John Lennon - George Harrison relationship in the 70's

Yep, that happens all the time. Whenever I have tickets to see a band/artist, I try not to read any fan reviews of the shows prior to the one I'm going to see. It tends to ruin the setlist and the banter.

 

It really bums me out that JL and GH apparently didn't have any contact for nearly the last 6 years of John's life Does anyone know if any pictures exist of the John, George and Ringo at the I'm the Greatest session? Might they of recorded anything else?

 

But I've never seen anyone as predictable as Macca. Granted, the stories did evolve over time - he added some elements and modified them a bit as the tour continued. But the show remained more scripted than most. I can't say I minded most of it, but the fake screw-up on "You Never Give Me Your Money" was lame. I don't know why he chose to do that - I always assumed he really DID screw it up at some point, got a good reaction and decided to keep doing it. But phony goofs are stupid. Just once I wanted to hear the dude sing it right!

 

It's sad that the last recorded meeting of Paul and John is that miserable "A Snort and a Toot" bootleg...

As for Rock Around the World...

Rock Around the World, at the time it was in syndication (1973-78, I believe) was one of the only US based syndicated rock shows (along with King Biscuit). Those early shows, distributed only on reel-to-reel (and which I've never seen for sale) were a paragon of eclecticism and some taste. Later shows (1976 on, I think) were issued on vinyl, and can be found on the collectors' market. But by this time, the shows were a bit more geared to label priorities of the day.

That said, there were some good (and somewhat overlooked) shows. The Harrison show is one. Another show is a double-length show devoted to LINDA McCartney. One of the very few such shows.

Kwad

 

Evidently, even Paul became tired of this predictable gag...during one show late in the "Back In The U.S." Tour, he actually sang is straight...no phony goof.

 

I was just listening to a few recordings of his Summer shows in Europe and it seems like the equivalent of the above for this tour is to play I'll Follow the Sun (which sounds very nice), and then repeat the last line of the song multiple times (stopping and starting again each time) and joke that he had to extend the song as "we wrote them pretty short back then."

That Macca is such a comedian.

 

About time! I saw the last show of the "Driving USA" leg in Florida and had hoped he'd finally do it right then, but all he did (IIRC) was say something like "it's the end of the tour and I still don't know the words". He continued to flub the line in Hartford the next fall, but I think that was early in the "BITUS" tour...

 

I always check through Paul's interviews for "I was the experimental one - I was into Stockhausen, you know." And it is always there.

 

That is definitely true regarding McCartney’s ‘stock-standard’ answers, re ‘Yesterday’, re ‘Sgt Pepper’, and just about everything else: but what is he supposed to do, change his answers and thereby rewrite history every time he is asked about how he wrote ‘Yesterday’? People like us have heard it a million times, but even as far back as Anthology when I was rolling my eyes back about McCartney’s ‘Scrambled Eggs’ yarn, I thought ‘wait a minute, there’d be kids watching this and they’d have never heard this before’, and that’s true, he is very candid and comes across as completely sincere and unpretentious in the Anthologies (except for the locales: the boat, the campfire, the gig: ‘The Many Shades of McCartney’. And what of his distancing himself from extremely emotive answers to questions about his beloved Linda’s death? He can say what he bloody well likes! It’s a gazillion times more important to him that it should be to the public. Have you heard him on Howard Stern? He quite rightly says: ‘if we were talking privately I would say things differently’ (mostly regarding Yoko), but he held his own against Stern, who was pushing him. Also on David Frost’s latest interview ‘Still Prancing’, McCartney is very candid and not glib all the time.

Nobody has mentioned so far that Harrison was composing ‘All Those Years Ago’ as a kind of ‘How Do You Sleep’ towards Lennon and then became a karmic fraud by changing the lyrics and dripping sentiment all over the song. That can be substantiated, although I don’t have a reference for that offhand, I have certainly read that before, as well as watching Harrison being callous about Lennon, telling Aspel (I think it was Aspel) in a joint interview with Ringo that he was ‘shocked and stunned’ about Lennon’s death, which is a line from the Rutles, thereby making a joke out of his death! Even though Harrison isn’t a microbe as humourous as Lennon, he financed Python and ‘rode the back’ of the film because he (quite rightly) saved ‘Life of Brian’ by bailing them out in Tunisia after EMI pulled the funding, and he quoted Python and Rutles stuff for years to come in interviews.

I personally think he felt betrayed by an apathetic Lennon, who just cut off friends A (almost all of them by the time of his death, in fact Mick Jagger lived minutes from the Dakota and he complained in the press that Lennon didn’t see him; Lennon addressed this in one of his last interviews, saying he is not a great communicator and does ‘drop friends’. He would have abandoned Harrison in George’s mind and George became angry about that, and angry that the hostile little ‘How Do You Sleep’ teaming up against Paul was so fleeting. But John forgave. George did not.

 

PS: And yes McCartney may ‘correct’ some of John’s folklore, such as breaking the myth that John met Yoko at the Indiga Gallery and she didn’t know who he was (McCartney successfully and truthfully says that he met Yoko first and she doesn’t deny it), plus the fact that McCartney was doing backwards taping and loops- for Godsakes they’re littered through ‘Revolver’- and was discussing with Lennon in 1966 that he should release an album of experimental tape looping and Avante Garde stuff called ‘Paul McCartney Goes Too Far’, a full two years before ‘Revolution 9’. So yeah, he does say stuff, some may not be true full stop, but a lot of it is true.

 

What's your source for this claim? I have never read such a thing. The story that I've always heard is that the song was originally written for Ringo, and was not even about Lennon in its original version.

 

"All Those Years Ago" was originally going to be a song given to Ringo. I have never heard it was going to be an anti- Lennon song.
According to Peter Doggett in his You Never Give Me Your Money book, George visited John occasionally at the Dakota and George "always got an overpowering feeling from him. Almost a feeling that he wanted to say more than he could, or that he did.You could see it in his eyes but it was difficult.It was almost like he was crying out to tell me certain things ,or to renew things, relationships,but he wasn't able to, because of the situation he was in."

Regarding Mick, May Pang said Mick rang her up looking for John: "I remember his reaction when I told him John had gone back to Yoko.There was a long pause, and then Mick said." I guess I've lost a friend."
In an Ono approved anthology of tributes to John, Jagger reiterated the charge: "When he went back to Yoko, he went into hibernation.He was living close to where I was living in New York City, but I was considered one of the "bad influences", so I was never allowed to see him after that."

We have no idea what was going on in each (Ex) Beatles heads regarding each other, because the feelings they had for each other seemed to change almost daily, depending on what was going on between them business-wise and also personal factors at any given point in time.

 

Regarding Paul's stock answers, sometimes I wonder if there's anyone in world who's met more people and given more interviews than Paul McCartney. (Maybe more than anyone else in the history of human civilization?) And all of those people ask him about the same things, over and over.

I absolutely think that Paul is capable of giving revealing, spontaneous answers, but it's up to the interviewer to spark him. Most don't, because they don't have the depth of experience, knowledge or skill to know how to ask him interesting questions, or the time to develop that rapport. Barry Miles managed to coax quite a bit of interesting stuff out of Paul for his book Many Years From Now, but Miles had the depth experience with Paul to know what to ask, where to pry, and, sadly, since it was an 'official' biography, what to leave out.

 

A nice response from Paul.... regarding time travel:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...h-I-could-spend-more-time-with-my-mother.html

 

Men Only: How close are you to those two, these days?
George Harrison: Not very, I'm afraid. I know everyone would like to hear otherwise, but Paul is busy with a film project, and lately John has become more introverted. - published November 1978

 

The quote that Glenn shares above is actually from an interview that appeared in the November 5, 1987 issue of Rolling Stone.

Anthony DeCurtis: What was your relationship with John during that period when he was living in New York?
George Harrison: I didn't often go to New York, but when I was in New York, I'd go see him, and he was nice. He was always enthusiastic. That period where he was cooking bread and stuff, I always got an overpowering feeling from him. Almost a feeling that he wanted to say much more than he could, or than he did. You could see it in his eyes, but it was difficult.
DeCurtis: In what way?
Harrison: Well, you'd read all these stories - and they'd keep coming all the time - about how the Beatles didn't mean a thing. That he was the only one who had a clue about anything - and the wife. There was a definite strained relationship right from the White Album. There was a lot of alienation between us and him. It was particularly strained because having been in a band from being kids, then suddenly we're all grown up and we've all got these other wives. That didn't exactly help. All the wives at the time really drove wedges between us. And then, after the years, when I saw John in New York, it was almost like he was crying out to tell me certain things or to renew things, relationships, but he wasn't able to, because of the situation he was in .
DeCurtis: Did you feel the two of you might have gotten close again if he hadn't been murdered?
Harrison: No, I only felt physically unclose to him, because we'd gone through too many things. The very first time we took LSD, John and I were together. And that experience together, and a lot of other things that happened after that, both on LSD and on the meditation trip in Rishikesh - we saw beyond each other's physical bodies, you know? That's there permanently, whether he's in a physical body or not.

 

I have heard some good interview questions put to Sir Paul and he has this remarkable way of evading/ignoring/redirecting the topic towards one of his stock answers. It's almost comical how unrevealing he is as an interview subject. If you ask him about friction in the Beatles' relations, out comes the George Harrison Hey Jude lead guitar story. (You know, Harrison was one of the greats, you know?)

I agree that Barry Miles would be one guy who knew him long enough to cut through the facade...I read that book (via public library) so long ago I've forgotten what's in it.

 

Don't forget, when Paul goes on a promo tour and agrees to interviews, there are ground rules set, and time limits enforced.
How deep is anyone going to get with Paul when he gives an interviewer 5 to 10 minutes, tops?
Of course he is going to go to stock answers. It's the same with any politician, athlete, or actor. And in the world of most rock stars who seem lucky to put a coherent sentence together Paul is positively glib.
And after John's "Jesus" interview, and Paul's own "Martin Luther Lennon" gaffe, he'd be a fool not to have his defenses up whenever a reporter/writer is near.
Anyway, I think Paul puts his emotions in the music. It's all pretty much there.

 

I have read the same basic thing - that the lyrics were originally critical of John somehow, and that after John died, the lyrics were re-written as a tribute. Unfortunately, I have no idea where I read this, or how I came by this information. It's something I knew in the eighties though.

If you listen to what George is singing, it isn't too hard to imagine the song having a different slant. The best interpretation I can imagine of an "anti" Lennon angle, given the existing lyrics, is that perhaps George was addressing John's late 1980 comments about George, particularly regarding his perceived slight in I Me Mine. It almost sounds like George could have been trying to reply in some way, possibly correcting John.

I don't know how the supposed original intent (if it was at all a personal statement by George to John) of the song fits in with giving it to Ringo.

 

Absent a source, I'm going to have to come down on the side of "I think you guys are misremembering what you heard/read." Not only because it contradicts what I've read about the song, but also because (as you noted) it's hard to reconcile the notion that he would write a song that expressed his own personal negative feelings about John, and then give it to Ringo to record. It's also hard to imagine Ringo would even want to record such a song. And the bouncy, lightweight, uptempo feel of the song also doesn't seem congruent with the confessional, pedantic, or bitchily attacking tone that one would expect in such lyrics. My guess (based on what has been said about the song over the years by the principals involved) is that the original lyrics had nothing to do with Lennon. It was a pop song for Ringo, and then was re-purposed into a tribute.

 

I'd forgotten about these comments. The last line I quoted cracked me up, considering George slept with Ringo's wife.

 

I have really enjoyed this thread love reading all the stories and interviews. I am going to get some of these books to read I could read this stuff all night ha ha

 

I can't remember when it was (I think it was when George was going out on one of his tours), but I recall reading it in a magazine at the time -- and subsequently later seeing the interview in an "archived" setting -- where George said, "I'd join a band with John anytime."

In the same interview he said he had no interest in playing with Paul.


Seems pretty consistent with a majority of the other posts in this thread.

 

It really seems like with these guys that it's the public that wanted/wants them to be friends. They'd been through so much intense stuff together that once they stopped recording, there wasn't a whole lot of motivation for them to socialise. They met up when they wanted to but once the common goal of making records had disappeared, there was much less reason for them to put up with what each one didn't like about the others. It's sad for fans but totally normal that they would lose interest in each other day-to-day, while still having a love and respect for each other.

It sounds like by the end of the 70s, once Lennon and Ono were together again. John was a bit of a weirdo, as well as elusive, and that George was sick of being treated deferentially. Seems pretty logical that they wouldn't have had much to do with each other.