• The Beatles and “Scenius” Comment by Michael Gerber on Oct 9, 10:58 Full disclosure: I’ve never met Conan, but I know a LOT of people who know/have worked with him. I don’t know if he’s a genius; he’s got some markers of it — he’s the only two-year President of the Harvard Lampoon as far as I know, and that place is a meat-grinder, with respect grudgingly given. Making the leap from the writer’s room to the talk show desk is another marker; I know no other comedy writer of his rank who really could’ve done that at the network level. On the other hand, Conan’s been astoundingly successful within a very conventional, very collaborative business, and that’s usually not how “geniuses” operate. He’s reputedly a very good boss, and when I was coming up six years behind him, he had a reputation for fairness and seeking out unusual people, both really good attributes. Also, you can’t really point to a “Conan” style of comedy, or a pre-Conan time and a post-Conan time. These all suggest that he is a fantastically talented guy, but not “a genius.” I think Robert Benchley was a genius; he developed a style mostly his own (with a bit of Stephen Leacock) that people are still copying today; the whole internet sounds a little like Benchley. He sort of fell into professional comedy, first in New York and then Hollywood, and had a very conflicted attitude towards it. I also think Doug Kenney was probably a genius; his use of nostalgia and parody, his co-founding National Lampoon magazine, and then Animal House, gave American comedy a whole new palette that it is still exploring (trapped in?) today. Kenney didn’t do it all himself, for sure, but I don’t think you have the Harvard Lampoon pipeline into comedy without Kenney — which means that people like Conan O’Brien become extremely funny lawyers, which is largely how it was for the century before. Norm MacDonald is the type of person — like Albert Brooks — who was/is incredibly loved by comedy people. They saw him doing new things in new ways, but like so many people acclaimed to be geniuses inside the biz, outside the biz his impact was muted. Like one of my favorite comedy geniuses, Peter Cook. Peter Cook did more to create the groundrules for modern comedy on both sides of the Atlantic than anybody else I know, but he was never, ever a mainstream person in the US. He did not have “the common touch” that I think is a hallmark of genius, from Caesar to Bob Dylan. I think to be an authentic genius, one is often in conflict, either with oneself or with some basic aspects of one’s time. And perhaps its being in conflict so much that inures so many geniuses to the commonsense restrictions we all must abide by. “I sweep away this meaningless convention” works for them, so they get used to doing it too much.
  • The Beatles and “Scenius” Comment by Michael Gerber on Oct 9, 10:39 Now THAT is an interesting question, @Justin — would geniuses be better off not heeding the call? I think one of the markers of authentic genius is you can’t help yourself. You HAVE to do it. Taking Caesar as an example, I think even apart from the aristocratic Roman’s lust for glory — a social norm which was universal, intense and constant — Caesar was absolutely driven to express all his gifts in the fullest, most public way possible. That’s probably a lot more of what we identify as “genius” than we realize. My brother isn’t just the kind of fellow who at 12 was identified as a person with a certain level of aptitude; he’s also told me, “I don’t take a job unless it comes with the possibility of a Nobel Prize.” And I understand, and respect that. If you can do it, DO IT. But I know another person, immensely gifted in a very similar way, and educated just as exquisitely as my brother, who suffers from self-doubt so crippling she cannot get a job. I think that’s another reason why “genius” is so often a male trait; not because women are not just as talented (or more so), but that it requires immense self-confidence, often much more than is appropriate.
  • Little Help From Our Friends? Comment by Paul on Oct 7, 12:03 Honestly, if someone said this might be fake, I would believe them. It does not quite sound like John to me, especially around the Rubber Soul period. There was a post Beatles time when John would have killed Paul for writing something like this. No wonder it didn’t make the final cut, it is embarrassing.
  • The Beatles and “Scenius” Comment by Justin McCann on Oct 6, 14:51 Ah, my sympathies Mike! If you’re talking about brain fog, I can seriously relate. Hard agree on all the pandering comedy. I’m always reading those cartoons and memes thinking ‘Why is all this observational whimsy supposedly so cringeworthy when Michael McIntyre does it, but OK as long as it’s slapped onto a drawing of a dog or a recognisable scene from a movie?’ I mentioned Norm Macdonald in my other reply just now, and one thing I always admired about him was that he’d challenge the audience to laugh at something that they didn’t even remotely see coming – all because he personally found it funny and knew there was some merit to it. Sean Lock and Bob Mortimer being two of my favourite UK equivalents, always demanding that the panel show format rise above the cheap gag and the easy laugh, asking for more from the audience, silently daring the other comedians to step up their game. (Lock used to say he’d refuse to laugh at his peers unless they genuinely earned it, because he didn’t want to encourage them. In making his laughter a rarer commodity, he made it more valuable, and more sought after. Bob…well, he’s just a trickster deity playing among mortals, joy in human form.) Would LOVE to hear more of your thoughts on Bruce, Cosby and Allen. Of the three I’m only properly familiar with Allen; I went through a massive phase in my teens and 20s and may have seen a couple dozen of his films. I dearly hope the allegations against him aren’t true; even if they aren’t, he’s definitely disturbed. . Can I join your political party? . I’ve actually applied for Ireland’s Basic Income for the Arts programme this year; they decided to continue with the idea after the pilot scheme found that artists’ mental health improved and the economy improved with it. Funding is allocated entirely randomly once you fit the basic criteria for entry. Getting it means an extra 350 or so euro a week for the next three years, which isn’t a living all by itself, but is definitely something. Going to hear back any day now 🙂 . Totally agree that we need room for what Big Five types would call “disagreeableness” in our society. Speaking as a recovering people-pleaser myself, I think our era has overvalued agreeableness and moral perfection for a while now. (Well, OK, we verbal-IQ people have. The data people are too busy moving fast and breaking things to give a damn about being nice, and from the POV of planetary survival that’s much the worse extreme to be at.) A sort of erring-on-the-side-of-doing-nothing-much-rather-than-doing-something-and-risking-it-being-the-WRONG-thing, doing less good because you want to make sure you don’t do anything bad. I know from experience how hobbling that can be, and have several friends who suffer so badly from Spotlessness Syndrome that I wish I could shake them all and say ‘You don’t have to be so good all the time! Stop depressing yourself! Get out of the house and live a little!’ I believe being a good person in the broadest sense involves a lot more than harmlessness; you need honour, courage, strength, decisiveness, being a warrior in a garden, all that old-fashioned stuff. I think geniuses often have a lot of the strength and determination and resolve but not much niceness, and end up doing a lot of good for the world, even if they’re not people that the rest of us would particularly want to share a lift with, let alone befriend or marry. So yes, it seems like being a genius requires not just raw ability, but timing, luck, circumstances – and that killer instinct. Makes me wonder if it would be better for the genius’ own soul to hear the call and not answer it.
  • The Beatles and “Scenius” Comment by Justin McCann on Oct 6, 14:12 Ah, fame. That classic line ‘the mask that eats the face’ sums it up perfectly, doesn’t it. Agree that, along with money, it’s the world’s greatest enabler. But you have famous people who act like Cosby, and famous people like Tom Hanks who don’t seem to act like that at all, so I think you’re right that the other ingredient is “transformative talent” Mike. If I’m right in thinking that you’re talking about the difference between “being really really good at something” and “true world-changing genius”. Tom Hanks is very good at his job, but he’s not a genius. In comedy, Conan O’Brien seems to me to be an example of someone who’s “merely extremely talented and hard-working”. Basically well-adjusted – a bit narcissistic, sure, & I know he’s needed a lot of therapy (and I can relate!) – but fundamentally decent, normal and capable of functional relationships. Of course, I’ve never met the guy, so this is all complete outside-looking-in speculation. Norm Macdonald, on the other hand, I would call a genius. But he was one strange dude. I love him, both as a comedian and a person. But a strange dude. In music, you have Dylan, who was intensely single-minded, ego-driven, treating people as a means to an end, stealing their records so he could learn the songs, all of it, long before anyone had heard of him. Then worldwide fame just walled him off from the rest of us even more. Paul McCartney is a lot more normal, but as a younger man he *absolutely* had that killer instinct that wouldn’t let anyone or anything stand in his way, and he certainly didn’t give a damn about all the tears of the hundreds of women he loved and left. Besides, he isn’t a genius without John, and IMO it’s only when you combined the one’s discipline with the other’s neurodivergence that you got that “transformative talent”.
  • The Beatles and “Scenius” Comment by Michael Gerber on Oct 6, 07:18 The most talented people I’ve met—illustrators and writers—have usually been very nice. There has been a rough concordance between talent and kindness, and I think that’s because to be very talented in these fields you have to be very aware of yourself and others. “But Mike, how does that square with geniuses being unpleasant?” There are at least two things afoot here—“transformative talent” and the license this buys a person to act out/misbehave. The guys I work with—even the tv writers with a ton of money—are not FAMOUS. Bruce, Cosby and Allen’s misdeeds (in Allen’s case, alleged misdeeds) took root in the soil of real fame. Famous people seem to be released from normal human strictures, and that license is granted them by us normal folk.
  • The Beatles and “Scenius” Comment by Neal on Oct 5, 19:11 @Justin – What an outstanding post. You have given me much to gnaw on. I particularly like your ending of “There’s something kind of ruthless about all this taking things (and people) up and discarding them, but alas, genius so often works that way. It has a habit of swallowing its victims’ lives whole so they can make beautiful things for the rest of us.” That alone leaves me much to ponder. @Michael. Also much to weigh in your OP. As to your reply to Justin, your remarks regarding Cosby, Bruce, and Allen lead me to ask, are there many examples in which the truly talented artist, actor, comedian, etc. is a genuinely nice person? I’m not talking about signing a few autographs or letting the fan take pics, but nice and considerate is most all areas of life?
  • The Beatles and “Scenius” Comment by Michael Gerber on Oct 5, 09:39 Excellent comment with so much to reply to! Unfortunately I am in bed with a cold and the first thing that goes in my 57-year-old body is my ability to think and write (there are reasons for this, I think, based on what healed me), but I just cannot resist commenting. Please ask me to clarify if I’m incoherent. “ He worries that social media’s creation of a “global village” might see us regress to organisation via ‘raw social power’ again” I think one of the most malign developments in my field over my lifetime has been the centrality of social media in comedy. The content rewarded by social is very simple stuff that reinforces widely held assumptions. You can see this clearly in one-panel cartoons, where jokes have been replaced by “that’s happened to me, too!” material. And the young people who rule the internet have massive anxiety of influence, so any suggestion that the material is objectively less interesting, challenging or personal is perceived as an attack. There are simply not enough liefunes to argue with @glassanimals420. “ So it’s hard to talk about this kind of stuff without coming across as right-wing or even downright Nietzschean, but I don’t think you have to long for the Overman in order to notice that some people are more intelligent, artistically gifted or charismatic than others, and some lucky few possess WAY more than their fair share of one or more of these traits.” I am of the belief that every persons inherent worth entitles them to good food, safe housing, meaningful work, and health care; I believe that educating children and caring for the aged should be civilizational baselines. I believe we should try to pack each life with as much beauty, connection, and meaning as possible, with as little coercion as possible, and that governmental structures seem to be the most efficient way to do this. I have no idea where this puts me in the left/right spectrum. But I think people really suffer when political systems do not reflect reality, and one of the realities they must reflect is the natural disparity of talent. Corporate structures are perhaps THE WORST POSSIBLE forms for either spotting talent, or slotting it into the place it will thrive. Corporate structures plus social media are perhaps the perfect genius-squelching machine, not least because both are excellent at extruding glutinous rationales for why their preferences are actually JUST. “ an article that talked about the activity of ‘musicking’ as being something everyone in the vicinity of a gig participates in, from the band to the patrons to the person cleaning the floor. Lovely sentiment, but really?” My dearest friend (and ex-writing partner) the leftist writer Jon Schwarz has argued for years that the ability to make a living via the arts is absolutely dead, or soon will be, and that the only way countries will have vibrant arts must be through the checking of a little box in your taxes, designating $5 thst you can assign to any arts group of any size. The progenitor of this idea is the leftist economist Dean Baker who I once posed a simple question: “How do we insure this funding mechanism is not political? That it does not turn all art into propaganda for the ruling party?” He did not have an answer for this, and as smart as Baker is and as much as I agree with him on other things, this invalidates the theory, which is the product of a person not within the arts, but the world of think tanks. “…whose specific psychology and actions moved the needle, who things would look very, very different without. Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon. A lot of these figures happen to be men because men kind of like hogging all the power; whether or not they’re “great” is very much a matter of perspective. (From an ethical point of view, many of them were very not great.)” The great man I’ve studied the most is Julius Caesar, whom I’ve studied quite deeply. Even with a man as gifted in several areas as Caesar, what he did, how, and why was completely moderated by his time and place. Did he act? Yes, incessantly. Was he deeply circumscribed by economic political and social forces? ABSOLUTELY. If Caesar had been born 200 years earlier, he would’ve likely been Scipio Africanus, a great general who worked within the structures of his era (and was ill-treated as a result). Caesar’s life and impact was fundamentally shaped by being born in 100 bce and living during the civil wars period, and there are at least two figures that are sort of dry runs for Caesar, Sulla and Pompey the Great. So it’s impossible to pry a Great Man out of his time, and no reason to do so. The point is to describe and understand, not win an argument by “science-ifing” something that is not quantifiable. You see this with sports and analytics. As to why geniuses are usually men, I think it’s very very simple: genius is an attempt at immortality. If I could birth a child, I would not care ANYTHING about artistic pursuits. They are a poor second, if that. My eyes are losing focus so I’ll just say one more thing: geniuses are indeed ruthless, because one of the essential traits of genius is single-mindedness. And I will go further and say that geniuses are often unpleasant, or even criminal. A mature, well-run society should be able to acknowledge artistic excellence without demanding “niceness,” not because I don’t wish for both, as we all do, but because it seems you cannot be ruthless and housebroken. Michael Jordan is a genius of basketball, and he is clearly out of his mind (that is, to me, why he is greater than LeBron James). Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby and Woody Allen are unsavory characters, but to deny each man’s genius—how they fundamentally changed what comedy is for us, and how it is made (I can dig into this if people wish), is simply not factual. Goldman’s book on Lennon paints a character whose ethics and manners are standard for a person on his scale of genius. I come from a family of scientific geniuses. My grandfather, a total psychotic, was short-listed for the Nobel Prize. My brother, who works on quantum computing, is likely a genius; he is a very difficult man. All the testing I underwent as a small person suggested that I had a mind of the same rank, whatever that’s worth—and what it was worth then was coming from poverty but going to lots of fancy schools on scholarship. I no longer have the raw horsepower I once had; this was my price for staying alive. Today, my abilities are thoroughly average, and it’s having been so far above average that makes me realize where I used to be; my skills were great, my focus was insane, my timing was poor (I was twenty years too late). Whether I am a genius is something I cannot know and do not care about — my focus has always been on creating artistic opportunities for others and if that obscures my own skills, so be it — depends on what happens to the things I’ve created after I die; but I really do try to be as nice as I can all the time to everyone, because of my cerebral palsy, which makes me suffer a lot and thus empathize. (My brother is probably on the spectrum, but abled.) the reason I’m telling you this is: “being nice” when it has come to my artistic pursuits, has made them less innovative, less recognized, and less good. I’m okay with that, which probably means I’m not a genius.
  • The Beatles and “Scenius” Comment by Justin McCann on Oct 4, 10:13 PS AGW is overrated; Before & After Science is where the Eno fun really is 🙂
  • The Beatles and “Scenius” Comment by Justin McCann on Oct 3, 16:27 Excellent essay. Some scattered thoughts. ‘Genius—the inflection points when a business changes and a paradigm shifts—may actually be suppressed by the scenius mechanism necessary to keep content flowing.’ I know you’re talking about the profit motive more than group psychology as such here, but this reminds me of an incredible essay by Erik Hoel: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-gossip-trap He argues that the fact that homo sapiens existed for tens of thousands of years without really progressing technologically at all can potentially be explained by what he calls the “gossip trap”. That is, until our population increased enough to put our societies significantly beyond Dunbar’s number, tribes were basically high schools in which the most popular kids ruled the roost and bright new ideas were smacked down for going against the grain. He worries that social media’s creation of a “global village” might see us regress to organisation via ‘raw social power’ again, and hobble our ability to nurture the outside-the-box thinking that creates genius and true progress. Very long, but well worth reading every word imo. So it’s hard to talk about this kind of stuff without coming across as right-wing or even downright Nietzschean, but I don’t think you have to long for the Overman in order to notice that some people are more intelligent, artistically gifted or charismatic than others, and some lucky few possess WAY more than their fair share of one or more of these traits. As you say, it feels pleasingly democratic to downplay this and say that we all have our part to play, and we do, but for 99.9999% of us “genuine artistic excellence” is not that part. I think the urge to elide this stems partly from a genuinely compassionate impulse to let everyone join in the fun, and partly from ressentiment (a concept Nietzsche actually did have a point with, he just didn’t know when to stop). When researching my dissertation, I vividly remember reading an article that talked about the activity of ‘musicking’ as being something everyone in the vicinity of a gig participates in, from the band to the patrons to the person cleaning the floor. Lovely sentiment, but really? I’d go a little further again and say I think there are individuals who do, in fact, have an outsize effect on history: whose specific psychology and actions moved the needle, who things would look very, very different without. Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon. A lot of these figures happen to be men because men kind of like hogging all the power; whether or not they’re “great” is very much a matter of perspective. (From an ethical point of view, many of them were very not great.) But I certainly think it’s fair to call them world-historical figures. This strikes us as elitist and problematic today to be sure, but OTOH is it not kinda deterministic, if not fatalistic, to say we’re just pawns pushed about by social forces? Is it not much more life-affirming and ennobling to say that an individual can choose to use their talents and energies to try and make a difference, and sometimes it works? (And is it not the irony of ironies that Marx, the king of historical materialists himself, is perhaps the most world-historical individual of the last 200 years? Shame it wasn’t in the way he’d been hoping for…) Anyway, about music. I have a romantic woulda-loved-to-be-there fondness for Swinging London, the Greenwich Village folk scene, late-70s CBGB’s and all the rest. But I couldn’t agree more that the true global impact of all this scenius comes from nurturing the talents and ambitions of true geniuses, who take everything they can from these surroundings, then expand way beyond them. (Also couldn’t agree more that no individual Beatle is a genius. I’ve always thought J&P put together equal one, where Dylan is one by himself, but you’re right to point out that G&R played a vital role as well.) A genius isn’t bound by the limits of any one scene; they hoover up inspiration from the whole world, as well as exploring the strange corners of their own endlessly fertile minds. The Beatles took what they could from Liverpool & Hamburg, then moved on. Dylan did the same with the folkies. There’s something kind of ruthless about all this taking things (and people) up and discarding them, but alas, genius so often works that way. It has a habit of swallowing its victims’ lives whole so they can make beautiful things for the rest of us.
  • Little Help From Our Friends? Comment by Baboomska McGeesk on Oct 3, 06:26 I was surprised to hear this Lennon demo from Rubber Soul. “Little Girl” never made it to the finished album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNA1-t3qras It’s a nice song, but so Lennony that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to.
  • Little Help From Our Friends? Comment by Paul on Oct 1, 18:32 This looks interesting: The Rubber Soul: New Special Edition by The Beatles is officially released on October 2, 2026. This expanded release brings fresh audio mixes and rare archival material to fans worldwide
  • My Yoko Problem… and yours? Comment by Michael Gerber on Oct 1, 10:51 I think there’s some merit to this argument, except that Yoko Ono was *absolutely terrible* for John’s PR. She alienated loads of his fans, affiliated him with a bunch of faddish, derivative art, encouraged him to associate with countercultural political movements that sicc’ed the US government on him while having no concrete impact on the political landscape (and even inside the New Left), encouraged him to leave the group that gave him a bully pulpit like no other, and so forth. Yoko is TERRIBLE at PR. She is, however, a genius at branding. John Lennon didn’t need help with that,he was already one of the most recognizable people in the world. She rebranded Lennon so that his fame would be her fame, and liking him HAD to include liking her. She branded him as a wholly owned subsidiary of Yoko Ono, Inc, and with the Liebovitz photo, this lasted literally until the day he died. This branding helped her immensely, and even more so after his death. I don’t think it helped him much, either as a performer or as a person, and you can see what I’m saying by listening to young people on the internet: Yoko is a genius who’s been held back because she’s a woman of color. John is a wife-beater who probably stole his music from black people. These opinions hold sway in large part because Yoko doesn’t defend his brand; she is primarily interested in branding that helps herself. Even how Sean looks and dresses—strongly recalling his father in the last Beatles shoot—is part of this branding. Also part of Yoko’s branding? That she is a business genius. However, doing things like buying real assets in a time of rampant inflation—the land! The houses! The cows!—is finance 101. John’s net worth skyrocketed because he DIED, just like Elvis’—and while I’m happy that Yoko hasn’t squandered thst “opportunity,” nothing I’ve ever heard suggested that she was possessed of any kind of financial genius. Aggressive, determined, lots of lawyers and advisors. That John fully bought into all this shouldn’t blind us to the reality of it; remember, John resisted the branding and PR of the Beatles, and if he’d been in charge of that, they would’ve ended up on Nuggets. As we labor under a President who is a genius brander, the Beatles story is a great, harmless way to learn how to parse marketing from reality.
  • John Lennon, Alma Cogan, and the Delicate Mechanism of Efficient Beatles Operations Comment by Freda Brown on Oct 1, 04:57 I would suggest that the photo of John with a lady in a long dress, looks more like Eleanor Bron, (actress & sister of record producer Gerry Bron) than Alma Cogan.
  • My Yoko Problem… and yours? Comment by Ghost Disco on Sep 30, 14:04 I’m sorry, but the “Be with May instead of Yoko” concept makes no sense to me. Nothing against May as a person, but she was clearly never a replacement for Yoko. In May’s own words, she reported to Yoko and recieved instructions. May says that the day John was supposed to sign the papers to end the Beatles, he freaked out and locked himself in the bedroom. So May called Yoko. Yoko sent someone to John with a letter that told him stuff about astrology, and he calmed down. That doesn’t sound like a man who has moved on to a new woman.
  • My Yoko Problem… and yours? Comment by Ghost Disco on Sep 30, 13:30 John Dunbar, who connected Yoko with the Beatles, has insisted that Yoko did not stalk John and was not interested in pop music. It’s worth noting that John went to Yoko’s show at the Indica Gallery the day after he got back from filming How I Won the War (about two weeks before he started work on Sgt. Pepper.) So he was definitely interested in her. I read in one Beatle book (I can’t remember which one) that John was hoping Yoko could broaden his horizons. But there was no source for the quote.
  • My Yoko Problem… and yours? Comment by Ghost Disco on Sep 30, 12:34 You bring up an excellent point: John and Yoko were not musical collaborators, at all. There are John songs and Yoko songs, but not collaborations. They didn’t even sing harmony, which you’d think would be easy to do. John seemed to be very good at collaborating (with Paul, obviously, and with Elton John and David Bowie.) I can only assume Yoko refused to collaborate with him. Except on Happy Xmas, I guess.
  • A Momentary Lapse of Reason Comment by Baboomska McGeesk on Sep 30, 12:29 And maybe Brian Epstein is the funny neighbor? Mal Evans is the humorous handyman?
  • My Yoko Problem… and yours? Comment by Ghost Disco on Sep 30, 12:23 I’ve always felt people get the cause-and-effect backward with Yoko. It simply does not make sense that John was having a great time with the Beatles, then a random woman walked up and said “the Beatles suck, actually,” and then he decided to leave. It’s hard for me not to notice that John hooked up with Yoko almost immediately after Brian Epstein died and they all got back from India. Yoko took over the same jobs Brian had been performing. On a surface level, she was an artist/musician/whatever. On a more real level, she was PR and financial management. And she did a pretty good job. John was winning the “most popular Beatle” polls after the breakup. He became vastly wealthier with Yoko managing his money.
  • My Yoko Problem… and yours? Comment by Ghost Disco on Sep 30, 12:10 Yoko went to Paul to ask for lyrics about 3 weeks before John came to her gallery showing, not several years. It appears to be John Dunbar who connected the Beatles with Yoko. Yoko says in interviews that she had heard of the Beatles, she just didn’t care that much about them and didnt recognize John when she first met him.
  • A Momentary Lapse of Reason Comment by Ghost Disco on Sep 24, 16:30 This comment amuses me because I just read Samira Ahmed’s BFI book on A Hard Day’s Night. She says that the fabs in that movie are sit-com family archetypes. John is the sit-com dad (an authority figure who is unreliable.) Paul is the mom (a nag.) George is the crafty, Bart Simpson-like child. Ringo is the goofy, adorable child (daughter?) Maybe unrelated to what you’re saying. But yes, Paul did seem to have a “band mom” image in the early days.
  • A Momentary Lapse of Reason Comment by anonymous on Sep 24, 14:59 As long as Paul played the “ Mother” in the Beatles, John was okay with it. But when he started trying to be the “ Father”, well, we all know how John felt about father figures. He was never going to stand for it.
  • Plea to Paul: Let it be when it comes to claiming credit Comment by Lawrence Martin on Sep 24, 06:48 Yes. The very first time John claimed it all in Hit Parader in 1972, Paul replied *in the same issue* that John wrote the words but he composed the tune on John’s new mellotron, which had just recently been delivered and was set up on John’s mezanine landing.
  • Plea to Paul: Let it be when it comes to claiming credit Comment by Lawrence Martin on Sep 24, 06:41 It’s fairly well known that an Abbey Road tape from the Mary Hopkin ‘Postcard’ sessions in late 1968 records a conversation between Paul and Donovan, in which Paul explicitly says that he wrote Blackbird after reading newspaper stories about about American race riots (it was very soon after the murder of Martin Luther King and the ensuing riots were in the UK headlines). He told Donovan that he did intend the word “blackbird” to evoke the image of a black woman. Of course it becomes a wider metaphor, and it appears that the song did evolve out of an idea first conceived in Rishikesh before the King murder and riots.
  • Covering "Julia" Comment by Paul on Sep 21, 18:15 She did a beautiful job with it, if not as good as JL’s
  • Old Draft: Beatles Folk Memory 1970-1995 Comment by J.D. on Sep 21, 14:11 I started listening to Another Kind of Mind’s critique of Mark Lewisohn but found myself put off right away by one of their stated rules, that they were basing their critique entirely on the shorter version of Tune In, not the unabridged version. Well, okay, the shorter version is the one more people are likely to read, so it’s going to be the more influential version of the book. Fair enough. But it seems to me that if you’re going to level charges like “Lewisohn spends X number of pages on John’s mom’s death but only Y number of pages on Paul’s mom’s death,” then completely ignoring the full version of Lewisohn’s book is critical malpractice. Lewisohn has his faults (he’s not the best stylist, which can make his books a slog to get through), but I find the intensity of some of the attacks on him to be a little bewildering.
  • Which song is he talking about? Comment by Paul on Sep 21, 13:04 Not a big fan of Rain, but the drumming, guitar and base are superb.
  • A quick yawp from Mr. History Comment by Cat on Sep 21, 11:04 Fans already don’t look at the Beatles like they are or were real human beings. That’s why I stop poking about Reddit and find this site to see some sane discussion on them that’s not just “Paul versus John and sometimes George”
  • Old Draft: Beatles Folk Memory 1970-1995 Comment by Michael Gerber on Sep 21, 00:55 I have had my fill of McLennon from our commenters, so I haven’t investigated either of those podcasts. I think HD was on the forefront of applying emotional intelligence to the conventional narrative of the Beatles story, which was basically the fruit of a bunch of middle-aged people with some life experience and some therapy re-addressing a youthful interest. Was it interesting? Seems so, to some. But I think there are at least two pretty substantial differences between how we’ve tried to do it, and others. The first is, speaking for myself, I’ve been very clear about which of my own personal experiences have informed my opinions, and why. This hasn’t been comfortable, frankly it’s been pretty uncomfortable, but I think it’s necessary information for readers to judge my theories. And I also think if I’m going to, for example, say that it’s highly unlikely that John Lennon kicked heroin, and was probably lying about it, it’s only fair to add that I have this opinion based on my own personal experience with addicts. My belief that Yoko probably used heroin at a maintenance level for her entire post-Lennon life comes directly from my conversations in 2016 with a man in his 70s who’d been using heroin since 1966. The second is, I’m basically satisfied with the Standard Narrative — not because I don’t want the story to keep deepening and unfolding, because who wouldn’t? or that I don’t want to be a Special Beatle-Boy with Special Secret Beatle-Knowledge, because of course I do — but because it’s already a hell of a great story. It doesn’t have to orbit our contemporary obsessions around identity to be absolutely engrossing. The only way you don’t realize it’s an amazing story is if you come in assuming that The Beatles, or something like them, was bound to happen. And I don’t think that’s true. I think The Beatles were a massive historical accident in the most wonderful sense, and directly and indirectly led to all sorts of fascinating things. I don’t need John and Paul to be sexual partners, and intuit that anybody who does, is reflecting their own erotic needs. Which is okay, until it becomes angry — which it often seems to? It’s one thing to have a sexual fantasy; it’s another to get pissed off if others don’t acknowledge it as truth. I think that people raised on the internet are used to having information curated to please them. The stories they encounter are stories they are predisposed to react to. When one scrolls social media, or reads a blog, one is in a world full of curated information. It’s difficult to explain to someone who didn’t grow up reading newspapers and magazines how uncurated that experience was — how reading stuff you were interested in or pleased by or which confirmed your priors, came with winnowing through lots of stuff that you wouldn’t have selected, or wasn’t “for you.” Which was broadening, and seems to have created different kinds of people. I think if you’ve lived in a world of curated information, it’s only natural to look at a story from long ago that has nothing to do with you or anyone you know, and attempt to 1) relate it to yourself and your obsessions and, 2) shape it into something you like, that serves you emotionally, that confirms your priors. If a person really, truly believes that sexuality is fluid and gender is a construct and there’s very little that is essentially male or female, then McLennon is a lot more plausible; it “feels true.” But I personally think it’s quite a stretch to make two guys who were born in Liverpool in 1940 and ’42 act like a couple of contemporary, deeply digital, fan-fic soaked 22-year-olds. This is why you have to “show your work,” as I try to. So the reader can decide whether “Kundalini emergency” for example is something that could potentially be experienced the same way between John Lennon in 1968-71 and Mike Gerber from 2012-2014.
  • Old Draft: Beatles Folk Memory 1970-1995 Comment by Ghost Disco on Sep 18, 20:17 That makes sense. I’m thinking a lot about McLennon right now, because I’ve finished listening to Another Kind of Mind and I’m working my way through One Sweet Dream. This podcast project started with the thesis that the Beatles broke up because John was romantically in love with Paul and Paul rejected him. But it’s going off the rails. That thesis turned out to be indefensible, so it’s devolving into rage against John for not treating Paul right. Also an odd level of rage or at least contempt against George and Ringo, and Brian, and Mark Lewisohn, and Beatle authors in general. I’m not sure what’s going on here.
  • Little Help From Our Friends? Comment by Paul on Sep 18, 12:47 @ Michael, Anything new on the substack idea?
  • Confessions of a Teenaged Beatleg Fanatic Comment by Baboomska McGeesk on Sep 18, 07:36 I’ve always been fascinated with BeatleBootlegs. Here’s why, and I’ll use Strawberry Fields as an example: I love (love, love, love) Strawberry Fields. But is the official record the only version I’m supposed to hear? No live versions, no alternate performances? One hundred years ago, if you liked a particular song, you could enjoy multiple versions of it. Here’s Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys recording it. Here’s Louis Armstrong with a rousing interpretation. Here’s Fletcher Henderson with a wildly inventive arrangement. Here’s Helen Merrill or Ahmad Jamal with a mellow piano jazz cover. So if you’re a fan of “Stardust” or “My Baby Don’t Mean Maybe Now” you’ve got lots to choose from. But me, the Strawberry Fields lover… I’m supposed to be satisfied with the official release… and THAT’S IT for the song? We’ll never have a live Beatles performance of it. We’ll never hear them to an “MTV Unplugged” version. So let me hear the bootlegs. I want to hear the song’s full potential. And so I love John’s acoustic Strawberry demos. For years I forgave the bad audio of the bootlegs because the song is so great. I was excited to finally hear the “LOVE” soundtrack, where they mixed the demos with the final version. Is the official Beatles Strawberry Fields release like the Mona Lisa? You look at it and that’s the end of the experience? To me, the bootlegs are like seeing early pencil sketches for the Mona Lisa. They just help with my appreciation. Here’s a gorgeous Rubber Soul pencil sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI4KMHVQYEQ
  • Little Help From Our Friends? Comment by Neal Schier on Sep 17, 18:55 Thanks Paul.
  • A quick yawp from Mr. History Comment by Michael Gerber on Sep 17, 01:11 Congratulations, @Maya! I am imagining you waving your hankie and stamping on your clay pipe. Whenever I meet a Yale CompSci person, I am polite but always think to myself, “Weren’t there better places for you to go than this medieval monastery?” When I was young the hives for that were either the obvious ones (MIT, CalTech, Carnegie Mellon), or the big state schools like Urbana or Berkeley. As I recall Yale CompSci was pretty good way back when — I was walking past Prof. Gelertner’s building when his hands were blown off by the Unabomber — but it was not the core of the place by any stretch. Yale, Harvard, Princeton — these were bastions of the Eastern Establishment, which were positively sniffy when it came to anything pre-professional (like comedy writing, for example!). Yale did not consider itself part of the US, and I’m only half-joking. The IDEA that they would pay attention, much less cave, to the wishes of a boorish President who wasn’t part of their own community would be unthinkable to the alums I knew from the 1930s and 40s and 50s. Yale snobbishness is obnoxious and I’ve suffered much at its hands, but it could be protective; money or status did not enter into the equation, much. Yale blue-bloods delighted in ignoring status markers from outside the tribe, which is why stuff like the Senior Societies mattered so much; in a place where Cleveland was still considered the boonies, the News and Record and Bones and Keys and such were how one could join the club. There was even something called “YWAT”, an abbrieviation for the Yale Way of Thought. Anyway, to spend one’s time in such a blessed cloister marinating in the Silicon Valley Way of Thought seems quite wrong-headed to me, and I think it’s a symptom of the money- and status-madness that’s infected Yale and every place like it during my lifetime. The school I went to wouldn’t WANT Elon Musk or Peter Thiel as an alum, because those guys didn’t share the school’s values — on display in a humorous but not wholly inaccurate way in “The Preppy Handbook” — and there was a vision of Yale’s unique mission that (for better and worse) extended far beyond the necessities of maintaining a great big pile of dough. I calculated it once; Yale’s endowment is roughly 17x bigger than when I graduated; there’s just one hell of a lot more money sloshing around there, and the culture is different. Sorry to say, I don’t feel very comfortable there anymore; I much prefer Sally’s or Pepe’s to any place on campus. Yale in 1987-91 was simply ALIVE with history and historians; it was the place to go for American colonial history (Jon Butler), history of the American West (Haward Lamar), LGBTQIA history (John Boswell), military history (Michael Howard), U.S. intelligence history (Robin Winks)…and so forth. The American Studies department was also very good. As one might imagine, Yale’s history department skewed conservative — my love, the history of the Sixties, was too recent for Yale when I was there; it was appropriate only for junior profs (see below). Ten years after I left, they invited Todd Gitlin to be a visiting professor, but anything countercultural (without an LGBTQIA spin) was seen to be a bit sweaty and better handled by Berkeley, NYU and Columbia. Basically, any speciality that Yale’s History department wished to dominate, it did so; with the caveat being that Harvard offered a better grad school education if the top person in your specialty taught there; like if I’d continued on the academic track as I’d initially wanted to, I probably would’ve applied to Berkeley, NYU, Columbia. because that’s where tne New Left had happened, and where they weren’t so close to the US Government — if I had studied the JFK stuff at Yale, I would’ve immediately encountered alumni names, and nobody needed that shit, not me, not them, not Yale in 1991. George H. W. Bush famously didn’t remember where he was on 11/22/63, but he spoke at my graduation. That generation was very much still in charge in certain subcultures of the U.S., and Yale. My main man on the faculty was a junior prof from Brown who left Yale for Oxford and the History Channel; and now is at UVA. He’s a wonderful person and a fine, fine historian; I disagree with him strongly on the JFK assassination, but realize that there have always been pressures on him to toe the Warren Commission line, professional ones of course but also personal (he knew JFK Jr. at Brown). So studying history at a place like Yale is not without its challenges; the prestige and access works for you if you are studying something settled like Harold Ickes and the New Deal, but works against you if you’re trying to figure out whether Charles Manson was part of MK-Ultra. It’s also difficult to overstate how deeply Anglophilic Yale was in those days, in large part due to the Second World War. Without turning this comment into more of a novella, Yale’s student culture changed from fiercely isolationist in the 1930s to fiercely anti-Fascist/pro-British in the 1940s, which led to much of the American intelligence establishment having Yale ties. And those men were taught the trade by Cantabridgians at SIS/MI6. When I was there, the Yale Center for British Art and The Lizzy, both founded and funded by Paul Mellon (Y’28, and Cambridge after that), plus the close ties between Yale and Cambridge (especially Clare College), gave the place a genteel air. Harvard always struck me as more Colonial, more American, more eccentric; but when I was there, the two main subterranean strains at Yale were 1) Anglophilia and 2) New York money. Anyway, had my timing been a bit different–maybe 10 years later?–I would’ve happily gone from Yale either to Cambridge for grad school to specialize in the (Cambridge-led) Satire Boom and the Beatles 60s, or to someplace in the States to study the murkier aspects of the counterculture, the assassinations and the like. This blog has always been, for me, an attempt to scratch this itch in an informal way. Though health and the exigencies of making a living have prevented me from doing some of my more ambitious dreams — so many podcasts and documentaries! — I’m glad that people enjoy Hey Dullblog, and hope that our seriousness and quality here has inspired those who got to formally study the topics I am fascinated by.
  • First Thoughts on “The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event” Comment by Michael Gerber on Sep 17, 00:21 I’d watch that film! I’ve always toyed with doing something that stretches from the last concert to Brian’s funeral.
  • First Thoughts on “The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event” Comment by Michael Gerber on Sep 17, 00:19 No surprise here.
  • Old Draft: Beatles Folk Memory 1970-1995 Comment by Michael Gerber on Sep 17, 00:19 I also think that McLennon cannot be separated from — I’m having trouble expressing this precisely enough — the emergence of Asian forms of youth culture as the dominant forms? Those which young people were formed by? Talking with some of the young people I know (under 30s), Japanese video games, anime, comic books, Asian horror/monster films, all these genres comprised the majority of what they consumed as kids. Even the biggest pop groups, like BTS, were Korean. So when I see McLennon, I see yaoi — a specific type of Japanese female fan culture highlighting m/m homosexual romance/relationships. This is anecdote, not data, but I glancingly knew the creator of one of the first pieces of gay hockey pop culture. She was a very talented student cartoonist, with a style that was heavily influenced by anime.
  • A quick yawp from Mr. History Comment by Michael Bleicher on Sep 15, 10:38 I think it says something about our age that regular people don’t want to engage with the big/hard questions even at the level of your average unquestioningly religious person from 100 years ago (i.e., this is what I’m told happens when I’m die) and prefers to sublimate it to the “now” of fandom – which often reaches its purest expression in the form of “here is why people on the Internet are being mean about my favorite, who never did anything wrong.” I’ve been reading a lot about early Christianity recently, and let me put it this way — I *get* why John Lennon, high on LSD, identified with Jesus Christ, and I also *get* why, knowing that there was a fairly high chance someone might try to kill him during that era of assassinations, he often set about living his *public* life from 1968 – 1980 in a way that might make him particularly martyrable. He clearly thought about it a lot; he bragged about it in The Ballad of John and Yoko.
  • Last Recorded Audio of John Lennon, 12/8/80 Comment by Michael Bleicher on Sep 15, 10:11 @Matt, not to immediately make this super dark (proceeds to make it super dark), but if one engages in the thought experiments we’ve discussed about Lennon’s foreknowledge of December 8, then his relaxed-ness makes an eerie kind of sense. As does the boundless optimism he offers in these November/December interviews.
  • Quadruple fantasy Comment by Paul on Sep 14, 08:56 Absolutely. All of their individual music would have been improved with their usual collaboration, and the bad songs would have been (mostly) voted out. The harmonies would have been so much better, when appropriate, and the synergy was self explanatory. Alas…
  • You Say it’s Your Birthday (Or Was Yesterday)?; or, How the Beatles May or May Not Have Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll Comment by Paul on Sep 14, 08:51 Is ‘My Ding a Ling’ Rock and Roll because Chuck Berry did it?
  • "Hullabaloo Salute to RUBBER SOUL" Comment by Paul on Sep 14, 08:45 I’ve never heard a cover that I have enjoyed as much as the Beatles original. But I Enjoy all the covers the Beatles did more than the originals. You can’t top them!
  • "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll"… Comment by Paul on Sep 13, 18:32 That’s because everything the Beatles did was suitable of LP release.
  • Happy Passover, Tatellehs and Mommellahs Comment by Paul on Sep 13, 17:23 Whoa, that link led to a big google warning!
  • Old Draft: Beatles Folk Memory 1970-1995 Comment by Ghost Disco on Sep 13, 14:07 60s-70s music in general is pretty well remembered and loved, not just the Beatles. Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, even the Monkees are still fairly popular. This is probably due to the technology of the LP. In the 80s-90s, VCRs meant film became the best art form (I recently watched RoboCop for the first time and couldn’t believe how much better it is than most movies nowadays. That’s not nostalgia, because I never watched it back then.) In the 00s-10s, DVDs gave us prestige television (with commentary tracks!) Today the best art form seems to be YouTube-style lo-fi horror films. McLennon, I think, is a side effect of millennials and zoomers consuming huge amounts of internet porn from a young age. It’s just assumed that you can hop online and insantly find porn of anything you like, complete with labeled categories. McLennon falls under the categories of “forbidden love” and “pining,” just like that gay hockey show every girl loves.
  • First Thoughts on “The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event” Comment by Ghost Disco on Sep 12, 12:09 I just read Pete Shotton’s book, and he says the Beatles acted pretty much like the Sex Pistols before Brian made them behave.
  • First Thoughts on “The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event” Comment by Ghost Disco on Sep 12, 11:44 The Hours and Times is my favorite Beatles movie, I think. And that’s largely because it’s not trying to be a Beatles movie. It’s a work of fiction inspired by a real event. That’s why John and Brian’s trip in the movie is 4 days in Barcelona, while in real life it was about 2 weeks starting in Barcelona and ending up in a seaside town. The movie is about a lonely gay man and a lonely straight man trying to figure out their situationship. The John character tries to start an affair with the Brian character, but he can’t follow through because he’s too heterosexual. For a while it looks like their friendship might be destroyed, but they patch things up and become closer friends than ever. Broadly speaking, I think something like this could have happened in real life. But even if it didn’t, it’s just a cool little story in its own right. I think movies like this can benefit from not trying to bring up every entry in the band’s Wikipedia. If I were going to make a Beatles movie, I’d make it about the “fun” era of the Beatles: from the time Brian discovered them to the time they stopped touring. And I’d give it a comedic tone, because that’s what people want from the Beatles. I’d cut out Stu Sutcliffe’s death (some might call this disrespectful, but I don’t think so.) The darkest events would be the threats during their final tours.
  • It happened in Toronto Comment by Paul on Sep 11, 17:17 Deviously and successfully wooed John away from his wife, kept him from his friends, wouldn’t allow him to treat Cynthia or Julian as part of his family, I vote DRAGON LADY!
  • A quick yawp from Mr. History Comment by Maya on Sep 11, 15:51 I was bumbling around on the internet and thought I would check in on this hibernating website…what a delight it is to discover that it’s back! Somehow it’s been almost a year and I didn’t notice, but better late than never. Thanks for turning the lights back on, Michael. Anyway, as a newly minted Yale alum, I think it’s pretty sad that comp sci is Yale’s most popular major. There are better (and cheaper) places than Yale to get a degree in computer science. But Yale’s humanities education is still something you can’t get anywhere else. I know they’re trying to stay atop the rankings in a world where STEM is prioritized above all, but it feels like they are sacrificing what they are uniquely good at.
  • Little Help From Our Friends? Comment by Paul on Sep 11, 10:41 You can get the details @ They May Be Parted