#craig brown

[tavolgisvist]

Two Virgins and Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

Two Virgins

recorded 3-4 (or 19–20) May 1968, released 29 Nov(UK), 11 Nov 1968 (US)

When he made that album Two Virgins he was hopeless technically. I had to set up a couple of tape recorders and I showed him this whole system that I used, and he, being John, the difference between him and me, he’d make the record of it. Whereas, being me, l’d do it and experiment with it and then bring it to our mainstream records.

(PM in "The Paul McCartney World Tour" book, September 1989)

August 31 Private Eye announced that John and Yoko’s forthcoming album would have a full-frontal nude cover. September 15 Around this date, John and Yoko photographed themselves in the nude,* from the front and rear, intending to use the shots as cover artwork for their rst collaborative album. November 11 John: “Originally, I was going to record Yoko, and I thought the best picture of her for an album would be naked. So after that, when we got together, it just seemed natural for us both to be naked. Of course, I’ve never seen my prick out on an album before.”

(The Beatles Diary. Volume1.The Beatles Years by Barry Miles, 2001)

*according to other sources the nude photographs for Two Virgins were taken at 34 Montagu Square in London in August 1968

Autumn 1968:

As the meeting was drawing to a weary close, John, not this day with Yoko, who hadn’t seemed particularly connected with what was going on, said he wanted to play us a tape he and Yoko had made. He got up and put the cassette into the tape machine and stood beside it as we listened. The soft murmuring voices did not at first signal their purpose. It was a man and a woman but hard to hear, the microphone having been at a distance. I wondered if the lack of clarity was the point. Were we even meant to understand what was going on, was it a kind of artwork where we would not be able to put the voices into a context, and was context important? I felt perhaps this was something John and Yoko were examining. But then, after a few minutes, it became clear. John and Yoko were making love, with endearments, giggles, heavy breathing, both real and satirical, and the occasional more direct sounds of pleasure reaching for climax, all recorded by the faraway microphone. But there was something innocent about it too, as though they were engaged in a sweet serious game. John clicked the off button and turned again to look toward the table, his eyebrows quizzical above his round glasses, seemingly genuinely curious about what reaction his little tape would elicit. However often they’d shared small rooms in Hamburg, whatever they knew of each other’s love and sex lives, this tape seemed to have stopped the other three cold. Perhaps it touched a reserve of residual Northern reticence. After a palpable silence, Paul said, “Well, that’s an interesting one.” The others muttered something and the meeting was over.

(Michael Lindsay-Hogg (filmmaker), Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond, 2011)

I started to tell him about the “Two Virgins” cover, just because it shocked me, as just as it shocked him and it shocked anyone. I’d just say “You are going to be in trouble doing that.” And he said “I don’t mind. I’d rather do it and get into trouble. And I’m not even sure I will.” I finally come round to it and said “don’t get yourself into trouble, son, go ahead.” I thought it was a good thing. Now it was silly of me to try and protect John.

(PM, interview for BBC Radio 1, May 23, 1970)

Inevitably, many people bought Two Virgins for the cover alone: for some of the Beatles’ younger fans, it was to be their first ever glimpse of grown-ups in the nude.

(Craig Brown, 150 Glimpses of the Beatles, 2020)

Paul: So what’s the point behind Two Virgins? <…> Paul [mimicing reporters]: Is there any need to do this in public, Mr. Lennon?*

(Get Back sessions, January 14th, 1969)

It’s like the rumour I told John off for posing nude for the Two Virgins cover as in Lennon Naked. I never told him that – that’s another legend. What John and Yoko did was always up to them. By that point we were grown people so I would never say to them, ‘Ooh, you’ve got your willy out in public. Imagine what John Lennon would’ve said to that?’“

(PM, interview for The Sun, June 24, 2010)

Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

recorded 9, 10 October 1968; released 22 Nov (UK), 25 Nov 1968 (US)

designing the White Album poster during Sept-Oct 1968

I was up on the flat roof [in Rishikesh] meditating and I’d seen a troupe of monkeys walking along in the jungle and a male just hopped on to the back of this female and gave her one, as they say in the vernacular. Within two or three seconds he hopped off again, and looked around as if to say, ‘It wasn’t me,’ and she looked around as if there had been some mild disturbance but thought, Huh, I must have imagined it, and she wandered off. And I thought, bloody hell, that puts it all into a cocked hat, that’s how simple the act of procreation is, this bloody monkey just hopping on and hopping off. There is an urge, they do it, and it’s done with. And it’s that simple. We have horrendous problems with it, and yet animals don’t. So that was basically it. Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? could have applied to either fucking or shitting, to put it roughly. Why don’t we do either of them in the road? Well, the answer is we’re civilised and we don’t. But the song was just to pose that question. Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? was a primitive statement to do with sex or to do with freedom really. I like it, it’d just so outrageous that I like it.

(Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, 1997)

PLAYBOY: “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” LENNON: That’s Paul. He even recorded it by himself in another room. That’s how it was getting in those days. We came in and he’d made the whole record. Him drumming. Him playing the piano. Him singing. But he couldn’t—he couldn’t—maybe he couldn’t make the break from the Beatles. I don’t know what it was, you know. I enjoyed the track. Still, I can’t speak for George, but I was always hurt when Paul would knock something off without involving us. But that’s just the way it was then.

(John Lennon, 1980, All We Are Saying by David Sheff, 2020)

The song’s (very) slightly risqué lyric, all two lines of it, heightened the vague air of controversy surrounding the album. McCartney was already in trouble with the press for allowing a minuscule nude picture of himself to be included on the set’s free poster.

(The Beatles Diary. Volume1.The Beatles Years by Barry Miles, 2001)

“All this work, all this talent — and what [the press] fixate on is one small picture.”

(Derek Taylor)

I did hear him some time later singing it [Why Don’t We Do It In the Road?]. He liked the song and I suppose he’d wanted to do it with me. It was a very John sort of song anyway. That’s why he liked it, I suppose. It was very John, the idea of it, not me. I wrote it as a ricochet off John.

(Paul McCartney, May 3, 1981 with Hunter Daivis)

from too long post

*thank you a lot, @i-am-the-oyster <3

[dovetailjoints]

All You Need is Love, 25 June 1967 │ © David Magnus

Many attendees had gone to some fuss with their clothes, not least Paul, who had stayed up all night applying psychedelic patterns to his shirt.

- 150 Glimpses of the Beatles by Craig Brown (ch. 99)

[mrepstein]

‘The Fifth Beatle’s Double Life’ (The Sunday Times - December 5, 2021)

Craig Brown reveals how the band’s debonair manager Brian Epstein made them millions but was tortured by drugs, homosexuality - and a fixation with John Lennon.

[Below is Craig Brown’s introduction to a new edition of Epstein’s A Cellarful of Noise]

With his polite side-parting, unflashy suits, diffident manner and public-school accent, Brian Epstein appeared much more mature than the Beatles. In interviews, he would call them ‘my boys’ or ‘the boys’; they, in turn, would always refer to him as ‘Mr Epstein’.

So it comes as a surprise to realise he was only six years older than John and Ringo. In April 1964, when he embarked on this memoir, he was twenty-nine. That same month, the top five places in the American top ten were all occupied by the Beatles, and there were a further seven Beatles’ singles in the top one hundred, along with two songs about them – ‘We Love You Beatles’ by the Carefrees and ‘A Letter to the Beatles’ by the Four Preps.

Since February, they had become the four most famous young men in the world. Even Ringo Starr, the least prepossessing of the Beatles, had been made the subject of  a song, ‘Ringo, I Love You’, written and produced by Phil Spector and sung by Bobbie Jo Mason, soon to become more famous as Cher.

Having engineered all this fame, Epstein was clearly in no mood to play it down. In A Cellarful of Noise he describes the Beatles as ‘a worldwide phenomenon, like nothing in any of our lifetimes, and like nothing any of us will ever see again’. Mixing condescension with a dash of hyperbole he writes, ‘The haunted, wonderful wistful eyes of little Ringo Starr from Liverpool’s Dingle are more instantly recognisable than any single feature of any of the world’s great statesmen.’

A Cellarful of Noise is a period piece. At times the period seems much earlier than the 1960s, exhibiting the muscular snobbery of John Buchan or Baden-Powell. At one point Epstein declares that the Beatles ‘never sit while a woman stands’ and at another that ‘their naturalness … wins them the admiration of people like Lord Montgomery’. Of one of his artistes, Gerry Marsden, he boasts that ‘Princess Alexandra twice requested him for cabaret at society balls’.

Many of his observations about the world of pop are now as dated as the National Milk Bar in Liverpool where he and the boys tucked into four packets of biscuits to celebrate the promise of a recording session at EMI. ‘The disc charts cannot stand very many girls,’ he writes, ‘however gorgeous they may look on stage.’

Nearly sixty years on, the Beatles are still part of the air we breathe, but some of Epstein’s other artistes, as he always called them, have vanished without trace. Who remembers Tommy Quickly? Epstein confidently predicts ‘he is going to be a star’, but alas he never was. Taken up by Epstein, he left his job as a telephone fitter, changed his name from Quigley to Quickly, took part in three Beatles tours and recorded five singles, all flops. He retired from the music business in 1965.

Michael Haslam – ‘he, I believe, is going to be very big’ – was part of the Beatles Christmas Show at the Hammersmith Odeon for three weeks in 1963. He recorded two unsuccessful singles, both produced by George Martin, the last of which was called, ominously, ‘There Goes the Forgotten Man’. Eventually, he fell out with Brian Epstein over an expenses claim for a pair of socks. Epstein let him go, and in 1966 Haslam returned to his £15-a-week job on a fleshing machine at Walker and Martin’s tannery in Weston Street, Bolton. His fellow workers greeted his return with a jaunty banner that read, ‘Welcome back Mike. Top of the Flops.’

In contrast to the devil-may-care merriment of the Beatles, Brian Epstein cultivated a reserved, fastidious air. He wore a Burberry raincoat, well-polished buckled shoes, gold cufflinks, a monogrammed shirt and a Christian Dior silk tie or a polka-dot cravat. ‘He was immaculate from head to toe, like Cary Grant,’ recalled Cilla Black. ‘He was everything you wanted a posh fella to look like.’ His Liverpool tailor, George Hayes, maintained that he always looked as if he’d just stepped out of the bath.

Epstein would have preferred Godfrey Winn or Beverley Nichols, well-manicured household names, to ghostwrite his memoir, but his publisher, Ernest Hecht, vetoed  them for being ‘far too pricey and the wrong image’. In the end, Epstein settled for Derek Taylor, then a showbiz journalist on the Daily Express, but soon to become the Beatles’ press officer.

The two men motored down to the Imperial Hotel, Torquay in Epstein’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Taylor was particularly impressed by the electric windows. ‘I’d never seen such a thing.’ The two men got on well. In their first session Epstein opened up about his uneasy childhood and troubled adolescence, but he hesitated before revealing his greatest secret. There came a point when he realised he would have to broach the subject. Over lunch, he suddenly asked, ‘Did you know that I was queer?’ ‘No, I didn’t,’ replied Taylor. ‘Well, I am, and if we’re going to do this book I’m going to have to stop buggering about saying I was with this girl when I would not be with a girl, it would be a boy. Does that make any difference?’

It must have been an agonising confession – in 1964 homosexuality was still an imprisonable offence – but Taylor was unfazed. ‘No,’ he remembered saying, ‘it doesn’t make any difference. It’ll make it a lot easier. So you mustn’t worry any more, difficult as it may be to convince you perhaps, but I won’t ever let you down.’

Between the two of them, they conspired to render everything seemly. The book makes no mention of Epstein’s sexuality or the deep torment it caused him. Of his time in National Service, for instance, we hear simply that he was ‘the lousiest soldier in the world’. Wearing a pinstriped suit and a bowler hat, he was charged with  impersonating an officer and confined to barracks. This caused his nerves to become ‘seriously upset’. Psychiatrists decided he was ‘a compulsive civilian and quite unfit for military service’, so he was ‘discharged on medical grounds’.

The truth is both more fraught and more interesting. Stationed at the Albany Barracks in Regent’s Park, Epstein had hated his ‘hideous’ private’s uniform and had asked his tailor to run him up a rather more elegant officer’s outfit, which he then wore to cruise the West End in search of young men. At the Army and Navy Club on Piccadilly, military police arrested him and charged him with impersonating an officer. His parents employed lawyers, who succeeded in saving him from a court martial. He was eventually discharged for being ‘emotionally and mentally unfit’ – code for homosexuality.

Elsewhere in the book Epstein claims, ‘I lost a girlfriend called Rita Harris who worked for me and who said, “I’m not going to compete with four kids who think they’re entering the big time”.’ In reality, ‘Rita’ was a boy.

In his unpublished diaries he was much less guarded, confessing that, after leaving the army, ‘My life became a succession of mental illnesses and sordid, unhappy events bringing great sorrow to my family.’ It now seems probable that his sexuality led to his torment and his torment led, eventually, to his death. John Lennon’s school friend Pete Shotton noted,  ‘Not only was Brian homosexual; he was sexually aroused by precisely those traits that otherwise most affronted or menaced him: qualities like vulgarity, insolence, callousness, and aggressiveness, all  so abundantly on display in the persona of the Beatles’ rhythm guitarist … Brian Epstein was irredeemably mesmerised by the one whose demeanour most resembled that of a caged animal.’

True to character, John Lennon taunted him about the memoir. When Epstein was wondering out loud what to call it, Lennon said, ‘Why don’t you call it Queer Jew?’ Later, when Epstein said it was called A Cellarful of Noise, Lennon replied that he would be better off calling it A Cellarful of Boys.

The self-portrait in A Cellarful of Noise may be partial, but it is not untrue. Epstein portrays himself as lonely, businesslike, scrupulous, obsessive, shrewd, awkward and pernickety, all of which he was. Now that we know how his story ended, the odd phrase flashes on the page like a fork of lightning. Quite late in the book, he confesses that the strain of being in sole charge of management ‘continues and increases and thrives like a malignant disease’. Soon after, he talks of the pressures he is under. ‘The chief of them is loneliness, for ultimately I must bear the strain alone, not only in the office or the theatre, but at home in the small hours.’

He was fanatical, in both senses of the word. When he writes ‘I can think of no warmer experience than to be in a vast audience at a Beatles concert’ he is guilty only of understatement. The four Beatles were everything he could never be. He told an interviewer in 1964 that the Beatles ‘represented the direct, unselfconscious, goodnatured, uninhibited human relationships which I hadn’t found and had wanted and felt deprived of. And my own  sense of inferiority evaporated with the Beatles because I knew I could help them, and that they wanted me to help them, and trusted me to help them.’

Simon Napier-Bell, manager of the Yardbirds, Wham! and many others, once recalled Epstein telling him that at a Beatles stadium concert in America ‘he went into the crowd of girls and he just screamed like one of the girls, which he said is what he’d always wanted to do from the first minute he’d ever seen them. He had spent his whole life being restrained and wearing suits and suddenly he just screamed and became the mad fan he wanted to be.’

John, Paul, George and Ringo sometimes went wild, and sometimes behaved foolishly, but they were always able to adapt and move on. They were survivors. Each of them was equipped with a safety valve. But for all his extraordinary abilities, for all his carefully buttoned-up exterior, Brian Epstein was not. He could manage others, but he could never manage himself; he lived in perpetual jeopardy. He took drugs – uppers, downers, acid, heroin, coke – far more recklessly than his boys, and was known to gamble away £20,000 in a single night. Nor could he resist picking up the type of young man who would steal from him, beat him up and blackmail him.

‘Eppy seems to be in a terrible state,’ John told Pete Shotton one night. ‘The guy’s head’s a total mess, and we’re all really worried about him.’ John then played a tape. Pete described it as ‘one of the most harrowing performances I’ve ever heard’, adding, The recording was barely recognisable as that of a human voice,  alternately groaning, grunting and shrieking words which, even when decipherable, made no apparent sense whatsoever. The man on the tape was obviously suffering from great emotional stress, and very likely under the influence of some extremely potent drugs.

‘What the fuck’s all that, John?’ I said incredulously.

‘Don’t you recognise the voice? That’s Brian. He made the tape for me in his house. I don’t know why he sent it, but he’s trying to tell me something – fuck knows what. He just can’t seem to communicate with us in his usual way any more.’

Three years after the publication of A Cellarful of Noise, on Sunday 27 August 1967, Brian Epstein was found dead in the bedroom of his house in Belgravia. Two brief suicide notes were found, hidden away in a book, but they were both dated several weeks before. At the inquest his psychiatrist Dr Flood reported that ‘his main complaint was insomnia, anxiety and depression’. Epstein had, he said, ‘always shown some signs of emotional instability … The patient was homosexual, but had been unable to come to terms with this problem.’ Recording a verdict of accidental death, the coroner said that it was due to poisoning by the sedative Carbitral, caused by an incautious self-overdose.

Together, the Beatles went round to comfort Brian’s mother, Queenie. They wanted to attend his funeral, but Queenie dreaded it turning into a media circus, and thought it best if they stayed away. ‘They were like four lost children,’ she recalled.

In the vast Beatles Story Museum in Liverpool, just  around the corner from the cabinet containing the four Sgt. Pepper costumes and housed in a glass case of its own, stands a dapper knee-length blue coat with three shiny buttons. It dresses a headless mannequin. A little triangle of sharp white shirt and a paisley tie poke out through the top. The caption on the cabinet reads, ‘Brian’s wool and cashmere coat made by Aquascutum of Regent Street’.

Had he lived, Brian Epstein would now be pushing ninety. He would probably control the Beatles Story Museum and have ensured the Beatles a decent share of the profits. He would undoubtedly have expanded his empire. Over the past fifty-odd years society’s misgivings about his homosexuality would have transformed into qualifications. By now he would be Sir Brian Epstein, or perhaps even Lord Epstein of Belgravia, a valued board member of the Garrick Club, Tate Modern and the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts.

Instead, he lies buried in Everton Cemetery, while his Aquascutum coat, spick and span as ever, retains a life of its own, resplendent under a spotlight in its glass case, admired by 300,000 people a year. It is a modern relic or, in sacramental terms, an outward sign of inward grace. In gold letters, embossed on the bottom of the case, is a quote from Paul McCartney: ‘If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian.’ 

[jerseydeanne]

CRAIG BROWN: As duchess tries to trademark 'archetypes'... has Meghan set her sights on archery too?

CRAIG BROWN: The Duchess tries to trademark 'archetypes' after her son

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[longforyesterday]

Like rival Elizabethan households, Britain’s two most illustrious groups operated a delicate rivalry, its wheels oiled by deference from the upstart towards the grandee. From George Harrison’s perspective, ‘Mick Jagger was always lurking around in the background, trying to find out what was happening. Mick never wanted to miss out on what the Fabs were doing.’ Jagger lived in Marylebone Road, a walk across Regent’s Park from Paul’s house in St John’s Wood. They would meet from time to time, but it was Jagger who would always come to McCartney, not vice versa. ‘I don’t remember him coming to us,’ Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s then girlfriend, says of Paul. ‘Mick always had to come to his house, because he was Paul McCartney, and you went to him. Paul never came to us. I was always very curious about how Mick saw him, how Mick felt about him. It was always fun to watch. There was always rivalry there. Not from Paul, none at all. Paul was oblivious, but there was something from Mick. It was good fun. It was like watching a game on the television.’ In some ways, the two bands were mirror images of one another: Paul and Mick the savvy front men, always with an eye on the prize; Ringo and Charlie the older, unflappable blokes on drums; John and Keith the rogues, the hard men, the undeceived; and Brian and George the other-worldly ones, nursing resentment at their exclusion by the top dogs.

Craig Brown, One Two Three Four – The Beatles in Time

[bigtickhk]

Road trips, yoga and LSD with the dentist: what the Beatles did next

Fifty years after the band announced their split, Craig Brown looks back at the Fab Four’s remarkable return to ‘normal’ life

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown

US: https://amzn.to/33Yl6FN

UK: https://amzn.to/2QVvjgA

[incorrect-r2m-quotes]

“A decent beard has long been the number one must-have fashion item for any fugitive from justice.”

– Tim Omundson

[days-of-reading]

Craig Brown, Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret (2018)