Podcast appearances and mentions of Pattie Boyd

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Pattie Boyd

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Best podcasts about Pattie Boyd

Latest podcast episodes about Pattie Boyd

Eso te pasa por...
Pattie Boyd – La musa que encendió el rock

Eso te pasa por...

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2025 27:17


A veces, una sola persona puede ser el epicentro de grandes historias. Pattie Boyd fue eso: musa, inspiración y testigo de dos de las canciones de amor más icónicas de la historia: Something y Layla.Con Adriana y Candy, reflexionamos sobre lo que significa ser la chispa de una historia que no escribiste tú. Hablamos del amor, la traición, el deseo y la presión de ser la imagen idealizada de alguien más. Porque a veces, ser la musa no es un privilegio, sino una cárcel.

Blokhuis de Podcast
#14 - Eric Clapton, Layla en Pattie Boyd (S06)

Blokhuis de Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2025 32:50


Afgelopen week bereikte Clapton de respectabele leeftijd van 80 jaar. Een mooie reden om naar het hoogtepunt uit zijn enorme oeuvre te kijken: Layla. Het nummer is een wanhopige cry for love gericht aan de vrouw van zijn beste vriend: Pattie Boyd was in 1970 getrouwd met George Harrison. Een podcast over Clapton, Boyd en Harrison.

In VOGUE: The 1990s
Aimee Lou Wood Reflects On White Lotus Ahead of the Finale

In VOGUE: The 1990s

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 3, 2025 46:37


This week, Aimee Lou Wood graces The Run-Through to catch us up on all things White Lotus just days ahead of the thrilling finale. Culture writer Hannah Jackson joins Chloe and gets answers to our most pressing fan questions: Why does her character Chelsea stay with the evasive Rick? What was up with the coconut bra? Might her next role be Pattie Boyd in The Beatles biopics like those pesky internet rumors suggest? And, most importantly, who dies??? While Aimee doesn't give away every answer, she does reflect on the shock of returning to life in London after being sequestered with her cast and crew for seven months.Plus, Chioma shares the goodies she got at the vintage sale, and shares her sleep routine.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Music History Today
Eric Clapton Marries Pattie Boyd, Cops Shut Down U2 Concert: Music History Today Podcast March 27

Music History Today

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2025 8:51


On the March 27 edition of the Music History Today podcast, Eric Clapton marries his muse, U2 gets shut down by the cops & gets it all on tape, & you can sing happy birthday to the woman who wrote it.For more music history, subscribe to my Spotify Channel or subscribe to the audio version of my music history podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts fromALL MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST NETWORK LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday

Significant Lovers
118. When Eric Clapton Met Pattie Boyd *TEASER*

Significant Lovers

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 26, 2025 8:17


“Have you ever loved a woman / so much you tremble in pain?” Eric Clapton certainly has. As he wrote on the album “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,” Eric Clapton was deeply, madly in love with his best friend George Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd. Picking up from last week, we tell Eric's side of this iconic rock ‘n roll love triangle. There's a voodoo spell, two love letters, obsession, music, and more. What happened when Pattie flew to meet Eric in Boston? And who was really her true love: George or Eric? Listen and find out! We spend the beginning of the episode discussing listeners' favorite love triangles in pop culture. Jump to 18:39 to get into Eric and ‘Layla'! Teaser: ***** This is a teaser for a bonus episode. You can listen to it in full on Patreon! About Significant LoversSignificant Lovers is a true-love podcast exploring celebrity couples and historic romances. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok @significantlovers, and contact us at significantlovers@gmail.com.Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for ‘fair use' for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

Significant Lovers
117. When George Harrison Met Pattie Boyd (& Eric Clapton)

Significant Lovers

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 19, 2025 94:57


We've covered John (and Yoko) and Paul (and Linda). It's time to finally discuss “the Quiet Beatle”—George Harrison. When George Harrison first laid eyes on Pattie Boyd in 1964, there was an instant connection. It was on the set of the Beatles' film ‘Hard Days Night,' where Pattie played a schoolgirl with one line. Off set, Pattie was an ‘it girl' model of the swinging ‘60s London, known for her iconic style. George asked her on a date, she ditched her current beau, and the two began a whirlwind romance. Later that same year, another character came into George's life: the guitar legend Eric Clapton. The two bonded over their love of guitar and soon became best friends. As the years went by, and Pattie and George's relationship struggled, Eric began falling in love with his best friend's wife. Known as one of the strangest, wildest love triangles in rock and roll, hear the story of George, Pattie, and Eric. Next week we'll continue with Eric's side of the story… ***** About Significant LoversSignificant Lovers is a true-love podcast exploring celebrity couples and historic romances. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok @significantlovers, and contact us at significantlovers@gmail.com.Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for ‘fair use' for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

Trashy Divorces
S26E16: George Harrison (A Game Day Trashy Divorces Encore Plus!)

Trashy Divorces

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2025 44:29


As you may know, there's a big football game coinciding with our regular Sunday releases, so we thought we'd indulge some trashy champions of our own: The Fab Four. In this Beatles-themed Game Day spectacular, we begin with Alicia's Season One story of the terribly trashy love triangle between Beatle George Harrison, his wife, model Pattie Boyd, and guitar legend Eric Clapton. Want early, ad-free episodes, regular Dumpster Dives, bonus divorces, limited series, Zoom hangouts, and more? Join us at patreon.com/trashydivorces! Want a personalized message for someone in your life? Check us out on Cameo! To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to info@amplitudemediapartners.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fans On The Run: A Podcast Made By, For And About Beatles Fans
Fans On The Run - Mary Devlin (Ep. 92)

Fans On The Run: A Podcast Made By, For And About Beatles Fans

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 25, 2025 82:10


It's time for another episode of Fans On The Run! Joining me today is another fellow young-er Beatle fan, musician/influencer Mary Devlin! (aka @beatledirt)   We cover a lot, including making friends on The Beatles' Facebook page back in the day, posing out front of the Apple store with the Beatle standees when they went to iTunes, Ethan's "Now And Then" Abbey Road Studios story, the evolution of online Beatles fandom, Pattie Boyd's everlasting style, another round of praising "Revolver", the existential dread of being "cringe", drawing a gap in your teeth on with makeup, and so much more!   This episode is available to stream wherever good podcasts can be heard!   Keep up with Mary: https://linktr.ee/maredevlin12   Follow us elsewhere: https://linktr.ee/fansontherun   Contact fansontherunpodcast@gmail.com

Lucio91.9FM Podcast
Sex On Rocks: Matrimonio Boyd Y Harrison

Lucio91.9FM Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2025 2:03


@Lucio91.9FM te cuenta cómo fue el matrimonio entre el “Beatle Silencioso” y la exmodelo Pattie Boyd.

Rock N Roll Pantheon
My Rock Moment: Chris O'Dell, Author and Tour Manager

Rock N Roll Pantheon

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 2, 2025 76:14


Chris O'Dell has led a fascinating life; one that planted her firmly in rock royalty's inner circle in the 60s and 70s. Befriending Derek Taylor in LA, she soon found herself working for the Beatles' Apple Corps in London. While there she was present for the recording of The White Album, Abbey Road, Let it Be, and sang in the Hey Jude chorus. She sat on the rooftop while the Beatles played their last live performance in January of 1969 and even lived with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd at Friar Park. She went on to be one of the first - if not, THE first - female tour managers, working with the likes of George Harrison, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan on his 'Rolling Thunder Revue' tour. She inspired George Harrison to pen the song, "Miss O'Dell,” she's the subject of Leon Russell's “Pisces Apple Lady” and “Hummingbird," she is the “woman down the hall,” in the Joni Mitchell song, “Coyote,” and her picture can be seen on the back cover of The Stones's 1972 masterpiece, Exile on Main Street. We cover a lot of ground in this episode, but to get the full story, check out her book and website with the links below: https://www.missodell.com Miss O'Dell: Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and the Women They Loved Playlist: Pisces Apple Lady - Leon Russell Hey Jude - The Beatles All Things Must Pass - George Harrison Miss O'Dell - George Harrison Torn and Frayed - The Rolling Stones Just Like a Woman - Bob Dylan Follow My Rock Moment on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/la_woman_rocks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rock N Roll Pantheon
Jenny Boyd, '60s Muse and Author of 'Icons of Rock: In Their Own Words'

Rock N Roll Pantheon

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2024 57:11


Jenny Boyd, though not a musician, is well-known in the music industry. Formerly married to Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, she's also Pattie Boyd's sister and sister-in-law to George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Jenny was surrounded by rock royalty from a young age and experienced many legendary moments in rock history as a result. Drawing on her deep connections in the rock world, Jenny wrote 'Icons of Rock: In Their Own Words' - a compilation of candid interviews with some of the greatest musicians of the '60s, 70s, 80s and today. Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, Don Henley, Eric Clapton and other rock giants draw back the curtain on their creative process, their thoughts on spirituality and the effect that drugs and alcohol may have had on their art. Infused with personal stories of her time in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, meeting George Harrison for the first time and her stay in India with The Beatles, Jenny and I discuss some of the most poignant interviews in the book. Get more details on the book with the links below: https://thejennyboyd.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Icons-Rock-Their-Behind-Famous/dp/1684815444 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Opperman Report
The Last Days of John Lennon

The Opperman Report

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 5, 2024 46:28


May Pang : John Lennon's Lost WeekendMonday Nov 9th 730 PM , May Pang is being honored with the Ambassador of Rock AwardLe Poisson Rouge 158 Bleeker St. NYhttp://rockersonbroadwayMay Pang, world-renowned confidant and companion of John Lennon, has been in the public eye for over three decades. Her career in the music industry spans over 40 years, beginning with Allen Klein's company, ABKCO Industries, the firm which managed the Beatles, Apple Corps. Ltd. and the Rolling Stones besides having an extensive music publishing catalogue which included songs by Sam Cooke.In 1970, Lennon and Yoko Ono hired Pang as their personal assistant. She would eventually become their production coordinator -- playing a key role in records by Lennon, Ono and Harry Nilsson. In 1974, Pang was awarded an RIAA Gold Album Award for her work on Lennon's Walls and Bridges, the #1 hit album which included his first and only #1 single in his lifetime, "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night." She can also be heard singing on "#9 Dream," the second single from the album.In the late 1970s working for Island Records, Pang coordinated all activities related to the release of albums by Robert Palmer, Third World, and Bob Marley and the Wailers. By the early 1980s, she was one of the leading professional managers in the music publishing industry, working with several unknown songwriters and successfully obtaining coverage by such artists as Diana Ross, Judas Priest, The Four Tops, Ullanda McCullough and Air Supply.During this period, Pang decided to set the record straight about her relationship with Lennon. Warner Books published her memoir, Loving John, in 1983. The book detailed her liaison and working association with the late Beatle and shed light on his relationships with his first son, Julian, as well as Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.During the last two decades, Pang has appeared in every major news and magazine publication worldwide (NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, The Daily News, UK's Mail On Sunday, Vogue online, Germany's Die Seite Drei, Marie Claire, People, etc.) and has been a guest on such national TV shows as Good Morning America, Howard Stern, Good Morning LA, CBS Sunday Morning, Court TV and Entertainment Tonight.Pang has also designed a unique collection of stainless steel Feng Shui jewelry and accent furniture. She has a weekly internet radio show with co-host Cynthia Neilson called Dinner Specials on BlogTalkRadio. Com. Pang continues her consulting work on music for films and is still an advisory board member of Women In Music. She also serves as an advisory board member, along with Julian Lennon, Jeff Bridges to name a few at the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) organization. ACT deals with saving the rainforest and its indigenous people. This was started by world known ethnobotanist Dr. Mark J. Plotkin and conservationist Liliana Madrigal.In 2008, St. Martin's Press released Instamatic Karma, a collection of Pang's personal photographs of John Lennon. Fine art prints of these portraits have been exhibited in major galleries across the country.Also in the Fall of 2014, she released a book only for the German market called John Lennon & May Pang, Another Love. She had received numerous press coverage in some of Germany's largest newspaper publications.Pang has lectured and given talks at various events across the country including public libraries and most recently at Berklee College of Music in Boston sponsored in part by theLiberal Arts Dept. While there, she also lectured the John Lennon Songwriting class. She also gave a talk at The Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp in Las Vegas as a Special Guest Speaker.She has also been asked to be a guest speaker along with guests Donovan, Peter Asher, Pattie Boyd and others at The International Beatles Week 2015 in Liverpool this coming August.In this age of “social awareness”, Pang was asked to participate as an artist on a CD called: ALL ABOUT BULLIES…BIG AND SMALL. The CD won a Grammy for The Best Children's CD category in 2012.John Lennon: The Lost Weekend- Living, Loving and Making Rock & RollShe shared his life, his music and his love. She was his intimate companion during the time known as- THE LOST WEEKEND.May Pang was twenty-two. She was John and Yoko's personal assistant, a trusted member of their inner circle of carefully chosen friends and associates. She budgeted and contracted for their albums and became an invaluable part of their creative and personal lives.When John and Yoko separated, May was enlisted to care for John as he embarked on a period known as "The Lost Weekend" – an intense period of enormous creativity and violent self-destructiveness. She lived, worked, and fell deeply in love with Lennon.Together they shared a rocky romance, with Yoko waiting in the wings for John's return. This is her record of that time, a time when John was recording, seeing friends, exploring the world and confronting his own inner demons. It is a personal account written of life with Lennon by a woman who loved and was loved by one of the most fascinating creative men of our time. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

The Opperman Report
May Pang : John Lennon's Lost Weekend (2015)

The Opperman Report

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 5, 2024 120:13


May Pang : John Lennon's Lost WeekendMonday Nov 9th 730 PM , May Pang is being honored with the Ambassador of Rock AwardLe Poisson Rouge 158 Bleeker St. NYhttp://rockersonbroadwayMay Pang, world-renowned confidant and companion of John Lennon, has been in the public eye for over three decades. Her career in the music industry spans over 40 years, beginning with Allen Klein's company, ABKCO Industries, the firm which managed the Beatles, Apple Corps. Ltd. and the Rolling Stones besides having an extensive music publishing catalogue which included songs by Sam Cooke.In 1970, Lennon and Yoko Ono hired Pang as their personal assistant. She would eventually become their production coordinator -- playing a key role in records by Lennon, Ono and Harry Nilsson. In 1974, Pang was awarded an RIAA Gold Album Award for her work on Lennon's Walls and Bridges, the #1 hit album which included his first and only #1 single in his lifetime, "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night." She can also be heard singing on "#9 Dream," the second single from the album.In the late 1970s working for Island Records, Pang coordinated all activities related to the release of albums by Robert Palmer, Third World, and Bob Marley and the Wailers. By the early 1980s, she was one of the leading professional managers in the music publishing industry, working with several unknown songwriters and successfully obtaining coverage by such artists as Diana Ross, Judas Priest, The Four Tops, Ullanda McCullough and Air Supply.During this period, Pang decided to set the record straight about her relationship with Lennon. Warner Books published her memoir, Loving John, in 1983. The book detailed her liaison and working association with the late Beatle and shed light on his relationships with his first son, Julian, as well as Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.During the last two decades, Pang has appeared in every major news and magazine publication worldwide (NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, The Daily News, UK's Mail On Sunday, Vogue online, Germany's Die Seite Drei, Marie Claire, People, etc.) and has been a guest on such national TV shows as Good Morning America, Howard Stern, Good Morning LA, CBS Sunday Morning, Court TV and Entertainment Tonight.Pang has also designed a unique collection of stainless steel Feng Shui jewelry and accent furniture. She has a weekly internet radio show with co-host Cynthia Neilson called Dinner Specials on BlogTalkRadio. Com. Pang continues her consulting work on music for films and is still an advisory board member of Women In Music. She also serves as an advisory board member, along with Julian Lennon, Jeff Bridges to name a few at the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) organization. ACT deals with saving the rainforest and its indigenous people. This was started by world known ethnobotanist Dr. Mark J. Plotkin and conservationist Liliana Madrigal.In 2008, St. Martin's Press released Instamatic Karma, a collection of Pang's personal photographs of John Lennon. Fine art prints of these portraits have been exhibited in major galleries across the country.Also in the Fall of 2014, she released a book only for the German market called John Lennon & May Pang, Another Love. She had received numerous press coverage in some of Germany's largest newspaper publications.Pang has lectured and given talks at various events across the country including public libraries and most recently at Berklee College of Music in Boston sponsored in part by theLiberal Arts Dept. While there, she also lectured the John Lennon Songwriting class. She also gave a talk at The Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp in Las Vegas as a Special Guest Speaker.She has also been asked to be a guest speaker along with guests Donovan, Peter Asher, Pattie Boyd and others at The International Beatles Week 2015 in Liverpool this coming August.In this age of “social awareness”, Pang was asked to participate as an artist on a CD called: ALL ABOUT BULLIES…BIG AND SMALL. The CD won a Grammy for The Best Children's CD category in 2012.John Lennon: The Lost Weekend- Living, Loving and Making Rock & RollShe shared his life, his music and his love. She was his intimate companion during the time known as- THE LOST WEEKEND.May Pang was twenty-two. She was John and Yoko's personal assistant, a trusted member of their inner circle of carefully chosen friends and associates. She budgeted and contracted for their albums and became an invaluable part of their creative and personal lives.When John and Yoko separated, May was enlisted to care for John as he embarked on a period known as "The Lost Weekend" – an intense period of enormous creativity and violent self-destructiveness. She lived, worked, and fell deeply in love with Lennon.Together they shared a rocky romance, with Yoko waiting in the wings for John's return. This is her record of that time, a time when John was recording, seeing friends, exploring the world and confronting his own inner demons. It is a personal account written of life with Lennon by a woman who loved and was loved by one of the most fascinating creative men of our time. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

The Opperman Report
May Pang : John Lennon's Lost Weekend, The Film

The Opperman Report

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 5, 2024 123:18


May Pang : John Lennon's Lost WeekendMonday Nov 9th 730 PM , May Pang is being honored with the Ambassador of Rock AwardLe Poisson Rouge 158 Bleeker St. NYhttp://rockersonbroadwayMay Pang, world-renowned confidant and companion of John Lennon, has been in the public eye for over three decades. Her career in the music industry spans over 40 years, beginning with Allen Klein's company, ABKCO Industries, the firm which managed the Beatles, Apple Corps. Ltd. and the Rolling Stones besides having an extensive music publishing catalogue which included songs by Sam Cooke.In 1970, Lennon and Yoko Ono hired Pang as their personal assistant. She would eventually become their production coordinator -- playing a key role in records by Lennon, Ono and Harry Nilsson. In 1974, Pang was awarded an RIAA Gold Album Award for her work on Lennon's Walls and Bridges, the #1 hit album which included his first and only #1 single in his lifetime, "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night." She can also be heard singing on "#9 Dream," the second single from the album.In the late 1970s working for Island Records, Pang coordinated all activities related to the release of albums by Robert Palmer, Third World, and Bob Marley and the Wailers. By the early 1980s, she was one of the leading professional managers in the music publishing industry, working with several unknown songwriters and successfully obtaining coverage by such artists as Diana Ross, Judas Priest, The Four Tops, Ullanda McCullough and Air Supply.During this period, Pang decided to set the record straight about her relationship with Lennon. Warner Books published her memoir, Loving John, in 1983. The book detailed her liaison and working association with the late Beatle and shed light on his relationships with his first son, Julian, as well as Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.During the last two decades, Pang has appeared in every major news and magazine publication worldwide (NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, The Daily News, UK's Mail On Sunday, Vogue online, Germany's Die Seite Drei, Marie Claire, People, etc.) and has been a guest on such national TV shows as Good Morning America, Howard Stern, Good Morning LA, CBS Sunday Morning, Court TV and Entertainment Tonight.Pang has also designed a unique collection of stainless steel Feng Shui jewelry and accent furniture. She has a weekly internet radio show with co-host Cynthia Neilson called Dinner Specials on BlogTalkRadio. Com. Pang continues her consulting work on music for films and is still an advisory board member of Women In Music. She also serves as an advisory board member, along with Julian Lennon, Jeff Bridges to name a few at the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) organization. ACT deals with saving the rainforest and its indigenous people. This was started by world known ethnobotanist Dr. Mark J. Plotkin and conservationist Liliana Madrigal.In 2008, St. Martin's Press released Instamatic Karma, a collection of Pang's personal photographs of John Lennon. Fine art prints of these portraits have been exhibited in major galleries across the country.Also in the Fall of 2014, she released a book only for the German market called John Lennon & May Pang, Another Love. She had received numerous press coverage in some of Germany's largest newspaper publications.Pang has lectured and given talks at various events across the country including public libraries and most recently at Berklee College of Music in Boston sponsored in part by theLiberal Arts Dept. While there, she also lectured the John Lennon Songwriting class. She also gave a talk at The Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp in Las Vegas as a Special Guest Speaker.She has also been asked to be a guest speaker along with guests Donovan, Peter Asher, Pattie Boyd and others at The International Beatles Week 2015 in Liverpool this coming August.In this age of “social awareness”, Pang was asked to participate as an artist on a CD called: ALL ABOUT BULLIES…BIG AND SMALL. The CD won a Grammy for The Best Children's CD category in 2012.John Lennon: The Lost Weekend- Living, Loving and Making Rock & RollShe shared his life, his music and his love. She was his intimate companion during the time known as- THE LOST WEEKEND.May Pang was twenty-two. She was John and Yoko's personal assistant, a trusted member of their inner circle of carefully chosen friends and associates. She budgeted and contracted for their albums and became an invaluable part of their creative and personal lives.When John and Yoko separated, May was enlisted to care for John as he embarked on a period known as "The Lost Weekend" – an intense period of enormous creativity and violent self-destructiveness. She lived, worked, and fell deeply in love with Lennon.Together they shared a rocky romance, with Yoko waiting in the wings for John's return. This is her record of that time, a time when John was recording, seeing friends, exploring the world and confronting his own inner demons. It is a personal account written of life with Lennon by a woman who loved and was loved by one of the most fascinating creative men of our time. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

Follow Your Dream - Music And Much More!
Madeline Bocaro - Author Of The Yoko Ono Biography “In Your Mind: The Infinite Universe Of Yoko Ono”!

Follow Your Dream - Music And Much More!

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 23, 2024 23:27


Madeline Bocaro is a rock and roll journalist and author of the definitive Yoko Ono biography called “In Your Mind - The Infinite Universe Of Yoko Ono”. The book has received the blessings of Sean Ono Lennon, Elliot Mintz, a close friend of Yoko's, Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's former wife, and Mark Lewisohn, the Beatles biographer. Madeline has also contributed to books and documentaries about David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Mick Ronson. And she's been a writer for Mojo, Dazed & Confused and Goldmine magazines.My featured song is my reimagined version of The Beatles' “I Wanna Be Your Girl” from the album East Side Sessions by my band Project Grand Slam. Spotify link.---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here .To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“THE GIFT” is Robert's new single featuring his song arranged by Grammy winning arranger Michael Abene. Praised by David Amram, John Helliwell, Joe La Barbera, Tony Carey, Fay Claassen, Antonio Farao, Danny Gottlieb and Leslie Mandoki.Click HERE for all links.—-------------------------------------“LOU'S BLUES” is Robert's recent single. Called “Fantastic! Great playing and production!” (Mark Egan - Pat Metheny Group/Elements) and “Digging it!” (Peter Erskine - Weather Report)!Click HERE for all links.—----------------------------------------“THE RICH ONES”. Robert's recent single. With guest artist Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears) on flugelhorn. Click HERE for all links.—---------------------------------------“MILES BEHIND”, Robert's debut album, recorded in 1994, was “lost” for the last 30 years. It's now been released for streaming. Featuring Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears), Anton Fig (The David Letterman Show), Al Foster (Miles Davis), Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Jon Lucien and many more. Called “Hip, Tight and Edgy!” Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's latest Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Madeline at:www.inyourmindbook.comwww.conceptualbooks.comwww.madelinex.comhttps://linktr.ee/conceptualbooks Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com

Unveiling the Legends: Dolls of the 60s & 70s
Chris O'Dell: Pisces Apple Lady

Unveiling the Legends: Dolls of the 60s & 70s

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 11, 2024 62:19


“Why don't you call me Miss O'Dell?” We're back after a short break! From the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, ELO, Santana, and all the bands in between, she saw it all. She's the woman in the hall in Joni Mitchell's' Coyote, Leon Russel's Pisces Apple Lady, the blonde seated next to Yoko and Maureen on the rooftop, and Layla's bestie. Chris O'Dell was one of rock-and-roll's first female tour managers and put in the work to keep all these boys out of trouble…for the most part! Hear all about Miss O'Dell on this episode of the Dolls Podcast, available wherever you stream your podcasts

Rock & Roll Nightmares
Chris O'Dell: Author, "Miss O'Dell" (memoir and documentary)

Rock & Roll Nightmares

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 3, 2024 28:16


Staci's guest is Chris O'Dell, the author of an incredible memoir called “Miss O'Dell.” Chris worked for Apple Corps and was in the studio when the Beatles recorded The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be, and she sang in the Hey Jude chorus. She lived with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd and she's the subject of Leon Russell's song, Pisces Apple Lady. She's “the woman down the hall” in Joni Mitchell's song Coyote, the “mystery woman” pictured on the Stones album Exile on Main Street, and the Miss O'Dell of George Harrison's song. She's even in Staci's latest book, “Rock & Roll Nightmares: Phantom Chords,” which has a chapter on the haunted goings-on at Friar Park, where she lived when she was working for George Harrison. She has a lot to say about Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, John and Yoko, and her upcoming "Miss O'Dell" documentary.

Perles de Culture
“Layla” d'Eric Clapton

Perles de Culture

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2024 11:22


Mars 1970, le guitariste des Beatles, George Harrison et sa compagne Pattie Boyd emménagent dans un magnifique manoir victorien à l'Est de Londres… Perles de Culture est un podcast Cultura produit par Création Collective Textes de Julien Bordier racontés par David Abiker Curation : Frédéric Bénaïm - Rédaction en chef : Eric Le Ray - Réalisation : Léo Gagnon Illustration dessinée par Anne Pastoureau - Générique : Alto Music - Naming et Création Graphique : Saint John's Enregistrements à l'Arrière-Boutique Studio Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Music In My Shoes
E36 Something about Layla is Like a Box of Chocolates

Music In My Shoes

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 14, 2024 33:18 Transcription Available


Send us a Text Message.Get ready for an exhilarating journey through the music history as we uncover the star-studded wedding reception of Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd. Promise you'll learn not just about the glitz and glamour of that eventful day in May 1979, but also about the intricate love triangle between Clapton, Boyd, and George Harrison that birthed legendary songs like "Layla" and "Wonderful Tonight." Imagine being a fly on the wall at Clapton's English estate, surrounded by icons such as Mick Jagger, Elton John, David Bowie, and three former Beatles. We'll take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of this epic event, and share the fascinating story of how Harrison's visit to Clapton's garden inspired "Here Comes the Sun."As we journey further, we'll reminisce about the unforgettable soundtrack of Forrest Gump, filled with timeless tracks from Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, and The Supremes. Ever wondered if it deserved to be 'Best Picture'? We've got you covered. We'll also explore the magic of the album 'The Kids are Alright' by The Who. A greatest hits package made up of live performances that includes Keith Moon's last performance with the Band before his death. Join us for a reflective, educational, and musically rich episode that promises to keep the music playing!Learn Something New orRemember Something OldPlease Like and Follow our Facebook page Music In My Shoes. You can contact us at musicinmyshoes@gmail.com.

Unveiling the Legends: Dolls of the 60s & 70s
Marijke Koger: The life behind the Wonderwall

Unveiling the Legends: Dolls of the 60s & 70s

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2024 57:40


Ever wonder who designed Pattie Boyd's iconic psychedelic fashions? Eric Clapton's most famous guitar? Jane Birkin's beautiful costumes in Wonderwall? One of the largest murals in the world at LA's Aquarius Theater? Host Abby takes us on a rainbow journey through the life of one artist, visionary, and leader of The Fool Marijke Koger. Buckle up: this episode is “tohuwabohu”!This episode is packed with art, follow @thedollspod on Instagram to see it!https://www.instagram.com/thedollspod/We want to thank our dear friend Michael Tegio for the wondeful intro tune!

Paul Maleary's Ex-Job Downloaded Podcast
Peter Baylis - Photographer To The Stars

Paul Maleary's Ex-Job Downloaded Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 17, 2024 85:28


Peter Baylis is from the Metropolitan suburb of Bexley. He left school and pursued his career in photography by starting in a processing lab. He learned his craft by taking as many photographs as possible and submitting them to photo editors and hope that they would use the image for a story.During his career Peter has photographed the great and the good. His first interaction with a celebrity was as an assistant's assistant was with Elton John. His most saleable image is of Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd.Peter worked with the Who both as a photographer and security, David Carradine was the most awkward subject and Keith Moon one of the best!Peter took images of the then Prince Charles at Belmarsh Prison and the late Queen Mother who posed for him!It was a regular visitor called Guy Robin (French Music Journalist) Who introduced him to an unknown band formed by Gordon Sumner, Stewart Copeland, and Henry Padovani – The Police were photographed, Padovani replaced by Andy Summers and the rest as they say is history. Peter toured with the band and went to the iconic CBGBs in New York. Mel Brooks Pulled a “Goochie” at Peter in protest at the noise made by the camera, this image was captured and is iconic.Making requests of appropriate authorities Peter was able to spend time with the Paras, On a submarine and flew as a passenger on an F1-11! Having a brass neck was the greatest asset that Peter has!Pete Townsend and David Essex posed for Peter at the Cannes Film Festival. He snapped an image of David Cassidy as he left a theatre in Leicester Square.He was invited by the producer of Shout at The Devil to photograph Lee Marvin and he went on to meet Roger Moore and Barbra ParkinPeters career was placed in jeopardy when he was violently assaulted by 3 Sunderland fans. This caused Peter to lose sight for a period of time and impacted on him for 3 years.During his time of treatment he became friends with Rodri Tasker Watkins , Son of Lord Tasker Watkins (Aberfan) https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/feb/03/legal-hero-tasker-watkinsPeter spent time photographing with the Boston and NYPD he photographed the work carried out by the officers.Peters role evolved in the Metropolitan Police from Volunteer to being employed.Having joined the Metropolitan Police in their media department as the official photographer he met the Late Queen having be requested by the Borough Commander to take photographs and he became the subject of the image. His career concluded when Theresa May assisted in reducing the budget for UK Policing. 4k met employees lost their job. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More Than A Muse
Behind 'The Beatles' Part One: Yoko Ono, Patti Boyd, Cynthia Powell & Olivia Arias

More Than A Muse

Play Episode Listen Later May 27, 2024 94:38


This week, Stauney and Sadie explore the iconic muses behind the most famous band of all time: The Beatles. In part one of this episode, we delve into the band's early days and eventual breakup, touch on the global phenomenon of Beatlemania, and then focus on the women who supported The Beatles, often at great personal cost. We discuss John Lennon's first wife, art student Cynthia Powell, their tumultuous secret relationship, as well as his later, controversial love, multimedia artist Yoko Ono, who is often blamed for the band's split. Next, we look at George Harrison's relationship with model and photographer Pattie Boyd, celebrated as one of rock and roll's greatest muses, followed by his marriage to poet and producer Olivia Arias, who literally saved George's life during a home invasion. These incredibly talented and accomplished women deserve their time in the spotlight, showcasing their significant contributions to the success of the famous London band. Tune in next week as we continue with the women behind Paul and Ringo! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frosty, Heidi and Frank Podcast
Heidi and Frank - 03/27/24

Frosty, Heidi and Frank Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2024


Topics discussed on today's show: National Viagra and Whiskey Day, Pattie Boyd, Quiet on Set, Birthdays, History Quiz, Softball Team Names, Gas Prices, Trump Stock, The Bachelor, 20 in 24, House Sitters, Listener DM, Good News, Deep Cut Face Off, and Apologies.

El celobert
Jennifer Juniper: la incre

El celobert

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2024 61:58


S'ha escrit molt sobre Pattie Boyd, la dona que, entre altres coses, va inspirar les millors can

El celobert
Jennifer Juniper: la incre

El celobert

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2024 61:58


S'ha escrit molt sobre Pattie Boyd, la dona que, entre altres coses, va inspirar les millors can

Instant Trivia
Episode 1136 - State sandwich - I'm latin intolerant - Beatlewomania - Current monarchs - Pick a number from 1-10

Instant Trivia

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 21, 2024 6:56


Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1136, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: State Sandwich 1: It's sandwiched between Mississippi and Georgia. Alabama. 2: It's sandwiched between California and Utah. Nevada. 3: It's the cheesy filling between Illinois and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Wisconsin. 4: It's sandwiched between Oregon and Wyoming. Idaho. 5: It's sandwiched between Minnesota and Missouri. Iowa. Round 2. Category: I'M Latin Intolerant 1: I cannot tolerate this Latin phrase abbreviated A.D. when referring to the time since Jesus was born. Anno Domini. 2: I don't care that it's only 4 letters long; I'm not using this abbrev. phrase meaning "and others" in a crossword clue. et al.. 3: I certainly won't call you this word meaning "retired but still retaining the title of your old position". emeritus. 4: Not that I care but...it means "for the time being"; you'll find it as part of a Senate job title. pro tem. 5: It's a fact; there's no way I'm saying this phrase that means "in fact" (as in the man behind the scenes, perhaps). de facto. Round 3. Category: Beatlewomania 1: Lady Gaga was among the stars who joined her new "Plastic" band for a 2010 rendition of "Give Peace A Chance". Yoko Ono. 2: Ringo Starr wed first wife Maureen Cox in London in 1965; she'd been born in this Mersey River city in 1946. Liverpool. 3: Buddy Clark's 1947 chart-topping song "Linda" was written about the future wife of this Beatle (when she was 5 years old). Paul McCartney. 4: "Half of what I say is meaningless", John Lennon sang on "Julia", which bears the name of this woman in his life. his mother. 5: Before she was married to Eric Clapton, George Harrison wrote the song "Something" about her. Pattie Boyd. Round 4. Category: Current Monarchs 1: He spoke Catalan at the opening ceremonies of the 1992 Summer Olympics. King Juan Carlos (of Spain). 2: He is the reigning prince of Monaco. Prince Rainier. 3: Princess Stephanie of Monaco is his youngest child. Prince Rainier. 4: Bhumibol Adulyadej, not Yul Brynner, current rules this country. Thailand. 5: OPEC nation ruled by King Fahd ibn Abd al-Aziz. Saudi Arabia. Round 5. Category: Pick A Number From 1-10 1: The prefix kilo signifies 10 to the power of this. 3. 2: Number of singers in the group that hit No. 1 in 1970 with "ABC". (Jackson) 5. 3: You should know this number is an anagram and a homophone of the German word for "no". nine. 4: Legend says only Adrastus survived out of a group of this many heroes who took on Thebes. 7. 5: In 1816 Ferdinand I ruled over the kingdom of this many Sicilies. 2. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used

Something About the Beatles
278: An Hour With Pattie Boyd

Something About the Beatles

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 17, 2024 60:06


Today is her 80th birthday, and given the attention being brought by the auction of some personal items through Christie's (see https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/pattie-boyd-collection/lots/3508 ), the time was right for a conversation. We made the most of the hour, given the demand for interviews right about now, but among the things discussed were:  Meeting George on the set of A … 278: An Hour With Pattie Boyd Read More »

Bob Sirott
Pattie Boyd recalls what it was like to have George Harrison write a song for her

Bob Sirott

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2024


Bob Sirott is celebrating The Beatles' 60th anniversary of visiting America. English model and photographer Pattie Boyd joins Bob to talk about the first time she heard The Beatles song “Something,” how she was discovered, and how she fell in love with George Harrison. She also discusses what the breakup of The Beatles was like, […]

Le Double Expresso RTL2
L'INTÉGRALE - Zaoui dans Le Double Expresso RTL2 (01/02/24)

Le Double Expresso RTL2

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2024 134:22


Zaoui était de retour dans le Double Expresso RTL2 ce vendredi 1er avril. Il a répondu aux questions de Grégory Asher et de Justine Salmon et a interprété son nouveau titre "Stigmate" en direct de la station Pop-Rock. L'info qu'il faut - Une startup française veut vous faire glisser sans neige - Le job de rêve des 18-24 ans Le winner du jour : - Pattie Boyd vend aux enchères la correspondance de son triangle amoureux avec George Harrison et Eric Clapton - Le produit bien spécifique que Michel Sardou a exigé juste avant son concert à Toulouse Les savoirs inutile : Le plus long mot du monde est un mot anglais. Le Bonus : Un magasin où tout est gratuit Le blind test du Double Expresso RTL2 Le jeu surprise : Mariane de Montrond Les Bains près de St Etienne remporte une croisière fluviale en France avec Le Boat. La banque RTL2 : Sébastien de Tarnos près de Bayonne remporte une PS5 slim. Mélanie de Corbas près de Lyon repart avec un vinyle dédicacé.

Daily Easy Spanish
Los detalles del triángulo amoroso de Eric Clapton y George Harrison con la musa de ambos que han revelado unas cartas subastadas

Daily Easy Spanish

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 29, 2024 22:12


Mientras la exmodelo Pattie Boyd estaba casada con el miembro de los Beatles George Harrison recibió apasionadas cartas de amor de Eric Clapton, con quien se casó en segundas nupcias y cuyos detalles salieron a la luz al subastarse las misivas.

BC the Beatles
The New Beatles Biopics!! What We Know and What We Want

BC the Beatles

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 28, 2024 55:57


Four new Beatles biopics are coming, and we're obsessed! Oscar- and TONY-award winning director Sam Mendes will direct the films, slated for 2027, with full life rights for all four Beatles. We break down what we know so far, speculate on what's to come, and opine on our dream casts. Plus, we look at Pattie Boyd's upcoming auction full of memories of her time with both George Harrison and Eric Clapton, and congratulate Paul on being reunited with his original Hofner bass. Beatles Get a Biopic. A Fab Four of Them, Actually (NY Times) The Pattie Boyd Collection at Christie's Auction House Paul McCartney's First Hofner Bass is Finally Returned (Bass Magazine)   --------------------- Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X for photos, videos, and more from this episode & past episodes — we're @bcthebeatles everywhere. Follow BC the Beatles on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening now. Buy us a coffee! www.ko-fi.com/bcthebeatles Contact us at bcthebeatles@gmail.com.

An Impossible Way Of Life
Episode 307 - Jimmy Page vs Jerry Garcia

An Impossible Way Of Life

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 28, 2024 64:52


Nice episode today.  Sat down with some tea and discussed Paul McCartney's shock and disgust that Foreigner aren't in the Rock n' Roll hall of fame, Don Henley's current Hotel California court case, Clapton's love letters to Pattie Boyd - and of course ranked Jimmy and Jerry.

The Opperman Report
May Pang : John Lennon's Lost Weekend

The Opperman Report

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2024 123:18


May Pang : John Lennon's Lost WeekendMonday Nov 9th 730 PM , May Pang is being honored with the Ambassador of Rock AwardLe Poisson Rouge 158 Bleeker St. NYhttp://rockersonbroadwayMay Pang, world-renowned confidant and companion of John Lennon, has been in the public eye for over three decades. Her career in the music industry spans over 40 years, beginning with Allen Klein's company, ABKCO Industries, the firm which managed the Beatles, Apple Corps. Ltd. and the Rolling Stones besides having an extensive music publishing catalogue which included songs by Sam Cooke.In 1970, Lennon and Yoko Ono hired Pang as their personal assistant. She would eventually become their production coordinator -- playing a key role in records by Lennon, Ono and Harry Nilsson. In 1974, Pang was awarded an RIAA Gold Album Award for her work on Lennon's Walls and Bridges, the #1 hit album which included his first and only #1 single in his lifetime, "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night." She can also be heard singing on "#9 Dream," the second single from the album.In the late 1970s working for Island Records, Pang coordinated all activities related to the release of albums by Robert Palmer, Third World, and Bob Marley and the Wailers. By the early 1980s, she was one of the leading professional managers in the music publishing industry, working with several unknown songwriters and successfully obtaining coverage by such artists as Diana Ross, Judas Priest, The Four Tops, Ullanda McCullough and Air Supply.During this period, Pang decided to set the record straight about her relationship with Lennon. Warner Books published her memoir, Loving John, in 1983. The book detailed her liaison and working association with the late Beatle and shed light on his relationships with his first son, Julian, as well as Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.During the last two decades, Pang has appeared in every major news and magazine publication worldwide (NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, The Daily News, UK's Mail On Sunday, Vogue online, Germany's Die Seite Drei, Marie Claire, People, etc.) and has been a guest on such national TV shows as Good Morning America, Howard Stern, Good Morning LA, CBS Sunday Morning, Court TV and Entertainment Tonight.Pang has also designed a unique collection of stainless steel Feng Shui jewelry and accent furniture. She has a weekly internet radio show with co-host Cynthia Neilson called Dinner Specials on BlogTalkRadio. Com. Pang continues her consulting work on music for films and is still an advisory board member of Women In Music. She also serves as an advisory board member, along with Julian Lennon, Jeff Bridges to name a few at the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) organization. ACT deals with saving the rainforest and its indigenous people. This was started by world known ethnobotanist Dr. Mark J. Plotkin and conservationist Liliana Madrigal.In 2008, St. Martin's Press released Instamatic Karma, a collection of Pang's personal photographs of John Lennon. Fine art prints of these portraits have been exhibited in major galleries across the country.Also in the Fall of 2014, she released a book only for the German market called John Lennon & May Pang, Another Love. She had received numerous press coverage in some of Germany's largest newspaper publications.Pang has lectured and given talks at various events across the country including public libraries and most recently at Berklee College of Music in Boston sponsored in part by theLiberal Arts Dept. While there, she also lectured the John Lennon Songwriting class. She also gave a talk at The Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp in Las Vegas as a Special Guest Speaker.She has also been asked to be a guest speaker along with guests Donovan, Peter Asher, Pattie Boyd and others at The International Beatles Week 2015 in Liverpool this coming August.In this age of “social awareness”, Pang was asked to participate as an artist on a CD called: ALL ABOUT BULLIES…BIG AND SMALL. The CD won a Grammy for The Best Children's CD category in 2012.John Lennon: The Lost Weekend- Living, Loving and Making Rock & RollShe shared his life, his music and his love. She was his intimate companion during the time known as- THE LOST WEEKEND.May Pang was twenty-two. She was John and Yoko's personal assistant, a trusted member of their inner circle of carefully chosen friends and associates. She budgeted and contracted for their albums and became an invaluable part of their creative and personal lives.When John and Yoko separated, May was enlisted to care for John as he embarked on a period known as "The Lost Weekend" – an intense period of enormous creativity and violent self-destructiveness. She lived, worked, and fell deeply in love with Lennon.Together they shared a rocky romance, with Yoko waiting in the wings for John's return. This is her record of that time, a time when John was recording, seeing friends, exploring the world and confronting his own inner demons. It is a personal account written of life with Lennon by a woman who loved and was loved by one of the most fascinating creative men of our time. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

The Style That Binds Us
Mick Fleetwood's ex wife, Jenny Boyd, gives us an inside look into Rock ‘n' Roll's most iconic musicians' creative processes

The Style That Binds Us

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2024 44:33


We are thrilled to welcome Jenny Boyd to The Style That Binds Us podcast. Jenny is a former model and has written the books, “Jennifer Juniper” and “Icons of Rock.” Jenny has a PhD in psychology. Jenny lived a whirlwind Rock ‘n' Roll' life during her 2 marriages to Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac. We previously had Jenny's sister, Pattie Boyd (who was married to George Harrison & Eric Clapton), on our podcast, & can't wait to talk to Jenny about her life, her books, musicians and more. We hope you enjoy! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/delia-folk8/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/delia-folk8/support

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 171: “Hey Jude” by the Beatles

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2023


Episode 171 looks at "Hey Jude", the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on "I Love You" by People!. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata Not really an error, but at one point I refer to Ornette Coleman as a saxophonist. While he was, he plays trumpet on the track that is excerpted after that. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. This time I also used Steve Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. I referred to Philip Norman's biographies of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, to Graeme Thomson's biography of George Harrison, Take a Sad Song by James Campion, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett, Those Were the Days 2.0 by Stephan Granados, and Sound Pictures by Kenneth Womack. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of “Hey Jude” is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but a remixed stereo mix is easily available on the new reissue of the 1967-70 compilation. The original mixes of the White Album are also, shockingly, out of print, but this 2018 remix is available for the moment. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick note -- this episode deals, among other topics, with child abandonment, spousal neglect, suicide attempts, miscarriage, rape accusations, and heroin addiction. If any of those topics are likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript rather than listening to this episode. It also, for once, contains a short excerpt of an expletive, but given that that expletive in that context has been regularly played on daytime radio without complaint for over fifty years, I suspect it can be excused. The use of mantra meditation is something that exists across religions, and which appears to have been independently invented multiple times, in multiple cultures. In the Western culture to which most of my listeners belong, it is now best known as an aspect of what is known as "mindfulness", a secularised version of Buddhism which aims to provide adherents with the benefits of the teachings of the Buddha but without the cosmology to which they are attached. But it turns up in almost every religious tradition I know of in one form or another. The idea of mantra meditation is a very simple one, and one that even has some basis in science. There is a mathematical principle in neurology and information science called the free energy principle which says our brains are wired to try to minimise how surprised we are --  our brain is constantly making predictions about the world, and then looking at the results from our senses to see if they match. If they do, that's great, and the brain will happily move on to its next prediction. If they don't, the brain has to update its model of the world to match the new information, make new predictions, and see if those new predictions are a better match. Every person has a different mental model of the world, and none of them match reality, but every brain tries to get as close as possible. This updating of the model to match the new information is called "thinking", and it uses up energy, and our bodies and brains have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible. This means that for many people, most of the time, thinking is unpleasant, and indeed much of the time that people have spent thinking, they've been thinking about how to stop themselves having to do it at all, and when they have managed to stop thinking, however briefly, they've experienced great bliss. Many more or less effective technologies have been created to bring about a more minimal-energy state, including alcohol, heroin, and barbituates, but many of these have unwanted side-effects, such as death, which people also tend to want to avoid, and so people have often turned to another technology. It turns out that for many people, they can avoid thinking by simply thinking about something that is utterly predictable. If they minimise the amount of sensory input, and concentrate on something that they can predict exactly, eventually they can turn off their mind, relax, and float downstream, without dying. One easy way to do this is to close your eyes, so you can't see anything, make your breath as regular as possible, and then concentrate on a sound that repeats over and over.  If you repeat a single phrase or word a few hundred times, that regular repetition eventually causes your mind to stop having to keep track of the world, and experience a peace that is, by all accounts, unlike any other experience. What word or phrase that is can depend very much on the tradition. In Transcendental Meditation, each person has their own individual phrase. In the Catholicism in which George Harrison and Paul McCartney were raised, popular phrases for this are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" or "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." In some branches of Buddhism, a popular mantra is "_NAMU MYŌHŌ RENGE KYŌ_". In the Hinduism to which George Harrison later converted, you can use "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare", "Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya" or "Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha". Those last two start with the syllable "Om", and indeed some people prefer to just use that syllable, repeating a single syllable over and over again until they reach a state of transcendence. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude" ("na na na na na na na")] We don't know much about how the Beatles first discovered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, except that it was thanks to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's then-wife. Unfortunately, her memory of how she first became involved in the Maharishi's Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as described in her autobiography, doesn't fully line up with other known facts. She talks about reading about the Maharishi in the paper with her friend Marie-Lise while George was away on tour, but she also places the date that this happened in February 1967, several months after the Beatles had stopped touring forever. We'll be seeing a lot more of these timing discrepancies as this story progresses, and people's memories increasingly don't match the events that happened to them. Either way, it's clear that Pattie became involved in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement a good length of time before her husband did. She got him to go along with her to one of the Maharishi's lectures, after she had already been converted to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, and they brought along John, Paul, and their partners (Ringo's wife Maureen had just given birth, so they didn't come). As we heard back in episode one hundred and fifty, that lecture was impressive enough that the group, plus their wives and girlfriends (with the exception of Maureen Starkey) and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, all went on a meditation retreat with the Maharishi at a holiday camp in Bangor, and it was there that they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead. The death of the man who had guided the group's career could not have come at a worse time for the band's stability.  The group had only recorded one song in the preceding two months -- Paul's "Your Mother Should Know" -- and had basically been running on fumes since completing recording of Sgt Pepper many months earlier. John's drug intake had increased to the point that he was barely functional -- although with the enthusiasm of the newly converted he had decided to swear off LSD at the Maharishi's urging -- and his marriage was falling apart. Similarly, Paul McCartney's relationship with Jane Asher was in a bad state, though both men were trying to repair their damaged relationships, while both George and Ringo were having doubts about the band that had made them famous. In George's case, he was feeling marginalised by John and Paul, his songs ignored or paid cursory attention, and there was less for him to do on the records as the group moved away from making guitar-based rock and roll music into the stranger areas of psychedelia. And Ringo, whose main memory of the recording of Sgt Pepper was of learning to play chess while the others went through the extensive overdubs that characterised that album, was starting to feel like his playing was deteriorating, and that as the only non-writer in the band he was on the outside to an extent. On top of that, the group were in the middle of a major plan to restructure their business. As part of their contract renegotiations with EMI at the beginning of 1967, it had been agreed that they would receive two million pounds -- roughly fifteen million pounds in today's money -- in unpaid royalties as a lump sum. If that had been paid to them as individuals, or through the company they owned, the Beatles Ltd, they would have had to pay the full top rate of tax on it, which as George had complained the previous year was over ninety-five percent. (In fact, he'd been slightly exaggerating the generosity of the UK tax system to the rich, as at that point the top rate of income tax was somewhere around ninety-seven and a half percent). But happily for them, a couple of years earlier the UK had restructured its tax laws and introduced a corporation tax, which meant that the profits of corporations were no longer taxed at the same high rate as income. So a new company had been set up, The Beatles & Co, and all the group's non-songwriting income was paid into the company. Each Beatle owned five percent of the company, and the other eighty percent was owned by a new partnership, a corporation that was soon renamed Apple Corps -- a name inspired by a painting that McCartney had liked by the artist Rene Magritte. In the early stages of Apple, it was very entangled with Nems, the company that was owned by Brian and Clive Epstein, and which was in the process of being sold to Robert Stigwood, though that sale fell through after Brian's death. The first part of Apple, Apple Publishing, had been set up in the summer of 1967, and was run by Terry Doran, a friend of Epstein's who ran a motor dealership -- most of the Apple divisions would be run by friends of the group rather than by people with experience in the industries in question. As Apple was set up during the point that Stigwood was getting involved with NEMS, Apple Publishing's initial offices were in the same building with, and shared staff with, two publishing companies that Stigwood owned, Dratleaf Music, who published Cream's songs, and Abigail Music, the Bee Gees' publishers. And indeed the first two songs published by Apple were copyrights that were gifted to the company by Stigwood -- "Listen to the Sky", a B-side by an obscure band called Sands: [Excerpt: Sands, "Listen to the Sky"] And "Outside Woman Blues", an arrangement by Eric Clapton of an old blues song by Blind Joe Reynolds, which Cream had copyrighted separately and released on Disraeli Gears: [Excerpt: Cream, "Outside Woman Blues"] But Apple soon started signing outside songwriters -- once Mike Berry, a member of Apple Publishing's staff, had sat McCartney down and explained to him what music publishing actually was, something he had never actually understood even though he'd been a songwriter for five years. Those songwriters, given that this was 1967, were often also performers, and as Apple Records had not yet been set up, Apple would try to arrange recording contracts for them with other labels. They started with a group called Focal Point, who got signed by badgering Paul McCartney to listen to their songs until he gave them Doran's phone number to shut them up: [Excerpt: Focal Point, "Sycamore Sid"] But the big early hope for Apple Publishing was a songwriter called George Alexander. Alexander's birth name had been Alexander Young, and he was the brother of George Young, who was a member of the Australian beat group The Easybeats, who'd had a hit with "Friday on My Mind": [Excerpt: The Easybeats, "Friday on My Mind"] His younger brothers Malcolm and Angus would go on to have a few hits themselves, but AC/DC wouldn't be formed for another five years. Terry Doran thought that Alexander should be a member of a band, because bands were more popular than solo artists at the time, and so he was placed with three former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had had some minor success. John Lennon suggested that the group be named Grapefruit, after a book he was reading by a conceptual artist of his acquaintance named Yoko Ono, and as Doran was making arrangements with Terry Melcher for a reciprocal publishing deal by which Melcher's American company would publish Apple songs in the US while Apple published songs from Melcher's company in the UK, it made sense for Melcher to also produce Grapefruit's first single, "Dear Delilah": [Excerpt: Grapefruit, "Dear Delilah"] That made number twenty-one in the UK when it came out in early 1968, on the back of publicity about Grapefruit's connection with the Beatles, but future singles by the band were much less successful, and like several other acts involved with Apple, they found that they were more hampered by the Beatles connection than helped. A few other people were signed to Apple Publishing early on, of whom the most notable was Jackie Lomax. Lomax had been a member of a minor Merseybeat group, the Undertakers, and after they had split up, he'd been signed by Brian Epstein with a new group, the Lomax Alliance, who had released one single, "Try as You May": [Excerpt: The Lomax Alliance, "Try As You May"] After Epstein's death, Lomax had plans to join another band, being formed by another Merseybeat musician, Chris Curtis, the former drummer of the Searchers. But after going to the Beatles to talk with them about them helping the new group financially, Lomax was persuaded by John Lennon to go solo instead. He may later have regretted that decision, as by early 1968 the people that Curtis had recruited for his new band had ditched him and were making a name for themselves as Deep Purple. Lomax recorded one solo single with funding from Stigwood, a cover version of a song by an obscure singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Genuine Imitation Life"] But he was also signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. The Beatles had only just started laying out plans for Apple when Epstein died, and other than the publishing company one of the few things they'd agreed on was that they were going to have a film company, which was to be run by Denis O'Dell, who had been an associate producer on A Hard Day's Night and on How I Won The War, the Richard Lester film Lennon had recently starred in. A few days after Epstein's death, they had a meeting, in which they agreed that the band needed to move forward quickly if they were going to recover from Epstein's death. They had originally been planning on going to India with the Maharishi to study meditation, but they decided to put that off until the new year, and to press forward with a film project Paul had been talking about, to be titled Magical Mystery Tour. And so, on the fifth of September 1967, they went back into the recording studio and started work on a song of John's that was earmarked for the film, "I am the Walrus": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] Magical Mystery Tour, the film, has a mixed reputation which we will talk about shortly, but one defence that Paul McCartney has always made of it is that it's the only place where you can see the Beatles performing "I am the Walrus". While the song was eventually relegated to a B-side, it's possibly the finest B-side of the Beatles' career, and one of the best tracks the group ever made. As with many of Lennon's songs from this period, the song was a collage of many different elements pulled from his environment and surroundings, and turned into something that was rather more than the sum of its parts. For its musical inspiration, Lennon pulled from, of all things, a police siren going past his house. (For those who are unfamiliar with what old British police sirens sounded like, as opposed to the ones in use for most of my lifetime or in other countries, here's a recording of one): [Excerpt: British police siren ca 1968] That inspired Lennon to write a snatch of lyric to go with the sound of the siren, starting "Mister city policeman sitting pretty". He had two other song fragments, one about sitting in the garden, and one about sitting on a cornflake, and he told Hunter Davies, who was doing interviews for his authorised biography of the group, “I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” But the final element that made these three disparate sections into a song was a letter that came from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at Lennon's old school Quarry Bank, who told him that the teachers at the school -- who Lennon always thought of as having suppressed his creativity -- were now analysing Beatles lyrics in their lessons. Lennon decided to come up with some nonsense that they couldn't analyse -- though as nonsensical as the finished song is, there's an underlying anger to a lot of it that possibly comes from Lennon thinking of his school experiences. And so Lennon asked his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton to remind him of a disgusting playground chant that kids used to sing in schools in the North West of England (and which they still sang with very minor variations at my own school decades later -- childhood folklore has a remarkably long life). That rhyme went: Yellow matter custard, green snot pie All mixed up with a dead dog's eye Slap it on a butty, nice and thick, And drink it down with a cup of cold sick Lennon combined some parts of this with half-remembered fragments of Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter, and with some punning references to things that were going on in his own life and those of his friends -- though it's difficult to know exactly which of the stories attached to some of the more incomprehensible bits of the lyrics are accurate. The story that the line "I am the eggman" is about a sexual proclivity of Eric Burdon of the Animals seems plausible, while the contention by some that the phrase "semolina pilchard" is a reference to Sgt Pilcher, the corrupt policeman who had arrested three of the Rolling Stones, and would later arrest Lennon, on drugs charges, seems less likely. The track is a masterpiece of production, but the release of the basic take on Anthology 2 in 1996 showed that the underlying performance, before George Martin worked his magic with the overdubs, is still a remarkable piece of work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus (Anthology 2 version)"] But Martin's arrangement and production turned the track from a merely very good track into a masterpiece. The string arrangement, very much in the same mould as that for "Strawberry Fields Forever" but giving a very different effect with its harsh cello glissandi, is the kind of thing one expects from Martin, but there's also the chanting of the Mike Sammes Singers, who were more normally booked for sessions like Englebert Humperdinck's "The Last Waltz": [Excerpt: Engelbert Humperdinck, "The Last Waltz"] But here were instead asked to imitate the sound of the strings, make grunting noises, and generally go very far out of their normal comfort zone: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] But the most fascinating piece of production in the entire track is an idea that seems to have been inspired by people like John Cage -- a live feed of a radio being tuned was played into the mono mix from about the halfway point, and whatever was on the radio at the time was captured: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] This is also why for many decades it was impossible to have a true stereo mix of the track -- the radio part was mixed directly into the mono mix, and it wasn't until the 1990s that someone thought to track down a copy of the original radio broadcasts and recreate the process. In one of those bits of synchronicity that happen more often than you would think when you're creating aleatory art, and which are why that kind of process can be so appealing, one bit of dialogue from the broadcast of King Lear that was on the radio as the mixing was happening was *perfectly* timed: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] After completing work on the basic track for "I am the Walrus", the group worked on two more songs for the film, George's "Blue Jay Way" and a group-composed twelve-bar blues instrumental called "Flying", before starting production. Magical Mystery Tour, as an idea, was inspired in equal parts by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the collective of people we talked about in the episode on the Grateful Dead who travelled across the US extolling the virtues of psychedelic drugs, and by mystery tours, a British working-class tradition that has rather fallen out of fashion in the intervening decades. A mystery tour would generally be put on by a coach-hire company, and would be a day trip to an unannounced location -- though the location would in fact be very predictable, and would be a seaside town within a couple of hours' drive of its starting point. In the case of the ones the Beatles remembered from their own childhoods, this would be to a coastal town in Lancashire or Wales, like Blackpool, Rhyl, or Prestatyn. A coachload of people would pay to be driven to this random location, get very drunk and have a singsong on the bus, and spend a day wherever they were taken. McCartney's plan was simple -- they would gather a group of passengers and replicate this experience over the course of several days, and film whatever went on, but intersperse that with more planned out sketches and musical numbers. For this reason, along with the Beatles and their associates, the cast included some actors found through Spotlight and some of the group's favourite performers, like the comedian Nat Jackley (whose comedy sequence directed by John was cut from the final film) and the surrealist poet/singer/comedian Ivor Cutler: [Excerpt: Ivor Cutler, "I'm Going in a Field"] The film also featured an appearance by a new band who would go on to have great success over the next year, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They had recorded their first single in Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were recording Revolver, but rather than being progressive psychedelic rock, it had been a remake of a 1920s novelty song: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "My Brother Makes the Noises For the Talkies"] Their performance in Magical Mystery Tour was very different though -- they played a fifties rock pastiche written by band leaders Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes while a stripper took off her clothes. While several other musical sequences were recorded for the film, including one by the band Traffic and one by Cutler, other than the Beatles tracks only the Bonzos' song made it into the finished film: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Death Cab for Cutie"] That song, thirty years later, would give its name to a prominent American alternative rock band. Incidentally the same night that Magical Mystery Tour was first broadcast was also the night that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band first appeared on a TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured three future members of the Monty Python troupe -- Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. Over the years the careers of the Bonzos, the Pythons, and the Beatles would become increasingly intertwined, with George Harrison in particular striking up strong friendships and working relationships with Bonzos Neil Innes and "Legs" Larry Smith. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour went about as well as one might expect from a film made by four directors, none of whom had any previous filmmaking experience, and none of whom had any business knowledge. The Beatles were used to just turning up and having things magically done for them by other people, and had no real idea of the infrastructure challenges that making a film, even a low-budget one, actually presents, and ended up causing a great deal of stress to almost everyone involved. The completed film was shown on TV on Boxing Day 1967 to general confusion and bemusement. It didn't help that it was originally broadcast in black and white, and so for example the scene showing shifting landscapes (outtake footage from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, tinted various psychedelic colours) over the "Flying" music, just looked like grey fuzz. But also, it just wasn't what people were expecting from a Beatles film. This was a ramshackle, plotless, thing more inspired by Andy Warhol's underground films than by the kind of thing the group had previously appeared in, and it was being presented as Christmas entertainment for all the family. And to be honest, it's not even a particularly good example of underground filmmaking -- though it looks like a masterpiece when placed next to something like the Bee Gees' similar effort, Cucumber Castle. But there are enough interesting sequences in there for the project not to be a complete failure -- and the deleted scenes on the DVD release, including the performances by Cutler and Traffic, and the fact that the film was edited down from ten hours to fifty-two minutes, makes one wonder if there's a better film that could be constructed from the original footage. Either way, the reaction to the film was so bad that McCartney actually appeared on David Frost's TV show the next day to defend it and, essentially, apologise. While they were editing the film, the group were also continuing to work in the studio, including on two new McCartney songs, "The Fool on the Hill", which was included in Magical Mystery Tour, and "Hello Goodbye", which wasn't included on the film's soundtrack but was released as the next single, with "I Am the Walrus" as the B-side: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Incidentally, in the UK the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double-EP rather than as an album (in the US, the group's recent singles and B-sides were added to turn it into a full-length album, which is how it's now generally available). "I Am the Walrus" was on the double-EP as well as being on the single's B-side, and the double-EP got to number two on the singles charts, meaning "I am the Walrus" was on the records at number one and number two at the same time. Before it became obvious that the film, if not the soundtrack, was a disaster, the group held a launch party on the twenty-first of December, 1967. The band members went along in fancy dress, as did many of the cast and crew -- the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed at the party. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys also turned up at the party, and apparently at one point jammed with the Bonzos, and according to some, but not all, reports, a couple of the Beatles joined in as well. Love and Johnston had both just met the Maharishi for the first time a couple of days earlier, and Love had been as impressed as the Beatles were, and it may have been at this party that the group mentioned to Love that they would soon be going on a retreat in India with the guru -- a retreat that was normally meant for training TM instructors, but this time seemed to be more about getting celebrities involved. Love would also end up going with them. That party was also the first time that Cynthia Lennon had an inkling that John might not be as faithful to her as she previously supposed. John had always "joked" about being attracted to George Harrison's wife, Patti, but this time he got a little more blatant about his attraction than he ever had previously, to the point that he made Cynthia cry, and Cynthia's friend, the pop star Lulu, decided to give Lennon a very public dressing-down for his cruelty to his wife, a dressing-down that must have been a sight to behold, as Lennon was dressed as a Teddy boy while Lulu was in a Shirley Temple costume. It's a sign of how bad the Lennons' marriage was at this point that this was the second time in a two-month period where Cynthia had ended up crying because of John at a film launch party and been comforted by a female pop star. In October, Cilla Black had held a party to celebrate the belated release of John's film How I Won the War, and during the party Georgie Fame had come up to Black and said, confused, "Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe". Black went and had a look, and Cynthia explained to her “I'm waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.” Black's response had been “You'd better face it, kid—he's never gonna come.” Also at the Magical Mystery Tour party was Lennon's father, now known as Freddie Lennon, and his new nineteen-year-old fiancee. While Hunter Davis had been researching the Beatles' biography, he'd come across some evidence that the version of Freddie's attitude towards John that his mother's side of the family had always told him -- that Freddie had been a cruel and uncaring husband who had not actually wanted to be around his son -- might not be the whole of the truth, and that the mother who he had thought of as saintly might also have had some part to play in their marriage breaking down and Freddie not seeing his son for twenty years. The two had made some tentative attempts at reconciliation, and indeed Freddie would even come and live with John for a while, though within a couple of years the younger Lennon's heart would fully harden against his father again. Of course, the things that John always resented his father for were pretty much exactly the kind of things that Lennon himself was about to do. It was around this time as well that Derek Taylor gave the Beatles copies of the debut album by a young singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson will be getting his own episode down the line, but not for a couple of years at my current rates, so it's worth bringing that up here, because that album became a favourite of all the Beatles, and would have a huge influence on their songwriting for the next couple of years, and because one song on the album, "1941", must have resonated particularly deeply with Lennon right at this moment -- an autobiographical song by Nilsson about how his father had left him and his mother when he was a small boy, and about his own fear that, as his first marriage broke down, he was repeating the pattern with his stepson Scott: [Excerpt: Nilsson, "1941"] The other major event of December 1967, rather overshadowed by the Magical Mystery Tour disaster the next day, was that on Christmas Day Paul McCartney and Jane Asher announced their engagement. A few days later, George Harrison flew to India. After John and Paul had had their outside film projects -- John starring in How I Won The War and Paul doing the soundtrack for The Family Way -- the other two Beatles more or less simultaneously did their own side project films, and again one acted while the other did a soundtrack. Both of these projects were in the rather odd subgenre of psychedelic shambolic comedy film that sprang up in the mid sixties, a subgenre that produced a lot of fascinating films, though rather fewer good ones. Indeed, both of them were in the subsubgenre of shambolic psychedelic *sex* comedies. In Ringo's case, he had a small role in the film Candy, which was based on the novel we mentioned in the last episode, co-written by Terry Southern, which was in itself a loose modern rewriting of Voltaire's Candide. Unfortunately, like such other classics of this subgenre as Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Candy has dated *extremely* badly, and unless you find repeated scenes of sexual assault and rape, ethnic stereotypes, and jokes about deformity and disfigurement to be an absolute laugh riot, it's not a film that's worth seeking out, and Starr's part in it is not a major one. Harrison's film was of the same basic genre -- a film called Wonderwall about a mad scientist who discovers a way to see through the walls of his apartment, and gets to see a photographer taking sexy photographs of a young woman named Penny Lane, played by Jane Birkin: [Excerpt: Some Wonderwall film dialogue ripped from the Blu-Ray] Wonderwall would, of course, later inspire the title of a song by Oasis, and that's what the film is now best known for, but it's a less-unwatchable film than Candy, and while still problematic it's less so. Which is something. Harrison had been the Beatle with least involvement in Magical Mystery Tour -- McCartney had been the de facto director, Starr had been the lead character and the only one with much in the way of any acting to do, and Lennon had written the film's standout scene and its best song, and had done a little voiceover narration. Harrison, by contrast, barely has anything to do in the film apart from the one song he contributed, "Blue Jay Way", and he said of the project “I had no idea what was happening and maybe I didn't pay enough attention because my problem, basically, was that I was in another world, I didn't really belong; I was just an appendage.” He'd expressed his discomfort to his friend Joe Massot, who was about to make his first feature film. Massot had got to know Harrison during the making of his previous film, Reflections on Love, a mostly-silent short which had starred Harrison's sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, and which had been photographed by Robert Freeman, who had been the photographer for the Beatles' album covers from With the Beatles through Rubber Soul, and who had taken most of the photos that Klaus Voorman incorporated into the cover of Revolver (and whose professional association with the Beatles seemed to come to an end around the same time he discovered that Lennon had been having an affair with his wife). Massot asked Harrison to write the music for the film, and told Harrison he would have complete free rein to make whatever music he wanted, so long as it fit the timing of the film, and so Harrison decided to create a mixture of Western rock music and the Indian music he loved. Harrison started recording the music at the tail end of 1967, with sessions with several London-based Indian musicians and John Barham, an orchestrator who had worked with Ravi Shankar on Shankar's collaborations with Western musicians, including the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack we talked about in the "All You Need is Love" episode. For the Western music, he used the Remo Four, a Merseybeat group who had been on the scene even before the Beatles, and which contained a couple of classmates of Paul McCartney, but who had mostly acted as backing musicians for other artists. They'd backed Johnny Sandon, the former singer with the Searchers, on a couple of singles, before becoming the backing band for Tommy Quickly, a NEMS artist who was unsuccessful despite starting his career with a Lennon/McCartney song, "Tip of My Tongue": [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] The Remo Four would later, after a lineup change, become Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who would become one-hit wonders in the seventies, and during the Wonderwall sessions they recorded a song that went unreleased at the time, and which would later go on to be rerecorded by Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. "In the First Place" also features Harrison on backing vocals and possibly guitar, and was not submitted for the film because Harrison didn't believe that Massot wanted any vocal tracks, but the recording was later discovered and used in a revised director's cut of the film in the nineties: [Excerpt: The Remo Four, "In the First Place"] But for the most part the Remo Four were performing instrumentals written by Harrison. They weren't the only Western musicians performing on the sessions though -- Peter Tork of the Monkees dropped by these sessions and recorded several short banjo solos, which were used in the film soundtrack but not in the soundtrack album (presumably because Tork was contracted to another label): [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Wonderwall banjo solo"] Another musician who was under contract to another label was Eric Clapton, who at the time was playing with The Cream, and who vaguely knew Harrison and so joined in for the track "Ski-ing", playing lead guitar under the cunning, impenetrable, pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", with Harrison on sitar, Starr on drums, and session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan on bass: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Ski-ing"] But the bulk of the album was recorded in EMI's studios in the city that is now known as Mumbai but at the time was called Bombay. The studio facilities in India had up to that point only had a mono tape recorder, and Bhaskar Menon, one of the top executives at EMI's Indian division and later the head of EMI music worldwide, personally brought the first stereo tape recorder to the studio to aid in Harrison's recording. The music was all composed by Harrison and performed by the Indian musicians, and while Harrison was composing in an Indian mode, the musicians were apparently fascinated by how Western it sounded to them: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Microbes"] While he was there, Harrison also got the instrumentalists to record another instrumental track, which wasn't to be used for the film: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "The Inner Light (instrumental)"] That track would, instead, become part of what was to be Harrison's first composition to make a side of a Beatles single. After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he'd compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he'd admired "Within You Without You" and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Tao Te Ching to music. He suggested a text that, in his translation, read: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth Without looking out of my window I can know the ways of heaven For the farther one travels, the less one knows The sage, therefore Arrives without travelling Sees all without looking Does all without doing" Harrison took that text almost verbatim, though he created a second verse by repeating the first few lines with "you" replacing "I" -- concerned that listeners might think he was just talking about himself, and wouldn't realise it was a more general statement -- and he removed the "the sage, therefore" and turned the last few lines into imperative commands rather than declarative statements: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics' eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally "Eastern" and so all the same really. On the other hand there's a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination. As someone who's neither Chinese nor Indian I wouldn't want to take a stance on it, but clearly the other Beatles were impressed by it -- they put it out as the B-side to their next single, even though the only Beatles on it are Harrison and McCartney, with the latter adding a small amount of harmony vocal: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] And it wasn't because the group were out of material. They were planning on going to Rishikesh to study with the Maharishi, and wanted to get a single out for release while they were away, and so in one week they completed the vocal overdubs on "The Inner Light" and recorded three other songs, two by John and one by Paul. All three of the group's songwriters brought in songs that were among their best. John's first contribution was a song whose lyrics he later described as possibly the best he ever wrote, "Across the Universe". He said the lyrics were “purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don't own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It's not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn't want to write it … It's like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.” But while Lennon liked the song, he was never happy with the recording of it. They tried all sorts of things to get the sound he heard in his head, including bringing in some fans who were hanging around outside to sing backing vocals. He said of the track "I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The "jai guru deva" chorus there is the first reference to the teachings of the Maharishi in one of the Beatles' records -- Guru Dev was the Maharishi's teacher, and the phrase "Jai guru dev" is a Sanskrit one which I've seen variously translated as "victory to the great teacher", and "hail to the greatness within you". Lennon would say shortly before his death “The Beatles didn't make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we' though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we'd spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul's songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields' or ‘Across The Universe', somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a _lousy_ track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I'm psychologically destroyed and nobody's supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.” Of course, this is only Lennon's perception, and it's one that the other participants would disagree with. George Martin, in particular, was always rather hurt by the implication that Lennon's songs had less attention paid to them, and he would always say that the problem was that Lennon in the studio would always say "yes, that's great", and only later complain that it hadn't been what he wanted. No doubt McCartney did put in more effort on his own songs than on Lennon's -- everyone has a bias towards their own work, and McCartney's only human -- but personally I suspect that a lot of the problem comes down to the two men having very different personalities. McCartney had very strong ideas about his own work and would drive the others insane with his nitpicky attention to detail. Lennon had similarly strong ideas, but didn't have the attention span to put the time and effort in to force his vision on others, and didn't have the technical knowledge to express his ideas in words they'd understand. He expected Martin and the other Beatles to work miracles, and they did -- but not the miracles he would have worked. That track was, rather than being chosen for the next single, given to Spike Milligan, who happened to be visiting the studio and was putting together an album for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. The album was titled "No One's Gonna Change Our World": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] That track is historic in another way -- it would be the last time that George Harrison would play sitar on a Beatles record, and it effectively marks the end of the period of psychedelia and Indian influence that had started with "Norwegian Wood" three years earlier, and which many fans consider their most creative period. Indeed, shortly after the recording, Harrison would give up the sitar altogether and stop playing it. He loved sitar music as much as he ever had, and he still thought that Indian classical music spoke to him in ways he couldn't express, and he continued to be friends with Ravi Shankar for the rest of his life, and would only become more interested in Indian religious thought. But as he spent time with Shankar he realised he would never be as good on the sitar as he hoped. He said later "I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm better off being a pop singer-guitar-player-songwriter – whatever-I'm-supposed-to-be' because I've seen a thousand sitar-players in India who are twice as better as I'll ever be. And only one of them Ravi thought was going to be a good player." We don't have a precise date for when it happened -- I suspect it was in June 1968, so a few months after the "Across the Universe" recording -- but Shankar told Harrison that rather than try to become a master of a music that he hadn't encountered until his twenties, perhaps he should be making the music that was his own background. And as Harrison put it "I realised that was riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' coming out of someone's house.": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel"] In early 1968 a lot of people seemed to be thinking along the same lines, as if Christmas 1967 had been the flick of a switch and instead of whimsy and ornamentation, the thing to do was to make music that was influenced by early rock and roll. In the US the Band and Bob Dylan were making music that was consciously shorn of all studio experimentation, while in the UK there was a revival of fifties rock and roll. In April 1968 both "Peggy Sue" and "Rock Around the Clock" reentered the top forty in the UK, and the Who were regularly including "Summertime Blues" in their sets. Fifties nostalgia, which would make occasional comebacks for at least the next forty years, was in its first height, and so it's not surprising that Paul McCartney's song, "Lady Madonna", which became the A-side of the next single, has more than a little of the fifties about it. Of course, the track isn't *completely* fifties in its origins -- one of the inspirations for the track seems to have been the Rolling Stones' then-recent hit "Let's Spend The Night Together": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"] But the main source for the song's music -- and for the sound of the finished record -- seems to have been Johnny Parker's piano part on Humphrey Lyttleton's "Bad Penny Blues", a hit single engineered by Joe Meek in the fifties: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] That song seems to have been on the group's mind for a while, as a working title for "With a Little Help From My Friends" had at one point been "Bad Finger Blues" -- a title that would later give the name to a band on Apple. McCartney took Parker's piano part as his inspiration, and as he later put it “‘Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. I got my left hand doing an arpeggio thing with the chord, an ascending boogie-woogie left hand, then a descending right hand. I always liked that, the  juxtaposition of a line going down meeting a line going up." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] That idea, incidentally, is an interesting reversal of what McCartney had done on "Hello, Goodbye", where the bass line goes down while the guitar moves up -- the two lines moving away from each other: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Though that isn't to say there's no descending bass in "Lady Madonna" -- the bridge has a wonderful sequence where the bass just *keeps* *descending*: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] Lyrically, McCartney was inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a woman in Malaysia, captioned “Mountain Madonna: with one child at her breast and another laughing into her face, sees her quality of life threatened.” But as he put it “The people I was brought up amongst were often Catholic; there are lots of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection and they are often religious. When they have a baby I think they see a big connection between themselves and the Virgin Mary with her baby. So the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working class woman. It's really a tribute to the mother figure, it's a tribute to women.” Musically though, the song was more a tribute to the fifties -- while the inspiration had been a skiffle hit by Humphrey Lyttleton, as soon as McCartney started playing it he'd thought of Fats Domino, and the lyric reflects that to an extent -- just as Domino's "Blue Monday" details the days of the week for a weary working man who only gets to enjoy himself on Saturday night, "Lady Madonna"'s lyrics similarly look at the work a mother has to do every day -- though as McCartney later noted  "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday ... So I figured it must have been a real night out." The vocal was very much McCartney doing a Domino impression -- something that wasn't lost on Fats, who cut his own version of the track later that year: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Lady Madonna"] The group were so productive at this point, right before the journey to India, that they actually cut another song *while they were making a video for "Lady Madonna"*. They were booked into Abbey Road to film themselves performing the song so it could be played on Top of the Pops while they were away, but instead they decided to use the time to cut a new song -- John had a partially-written song, "Hey Bullfrog", which was roughly the same tempo as "Lady Madonna", so they could finish that up and then re-edit the footage to match the record. The song was quickly finished and became "Hey Bulldog": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Bulldog"] One of Lennon's best songs from this period, "Hey Bulldog" was oddly chosen only to go on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. Either the band didn't think much of it because it had come so easily, or it was just assigned to the film because they were planning on being away for several months and didn't have any other projects they were working on. The extent of the group's contribution to the film was minimal – they were not very hands-on, and the film, which was mostly done as an attempt to provide a third feature film for their United Artists contract without them having to do any work, was made by the team that had done the Beatles cartoon on American TV. There's some evidence that they had a small amount of input in the early story stages, but in general they saw the cartoon as an irrelevance to them -- the only things they contributed were the four songs "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Hey Bulldog" and "Only a Northern Song", and a brief filmed appearance for the very end of the film, recorded in January: [Excerpt: Yellow Submarine film end] McCartney also took part in yet another session in early February 1968, one produced by Peter Asher, his fiancee's brother, and former singer with Peter and Gordon. Asher had given up on being a pop star and was trying to get into the business side of music, and he was starting out as a producer, producing a single by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. The A-side of the single, "And the Sun Will Shine", was written by the Bee Gees, the band that Robert Stigwood was managing: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "And the Sun Will Shine"] While the B-side was an original by Jones, "The Dog Presides": [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "The Dog Presides"] Those tracks featured two former members of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Paul Samwell-Smith, on guitar and bass, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Asher asked McCartney to play drums on both sides of the single, saying later "I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer." McCartney was impressed by Asher's production, and asked him to get involved with the new Apple Records label that would be set up when the group returned from India. Asher eventually became head of A&R for the label. And even before "Lady Madonna" was mixed, the Beatles were off to India. Mal Evans, their roadie, went ahead with all their luggage on the fourteenth of February, so he could sort out transport for them on the other end, and then John and George followed on the fifteenth, with their wives Pattie and Cynthia and Pattie's sister Jenny (John and Cynthia's son Julian had been left with his grandmother while they went -- normally Cynthia wouldn't abandon Julian for an extended period of time, but she saw the trip as a way to repair their strained marriage). Paul and Ringo followed four days later, with Ringo's wife Maureen and Paul's fiancee Jane Asher. The retreat in Rishikesh was to become something of a celebrity affair. Along with the Beatles came their friend the singer-songwriter Donovan, and Donovan's friend and songwriting partner, whose name I'm not going to say here because it's a slur for Romani people, but will be known to any Donovan fans. Donovan at this point was also going through changes. Like the Beatles, he was largely turning away from drug use and towards meditation, and had recently written his hit single "There is a Mountain" based around a saying from Zen Buddhism: [Excerpt: Donovan, "There is a Mountain"] That was from his double-album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, which had come out in December 1967. But also like John and Paul he was in the middle of the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and while he would remain with his then-partner until 1970, and even have another child with her, he was secretly in love with another woman. In fact he was secretly in love with two other women. One of them, Brian Jones' ex-girlfriend Linda, had moved to LA, become the partner of the singer Gram Parsons, and had appeared in the documentary You Are What You Eat with the Band and Tiny Tim. She had fallen out of touch with Donovan, though she would later become his wife. Incidentally, she had a son to Brian Jones who had been abandoned by his rock-star father -- the son's name is Julian. The other woman with whom Donovan was in love was Jenny Boyd, the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie.  Jenny at the time was in a relationship with Alexis Mardas, a TV repairman and huckster who presented himself as an electronics genius to the Beatles, who nicknamed him Magic Alex, and so she was unavailable, but Donovan had written a song about her, released as a single just before they all went to Rishikesh: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"] Donovan considered himself and George Harrison to be on similar spiritual paths and called Harrison his "spirit-brother", though Donovan was more interested in Buddhism, which Harrison considered a corruption of the more ancient Hinduism, and Harrison encouraged Donovan to read Autobiography of a Yogi. It's perhaps worth noting that Donovan's father had a different take on the subject though, saying "You're not going to study meditation in India, son, you're following that wee lassie Jenny" Donovan and his friend weren't the only other celebrities to come to Rishikesh. The actor Mia Farrow, who had just been through a painful divorce from Frank Sinatra, and had just made Rosemary's Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski with exteriors shot at the Dakota building in New York, arrived with her sister Prudence. Also on the trip was Paul Horn, a jazz saxophonist who had played with many of the greats of jazz, not least of them Duke Ellington, whose Sweet Thursday Horn had played alto sax on: [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Zweet Zursday"] Horn was another musician who had been inspired to investigate Indian spirituality and music simultaneously, and the previous year he had recorded an album, "In India," of adaptations of ragas, with Ravi Shankar and Alauddin Khan: [Excerpt: Paul Horn, "Raga Vibhas"] Horn would go on to become one of the pioneers of what would later be termed "New Age" music, combining jazz with music from various non-Western traditions. Horn had also worked as a session musician, and one of the tracks he'd played on was "I Know There's an Answer" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] Mike Love, who co-wrote that track and is one of the lead singers on it, was also in Rishikesh. While as we'll see not all of the celebrities on the trip would remain practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Love would be profoundly affected by the trip, and remains a vocal proponent of TM to this day. Indeed, his whole band at the time were heavily into TM. While Love was in India, the other Beach Boys were working on the Friends album without him -- Love only appears on four tracks on that album -- and one of the tracks they recorded in his absence was titled "Transcendental Meditation": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Transcendental Meditation"] But the trip would affect Love's songwriting, as it would affect all of the musicians there. One of the few songs on the Friends album on which Love appears is "Anna Lee, the Healer", a song which is lyrically inspired by the trip in the most literal sense, as it's about a masseuse Love met in Rishikesh: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Anna Lee, the Healer"] The musicians in the group all influenced and inspired each other as is likely to happen in such circumstances. Sometimes, it would be a matter of trivial joking, as when the Beatles decided to perform an off-the-cuff song about Guru Dev, and did it in the Beach Boys style: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] And that turned partway through into a celebration of Love for his birthday: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] Decades later, Love would return the favour, writing a song about Harrison and their time together in Rishikesh. Like Donovan, Love seems to have considered Harrison his "spiritual brother", and he titled the song "Pisces Brothers": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Pisces Brothers"] The musicians on the trip were also often making suggestions to each other about songs that would become famous for them. The musicians had all brought acoustic guitars, apart obviously from Ringo, who got a set of tabla drums when George ordered some Indian instruments to be delivered. George got a sitar, as at this point he hadn't quite given up on the instrument, and he gave Donovan a tamboura. Donovan started playing a melody on the tamboura, which is normally a drone instrument, inspired by the Scottish folk music he had grown up with, and that became his "Hurdy-Gurdy Man": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man"] Harrison actually helped him with the song, writing a final verse inspired by the Maharishi's teachings, but in the studio Donovan's producer Mickie Most told him to cut the verse because the song was overlong, which apparently annoyed Harrison. Donovan includes that verse in his live performances of the song though -- usually while doing a fairly terrible impersonation of Harrison: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man (live)"] And similarly, while McCartney was working on a song pastiching Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, but singing about the USSR rather than the USA, Love suggested to him that for a middle-eight he might want to sing about the girls in the various Soviet regions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] As all the guitarists on the retreat only had acoustic instruments, they were very keen to improve their acoustic playing, and they turned to Donovan, who unlike the rest of them was primarily an acoustic player, and one from a folk background. Donovan taught them the rudiments of Travis picking, the guitar style we talked about way back in the episodes on the Everly Brothers, as well as some of the tunings that had been introduced to British folk music by Davey Graham, giving them a basic grounding in the principles of English folk-baroque guitar, a style that had developed over the previous few years. Donovan has said in his autobiography that Lennon picked the technique up quickly (and that Harrison had already learned Travis picking from Chet Atkins records) but that McCartney didn't have the application to learn the style, though he picked up bits. That seems very unlike anything else I've read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney -- no-one has ever accused Lennon of having a surfeit of application -- and reading Donovan's book he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison, so possibly that enters into it. But also, it may just be that Lennon was more receptive to Donovan's style at the time. According to McCartney, even before going to Rishikesh Lennon had been in a vaguely folk-music and country mode, and the small number of tapes he'd brought with him to Rishikesh included Buddy Holly, Dylan, and the progressive folk band The Incredible String Band, whose music would be a big influence on both Lennon and McCartney for the next year: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "First Girl I Loved"] According to McCartney Lennon also brought "a tape the singer Jake Thackray had done for him... He was one of the people we bumped into at Abbey Road. John liked his stuff, which he'd heard on television. Lots of wordplay and very suggestive, so very much up John's alley. I was fascinated by his unusual guitar style. John did ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun' as a Jake Thackray thing at one point, as I recall.” Thackray was a British chansonnier, who sang sweetly poignant but also often filthy songs about Yorkshire life, and his humour in particular will have appealed to Lennon. There's a story of Lennon meeting Thackray in Abbey Road and singing the whole of Thackray's song "The Statues", about two drunk men fighting a male statue to defend the honour of a female statue, to him: [Excerpt: Jake Thackray, "The Statues"] Given this was the music that Lennon was listening to, it's unsurprising that he was more receptive to Donovan's lessons, and the new guitar style he learned allowed him to expand his songwriting, at precisely the same time he was largely clean of drugs for the first time in several years, and he started writing some of the best songs he would ever write, often using these new styles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] That song is about Lennon's dead mother -- the first time he ever addressed her directly in a song, though  it would be far from the last -- but it's also about someone else. That phrase "Ocean child" is a direct translation of the Japanese name "Yoko". We've talked about Yoko Ono a bit in recent episodes, and even briefly in a previous Beatles episode, but it's here that she really enters the story of the Beatles. Unfortunately, exactly *how* her relationship with John Lennon, which was to become one of the great legendary love stories in rock and roll history, actually started is the subject of some debate. Both of them were married when they first got together, and there have also been suggestions that Ono was more interested in McCartney than in Lennon at first -- suggestions which everyone involved has denied, and those denials have the ring of truth about them, but if that was the case it would also explain some of Lennon's more perplexing behaviour over the next year. By all accounts there was a certain amount of finessing of the story th

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beck nilsson bohemian buddy holly john smith prosperity gospel royal albert hall inxs hard days trident romani grapefruit farrow robert kennedy musically gregorian transcendental meditation in india bangor king lear doran john cage i ching american tv sardinia spaniard capitol records shankar brian jones lute dyke new thought inner light moog tao te ching ono richard harris searchers opportunity knocks roxy music tiny tim peter sellers clapton george martin cantata shirley temple white album beatlemania hey jude helter skelter world wildlife fund all you need lomax moody blues got something death cab wrecking crew wonderwall terry jones mia farrow yellow submarine yardbirds not guilty fab five harry nilsson ibsen rishikesh everly brothers pet sounds focal point class b gimme shelter chris thomas sgt pepper bollocks pythons marianne faithfull twiggy paul jones penny lane fats domino mike love marcel duchamp eric idle michael palin fifties schenectady magical mystery tour wilson pickett ravi shankar castaways hellogoodbye across the universe manfred mann ken kesey schoenberg united artists gram parsons toshi christian science ornette coleman maharishi mahesh yogi psychedelic experiences all together now maharishi rubber soul david frost sarah lawrence chet atkins brian epstein eric burdon summertime blues orientalist kenwood strawberry fields kevin moore cilla black chris curtis melcher richard lester anna lee pilcher piggies undertakers dear prudence duane allman you are what you eat micky dolenz fluxus george young lennon mccartney scarsdale sad song strawberry fields forever norwegian wood peggy sue emerick nems steve turner spike milligan soft machine hubert humphrey plastic ono band kyoko apple records peter tork tork macarthur park tomorrow never knows hopkin derek taylor rock around parlophone peggy guggenheim lewis carrol mike berry ken scott gettys holy mary bramwell merry pranksters pattie boyd easybeats hoylake peter asher richard hamilton brand new bag neil innes beatles white album vichy france find true happiness anthony newley rocky raccoon tony cox joe meek jane asher jimmy scott georgie fame webern richard perry john wesley harding massot ian macdonald esher david sheff french indochina geoff emerick incredible string band warm gun merseybeat bernie krause la monte young do unto others bruce johnston sexy sadie mark lewisohn apple corps lady madonna lennons paul horn sammy cahn kenneth womack rene magritte little help from my friends northern songs hey bulldog music from big pink mary hopkin rhyl bonzo dog doo dah band englebert humperdinck robert freeman philip norman stuart sutcliffe robert stigwood hurdy gurdy man two virgins david maysles jenny boyd cynthia lennon those were thackray stalinists jean jacques perrey hunter davies dave bartholomew terry southern honey pie marie lise prestatyn terry melcher magic alex i know there david tudor george alexander om gam ganapataye namaha james campion electronic sound martha my dear bungalow bill graeme thomson john dunbar my monkey barry miles stephen bayley klaus voorman mickie most gershon kingsley jake holmes jackie lomax blue jay way your mother should know how i won in george hare krishna hare krishna jake thackray krishna krishna hare hare get you into my life davey graham tony rivers hare rama hare rama rama rama hare hare tilt araiza
About A Girl
Pattie Boyd, George Harrison, & Eric Clapton

About A Girl

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 27, 2023 43:54


Pattie Boyd is one of the best known rock star partners, having married both Beatle George Harrison and then Harrison's close friend Eric Clapton. She famously inspired the Beatles' “Something” and Clapton's “Layla.”. But less publicized is the infidelity and turmoil that infected both marriages. Find out how she responded and finally emerged from it all. Sources: Wonderful Tonight by Pattie Boyd George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door by Graeme Thompson Clapton: The Autobiography by Eric Clapton BeatlesBible.com Timeline Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved by Chris O'Dell Jennifer Juniper by Jenny Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'd Rather Be Reading
Philip Norman on George Harrison, the Beatles, and "Rock's Strangest Love Triangle"

I'd Rather Be Reading

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2023 43:59


Just when you think you know everything there is to know about the Beatles, the most famous group in history—you're wrong. Today on the show we have the Beatles expert himself, Philip Norman, here to break down George Harrison, as complex and complicated a character as they come. Just about as antithetical to fame as it gets, George never saw his talent like the rest of the world did, and his contributions to music are vast: “Something.” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” “Here Comes the Sun.” “My Sweet Lord.” In addition to his professional life, his personal life is compelling too. (Four words—Pattie Boyd. Eric Clapton.) He left us far too soon nearly 22 years ago, and I am excited to bring you part of his story through this conversation.

Untitled Beatles Podcast
Beatlefest 2023 Part 2: Live from the Fest Floor

Untitled Beatles Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2023 55:26


Roll up! Roll up for another Untitled Beatles Podcast Field Trip, this time to the 2023 Chicago Fest For Beatles Fans. In this podcast concrète, T.J. and Tony - aka the Beavis & Butthead of the Beatleverse - take a 2-day sound bath of live Beatle music, as they scratch and sniff rare Beatles vinyl, aimlessly wandering and wondering:

Another Kind of Mind: A Different Kind of Beatles Podcast
AKOM Mailbag: There Will Be an Answer 2/2

Another Kind of Mind: A Different Kind of Beatles Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2023 132:32


SUMMARY Phoebe and Daphne answer more listener mail! In Part 2 they tackle: the controversial production of Strawberry Fields Forever, an alternate theory on Paul and Jane's breakup, what Mick Jagger and Pattie Boyd know about India, Projecting Onto George, granny music, voodoo dolls and more! FULL LIST OF TOPICS Security Blanket Midas Man Pattie's Post What Does Pattie Mean? Maharishi Hit on a Beatle? Sympathy for Teenage Paul Estranged Fiance Theory Projecting Onto George SFF (John's dissatisfaction) Paul's Farm Maxwell Paul and Jane: Alternate Theory Infamous Postcard Voodoo Dolls Mistake Feedback Mozart Prodigy Discussion Granny Music Voodoo Dolls If I Fell Foreverly Brothers Morbid Question PLAYLIST What You're Doing THE BEATLES 1964 From Me to You THE BEATLES 1963

Ghost Town
276: The Twisted Triangle of Pattie Boyd

Ghost Town

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2023 20:29


The dark history of a rock n roll muse makes her mark in the late 1960s & 1970s.More Ghost Town: https://www.ghosttownpod.comSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/ghosttownpod (7 Day Free Trial!)Instagram: https;//www.instagram.com/ghosttownpodSource: https://bit.ly/3LhzNKX Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ghost Town
276: The Twisted Triangle of Pattie Boyd

Ghost Town

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2023 23:14


The dark history of a rock n roll muse makes her mark in the late 1960s & 1970s. More Ghost Town: https://www.ghosttownpod.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/ghosttownpod (7 Day Free Trial!) Instagram: https;//www.instagram.com/ghosttownpod Source: https://bit.ly/3LhzNKX Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Opperman Report
May Pang : John Lenon Lost weekend

The Opperman Report

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2023 132:57


May Pang, world-renowned confidant and companion of John Lennon, has been in the public eye for over three decades. Her career in the music industry spans over 40 years, beginning with Allen Klein's company, ABKCO Industries, the firm which managed the Beatles, Apple Corps. Ltd. and the Rolling Stones besides having an extensive music publishing catalogue which included songs by Sam Cooke.In 1970, Lennon and Yoko Ono hired Pang as their personal assistant. She would eventually become their production coordinator -- playing a key role in records by Lennon, Ono and Harry Nilsson. In 1974, Pang was awarded an RIAA Gold Album Award for her work on Lennon's Walls and Bridges, the #1 hit album which included his first and only #1 single in his lifetime, "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night." She can also be heard singing on "#9 Dream," the second single from the album.In the late 1970s working for Island Records, Pang coordinated all activities related to the release of albums by Robert Palmer, Third World, and Bob Marley and the Wailers. By the early 1980s, she was one of the leading professional managers in the music publishing industry, working with several unknown songwriters and successfully obtaining coverage by such artists as Diana Ross, Judas Priest, The Four Tops, Ullanda McCullough and Air Supply.During this period, Pang decided to set the record straight about her relationship with Lennon. Warner Books published her memoir, Loving John, in 1983. The book detailed her liaison and working association with the late Beatle and shed light on his relationships with his first son, Julian, as well as Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.During the last two decades, Pang has appeared in every major news and magazine publication worldwide (NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, The Daily News, UK's Mail On Sunday, Vogue online, Germany's Die Seite Drei, Marie Claire, People, etc.) and has been a guest on such national TV shows as Good Morning America, Howard Stern, Good Morning LA, CBS Sunday Morning, Court TV and Entertainment Tonight.Pang has also designed a unique collection of stainless steel Feng Shui jewelry and accent furniture. She has a weekly internet radio show with co-host Cynthia Neilson called Dinner Specials on BlogTalkRadio. Com. Pang continues her consulting work on music for films and is still an advisory board member of Women In Music. She also serves as an advisory board member, along with Julian Lennon, Jeff Bridges to name a few at the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) organization. ACT deals with saving the rainforest and its indigenous people. This was started by world known ethnobotanist Dr. Mark J. Plotkin and conservationist Liliana Madrigal.In 2008, St. Martin's Press released Instamatic Karma, a collection of Pang's personal photographs of John Lennon. Fine art prints of these portraits have been exhibited in major galleries across the country.Also in the Fall of 2014, she released a book only for the German market called John Lennon & May Pang, Another Love. She had received numerous press coverage in some of Germany's largest newspaper publications.Pang has lectured and given talks at various events across the country including public libraries and most recently at Berklee College of Music in Boston sponsored in part by theLiberal Arts Dept. While there, she also lectured the John Lennon Songwriting class. She also gave a talk at The Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp in Las Vegas as a Special Guest Speaker.She has also been asked to be a guest speaker along with guests Donovan, Peter Asher, Pattie Boyd and others at The International Beatles Week 2015 in Liverpool this coming August.In this age of “social awareness”, Pang was asked to participate as an artist on a CD called: ALL ABOUT BULLIES…BIG AND SMALL. The CD won a Grammy for The Best Children's CD category in 2012.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/1198501/advertisement

The Style That Binds Us
Meet Sixties Style Icon, Model & Muse, Pattie Boyd

The Style That Binds Us

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 14, 2023 36:48


We are delighted to welcome Pattie Boyd to The Style That Binds Us podcast. Pattie is a Sixties style icon and model who inspired love songs such as “Something,” “Layla,” “Wonderful Tonight” and more. She was at the heart of Swinging London and Rock and Roll as she balanced life between being a highly in-demand model and her marriage to George Harrison and later Eric Clapton. We thoroughly enjoyed reading her 2 books: “Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me” and “Pattie Boyd: My Life in Pictures” and can't wait to hear all about Pattie's career, what she's up to now and more. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/delia-folk8/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/delia-folk8/support

Bob Sirott
Pattie Boyd tells Bob Sirott how she fell in love with George Harrison

Bob Sirott

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2023


English model and photographer Pattie Boyd joins Bob Sirott to talk about the first time she heard The Beatles song “Something,” how she was discovered, and how she fell in love with George Harrison. She also discusses what the breakup of The Beatles was like, when she heard the songs Eric Clapton wrote for her, […]

Last Word
Anne Perry, Dame Mary Quant, Jean Argles, Ahmad Jamal

Last Word

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2023 27:07


Matthew Bannister on Anne Perry, the best-selling crime novelist who committed a murder when she was a teenager. Dame Mary Quant, the influential fashion designer at the heart of the swinging 60s. Pattie Boyd recalls the coat Mary designed for her wedding to George Harrison. Jean Argles, who – with her sister - served as a codebreaker during the second world war. Ahmad Jamal, the jazz pianist and composer whose restrained but intense style inspired Miles Davis. Joe Stilgoe pays tribute. Producer: Gareth Nelson-Davies Interviewee: Joanne Drayton Interviewee: Jenny Lister Interviewee: Pattie Boyd Interviewee: Tessa Dunlop Interviewee: Joe Stilgoe Archive used: Carnaby Street, British Pathe News, 1969; Mary Quant interview with ITN about the ideas that guided her innovative designs, ITN Archive, YouTube uploaded 13/04/2023; Mary Quant interview, Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4 , 16/02/2012; Anne Perry: The Making of a Writer, Open Road Media, YouTube uploaded 21/03/2010; Ian Rankin interview with Anne Perry, YouTube uploaded 18/08/2007; Heavenly Creatures film promo, YouTube uploaded 22/07/2014; Jean Argles interview, Legasee, The Veterans Video Archive, recording date unknown, source: legasee.org.uk;

The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan
Pattie Boyd: Art, Fashion, and Beatlemania

The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2023 31:13


Photographer, model, and muse to two of the greatest musicians of our time, Pattie Boyd is Mitchell's guest on this edition of The Literary Life. Her new book, My Life In Pictures (published by Real Art Press) is a stunning collection of her personal photographs capturing the essence and zeitgeist of the Bohemian rock and roll world of the 1960s and early ‘70s. Mitchell spoke to Pattie about all of this and more in front of a live audience at Books and Books in Coral Gables, Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Play That Rock'n'Roll
Ep 58: Interview w/ ABIGAIL DEVOE (Host of ”VINYL MONDAY”)

Play That Rock'n'Roll

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2023 54:35


This is Play That Rock n' Roll's interview with YouTuber Abigail Devoe about her channel, "VINYL MONDAY". In this conversation, we discuss how Vinyl Monday came to be and also how she became such a fan of Classic Rock. We talk about her production and fashion, and also her impressive vinyl collection. She then talks about her admiration for women like Pattie Boyd and Pamela des Barres, and she also shares her thoughts on Eric Clapton. Finally, we conclude with a look at some of the Record Store Day 2023 releases that have caught our attention, and she tells us about what RSD means to her. Find Abby online at: https://www.reallifelayla.com/ Follow us on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/playthatpodcast​​ Find us on facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/playthatpodcast

Death By Music Podcast
The Story Behind "Layla" by Derek & The Dominos | Mini 101

Death By Music Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 3, 2023 14:35


This song brought Duane Allman into the studio with Eric Clapton, and details Clapton's love for George Harrison's wife Pattie.Support the show

Everything Fab Four
Episode 38: Pattie Boyd on falling for George Harrison and why "you can't grasp" the intensity of Beatles fame

Everything Fab Four

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 21, 2023 36:36


Pattie Boyd is an English model, photographer, and an eyewitness to key moments in rock ‘n' roll history, particularly in terms of the lives and times of the former members of the Beatles, especially George Harrison. In 1962, Boyd began her modeling career, later appearing on the covers of Vogue and other leading magazines. In 1964, she met Harrison while working as an extra on the set of "A Hard Day's Night." After moving in together at Harrison's Kinfauns home in Esher, Boyd and Harrison married in January 1966. Boyd was a regular fixture in the Beatles' lives, attending the June 1967 Our World live simulcast and joining them in Rishikesh, India, for the group's February 1968 visit to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram. In 1970, Boyd and Harrison relocated to Friar Park, the former Beatle's enormous Victorian mansion in Henley-on-Thames. By 1973, the Harrisons' relationship was disintegrating. In 1974, the couple separated, with Boyd later marrying Harrison's longtime friend and collaborator Eric Clapton, who had nurtured a long-running passion for the model. Over the years, Harrison had written numerous songs for Boyd, including the top-charting Beatles hit “Something.” In 1970, Boyd was the subject of the legendary Derek and the Dominos' album "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs." The album's title track describes Clapton's unrequited love for Boyd. Clapton later composed the Top 20 U.S. hit “Wonderful Tonight” with Boyd as his inspiration. In 2007, Boyd published her best-selling autobiography entitled "Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me." In 2022, she published her latest book, "Pattie Boyd: My Life in Pictures." --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/everythingfabfour/support

The Vinyl Guide
Ep370: Pattie Boyd - A Life in Pictures & Music

The Vinyl Guide

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 12, 2022 44:52


Pattie Boyd's life has been surrounded by music, art and history. Once married to George Harrison, then Eric Clapton, Pattie inspired some of the greatest songs of the 20th century and witnessed key moments in music history. Today we discuss her new book 'A Life In Pictures' and many of her moments that are collective cultural touchstones. Topics include: Sharing her photos in the new book Best practices for her photography Going through all her negatives So many songs written about Pattie Meeting George Did she know much about The Beatles prior to meeting George George asking Brian Epstein about getting married Pattie's participation in a few Beatles recordings Talking to George about music The records that George and Pattie enjoyed Watching Frank Sinatra record “My Way” Meeting Elvis George sharing the song “Something” with Pattie Pattie would hear Beatles demos as they were doing them Pattie's memories of Magic Alex Meeting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Recalling the moment of hearing of Brian Epstein's death Moments and Memorabilia from the Beatles Recollections of The Beatles breakup John & Yoko talking George back into the band Pattie's perspective of Yoko in the studio Did George miss being in The Beatles? The Beatles received a large financial offer to reform Wearing disguises in public The original Derek & the Dominos / Layla painting Many photographs for potential subsequent books Pattie left a lot of her Beatles white label promos with Eric Interview wrap up Order a signed Pattie Boyd book here High-resolution & Commercial Free version of this interview available at: www.Patreon.com/VinylGuide Listen on Apple: https://apple.co/2Y6ORU0 Listen on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/36qhlc8 Follow our Podcast: https://linktr.ee/vinylguide Facebook: www.Facebook.com/VinylGuide Instagram: www.Instagram.com/VinylGuide Support our show: www.Patreon.com/VinylGuide If you like records, just starting a collection or are an uber-nerd with a house-full of vinyl, this is the podcast for you. Nate Goyer is The Vinyl Guide and discusses all things music and record-related