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The Artist as a Dissipated Man: Fred Seaman’s “The Last Days of John Lennon”
John at Thanksgiving, 1979 Belatedly for someone as into the Beatles as I, I’ve been reading Fred Seaman’s The Last Days of John Lennon. It’s a very quick read, but not a particularly pleasant one. Seaman, John’s personal assistant for the last two or so years, depicts a rock star in his late thirties who […]
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Three Cheers for the Girls School Bus
These dark days, I’ll take opportunities to laugh wherever I can get them. On a recent trip to Indianapolis I saw this bus, and immediately imagined it as on its way to the imaginary, wink-wink-pornographic girls school Wings celebrated in song back in 1977. It was released as the B side of “Mull of Kintyre” […]
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Ethical Reflections on John/Paul
I’m writing this because the discussion on the “Were John and Paul Lovers?” post has been niggling at me for a while now. Though it was published more than six years ago, it’s one of Hey Dullblog’s most viewed and most contentious posts. And because Michael Gerber and I read every comment as it goes […]
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What are we doing here, anyway?
They don’t even golf like you or I. I was responding to a comment regarding the podcast Another Kind of Mind, and the application of “emotional intelligence” to The Beatles, and as I wrote the water grew deep enough for me to want this to be its own post. I have long thought—since 1995 or […]
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John Lennon, Alma Cogan, and the Delicate Mechanism of Efficient Beatles Operations
This article and this article from the Daily Mail have long intrigued me, less for whether or not it they are definitely true or false than because their truthiness is revealing. They claim that John Lennon had an affair with Alma Cogan, a British singer eight years his senior, and that he apparently believed she […]
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The Problem With Being a Genius
In catching up on recent comments, I ran across a couple that suggested Hey Dullblog judges Paul McCartney more harshly than it does the other Beatles; and one of the persistent conversations here for the last couple years is an anti-Paul bias in the media (I suppose we are part of the media?). Why doesn’t […]
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George Starostin on music today
Longtime readers of Hey Dullblog will recall that I’ve posted about Starostin’s music reviews before. He’s prolific, insightful, and unafraid to swim against the tide — though he’s never a contrarian for controversy’s sake. His reviews of the Beatles catalog are well worth reading. His original site is here, and the site he is currently […]
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Geoffrey Giuliano Goes Off
Commenter Gibson pointed me to this cri de coeur from Beatle author Geoffrey Giuliano on the perils of “thinking about the Beatles a little too much.” It tickled me immensely, and some of you will have strong feelings, I’m sure. I look forward to hearing them in the comments. Now if you’ll excuse me, I […]
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A Few Words on Conspiracy Theory
Who is this man? Several Beatles-related conspiracy theories—the idea that John and Paul were lovers, and the granddaddy of them all, the Paul McCartney death hoax—have emerged in the comments of late, and so I wanted to take a moment to share some strategies on how to deal with this kind of thinking. The goal […]
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A Secret History of The Beatles?
Is there, do you think, a secret history of The Beatles? In a private email, commenter Justin and I began talking about this Dullblog post—which, nearly ten years later, remains the best summary of my feelings on the breakup. (For those short on time: I think Lennon pulled away from Paul and the group impulsively, […]