Latest Posts by beatlesinfoarchive - Page 3
what if I just jump off a bridge
A style selection, 1956-1969.
A continuation of sorts from this post.
“[George’s] idea, which he ordered [in Liverpool in the 1950s], was a four-button jacket with cloth-covered buttons. Two breast pockets which were slitted (jetted) and in the shape of a bird in flight, the two side pockets corresponded. The cuffs had to be folded back with a cloth-covered button. His trousers had no pleats in the front, not normal in those days, and he was by far the very first person to have two slits at the bottom side seam of the trouser and he wanted them folded back with cloth covered buttons to match the cuffs on his jacket. The workshop queried the order when they received thinking we had gone bonkers. George got his suit and was pleased with the outcome. Later lots of guys were walking about town with cut back cuffs and side seams on their trousers, but George was the first.” - Rollo Torpey, The Beatles and Me (2015)
“At Iris’s 14th birthday party, I remember George turned up in a brand-new, Italian-style stuff with covered buttons. He looked very grown-up.” - Violet Caldwell (mother of Iris, and Alan, a.k.a. Rory Storm), The Beatles Monthly September 1965
“[George’s mother Louise] took an unusually benign view of George’s luminous pink shirts, yellow waistcoat, and drainpipe trousers.” - Pete Shotton, The Beatles, Lennon, And Me (1984)
“Going in for flash clothes, or at least trying to be a bit different, as I hadn’t any money, was part of the rebelling. I never cared for authority. They can’t teach you experience; you’ve got to go through it, by trial and error.” - George Harrison, The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (1968)
“At the Institute, George was known from the beginning as a way-out dresser. Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother, was a year below him. He remembers George always having long hair — years before anybody else did. […] ‘George used to go to school with his school cap sitting high on top of his hair,‘ says Mrs. Harrison. ‘And very tight trousers. Unknown to me, he’d run them up on my machine to make them even tighter. I bought him a brand-new pair once and the first thing he did was tighten them. When his dad found out, he told him to unpick them at once. “I can’t, Dad,” he said. “I’ve cut the pieces off.”’” - The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (1968)
“I’d started to develop my own version of the school uniform. I had some cast-offs from my brother. One was a dog-toothed check-patterned sports coat, which I’d dyed black to use as my school blazer. The color hadn’t quite taken, so it still had a slight check design to it. I had a shirt I’d bought in Lime Street, that I thought was so cool. It was white with pleats down the front. and it had embroidery along the corners of the pleats. I had a waistcoat that John had given me, which he’d got from his ‘uncle’ Dykins (his mother’s boyfriend), Mr. Twitchy Dykins. It was like an evening-suit waistcoat — black, double-breasted, with lapels. The trousers John also gave me, soon after we first met — powder-blue drainpipes with turn-ups. I dyed them black as well. And I had black suede shoes from my brother. […] That outfit of mine was very risky, and it felt like all day, every day, for the last couple of years I was going to get busted. In those days we used Vaseline on our hair to get the rock n’ roll greased-back hairstyle. Also, you were supposed to wear a cap and a tie, and a badge on your blazer. I didn’t have my badge stitched on, I had it loose. It was held in place by a pen clipped over it in my top pocket, so I could remove it easily, and the tie.” - George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology (2000)
“He was always a pretty snappy dresser, and he did always like that waistcoat look. And he used to wear a V-neck Fair Isle jumper. Sometimes he’d be a little too outrageous, like purple trousers with bright green, but it was fine. Everything seemed to be fine then.” - Pattie Boyd, interview for the British Beatles Fan Club
“The boys are wearing all sorts of fantastic clothes for their film and introduce a very new, unusual gimmick. If they’re wearing corduroy, for example, then they have corduroy boots to match. If they’re seen in velveteen suits, then they’re coupled with velveteen boots. George first thought of the idea two years ago, but when he put the idea to a local bootmaker, he told him it couldn’t be done. Well, that’s one cobbler that’s been proved wrong.” - The Beatles Monthly, June 1965 (x)
“With his long hair, pointy shoes, pink shirt and yellow waistcoat, George made a habit of tagging along with John and Cynthia wherever they went.”
"It was on such days as these that John and I would leave the college portals hand in hand for an afternoon at the cinema or a bus ride to see Aunt Mimi in Woolton, just happy being in each other's company for a while. It wouldn't be for long, though. Wandering along lost to the world we would be brought down to earth with a bump by a piercing whistle or yell from behind us that could only mean one thing-
George.
-
'Hi John, Hi Cyn.' He would hurriedly catch up to us and then it would be, 'Where are you two off to? Can I come?' Neither of us would have the heart to tell this thin gangly kid in school uniform to push off. Poor George! He hadn't really got to the stage of serious girlfriends yet and was totally unaware of what it was all about, Alfie! So we would spend the lost afternoon as a jolly threesome, wondering what on earth we were going to do with ourselves."
- A Twist of Lennon by Cynthia Lennon (via thateventuality)
George Harrison and the love he left behind<3
“So he gave me a tree as a present. It's a big fir tree, and it's by my gate. As I was leaving my house this morning [December 11], I get out of the car, close the gate and look up at the tree and say, 'Hi, George. ‘“—Business Insider
“John used to go on and on about George. About what a nice boy he was and how I’d like him. He went to great lengths to impress me with George. ‘Give you anything, George’, he’d say.” -John’s Aunt Mimi
“I was going to Boston because my daughter had a brain tumor, and I said, ‘I’ve got to go to Boston.’ And he said, ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Those were the last words I heard him say.” —Living in the Material World
“There were moments when it felt like we were the only two people in the world. The love we had was real and beautiful.” —Wonderful Tonight
“George and I shared a connection that went beyond words. It was a quiet understanding, a deep love that didn’t need to be spoken.”
— “Concert for George”
“It’s impossible to not feel his presence every day. The things he taught me, the way he lived, it’s all still here. I carry that love with me wherever I go.”
— People Magazine
“Like a film flashing by, everything comes to my mind since I met him more than 30 years ago. His childlike quality, his shy but naughty little smile, his passion for all the music he loved and the serious quest for religion“—George Harrison: Behind the locked door
“George was a good friend of mine, a true friend. He had a lot of love in him, and it was always a joy to be around him. I miss him deeply.”
— Rolling Stone (2001)
Thank you for leaving so much love behind George. Your a bright light that we all miss immensely. Rest in peace now George, we love you!❤️
Nowhere man: The final days of John Lennon. Robert Rosen
Prisoner of Love: Inside the Dakota with John Lennon. Peter Doggett | Release cancelled in 2021
Lennon in America. Geoffrey Giuliano
John Lennon and Yoko Ono: his affairs, binges and diet pills
For years the radio host Elliot Mintz was the only person the former Beatle and his wife trusted. Now, he has written a book about his intense relationship with the couple — including what really happened during Lennon’s infamous ‘Lost Weekend’
John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Elliot Mintz outside the Mampei Hotel in Karuizawa, Japan, 1977. Right: Lennon and Ono in 1980
I am holding a pair of glasses. They are antique, made of steel wire and perfectly round. The trademarked name is the Panto 45. This is the 26th pair of John’s glasses I’ve examined on this snowy night in February 1981. It’s been about two months since he was gunned down in New York outside the Dakota, the gothic edifice where he and Yoko Ono had been living since 1973.
I’ve been tasked with the responsibility of inventorying his personal effects so that Yoko, and posterity, would know precisely what he had left behind. I did not want this task. For one thing, I live 2,500 miles from the Dakota, in Los Angeles, where I host a late-night radio interview show. But Yoko asked me to do it, and I have rarely been able to say no to Yoko, let alone John.
I found their idealism infectious and inspiring. Still, as I got to know John and Yoko as flesh-and-blood friends, I began to see their flawed human sides as well.
The trio at a restaurant in Kyoto, 1977
Yoko, for one, was even more airy and ethereal in private than she was in the media. She could be a fountain of aphorisms, dispensing endless nuggets of Zen-like philosophy. Her haiku-esque homilies on manifesting one’s desires or the wisdom of the nonrational mind could be a bit much for some people.
There were moments when even I was a bit baffled by it all. Except then she would say or do something that would absolutely convince me that she was connected to some higher plane.
John, meanwhile, was every bit as charming, funny and intelligent as he came across in public. But I gradually discovered he was far from perfect. For starters, for a guy who aspired to be a world-shaking peacemaker — a thought leader on a par with Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela — he was surprisingly uninformed about historic figures like, well, Gandhi, King and Mandela.
He also had some Luddite-like notions about science, particularly medicine, extending well beyond his annoyance at “daddy doctors” for not letting him perform his own weight-loss injections. Even though John had smoked, ingested or snorted just about every illegal recreational drug he could get his hands on, he was weirdly suspicious of the ones that were properly prescribed and proven efficacious.
Lennon and Ono on The Dick Cavett Show, 1971
John and Yoko could be incredibly sensitive, honest, provocative, caring, creative, generous and wise. They could also be self-centred, desperate, vain, petty and annoying. In John’s case, also shockingly cruel — even to Yoko.
An example…
Early one morning in November 1972, the red ceiling light that would flash whenever my hotline to John and Yoko rang started blinking. I picked up.
“Ellie, I f***ed up,” were the first words out of John’s mouth.
“Why?” I groggily asked. “What did you do?”
“We were at this party last night,” he said, “and I got loaded. And there was a girl…”
I sat up in bed.
The party was at Jerry Rubin’s Greenwich Village apartment. A small crowd of well-connected peaceniks had gathered to watch the presidential election returns on television. As it became clear that Richard Nixon would win re-election by a landslide, the mood grew bleaker and the crowd began drinking more heavily.
Alcohol was not John’s friend and on this occasion, John’s evil inner gremlins truly outdid themselves.
I got some of the specifics from a hungover John during his morning-after call. The upshot was that John had indeed hit it off with some girl at the party and had slipped into a bedroom with her, where they proceeded to have such loud, raucous sex that everyone sitting around the TV in Rubin’s living room — including Yoko — could clearly hear them going at it.
Lennon and Mintz in 1972
At one point, a well-meaning guest put a record on the turntable — Bob Dylan’s 11-minute ballad Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands — at high volume. Yoko sat on the sofa in stunned, mortified silence.
Whatever they said to each other later, I suspect the conversation was not a pleasant one.
“I slept on the sofa,” John told me, sounding defeated and embarrassed — although, frankly, not quite as contrite as I thought his situation warranted. “Things like that happen,” he said, way too matter-of-factly for my taste. “A bloke cheats on his wife… If I weren’t famous, nobody would care.”
Yoko, unsurprisingly, felt differently.
“Are you OK?” I gently asked her when I phoned to check in on her a few hours later.
“There is no answer to that question,” she said shakily.
“Do you think you’ll ever be able to forgive him?”
“I can forgive him,” she said. “But I don’t know if I can ever forget what happened. I don’t know if it will ever be the same.”
After a few weeks of cooling down, though — during which Yoko wrote and recorded Death of Samantha, her bluesy ode to burying one’s pain for the sake of outward appearances — the crisis seemed to abate. John and Yoko chose to roll the cosmic dice with a spectacular gesture of faith and hope in the staying power of their love. They bought an apartment in the Dakota.
“It’s apartment No 72,” Yoko announced when she called to tell me about the purchase. “Do you see the significance?”
Lennon’s 38th birthday party, 1978
When you add seven and two, you get nine, Yoko explained, which was a hugely significant numeral to the Lennons, a magic integer that seemed to mysteriously recur throughout John’s life. Yoko would rattle off the number’s many repeated appearances: John was born on October 9. She was born on February 18 (1 plus 8). Paul McCartney’s last name has nine letters…
I was somewhat mystified as to why they chose this particular neighbourhood. “Aren’t you worried it’ll be too stuffy for you?” I asked John. “Will the people who live there even know who you are?”
“I don’t want them to know who we are,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t want to know who they are. We just want to be left alone.”
The Dakota struck me as one of the most eerily beautiful — and oddly daunting — structures in all of New York. John and Yoko greeted me in the vaulted vestibule, eager to begin our tour, which started on the ground floor with the new headquarters for Studio One, the business entity behind John and Yoko’s creative enterprises. Tellingly, John did not have an office in Studio One; Yoko did.
The main attraction was on the seventh floor. It was nearly 5,000sq ft, with massive windows offering eye-popping views of Central Park. Virtually everything in its expansive living room, from the plush carpeting to the grand Steinway piano, was as white as Japanese snowbells.
Lennon, Ono and Mintz at a Shinto temple in Kyoto. The custom was to hang your horoscope on a line
There was only one highly conspicuous work of art in the White Room: a Plexiglass case on a white pedestal, in which was a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus. John and Yoko had scored the very last mummy allowed out of Egypt before the Egyptian government put a ban on exporting their national antiquities.
“You should x-ray it and see what’s inside,” I suggested. “There might be something of great value, like precious jewels.”
“I don’t care what’s inside,” Yoko responded. “The great value is the magic of the mummy itself.”
Another thing I clearly remember about that long afternoon at the Dakota was how enthusiastic both John and Yoko seemed about the life they were building together in this new nest. John giddily described the “entertainment centre” he wanted to construct in a nook off the kitchen. Yoko, ever the artist, chattered about the endless design ideas she had. It was all too easy to forget about the pain and stress they’d been dealing with. I managed to convince myself that the worst was over for John and Yoko. I was wrong.
There are those who believe Yoko not only approved of the affair but arranged it. That she planted May Pang in the seat next to John on that American Airlines flight from New York to Los Angeles knowing full well what was likely to happen. That their comely 23-year-old assistant would sooner or later end up sleeping with her husband.
It’s possible, I suppose. It could be she saw some strategic long-term advantage in setting up the affair; by handpicking John’s mistress, she might have felt she could exert some dominion over his extramarital wanderings. Perhaps, thanks to her mystical advisers, she really did see that John was heading for a free fall and was endeavouring to soften his inevitable crash.
If any of that is true, though, Yoko never breathed a word of it to me. All she said in October 1973 was that she was sending John and an assistant to LA. Could I please meet them at the airport?
With his assistant and lover, May Pang, 1974
I was by then aware that their marriage was in deep trouble. Despite their best efforts to mend the relationship, the red light on my bedroom ceiling had been blinking even more feverishly than usual leading up to what would later be known as John’s “Lost Weekend”, the 18 months he spent in exile from his wife in New York.
Yoko’s demeanour back then, as always, was not demonstrably emotional but it was clear from our phone conversations that she was in pain. John’s calls were every bit as depressing.
“Has Mother been talking to you about us?” he asked during one early morning chat.
“Yoko talks to me about everything,” I answered vaguely.
“The other day I shaved and got dressed up and told her I wanted to take her to her favourite restaurant and she turned me down,” he lamented. “She said she didn’t have time. Me own f***ing wife said that to me!”
Yoko has always been a methodical person, and my guess is that she precisely and carefully orchestrated John’s eviction from the Dakota. John might not have even realised what was happening to him. He certainly didn’t seem like a man who’d been kicked out of his home when I met him and May Pang at LA airport.
“You look trim, Ellie,” he said with a big grin when I greeted them. “Have you been taking those diet pills again?”
They had very little luggage, suggesting that neither of them was expecting a long stay. My instructions from Yoko were to drive them to music manager Lou Adler’s house in Bel Air, a mini-mansion up on Stone Canyon Road.
“I need some money,” John said as we settled into my weary old Jaguar. “Mother said these could be used for money,” John continued, shoving a fistful of traveller’s cheques in my hand.
The couple outside the Dakota building in New York, 1980. They bought an apartment there in 1973
John was functionally a child when it came to taking care of himself. But then, that was what May was for. Whatever other intentions Yoko may or may not have had for the assistant, her primary job was to make sure John was properly fed and cared for, that all his basic needs — or at least most of them — were satisfied.
John and I spent a lot of time together over the next several weeks. He was also expanding his friendship circle in LA, hanging out with people like Harry Nilsson, the brilliant but notoriously hell-raising singer-songwriter. But after three or four months, much of his initial enthusiasm had boiled off and his mood was starting to curdle. He was missing Yoko: he began asking me when I thought she’d be ready for him to come home. He started spending more and more time with Nilsson, drinking at the Troubadour till all hours. After John famously got thrown out for drunkenly heckling the Smothers Brothers, the late-night shenanigans moved to the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset. That’s where John and Harry and a collection of others — including my old pals Micky Dolenz and Alice Cooper — formed an infamous drinking club known as the Hollywood Vampires.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the level of unbridled indulgences that took place in the Rainbow’s VIP room, a small alcove atop some stairs overlooking the bar. The amount of alcohol imbibed was staggering, to say the least, and there were also small bags of cocaine discreetly passed into the room. Nilsson, a great big bear of a man, could pound down a dozen or so brandy alexanders — a potent mix of brandy and cream, his cocktail of choice, which John soon adopted as his own — in a single sitting.
Not being a celebrity, I was never invited to become a member of the Hollywood Vampires, but I was a welcome visitor and spent many a late night on the edges of their wild, sometimes harrowing saturnalias.
Lennon with his Hollywood Vampires drinking partners, from left, Harry Nilsson, Alice Cooper and Micky Dolenz, November 1973
There was always a crowd of attractive young women at the bottom of the steps leading to the Vampires’ VIP lair. Frankly, though, by the time the boys descended, usually at closing time, most of them were too wasted to take advantage of the opportunity. I lost count of the number of times I all but carried John down those stairs and poured him into whatever car service I had called to the bar’s car park.
For the most part, I kept my promise to Yoko: I kept John safe. But one night, I realised things were starting to spiral out of my control. Normally, John didn’t put up much of a fight when I helped him down the stairs at the Rainbow Bar but on this occasion, he resisted. He didn’t want to go home.
He pushed away and dived straight into the crowd. It was my worst nightmare: a drunken star lost inside a drunken mob.
Finally, I spotted John with Nilsson at the edge of the car park, the two of them climbing into the back of a black limousine. A moment later, it pulled away into the night, going I had no idea where.
John, I realised with a sinking feeling in my gut, was slipping away.
I was about to walk into the nadir of the Lost Weekend, John’s rock bottom. The call came not on the hotline but my regular house phone, and the voice on the other end identified himself as a security officer working for Phil Spector. John was in trouble: could I please hurry over to Adler’s house and help “calm him down”.
What I saw when I stepped into Adler’s living room some 20 minutes later looked like a scene out of The Exorcist. Drunk and wild-eyed, John was strapped to a high-backed chair, his arms and legs restrained with ropes, which he was struggling against with all his might as he shouted obscenities at his captors, a pair of beefy-armed bodyguards who stood in awkward silence nearby. The place was a shambles. John had torn some of Adler’s framed gold records off the walls and smashed them to pieces. Bits of broken wood and shattered Plexiglass littered the floor.
The couple in Selfridges in London where Ono was signing copies of her book Grapefruit, July 1971
Apparently, the meltdown had started earlier that evening at the studio, where John and Phil had nearly come to blows. What precisely they were arguing about, nobody seemed to remember. But the session ended early with Phil’s guards restraining John and shuttling him to Adler’s house, where John slipped away from them long enough to pick up some sort of walking stick or cane, which he swung wildly around the living room until the guards were able to subdue him.
I slowly stepped up to John, who had stopped shouting. His head hung low on his shoulders, his chest heaving furiously. After a long beat, he slowly lifted his eyes to me. He looked possessed.
“Get these ropes off me!” he erupted. “Get them off me, you…”
And then John spat out an epithet so hurtful and offensive, I can’t bring myself to repeat it.
I looked straight into his eyes, barely containing my disgust and disappointment. He looked back into mine. And that exchange of glances seemed to reach some shred of humanity buried deep in John’s alcohol-addled brain. Suddenly he became very, very quiet.
After a moment or two, I turned to the guards. “I think you can take those ropes off him,” I said. “I think he’s done.”
John stood up, rubbed his wrists and, without another word, slowly made his way down the hall to the bedroom, where he must have collapsed on the mattress and passed out.
The next day, as I was getting ready to leave for work, the hotline started flashing.
“Ellie?” John said. “I’m sorry for what I said. But if you think about it, if that’s the worst thing I could say about you, you couldn’t be all that bad, right?”
“Thanks for the compliment,” I said.
“Well, welcome to the real world, Mother Virgin Mary. I’m me. I have a big mouth and express meself the way I feel when I feel it. I don’t hide behind some microphone. I sing into it or speak into it when it suits me. I’m not always the Imagine guy or the Jealous Guy or the Walrus. So I said I’m sorry to you. That’s all I can do.
Lennon and Ono in 1972
“Do you want to have dinner?”
“No,” I answered. “I think I’m going to take the night off.”
For the first time I can remember, I was the one who hung up the phone.
Obviously, our friendship took a hit after the incident at Adler’s house; how could it not? For the next several months, John and I barely spent time together — at least, not in person. We would talk almost every day on the phone, as we always had, and eventually our rapport began to feel as easy and familiar as ever. But I no longer joined him for evenings at the Troubadour or the Rainbow.
John, meanwhile, had shifted from the mayhem of the Spector sessions to the slightly lesser bedlam of producing a record for his pal Harry Nilsson. The most notable thing about the Pussy Cats sessions was who else was in the room. Ringo Starr sat in on drums. And although it never made it onto Nilsson’s album, another ex-Beatle unexpectedly turned up and even sang with John, the first time the two of them had performed together since the Beatles split.
I wasn’t present but later heard that Paul McCartney and his wife, Linda, had popped in without warning, bringing Stevie Wonder with them. According to those who were there, John and Paul seemed to pick up their friendship as if they were teenagers again, but when John told me about it later, he was kind of dismissive about it, saying, “They were all just looking at us, thinking that something big was going to happen. To me, it was just playing with Paul.”
Lennon with Harry Nilsson, left, outside the Troubadour club in West Hollywood, having just been ejected for heckling a performance by the Smothers Brothers, March 12, 1974
What John didn’t know, though, was that, according to Yoko, Paul had an ulterior motive for the visit. A few days earlier, she had called me to explain the machinations behind the visit.
Yoko told me she spoke with Paul, who offered to speak with John. “I thought it was very kind,” she said. “I was very appreciative. But I made it very clear to Paul that it wasn’t something I was asking him to do. It would have to be Paul’s idea, not mine.”
To me, there was never any question that John desperately wanted to get back with Yoko. Yes, he had feelings for May, yet at some point during virtually every phone call I had with him, John would sooner or later beseech me to talk to Yoko on his behalf. “Tell Mother I’m ready to come home, Ellie. Tell her I’m a changed man.”
“I don’t think she wants to hear it from me,” I would say. “She wants you to show it to her.”
Paul, I later heard, gave John similar advice. Sometime after popping into the studio in Burbank, he sat down with John and laid out, step by step, what he would need to do to win Yoko back.
It’s impossible to say if Paul’s presentation was what did it, or if John experienced some other epiphany around that time, but over the ensuing months he did indeed begin to clean up his act. In the summer of 1974, he started working on his next album, Walls and Bridges, regularly flying to New York for rehearsals and recordings at the Record Plant on West 44th Street. By all accounts, those sessions were entirely professional, with John showing up 100 per cent sober every day.
At the Grammy Awards in New York, March 1, 1975
Then, as work on the album neared completion, John made a fateful decision: he decided not to wait any longer for Yoko’s invitation to return to New York. Instead, towards the end of the summer, he and May rented an apartment of their own on the Upper East Side. It was a small but comfortable place that had a wraparound balcony with spectacular views of the East River.
When I flew to New York to tape some interviews, I took the opportunity to pay them a visit — my first face-to-face meeting with John since the ugliness at Adler’s house. It was an awkward encounter for numerous reasons. For one thing, I had just spent an afternoon with Yoko at the Dakota, some 20 blocks away; taking a cab across town to John and May’s felt something akin to betrayal.
Perhaps sensing my apprehension, May gave me a wide berth, leaving to make some phone calls in a bedroom while John and I stood together on the balcony, catching up.
“Does this make you feel uneasy?” John asked after a beat.
“You mean being here with you and May? Yes, a little,” I admitted. “It just reminds me of the fact that you and Mother are still separated, and that makes me sad.”
“Well, that’s the way Mother wants it,” he said. “At least for now.”
Then, unexpectedly, he wrapped his arm over my shoulders and added, “Don’t look so glum, me boy. Put on your radio face. There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.”
It was one of the few times he’d quoted a line to me from a Beatles song.
Walls and Bridges was released a month or so later. John sent a prereleased signed copy (“To my little dream lover on ice, with love and old pianos,” he wrote, referring to my affection for Bobby Darin’s hit song).
As it happened, Elton John had joined John on keyboards for one song on the album. Elton made a bet with John. If the song was a hit, John would have to perform at Elton’s upcoming concert at Madison Square Garden. John agreed, never imagining he’d have to honour that promise.
Of course, Elton was spot on: Whatever Gets You Thru the Night did indeed become John’s first No 1 solo single. And so it came to pass that, in November 1974, onstage at Madison Square Garden, in front of thousands and thousands of fans, that the Lost Weekend finally began to fade to a finish.
Lennon’s surprise appearance at Elton John’s concert at Madison Square Garden, November 28, 1974
The details of what exactly transpired backstage that night remain, 50 years later, shrouded in some mystery. What is known is that Yoko, who’d been invited to the concert by Elton’s manager, was in the audience. She couldn’t have been prepared for the reaction around her when Elton announced, about two thirds into the concert, that he was bringing John onto the stage for his first public performance in two years. The crowd went berserk.
After the show, Elton’s manager approached Yoko and told her that Elton had requested her presence in his dressing room. Yoko was led backstage to a door with a star on it. She knocked, the entrance opened, and inside she saw her husband standing there, alone.
I cannot tell you what happened after the dressing room door closed behind them. Nobody but Yoko knows that, and she has never shared with me any details. What I can tell you is that in the weeks and months that followed, there must have been many more rendezvous as Yoko and John re-established their connection, even as he continued living with May in their East Side apartment.
According to one of May’s early accounts, John was ultimately hypnotised into ending his relationship with her; she has long claimed that Yoko hired a mesmerist to help John quit smoking but that it was all a ruse to brainwash him into splitting up with her so he could return to Yoko. To this day, many people believe that story. But I know for certain that it wasn’t true. Because, as it happens, I’m the one who arranged the hypnotist.
Yoko had nothing to do with it.
John had remembered that I had interviewed a hypnotist on my radio show and asked me if he might be able to help him kick nicotine.
At the Lincoln Center in New York, circa 1975
I called the hypnotist, planned for him to fly to New York, booked him a room in a Midtown hotel, and set up an appointment with John. In just about every respect, though, the hypnosis was a total bust. John told me immediately afterwards he was never put under; the hypnotist claimed John was but just couldn’t remember. The hypnotist also turned out to be something of a diva. He disliked his hotel — he thought the desk clerks were rude — and checked out the next day, flying back to LA in a huff.
John didn’t quit smoking, not for a minute, so it’s hard to imagine the hypnotist had succeeded in brainwashing him into anything else — like, say, leaving a lover. But the very next day, John did break it off with May and returned to the Dakota, resuming his marriage to Yoko and ending, at last, the long and lonely winter that had been the Lost Weekend. He called me in LA shortly afterwards to share the happy news.
He said, “Let the media know the separation did not work.”
‘He’d weigh himself twice a day’
Elliot Mintz on his friendship with John and Yoko. By Georgina Roberts
When a red light in Elliot Mintz’s bedroom flashed, it meant that John Lennon or Yoko Ono was calling him on a special hotline. “In an average week, 20 hours of phone conversation would not be unusual,” the 79-year-old former radio DJ and talk-show host says from his Beverly Hills living room.
Mintz describes the friendship with the couple that “dominated” nine years of his life as “almost a kind of marriage”. He was taken aback when Ono called him in 1971 to thank him for not asking about Lennon when he interviewed her on his radio show. When they began to speak for hours at night, she batted away his concern that her husband might get jealous, saying, “Aren’t you giving yourself a little too much credit, Elliot?”
Lennon first called Mintz to ask if he could get him fat-melting pills. “That was my first conversation with John Lennon. It wasn’t philosophical. It wasn’t about Elvis or the Beatles. It was about weight loss,” he says. Sometimes Lennon would weigh himself twice a day and the couple “were obsessive about diet”.
In Hotel Okura in Tokyo, October 1975
After six months of speaking, the couple summoned him to meet them in Ojai, California, where they were trying to kick a methadone addiction. Ono barely spoke until she was in a bathroom with the tap running. “She whispered to me, ‘This house is bugged. Everything we say here, they’re listening. So you have to be very careful what you say.’ ” FBI files released years later showed that Ono wasn’t being paranoid. President Nixon had placed the couple under surveillance after rumours they planned to disrupt his convention, Mintz says.
His clandestine friendship with the couple wreaked havoc on his love life. When he couldn’t explain whom he’d been speaking to in the middle of the night, one love interest assumed he was married and stormed out. “I realised at that moment that my love life would have to take a back seat to my relationship with John and Yoko,” he says.
There were times when lines were crossed in the friendship. One morning, Lennon summoned Mintz to kick out a girl who’d stayed the night. “I told him, ‘Please don’t ask me to do something like that again.’ He flipped out. He said, ‘I will effing ask you to do anything that I feel like asking you to do. Do you understand that?’ ” Mintz was hurt and offended. The next day was one of the few times he said no to “grabbing a bite” with Lennon.
Becoming parents was “the biggest game-changer” for the couple. After his son Sean was delivered via caesarean section in 1975, “John was outraged that when Yoko was clearly struggling, doctors would come up to him and say, ‘I’ve always dreamt of shaking your hand.’ He would bark at them, ‘Look after me wife!’ ”
While Lennon threw himself into childcare, Ono, who came from a banking dynasty, handled the couple’s finances. After becoming stratospherically famous so young, Lennon was “clueless” about money. “I doubt if John was ever in a supermarket, went to a bank, wrote a cheque. That’s what Yoko did,” Mintz says. “If not for Yoko, there’d be no money in the Lennon-Ono estate today.”
A drawing by Lennon on a postcard from Japan sent to Mintz in 1977
The first time Mintz met their son, Lennon said protectively, “Not too close. Germs.” “He said, ‘Look, we were going to make you the godfather, but we decided on Elton, because he would at least give him better Christmas presents.’ ” “This is typical John,” Mintz says.
Sean would only spend five years with his father before Lennon was murdered outside the Dakota in December 1980. Lennon had always “poo-pooed” Mintz’s requests for him to employ more security. “John said, ‘I’m just a rock’n’roll singer. Who would want to hurt me?’ ”
When Mintz speaks about learning of Lennon’s murder from a weeping flight attendant, his honeyed radio-presenter voice cracks with emotion. “Even now, after all these years, just thinking about that moment…” He trails off. The most gut-wrenching of his responsibilities was making an inventory of Lennon’s possessions. When he signed for a stapled brown paper bag that came from the hospital where Lennon was taken after he was shot, he could not bear to open it. “It was what John was wearing, what he had on him when he fell, including his broken, bloodied glasses.”
He is reticent about his friendship with Ono today. “I want to give her a sense of privacy,” he says, but adds, “It still feels like family. I still love her dearly.” The last time he saw her was at her 91st birthday in February. It was there that Sean encouraged Mintz to write his book, We All Shine On. Does he think Ono will like it? “I’ve never tried to predict a Yoko Ono conclusion.”
How different would his life be if he had never met the couple? “I could have got married. Could have had children.” Were the sacrifices worth it? “Of course. I got to spend that amount of my time with these two extraordinary people.”
We All Shine On: John, Yoko, & Me by Elliot Mintz (Bantam, £25).
(source)
“I could draw naked ladies. I could do them on folded paper so that when it was closed up the lady had her clothes on and then when you opened it up…wey-hey! The only trouble was before she did the washing my mum used to go through my pockets for school dinner tickets and, of course, one day she found one of my naked ladies. I came home and my dad said, I want a word with you. Did you do this? It was like death. Anguish. Tears.”
— Paul McCartney on his claim to fame in school, from The Paul McCartney World Tour concert program, 1989 (via theoldpaulband)
"The Beatles wearing makeup (that they put on themselves)" 1963
Ringo: the only thing I'm guilty of is being adorable!
Ringo: and also illegal street fighting
Nowhere man: The final days of John Lennon. Robert Rosen
Prisoner of Love: Inside the Dakota with John Lennon. Peter Doggett | Release cancelled in 2021
Lennon in America. Geoffrey Giuliano
The Beatles' first pet: George Harrison's vomit. ㅡ From the book "One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles In Time" by Craig Brown.
The Ultimate Beatle Guide: Interviews
1962
The Beatles first radio airplay with Pete Best (3rd August)
The Beatles first radio interview (27th October)
The Beatles rehearsals in The Cavern Club (October)
1963
The Beatles played on American radio for the first time (Late Feb)
The Beatles Ireland interview(Feb/March)
Please please me mini documentary (March 22nd)
The Beatles ‘Easy Beat’ Radio Show (April 3rd)
The Beatles BBC Radio show ‘Side By Side’ (April 4th)
The Beatles Swedish interview (August 23rd) part one
The Beatles Swedish interview (August 23rd) part two
Short interview with The Beatles (August 28th)
The Beatles interview with Dusty Springfield (October 4th)
The Beatles short interview with BBC News (October 16th)
The Beatles interview in Cheltenham (November 1st)
The Beatles Dublin interview (November 7th)
The Beatles ‘This Week’ interview uncut (November 7th)
The Beatles ‘Day By Day’ interview (November 12th)
The Beatles first time on American TV NBC News (November 18th)
The Beatles Come To Town: ABC Ardwick in Manchester (November 20th)
The Beatles Come To Town Behind The Scenes/Outtakes (November 20th)
The Beatles and fans interviews at ABC Cinema Carlisle (November 21st)
The Beatles interview with Ken Dodd (November 27th)
Morecambe and Wise Show featuring The Beatles (December 2nd)
The Beatles photoset at BBC radio show Saturday Club (December 17th)
Beatles Christmas message at Astoria by ‘Day By Day’ (December 24th)
1964
The Beatles awarded Silver Hearts (1964)
The Beatles Live At The BBC Full Album (1963/1964)
The Beatles Paris interview- starts at 2:00 (February 5th)
The Beatles arrive in America (February 7th)
The Beatles JFK Conference (February 7th)
The Beatles on Ed Sullivan (February 9th)
The Beatles Washington D.C interview (February 11th)
The Beatles L.A interview (Mid-Feb)
The Beatles U.S Documentary(Late Feb)
The Beatles return from the US (February 22nd)
The Beatles ‘Public Ear’ interview talking about John’s book (March 18th)
The Beatles fan Q&A interview (April 3rd)
Paul McCartney interviewed by David Frost (May 18th)
The Beatles perform ‘A Midsummers Night’s Dream (Late April)
The Beatles ‘Round Up’ interview (April 30th)
John Lennon and his Auntie Mimi airport interview (June 7th)
The Beatles Adelaide press conference (June 12th)
John Lennon and Paul McCartney Melbourne interview (June 15th)
John Lennon Melbourne interview (June 15th)
The Beatles Australian radio interview (Mid June)
The Beatles San Francisco press conference audio only (August 18th)
The Beatles Seattle press conference audio only (August 21st)
The Beatles Vancouver press conference audio only (August 22nd)
The Beatles New York press conference (August 28th)
The Beatles Boston press conference (September 12th)
The Beatles Ohio press conference (September 15th)
The Beatles Sydney conference with Jimmie Nicol (Mid-December)
The Beatles interview with Jimmie Nicol (Mid-December)
1965
Ringo Starr ‘Pop Personality’ interview (1965)
Ringo and Maureen interview (1965)
Ringo Starr’s interview after his operation (Early January)
The Beatles first interview talking about drug use (March)
Help! radio interview after returning from The Bahamas (March 12th)
John Lennon Cannes Help! interview (May)
John Lennon BBC interview (June 18th)
The Beatles New York press conference (August 13th)
The Beatles Toronto press conference (August 17th)
The Beatles Chicago press conference (August 20th)
The Beatles Metropolitan Stadium press conference (August 21st)
The Beatles Capitol Tower L.A press conference (August 29th)
The Beatles San Francisco press conference (August 31st)
The Beatles MBE interview part one (October 26th)
The Beatles MBE interview part two (October 26th)
The Beatles MBE interview part three (October 26th)
The Beatles MBE interview part four (October 26th)
George Harrison BBC interview (November 30th)
John Lennon BBC interview (November 30th)
1966
The Beatles in Hamburg interview (June 26th)
The Beatles Tokyo press conference (June 30th)
The Beatles Chicago press conference (August 12th)
The Beatles Toronto press conference audio only (August 17th)
The Beatles New York press conference (August 22nd)
The Beatles Warwick Hotel press conference (August 22nd)
The Beatles L.A press conference (August 24th)
John Lennon apologising for comparing The Beatles to Jesus (unsure of date)
1967
Paul McCartney ‘Special Underground’ interview (January 18th)
John Lennon and Paul McCartney TOTP interview (March 20th)
Paul McCartney LSD interview (June 27th)
John Lennon and George Harrison interview (August 27th)
The Beatles interview after Brian’s death (August 29th)
John Lennon radio interview (November)
1968
Paul McCartney and Jane Asher interview (26th March)
John Lennon and Paul McCartney NBC interview (May 14th)
The Beatles (Minus John) promoting ‘Yellow Submarine’ (July 8th)
Paul McCartney solo interview (November)
1969
As The Beatles were extremely close to breaking up there aren’t many interview and it’s hard to date everything, someone has kindly made a compilation of them talking though: (x)
George Harrison speaks about the future of The Beatles
Wait what happened on December 14th 1974 ?
tl;dr is during John’s “Lost Weekend” on that date George showed up to see John before playing some of his last dates for his infamous Dark Horse tour and blew up at him; the next night after the show, George felt really bad and was forgiven
excerpt from May Pang’s 1983 book Loving John about December 14-15, 1974:
some additional info for anyone interested:
in Chris O’Dell’s book Miss O’Dell she talks about how after the show on December 15th, George and John talked backstage about old times
a few days later a radio interview aired on December 21st, 1974 around 9:30am of John and George where they seem to be intoxicated and/or extremely tired, as the interview was done at 5am x x
the night before this interview was broadcast and presumably taped, George played his last show of the Dark Horse tour at Madison Square Garden and partied with John, May, and assumingely Olivia as well; so it would make sense for them to be tired in that interview x
hope this was informative and useful !!!!
Beatles Resources Masterpost
I've never seen anyone collect different Beatles resources all in one place, so I thought it would be nice to create a masterpost for newer or less research savvy Beatles fans looking for where to find them and learn more
Included below are Beatles movies, autobiographies, biographies, magazines, miscellaneous files, archive sites, and much more
This is by no means a comprehensive list of Beatles resources, as there is an often overwhelming amount of sources relating to and informative about the Beatles; this is simply a post to gather more important, prominent, and larger Beatle related texts and media together, as I would love for the online Beatles fan community to be more organized in its research and archive efforts
This is an extremely long post, enjoy!
*PLEASE READ DISCLAIMERS*
This post does not include links to Beatles music videos or where to listen to their music; however, I highly recommend listening to the updated remasters of The Beatles' albums done by Giles Martin, George Martin's son (the remasters done AFTER 2009) instead of the 2009 remasters when possible
There is a plethora of misinformation online about The Beatles so PLEASE do your own research, using reliable sources
Some sources have disclaimers attached, in case I believe they may to any degree be misleading or require additional context
All sources have been listed within sections chronologically, not in order of importance
If at any point any of the hyperlinks are broken or are not working, let me know and I’ll try my best to fix or update them
Some of the literary sources here are no longer being published, which is why I’m happy to supply the links here to read them online. However, if they are still in print and you’re able, please go borrow them from your local public library! Some of the movies and documentaries linked below can also be found on streaming or bought online; they are linked below for those unable to easily access them or for whatever other reason
There are some other important sources I could not find reuploads or scans of, but are still listed below in case someone is looking for more important sources
If I come across links to said sources I will edit this post and add them as hyperlinks. Additionally, if someone finds a working, safe link for anything listed without a link or for something they believe should be listed, they can message me and I'd be happy to add it
Movies Starring The Beatles as a Group
A Hard Day's Night (1964) dir. Richard Lester
Help! (1965) dir. Richard Lester
Magical Mystery Tour (1967) dir. The Beatles, Bernard Knowles
Yellow Submarine (1968) dir. George Dunning (The Beatles themselves do not voice their cartoon selves in this film)
Fictional/Partially Fictional Movies made by and/or Starring Beatles (A short selection of the films most often mentioned by Beatles fans)
How I Won the War (1967) dir. Richard Lester
Two Virgins (1968) dir. John Lennon, Yoko Ono
Candy (1968) dir. Christian Marquand
The Magic Christian (1969) dir. Joseph McGrath
Imagine (1972) dir. John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Steve Gebhardt (Some of the aspects in this film are fictional, and some are akin to a documentary)
Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) dir. Peter Webb
Documentaries/Docuseries
Bed Peace (1969) dir. John Lennon, Yoko Ono (Yoko Ono has since said in 2020 she and John were naïve to think that doing the Bed-Ins would change the world)
Let It Be (1970 Original) dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg
Let It Be (2024 Remaster) dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg
The Concert for Bangladesh (1972) dir. Saul Swimmer
Imagine: John Lennon (1988) dir. Andrew Solt
The Beatles Anthology (1995) dir. Geoff Wonfor, Kevin Godley, Bob Smeaton (Focuses mainly on pre-1966 Beatles history and does not cover post-breakup events)
ep. 1 ep.2 George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011) dir. Martin Scorsese
The True History of the Traveling Wilburys (2007) dir. Willy Smax
ep.1 ep.2 ep.3 Get Back (2021) dir. Peter Jackson
Yoko's Films (including films that list John Lennon as a co-director)
Rape (1969) dir. Yoko Ono, John Lennon
Fly (1970) dir. Yoko Ono, John Lennon
Up Your Legs Forever (1971) dir. Yoko Ono, John Lennon
Movies Made about The Beatles
The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978) dir. Eric Idle, Gary Weis (Beatles parody)
I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) dir. Robert Zemeckis
The Hours and Times (1991) dir. Christopher Munch (This film is speculative)
Two of Us (2000) dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg (This film is speculative)
The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch (2003) dir. Eric Idle (Beatles parody)
Books Written by The Beatles
In His Own Write (1964) by John Lennon
A Spainard in the Works (1965) by John Lennon
I Me Mine (1980) by George Harrison
Skywriting by Word of Mouth (posthumous, 1986) by John Lennon (Partially autobiographical and partially fictional)
The Beatles Anthology (2000) by The Beatles (Book version of the docuseries)
Postcards from the Boys (2004) by Ringo Starr
The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present (2021) by Paul McCartney
Books Written about The Beatles
A Cellarful of Noise (1964) by Brian Epstein
Yellow Submarine Comic (1968) by Paul S. Newman
The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (1969) ed. Alan Aldridge
The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics 2 (1971) ed. Alan Aldridge
A Twist of Lennon (1978) by Cynthia Lennon
Loving John (1983) by May Pang
Rock 'N' Roll Times: The Style and Spirit of the Early Beatles and Their First Fans (1983) by Jürgen Vollmer
John (2005) by Cynthia Lennon
Wonderful Today (2007) by Pattie Boyd with Penny Junor
Miss O'Dell: my hard days and long nights with the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the women they loved (2009) by Chris O'Dell
George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011) by Olivia Harrison
George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door (2013) by Graeme Thomson
NOTE: Many beginner Beatles fans tend to read books written by authors Mark Lewisohn and Philip Norman as introductions to the Beatles; however, both of these authors can be incredibly biased for and against certain figures in Beatle history and require often hefty amounts of context to properly analyze them in an accurate manner, Norman in particular.
Magazines
The Beatles Book (Only Original 77 Issues) (1963-1969)
Paul McCartney Playgirl (1982)
Paul McCartney Playgirl (1985)
Archive and Timeline Sites
Meet The Beatles For Real (A site with mostly paparazzi, fan, and personal photos of the Beatles and their associates, along with some transcribed interviews, fan stories, and much more)
Beatles Bible (Primarily useful for basic information surrounding The Beatles' music together and solo can be found here, such as album/single release dates, in addition to pictures, a fan forum, and other basic info; not cumulative)
DM Beatles (Basic outlined timelines for 1963-1970 and album/single releases; not cumulative)
The Beatles On Film (A collection of almost every publicly available filmed video of The Beatles, together and solo, logged for reference purposes)
Beatles Interviews Database (Not cumulative)
Harrison Archive (Actively updating archive of interviews, fan encounters, quotes, and stories from or surrounding George Harrison; fun fact: Olivia Harrison, George's widow, follows the Instagram version of this archive)
The Paul McCartney Project (Archive of Paul McCartney interviews, dates for concerts, and more)
Misc. Documents/Videos
Around the Beatles (1964) dir. Rita Gillespie
The Beatles in Rishikesh Home Videos (1968)
The Beatles in Rishikesh Archival Footage and Home Videos (1968)
The John Lennon and Yoko Ono Playboy Interviews Transcript (1980)
The John Lennon and Yoko Ono Playboy Interviews Audio (1980)
John Lennon FBI Files
The Beatles FBI File
The Beatles Accepting Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction (1988)
The Beatles/Threetles Reunion at Friar Park (1994)
The Beatles/Threetles Studio Footage (1995)
Paul and George Anthology 3 Studio Interviews for VH1 (1997)
Concert for George (2002)
Animatics and Test Footage for Scrapped Motion Capture Yellow Submarine Remake (2009)
Audio Files
Beatles Christmas Records 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969
The Beatles Artifacts (Different takes/demos of songs along with studio chatter; the link supplied simply lines out what is on all of these Artifacts, as many of them are currently unavailable on Internet Archive)
John Lennon Last Interview (1980)
“George was younger, the little one. He was very sweet, with his little tooth and the cocky songs he was singing. He was really cute, and was an essential part of the team. When all of them were harmonising together was incredible!”
— Klaus Voormann, “Hamburg Days” (1999)
“When he has that funny grin on his face, so that his little Dracula-tooth was showing — that was it! There he was, this little cocky underage boy singing cocky little songs like “C[‘mon] every body” or Joe Brown’s “I’m [Hen]ery the eight[h], I am” and then he played his little guitar solos, unmistakable George, nearly breaking his fingers on this cheap guitar, he hated so much. He couldn’t wait to earn enough money, to at long last be able to buy an expensive guitar. So when he got his first Grets[c]h, he proudly showed it to everybody. 1971 George let me have this Guitar. I loved it. Finally I had to give it back to him, which I think is perfectly right. He gave me a beautiful tel[e]caster as a replacement. Ain’t that great?”
— Klaus Voormann, “Hamburg Days” (1999)
“…George grinned his cheeky, crooked boyish grin beneath his thick brown head of hair. He was irresistible, and not just for the girls.”
— Klaus Voormann, on the first time he saw The Beatles; translated from “Warum spielst du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John?” (2003)
On the cover of Tan magazine, September 1965. (Featuring a photo of The Beatles with Mary Wells in October 1964.)
“I’d never really heard Marvin Gaye, The Miracles and all that until George played me the records up in their flat [on London’s Green Street] and they absolutely blew me away. I then went on a sort of crusade for Motown!” - Tony Hall, The Beatles: The BBC Archives
Cathy McGowan: “What records do you like, other than your own?” George Harrison: “All the Motown Tamla records, Mary Wells, Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Impressions, all that crowd.” - Ready, Steady, Go!, March 20, 1964
“[The music] that we play at home — like Mary Wells, Miracles and not to mention Marvin Gaye.” - George Harrison, BBC’s Public Ear, January 12, 1964
“Tamla Motown artists are our favorites. The Miracles, The Impressions, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, The Exciters.” - George Harrison, The Beatles’ Detroit press conference, September 6, 1964
“That boy George — he’s very quiet, but he’s cute.” - Mary Wells, Melody Maker, November 7, 1964
“Labeling the various members of the Beatles, Mary [Wells] recalled that Paul McCartney is the ‘real life of any party; Ringo Starr is a complete clown; George Harrison is kind of on the quiet side; and John Lennon is more of a businessman than the other three and he’s the toughest one to get to know.’” - Tan, September 1965
“The Beatles — who were always among Mary’s very early fans — are now her own favorites. She thinks they are very adorable and feels dreadfully sorry for them. ‘You have no idea how surrounded they are. There’s always someone wanting them. Their lives are certainly not their own. You know sometimes Paul or George will come into my dressing room and play a couple of records and then leave again.’” - Disc, October 31, 1964 (x)
Hold up ,,, Mal called Paul his love in his diaries?
Yes. In his autobiography. He also analyzed their relationship in his diaries. For some context, here's a longer passage from Ken Womack's book, Living the Beatles Legend (Chapter 31).
As January 1970 came to close, Mal began drifting into an emotional slide that had been developing over the past several years. "Seem to be losing Paul," he wrote on January 27. "Really got a stick from him today. He let me down," and ominously added "Fixing a hole," "Pepper," and "directorship" to a growing list of disappointments. Apparently, the conversation had turned yet again to the issue of Mal's servile role in Paul's life, with the roadie believing that the association was bounded by friendship and love. "A servant serves," Mal wrote, "but he who serves is not always a servant," he added, echoing John's philosophy from December 1968. "Love is as sharp and piercing as a sword, "Mal reasoned, "but as the sword edge dulls — you sharpen it. So love's keenness needs honing — needs honesty." *
[...]
On February 11, Mal joined John and Yoko for a lip-synched performance of "Instant Karma!" on Top of the Pops, with the roadie, clad in beige suit and a light-green tie, playing the tambourine. By this juncture, Mal's long-standing relationship with Paul was in freefall. A few days earlier, he have been awakened by a 1 p.m. telephone call from the Beatle. It went "something like this," he wrote in his diary:
Mal: yeah? Paul: I've got time at EMI over the weekend. Would like you to pick up some gear from the house. Mal: Great, man. That's lovely. Session at EMI?! Paul: Yes, but I don't want anyone there to make me tea. I have the family – wife and kids there. Mal: [thinking to himself] Goes my poor head, "Why????" **
By the next week, Mal found himself behind the wheel of the Apple van, moving Paul's gear from EMI Studios to Morgan Studios, another Northwest London facility where Paul could work incognito. At one point, Neil cornered Mal about Paul's surreptitious recording sessions, demanding to know more. "Where's Paul?" he asked, to which Mal tersely replied, "Not telling you."
In other instances, Mal ordered a Mellotron for Paul, while keeping him fully stocked with plectrums and other gear. In late February, Paul asked Mal to move everything back to EMI, where he was set to record "Maybe I'm Amazed" in Studio 2. For Mal, everything came to a head at 7 Cavendish Ave., when "my long love, Paul, to whom I have devoted so many years of loyalty, turned around to me and said, I don't need you anymore, Mal." *** *, ** : Evans, "Diaries." [1963—1974.] 10 vols. Malcolm Frederick Evans Archives. Entries from Jan 27 & Feb 5, 1970.
***: Evans, Mal, 'Living the Beatles Legend: Or 200 Miles to Go.' Unpublished MS, 1976. Malcolm Frederick Evans Archives.
there’s a lot of bullshit lennon/mccartney quotes out there, misattributed by biases in biographers or straight-up fabrications. but there’s also “if i was a girl”. there’s also “if he had been a woman”. there’s also “is this a self-portrait?” there’s “in bed.” there’s “maybe that would’ve satisfied it”. there’s “nothing to worry about”, and “life begins at 40”, and “it’s only me.” there’s “the emperor of eternity”. “he chose me.” “i’m still in love with you”. there’s “i can always deny that it was ever written about him.” so who cares
One of my favourite Mcharrison stories ♥
Jimmy and Jemima; you will never be forgotten. RIP.
"On the subject of coloured landscapes, I was the last in the group to take LSD. John and George had urged me to do it so that I could be on the same level as them. I was very reluctant because I'm actually quite straitlaced, and I'd heard that if you took LSD you would never be the same again. I wasn't sure I wanted that. I wasn't sure that was such a terrific idea. So I was very resistant. In the end I did give in and take LSD one night with John. I was pretty lucky on the LSD front, in that it didn't screw things up too badly. There was a scary element to it, of course. The really scary element was that when you wanted it to stop, it wouldn't. You'd say, 'Okay, that's enough, party's over,' and it would say, 'No it isn't.' So you would have to go to bed seeing things." - Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, 2021
Some mcharrison doodles! really missed drawing these guys.
If you don’t undertstand the B7 reference; there’s a story when they were kids in which they took a bus across Liverpool to learn the B7 chord from someone who knew how to play it. So i just drew them happily saying they learn the B7 chord, finally.
Ed Sullivan gives The Beatles a message from Richard Rodgers on The Ed Sullivan Show in Miami, 16th February 1964
The whole idea of calling it ‘Lennon-McCartney’ instead of Paul Lennon and John McCartney… other way round…
Paul McCartney interviewed by Joe Smith, 22 October 1987
The Beatles and their fans: Some interesting facts that Lizzie Bravo, a brazilian fan who lived the beatlemania in 1967/1968, said. I translated from the interview that Lizzie gave to "Pitadas Do Sal" in 2021. May Lizzie rest in peace. ♡
Paul McCartney lived near Abbey Road so he walked around and sometimes barefoot.
The Beatles called their fans "luv" and always said hello/goodbye even if they were in the car.
When Lizzie was invited to record Across The Universe with the band, Paul McCartney asked her to sing something "in brazilian" but she was so nervous that she couldn't.
It was hard to distract John Lennon and Paul McCartney when they were together. They talked a lot in private, laughed a lot, and even finished each other's sentences. "They lived in their own bubble" Lizzie about Lennon-McCartney.
When Lizzie met John Lennon for the first time (her favorite beatle), she started crying and Mal Evans hugged her and gave her a chocolate.
George Harrison wrote Apple Scruffs for specific fans, not for all the fans who stayed in the studios.
George Harrison also wrote letters to these 3 fans in particular, thanking them for their support especially when he was starting his solo career.
Once, John Lennon was leaving Paul McCartney's house and when he said goodbye to Lizzie, who was waiting for him outside, she said "I love you" spontaneously. John smiled and waved.
Lizzie said they never seemed as mad as people sounded.
The fans did a marathon every day: They ran to Abbey Road, saw The Beatles and in the end of the afternoon they ran to Paul McCartney's house to see John Lennon go there - something he did a lot.
Sometimes they arrived together in the studio in the same car.
There were 20 or 30 fans waiting to see them everyday! It depended on which beatle would arrive before or after.
Lizzie said that The Beatles were very humble, kind and didn't even seem like the renowned band they were (and are!).