And to get back on topic: Re-watching episode 3, the spontaneous joyful enthusiasm Paul shows for Old Brown Shoe shows how much respect he gives George's originals, at least when the song hits the spot for him.
A nicer house for sure, but just a small semi detached. Upper working class maybe. Middle class is a lot higher in England. I grew up there, my best friend was middle class. His Dad was a surgeon, went to the Opera etc.
I have a new found enthusiasm for Old Brown Shoe. I dare say it was my least listened to Beatles song of all time other than a couple of the cover songs. I kind of get now for the first time, and, yes, Paul seemed to like it straight off. And he also said that For You Blue was nice.
Watching this scene in Get Back reminded me of a quote from Little Richard about knowing the Beatles in Hamburg. He said that while Paul and George had sweet personalities, Ringo and John were “nasty.” Apparently, he was offended because Ringo and John would go around passing gas or at least pretended too all the time!
My memory of my 2003 visit (where we only went to J and P’s houses) but drove by George’s was that Paul’s had a small bit of a front yard and some shrubbery while George’s only had sidewalk in front, so Paul’s neighborhood appeared nicer. Ringo’s street was too narrow for the bus to go down so we did not get a good view of that.
Thanks I will check it out. Someone on a podcast says that they filmed 40 hours of footage for the First US Visit documentary and that Apple now owns it. I know I would love to see it.
You guys have no concept of life in Liverpool in the 50s and 60s. It's nice that some have been on day trips in the 21st century but you haven't got the first idea.
Paul moved a few times as a child because prior to them moving to a council house in Allerton in 1955 they lived in accommodation connected to his mothers job iirc. So Paul lived in Western Ave, Speke from 1947 to 1955 and that was the house he lived in for the longest portion of his childhood. George and Paul spent most of their childhood in the same neighborhood.
I like watching documentaries produced in England, from the mid 60s time period. Slagging off Liverpool, and talking about it in such a condescending way. And how if not for The Beatles being from there, that is what tended to raise Liverpool's stature in the eyes of the rest of the country.
In one of many of Paul's interviews (there is like a million of them lol) he refers to the Beatles as having been working class kids, and of course doesn't make any qualification about John. I am not from the UK of course but my general understanding is that accent sort of determines your class identity. Maybe someone from the UK can chime in but perhaps where you live in a certain town or city might not be as big a deal as how you speak? There is a recent interview on YouTube where Sean Lennon asks Paul how he first noticed his dad and Paul recounts how he had seen John in his neighborhood waiting on a bus several times before he even had been introduced to him by a mutual friend named Ivan. Then after they met both Paul and John would take the same bus to go and visit Julia. In any event John had working class friends and went to visit his mother who lived in a working class neighborhood...and soon would be working with the same working class friends in a red light district in Hamburg West Germany. Technically John was an itinerant show business performer...as his father was an itinerant merchant seaman...I don't think either would qualify as middle class occupations. I am talking about the time before they were famous.
I've been trying to resist further derailing the thread, but in the interest of providing information/answering your question, I've put my response in spoiler tags. Spoiler Accent is not a determiner of class, but it can be an indicator. Even so, it's not that simple, especially if someone has been privately educated when they tend to lose their regional or local accent and adopt a more middle class one, or one that begins to leans towards RP (received pronunciation). Other times, a regional accent is simply the accent of your area, and area by itself is not an indicator, which is the mistake some people are making here: placing too much emphasis on which area John lived in, what kind of house, not taking into account the time period, and how accommodation in post-war Liverpool compared with that of post-war London and the South-East. In large cities in England, it is common for working class housing to be mixed up with middle class housing i.e. World's End Estate being in Kensington and Chelsea, or in Notting Hill where you've literally got council housing backing onto million pound housing. So postcode as an indicator of class can be misleading. Liverpool was undergoing regeneration after being bombed and the housing reflected that. There are many complex factors to consider, but the biggest determiner of class is background/heritage/family tree. Hence you are born into your class. John's background was working class. His father and mother were working class, as were their parents before them etc...as detailed by Lewisohn. Also, I'm not sure what vision people have of what it means to be working class in England, then or now, but it doesn't automatically mean destitute or poor, and it's not standardised across the country. Yes, it's an umbrella term, but individuals will have their differences, as in John's case. He was better off than the other Beatles, thanks to Mimi having married George, but that doesn't mean he was a class above them.
Please - I really would hate to see the Get Back thread get closed! Open a new thread for the Working Class Hero topic if you need to discuss this even more than already done. Thank you.
Then educate us! I would wager that you haven’t got much idea of life in NYC over the decades, and that’s fine. It’s all down to people’s experiences.
New thread for John Lennon - Working Class Hero? Beatles Childhoods in Liverpool. Please take that discussion there. John Lennon: Working Class Hero? - Beatles Childhoods In Liverpool