I think that initial mindless fandom was one of the most encouraging elements of The Beatles because, for once, there was an artistic force that would validate the mania. That could push past expectations all that screaming put on them to become arguably (probably) the most influential of all cultural shifters of the century (all time?). It's nice to think that sometimes the thing an entire world of people love, and maybe go a little bit crazy over, can actually be deserving of it.

The difference between now and then though is, all those mindless fans, were to some degree willing to sit down and learn at least a little about what was significant about what The Beatles were doing. Most of them probably didn't entirely understand it, but they weren't hostile towards it. They became a part of a knowledgable deification. Unlike now when, if any kind of nuance of expertise is applied to the appraisal of an artist, it is treated with animosity and suspicion. If The Beatles happened today, you wouldn't so much have resistance to those who could break their compositions down and explain what is interesting and revolutionary about them, as it would just be completely ignored. It would become harder to prove why they were the geniuses they obviously were.

For the most part, people have always been dumb and culturally retarded. Now though, it seems that this is the ideal state to stay in, and any mention of how there is more to think about, more to talk about, the more they dig their heels in and refuse to listen. Request you shut up. It's a weird mix of insecurity (they know they don't entire understand some of these things, and resent it, but won't admit it outright) and privilege (the internet makes everyone believe they have equal access to knowledge, which to some degree they do....if only they used it)

My greatest hope now is that in coming generations they will rebel against the lifestyles of their parents, and decide tech is for stupid ignorant old fogeys. Go sit in a field somewhere. Read a fucking book.


 

What am I going to do with this thread?  Started somewhat impulsively on the 60th anniversary eve of their "invasion".  What are they doing now?  Probably in the middle of filming Hard Day's Night.  It's astonishing how quickly they crammed everything into seven short years.  Between the time I started the thread and today, the band had already recorded three small masterpieces - "I Should Have Known Better", "And I Love Her" and "If I Fell".  I think about the pictures from this time of George Martin standing to their side in the studio, with that look of mixed wonder and bemusement.

Of all the minor miracles of fate with which the Beatles seemed to be so serendipitously endowed, the fortunate factor of George Martin is difficult to overestimate.  Through the very many biographies of 20th century recording artists, there tend to be two fatal elements, and The Beatles are a rare exception to both.  The first is the archetypal svengali, the idol-maker, the controlling and parasitic manager.  Part of the band's charm was their ability to escape the notice of the more predatory and avaricious moguls of the scene until they were already on top.  Brian Epstein, for all of his naivety as what was essentially an amateur manager, never pretended that his best efforts at image-massaging could equal or overshadow the quality of the content of his clients.  He respectfully knew his place, and it doesn't take too long a look through the history of the pop music industry to see how remarkably precious such respect is.  George Martin had the parallel role in the studio.  His job was to nurture and aid, not control, the lads' creativity.  There was no ulterior agenda at play, ego or opportunism.  In short, this is not the way that the vast majority of relationships in the musical industry operated, either before or since.  The Beatles had a Goldilocks grace in being dealt such advantages.  The already robust, and equally naive, egos of Lennon and McCartney were soon proven to be productive enough.  (Across the pond, one could consider that Bob Dylan was similarly forging equally sympathetic relationships through John Hammond and Alan Grossman, affording him an ideal creative autonomy which is the vantage of young genius.)

Unfortunately, despite all of these clear contingencies in the drama of our post-war music history, The Beatles' legacy has not established this winsome formula for success, and instead, still after 60 years, remains a conspicuous exception.  That isn't because such a sympathetic dynamic between the creative/commercial components is less likely to replicate such success.  It's because this sense of whimsy surrounding The Beatles is due to the larger media industry - music, fashion, culture - being briefly incapable of controlling this thing that was happening.  The last thing these media institutions want is for such creative surprises to continue to erupt untethered.  Turns out that there's quite a potency in mining these vibrant emotions and enthusiasms.  It became a rich fount for artistic expression of youth energy for a handful of decades.  But the commercial side knows best, and eventually narrowed the expressions into easily catalogued and trademarked products.  The Beatles are now celebrated as the epitome of the industry.  In fact, The Beatles were always an aberration, of the stratified pop radio industry before them and the commercial hierarchy of pop music today.  It was always too much.
 

At this point, the biography of the Beatles is far less interesting than arbitrating the competing myths underlying their biography, and with this recent case between Get Back and Let It Be providing evidence of the endurance of such competing myths.  And by myths, I don't necessarily mean falsehoods.  The Beatles are mythic by design, and their image and message has always been curated to some degree, by Epstein's NEMS PR team and afterward by each Beatle in their own capacity in their interviews, with strategic agendas to capitalize on the public's favor.  This was especially the case in the immediate aftermath of the group as they were locked in litigation for several years and trying to manage their standing like parents fighting over their millions of orphaned fans.  At this point, since the general trajectory of the band's successes and stumbles are fairly well accounted for, there's far more interest in mining these mythic strategies.

Two early myths involve Brian Epstein.  The first one is still persistent, which is that Epstein just happened to stumble upon these boys making a great deal of clang in a cellar club one fateful afternoon in Liverpool.  This myth was well established in one of the first real books on The Beatles, Epstein's A Cellarful of Noise, which is especially mythical seeing as it was actually written by Derek Taylor, Epstein's premiere PR man and one of the most colorful and integral players in The Beatles' story.  Taylor, who initially managed the group's press relations and later became the de facto captain of the Apple Offices ship, is far more witty that Epstein could ever hope to be and actually makes Cellarful worth the read, and would also write his own memoir, As Time Goes By, several years later.  In addition to The Beatles, Taylor would cultivate an insider presence throughout the British rock scene, the West Coast rock scene and inevitably in Hollywood as well.  But as sharp as he is as a wit and writer, he also has that most valued asset of a dedicated PR professional  - discretion.  So don't expect too much dirty goss.

The truth of the matter is that Brian Epstein had, for months prior to his initial meeting with The Beatles, been a columnist for Mersey Beat, a local publication covering the Liverpool music scene which featured The Beatles on multiple covers.  Even had he not been an active participant to the paper, he would surely have been aware of it as it was regularly stocked in his record store.  No, the fact is that Epstein, who was infatuated with the band, had invented an aloof subterfuge when he finally decided to approach them.  It's a classic negotiating tactic - never show your hand for how badly you want the deal.  But this story of implausible happen-chance still is so commonly repeated it's included in the Anthology series unchallenged.  Meanwhile, the band themselves began referring to Epstein/Taylor's book as A Cellerful of Boys, and Lennon was even more rude to suggest the title as Queer Jew.

The second myth of Epstein is that the band "sold out" by acquiescing to his recommendation to swap out their leathers for smooth suits and smart boots.  Another fact is that the "Savage" image of leather Beatles is also largely a myth in itself.  None of The Beatles were ever really "Teddy Boys" or a part of that culture, although they may have gotten into scraps here and there, especially in Hamburg.  It was simply one costume exchanged for another.

Less discrete than Derek Taylor was his Amercian assistant (anointed Apple's "house hippie") Richard DeLello who would publish the definitive insider dirt of the Apple Offices called The Longest Cocktail Party.  I don't believe this book has been reprinted in 30 years (presumably because no one currently at Apple wants it to be), but I'm not aware of any of it being seriously disputed, and much of it doesn't regularly get reused in more recent volumes on the the group.  It's wild stuff indeed, if you're curious about scenes like Lennon getting threatened by a Hell's Angel biker at the office Christmas party because the turkey was late in arriving.  Derek Taylor himself is a central figure in the book, always freshly stocked with reefer and scotch to keep the machine well lubricated.  Fun read, if you find it.
 

In all of the mountain of Beatles literature, there's of course one considerable elephant to dispatch of, which is Albert Goldman's Lives of John Lennon.  Although this stack of shit has been out of print for 30 years, it's still managing to raise its head in unsuspecting corners.  I noticed a copy behind David Spade's head on his podcast, and, unsurprising as it is, Bill Maher is apparently a big fan.  So let's cap these knees before they get a chance to stand.

On release in 1988, the book benefited from a huge publicity roll-out, including excerpts in the then-still-relevant People magazine and TV interviews for Goldman on such reputable shows as Morton Downey Jr and Geraldo Rivera, where he appeared via video because he was in hiding from all of the alleged death threats.  Whether any such threats were credible is anyone's guess, but the preemptive presumption was that this book was going to be so explosively revelatory, people are going to freak the fuck out so goddamn buy your copy today before they burn down your local bank!  (I shoplifted my copy in my backpack.)  The book's release was also eerily coincided with the release of the years-gestating documentary Imagine: John Lennon.  The book is quite clearly and unapologetically a hatchet-job, an icon-killer, the "real truth" on a supposedly beloved man and martyr.  The problem is that only a completely pedestrian kinda-fan could have possibly been persuaded or been unaware that about 90% of the book's scoops had already been uncontroversially in the public sphere for years.  Much of the purported revelations were directly dirived from previous books by May Pang, John Green and Peter Brown's Love You Make.

Designed to be the most contentious revelation was that Lennon and Epstein had had a "tryst" in Spain in April 1963, and to add spice to that sauce it's pointed out that this was immediately following the birth of son Julian.  This story was already fully elaborated in Brown's book, and Goldman adds nothing more than his own personal disgust at the thought.  Lennon had even told this story to Hunter Davies way back in 1967, although Davies obviously chose not to use it in his book.  Lennon explained rather pragmatically that if Brian Epstein controlled the Beatles, then he wanted to fuck Epstein to gain control over him.  Later, to old Liverpool chum and regular friend Pete Shotton, Lennon elaborated:

“What happened,” John explained, “is that Eppy just kept on and on at me. Until one night I finally just pulled me trousers down and said to him: ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Brian, just stick it up me fucking arse then.’
“And he said to me, ‘Actually, John, I don’t do that kind of thing. That’s not what I like to do.’  'Well,’ I said, ‘what is it you like to do, then?’  And he said, ‘I’d really just like to touch you, John.’  And so I let him toss me off.”  And that was that. End of story."

“That’s all, John” I said. “Well, so what? What’s the big fucking deal, then?”

“Yeah, so fucking what! The poor bastard. He’s having a fucking hard enough time anyway.”

“So what harm did it do, then, Pete, for fuck’s sake?” John asked rhetorically. “No harm at all. The poor fucking bastard, he can’t help the way he is.”

This version of the story is further corroborated by American journalist Larry Kane, in his book When They Were Boys about being in their media entourage on tour.  Kane was a fellow homosexual and therefore allowed into Epstein's confidence, and when Kane asked about this widely rumored incident, Epstein sighed and said "It was simply an impossibility", explaining that Lennon had gotten too loaded to get it up and passed out while Epstein fondled him.

Of course none of this would matter if Lennon was indeed homosexual, or bisexual, or even given to the era's more libertine experimentations.  But what needs to be understood in context of Goldman's book, which is crystal clear in his writing, is that Goldman views homosexuality as a debauched character flaw, and uses this incident to cast aspersions on Lennon as weak and effeminate and decadent.  And of course it isn't enough to suggest that Lennon was attracted to Yoko because she looked like "a bloke", but given her diminuitive stature, clearly an adolescent one at that.  Because surely it isn't enough for Goldman to out Lennon as a secret homosexual, in order to erode his moral credibility, but he must be a secret pedophile as well.  Late in the book, describing one of Lennon's trips to Asia, notes that he had a stop in Thailand, and muses that Lennon "must have tasted the local ladyboys".  I note the language because there's no evidence offered for any of this outside of Goldman's own fetid imagination.  And Goldman is also guilty of projecting homosexual tendencies onto his other subjects, like Lenny Bruce and Elvis Presley, again not as evidence of factual behavior but as evidence of their inherent debauched characters.  Even with Elvis where evidence of homosexuality is seriously lacking, Goldman is content to muse about his "latent homosexual" pelvic gyrations.  In short, dude has problems with male gayness and they frequently manifest in his work, none more so that his John Lennon butcher job.

As perhaps the best proof, the most objectionable thing that I can recall from his Lennon bio isn't even about Lennon at all, but about Epstein's death.  Goldman spends about a page and a half entertaining the notion that perhaps, instead of dying from a drug overdose, Epstein had actually accidentally suffocated in a leather mask during an S&M misadventure.  Goldman goes out of his way to speculate on Peter Brown's whereabouts, his response and reaction to the event, as Brown was the one who found Epstein dead, and tries to tie all of this into an overall theory about the Londan gay underground.  In the end, try finding any support for this in the book's feeble little attempt at citations and you'll soon realize that the only basis whatsoever for this is, again, Goldman's imagination which seems particularly stimulated, as much as repulsed, by these secret habits of gay men that he claims not to understand.

In no world would any responsible publisher issue a book like this without ulterior motives.
 

crumbsroom wrote:

Somehow I never had The Lives of John Lennon in my collection. And I thought I had all of them, but looking at the cover, nope.

The only slightly significant thing about it is the historical context of the media controversy its release provoked, which I believe was entirely intentional, again to act as counterprogramming to the near-simulteneous release of the Imagine: JL film.  Probably finding some of Goldman's pitiful TV interviews around the time would be far more engaging than reading the damn thing.

crumbsroom wrote:

I know her favorite was the one written by their Tarot card reader. Which I think I read too, but I don't even know anymore.

That's the John Green one, Dakota Days, which I re-read recently.  It's not as tawdry as that premise makes it sound.  Green was an "on-call" Tarot card reader, and I know from other sources that John and Yoko had also on their payroll a professional I Ching reader and a Japanese numerologist with whom they would constantly confer over everything from busines decisions to travel plans.  (Traveling east, for example, was considered bad luck, so whenever they visited Japan they would always return through Europe.)  In addition to this, I believe they also had at least one purported psychic to answer any little emergency at any time of day.

And one of the amusing things about Green's book is that he says everything for Yoko was an emergency of varying degrees.  One could say that this was unfair, or even speculate on whatever axe he may have had to grind for such an uncharitable portrayal, as Green doesn't go into any detail about their working relationship after Lennon's death.  And, I mean, it's hard not to see some grifter influences which Green honestly admits to, such as the fact that he quite openly admits that his Tarot card reading were simply a ruse, or more accurately a medium for which to mask what was more like psychoanalysis, reading his clients more than the cards and deciphering how they themselves interpreted the various subjective symbology in the cards.  It's really more akin to Jungian dream therapy.  But at least he's admitting that their relationship was fundamentally based on a false pretense.  (And to add to that subterfuge, Lennon was led to believe that Green's real name was "Charles Swan" because Yoko believed that Lennon would immediately distrust and be competitive with another "John" in the house.)

Still, I believe it is a fact that he had hours and hours of intimate face time with both of them during these sessions, and based on his writing, he does appear to have quite a keen eye for human psychology.  I was going to write a later post breaking down some of the self-perpetuated myths in Lennon's own interviews and how they contradict over their evolution, and Green seems to nail Lennon's tactics of alternating deprecation and deflection as a defense mechanism, going from false-modest humblebragging to "it's all bollocks" cynicism in an instant.  And what is probably the big scoop of the book, which was exploited by Goldman, is the correction that Lennon's "househusband" retirement was more of a result of his creative paralysis (his "lost muse") than a voluntary choice to spend more time raising his son.  It seems that most of his biographies have now accepted that he spent at least a year of this retirement in a deep depression.

Another problem some people may have is that Green recalls numerous verbatim quotes from both of them, seemingly from memory because I doubt he was secretly taping them, which puts these quotes and their accuracy under suspicion.  But there is one classic quote at the end, I'll just let anyone judge it for themselves, but I do find it quite funny:

Yoko wrote:

The problem that we have to solve is to select the songs of mine that should go onto the album that will be guaranteed to be successful.  You see, John's stuff isn't all that good, and when people buy the record to hear him and they hear how much better I am, I will have an instant market for my next release.  I want this record to make people think of Yoko and John, not John and Yoko.  Then it will be easier to make them think of Yoko only.  That's my real goal, an independent career.

....I'm much better than he is....Think of John as an old star fading and me as the new star on the horizon.

That roughly checks with the picture of the Yoko Ono who never really liked or respected The Beatles as true musical art and who encouraged Lennon that he would never fulfill his potential with them, and this appealed to Lennon's more masochistic side, "she tells me the truth", etc.

Out of all of the Youtube creators dedicated to either vinyl or The Beatles, this is one of the better ones, since "Fathom" is a musician herself, she can discuss the music in depth with technical descriptions.  I chose to highlight this one because it brings up a bit of trivia that I've long liked to brag about, which is the advent of "baroque pop" or specifically the use of Bach's descending bass line from his "Air on a G String (Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major)".  (Although the same bass line is also used in the older "Canon in D" by Bach family friend, Johann Pachelbel.)  In the late '60s this chord structure became very fashionable in pop music, from "When a Man Loves a Woman" and "Whiter Shade of Pale", to "So Far Away" and "Piano Man".  David Bowie uses it in both "Changes" and "Oh! You Pretty Things", and McCartney on "For No One", "Penny Lane" and "Hello Goodbye".  Even Lennon uses it on "Mind Games".  And although this video claims that McCartney's "For No One" was the first, which kicked off the trend, I've noticed that it was actually used in the chorus of Dylan's "Sad Eyed Lady" before it.



 

Mark Lewisohn is perhaps the closest thing to an official Beatles historian that exists.  If I were to rank my favorite Beatles books on sentimental value alone, then Lewisohn's Beatles Recording Sessions has to be at the top of the list.  For someone, like myself, who has always prioritized the value of the Beatles music itself far above any and all of the sociocultural impact that the group represents, there simply is no more alluring text than that which promises to pull back the curtain on the intimate creative process for that music's creation.  And despite the perhaps understandable limitations of that revelation, Lewisohn's tome is a grand testament to that process. 

My copy of the original hardback book is tattered beyond belief, due to countless thumbings and consultings over some 35 years (this November, in fact).  In addition to the invaluable technical details of the recordings, is the insight into the experimental approach to arrangement, where with certain songs (usually the more interesting ones) we can follow the chain of ideas which lead up to a result which, previously, we had no recourse but to assume was the vision all along.  This is crucial, as indicative of artistic endeavor, to understanding the fragile nature of this vision, and to understanding the value of those ideas which failed and were discarded along the way, as well as to understand the somewhat serendipitous vein in which the "final" product is surrendered.  Perhaps no better song in the Beatles catalogue to demonstrate this process is "Strawberry Fields" (again, also perhaps their most interesting recording), where by virtue of these preserved studio recordings can afford us a breathtaking glimpse inside all of the things that the finished song could have been, was never meant to be, and was only arbitrarily destined to become.  And the most frightening aspect for an artist are these decisions, many very much in the moment, and settling on the result in the face of every other potential decision to come in any and all future moments.  It is true that an artist has to choose to abandon a work, because otherwise, in truth, there would be no end to it.  The genius embedded in a book like these Recording Sessions is in this in-the-moment crafting of what will become classic recordings.

For my money, I would have preferred for the book to be more technical.  I appreciate the ground-level, layman-style of exposition for what it's worth, but not so much the constant apologetic deference.  Hey, Mark?  I'm a fan, I bought the book, I want to know!  Don't worry about how your normie Beatles fan will lose interest with the details.  The Fairchild 607 tube compressor/limiter?  I'm listening!


(this unassuming piece of metal is one of the most important pieces of recording hardware in history, and is crucial to the leap in sound quality heard on Revolver and Pepper.)

Geoff Emerick's later Here There and Everywhere book is a bit more inclusive of some technical details such as this, like how different types of microphones were used for various demands.  And probably one of the most insightful uses of Lewisohn's book is in the detailed descriptions of their use of four-track technology, and how they layered the overdubbed sounds on top, step-by-step, "bouncing" each track to make room for more, all creating the elaborate souffle of sound.  Amateur recording enthusiasts (such as myself - or the Elephant Six crew who cited this book as their Bible) discovered a treasure of useful tips and techniques in these pages.


Over the years, however, it has come into question the exact extent that Lewisohn actually, as advertised, listened to the source tapes.  For a sprite young fan such as myself, there was no more delightful prospect than the chance to personally go through every hour, every second or these raw studio recordings, which Lewisohn had apparently accomplished.  But there are a number of instances throughout the book where certain details are lacking in such a degree as to doubt this.  In fact, the amount of the recordings for which Lewisohn supplies the most ample detail also happens to be those recordings which had already been compiled by the faithful engineer John Barrett.

John Barrett is otherwise known as the true hero of the entire endeavor.  A longtime loyal Abbey Road engineer, he was given the task, in the early '80s, of assembling a number of projects simultaneously.  He was the actual person tasked with going through the entire EMI archives and cataloguing, apparently for the first time, the whole of the extant Beatles session tapes.  In doing this, he was also obliged to assist Lewisohn in his planned coffee-table book, but also to assemble an approximate hour to use as a demonstration presentation for tourists (as the Abbey Road Studio had just opened for tourist activity) and to assemble a selection of outtake recordings for potential archival release in the future.  Barrett's compilation of studio outtakes runs about 8-9 hours, and Lewisohn, curiously, rarely veers far from the selections included in this for his detailed analysis.  Although Barrett conducted several preliminary mixes on his own, Geoff Emerick - the established Beatles engineer - would perform his own mixes of the prime selections for an unreleased LP titled Sessions (although most of these mixes would wind up on the later Anthology).  It's significant to note that many Beatles fans do, in fact, prefer Barrett's mixes of some fo these numbers, including his "Norweigian Wood (take one)" (his "Norwegian Wood take 2 is so far the only version available) and his "Obladi Oblada (take 5)" which is a dry mix, compared to the horribly reverb-slathered version from the Anthology. 

John Barrett, who would pass away in 1984 after having battled cancer throughout this archival process, had only received a slight "thanks" mention in Lewisohn's Recording Sessions book, despite the fact that even if he hadn't done the lion's share of the archival work (which he certainly had) he was the one who had operated "the board" for the entirety of Lewisohn's listening sessions, and whose context and insight was surely invaluable to the finished book.  Maybe as a revenge, starting around 1986, Barrett's compliations of these studio outtakes began to show up on bootleg recordings, and, due to their excellent sound, reinvigorating what had become a rather stale medium for collectors.  Instead, now fans and listeners found hours of new Beatles material, in pristine condition, to comb through just as their back catalogue was arriving on CD for the first time.  Pretty much everyone, including McCartney, has acknowledged that these high-quality bootleg releases spurred the necessity of finally releasing the competitive sets of Anthology releases, even if many fans would still prefer many of Barrett's own mixes of the same material.






(My first bootlegs of John Barrett material)
 

Jinnistan wrote:

There are some quality audio of full-length shows - Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Vancouver. 
 

As a matter of fact, a pristine newly-discovered professionally recorded tape of The Beatles' show in Toronto from the '65 tour has been recently announced to be going up for auction.  It's amazing how fecund the fates of all of the Beatles material which is somehow still managing to come out of the woodwork every year.

And there's also the endless churn of recycled product served as bait for the compulsive collectors and/or newbies.

Also announced this week is a new vinyl box set of the Beatles 1964 Capitol LPs in their original mono mixes.  On the face of it, it doesn't sound at all that bad.  As someone who grew up on the Capitol records, I do have a fondness for these LPs' sequences and their unique mixes (which used some EQ touch-ups and slightly added reverb), so I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with some fresh, spotless pressings on the best grade vinyl available.  Here's the problem though....who the fuck asked for a reissue of The Beatles Story?  That's the double LP "documentary" issued at the height of Beatlemania as a total cash-grab on susceptible fans, which includes precious little Beatle music (most of it is some muzak covers) and not that much interview material from the band either, entirely in snippets pasted together while some narrator tells the tale of this little band from Le'uh'poo.  And at two LPs, it seems pretty obvious as filler to justify a box set, instead of - I dunno - maybe adding the Capitol albums like Beatles XI, Help or the exceptional US mono version of Rubber Soul.  What's more appropriate than a 9 disc Beatles box set.  Or, hey, make it 10 with the Yesterday and Today, and you have a complete set of Capitol mono records.  And all without the most notoriously useless and cynical cash-in release of the Beatles catalogue.

The records will be sold separately, so it might be useful to pick up the Second Album, Hard Day's Night (the only version with a single-tracked Paul vocal on "And I Love Her") and Beatles '65.  I've already long had the original mono press of Meet, but like my US mono Rubber Soul, it is, as they say, well loved.

I posted a video from this New Zealand youtuber above, breaking down "For No One", and if you have about six hours, she has helpfully combined her entire series on every track of Revolver into two 3 hour clips, and personally I don't see why not.  Unlike the other myriad Beatles-related youtube content out there, I really appreciate this girl's musical literacy, with an understanding of harmonics and multiple instruments.  She's like the ideal music teacher, and indeed something like this makes quite a solid case for The Beatles' music as the ideal elementary musical curriculum, given their variety, deceptive simplicity and that essential impulse of experimentation and evolution.  And of course enthusiasm.

This is a neat idea, the kind of thing where we can all make up our own set and no two would be the same.  Obviously I could provide all kinds of alternatives to her choices (no mention of the climax in "I'm So Tired"?!?!), but it's still a fairly compact (approx. 40 minutes) run through the catalogue.



 

A new John Lennon/Yoko Ono documentary is coming out, One To One, incorporating their 1972 benefit concert which was released on LP and VHS in 1986 as Live in New York City, as well as more personal material (home movies, etc) of their early times in New York.  Like a lot of these things, the promotion promises it will "shatter our expectations of their relationship", which probably means that it will omit all of the stuff about methadone and infidelity and provide another brick in their mythic wall.

But as much as I kinda hate these new style docs, I do somewhat hope that it will be accompanied with somenew mixes of the "One To One" benefit concert, and a possible box set, including full audio and video of the shows, would also be appreciated.  It's probably way too much to expect them to include other performances from this concert, which included sets from Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack.  I imagine there would be some copyright/licensing issues, which is also probably why Stevie Wonder was conspicuously absent from the recent Summer of Soul soundtrack.

The 1986 release of this concert was notoriously panned at the time of its release.  The sound is awful, but it's not clear if that's due to the PA or the mix.  Being the only live performance with Lennon and backing band Elephant's Memory (who were never great to begin with), the performances are also pretty shoddy and under-rehearsed.  Lennon flubs a number of lyrics, and tends to hit some off notes on his electric piano.  The Imagine: John Lennon documentary included this version of "Mother", and while it's interesting to see this unique performance, it also highlights why it is not a song meant for a live performance, with Lennon clipping the high notes off the melody and faking his way through the primal screams.  Members of Elephant's Memory were vocally pissed that Ono chose to use the afternoon show for these releases, which they say were much weaker than the evening show.  That may be, but both shows' audio has been booted, and it's much of a difference without distinction.  However video from the evening show has never officially been released, and only a couple of audio performances were used on his Anthology.  Last year, for the Thanksgiving Record Store Day, the Lennon estate released an EP featuring mostly new, evening performances (including an extended "Well Well Well"), so hopefully this is a prelude, or perhaps a feeler for demand, for a fuller release.

Being one of these new style docs, I don't expect it to include any, or very many, complete performances, so it would be nice to get a newly remixed version of both shows.  And maybe even the show's rehearsals, which, while occasionally fun (several oldies like "Don't Be Cruel", "Ain't That a Shame", "Honey Hush",etc plus a rare run through Yoko's "Mind Train"), further the evidence of how scattershot the process was.  At one point, Lennon finally admits that he needs someone to get him a lyric sheet for "Come Together".  Not that it would help much.