December 14, 1970
Making of the film "Fly"
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Sunday, December 14, 2025
Easy, Stimulating Man to be With (1980)
Easy, Stimulating Man to Be With
By Robert Hilburn
Los Angeles Times
December 14, 1980
With the Beatles, John Lennon helped stretch rock and roll from its infancy into an art form. Yet it's Lennon, the man whom I'll miss more than Lennon, the rock and roll star. That's not a shot at his music, but a tribute to the warmth of the man.
Few people I've met in rock are as easy or as stimulating to be around. The quality of his albums fell after the brilliant Imagine in 1971, but the former Beatle never lost the graciousness or enthusiasm that made him such a delightful host.
Perhaps the most comforting thought that can be passed on to fans saddened by his death is this: if you had been able to meet Lennon, you wouldn't have been disappointed. He was a person of profound commitment and integrity. In an age of tarnished heroes, he remained remarkably true to his ideals. Beneath the hoopla over the Beatles and superstardom, Lennon was usually unaffected. He was a man who could be equally thrilled by the simple pleasures of the rock and roll music that he'd heard as a youth and by the promise of peace and love, not a Utopian fantasy for Lennon but a legitimate, if elusive, social goal.
Relations between journalists and performers are often strained. Strained interviews are frequently coldly professional exercises that force together artists who need publicity to sell themselves and writers who need information to attract readers. This form of exchange rarely results in genuine human contact. Often, there's little said when the tape recorder is turned off.
An added problem is that many rock personalities are dull, vain, and deceitful. Lennon was an exception; much like his music, he was engaging, open, and appreciative. It's frequently possible to draw striking parallels between a performer's attitude in an interview and his musical output. David Bowie and Mick Jagger, for example, are as elusive and manipulative when confronted by a journalist as they are when teasing audiences from the stage.
Bowie was so sophisticated about the press that when he found out I was going to use an early 70s interview for an English publication as well as in the Los Angeles Times, he said, "Oh, I'd better give you something for the boys back home." After a pause, Bowie announced, "I'm interested in politics. I think I want to run for Prime Minister someday." I placed those remarks at the end of my article, and the editors in London pulled them to the top. The headline read, "Bowie wants to be PM."
Paul McCartney, a conservative music maker, is also so cautious at times in interviews that you sense him editing his thoughts to see how they'll read in print.
In the several times I spoke with him, Lennon was filled with the wit, candor, and imagination that mark his most probing songs, and he was aware that being an ex-Beatle could lend him an intimidating presence. He seemed to go out of his way to make people feel at home. Nothing was off the record, and he let the conversation go wherever you wanted to take it, whatever the subject. He attacked it with a draining intensity, as in his music, he wanted to dig as deeply as possible.
Despite his graciousness during interviews and visits in Los Angeles in the early 70s, I felt a little apprehensive in October when I came here to interview him for the first time in five years. While I was sitting in Yoko Ono's office at the Dakota Building, Lennon burst in holding a copy of Donna Summer's single "The Wanderer", saying to me, "You've got to hear this. She's singing just like Elvis. Listen to that tape echo on her voice. It's like 1958 all over again."
There was no need for a formal reintroduction. He picked up where we'd left off, and it was as if we'd been apart for like five minutes, rather than five years. Unlike McCartney, Lennon would only interrupt himself when he felt he was becoming stuffy. Once, during a half-hearted, less-than-convincing defense of his notorious drunken behavior at a West Hollywood nightclub, he cut himself short. "I just wish I had a new record coming out. All the publicity would have helped."
Lennon loved to have his music played on the radio and move up the charts, but he didn't need constant reinforcement of his celebrity status. When most visiting top-level rock figures go out in Los Angeles, they invariably order a limousine. They also enjoy it when someone in the entourage lets the restaurant owner know that they'll be favoring the establishment with their presence; they enjoy the stir that usually creates-- flattery, a special table and special wine.
When Lennon and I went out to dinner late one night in Beverly Hills, we went to the restaurant, unannounced, in my car; there was no fuss, and he didn't seem to miss it.
He never lost touch with his child-like side. During one especially long mixing session in the New York recording studio in October, he disappeared into a nearby lounge area every few hours with some musicians. You'd suspect a drug break, but it didn't seem likely. In Lennon's case, he and Yoko had been on a strict macrobiotic diet for years. Curious, I followed him on his third trip and saw him reach into a refrigerator and gobble something down. After he returned to the studio, I walked over to the refrigerator to see his diet supplement: a stack of King-size Hershey bars.
Lennon's candor sometimes came across as harshness. When I asked him about some of his scathing remarks about his former Beatle-mates, he said, "That's why I am the one who others understood what I was saying, because they had to deal with me since they were 16. So I didn't really surprise them. It just surprised everyone else. But I couldn't not be what I am."
In Yoko Ono, he found someone who was as forceful and direct as he was. When she made what he felt was too much noise while he was answering a question in an interview, he snapped, "Yoko, could you do that somewhere else?" Later, when he came into an interview room and started being playful, she barked, "John, this isn't the time for that. Can't you see, I'm talking?"
To anyone unfamiliar with them, their actions seemed insensitive, but this give-and-take is what both Lennon and Ono seemed to thrive on.
On the last day of my four-day visit with the Lennons in October, both spoke deeply of their need for each other. Lennon acknowledged that she was even more important to him than his music. "She's my other half," he said. "I'm always scared that she will die or something, and I won't be prepared, because I wasn't prepared for losing my mother when I was a teenager. I'm terrified of that deep down all the time. I need her so much. How will I survive when Yoko is gone?"
Lennon Felt Reborn Only to Die After All (1980)
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| This is what Robert is remembering in this article-- that is him in the background |
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| John is being given a birthday card, as Robert mentions. |
Lennon Felt Reborn Only to Die After All
By Robert Hilburn
Los Angeles Times
December 14, 1980
On the way out of his New York apartment building one evening in October, John Lennon paused in the lobby to ask the doorman if there was much of a crowd outside. The ex-Beatle was accustomed to fans waiting for hours to see him. "Not too many tonight", the doorman replied, "It's kind of chilly out there."
Still, a half dozen people rushed toward Lennon when he and wife, Yoko Ono, stepped from the building and began walking to their nearby limousine. They were up on Lennon so quickly that I was startled. One was shoving an envelope into his hand, another was handing him a belated birthday gift. Another just touching his arm. Lennon stopped, signed a couple of photographs, and chatted briefly before slipping into the car.
More fans were waiting when the car arrived a few minutes later at the recording studio where the Lennons were finishing their new album. Those fans quickly surrounded the couple. Without bodyguards, they were helpless if somebody wanted to harm them.
Didn't he worry about his and Yoko's safety? Lennon shook his head and said, matter-of-factly, "They don't mean any harm. They're just fans. They just want to let you know they care. Besides, what are you going to do? You can't spend all your life hiding from people. You've got to get out and live, don't you?"
When Lennon stepped from the limousine for the final time Monday night, he just figured he would be with the crowd for a few seconds, as he had been so many times before. Again, he was returning from the recording studio, but bullets hit him in the chest, stunning the rock world once more. At 40, John Lennon was dead, murdered.
The added tragedy of Lennon's death is that it came at a time when he believed that he had rallied against the rock excesses that had threatened his life in the mid-70s. He spoke of being renewed and full of life and optimism.
Depressed by a separation from Yoko and the pressures of living up to public expectations, he had spent nearly 18 months in Los Angeles on a "lost weekend" of drugs and alcohol. "I think I was suicidal on some kind of subconscious level," He told me last month. "The goal was to obliterate the mind so that I wouldn't be conscious. I didn't want to see or feel anything. Part of me can't believe I would self-destruct, the youthful part that feels invincible, yet another part realizes I could have died with Yoko's help."
Lennon pulled himself out of that depression, patched up his life during a five-year self-imposed exile, and excluded himself from recordings and public appearances, resurfacing last month with the new album and single. He looked forward to touring and more recording.
When I last spoke to him on the phone three weeks ago, he was excited by the acceptance of the record. The single "Starting Over" was already in the top 10. "It's still a thrill to hear your record on the radio," he said. "It sort of finally makes the music real to me. Even though I've heard the songs a million times by now in the studio. It also makes me feel good to hear the way the disc jockeys are responding to it when they play the song; the DJs don't have to say anything, but they've been saying all sorts of wonderful things that make me feel like they really like it. Yoko and I are excited that we are going right back into the studio to begin working on the next album. I feel just like a kid again!"
"So this is a good time for you?"
"The best."
Lennon, as a Beatle or an individual, was to much of his generation what Elvis Presley was to an earlier one, a man who not only inspired and entertained with his music, but also comforted. Lennon seemed like an ally, someone who understood and made things appear a bit clearer and manageable
. Understandably, perhaps Presley was Lennon's own biggest pop hero. I noticed several of Elvis's records on the jukebox in Lennon and Yoko's apartment in the Dakota Building. "Lots of other people were important to me," he explained last month. "I loved Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Fats Domino, all the classic guys from the '50s, but Elvis had it all. He had the looks, the image, the voice, everything.
"Everybody tried to contact me when he died, but I was still doing my Greta Garbo disappearing act. I nearly opened my mouth and said something, but I was in the mountains in Japan, and that helped me maintain my silence.
"It's hard for me to speak about death. I have had so much death around me. My mother was killed in an auto accident. Stuart Sutcliffe died of a brain tumor. So did Len Gray, another guy in one of our groups. Buddy Holly died when I was in art school. They all affected me, but I can't find a way to put the feelings into words. It's just like you lose a piece of yourself each time it happens."
Friday, December 12, 2025
No Rest For The Beatles (Cardiff 1965)
No Rest for The Beatles
By Robert Peart
South Wales Argus
December 13, 1965
The quiet of a wet Welsh Sunday was shattered last night when the Beatles wound up their most successful British tour yet at the Capital Cinema, Cardiff.
Normally deserted, streets were crowded with 1000s of teenagers, many carrying larger than life photographs of their idols. Extra police on duty lined the pavement alongside a 400-yard queue of fans who had been standing in the rain hours before the show began.
Crash barriers were erected to stop them spilling onto the road, but traffic came to a halt as the 2,000 fans leaving the first performance mingled with an equal number waiting for the second show.
As the curtain went up for the second time, the whole cinema erupted into screams of anticipation. Eighty bouncers and police inside took up their position while the four Liverpool lads sat calmly in the dressing room, eating sausages and mash. Two white coat waiters hurriedly cleared up their plates, and the Beatles settled down to watch a Western on a television set specifically installed in their dressing room.
"They'll put him away for that-- the thug," called out Ringo as another Indian bit the dust. "Get right carried away, does that one? Don't you, Ringo?" said Paul. "No," came the dour reply.
Then the conversation switched to their latest record. "It's made number one today, according to the papers," said George. "Yes," added John. "It's always a relief to hear that. Every time we release a record, it can be hell wondering if it will go to the top or not. There are always those who will be only too ready to laugh if it does not.
"The best way to stay successful is not to take it for granted. You can't afford to let up for a moment. If you do, you are finished." He picked up a bunch of grapes from a nearby bowl of fruit. "Takes away the taste of sausage", he said, brushing back his hair, which was still wet with perspiration from the first act.
Yet underneath this air of relaxation, tension was beginning to build up as the time. For the second spot approached.
"No matter how many times we've done it," said John, "just before the curtain goes up, we all become a bag of nerves. Until you hear the crowd react approvingly, it's hell. Nerves are something even experience can't wipe out."
Yet he need not have worried. The Beatles ' last live show in Britain for probably a year must have been the best performance South Wales pop fans have seen. They just could not go wrong. After the first chord, it must have been clear even to the eldest listener present, why this foursome have become the world's greatest name in pop entertainment. Their approach, still zealously fresh, proved that they have resisted the temptation to rest on their laurels.
Thursday, December 11, 2025
The Prirate Song
December 12, 1975
If you have never seen George's performance on Rutland Television from 50 years ago, then you need to stop what you are doing and go to YouTube to see it. If you had seen it live, it must have been extremely hilarious. George is seen walking down a staircase while strumming the guitar. A group of men is behind him, and they seem to be playing the introduction to "My Sweet Lord." And you would think, "Nice. George is going to perform My Sweet Lord on this show." But to your shock and surprise -- George starts singing a song about being a pirate! Soon, Eric Idol is trying to get George to stop, but he keeps repeating the song. Next, show girls and others in costume descending the stairs and joining George in the singing. Before you can catch your breath, Idol and the showgirls are doing a kickline, and George is kicking his legs as well. What a great highlight of George's humor!
Battle for a Beatle Kiss (London 1965)
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Battle for a Beatle Kiss
No Writer listed
Western Daily Press
December 13, 1965
Up went the curtains, and up rose 5,000 teenage girls from their seats in the Finbury Park Astoria, London. The Beatles were making a one-night stand there. More than 1000 girls in the stalls moved forward several rows, but were barred from the stage by a shoulder-to-shoulder cordon of uniformed policemen and police women.
Two girls got through and over the orchestra pit. One got her arms around Ringo's neck and stole a kiss before being jerked off. The frustrated remainder swooned in the aisles or stood on the backs of the seats, raining jelly babies, dolls, and even a top hat onto the stage.
Twenty girls were carried out for medical treatment, and the police had difficulty in removing about 100 others who felt unable to leave their seats between the two performances. Forty more girls were wriggled out from various parts of the building, including some under a pile of policemen's top coats.
Said a Beatles veteran, " Beatlemania is worse now than it was two years ago."
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