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b. est friends Who both look like shaggy. scoopy doo

#unstoppable power #the beatles

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#I want a jumper like this #also? #the sweater sharing fic is real #lmao #tapped into the main frame #john and paul

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“There will be thousands more pages written about Paul McCartney, and yet, he seems to be taunting, we will never catch him.”

— Alexandra Jacobs, Reviewing The McCartney Legacy: Vol. 1 in the New York Times

#would you want to tho #that’s part of the fun #paul mccartney

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#the green #yes

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4 December 1968

George Harrison drafts the following memo for Apple staff:

Hells Angels will be in London within the next week, on the way to straighten out Czechoslovakia. There will be twelve in number complete with black leather jackets and motor cycles. They will undoubtedly arrive at Apple and I have heard they may try to make full use of Apple’s facilities. They may look as though they are going to do you in but are very straight and do good things, so don’t fear them or up-tight them. Try to assist them without neglecting your Apple business and without letting them take control of Savile Row.

Running a business sounds super easy.

#^prev tags #convinced they can’t find good Beatles actors #they haven’t been able to so far #🤷‍♀️ #a tv show would be cool tho

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The three were particular [about their food] though, as Margo soon learned. Ringo liked 'soldiers', that is toasted bread cut in parallel strips with the crusts cut off. He wanted to dunk each 'soldier' in whatever liquid was at hand. George would only drink Earl Grey tea, bought specially for him from Jackson's of Piccadilly. As if this wasn't enough, the tea bag had to be dunked an exact number of times and the amount of sugar varied from one, one and a half, one and three-quarters to two teaspoons depending on his mood. John was into 'jam butties' by the hundreds. (Years later, Margo went to New York to see Elton John's concert there. She had not seen Lennon in a couple of years, not since his move to New York. As she was registering at the hotel, she heard a voice yell "Jam butties and a cup of tea!" She turned around to see John. He never forgot England.) All three rarely had anything for lunch except omelettes and chips. Margo was a very good cook and these delicacies were well below her capabilities. Penny occasionally did a fancy souffle or quiche to try to impress them. They would eat it politely and tell Penny it was marvellous. But when Margo appeared with their cups of tea, one of them would whisper "Could you bring me some chips, Margo. I only got a side salad with that cheesy thing at lunch. I'm still hungry."

Waiting for the Beatles: An Apple Scruff's Story, Carol Bedford (1984)

#the English palette #jam sandwich #tea #but like specifically how you like it and no other way #the toast in get back #yup #ringos Heinz beans #the Beatles #apple scruffs

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Onstage in Munich, June 1966. Photos by Frank Fischbeck.

Remembering John.

“During Goldmine’s first National Record Show, in September 2000 at The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, dealers and the Goldmine staff were given a behind-the-scenes look at some recently acquired items that had not yet been shown publicly. Among the items was the jean jacket Lennon wore during the ‘70s. There were few embellishments on the jacket, but he had sewn a Dark Horse Records patch on it.” - “Letter from the editor” by Greg Loescher, Goldmine, January 25, 2002 “The idea of John not being here doesn’t bother me so much because — he is here, to me. That’s what the whole life of Christ was, to show people, ‘You dug him then — re-dig him now.’ To realize that it’s the spirit, not the body. And I’ve learned whatever the years. In a way, you don’t need a living guru in front of you, because he’s in front of your spiritual eye, every time you close your eyes and go inside. They’re all there, all our friends and loved ones, all our relatives. Everybody is there. So the way he died was tragic. But: ‘If your memory serves you well, we’re gonna meet again…’ [...] They can kill the man, but they can’t kill the spirit. They can’t kill what he meant to you.” - George Harrison, Musician, March 1990 (x)

#the dark horse patch gets me #🥲

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#he goin thru it

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god he's just like me fr fr

#should anybody be showing their forehead really #bring back bangs/fringes for guys #like Jonathan Byers type bangs

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love the little “for paul” they added here

#real love #all the way

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During the recording of Revolution. 1968. After India. The mood on Ringo and George's faces is indescribable. "Here we go again..."

#genuinely hilarious #ringos face #ffs

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John smiling at Paul like this will sustain me for 100 years and I hope it sustains Paul too

#fav #I think of this when I need cheering up #:3 #john and paul #bug boys #goodnight Paul #goodnight John

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The Beatles as beetles!!

#yup

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what songs do you tinhat for?

I think that the last three Beatles albums are a conversation that goes something like this:

THE WHITE ALBUM John: "Hey Paul you ignorant slut, I have something to say to you!" Paul: *fingers in ears* "La la la la, sorry what was that? I'm busy getting dumped by Jane Asher in the other chat window."

LET IT BE Paul: "Why are you breaking up with me??? ;___;" John: "I'm not, YOU'RE breaking up with ME!!!!"

ABBEY ROAD John: "Whatever, I'm gonna salt the earth on my way out btw." Paul: "Not if I get there first, but also you'll regret that I think."

- with many songs that are directly written at and about each other and their disintegrating relationship (I'm So Tired & John's other angsty India songs, Dig a Pony, Don't Let Me Down, Let it Be, The Long and Winding Road, Oh Darling!, YNGMYM/Golden Slumbers-suite, etc. you know - the songs even no-homo Boomers would probably agree with). I think there's some truth to 'Hey Jude' being subconsciously about the situation with John and Yoko. I don't think John wrote explicitly about Paul until they started breaking up (w/ the exception of 'In My Life', which per John telling Pete Shotton that a good chunk of the song is about him & Stu, has a "platonic" interpretation), and I don't think Paul wrote about John at all until '68.

Post-breakup, I think Paul's songs about John were largely subconscious and indirect with the exception of ones that were written with the expectation of getting a response ('Dear Friend', 'Call Me Back', 'Coming Up'). I think John has a lot of pre-68 songs like this, influenced but not directly about, his relationship with Paul (on my crazy days, I'm a "Girl is about Paul" truther, but in the sense that John is singing/venting about "his type" here), but after 1968, any song about Paul is literally about him (so like, 'Jealous Guy' and 'I Know I Know', etc. Bc he often uses Beatles references, it's v. straight forward). Because of this, I actually think Paul has more album songs about John in the 70s than John does about him (concentrated at the beginning and end of the 70s). John has all those mournful demos that are BEYOND obvious Paul-pining ('La la la farm', 'oh memory haunting me,' etc.) which makes me think that he tended to keep this stuff off his albums, or it was a state of mind he went in and out of, and made effort to stay out of. On my extra crazy days, I'm a '#9 Dream' truther. It's kind of like 'Dig a Pony' where yeah, okay, you can say it's crazy nonsense lyrics about how much he loves drugs and heterosexual sex, but if you stop reading it upside down, it sounds like it has an extremely clear narrative arc of remembering what it was like to play music with a person/people you love/d (ie: it could be about The Beatles in general).

I think RAM and Imagine are pretty clearly and immaturely aimed right at each other. Not that every song on the album is about each other, but that both of them wrote those albums looking over their shoulder to see if the other was listening, and this attitude is dripping from every song regardless of what it's about (I include 'Little Lamb Dragonfly' - originally fr. the RAM sessions - here, which is I think, directly about missing John; "how did two rights make a wrong?" seems to be an early version of the "why can't we both be married and stay friends?" sentiment expressed on 'Dear Friend'). They're pointedly ignoring/dismissing each other on McCartney I and POB, but on these second albums they're definitely smashing the keyboard hard as they can like "I HOPE YOU'RE FUCKING LISTENING TO THIS AND SEEING HOW MUCH I DON'T NEED YOU AND HOW HAPPY I AM WITHOUT YOU!"

After John's death, I think Paul writes about him more consciously, sharply and obviously, though still covertly. Most of the fandom-theory songs I dismiss from the 80's onwards are the ones that read like generic love songs with the signature McCartney "I'm so emotionally repressed" theme and the (sometimes quite bitter) "but our relationship didn't work out" twist (ex: 'The Lovers That Never Were'). I think it's possible-to-likely that he's drawing on an emotional well in songs like this which was largely filled with John Lennon related groundwater, but being a writer myself, I tend to believe him that he doesn't always know what a song is about while he's writing it because that happens to me all the time (writing something deeply personal w/o realizing it) and I have conservatively a zillion times more emotional awareness and self-knowledge in my female-(over)socialized pinky finger that this man has collected in his 79 years on Earth.

There are, however, songs like 'Tug of War' and 'However Absurd', (and maybe the bridge of 'The Pound is Sinking')(also wtf is with 'Get Enough', Sir McCartney??????? that one DOES make me feel like an unhinged conspiracy nut), etc. where him saying they're about anything but John is like pissing in my mouth and telling me it's raining. I think the purpose of having a song like 'Here Today' is partially to help deflect from him working out other emotions (both unGay, and Negative) about John in other songs.

I think '(Just Like) Starting Over' is probably about Paul (tho' idk sometimes, idk), but that doesn't matter to me as much as the fact that Paul seemed to think it was about him???

(if this anecdote is true that is; I've read it in multiple places, but I think there's only one source.)

Wow, having written all that out, I guess I AM actually a huge Lyrics Tinhatter lmao. My skepticism is mostly aimed at widely accepted interpretations of John's AHDN & Help! songs (while I do think they pre-empt his behaviour w/ Paul, they're not rly about him imo, except Help!'s title track), and the idea that every post-1980 McCartney album has a scattering of revealing John-related tracks. I also don't think the fact that they openly wrote love songs to each other necessarily proves anything, because like... they were professional love song writers. That's literally the format they wrote in for most of their careers, and appears to have been the only way they were capable of honestly communicating with each other. The aspect of their music that wraps the tinfoil around my head is more in the emotionality of it. The way their songs feel when they wrote together, vs when they wrote apart, vs when they wrote at and about each other. I've always thought this was a bigger factor in their solo music being so divisive than the peaks and valleys of the Fanboy/girl Rivalry-As-Played-Out-Through-Music-Journals-And-Biogs. John's music is emotionally unrestrained, and Paul's is the opposite (which is why when he lets his walls down with a 'Hey Jude', it's so mindblowing even though he's technically got hundreds of equally tuneful tracks). I get both why ppl find John's solo stuff turgid and self-absorbed, and why ppl find Paul's facile and insubstantial. I feel that way about a lot of their solo work myself, but to me it's a bonus b/c I'm so fascinated by their psychology. They both have albums where you kind of need to have love and tolerance for them as Personalities to bear the music.

But what you're experiencing when you listen to The Beatles most classic albums? Well - that's just the purest expression possible of how they felt about each other.

#They both have albums where you kind of need to have love and tolerance for them as Personalities to bear the music #^this is so funny #but you’re right #paul and john

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#the only time they got fed #bug boys

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"im sniff" "im whimper" "the cigarette brothers" type post but instead it just says "im the transcendental nature of identity between two beings that are more one than two" "the guy"

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The Beatles are my Roman Empire. The Beatles are my WWII. When men are like "I just like studying it because of the impact it had on the world, it was such a turning point for society, there's so much to think about" I'm like "yeah I totally get that, just like the Beatles.”

#=)