A little off topic, but a new official Yellow Submarine podcast was just posted to the official Beatles YouTube channel:
This is what you said that I quoted in my initial response: This, and only this, is what I have been responding to. The responses to my point have been beside the point.
I don’t see how anything you’ve said has been responsive to that statement—that statement concerns John’s approach to his work, and your responses have accused me of wanting the frat party to go on forever and not understanding that John had to grow up. We clearly disagree, and we may as well leave it at that.
Whatever your love life, it should be left at home. How many of us bring our spouse (and their bed) to work with us and have that spouse suggest to our co-workers how they should be doing their job?
Agreed. There is no reason keeping John from balancing Yoko and the Beatles at the same time. Except that John making a choice of one or the other was his own decision. Too bad, I think he was quite short sighted.
John was convinced he needed to leave the Beatles after India, but he was afraid to do it, so he used My bad, you're right.
There was a guitar solo originally. It can be heard leaking into the drum mics on the Rock Band game "multitracks". Now whether that was wiped or just mixed out....So it might never be available to hear.
The Beatles were not going to be like the Rolling Stones. Too much talent and individuality. It's a wonder they stayed together as long as they did. The White Album begins the long goodbye.
Yeah, I hope that guitar track still survives on the session tapes & we get an alternate mix as part of an Abbey Road reissue box set. But that's drifting towards an "Abbey Road reissue speculation thread" that's yet to happen
Yes, I agree with that, absolutely. The White Album was the true "beginning of the end." After that, there were the disenchanting attempts to record Get Back (the album), but they managed to pull it together for Abbey Road, then finished off what became Let It Be. They had been together for (at least) 7 years under unimaginable pressure. Considering the amount of scrutiny that they were constantly under, we are lucky they lasted that long. As much as I enjoy the "what if" discussions of alternative Beatles timelines where they didn't break up in 1970, I really can't see, even in a best-case scenario, how they could have lasted beyond mid-1971 (at best) and perhaps given us one more album and two more singles. Hindsight is always 20/20, and The White Album to me, both musically and in the context of how they were relating to one another, indicates that a break-up was inevitable.
Impressively, they never 'milked' the prospect of 'professional career' moves. In fact, they flew in the face of them. You want us to stay together forever? Stuff it!
John was a rebel. He could only stay a 'good Beatle' for so long. There's the Apple cart. What happens next?
Much has been made here of Lennon going 'uncommercial' with his teaming up with Yoko. I recall other forum writers having earlier traced Lennon's 'descent' into uncommercial songwriting territory to 1966. His contributions to Revolver and the '66 single don't strike one as going aiming for the pop charts in any manner at all, other than to force avant-garde sounds and messages onto the general public. Even his Pepper-era 'hits' are as avant-garde sounding as possible in their sound and arrangements; they're not conventional pop songs. Ditto for the MMT material. Even with 'All You Need Is Love', he's forcing The Word onto the entire World via satellite. So it's not as if he suddenly 'saw the light' when he met Yoko and decided he was going to make music to confound the general public by; he had already been doing it. He just go even more extreme on the path. He knew that anything he did, post-1965, was going to be listened to en masse, or at least publicized (ie., the solo/duo works), whatever it was, and he took advantage of this situation to 'break free' artistically, if you will.
Yes they had to evolve and move on. It was John's decision to move on with Yoko. The dream was over my friends.
Since it’s now officially July 7th, lets all take a moment to wish a very happy 78th birthday to the one and only Sir Richard Starkey!