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Who Was John Lennon? · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: Alright, Alex.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's time for another episode of Dirt Nap City.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: And today, I want to talk about somebody that's been on my list since day one.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody I've always wanted to do.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I found that this is probably just about the right time to do it.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: Eddie Van Halen.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: Eddie Van Halen.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, not Eddie Van Halen.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: That that'll come.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: That'll come.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Guest person, probably, in any of these games.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: It always comes down to Eddie Van Halen or Orville Redenbacher.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: Those two guys.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: They're like the Kevin Bacon of Dirtnap City.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: They they link back.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, I would say probably the Roosevelts are more like the Kevin, Kevin Bacon of Dirt Knap City.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's complicated sentence, but if you know it, if you know, you know, right?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, definitely.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, no, the person I want to talk about today, uh, and and actually I also want to just say real quick that during this episode, everyone should look out for callbacks to for callbacks to old episodes.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's about four of them in this episode.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Easter eggs.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, little Easter eggs, callbacks to uh previous episodes, things, things we've talked about in previous episodes.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and there might even be five now, uh, because there might be one from the episode we just did, but we'll get to that.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, here's here's my first clue about who I'm talking about today.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: This person shares my birthday.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Now, not the year, but the uh month and the day.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know when your birthday is, man.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, there you go.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then help me.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I probably wouldn't know when this person's birthday was.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's a bad clue.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, I start with the more difficult clues and then I and then I it's a funnel.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: You don't want to if I if I gave you the clue that you guessed it right away, what fun is this, right?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, true.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, second clue, uh, this person, um, by the way, 20th century man, and uh he wore a very distinctive style of glasses.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like you would look at those glasses and almost almost like like you call those short shorts Daisy Dukes.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: You might call these glasses by his name, like and people would know what you meant.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: Can I guess?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Is it John Lennon?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Good guess.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know who else I would have said.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe Andy Warhol had distinct kind of glasses.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, John Lennon, the the the round uh kind of small but round, right?
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, if you said if you said uh he you know somebody's wearing a pair of John Lennon's uh glasses, you'd you'd know what they were saying, right?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: Just like a just like a pair of Daisy Dukes.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: Now, is that a bad clue?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: Are you gonna give me credit for a good clue?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: That was a good clue.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was a good clue.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: So much so that if you wore those kind of glasses today, and somebody started talking to you about the Beatles, and you said, I don't like the Beatles, you'd almost feel betrayed.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't mean you don't like those.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Take those glasses off if you don't like the Beatles.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: You you can't wear those glasses and like the Beatles.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, my third clue is gonna be that uh at one point he claimed uh his musical group was more popular than Jesus.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: See, so so harder clue, yeah, easier clue.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but yeah, I share I share an October birthday with uh John Lennon.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, I'm planning to launch this episode on John Lennon's birthday.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: So happy birthday, John.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: And happy birthday, Kelly.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, thank you.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: John Lennon was born on October 9th, 1940, in Liverpool, England.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and you know, the name for a person from Liverpool is like a liver Pudlian, yes.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's kind of kind of an unusual name.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Liver Liver Pudne.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: I've never been there, but I've always wanted to go.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, just you know, for the for the Beatles stuff alone, it might be kind of cool.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and he died uh 40 years later, 40 years and three months later on December 8th on New York City.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, we all know he was gunned down, unfortunately, by kind of a person that we're gonna talk a little bit about.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: But he was born, let's get back to his uh birth.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: He was born uh John Winston Lennon on October 9th in uh Liverpool Maternity Hospital.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: He was of Irish descent, uh, might have might have come from the same family as typhoid Mary, who knows?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um his his uh he was the only child, and he was named after his paternal grandfather, John Jack Lennon, um, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that's where the Winston came from.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's a lot of Winston and a lot of English Winston's.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a very, very, very English name, very distinguished sounding name.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: John Lennon's parents divorced when he was four, and he ended up going to live with his uh uh aunt Elizabeth Smith, who was called Mimi.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: And Mimi was um pretty strict.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: She she kind of always knew when John was up to something bad.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but she said that uh John was always drawing, writing, singing, uh, very creative, like sung himself to sleep at night and just loved music and loved art and loved reading too, was kind of one of those kind of kids.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: So as I said, his parents had divorced when they when he was four, but he only lived a few blocks from his mother, and he didn't see her very much.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: She wasn't very capable as a mother.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, sometimes people have children, but they're not really ready to have children, and I think that's what his mother was.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: But when he got to be a teenager, he actually started to s hang out with his mother a little bit more, you know, maybe around 12, 13 years old.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: Was she very young, did you say, when she had him?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I don't know how old she was when she had him, but again, only child that that she had.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I do think she got remarried, but during this time, he was still living with his aunt and uncle, but visited his mother, and his mother's the one that kind of started him on music.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: So she taught him the banjo and then encouraged him to play guitar, and they would listen to Elvis Presley records together.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: Her name was Julia, and uh they would listen to Elvis Presley records, you know, rock and roll.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: She was into all that, and so she was almost more of a friend than a than a mother figure to him.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately, um, as he was reconnecting with his mother, she actually got killed by a drunk police officer who was off duty and driving a car and hit her.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so that sort of gave him a little bit of a chip on his shoulder.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he had been somewhat abandoned as a child by his parents.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: His father had left, uh, his mother had left him as well, and then when he starts to reconnect with her, she dies.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so he got this sort of rebellious nature, and it was to the point where um people thought he was a bit of a hooligan.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like they they saw him as a bully, as a disruptor.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm gonna read a quote, it's kind of long from him, but this is something he says about himself um later in life.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: He said, A part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouth lunatic poet musician.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: But I cannot be what I am not.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: I was the one who all the other boys' parents, including Paul's father, would say keep away from him.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: Parents instinctively recognized that I was a troublemaker, meaning that I did not conform and I would influence their children, which I did.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: I did my best to disrupt every friend's home, partly out of envy because I didn't have a home myself.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: But there were five women in my family, five strong, intelligent, beautiful women who helped to raise me.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: One happened to be my mother.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: She couldn't deal with me in real life.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: She was the youngest and had a husband who ran away to sea and to war, and she couldn't cope with me, and I ended up living with her elder sister.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: Now, those women were fantastic, and that was my feminist education.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: I would infiltrate the other boys' minds, and I would say, parents aren't gods, because I don't live with mine, and so I know.
• 8:16
  unknown: Huh.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: Pretty lot, lot, lot going on there, right?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: A lot to unpack.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's funny because I don't think that's his reputation as being like a troublemaker.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't like some of the rock stars.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't like Keith Moon.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't have that kind of reputation of being a loudmouth.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like drugs and sex drugs and rock and roll.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like when the Beatles were first popular, they said there was the cute one.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: He was the smart one.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: He was the smart one, right?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: He was the cute one, the smart one, the quiet one, and the funny one, right?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: So so that's kind of that's kind of something I learned in all this research is when you think of John Lennon, you think of peace and you think of love and you think of pacifism, you know, being a pacifist.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: He he was all those things later in life, but he actually grew up kind of tough.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like he would get into fights, uh, he would pick on other children, but a lot of that was again just because his parents, he didn't have a stable home life, you know?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: So he ended up taking this thing when he was 11 years old called the 11 plus exam.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: Have you heard of that?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: This was a standardized test taken in England and Northern Ireland uh that basically determined whether or not you could attend grammar school.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so you had to pass with a certain amount of verbal reasoning and nonverbal reasoning and a little bit of math.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: And if you did these things, you it's kind of like an IQ test, you could actually go on to higher education.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: So and if you didn't, what do they put you to work in the mines?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Or uh um well, you didn't you didn't go to you didn't go to free public school if you didn't pass.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: You you yeah, you were basically it was almost like a college entry exam, but for upper grades of high school.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it was like you have to be smart enough to do these things, otherwise just go get a job as a oh you I when you said um you said grammar school, I thought you meant like elementary school.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they were 11 at the time when they took the test.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I think you meant like five or six.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, this was this was determined whether or not you continued on with your sort of secondary education.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: He passed, and um, so he actually was able to continue his education.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: He ended up going to art school, but again, he had a reputation in school for being a bully, uh disrupting classes, and he even um had a reputation for being the class clown because he drew cartoons uh of the uh teachers and stuff like that.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: And he made a his a little magazine that he put out at school called the Daily Howl, H O W L, which is a funny name.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um the school he went to when he was a little bit older was called Quarry Bank High School.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: And do you remember the name of his first band?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: The Quarryman.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: The Quarryman, yep.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: In September of 56, he started the Quarryman, and it was a Skiffle band initially.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: We learned about Skiffle.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: Skiffle was uh sort of folk music influenced in the US, had some country, some bluegrass, some jazz, and it was usually played with uh you know improvised or broken or homemade instruments.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that's our episode, Rock and Roll Part One.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh and and Kelly actually played a sample of that skiffle band.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: What was their name?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: What did you just say their name was?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the Quarryman.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that was the skiffle band?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's what it his first band was was a skiffle band.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's John Lennon doing the skiffle stuff.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: So if you wanna if you want to hear that stuff, listen to that episode.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he kind of um he kind of mixed up the skiffle genre along with rock and roll.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, back then Elvis was uh kind of taking off, um things were coming across from the US, but he was part of a sort of look, you know.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: Today, you know, you might say somebody looks like a goth or a mod or a hippie or whatever.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um there was, and we have even talked about this, I think, with um maybe it was the Bob Marley episode.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: We talked about Rude Boys, um, the the Roodies.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he was what was called a teddy boy.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: A teddy boy.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: Teddy boy was a man who dressed in the style uh of rock and roll and was usually regarded as being uh almost maybe like a greaser, you know, what we might have called a greaser.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like leather jacket, white t-shirt, rolled up jeans, yeah, cigarettes, shannana, cigarettes rolled up in the arm in the sleeves.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: These were teddy boys, and John Lennon was a classic teddy boy during the 1950s.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um Bowser with the muscle.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um so he played with the quarrymen, they played a couple of gigs, and I think it was on the second or third gig that uh Paul McCartney came to see them and talked to Lennon afterward, the first time they met, and said, uh, you know, I want to join.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: And Lennon asked him to join the band.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: He said he saw a lot of um talent in Paul McCartney.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, um, in an interview many years later, you know, after the Beatles, Paul McCartney said that uh John Lennon's Aunt Mimi was aware that Paul McCartney was pretty lower class.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: Like he and George Harrison and some of the people that were hanging out with John Lennon at the time were lower class, and she actually didn't want him hanging around with them.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: She considered them to be too good for Paul McCartney and the people of that class because John Lennon had more of an education, and I think Mimi and her husband made a decent living, and you know, they were a little more in the middle class.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: But then it was said that um uh Paul McCartney's father didn't like John Lennon, so he said that he would, you know, stay away from that boy, he'll get you into trouble.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but he did, he did, uh Paul McCartney's father did actually let them rehearse and play in the front room of their house.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: And it was during that time that John Lennon wrote a song called Hello Little Girl, which became a top UK top 10 hit in 1963.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: So who's in that band?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's the two of them and maybe Pete Best.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: So actually, this was before Pete Best.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't have a drummer at the time, so I they were rotating through drummers.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they ended up hiring Pete Best and a guy named Stuart Sutcliffe.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: Stuart Sutcliffe played the bass, and he was uh from John Lennon's art school.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: And uh George Harrison joined, even though he was only 14 at the time, and they thought he was a little too young, but but he was such a good good guitarist.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: He impressed um he impressed John Lennon enough.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: And it's interesting because I never realized this until I did this research.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: I always thought of Lennon and McCartney as as sort of equal partners in the band, but it was John Lennon's band initially.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was the quarrymen, and then it became the Beatles, and he asked John, he asked Paul McCartney to join.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: He invited George Harrison to join.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he was the leader, and he was also older than the other boys.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: Did you know that?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Makes sense now that you're saying it, yeah.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, so so this lineup of uh Pete Best and John Lennon and Paul McCartney and Stuart Sutcliffe got a uh gig in 1960 in Hamburg, Germany, and they changed their name to the Beatles.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: Don't don't really know, haven't haven't looked into why that was why they changed the name, but they changed their name to the Beatles and they got a job playing for a hundred pounds a week in Hamburg.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: Now, at the time, Hamburg was actually a pretty seedy place.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: It it's kind of um, you know, in looking at all of this, it it kind of had a lot of uh brothels and it had a lot of um like uh teddy boys that were throwing chairs and you know, maybe the pre-punk rockers, because a lot of times the uh sure shows would end up with them getting chairs thrown at them on stage.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's so funny though, because you you can totally like picture that, but then the music that they were playing doesn't go with that at all.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: Right, it's it seems so wholesome, right?
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like it does.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: So they'll be throwing chairs and then sing, I want to hold your hand.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, so they did they did this residency in Hamburg and they actually did it for a couple of years while they were establishing their sound and kind of trying to get make a name for themselves.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: And what's funny is when they came back from Hamburg to Liverpool, um the the radio stations and the promoters in Liverpool actually thought they were a German band and complimented their English.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: Have you been to Hamburg?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: I never have, no.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: I've heard it's pretty gritty and industrial.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it hasn't changed a whole lot then.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's always I think Northern it's it's funny, it's kind of kind of the same as um the US, you know.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: I I I think that Northern and England for that, because Liverpool was northern England, right?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: A little more little more gritty, a little more industrial.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um well, so they they ended up coming back to Liverpool and starting to play around, and that's when they met Brian Epstein, so who was their uh their manager who kind of managed them from 62 to 67.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: And what he did was pretty interesting.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: He actually um said that they were gonna dress uh sharp, they were gonna dress in suits, they were gonna have a style, and at the time, you know, with John being a teddy boy, he didn't want to do all that, but he eventually agreed to it and said, I'll wear a bloody balloon if someone's gonna pay me.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: Not a bloody balloon, just no bloody balloon, yeah.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: A bloody balloon.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, not a bloody balloon.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so he uh they they kind of got this look and this image from Brian Epstein, which was brilliant because they were very clean cut, well, aside from the mop top haircuts, but but they were, you know, they wore suits, they looked like nice boys, and they had that persona of being nice boys, and that's really what the world was looking for, at least um before the 60s really got underway.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: That was still a throwback to the 50s, you know, the kind of clean-cut look that everybody had.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: So at this time, McCartney took over base for Sutcliffe because he decided to stay in Hamburg, and they replaced Pete Best with Ringo Starr.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: So they had their lineup.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it's interesting too.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: I mentioned earlier about Paul McCartney's uh father saying that John Lennon was a troublemaker and stay away from him.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Paul McCartney said in an 87 interview that he and the other Beatles idolized John Lennon.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_02: He said he was like our own little Elvis.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: We all looked up to John, he was older and very much the leader.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: He had the quickest and the smartest wit.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Were these guys?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: I I I know that um they were were they considered good musicians?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because I I know that people have talked about how it was just about repetition with them.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: They had played so many gigs and so many nights, and the whole that's where the whole 10,000 hours thing got originated.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um were they good musicians at the time or did they grow into that?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I think they were good musicians, but what's what's um, you know, the the thing behind that and what's unusual about the Beatles compared to other bands is they at the time they just started playing these very simple, like you said, I want to hold your hand kind of songs.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: These were these were songs that were very um not very complicated, not very innovative.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: And they were songs though that that performed well with the audience, and so they weren't stretching themselves artistically.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh as a matter of fact, it was kind of one of these things at that time where the image and the music were equally important.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: The music wasn't more important than the image, right?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: So, so people saw them and it almost didn't matter what they sounded like.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they saw these four cute, smart, funny, and quiet.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'd hate to be the quiet one, you know, like okay, at least cute, funny, and smarter sort of compliments.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: But um they they saw these people, and so yes, I mean, I I believe they were fantastic musicians, and um, but didn't come into that until later, you know, for later in the 60s.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so they actually started to get some recognition in their home country, and they ended up getting uh invited to play for the Queen at a Queen's uh birthday jubilee or birthday.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: I I know the Jubilee was something when she turned uh 95 or something, but but they had some sort of a queen, uh some sort of not queen the band, some sort of a birthday thing for the queen, and they ended up getting um uh the Beatles to come play at it, and they were awarded a award called the Most Excellent Member of the Order of the British Empire, which was called an MBE.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: MBE.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: You you've heard of that?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a big deal.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like being knighted.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's like one step below of being knighted, I think.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: It it is, it is, it is, you know, like maybe the presidential medal of freedom or something like that.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and just like there's been some recent controversy, I think one of our uh presidential candidates talked about how the um the version for uh individuals or or civilian citizens is just as important as the military one.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it rubbed the military people the wrong way.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, a lot of the military people.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Who had been awarded the MBE or you know, first responders or firemen who had who had saved people kind of felt like the Beatles getting it was a little bit of a a ripoff, you know?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think since then though, a lot of rockers have gotten those.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, I think Paul McCartney actually was knighted.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: So they they played, um, I think it was Royal Albert Hall, and they played and the Queen was in attendance.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: And here's the thing.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: I've watched during this uh research, I watched a lot of off the cuff interviews with the four Beatles back in the early 60s.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know if you've seen any of those interviews with the four of them, but they're always all together.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: They're kind of like they're kind of horseplaying, you know, like they've got their arms around each other, like, you know, punching each other in the arms and stuff.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't serious lads back then.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: No, they weren't serious, and they were they were very, very um uh kind of sarcastic and um like cheeky, like they'd come up with a lot of cheeky things to say.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: If somebody asked them a question that they thought was stupid, they'd answer in a stupid way.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: Teddy boys.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: They had to maintain the image.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: Even though they weren't dressed like a teddy boy, they were they were maintaining that image.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: And and um what I've come to realize, you know, through through watching these interviews and stuff, is that other performers at the time were much more tightly managed and much more told what to say and much more demure, you know, like the older person asking the questions, the Ed Sullivan or whatever would ask the questions and then they would answer them.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: This is the other performers, but the Beatles just kind of said what they wanted to say.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: They Brian Epstein tried to keep them to to certain talking points, but they just would kind of go off.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of people actually liked him for the authenticity.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: They thought, oh, these guys are, you know, what they're saying might be ticking me off a little bit, or I don't agree with it, but people like their authenticity because of that.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think the other thing that's hard to see with today's eyes is the hair back then was considered a major counterculture thing, even though today you look at their hair and it doesn't look like any anything particularly bad.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: They that the hair that they had was they called them mop tops.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Mop tops, yeah.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and their hair was longer than the average man back then, and it was really making a statement.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: So when you came, even if you were dressed in suits with hair like that, it was really making a statement um that was some some people felt disrespectful.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, at one of those interviews where the four of them were sitting there in front of the camera and being asked questions by a reporter, uh, I think it was George Harrison.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: They said, uh uh the reporter said, So do you think it's time for you to get a haircut?
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: And George Harrison said, I just got one, mate.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: And and it was probably true.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: He probably did just get one, you know?
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: So so this whole thing with the MBE, um, one of the things that John Lennon said uh during this performance with the Queen that was a little bit scandalous was uh he said that the he he kind of was acknowledging the audience and he wanted them to clap.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, So I'd like to get all the people in the audience to participate in this next song.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're in the cheap seats, I'd like you to clap, and the rest of you up here can just rattle your jewelry.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: And and in the video of that, it's it's a recording from this performance for the Queen.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: In the video, he gives this sort of sheepish grin after he says it.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like almost like, I I know I shouldn't have said that, but I said it anyway.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, which did he get in trouble for that?
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think so.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think so.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they ended up that was when they ended up getting their MBE awards, which by the way, in 1965, um, that's when they received them.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh John actually returned his in 1969 because he said he couldn't uh take it knowing that um Britain was involved in Vietnam or or was supporting American Vietnam and that he basically um had to return it because he couldn't support it.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: They accepted it that night, but but then four years four years later, John Lennon returned it.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um and actually it said that the medal was discovered uh in a vault at St.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: James Palace in 2009, John Lennon's MBE medal.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: Who knows where it is now I don't know how it got there.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they they uh of course this was uh 1962, 63, 64, 65.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um their big break in the U.S.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: was on the Ed Sullivan show, a variety show.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: What is a variety show, Alex?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, listen to our up.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in 1963, and they played uh I Wanna Hold Your Hand.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then from 64 to 66, it was just constant touring, filming, recording.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was nonstop, crazy, crazy thing.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: As a matter of fact, in 1965, when they came out with the album and the song Help, John Lennon actually said it was a real call for help.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like he meant it.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: He was he was feeling that his life was out of control.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, he had put on some weight.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: He he called himself the fat Elvis at that during that time of his life.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and he also, along with the rest of the band, was frustrated because the shows were turning into a circus.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: People would show up and there would just be so much screaming and so much uh clamoring to get to them and to mob them that it wasn't really about the music.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: It was about, you know, this is what we were talking about before.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: He he got frustrated with that.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: So they actually did a did a show in '66 and then they decided to stop touring.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: We're not, we're not gonna we're not gonna tour after '66.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um at that point, they kind of got involved with uh LSD.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: They were given some LSD at a party, unbeknownst to them.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: It was actually a dentist.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody who was a dentist had a party and put LSD and some sugar cubes in their tea.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: And they had a crazy night.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_02: Apparently, there was they were on an elevator and thought it was on fire, even though it wasn't.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, but then they wanted to do it again because they felt like it was mind-expanding.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: They started uh uh listening to and reading uh Timothy Leary, and uh John Lennon kind of became a little bit transfixed by Tineth Timothy Leary and him kind of stripping down the ego and what the distinction between life and death was and rebirth.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: And uh Leary had a book called, or he had a uh psychedelic interpretation of a book called The Tibetan Book of Death.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: And in the book, he actually said um uh these lines turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream, which became the lyrics to a Beatles song called Tomorrow Never Knows.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: Now, do you know that song?
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: No, I don't.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think you would recognize it because I didn't know the name of it, and then as soon as I turned it on, I recognized it.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: Is it real trippy?
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's very trippy.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: It is one of the last songs on Revolver, I believe.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, it has this really heavy guitar, it has a sitar in it, and uh John Lennon's um idea.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_02: You said trippy, perfect word.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: He wanted it to have a hypnotic feeling.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: He wanted it to feel like you were.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: He he said, as a matter of fact, he wanted a sound, he wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was one of the first songs they really experimented with tape loops.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: They ran a tape loop backwards.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they played this, um, it was called actually a tambora, which is a Indian instrument.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they reversed some of the loops and played some of them forward.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: Ringo Star played this sort of um, it's it's you would recognize it.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: It is a dun dun dun dun dun dun dun.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um at the time, though, it was a very, very unusual song.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: It was way out of bounds with um, you know, the the more poppy, more approachable stuff they had done.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: And they were afraid actually that their engineer and their producer and everybody wouldn't like it, but they actually did.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like the the people that they played it for uh were into it, and this was 66.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, they were they were really starting to push the boundaries.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: And you asked if they were good musicians.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is when they started to treat the studio as its own musical instrument.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what can we do in the studio?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and to be clear, I wanted to know if people thought of them as good musicians.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're good musicians too, but I I did people respect them when they first came out.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think they did.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I don't think they were playing anything particularly difficult.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, but a lot of people did like their harmony when they first came out.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_02: They did, you know, they sang together and and they had um they had a lot of harmonies in their in their music.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's a weird thing though, because the Beatles were one of the only bands to be commercially successful, wildly commercially successful, while sort of being avant-garde at the same time.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: And they also had something, I think we talked about this in one of the rock and roll episodes, that a lot of bands had back then and almost nobody has now two well, multiple singers, right?
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: They actually have four singers.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: So you could really make your song sound different um when you have more than one singer, you know, you have multiple styles, and yeah, we're just down with to listen to whatever they put in out.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Think of how different that stuff sounded in '66 than it sounded just six years earlier.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it wasn't even the same kind of music, and everyone followed him.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Totally, totally changed.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: And also, those people were getting older, their fans were getting older, they were getting into drugs, they were getting into that countercultural movement, so it was all timed pretty well.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure a band that came out today would have the same effect and to do all that stuff, right?
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, to have all those uh that evolution of their sound, of their style.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um so something kind of big happened in 66, and this is this was referenced in the um uh clues I was I was giving, but but you got it before I gave this clue.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, he was John Lennon was being interviewed by the Evening Standard in March of 66, and he said, quote, Christianity will go, it will vanish and shrink, we're more popular than Jesus now.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: And in England, nobody really paid attention to that, quote, but that got picked up a few months later in the US and right before their tour, and a lot of people got very upset about that.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: They had the Ku Klux Klan was it's so funny too, because the Ku Klux Klan leaders are being interviewed, and they're saying, Oh, we can't have them saying it's you know they're bigger than than Christ, and we're gonna we're gonna cause some trouble, and this concert's not gonna happen.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: No context at all, burning records.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and remember, I said they decided at 66, uh, I think after their last show in 66, they started decided to stop touring for a while.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, this was a contract contribution to that decision as well.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like they were getting threats.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: But even when you read it just now, that quote, to me, what I'm hearing, and just a little buildup that you had about it, it's a comment on fame and their popularity, and how there's no way that I mean, this is not healthy the way people are treating us.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Look at we're being yeah, I mean, I I don't think he was bragging about being more popular, he was saying this might be a problem.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: No, he actually he actually said later in an interview later that he he exact kind of what you're saying, he didn't mean to say it was good or bad, he and he wasn't putting down Christianity.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: He was just saying that that was the perception that people had right then.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: And if if people were being honest with themselves, they were bigger than than yeah, you know, fewer people were going to church and more people were listening to rock and roll at the time.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: And imagine from his perspective, you're coming out every night, people can't even hear you playing your songs because you're just screaming.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine what you would think about the priorities that people had back then.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it it was taken out of context, and and um, of course, you know, that's a classic thing for people to do and get upset about.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and Lennon did, he didn't ever apologize for it necessarily.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think he sort of apologized for it for offending people from it, but he was just being honest.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: And and you know, there were a few other situations.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, for instance, one time uh Paul McCartney was asked if he ever did acid, and he said yes.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh they said, Why did you why did you tell people you do acid?
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: He said, Well, I I had a reporter ask me, and I was just honest.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I could have either lied or told him the truth.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: I told him the truth.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: And and people got upset about that.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: Another thing that um John Lennon was asked to keep quiet about was he was married.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: So during their early years, he was married to a woman named Cynthia.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and he was told not to share that because he they wanted everybody to think it was a group of eligible bachelors, you know, that these were these were young men unmarried and and make these girls who were going crazy think that, oh, maybe I have a, you know, maybe I have a chance with them or something.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um so so he wasn't supposed to say he was married.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this was bad because he had a son, Julian, his first son, hey Jude, right?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: You've heard hey Jude.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Julian was also responsible for supposedly coming up with the idea of Lucy in the sky with diamonds.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: That was something that Julian Lennon had drawn and showed to his father, and John wrote a song about it.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, John claims it was not LSD, like the the three letters were coincidental.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it is coincidental.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Drawing by his son, but but they're so honest that if they say it wasn't the case, maybe it wasn't the case.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, why would I lie about this?
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I I mean I've told people I do drugs, so I'm not trying to hide that.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: But um, Julian was born in 63.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that was right when they were taking off, right?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: Right when they were getting big.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so John was a very absent father.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: He was not he was not a good father.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then what happened is they, you know, they continued to be married, he and he and Cynthia, and he had sort of an estranged uh relationship with his son because he was always out on tour.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_02: He met uh Yoko Ono on November 7th, 1966, at a gallery in London called the Indica Gallery, and she was doing an art exhibit of what she called unfinished paintings, and it was a conceptual art exhibit about interactive painting and sculpture.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it had like a ladder that you climbed up, and there was a magnifying glass on the top of the ladder, and you were supposed to look up and see some words written on the ceiling or on the ladder or something like that.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there was a there was a board that you would hammer nails into.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was it was it was the kind of thing stuff you think of when you think of avant-garde.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely such a caricature of that stuff.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: But John the love of her stuff is like that.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: John.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: He was like the only person that understood her.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: He he thought it was brilliant.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: He and and I think at the time, you know, he was so tired of the traditional stuff, you know, and he was trying to expand his mind and she was doing something different.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he started uh corresponding with with her after November of 66.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: They started writing letters back and forth, you know, there wasn't texting or email or anything like that.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and he actually sponsored a show of hers in London in '67.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh she would call, like Yoko Ona would call the house, and Cynthia answered sometimes, his first wife.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_02: And when she asked him what was going on, he said that she was trying to get that Yoko was just trying to get money for her avant-garde bullshit, is what what he told his wife.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: But um, you know, the truth is that uh he was writing secret lines and songs.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like there is a line, there's a song called Julia that's written actually about his mother uh on the white album.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: Julia.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it wasn't about Julia Child.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: It was not about Julia Child.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, another another callback.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um this was a song about his mother, um, but he says something about the ocean child's call me, and he was referring to Yoko Ono because her her name Yoko translated to Ocean Child.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_02: Ah, a little secret message, and also happiness is a warm gun.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: That was also a reference to his uh desire for Yoko.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: He was talking about different types of guns and how he wanted a warm one.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, he uh ended up having Yoko over to his house uh in 1968 while his wife was out on vacation.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: She came home, found Yoko there in her are in her uh bathrobe and uh drinking tea, and apparently all John Lennon said was, oh hi.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: So John and John and Cynthia divorced in 1968.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_02: John married Yoko Ono in 1969.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_02: They divorced, uh he got divorced in November of 68, got married to Yoko in March of 69, and everything was the opposite.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: He was he was so in love.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: And he even said, you know, people people asked about Cynthia, and he said, I I I loved her at the time, but I got married too young.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I I was still a youngster when I married her and I didn't know his life.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: His life changed so much that he was a different became a different person, I suppose.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, yep.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in um 1975, and guess what date in 1975?
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: Sean Lennon was born, his his second son.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: October 9th?
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_02: October 9th, yep.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_02: Shared another shared birthday, uh, 1975.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: That was on birthday, Sean in Kelly.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: John.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: Before Sean was born, uh, John and Yoko did this thing where they uh when they got married called the bed-in.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: Did you ever hear about this bed-in piece?
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've seen pictures of that.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_02: So so they did it twice in the world.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: Reporters were such suckers back then.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: They would show up to anything and take pictures.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I watched some videos from this, like some film that was taken during this, and some of it was very confrontational.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like some of these guys came in to yell at them about their, you know, about some some uh nude nude drawings that or photos that have been taken of the two of them, John and Yoko, they like to strip down and get their picture taken about their style, about their hippiness, you know.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_02: They they got yelled at by some people, but John, I have to say, in all these clips, he plays it pretty cool.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: He really doesn't get too upset with people.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: He said, We invited these people here.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_02: I want to have a dialogue with them.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting with his background.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder where he got so zen-like and how he was able to hold himself back when people are screaming at him with if he used to be such a hoodlum.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's it's interesting because it was kind of the opposite.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he went from this kid with a chip on his shoulder to being a lot more um a lot more chill and a lot more open-minded and and trying to really make the world a better place.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_02: I saw us I saw a clip.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he and Yoko lived on a an estate, um, and it was called like Tittenborough or Titansworth or something like that.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I don't remember the name of the estate.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'll find it here in a minute.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_02: But um clearly you remember part of it, the name.
• 42:12
  unknown: Right.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was tit tit something.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_02: And they lived on this estate.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was like 90 acres, and he had plenty of money, and and they had a pond, and they had you know horses and all this stuff.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_02: It was a Tittenborough.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_02: It was a place that he really enjoyed being.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but there were people, there were no fences, or if there were, there were very minor fences, very minor security.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_02: And he had people that would come camp out on this land, and he would go talk to them and he would give them food, and he would he didn't chase them away.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he was he was pretty open to sharing what he had with people, which you know, in today's world, that would never that would never fly.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: Partly because of the way he had ended with him.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they moved from their estate in England to Manhattan.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_02: There were a lot of tabloids in London that were very racist and were very against Yoko Ono, making, you know, racist drawings of her, saying bad things about her, uh, just you know, and people were, of course, upset that the Beatles had broken up and they blamed Yoko.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so they wanted to get away from it.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_02: So they ended up moving to New York City.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: And while they were in New York, they kind of had some strain in their relationship because um John was facing deportation charges because of drugs.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_02: He had been caught with drugs.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, Yoko was separated from her daughter, and that was causing some stress.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so in 1973, they separated for a period of 14 months.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_02: And if you've heard of this, I see you're nodding your head.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_02: You you know what they call it, they called the the lost weekend.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: They called it the lost weekend, right?
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: This is a really fascinating to me.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_02: This is where John was splitting time between New York and uh LA, and he was with a woman named May Pang, P A N G, and And apparently, this was his assistant, but she was more than an assistant to John.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: And Yoko gave her blessing that that uh he could he could have paying as a mistress basically during this time.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so he went to LA, he drank a lot, he did more drugs, uh, he met people like David Bowie and Frank Zappa and kind of got to know a lot more of the musicians, um, you know, network with other musicians, and he drank a drink called a brandy Alexander.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: Now, your your your name is Alec.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I'm sorry, Alex.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, a brandy Alexander, it's brandy and milk.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that sounds disgusting.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_02: And apparently he was a very charming person after two or three drinks, and he was a aggressive uh loudmouth after more.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_02: Difficult to be around when he was uh drunk.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he was hanging out with this May Pang woman who was his assistant, and I guess his more than assistant, a lover at the time.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in 1974, they were looking into buying a house.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_02: He wasn't calling Yoko Ono back, he was kind of done with her, and then in 75, January of 75, um Yoko uh got a hold of John and said she had found a cure for smoking and he had to come back so he could undergo this treatment for smoking.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he went back to Yoko and he did the cure for smoking, and he didn't go back to to May Pang.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_02: He he basically quit calling her, and when May Pang finally got a hold of him, uh, she thought he had been brainwashed.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: She's like, You've been brainwashed, and he said, No, he was with Yoko now and that May could be his mistress.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Yoko was okay with that, but May didn't want anything to do with that.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so the two of them broke up and he was back with Yoko.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I heard that they never saw each other again.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like it literally was just this flash in the pan where he was all in and then he was all out.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: What a weird, what a what a strange part of somebody's life.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and how how long did that period last?
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: Fourteen months.
• 46:16
  unknown: Yeah.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_02: Fourteen months.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so he had he and it was at this time that he and uh Yoko had Sean, and he took on a very different approach with Sean.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: He wanted to be a stay-at-home dad, he wanted to spend as much time as he could, he wrote songs about Sean, he adored him, and he kind of quit doing music from um 75 to 80.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: He was like, I'm just gonna hang out and be a family man for that period of time.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think he was on like the background in like some David Bowie songs.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think he's in Young Americans, right?
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: He he was in he was in fame.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, fame, right?
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_02: He actually he has a co-writing credit for fame.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'll tell that story in a second.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we'll talk about his collabs in a in a second here, but yes, he he um he did do a lot of collaboration.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I guess we could talk about it now.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: He he uh collaborated with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, he collaborated with Elton John, he actually did some live tracks with Elton John, he worked with Mick Jagger, he worked with Harry Nissan, who I'm not sure who that is, Nielsen.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um he worked with Ringo Starr, um, and he is supposedly the one that came up with a um so so a guy named Carlos Alomar was playing guitar for Bowie and had come up with a riff for a cover of a song called Foot Stomping that Bowie was gonna do, but Bowie thought it was a waste because it was such a good riff to put it into a cover.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_02: So he and John came up with the hook, and apparently John started to sing aim, AIM, over the riff, and Bowie turned that into fame.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_02: That is a good riff.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_02: I like that riff.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty much all the song is, it's just that riff.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, over and over again.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it was during this time, um, you know, 75 to 80, he was doing all these collaborations, he had the lost weekend.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he kind of had had stepped out of the public's eye and was living in a building called the Dakota Building, which was on the edge of Central Park.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a it wasn't a huge building.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_02: It was like a maybe five or six story um apartment building, but it looked very uh it looked kind of like a castle, you know, it was kind of a cool-looking building.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_02: Not a lot of security, you know, there was a gate and he did have a uh like a doorman and and uh people that kind of worked and like let him out the front, but people would hang out in front and get autographs from him all the time.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: That was constantly happening.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um so in 1980, he decided he was going to go back to doing music.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he'd kind of started to dabble in studios again.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_02: He was recording with Yoko, doing uh Yoko had a band called the Plastic Yoke or Plastic Ono band, I think.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um terrible.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, he was doing stuff with her.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he did his uh first interview in a long time on December 8th, um, 1980, which happened to be the day he was killed.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_02: But earlier that day, he did his first interview in a long time with a producer from RKO Radio.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_02: By the way, if you recall who owned RKO for a while.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_02: Was it Howard Hughes?
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: It was Howard Hughes, yeah.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh a woman named Lori Kay, and she was asking him questions about where he'd been and and what he was up to, and he said, Well, uh, wasn't the 70s a drag?
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_02: Here we are.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_02: Let's try to make the 80s good.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh, you know, further in the interview, he said, any artist or poet's role is to try and express what we all feel.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's the job, not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of all of us.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I consider that my work and that my work won't be finished until I'm dead and buried.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I hope that's a long, long time.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he died that same day.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, yep.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_02: So he did that interview with this woman, Lori Kay, with RKO.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, she she actually left the building with him.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_02: There was a crowd outside.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: He um on the way out, he signed some autographs, including signing the um signing the record uh double fantasy for a guy that was standing there, uh a guy named Mark David Chapman, got got his autograph, and he got in the lemo, went to the studio, and then he and he and uh Yoko recorded a song called Walking on Thin Ice, which was one of Yoko's songs, and they had a great recording session.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he said, too, that um he said this during the interview, and I don't have the exact quote, but I have the paraphrase.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: He said that um it was he was going to the studio that night, he was excited because it was his first time to be in the studio in like five years, and he was excited because he wasn't trying to compete with his younger self anymore.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_02: Sounds like he had it all figured out.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, what a great quote.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_02: How often do you compete with your younger self?
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_02: I I do that all the time.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like I used to be able to do this, or I I I, you know, like I look at what my younger self did, and I often compare my today self to my younger self.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he wasn't gonna compete with his younger self, he was just gonna go record, have fun recording this Yoko song called Walking on Thin Ice.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, he returned and and um was getting out of the lemo and Yoko had gotten out first and uh walked past Chapman.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_02: Chapman was standing there, um and as John passed him, uh he called out.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_02: Chapman called out to John Lennon and uh shot him in the back five times.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: Five bullets.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_02: And this guy, Mark David Chapman.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_02: Now, have you heard this?
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't really know much about this.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_02: He had a fascination with Catcher in the Rye.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe at the time I had heard that, but I'd forgotten that.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_02: He was very fixated with that book to the point of considering himself to be Holden Caulfield, and he had made a list of people he wanted to kill.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_02: It included Johnny Carson, Elizabeth Taylor, John Lennon, and he wanted to kill them because they were phonies.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a book that or that's a word phony that Holden Caulfield used a lot.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_02: He also thought it would make him famous.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_00: How old was he?
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not John Lennon, but Chapman.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_02: Chapman, like 25.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_02: He thought he thought it would make uh make him famous and that he would turn into a somebody instead of a nobody.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: So he he pre-meditated all this because in 1980 he quit his job, he bought a gun, uh, he went to New York.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: He was actually living in Hawaii at the time, uh, Chapman was, and he was married.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_02: December 6th, he flew back to New York and waited outside the Dakota apartment.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_02: And as I said, he got John's autograph uh on Double Fantasy as they were leaving for the studio, and then when they returned, uh he shot John Lennon, and then he didn't run.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_02: He just stood there and he got out his book, Catcher in the Rye, and started reading it.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: And that's how the police found him when they arrived.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_02: They arrived, you know, within five, ten minutes, found him reading his book, and what he said was, I'm sorry I've ruined you guys' night.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: We were talking about infamy, and so he wanted to be a somebody, but that's not that's that's still being a nobody.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's being uh forever hated by everybody, nobody's pro shooting John Lennon, right?
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah, yeah.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, it was an immediate um an immediate response.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, first of all, you know, he was taken to the hospital.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, by the way, he was taken to Roosevelt Hospital.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: And and um another Easter egg.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_02: Another callback.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_02: And the um there happened to be a guy from ABC News who had been hit hit on his motorcycle or something in the hospital at the time.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_02: Saw all this going on.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_02: This was all um, I think in the story about uh Howard Cosell because Howard Cosell ended up introducing or or announcing the death on Monday night football.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I actually heard a kind of behind the scenes uh recording of Howard Cosell talking to the other sports commentators uh before they went on the air.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like, should we do it?
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we have to do it, we can't not do it.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um so Howard Cosell ended up um talking about it and uh Chapman was arrested.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_02: There was no question that he was guilty, like he didn't he didn't um fight that, but he really wanted to, or his lawyers um who were getting death threats them death threats themselves, um, because people were going crazy.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: People were so sad.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_02: People showed up to you know stand outside of this building, there were vigils, there was uh uh 10 minutes of silence in in Central Park.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, all this stuff was going on, and people were very upset.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so the lawyers for for uh John David or Mark David Chapman had a very difficult thing to do.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_02: They wanted to prove he was insane.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and they were collecting evidence to say that he was insane, and you know where he was held so that he would be safe um away from other prisoners and not get uh shivved or something?
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_02: Not on North Brother Island.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_02: Rikers.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_02: Rikers, yeah.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_02: Rikers Island, yep, yep.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_02: He was held on Rikers Island uh until his um trial, and his trial took place in June of 81, and instead of the the um innocent by way of insanity, by reason of insanity, instead of that, he just pled guilty.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_02: He said that the Lord wanted him to plead guilty.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he was sentenced to 20 years to life, and he has been eligible for parole, I believe, 14 times.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: He's been denied parole 14 times.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_02: In 20 uh 2022, during his parole hearing, he admitted that what he did was wrong, and he said he wanted fame too much, and he wanted to be a somebody, and nothing was gonna stop that.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_02: The parole board said that Chapman's release would be in incompatible with the welfare of society.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a interesting phrase.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_02: He's in the 70s now, huh?
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he was denied parole in 2024 in March, and his next parole hearing is August of 2025.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and they'll just keep saying no, I'm sure.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you hope so.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_02: You hope so.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you know, he he I think he had a lot of mental issues, but there were some conspiracy theories as well about what happened.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_02: Have you heard of any of these?
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_00: No, but of there of course there were.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of people knew that um at the time Nixon did not like John Lennon.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_02: He was a big uh he was a big protester of the Vietnam War, John Lennon was, and he actually Richard Nixon ordered the FBI to follow and monitor Yoko and John, and there was a big, big file on them.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but by 1980, what's the point?
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know?
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_02: As I said, thousands of people showed up for a vigil in Central Park.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Yoko said he that John wouldn't want a funeral.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_02: What he would want was 10 minutes of silence where people would pray for his soul.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_02: She said, uh, whatever god you worship or don't worship, just spend 10 minutes uh meditating or praying or just being quiet and thinking, reflecting, and that's how they kind of celebrated his life.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think she's still alive.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Yoko Ono is still alive.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_02: She's in her 90s at this point, I think.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um and the person that was at that um one of the people at that uh uh vigil for John Lennon was John Hinckley Jr., who shot Reagan several weeks later.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_02: Wow and and also apparently uh also was uh declared uh innocent or or not guilty by reason of insanity and actually just got out of jail uh not too long ago.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: John Hinckley Jr.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_02: is uh uh released to the custody of his sister, I think, and is no longer in in prison for shooting the president.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: So what kind of music do you think he would have made if he if that hadn't happened?
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_00: So we had we had Paul McCartney in the 80s, he was making music with Michael Jackson.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, big thing.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_00: He hasn't really had many hit songs since then.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's he does shows up with Dave Grohl every now and then.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: People still love him.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: He does concerts, but he hasn't really been a player in the music scene.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: George Harrison had a great, probably the best or definitely the best, post-Beatles career.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: He did his stuff with Trevoring Wilbury's and collaborated a lot with guys like Tom Petty.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the record that the record that John Lennon put out right before he died was kind of a light rock, yacht rock-ish kind of record.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_00: That um do you think you would have done more of that kind of stuff and more like the doobie brothers kind of music?
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_02: Well, so so if you were to rank the uh four Beatles post-Beatles and their their music, um, you know, the success of their music, I guess commercial success or popularity of their music afterward, what order you you think?
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely George, definitely George Harrison, number one.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: Huh?
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely and then who who would be number two between um Lennon and McCartney?
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it would have to be Paul McCartney, I suppose, just because of the he John Lennon barely did anything after the Beatles.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_02: So he did um Watching the Wheels Go Round, you know that song?
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just sitting here.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_02: He did Woman.
• 1:00:36
  unknown: Right.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: That was all from that same double album, though, I think.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_00: He did uh right around the time he died.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: Happy Christmas.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so this is Christmas, you know, that's John Lennon.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_02: He did Give Peace a Chance.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he did Instant Karma, We All Shine On, you know that one?
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and he did Imagine.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he had some he had some pretty big hits post post Beatles.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: So you're stacking that up against the wings and and the Michael Jackson stuff, yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: That that might have been better, actually.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Imagine is probably one of the greatest songs of all time.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, do you did you ever watch WKRP in Cincinnati?
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember the episode where uh basically the boss, I forget his name, Mr.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_02: Mr.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um the the big guy who ran the radio station was telling him they couldn't play certain songs, and Johnny Fever went to him and said, What about this song?
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_02: It read the lyrics to Imagine, and he said, uh, yeah, you you can't play that because uh you know it's about communism, and Johnny Fever, like, I don't know if he quit or whatever, but they they they made a big deal out of the lyrics to that song.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um Mr.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: Tarlick, Herb Tarlick.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_02: No, her Herb Tarlik was the uh was the sales guy.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_02: What about Les Nessman?
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_02: He was the reporter.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_02: He was the reporter.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I forget the the big guy's name.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on, should we should we look that up?
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody cares.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_02: Boss of WKR.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody cares about you and me.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: Art Art Carlson.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_02: Art Carlson.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_02: There was Bailey and there was um uh who was the Lonnie Anderson's character.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: I was a big Bailey fan, though.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_02: She she was like Marianne from from uh the less the less overtly sexy but still incredibly attractive woman.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and wore John Lennon glasses, actually, to bring them all back.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_02: So a couple things I learned during this this uh process with about John Lennon.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_02: Number one, he was a lot rougher and more of a sort of hooligan and a troublemaker and a Weisenheimer and uh um class clown when he was younger.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he wasn't quite as serious and peace peaceful.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he was the leader of the Beatles, he was the founder, the leader, the guy who could, you know, bring people into the band, but he kind of conceded that to Paul McCartney later in later years.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like he sort of became, you know, Lennon McCartney became the the writing duo, the powerhouse duo that wrote a lot of the songs.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_02: And he was very into peace.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that was his big thing was after the Beatles.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_02: He just wanted to find peace, he wanted to stop war, which sounds very cliche these days, but was was totally what he was all about.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think in that Beatles documentary, that get back, he does come across as a goofball, but you can definitely tell that it's not his band anymore.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you can also tell that he's not okay with that.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's obvious from that movie that Yoko Ono, or even probable that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of things going on that had nothing to do with her.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of eye rolling when she came around, but I think you'd find the same when Linda McCartney comes around in that movie, too.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody was different when those were around, and they and they just kind of changed the vibe of the of the whole thing, and it was a business by then.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and I weren't having as much fun anymore.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_02: I think that uh, you know, Ringo and George, George Harrison.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_02: Now, George Harrison was was Paul McCartney's friend before he met John Lennon.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think Ringo and George Harrison kind of got along, they got along with everybody.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_02: The friction was between Lennon and McCartney, you know, for a lot of reasons, you know, like you said, uh whether it was who was with them at the time, their their spouses, or whether it was the creative control or, you know, as you said, it was a business.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I think he was really okay with the Beatles being over.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_02: He he really didn't mind, but he did say in an interview, somebody asked him if they would ever get together again.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, I don't rule it out.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if the if it was the right time and the right moment, the guys were into it, I would certainly do it.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he never almost maybe I said this on that Howard Cosel one, but they almost came together for the it was the first episode of Saturday Night Live.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: They were all in this in New York together and they were all friends um um with um Lauren Michaels.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_00: And they were about to do it, and then they changed their mind at the last minute.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: But they almost did reunite for that.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's a damn shame that they weren't able to, and I'm sure that if uh Lennon had lived, they would have probably had a live aid set, you know.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: They they definitely um were considered.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_02: I was I was debating with some friends of mine while I was up in uh Michigan, actually, uh, who both are like, yeah, the Beatles are overrated.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I could see where you could say that maybe um, you know, they didn't have the greatest lead guitarist or the greatest drummer, or you know, really the greatest anything.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_02: But as a group, as a unit, there's nobody that was more influential than them.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Musically in the rock and roll world.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: Probably never will be either because music's so fractured now.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody will have that kind of impact again.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well that that was that was John Lennon.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, very very interesting character.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was never really a big Beatles guy growing up, but I'll tell you in the last five to ten years, I've really I mean I always respected them, but I think in the last ten years, and I don't know if it's age or just that I've had time to kind of dive in.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: I really uh have enjoyed learning about them and listening to them.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's definitely some periods that I like better than others.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not crazy about their the very beginning, and I'm not crazy about the Sgt.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_00: Pepper stuff, but um but I like a lot of their stuff, and I'll probably never be a super fan, but uh it's really fascinating to read a little bit about them and then listen to some music.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this is probably what you've been doing the last week.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: Is you you read a little and then you listen to them and then you read a little, and hearing their music in context with learning more about them is kind of fun.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's like hearing, you know, even that song Tomorrow Never Knows.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like I I had heard that song many times before.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_02: I thought it was interesting and weird, but I never thought that much about it.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_02: And now that I kind of know the story behind it, it's a lot more interesting to me and it's easier to listen to.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely a band where you can learn as much as you want.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's probably as much written about them, if not more, than like Beethoven or Mozart.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you can you can you can be a Beatles scholar without trying.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's like Star Wars, you know, it's like there's a whole universe that exists, and and you can uh look at all the spin-offs and all the connections.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what I was thinking when you were talking about how they were they in 66, I think you said they kind of came back to England and they were kind of disillusioned.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_00: That would have been a perfect time if MTV Unplugged was around then, because that's what gave a lot of bands like instant credibility, you know.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_00: But in the 90s, like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, when they got unplugged, then people could like, oh wow, let's listen to this stuff stripped down without all the screaming, without all the hype.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_00: And just think of how cool that would have been to hear them kind of kind of like they were in that documentary, but at the time, how cool it would have been and how it might have shaken their career up a little bit.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, definitely, you know, a lot of stuff didn't exist, but as you said earlier, the timing was perfect for them because they were able to ride that wave of the British invasion to, you know, start that wave of the British invasion and uh become a pop band and then a more serious musical band, you know, take their music more seriously and more experimentally.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_02: And and it's funny because I remember as a kid looking at them with their mop tops and thinking, those guys look really nice, and then looking at the sort of hippie characters of them later and thinking, uh, you know, not not not not guys I want to hang out with, but I but I understand it so much better now.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's like okay, they they they didn't want to be fake, they didn't want to be um you know a boy band, they wanted to be a real band.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's also crazy to me how they didn't they weren't around very long.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like I think the killers have been around twice as long.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like they were only around like 10 years, that band existed from like 60 to 70, and that's it.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_00: And uh just the just the impact they had in such a short amount of time is just crazy.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_02: And John Lennon was a big part of it.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_02: So happy birthday, John Lennon.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_02: We'll catch you on the other side.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_02: Happy birthday, Kelly.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Alex.