Beatles Baby!

Hi 👋🏼 I’m Ayla 25 ✶ TX ✶ Mclennon Enthusiast & Macca gal 🤍

[costigans]

[thedissenters]

Portrait of John Lennon | © (attributed to) Stuart Sutcliffe

This painting is believed to have been hanging in the sunroom at John Lennon's Kenwood home before he gifted it to Bernard Clark - Director of Photography for Cave Photographic Studios - after he had prevented Lennon from completely tearing it apart in a moment of frustration.

[javelinbk]

The Beatles in India, 1968: A collection of photographs. From the Pattie Boyd collection at Christie’s

[ceofjohnlennon]

"John's art school friend Jonathan Hague recalled later that John 'Suffered an awful lot from loneliness... If you were his friend he would beg you not to leave him and then go over with you exactly when you would be back.'"

ㅡ From the book "Meet The Beatles" by Steven D. Stark.

[stopandimagineloveforever]

Paul McCartney - Besame Mucho in LET IT BE

[force-dyad]

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[dateinthelife]

7 May 1965

On this date, comically large props are used to create the illusion that Paul McCartney's character in Help!, also called Paul, is very small.

[the-cosmic-empire]

John and Paul on set during a break from recording a TV special, ‘The Music of Lennon and McCartney’ at Granada Studios, Manchester, 1st November, 1965. 

“[Paul] provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes. There was a period when I thought I didn’t write melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting rock ‘n’ roll. But, of course, when I think of some of my own songs –In My Life, or some of the early stuff, This Boy – I was writing melody with the best of them.”

[John, Playboy Interviews, 1980]

“We would normally be rung a couple of weeks before the recording session and they’d say, ‘We’re recording in a month’s time and you’ve got a week off before the recordings to write some stuff.’ … So I’d go out to John’s every day for the week, and the rest of the time was just time off. We always wrote a song a day, whatever happened we always wrote a song a day… Mostly it was me getting out of London, to John’s rather nice, comfortable Weybridge house near the golf course… So John and I would sit down, and by then it might be one or two o'clock, and by four or five o'clock we’d be done.”

[Paul, 1994]

“I Want to Hold Your Hand, From Me To You, She Loves You – I’d have to have the list, there’s so many, trillions of ‘em. Those are the ones. In a rock band you have to make singles, you have to keep writing them. Plenty more. We both had our fingers in each others pies.”

[John, in response to the question: What songs really stick in your mind as being Lennon-McCartney songs? Rolling Stone Interviews, Dec 8, 1970]

“John and Paul’s standard of writing has bettered over the years, so it’s very hard for me to come straight to the top, on par with them. They gave me an awful lot of encouragement. Their reaction has been very good. If it hadn’t, I think I would have just crawled away.”

[George, 1966]

“I said that [playing down how much he and Paul collaborated], but I was lying… We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball… In those days we absolutely used to write like that — both playing into each other’s noses.”

[John, Playboy Interview]

Pics: by Robert Whitaker / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

Quotes from BeatlesWiki

[thedissenters]

John Lennon on the set of How I Won The War at the Desierto de Tabernas in Almería, Spain | September 1966

[michonnegrimes]

John smiling at Paul like this will sustain me for 100 years and I hope it sustains Paul too

[eppysboys]

Paul + Royston Ellis + The Poem

Break me in Easy

Easy, easy, break me in easy. Sure I’m big time, cock-sure and brash, but easy, easy, break me in easy. Sure they’ve been others, I know the way… (Royston Ellis, From Rave published by Scorpion Press, May 1960) 

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“I suppose I read these at the session attended by John Lennon (and Bill Harry) in the audience at Liverpool University. However, the poem I read backed by the Beetles was called “Break me in Easy” and Paul [McCartney] remembers it to this day (he quoted it to me when we met by chance in a bar in Paris in 2006).”  (Royston Ellis) -

“When I met Paul [McCartney] in the bar at Le Bristol in Paris in 2006, after a few minutes of conversation, he - without any prompting from me - quoted the poem to me, but suggested it was better if it began: “Easy, easy squeeze me in easy.”

It was pretty impressive to hear Paul remembering one of my poems 46 years after we performed it together at the Jacaranda in Liverpool!” (Royston Ellis)

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“However, I did meet Paul again by chance at Le Bristol Hotel in Paris in 2006 and he immediately recalled the poem I had performed with them and even recited the opening lines: “Easy, easy, break me in easy.” He also recalled then that I had told him in 1960 that statistically one in five people were gay and he wondered which one of the Beatles and their associates was the “fifth man.”

(Royston Ellis)

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“Paul worried it was about “shagging sailors” while attempting to find the right guitar notes to set it off.

Ellis’s bisexuality was an eye-opener for the Beatles, as he remembers: “There was an expression, ‘Do you still love me?,’ and I think I must have said it to John because all the eyebrows went up ‘What?!’ And I gave them a lecture about the Soho scene and said they shouldn’t worry, because one in four men were queer although they mightn’t know it.” The remark bit deep. As Paul says, “We looked at each other and wondered which one it was. ‘It must be one of us, because there’s four of us…Oh fucking hell, it’s not me, is it?’”

Mark Lewisohn, “1960”, The Beatles - All These Years: Tune In

[thecoleopterawithana]

I’m not asking for an easy passage,

So I hope you understand,

I’m not after any special treatment,

But I wouldn’t mind a hand.

On a rough ride, on a rough ride,

On a rough ride, on a rough ride,

On a rough ride to heaven,

I want to get inside, what will I do?

‘Rough Ride’, recorded in October 1987, released in Flowers In The Dirt (1989).

[paulmccartneyfiles]

paul was CLEARLY so jealous here, it’s a mclennon moment for me

[paulmccartneyfiles]

THE WAY PAUL SAYS “HEY!!!!”

[groovybananastarfish]

[tavolgisvist]

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[carolsturka]

Cavendish, 31 January 1968. Photos taken by Ringo.

[amoralto]

Visit Original Link

“I don’t have any friends!” John reminded me. “Friendship is a romantic illusion!” He said that he had learned this the hard way after the breakup of his relationship with Paul McCartney, whom he had once regarded as his close friend.

— Fred Seaman, The Last Days of John Lennon. (1991)

SHEFF: As Tom Robbins half-facetiously asks in his most recent book, “How do you make love stay?”

JOHN: Trying to possess it makes it go away. Trying to possess somebody makes them go away. Every time you put your finger on it, it slips away. Every time you turn the microscope’s light on, the thing changes so you can never see what it is. As soon as you ask the question, it goes away. Peripheral vision is what it is. There’s no looking directly at it. Try to look at the sun. You go blind, right? Now that doesn’t mean you don’t have to work on it. Love is a flower and you have to water it.

YOKO: Yes. I think that love will never die. Once you know somebody, you can never unknow that person. And knowing is loving. So you can never get out of love. There might be misunderstandings and separating for other reasons, but love is always there. Staying together is just one form of love. Maybe that’s a strong love and expression of love. But love is a soul thing. It always stays there.

— John Lennon and Yoko Ono, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)

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Another glimpse of the fanmix-in-progress, featuring John seemingly talking about relationships (under the guise of the 1960s revolution) and a rendition from the very last Goon Show (of all).

[thecoleopterawithana]

JOHN: I think, in one way, all of us were under the slight illusion that we might— or maybe it wasn’t an illusion and maybe had we pushed harder we would have got what we wanted, but I’m not sure that anybody really knew what we wanted. We knew we didn’t like what was happening but nobody quite knew what it was that we wanted, cus we’d never had it! 

So there was that sort of backlash on the 60′s thing, about “Oh, that’s dumb!” You know? “That’s dumb!” That was a bit of juvenile on all our parts, in a way, because— to expect that just because we’d suddenly decided or discovered something that we wanted, that we couldn’t get it just by one small effort, you know, for about five years, or something, ten at best! I doubt it was even around one, which probably would have been going on eternally! And I think a majority of us, whoever we are, that all of us were changed by whatever was going on in the 60′s — and no doubt before that, but that was the period that we were all sort of… on to — and I think a lot of changes did happen, however subtly. And they happened! And you can never — that’s something Yoko always says — you can never unknow what you know! And we all know something. Whatever it was that we found out or discovered for ourselves — maybe every generation finds it and loses it, and it’s up to them to decide what to do once they find out certain… realities about life. I think as that generation goes into middle-age, or whatever it is, that’s the decision that they make: whether to carry with them that slight torch of light that we all saw — and I’m saying every generation sees it, and then decides what to do with it — whether we keep it, the light, lit or say “Forget it!” and let the next sh- generation handle this, because I’ve had enough of this, now I want me car and me wife and I’ve decided to settle down instead. 

“Maybe it wasn’t an illusion and maybe had we pushed harder we would have got what we wanted”

In a marriage, or a love affair – when the seven-year-itch or the twelve-year or whatever these things that you have to go through – there comes a point where the marriage collapses because they can’t face that reality, and they go seeking what they thought they should be having, still, somewhere else. I get a new girl, it’ll all be like that again; I get a new boy… (…) The early stuff – the Hard Day’s Night period, I call it – the early period, was the early equi– se– what I’m – what I’m equating it to is the sexual equivalent of the beginning of a relationship, of people in love. And the Sgt. Pepper-Abbey Road period was the period of maturity in the relationship. And maybe had we gone on together, maybe something more interesting would have come out of it. 

— John Lennon, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)

“I’m not sure that anybody really knew what we wanted. We knew we didn’t like what was happening but nobody quite knew what it was that we wanted, cus we’d never had it!”

Q: So you think with Linda he’s found what he wanted?

JOHN: I guess so. I guess so. I just don’t understand. I never knew what he wanted in a woman because I never knew what I wanted. I knew I wanted something intelligent or something arty. But you don’t really know what you want until you find it. So anyway, I was very surprised with Linda. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d married Jane (Asher) because it had been going on for a long time and they went through a whole ordinary love scene. But with Linda it was just like – boom! She was in and that was the end of it.

— John Lennon, interview: St. Regis Hotel, New York City (5 September 1971).

“That was a bit of juvenile on all our parts, in a way, because— to expect that just because we’d suddenly decided or discovered something that we wanted, that we couldn’t get it just by one small effort”

Well, you’re asking why we met. I mean, I don’t know. It’s like asking why you were born. I can give you theories of karmic pasts and things like that, but I’ve no idea why. But why it continues is because we want it to continue and work to continue. There seem to be certain cycles that relationships go through. The critical points are at different parts of the different cycles. The new way of talking is like, “Well, why work on a relationship? We just stop and get another one.” But the karmic joke is, presuming you’re lucky enough to find a new relationship anywhere near the relationship you’re giving up – or exchanging, or walking away from, or destroying by inattention or inadvertence of selfishness, or whatever it is – that you have to go through it over and over and over again right up until you’re seventy.

— John Lennon, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)  

So there was that sort of backlash on the 60′s thing, about “Oh, that’s dumb!” You know? “That’s dumb!”

It’s like, they were playing ‘All You Need Is Love’ earlier, and I was saying to Yoko, “I still believe all you need is love,” you know. But I don’t believe that just saying it is gonna do it. I still believe in the fact that love is what we all need, that it’s what makes us all sort of desperate, frenetic, or whatever the word, neurotic, et cetera, et cetera. But I still believe that there’s many ways of getting to that situation, you know. I mean, there’s a lot of changes in society to come before we’d ever get to a state of even realising that love is what we need. But, uh, I still believe in it. And I know, I’ve read cracks about, “Oh, the Beatles sang ‘All You Need Is Love’, but it didn’t work for them,” but nothing will ever break the love we have for each other. And I still believe all you need is love. I don’t have to live with three guys to prove that love is the basic necessity of all of us.

— John Lennon, interview w/ Howard Smith for WPLJ (23 January 1972).

[amoralto]

“I was very anti the new guy. I didn’t like the smell of [Allen Klein]. But John was particularly infatuated with him and the other guys went with John. I was left kind of isolated. I had a choice, to go with Allen Klein or, as I saw it, to fight to save all I’d ever achieved with the Beatles. I fought. It was a very difficult period. They were with the new guy and I wasn’t. I was boycotting my friends. I’ve said afterwards to friends that I got to understand people going through redundancies and all those horrors when the group split up. I got the smell of people sacking people, of terrible knives in the back and people ganging up on people—of feeling redundant and useless. And I took all the problems home. That’s what most of my rows with Lin were about. I’d come back from a meeting and say, ‘Oh the band’s breaking up…’ ‘John said he’s leaving the band…’ ‘They’re stopping this record coming out…’ That’s why I felt guilty after her death for starting those rows. The legal actions over the Beatles lasted for 20 years. We’d row and it would always be because of my insecurities. The business meetings were so terrible. You’ve never known such heaviness. It drained the hell out of us for years. I felt completely useless when the Beatles broke up. I was probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I felt as if I had lost control of everything. I lost all my say. Everything had been taken out of my grasp. They’d get annoyed if I tried to produce a track one day and the next they’d say, ‘Go on, produce it.’ [Linda] gave me confidence. She said, ‘You’re great, you’re OK.’ We liked doing very simple and down-to-earth things. During the time we spent up there [on the farm in Scotland] I did a lot of sheep-shearing. It’s the only time in my life I had shoulders. I helped with the shearing and mowing the fields—and horse-riding. That was the biggest thing. Linda taught me to horse-ride. I really remember at that time being on a horse and thinking I’ve got control of something. It was a feeling of some sort of power that was very strong. Through the nature in Scotland, through riding and through her support I did manage to get it back together.”

— Paul McCartney, The Mail on Sunday: When the Beatles broke up… (October 18th, 1998)