Quote of the Day (Ronnie Spector, on Dating John Lennon)

“I was 18, and I didn’t know John [Lennon] was married. John and George [Harrison] came and picked us [Ronnie and her sister] up at the Strand Palace Hotel in London. They said to my mom, ‘Mrs. Bennett, would you like to go out with us to dinner?’ I thought she would say, ‘Oh, you kids go out and have fun.’ But she said, ‘Let me get my purse!’ George and John almost passed out. After dinner, my mom took the hint and got in a cab. The rest of us went to the Crazy Elephant club and John said, ‘Ronnie, sing a bit of “Be My Baby” in my ear.’”—Ronnie Spector, pop legend and lead singer of the ‘60s group The Ronettes, interviewed by David Browne, in “The Last Word: Ronnie Spector on Her Childhood Hero, Getting Sober, Life With Phil Spector, and Dating John Lennon,” Rolling Stone, June 2, 2016

Video of the Day: George Harrison, ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie,’ From the ‘Bobfest’

At Madison Square Garden 25 years ago today, a galaxy of rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm and blues, country, and folk music stars gathered for what one of them, Neil Young, termed “The Bobfest”—a tribute to Bob Dylan on the 30^th anniversary of his recording career.

While the most unusual performers might have been The Clancy Brothers, Tommy Makem, and Robbie O'Connell on  "When the Ship Comes In" (“Hello, you never thought you'd hear Dylan with an Irish accent, did you?” they joked) and the most ferocious one Neil Young on "All Along the Watchtower," my favorite was George Harrison, on “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” 

Sadly, this YouTube clip does not feature Chrissie Hynde’s ecstatic introduction of the “guitar hero” (“Let me give you a little clue: hallelujah, hare Krishna, yeah yeah yeah!”), because that was on his prior song at the show, “If Not for You.”

The ex-Beatle’s aversion to live performing had kept him off the stage for most of the last 18 years, and he had given what turned out to be his last full-length concert in the U.K. the prior spring, so it was natural that, even for a song he had recorded successfully yours ago like “If Not for You,” he might have played a big tentatively.

But “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” one of Dylan’s most humorous songs (“Well, anybody can be just like me, obviously/But then, now again, not too many can be like you, fortunately”), loosened Harrison up considerably, and I can swear he’s having fun with Dylan’s—how shall I say it?—distinctive emphases of words (“all these promises you left for me”). (Harrison, reputedly “the quiet Beatle,” may also have been the one with the slyest sense of humor.)

It’s easy to overlook “Absolutely Sweet Marie” on the teeming double-album Dylan masterpiece Blonde on Blonde, which made all the more welcome Harrison’s spotlight on the tune. It’s impossible not to get caught up in Harrison’s infectious appreciation of the tune. Certainly G.E. Smith, the musical director of the show, did, as he unleashed a fun guitar solo, trading licks with one of the rock ‘n’ roll masters of the instrument.

I’m not sure why Harrison wore this violet jacket during his appearance. If it was meant to attract attention, it was unnecessary. His terrific performance took care of that, with no other visual aids needed.

Quote of the Day (Mikal Gilmore, on the Significance of the Beatles’ ‘Revolver’)

“Sgt. Pepper captured a moment, but Revolver created the context and motion that became that moment. Partly because it was swallowed by the events of the summer of 1966, and partly because of the shadow cast by Sgt. Pepper, it would take years – decades, even – before critics and fans would widely regard Revolver as the Beatles' finest album. But the form-stretching possibilities it had unleashed would change popular music by giving it new and more blatant thematic range, matched by innovative and outrageous sounds. It introduced different angles in chords and melodies and gave other bands the courage to look at the risky moment as both internal and social unrest. The Beatles sneaked all of this into their music with flair and confidence, with beauty and dissonance.”— Mikal Gilmore, “The Beatles' Acid Test: LSD Opened the Door to Their Masterpiece 'Revolver'—But Also Opened Wounds That Never Healed,” Rolling Stone, Issue 1269 (Sept. 8, 2016)

This August marks the 50^th anniversary of perhaps the most unsettling month in The Beatles’ history as a group—begun with John Lennon’s controversial remark that the band had become “more popular than Jesus now,” and ended, in exhaustion, with the Candlestick Park appearance that served as the final stop of their last tour. In between came their transitional LP, Revolver. I discussed this masterpiece in a prior post, but it's worth another look in light of what Gilmore brings to light on its history.

Rubber Soul, as I discussed in this prior post, remains (for me, anyway) the most consistently satisfying Beatles studio album. But in his essay in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone, Mikal Gilmore makes a credible case for Revolver as the group’s first to spring from a self-conscious search for personal meaning.

That search was spurred mainly by the LSD taken—first unwittingly, then more enthusiastically—by John Lennon and George Harrison. While Rubber Soul was what Paul McCartney later called the band’s “pot album,” Revolver originated with the more intense, dangerous LSD.  “Tomorrow Never Knows,” sometimes called the first example of  “acid rock,” derived from Lennon’s attempt to make sense of his LSD trip through reading Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience.

I wish I could have heard more from Gilmore about the evolution of the album’s other sterling songs (notably, "Eleanor Rigby," “Got To Get You Into My Life,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”). But in view of the group’s subsequent history, it’s understandable why he delves into the LSD angle.

The drug opened up the band to new thinking and new sounds—and irrevocably altered its internal dynamics. From then on, Lennon and Harrison shared a bond that would endure until Lennon’s murder in 1980. Simultaneously, they treated McCartney as someone apart from their philosophical and creative journey, a Johnny-come-lately to their altered state.

Gilmore does point out a cost of the hallucinogen to Lennon: it worsened his drug habit, even leading to a 1968 incident in which he summoned astonished Apple employees to issue a press release announcing that he was Jesus Christ returned to Earth.

Gilmore might also have discussed how Lennon’s increased absences from the studio within a few years led to more tensions with bandmates, as well as to Lennon’s push back when McCartney sought to fill the inevitable leadership void. But altogether, he shines a strong light on a key album in rock 'n' roll history--one whose significance may only now be properly appreciated.

Song Lyric of the Day (George Harrison, on Transient Existence—and Bands?)

“All things must pass

None of life's strings can last.”—George Harrison, “All Things Must Pass,” from his three-album All Things Must Pass (1970)

How on earth did “quiet Beatle” George Harrison make the loudest splash among his ex-bandmates as a solo artist in 1970?  Perhaps Phil Spector asked if he’d like to collaborate on an album, and hearing Harrison’s response—“Yeah, yeah, yeah!”—the producer, who habitually layered two more instruments on one already in the mix for his “Wall of Sound," interpreted each “Yeah” as worth a whole album.

My explanation, in case you haven’t figured it out already, is a stretch. But nobody would greet it with the kind of astonishment, even incredulity, that awaited Harrison’s All Things Must Pass upon its release in the U.S. 45 years ago today. Nobody could have guessed that the Beatles’ lead guitarist, even after a few recent songs with his old band like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Something,” had that much material waiting to burst out.

Nobody, that is, except that part of the Beatles’ inner circle who knew that principal songwriters Paul McCartney and John Lennon (particularly the latter) had repeatedly rejected their bandmate’s work. (Both the title track of Harrison’s new work and “Isn’t It a Pity” had been recorded for Abbey Road, but left off the final release—a shame, really, since either could have replaced “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and strengthened an already great album into something more.)

I wrote a post on All Things Must Pass five years ago, but my fascination continues and more can still be said about the circumstances revolving around its release.

In the wake of the quartet’s acrimonious front-page dissolution early in the year, many fans interpreted the song as a commentary on the long and ending road for the group. But Harrison’s own explanation for the song’s evolution—that it grew out of a translation of a poem in the Tao Te Ching by Timothy Leary—makes more sense.

The year 1970 was marked by the release of a number of classic albums: James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, Van Morrison’s Moondance, CSNY’s Déjà vu, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water—and that hardly even exhausts the list. But even among such distinguished company, All Things Must Pass stands out.

Of course, for a work that sprawling, a good part of it is uneven (notably the jam session recordings). But All Things Must Pass gave Harrison, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s great guitarists, his own voice at last, with an identity as the group’s spiritual seeker. He was also rewarded with success—topping the charts for seven weeks, sparked by the singles “My Sweet Lord” and “What Is Life?”—and notices that must have galled the competitive and highly territorial Lennon and McCartney, including the headline, “Maybe George Was Always the Most Talented After All.”

(On the “Pop Matters” blog, Sam Buntz offers an interesting post comparing All Things Must Pass and Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band as the best Beatles solo LPs.)

Far more has passed since 1970 than the Beatles, or even Harrison himself. So have the album cover as photographic art, the notion of an album itself serving as a Grand Artistic Statement, or even commercial free-form FM stations that mine “deep album cuts” that become as memorable a listening experience as singles.

This Day in Rock History (Macca Announces Beatles Split)

April 10, 1970—It fell to The Cute One to say that the Fab Four were history. Inevitably, the announcement by Paul McCartney ignited a debate that continues to this day about who or what was really responsible for the breakup of the Beatles.

The Beatles bassist (“Macca,” as the British tabloids have called him over the years) felt aggrieved that many fans blamed him for the split in the band that, since their landing in the United States six years before, had transformed world culture. From his perspective, he was the last person in the quartet who should have taken the rap for this. All three of his bandmates had, at one time or another in the last year or so, walked out on the group as they found it increasingly impossible to work together. The prior September, in fact, John Lennon had to be talked out of revealing his decision to exit because the other members were finishing negotiations for a longed-for better deal on past royalties.

It had simply been his lot to state publicly (albeit coyly, in a promotional “self-interview” for his first solo LP) what had become increasingly apparent to those in the know: that he did not expect to work with the other three again

So who or what drove the four apart?

  1) Drugs. How trite, I can hear you say, Faithful Reader: What rock ‘n’ roll group hasn’t gotten involved in drugs? True. But there are levels upon levels of drug use that make a huge difference, in productivity and interpersonal relations. In the case of the Beatles, McCartney might have been a pothead, but that didn’t interfere with his habit of doing something creative every day, instilled while he had dated former girlfriend Jane Asher by her mother. But Lennon had started taking acid and heroin, leaving him in little condition to match his ostensible songwriting partner in writing tunes or leading the band.  The other members were stunned by what was occurring. “This was a fairly big shocker for us," McCartney said, in Mikal Gilmore’s revealing Rolling Stone analysis of the split nearly 40 years after the fact, "because we all thought we were far-out boys, but we kind of understood that we'd never get quite that far-out."

  2)     Infuriating musical sessions. The death of manager Brian Epstein in 1967 left the Beatles rudderless—a void that McCartney sought to fill. That tendency might have been resented by Lennon, but he was in little shape to offer an alternative direction because of his heroin abuse. All he could do was go into passive-aggressive mode in his withdrawn, inert state. Recording sessions at their Abbey Road studios took forever to start and, often, just as long to finish. McCartney, getting little feedback from Lennon, as he had in the old days, now indulged to the hilt his control-freak tendencies, particularly irking George Harrison by telling the masterful lead guitar not to play on one song. Just how fragile things had become became apparent when Ringo Starr, the most easygoing of the four, walked out on the group became of these rising studio tensions. Matters reached a truly awful state while preparing for a lunchtime concert atop their Apple headquarters in 1969. The so-called "Get Back" rehearsals were so lifeless and uncollaborative that the group feared for its reputation. Their attempt at a solution--hiring "Wall of Sound" producer Phil Spector--only further contributed to tensions. John, delighted that someone could do anything with with this mess, would turn to Spector for several subsequent solo LPs; McCartney, appalled by all the strings added to his song 'The Long and Winding Road," released his alternative version more than 30 years later, Let It Be--Naked.

  3)     Women. Those men who ascribe the faults of the universe to the female of the species had a field day with the women closest to the Beatles. Only this time, other women, jealous at the ones who made off with one of the desired Fab Four, often joined in the pileup. For awhile, it was Linda Eastman, wed to Paul in 1969, who bore the brunt of much scorn, particularly when Paul, dispensing with any possible conflict of interest, turned to her brother for financial advice. But before long, Yoko Ono took the full wave of public opprobrium—for stealing Lennon away from his wife; for joining him in group recording sessions that had normally been closed to outsiders, becoming, in effect, a fifth Beatle; for distracting her husband with all kinds of extramusical adventures (e.g., a “bed-in” for peace); and sometimes (but not always) mixed in with this, simple racism.

     4) Money. They might have been the world’s most popular entertainers, but the Beatles were increasingly finding themselves hard-pinched. With their Apple venture, begun with high hopes, bleeding them dry, they sought financial advice to get them out of the morass. Their attempt to extricate themselves with a manager who would look after their interests only became a source of further division, with McCartney bitterly opposing their selection of Allen Klein to represent them. (They might have been better off simply to ask Dave Clark to chuck the music business for good and concentrate on their work-he was perhaps the most money-savvy of all the British Invasion musicians.)

         5) Different Places in Life. When they started, the Beatles were four young guys hoping to make enough from whatever talent they had to emerge with something more than they had in Liverpool. In the years since, fame, the world, their aspirations, and life itself had gotten between them. John was giving full vent to the rebel tendencies that had been apparent even as a teenager, even as the collapse of his first marriage was bringing to the surface all kinds of guilt he would increasingly try to expunge through unconventional forms of psychotherapy. Paul, less interested in social statements, was concentrating on his recently started family with Linda. George had grown tired of having John and Paul, the group’s two principal songwriters, vetoing one song or another of his from the group’s albums. Ringo was displaying an entirely non-musical interest: acting.

Just before the end of the year, a writ would be filed on McCartney’s behalf in High Court in London to extricate him from the Beatles. As with most legal wrangles, it created an ancillary set of tensions and resentments that would linger even after the case was settled in 1975.

With time, the hopes for a reunion grew so wild and hyped that the group members, even when they visited each other or helped on individual projects, came to see that any possible return concert or project could only be viewed as anticlimactic.

And then, with the murder of Lennon at the hands of a crazed Mark David Chapman in December 1980, a line from a solo song by the most complicated, tortured Beatle, “God,”  rejecting the myth of his old group, took on unexpected, definitive new meaning: “The dream is over.”