How to use this Page

A poignant peek into the mind of a Beatle whose talents extended past creating immortal music.

Bluewater Productions has created a biographical comic book profiling legendary musician and songwriter, John Lennon.

Writer Marc Shapiro had this statement in the press release: “I approached writing Tribute: John Lennon as an exploration of a life full of potential and promise that was, sadly, cut short. We all know the importance of John Lennon as part of The Beatles. But I felt it was more important to concentrate on his post Beatles’ life and career, both good and bad, so that readers would get the clearest possible idea about who he was as a creative entity, husband and father.”

This new project, part of the Tribute series, features interior artwork by Luciano Kars and cover art by Graham Hill. Other recording artists who have been featured in this series include Queen lead vocalist Freddie Mercury, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, and more.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar this week.

To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

Celebrate John Lennon’s birthday with the readings of “Lennonight.” Join in on Tuesday, October 15th at 2A Bar starting 8 p.m. (New York, NY)

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

By Gordon R. Thompson

Songwriting had gained the Beatles entry into EMI’s studios and songwriting would distinguish them from most other British performers in 1963. Sid Colman at publishers Ardmore and Beechwood had been the first to sense a latent talent, bringing them to the attention of George Martin at Parlophone. Martin in turn had recommended Dick James as a more ambitious exploiter of their potential catalogue and, to close the deal, James had secured a national audience for the Beatles. Nevertheless, as the band grew in popularity, James knew that McCartney and Lennon would attract the attention of other music publishers.

Most fans, unless they bought sheet music, were at best only vaguely aware that music publishers had any role at all in popular music, let alone that they controlled an economically critical part of the industry. Even Lennon and McCartney at first underestimated the importance of music publishing until probably the first royalty checks began arriving at manager Brian Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises offices. Every time someone purchased a recording of one of their songs—no matter by whom—both the songwriters and the publisher profited. And every play on the radio and every television appearance did the same.

The home of Britain’s music publishing industry resided in London’s Denmark Street, a one-block stretch of offices, studios, and stores near Soho, serviced by a small pub, a café, and a steady stream of aspiring songwriters. Dick James’s office sat at the corner of Denmark Street and Charing Cross Road, not far from the premises of Southern Music, Regent Sound Studios, and other music-centered establishments. Brian Epstein had walked into these offices in November with a copy of “Please Please Me” and the hope that James could break the Beatles into the national media. James delivered immediately, booking an appearance for the band on the 19 January 1963 edition of ABC’s television show, Thank Your Lucky Stars.

The traditional role of the music publishers was to plug songs, bringing them to the attention of artist-and-repertoire and/or personal managers in an effort to have them match compositions with performers; but rock and roll was changing that model. When EMI’s Columbia Records released Cliff Richard and the Drifters’ recording of Ian Samwell’s “Move It” in August of 1958, London saw the start of musicians performing their own music. The tradition only deepened with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over” in June 1960. American artists such as Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Carl Perkins routinely wrote and recorded their own material, unlike singer Bobby Rydell or many other pop stars who performed material written by professional songwriters. In Britain, songwriting recording artists often proved fleeting phenomena.

With “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me,” as well as a number of other originals that would appear on their first album Please Please Me, John Lennon and Paul McCartney demonstrated their ability to write and perform their own material with spectacular results. Nevertheless, they knew the model and their first efforts to write a song for another performer met with mixed results. Touring with Helen Shapiro, the two songwriters futilely attempted to convince her and her management to record their song “Misery.” Another performer on the show, Kenny Lynch happily picked up the tune and very soon other artists would be looking for songs by McCartney and Lennon. Dick James, perhaps worried that with greater success the two ambitious Liverpudlians (and their manager) might bolt for yet another publisher, sought a strategy that would keep them as clients.

Click here to view the embedded video.

McCartney and Lennon were not the only songwriting performers in London. Southern Music had contracted eager songwriters and willing performers John Carter and Ken Lewis (later the core of the singing group the Ivy League) to write for the publisher. Their mentor at Southern, Terry Kennedy had even dubbed their band the “Southerners” (with a young Jimmy Page on guitar). However, they tended to write tunes for other singers and to perform songs written by other songwriters, all under the umbrella of their publisher.

Dick James’s big idea was to have John Lennon and Paul McCartney become part owners of their own publishing venture: Northern Songs. The arrangement that Epstein, McCartney, and Lennon made with James must have seemed good at the time, especially given that most young composers had no income from their work other than their author royalties. Northern Songs rewarded the two Liverpudlians with a larger piece of the pie, dividing the ownership of company between (i) Dick James Music, (ii) NEMs, (iii) Lennon, and (iv) McCartney. Dick James Music held a 51% voting share, leaving Lennon and McCartney each 20%, and NEMS Enterprises picking up the remaining 9%; however, James also took a 10% administrative fee off the top, so that in practice, the songwriters and their manager shared about 44% of the income.

Lennon and McCartney already had an agreement with Epstein to write songs, but a company dedicated to their music brought the game to an entirely new level. This would not be the last time that they would be the first to explore new territory in the business, from which other rock and pop artists and their managements would learn.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Gordon Thompson’s posts on The Beatles and other music here.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post The Beatles and Northern Songs, 22 February 1963 appeared first on OUPblog.

How did the last book you read make you feel? Hachette Australia produced a beautiful new video spelling out emotions with giant stacks of books, filling a giant warehouse with book sculptures.

It’s the perfect Friday morning video. Follow this link to see all the books in the video, but it includes The John Lennon Letters by John Lennon, The Twelve by Justin Cronin and The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne. (Via Reddit)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

By Gordon Thompson

I first heard of Henry Miller, perhaps fittingly, when I lived with two guys in East Vancouver. One of the guys had a friend who was a postman, the other guy was having an affair with the postman’s wife. There were a few awkward moments when he snuck her in for a night or an afternoon quickie, but, all in all, things went well and I saw a book which the postman had lent to his buddy, my housemate. It was a compilation of the letters between Henry and Lawrence Durrell.
I became interested and then obsessed with Miller’s writing, read everything of his I could get my hands on.
I still have a worn copy of Tropic of Cancer by my bedside along with Flann O’Brien’s, The Poor Mouth. For some reason which I don’t want to analyze, both books are places of refuge for me when I just want to relax and enjoy the language. At times like that I don’t think as much about the content of what I’m reading as much as how the words are strung together.
Finding Henry’s writing was like the moment when Shakespeare made sense to me in high school: a light bulb shone.
In all my travels after that I kept a sharp eye open when books by Henry were displayed. Krishnamurti, Durrell, Arthur Rimbaud, Anais Nin and others were introduced to me by Henry’s writing and their books were ones I watched for too. Of course, I was watching for cheap versions of their works.
When my friend, Robin, arrived to visit me in Crete he brought a copy of The Colossus of Maroussi, written when Henry visited Lawrence Durrell and his wife in Corfu.
Surviving in a tiny room in Paris on croque monsieurs, cheese, baguettes and red wine, I planned a novel using the Paris metro map as structure. Needless to say, the novel became as confusing and mixed up as my understanding of the Paris subway system and was abandoned.
I made a pilgrimage to the street where Anais Nin lived when she and Henry were having their affair. Their conviction that analysis was necessary and their visits to Otto Rank, a student of Freud, revealed the notion that psychoses are the products of frustrated or blocked creativity. Frustrated writers can take comfort in the idea that writing is at least healthy if not profitable.
By the time I was there, the bars mentioned in his books were too expensive for me to patronise but I lingered outside the Coupole and the Dome.
I walked endlessly around Paris, imagined what it was like then, wondered why Henry was never mentioned in the list of writers who lived in the city in the 30's. There was irony in the thought of him existing from meal to meal as he worked on Tropic in the arts capital of the Western world, poor, reviled and rejected.
I didn’t know then that he and Anais Nin wrote pornography for the money of their rich patrons but I knew there had been an overwhelming rejection of him in the States and that he was involved in the debate about pornography and obscenity.
It looks like the descendants of those moral Americans who banned his books for so long have, seventy or eighty years later, taken over the government of the USA.
He described his trip across the states in The Air Conditioned Nightmare. The title pretty well demonstrated Henry’s attitude toward the system.
It gave me hope.
Here was a man with great curiosity about the world and other people and sex who ignored all the warnings and temptations which were placed before him and followed a singular path of his own. It led him to another continent, through years of poverty and piles of rejection slips. But he kept going and kept laughing.
“Always cheery and bright” was his motto and the most depressing situations could be changed for the better just by reading his books.
I know that a generation who thinks the 60's is ancient history has a hard time understanding his relevance now, but then he was like a beacon. He personified the rebelliousness and questioning which was rumbling underground.
I often wonder what he would have made of this internet, instant world. I like to think he’d re

In October 2012 Little, Brown will publish selected letters by John Lennon. The book will be edited and introduced by Hunter Davies.

Here’s more about the book: “He lived – and died – in an age before emails and texts. Pen and ink were his medium. John wrote letters and postcards all of his life; to his friends, family, strangers, newspapers, organisations, lawyers and the laundry – most of which were funny, informative, campaigning, wise, mad, poetic, anguished and sometimes heartbreaking … It will be visual – in a sense that many of the letters are reproduced as they were, in his handwriting or typing, plus the odd cartoon or doodle.”

Robert Kirby of United Agents negotiated the deal. Davies has written an authorized biography of the Beatles and The Glory Game. In the video embedded above, Yoko Ono shared a message from her late husband.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tweet

By Gordon Thompson

Fifty years ago, one of the great stories in pop music began when the Beatles debuted in a dank arched subterranean Liverpool club dedicated to music.  Located in the narrow lane called Mathew Street, just of North John Street, the Cavern Club had opened as a jazz haven that enfolded blues and skiffle, which was how the Quarry Men, John Lennon’s precursor to the Beatles, had first descended the steps and climbed the tiny stage in August 1957.  Three-and-a-half years later, the Beatles had evolved into a much different beast than the Quarry Men and the Cavern Club had modified its business strategy to embrace a growing youth audience.  The band’s recent stint in Hamburg had initiated a transformation that was about to blossom inside the brick arched chambers built to warehouse vegetables.  For the Beatles, Stu Sutcliffe’s return from Hamburg in late January added his dissonant rumble to their sound; but they had entered a transitional phase with Paul McCartney gradually assuming the role of bassist.  As Sutcliffe returned to a career in art, the Beatles would tighten their sound and performances.

Other Liverpool bands played the Cavern too, including the Remo Four who had recently trumped the Shadows—the most famous band in the UK at the time.  The Beatles would find the club a competitive environment in which to sharpen their skills in the pursuit of fans.  Their first gig at the Cavern on 9 February 1961 would lack auspiciousness and earn them a mere £5 (split five ways) for their 12:00-2:00 PM performance.  This engagement initiated the club’s attempt to draw a midday audience and, with little advertising, the crowd would have been small.  Moreover, when owner Ray McFall saw the musicians, he took offense at their leather jackets and jeans, informing them that they had to dress better if they wanted to play the club again.  And to the band’s further discomfort, Sutcliffe’s playing would have, if anything, deteriorated even further during the month he had stayed in Hamburg.  But they were beginning to develop a reputation, commencing with a remarkable December performance at the Litherland Town Hall.  The Beatles tapped into a curious mix of hard rock, rockabilly, and pop, with each of the band members taking a turn at the microphone and applying a combination of enthusiasm and irreverence.

The Hamburg experience had taught them how to survive the long hours by sharing responsibilities, working as a team, and exploiting their existing repertoire of all its possibilities.  Their model may in part have derived from Britain’s postwar experience, when families shared and extended their meager resources.  The division of responsibilities in the band helped make it successful.  Lennon, the social director, knew how to deliver the emotionally charged performances.  McCartney, the self-appointed music director, had a screaming Little Richard imitation that he could counter with coy ballads.  And Harrison—the boy of the band—focused on his succinct guitar solos and a growing vocabulary of altered chords.  That left the stoic and impassive drummer Pete Best and bassist Sutcliffe sitting at the back, occasionally crooning a song for the benefit of their fans.

In the Cavern, the Beatles would build an audience by playing rock ‘n’ roll while smoking, eating, and joking on stage, including McCartney doing imitations of the Shadows’ by now infamous Cavern catastrophe.  (Their bass player had shown up drunk and fallen off the stage.)  Lennon recalled that half their stage show was ad lib comedy, which portended the public image

Yoko Ono, the widow of Beatles legend John Lennon, has given permission for 150 of Lennon’s personal letters to be published in a single volume.

According to The Guardian, Alan Samson from the Orion Publishing Group acquired world rights to the collection. Publication is set for October 2012–the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ hit release, Love Me Do. The video embedded above shows the band playing that song.

Here’s more from the article: “Orion saw off competition from all the big-hitting publishing houses who went to Davies’s home in Kentish Town, north London, to make their bids…Samson would not disclose how much Orion had paid for the right to publish the book, although it is thought to be in excess of £500,000 but less than £1m quoted in other media.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I've been playing the Plastic Ono Band album for about 6 months now. I'm completely obsessed with it. And, it hadn't even occurred to me that there were two significant anniversaries taking place this year. It's hard to imagine John as a 70 year old man. I guess he'll always be 40. And then there's today's anniversary. 30 years since his death. I remember hearing he had died before I left for school. I didn't know then how much he would come to mean to me later in life when I fell in love with music and, of course, the Beatles.

When I came into this world the Ballard of John and Yoko was top of the charts. I've always liked that little fact.

"My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection to us all." ~ John Lennon (October 9, 1940 - December 8, 1980)



Tomorrow, to celebrate John Lennon's 70th birthday, Yoko Ono will once again relight the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland.


Yoko Ono's official flickr photostream

This "tower of light" is projected from a white stone monument ("wishing well") with the words, "Imagine Peace," carved on it in 24 different languages. Fifteen searchlights reflect off prisms to create this lighted column, which is 4000+ m. tall and touches the clouds!
 

Yoko Ono official/flickr

Buried beneath the wishing well are approximately 500,000 wishes from around the world Yoko collected for her project, "Wish Trees."


Yoko Ono official/flickr

As a child in Japan, Yoko recorded her wishes on small slips of white paper, then tied them to trees in temple courtyards. She says all her work is a form of wishing. Writing is like that, don't you think? There's the envisioning and hoping that the end product will approximate the dream, the idea, the concept. Always trying and reaching for the ultimate story or poem. Always imagining.


rising70/flickr

I think if John were alive today, he'd be working extra hard as an activist for world peace. "Imagine," his most well known solo composition, was named by Rolling Stone Magazine as the 3rd greatest song of all time. President Jimmy Carter once said, "In many countries around the world -- my wife and I have visited about 125 countries -- you hear John Lennon's 'Imagine' almost equally with national anthems." Interesting that the song's refrain may have been influenced in part by Yoko's poetry -- in her book, Grapefruit (l965), she includes such lines as "imagine a raindrop," and "imagine the clouds dripping."

Imagine all the people, living life in peace.



Tomorrow, in honor of John's birthday, tie a wish (or maybe a haiku), to a tree. Words, written from a place of love, are powerful and can offer hope. Yoko is also asking everyone to tweet a birthday wish tomorrow (@IPTower), hoping to amass a million wishes. The tower will remain lit until December 8th.

Yoko: "I hope the Imagine Peace Tower will give

Tweet

By Gordon Thompson

On 9 October, many in the world will remember John Winston Ono Lennon, born on this date in 1940. He, of course, would have been amused, although part of him (the part that self-identified as “genius”) would have anticipated the attention. However, he might also have questioned why the Beatles and their music, and this Beatle in particular, would remain so current in our cultural thinking. When Lennon described the Beatles as just a band that made it very, very big, why did we doubt him?

Today, the music of the Beatles remains popular, perhaps because it helped define a musical genre that continues to flourish, leading some to speculate that these songs and recordings express inherent transcendental qualities. Nevertheless, no graphed demonstration of harmonic relationships and melodic development and no semiotic divination of their lyrics can explain what these individuals and their music have meant to Western civilization. Those born in the aftermath of the Second World War harbor the most obvious explanations. A plurality of the children who came of age during the sixties continues to hold the Beatles as an ideal expression of that decade’s emphasis on self-determination and optimism.

The composer of “A Hard Day’s Night,” “If I Fell,” “Help!,” “Nowhere Man,” “In My Life,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Across the Universe,” “Imagine,” and other classics of the modern Western canon left an indelible mark on our notions of music and expression. Where Paul McCartney searched for polite answers to reassure adults, Lennon often seemed to taunt reporters, to the delight of adolescents and the adolescent at heart. When Lennon got into trouble (as he did when American Christians took umbrage at his comparison of fan reaction to the Beatles and to Jesus), we apprehended our own image in the mirror of his discomfort. Moreover, when he shed the conventions of adolescence for the complicated independence of adulthood, we followed his example, albeit usually with less flair and more humility.

In many ways, John Lennon represented a twentieth-century Everyman: someone in whom we could see ourselves re-imagined in extraordinary circumstances with a quicker wit and more charisma. His assassination thirty years ago in December 1980 consequently left an indelible mark on us, standing as one of those moments stained in memory and time. That he had recently emerged from a well-earned domestic sabbatical with renewed possibilities, which both he and his fans recognized, made his death all the more tragic.

Just as the Fab Four had helped to define adolescent identities, perhaps these same baby boomers recognized in Lennon’s death the fragility of our own existence writ large on the wall. And, as the writing hand moved on, we contemplated one last indisputable truth that this most poetic Beatle had bequeathed: the passion play of his life, career, and death had provided us with a sand mandala of our own impermanent individual selves.

Pop culture by definition presents a fleeting expression of our consciousness, which we perpetually construct and reconstruct; but we sometimes forget that the currents of culture have lasting effects on the swimmers. Lennon, Harrison, McCartney, and Starr may have only been musicians that made it very, very big; but, in their roles as ritual players on the altar of the sixties, they played out an extraordinary version of everyday universal lives.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties Br

0 Comments on John Winston Ono Lennon, Everyman as of 1/1/1900

Add a Comment

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on nostalgia for the 80’s. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Journalists are not usually in the habit of looking back. They are charged to deliver “breaking news” to us. Novelty is the coinage of the newsroom, not history. Yet this week, the media’s preponderant coverage of the life and death of Michael Jackson has been stridently nostalgic. It reveals a culture needing and ready to sing an ode to the 1980s.

We cannot turn back time, but we can mark its passing. Up till last week, popular culture hadn’t had the chance to address the passing of an 80s superstar and with that, the 1980s. We were given occasion to mourn and contemplate the passing of the 1950s with Elvis Presley’s untimely death, and the passing of the 1960s with John Lennon’s death. So we have sung an ode to the post-war consensus, as we have sung an ode to the cultural revolution.

But enough of the 80s has remained with us - MTV, Nintendo, Reaganomics - not defunct but writhing for relevance, that we have not dared sing its eulogy. Michael Jackson’s and Farrah Fawcett’s death has served us a dramatic notice that it may be time.

After all, it is unlikely that we will see another Michael Jackson. In our era where songs are downloaded one at a time, no one is likely to sell a 100 million records (of “Thriller” or any other album) again. The 80s are over, but it has taken us three decades to find a moment to collectively mark and mourn its passage.

Tragic deaths are compelling not only for human interest reasons, but for the decisive statement about our mortality they make. For if even iconic characters who once defined their age can be so suddenly ejected from the remorseless flow of history, then there is surely no stopping the march of time.

It is no surprise that Michael Jackson is more beloved posthumously than he was all of this decade. Elvis Presley too, had become more and more of a has-been as the 60s progressed. Time is never forgiving - our only feeble antidote is nostalgia. So wrote Joseph Conrad, “Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamor–of youth! … A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and–good-bye!–Night–Good-bye…!”

If the 1980s and whatever the decade repesented are indeed over, then businessmen, journalists, and especially politicians - take note! Nostalgia can only occur when the past has been rendered past.

So, I've gone and started yet another Moleskine. This is a kind of travel one. That's four different themed ones that I have on the go now. 'Cos, you know, I don't have anything else to do (that's sarcasm, I have SO much on). I know that it's just another avoidance tactic. I am conscious.

Still, at least I'm drawing. You can click on the drawings if you would like to read the text. Although I don't recommend you do. All this stuff is written in the early hours of the morning. The spelling, punctuation and grammar is shocking. But more than that, I always sound rather unhinged.