The website for the book Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles' Solo Careers
Beatles expert extraordinaire Robert Rodriguez had me on his super podcast Something About The Beatles to talk about the ex-Beatles during the era of my new book 1973: Rock at the Crossroads. Against a backdrop of AM vs. FM – 60s giants vs. emerging upstarts – mainstream vs. underground, the four issued five albums of all new material, all of which made the Top Ten (while three scored US number one hit singles, two of them back-to-back).
It’s episode 187 at https://somethingaboutthebeatles.com/
The solo Beatles appear quite a bit in the book — as it was the year of Band on the Run, Mind Games, Living in the Material World, and Ringo.
Here’s a link to a review of the book from NPR:
At www.facebook.com/1973book I’ve got stories, videos and playlists. And please feel free to post your own!
The Pandora podcast can be found at http://bit.ly/1973AGJ
You can order it at Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, and many other places listed here: http://bit.ly/the1973book
1973: the year rock peaked, began to die, and was reborn.
It was the last blockbuster year where all the ‘60s giants released classics at the same time: the former Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, the Who, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Neil Young, Elvis.
Five mid-level veterans shot to the front of the pack: Pink Floyd, Elton John, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Marley.
An amazing crop of new superstars released their debut albums: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Queen, Aerosmith, the New York Dolls, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Tom Waits.
But when radio programmers created the Album Oriented Rock format for FM radio, the music began to homogenize, and whose who weren’t mainstream white rockers began to get squeezed out.
Under the radar, however, new movements started percolating that would eventually rise up to rejuvenate popular music: punk, disco, hip hop, reggae, techno, and outlaw country.
Thanks!
Andrew
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In June 1973 Yoko Ono told Lennon she wanted a separation right before the sessions for the Mind Games album began began. Lennon didn’t want to believe they were through, and many Mind Games songs were tributes and apologies to Ono: “Aisumasen (I’m Sorry),” “You Are Here,” and the best of them, “Out the Blue.”
In one of his finest arranging jobs, he keeps the song continually interesting through the gradual introduction of each element: first just guitar, then piano/steel guitar/bass/and drums, then Beatles-esque backing harmonies. His impassioned vocal becomes a touch rawer, then leads into a fiery piano solo. With each piece making its own entrance, the listener can appreciate the new color it adds to the whole more clearly than if they had all been playing together right from the beginning.
Lennon fiercely pins his survival on Ono, singing that he was born just to get to her. A reformed chauvinist, he thanks both the Lord and Lady that he survived long enough to marry her. He sings that she came to him like a UFO out of the blue and cast out the blue that had been depressing him with the romance that rocked their world. A UFO is an apt metaphor, for it’s hard to think of any other woman who could have been more surprising to find on Lennon’s arm than Ono back in 1968. One has to give him points for originality. Lennon himself was an alien to much of the conventional world, so naturally he adored someone who had a similar power to confound the small-minded.
Lennon uses all his power to express how much Ono means to him to sway her to stay. The song comes close to being a standard that could serve as the traditional first dance in a wedding, though Lennon’s intensity and offbeat lyrics are too much for that context.
Ono still said it was over and thus Lennon headed out to Los Angeles for the epic bender that was his Lost Weekend. In the cover he designed for Mind Games, a very small Lennon walks away from a mountain that is Ono’s profile, as if she’s lying in a sarcophagus. But in 1975 Ono would take him back.
When McCartney and his wife Linda were on vacation in Jamaica in 1973, they visited the set of the feature film Papillon starring Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen. Hoffman invited the couple over to dinner and asked McCartney how he wrote songs. When McCartney replied that he just made them up, Hoffman produced the April 23 issue of Time with an article about “Pablo Picasso’s Last Days and Final Journey” and challenged him to write a song about that. The piece reported that Picasso had told his friends, “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink anymore,” then went to bed and died in his sleep. McCartney started strumming a guitar and quickly made a chorus out of the quote.
“He’s doing it! He’s doing it!” Hoffman cried. He later said that the experience was “right under childbirth in terms of great events of my life.”
Later that year, Wings flew to Nigeria to record Band on the Run, by which time McCartney had fleshed out a few more lines. The painter wakes in the middle of the night and sings that he’s waiting. Either he’s waiting for death, or he’s already died and waiting for his wife on the other side to join him. Recently, McCartney had suffered the near-death experience of a bronchial spasm due to smoking and was told by his doctor to cut back on cigarettes, so perhaps that helped him relate to Picasso’s words.
Cream’s drummer Ginger Baker had a studio in a Lagos suburb called Ikeja and was pushing for McCartney to do the whole album there. McCartney didn’t want to but agreed to do “Picasso’s Last Words” at Baker’s place. Baker and some additional people from the studio filled some cans with gravel and shook them for percussion.
With his technique called cubism, Picasso would paint an object by breaking it up and showing different viewpoints of the object randomly recombined on the same plane, transforming something representational into something abstract. As quoted in Paul Gambaccini’s Paul McCartney: In His Own Words, McCartney said, “We started off doing [the song] straight. Then we thought, Picasso was kind of far out in his pictures, he’d done all these different kinds of things, fragmented, cubism, and the whole bit. I thought it would be nice to get a track a bit like that, put it through different moods, cut it up, edit it, mess around with it—like he used to do with his pictures. You see the old films of him painting, he paints it once and if he doesn’t like it he paints it again, right on top of it, and by about twenty-five times he’s got this picture … We were just making it up as we went along. We didn’t have any big concept of it in mind at all. I just thought, we’ll mess it up, keep messing it up until it sounds good, like Picasso did, with the instinctive knowledge you’ve got.”
Along with a drunken chorus singing “Drink to Me,” McCartney mixed tempo changes with echoes of other songs from the Band on the Run album — the “Jet” refrain and the “Ho Hey Ho” bit from “Mrs. Vandebilt.” A Frenchman from a tourist service offers to send free travel guides. The highlight of the collage is the “Sound of Philadelphia”/proto-disco string arrangement by Tony Visconti.
The long-awaited follow up to the one-two punch of All Things Must Pass and The Concert for Bangladesh, Harrison’s second solo album Living in the Material World held the number #1 in the U.S. for five weeks (knocking off McCartney’s Red Rose Speedway) and #2 in the U.K. Ironically, the soundtrack to Starr’s film That’ll Be the Day kept him out of the top spot in the U.K.
The only light numbers were “Give Me Love” and “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long.” There were three other up-tempo (if not light-hearted) tracks, the best being his acerbic take on the Beatles break up court case, the funky “Sue Me Sue You Blues,” a worthy companion piece to “Taxman,” this time aimed at Paul McCartney, although the Concert for Bangladesh was tied up in its own legal woes as well.
The record’s overall somber tone was, in fact, because the record labels and U.S./U.K. governments wanted such big cuts of the Concert of Bangladesh profits that there was barely anything left over for the people the shows were intended to help. The dark mood was announced by a creepy cover featuring a hand holding an Indian medallion. With its red and black hue, it looked like an image out of a horror movie.
The minor key same-ness of the songs was exacerbated because Harrison had decided he was ready to go it alone and produce the album without Phil Spector. Interestingly, Lennon had made the same choice with his 1973 offering, Mind Games. Either both former Beatles learned from the teacher at the same rate, or Spector’s madness had been accelerating and alienated them both.
The quiet mood was also due to the fact that Harrison was just trying to chill himself out. Ultimately he was forced to cover the taxes for the Concert of Bangladesh with a million pounds out of his own pocket, a rough price to pay when all he had been trying to do was a good deed. Between that and his ongoing litigation with McCartney, he needed his religion to keep perspective. So he wrote low key spiritual songs in the hopes of creating the mindset he wanted to attain.
He had never been shy about imparting the wisdom he felt he had gathered, and from the start he had been railing against the material world. In the 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night, he surprised everyone with the naturalism displayed in his solo vignette. With an offhand, laidback confidence, he destroys the arrogance of a pompous advertising executive and his phony cover girl. Many of Harrison’s subsequent album tracks promoted a similar perspective, from “Think for Yourself” to “I Me Mine.”
As he had recently masterminded the biggest album and biggest concert of the decade thus far, no one dared critique or reign him in. Thus, glowering like Rasputin, he put out an album of downbeat songs with titles like “The Lord Loves the One (Who Loves the Lord).” To many, it began to look like Harrison thought he was almost a saint himself, “the light that lighted the world.” The backlash would soon gather steam.
Material World’s songs were good, they just needed to be mixed with a wider variety of moods and tempos in order to create a classic album. (The “Give Me Love” b-side “Miss O’Dell” would have been a great addition, but it was perhaps a little too similar to “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long.”)
The same year, Harrison played on Cheech and Chong’s #15 hit “Basketball Jones,” and he would soon befriend the Monty Python troupe. Comedy had always been another technique of his to transcend life’s annoyances, and by the late 1970s, after getting pummeled by the critics for self-importance, Harrison would learn to synthesize his comedic and spiritual sides, and leaven his lectures with humor and happy tunes.
But meanwhile, Material World is a fine mellow album to relax to. I’d even go so far as to say to fall asleep to, which sounds disparaging but really is not, as we all sometimes need something good to help us fall asleep once in a while.
Along with “Give Me Love” and “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long,” other stand out tracks include “The Day the World Gets ‘Round” which he wrote the day after the Bangla Desh concert, the aforementioned “Sue Me, Sue You Blues” and “The Light That Has Lighted the World,” and “Try Some By Some.” The latter tune was a single he wrote for Ronnie Spector. When it didn’t do well on the charts, Harrison slowed it down and put his own vocals on it.
In 1973 or 1974 (accounts vary) while Lennon was in L.A. during his infamous “Lost Weekend,” he produced a song for Mick Jagger — a cover of bluesman Willie Dixon’s “Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup).” Accounts also vary as to whether Lennon plays guitar on the track or appears at all, but it is in the vein of some of the funky tunes on his 1974 album WALLS AND BRIDGES, such as “Beef Jerky” and “What You Got.”
Bored with recording in England in 1973, McCartney checked out a list of EMI’s international recording studios and discovered one in Lagos, Nigeria. Dreaming of new African rhythms to be discovered, he made plans for his band to travel there with former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick.
Tension had been growing between McCartney and Wings guitarist Henry McCullough. In performances, McCullough prided himself on always improvising something new. McCartney believed the crowd wanted to hear it how they expected it. As Harrison had learned long ago, there wasn’t a lot for McCullough to add to McCartney’s tunes since Macca wanted them recorded exactly as he envisioned them. The low pay rankled, and Linda got on McCullough’s nerves. Finally, he turned in his notice a few weeks before the trip to Lagos. McCartney was surprised but figured they could make do without him.
The night before they were set to fly, drummer Denny Seiwell also quit, having lost faith that McCartney would ever give him a raise from $175 a week. McCartney decided, screw ’em both, Wings would record the album as just a trio. He had already played drums on THE WHITE ALBUM when Starr briefly walked out, and then on McCARTNEY. He figured it’d be easier taking over the drums himself than trying to explain what he wanted to a Nigerian. Seiwell noted later with irritation that McCartney mainly re-created all the drum parts Seiwell had worked out in advance.
It’s interesting that McCartney made perhaps his greatest album immediately after two-fifths of his band split—in particular, an album built around a song celebrating the camaraderie of bands. Perhaps having lost his second band in three years, McCartney had a vendetta to make an album so good they’d regret leaving.
McCartney’s previous hit “Live and Let Die” had introduced a more cinematic, action-oriented mind-set, and now the adrenalin of a very unique set of circumstances poured into “Band on the Run.” There was the life-threatening chaos of Lagos, where the McCartneys were mugged and Macca also suffered an attack of bronchial spasms. Also, McCartney’s persistent busts for marijuana had made him feel that the authorities were turning musicians into outlaws because they wanted to substitute herb for booze. The strands combined to make “Band on the Run” the greatest of his rock operas.
The song begins with the group stuck in jail for life, harmonizing like inmates in old prison movies. McCartney ruminates about what he’d do “if I ever get out of here,” a line Harrison uttered during one of the interminable Apple board meetings.
Suddenly, guitars and orchestra rev and roar like dynamite blasting a hole through the wall. The gang runs for the fences as the debris falls like the sound of the acoustic guitars strumming, embodying light and freedom as McCartney’s vocals echo. As the band runs toward the sun, one of them turns to the others and wryly cracks that he hopes they’re having fun. No other line captures the exhilaration and terror the Beatles must’ve felt being chased by the fans who nearly tore them limb from limb. Beatlemaniacs would drop down onto the tops of the limos and nearly crush the group inside so frequently that it became necessary to transport them in armored vehicles.
The song crystallizes McCartney’s nostalgia for old friends sharing the eye of a hurricane together, a time never to return, and simultaneously reflects his steely determination to capture the excitement again anyway. Even if McCullough and Seiwell had bailed out, he’d do it with his wife/best friend Linda and Denny.
McCartney’s vision of escape became the best-selling album of 1974, and the seventh best-selling album of the 1970s. Soon he would conquer America and the rest of the globe again in his 1976 Wings Over the World tour.
It would have been nice to be a fly on the wall the first time Lennon, Harrison, and Starr heard the song. Perhaps they smiled a little, remembering the blood stone days. Hard nut Lennon sang the album’s praises. A month after the single “Band on the Run” hit the US number one spot, Lennon went into the studios to record WALLS AND BRIDGES and finally came up with his own number one, “Whatever Gets You thru the Night.” Soon, he’d be talking with McCartney about meeting in New Orleans to record together.
The Beatles’ break up feud and its aftermath were over. McCartney was now healed and complete on his own, even as he nostalgically looked back at his old mates and celebrated them, echoing that moment from A HARD DAY’S NIGHT when the four banged open the theater door and ran down the fire escape with Ringo’s cry, “We’re out!”
A 1957 hit for Larry Williams, Lennon sang “Bony Moronie” in the only show his mother saw him play before her death, hence the song’s special place in his heart. It was the first song Lennon laid down for his Rock ‘n’ Roll covers album, and you can hear his wildcat excitement to get the show on the road after waiting three hours for producer Phil Spector to set up approximately eleven guitarists, seven pianists, seven sax players, four keyboardists, four drummers, four percussionists, four bassists, four trumpeters, three woodwind players, one clarinetist, and one horn player. An engineer accidentally stretched the tape, but, coupled with the seventies guitar effects, it gives the song an even more uniquely languorus groove.
Hosts Ryan and Chris of the excellent McCartney podcast TAKE IT AWAY and I recently discussed THE SONGS THE BEATLES GAVE AWAY TO OTHER ARTISTS.
We play Paul and John’s unreleased demos and compare them with singles by the Stones, Peter and Gordon, Badfinger, Cilla Black, Billy J. Kramer and more.
If you want it, here it is, come and get it!
Episode 22 – Songs Paul Gave Away
In the early ’60s, girls used to stand in line for three hours before the Beatles’ daily Cavern Club shows, sometimes clawing Starr’s future wife, Maureen, out of jealousy. In the late ’60s, when the group no longer played live, therewas a clique of hardcore female fans who would permanently hang around outside Apple Records or Abbey Road Studios, regardless of the weather, in the hopes of getting to chat with the Fabs. They’d come by in the morning for a while, then go to their day jobs, then return in the evening. Collectively, they were known as the Apple Scruffs.
Since McCartney lived in town, they also loitered outside his gates. “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” from ABBEY ROAD talks about when they snuck into his house and swiped some pants, which they all traded off wearing. They also took a photo, but gave that back when McCartney asked.
The Beatles also invited two of them (Lizzie Bravo and Gayleen Pease) to sing backing vocals on the first version of “Across the Universe.” The song was given to the World WildlifeFund charity and is now on PAST MASTERS, VOL 2. One night, McCartney sang his new song “Blackbird” to them from his window.
During the early “Longest Cocktail Party” days of Apple, before all the Beatles grew to hate the legal turmoil brought on by their own label, Harrison and publicist Derek Taylor considered doing a musical about the place, at which point Harrison started composing Apple-related tunes. One of them, “Not Guilty,” would be rejected for THE WHITE ALBUM and resurface eleven years later on GEORGE HARRISON. Another was “Apple Scruffs,” which he finished for his first solo album.
While he was once sang “Don’t Bother Me” to his fans, in the early days of going solo he seemed to be trying to shore up his base with this wistful love letter. Perhaps he sensed that he’d never again experience such unwavering devotion.
Harrison’s evocative lyrics describe the Apple Scruffs waiting on the steps in the fog and the rain with flowers in their hands. His wavering voice momentarily veers toward good-natured exasperation, but the Dylanesque harmonica makes the overriding mood one of nostalgia for days already fading.
