"Ebony & Ivory wastes your time, knows it's wasting your time, knows that you know it’s wasting your time, and loves that you know."

"Make no mistake: it has extremely niche appeal. But having watched this film, I think I can safely say I’m in that niche."

Writes Samantha McLaren, quoted at Rotten Tomatoes.

And here's the original song that asked the question, "Oh Lord, why don't we [live together in perfect harmony]?"

"I've always have loved good tunes. And my dad played them on his piano... My cousin Betty introduced me to 'My Funny Valentine.'"

"I loved sort of classic pieces that I would hear. I would love ‘Cheek to Cheek,' Fred Astaire, all these things. I just thought, these are classics.... Heaven, I'm in heaven.... So, I had a lot of information in my head of those tunes.... People have said to me, do you believe in magic? And I say, I have to 'cause of that song.... I think I'd loaded my computer so strongly with 'Cheek to Cheek,' 'Stardust,' 'When I Fall in Love,' with these beautiful songs, I'd heard all my childhood. I mean, I can still remember standing in the kitchen of Forthlin Road and hearing 'When I Fall in Love' by Nat King Cole as I was reaching for an HP bottle and thinking, my God, this is good.... So, you know, that's all I can think is that all of that data — to use modern terminology — had gone into my very sophisticated computer. The human brain, right? Had jumbled up, done all this sort of stuff. And somehow as the dream, it just, it tumbled out this song."

Said Paul McCartney, in the "Yesterday" episode of the "Life in Lyrics" podcast. 

I had to look up HP. My own "computer" is full of A1 and Heinz 57. HP is in the British mind. "HP Sauce is a British brown sauce... named after London's Houses of Parliament."

What sauce is splattered on your magical dreams?

"I think she does a magnificent version of it and it reinforces the civil rights message that inspired me to write the song in the first place."

Instagrams Paul McCartney, gently but pointedly pushing back those who are crediting Beyoncé with adding a civil-rights meaning to "Blackbird."

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A post shared by Paul McCartney (@paulmccartney)

It's a new year.

What are you going to do about it?

CORRECTION: This post title was originally "It a new year." Yes, I started the new year of blogging with an error. The very first word, too. Glad I got that out of the way. What was your first mistake?

That was your first mistake/You took your lucky break and broke it in two/Now what can be done for you?/You broke it in two....

"Aided by the fact that McCartney is allowed to use Beatles music when almost all other podcasters are not, the appeal is in going deep into material we all know."

"McCartney explains how Eleanor Rigby, from Revolver, was about all the old ladies he knew in Liverpool, many of whom he met while knocking on doors as a boy scout on bob-a-job week. 'So I imagined this lady and I gave her a scenario....' ... She’s cleaning up after someone else’s wedding, she’s putting on cold cream at night from a jar by the door.... 'My mum’s favourite was Nivea,' McCartney says.... 'It kind of scared me.'.... For Beatles nuts this is 18 minutes of pure gold.... An episode on Back in the USSR is also released today, while future instalments — one will be released each Wednesday — will explore Let It Be, Penny Lane and even Mull of Kintyre...."

From "McCartney: A Life in Lyrics review — pure gold for Beatles nuts/In a new podcast Paul McCartney talks to the Irish poet Paul Muldoon about the stories behind 12 of his songs. First up, Eleanor Rigby...." (London Times).

"Grief reigns in the kingdom of loss. I refer to not only the loss of a loved one but also the loss of a hope, a dream, or love itself."

"It seems we don’t finish grieving, but merely finish for now; we process it in layers. One day (not today) I’m going to write a short story about a vending machine that serves up Just the Right Amount of Grief. You know, the perfect amount that you can handle in a moment to move yourself along, but not so much that you’ll be caught in an undertow."

That's item #13 on "MONICA LEWINSKY: 25 'RANDOMS' ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BILL CLINTON CALAMITY/My name became public 25 years ago this week. What have I observed and learned in the quarter century since? Oh, plenty" (Vanity Fair).

Okay, let me try to write 25 "Randoms" on the text printed above:

Here are 6 TikToks for you. Some people love them.

1. Not at all lonely, singing about loneliness.

2. Paul McCartney, busking.

3. You don't have to sing in your "Happy Birthday" voice.

4. Every particle of feminism evaporated.

5. A coat of doll heads.

6. The notion that a "non-hottie" cannot write from the point of view of a beautiful woman.

Here are 6 TikToks I've selected for you. Let me know what you like.

1. A downplayed gift.

2. Fear of heights.

3. The opposite of fear of heights.

4. Paul McCartney, on horseback, shows you his sequoia.

5. A man imitates that chickadee you liked so much yesterday.

6. Is it too weird to skip small talk?

"He was the clear extravert of the Beatles … yet 'For No One' is beautifully introspective, and even a song as extraverted as 'Hey Jude' has a contemplative side."

"John rightly gets most of the credit for 'A Day in the Life,' which many point to as the artistic high point of the Beatles’ oeuvre — but it wouldn’t have achieved those heights if it had been all John. Music is all about context, and the dissonant orchestral frenzy wouldn’t have been as interesting if it had gone from John back to John again. It needs to give way to Paul waking up and reeling off the details of his ordinary life, before drifting off into a dream."

Writes my son John, in "Paul McCartney turns 80" (posted yesterday, Paul's birthday), in the first post of a new blog. The blog is titled "Music Is Happiness," and we'll see where that goes. 

John gives high marks to Paul's 2021 recording, "Deep Deep Feeling": 

I've selected 8 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you liked best.

1. CoCo's sad checklist.

2. Rooster crowing in slow motion must be the sound the dinosaurs made.

3. Oh my gosh! Look! It's a pretzel from last night.

4. Whoa! That hat!  

5. The most beautiful landscape in Scotland?

6. Downtown L.A. is really dodgy.

7. Moose versus grizzly bear.

8. Don't get Paul McCartney mad.

"And I should have told him, 'No, you're not old.'/And I should have let him go on, smiling, babywide."

 

"Lather" came up in the "Rock Mix" that Spotify made especially for me today, as I was smiling — babywide? — on my morning run today, the day after my birthday, my 71st birthday, or as I like to put it, the first day of my 72nd year.

Lather's friends in the song — who've "stopped being boys" — are 33 and 27. I mean one (the banker) is 33 and the other (the commander of his "very own tank") is 27. They're not each 33 + 27. But I can see that those numbers add up to 60, and I am 11 years old than that. "Lather" is a song facing the confusion of becoming 30ish. Lather himself has just turned 30, and he seems to be clinging to outright babyhood, as the band suggests maybe that's just fine... or good enough for Lather anyway.

It's a whole other matter breaking into the decade that begins with a 7, which I like to come out and say is the 8th decade of life. Speak plainly! And look for what is good. Some people — the glass-half-empty folks — say that as you get older, with more of your days behind you, each day is a smaller percentage of the total time you have lived, and thus, the days seem insubstantial and short. But the other way to see it is that is that each day now is a bigger percentage of the time you have left. Today might be 1% of the rest of your life. It might be 100%! Are you giving today what it deserves? It is so much.

As I listened to the old rock songs that Spotify had strung together for me, I visualized myself — I was running through the woods — looking over at the me who existed at the time I first heard a particular song — it was "Too Many People" — and I waved at myself in the 70s and sent the message that everything will be fine when you are in your 70s. You'll be able to run — in the woods! — and you'll have this music in your ears because a computer — an "electronic brain," as you call it — will know you like it and will pump it directly into your head. 

And you won't care so much about your birthday, because 2 days after your birthday will be something called your "bloggiversary." There will be something you do for the first time on January 14, 2004, and you will proceed to do it every single day for 18 years and counting....

Althouse is productive, you know....

"To wander aimlessly is very unswinging. Unhip."

Said Paul McCartney, quoted in a NYT piece about the big Beatles documentary, "'Improvise It, Man.' How to Make Magic Like the Beatles." That's by Jere Hester, author of "Raising a Beatle Baby: How John, Paul, George and Ringo Helped Us Come Together as a Family" (NYT). 

I remember hearing that line in passing — I'm about half way through the 7-hour Disney Channel extravaganza —  and wanting to think about it, but missing the context. All Hester gives us is:

Even as wine, beer and more flows, the Beatles stay disciplined, working and reworking lyrics and arrangements until they get them right. “To wander aimlessly is very un-swinging,” Mr. McCartney says. “Unhip.”

I'm so fascinated by the insight that there's hipness and swing in discipline and order, and that chaos — wandering aimlessly — is what's really uncool. It's a great hypothesis. Who knows if it's true, but where did it come from in Paul? Without context, one is left to theorize that Paul criticized chaos because the other Beatles weren't rising to the level of organization he wanted, that came naturally to him.

Googling, I found this transcript of the whole conversation (published a few years ago). There's audio too, and it's crisper than the mix in the documentary. It's January 14, 1969 (in Twickenham Film Studios):

"In the Beatles circa 1969, Paul McCartney is the negotiator-in-chief, and he’s aware of every eggshell he has to walk around or smash to achieve greatness..."

"... or just to get shit done.... [H]e comes off as surprisingly aware of the minefield of sensitivities around him... and he’s certainly beyond aware that he’s paying a cost to be the boss. He’s a domineering older brother to George and rival/BFF/frenemy to John, and now he’s playing de facto manager to everyone — not necessarily because he’s taken pole position in the band on merit alone, but because Lennon is suddenly more invested in a woman... Seeing McCartney recognize and articulate all these shifts, and soldier on while he gets a little bit sad about them, is one of the pleasures of 'Get Back.' If you don’t come away from this with just a little more admiration for Paul, you may just be too in the bag for John and Yoko and their bag-ism, but that’s all right. Everybody is going to be your favorite or most admired Beatle, some time before you complete the eight-hour Get Back Challenge. 'Daddy’s gone away now, you know, and we’re on our own at the holiday camp,' McCartney says, about they’ve felt rudderless since the death of manager Brian Epstein. In the contretemps with Harrison where the guitarist famously says 'I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play,' McCartney tells the whole group he’s aware of turning into dad, and he doesn’t like it: 'I’m scared of that one… me being the boss. And I have been for, like, a couple of years – and we all have, you know, no pretending about that.'"

From "Why the Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ May Stand as the Best Rock Doc Ever" by Chris Willman (Variety).

Lots more at the link. I resisted watching this show because I didn't want to subscribe to another streaming service — in this case, Disney. But I gave in, paid the $8 for the first month, and intend to exit as soon as I'm done watching this 8-hour extravaganza. I'm only one hour into it, after 2 sessions. I can only take so much. They look bored, that is, John, George, and Ringo look bored. Paul is more or less everything. That's pretty unpleasant! But I see that's the idea, and I have to watch it slowly enough to appreciate the details, the clues. Is John bored or is he utterly mentally absent, relocated somewhere in drugworld? Is Ringo bored or is he paying intense attention and just essentially, perpetually mute? Is George bored or is he an angry, resentful son of a bitch? 

ADDED: Willman casually used the term "bag-ism" — accomplishing a little play on words. I know what it means. I remember bagism, but I looked up the Wikipedia page anyway:

George yawns as Paul invents "Get Back" out of thin air.

Watching Paul come up with “Get Back” out of literally thinking air while Ringo and George just yawn is a marvel to watch. This Beatles documentary is INSANE #TheBeatlesGetBack pic.twitter.com/09Nii0tHqr

— Darth Yavin (@DarthYavin) November 27, 2021

"My mum’s favorite cold cream was Nivea, and I love it to this day. That’s the cold cream I was thinking of..."

"... in the description of the face Eleanor keeps 'in a jar by the door.' I was always a little scared by how often women used cold cream. Growing up, I knew a lot of old ladies—partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling. You’d get a shilling for cleaning out a shed or mowing a lawn. I wanted to write a song that would sum them up.... When I took the song to George [Martin], I said that, for accompaniment, I wanted a series of E-minor chord stabs. In fact, the whole song is really only two chords: C major and E minor. In George’s version of things, he conflates my idea of the stabs and his own inspiration by Bernard Herrmann, who had written the music for the movie 'Psycho.' George wanted to bring some of that drama into the arrangement. And, of course, there’s some kind of madcap connection between Eleanor Rigby, an elderly woman left high and dry, and the mummified mother in 'Psycho.'"

From "Writing 'Eleanor Rigby'/How one of the Beatles’ greatest songs came to be" by Paul McCartney (The New Yorker).

AND: There's also some kind of madcap connection the mummified mother and your "mum" with her cream used to fend off the wrinkles, wrinkles being very obvious on the mummified mother. 

"I think he had an idea in his head of what he wanted it to sound like, but he couldn't describe it. He couldn't express it. And he was waiting for somebody to bring it out of the air."

Said Shiela Bromberg, whose obituary I blogged 3 days ago. 

The quote appears in the center of the interview embedded below, which a reader called to my attention.

Bromberg was the harpist on The Beatles' "She's Leaving Home." The "he" is Paul McCartney: 

ADDED: If you love Ringo, be sure to watch the video through to the end.

The many voices of Paul McCartney.

May I recommend this highly detailed episode of "The Beatles Naked" podcast? 

I'm not yet half way through, but I'm so impressed with the analysis. There's so much of it! With the music played, so you can judge for yourself. 

I was interested, for example, in the discussion of the emotional effect of any slightly out-of-tune singing. Is it "soulful"? And has our experience of it changed over the years as present-day music is electronically tuned to perfection?

And is it the case that there is a song that only Paul McCartney can sing and that song is "Helter Skelter"? The Wikipedia article on the song cites a number of cover versions, but the only one mentioned in the podcast is Bono's. It is mentioned with a scoffing laugh (just before saying that if Kurt Cobain had tried, he might have succeeded). I just annoyed myself by listening to the Mötley Crüe version. I also sampled a little of the Marilyn Manson "Helter Skelter." Here's the awful Oasis version.

I'm no expert, but I'd say if you're just going to do it like Paul and just approach what he did, why do it at all? As an homage? But it's an homage with a song that got its reputation twisted up into the Manson murders. Bono said Charles Manson "stole" the song from The Beatles and he was "stealing it back." 

Having just written about the connection between Trump's January 6th speech that — intentionally or unintentionally — seems to have inspired the storming of the U.S. Capitol, I'm interested to stumble so soon into this story of a vocal presentation that may have inspired murder. According to one Manson follower: 

When the Beatles' White Album came out, Charlie listened to it over and over and over and over again. He was quite certain that the Beatles had tapped in to his spirit, the truth—that everything was gonna come down and the black man was going to rise. It wasn't that Charlie listened to the White Album and started following what he thought the Beatles were saying. It was the other way around. He thought that the Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years. Every single song on the White Album, he felt that they were singing about us. The song 'Helter Skelter'—he was interpreting that to mean the blacks were gonna go up and the whites were gonna go down.

Of course, there's no way to hold The Beatles complicit in a murder scheme. At most, they could have thought that too many people are too attached to them and looking for messages and crazy connections and maybe they ought to stick to the peace-and-love songs so they don't accidentally inspire murder. It would be a different matter if The Beatles knew before they put out the White Album that there was a violent group set to rise up when The Beatles gave the signal "helter skelter."

"George Harrison once sent a handwritten letter to a Beatles fan asking them to trash Paul McCartney’s car."

Far Out reports. 

The fan, Susan Houghton, presumably calculating what it would take to get Harrison to choose her letter as one to write a response to, had asked him how to wash her car. Harrison wrote out a 7-point list of instructions, the 7th point being: 

Now proceed to 20 Forthlin RD. with about 6 buckets full of dirty muddy greasey water, where a shiney Ford Classic will be seen. Spread contents of the buckets evenly, so as to leave a nice film of muck over the car. You can now return home knowing you have done your deed for the day. Thank you!!!

Harrison was more of a jerk than you might think if you mostly just listen to his song lyrics. So spiritual! 

"I got born into the material world /Getting worn out in the material world/Use my body like a car/Taking me both near and far." 

Do you think of your body as a car your spirit rides around in? Do you admire a man who does?

But enough of that jerk George. What was this "Ford Classic" of Paul's? I don't know exactly when George wrote that letter and gave out what seems to have been Paul's home address. But here's a GQ article from this year, "Paul McCartney's car collection is a tour de force." It says Paul has a 1962 Ford Consul Classic 315. 

Wikipedia's "Ford Classic" article has this picture (not specifically Paul's car):

(cc Charles01)

John Lennon turns 80.

I love this picture, it reminds me of the bond between us. Happy 80th John. Love Paul#JohnLennon #LENNON80 pic.twitter.com/ePrHqvZxVB

— Paul McCartney (@PaulMcCartney) October 9, 2020

Happy Birthday John!
Happy Birthday Sean!
Yes, you are my angels. I love you!
yokohttps://t.co/AU1ZFRTjOf pic.twitter.com/uvIa3lu2hx

— Yoko Ono (@yokoono) October 9, 2020

A Late Show is thrilled to welcome @seanonolennon for this very special performance of ISOLATION to help kick off John Lennon’s 80th birthday celebration. #LENNON80 #GIMMESOMETRUTH @johnlennon pic.twitter.com/isQDVGlAVd

— A Late Show (@colbertlateshow) October 9, 2020

No better metaphor.

I can think of no better metaphor for this presidency than Donald Trump not wearing a face mask to a face mask factory while the song “Live and Let Die” blares in the background. pic.twitter.com/mJzU1HW7HA

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) May 5, 2020

He wore goggles. To keep his tears off you.

ADDED:

What does it matter to you?
When you got a job to do
You got to do it well
You got to give the other fellow hell...