#akom

LOVE TO TURN YOU ON: John & Paul in the Summer of Love Ep 1 Tara, Robert and Eleanor Rigby

I'm not saying this. Let me go back. I was listening to "Producing the Beatles" the other day, which is a really terrific podcast if you are interested in music production. I finally got to the "Now and Then" episode. The host, Jason Kruppa, had Beatle author Ken Womack and "Ranking the Beatles" podcast host Jonathan Pretus as guests to discuss it. They were talking about the origin of the song, and one of them (maybe Womack) said that the bridge ("I don't want to lose you, abuse you, or confuse you") which was left out of the released version of it, proves that the song couldn't have been for Paul, since it was obviously about a romantic relationship.

<sigh> I'm not someone who believes that John and Paul were having a physical relationship, or necessarily even a romantic one in the dating sense, since we have no proof of that. (Don't @ me, I am open to the possibility for sure, but I'm someone who deals in actual evidence, not wishful thinking, and there's little there.) HOWEVER I definitely know, and there's plenty of evidence for it, that they loved each other and had a very intense relationship which never let up, even until John's death, and Paul felt the same way, and still does. It's totally possible, and very likely, that John would direct/express the feelings he wrote about in the bridge to Paul, given the state of their relationship at the time, and the lyrics of the entire song only make sense if it's about Paul. Why else would he write a song which has lyrics about missing someone? It couldn't be about Yoko, because they were back together and had Sean. The only other person it could possibly be about would be May Pang, but as much as I like her and think John probably would have been better off staying with her, I don't think she's the person he's talking to in the song. It's too intense. Also, it explains Paul's 30-year relentless goal to clean up and release the song, if John is singing it to him.

It's sad that some Beatle people can't handle the possibility that these two guys had that close of a relationship (you might even call it obsessive), and especially that John Lennon, the coolest guy in the universe, would have those feelings for Paul McCartney. Beatle dudes, it's OK for men to feel that intensely about each other. Really!

Aside from that, they were all very complimentary about the song, and about Paul's work on it. They praised his producing skills, and especially his slide guitar work on it. Don't let that one small part deter you from listening to it, if production minutia is your thing.

@anotherkindofmindpod I listened to this podcast not long after listening to Ep. 1 of the new series, so it was timely!

I've thought a bit about writing something on how @wingsoverlagos and I killed Mark Lewisohn... because we did, but this is tumblr so of course I'll just randomly post something from my phone.

It was hell, but we did bury him. The hate I got in the month after my last two posts was unbelievable. I shut everything out.

But of course I was getting Mark Lewisohn Google alerts. I was investigating him, so of course I did. Every week. And they all looked the same. Six or so big papers quoting him for whatever Beatles' crap they had going on that week, then some combo of appearances and old book stuff would shuffle towards the top.

But after the posts on his accuracy that all changed.

Now the Google alerts are the alerts of a dead man. Whatever the lag time within the fandom, his credibility was wiped out almost instantaneously on the broader scale. No one is seeking quotes from him any more. Every week it's just a regurgitation of his books. Get a free PDF here. An old message board post. If you Google “Mark Lewisohn+accuracy” or anything like it you'll get us. Me and Sharon.

It's kind of sad. When I was trying to finish my last two pieces my biggest issue was that I felt like I would be killing him. Destroying him. His whole life and image was completely wrapped up in the Beatles, and destroying a human was difficult. I had to keep myself angry at him because otherwise I would begin to think about what it meant for us to succeed. I didn't want him to be able to continue his mythology-as-biography, but also it was scary to think about what the truth would do to him.

I thought—we both thought—that the biggest problem would be getting people to see what we had uncovered, but in the end Phoebe @anotherkindofmindpod saw it before I'd even recovered from writing it and within 24 hours it had blown up and I was getting hate mail. There was no time to process anything. We went from a tumblr oddity to a nuclear bomb overnight.

And for a few months we both felt like it had all been for nothing. Like everyone hated us but to no purpose. The feedback we saw was all negative, and from the most vehement Lennon/Lewisohn freaks imaginable. It colored everything. And it was a while before I even managed to look at the Google alerts again.

But once I did it started to sink in.

Sharon, I think we won. I think we actually did it.

It's too bad that “winning” meant hurting a human. I wish it didn't. But this last month I've gone back and read my last two big posts and I realize that we were right. We were righteous. It had to be done, whatever the costs. I wish it had been less painful, but it's not our fault that he misrepresented things. We just told the truth. That's all.

That can't be a sin.

I've missed my tumblr peeps, though. Sincerely. 💜

Gladly, Anon.

Rob Sheffield (Dreaming the Beatles) said he thinks Girl is about Paul in this episode of @anotherkindofmindpod. The episode is actually an in-depth discussion of In My Life, but Girl came up a number of times, since it's also on Rubber Soul.

I thought Sheffield's statement was interesting, and not in a silly “John saw Paul as a girl” kind of way.

Summarizing mercilessly, and taking a few steps back before returning to Girl:

RS argues that Rubber Soul marks a moment when the Beatles’ songwriting moved from a commercial/craft perspective towards a more open/confessional/personal tone, In My Life being an example of this, with John examining his feelings for all his friends and lovers, and singling out a new kind of love that transcends the loves he’s known before. According to RS and the hosts, In My Life is not only addressed to Paul (I personally feel it could also be about Julian, or about both; as someone who writes, I really feel the “a piece of art is never about just one thing” argument)— it also, by summoning a group of dear people and openly expressing his feelings for them, emulates Paul, who, in John’s eyes, is the more extrovert and socially comfortable of the two. The song is a two-fold tribute.

Girl, still according to RS, forms a matched pair with In My Life, because it, too, concerns complex and intimate emotions; in this case being unsettled by a complex, alluring and confusing person (Paul/the girl). It's a non-generic, specific, highly personal song you wouldn't have found on earlier albums. (You Won’t See Me is Paul’s reply to John.)

Whether you agree with these interpretations or not (by the way, instead of trusting my summary, it’s probably a better idea to listen to RS and the hosts in their own words), I’m happy to see the acknowledgment of the depth of John and Paul's relationship.

RS also makes a beautiful point about If I Fell (which, as we know, John saw as a continuation of In My Life): That John and Paul, as always, tell the truth about each other by the way they sing together.

(Cue the If I Fell/marriage vows quote from Gould’s Beatles bio).

Ian Leslie (no introduction needed) was more direct in his “Hidden Gems” episode on @onesweetdreampodcast. He stated he believes that If I Fell was written for Paul, commemorating their Paris ‘honeymoon’.

And look—people are free to go as far as they want in how they interpret all this, but I personally feel it liberates and elevates the discussion of their songwriting and relationships to include the romantic love or friendship or X or [redacted] or 'tender and tempestuous' but ‘not sexual as far as we know’ relationship between John and Paul as one of its many possible inspirations.

It just feels silly to me to ignore it or act all offended at the mere suggestion.

And when RS writes in Dreaming the Beatles “For John, Paul was the boy who came to stay; for Paul, John was the song he couldn’t make better,” it just feels right.

My two cents.

I'm really grateful for the whole thing. Grateful the way I was when I watched Understanding Lennon McCartney the first time, like being given a genuine gift of fandom making sense of itself. I don't know. It's just lovely to have. And it's done so well.

When, in the first ep, they casually mentioned that there were going to be ELEVEN episodes I knew it was going to be amazing. Proper genuine "we have a lot to say and we're going to say it all so you don't think we didn't think it through" you know? I love that they didn't start making eleven episodes and then decide that was too many and cut 40% of it out, it's more like they wanted to make twenty episodes and then cut out about 40% of that. Making eleven episodes and then being like 'we didn't even have time to talk about anything that we LIKED about this book' is a real move. A perfect shiny move.

The fact they made a spreadsheet sends me into fits. I love it.

Cards on the table I have not read Tune In properly, I have skimmed and picked at it, and obviously I've seen loads of it quoted on tumblr, but EVERY quote you read from it (and everything he says in interviews) makes it so fucking OBVIOUS that he doesn't understand basic things, I've never been able to face it full on. And the frustration that people (men) can't see how bad it is. So having it put out there like this, bit by bit, oh the joy of it.

And then it's also so much worse than I knew, because I'd never really worked out that he was just MAKING UP QUOTES and mushing them together to say new things, and oh my god the stuff that's NOT in there, is insane. The bit in episode 3 where AKOM quickly list off about five or six really interesting things about Paul's art in his schooldays and then you find out that Tune In didn't even MENTION that he liked to paintklsjdofihoijsodijfohwoisjdf OH MY GOD.

I'm blown away by the work of it, and the scale of it, and how well put together it was. I love the *feel* of it. I love its tone when they let the sarcasm ride high. The voices of "sincere surprise" are just my favourite thing. "Oh, so he mentions that Paul did x and y right?" "Actually, weirdly he doesn't!" "Oh, HOW STRANGE. But does he say he was interested in z???" "Oddly no." I love the sense of giddy anticipation in the intro ep, it must have been killing them to have made so much of it and not be able to talk about it.

I'm so fully aware that all of what they're saying will move into other podcasts, and become things that men sort of talk about as if obviously everyone kind of sees the bias in Tune In, even though they've always talked about it as if it's a great work of truth until now. It kills me softly. And they'll claim it's only POSSIBLE to see that now, ten years later when it's spelled out to them, as if it's aged badly or something, when actually female fandom has been fucked off with Tune In for fucking years. But that's FINE. WHATEVER.