Why The Beatles Never Had a Mudshark Story
Four years later, Led Zeppelin would make this hotel famous. The title is referring to a notorious groupie-related event in Led Zeppelin history, detailed here. Long dismissed as legend, it seems to have really happened in July 1969, and (could this possibly be?) everybody left the hotel room happy. Except, of course, for the poor shark. My last few posts [...]
Why Your Favorite Celebrity Isn’t Who You Think They Are
"This Halloween, go as one of the biggest bastards on Earth!" Folks, just a quick post here but one I think is worth making. In the comments to my 80th birthday post for John Lennon, we're talking about John's bad behavior (specifically his abuse of women--and men, too, though that is mentioned less). It's come up several times, and indeed [...]
Happy Birthday John Lennon, Whoever You Are
Lennon, no saint, mid-miracle. I haven't been thinking a lot about The Beatles or John Lennon lately, which is why you haven't seen me around here. But today being John Lennon's 80th birthday, I was awakened with this article from Esquire.com in my Twitter feed: "The Difficulty of Remembering John Lennon Today," by Alan Light. "Why does John Lennon, for [...]
The Worst Beatle Waxworks Ever
Being immortalized in wax is a particularly harsh price of fame, don't you think? Even the dummies reproduced on the cover of Sgt. Pepper (surely the best of a bad lot) seem to have at best a distant relationship to their human counterparts. But this one, provided by friend and fellow Beatlefan Stephen Kroninger, takes the cake. If you have better (or [...]
Johnandyoko Open Thread
My Dear Dullblogisti, Yesterday I wrote a post about Yoko Ono's relationship to The Beatles, and how strange it seems to me—not only her needless antipathy, but also John Lennon's—and how their marriage seemed to be founded on a mutual dismissal of/antagonism towards the idea of The Beatles. I mentioned how this puts any Beatles fan in a weird, yet seldom examined [...]
Mob Psycho 100 and the Beatles’ Mop Tops
A few days ago Eric Trump inadvertently sent the anime series Mob Psycho 100 to the toppermost of the Twitterverse when he Googled "mob." He signally failed to grasp why the popularity/relevance algorithm Google uses put images of the show early in the search results. Fans of the show reacted with predictable glee, and the Mob Psycho 100 Twitter account posted this, [...]
Rob Sheffield on the Beatles’ breakup and Peter Jackson’s upcoming film
This piece by Rob Sheffield (whose most recent book is Dreaming The Beatles) just came out in Rolling Stone. Sheffield uses the lens of the new Peter Jackson documentary due out next August and put together from the same sessions that yielded Let It Be to consider, again, just why the Beatles came apart as and when they did. There's nothing especially [...]
Craig Brown’s “One Two Three Four”
Is it possible to write anything fresh and interesting about the Beatles in 2020? Improbably, Craig Brown has managed to pull off this feat in One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time. It helps enormously that Brown departs from the marching-in-strict-chronological order structure used, understandably enough, in many accounts of the band. Brown is the author of 99 Glimpses of Princess [...]
The Beatles and Jeffrey Epstein
Knowing the internet, SEO alone will probably make this the most popular post in the history of Dullblog (hello Were John and Paul Lovers). But my thoughts are philosophical, not evidentiary. Spare your revulsion for a moment while I share some thoughts which may explain a lot of what I've written on this blog since 2010. Fact: there is a level of [...]