Early Bloomsday.

May 16th 1968 - John and Paul arrive home🎸🎸🎸

On May 11th, 1968, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, joined by 'Magic' Alex, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans and Derek Taylor, travelled from London to New York to promote their newly formed company, Apple Corps🥀

Following a day of business meetings on May 12th and interviews on the 13th, a press conference was held at 1:30 pm on the 14th at New York's Americana Hotel🌵

There, John and Paul shared their vision and aspirations for Apple. After the press conference, they recorded an afternoon interview with New York's educational TV station WNDT / Channel 13, and made a special appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, hosted by Joe Garagiola🍃

On the evening of May 15th, John, Paul, and 'Magic' Alex returned to London, arriving in the early hours of the 16th. Nat Weiss, who had hosted them at his New York apartment, and Linda Eastman, upon Paul's request, accompanied them to the airport🍀

Paul was set to return to the US in June 1968 for promotional activities with Apple. This trip would also provide another chance for him to spend time with Linda💐

“It was at the Apple press conference [on the 14th] that my relationship with Paul was rekindled. I managed to slip him my phone number. He rang me up later that day and told me they were leaving that evening [sic - on the 15th], but he'd like it if I was able to travel out to the airport with him and John. So I went out in their limousine, sandwiched between Paul and John.” - Linda McCartney - from "Linda McCartney's Sixties", 1992🌼

Via Beatles and Cavern Club Photos on Instagram🎍

Have One On Me review

In anticipation of Tuesday’s gig, here (finally) is my review of Have One On Me:

It’s been over three months of gradual (gradually becoming constant) listening and finally I’m in a position to deliver a full assessment of Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom’s latest album. My initial reactions were not very favourable – I found her newly softened voice somewhat insipid and the exhibitionist sleeve pictures off-putting – but a lot of this negativity is part of any reaction to a new work from an artist I hugely respect. When faced with change in our idols, we tend to stubbornly retrench, refusing to see anything good in the new. I was similarly cool towards Ys at first, before the spell was cast.

And this spell is the secret to Newsom’s talent. She can conceivably be compared to some contemporary singers, writers and composers, and certainly has drawn inspiration from a huge variety of sources, but like all the best artists she creates a world that is entirely unique and that can only be appreciated on its own terms. Throughout her three full-length albums she has maintained certain thematic consistencies, such as immersion in the natural world, a love of wordplay and elaborate language, a kind of timeless musical dreaminess, acute observations on key philosophical questions and an unapologetic celebration of femininity. Despite the different musical styles of the three works – The Milk-Eyed Mender, Ys and the current album – the continuity and development of these themes mark each one out as uniquely Newsomesque. This is her world, and the listener is a guest in that world.

It’s impossible not to be drawn into this world once you take the time to listen closely to her words and harp playing. Like many who inhabit a heightened, mysterious artistic sphere, Newsom seems quite normal and placid in real life. The songs on Have One On Me are more emotionally direct than anything she’s written before, and clearly inspired by real-life events, but it would be simplistic to take them as a straightforward commentary on Joanna Newsom the person. Instead they are a kind of alternative reality, where the songs’ nameless narrator sings of grandiose love, cataclysmic betrayal and the joy of sheer existence, occupying strange liminent spaces between solidity and air, music and silence, dreams and reality.

The songs vary from heavily orchestrated epics to almost silent, harp-driven elegies. There is a huge variety of instrumentation running through the album, to the point where it almost seems distorted and confused, but Newsom knows what she is doing – a complete listen, though time-consuming, reveals that not a note or a line in this work is accidental. (Headphones are also recommended for listening, part of the reason it underwhelmed me at first was the way much of the musical complexity was lost through traditional stereo speakers.)

Newsom has alluded in interviews before to her albums being inspired by a different element, and she returned to that theme in a recent interview with the Times when she said of Have One On Me that it is “earth and dirt, very grounded”. Certainly, themes of home, while strong on all her previous work, are the carrying force of this triple-CD opus. She returns again and again to the theme of pastoral home, whether in the form of an allegory like in ‘81′, or directly, as in “Occident”, where she sings ‘to leave your home and your family/for some delusion of property – well I can’t go…’.

However, home is not a place of unambigiuous peace. ‘In California’ – placed pointedly at the dead centre of the album – presents the narrator fleeing the ‘trouble and sorrow’ of the world by resolutely ‘abandoning the thought of anywhere but home’. This flight is not joyful, rather it is a denial of life’s fullness, emphasised by recurring references to loss and heartbreak and the statement ‘I am no longer afraid of anything – save the life that here awaits’. Even the most stalwart homebirds can’t hide away forever, and must face the confusion and strangeness of the wider world. The narrator loves her home, but comes to understand that: ‘I am native to it, but I’m overgrown’.

An elusive man is the next most important character in this work, after the constantly present narrator. He stars in the opening track, ‘Easy’ where the hazy joy of lying in bed with a lover is tainted by the narrator’s knowledge that her all-consuming love is not fully returned. The beloved’s ambiguity leads the narrator to ever wilder declarations of undying love ‘I was born to love, and I intend to love you’, ‘Pluck every last daisy clean, till only I may love you’ and so on. Themes of self-effacement in the name of love pop up again and again in the album, most notably in that track where she declares ‘you must meet me to see me, I am barely here’. Similarly, the narrator frequently refers to herself as a fragile creature, a ‘little clock that trembles on the hour’ in ‘In Califiornia’ and ‘your little nurse’ or a ‘princess of Kentucky’ with ‘ankles bound in gauze’ in ‘Go Long’. Yet the album as a whole does not reveal a personality that is likely to to be swallowed up by another, and sharp irony and wit, as well as affection, come to the fore in other songs that dissect that unhappy relationship.

Towards the end of the title track, after the section told from the point of view of 19th-century courtesan and dancer Lola Montez (another creative woman trying to find a balance between self-expression and love), the song swings back to the present-day narrator’s point of view, listing moments from the past that have leapt into sudden relief in her memory. She repeatedly maintains that she was ‘helpless as a child’ when her lover held her in his arms. This helpless longing is expressed musically in a gorgeously swooping vocal arrangement, the very power of which reveals to us, more than any lyrics could, that the narrator has mistaken great sex for great love, and is suffering the consequences of that mistake.

But the narrator has not lost her sense of humour to heartbreak, admitting frankly in the wonderfully rollicking ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ that ‘I knew right away that the lay was steep, but I fell for you honey, easy as falling asleep’. She is a winning mix of sardonic and sweet in the line ‘I know you meant to show the extent to which you gave a goddang, you ranged real hot and real cold but I’m sold’. The impermanence of the love that she has banked so much on is revealed when she refers to it as ‘this thing we’ve been playing at, darling’ which will only work when the beloved is wearing his ‘staying hat’.

Later in the album,’Soft As Chalk’ looks at the affair with the wryly detached eye of someone who has realised she spent a great deal of time falling in love by herself, as the narrator frankly admits that back in the heady days when she and her man would ‘talk as soft as chalk till morning came, pale as a pearl’, ‘time was just a line that you fed me when you wanted to stay’. That song ends with her calmly wishing her old love well, but acknowledging that her own life must move on:- ‘I have to catch a cab and my bags are at the carousel – and then, lord knows, time will only tell’.

In all these tracks wonderful tunes, arresting lyrical imagery and intriguing musical arrangements breath new life into what is probably the oldest of poetic themes. The only track that could be considered anything resembling a classic ‘f**k you’, is the spooky ‘Go Long’, where frightening images of broken ankles, rooms made of ‘the gold teeth of the women who loved you’ and a burning river are offset by perhaps the most heartbreakingly direct admonishments of the whole album: ‘Who is going to bear your beautiful children…Who will take care of you when you’re old and dying?’. Musically, that track pays homage to the West African influences of Newsom’s early work with a pitch-perfect collaboration between her harp and the Malian kora.

The main story arc of this album is the tale of this ultimately unrequited love, and it’s fitting that the last track, ‘Does Not Suffice’ closes the book on that story. The narrator catalogues the possessions she packs up as she leaves the home she and her man have shared, the ‘pretty dresses…sparkling rings….coats of boucle, jacquard and cashmere’ – a veritable junk-shop of belongings that remind her lover of how ‘easy I was not’  (a line that ties in nicely with the opening track). She goes on to imagine her newly freed lover ‘stretching out’ on a ‘boundless bed’ and sadly tells him ‘everywhere I tried to love you/is yours again, and only yours.’ Sad, but not despairing – the narrator may have initially wanted to immolate her identity and replace it with that of her beloved’s, but has come to learn that real love is the meeting of two equal individuals, not the absorption of one into another.

The narrator’s sense of self is reaffirmed by her celebrations of home, friendship and her femininity. Newsom celebrates motherhood, both that of others and her potential own – the latter in ‘Baby Birch’ a beautiful hymn to a dreamed baby daughter, and the former in the exquisite ‘Esme’, a celebration of the joy a child brings to everyone. She links themes of motherhood, home and creativity together in a way that seems both ancient and thrillingly new, in a piece of art that is firmly, unselfconsciously female in its aesthetic. Newsom’s artistic world does not and cannot define itself in relation to a male prototype. She sings on Go Long  of ‘the loneliness of you mighty men, with your jaws and fists and guitars and pens, and your sugarlip – but I’ve never been to the firepits with you mighty men’. It’s clear that that the world of the ‘mighty men’ is a different world to hers, with a different aesthetic, and even the narrator’s love for one man does not cause her to turn her back on or lose pride in her femaleness. She does not criticise or denigrate the male world, but simply takes for granted that it is different, and not suitable to her mode of creative expression.

The musical feel of this album is quite different to the medieval-style arrangements of its predecessor or the minimalism of her debut, though it shares the common Newsomian themes of rich instrumentation and experimental tunes. Newsom has said of this album that its sound is supposed to evoke a hedonistic, 1920s atmosphere, but the musical styles are broader than that, taking in 70s Californian rock, 60s folk, avant-garde composition and any number of other influences. Colloborators Ryan Francesconi and Neal Morgan bring wonderful warmth to the string and percussion arrangements respectively. Francesconi contributes guitar, banjo, mandolin and the beautifully rich-sounding Bulgarian tambura, used to great effect on the title track. Morgan’s clattering drumwork provides the backbone to some of the best tracks, including ‘Have One On Me’, ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ and ‘Soft as Chalk’, but his percussion is more than just a backdrop – he plays the drums as a fully realised instrument. Combined with Newsom’s harp – more accomplished than ever – her increased use of piano, and the talent of the many other musicians playing on the album, the informally named ‘Ys Street Band’ are the heart and soul of the most soulful of Newsom’s albums to date.

At over two hours long, naturally not all tracks are top-drawer – the recorders on ‘Kingfisher’ are a little too reminiscent of Pentangle for my tastes, and Newsom has always been prone to cringey lyrics – the title of Good Intentions Paving Company being the most obvious example, though the song’s charm more than makes up for that. Newsom needs to be accepted on her own terms or else her music can be difficult to understand, but the extra effort required pays off enormously. This is a magnificent piece of art, encompassing enormous themes of life, death and meaning, but also small celebrations of the joy of everyday existence. ‘Ribbon Bows’ explores the eternal question ‘God – no God?’ without coming down conclusively on one side or the other, but a powerful sense of transcendence and faith in humanity permeates this whole work – even in despair, the narrator is never nihilistic. Perhaps Newsom’s spiritual beliefs can best be summed up in this wish-blessing from ‘Esme’:

‘May kindness, kindness, kindness abound’.

fuckkkkkkk offffffffffff

Charley Foxx, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder at the Scotch of St James club, 1966.

“When on tour I have to write essays about the places I visit. In the essay I’ll be writing when I get back I’ll certainly include my meeting with Paul McCartney. I met him in the Scotch Of St James club. He’s a really swinging guy, the only Beatle I’ve met.”

15-year-old Stevie Wonder, NME, 18 February, 1966

“None of the Beatles was on hand for Stevie’s show at the Cavern, but Paul McCartney came to a show we did in London. After the final set, Stevie, Paul, Clarence [Paul, Stevie’s producer] and I sat around acting like a proverbial mutual admiration society - Paul going on and on about how the Beatles loved rhythm and blues and how they all admired Stevie’s music and the Motown sound; the rest of us quizzing him about the “Fab Four”. it was the only time in all my years of working alongside the greatest singers and musicians in the world that I ever asked for an autograph, which earned me major points with my sisters Joan and Diane.”

Ted Hull (Stevie’s tutor), The Wonder Years: my life and times with Stevie Wonder, 2000

Braille message for Stevie (“We love you baby”) on the cover of Wings’ 1973 album Red Rose Speedway.

On the first night of recording, who should turn up at the studio door but Paul and Linda. It was the first time since the Beatles had broken up that John and Paul had been in the same room…They play. With Paul on drums, in the absence of Ringo and Keith Moon that night, and John picking up his guitar, soon to be joined by Stevie Wonder, they went into a jam of ‘Midnight Special’.

Ray Connolly, Being John Lennon A Restless Life

“I’ve always been an admirer from the early days when we first heard him as ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder with ‘Fingertips’. Then I met him on and off [for a few years] and went to his shows. Eventually, I asked him if we could record together ‘Ebony and Ivory’. I spent some time with him in Montserrat to make that record... He’s such a musical monster. You sit down with him at the piano immediately he’s off. I know some of his old stories so I can joke with him and take the mickey. He was originally ‘Steveland Morris’ and he was in a little blind school in Detroit. He was just one of the blind kids who happened to be musically gifted. He went to Motown to make ‘Fingertips’ and then he was famous. He came back as ‘Little Stevie Wonder’. So he once told me all the blind kids in the school used to call him [adopts mocking tone] ‘Wundurr’. They didn’t like him and were jealous of him. So now when I see him and if we pass in the corridor I say ‘Wundurr’ and he immediately knows it’s Paul.”

Paul McCartney, GQ Magazine, November 2012

Stevie and Paul in Montserrat, working on Tug of War, 1981.

“But, you know, he’s such a fantastic person to work with that you just go along with it. He’s worth it! He may not always show up when he says he will. Maybe he has got to finish this other album he’s doing, whatever. You just have to make a lot of allowances. He’s such a great musician. It’s all fine, in the end. When he eventually got there and started working, it was perfect. I thought, ‘Oh God, everything he does is perfect.’ I’m talking about even handclaps here… you know, just handclaps. I remember being just a little bit out on the handclaps. We were round a mic clapping, and he just went, ‘Hey Paul, stop! Hey man, you’re not in the pocket!’ And I’m going, ‘Okay, alright, I’m not in the pocket! Let’s get it in the pocket.’ On the Beatles records we weren’t that precise with handclaps! ‘In the pocket’ means being exactly on the beat. So Stevie is saying, ‘You’re not in the pocket, man!’ and I’m going, ‘Oh shit! Okay, let’s get it right!’ So we just worked at it until we got it. He’s very much the perfectionist.”

Paul McCartney, Tug of War Archive Collection, 2015

“Stevie came along to the studio in LA and he listened to the track for about ten minutes and he totally got it. He just went to the mic and within 20 minutes had nailed this dynamite solo. When you listen you just think, ‘How do you come up with that?’ But it’s just because he is a genius, that’s why.”

Paul on recording Only Our Hearts with Stevie in 2011.

Paul and Stevie during mixing for Kisses on the Bottom, 15 November 2011 source

this is always a bodyslam whenever you hear it 🤯

but aside from that I just love long haired lady, most days at random times I find myself doing linda NYC voice DO YOU LOVE ME LIKE YOU KNOW YOU OUGHTA DOOOO .... OR IS THIS THE ONLY THING YOU WANT ME FORRRRR

When you’re WRONG love is long???!?!!?

I’ve only ever heard “gone” before (which Linda does sing at least once). I’m going to have to stew on this.

Stories from the city

In Our Time recently had a great two-part episode on the history of the city, charting the economic and political rise of cities from Ur to Bogota. Some of the information was familiar, and some quite unexpected. For example, after the fall of Rome heavily populated cities became a minority, and London didn’t reach first-century Roman population levels until the beginning of the 19th century. The political architecture of 18th century cities was illuminative – Hausmann’s wide boulevards were designed as much to prevent rebellious working classes from erecting barricades as they were for aesthetic reasons. The earliest ‘gated communities’ were the Georgian townhouses of 18th-century London and Dublin, where the mews at the back gave access to carriages, so that their inhabitants need never step on to the main street outside and encounter any of the ordinary inhabitants of the city. But cities were often reclaimed by the very people who they were designed to control – New Delhi was designed with Hausmann-esque boulevards after the Indian Rebellion of the 1850s in a concentrated effort to consolidate imperial power, however after independence in 1947 Lutyens’ architecture was celebrated and the city accepted as a key part of India’s history. Similar accomodations with the symbols of past conquest have occured in Dublin and Kingston. And there’s no doubt that a dense concentration of people, while often leading to poverty and disease, is a significant factor in the development of revolutionary ideals and a vision of a fairer society for all – Engels’ Manchester and early 20th century Paris and Moscow being key examples. Part of the second programme focused on the astonishing effect the development of the railways had on British cities, particularly London. One commentator referred to the light-speed adoption of railway travel as the equivalent of an ‘atomic age’ and the analogy is not exxagerated – within 30 years London and Paris had evolved from cities which relied on horse-drawn carriages to ones with mass under- and overground transit systems. This had the effect of finally bringing the rich into almost direct contact with the poor masses, as the engraving above by Dore reveals. Bridges ran directly over slum tenements, leaving the passengers in no doubt as to the conditions the inhabitants lived in. Many poor people were evicted from their homes without compensation in the early days of the railways, yet ironically it was the social mixture and opportunities for mobility brought about by those same railways that later helped increase employment opportunities, and subesequently, aspiration. Modern cities were analysed too, with a fascinating parallel drawn between the development of Los Angeles as a car city in the 1930s and its imitation by South American new cities like Mexico and Bogota. One contributor broke past the usual cliches about the relentless ugliness of modern cities – an argument that has been pitched against all new building since probably the days of Ur – and described how run-down slums in Bogota have evolved into respectable neighbourhoods after the introduction of good public transport. He seemed to be siding with the unfashionable but hopeful view that regeneration is always possible where people are concentrated together, even in desperate slums, and it is good planning, support and an understanding that millions in the developing world would rather live in cities than in the country that are needed to improve cities, not hand-wringing over their lack of beauty. Human life is messy and complex, therefore our cities are too, but that’s no excuse for neglect and doom-mongering. I would have liked more analysis of the cultural life of cities, and the greatest city of all, New York, was barely touched upon, but overall the series was extraordinarily comprehensive and informative. Above all, the history of cities is the history of humanity, a story in equal parts unequal, cruel, thrilling and wonderful. As Velutus says in Shakespeare’s Corialunus: ‘What is the city but the people?’ Listen to In Our Time: Cities here.

Bull’s-eye view

The camera lens as a ruthless eye – it’s a well-worn cliche, but one that keeps demanding to be used. Photographs, even the most carefully shot, can reveal elements utterly unplanned by the photographer and the subject, from an previously unnoticed tower in a landscape to the lines in the face of a movie star clinging to youth. Since its invention the camera’s capacity to invade privacy has been readily exploited, leading to excitement and anxiety in equal measure.

Another common, but apposite cliche, is the idea that the photographer somehow violates their subject – even if the latter is willing to be photographed – by capturing their raw, unmediated image. As Henri Cartier-Bresson put it: ‘The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.’ Referring to the subject as ‘prey’ sounds slightly terrifying, but is probably a sentiment familiar to many photographers. Even inanimate objects and views become a kind of prey in the avaricious aperture of a camera.

It’s the camera’s invasion of human privacy that is the focus of an exhibition beginning at the end of the month in Tate Modern, entitled Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. Grouped under various themes that range from the obvious (sexually explicit or graphically violent shots) to more subtle examples of voyeurism like government surveillance and street photography, the sample of images available online indicates an exploration of humanity’s secret moments. Some are shocking, like the terrified face of a young South African man clinging to the side of a building while a jeering crowd urges him to jump, some are unsettlingly banal, like the couple kissing at the New York Tortilla Factory, but all share that strange intimacy that comes when a photography ‘steals’ a moment that a subject would never intend to be recorded.

One photograph from the exhibition that captures a thing rather than a person is a powerful image of a British army watchtower at the Crossmaglen security force base in South Armagh. On an otherwise normal-looking street the watchtower looks utterly unnatural, bristling with wire fencing and multiple aerials. Obviously this photo was illicitly taken, and yet the tower looks somewhat ridiculous, rather than threatening. Its incongruity highlights the unnatural political situation that gave rise to its creation.

Ideas of reality and artificiality are thrown into relief in Walker Evans’ 1927 Street Scene (above), where the hatted man viewed from above, bathed in intense shadow, look like figures from the set of a film noir. The fetishisation of the past in film and art often means that genuinely contemporary images end up looking like pastiches.

The value of this exhibition is not just the interesting images that will be on show, but the questions it raises about the function and power of photography, which are even more relevant now than in the past, considering we are under more surveillance now than ever before.

Good analysis of LJ. I don't remember overt Paul disike but I do remember a lot of Linda dislike. Tho that seems to have been part of a sort of reflexive lack of solidarity between women in the rock scene at the time, encouraged to see each other as threats or something. There's even a weirdly bitchy aside about Joni Mitchell of all people.

The Lost Weekend doco is prob more mature in that way & more positive to Paul+Linda, tho it seems revisionist in that John's violence & periodic dumping of May is played down, & the "paul bringing a message from yoko" forms part of her story by then even tho it's clear from the book that she knew nothing about this at the time. Not dunking on May or saying she's lying - it's just another example of how memories get softened with time, and augmented by stories from others.

Anyway my favourite part of Loving John is John and David Bowie queening out over Elizabeth Taylor, please someone put that in a fic

finished loving john and am turning it around and around in my head. may pang is not without her biases but it's pretty easy to flag where they are and what they're colored by. it is clear to me that she didn't like paul very much, and im not sure whether that's because of the way john presented him to her amidst the business troubles or because she perceived he didn't like her with john. the way may presents the johnandyoko reconciliation, it's entirely caused by yoko's hypnotherapist. but we know that's not entirely true and i dont know if at the time of writing she knew about paul telling john in LA that yoko wanted him back. there's a lot of instances where john and may are conspiring against yoko: keeping secrets and telling lies to pacify her. i dont know if may considered the two of them might have been doing the same to her. it seems easier for her to blame yoko for the whole thing, both the start and end of the relationship, and while she certainly deserves quite a bit of blame it's also john who won't take no for an answer when he first tries to sleep with her and it's john who chose to go back to yoko. yoko knew how to use the deepest parts of his psychology to convince him, but is was still HIS psychology. and honestly as an outside observer even though may had an incredible strength of character at such a young age i dont think anyone was really a match for the depth of trauma john had and it's entirely possible something worse may have happened had he stayed with her longer. and he did almost kill her.