I Am Not Sure John Was A Baby But He Was A Softie. He Is Missed

Yes let’s perpetuate the myth that one of the greatest songwriters of all time didn’t know how to work hard. I know it’s supposed to be cute but John produced his own albums in the 70s. He contributed the majority of songs on the Beatles early albums. John wasn’t a workaholic like Paul but he was a hard worker. He learned those chords because he was determined to learn the guitar properly. Music was his passion too you know

John learning to play upside down for Paul... Something about that always gets me, John is the guy who allegedly didn't like work and wouldn't stick to anything. But he learned to play upside down because he would need to borrow Paul's guitar or to learn how to play something... he put that extra effort in just because Paul is left handed...

It's a small gesture but it means so much

🥺

I know Anon, he really did that.

It was love 💕

I know a lot of people will say How Do You Sleep, but I’d love to see John’s reaction to Mother. I think 1964 John would be amazed he allowed himself to get so vulnerable and have it be so public

Beatle (John) Hypotheticals #15

If you could show John four of his solo songs in 1964, which one of the following songs do you think would most surprise him and why?

Mother

How Do You Sleep

Woman Is The Ni**er of the World

Watching The Wheels

Are there any songs not listed above that you think would be more shocking to John? If so, which ones?

Shout out to @odearjohn for the inspo!

Interesting he made this assessment when it was only Paul he got alone time with. If he only spent time with Paul one to one, why assume he’s more clever than John? As clever, fair enough. But more clever? Based on zero time with John? This is why I hate all this Paul revisionism going on. He reality is that few people had access to John in relation to Paul due to his introvert tendencies and difficulty trusting people and therefore few people really knew John well. So they put John down in relation to Paul because Paul flattered them more by giving them the time. Total stupidity

Their separate personalities are as clearly defined as characters in a fairy tale: John the clever one, Paul the sweet one, George the quiet one and Ringo the holy fool. As these public images are rooted in a private reality, there seems little point in meeting the Beatles; social confrontation can only confirm the known and simple truth. Yet I was curious to talk to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, because it is as songwriters rather than as performers that the Beatles interest me most. When I met them both together, however, they gave an impenetrable performance - a double act, with John facetiously punning on clichés and Paul obligingly feeding him. The jokes were good, but no better than Beatle jokes on the cinema or television screens. Later, I had the chance of spending two hours alone with Paul at Brian Epstein's office. He was ready to talk about his music, and did so with the minimum of suspicion or self-consciousness. The sweet, in their desire to please, can be even more articulate than the clever.

'Close-Up: Paul McCartney as Songwriter', Francis Wyndham (London Life, 4th December 1965)

they must be separated.....they're just too annoying together..... 😫

Reblogging because of Bob Spitz being yet another person who has no idea what Working Class Hero is about. In the song when John says “a working class hero is something to be” he is being sarcastic. A working class hero is a sucker who believes the lies of the upper classes that if they keep working harder and harder that corner office will be theirs when of course the upper classes have no intention of ever giving them “room at the top”. Not only is John not saying he’s a working class hero, he’s criticising people who are. If you post things about Paul being the “true working class hero” it shows you have no idea what the song is about. I’m not referencing the original OP for this post when I say this but rather similar quotes I’ve seen around here. Listen to the song! It’s very powerful and it helps to educate yourself

No doubt about it, they were tuned to the same groove. But aside from a musical passion and amiability, they filled enormous gaps in each other's lives. Where John was impatient and careless, Paul was a perfec-tionist-or, at least, appeared to be- in his methodical approach to music and the way he dealt with the world. Where John was moody and aloof, Paul was blithe and outgoing, gregarious, and irrepressibly cheerful. Where John was straightforward if brutally frank, Paul practiced diplomacy to manipulate a situation. Where John had attitude, Paul's artistic nature was a work in progress. Where John's upbringing was comfortably middle-Class (according to musician Howie Casey," the only claim he had to being a working-class hero was on sheet music"), Paul was truly blue-collar Where John was struggling to become a musician, Paul seemed born to it.

And John gave Paul someone to look up to. Their age difference and the fact that John was in art college- a man of the world! - made John "a particularly attractive character" in Paul's eyes. There was a feral force in his manner, a sense of "fuck it all" that emanated great strength. He had a style of arrogance that dazed people and started things in motion. And he scorned any sign of fear. John's response to any tentativeness was a sneer, a sneer with humbling consequences.

John occasionally felt the need to reinforce his dominance, but he never required that Paul cede his individuality. He gave the younger boy plenty of room in which to leave his imprint. The Quarry Men would try a new song, and John would immediately seek Paul's opinion. He'd allow Paul to change keys to suit his register, propose certain variations, reconfigure arrangements. "After a while, they'd finish each other's sentences," Eric Griffiths says. "That's when we knew how strong their friendship had become. They'd grown that dependent on one another."

Dependent--and unified. They consolidated their individual strengths into a productive collaboration and grew resentful of those who questioned it. Thereafter, it was John and Paul who brought in all the new material; they assigned each musician his part, chose the songs, sequenced the sets-they literally dictated how rehearsals went down. "The rest of us hadn't a clue as far as arrangements went," Hanton says slowly. "And they seemed to have everything right there, at their fingertips, which was all right by me, because their ideas were good and I enjoyed playing with them." But the two could be unforgiving and relentless. "Say the wrong thing, contradict them, and you were frozen out. A look would pass between them, and afterwards it was as if you didn't exist.

Even in social situations, the Lennon-McCartney bond seemed well defined. The unlikely pair spent many evenings together browsing through the record stacks in the basement of NEMS, hunting for new releases that captured the aggressiveness, the intensity, and the physical tug about which they debated talmudically afterward over coffce. Occasionally, John invited Paul and his girlfriend, a Welsh nurse named Rhiannon, to double-date.

To John's further delight, he discovered that Paul was corruptible. In no time, he groomed his young cohort to shoplift cigarettes and candy, as well as stimulating in him an appetite for pranks. On one occasion that still resonates for those involved, the Quarry Men went to a party in Ford, a village on the outskirts of Liverpool, out past the Aintree Racecourse.

"John and Paul were inseparable that night, like Siamese twins," says Charles Roberts, who met them en route on the upper deck of a cherry red Ripple bus. "It was like the rest of us didn't exist." They spent most of the evening talking, conducting a whispery summit in one corner, Roberts recalls. And it wasn't just music on their agenda, but mischief. "In the middle of the party they went out, ostensibly looking for a cigarette machine, and appeared some time later carrying a cocky-watchman's lamp. The next morning, when it was time to leave, we couldn't get out of the house because [they] had put cement stolen from the roadworks into the mortise lock so the front door wouldn't open. And we had to escape through a window."

Through the rest of the year and into the brutal cold spell that blighted early February -every day that winter seemed more blustery than the last-the two boys reinforced the parameters of their friendship. Afterschool hours were set aside for practice and rehearsal, with weekends devoted to parties and the random gig. It left little time for studies, but then neither boy was academically motivated anyway.

Yes thank you! Also the comments on this post from some commentators are disgusting. They somehow think it’s okay to wish violence on someone because they perceive John to be violent and don’t see why this makes them a massive hypocrite

i really really wish i could just write this everywhere.

You forgot to mention Paul has a flower randomly placed on his head while being weird in 18 other ways. The tragedy if these 2 idiots is they spent a lifetime being obsessed with each other while pretending not to because of the toxicity of the times they lived in. It’s comical, tragic, bizarre and beautiful all at the same time

John Lennon, Peter Brown, Paul McCartney, Derek Taylor and Neil Aspinall at the Apple Corps Headquarters, Savile Row , London 1968 © Jane Bown /TopFoto/ The Image Works

John and Jane would be great but I also wouldn’t mind Paul and Stu lol. You could cut the tension with a knife lol

Beatle Hypotheticals #19

If you could be a fly on the wall in a broken lift for an hour, which one of the following pairs would you want to be trapped in a lift with and why?

John and Jane Asher

Paul and Brian Epstein

George and Magic Alex

Ringo and Pete Best

Is there another pairing not listed above that you would want to be trapped in a lift with? If so, which pairing and why?

This 100 percent nails how I feel. Who is attacking Paul’s talent now? Why do people think he needs defending? The thing that really annoys me is you are apparently never allowed to criticise anything Paul does. If you found him annoying at times in Get Back, people will come at you with pitchforks. But it’s perfectly ok to call George a whiner or criticise John’s whole existence and it’s fine. Lol!!

Re: the Paul divide; I always find it so strange how people are so either/or about the whole thing. I think people need to understand that yes, Paul is absolutely a brilliant, visionary creative figure, but that doesn't mean he isn't also a weird, neurotic gay mess, and vice versa. Both are true. Also that those things aren't mutually exclusive - it's actually not that unusual a combo. This isn't really directed at you per se, just a general observation.

Oh, no worries. You put it brilliantly, really, better than I could.

Going to go on a bit of a tangent here, because I'm trying to understand this a bit better lately, but I do wonder when precisely the either/or attitude towards Paul in fandom really started? And exactly what purposes it serves. Because, like you said, neurotic gay and visionary genius aren't mutually exclusive; often those two sets of characteristics come hand in hand (Bernstein is there to prove that, after all. Tchaikovsky, too.) Obviously, within fandom spaces, we are all trying to have fun in different ways, and friction is bound to happen, but it's still interesting to me to try and figure out whether this dichotomy based view re: Paul actually does still come from the Lennon Remembers etc. fallout (as reaction to it) or if its current incarnation is a more or less new construct based on the idea of "rehabilitating" Paul's image, but made more intense (and bound to get into echo loops) by internet fandom spaces, when whatever or whoever called Paul "villain" in the first place has long left the room, and the material consequences of that have been more or less neutralised (I would argue this has been the case since the 90's, since a lot of Paul Sympathy hinges on Beatles Popularity.) I dunno! I spent 10 years very deliberately liking the four of them on my lonesome, someone tell me what the fuck happened here lmao

It feels to me like something of that either/or attitude (which goes beyond just, he was gay and neurotic vs. he was a normie genius, which are both fairly Positive views) comes from an almost... hilarious translation of the Lennon-McCartney competitive game to Beatles fandom as a whole. And a translation of a very specific moment of their competition, when it was less playfully antagonistic and more Mozart vs. Salieri Showdown Picking One or the Other Will Show How Good You Are, Morally. The origins of the thing seem easy enough to understand, but its usefulness now, in 2021, when Paul is a billionaire and has been more than recognised for his brilliance, is what escapes me. Shouldn't we now move to a deeper understanding of him, now that the external validation bit has been taken care of? Shouldn't we move on and talk about how In Spite of All the Danger is such a beautiful song of gay teenage longing and loyalty look at him go his flat PR image was constructed in the first place? How the push for him to be seen as The genius (it's his turn to be 3/4 of the Beatles now!) isn't actually that helpful at all in terms of allowing him depth? I guess the thing I'm trying to understand is, who exactly do we think is attacking Paul now, or have we based our defence of him on things that got solved in 1997.

And why John specifically? Were George and Ringo master electricians? I know John was paranoid too often but sometimes with Paul I think it’s justified.