Craig Brown’s “One Two Three Four” Comment by Michael Gerber on Sep 14, 10:08 test reply
Craig Brown’s “One Two Three Four” Comment by on Sep 3, 20:40 I read Truant Boy and thought it was very good and I remember that passage you quoted and was also like “Yes this” when I read it. 🙂 Particularly with regards to his lyrics and his overall creativity. Like you mention, it doesn’t help when half his biographies are written by people just looking to make a buck rather than people who are actually interested in their subject and so just repeat the same old stuff with the same old “yeah I didn’t give this much thought” interpretations. No not everything he wrote lyrically was profound but plenty of what John and George wrote were pretty banal as well. The bias comes in that when John writes so called “nonsense” many immediately look for “deep meaning” because hey it’s John he’s deep, right? Whereas with Paul they just assume it really is nonsense. ” Like if John wrote Monkberry Moon Delight my person opinion is that many would immediately note the surreal nightmarish imagery of the lyrics and how they related to events that were going on around the time they were written(this was around when all the lawsuits were going on, the end of the Beatles, etc). It’s that Paul’s lyrics tend to be nitpicked over and the tiniest weaknesses often exaggerated because they are assumed to be weak and meaningless and John’s are assumed to meaningful so a weak word choice or repetition is often given a pass or at least not mentioned. I read a great joint research paper done by these three professors, at different universities in different countries, which did a study of the language of John, Paul and George’s lyrics while in the Beatles, with charts and everything, so it was as scientific as something involving words could be. LOL Unfortunately I had the link saved in a “Notes” program and that program stopped working so I can’t open them anymore. Hopefully I’ll come across it again some day, it was interesting. As Christmas songs go, I prefer Wonderful Christmas Time. Happy Xmas(War is Over) is okay but mainly I find it dirgelike and cloying, not that Xmas songs need to be upbeat(Silent Night isn’t exactly a party ). So I’d rather have something like Wonderful Christmas Time stuck in my head, because IMO it’s more interesting musically. I’m not saying it’s some sort of epic classic but it just has more interesting things going on musically. I do think Lady Madonna is probably not quite as straight a lift as Stewball is, I mean Stewball is pretty much the same music, just with different lyrics, I think Lady Madonna is more “in the style of Bad Penny Blues”, which isn’t to say it’s not pretty obvious where the influence came from. Xmas is sort of the opposite of Golden Slumbers, Paul had the lyrics from the book but didn’t know the music so he made up his own music, Xmas uses most of the music and makes up new words. 🙂 “A.k.a. “Happy Stewball (War Is Over)” ;)… ” Maybe someone could do a mashup? LOL
Craig Brown’s “One Two Three Four” Comment by on Sep 2, 23:19 Nancy, belated thanks for this review! I bought the book on the strength of your recommendation and am really enjoying it. Brown does an excellent job of helping me, a Millennial, get a better understanding of what Beatlemania must have been like than any other author I’ve read. Most everyone else describes it as a tiring triumph; Brown shows it as being bizarre, frightening, silly, and traumatic. I feel as if I’m just now understanding a key part of why the Beatles circa 64 seem like people one might actually know, but by 68, they’re not. . Brown is also very good on how Beatles history is a series of authorial choices based on imperfect memories. Every other book simply reports their preferred version of events as true, so this is refreshing. My only note is that he gives Goldman short shrift at times—yes, Goldman was hyperbolic and had an axe to grind, but Brown glosses over the fact that Goldman’s version of the Wooler incident is the only one supported by a statement from Lennon himself, in 1980 (“I realized I could kill him”). That tension in Goldman between accuracy and hyperbole is important in trying to separate truth from untruth in the Beatles story.
Recent CommentsMichael Gerber2020-09-03T15:07:30-07:00
