♪ And You Know What It's Worth ♪

Everyone reading this focussing on the fire when my first thought was how cruel Mimi was. Calling John fat. Making fun of his way of speaking. Putting down his musical interests. Discouraging him from going to Hamburg. Poor Johnny. Mimi’s impact on his mental health must have been severe

miss auntie mimi and little johnny starting a fire with his gang

Photo shoots like this make me realise how good John looked again an autumn backdrop. With his pale colouring and the auburn in his hair, he looks amazing against the reds and oranges of the leaves. It makes me think of the Beatles were seasons, John would be autumn (going to the darker part of his nature but lots of light underneath the surface), Ringo is definitely summer (warm and enjoying the simple things in life). George is winter because he likes the idea of tearing things apart to rebuild and Paul is spring (trying to repress his darker side to focus on the light but still fighting that darkness underneath). It also explains why Paul and John were so similar yet different-both individuals with darkness and light but reflected in different ways)

Photo session for the “Beatles For Sale” album. Photos by Robert Freeman in London’s Hyde Park, in the autumn of 1964 .

Reblogging because of Bob Spitz being yet another person who has no idea what Working Class Hero is about. In the song when John says “a working class hero is something to be” he is being sarcastic. A working class hero is a sucker who believes the lies of the upper classes that if they keep working harder and harder that corner office will be theirs when of course the upper classes have no intention of ever giving them “room at the top”. Not only is John not saying he’s a working class hero, he’s criticising people who are. If you post things about Paul being the “true working class hero” it shows you have no idea what the song is about. I’m not referencing the original OP for this post when I say this but rather similar quotes I’ve seen around here. Listen to the song! It’s very powerful and it helps to educate yourself

No doubt about it, they were tuned to the same groove. But aside from a musical passion and amiability, they filled enormous gaps in each other's lives. Where John was impatient and careless, Paul was a perfec-tionist-or, at least, appeared to be- in his methodical approach to music and the way he dealt with the world. Where John was moody and aloof, Paul was blithe and outgoing, gregarious, and irrepressibly cheerful. Where John was straightforward if brutally frank, Paul practiced diplomacy to manipulate a situation. Where John had attitude, Paul's artistic nature was a work in progress. Where John's upbringing was comfortably middle-Class (according to musician Howie Casey," the only claim he had to being a working-class hero was on sheet music"), Paul was truly blue-collar Where John was struggling to become a musician, Paul seemed born to it.

And John gave Paul someone to look up to. Their age difference and the fact that John was in art college- a man of the world! - made John "a particularly attractive character" in Paul's eyes. There was a feral force in his manner, a sense of "fuck it all" that emanated great strength. He had a style of arrogance that dazed people and started things in motion. And he scorned any sign of fear. John's response to any tentativeness was a sneer, a sneer with humbling consequences.

John occasionally felt the need to reinforce his dominance, but he never required that Paul cede his individuality. He gave the younger boy plenty of room in which to leave his imprint. The Quarry Men would try a new song, and John would immediately seek Paul's opinion. He'd allow Paul to change keys to suit his register, propose certain variations, reconfigure arrangements. "After a while, they'd finish each other's sentences," Eric Griffiths says. "That's when we knew how strong their friendship had become. They'd grown that dependent on one another."

Dependent--and unified. They consolidated their individual strengths into a productive collaboration and grew resentful of those who questioned it. Thereafter, it was John and Paul who brought in all the new material; they assigned each musician his part, chose the songs, sequenced the sets-they literally dictated how rehearsals went down. "The rest of us hadn't a clue as far as arrangements went," Hanton says slowly. "And they seemed to have everything right there, at their fingertips, which was all right by me, because their ideas were good and I enjoyed playing with them." But the two could be unforgiving and relentless. "Say the wrong thing, contradict them, and you were frozen out. A look would pass between them, and afterwards it was as if you didn't exist.

Even in social situations, the Lennon-McCartney bond seemed well defined. The unlikely pair spent many evenings together browsing through the record stacks in the basement of NEMS, hunting for new releases that captured the aggressiveness, the intensity, and the physical tug about which they debated talmudically afterward over coffce. Occasionally, John invited Paul and his girlfriend, a Welsh nurse named Rhiannon, to double-date.

To John's further delight, he discovered that Paul was corruptible. In no time, he groomed his young cohort to shoplift cigarettes and candy, as well as stimulating in him an appetite for pranks. On one occasion that still resonates for those involved, the Quarry Men went to a party in Ford, a village on the outskirts of Liverpool, out past the Aintree Racecourse.

"John and Paul were inseparable that night, like Siamese twins," says Charles Roberts, who met them en route on the upper deck of a cherry red Ripple bus. "It was like the rest of us didn't exist." They spent most of the evening talking, conducting a whispery summit in one corner, Roberts recalls. And it wasn't just music on their agenda, but mischief. "In the middle of the party they went out, ostensibly looking for a cigarette machine, and appeared some time later carrying a cocky-watchman's lamp. The next morning, when it was time to leave, we couldn't get out of the house because [they] had put cement stolen from the roadworks into the mortise lock so the front door wouldn't open. And we had to escape through a window."

Through the rest of the year and into the brutal cold spell that blighted early February -every day that winter seemed more blustery than the last-the two boys reinforced the parameters of their friendship. Afterschool hours were set aside for practice and rehearsal, with weekends devoted to parties and the random gig. It left little time for studies, but then neither boy was academically motivated anyway.

I know a lot of people will say How Do You Sleep, but I’d love to see John’s reaction to Mother. I think 1964 John would be amazed he allowed himself to get so vulnerable and have it be so public

Beatle (John) Hypotheticals #15

If you could show John four of his solo songs in 1964, which one of the following songs do you think would most surprise him and why?

Mother

How Do You Sleep

Woman Is The Ni**er of the World

Watching The Wheels

Are there any songs not listed above that you think would be more shocking to John? If so, which ones?

Shout out to @odearjohn for the inspo!

Just wish I could read an article that praises Paul yet doesn’t crap on John. I’m the member of about 30 John Lennon pages across multiple social media platforms and they are really positive places that celebrate John with photos, video and articles. If the other Beatles are mentioned it’s always with respect and a desire to support their various projects. I can’t remember the last time someone bashed Paul. Why can’t this be the norm?

“Did you know Paul sent a telegram to Margaret Thatcher in 1982? He did. It wasn’t friendly. He lost his temper over her treatment of health workers and fired off a long outraged message, comparing her to Ted Heath, the prime minister (tweaked in “Taxman”) felled by the 1974 coal strike. McCartney warned, “What the miners did to Ted Heath, the nurses will do to you.” This controversy is a curiously obscure footnote to his life—it seldom gets mentioned in even the fattest biographies. He doesn’t discuss it in Many Years from Now. I only know about it because I read it as a Random Note in Rolling Stone, not exactly a hotbed of pro-Paul propaganda at the time. (The item began, “Reports that Paul McCartney is intellectually brain-dead appear to have been premature.”) But the telegram was a major U.K. scandal, with Tory politicians denouncing him. In October 1982, Thatcher was at the height of her power, in the wake of her Falkland Islands blitz. Many rock stars talked shit about Maggie—Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Paul Weller—but Paul was the one more famous than she was. He had something to lose by hitting send on this, and nothing to gain. What, you think he was trying for coolness points? This is Paul McCartney, remember? He was in the middle of making Give My Regards to Broad Street. He could have clawed Thatcher’s still-beating heart out of her rib cage, impaled it on his Hofner on live TV, and everybody would have said, “Yeah, but ‘Silly Love Songs’ though.” Why did he feel so intensely about the nurses? He didn’t mention his mother in the telegram, but he must have been thinking of Mary McCartney’s life and death. So he snapped, even though it was off-message. (He was busy that week doing interviews for the twentieth anniversary of “Love Me Do”—the moment called for Cozy Lovable Paul, not Angry Paul.) He didn’t boast about it later, though fans today would be impressed that any English rock star of that generation—let alone Paul—had the gumption to send this. You can make a case that it was a braver, riskier, and more politically relevant move than John sending his MBE medal back to the Queen in 1970. Still, John’s gesture went down in history and Paul’s didn’t, though his fans would probably admire the move if they knew about it. He couldn’t win. He was Paul. All he could do was piss people off.”

— Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles. (2017)

Love the Paul fans in the comments not getting things yet again. No John wasn’t an orphan. Yes he did have an awful childhood. He didn’t know his dad. His mum left him alone at night as a baby to go party and then come back to have sex with random men in front of him. He was taken away from his mother by Liverpool Social Services because at the age of 8 he didn’t have a bed to sleep in. His mothers last act on the night she died was to tell Mimi he wasn’t welcome to come around her house anymore because her husband didn’t like it. She walzed in and out of his life all the time. His aunt Mimi rarely showed him any physical affection, didn’t speak to him as a child for days at a time when she was angry and regularly removed photos of him from the house as a sign of removing her love when he was angry. You don’t think this is traumatic for a child? Saying that John had a rough childhood isn’t glorifying it and excusing anything he did. But it does help understand the traumatic lens of his behaviour. I think the Paul fans commenting need to take 30 steps back. I’m over it

“I’ve no idea if John wants to do anything again. I haven’t spoken to him for quite a while because he’s been keeping himself quiet.

But, if you think about it, there’s a fella whose father left home when he was a little kid, who lived with his aunt and his uncle. Then his uncle died, then his mother remarried and used to come to visit him but lived with another man. And while she was coming to visit him one night, when he was 16, she got knocked down by a car and killed. So that guy has grown up in a world where basically he’s never had any family.

He then got married to Cynthia but he was in the middle of all the Sixties dope and everything and he never really got with that family.

And he’s now married again to Yoko, who, for him, is the love of his life. He believes he’s found it and they now have a son. And I think he’s just taking every second that’s left to him to enjoy that —and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

— Paul McCartney, Liverpool Echo, December 4th, 1979

He looks so good. My God. That is all

John in 1965

Reposting because John looks so good in this picture. I don’t even care about the anecdote. This is a beautiful man.

“John and I went hitchhiking. George and I did it a couple of times too. It was a way to get a holiday. Maybe our parents booked holidays, but we wouldn’t have known how to. So we would head out, just the two of us, with our guitars. John was older, but I was in on the decision about where we might go. He’d got a hundred pounds from his uncle, who was a dentist in Edinburgh, for his twenty-first birthday, and we decided we’d hitchhike to Spain by way of Paris. We’d start over on the other side of a particular bridge because that’s where all of the long-distance lorries started. We’d wear little bowler hats to get their attention! When we got the lift, we sat together; we’d experience the lorry driver together. We knew what it was like to go on the cross-channel ferry; we knew what it was like to try and hang out in Paris. We would walk for miles around the city, sit in bars near Rue des Anglais, visit Montmartre and the Folies Bergère. We felt like we were fully paid-up existentialists and could write a novel from what we learnt in a week there, so we never did make it to Spain. We’d been together so much that if you had a question, we would both pretty much come up with the same answer.”

Paul McCartney, “Ticket to Ride” from The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present (2021)