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Good morning, Beatle People 🌞

We have a special treat for you all! Instead of our usual articles, for the next two weeks we will share our thoughts on Paul's new album The Boys of Dungeon Lane. This week, we discuss Side A. What do winding journeys along the road, operas, phallic fungi, and the passage of time all have in common? Find out in our review!

Here! (Also got another ask about this too btw😭). Yeah so. To quote Brian "I'm real hot for sex." After only 8 days without. I believe I got this out of Debbie Geller's book but found this in January so idk for sure.

Today we celebrate the 86th birthday of the one and only Richard Starkey aka Ringo Starr aka our favourite blue-eyed boy ♡♡♡

Peace and love to all the Beatle people!

The central thesis of each song according to me:

As You Lie There I was an obsessive young man, and I'm an obsessive old man. If I fall for you I want you to obsess about me too.

Lost Horizon We live in time we lose people and things that meant a lot to us. Knowing that ought to shape what we do.

Days We Left Behind I'm feeling a lot better about a lot of things, but it's been a hard road getting here.

Ripples in a Pond I can't quite give full vent in public (possibly also in private) to my insecurities but I'm really glad you're here Nancy.

Mountain Top It can be really nice and fun to do mind altering drugs together.

Down South What I had with George before I met John was real and important. I love you George.

We Two I miss you John. Down South has me all in my feelings about poetry.

Come Inside I've already said I'm not going to say the secrets out loud, and that you should listen to my music. Listen!

Never Know I miss you John. I miss being your number one. And despite my previous protestations on this album I'm still never completely certain what I meant to you.

Home to Us When I speak positively about Liverpool, it doesn't mean it wasn't hard. And when Ringo speaks negatively about Liverpool, it doesn't mean it wasn't his home.

Life Can Be Hard Life can be hard. But I don't like to think about that. And honestly that approach has served me pretty well.

First Star of the Night Linda's spirit watches over our family and gives me a lot of comfort. I'm sad she's gone.

Salesman Saint The past weaves into the future. I forgive my Dad for some things I don't want to think about, but I can't think of anything I need to forgive my Mum for.

From beatlesliverpoollocations.blogspot.com:

The unnamed family mentioned in Mark Lewisohn’s notes are the Hodgsons. In 1956 Charles (senior) and his wife Annie were living at 111 Stamfordham Drive, Allerton with their two sons, Reginald, 26 and Charles, 14. Peter Hodgson, Reginald's son, has told me how his Uncle Charlie got to know the 14 years old Paul McCartney when he was working as a paper boy. Peter Hodgson: In or around 2010 I told Mark [Lewisohn] that (Paul had worked at) the shops at the Cenotaph, right by my Dad’s [...]  We now know that sometime in the past, Paul has revealed the actual first meeting between himself and John and where that meeting took place. I think someone close to Paul has let the cat out of the bag to Mark and (Lewisohn) has wanted to know the name and location of Abbas in 1956. At this time and in the subsequent years, the locals will still have referred to the shop as Abbas when mentioning it, hence it was still known as Abbas by my Dad and brother...many decades later. This is where the confusion started as to the shop’s location as Mark was relying on documentation only, whereas I was relying on first hand witnesses who actually lived literally yards away. I got it straight from Macca, face to face, he agreed and nodded when I mentioned Abbas so when I told Mark many years later he went searching and could only find an Abba in Aigburth. What’s interesting is that at some point Mark actually asked Paul the name of the newsagent’s he delivered for in Allerton. Paul refused to answer him. An unusual refusal for such a seemingly trivial question. [Peter was pleased with what my own research had uncovered, for personal family reasons as much as for the benefit of Beatle’s history. (He said to me): You finding W.W. Abba at 85 Woolton Road vindicated me to Mark, as it’s impossible for me, my Dad or Uncle Charlie to have been making it up].

When a bond outgrows the terms that are available to it, descriptions of the bond must stretch, too. ‘Friend’ or ‘collaborator’ or ‘partner’ or ‘family’ may still be true as far as they go, but what happens when they don’t go far enough? What happens when the available classifications fail to capture the scale or the actual structure of what is experienced? Whatever else the Lennon-McCartney bond may be, it seems to arise from a kind of mutual legibility that the ordinary world can’t quite measure or describe. As I see it, the challenge isn’t necessarily figuring out what they are to one another, but confronting a relationship that exceeds the usual terms for closeness. And perhaps this is where language begins to stretch beyond social classification entirely. In Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, Sean Ono Lennon describes John and Paul as “quantum entangled.” This is a pretty big claim to consider, so let’s step back for a sec. Loosely speaking (I am not a physicist!), quantum entanglement describes two particles whose states remain correlated even when separated. What feels significant here is the scale and the substance of the language we reach for when ordinary categories fall short. And, more curious still, the metaphor Sean uses in retrospect points toward a phenomenon that the love songs of Lennon-McCartney had long been articulating: a form of attachment that bends time and space around itself.

On this day in 1957, these two crazy kids met at the Woolton Village Fête in Liverpool, and history was made!

“I was very impressed by Paul playing Twenty Flight Rock. He could obviously play the guitar. I half thought to myself – he’s as good as me. I’d been kingpin up to then. Now, I thought if I take him on, what will happen? It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line, if I let him join. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.” 

“My memory of meeting John for the first time is very clear. … I can still see John now - checked shirt, slightly curly hair, singing ‘Come Go With Me’ by the Del Vikings. He didn’t know all the words, so he was putting stuff in about penitentiaries - and doing a good job of it.I remember thinking, ‘He looks good - I wouldn’t mind being in a group with him.’ … Then, as you all know, he asked me to join the group, and so we began our trip together. We wrote our first songs together, we grew up together and we lived our lives together. And when we’d do it together, something special would happen. There’d be that little magic spark. I still remember his beery old breath when I first met him here [Woolton church fete] that day. But I soon came to love that beery old breath. And I loved John. I always was and still am a great fan of John’s.” 

To mark this “fated” day, why not revisit the article "Quantum Entangled: Space, time and the love songs of Lennon-McCartney" on Won't You Come Out To Play:

messages from Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono on the 40th anniversary in 1997 of the Woolton church fête where John and Paul first met

John, Paul & Me Before the Beatles: The True Story of the Very Early Days, Len Garry (2014)

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