DM's Beatles forums
Solo forums => John Lennon => Topic started by: Geoff on September 12, 2008, 06:31:09 PM
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There are lots of news stories circulating about Philip Norman's new biography of John Lennon, but Steve Marinucci over at Abbeyrd found the only one worth reproducing:
The Curious Life Of John Lennon
His sexual fantasies included Paul McCartney and his own mother. And he was haunted by a mystifying inability to forget any pain ever caused him. John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman adds a complex, epic dimension to "a major, towering presence of the 20th century". Paul Du Noyer investigates.
It's bloody enormous, for a start.
I had intended to take my review copy away on holiday, until it arrived by courier in two huge A4 binders. I would literally have needed an extra suitcase. The author tells me it runs to about 300,000 words and that was after he'd cut 60,000. Can there still be so much to say about John Lennon? Or indeed about anyone?
I would pitch Philip Norman's blockbuster somewhere in between its two best-known predecessors, namely Albert Goldman's The Lives Of John Lennon (a book he calls "malevolent, risibly ignorant") and Ray Coleman's Lennon: The Definitive Biography ("an honourable attempt"). But I would place it above both of them - more accurate, more perceptive and far better written. The great surprise for people like me, who have spent too many years reading about The Beatles, is the revelatory material that John Lennon: The Life actually contains. So, yes, there really is more to say.
The first eye-opener is John's incestuous desire for his mother Julia - a flighty and spirited woman who left him, as a child, in the care of her sister Mimi. (She was killed in a car accident when John was a teenager.) He spoke to Yoko of this fixation repeatedly; he confided it to others and speaks of it in a 1979 audio-diary. At 14 he lay next to his mother during her afternoon rest and wondered how far she would let him go.
Then it's suggested that he had a crush on Paul. "On the principle that bohemians should try everything," writes Norman, John had contemplated an affair, "but had been deterred by Paul's immovable heterosexuality." Yoko, again, is party to this speculation. She recalls hearing people in the Apple office who called McCartney "John's Princess". One is never sure whether John really had those leanings - or just an intellectual curiosity and appetite for mischief. The same ambiguity surrounds his early Spanish holiday with The Beatles' gay manager Brian Epstein. (Although, when a Liverpool DJ unwisely made a jibe, Lennon battered him savagely.)
Norman writes with a shrewd eye for the wider context. He's especially good on the post-war, middle-class world of Lennon's childhood. We follow John from semi-detached tranquillity to art-school and Hamburg, to the London Palladium and the world. We are necessarily in familiar territory for a lot of the time, thanks not least to the author's own Beatle book, his estimable 1981 biography Shout!. Yet there is always an arresting new fact around the corner. Connoisseurs of trivia will enjoy learning that "eight days a week" was not a Ringo-ism, but a quip by Paul's taxi-driver on the way to a songwriting session with John. Nor had I known of John's fling with the pop singer Alma Cogan - a woman whom poor Brian Epstein, ironically, had once considered marrying.
More startling, though, is the business of Norwegian Wood. This song was always read as a coded admission of adultery - but with whom? The journalist Maureen Cleave is often suggested - she was pretty and clever and Lennon adored her - but Norman's evidence points elsewhere. When John moved to London with his wife Cynthia and their child Julian, they took a flat in South Kensington. It had been found for them by The Beatles' photographer Robert Freeman, who lived downstairs with his beautiful wife, Sonny. Now, she was German but preferred to say she was Norwegian. The Freemans' pad was fashionably wood-panelled. When Robert was out and Cynthia upstairs, John slipped down to see Sonny Freeman and they did, indeed, have an affair.
The book's numerous sources include both Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, The Beatles' producer George Martin and their right-hand man Neil Aspinall. There are long-lost girlfriends from Liverpool and the "primal scream" therapist Arthur Janov. I even provided a few scraps myself.
Documentary evidence comes from the private papers of Aunt Mimi and John's autobiographical notes and tapes. A Lennon biographer always has the benefit of his songs, which are among the most candid ever written. And there are the ever-engaging public utterances: he was, says Norman, "perhaps the only celebrity in history who never did a dull or dishonest interview".
What must it be like to write a Lennon book with Yoko looking over one shoulder and Paul over the other? The author had Yoko's blessing for the project - although she's apparently unhappy with the finished result - and Paul agreed to be interviewed also. The tone is scrupulously fair to both of them. Yoko appears to have been pulled reluctantly into Lennon's orbit. She did not push her way forward to bag a Beatle. And McCartney has shown a forgiving side. I doubt whether he has forgotten Philip Norman's Sunday Times attack from years ago, a parody poem that ended:
O deified Scouse, with unmusical spouse
For the cliches and cloy you unload,
To an anodyne tune may they bury you soon
In the middlemost midst of the road.
Of all the stories contained within this teeming tale, few are as strange as that of Alfred Lennon, John's wayward father. A rascally Scouse seaman, it's true that he abandoned John in childhood, but not without a struggle to keep him. Later, as a penniless drifter, he sought the company of his Beatle son but never expected much. At 54 he eloped to Gretna Green with a teenage bride and they had two sons - Lennon's little-known half-brothers. Unaware the superstar now wore a beard, he once took along that quintessentially 1970 gift, a bottle of aftershave. The visit enraged Lennon, who responded with brutal fury and threatened to have him killed - poor Alf was so shaken he filed a statement with a solicitor, in the event of his unnatural death.
It's another instance of John's propensity to extreme nastiness. His behaviour towards his first wife, Cynthia, has some repellent aspects too. Such stories, and they're well documented, make you question the posthumous sanctification of Lennon. The Man of Peace was, in a way, the classic idealist - he loved the human race in abstract but could be a complete bastard with individuals, including his own family. He admits as much in one of his last-ever songs, I Don't Wanna Face It: "You wanna save humanity/But it's people that you just can't stand".
But there, in the humour and self-awareness, we catch a more endearing man as well. Quick, funny and frequently kind, Lennon never stopped learning, questioning and revising his ideas. Where he was headed, we can only guess. There was never much need to "expose" or "debunk" John Lennon - in his songs, from Cold Turkey to Jealous Guy, he always got there before you. Lennon: The Life may be a warts-and-all sort of book, but it's also respectful and affectionate. In the end, it's the portrait of a complex man, and it's as big as it needs to be. This is the best Lennon book so far.
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/the-curious-life-of-john-lennon
http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/fabnews.htm
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Someone just posted this on another site. It's from the Sun. It's pretty bizarre, but people are actually believing it! Please, please, please, give me your thoughts! There's audio to it too. And it does sound like him.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/article1679838.ece
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Here's the article in case you don't want to click on the link.
[size=14]Lennon's amazing tape of lust for mum[/size]
By SIMON ROTHSTEIN
Published: 12 Sep 2008
rigTeaserImage
JOHN LENNON fantasised about having sex with his mother Julia, according to a leaked audio diary which it is claimed he recorded a year before his death.
His widow YOKO ONO and BEATLES bandmate PAUL McCARTNEY are furious about forthcoming book John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman, which makes the lurid accusation.
However on the tape - which you can listen to by clicking here- a voice alleged to be John
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Remind me please who Philip Norman is again?
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Well, I was just wondering about the audio and what people thought of this in general. :-/
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That tape has been out on bootleg for years from the lost Lennon tapes.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TawfSfiVmjw
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Well, I was just wondering about the audio and what people thought of this in general. :-/
I think I need to read the whole book: Norman's Shout! is one of the few Beatles volumes worth owning, so I'm "cautiously optimistic", as the old cliche goes, that the thing will be worth having.
But the tabloid press are operating at their usual level; this is a screen shot of the Google page for references to Norman's book:
(http://i299.photobucket.com/albums/mm317/geoffw_2008/journos.jpg)
Guess which bits interested them, eh? :-/
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First, I'm sorry I didn't realize there was another thread about this, so thanks for the merge. Second, I was just asking opinions on the whole matter of WHAT he said. Which he did say. I find it curious. Anyway, no one seems to be offering opinions of it, just of the book or the fact that it's being sensationalized. Which I understand. If a discussion has already been had and I missed it, again I apologize. Was just hoping for some sort of discussion. As usual.
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First, I'm sorry I didn't realize there was another thread about this, so thanks for the merge. Second, I was just asking opinions on the whole matter of WHAT he said. Which he did say. I find it curious. Anyway, no one seems to be offering opinions of it, just of the book or the fact that it's being sensationalized. Which I understand. If a discussion has already been had and I missed it, again I apologize. Was just hoping for some sort of discussion. As usual.
First, IMO, it needs to be established what he DID say, vs. what other people say he said. Secondly, even if Lennon DID say he said these things, we all know that doesn't necessarily establish them as facts - we all know he would say the most outrageous and untrue things at times, for who knows what reason. He may even have believed them at the time he said them.
Moving on ... it is not unusual for adolescent boys to have wildly inappropriate fantasies as they begin to sexually develop. Most do not cop a feel of their mother, as one of these threads said Lennon said he did. But you put a vulnerable boy in that position with a vulnerable mother who has severe emotional and perhaps psychiatric problems of her own ... I'm guessing this kind of thing has happened uncountable times over the ages. BTW - did the book say what happened after this was supposed to have happened?
And this holiday with Brian ... is there anything more than he said/she said innuendo and hearsay to establish he and Brian had an affair? And what does the book give as proof that John wanted to bonk Paul?
Finally - even if all these things are true (and there is a lot of evidence lacking before one can say this even semi-confidently) - in the end what does it matter? We all know John had serious emotional issues. The essence of John to me is his music, his wit, his drive, and his intelligence. What he did with these, despite his demons, is the important thing - not the demons themselves.
Just my two cents!
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Well, obviously, nothing about their personal lives should matter to the fans, but this is a discussion board and we discuss. I wasn't asking about all the other stuff in the book. Rather, I was asking about what he SAID on audio. Which I thought was interesting. I was wondering what people thought it said about him. If it gave us anymore insight into his mind set at that time of his life. He sounds a bit depressed to me actually.
Anyway, Yes, the experience is probably not all that shocking, but what he said about it was a bit odd. That he wished he did something more or whatever. I had just never heard it before and having listened to it, wanted a bit of discussion. I'm not making it more than it is and I know John was a contradictory person and used to say things that weren't even true in the end. But I did want other fans opinions on the topic as it is relevant to a Beatles board.
Moving on ... it is not unusual for adolescent boys to have wildly inappropriate fantasies as they begin to sexually develop. Most do not cop a feel of their mother, as one of these threads said Lennon said he did. But you put a vulnerable boy in that position with a vulnerable mother who has severe emotional and perhaps psychiatric problems of her own ... I'm guessing this kind of thing has happened uncountable times over the ages.
This is pretty much what I feel. That it's something boys go through, but it's usually not taken so far. But again, him wishing he had done more in his later years and regretting it is somewhat disturbing and probably not the norm. Again, this is on the audio of Lennon speaking. I'm not going by the book. I was never talking about the book. Just the audio. But since this was merged with the book thread, it might appear that way.
:)
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I don't think it's John on the tape , it sounds like a much older man to me ?
And as for him fancying Paul why not , them Beatles sandwiches they used to indulge in are bound to get a closet bisexual like John going .
When's this book out ?
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... But again, him wishing he had done more in his later years and regretting it is somewhat disturbing and probably not the norm ...
:)
Aye, but John wasn't the norm, that was smith :)
To be honest, I have always wondered if at some point later in life John wasn't reduced to a basket case by intrinsic and extrinsic factors (genes for the former - Mum and Dad didn't seem to have an excess of "stability genes" to pass along; substance abuse and Yoko for the latter - though I'm never sure if Yoko contributed to all this, or whether the effect of her doing what she did actually kept John from spiraling down out of existence).
You never know with John if when he said something it was actually true, or if he just said it for effect, or he even believed it at the moment. It was like he was Woody Allen and the microphone/movie camera was his therapist's couch. I suppose, even if all this were true, I wouldn't be shocked.
BTW, what year was the interview where he supposedly expressed regret about not consumating his Oedipal desires given?
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The audio
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The audio
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When's this book out ?
1 October in the UK, and 28 October in the US.
[UK] http://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Lennon-Life-Philip-Norman/dp/0007197411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221333332&sr=8-1
[US] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006075401X/ref=s9sims_c3_14_img1-rfc_g1-frt_g1-3215_g1-3102_p?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-6&pf_rd_r=08XYHNTP9ZBDZP27NRWX&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=436516401&pf_rd_i=507846
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Anyway, no one seems to be offering opinions of it, just of the book or the fact that it's being sensationalized.
I want to know more before I pass judgment or even comment much: tabloid chatter and a minute's worth of audio simply aren't enough. Give me the book.
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There's about 10 minutes more audio on that youtube clip. Which is all I'm going by. I couldn't care less about the gossip part of it. But I get it. I don't think I'm passing judgment so much as just discussing what I think of it. Which is all we can do no matter how much information we get. In the end we weren't there and will never know the real truth. Most of the discussion that goes on here is based on little bits of information we've received here and there over the years. I don't think any of us know or will ever know the full picture. Still it's interesting chatting about it.
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First, I'm sorry I didn't realize there was another thread about this, so thanks for the merge.
I doubted about that and in a way still do. But it is about the same matter, isn't it?
It sounds like John on the tape, but we will never be certain I guess.
The relationship between Julia and John could have been quite complex. She was his mother but she didn't raise him. I bet John never had any sexual feelings towards Mimi. Julia might have been more some kind of older sister with a wild life and funny ideas that John was attracted to. Looking at it that way, it's not a step too far to imagine that he wished he had gone further.
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I remember reading Goldman's book when it first came out and feeling pretty disgusted when I finished it (yes, I did finish it I'm ashamed to say.) I've read about this today on the BBC News website and frankly it doesn't surprise me. John ain't around to defend himself so it's easy to make sensationalist allegations about a dead man, as Goldman's already showed us. His Elvis biography was equally absurd.
Whether these claims are true or not, I don't know and don't care. It doesn't make John any less of a man or artist in my opinion and I think most of his fans feel the same.
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I doubted about that and in a way still do. But it is about the same matter, isn't it?
It sounds like John on the tape, but we will never be certain I guess.
The relationship between Julia and John could have been quite complex. She was his mother but she didn't raise him. I bet John never had any sexual feelings towards Mimi. Julia might have been more some kind of older sister with a wild life and funny ideas that John was attracted to. Looking at it that way, it's not a step too far to imagine that he wished he had gone further.
That makes sense I suppose. And he probably confused his feelings about her too. I mean, he always longed for her to be in his life. I also think he was very attracted to the whole bohemian lifestyle she led. Or he could have just been saying it to be controversial. Because, I feel like that's who he was. Who could tell what was real and what was just his ramblings.
Anyway, if it isn't him on the tape then whoever it is does one hell of an imitation! ??)
BTW, I don't mind that the threads were merged. Hope it didn't come off that way. I was just trying to make clear that I wasn't going by the gossip in the book. Just what is on the diary tape. :)
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Do you have any other thoughts on this, Sandra? What do you make of his sounding subdued and depressed at the time of the recording?
I listened to the longer recording and I don't know, I just think for 1979 he still sounds very bitter. He also sounds as if he had become a bit self important. Or maybe it's just that he had lost touch. He did lock himself up in a tower for years. From what he goes on about, it seems like he's trying to justify his lack of creative output. He calls Paul, Jagger, and Dylan company men, he calls Paul Simon the singing dwarf, he ridicules their music, and so on. After all those years of supposed family harmony and all the therapy and stuff he's still sounds bitter.
I also find it interesting how he says he used to worry about the competition and used to order their albums so he could hear what they were doing. Didn't he say in a few earlier interviews that he NEVER listened to them and didn't care? There we go again! Oh well. He wouldn't be John without all the quirks and if I wasn't such a huge fan, I wouldn't spend the time caring about stuff like this I guess! No matter what, he made amazing music and nothing will ever take away from that.
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That tape has been out on bootleg for years from the lost Lennon tapes.
[url]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TawfSfiVmjw[/url]
I'm listening to this right now. He, whoever "he" is, sounds extremely BORED.
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Sounds like a typical junkie to me. Blaming everyone else for his problems. Belittling those who intimidate him. Musing about incestuous feelings. In short, regressing.
But a lot of John's art was about regressing to a simpler state. "Strawberry Fields Forever." "Julia" (in which mother and lover are elided in a child's drawing view of the world). "Imagine" (why won't all the bad people go away). "All You Need is Love" (All "I" need is Love).
When you look for emotional complexity, you don't find that in most of John's songs. There's very little as complex as Dylan's Blood on the Tracks or alot of Paul Simon's work. The "adult" John is writing songs like "Jealous Guy" while the "young" John wrote "I'm a Loser." Not a lot of ground gained.
John's most advanced work lyrically (like "I Am the Walrus" and "Across the Universe") tends to overlook the personal for the satirical or metaphysical. He's like a James Joyce who never discovered the voice of Leopold Bloom to offset his Stephen Daedalus.
It's a shame. Maybe John would have developed this had he lived. Songs like "Beautiful Boy" and "Watching the Wheels" seems to have a maturity, candor, and maybe even acceptance of who he was.
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Dang, that man sounds clinically depressed. How sad. I hope he really did perk up in the last year of his life.
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Sounds like a typical junkie to me. Blaming everyone else for his problems. Belittling those who intimidate him. Musing about incestuous feelings. In short, regressing.
But a lot of John's art was about regressing to a simpler state. "Strawberry Fields Forever." "Julia" (in which mother and lover are elided in a child's drawing view of the world). "Imagine" (why won't all the bad people go away). "All You Need is Love" (All "I" need is Love).
When you look for emotional complexity, you don't find that in most of John's songs. There's very little as complex as Dylan's Blood on the Tracks or alot of Paul Simon's work. The "adult" John is writing songs like "Jealous Guy" while the "young" John wrote "I'm a Loser." Not a lot of ground gained.
John's most advanced work lyrically (like "I Am the Walrus" and "Across the Universe") tends to overlook the personal for the satirical or metaphysical. He's like a James Joyce who never discovered the voice of Leopold Bloom to offset his Stephen Daedalus.
It's a shame. Maybe John would have developed this had he lived. Songs like "Beautiful Boy" and "Watching the Wheels" seems to have a maturity, candor, and maybe even acceptance of who he was.
Nicely put, thanks for the perspective.
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I've listend to the full tape now , and i now think it is John.
I agree alexis he doe's sound clinically depressed .
Boy did he need to start writing music again and get a life ,another year in that appartment and he would have gone like Howard Hughes.
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I've listend to the full tape now , and i now think it is John.
I agree alexis he doe's sound clinically depressed .
Boy did he need to start writing music again and get a life ,another year in that appartment and he would have gone like Howard Hughes.
^I read that and I thought you said something about Hogwarts. Haha!
But really, I don't wanna believe it's John. I'm not gonna believe it! *blocks ears* I'm not gonna!
But those bagpipes made my day. Were they bagpipes? I can't remember...
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^I read that and I thought you said something about Hogwarts. Haha!
But really, I don't wanna believe it's John. I'm not gonna believe it! *blocks ears* I'm not gonna!
But those bagpipes made my day. Were they bagpipes? I can't remember...
It's OK, we all get sick at times (flu, or mumps, etc.), and mental illness/depression is no different, just a bit less common perhaps :)
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Just a theory:
John was without a doubt someone who wanted to be seen as an interesting person. And maybe that's why he sometimes just said things to shock people. Like the famous "We're bigger than Jesus" comment. John was a smart guy, he must've known that people would take it the wrong way. But he said it anyway...
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Just a theory:
John was without a doubt someone who wanted to be seen as an interesting person. And maybe that's why he sometimes just said things to shock people. Like the famous "We're bigger than Jesus" comment. John was a smart guy, he must've known that people would take it the wrong way. But he said it anyway...
Lot to be said for this! Especially as he was obviously green with envy at the success of the "company men" (Paul, Jagger) and the "singing dwarf" (Paul Simon). If he couldn't get attention musically, he'd get it some other way. Nice one, joost!
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Just a theory:
John was without a doubt someone who wanted to be seen as an interesting person. And maybe that's why he sometimes just said things to shock people. Like the famous "We're bigger than Jesus" comment. John was a smart guy, he must've known that people would take it the wrong way. But he said it anyway...
I think you're onto something there.
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Then it's suggested that he had a crush on Paul. "On the principle that bohemians should try everything," writes Norman, John had contemplated an affair, "but had been deterred by Paul's immovable heterosexuality." Yoko, again, is party to this speculation. She recalls hearing people in the Apple office who called McCartney "John's Princess".
(http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc97/thebeatlesband/publicandmiscpics/paulandjohnsexy.jpg)
Okay, I'm sorry. I just COULD NOT resist! Forgive me. Please? :X
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Just a theory:
John was without a doubt someone who wanted to be seen as an interesting person. And maybe that's why he sometimes just said things to shock people. Like the famous "We're bigger than Jesus" comment. John was a smart guy, he must've known that people would take it the wrong way. But he said it anyway...
I have to agree with this. Bisexuality was all the rage in the '70s with Bowie and Elton John. I wouldn't be surprised if John had thought about using it as a marketing tool.
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[url]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TawfSfiVmjw[/url]
He sounds awful: disjointed and obsessive ramblings about his mother, along with sharp, resentful stabs at his contemporaries, probably for still having the careers and lives John doesn't and is afraid he can't have. The fact that he's ruminating about boyhood fantasies involving his mother at one point says more about his terrible state of mind at the time the tape was recorded than it does about the fantasies themselves. Very sad.
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More grist for the (rumor) mill:
Sir Paul McCartney Denies John Lennon 'Gay Claims'
by Jason Gregory
15 September 2008
Sir Paul McCartney has denied that his former Beatles band mate John Lennon ever tried to make a sexual advance on him.
A new book about Lennon, who died in 1980, claims that the former Beatle wanted a gay relationship with Sir Paul.
But in a new interview, Sir Paul has rubbished the claims, saying the pair only occasionally shared a bed on tour.
"I don't think (the gay claims) are true. John never ever tried anything, I slept with him a million times,
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More grist for the (rumor) mill:
"I've seen him on tour roaring drunk, out of his mind in the early days before he sobered up and went to rehab. Roaring drunk and it was always with a female, never once.
"If you've got a little gay tendency and your roaring drunk I'd have caught him once."
[url]http://www.gigwise.com/news/46046/sir-paul-mccartney-denies-john-lennon-gay-claims[/url]
He said the same thing YEARS ago on a radio show. I have no reason to doubt him. I think if anything, like Joost and Mairi say, John was just trying to shock. But then, who knows!
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More grist for the (rumor) mill:
"If you've got a little gay tendency and your roaring drunk I'd have caught him once."
Maybe this adds an ironic twist to "How Do You Sleep?"
Maybe Paul slept a little too soundly . . . ?
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More grist for the (rumor) mill:
Sir Paul McCartney Denies John Lennon 'Gay Claims'
by Jason Gregory
15 September 2008
Sir Paul McCartney has denied that his former Beatles band mate John Lennon ever tried to make a sexual advance on him.
A new book about Lennon, who died in 1980, claims that the former Beatle wanted a gay relationship with Sir Paul.
But in a new interview, Sir Paul has rubbished the claims, saying the pair only occasionally shared a bed on tour.
"I don't think (the gay claims) are true. John never ever tried anything, I slept with him a million times,
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John went to rehab?
Yeah: Dr Robert's. It got him off the bottle, anyway. ;D
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Yeah: Dr Robert's. It got him off the bottle, anyway. ;D
I liked him better when he was on the bottle, he seemed to have lost his spark after that. I never did understand how they could party so hard and late, and still have enough energy to be so good. Like around AHDN - it seems like they never slept!
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More grist for the (rumor) mill:
Sir Paul McCartney Denies John Lennon 'Gay Claims'
by Jason Gregory
15 September 2008
Sir Paul McCartney has denied that his former Beatles band mate John Lennon ever tried to make a sexual advance on him.
A new book about Lennon, who died in 1980, claims that the former Beatle wanted a gay relationship with Sir Paul.
But in a new interview, Sir Paul has rubbished the claims, saying the pair only occasionally shared a bed on tour.
"I don't think (the gay claims) are true. John never ever tried anything, I slept with him a million times,
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More grist for the (rumor) mill:
Sir Paul McCartney Denies John Lennon 'Gay Claims'
by Jason Gregory
15 September 2008
Sir Paul McCartney has denied that his former Beatles band mate John Lennon ever tried to make a sexual advance on him.
A new book about Lennon, who died in 1980, claims that the former Beatle wanted a gay relationship with Sir Paul.
But in a new interview, Sir Paul has rubbished the claims, saying the pair only occasionally shared a bed on tour.
"I don't think (the gay claims) are true. John never ever tried anything, I slept with him a million times,
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Food for Kevin! ;D
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More grist for the (rumor) mill:
Sir Paul McCartney Denies John Lennon 'Gay Claims'
by Jason Gregory
15 September 2008
Sir Paul McCartney has denied that his former Beatles band mate John Lennon ever tried to make a sexual advance on him.
A new book about Lennon, who died in 1980, claims that the former Beatle wanted a gay relationship with Sir Paul.
But in a new interview, Sir Paul has rubbished the claims, saying the pair only occasionally shared a bed on tour.
"I don't think (the gay claims) are true. John never ever tried anything, I slept with him a million times,
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...your basic male heterosexual pig (Swine, please feel free to chip in).
grunt!
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The first eye-opener is John's incestuous desire for his mother Julia - a flighty and spirited woman who left him, as a child, in the care of her sister Mimi. (She was killed in a car accident when John was a teenager.) He spoke to Yoko of this fixation repeatedly; he confided it to others and speaks of it in a 1979 audio-diary. At 14 he lay next to his mother during her afternoon rest and wondered how far she would let him go.
I was flicking through Many Years From Now earlier this month, and found a passage early on where McCartney describes occasionally seeing his mother in her underwear, and how it turned him on. It was a surprisingly candid comment, and admirably brave of McCartney to make.
Mother Mary died in 1956 when Paul was 14. Julia Lennon died in 58 when John was 17. The 1950s was a time of far more innocent sexuality than today, when, I'm told, the sight of Bridgitte Bardot in a bikini was enough to preoccupy your average teenage boy for months. I suppose a typically confused adolescence combined with a sexually repressed era may have led to some thoughts and actions which simply wouldn't happen today, now that most 14-year-olds can see all kinds of stuff on the net.
I dunno. Just a suggestion.
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The 1950s was a time of far more innocent sexuality than today, when, I'm told, the sight of Bridgitte Bardot in a bikini was enough to preoccupy your average teenage boy for months. I suppose a typically confused adolescence combined with a sexually repressed era may have led to some thoughts and actions which simply wouldn't happen today, now that most 14-year-olds can see all kinds of stuff on the net.
I dunno. Just a suggestion.
Quite possibly true as a general proposition, but I think John's comments have to be placed in the context of that particular tape: to me he just sounds horribly depressed and angry, and while his selection of subject matter- mother and musical contemporaries- is no doubt revealing, I'm not sure that any specific comment he makes about any of them can be taken all that seriously: the guy's really out of it. Did Cynthia say anything about John's moods or a tendency toward depression in any of her books?
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Quite possibly true as a general proposition, but I think John's comments have to be placed in the context of that particular tape: to me he just sounds horribly depressed and angry, and while his selection of subject matter- mother and musical contemporaries- is no doubt revealing, I'm not sure that any specific comment he makes about any of them can be taken all that seriously: the guy's really out of it. Did Cynthia say anything about John's moods or a tendency toward depression in any of her books?
Great question. I have a Twist of Lennon, and maybe one of her others, but I don't remember too much about them.
My guess is that the episodes of depression were always there in one form or another. I always felt John's bluster and cruelty (lovable cruelty in the early days) was just his using tools he had, to overcompensate or "get back" at others he felt inferior to. "Although I laugh, and I act like a clown...". I think he's been quoted as saying something like "Sometimes I think I'm better than Jesus Christ, and sometimes I feel like everybody is better in every way than me". "Help, I need somebody ...". "Half of what I say is meaningless ...". "I can hear them laugh at me ...". Etc.
Signed, Dr. Sigmund Robert
The more I think about it, the more I think Yoko kept him alive, but in doing so sucked all the life out of him.
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It's great to consider our heroes as being quirky geniuses or something, but more likely, it's some kind of disorder or chemical imbalance. Bipolar maybe? Not quite as glamorous, but sort of makes sense. They were just lucky enough to have an incredible talent to go along with it. Or maybe in the case of Lennon is was just an acute case of an out of control ego. I mean, when you read/listen to his interview, if you listen carefully, he really sounds like a narcissist.
Just in case anyone wonders why I think that:
Dictionary:
narcissism
1. Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See synonyms at conceit.
2. A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.
3. Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one's own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.
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It's great to consider our heroes as being quirky geniuses or something, but more likely, it's some kind of disorder or chemical imbalance. Bipolar maybe? Not quite as glamorous, but sort of makes sense. They were just lucky enough to have an incredible talent to go along with it. Or maybe in the case of Lennon is was just an acute case of an out of control ego. I mean, when you read/listen to his interview, if you listen carefully, he really sounds like a narcissist.
Just in case anyone wonders why I think that:
Dictionary:
narcissism
1. Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See synonyms at conceit.
2. A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.
3. Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one's own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.
The problem being ...?
;)
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I thought he sounded like he had gone off sex altogether .
Mid- life crisis also came to mind ?
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Didn't Pauline Sutcliffe in her third book about her brother suggest that Stuart and John had a sexual relationship. This was rubbish. Didn't Geoffrey Giuliano in his book about John in New York suggest that John had a sexual relationship with his mother? All these kinds of rubbishy things have been prevalent in books for decades, so what's new. Basically, a lot of these books are penned by ghost writers who know what salacious stories tittilate readers and also bring them financially rewarding seaialisation in the tabloid newspapers. Pauline Sutcliffe, in an interview in Beatles Unlimited said that the story that Albert Goldman put in his book that Stuart died as a result of John kicking him in the head in Hamburg was a complete fabrication. Then she puts the same story in her book alleging that it was true - and that was the story that appeared in the tabloids
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Basically, a lot of these books are penned by ghost writers who know what salacious stories titillate readers and also bring them financially rewarding serialisation in the tabloid newspapers.
I think you're bang on: there's precious little in the way of decent writing about rock / pop music, and much of what is available is either indifferent hackwork or nasty exploitation. Geoffrey Giuliano is a fine example of that species of writer, and eight or ten years ago you couldn't go to the music section of any decently stocked bookshop without having to look at a half dozen or so of his miserable titles. It's also slightly perverse that there still isn't a really solid, reliable biography of The Beatles, despite the fact that they disbanded nearly forty years ago.
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My guess is that the episodes of depression were always there in one form or another.
That would be my guess as well, but what's startling about that tape is how despondent he was capable of becoming. I thought of Krapp's Last Tape while listening to it.
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More bits and pieces....
Lennon's angry outburst 'damaged son's hearing'
A controversial new book claims John Lennon had a temper so volatile his son Sean had to be rushed to hospital as a young boy to repair his damaged hearing.
Sean Lennon remembers his dad in a postscript written in Philip Norman's new biography about the star, "John Lennon: The Life."
He claims his late father screamed into his ear during an angry outburst.
Sean says, "(He was) teaching me how to cut and eat steak, which was a mystery to me at age 4; how to stick the fork in and cut behind it, and that was how you got a piece in your mouth. I think it was that night when he got very upset with me, I think because of something I did very cheekily with the steak. He did wind up yelling at me very, very loudly to the point where he damaged my ear, and I had to go to the hospital."
But the 32-year-old admits his father was mortified by his own actions, adding: "I remember when I was lying on the floor and hurting, and him holding me and saying, 'I'm so sorry.' He did have a temper."
Lennon's widow Yoko Ono and his former Beatles bandmate Sir Paul McCartney have both distanced themselves from the book, which is scheduled to hit shelves later this month.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=7&entry_id=30598
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Yoko's distanced herself, and Sean has written a postscript to the book? Hmmmm.....
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Observer Review of John Lennon: The Life.
Rock from a hard place
Sean O'Hagan
The Observer,
Sunday October 5
It has been 20 years since the last major biography of John Lennon, Albert Goldman's extravagantly spiteful The Lives of John Lennon. Before that there was veteran music writer Ray Coleman's Lennon: The Definitive Biography, published in 1984, which was respectful, going-on adulatory. Blessedly, Philip Norman opts for a tone that sits between the two, though the so-called revelations contained in his account often tend towards the prurient.
Weighing in at around 500,000 words, John Lennon: The Life - note the definite article - tells a familiar tale in exhaustive but often illuminating detail. The book was written with the blessing of Yoko Ono and the tentative co-operation - by email - of Paul McCartney, though both are reported to be unhappy with the end result, which Ono claims is 'too mean' to Lennon's memory.
Other key sources include George Martin, the Beatles' producer; Arthur Janov, the primal therapist who treated Lennon for a time in the Seventies; and Jimmy Tarbuck, the Scouse comedian and erstwhile teddy boy who attended Dovedale Primary School with him. Norman has also tracked down several long-lost childhood friends and ex-girlfriends, all of who testify to the young Lennon's rebellious but essentially vulnerable temperament.
For me, the most fascinating section is the first third, which recounts Lennon's pre-stardom life in Liverpool and Hamburg. Norman is brilliant at evoking the postwar world from which the Beatles emerged and to which their unprecedented global success signalled the end. He vividly recreates Lennon's childhood in Liverpool, and his often tumultuous family environment, providing in the process what is the most rounded portrait to date of Lennon's wayward father, Alfred 'Freddie' Lennon. Freddie has long been caricatured as a feckless drifter but here emerges as a more complex man who deeply regretted abandoning his young son and who craved, but never received, John's forgiveness.
Norman is the first Lennon biographer to be granted access to the private papers of Lennon's celebrated Aunt Mimi, who took the troubled youngster in when his parents' ill-fated marriage finally imploded. He has also made good use of the notebooks the singer filled with his often scabrous musings and the cassettes on to which Lennon fitfully recorded his random thoughts, opinions and memories. The tabloids have already provided some invaluable pre-publicity for Norman's book by homing in on the 'revelation' that John may have harboured secret homosexual longings for Paul. Imagine! Macca, though, is having none of it. 'John never tried anything on,' he said recently. 'I slept with him a million times.' Lest there be any doubt about their laddishness, he added that had Lennon had 'a little gay tendency', he would 'have caught him out'.
There has been much conjecture about Lennon's sexuality in the past, most of it centred on his intense love-hate relationship with the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein. Norman refutes the oft-repeated rumour that the two slept together during a holiday in Spain in the summer of 1963. He concludes that Lennon's 'gay tendency' was aesthetic rather than carnal, and 'based on the principle that bohemians should try everything'.
The book's other big revelation, this time culled from a 1979 audio confession, is that, when he was a hormonally charged 14-year-old, Lennon harboured incestuous desires for his mother Julia. Her death in a car accident, when John was 17, was to haunt him for the rest of his life. Likewise, it would seem, the heightened moment in his adolescence when he lay down beside her and accidentally touched her breast. 'I was wondering if I should do anything else,' he mused later in a bout of post-therapy soul-baring. 'I always think I should have done it. Presumably she would have allowed it.'
Though Norman does not pick up on it, it's the word 'presumably' that intrigues here. Did Lennon assume his mother had no moral scruples and would have reciprocated his advances? Or that her love for him was as fearsomely all-consuming as his for her? Or was it the case that he had transformed this fleeting moment of intimacy between them into something more transgressive in the emotional upheaval that followed her sudden death? Either way, Julia is an abiding presence in this book, just as she was in her son's life, having, in his eyes, abandoned him when she gave him up to the care of her childless sister Mimi and then died on him while he was still trying to come to terms with that first perceived betrayal.
Though he always insisted that 'Help' was 'the only honest song I wrote', it is still deeply affecting to listen to the Freudian cri de coeur that is 'Mother' on his first solo album. It begins with the line: 'Mother, you had me, but I never had you' and is as naked an expression of hurt and longing as anything in popular music.
That John Lennon was an emotionally tortured individual, often consumed by rage, unprocessed grief and a lifelong fear of abandonment, should come as no surprise to anyone who has paid close attention to his often brutally honest and occasionally self-lacerating songs. What emerges most strongly, though, from this epic trawl through Lennon's life is just how emotionally tortured he was for most of it and how his own demise was foreshadowed by the deaths of those closest to him: Julia, Epstein and his teenage soulmate and fellow bohemian Stuart Sutcliffe, who died at 21 from a brain haemorrhage in Hamburg in 1962.
For a while, the music he made assuaged his demons, as did, fleetingly, his dalliances with LSD, heroin, alcohol, primal therapy and radical politics, all documented here in greater detail than before. Likewise, his complex and, for a while, all-consuming relationship with Yoko. The cruellest irony of Lennon's death at the hands of a devoted-to-the-point-of-unhinged fan is that it happened at a time when he seemed to have found a degree of contentment through the simple domestic pleasures of late fatherhood. How, one wonders, would he have fared with encroaching old age?
Fittingly, it is Sean Lennon's testimony that provides the affecting postscript to this biography, which ends too abruptly at the moment of his father's death. I was left longing, though, after such a long and detailed account of John Lennon's life, for some reflection on the deeper meaning of that life, some sense of how, nearly 30 years after his death, he shaped the world we now live in.
This is the best life of Lennon to date, however, if only for its brilliant evocation of his childhood in postwar England, that repressed and essentially Victorian society that shaped him and that he, more than any other British pop star, helped tear down.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/05/music
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^ Two things, though: I was unaware that John had ever said that "Help!" was the "only honest song I ever wrote," and does he say "presumably she would have allowed it" or "presuming" on the 1979 tape?
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t's also slightly perverse that there still isn't a really solid, reliable biography of The Beatles, despite the fact that they disbanded nearly forty years ago.
Just wait till the three-volume Mark Lewisohn biog comes out. That'll be essential reading, doubtless. Volume one is due in 2010, with the others in 2014 and 2018.
http://www.whatgoeson.com/story.200504041.html
I have quite a dim view of Norman - I think he's quite a poor writer, and some of the statements in Shout! don't stand up to much scrutiny. Also, the introduction to my edition of that book suggested he was a bit sick of writing about The Beatles, so for him to turn his attention to Lennon seems rather odd to me. Doubtless he got paid a nice advance though. I'm surprised McCartney gave it his blessing, though, as Shout! was quite needlessly harsh and partisan about his solo career.
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Just wait till the three-volume Mark Lewisohn biog comes out. That'll be essential reading, doubtless. Volume one is due in 2010, with the others in 2014 and 2018.
[url]http://www.whatgoeson.com/story.200504041.html[/url]
I have quite a dim view of Norman - I think he's quite a poor writer, and some of the statements in Shout! don't stand up to much scrutiny. Also, the introduction to my edition of that book suggested he was a bit sick of writing about The Beatles, so for him to turn his attention to Lennon seems rather odd to me. Doubtless he got paid a nice advance though. I'm surprised McCartney gave it his blessing, though, as Shout! was quite needlessly harsh and partisan about his solo career.
Shout! is journalism, which is to say that its merits are that it's pithy and vivid, and that its defects are that it's full of errors and opinionated. Norman obviously doesn't think much of Paul McCartney, and, like a lot of journalists he's a sucker for anything conspiratorial or prurient: see the bit about Brian Epstein's death, for example. Still, when Shout! came out in the early eighties, it was one of the few books since Hunter Davies' The Beatles to take its subject seriously and to have been the result of at least some amount of research. I think it's worth having because it's a good narrative, but it won't stand up as reference book. The same will probably be true of his Lennon as well.
Definitely looking forward to Mark Lewisohn. :)
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hiya everyone/anyone
i have an extensive review of this book at my website which also includes comments from yoko (i spoke to her a few days ago about a touring lennon art exhibition and got her to -- reluctantly -- comment on this book by philip norman.)
my website also has any number of beatles/lennon/ono interviews/articles/reviews etc (use the "search" function) but the link to my newly posted review is here
http://www.elsewhere.co.nz/writingelsewhere/
just thought you might be interested and might want to draw other people's attention to it.
i look forward to your comments, it is quite an in-depth article.
graham