage to the photo.
In the video for "Parklife" by Blur, Phil Daniels suddenly stops the car as the band walk over a zebra crossing in the style of the Beatles.
On the back cover of the textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell, third edition, the authors in alphabetical order cross Abbey Road on their way to lunch (including UCL professor Martin Raff without shoes).
The cover for Ren & Stimpy's You Eediot! album features Ren, Stimpy, Muddy Mudskipper and Mr. Horse, crossing Abbey Road in similar fashion.
In the 9 December 2007 episode of Kevin and Kell the Dewclaw family crosses the road in AR fashion to visit their neighbour Aby Eyeshine. The title of the spoof is Aby's Roadkill.
Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy is seen running across Abbey Road barefoot and exclaiming it "a dream come true" in their Images and Words: Live in Tokyo video.
Booster Gold #6 features a panel of Booster Gold getting into a time bubble with three Blue Beetles in the manner similar to the Abbey Road cover.
On a particular cover of Rolling Stone, Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa of The Simpsons play the roles of John, Ringo, Paul, and George respectively.
Immediate Music named the second album of their Themes for Orchestra and Choir collection "Abbey Road".
Cover versions
The songs on Abbey Road have been covered many times and the album itself has been covered in its entirety.
One month after Abbey Road's release, George Benson recorded a cover version of the album called The Other Side of Abbey Road. In 1970 Booker T. & the M.G.'s recorded McLemore Avenue (the location of Stax Records) which covered the Abbey Road songs and had a similar cover photo.
Additionally, several artists have covered some or all of the side B medley, including Phil Collins (for the Martin/Beatles tribute album In My Life), Dream Theater, Transatlantic, The Punkles and 70 Volt Parade.
Accolades
In 1997, Abbey Road was named the 12th greatest album of all time in a 'Music of the Millennium' poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM; it received the same ranking in a 1998 poll of Q magazine readers. In 2000, Q placed it at number 17 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2001, the TV network VH1 named it the 8th greatest album ever, and, in December 2003, it was named the 14th best album by Rolling Stone. In 2006, the album was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best albums of all time. In 2006, Abbey Road was rated as Australia's fourth favourite album on My Favourite Album, a television special done by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation aired on 3 December 2006 (it was the highest position for a Beatles Album on that list).
Track listing
All songs written and composed by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, except where noted.
Side one
# Title Lead vocals Length
1. "Come Together" Lennon 4:20
2. "Something" (Harrison) Harrison 3:03
3. "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" McCartney 3:27
4. "Oh! Darling" McCartney 3:33
5. "Octopus's Garden" (Richard Starkey) Starr 2:51
6. "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" Lennon 7:47
Side two
# Title Lead vocals Length
7. "Here Comes the Sun" (Harrison) Harrison 3:05
8. "Because" Lennon, McCartney, Harrison 2:45
9. "You Never Give Me Your Money" McCartney 4:02
10. "Sun King" Lennon 2:26
11. "Mean Mr. Mustard" Lennon 1:06
12. "Polythene Pam" Lennon 1:12
13. "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" McCartney 1:57
14. "Golden Slumbers" McCartney 1:31
15. "Carry That Weight" Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starr 1:36
16. "The End" McCartney 2:05
17. "Her Majesty" McCartney 0:23
47:23
Notes
* "Her Majesty" appears as a hidden track. Between "The End" and "Her Majesty" is 14 seconds of silence.
* One cassette tape version in the US had "Come Together" and "Here Comes the Sun" swapped so that Harrison's composition opens the album. All subsequent versions (including the CD) have restored the track listing to its original order.
* Tracks 9 through 16 are sometimes noted as one song (medley) called "The Abbey Road Medley".
* Tracks 14 through 16 are sometimes noted as one song called "The Golden Slumbers Medley".
Personnel
The Beatles
* George Harrison – lead, rhythm, acoustic and bass guitars; lead, harmony and background vocals (sometimes multitracked); Hammond organ, harmonium and Moog synthesizer; handclaps and assorted percussion.
* John Lennon – lead and rhythm guitars; six- and 12-string acoustic guitars; lead, harmony and background vocals (sometimes multitracked); electric and acoustic pianos; Hammond organ and Moog synthesizer; white noise generator and sound effects; tambourine and maracas.
* Paul McCartney – lead, rhythm, acoustic and bass guitars; fuzz bass; lead, harmony and background vocals (sometimes multitracked); electric and acoustic pianos; Hammond organ and Moog synthesizer (ribbon strip); handclaps and assorted percussion and sound effects.
* Ringo Starr – drums, percussion, timpani, anvil and handclaps; lead and background vocals.
Additional musicians
* George Martin – piano; electric harpsichord, harmonium and percussion.
* Billy Preston – Hammond organ on "Something"
Production
* "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with George Harrison)
* "Golden Slumbers", "Carry That Weight" and "The End" orchestrated and conducted by George Martin (with Paul McCartney).
* Produced by George Martin (with The Beatles).
* Recorded by Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald.
* Mixed by Geoff Emerick, Phil McDonald and George Martin (with The Beatles).
* Moog programming by Mike Vicker.
Release history
| Country | Date | Label | Format | Catalog |
| United Kingdom | 26 September 1969 | Apple | LP | PCS 7088 |
| United States | 1 October 1969 | Apple, Capitol | LP | SO 383 |
| Japan | 21 May 1983 | Toshiba-EMI | Compact Disc | CP35-3016 |
| Worldwide reissue | 10 October 1987 | Apple, Parlophone, EMI | CD | CDP 7 46446 2 |
| Japan | 11 March 1998 | Toshiba-EMI | CD | TOCP 51122 |
| Japan | 21 January 2004 | Toshiba-EMI | Remastered LP | TOJP 60142 |
Released: 26 September 1969
Recorded: 22 February 1969 – 20 August 1969, at Abbey Road Studios, Olympic Studios, and Trident Studios
Genre: Rock, art rock, blues-rock, rock and roll, hard rock
Length: 47:23
Language: English
Label: Apple/Parlophone, Capitol, and EMI
Producer: George Martin
Singles from Abbey Road
1. "Come Together"/"Something"
Released: 6 October 1969 (US)
2. "Something"/"Come Together"
Released: 31 October 1969 (UK)
Wikipedia
Sunday, September 06, 2009
The Beatles (The White Album)
The Beatles is the ninth official British album and the fifteenth American album by The Beatles, a double album released in 1968. It is more commonly known as The White Album as it has no text other than the band's name (and, on the early LP and CD releases, a serial number) on its plain white sleeve. The album was the first The Beatles undertook following the death of their manager Brian Epstein. Originally entitled A Doll's House, the title was changed when the British progressive band Family released the similarly titled Music in a Doll's House earlier that year.Composition
Most of the songs that would end up on The Beatles had been conceived during the group's visit to Rishikesh, India in the spring of 1968. There, they had undertaken a transcendental meditation course with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Although the retreat, which had required long periods of meditation, was initially conceived by the band as a spiritual respite from all worldly endeavors — a chance, in Lennon's words, to "get away from everything" — both Lennon and Paul McCartney had quickly found themselves in songwriting mode, often meeting "clandestinely in the afternoons in each other's rooms" to review the new work. "Regardless of what I was supposed to be doing," Lennon would later recall, "I did write some of my best songs there." Close to 40 new compositions had emerged in Rishikesh, a little more than half of which would be laid down in very rough form at Kinfauns, George Harrison’s home in Esher.
The Beatles left Rishikesh before the end of the course, with Ringo Starr and then McCartney departing first, and Lennon and Harrison departing together later. According to some reports, Lennon left Rishikesh because he felt personally betrayed by rumors that Maharishi had made sexual advances toward Mia Farrow, who had accompanied The Beatles on their trip. Shortly after he decided to leave, Lennon wrote a song called "Maharishi" which included the lyrics, "Maharishi/You little twat"; the song became "Sexy Sadie". According to several authors, Alexis Mardas (aka "Magic Alex") deliberately engineered these rumors because he was bent on undermining the Maharishi's influence over each Beatle. Lennon himself, in a 1980 interview, acknowledged that the Maharishi was the inspiration for the song. "I just called him 'Sexy Sadie'." In May 1968, Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison assembled at Kinfauns, and demoed 23 songs that they composed at Rishikesh.
Recording sessions
The Beatles was recorded between 30 May 1968 and 14 October 1968, largely at Abbey Road Studios, with some sessions at Trident Studios. Although productive, the sessions were reportedly undisciplined and sometimes fractious, and they took place at a time when tensions were growing within the group. Concurrent with the recording of this album, The Beatles were launching their new multimedia business corporation Apple Corps, an enterprise that proved to be a source of significant stress for the band.
The sessions for The Beatles marked the first appearance in the studio of Lennon's new girlfriend and artistic partner Yoko Ono, who would thereafter be a more or less constant presence at all Beatles sessions. Prior to Ono's appearance on the scene, the individual Beatles had been very insular during recording sessions, with influence from outsiders strictly limited. McCartney's girlfriend at the time, Francie Schwartz, was also present at some of the recording sessions.
Author Mark Lewisohn reports that The Beatles held their first and only 24-hour recording/producing session near the end of the creation of The Beatles, during which occurred the final mixing and sequencing for the album. The session was attended by Lennon, McCartney, and producer George Martin.
Division and discord in the studio
Despite the album's official title, which emphasized group identity, studio efforts on The Beatles captured the work of four increasingly individualized artists who frequently found themselves at odds. The band's work pattern changed dramatically with this project, and by most accounts the extraordinary synergy of The Beatles' previous studio sessions was harder to come by during this period. Sometimes McCartney would record in one studio for prolonged periods of time, while Lennon would record in another, each man using different engineers. At one point in the sessions, George Martin, whose authority over the band in the studio had waned, spontaneously left to go on holiday, leaving Chris Thomas in charge of producing. During one of these sessions, while recording "Helter Skelter," Harrison reportedly ran around the studio while holding a flaming ashtray above his head.
Long after the recording of The Beatles was complete, Martin mentioned in interviews that his working relationship with The Beatles changed during this period, and that many of the band's efforts seemed unfocused, often yielding prolonged jam sessions that sounded uninspired. On 16 July recording engineer Geoff Emerick, who had worked with the group since Revolver, announced he was no longer willing to work with the group.
The sudden departures were not limited to EMI personnel. On 22 August, Starr abruptly left the studio, explaining later that he felt his role was minimized compared to that of the other members, and that he was tired of waiting through the long and contentious recording sessions. Lennon, McCartney and Harrison pleaded with Starr to return, and after two weeks he did. According to Mark Lewisohn's book The Complete Beatles Chronicle, McCartney played drums on "Back in the U.S.S.R." However, according to Lewisohn, in the case of "Dear Prudence" the three remaining Beatles each took a shot at bass and drums, with the result that those parts may be composite tracks played by Lennon, McCartney and/or Harrison. As of 2009, the actual musician/instrument lineup is still undetermined. Upon Starr's return, he found his drum kit decorated with red, white and blue flowers, a welcome-back gesture from Harrison. The reconciliation was, however, only temporary, and Starr's exit served as a precursor of future "months and years of misery," in Starr's words. Indeed, after The Beatles was completed, both Harrison and Lennon would stage similar unpublicized departures from the band. McCartney, whose public departure in 1970 would mark the formal end of the band's ensemble, described the sessions for The Beatles as a turning point for the group. Up to this point, he observed, "the world was a problem, but we weren't. You know, that was the best thing about The Beatles, until we started to break up, like during the White Album and stuff. Even the studio got a bit tense then."
Other musicians
Harrison asked Eric Clapton to play lead guitar on Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Harrison soon reciprocated by collaborating on the song "Badge" for Cream's last album Goodbye. Harrison explains in The Beatles Anthology that Clapton's presence temporarily alleviated the studio tension and that all band members were on their best behavior during his time with the band in the studio.
Clapton was not the only outside musician to sit in on the sessions. Nicky Hopkins provided electric piano for the single cut of "Revolution" (recorded during these sessions) as well as acoustic piano for a few others; several horns were also recorded on the album version of "Revolution." "Savoy Truffle" also features the horn section. Jack Fallon, a bluegrass fiddler was recruited for "Don't Pass Me By," and a team of orchestral players and soothing background singers ended up being important contributors to "Good Night."
Technical advances
The sessions for The Beatles were notable for the band's formal transition from 4-track to 8-track recording. As work on this album began, Abbey Road Studios possessed, but had yet to install, an 8-track machine that had supposedly been sitting in a storage room for months. This was in accordance with EMI's policy of testing and customizing new gear, sometimes for months, before putting it into use in the studios. The Beatles recorded "Hey Jude" and "Dear Prudence" at Trident Studios in central London, which had an 8-track recorder. When they found out about EMI's 8-track recorder they insisted on using it, and engineers Ken Scott and Dave Harries took the machine (without authorization from the studio chiefs) into the Number 2 recording studio for the group to use.
Songs
Although most of the songs on any given Beatles album are usually credited to the Lennon/McCartney songwriting team, that description is often misleading, and rarely more so than on The Beatles. With this album, each of the four band members began to showcase the range and depth of his individual songwriting talents, and to display styles that would be carried over to his eventual solo career. Indeed, some songs that the individual Beatles were working on during this period eventually were released on solo albums (Lennon's "Look at Me" and "Child of Nature," eventually reworked as "Jealous Guy"; McCartney's "Junk" and "Teddy Boy"; and Harrison's "Not Guilty" and "Circles").
Many of the songs on the album display experimentation with unlikely musical genres, borrowing directly from such sources as 1930s dance-hall music (in "Honey Pie"), classical chamber music (in "Piggies"), the avant-garde sensibilities of Yoko Ono and John Cage (in "Revolution 9"), and the sentimentality of elevator music (in "Good Night"). Such diversity was quite unprecedented in global pop music in 1968, and the album's sprawling approach provoked (and continues to provoke) both praise and criticism from observers. "Revolution 9," in particular, a densely layered eight-minute-and-thirteen-second sound collage, has attracted bewilderment and disapproval from both fans and music critics over the years.
The only western instrument available to the group during their Indian visit was the acoustic guitar, and thus most of the songs on The Beatles were written and first performed on that instrument. Some of these songs remained acoustic on The Beatles (notably "Rocky Raccoon," "Julia," "Blackbird" and "Mother Nature's Son") and were recorded in the studio either solo, or by only part of the group.
Individual compositions
Lennon's contributions to the album are generally more hard-edged lyrically than his previous output, a trend which carried over to his solo career. Examples include his pleas for death on "Yer Blues," his parodic "Glass Onion," which mocks fans who read too much into The Beatles' lyrics, and what may be references to drug addiction in "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" ("I need a fix..."). Lennon's intensely personal "Julia" may be seen as foreshadowing his later song "Mother" from his first solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band; the political "Revolution 1" begins a pattern of overtly political songs like "Give Peace a Chance" and "John Sinclair"; "Revolution 9" reflects extensive contribution and influence from Ono, another feature of much of Lennon's solo output. Lennon's songs on The Beatles embrace a wide array of styles, including blues ("Yer Blues"), acoustic ballads ("Julia" and "Cry Baby Cry"), and rock ("Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey"). Lennon would later describe his contributions to the The Beatles as among his favorite songs recorded with The Beatles.
McCartney's songs for the album include pop ballads ("I Will"), the proto-heavy metal "Helter Skelter," a Beach Boys homage ("Back in the U.S.S.R."), the up-beat "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," and a music-hall foxtrot ("Honey Pie") among others. The soothing, stripped-down "I Will" foreshadowed themes of McCartney's later solo career.
Harrison's sparse ballad "Long, Long, Long" is stylistically quite similar to much of his earlier solo output. His songs on The Beatles also includes the lyrically sophisticated "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," a chronicle of gastronomic excess and dental trauma in "Savoy Truffle," and a class-driven piece of social commentary in "Piggies."
Even Starr was given leave to include the first song composed entirely by himself on a Beatles album, the country number "Don't Pass Me By."
The album is the first by the group not to feature any genuine Lennon-McCartney collaborations; in fact, there would only be one more co-write from the pair in the remainder of the band's career ("I've Got a Feeling" from the Let It Be album). This new lack of co-operation and focus is reflected in several fragmented, incomplete song ideas that were recorded and released on the album ("Why Don't We Do It in the Road?", "Wild Honey Pie," and an officially untitled McCartney snippet at the end of "Cry Baby Cry" often referred to as "Can You Take Me Back"). On previous albums, such undertakings might have been either abandoned or collaboratively developed before release, but here again, The Beatles represented a change of course for the band. The trend continued for the rest of the band's recording career: such song fragments were presented by joining them together as a long suite of songs on side two of Abbey Road.
Self-reflection and change
Many of the songs are personal and self-referencing; for example, "Dear Prudence" was written about actress Mia Farrow's sister, Prudence, who attended the transcendental meditation course with The Beatles in Rishikesh. Often she stayed in her room, engaged in Transcendental Meditation. "Julia" was the name of Lennon's beloved but frequently absent mother, who died during his youth. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" expresses concern over being "bought and sold," a theme in later songs about Harrison himself, such as "Handle with Care," recorded with The Traveling Wilburys. "Glass Onion" is a Beatles song about other Beatles songs.
Some of the songs on The Beatles mark important changes in the band's recording style. Previously, no female voices were to be heard on a Beatles album, but Yoko Ono made her first vocal appearance on this record, adding backing vocals in "Birthday" (along with Pattie Harrison); she also sang backing vocals and a solo line on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" and, as noted earlier, was a strong influence on Lennon's musique concrète piece, "Revolution 9," an avant-garde sound collage that McCartney initially did not want to include on the album.
Compositions not included
A number of songs were recorded in demo form for possible inclusion but were not incorporated as part of the album. These included "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam" (both of which would be used for the medley on Abbey Road); "Child of Nature" (recorded with drastically different lyrics as "Jealous Guy" for Lennon's Imagine), "Jubilee" (later retitled "Junk" and released on McCartney's first solo LP); "Etcetera" (a McCartney composition that remains unreleased); "Circles" (which Harrison would return to fourteen years later on his 1982 album Gone Troppo); "The Long and Winding Road" (completed in 1969 for the Let It Be LP); "Something" (which ended up on Abbey Road); and "Sour Milk Sea" (which Harrison gave to friend and Apple artist Jackie Lomax for his first LP, Is This What You Want). Other songs recorded for, but ultimately left off The Beatles received significant exposure via bootlegs, notably Harrison's "Circles" and "Not Guilty" (which he would eventually re-record as solo tracks and release on his 1982 album, Gone Troppo and 1979 self-titled album, George Harrison respectively) and Lennon's manic "What's the New Mary Jane."
Editing concerns, and release
The Beatles was the first Beatles' album released by Apple Records, as well as their only original double album. Producer George Martin has said that he was against the idea of a double album at the time and suggested to the group that they reduce the number of songs in order to form a single album featuring their stronger work, but that the band decided against this. Interviewed for the Beatles Anthology, Starr said he now felt it should have been released as two separate albums. Harrison felt on reflection that some of the tracks could have been released as B-sides, but "there was a lot of ego in that band." He also supported the idea of the double album, to clear out the backlog of songs the group had at the time. McCartney, by contrast, said it was fine as it was and that its wide variety of songs was a major part of the album's appeal.
The Beatles (1968) shares the same November 22 release date as The Beatles' second album, With the Beatles (1963).
Singles
Although "Hey Jude" was not intended to be included on any LP release, it was recorded during the White Album sessions and was released as a stand-alone single before the release of The Beatles. "Hey Jude"'s B-side, "Revolution," was an alternate version of the album's "Revolution 1." Lennon had wanted the original version of "Revolution" to be released as a single, but the other three Beatles objected on the grounds that it was too slow. A new, faster version, with heavily distorted guitar and a high-energy keyboard solo from Nicky Hopkins was recorded, and was relegated to the flip side of "Hey Jude." The resulting release — "Hey Jude" on side A and "Revolution" on side B — emerged as the first release on the Beatles' new Apple Records label. It went on to become the best selling of all Beatles' singles in the US.
Four tracks from the White Album were released on two American and one British single almost eight years after the original album was released. In the summer 1976, to promote the compilation album, Rock 'n' Roll Music, EMI's Parlophone label in the UK and its Capitol label in the US each released a single that contained A and B-sides that appeared on the compilation album. In Britain, Parlophone issued "Back in the U.S.S.R." as the single (its B-side was "Twist and Shout," which originally appeared on the group's first album, Please Please Me). In America, Capitol released "Got to Get You Into My Life" (from the group's 1966 album, Revolver) on the A-side, but selected "Helter Skelter" to serve as the flip side. "Helter Skelter" was likely chosen for the B-side because a cover version of the song had been prominently featured in a made-for-tv movie about the Charles Manson murders that had aired on CBS shortly before the release of Rock 'n' Roll Music. The singles were successful, with "Got to Get You into My Life" hitting No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US and "Back in the U.S.S.R." hitting No. 18 on the New Musical Express chart in Britain. Both records also helped sell Rock 'n' Roll Music, which hit No. 2 in the United States and No. 10 in the UK. With the success of the singles from the compilation album, Capitol followed-up "Got To Get You Into My Life" with the release of another single in November of 1976. Instead of taking two more tracks from Rock 'n' Roll Music, however, Capitol selected two White Album tracks—"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" as the A-Side, and "Julia" as the B-Side. The "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" single was sold in an individually-numbered white picture sleeve that mimicked the design of the original album. "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" did not duplicate the success of its predecessor, however, as it failed to make the Top Forty, stalling out at No. 49 on Billboard.
Mono version
The Beatles was the last Beatles album to be released with a unique, alternate mono mix, albeit one issued only in the UK. Twenty-eight of the album's 30 tracks ("Revolution 1" and "Revolution 9" being the only exceptions) exist in official alternate mono mixes.
Beatles' albums after The Beatles (except Yellow Submarine in the UK) occasionally had mono pressings in certain countries (such as Brazil), but these editions—Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and Let It Be—were in each case mono fold-downs from the regular stereo mixes.
In the U.S., mono records were already being phased out; the U.S. release of The Beatles was the first Beatles LP to be issued in the U.S. in stereo only.
Sleeve
The album's sleeve was designed by Richard Hamilton, a notable pop artist who had organized a Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery the previous year. Hamilton's design was in stark contrast to Peter Blake's vivid cover art for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and consisted of a plain white sleeve. The band's name was discreetly embossed slightly below the middle of the album's right side, and the cover also featured a unique stamped serial number, "to create," in Hamilton's words, "the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like five million copies." Indeed, the artist intended the cover to resemble the "look" of conceptual art, an emerging movement in contemporary art at the time. Later vinyl record releases in the U.S. showed the title in gray printed (rather than embossed) letters. Early copies on compact disc were also numbered. Later CD releases rendered the album's title in black or gray. The 30th anniversary CD release was done to look like the original album sleeve, with an embossed title and serial number, including a small reproduction of the poster and pictures.
The album's inside packaging included a poster, the lyrics to the songs, and a set of photographs taken by Richard Avedon during the autumn of 1968 that have themselves become iconic. This is the only sleeve of a Beatles studio album not to show the members of the band on the front.
Tape versions of the album did not feature a white cover. Instead, cassette, reel-to-reel, and 8-track versions (first issued on two cartridges in early 1969) contained cover artwork that featured a black and white (with no gray) version of the four Avedon photographs. In both the cassette and 8-track versions of the album, the two tapes were sold in a black slip-cover box that bore the title, "The BEATLES" in gold lettering along the front. This departure from the LP's design not only made it difficult for less-informed fans to identify the tape in record stores, but it also led some fans at the time to jokingly refer to the 8-track or cassette not as the "white album" but as the "black tape." In 1988, Capitol/EMI re-issued the 2-cassette version of the album, still with the same cover artwork as the original cassettes — but without the black slip-cover box.
Critical reception and legacy
The Beatles were at the peak of their global influence and visibility in late 1968. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released the previous year, had enjoyed a combination of commercial success, critical acclaim, and immense cultural influence that had previously seemed inconceivable for a pop release. Time, for instance, had written in 1967 that Pepper constituted a "historic departure in the progress of music — any music," while Timothy Leary, in a widely quoted assessment of the same period, declared that the band were prototypes of "evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with mysterious powers to create a new human species." After creating an album that had delivered such critical, commercial, and generational shockwaves, The Beatles faced the inevitable question of what they could possibly do to top it. The next full-length album, whatever it was, was destined to draw considerable scrutiny. The intervening release of Magical Mystery Tour notwithstanding (released as a double-EP package in the UK), The Beatles represented the group's first major musical statement since Sgt. Pepper, and thus was a highly anticipated event for both the mainstream press and the youth-oriented counterculture movement with which the band had by this time become strongly associated. Expectations, to say the least, were high. The reviews were mixed.
* Tony Palmer, in The Observer, wrote shortly after the album's release: "If there is still any doubt that Lennon and McCartney are the greatest songwriters since Schubert, then . . . [the album The Beatles] . . . should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making. . . ."
* Richard Goldstein, writing in The New York Times on December 8, 1968, described the album as a "major success."
* Another review in The New York Times, this one by Nik Cohn, considered the album "boring beyond belief" and described "more than half the songs" as "profound mediocrities."
* Alan Smith, in an NME review entitled "The Brilliant, the Bad, and the Ugly," derided "Revolution #9" as a "pretentious" example of "idiot immaturity" and, in the following sentence, assigned the benediction "God Bless You, Beatles!" to "most of the rest" of the album.
Smith's review established a pattern that has endured for much of the critical assessment that followed. Many of the reviews since 1968 — and The Beatles surely ranks among the most-reviewed releases in rock history — have tempered rapturous enthusiasm with a consistent note of criticism about the album's seemingly undisciplined structure. Unlike such albums as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver, The Beatles is a release that, four decades on, tends to provoke heated discussions of such topics as continuity, style, and integrity.
* The New Rolling Stone Album Guide praises the album but maintains that it has "loads of self-indulgent filler," identifying "Revolution #9" in particular as "justly maligned," and suggests that listeners in the CD era, who can program digital players to skip over unwanted tracks, may have an advantage over the album's original audience.
Some contemporary critics say the album's inclusion of supposedly extraneous material is a part of its appeal. The allmusic.com review contends that:
* "Each song on the sprawling double album The Beatles is an entity to itself, as the band touches on anything and everything they can. This makes for a frustratingly scattershot record or a singularly gripping musical experience, depending on your view, but what makes the White Album interesting is its mess."
One important current trend in critical assessments of the album is to draw parallels between the band's disintegrating ensemble and the chaotic events of the tumultuous year in which The Beatles was created, 1968. Along these lines, Slant Magazine observed that:
* "(The album) reveals the popping seams of a band that had the pressure of an entire fissuring generational/political gap on its back. Maybe it's because it shows The Beatles at the point where even their music couldn't hide the underlying tensions between John, Paul, George, and Ringo, or maybe because it was (coincidentally?) released at the tail end of a year anyone could agree was the embittered honeymoon's end for the Love Generation, the year when, to borrow from a famous Yeats poem, the center decidedly could not hold ... for whatever reason, The Beatles is still one of the few albums by the Fab Four that resists reflexive canonization, which, along with society's continued fragmentation, keeps the album fresh and surprising."
In 1997, The Beatles was named the 10th greatest album of all time in a 'Music of the Millennium' poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 1998, Q magazine readers placed it at number 17, while in 2000 the same magazine placed it at number 7 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever.
In 2001, the TV network VH1 named it as the 11th greatest album ever.
It was ranked number 10 in Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time in 2003.
In 2006, the album was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best albums of all time.
On the 40th anniversary of the album's release the Vatican issued an unusual review of the album. The official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, published a lengthy article which declared that "Forty years later, this album remains a type of magical musical anthology: 30 songs you can go through and listen to at will, certain of finding some pearls that even today remain unparalleled." Forgiving John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" remark, the paper called the White Album the "creative summit" of the Beatles' career, comparing it favorably to contemporary music and taking note of the now antiquated equipment used, concluding that "a listening experience like that offered by the Beatles is truly rare."
Cultural responses
Ian MacDonald, in his book Revolution in the Head, argues that The Beatles was the album in which the band's cryptic messages to its fan base became not merely vague but intentionally and perhaps dangerously open-ended, citing oblique passages in songs like "Glass Onion" (e.g., "the walrus was Paul") and "Piggies" ("what they need's a damn good whacking"). These pronouncements, and many others on the album, came to attract extraordinary popular interest at a time when more of the world's youth were using drugs recreationally and looking for spiritual, political, and strategic advice from The Beatles. Steve Turner, too, in his book A Hard Day's Write, maintains that, with this album, "The Beatles had perhaps laid themselves open to misinterpretation by mixing up the languages of poetry and nonsense." Bob Dylan's songs had been similarly mined for hidden meanings, but the massive countercultural analysis of The Beatles surpassed anything that had gone before.
Even Lennon's seemingly direct engagement with the tumultuous political issues of 1968 in "Revolution 1" carried a nuanced obliqueness, and ended up sending messages the author may not have intended. In the album's version of the song, Lennon advises those who "talk about destruction" to "count me out." As McDonald notes, however, Lennon then follows the sung word "out" with the spoken word "in." At the time of the album's release — which followed, chronologically, the up-tempo single version of the song, "Revolution," in which Lennon definitely wanted to be counted "out" — that single word "in" was taken by many on the radical left as Lennon's acknowledgment, after considered thought, that violence in the pursuit of political aims was indeed justified in some cases. At a time of increasing unrest in the streets and campuses of Paris and Berkeley, the album's lyrics seemed to many to mark a reversal of Lennon's position on the question, which was hotly debated during this period.
The search for hidden meanings within the songs reached its low point when cult leader Charles Manson used the record, and generous helpings of hallucinogens, to persuade members of his "family" that the album was in fact an apocalyptic message predicting a prolonged race war and justifying the murder of wealthy people. The album's association with a high-profile mass murder was one of many factors that helped to deepen the accelerating divide between those who were profoundly skeptical of the "youth culture" movement that had unfolded in the middle and late 1960s in the UK, the United States and elsewhere, and those who admired the openness and spontaneity of that movement. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote a best-selling book about the Manson "family" that explicated, among other things, the cult's fixation with identifying hidden messages within The Beatles; Bugliosi's book was entitled Helter Skelter, the term Manson took from the album's song of that name and construed as the conflict he thought impending.
Cultural responses to the album persisted for decades, and even offer a glimpse into the process of collective myth-making. In October 1969, a Detroit radio program began to promote theories based on "clues" supposedly left on The Beatles and other Beatles albums that Paul McCartney had died and been replaced by a lookalike. The ensuing hunt for "clues" to a "cover-up" The Beatles presumably wanted to suppress (and simultaneously publicize) became one of the classic examples of the development and persistence of urban legends.
Sales
The album was a major commercial success, spending a total of eight weeks at #1 in the UK (the first week being that of December 7, 1968), and nine weeks at #1 in the United States (the first week being that of December 28, 1968). Total US sales are estimated at over 9.5 million copies (19 million units).
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, The Beatles is The Beatles' best-selling album at 19-times platinum and the tenth-best-selling album of all time in the United States.
Re-issues
Two re-issues in 1978 (one by Capitol Records, the other by Parlophone) saw the album pressed on white vinyl, completing the look of the "white" album. In 1985, EMI Electrola released a DMM (direct metal mastered) white vinyl pressing of the album in Germany, which was imported to the United States in large numbers. Another popular white vinyl pressing was manufactured in France. The 1978 Parlophone white vinyl export pressing and the German DMM pressing are widely considered the best-sounding versions of the album. This is due to the use of the famed Neumann lathe on the 1978 export pressing and the use of the DMM process on the 1985 pressing.
On January 7, 1982, Mobile Fidelty Sound Lab released the album in a non-embossed unnumbered version of The White Album cover with the ORIGINAL MASTER RECORDING banner at the top. Neither the poster nor portraits were included. The labels to the discs are white with primarily black text and the Capitol dome logo at three o'clock. The MFSL discs were made with Super Vinyl, a heavy and hard compound that that provides an extraordinary quiet playing surface. Although MFSL leased the album from Capitol and used the company's sub-master, the discs still sound superior to the standard British and American pressings. The discs were stored in "rice paper" static-free, dust-free inner sleeves enclosed in an off-white gatefold reinforced stiff board that fit into the custom fabricated album jacket.
In 1998, a 30th anniversary reissue of the album was released on a two-disc compact disc version in the United Kingdom. The packaging of this release is virtually identical to its vinyl counterpart. It has the same pure white gatefold cover, complete with the title "The BEATLES" in a slightly raised, embossed graphic at a slight angle. It also included the now-classic sequentially numbered serial number on the front of this cover, thus making this one a real limited edition. The interior of this cover features the song titles on the left-hand side, and the four black-and-white photos of the group members on the right. This version of the cover even accurately mimics the original British vinyl pressing from 1968, with the openings for the discs at the top rather than the sides. There are miniatures of the four full-color glossy portrait photos included, as well as an exact replica of the poster with the photo collage on one side, and the album's complete song lyrics on the opposite side. The CDs are housed in black sleeves, which were also used for the original British album. This commemorative double CD album is housed in a clear plastic slipcase.
Influences, parodies and tributes
The album's cover, though stark and minimalistic, has been highly influential. Goth band The Damned released The Black Album in 1980, and is considered the first album to draw influence from the cover, as well as the first band to use the term "Black Album." The 1984 Rob Reiner "rockumentary" This Is Spinal Tap also pays homage with their own "Black Album," which is juxtaposed to the original by A&R staff Bobbi Fleckman, who notes in a debate about appropriate packaging material: "What about the White album? There's was nothing on that Goddamned cover." The band are generally less enthusiastic, referring to it variously as "a black mirror," "none more black" and "death." The self-titled debut album of They Might Be Giants is commonly referred to as "The Pink Album" due to the amount of the color pink on the cover. Comedian Dennis Miller released a stand-up comedy recording in October 1988 titled "The Off-White Album" which mimicked the design of The Beatles. In the 1990s, both Prince and Metallica released self-titled albums with their names printed against mostly plain black covers, and are both informally referred to as "The Black Album." In 2003, rapper Jay-Z released an album officially called The Black Album. DJ Danger Mouse produced the mash-up The Grey Album by combining vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album with samples from The Beatles. Two compilations of Beatles' material, released in 1973 as 1962–1966 and 1967–1970, are often referred to as "The Red Album" and "The Blue Album" respectively, in reference to their color scheme. The Bob and Tom Show named their first collection of material as The White Cassette (later renamed The White Album when released on CD). All three of Weezer's self-titled albums borrow from this idea as well and fans refer to them respectively as "The Blue Album" (1994), "The Green Album" (2001), and "The Red Album" (2008). 311's self-titled release from 1995 is often referred to as "The Blue Album," and The Dells' 1973 self-titled album is often known as "The Brown Album," as is The Band's 1969 self-titled album. Australian comedy duo Martin/Molloy also released a CD called The Brown Album in 1995, while American rock band Primus did likewise in 1997. The animated television series The Simpsons and SpongeBob Squarepants both used the title The Yellow Album for their spin-off CDs, with the latter also parodying the plain cover. The British electronica duo Orbital released their first two albums without definite names, which in time became known as The Green Album and The Brown Album, while their final release is known as The Blue Album. The satirical Australian alternative rock band TISM released The White Albun [sic] in 2004. The band Phish covered the album in its entirety for their second set of their three set Halloween show in 1994.
Track listing
All songs written and composed by Lennon/McCartney, except where noted.
Side one
# Title lead vocals Length
1. "Back in the U.S.S.R." McCartney 2:43
2. "Dear Prudence" Lennon 3:56
3. "Glass Onion" Lennon 2:17
4. "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" McCartney 3:08
5. "Wild Honey Pie" McCartney 0:52
6. "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" Lennon 3:14
7. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (George Harrison) Harrison 4:45
8. "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" Lennon 2:43
Side two
# Title lead vocals Length
1. "Martha My Dear" McCartney 2:28
2. "I'm So Tired" Lennon 2:03
3. "Blackbird" McCartney 2:18
4. "Piggies" (Harrison) Harrison 2:04
5. "Rocky Raccoon" McCartney 3:32
6. "Don't Pass Me By" (Richard Starkey) Starr 3:50
7. "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" McCartney 1:41
8. "I Will" McCartney 1:46
9. "Julia" Lennon 2:54
Side three
# Title lead vocals Length
1. "Birthday" McCartney with Lennon 2:42
2. "Yer Blues" Lennon 4:01
3. "Mother Nature's Son" McCartney 2:48
4. "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" Lennon 2:24
5. "Sexy Sadie" Lennon 3:15
6. "Helter Skelter" McCartney 4:29
7. "Long, Long, Long" (Harrison) Harrison 3:04
Side four
# Title lead vocals Length
1. "Revolution 1" Lennon 4:15
2. "Honey Pie" McCartney 2:41
3. "Savoy Truffle" (Harrison) Harrison 2:54
4. "Cry Baby Cry" Lennon with McCartney 3:01
5. "Revolution 9" N/A 8:22
6. "Good Night" Starr 3:11
The arrangement of the songs on the The Beatles follows some patterns and symmetry. For example, "Wild Honey Pie" is the fifth song from the beginning of the album and "Honey Pie" is the fifth song from the end. Also, three of the four songs containing animal names in their titles ("Blackbird", "Piggies", and "Rocky Raccoon") are grouped together. "Savoy Truffle," the fourth song from the end of the album, contains a reference to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," the fourth song from the beginning. In addition, the four songs composed by Harrison are distributed with one on each of the four sides.
Personnel
The Beatles
* George Harrison – lead, harmony and background vocals; lead and rhythm (electric and acoustic) guitars, four- and six-string bass guitar; Hammond organ; drums and assorted percussion (tambourine, hand-shake bell, handclaps and vocal percussion) and sound effects
* John Lennon – lead, harmony and background vocals; lead and rhythm (electric and acoustic) guitars, 4 and 6-string bass guitar; pianos (electric and acoustic), Hammond organ, harmonium, mellotron; drums and assorted percussion (tambourine, maracas, thumping on the back of an acoustic guitar, handclaps and vocal percussion); harmonica, saxophone and whistling; tapes, tape loops and sound effects (electronic and home-made)
* Paul McCartney – lead, harmony and background vocals; lead and rhythm (electric and acoustic) guitars, 4 and 6-string bass guitar; pianos (electric and acoustic), Hammond organ, drums, timpani and assorted percussion (tambourine, handclaps and vocal percussion; drums on "Back in the U.S.S.R." and "Dear Prudence"); recorder, flugelhorn and sound effects
* Ringo Starr – drums and assorted percussion (tambourine, bongos, cymbals, maracas, vocal percussion); lead vocals, electric piano and sleigh bell (on "Don't Pass Me By") , lead vocals (on "Don't Pass Me By" and "Good Night") and backing vocals ("The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill")
Guests musicians
* Eric Clapton – lead guitar on "While my Guitar Gently Weeps"
* Mal Evans – backing vocals and handclaps on "Dear Prudence","The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" and "Birthday", saxophone and sound effects on "Helter Skelter"
* Jack Fallon – violin on "Don't Pass Me By"
* Pattie Harrison – backing vocals on "Birthday"
* Jackie Lomax – backing vocals and handclaps on "Dear Prudence"
* Jimmy Scott – congas on "Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da"
* Maureen Starkey – backing vocals on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill"
* Yoko Ono – backing vocals and handclaps on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" and tapes and sound effects on "Revolution 9", backing vocals on "Birthday"
Session musicians
* Ted Barker – trombone on "Martha My Dear"
* Leon Calvert – trumpet and flugelhorn on "Martha My Dear"
* Henry Datyner, Eric Bowie, Norman Lederman, Ronald Thomas (all on "Glass Onion"), Bernard Miller, Dennis McConnell, Lou Soufier and Les Maddox (all on "Martha My Dear") – violins
* Reginald Kilby (on "Glass Onion" and "Martha My Dear"), Eldon Fox (on "Glass Onion") and Frederick Alexander (on "Martha My Dear") – cellos
* Harry Klein – clarinet on "Honey Pie", saxophone on "Savoy Truffle"
* Alf Reece – tuba on "Martha My Dear"
* The Mike Sammes Singers – backing vocals on "Good Night"
* Stanley Reynolds and Ronnie Hughes – trumpet (all on "Martha My Dear")
* Tony Tunstall – French horn on "Martha My Dear"
* John Underwood, Keith Cummings (all on "Glass Onion"), Leo Birnbaum and Henry Myerscough (all on "Martha My Dear") – violas
Production team
* Geoff Emerick – engineer, vocal on "Revolution #1" ("Take 2")
* George Martin – record producer and mixer; string, brass, clarinet, orchestral arrangements and conducting; piano on "Rocky Raccoon"
* Ken Scott – engineer and mixer
* Chris Thomas – producer; mellotron on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill," harpsichord on "Piggies" and piano on "Long, Long, Long"
Released: 22 November 1968
Recorded: 30 May – 14 October 1968, Abbey Road Studios and Trident Studios, London, United Kingdom
Genre: Rock
Length: 93:35
Language: English
Label: Apple, Parlophone, EMI
Producer: George Martin
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