Happy Mother's Day!

 

Here is a photo of Ringo with his Mum in the 1980s (I would guess 1985 when Ringo shaved his beard to play the Turtle in Alice in Wonderland).

Wishing all of the Mothers out in Pepperland a happy day!  

Press to Play Session

 

Yesterday and Today (The 'maneuvering swine' interview - 1985)

 

Yesterday and Today

By Hunter Davies

Found in the Southern Illinoisian

(originally published in a British women's magazine "Woman." )

December 26, 1985 

The Editor's Note:  After the Beatles broke up, John Lennon was openly critical upon McCartney, but McCartney chose to remain silent. Later, McCartney opened up to writer Hunter Davies, who wrote The Beatles. What has appeared in recent news accounts is a quote by McCartney who said Lennon was a "maneuvering swine and has become Martin Luther Lennon." McCartney has since said his quote was taken out of context. What follows is the story behind the headlines. The feelings McCartney had for Lennon, whom he called "a jealous man who was paranoid about McCartney's songwriting abilities."

Written by Hunter Davies

     Not long after John's death, I had some strange conversations with Paul. He seemed so upset by so many things, not least of which was John's death. This was in May 1981, and I jotted down in a diary some of the things he told me. 

    John's death on December 8, 1980, had grown into a sort of cult, with instant books appearing, and the papers were still full of it. Many people in praising John were putting down Paul, or so it appeared.

     Paul rang me on May 3, 1981, and went on for over an hour, all about how hurt he was. He said he was fed up with all these people going on about him and John and getting it all wrong, only he knew the truth. It wasn't anything like the things being said. 

    Paul had a go at me for having gone on some TV news program after John's death. In my tribute to him, I had said that John was more the hard man with the cutting edge, while Paul was more soft and melodic. 

    But what had really got Paul upset that day was an interview with Yoko in which Yoko was quoted as saying that Paul had "hurt John more than any other person."  Paul thought they were amongst the cruelest words he had ever read. "No one ever goes on about the times John hurt me,"said Paul, "when he kept calling my music 'muzak'. People keep on saying I hurt him. But where's examples? When did I do it?

     "No one ever says. It's just always the same, blaming me. Could I have hurt John more than anyone in the world? More than the person who ran down Julia, John's mother, in a car?

     "We were always in competition. I wrote Penny Lane, so he wrote Strawberry Fields. That's how it was. But that was in competitions. 

    "I can't understand why Yoko was saying this. The last time I spoke to her, she was great. She told me she and John had just been playing one of my albums and had cried."

     What did he think then might have hurt John? "There's only one incident I can think of which John has publicly mentioned. It was when I went off with Ringo and did, "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" It wasn't a deliberate thing. John and George were tied up finishing something, and me and Ringo were free, just hanging around. So I said to Ringo, 'Let's go and do this.'

     "Nobody knows how much I helped John. Me and Linda went to California and talked him out of his so called Lost Weekend when he was full of drugs. We told him to go back to Yoko. And not long after he did. He never gave me an inch, but he took so many yards and feet.

     "He always suspected me. He accused me of scheming to buy over Northern Songs (the company owning rights to many Beatles songs) without telling him. I was thinking of something to invest in. And Peter Brown (the Beatles personal manager) said, 'What about Northern Songs? Invest in yourself.' So I bought a few shares, about 1000 I think.

     "John went mad, suspecting some plot. Then he bought some himself. He was always thinking I was cunning and devious. That's my reputation. Someone who's charming, but a clever lad.

     "I do stand back at times. Unlike John, I look ahead. I'm careful. John would go on for the free guitar and just accept it straight away in the mad rush. I would stand back and think, 'but what's this bloke really after? What will it mean?' I don't like being the careful one. I'd rather be immediate like John. He was all action. John was always the loudest in any crowd. He had the loudest voice. He was the cock who crowed the loudest. 

    "Me and George used to call him the cockeral in the studio. I was never out to screw him, never. He could have he could be a maneuvering swine, which no one ever realized. Now, since the death, he's become Martin Luther Lennon. But that really wasn't him either. He wasn't some sort of holy saint. He was still really a debunker.

     "We grew to be equals. I made him insecure. He always was really. He was insecure with women. You know, he told me, when he first met Yoko, not to play for her.

      "I saw somewhere that he says he helped on 'Eleanor Rigby', yeah, about half a line. He also forgot completely that I wrote the tune for 'In My Life', that was my tune. But perhaps he just made a mistake on that, forgot.

     "I didn't hate John. People said to me, when he said those things on his record about me, 'you must hate him.' But I didn't. I don't. We were once having a right slagging session. I remember how he took off his granny glasses. I can still see him. He put them down and said, 'It's only me, Paul.' And then he put them back on again, and we continued slagging. 

    "That phrase keeps coming back to me all the time. 'It's only me.' It's become a mantra in my mind.

     "Until I was about 30, I thought the world was an exact place. Now I know that life just sputters along. John knew that he was the great debunker. He'd be debunking all this death thing now."

Paul Won't Get His Wish For Christmas (1985)

 

Paul Won't Get His Wish For Christmas

By David Zimmerman

USA Today

December 19, 1985

    Paul McCartney arrives at his office overlooking Soho Square and beelines to his prized 50s Wurlitzer. He punches Fats Domino's "Be My Guest." The jukebox balks.

     No matter, the McCartney charm, smile, and patter play on just as they have through a year in which his movie bombed, his buddy Michael Jackson beat him for rights to the bulk of Beatles songs, and his published remark that" John Lennon could be a maneuvering swine", outraged Lennon's fans.

     A new album and movie are in the works, and the Beatle who talked the most and feels the most misunderstood is anxious to set the record straight about John Lennon. 

    This morning, he received a Christmas card from Ringo Starr. There's less contact with George Harrison, who spends much time in Hawaii. "We're always trying to tell each other it's all right, but there's still all this trouble with a company that stopped existing in 1969. That's what I want for Christmas, and I won't get it this Christmas, but if the business thing is solved, we'd kiss tomorrow. "

    That's later. For now, there's Lennon, whose death left McCartney to sort out his relationship with a legend. "I'm not looking for anyone to say, 'Oh, you're the one who did this or that'," he says. "That's rubbish. It's that I love the truth, and it's scarce these days." McCartney says, "I loved John." That was the heart of the message he sent to Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, and son, Sean, shortly after publication of the swine remark, quoted from a conversation four years ago.

     Ono's responses so far? Silence. "If she didn't get the message the first time, I hope she gets it here", he says.

     Thus, McCartney, 43 again, is trying to make amends, just as he did after having shrugged, "It's a drag, isn't it," to a reporter on the day Lennon was shot.  I meant draaaaaaaaag in the worst sense of the word, but when I saw it in the papers, I thought, 'Oh my God. It seems so flippant."

     The controversy fed on the pair's years of estrangement during which they, especially Lennon, fired bitter, often cheap shots. "But I have to admit, John was special," says McCartney. 

    "I remember writing a song for the Sgt. Pepper album. Had most of it written, and I was singing, 'It's getting better all the time'. And John goes, 'It couldn't get much worse.' That was typical Lennon. It made the song."

     He didn't expect another such match because "He was so good and so clever, and we came up together."

     For his new album next spring, he's co-writing with Eric Stewart of 10 CC. The album will include "Spies Like Us", which director John Landis asked McCartney to write for the Dan Aykroyd/ Chevy Chase comedy. The video finds McCartney (Landis' idea) back on the famous Abbey Road crosswalk. He knows Beatles die-hards may howl, as they did at new arrangements of revered Beatles hits in McCartney's movie flop, Give My Regards to Broad Street. "They're just songs, really." He shrugs, undaunted. 

    McCartney is going ahead with the film he wanted the Beatles to make instead of Yellow Submarine, an animated musical featuring Rupert the Bear, the British storybook character. McCartney expects the film to renew charges that his work is saccharine. "There's an innocence to children's stuff that I really love. It reminds me of how uncomplicated things can be," he says, smiling his boyish face, only slightly altered by crow's feet around his puppy-ish eyes. "And I never have ever been ashamed of sentimentality, even though I've had moments when I knew it was very uncool. My kids don't get off on it. They say Daaaad."

     McCartney's not ruling out a USA tour. "I'm usually asked that based on the fact that John got shot and the rumor that none of us dare tour again. In actual fact, I'm no more frightened than I ever was."

     McCartney would like the sentimental and monetary pleasure of owning Beatles songs from 1964 to 1970. Only after Jackson locked them up for  $47.5 million did McCartney learn his friend had been negotiating for almost a year. "Business is business," he says, without bitterness. "You'd think he might have called me. I'd like them someday, particularly the songs like 'Yesterday' that nobody ever had anything to do with but me."

     Which reopens the who-wrote-what debate. For instance, Lennon claimed he helped write "Eleanor Rigby" and composed the tune for "In My Life." McCartney says Lennon contributed half a line to "Eleanor Rigby" and nothing to the "Life" melody.

     The pair had decided together to be like Rogers and Hammerstein. "Which meant that anything that was totally my work was called co-written. I don't regret it, but my heirs might regret it later."

     The years, just after the Beatles' divorce, were the worst. McCartney drew the hatred of the other Beatles for initiating the legal breakup. He drew his main support from his wife, Linda, and Linda took her share of knocks, especially when she was playing with McCartney's group Wings.

     "It started off like, 'Let's go have a laugh.' We didn't realize till much later that she'd become known as the keyboard player in a world-renowned group and that she had to be criticized. She handled it well, but, you know, she's only a girl. Emotional traumas, I think, don't fit so easily for women as they do for men. It may be a sexist judgment, but tough. I happen to believe girls are a little more delicate in that respect."

     McCartney describes the children, Heather, 22, Mary, 16, Stella, 14, and James, eight, as surprisingly normal at this time. The family lives a quiet life on a farm in Sussex. Vegetarianism reigns. All the sheep die of old age. Neighbors have joined the conspiracy of treating them like anybody else. He admits his estimated $500 million fortune (enough to buy two Bob Hopes) makes normalcy tough. 

    "It's what we started off writing for. John and I would say, 'let's write a swimming pool today'. But the trouble is, when you get rich, that comes to seem like a dirty philosophy. Then you're supposed to say, 'I don't want money.'

    "Being rich isn't just good for me," he says. "I do give quite a bit to charity, and I can help my friends and relatives." But the money can't buy love among the remaining Beatles, though McCartney says sharing the loss of Lennon brought some healing; he hopes for reconciliation or even collaboration. 

Perkins Changes His Tune (1985)

 

Perkins Changes His Tune

By Michael Donahue

The Commercial Appeal

December 20, 1985

    Carl Perkins wasn't afflicted with Beatlemania in the early 1960s. "I didn't like them", said the rockabilly singer, as he discussed the mop top group from Liverpool. "Well, I just thought they were copying what we were doing. I knew they were copying Sun Records. I don't know these long-haired, slick-looking guys whom I'd seen pictures of. Well, I don't think they were original, man," said Perkins, who occasionally dabbed cigarette ashes in a guitar-shaped ashtray in his den. 

    "Well, I don't really know exactly what it was, other than they were getting so hot that every kid was going around, 'yeah, yeah, yeah'-- 'I want to hold your hand.' That's all we would hear. And I thought, 'Well, here comes four cats from England.' That's all these kids are crazy about. It was exactly what came out of Memphis, Tennessee. I don't know, it kind of felt like some kind of infringement coming from a foreign country."

     But times change. Today, Perkins, more than anybody, may be the man who will bring the remaining Beatles together. He's already brought George Harrison and Ringo Starr together in A  Rockabilly Session: Carl Perkins and Friends, debuting at 9pm January 5 on Cinemax. The special also includes Eric Clapton, Dave Edmunds, Roseanne Cash, Earl Slick, and former Stray Cats, Lee Rocker, and Slim Jim Phantom. 

    "Well, I came very close to putting the Beatles back together. That really wasn't my intention. I didn't go into this thing saying, 'I'm going to be the guy that puts these three boys together.'"

     Perkins, who still recalls the time his son showed him a photo book on The Beatles and said, 'Daddy, them long haired boys that you don't like....' 

    How did he have a change of heart about the Beatles when he met them in England? It was during a tour with Chuck Berry in 1964. He was invited to a party that night. "John, Paul, George, and Ringo were sitting on a couch, and I was sitting on the floor with a guitar, and they just wanted me to show them all these old Sun kick-offs and all that stuff that I did back on Sun Records. And wanted to talk about what it was like in the studio. Was I really a friend of Elvis? Were we not rivals? Everybody playing the same hot music, and going out on shows together."

     A cigarette brought Perkins and Harrison closer. Harrison passed around a cigarette pack, and Perkins took one and put it in his pocket. "He told me, the next night, 'I still can't get over you wanting to keep that cigarette.' I said, 'Well, why not? Man, you're great. You're George Harrison, The Beatles. I want to take it home and keep it. You gave it to me.'"

     Harrison remembered the incident and referred to it later in interviews. According to Perkins, "Harrison said, 'He wanted to keep the cigarette, and I would have given anything for something from him.' I gave him a guitar pick that night, and he swears he still has it."

     Perkins liked the Beatles. "Yeah. After I got to know them, I found them to be so humble. John Lennon was the live wire of the four, really, by that, I mean he asked more questions. He did a version of 'Blue Suede Shoes' with the group when it was called the Plastic Ono Band."

     Perkins didn't see any of the Beatles again until about five years ago, when Paul McCartney invited him to Monseratt to play on an album. "Paul told me something that was a thriller to me. He said 'We used to take your old Sun Records, The 45s, and slow them down to 33 1/3 to catch what you were doing.' "

    Lennon and McCartney got into an argument over "Lend Me Your Comb", because one thought it was impossible for Perkins to suddenly switch to falsetto on the word "out" and then continue singing without taking a breath. Perkins did switch to falsetto on the recording, but his brother was the one who picked up the lead.

     "McCartney and Lennon then began doing the same thing on stage," said Perkin. "They'd look at each other, wink, and swap parts without the audience knowing. I really don't know the right words to describe how it does make me feel to know that you influence somebody you know that deeply."

     His idea to get together with the former Beatles occurred to him about a year ago. He originally wanted to put together an album featuring himself and 25 friends. "It was just a wild dream that I had. I said, 'Well, 30 years you have been in this business, and what really have you left? If you leave here today, what have you left except a couple of songs? Why don't you really try to do something that's just beyond anything that you ever thought about?"

     It was hard, however, to get his friends together on an album because of the demands of their labels. So Perkins decided on TV. "If these same dudes want to do a television show, you wouldn't have to deal with record companies. They can just say, 'Back off, Jack. I want to sing with this man on the show', and that's it."

     Perkins thought, "What would George Harrison, Ringo, Clapton, these kinds of people, what would they say if they got a video cassette from Carl Perkins and they put it in their machines and I said, 'Hey, George, this is your old buddy, Carl Perkins. Ah, I'm getting old and fat. I know that, but I'm Carl Perkins, and I'd like to-- I've got to have some help.' I want to do something before I slide completely out of this business, and that's the way I did it."

     He sent the cassettes (no two were alike) to his friends, with a little card enclosed for the recipient to note whether he or she would appear; the cards began to fly back. McCartney had to decline because he was recording an album, but he said he would do anything Perkins wanted after the album was complete. 

    "The first one I got back was one I didn't think would do it, and that was George Harrison. He has just been a recluse and has completely gotten out of the business. And since Lennon was killed, he has just been scared to death. His house is like a fortress. He's got radar vision that scans the wall at night, everything. He just refused to do anything public."

     But Harrison also was the Beatle who changed his name to Carl Harrison when the group was known as the Silver Beetles.  The special was set. Perkins arrived for the rehearsal. "The elevator door opened, and I heard, 'uh, Honey Don't' (from one of Perkins' songs). George and Ringo had already been there. They got there at 1:30. I was on time. I got there at 2:00. It just sent chills through my body.

     "Harrison looks so great, clean, healthy, radiant, smiling, happy. From the word go and from the first slick to the last, it was just dynamite."

     Following the rehearsal, Harrison invited Perkins to dinner. "Later, Harrison's limousine pulled up to this massive, massive gate. It looked like a prison. You couldn't run through that gate with Casey Jones' train. Guards standing on each side of it."

     They finally reached Harrison's castle. "It was absolutely mind-boggling. I don't know why the Queen lives where she does, because her castle is second-rate."

     Harrison, his wife Olivia, and their little boy, Danny [sic], were standing at the door. Inside the castle were robots in the playroom and a dining table that could seat 30 people. There also was a state of the art all digital mounted studio. 

    When Perkins remarked on how well Harrison looked, he said, "I've had to live it all to find out the simplicity of life is being part of putting your hands in dirt.

    " And Olivia told me that he's in the yard every day, said Perkins. "He's out there cleaning up, planting, working in that yard. Well, we wound up sitting on the music room floor. His guitar collection is on the wall. Harrison asked questions. There was still some of those old licks he wanted, and I had forgotten them. I made up a little song. 'Carl, where did that song come from?' I made it up."

    Harrison, then began talking about how he might like to go on stage with Perkins. "That might be neat," said Harrison, "What would you think about it? I said, 'I'm going to faint right now. When I get back, I'll tell you that it'll be the greatest thing that's happened in my life.' He said, 'Let me think about it. Let's talk about it some more.'

    "I played him a lot of new stuff I've been writing. He said, 'I want to do an album with you.' I said, 'What do you mean? You want to produce something?' 'Well, I'll produce it. We'll all sing, we'll all do whatever we want to. You just come back and stay maybe a month, and we'll just work in the studio.' And that's what the boy said. I said, 'Well, you have my phone number, Hoss, just call. I'll be here. I'll be glad to.'"

     Perkins already had planned future specials. He's lined up artists including Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Linda Ronstadt, and John Fogerty, and Faye Dunaway, who was in the audience for the Cinemax special. She asked them to write the music and appear in an upcoming movie for her in February. 

    But Perkins is proud of his work on his first Cinemax special, and equally proud that the Beatles think so much of him. In fact, he once asked Harrison 'Why me when I was probably the worst one who ever recorded? Now, really now, I definitely feel that way.

     "He said, 'Well, look here, Carl, you forgot you were writing your songs. You played your own lead. You were singing your songs, and you were singing the lead and harmony on your songs. We wanted to write our own songs, we wanted to play our own music, and we wanted to sing our own songs. So we liked Elvis, but that isn't what he did. You are the only one at Sun Records who was doing what we wanted to do."

Ringo Wary of Elephant Polo (1985)

 

Ringo Wary of Elephant Polo

Associated Press

December 16, 1985

    The former Beatle, Ringo Starr, says he was skeptical about riding an elephant for a polo match, but ended up having a ball. Starr was on a celebrity-laden team from Cartier, the Paris jewelers, in the 10-team bout of this year's World Elephant Polo Championship on Sunday. 

    "I think I've done excellently," Starr said, although his team didn't win. "I was pretty skeptical when it all began, but it's fun when you come down to it."

     Others on the Cartier team were Starr's wife, actress Barbara Bach, Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, actor Max Boyce, and Cartier President Alani Perrin. The tournament was won by a team called Tiger Top Tuskers who smashed in a goal during overtime to trounce the King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation one to zero.

End of McCartney's Slump? (1985)

 

End of McCartney's Slump?

By Mike Dion

Daily Hampshire Gazette

November 22, 1985

    A few weeks ago, while listening to a Beatles album (a frequent occurrence in my life), I mentioned to a friend that, except for his appearance at Live Aid in London, Paul McCartney has kept a pretty low profile this year. Wouldn't you know it? A few days later, I received a call from another friend in the music business informing me that he was shipping me McCartney's new single. 

    Yes, Paul McCartney is back. His new single, "Spies Like Us," is the title tune to a new John Landis film starring Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. "Spies Like Us" is Paul's best single in years. It's hummable and for change at rocks -- unlike some of the sappy, syrupy ballads he's bogged himself down with in recent years.

    I'm only speculating, but I would imagine that 1985 hasn't been the best of years for McCartney. His film, Give My Regards to Broad Street, released last year about this time, was a bomb, savaged by critics and fans alike. The film soundtrack album produced only one hit, "No More Lonely Nights." Not a disaster, but nothing earth-shattering by today's mega hit standards.

     McCartney also ended his six-year relationship with Columbia Records, a union that saw only one number one album and a lackluster singles performance. He is back now on Capitol Records, the label that distributed the Beatles in America, and the one he had recorded for with Wings and as a solo artist until 1979.

     McCartney also said to be distressed that he lost a bidding war this year to Michael Jackson for copyrights to many of the early Lennon and McCartney songs. The copyrights had been owned by ATV Inc. McCartney reportedly wanted to buy them back, but Jackson came along with close to $50 million and won out. Since McCartney could buy and sell Jackson 10 times over, one has to imagine that he wasn't all that interested in the catalog, or that he was simply out hustled by Jackson.

     Paul also received bad press a few weeks ago regarding some comments he made in an interview (done four years previously, but only just published) about the late John Lennon. In defense of McCartney, there seems to be some validity to his statement that Lennon is being made into a saint by his fans and the public in general. Any follower of the Beatles knows Lennon wasn't always the kindest of people when it came to dealing with his friends and family.

     Controversy is nothing new to McCartney in his 20-plus years in the forefront of the music world; he has been both praised and damned, but he continues to crank out his songs. Since he doesn't need the money nor the aggravation, I guess he keeps making music because he likes to, a noble enough reason for me.

You Get Along with Yoko? (Paul Interview from 1985)

 

You Get Along With Yoko?  Medium Says Paul

By Duncan Fallowell

The Magazine

January 20, 1985

    The crow's feet around Paul McCartney's eyes started to make it big about 10 years ago. Since then, not much has changed. His band, Wings, was finished, and Paul was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most commercially successful composer. 

    It's impossible to calculate what the total turnover might be, but every tune is an oil well, and after the first $100 million, a kind of indifference sets in. His appeal has grown even broader, if that's possible. He makes his contemporaries feel young, or at least abreast of things, and he doesn't offend the old. It's very nice that he's smiling and still around with everybody dying off so fast, being shot, jumping off buildings, having heart attacks, drowning. 

    Where is Ringo? Where is George? Ringo made a record recently, but wouldn't release it. George keeps traveling.

 Q: You travel a lot like George, don't you?

A:  I don't, actually; everybody thinks I do, because you see pictures of me going through airports.

 Q: That's right, being arrested for drugs.

 A:  I do seem to get arrested a lot, but I'm really intending to be a very law-abiding citizen.

 Q:  Why carry it about? Why not leave it behind?

 A: Good question. But I'm over 40, and I feel silly not being allowed something I've checked out rather fully. Compared to alcohol, Valium, uppers, downers, whichever way you go, marijuana is a relatively harmless release. It's a plant that grows for a start. 

Q: So is Deadly Nightshade

 A: Yeah, so is tobacco. I think marijuana is less harmful than tobacco, but I'm not actually going to advocate it. I now say to any kids reading this that I advise you to do nothing, just drink water. Get by. Say hi, drink water. 

Q: You get on with Yoko?

 A:  Medium. I introduced her to John. She originally came around to me for some charity thing, and I said, 'Well, you know, love, I got this friend called John.' I don't know why I palmed her off on him. Perhaps it was because I thought he would be more interested than I was in whatever she was talking about. Yoko's okay, really; she's very misunderstood. She's not a pin-downable person. I really can't call her irrational, because then she'd go and do something rational. Now she's suffering like all other widows, probably more.

 Q: What about the Beatle days? Were you prepared for sudden success? Did you have a doctor on tour giving you injections? 

A:   No, no, but we heard about those doctors. It tends to be high-ranking politicians and socialites who use them. By the time we became famous, we'd put in a few years of hard, slogging work, 365 days a week. Beatlemania was just a much bigger version of what had gone on before, and we had an inbuilt savvy that came from being Liverpool boys.

 Q: What was the worst time in the Beatles? 

A:  (with no hesitation) Toward the end when it started to fall apart and you didn't know what the hell was to happen next.

Q:  Do you suffer from depression? Things like that?

 A:  I hardly know anyone who doesn't, but I can get out of it, which is perhaps what depression isn't, but I do get it.  I had a terrible nervous period after the Beatles. I lost one of the world's good jobs, and I couldn't see what I was going to pick up. The business stuff took a toll. We really were playing Monopoly with real money.

 Q: You were in there very fast with the solo album.

 A: The stories that came off the split up did make me look ruthless, ambitious, not wasting time, but in actual fact, all the others were every bit as ambitious and ruthless and stuff.

 Q: Are you saying you're more talented?

 A: ( His hands open horizontally, the outspread thumb and little fingertip are backwards and forward a couple of times) One or two things I did right. A lot of it was luck. Some of it is just that I'm more careful than the others.

( In fact, McCartney, one of his weakest albums, came out three months before Let It Be, the last Beatles album. Although Paul was the first to go solo, he was also, paradoxically, the one who did the most after Brian Epstein's death to hold the group together. He needed the company. He needed the stage. He is the opposite of a loner. In addition to being "more careful" than the others, he has some tunes as well. Mr. Tuneful. Many good songs, that's for sure. Still, not so many lately; however, he still has the knack and the money to give the big production lift to what may be a very characterless chord sequence, so that you are distracted from the fact that the melody has somehow been around for 300 years. The thing becomes a hit in 50 countries again. When it comes to the lowest common denominator, given the highest possible treatment, the pure cellophane pop that can crush all barriers of race, age and class, Paul McCartney is a master.)

 Q: What was John Lennon's special quality?

 A:  Balls. Mind you, and put in one word, balls as a hell of a quote, but it's incomplete. There were balls, but there was smart. The real truth is that it was balls,  but smart.

 Q: The media don't seem to have taken to your wife, Linda, very much. Why is that?

 A:  Yeah, I know what you mean. It was because I brought her into the act after the Beatles. I just had to go back to square one again —follow them? Impossible. So it was natural for me to suggest to Linda, who was my mate, that she do some backup harmonies. Then I sort of said, 'Do you want to plunk on the keyboard?' Also, we decided never to try and explain Linda 

Q: She's not quite there media-wise. Is she?

 A: We could have gone around doing all the talk shows and stuff and put her across, but I felt, sod it. I'm not going to get up there and say, 'Please, fans don't hate me because I married her. Awfully sorry. But she's quite nice, really, when you get to know her.'

 Q: How did you get involved with Michael Jackson? 

A:  He telephoned me on Christmas. I was having Christmas with the kids, unwrapping presents, generally being daddy, and the phone went. I thought it was a girl fan because it sounded like that. 'Who is it?' I said in my deep, fatherly voice, 'It's Michael Jackson.' He said in a high, soft voice, 'Come on. Who is it really?' 'Oh, you don't believe me? Hey, that's great. Ha, ha, ha.'

 Q: What good did the 60s do?

 A:  Not a lot. I say that a little bit sadly, mind you, I felt like I stepped through the minefield in the 60s.

 Q:  tread on any mines?

 A: Overdoing drugs, mostly.  Now I'm one of what many 60s people have become in the 80s, a businessman, realistic, clear thinking, pretty much.

 Q: What qualities do you most admire in a man?

 A: Oh God, some kind of moral courage, forthrightness, uprightness, I do like all that, I suppose. Honesty, then I know where I start.

 Q: And in a woman?

 A: The same honesty, yeah, real honesty, because it's a bit rare.

Still Laughing

 

November 15, 1985

Lennon-McCartney Rivalry Recalled (1985)

 

Lennon-McCartney Rivalry Recalled

By Robet Palmer 

N.Y. Times News Service

November 24. 1985

    The media attention recently given to a four-year-old interview in which Paul McCartney calls John Lennon his Beatles songwriting partner, "insecure, jealous, and a maneuvering swine," is curious indeed. The rivalry that existed between the two has been explored exhaustively for years in books and articles on the Fab Four.

     My own brief encounters with the two former Beatles may shed a glimmer of light on their differences and on a fragile but long-lasting mutual affection.

     I have interviewed McCartney twice. In one of our talks, he attributed differences between the two to their upbringing. Lennon, he said, had had an unstable home life and consequently, an insecure childhood, which left him with a chip on the shoulder. McCartney's family was extended and perhaps unusually sociable. When mom or dad weren't around to bounce the children on their knees, there were always grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives to fill in. But the atmosphere around McCartney during the interview: tight security,  and a strict time allotment, showed little of this warmth.

     I first met John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they invited me to one of their recording sessions. When I arrived in the control room, Lennon was in the studio adding vocal harmonies to "(Just Like) Starting Over."  When he sidled in to join us, he said to me, "I figured you were the guy from The New York Times, it made me really nervous." The remark resolved my own nervousness.

     After the session, we went to the Dakota, where we sat around the kitchen table most of the night, talking music and indulging ourselves with brownies, milk, and a cheesecake that must have been sent from heaven. 

    There were more visits to the in the two months before Lennon was murdered, and the talk was always fast, intense, and mercurial. Lennon told Beatles stories from the early days, but had little to say on the subject of Paul McCartney. Basically, he said their temperaments were very different, and while the clash added juice to their early songwriting collaborations, it was inevitable that they would drift apart. He did not pretend that he cared for McCartney's post-Beatles music, but he didn't go out of his way to exonerate it either.

     One man, Paul McCartney, living in self-imposed isolation and perhaps providing for his children the close family life he had enjoyed as a child. The other, John Lennon, verbally brilliant, cosmic one moment and deftly cutting the next a rocker until the day he died. No matter how much distance developed between them, they never showed signs of intense hatred, only a kind of puzzled acceptance of the way things had turned out for them, and a low guttering, but never wholly extinguished flame, is something very much like love.

Jet setting to Australia

 October 28, 1985

Carl Perkins and Friends

 October 21, 1985

The Masked Ball

 October 11, 1985

Ringo, Barbara and Pattie Boyd attend a masked ball -- looks like a really fun time.  

A Day at the Races

October 6, 1985
 

Live Aid

July 13, 1985
 

Arriving at Heathrow

 July 11, 1985

Mock Turtle Ringo

 

World Turtle Day just ended, so I thought I should post these photos from May 1985 of Ringo playing the part of the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland.   

Clean Shaven Ringo

 April 25, 1985 

Mary in NYC

 

April 14, 1985

Clean Shaven Ringo

 

March 27, 1985

Ringo was soon to begin filming his part as the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland and because of the extensive make up he had to wear for the part, he had to shave all of his facial hair.  He looks like a completely different person!