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The McCartney/Costello Demos

March 27, 2015 · by solobeatles

The mid-‘80s saw a dip in McCartney’s career after the triumph of his 1982 album Tug of War. Pipes of Peace (1983) received lukewarm critical response, his feature Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) was a box office flop, and Press (1986) saw a significant drop in sales compared to his earlier releases. McCartney decided an overhaul was in order and reached out to Elvis Costello (born Declan MacManus).

Costello originally rose to fame as a member of the late ‘70s punk/New Wave movement due to his angry intellectual persona, but the sophistication of his snarky wordplay and torch song melodies made him a genre all to himself. Also, like McCartney he had a musician father, a Liverpudlian mother — and he had joined the Beatles fan club at age 11.

On George Harrison’s recent comeback album Cloud Nine (1987), producer Jeff Lynne cajoled him to get back in touch with the Beatle qualities he had suppressed in order to prove he could make it on his own. On Flowers in the Dirt, Costello did the same for McCartney, first by encouraging him to get his Hofner violin bass out of mothballs. Deciding the past was now far enough away, McCartney did so and from then on played it regularly.

McCartney relished working with Costello, whose cynical persona was reminiscent of Lennon’s. However, when Costello started answering back in song, as Lennon did in “Getting Better,” McCartney initially balked, fearing they were setting themselves up for too close a comparison. Still, he eventually relaxed, and Costello joined the tradition of singing partners with whom McCartney competes for a girl in a song. Lennon did so in “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl,” Michael Jackson in “The Girl Is Mine,” and Costello in “You Want Her Too.”

In 1987 and 1988, McCartney and Costello recorded an album’s worth of acoustic demos. Twelve were eventually re-recorded for various albums or b-sides, but to many hardcore fans the demos are actually superior to the slickly produced official versions. The high-pitched harmonies of the “My Brave Face” demo have the strength and purity of the Fabs in 1963.

The “Don’t Be Careless Love” demo recalls the heyday of British duos like Chad and Jeremy and Peter and Gordon, but on Flowers in the Dirt, McCartney dropped Costello’s voice in the mix and swathed it with ‘80s production gauze.

He did the same for “That Day Is Done,” but at the Concert for Linda’s Memorial in 1999, Costello knocked it out of the park accompanied just by piano.

Hopefully, Macca and Costello will officially release the original demos one day soon.

Probably their finest collaboration was “Veronica,” which appeared on Costello’s 1989 album Spike. A shimmering up-tempo number, paradoxically it was about Costello’s grandmother who suffered from Alzheimer’s. (“The Day is Done” was about her death.) It was Costello’s biggest hit in the US, making it to No. 19 on Billboard and No. 1 on the Modern Rock chart.

Of the twelve McCartney-Costello songs that have so far seen official release, the only ones on which the two sing together are “My Brave Face,” “You Want Her Too,” and “Veronica.” The others include: the fine “Back on My Feet,” b-side to McCartney’s “Once Upon a Long Ago” (on bonus reissues of Flowers in the Dirt), “Don’t Be Careless Love” and “That Day Is Done” on Flowers in the Dirt, “Mistress and Maid” and “The Lovers That Never Were” on McCartney’s Off the Ground (1993), “Pads, Paws, and Claws” on Costello’s Spike (1989), “So Like Candy” and “Playboy to a Man” on Costello’s Mighty Like a Rose (1991), and “Shallow Grave” on Costello’s All This Useless Beauty (1996).

McCartney Gets “Back on His Feet” with the Help of Elvis Costello

February 23, 2015 · by solobeatles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cEzh1sjqGE

In the mid-’80s, the commercial drop off that had hit Starr and Harrison finally caught up to McCartney. First, his feature film GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET (1984) was not well-received by the critics. For his follow up, 1986’s PRESS TO PLAY, he enlisted cutting edge producer Hugh Padgham (the Police, Phil Collins, Genesis, Peter Gabriel), but the record failed to go gold and was his worst-selling album to date.

As workaholic as ever, McCartney immediately started the next record with Billy Joel’s band and producer Phil Ramone, and they created an early version of “Back on My Feet.”

Ramone was dead center in the mainstream, but to spruce up the lyrics McCartney turned to New Wave singer-songwriter Elvis Costello. In their first meeting, they both brought unfinished songs for the other to fill in, like McCartney did with Lennon in the old days. Costello immediately helped bring “Back on My Feet” into sharp focus with concrete, vivid details.

In the first two verses, the protagonist is an old man railing at the thunderstorm pouring down on him, vowing to bounce back in the face of bruising setbacks. The defiance turns into cheerful optimism in the final verse, as a resilient young girl becomes the new protagonist, yelling that she’ll be back on her feet to the passing traffic. The characters ask us for a hand but warn us not to pity them, as they’ve seen things we’ll never see.

McCartney was still in a movie mindset and sings that the song is “in CinemaScope.” Each verse begins with cinematic terminology: “Reveal a,” “Cut to the,” “Focus in on,” “Cut back again to a . . .” At the end, McCartney sings that the song fades out as he pulls down the shade.

The amazing thing about McCartney is the number of times he’s rebounded from flops that would have discouraged someone with less fortitude: MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, WILD LIFE, BROAD STREET, Heather Mills. Perhaps the cost of producing so many successes was the inevitable dud, but the guy was a machine who never stopped.

“Back on My Feet” became a B-side that marked a moment of resurgence. The non album A-side “Once upon a Long Ago” featured an impressive orchestral lushness but also sappy lyrics about puppy dog tails, blowing balloons, and children searching for treasure, not to mention a Kenny G–like sax solo perfect for the corporate luncheon crowd. Costello arrived just in time to remind McCartney how not to be corny.

To Musician, Costello said, “There’s no denying that [McCartney] has a way of sort of defending himself by being charming and smiling and thumbs up and all the bit. I said once that I thought he should try and step from behind that, at least insofar as the music was concerned.”

Re-energized and refocused, with his next album (FLOWERS IN THE DIRT) and subsequent world tour, McCartney would indeed be back on his feet.

“Move Over Busker” was another fun track from the period that shared the movie imagery of “Back on My Feet,” along with its resolve to overcome the disappointment of GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIvthEC41Us

A pub rocker refitted with a modern sound, “Move Over Busker” was akin to a surreal Bob Dylan tune in the sense that McCartney meets a famous actor from the past in each of the three verses.

The first is Nell Gwynne, an actress and mistress of King Charles II in the 1600s. She started out selling oranges in the theater as cover for the fact that her real job was to be a liaison between the male patrons and the actresses backstage, who were also prostitutes. Hence, McCartney sings to her that he’ll have one of her oranges, but she tells him to “Move Over Busker.”

In the next verse he sees Mae West. Quoting her famous catch phrase, McCartney tells her he’ll come up and see her sometime, but she tells him to “Move Over Busker.”

It’s as if, in McCartney’s subconscious, after BROAD STREET’S failure he keeps getting rejected by actresses and is reduced to playing for change in the street.

Finally, in the bridge, he beats his chest and asserts that no one can hold him back and his time will come again. We see both the desperation and steely drive that kept him working for the chart hits. He sings that he wants to stay with the action, knowing if he doesn’t “grab it now,” his “great illusion” will vanish, before busting out with a Little Richard howl.

In the third verse, he’s nursing his injured pride when he sees a satisfied Errol Flynn being called into his trailer by a lusty lady. Flynn’s getting the love now, but McCartney tells him to move over, busker, because Flynn’s day is done and McCartney’s is on the way.

In the tradition of his ’70s albums, the refrain “good times coming” echoes another song on PRESS TO PLAY, “Good Times Coming/Feel the Sun.”

Lennon and Cheap Trick Get Primal on “I’m Losing You”

September 2, 2013 · by solobeatles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVhj34J18EM

While on vacation in Bermuda during the summer of 1980, Lennon tried to call Yoko Ono but couldn’t get through to her and channeled his frustration into this bluesy rocker. In the song, he worries that she’s shutting him out because she can’t forget all the bad things he did in the past. Lennon concedes he hurt her but counters that it was long ago and, exasperated, implores her to let go of the negative memories.

When Lennon began recording his next album, Double Fantasy, he chose Jack Douglas for his co-producer. Douglas engineered Lennon’s Imagine album as well as Who’s Next, worked with Patti Smith, Blue Oyster Cult, and the New York Dolls, and produced three mid-seventies Aerosmith albums, including the seminal Toys in the Attic with “Sweet Emotion,” “Walk This Way,” and the overlooked “No More No More.” As Douglas had produced some of the heaviest rock of the ’70s, he was slightly restless with Lennon’s current middle-of-the-road approach and suggested Lennon try cutting “I’m Losing You” with another up-and-coming band he had produced, Cheap Trick.

When the power pop group made its debut in 1977, Cheap Trick was quickly tagged as the bridge between Beatles melodicism and punk energy with hits like “Surrender” and “I Want You to Want Me.” Guitarist Rick Neilson garnered further attention by always wearing a flipped-up ball cap and hamming it up onstage like one of the Bowery Boys. No less than Beatles producer George Martin was producing their latest album, so Lennon said bring them in. Neilson’s wife had just given birth, but she gave him permission to go to the studio with drummer Bun E. Carlos.

The track became Lennon’s most primitive and edgy since 1970’s Plastic Ono Album. Afterward, Lennon told Carlos he wished Neilson had been around when he did “Cold Turkey,” as Lennon felt Eric Clapton “choked” when he played guitar on that 1969 track.

But Lennon didn’t bring them back for any other songs, and their version didn’t end up on the album. The regular session guys listened to the Cheap Trick version in their headphones and laid down a less gritty version. Some Beatles scholars speculate it was because the cut would have sounded out of place amidst the rest of the glossy album. Others say Ono didn’t like Neilson and Carlos, Lennon thought it sounded too much like “Cold Turkey,” and/or Cheap Trick’s manager asked for too much money. Another theory is that Lennon was angry when someone leaked news about the sessions to Rolling Stone — he was trying to keep everything secret because he was nervous he might not “have it” after five years of semi-retirement.

The track finally saw the light of day eighteen years later when it was released on the John Lennon Anthology. Ironically, today the Cheap Trick version sounds more contemporary than the soft rock version Lennon went with.

Cheap Trick later covered “Cold Turkey,” “Day Tripper,” and “Magical Mystery Tour” and were the house band for the Sgt. Pepper fortieth anniversary concert at the Hollywood Bowl.

“Looking For My Life” and the Night George and Olivia Saved Each Other

February 17, 2013 · by solobeatles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBov2x9L3UQ

Harrison started smoking in 1957 and quit in 1992, but in 1997 he developed a lump on his neck and in his lung. But after undergoing two operations for cancer and radiotherapy, he was doing well. By mid-1999, he had completed most of the demos for his new album Brainwashed, with son Dhani often playing with him.

Then a horrible assault contributed to the cancer’s return. In 1999, thirty-six-year-old Michael Abram kicked his heroin addiction, but ironically that made his schizophrenia worse. His mother tried to get him back on medication, but the bureaucracy of England’s National Board of Health kept putting her off. Abram went through an obsession with Oasis, then switched his focus to the Beatles. As he later told his lawyer, he became convinced they were “witches,” with Harrison in particular being “a witch on a broomstick, who talked in the Devil’s tongue—an alien from Hell.” Perhaps the song he was referring to was “My Sweet Lord,” in which Harrison midway switches from singing “Hallelujah” to singing Hare Krishna chants. Abram believed that Harrison was possessing him, and that it was Abram’s mission from God to kill him.

On December 30, a young female stalker broke into Harrison’s home in Maui and was arrested. The same night in England, Abram went to Harrison’s Friar Park.

The main gates had security cameras, but on other parts of the estate the fence was falling down. At 3:30 a.m., the sound of breaking glass woke Harrison and Olivia. From downstairs, Abram yelled for Harrison. Harrison went to investigate in his pajama bottoms while Olivia called the police. In a scene reminiscent of that year’s box office hit The Sixth Sense, Harrison came face to face with Abram holding a long kitchen knife. Trying to calm Abram and himself, Harrison chanted the Hare Krishna Mantra—probably the words that made Abram believe he was a witch in the first place. Abram attacked.

Harrison later recounted, “I thought I was dying. I vividly remember a deliberate thrust of a knife and I could feel the blood entering my mouth and hear my breath exhaling from the wound.”

Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts told the Observer, “I spoke to Ringo about a month after it happened and he told me exactly what went on, and it was horrific. George was stabbed about forty times. It happened outside his bedroom on the landing. He would have been dead if he’d been lying in bed, he wouldn’t have been able to fight. The papers did say that one wound punctured his lung, but a lot of the others were just as horrific. The man was slashing him everywhere. George’s wife hit him again and again on the head with this brass lamp, but he just wouldn’t stop. There was blood everywhere.”

First Olivia hit him with a fireplace poker, then smashed the antique lamp on the head. Olivia later told Katie Couric, “George was coaching me, I have to say. And George was very brave and people don’t know that. Because he had already been injured and he had to jump up and bring him down to stop him from attacking me. You know, he saved my life too.”

Katie Couric: “You saved each other’s lives.”

Olivia Harrison: “Yes, we did. And that was an interesting experience. Because, you know, not a lot of people get tested like that, thank God.”

The lamp knocked Abram out, ending the fifteen-minute assault. The police carried him away. Harrison’s condition was critical for a day, then he was back home. Harrison said to the press, “He wasn’t a burglar and he certainly wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.”

Tom Petty said, “When I heard about it, I sent George a fax, and it just said, ‘Aren’t you glad you married a Mexican girl?’ Olivia really kicked ass. She is a beautiful person.”

Abram was acquitted of attempted murder due to insanity. He was treated then released after nineteen months in 2002.

Harrison got aggressive about finishing the album, and began giving Dhani detailed notes on how he wanted the sound and the artwork. For a while he said he planned to call it The World Is Doomed. Abram had punctured Harrison’s lung, and the cancer returned there. In May 2001, he had an operation at the Mayo Clinic, but it was discovered the cancer had spread to his brain. Harrison went to Switzerland for treatment, continuing to work on the album at a studio there.

In “Looking For My Life,” Harrison sings that he never anticipated that life could explode at any moment, as he’d been enjoying an idyllic existence in his garden for years. When he sighs that we’ve no idea what he’s been through, it’s as if Lennon has survived his shooting and is singing about it. When Harrison asks the Lord to listen to him and help him find his faith again, you know he truly does have something to plead about, like Job.

Featuring just Harrison with his son, Dhani, and producer Jeff Lynne, Lynne steps back and lets the guitars speak for themselves, with just a few deft touches, like giving the chorus’ drums a timpani-like depth for an epic feel.

Ironically, the song was written before the knife attack, perhaps in response to his cancer diagnosis or earlier eras of substance abuse. Still, as he strums intensely with his son, it’s hard to think of anything but that night at the end of 1999 that saw him on the floor soaked in blood next to Abram, finally knocked out by Olivia’s brass lamp.

McCartney Declares War Then Peace On Lennon In “Too Many People” and “Dear Friend”

February 17, 2013 · by solobeatles

No song by McCartney captures the loneliness and anger of the Beatles’ feud as intensely as “Too Many People,” in which all his vitriol spewed out like an infected zit. The lyrics read as the anti-Beatles version of Starr’s “Early 1970.” McCartney is getting pushed around by Lennon going underground and letting himself be a mouthpiece for the Communist party radicals. One of them, Yippie A. J. Weberman, even took a break from harassing Dylan to stage a protest in front of Linda’s father’s Park Avenue residence on Christmas Eve 1970.11 McCartney also slams Lennon for sinking into heroin with Ono, losing weight, and just eating cake, as junkies have a notorious sweet tooth. Not only was Lennon preachy politically, Harrison was religiously preachy to the max as well. And all of them were trying to grab McCartney’s cake: under the groups’ contract, all the profits of each ex-Beatles’ albums go to the company and then the total is divided among them. (Although, truth be told, Harrison was the biggest seller at the moment, so the set up benefited McCartney in 1971.)

McCartney vows that he’s not going to hold back his feelings anymore, though he did temper the opening line. Originally it was “Yoko took your lucky break and broke it in two,” but he changed “Yoko” to “you.”

The performance opens with a malevolent groan that could either be an effects-treated guitar, a harmonium, or far-off horns. The sense of physical space in the recording conjures the dread of walking into a deserted mausoleum in a horror film, underscoring the “lucky break” taunt. No doubt it is meant to instill the unease in Lennon and Co. that they will never be able to measure up in the future without McCartney. It perfectly captures the eerie foreboding when partners are divorcing, with one wondering privately if he is making a mistake even while trying to scare the other that he will regret it. When Lennon heard it, did he have an inkling that he would only have one more number one record in his lifetime?

McCartney whips himself into a war dance, dancing around Hugh McCracken’s guitar pyrotechnics with falsetto shrieks and whoops, banging the floor tom drum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mprAKT27C0

Lennon would counter on his next album with “How Do You Sleep,” which would also be magnificently played and produced. But it is so overtly about McCartney that its subject can’t be separated from the performance, making it difficult to enjoy beyond the context of Lennon’s character assassination. By being lyrically just vague enough and played within an arresting sound scape, “Too Many People” transcends the backdrop that inspired it.

Ram’s back cover included the subtle snapshot of one beetle screwing another. The front featured McCartney holding a ram by horns, so for Imagine Lennon inserted a postcard in which he holds a pig by the ears, grinning. Lennon also continued to be a loose cannon in the press. He sent an open letter to McCartney via the music mag Melody Maker in which he wrote that McCartney had said to him, “‘Ringo and George are going to break you John’ . . . Who’s the guy threatening to ‘finish’ Ringo and Maureen, who was warning me on the phone two weeks ago? Who said he’d ‘get us’ whatever the cost? As I’ve said before—have you ever thought that you might possibly be wrong about something?” He then slagged off McCartney’s father-in-law.

Obviously, fighting with the vicious Lennon in public was like dancing around gasoline with a match. And while Lennon forgot the fact whenever convenient, to McCartney they had been best friends, which was why he had overreacted and botched the whole “dealing with Yoko” thing in the first place.

McCartney began working on the song that would become “Dear Friend” during the Ram sessions. For many critics it was the sole redemption of the Wild Life album. It was the record’s last song, showing the continued primacy of the feud in his life, as “Too Many People” had been the first song on Ram.

The disconsolate piano brings to mind a man walking through a dark cavern, as McCartney faced the precarious decision of whether to up the arms race of mutually assured destruction. His voice strains at the high end of his register, like a guy who has been bullied but knows he must speak up though he’s also afraid. He can’t believe they’ve come so close to the edge, and he’s shocked it all means so much to Lennon. Perhaps he’s referring to the money and how they were forcing McCartney to stay in the company to avoid paying higher taxes. Perhaps he’s referring to Lennon’s need to yell his side of the story through the press at everyone else’s expense.

The song is famously known as a conciliatory make-up song. With surprising honesty, McCartney sings that he’s in love with his friend and wishes him the best with his marriage. But McCartney also asks Lennon if he’s a fool and if he’s afraid, which sounds like a bit of a provocation, even as his voice is timid in the gloom, a passive-aggressive Gemini as always. Probably it was hard for McCartney to be the guy stepping back saying, “I don’t want to fight,” even though he had been the one who started it.

McCartney plays the same ruminating piano chords for almost six minutes, mirroring the emotional obsession he couldn’t shake. But he uses what he learned on the Thrillington instrumental album to sustain interest through a subtle build in accompaniment with forlorn strings and foreboding horns until everything recedes except the quiet, lonely piano, and then it finally stops as well. Wild Life was released in the United Kingdom in November 1971 and in the United States in early December. At some point, McCartney called Lennon, and shortly afterward Lennon sent McCartney a Christmas gift, a bootleg of the group’s audition for Decca Records. A little after Christmas, the McCartneys dropped by Lennon and Ono’s Greenwich Village home, and the former bandmates stopped attacking each other in public. Eventually, the postcard in Imagine was changed to one of Lennon playing the panpipes.

McCartney’s Anthem to Optimism “Hope of Deliverance”

December 30, 2012 · by solobeatles

The lyrics of the single from 1993’s OFF THE GROUND album recall the stiff upper lip of World War II–era Britain. They’re married to bossa-nova percussion, an accordion, and a twelve-string acoustic guitar vaguely reminiscent of Trini Lopez’s “If I Had a Hammer” or a relaxed take on the 1940s Latin hit “Besame Mucho,” an old standby of the Beatles in their Cavern days.

The storyline of McCartney’s 90-minute classical piece LIVERPOOL ORATORIO followed his own life, beginning with his childhood in Liverpool. When he returned to Liverpool to write it, he was flooded with memories from the 1940s. Perhaps the same memories informed this song as well. Maybe the 1987 feature HOPE AND GLORY also inspired him. The film was based on director John Boorman’s experience as a little kid in London during the Nazi bombings and how his family tried to hold together during the chaotic times. The film’s title came from the 1902 patriotic British song “Land of Hope and Glory.”

McCartney’s song expresses the same unsinkable determination not to give into despair despite the encroaching darkness. As it sprang from English history, the song resonated more in the United Kingdom, making it to number fifteen there but only number eighty-three in the United States. (It did reach number nine on the US adult contemporary chart.)

Despite the possible World War II connotations, it became the most played record on German radio ever. It was one of McCartney’s biggest-selling singles in Europe, with sales of over 4 million, helped by a colorful dance remix video in which it looks like the crowd is all on really good ecstasy.

Ringo Rebounds With a Vengeance in “Don’t Go Where the Road Don’t Go”

December 30, 2012 · by solobeatles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylJgs308PuU

After being unable to get distribution for his 1983 album OLD WAVE in the States or the UK, Starr dropped out of the music business for the rest of the decade and narrated the children’s TV series Tommy the Tank Engine along with appearing in the occasional commercial.

By the late 1980s, Starr’s substance abuse was out of control and he was blacking out often. So in October 1988, Starr and wife Barbara Bach entered a detox clinic in Tucson, Arizona, for a six-week alcohol and cocaine treatment program, trying to ignore the press constantly flying overhead.

He realized he needed to get back in the game, so with producer David Fischof came up with the concept for his All-Starr Band. The idea was to assemble a team of musicians who were concert draws in their own right. Starr would sing some Beatles songs and some solo songs, and then he would take a backseat on the drums while the other artists sang their hits.

The first incarnation of the All-Starr Band featured regulars Jim Keltner, Billy Preston, and Joe Walsh, along with Dr. John, Levon Helm and Rick Danko of the Band, and E Street Band members Clarence Clemons and Nils Lofgren. They made their debut in Dallas on July 23, 1989, to ten thousand people and toured North America through the summer. New incarnations would follow every one to three years. By 2010, there had been eleven All-Starr bands featuring the likes of Sheila E., Jack Bruce, Edgar Winter, Zak Starkey (his son), Todd Rundgren, Billy Squier, Richard Marx, Randy Bachman, Peter Frampton, John Waite, John Entwistle, Howard Jones, Greg Lake, Felix Cavaliere (The Rascals), Eric Carmen, and many more. Starr released live albums like baseball programs, ten as of 2011, which are five more live albums than McCartney has issued.

The structure helped him get back on his feet. In 1990, Starr recorded a cover of the Beatles’ “I Call Your Name” for a TV special marking Lennon’s birth and death anniversaries. Featuring Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Walsh, and Keltner, the track was produced by Lynne, who went on to produce two of the best songs on Starr’s first album in nine years, TIME TAKES TIME, including “Don’t Go Where the Road Don’t Go.”

Lynne gives Starr a tougher drum sound and plays a louder, fiercer guitar than had been heard heretofore on a Ringo tune, like “In My Car” on steroids. Lynne layers in some Petty-esque acoustic rhythm guitars, then Suzie Katayama on cello where the lead guitar would typically be. Ringo jumps in, angry, bitter, recounting how he woke up from a nightmare, beaten up and alone in rehab with the walls closing in, and one’s first reaction is, “Whoa, this is a Ringo tune that truly rocks.”

As with much of the album, the lyrics are heavier than those on Starr’s previous work. He sings of once being at the epicenter of the world, but from what he can barely remember of the past, he blew it. Friends who used him when times were good have all disappeared. Still, he’s back with a vengeance and warning us to learn from him: don’t drive/live drunk, or you’ll end up driving where the road don’t go and end up nearly killing yourself. With this song he fashioned an anthem for anyone who has driven their life off a cliff but has rebuilt themselves and hit the road with reborn determination.

Did Lennon Pinch a Lick From a Coke Commercial For His Final Political Song?

December 13, 2012 · by solobeatles

When Lennon and Ono co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show for a week in January 1972, they brought in friends ranging from radical political figures to Chuck Berry. When Lennon performed “Imagine,” he made the comment, “Only people can save the world.” With “save” switched to “change,” the phrase would become the chorus for this MIND GAMES (1973) track and be printed on the album’s inner sleeve.

The ebullient melody reflects the hopeful little boy part of Lennon’s personality in the same vein as tunes like “I Should Have Known Better” and “Oh Yoko!” With its skipping, folk/R&B swing, it almost sounds like something that could have been sung by the Brady Bunch.

As Lennon was adept at finding inspiration for songs in commercials (i.e. “Good Morning, Good Morning”), it would be unsurprising to learn that “Only People” owed something to the famous “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial from 1971, helmed by Medium Cool director Haskell Wexler.

The commercial made such a splash that the New Seekers (“Georgy Girl”) quickly released it as a hit single refashioned as “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Coke allowed the proceeds to go to UNICEF.

(What do you think? Am I hearing things?)

“Only People” was certainly Lennon’s least threatening attempt to use pop to sway the masses. For the ultraconservatives who wrote books like The Beatles, LSD, and Communism, no doubt this would have struck them as one of Lennon’s most insidious propaganda pieces, refashioning a Coke commercial for socialism.

Bouncing back from Nixon’s 1972 landslide, Lennon commiserates with his fellow idealists. He concedes they’ve cried a lot of tears, but now they’re wiser and ready to start again. He throws in his usual feminist reminder that if man and woman work together they are unstoppable, and vows to resist the Pig Brother scene, conflating the “Big Brother” that had put him under surveillance and slang for the cops.

Whooping like a cheerleader before a clapping gospel chorus, Lennon finished his final political song. He and Ono would mirror their generation by abandoning activism, and by the end of the decade, Ono would transform herself into an economic wheeler dealer like the yuppies.

But while it would be easy to slam the sixties idealists for selling out, they had won the war against conformity and ended the Draft. The right to liberated sex without marriage, long hair, and freedom of expression and religion progressively melded with the mainstream throughout the decade. The ex-Beatles could look around at the new, freer world and know they had played a central part in changing it.

Lennon Celebrates the Love of His Life in “Oh Yoko!”

August 31, 2012 · by solobeatles

The romantic songs Lennon composed in the Beatles’ early days still resonate with millions of fans, but for the most part there has not been a woman put forward as the inspiration for those classics. By the time of Beatlemania, his first wife Cynthia and he shared a warm bond of security, but not passion. Lennon was rumored to have liaisons with strong women like folk singer Joan Baez, journalist Maureen Cleave, Help! actress Eleanor Bron, and model Sonny Drake — but perhaps in the early years his real love affair was the one between him and his audience, whose adoration he certainly craved “Eight Days a Week.”

By 1967, the euphoria of success had long worn off. “A Day in the Life” found him sunk in a near-catatonic depression (likely accelerated by rampant substance abuse). Though he sang mournfully, “I’d love to turn you on” (à la Timothy Leary’s “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out”), Lennon needed someone to turn him on. He imagined a dream woman coming to save him in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and gradually he began to realize she had arrived in the form of an avant-garde artist he first met at a London gallery in November 1966.

Lennon had envisioned himself the ultimate “Bad Boy,” but Yoko Ono was a bad girl more extreme than he had ever dared to be. She was an exhibitionist artist from New York who’d done time in a mental hospital and who might have been the prime instigator in their joint plunge into heroin. Yet she also strove to be a “people teacher” who wanted to change the world for good. She was the ultimate glass onion.

His earlier songs were not just “made to order” odes to puppy love; they expressed an ideal he’d been waiting to live out. In Ono, Lennon was electrified to discover that he had at last found his Juliet, and he sang it from the rooftops in the Let It Be film with “Don’t Let Me Down.”

The final song of the Imagine album, “Oh Yoko!” is another song that captured the intensity of his love, though from a more childlike and joyful angle. The proclamation that his love will turn her on echoes “A Day in the Life” and underscores his salvation since that tune. If he felt 100 years old then, he sounds like a little boy here, even bringing his harmonica back out from the cobwebs to express a joy he hadn’t felt since the triumphant early days in songs like “I Should Have Known Better.”

Still, there is a just a hint of bittersweet loneliness to Nicky Hopkin’s sparkling piano. Perhaps it is only producer Phil Spector’s famous echo. But perhaps it also reflects the mood of two needy children who had pushed the rest of the world away from their 72-acre estate Tittenhurst Park in 1971. After living in the spotlit fishbowl for two years, they now had to face each other truly alone for the first time, and the deal Ono had made for herself was becoming clearer. In return for the fame she had craved, she had to live with a guy who could be exceptionally moody, to say the least.

Lennon sensed her growing reservation and tried to tap back into the little girl in her who wanted to be innocently and passionately in love. But soon Ono would convince him to move to New York City with its myriad distractions, and eventually kick him out of the house for a year.

Still, despite the rollercoaster of the next few years in their marriage, by 1975 they would settle down together for good.

EMI wanted Lennon to release “Oh Yoko!” as a single but he declined, calling it too “pop.” This seems odd from a guy who stated his intention with the Imagine album was to get a “sugarcoated” hit. Maybe the song was just too vulnerable.

(Photo on home page from http://anneyhall.tumblr.com/)

Today’s Excerpt on Rolling Stone.com: George, “Wah Wah,” and “Run of the Mill”

August 17, 2012 · by solobeatles

Two classic songs in which George expressed his mixed emotions at the dissolution of the Beatles. Click here for the story at Rolling Stone.com:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/book-excerpt-george-harrison-realizes-its-time-to-move-on-from-the-beatles-20120817

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