The Life of Mr. Conductor

 

George and Phil

 

Here we have a snowy photo of George walking with Phil McDonald (who recently passed away) on what must have been the grounds of Friar Park.  

Paul is a face in the crowd

 

October 31, 1990 

A Little Chat with John and Yoko (1971)

You can see some of the things described in this article, including the Butcher Cover on the wall in this screenshot. 

A Little Chat With John and Yoko

By Tom Zito

Washington Post

November 5, 1971

    Mr. and Mrs. (Yoko Ono)  John Lennon, were feeling down. The new Village Voice had just come out, wherein Jill Johnston spills some uncomplimentary words about Yoko.

     "I like Yoko, but she isn't very nice to people." Is one of the things she writes in this week's Dance Journal column.

     "It's absolutely disgusting," said John, as he assumed a lotus position at the edge of the bed where his wife lay sick, victim of a bad cold, caught in Syracuse at the opening of her first AWL. Museum art show. "You can't imagine how we've tried to be kind to this woman, and then she turns around and stabs us in the back," he says.

     "I always try to go out of my way to be available to female members of the press," added Yoko as she called downstairs for tea, and lit another cigarette.

     John was visibly distressed at his wife's depression. He leaned over to comfort her, running his hand through her long black hair and kissing her on the cheek. They're surprisingly direct. It may be their togetherness that puts many people off. You cannot simply interview John or Yoko. To be with one is to be with both. 

    He is the real surprise. You come expecting the sarcastically witty, tense, hard fellow who romped through the Beatles' films and spewed forth caustically in the pages of Rolling Stone and on the Dick Cavett Show. What you discover is a man unexpectedly kind and gentle. 

    "I'm afraid you're not getting much of an interview," he said apologetically, and then urged Yoko to calmly write a clever letter to the Village Voice, explaining all she had tried to do for Jill Johnston. "But you're getting to see us map out our battle plan. Exciting, isn't it?" And his eyebrows rose in mocking exclamation.

     The Lennons have been living in New York for several months in a 17th-floor suite at the St. Regis Hotel. It contains a complete 16 mm film editing room, a powerful stereo system, Chuck Berry albums everywhere you look, assorted books by authors, including realist editor Paul Krasner and Reverend Daniel Boringen, several unfinished paintings of skulls, a large rack of clothes, an ever-glowing color TV, two acoustical guitars, a vase filled with yellow roses, and walls covered with posters and a rare copy of a withdrawn Beatles album cover of the boys dressed as butchers and holding bloody decapitated dolls and slabs of meat.

     Now they have decided to take up residence in New York. "We are looking around for an apartment," said John, "but rather unsuccessfully. It's getting kind of cramped up here, and today I couldn't even get somebody to come up and turn the bloody heat off. 

    "I didn't like New York at first, but now I've come to love it. It's dead in London compared with living here. It's still a nice place to go for a rest, but this is where everything is happening."

     The couple recently finished off their respective just-released albums, John's Imagine and Yoko's Fly, which had begun in England. They also made several films in the U.S., some of which are still being edited. 

    The phone rang. It's a reporter from Time Magazine. John covered the mouthpiece, and said, "They want some quotations, Yoko. That tells you where their heads are at now, doesn't it?" He ran off to look for a sheet of quotes from the art show catalog.

    While talking about the guitar playing he does on "Night Train," a song on Yoko's album. "You know," he said, "we can just go out here and wander about. Have to give out an average of one autograph a day. The other night we walked up to a kiosk to buy tickets for Death in Venice, and the fellow looked up and said, 'Oh, please go in as guests of the house.' But it was so bloody awful that we left after half the show, and I turned to the fellow on the way out and pointed back and said, 'That's why it's on the house, eh?'"

     He doesn't miss being a Beatle at all, particularly the constant rushing about. "You never had a chance to do anything you wanted to do," he said. "I mean, we had a taste of it again up in Syracuse, now didn't we?"

    The couple had been surrounded there by admirers. Every time they tried to move through Yoko's show, "You have 1000s of people who'd like to meet you and no time to really be with your own friends, and then on top of that, you have people like Jill Johnston saying you're not nice. How are you supposed to be nice to 1000 people?"

     Why had the Beatles split? "For me, at least, things were getting too compartmentalized. Sure, it was nice working with three other musicians. The interplay between us, I've never been, and probably never will be, as close to anyone except for Yoko as I was to them. Paul is an extremely clever boy, and he kept wanting to get back to the "Sergeant Pepper" idea of music, and my spirits lay a lot closer to Chuck Berry. 

    "'Sergeant Pepper' happened out of a vacuum, and it seems useless to go back and try to do it again, like the B side of Abbey Road. I've always liked little packages better than big extended pieces. Haiku seems the ultimate form of writing to me, but anyway, Yoko came along and completely opened my mind to new things. I was becoming aware of all sorts of music that I never would have encountered through the Beatles.

     You know, I still want to perform. In fact, next year I plan to go out on the road with Klaus Voormann, Jim Keltner, Nikki Hopkins, and Eric Clapton. If he'll do it. I want to listen to this Roy Buchanan fellow too. And if I like him, maybe ask him. But this is going to have to be a different kind of tour. Not just music, but a complete range of media. The age of sit back and listen to the band is over. At least for me, the audience has got to be part of the show, even if it only means painting each other's toenails."

 

Splinter

 

Austria '01

 November 3, 2001

The Beatles Story (Part 3 by Tony Barrow 1981)

 

The Beatles Story (Part 3)

By Tony Barrow

Liverpool Echo

October 30, 1981

    Paul McCartney will be a pop star forever. In sharp contrast to George, he feeds on the approval of his public. His body and his mind are custom tailored for the job of being in the limelight. Paul has not stayed quite so baby-faced as Cliff Richard, but not has he led the same sheltered existence. 

    If George and then John had not made such an issue about ending the regimen of touring, Paul would have lapped the globe a few more times after 1966 as the Beatles' left-handed guitarist.

     Paul is made with the distinctive molecules of a showman, from his bone marrow to his fingertips. He remains incurably addicted to the adulation of an audience. Like all good policemen and actors, he is never off duty. He conducts himself with flamboyant self-importance because he knows he is a very big star, and he wallows in the constant glory of it all. When he appears to be operating with a low profile, it's because Paul feels scripted to do so.

     These traits made him an ideal Beatle. He coped with the trauma of Beatlemania, showing scarcely a sign of brain damage. I think he and I worked well together. We placed the same importance upon the value of publicity. I tended to home in on Paul for PR purposes, without realizing I was doing it.

     In the days when the Beatles would pose for endless pictures, it was Paul who fetched a dull session to life by adding bits of action. That was almost too good to be true, really, because Paul was also the world's most successful writer-performer of pop songs in history. What more could any publicist ask for? 

    The changes in Paul were the result of gained experience. In 1962, he was willing to work very hard at being the most charming Beatle. By Magical Mystery Tour, he had mastered his art and acquired power too. He handled media interviews astutely. An interview he gave to America's Life magazine about his drug-taking experience led to worldwide headlines. 

    Paul was called upon to clarify his position. "I was asked the question, and the decision was whether to tell a lie or tell the truth. The man from the newspaper is the man with the mass medium. I'll keep it a personal thing if he does too. It's his responsibility for spreading whatever I say. I don't think my fans are going to take drugs just because I did."

     Long after the breakup of the Beatles, Paul came back to me when his Ram album was ready for release in May 1971. He wanted me to give the new record a push with the press. Ram contained the least significant songs of Paul's solo period. Our brief reunion was unsuccessful not because of the album's mediocre material, but because Paul favored a strange remote control PR campaign: me playing his LP tracks to journalists at my Mayfair offices in central London, him staying incommunicado about the whole thing at his Scottish farm, 538 miles away!

     "Can you make it all up like we used to?" He asked when I wanted some in-person McCartney words to support the project.

     John Lennon was the firm foundation upon which the Beatles were built. He held his men together through the tough, crude, crazy, illegal, and exhausting sessions in the Hamburg clubs. He led them on into their era of great commercialism and social success without too much compromise toward the gold, lame, littered land of pop music.

     John was the main reason Brian Epstein involved himself with the Beatles. But the closeness of their relationship did not stop John from verbally thrashing the group's new young manager whenever he disagreed with Epstein's policy. He did not have McCartney's fine flair for creating little ditties, which grew up to be infectious bestsellers. But he was the period's most adventurous composer-lyricist, a full decade ahead of himself. 

    He did not have Ringo's facility for steering himself clear of aggro by crossing over to the other side of the street, but he delivered a solidly valid argument when he stayed to fight. He said what he thought, and he meant what he said. Then he moved on swiftly to avoid boring himself.

    In the summer of 1962, the news of his wedding was kept from the Beatles' public (because that is the way it was in 1962) for almost a year, until baby Julian was a few months old. During the time we were ignoring his marriage in front of outsiders, John picked up my press office copy of the Beatles' first album and wrote on the back of the sleeve. Besides the credit line, John Lennon - guitar. He added, "Married." It was not until a puzzled visitor queried the matter that we noticed what he had done.

     In the years which followed, John Lennon proved to be a PR man's nightmare for more serious reasons. He did not care who he insulted, provided he felt they deserved it. His brand of black humor varied between sickness and cruelty. He was a premature punk rocker clad awkwardly in a carefully buttoned Cardin jacket.

     Although their names were linked neatly under the composers' credit, Lennon and McCartney, John and Paul stayed poles apart as songwriters. When interviewed, each gave the impression that the writing partnership was a closely knit affair. In fact, with few exceptions, their songs were solo creations. It was not too difficult to distinguish a romantic McCartney lilter from a roaring linen belter.

     A few titles were genuine 50-50 collaborations. Otherwise, they merely offered one another advice and made fragmentary contributions to each other's stuff. Once the Beatles ceased to function as a unit, even in the recording studio, my public relations job on the group's behalf came to an end. 

    It is more than 10 years since I saw John. On reflection, over a decade later, I conclude that I knew only half of John Lennon. There was little in the half I knew in the 60s to suggest that he would become a preacher of peace and a lecturer of love in the 70s.

     During the lifespan of the Beatles, he was a man whom it was easy to respect, and I did for his pioneering musical ingenuity, his brute-force determination. But love, really love Lennon and be loved in return? I doubt that happened before Yoko Ono.

John in his leathers at the Cavern

 November 3, 1961 

Fan Club Offices

Photo from Mary Cockram 

 

Celebrating George's Photography

 October 11, 2026

I love the photo of Ringo looking at the George photo of him riding the horse and Oliva is laughing.  I wonder what memory that photo brought back to Ringo.