Hey you guys, should I make some Hey Dullblog t-shirts? They'd be about $25 each (shipping included), cheaper if we got a bunch, you just have to order it on theswissavenue.com. I did it on black because my wife said people like black t-shirts better, but I can do white instead if everybody squawks. Hairy arms optional Work it, sister
File under "M" for money In the midst of commenting on Michael B.'s excellent post, I was reminded of something that I've said to friends innumerable times but might never have ever written here for you all. I have a lot of Beatle Thoughts like that, sorry. The only solution is for everyone to live with me, and that won't work because my cat Max gets hemorrhoids around new people. All John Lennon needed to be happy was to give it all away. This isn't the hippie pipe-dream it might seem. Let me explain: At his death, the Chief Beatle was estimated [...]
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 may as well be in his late eighties for the way in which his happiness seems to be confined to rare moments when he reminisces about something he did in his early twenties. If there’s a spectrum of Dakota-era John Lennons stretching from Goldman’s smack-addled burnout on [...]
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" and reached #33 on the U.S. charts. I so want to think that everyone on this bus is cheering "Hip, hip, hooray!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkoYyo1yyU
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 through moderation, we're aware of movements on the blog in a way others may not be. Given the persistent interest in this topic, I've decided that it’s worth articulating my thoughts about it in more depth. Backstage at Hey Dullblog can get complicated I want to [...]
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 so, when the Anthology finally belched out all the last tracks worth hearing—that the great undiscovered country of Beatle fandom was trying to figure out what the experience was like for John, Paul, George, and Ringo. What, day by day, LP by LP, million by million, did [...]
The Beatles with Alma Cogan 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 was the reincarnation of his late mother. Cogan, as the article points out, was very much a traditional entertainer of the sort whom the Beatles quickly rendered culturally antiquated. But offstage, Cogan and the group mixed in the same relatively [...]
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 Paul get his due? commenters ask. Is it because he's been coded as feminine? Is it because he traditionally appealed to female Beatles fans? Is it misguided post-murder worship of Lennon? Is it Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone vendetta hardening into a permanent attitude? This is how a [...]
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 updating is here. On September 1 of this year Starostin posted a lengthy essay entitled "Music: Where The Hell Is It Heading To (Twenty Years After)?" Hard to believe that it's been two decades since Starostin published his first long essay about the state of music, but [...]
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 must go back to frying chicken. :-) You'll get the joke if you watch the video. (Actually, Kate and I are about to go to The Getty Villa. Ancient Romans had many analogues to Beatle-worship, and not simply gods and emperors and the cults around each. There [...]