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 [...]

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 [...]

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 should be to address the material in a respectful way—clearly it touches many people powerfully—while at the same time keeping things sane and positive. From the age of roughly five (I know, I know) to 42, I was fascinated by conspiracy theories about the assassinations of the [...]