#barbara baker

[freddiemercurylegendabovelegends]

Late 70s - Freddie Mercury with Barbara Baker (wife of music producer Roy Thomas Baker) and friend

- Roy Thomas Baker, English record producer, songwriter, arranger, and Recording Academy governor, began career at Decca in England aged 14. Moved to Trident Studios. After co-founding Trident's record company Neptune, Baker began working with Queen whom he produced for five albums including the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" -

📸 Credit Photo © Barbara Baker

[pcincart]

[debdarkpetal]

[debdarkpetal]

Freddie Mercury with Barbara Baker and Joe Fanelli, Montreux 1978.

[ominous-synths-records]

Live! - Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles

Photographers (Cover): Richard Upper, Robert Knight

Photographers (Gatefold): Barbara Baker, Richard Clark

Release: 1972

[thedissenters]

To his credit, John wasn’t deceived by appearances. Each day, he met his friends by the entrance, then accompanied them down a wide flight of cast-iron stairs to the crowded canteen, where they lounged across a tiny stage reserved exclusively for the annual college dress designers’ show and ate the students’ staple of baked beans on toast, with tea. The canteen was noisy, but its appeal was “you could smoke there,” says a classmate who occasionally joined the boys for lunch. As soon as everyone got settled, John would “whip out a pack of fags” and entertain Paul and George with “stories about the art school birds he was shagging,” spinning tales with about as much veracity as a fortune-teller. Eventually their attention was drawn toward “an older, ethereal, very talented painter” named Johnnie Crosby, who fashioned her appearance after Brigitte Bardot, with slinky, formfitting sweaters and “wonderful honey-blond hair piled up into a beehive,” and sat alone each lunch hour at the opposite side of the stage, her long legs crossed provocatively in deference to the boys who were “swanning about and drooling over her.”

“Hey, John? Have you had her yet?” they’d chime in „a chorus of breathless anticipation. To which John would glumly snap, “No!” before amending it to “Not yet.”

John had no way of knowing the effect that his boasts of casual sex had on other classmates. All around him, he saw fellow students living out their bohemian fantasies. He just assumed that included sexual fulfillment. And yet, for all the free-spiritedness, the art college crowd remained frightfully inexperienced. “A student’s having sex wasn’t socially acceptable,” says Ann Mason, who fought off escalating advances from Geoff Mohammed with game defiance. “Contraception was not easy to come by; you couldn’t get it without some dispensation from the vicar that said you were getting married within the next three weeks, and even then you needed credentials proving you were worthy of family planning. Actually, I didn’t know anyone at school who was having casual sex aside from the teachers—and John Lennon.”

In fact, Barb Baker had resisted his constant groping for nearly a year. She was “too afraid of getting pregnant” to surrender to their lust and said that “as far as we got were kisses and cuddles.” Still, they teased each other with maddening recklessness, necking and petting, until „sleeping together seemed like the only recourse. Pleadingly, calculatingly, John swore his undying love, “proposing to [Barb] nearly every night.” Things got so intense between them that “getting pregnant… no longer mattered,” she said, and so in the spring of 1958 they “became each other’s first [sexual] experience.

The Beatles - Bob Spitz

[thedissenters]

"I was always obsessed with sex," John confessed. "I'd run after girls and feel them up, put them up against a wall, that sort of thing." He said he lost his virginity at age fifteen with his first girlfriend, Barbara Baker, a buxom, buck-toothed beauty. John then described the deflowering. "Barb wasn't wet and I had a hell of a time shoving it in," he said nonchalently. "I was frantic to get inside her, and when I couldn't, I got so frustrated and angry that I started to curse her: 'You dumb cow, what's wrong with you? You're tight as a rat's ear!'" John paused, shook his head and smiled. "It wasn't her fault, of course. But what did I know? I was just a weird, psychotic kid covering up my insecurity with a macho facade." Ruminating about his clumsy, often violent approach to love-making, he said that he never used to engage in foreplay; he would immediately attempt penetration. "I had no idea you were supposed to take your time," he laughed nervously. "I thought the idea was to get in and out as quickly as possible." He also told me that he would sometimes write his girlfriends erotic letters. "I wouldn't be surprised if they show up one of these days, hopefully after I'm dead."

The Last Days of John Lennon - Fred Seaman

[closetofanxiety]