John Lennon is considered by many to be a poet. But the Beatle revealed his more prosaic side in a letter penned in 1962 to his future wife Cynthia Powell, in which he declared: “I wish I was on the way to your flat with the Sunday papers and chocies and a throbber.”

The intimate missive, which includes a complaint about his bandmate Paul McCartney’s snoring, is now being sold at auction by Christie’s with a £30,000 to £40,000 estimate.

Written over five nights after concerts during their Hamburg residency in April 1962, Lennon, then aged 21, wrote: “I love love love you and I’m missing you like mad … I wish I was on the way to your flat with the Sunday papers and chocies and a throbber.

“I wonder why all the newspapers wrote about Stu … I haven’t seen Astrid since the day we arrived I’ve thought of going to see her but I would be so awkward.

“Paul’s leaping about on my head (he’s in a bunk on top of me and he’s snoring) … Shurrup Mcarntey [sic]!”

Source: theguardian.com/Jamie Grierson

Read More<<<

She's Leaving Home was one of the most spellbinding moments on the Beatles’ 1967 magnum opus Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. A heartstring-tugging document of coming of age angst, its sweeping orchestral arrangement supported a lyric that was inspired by a very real story.

The Paul McCartney-penned narrative gently expanded on a young girl’s decision to leave her stuffy, conservative parents’ home and - at Wednesday morning at 5 o’clock (as the day begins) - sneaks out to join the man (from the motor trade) that she was going to start her new life with.

Marrying sentiment with rebellion, She's Leaving Home balances a sympathetic, and nostalgic, longing for the past with the increasing rejection of conservatism then rife within 1960s youth culture.

This was characterised by its parent-perspective chorus lyric - sung in typically spine-tingling fashion by John Lennon.

We're not the first to say it, and we won't be the last, but it's wonderful stuff all round.  But the unlikely, fateful layers behind its origin deepen its magic…

Firstly, there's that newspaper story that McCartney based his lyric on. Within the February 27th 1967 edition of the Daily Mail, a story that ran with the headline 'A-level girl dumps car and vanishes', detailed how a young schoolgirl - Melanie Coe - had disappeared from her family home in London’s Stamford Hill. Not even taking her car (an Austin 1100) or any of her wardrobe full of clothes - only the clothes she was wearing that day.

This had lead her extremely worried parents to contact the national press, with her father telling the paper that, “I cannot imagine why she should run away. She has everything here… even her fur coat.”

Melanie, whose hasty exit was spurred by finding out that she was pregnant, would later turn up safe and sound. She wasn't aware that the newspaper story had inspired She's Leaving Home until many years later.

In later life, she explained to the press that while her parents did in fact provide her with all the material possessions she could ever need, what she wanted most of all was some kind of emotional closeness. "As a 17-year-old I had everything money could buy - diamonds, furs, a car - but my father and mother never once told me they loved me,” Coe told the Daily Mail in 2007, echoing the dynamic presented in McCartney's lyric.

Source: musicradar.com/Andy Price

Read More<<<

On This Day, June 11, 2002…

Beatles legend Paul McCartney married his second wife, Heather Mills, a former model and activist, whose leg was amputated in 1993 after she was run over by a police motorcycle in London.

The couple wed at Castle Leslie in the village of Glaslough in County Monaghan, Ireland, with the celebration attended by several celebrities, including McCartney’s Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr.

The wedding took place four years after the death of McCartney’s first wife, Linda McCartney, from cancer.

McCartney and Mills welcomed their first and only child together, daughter Beatrice, in 2003, and three years later announced they had separated, with their acrimonious divorce finalized in 2008.

McCartney went on to marry a third time, to New Yorker Nancy Shevell, in 2011. They are still married to this day.

Source: everettpost.com/ABC News

History is rarely kind to the third voice in a group that changed the world. But George Harrison didn’t just leave The Beatles in 1970 — he arrived.

And arrive he did with All Things Must Pass, a sprawling, audacious triple album that served as both a catharsis and a declaration. Central to that project was My Sweet Lord, a track that remains — five decades on — a towering moment in solo Beatles history. A spiritual lament disguised as a pop song. A cross-cultural anthem that dared to blend gospel exultation with Eastern devotion. A transcendent piece of music that, as it happened, may not have been entirely original.

Harrison wrote My Sweet Lord in Copenhagen in December 1969 during a creative burst on tour with Delaney & Bonnie. Surrounded by fellow believers in music’s power — Billy Preston, Eric Clapton — Harrison began piecing together a track that was less “boy meets girl” and more “soul meets divinity.” Its DNA was gospel, its mantra was Krishna. The chords were Preston’s, the “hallelujahs” came from Delaney Bramlett. Harrison brought the sincerity. “I don’t feel guilty or bad about it,” he would later insist.

As the song climbed the charts in 1971, comparisons to The Chiffons’ He’s So Fine surfaced. And not unjustly. A court would ultimately rule that Harrison had “subconsciously” lifted the melody. Intent was irrelevant. Legally, it was still plagiarism.

It didn’t help that music industry shyster Allen Klein complicated the legal fallout to an almost Shakespearean degree. The case dragged for years. The resolution came decades later. Harrison, for his part, doubled down on the song’s intent. My Sweet Lord wasn’t about the charts — it was about God.

Ironically, Harrison wasn’t even the first to release the track. That honour fell to Billy Preston, who issued it months before George’s own version. It barely cracked the charts. Harrison’s, however, soared. It became the first post-Beatles solo number one and the best-selling solo single by any member of the Fab Four during the 1970s.

The song would return to the top in 2002, in the shadow of Harrison’s death. It wasn’t just nostalgia. My Sweet Lord remained relevant — in its message, in its longing, in its unshakable sincerity.

Source: classichits.ie/Jake Danson

Read More<<<

Brimming with an overflow of material, The Beatles uncorked The White Album in 1968. Technically titled The Beatles, it was the first and only double album that they’d release in their career.

The White Album offers just about every type of music imaginable over the course of its four sides. It also offers some fantastic factoids and trivial information about its making, including these five juicy tidbits. 

The Beatles started writing many of the songs for The White Album while on retreat in India in 1968, learning meditation at the foot of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. As such, several songs were thinly veiled depictions of actual events from the camp and the people involved in them. “Dear Prudence” referenced Prudence Farrow (sister of actress Mia) and her refusal to come out of her tent. “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” was a jibe at a gung-ho hunter within the entourage. And “Sexy Sadie” was originally titled “Maharishi”. The song reflected how John Lennon ultimately felt let down by the “Giggling Guru”. 

Many, including certain Beatles themselves, have pointed to the White Album sessions as the beginning of the end for the band. No longer as tight as they once were, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison often worked in separate studios on the tracks they’d written. Meanwhile, Ringo Starr began the sessions feeling like he no longer had any connection with the other three. To that end, he briefly left for a boating holiday. In his absence, the band carried on and recorded both “Back In The U.S.S.R.” and “Dear Prudence” with Paul McCartney handling the drums.  Plenty for “Paul Is Dead” Believers

Paul McCartney is very much alive and well and still thrilling us with his albums and concerts. But the rumor of his untimely demise in an auto accident, which gained international steam in 1969, was already circulating circa the making of the White Album. For those inclined to believe such a thing, the double album provided clues galore. The gibberish at the end of “I’m So Tired” and sections in “Revolution 9” were supposed to refer to McCartney’s fate when played backward. “Don’t Pass Me By” mentions a car crash. Most notable was John Lennon’s assertion that “the walrus was Paul” on “Glass Onion”. John was just having fun with all that nonsense, not making some oblique reference to death as some believed.

Source: americansongwriter.com/Jim Beviglia

Read More<<<<

During the pandemic, Ian Leslie wrote a Substack essay called “64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney,” arguing that despite his accomplishments, the ex-Beatle was underrated. But he didn’t delve much into McCartney’s relationship with John Lennon, writing, “I’m trying to keep this essay-length and that subject, inexhaustibly fascinating, is a book in itself.”

Inspired by this, Leslie went and wrote that book: “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.” Despite a seemingly endless parade of Beatles books, Leslie offers a fresh take, telling the story of the band through the duo’s relationship and the story of their relationship through the songs they were singing.

 In a video interview from London, Leslie said most previous tomes recount the facts of the story without doing the music justice – “which is what this is all about and you can’t understand them without understanding the music” – or failed to explore the pair’s relationship “with depth or emotional intelligence.”

He was initially hesitant to pitch a book, since he wasn’t a music writer. Still, as a journalist, he’d written two books about human behavior that were relevant to understanding the Beatles’ genius: “Curious: the Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It” and “Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes.”

“The idea of how curiosity leads to creativity and how you can have productive conflict was central to their music,” Leslie says. Even early on in Liverpool, “when they were kind of crap musicians, they already had the personalities” that would create this unparalleled future.

After his essay went viral, providing rave responses from musicians and music experts he could use to pitch a book, he realized “even though I didn’t really have music credentials, I’d invented my own credentials.”

Source: whittierdailynews.com/Stuart Miller

Read More<<<