really big fan of those interview clips where john starts being really weird and obsessive about paul and yoko just cuts him off and it's really clear that she has to hear about this all the time at home
harry dubois would end death note in one episode. he'd be unkillable bc he has no fucking idea what his name is and then he'd go drink driving and accidentally run light over and the killings would mysteriously stop
Yoko for her birthday? Mayhaps John and Yoko with John giving purse dog ?
genius
You're telling me being in close proximity to this in his teens and twenties meant nothing to John Lennon, a man fighting bisexuality? Sure. Sure. Let's just go out and tell lies.
after ringo wrote to george "i think love is about you" ANY other declaration of love completely lost its meaning forever
An absolute must read if you care about Jurgen or John and Paul, or George or gay.
Jurgen is very unapologetically queer.
Q: “Was it heartbreaking to fall out of love with George Harrison? I mean, to fall in love with him is an amazing story.” Pattie Boyd: “Oh, it was heartbreaking, of course it was. You know, it was like… I was losing someone who was my best friend and who I adored, and we learnt an awful lot of very important things, issues, during our time together. We learnt them together. So this is something one will never forget.” Q: “What did he teach you, and what did you teach him?” PB: “No, we both learnt together. We learnt, you know, about art, about film making, about meditation, about all sorts of things.” - BBC Radio, September 2019 “I think probably the memory that will always remain with me is when he came to see me not long before he passed away. And he came over to my cottage and wanted to see the garden and wanted to see my darkroom because I’d been doing some printing, and, um, he wanted to see the flowers. And he said — he saw some flowers, tiny little flowers that were growing in a crack in the pavement, and the wind was blowing them. He referred to them as ‘shivering flowers,’ and I thought, ‘Oh God, that’s so sweet.’ He just had a wonderful view, and he used such a different language to describe what he was feeling or thinking. And, you know, he brought me a little gift, a little something for my studio, a little Krishna. And, you know, he was just always generous and kind and sweet and always had a good sense of humor.”
Pattie Boyd (on how she best remembers George), Every Little Thing With Ken Michaels, February 2019
"‘John always used to say,’ Yoko told me at one point, ‘that no one ever hurt him the way Paul hurt him.’ The words suggested a far deeper emotional attachment between the two than the world ever suspected - they were like those of a spurned lover." -Philip Norman
"No matter how much he loved Yoko, the Gibraltar ceremony seems like something close to an on-the-rebound reaction to the loss of his first great love, Paul McCartney." -Chris Salewicz
"Almost in each other’s face, John and Paul quickly gained an unusual closeness, little or nothing hidden. Paul noticed that ‘John had beautiful hands." -Mark Lewisohn
"With Yoko present, Paul McCartney’s reign as Lennon’s princess was doomed.” -Peter McCabe
"John's in love with Yoko," Paul confessed to a reporter from the 'Evening Standard', "and he's no longer in love with the three of us." But for all intents and purposes, he might as well have been talking about himself." -Bob Spitz
'I thought Paul's was rubbish,' opined Lennon, saying that he preferred George's All Things Must Pass. McCartney studied the article with the morbid fascination of a jilted lover receiving a kiss-off letter. -Howard Sounes
“Lennon could have abandoned the (US) immigration case and returned to Britain, and possibly even to McCartney, but that would have meant accepting that his relationship with Ono was over.”-Peter Dogget
"Theirs was a volatile relationship right up to the end, and was fraught with emotional summits and valleys. While the connection between them was strictly heterosexual, it was deep, passionate, and highly explosive." -Geoffrey Giuliano
"John was insecure, and when he saw Paul he wanted to look cool. He gave up all his friends for Paul. Aunt Mimi recalled that John jumped around the kitchen when he told her about his new friend. She sarcastically said to John that they were like ‘chalk and cheese’ meaning how different they were. And John would start hurling himself around the room shouting ‘Chalk and Cheese!'’ smiling and laughing. He was fucking in love with him, he adored him. She understood he found the partner of his life." -Thomas Rhodes
“The last week in August, Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool, tanned and noticeably slimmer. In addition to starting school, he came back to begin a relationship he seemed destined for: hooking up with John Lennon." -Bob spitz
“Seeing Lennon focus on Ono rather than him [Paul] was as devastating as it would have been for Cynthia Lennon to witness the couple making love.” -Peter Dogget
What do you make of the infamous hunter davies phone call? Paul does not come off well at all so I do think it was meant to be private. Not that I think Paul would be tell Hunter that he & John did hand stuff or whatever regardless but I do think he truthfully has no idea what had John so upset w him so I agree I don’t think there was some big rejection in India (but then wtf is that get back scene) or elsewhere but I do think John seems driven by some hurt “the wound” as Lindsey-Hogg called it
ugh that phone call i hate it so much like he really wanted all that kept private & it's soooo one-sided like we don't see anything davies said, where he was leading him or not, what he was cutting out... it's just not good journalism, first off, but it's also just so disrespectful
but for the content like....... i think he was really twisted up and in a bad place. it was what, barely 3 months out from john's death? i don't really take Anything he said in that interview at face value like even if he had said "me and john used to fuck like rabbits" in it i would take it with a grain of salt lmao
but anyway re the wound...
i think it's important to note again that these are all fragments of what he said and not like professionally recorded- just written down while they were on the phone.
but i do think there were a lot of things that hurt john about the way paul had been behaving for years (& vice versa) that have nothing to do with their potential sexual/romantic relationship on the surface but i think it was all sort of tangled up. songwriting, friendship, sex- same thing, in what started as a great way and ended up pretty disastrous.
when john talks about the things paul did that pissed him off, he tends to bring up things like this incident w eleanor rigby:
and then naturally w the divorce he tends to bring up the money aspect, paul announcing the break by releasing mccartney and that whole scheduling conflict, paul's treatment of yoko & john's relationship...
i think what's Most Likely, to me, is that:
things started to strain around '65 with john & george doing lsd together and paul turning them down (& them subsequently being dicks to him about it And going off to write she said she said together, which is as far as i know the first time either paul or john actively wrote with someone else like that).
'66 brought the end of touring, john's increasing reliance on lsd to cope, being separated for months for the first time in years when john filmed how i won the war, paul working on the family way (which john later said was hurtful), and paul settling into the sort of "swinging london life" while john was stuck in the suburbs with a family. i think they were, for once, doing things very separately. they had separate lives, when they'd been joined at the hip since at least hamburg. john even later referred to it as them "living together" (in the context of, he lived with paul so he wrote with paul, he lives with yoko so he writes with yoko).
'67 just continued that snowball of Bad bc while they were very close for sgt pepper's, you also have brian dying and paul just continuing to push them all to work on mmt. and i can only imagine the types of insensitive things he was doing similar to that eleanor rigby account without realizing they were hurtful. it's also when john & cynthia's relationship was really starting to deteriorate. paul also proposed to jane in december.
'68 ofc had india, but i GENUINELY do not think anything super crazy happened there. i think they were sober for the first time in ages, meditating for hours on end, and just Thinking. with everything that came before it, i wouldn't be shocked if part of that thinking was about their relationship and where it was going and the beatles in general. the get back scene really reads waaaay too light-hearted to me to be indicative of any serious issues- they're smiling and joking around and paul at Most seems a lil uncomfortable that john's bringing this up in public. which just honestly makes me think that if that Was referencing them fucking, it was just a regular thing. and john was maybe bringing it up to try and poke a bit at that close relationship they had lost along the way. i think paul leaving early did probably set off his abandonment issues a bit, even if it was pre-planned, but i don't think enough to "hurt him worse than anyone ever has"
the rest of '68........ shit was a mess. you have john leaving cynthia for yoko, the cursed apple nyc trip, john & yoko staying with paul (which REALLY would not have happened if there was some huge rejection that made john hate paul), paul doing enough coke to kill a fucking whale, francie, jane & paul splitting, paul meeting linda and getting serious with her, the white album disaster, john starting to rely on yoko as a creative partner where he hadn't let anyone else in before like that aside from paul... just a nightmare all around and i think they probably, if they had a sexual relationship, let it fall to the wayside around this time. they're both busier, they're both in relationships they're actually sort of committed to now, they're growing up, etc.
but by '69, with get back specifically, there's a ton of tension there ofc- but they're still joking around and close and loving in a way that doesn't jive with the wound being some big argument i don't think. i think whatever happened, it happened unsaid. which leads to both of them being hurt, neither of them knowing how badly they hurt the other person, paul scrambling to figure out what he possibly did wrong to hurt john more than anyone in his life... like, to him, in this scenario here i find most likely, it would've just been a slow and meandering end to their relationship, sexual or otherwise, that culminated in john asking for a divorce and then everyone freaking out when he was the one to make that official. so it wouldn't fit with john saying he hurt him more than anyone. for john, i think he'd started feeling terrified as early as '65 that paul was going to leave him- paul was better than him (gotta love yesterday), paul didn't need him, paul was thriving in london while he was stuck in his house depressed and high, etc etc. all these god awful thoughts that only came true, in his view, when paul just let him go. i think john wanted a fight and i think paul thought that handling things peacefully would save the relationship. i don't think either of them really got each other at all, in that instance, and it fucked them.
i mainly use twitter but their beatles fandom is nothing compared to this so here i am
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