• How We Got Here Comment by Michael Gerber on May 15, 17:44 Thank you, @Paul — I’ll fix the Patreon next week!
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Michael Gerber on May 15, 17:43 @Nancy, please do post! You are missed. I agree, especially with your sentiment that the story gets harder to tell accurately (and much more contentious!) the further along one gets. And also, a significantly younger collaborator (say, someone in their 30s) would make sure that all the volumes are written.
  • How We Got Here Comment by paul on May 15, 17:04 I’m sorry to hear all this Mike, what a mess. If you bring back the dullblog patreon, I’m onboard!
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by paul on May 15, 17:02 @Nancy Carr, I was hoping you would be back! I have enjoyed your writing and well thought out posts. I look forward to more of your insights, thank you!
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Nancy Carr on May 15, 12:39 I hope Lewisohn is listening! This seems like a workable plan and it would be great if he’d get behind it. I’m not sanguine about the prospects of ever getting an additional volume, because Lewisohn seems to me like a born researcher who has trouble getting to the writing stage. It would be interesting if he were willing to work with a partner who could help with the writing and editing, not just to get the project moving more briskly but also to help liven up the prose. Compounding Lewisohn’s deep-dive researching challenge is that the further one gets into the Beatles story the steeper and rockier the terrain. I don’t envy anyone trying to build a definitive history out of so many conflicting and deeply-entrenched readings of events (and disagreements about some of the events). Glad to see HD back and I may even begin posting myself!
  • Did Paul “Save The Beatles”? Comment by Michael on May 14, 19:00 A good point, and like Michael Gerber, one I hadn’t really thought of. It seems plausible. I think I’ve posted somewhere on here before (or maybe I’ve just *meant to post*) that by 1968, John Lennon is the only one of the people who founded and led major band who isn’t completely sidelined – Brian Wilson and Brian Jones did not really survive 1967, and Bob Dylan at least metaphorically crashed out and was trying to figure out a way forward that didn’t kill him. John’s acid reverie is maybe his version of the “motorcycle crash” but McCartney/Epstein/George Martin/the Beatles family seem to have cushioned him from something as drastic and life-threatening as what happened to Dylan. Anyway, that’s a long way of saying – thinking about it more, it does sound plausible that he would be. Especially, perhaps, once he gets to India and isn’t constantly trying to destroy his ego.
  • My Yoko Problem… and yours? Comment by paul on May 14, 18:31 Just the amount of comments here tells me everything I need to know. I’ll let it at this: I agree with Sir Huddleston
  • Eleanor Rigby But The Beatles Step On A Lego Comment by Alejandra Castro on May 14, 16:44 Did it hurt John more, or is he doing primal therapy?
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Justin McCann on May 14, 13:08 That’s a nice way of looking at George! I note with interest that I always come down harder on him than the other guys, even though I know John (and even Ringo) did worse things. I guess preachiness is always hard to take, especially from people who don’t practise what they preach, but I suspect I also project a lot of my own ‘stuff’ onto the guy 🙂 As a fellow introvert HSP, I think my Beatle experience would be the most similar to his out of the 4 of them. Biting my tongue now and resenting later very much included.
  • Did Paul “Save The Beatles”? Comment by Michael Gerber on May 14, 11:55 Yeah, I bet that was a fear of John’s, @Baboomska, and I’ve never really thought of it that way. Thanks for the insight. I think post-India John felt a lot more insecure within The Beatles than any of us outsiders could ever imagine. Crazy to think, but he sure does act like a guy who’s insecure.
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Michael Gerber on May 14, 11:53 “make Ovid look like a feminist” LOL OK now you’re just making jokes tailored to me. 🙂
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Michael Gerber on May 14, 11:51 Oh this is so fascinating, thank you for it. “people just stopped trying to build something better because the system fought back really hard!” Yeah. Also, a dear friend of mine who occupied the President’s office at Columbia in 1968 always reminds me that the hippies were actually a very small portion of his generation. “We just got a lot of publicity,” he says with a smile. Doing the peace-and-love work — which by the way looks very similar regardless of the tradition around it — is really the only answer, as far as I can tell. This is, IMHO, the real shame of John hooking up with Yoko. Because she carries so much trauma from her childhood in wartime Japan, he absorbed a lot of that fear and anger near the end of his life. I’ve said it before, but if there was one person who didn’t need a wallet for the rest of his life, it was John Lennon in 1980. I have a lot of sympathy for George. I get the sense that he was very sincere in his desire for, I don’t wanna say “awakening” because that’s got a lot of baggage around it. Let’s say he sensed there was a better way to live, and wanted that. But he was dealing with a kind of super-delusion. I don’t want to speak for any of you, but I think I deal with a normal level of access to distraction and sensory pleasures. George had as much sex as he could want, whenever he wanted, with anyone he wanted. He had money — then lost a lot of it — then had more again. He had an amazing place to live that I’m sure he didn’t want to lose. He had a lot of people praising him, and a lot of people damning him. So much to say that the winds buffeting his spiritual practice were about as strong as I can imagine. And yet, he never lost them for good, and by all accounts seemed to be an alright guy. I sure as heck couldn’t do any better than he did, and probably a lot worse. So I look on him with real appreciation.
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Justin McCann on May 14, 10:51 YES, Mike. We’re living in a Marcusian nightmare where the Man first crushed all dissent, then nipped all future dissent in the bud by convincing the dissenters that they’d finally stopped being so silly and woken up to reality. It just depresses me to see people of the time, Lennon included, swallow the propaganda and talk about the dream being over and waking up to the cold, hard truths of life – it’s like, no, people just stopped trying to build something better because the system fought back really hard! Same goes when people today express this knee-jerk contempt towards the hippie ideal – what, because now is so great and we’re all so happy with how everything turned out? On the other hand you have people like Ram Dass, who over time turned from drugs-are-the-answer towards spirituality and service, and *never* stopped modelling an alternative to our fear-and-paranoia-based system and trying to make the world a better place (see: Seva, visiting the dying, etc). OK he wasn’t perfect, but that’s the point, right, you can be imperfect and still get a lot done. If you do the peace-and-love thing right, it’s just the farthest thing in the world from the do-nothing head-in-the-clouds caricature of the lazy hippie – it’s *harder* than the fear-and-paranoia lifestyle, takes more work, requires more courage. And that’s exactly why it’s easier to laugh at it than to actually give it a chance. Of course, unfortunately a lot of hippies *did* fit the caricature, plus the movement was inextricably tied to drug-addled rock musicians, who were great at singing about selfless love and often not great at demonstrating it. Among the Beatles, George is obviously the most similar to a Ram Dass, but the poor guy strikes me as somewhat of a spiritual bypasser, embittered and grudge-nursing almost to the end, trying so hard to float above Maia but so hopelessly attached to its pleasures and opportunities for self-indulgence. But hey, I don’t know the guy’s heart, and if RD had been in the Beatles, I’m sure he’d have acted just the same way.
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Justin McCann on May 14, 10:32 Oh I wasn’t saying people respond to HIAWG *more* than 64 – I do, but I don’t see my community choir putting it on the programme any time soon 😉 I was more talking about the WAY we’ve been trained to respond to these very different songs – among the musos & intelligentsia there’s this faint embarrassment about all that granny music, like you’re enjoying this smug escapism almost in spite of itself. Of course it’s exactly the other way round, it’s the guns-&-heroin shtick that’s really the escapism for most of us. (I love Mike Leigh btw.) And yes, couldn’t agree more that our immature obsession with coolness has stunted the culture. Massively so. You have novelists infatuated with hip, ironic distance; musicians singing only about sex and never about love (the exact opposite problem to the songs of 100 years ago – can’t we have both?); and rappers whose verses about women make Ovid look like a feminist. Somewhere along the way, the critics & public decided that the values of It’s a Wonderful Life & 64 were irreparably bourgeois / capitalist / sickly sweet / manipulative / fake / you name it. And it’s like, really, there’s nothing manipulative about all the defensive studied distance that’s replaced them? No fear of being judged by your audience? Also, how exactly are warmth, familial love and community spirit fake? They’re the only things strong enough to *stand up* to the anti-human values of unrestrained capitalism! Why be so dead set against artistic representations of the very things that have given your own life meaning? (And if they haven’t, God help you…)
  • Did Paul “Save The Beatles”? Comment by Baboomska McGeesk on May 14, 03:46 “An interesting question, but I never got the impression that John saw any of the Stones as equals…” Believe me, I know the Stones weren’t in the same class as the Beatles, either music-wise or power-wise, and never ever were. But John saw them selling records, and he saw what Jagger did to Brian Jones. Obsessed as he was with status and hierarchy, maybe his worst fear was waking up one sleepy morning to a group called “Paul McCartney and The Beatles” by the fans.
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Michael Gerber on May 13, 22:25 Love this, thank you. Your comment makes me remember something I wrote about in one of my earlier drafts: 1967’s Summer of Love was followed by 1968’s revolutions of May, and August ’68’s “Days of Rage” at the Chicago convention. Pepper’s gentle Utopian stance was followed by “Revolution.” And that evolution was seen as “natural” or “inevitable” or “realistic” or whatever. From 1968 to now the dominant idea is that hippie Utopianism, whether it was free love or free medical care or free food, was a ridiculous drug-addled dream, and that the only way to make a better world was through some sort of violence, some sort of geopolitical remedy, some sort of overthrow. But we know now that this change WASN’T natural or inevitable. Psychedelic utopianism might’ve been fatally flawed, but it wasn’t given a fair hearing. Last month I read a book called Season of the Witch, David Talbot’s history of San Francisco from 1950 to 1985. The crush of kids descending on San Francisco starting around May 1967 was a phenomenon caused by mass media (songs, articles in LIFE); that was unprecedented. But city officials knew this was going to happen months in advance, and rather than accepting it — beefing up social services, arranging for food and housing, trying to reduce harm in logical ways, and treating it as a kind of temporary tourism — the City said, “Stay away, and if you do come, you may get thrown in jail.” Which meant that by August when George Harrison showed up, the neighborhood had been thrown into chaos, and there was lots of visible suffering in the Haight — drunkenness, homelessness, crime, disorder. Because in some sense, that’s what the City wanted. Now there was PLENTY of money and food and material wealth in America in 1967 for all these kids (many of them runaways from unhappy homes) to be cared for. That wasn’t an option, because conservative forces in San Francisco, and Sacramento (Governor Reagan), and even people on the national level, wanted this all to fail. They didn’t want kids experimenting with new ways to live. When doctors set up a Free Clinic, for example, the city tried to shut it down. The (mostly Catholic, mostly conservative) SFPD went around cracking heads, so the hippies had to turn to the Hell’s Angels to keep good order. This worked better than expected…until it didn’t. In an era of almost unimaginable plenty, in the richest best-educated country in human history, lots of needless suffering was created, then maintained, so that any kind of “alternative society based on freedom and sharing” (my words) could not take root. So a lot of kids from around the country hitchhiked to San Fran and found themselves dropped into Hell, and were kept there by a society that wanted to punish them, and use their suffering to dissuade others from stepping out of line. We now know that the US government was scared shitless that the counterculture would go mainstream — not the clothes or the music, but the politics. If the next generation didn’t want to have jobs, and felt their government should provide basic services taken from the wealth of the society, to LBJ and the rest that sounded like Communism. (And maybe it was.) The Cold War was not some theoretical thing; it was something that millions were sacrificed to “win.” Just like the City of San Francisco’s reaction to the kids of the Summer of Love was to throw ’em in jail, or let ’em get STDs, or OD, by August 1967, both the FBI and the CIA had launched programs specifically designed to infiltrate and splinter the counterculture. (The FBI’s program was COINTELPRO; the CIA’s program was CHAOS.) And these programs, aimed at movements that were functionally defenseless, succeeded massively right from the beginning. By the middle of 1968, the mood of the kids in the counterculture had changed drastically, and the happy nonsense of flower power had been replaced by the evil nonsense of the Weathermen. Some of that change was brokenheartedness over the deaths of MLK and RFK; some of it was seeing what was happening in Europe in May ’68; some of it was the changing diet of drugs ingested by the hippies. When the face of the movement was Sgt. Pepper, it had some real chance of taking hold, and making things better; but Abbie Hoffman wasn’t going to lead anybody anywhere. He was politics as entertainment, and we know this because anybody who wasn’t an entertainer — anyone who was a real threat to ANYTHING — was killed. (Fred Hampton for example.) Anyway: the Summer of Love wasn’t some stupid idea that was tried and found wanting; it was an experiment based on sincere and durable desires, that was methodically crushed, so that the counterculture started playing by the same rules as the authorities — violence and anger. This was a fight the counterculture could not win, and that’s why the authorities forced them into that spot. The moment the song turned to “Street Fighting Man” the game was all over.
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Michael Gerber on May 13, 21:47 Great comment! DO we respond to songs like “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” more? Some people do — certainly people who are musicians (HIAWG is a million times more in tune with modern pop music than 64), and critics. But sitting here thinking about it, what other contemporary musician can pull off 20s-30s pastiche like McCartney could? I think your analogy of Scorsese is very good, but instead of Leigh it’s more like…Capra? The inability of modern directors to be able to create in that register could be seen as a flaw. Like, isn’t it a flaw that nobody knows how to make movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” anymore?
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Michael Gerber on May 13, 21:36 Thanks, @Paul. Blood on the floor in that one, but I got there eventually. The BEAUTIFUL thing about Pepper is you don’t need to perceive this concept at all to enjoy the LP. It’s just a feeling of happiness and excitement — of possibility, and The Beatles pretending to be these guys from 1900 or whatever.
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by paul on May 13, 17:36 Great read Mike! Thank you for taking the time to put your profound thoughts into words. When I heard Pepper for the first time, I was in awe. But I also wondered, what happened to the Beatles. Who were these guys, and how did they make it feel so different? Of course, I was only 9 years old, and it took a long time and a lot of reading to begin to understand.
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Justin McCann on May 13, 17:27 & on the subject of gritty realism in songwriting – something Pepper’s very much criticised for lacking – it’s time for everyone to admit that we respond to songs like Happiness Is a Warm Gun not because they’re ‘realer’ than songs like When I’m 64, but because they’re more titillating. They’re thrilling because they’re *less* like the mundane lives we lead, not more, same as Scorsese raises your adrenaline more than Mike Leigh. I’ll grant that John’s songs contain more ‘reality’ than Paul’s in the limited sense that he (occasionally) reveals himself more in the lyrics, and (basically always) invests his singing with more raw emotion – McCartney’s virtually always at a professional remove that, to me at least, makes his stuff generally less affecting. But at the end of the day, the vast majority of us live lives that are far more like McCartney’s world than Lennon’s. Woke up, fell out of bed. Grandchildren on your knee. Fixing a hole. Bourgeois stuff? Sure. But it’s working-class stuff too. Human stuff. Life-affirming attitudes that make you happier and more functional, applied to the ins and outs of everyday experience, are just about as close to reality as you can get. And for every time Lennon’s jadedness brought Paul’s sentimentality back down to earth, there were many more times he could sorely have benefited from the latter’s optimism.
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Justin McCann on May 13, 17:02 Part 2 just dropped! https://open.substack.com/pub/onlysolitaire/p/review-the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-928?r=8z5zd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Where I think we’re totally in agreement on Pepper, Mike, is that we both seem to *like* hippie idealism and utopianism – we’re rooting for the peace-and-lovers and want them to win. Part of the ’90s backlash against the album stems from the fact that grunge’s mainstreaming of punk and gangsta’s cheapening of hip-hop (not to mention South Park etc on TV) resulted in pop culture worshipping selfishness & ugliness for a long time. I remember it well. But more and more lately, I find myself gravitating towards music that conveys joy and transcendence – a lot of that being soul, funk, gospel and various African genres, because very few white artists can, or want to, pull it off. But in the ’60s joy was temporarily cool, and you got your Hollies, your Van Morrisons, and most of all, your Beatles. For all that I’m drawn to some darker stuff too – one of the reasons Lennon’s stuff generally excites me more than McCartney’s – it’s always annoyed me when grittier art is praised for its ‘realism’. Why are e.g. hard drugs, jail time and violence more ‘realistic’ than e.g. love, simple pleasures and strong family bonds, when the latter are far more common experiences, not just among the Western middle class but practically around the world? X-rated albums and movies are generally about *exceptional* circumstances, not everyday ones. As they came right out & said themselves in ‘Salt of the Earth’, the Stones are not you and me. And we wouldn’t want them to be. Calling pessimism and myopia more ‘realistic’ than optimism and unity is cynicism and laziness assuming the outcome they want in advance: the only true ‘realism’ is admitting that we all get the world we bother to build. If you time travelled back to the Ancient Near East in the Bronze Age and told a random warrior there about democracy, human rights, fair trials, free speech, international cooperation, the welfare state, and all the scientific advances & improved health outcomes we currently enjoy, I don’t think they’d find your spiel particularly ‘realistic’. But we got here because we bothered to get here. We have no right to assume that things can’t get better still, that our current backsliding will continue forever, that we had a good run but it’s over now. And love actually-existing hippies or loathe them, we have no excuse for not wanting the same things they wanted.
  • I’d Love to Turn You On Comment by Michael Gerber on May 13, 14:28 @Michael, I agree that McCartney and cocaine is a great window here. My second-hand knowledge of cocaine suggests that in creative people it makes them more productive, but ruins their judgment, and eventually makes them much harder to work with — “bossy, demanding, egotistical,” as you say. In the early era, when their brain is MOSTLY a non-coke brain, the drug gives them the energy to create extremely well-focused things like Sgt. Pepper. But if they keep it up, they start making things like Magical Mystery Tour. “We don’t need a story! It’s down on this piece of paper! We’ll just go out and film it! And direct it ourselves!” Lots of productivity, lousy quality control. The same thing happened at SNL in the 70s; brilliance in 1976, and by 1979 a snakepit of egos producing less good work. Truth be told, I don’t know much about Paul in 1968 except that he helps start a whole corporation AND writes “Hey Jude” AND breaks up with his fiance AND gets close to Linda AND makes a zillion songs for the White Album AND at year’s end he looks at his main collaborator who is obsessively hooked up with a new girlfriend and zonked on heroin and thinks, “What this situation calls for is a new album! Which should be filmed!” That doesn’t seem quite sane, to me. I believe Paul when he says he didn’t much like the drug, but that he liked the paraphernalia/ritual, and I am sure he loved the effects. If you love having ideas (which he does) and making songs (which he does), stimulants are great. I also believe him when he says that he frequently balanced it with weed. Lots of productivity, poor quality control, mixed with a kind of unfocusedness — that sounds like Paul in the 70s and 80s as well. (With the caveat that he had a family, and that probably vastly curtailed his drug use.) But when Paul McCartney came into his potential as a musician and creator, that was the time he was doing coke and balancing that with weed, and those chemicals surely changed how he developed. George’s drug history is fascinating. It seems he, like Paul, prefers stimulants to depressants; he’s a heavy smoker from an early age, so he’s definitely hook-able, with the right drug. When George is using coke, it’s obvious — as in the mid-70s — so I DON’T think he’s using coke regularly at any time during the Beatles. I don’t think he ever seriously considered heroin, either — though it’s fascinating that he was so close to Clapton. Some people’s drug story is to stay mostly clean but enable addicts, and that may have been George. I think he was sincerely meditating, and that plus a little genetic luck may have been enough to avoid the worst stuff. I am not sure about the relative flow of heroin into London in 1968 as opposed to earlier. I know there was a law passed in ’67 that took effect in ’68, and cocaine and heroin addicts could no longer get it via prescription, but had to go to clinics. I suspect this actually reduced the spread among your more famous rock stars, and that the real habits had been established earlier.
  • Did Paul “Save The Beatles”? Comment by Michael Gerber on May 13, 13:30 “Paul, John, and George were friends who loved each other.” …which is why the group broke up when it did, and why The Stones never had to.
  • Did Paul “Save The Beatles”? Comment by Michael on May 13, 11:41 An interesting question, but I never got the impression that John saw any of the Stones as equals, least of all a non-songwriting Stone. Nor did the Beatles have the same kind of ruthless, Lord of the Flies-style band dynamics that the Stones did, where it seems inevitable that either Brian and Keith were going to need to grind Mick into pieces (impossible, when Brian and Keith were junkies), or Mick and Keith do the same to Brian. Paul, John, and George were friends who loved each other. Mick, Brian, and Keith, whatever they were, do not seem to have loved each other like that.
  • I’d Love to Turn You On Comment by Michael on May 13, 11:26 @Michael Gerber, I think cocaine is an interesting test case of this problem: we know Paul was using it from late 1966 until…when? He said in one interview that he used it for “about a year,” I think. I’ve seen that get repeated as fact. Is it fact? Did Paul McCartney stop using cocaine in late 1967 or early 1968, and not use it again after that (at least while the group were together)? Do you think he wasn’t using it during the White Album sessions, when all of London was, and his relationships with Jane and John were falling apart, and seemingly every account of him in the studio that year is of someone being bossy, demanding, and egotistical? I don’t. And what about John and George? Just because John was using a lot of LSD and, later, heroin, that doesn’t mean those were the *only* drugs he was addicted to. Rather, those were the drugs he was abusing the *most*. But there was a cocktail of other drugs – amphetamines, downers, cocaine, marijuana – to smooth the path. We know this from details in accounts – Yoko saying John kept a jar of pills on his nightstand and indiscriminately swallowed a few at the start of each day; Peter Brown giving us the detail about the mortar and pestle in Weybridge that kept a combination of speed, cocaine, and LSD that John used to keep trips going. How do all those drugs interact with each other? What happens if you’re using them all of the time? What happens if you and your co-writer/best friend are both using marijuana and cocaine regularly, and then *you* go and get addicted to heroin, and he doesn’t? It does seem like the two times the Beatles are most fractured before 1969 are when Paul and John are not taking the same drugs – in 1966 with LSD, and then in 1968 with heroin. We don’t know what we don’t know; did John, who is well documented was always interested in the next available new drug and therefore surely interested in heroin once Clapton/Keith/Hendrix/Brian Jones were trying it, resent Paul for not trying it with him? Did that contribute at all to choosing Yoko as his new best friend? Why did all of that happen in 1968, when Robert Fraser was trying to get Paul addicted to heroin 18 months earlier and surely offered it to John, too, at that time? And what about George – we simply don’t hear about him in this regard, as though we are to believe that the Beatle who took almost as much LSD as John simply renounced drugs in 1967 and meditated through the end of the breakup.
  • The concept behind Pepper Comment by Michael Bleicher on May 13, 09:21 Beautifully stated and I think Pepper and Revolver are the most European of the Beatles LPs, bit just because of the musical idioms but because they seem to be in dialogue with death, rebirth, destruction, Utopianism in a way that they weren’t before or after, and I think it’s most of all these two that make the Beatles as album artists so mystifyingly brilliant to me. In an effort to keep the album surprising to me, I recently made a playlist the puts Strawberry Fields Forever after …Friends, followed by Fixing a Hole, Lucy, and then the rest of the track order. It’s an interesting exercise. It makes the album feel a bit more like a Beatles album; there’s more Lennon on it, but it also becomes darker and more idiosyncratic because that song has such a strong gravitational pull. The “LSD tea party of the end of civilization” element works a bit better if that darkness only comes to the fore at the end of the album. But at the same time, it’s definitely a stronger listen, song for song. As it stands, of course, the album wasn’t released that way but I think it would have truly devastated Brian Wilson if it had been.
  • Did Paul “Save The Beatles”? Comment by Baboomska McGeesk on May 13, 03:55 “I think it was a game of chicken to get Paul back in line as the number two…” Something just occurred to me: Was John frightened by what he saw happening to Brian Jones? I know John watched Mick and the Stones very closely. So when he saw the fall of Jones and the rise of Jagger, did he think (perhaps subconsciously) “I’d rather destroy this thing we built rather than suffer the same humiliating fate” ?
  • Are the guitars on Pepper…different? Comment by Michael Gerber on May 12, 22:46 I’ll write my theory up as quick and brutally as possible in a post. At the risk of getting to a level of detail nobody wants, my theory isn’t “Via meditation, Lennon unearthed trauma or other emotional material that he couldn’t handle.” That’s a perfectly legit theory, and may have happened, but it’s not what I’m talking about. I’m suggesting that 1) There is an “energy body” which Western medicine doesn’t recognize, but Eastern medicine does. 2) Long-term use of drugs causes changes in that energy body. 3) Sudden changes to drug usage patterns can cause disturbances — and even injuries — to a person’s energy body. Beginning or ending certain chemicals, for example. The sensations and states we use drugs for, can come from changes in the flow of qi. It’s not just that LSD does things to your nervous system, but also impacts your qi. 4) Big meditation — or big yoga/qigong, or big acupuncture, or big martial arts — can also disturb/injure the energy body. 5) Injuries — or, if you prefer, imbalances that don’t resolve without professional help — can cause physical and mental maladies. 6) Lennon’s energy body was developed in a certain way from his genetics, his childhood, and experiences. He had taken to using chemicals to soothe imbalances in his energy body, and those chemicals — which were stronger and stronger, from booze to speed to pot/LSD/whatever — had, by February 1968, become a load-bearing pillar in his energy body. 7) The abrupt removal of those drugs threw his energy body out of whack. 8) Lots of meditation and probably yoga threw it further out of whack. Even things that are healthy, like yoga, can cause uncomfortable symptoms as the system “detoxes.” 9) Lennon was damn strong, uncommonly resilient, but by the end of his India trip, these imbalances were making him act strangely. This is why he abruptly turned on the Maharishi. This is why he bitterly fought with Cyn on the flight home. This is why, once he got back to London, he started using again HARD. And it’s why he’s seemingly enraged at everybody in his life and runs to Yoko, and starts H. None of this is to ignore or downplay the emotional content that he unearthed in India and was trying to metabolize. It is merely to share a very surprising subset of knowledge that I myself experienced a little more than ten years ago. Imbalances in the energy body — in Worsley acupuncture called “blocks” — make you feel physically awful, give you distinctive thoughts (some blocks make you depressed, some make you angry, some make you have repetitive thoughts). Each type has different effects, and you can have more than one going on at once. I don’t know if Lennon was out-of-whack, that would require an examination from a Worsley acupuncturist, but he sure acts like someone with one or several powerful, untreated energy blocks. By 27 he had really mistreated his body/mind/spirit, and had expended a huge amount of vitality. Like I said, he was strong, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was suffering from this very peculiar kind of sickness. All the “acting out” he does from 1968-71 or so are symptoms, and not just of childhood trauma. To me it’s much more acute than that, and his disregulation reminds me of periods of my own life. Luckily I was under the care of someone who knew what to do, but even so, I had many really hairy experiences.
  • Did Paul “Save The Beatles”? Comment by Michael Bleicher on May 12, 21:21 @Michael I think it was a game of chicken to get Paul back in line as the number two, and/or to fight for John, and/or to break up the group, i.e., several slightly different things often all at once. I don’t see the evidence that between mid-1968 and 1973 John really knows what he’s doing in that calculated a way. I think post-18 months of acid, post-India, post-whatever happened in New York in May 1968, the unease in John’s soul turns into both “I need Paul to choose me, JOHN LENNON, and I also hate how small he has made me feel”, and also “I can’t handle this, I need heroin.” That’s just the impression I have the longer I look at his actions, and it feels like Yoko and Klein both stem from those things — both of them will piss off McCartney, force him to submit in some way to John’s authority, and enable John’s web of addictive behaviors to continue unabated. Increasingly I see speculation online that something happened not just in India (or in India at all) but in New York, which is where Lennon supposedly first sees Linda and Paul together, in a limo on the way to JFK. It certainly is odd that within 48 hours of returning to London he announces he’s Jesus and then becomes inseparable from Yoko. And isn’t bringing Yoko to the white album sessions (starting that following week!) the same deliberately destructive behavior as insisting on Klein?
  • Are the guitars on Pepper…different? Comment by Justin McCann on May 12, 15:53 If you have a one- or two-sentence version of the theory you want to drop here, that’s good enough for me – if Nietzsche could get away with bald assertions couched in witty aphorisms, so can we all 🙂 Your theory makes sense to me based on my experience too. I’ve done a lot of meditation, inner work, journalling and Gestalt therapy, and while all that sitting with the discomfort has been good for me, it’s also been UNCOMFORTABLE. Very much so. I understand what it’s like to have unpleasant feelings violently coming up before you’re grounded enough to deal with them, I’m intimately faniliar with psychosomatic disturbances in the bodymind, and I also know what it is to feel viscerally let down by someone you’ve not been able to stop yourself putting on a pedestal (transference and codependency are not a happy mix). Then I consider that John had a way harder life than I’ve had, and was in much more pain – as evidenced by just how manically he consumed anything that could possibly help him shove the feelings down – and then he’s suddenly not consuming any of it, and Brian’s just died, and Paul’s done something to piss him off (usurped him, rejected him, left India early, whatever it is). And the culture of the time allowed him so much less self-awareness than we enjoy today: at least when I experience codependency, shame, transference or idol-building I immediately *know* what’s happening, and can compassionately witness it all from a deeper place in which those things *aren’t* happening. John was just totally at the mercy of his inner child. In any case, it bothers me that so few Beatle people are willing to seriously grapple with the fact that the band went to India to mellow out and get enlightened, upon which John instantly starts writing songs filled with lyrics like ‘Feel so suicidal’, ‘I’m GOING INSANE!’ and ‘I’d give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind’, then starts acting like a crazy person, virtually single-handedly goes about fostering tension and discord, and ends up breaking up the band.
  • Are the guitars on Pepper…different? Comment by Michael Gerber on May 11, 22:43 Thank you @Justin! Reading some of that Starostin made me write a bunch about the concept behind Pepper — it’s so obvious to me I can’t un-see it — but I got tangled up and ran out of steam halfway through. I’m just not a critic, you know? Devin and Nancy can do that dance, but I want to just SAY it, and be done with it. “Pepper’s about this, duh. Go read books about the Sixties, you’ll see it!” My theory, based on my own experience mind you, is that the sudden cessation of drugs (save pot), followed by intense meditation outside of the usual type of instruction and supervision, gave Lennon a severe energetic imbalance. These energetic imbalances manifest in very uncomfortable thoughts and feelings as the energy moves around your meridians (or doesn’t), and you think they’re externally caused. You feel angry, and look for the external cause; you feel scared, and look for the external cause; you feel like you just wanna DIE right NOW, and so forth. Lennon medicated his condition with even more drugs post-India, including opioids, which makes perfect sense. He was in agony and needed nervous system relief. But being in this state one is very very reactive, and if you’re not getting the root cause treated, you’ll do things in your life that fuck things up. And then you have problems caused by that, which is what plagued Lennon for the rest of his life. I think his endless searching for diets and such was an attempt to treat this condition. If he’d lived a bit longer, I think he would’ve run across the type of Eastern medicine that saved my life, and it might’ve helped him immensely. I…think? I’m not a doctor, or a critic. 🙂
  • Are the guitars on Pepper…different? Comment by Justin McCann on May 11, 10:49 Oh, and I read somewhere that there’s a good chance the title track was the Beatles’ attempt to keep up with Hendrix (btw Paul is my favourite guitarist in the band, not George – he’s so much more spontaneous and aggressive). Makes sense. Lovely how it all came full circle, with the great man covering the song a few days after the album came out, as the song’s authors looked on.
  • Are the guitars on Pepper…different? Comment by Justin McCann on May 11, 10:45 Mike! I was just leaving a comment on a Substack about the right and wrong ways to do meditation, where I mentioned your theory about how John’s incautious approach to meditating in Rishikesh might have permanently changed his personality. I gave ‘the old Beatles blog Hey Dullblog’ as my source, hit send, then idly thought I’d look the site up to see if I could find your thoughts on the subject. Imagine my delight when I saw the date of your last post, and immediately went back to remove the adjective ‘old’ from my comment! On Pepper – I know we’ve had our differences re: it vs. Revolver, hehe (although the point seems to be moot these days, because if Revolver was Gen X’s album of choice, the Zoomers are definitively going for Abbey Road. Time is a funny thing…will Radiohead end up more known for In Rainbows than The Bends, Damon Albarn more for Gorillaz than Blur?). But I’ve really been enjoying Starostin’s latest magnum opus on the Sgt., which he’s only halfway through. Link here for the curious: https://substack.com/home/post/p-195323318 Welcome baaaaaaack
  • Did Paul “Save The Beatles”? Comment by Michael Gerber on May 10, 17:48 This to me suggests that, as I’ve mentioned before, hiring Klein was part of Lennon’s efforts to break up the group. See also: JohnandYoko, “Two Virgins,” etc etc and ad nauseam, from the Summer of ’68 onwards. Doing stuff McCartney couldn’t agree to, without putting his own work at risk. After Yoko comes on the scene, John treats his Beatle legacy like a mere lead-up to the real genius to come. Paul, for all his flaws, at least recognized that protecting their work was important. You can already hear John justifying himself in that irritating “man of the people” way he’d use so often before Yoko threw him out. That Klein, friend of the downtrodden, deserved to face his accuser. But that’s just my imagination, so forget I said it.
  • Did Paul “Save The Beatles”? Comment by paul on May 10, 15:55 This is from the book, ‘many years from now’, by Barry Miles. Definitely biased toward Paul, but believable. John wanted Allen Klein, a small, round, ruthless American accountant who had managed the Stones, to manage him. Klein had made the Stones a fortune—far more than the Beatles, even though they’d sold fewer records—and Mick had once sung his praises. But he had fallen out with Klein. They had parted company but Klein had managed to keep the rights to many of the group’s earlier songs. When Mick heard the Beatles were about to meet Klein, he wanted to advise them against him. He rang Peter Brown and told him that the Beatles should not meet with Klein because he could not be trusted. Peter insisted that Mick should tell the Beatles so himself, and set up a meeting. But John, in his perverse way, invited Klein to be there too. Mick left. The upshot was that John, George, and Ringo hired Allen Klein, while Paul stuck with his in-laws. Klein prom- ised them all sorts of riches but in the end the relationship soured, as it had with the Stones, and the Beatles ended up suing him.
  • Are the guitars on Pepper…different? Comment by Michael Gerber on May 9, 21:59 I’ve always felt that Revolver was black and white, and Pepper full living color. Yes, that’s the packaging but…can you imagine if Brian had gotten his way and they’d put brown paper bags on Sgt. Pepper? The thing about Pepper — and this for me is what elevates it over Revolver — is how it was full of correct artistic decisions by the Fabs. The music is wonderful on both, though I ever-so-slightly prefer psychedelic musichall to switched-on pop. Revolver was basically old-style packaging with Voorman’s groovy cover slapped on the front; Robert Freeman’s rosette could’ve (should’ve) been either the back cover or the inner sleeve or the label on the LP itself. But Pepper…they picked Peter Blake over The Fool, printed the lyrics, added the inserts. They indemnified EMI against lawsuit so they could run all the famous photos. Pepper wasn’t just The Beatles at their most innovative, they were also infallible with it in a way that they never were again. Pepper is Beatle Taste (and Beatle Luck) at its zenith. It’s not for nothing that the film Yellow Submarine was greenlit during this period, too.
  • Are the guitars on Pepper…different? Comment by Jarret Cooper on May 9, 21:03 I can’t help you with the guitar question but I’ll definitely support Pepper supremacy, as lonely a hill as that has become to defend. It IS a better place to be than Revolver, and though the c.w. holds that Revolver’s songs are superior (as you say), I think if you did a “shootout” between appropriate pairs of songs on Revolver vs. Pepper, it would be a pretty close contest. And the “concept” works whether they consciously engineered it or not (or started to and gave up) — see Gould’s “Can’t Buy Me Love”. Or Faith Current’s “Revolver/Pepper” articles that were reposted here.
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Jarret Cooper on May 9, 20:36 You’re very welcome, Michael; I pledged on Patreon about a year ago during the HD hiatus, and, well, I guess it worked out 🙂 But if you decide that it’s not worth it and supporting AB would be the best way to keep HD going I’ll pay for that instead.
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Michael Gerber on May 9, 18:43 @Jarret, THANK YOU. If the ads on the site prove intrusive, I will take them down and speak to everyone about the Patreon. My only concern is that I can’t do that Patreon properly — like, give you guys more interesting stuff — based on my insane workload right now.
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Michael Gerber on May 9, 18:38 @Craig, I would never be so pushy and American as to contact Mr. Lewisohn, but I hope that what I wrote gives him (and any advisors) some useful food for thought. Just one man’s opinion — based on a lot of lived experience, though. He seems like a nice fellow, and is certainly doing God’s work. I like all of us want him to be well cared for, and book publishing is set up to care for everybody but the author. His bind is very typical, especially for a non-fiction project, but crowdfunding seems to me to offer him a way out.
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Michael Gerber on May 9, 18:30 Yes, if Mr. Lewisohn doesn’t want to do it, his publisher could, and reap major, major benefits. Not just money, but that mailing list. That publisher could set themselves up as the Beatle Publisher for a generation, and use that mailing list to publish books that were basically guaranteed to be profitable. How many Beatle peedles would back a Lewisohn Kickstart? 5,000? 10,000? 25,000? Most books sell nowhere near those numbers. I don’t know when they negotiated it, but if he got less than a million for a three-book comprehensive history on The Beatles, he was robbed. The conversation with the agent has to be, “I’m going to work for 30 years on this. I need to eat for 30 years.” 30k x 30 = $900,000. The problem is, book agenting has within it a conflict of interest. 15% of one deal, no matter how big, is enough to defray future monies lost by pushing a publisher hard on an advance. If your agent really puts the screws to say, Random, that house — and all of its subsidiaries — is going to be less likely to buy any future book that agent is pitching. So the pressure on any agent is to keep their relationships with the publisher as positive as possible. And once you, the author, sign with an agent, that agent owns 15% of any book they shop for you, even if the agent sells it to a chum of theirs, or gets you a shitty deal, or doesn’t sell it at all. So the important relationship, from the agent’s perspective, has to be the publisher — since most books don’t earn out, that’s where their money comes from. If Mr. Lewisohn did this Kickstarter, he — NOT his agent, NOR his publisher — would own that sizable, targeted, proven mailing list. And the balance of power would be firmly in his court, for as long as he owned that information, and they didn’t. They would use every tool to get it from him. The smart thing might be to 1) Do the Kickstarter; 2) Make the money, and get that list; and then 3) Renegotiate the deal on top of that, using that list as leverage. If he did that, he would have a really significant chunk of change, more than enough to live and research and write happily on this topic, for the rest of his life.
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Michael Gerber on May 9, 18:11 Paul, I hope you enjoy it! I think you will. And thank you!
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Michael Gerber on May 9, 18:10 @Neal, this is so wonderful for you to say. Thank you! My life is beyond crazy right now, trying to keep a whole bunch of plates spinning (including a big one I can’t talk about just yet), but it is always a pleasure to talk with all of you here. Speaking of being able to write about anything, I just wrote a little piece about my use of Cuban cigars as an antidepressant. 🙂
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Neal Schier on May 9, 15:46 Michael, I know your schedule must be filled from morning till night, but I just want you to know how grateful I am that you have started to post here again. Actually not so much for the Beatles per se, but rather that your writing is always so good. In fact, you could be writing about lawn care and you would no doubt make it witty, compelling, and interesting. I was having trouble with my digital subscription to the American Bystander so I cancelled that last week, but will re-subscribe to the actual print edition. Pro tip to those who might be browsing this comment section, the AB is downright fun. Give it a try. Again Michael, a big fan of your writing so a hearty thank you for what you do.
  • Did Paul “Save The Beatles”? Comment by Baboomska McGeesk on May 9, 10:23 I recently saw the Jason Statham film “The Bank Job” and Lennon (played by Alan Swofford) appears very briefly, and with no dialogue. Maybe that’s the easiest way to portray him. Although John with nothing to say doesn’t exactly seem historically accurate!
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by paul on May 9, 10:23 I have looked at your bystander website, but never thought of it as a possibility of supporting hey dullblog. I’ll take a digital subscription, thanks!
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Tom on May 9, 03:43 Mark’s comments on recent podcasts etc. suggest it is the writing itself, including distilling the mountains of research already done, that’s taking him so long. He’s also said his publisher is ‘very patient’ but he’s long since spent the advance hence the side projects to pay the bills. This suggests he signed a contract and took an advance for all 3 volumes. Nevertheless maybe he and his publisher should in any case be doing something like your suggestions. After such a long delay it should be in the publishers’ interest to see it through – including renegotiation if necessary to get Mark more money or support if necessary.
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Craig on May 8, 20:03 Brilliant! I ask one stupid question and am given an opus of an answer. Thank you Michael for providing this kind of illumination on a subject I’m unfamiliar with. I would like to say, I don’t have specific knowledge he doesn’t have a book contract, it’s just something I’ve read and seen about the interwebs. I sincerely hope someone forwards this post to ML and his advisors (although after reading MG’s post, not sure he has any). I’m ready to put down my $250 for the extended edition right now! Although I would want a finish date or however they call it on kickstarter. Hey here’s a thought: MG you should contact ML and get the ball rolling. You seem to have a pretty good handle on crowdfunding and publishing (not to mention Beatles!) and perhaps Mr. Lewisohn will be receptive to some more progressive ideas re his future books. Thanks again for your 2¢ on this topic. It does help explain some things for me.
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Jarret Cooper on May 8, 19:25 You’re still running the Dullblog Patreon though, right? (If not, someone else is getting my money…)
  • How I’d publish Tune In Vol. 2 and 3! Comment by Michael Gerber on May 8, 14:53 Paul, that’s very kind of you. I’ve just installed Google AdSense, in an effort to defray my monthly expenses, so for the moment, browse around and click on some ads. If you’d like to do more, I’d encourage you to subscribe to The American Bystander’s Patreon or Substack. Both are monthly charges, and I think you can do as little as $1 (and also cancel at any time. The Bystander is my day job — I run an all-star print humor quarterly full of people from SNL, The New Yorker, the Simpsons, et al. With the insane workload of that, I don’t want to run a Dullblog-specific Patreon at the moment. Even though I set one up years ago.