Lewisohn - Beatles - New Tape! - Abbey Road - 'Rewrites everything we knew about the Beatles'*

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by 3coloursbeige, Sep 11, 2019.

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  1. Arnold Grove

    Arnold Grove Senior Member

    Location:
    NYC
    Yeah, Manson liked that one too.
     
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  2. Arnold Grove

    Arnold Grove Senior Member

    Location:
    NYC
    Dwarfs? ;)

    [​IMG]
     
  3. blutiga

    blutiga Forum Resident

    "
    "Then she knew not what to do, and sat down once more to weep; but the dwarf soon opened the door, and said, 'What will you give me to do your task?
    As soon as she was alone that dwarf came in, and said, 'What will you give me to spin gold for you this third time"?
     
  4. lou

    lou Fast 'n Bulbous

    Location:
    Louisiana
    True. Amongst Beatle fans who followed the Paul/John back and forth after the break up, though, Obladi Oblada (and Maxwell) were definitely on the infamous more than famous side.
     
  5. idreamofpikas

    idreamofpikas Forum Resident

    Location:
    england
    I'd hardly say it dwarfs it. Obladi still receives more radio play (as does The Offspring's Why Don't You Get a Job) and is still amongst the most well known Beatle songs.

    Blackbird is the song that has risen most in prominence from the White Album. Initially it was just a decent album track from the White Album but over the decades has became one of the most covered songs of all time.

    The 10 Most Covered Songs

    While it is easily the most played White album track on streaming sites.
     
  6. blutiga

    blutiga Forum Resident

    Au contraire.
    Paul's acolytes are insatiable in their attempts to defame Lennon and Harrison personally and musically at every moment possible. That would appear the reason de jour of the Hoffman Forum McCartney chorus wouldn't it?
     
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  7. milankey

    milankey Forum Resident

    Location:
    Kent, Ohio, USA
    While My Guitar Gently Weeps is my favorite Beatles song of them all.
     
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  8. blutiga

    blutiga Forum Resident

    Seriously? Obladi is ensconced these days as track 4 side 1 of The White Album. While My Guitar Gently Weeps lives on beyond it's White Album context. as for Blackbird yes it's always been a beloved song, especially for folksy acoustic guitar pickers. I do find it ironic and representative of McCartney's endless rewriting of history that 50 years after the fact he takes the opportunity to connect it directly to specific people and events of the Civil Rights movement. Pity he didn't have the guts to do the in '68. Probably didn't want to alienate his 'crossover audience'
     
  9. J Alesait

    J Alesait Forum Resident

    Location:
    Buenos Aires
    The teenagers of today are the grannies of tomorrow...
     
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  10. Hall Cat

    Hall Cat Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    It's weird to me that Beatles fans have become like Beach Boys fans in the past few years.
     
  11. idreamofpikas

    idreamofpikas Forum Resident

    Location:
    england
    If we are going by modern day listeners it is only behind Blackbird (126 million) and WMGW's (89million) on Spotify. With 62 million plays it is one of the Beatles most listened to tracks. Those 'grannies' from the 1960's must be taking their vitamins to still be around and keeping the song so popular.



    Why the need to keep on moving the goalposts? The reasons why Blackbird is currently more popular than WMGW's is immaterial.

    However it should be pointed out that McCartney has not rewrote history on Blackbird.



    Here he is telling Donovan the inspiration for Blackbird in late 1968. It has always been about the riots in America, that is not a new invention.

    Can you quote the interviews where Paul has changed his story on Blackbird? If he is endlessly rewriting history it should be easy for you to find multiple quotes of him doing so.


    He's mentioned it in a couple if interviews. You do exaggerate.



    But he did. It was Paul speaking at a press conference in America about segregation. I'm pretty sure the band agreed with him, but Paul was the one who spoke out against it.

    The Beatles encounter a segregated America in 1964

    Also in the same interview series that Lennon made the Jesus statement it was Paul who spoke of America's race relations at the time.

    Truth About the Beatles' Girls

    • "It makes me sad for them. And it’s a lousy country where anyone who is black is made to seem a dirty n*gger. There is a statue of a good Negro doffing his hat and being polite in the gutter. I saw a picture of it." - Paul in 1966 speaking out about America's race relations.


    No one is rewriting history, you've just decided to be misinformed about it.
     
  12. PhoffiFozz

    PhoffiFozz Forum Resident

    To quote George "It's a matter of taste".

    First, unrelated to the quote above, but just in general to this thread: Every one of us here who are taking sides is clearly biased ourselves. The Beatles were 4 human beings, all of which have good traits and bad traits. People who like to slam John over Paul or Paul over John or George or Ringo, take your pick, are clearly biased to what they like or feel people should be like. (Probably most of which is circumstantial anyway, since none of us were there hanging out with them). We try to add context after the fact and say "Clearly Paul was holding George down", but we don't truly have context and it's easy to make a simple assumption based on a statement. We only have context to small amounts of conversation (excepting January 1969, which is still pretty incomplete in the grand scheme of life) and lots of media articles and years of misremembered recollections. - Which I guess is fine, this is a forum to discuss these things. But the same short-sighted observations are spewed out over and over and it's a bit funny to watch/read/listen to over and over again. And a bit tedius.

    The same goes with songs. I love how everyone can call a song "clearly" lesser or better than anything else. It's a matter of taste and preference. There is no really grand final ruling. And that goes for charts and lists of covers or spotify plays. Really it means nothing.

    I have my own thoughts on all of these comments from the article. I find it interesting but not surprising due to the overlooked things we already knew from this time period. But even less surprising is the typical obvious conclusions drawn from such an article.

    Actually this quote from Hall Cat, probably sums up my views better than my long-winded one above! :) (Not just Beach Boys fans, but Yes fans too... on a bit of a smaller scale).
     
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  13. Zeki

    Zeki Forum Resident

    I don’t think this is true at all.

    There you go.
    Fall on your sword time? (@blutiga )
    Exactly.
     
  14. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I should stress that my point wasn't to suggest that Paul did not give 100% on George's songs, but to say that John likely did too. @MCK57 implied that McCartney's giving 100% was exceptional, and stood in contrast to John's attitude toward George's work. I do not think there is any evidence that George thought John was not giving 100% on the songs on which he appeared. George's complaint was that it was hard to get the others to work on his songs, not about their lack of effort when they did work on them.
     
  15. John B

    John B Once Blue Gort,<br>now just blue.

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    Why put someone else down for alleged facts that are clearly wrong? Does it make you better?
     
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  16. FernandaDireit

    FernandaDireit Forum Resident

    Location:
    brazil
    How is he rewriting story if in 1968 he had already Linked it to The civil moviment?
     
  17. Fivebyfive

    Fivebyfive Forum Resident

    Location:
    East coast, US
    Prepare to eat your words. Paul did say this in 1968. I found a 1968 quote from Paul talking about the White album and how Blackbird was inspired, in part, by the civil rights movement in The History of Rock magazine for the year 1968. That magazine reprints articles about music that were published in that year. So Paul was saying this in 1968.

    How did you all0w yourself to get this bitter about someone you don't know? Sheesh, you're even repeating that "rewriting of history" nonsense -- long after Philip Norman's version of events has been widely discredited. Maybe open your mind a little bit to the possibility that things about each of the Beatles are never as black and white as they seem.
     
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  18. Fivebyfive

    Fivebyfive Forum Resident

    Location:
    East coast, US
    There's nothing new to discuss until Mark Lewisohn's next book comes out. Until then, we're like rats fighting over crumbs. Someone should alert Mark that the peace of the SHF is at stake if he doesn't get a move on. :cool:
     
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  19. idreamofpikas

    idreamofpikas Forum Resident

    Location:
    england
    In fairness to Blutiga he is not the first person to make that claim about Blackbird, it is everywhere on the Internet. Many, many people use Blackbird as an example of Paul rewriting history that I imagine many take it as fact simply because of the numerous times they've seen it repeated (without being challenged).

    Any time I engage with such people they can never quote Paul on one of his other versions of the meaning behind Blackbird. I researched it myself and it all seems to stem from a book released in 1999 by Steve Turner; (1999). A Hard Day's Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Carlton/HarperCollins.

    Online there are zero quotes from this book on Blackbird, no indication they used Paul as a source. Due to the book being released in '99, before Many Years From Now I'd say that there is a good chance that the author was not aware of the real reason behind the song and made up his own version.

    This is not to say that Paul does not rewrite history, or more accurately has his own Rashomon effect were his version of events may not have actually been what happened (the same goes for all the Beatles and associates) but I very much doubt he is doing so cynically to exploit the situation like the claims of him rewriting Blackbird seem to suggest.
     
  20. paper shoes

    paper shoes Forum Resident

    So if it was the April 1968 race riots that inspired "Blackbird", it's not one of the Rishikesh compositions as he returned from there in late March.

    Diana Ross was in the UK in November 1968, she performed at the Royal Variety Show and paid tribute to Martin Luther King in the middle of her song. Maybe Paul met her and played it to her during that visit, if not then it must have been on his 2nd trip to the US that year when he hooked up with Linda. I suppose it's possible that he felt bad that Ross took offence to it and only started claiming it was inspired by the civil rights movement as a result of that encounter, but that's being cynical. As noted above, it was an issue he had spoken about on the 65/66 tour on tape, so to write that song about that subject would have been consistent with his views.
     
  21. dudley07726

    dudley07726 Forum Resident

    Location:
    FLA
    Who cares if she took offense to it? And why would she? He created a beautiful song using civil rights as an issue for inspiration without even alluding to it in the song. Today, it’s still a beautiful song.
     
  22. Arnold Grove

    Arnold Grove Senior Member

    Location:
    NYC
    And the grannies of today are the ... uhhhh... errrr....
    Well, after further thought, you don't want to know what they are tomorrow. :hide:
     
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  23. theMess

    theMess Forum Resident

    Location:
    Kent, UK
    I always wonder what happened to the song he was writing with Ringo, first mention in 1964 I believe ? It would have been interesting to see how things progressed had Ringo and George written together sooner, like they started doing in 1969 and into the early 70's.
     
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  24. idreamofpikas

    idreamofpikas Forum Resident

    Location:
    england
    It can be both. The melody written in India, the lyrics in England. They don't have to have been written at the same time to be the same song.
     
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  25. paper shoes

    paper shoes Forum Resident

    Here's the passage from Many Years From Now on Blackbird.....


    Paul wrote 'Blackbird' at his farm in Scotland. Shortly afterwards, on a warm summer night back in London, he sat next to the open window of his top-floor music room and sang the song, accompany-ing himself on acoustic guitar. For the fans gathered in the darkness beyond his gates this unwitting free concert was the sort of magical moment that made their vigil worthwhile.
    PAUL: The original inspiration was from a well-known piece by Bach, which I never know the title of, which George and I had learned to play at early age; he better than me actually. Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me. Bach was always one of our favourite composers; we felt we had a lot in common with him. For some reason we thought his music was very similar to ours and we latched on to him amazingly quickly. We also liked the stories of him being the church organist and wopping this stuff out weekly, which was rather similar to what we were doing. We were very pleased to hear that.
    I developed the melody on guitar based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fitted tile words to it. I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird. Those were the days of the civil-rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: 'Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.' As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place so, rather than say 'Black woman living in Little Rock' and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic, so you could apply it to your particular problem.
    This is one of my themes: take a sad song and make it better, let this song help you. 'Empowerment' is a good word for it. Through the years I have had lots of wonderful letters from people saying, "That song really helped me through a terrible period.' I think that the single greatest joy of having been a musician, and been in the Beatles, is when those letters come back to you and you find that you've really helped people. That's the magic of it all, that's the wonder, because I wrote them with half an idea that they might help, but it really makes me feel very proud when I realise that they have been of actual help to people. The blackbird itself was taken from an ornithological record in the EMI sound archives. Paul: 'He did a very good job, I thought. He sings very well on that.'
     
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