One Sleepy Little Girl

 

3 Savile Row

 

George wears his favorite coat

 

Glasses fix

 

John and Yoko's Taste of Scotland (1995)

 John and Yoko's Taste of Scotland

By John Dingwall

Scotland's Champion

November 22, 1995

    A Highland ex-poacher relived the night he caught a salmon for Beatle John Lennon. Joe couldn't believe it when his GP asked him to get the fish for the star. Lennon had been injured in a car crash in Sutherland, and was in hospital in Brora. 

    Joe, now 53, spent all night getting an 18-pound fish and took it into the town's Lawson Hospital. He revealed, "I couldn't tell John from Yoko because they were in bed asleep together and both had very long hair. I prodded Yoko, then realized it was John." Joe chatted to John, who joked he liked his salmon poached. 

    He added, "I made sure John paid me five bob a pound for it; it was probably only worth about half of that. "

    Joe told his story about his 1969 meeting with the star as a new wave of Beatlemania swept the country, inspired by a TV documentary and new record. But fans of the band had a hard time getting a hold of their new Anthology album released yesterday. Early shoppers fumed as Scottish stores did not receive their copies until midday. Record company EMI had kept the album under tight security in a closed warehouse and only began distributing it in the early hours of yesterday.

Don't Worry Kyoko

 

It was a beautiful holiday

 

I replaced the A.I. enhanced photograph with the original but I cannot find an original of the one of just Maureen.   

The lovely couple

 

George and Billy

 

Have Troubles Altered the Public Image of the Beatles? (1969)

 Have 'Troubles' Altered the Public Image of the Beatles?

By:  Glen Goodey
Associated Press

April 29, 1969

      These are changing times for The Beatles. "Once we were everyone's darlings," said George Harrison, "but it isn't like that anymore."

     "They hate us, "Ringo Starr adds. "It's shocking the way some sections of the public have turned on us. It's completely unmerited."

     What's happened to the Beatles image?

     George, Ringo, and the other Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, haven't given a public performance together in two years, although they have continued to make hit recordings, and their joint business enterprises have run into problems. 

    George and John were recently fined on drug charges. John and his Japanese bride, Yoko Ono, drew some barbed comments from British newspapers when they spent their honeymoon ostensibly as a sleep-in for world peace and invited full publicity.

     Amidst all this activity, Ringo Starr was busy on a separate career as a movie actor, but he has not turned his back on his fellow Beatles. In an interview, he insisted that the Beatles were retaining their fans and that their financial affairs were being straightened out. The interview was on the set of The Magic Christian a film that pairs Ringo with actor Peter Sellers.

     Dressed in a brown suit, extravagant bow tie, and frilly shirt, Ringo talked as much with gestures as with words between mouthfuls in the studio canteen, his hair hung in long folds over his shoulders, and his Mexican-type mustache drooped over his mouth. He looked heavier than his 150 pounds distributed over his five-foot-eight frame. 

    "Despite the critics, we are as popular as ever," insisted Ringo. To back up his point, in the Electrical and Musical Industries-- EMI, who cut the Beatles' discs, reported the group's recording of "Hey Jude" last fall sold 750,000 copies in Britain alone, equaling sales of previous releases. 

    In 1965, The Beatles were decorated with the Order of the British Empire for promoting British exports. "We've done a lot for this country," Ringo said. "We don't necessarily want any thanks, but at least we don't want to be criticized every step of the way.

     "Just because John leads a different sort of life than most people, that doesn't give everyone the right to attack him out of hand. I would never be seen in the nude," added Ringo. "John can get away with it, but I never could."

     Ringo denied rumors that the group was breaking up. He said he did not expect them to perform together in public again, but insisted they would remain together for recordings, films, and broadcasts.

     "We shall branch out and pursue our individual careers, but we shall always be the Beatles. I won't say we will last forever, but we will go on for a very long time-- unless we get shot or something."

     Observers of the Beatles trace the beginning of their eccentric ways to the death of their manager, Brian Epstein in 1967. "Yes, his death did affect our career tremendously," said Ringo. "Now we have to do everything he used to do in the office. It's very hard. Not only are we the Beatles, but we're our own managers and agents. There could never be anyone to replace him. We have appointed certain people to do certain things, but no one could do all that he did, and we wouldn't want them to."

     The Beatles launched their own company called Apple in early 1968 to promote films, records, and clothing. In January, John Lennon said it had turned sour, and unless something was done, they would be broke within six months. 

    "Apple would have been broke," said Ringo, "but we wouldn't. It was a bit mixed up. At one time, we were employing lots of people we didn't want, but we pruned it down, and it's on the right line now."

 Ringo, whose real name is Richard Starkey, is 28

Beatles Discovery (1969)

This photo from 1968 accompanied the article

 Beatles Discovery

No author listed

Courier Express

March 8, 1969

    If you want something that hasn't been invented ye,t ask Magic Alex. He is the inventor inrResidence of Apple Corp., the company founded by The Beatles. The company is now in financial trouble but that doesn't worry Magic Alex. He works in a laboratory that cost $250,000 to equip, where he turns out  ingenius and low cost items.

     It took him 16 days, for example, to devise a tape recorder without tapes or moving parts. It's the size of a cigarette pack and uses an electron beam and a plastic card to function.

     Alex has also invented a composing typewriter that automatically types the musical notation for any song that is played or sung to it.

     For the Beatles' new recording studio, he has created the machine of 10,000  echos, which makes any music sound as if it is echoing from any given place: a church, beach, mountains.

     Alex is also working on plans for a robot housewife, a machine shaped  like two tennis balls on top of each other and program to do all the housework.

     Magic Alex-- real name John Alexis Martas, came to London two years ago. His father is a former General of the Greek army.

     Alex says that American and Japanese companies have offered him huge sums to work for them, but he prefers Apple Corps., taking from the Beatles only a fraction of what he is worth.    

    The Beatles say they hope to make enough from his inventions to subsidize the handicapped and underprivileged.

Yoko's Marriage to Beatle Lennon Reinforced Each Others Creativity (1969)

 

Yoko's Marriage to Beatle Lennon Reinforced Each Others Creativty

By:  Earnest Leogrande

Niagara Falls Gazette

January 25, 1970

    John Lennon has become the outstanding member of The Beatles because of his diversity of talent as well as outspokenness. With Paul McCartney, he has composed most of the Beatles' songs. He has shown a James Joyce-like adroitness with words and in writing two humorous books (one letter adapted to the stage). He has been featured as a movie actor, apart from his fellow Beatles, in the anti-war How I Won the War. He has filmed an experimental movie with his wife, Yoko Ono, plus an anti-capital punishment TV documentary. He has drawn a series of erotic lithographs, which will be published by Avant-Garde magazine. 

    Yoko has made a reputation of her own as an offbeat artist making a taboo, challenging movie consisting of a succession of 364 bare bottoms and encouraging people to crawl into bags, where shut off from the outside environment, they can confront themselves. 

    When these two divorced their mates and married, they reinforced each other's exploratory creativity. "We were both doing things, but when we came together, I think the forces became naturally stronger," Yoko told me in her quiet, almost shy voice. "It was like meeting a mirror and knowing where you're at. Both of us sort of serve as each other's mirror."

     Their great peace campaign came naturally out of this union. "Both of us were peacenicks, you know," Yoko explained. "Alone, maybe we'd have been discouraged. We influenced each other. Peace was a very natural outcome of our work. If you remember, John wrote the song, 'All You Need Is Love'. And that was like a beautiful message. I was doing things in my own way, which was to stand in Trafalgar Square with a bag over me to protest."

     The couple having forsaken the bed as a place for interviews, were sitting on a couch in the living room of friend country western singer Ronnie Hawkins and his wife. The Lennon had just come in from a romp in the snow. The house is in the country, an hour's drive from Toronto, and both looked as cheery and healthy as a couple of youngsters after recess period. 

    Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins go for plain cooking, but the smell of macrobiotic cooking permeated the house. The Lennons follow this diet, which is related to Zen Buddhism, and they had brought in Mr. and Mrs. Martin Schlass, proprietors of the macrobiotic Cauldron restaurant in New York's East Village, to cook for them. 

    John's beard looked a bit short because he had shaved it off and now regrowing it. "It's growing fine, thank you," he said.

     Yoko assured me that she didn't object to John's beard. "That was just a reporter's story. We like to change our hairstyle, but because we are in a constant spotlight, the reporter played it up. We were wearing totally black yesterday, so that was an issue. We'd like some freedom too."

     There had been a report that Lennon was considered for the title role of Jesus Christ in a rock opera to be presented at St Paul's Cathedral next spring. Christ is referred to as a "Superstar" in the musical production. "I never got the offer," he told me. "I'm always reading. I've been offered these parts to play, but no one ever offers them to me. Then when, the press asks, 'Did you offer this to him?' They'd say 'We wouldn't offer it to that idiot.'

     Actually, the writers of the opera said they had decided it was better to give the role to an unknown. they may have been swayed by the recollection that Lennon was called a blasphemous egotist in 1966 when he said "The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. now." He later tried to explain by saying it was meant as a criticism of fans' distorted values. 

    I asked him if he agreed that the emphasis on material possessions prevented society from achieving peace after 1000s of years of war experience. "It hasn't helped," he said. "If you imagine material possessions as being a kind of drug, many people are hooked on it. That's why you get things like dropouts and hippies."

     How could he square this attitude, I asked, with the material wealth that being John Lennon Superstar has brought him? His ready response indicated he contemplated the question before. "As a result of having all the material wealth I could have and still not finding any satisfaction or peace or happiness or whatever, that made me think, well, what else is there in life?

    "Am I just going to sit here watching 20 TVs in 20 suites with 20 cars for the rest of my life? What shall I do after having achieved so-called success and fame that Western civilization says you should have? I'm finding out, it's nowhere. I'm them rather than giving them up."

     The early Beatles told us in song that you can't buy love, but John Lennon is trying to find out if his fame and wealth can buy peace. Yoko concluded the interview with a benediction "We should all try together." She said, "Peace to you."

Message in a bottle

 

John in 1969 in stills from a home movie made by Yoko.   John has messages of peace in the bottle that he is trowing in to the ocean.    Much thanks (and love) to fellow Lennon lover,  Ingryd.  

Beatles Music Straightforward on Next Album (1969)

 Beatles Music Straightforward on Next Album

By Alan Smith

New Musical Express

May 3, 1969

    "If I could only get the time to myself right now, instead of all this Monopoly and financial business with Northern Songs, I think I could probably write about 30 songs a day.  As it is, I probably average about 12 a night. Paul, too, he's mad on it. It's something that gets in your blood. I've got things going round in my head right now, and as soon as I leave here, I'm going around to Paul's place and start work.

     "The way we're writing at the moment, it's straightforward, and there's nothing weird. Songs like 'Get Back'- things like that. We recorded that one on the Apple roof. And I'm not sure if that's the version that went out. We always record about 10 versions. 

    "You get lost in the end. I'm not really interested in the production of our records. In fact, I wish I didn't have to go through the whole thing -- going through the production and balancing the bass and all that. For me, the satisfaction of writing a song is in the performing of it. The production bit is a bore. If some guy would invent a robot to do it, great, but all that, 'get the bass right, get the drums right.' That's a drag to me. All I want to do is get my guitar out and sing songs.

     "I quite fancy giving some live shows, but Ringo doesn't, because he says, you know, it'll just be the same when we get on, nothing different. I can't give you any definite plans for a live show when we're not even agreed on it. We've got to come to an agreement for a start. There's too much going on now for us to even talk realistically about going on tour.

     "In a way, that's why it's unfortunate that all the publicity came out about doing live shows when it did; we were only thinking about it vaguely, but it kind of got out of hand. I suppose the next Great Beatle Event will be the next LP in about eight weeks. A lot of the tracks will be like, 'Get back.' A lot that we did in one take, kind of thing. We've done about 12 tracks, some of them still to be remixed.

     "Paul and I are now working on a kind of song montage that we might do as one piece on one side. We've got two weeks to finish the whole thing. So we're really working at it. All the songs we're doing sound normal to me, but probably they might sound unusual to you. There's no 'Revolution #9' there, but there's a few heavy sounds. I couldn't pin us down to being on a heavy scene or a commercial pop scene or a straight, tuneful scene. We're just on whatever's going--- just rocking along.

     "The follow-up to 'Get Back' is 'The Ballad of John and Yoko'. It's something I wrote, and it's like an old-time ballad. It's the story of us going along, getting married, going to Paris, going to Amsterdam, all that. It's 'Johnny B Paperback Writer', as I say. We don't want to release it straight away, because it might kill the sales, and I suppose we're cowards that way.

     "I don't regard it as a separate record scene. It's the Beatles' next single, simple as that. The story came out that only Paul and I were on the record, but I wouldn't have bothered publicizing that. It doesn't mean anything. It just so happened that there were only two of us there. George was abroad, and Ringo was on the film, and he couldn't come that night. Because of that, it was a choice of either remixing or doing a new song, and you'll always go for doing a new one instead of fiddling around with an old one. So we did, and it turned out well.

     "As for this financial business that's going on, it does get in the way of the writing, but I don't find it that much of a drag. It is. It is that much of a drag. It's like Monopoly, what with all these bankers and played around a big table with all these heavies, you know, the bit, 'then I'll give you the Strand or Old Kent Road', and you say, 'No, you give me two houses.' It's just like that. Really, the outcome of this whole financial business doesn't matter. We'll still be making records, and somebody will be copping some money, and we'll be copping some money, and that'll be that. 

    "I don't have any involvement in Mary Hopkin's records. It's pure Paul. But there is one discovery I'd like to promote. I think I'm going to make a pop record with Yoko. I've got this other song we've been singing last night, and I think it would be quite a laugh for her to do a pop record. It's one I've written myself, and it's about Yoko, but I'll just change the word Yoko to John, and she can sing it about me.

     "This TV film, Rape, we did for Austrian TV--- so it didn't get fantastic reviews, but then neither does every record the Beatles make. Hell, do you remember the reviews of "Hey Jude?" I remember Stuart Henry saying, 'Och weel, y' either like it orr y' don't.' The critics are the same with Rape. It's a good film, and we stand by it. There's a few people  who understand it, and the rest have no idea. They don't know the difference between Jean-Luc Godard and Walt Disney.

    It's funny. The critics can accept it from Luc Godard, but they can't accept it from us, too, because they're so hung up on who Yoko and I are and what we do that they can't see the product. But that'll die, and Yoko and I will just have to overcome our image, and people will have to judge us on our art, not the way we look. 

    "You can say Paul and I are writing separately these days. We do both. When it comes to needing 500 songs by Friday, you've got to get together. I definitely find I work better when I got a deadline to meet. It really frightens you. You've got to chum them out all the time. I'm sort of arranging things in my mind. The film that The Beatles recently made of us recording and working. Somebody is editing that at the moment, it's 68 hours, and they're trying to get it down to five for several TV specials, or then it might be a movie. I don't know. 

    "This image thing that people are always on about with the Beatles' image is something in Joe Public's eye. That's why it's a drag when people talk about fresh-faced Beatles like it was five years ago. I mean, we're always changing, like the TV clip of 'Get Back.' Now I've got the beard, Paul is clean-shaven, and George is the one with the mustache. Even I can't keep up with our own image, I come into Apple one day, and there's George with a new head on him. So if that's the way it is with us, I tell you, the public doesn't stand a chance of keeping up with how we look. Anyway, who we are, is up to ourselves. Personally, music is what's important. As far as that's concerned. 

    "In my case, Yoko and I stimulate each other like crazy. For instance, did you know she's trained as a classical musician? I didn't know that until this morning. In college, she majored in classical composition. I've just written a song called  'Because.'  Yoko was playing some classical bit, and I said, 'Play that backward', and we had a tune. We'll probably write a lot more in the future.

     I've written with other people as well. For instance, there's this mad thing I wrote half with our electronic genius Alex. It was called, 'What a Shame Mary Jane had a Pain at the Party,' and it was meant for the last Beatles album. It was real madness, but we never released it, and I'd like to do it again. There was another song I wrote around Pepper time that's still in the can called, 'You Know My Name, Look Up the Number.' That's the only words to it. It just goes on all the way like that. And we did these mad backings, but I never finished it, and I must.

     Why did we spring 'Get Back' on the public so suddenly? Well, we'd been talking about it since we recorded it, and we kept saying, 'That's a single.' Eventually, we got so fed up talking about it. We suddenly said, 'Okay, that's it. Get it out tomorrow.'

Heading to Work

 

Look up to Lennon

 

A 1969 Paul meeting

 

Sessions with McCartney

 

Another interview

 

Holidays in Swinging London

 

Beatle fans from all around the globe gathered on Abbey Road during the summer of 1969.  Here is a story of some music fans from Germany who saw the Beatles during that amazing summer.  If you want to read the full story, please go to Horst Gassen's webpage.   The web page is in German, and I used the Google Translate feature on Chrome to share the story here with you. 

It happened again at Piccadilly Circus that we received a valuable tip.

 

"You can see the Beatles. They are currently recording a new album at Abbey Road Studios. They always arrive there in the late morning to record the tracks."

 

At first, we couldn't believe it and thought they were pulling our leg. The Beatles were practically gods to us by then; you couldn't just see them like that, we thought. Nevertheless, the next morning we set off there by subway.

When we arrived at EMI Studios, there were only about a dozen people there. Far too few for the Beatles, I thought. Nevertheless, we lingered and waited. Rumors were circulating that the "Fab Four" had already been spotted there several times a few days earlier on their way to the studio. So I got my 10-mark Photo-Porst roll-top camera, with about eight exposures left, ready to shoot.

 

My efforts should be rewarded...

 

After a while, when a Mini Cooper pulled into the small parking lot in front of the studios, the crowd suddenly became restless. I remained calm, because I simply couldn't imagine a Beatle in a little Mini. However, my imagination was abruptly and violently shaken when Paul McCartney stepped out of the car. Unbelievable, incredible... a Beatle standing right in front of me, within arm's reach... not a bodyguard, no security detail in sight... the few people there surrounded Paul to get an autograph... he remained very friendly and signed autographs while I frantically fumbled with my camera to take one or two pictures... unfortunately, I couldn't take more, as I was only allowed eight shots.

The unbelievable news was true after all: the Beatles are in the studio today!

After Paul disappeared into the studio through the main entrance, we waited again outside on the sidewalk, eagerly anticipating the next Beatle to come...

And that was George (Harrison) .

He arrived in a Bentley, also without a chauffeur or security detail. He too signed autographs, though he was somewhat more reserved than Paul.

Next up was the drummer Ringo (Starr) . He drove a Rolls Royce. I don't even remember if he gave autographs; he certainly doesn't look friendly in the photo.

Never mind, I didn't like him anyway...

Finally, John Lennon and Yoko Ono arrived in a long white Mercedes 600. They were very shy, seemed annoyed, didn't give any autographs, and sped right past us into the building.

Yoko Ono is largely blamed for the Beatles' breakup the following year, 1970. And as we know today, tensions were already running high between the Beatles at that time.

Although I was (and still am) a Stones fan, this encounter with the Beatles at Abbey Road left a lasting impression on me. I'd never seen them in concert before; I couldn't afford it. But experiencing the Beatles up close and in a more or less private setting—that will stay with me forever.