Yer Blues by the Beatles

I mentioned this song on October 9, what would have been John Lennon's seventy-fourth birthday. It's a great Lennon song.

"I'm so lonely, wanna die..."

Remembering John Lennon on what would have been his seventy-fourth birthday.

The lyrics above are what I automatically, first-reflex think of when I think of Lennon. I don't know why. The song? Yer Blues.

According to Lennon's famous 1970 interview with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, the rest of the Beatles told Lennon that the name of the song should be My Blues, to be honest. But he couldn't quite admit to being "blue" so publicly, he said.

I'm more than blue that John Lennon was killed at the age of forty and that he apparently never got to know Jesus Christ.

Pray for the artists whose work touches you, Christians and not. Fame is a corrupting state of being that can destroy a person's soul. So, pray for those who have been gifted by God with the ability to create and perform music--hip hoppers, rockers, country crooners, techno poppers, dubbers, whatever. You may never meet them; but you could change their lives (and their art) for eternity by lifting them up to the throne of God.

(By the way, I still love the Beatles.)

40-Days to Servanthood: Day 29

Every follower of Jesus Christ has her or his own way of serving.

Rocker Steve Taylor once wrote a song from the perspective of a new Christian. It was called I Want to Be a Clone. With tongue in cheek, Taylor sang in the last verse:

So now I see the whole design:
My church is an assembly line.
The parts are there, I'm feeling fine.
I Want To Be A Clone...

Does growing to be more like Jesus mean that we must all be the same? Not according to the Bible. In discussing what’s called “spiritual gifts” (more on that later), Paul says in the New Testament: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (First Corinthians 12:4-7).

Think of what Paul is saying in this way: A prism takes a single beam of light, filters it, and then refracts it in differing colors and directions. Jesus Christ is, according to the Bible, the light of the world (John 1:9). When that one true light floods our lives, it’s God’s desire that it be refracted through us in millions of different ways. We receive Christ into our lives and offer service to fellow believers and to others through the ministries of the Church.

Jesus Christ frees people who surrender to Him to become what I’ve called their true God-selves, the people God had in mind for us to be when He put us together in our mother’s wombs (Psalm 139:13).

We’re made to be part of a community called the Church, a community that exists in this world and in eternity. While God wants the Church to live in unity, He doesn’t expect uniformity. Some believers will feel comfortable in jeans; others will enjoy three-piece suits. For their ministries, some will sing; others will prepare dinners. Christ sets us free to refract and reflect His light in our own unique ways.

Every follower of Jesus Christ has his or her own way of serving.

Bible Passage to Ponder: “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

LP Cover Parodies and Self-Deprecation

I was in a Virgin Records Store earlier this week. (It's a place through which I sometimes peruse, although I can't remember ever buying anything there.) As I looked around, this CD cover caught my eye:


Imitation is, of course, if not the highest, one of the highest forms of flattery and obviously, this LP cover art from Def Leppard, a band I have managed to totally avoid through the years, pays homage to the Beatles. The Sparkle Lounge, I've since learned, was released in April of this year.

In case you don't know which Beatles LP it mimics (How have you managed to avoid the Beatles all these years and why would you want to?), here's the cover for their 1967 release, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band:

One of my favorite knock-offs of this landmark LP's cover was on the 1973 release by Beatle Ringo Starr. It looks like this:

The Beatles always had a healthy sense of humor, concealing pride in their musical legacy beneath a willingness--most of the time--to deprecate and parody themselves. This was true of them from the beginning of their careers, when the Four Moptops appeared on a British variety show mocking their own then-signature, "Wooh!" while singing Moonlight Bay:



In later years, George Harrison appeared in the Eric Idle-created mockumentary, The Rutles.

But when it comes to LP covers, one of my favorite Beatles send-ups came from Beatle Paul McCartney. It mimics the cover that may be even more famous than that of Sergeant Pepper's: Abbey Road. Again, for those who've been living under large geological formations for all or parts of the last forty-five years, the original looks like this:

And here's Macca's send-up, a concert LP released in 1993, called Paul is Live:


The Paul is Live cover manages also to allude to at least two tidbits of Beatles lore. First, it hearkens back to the resilient rumor, which started in 1966 and was still going strong in some circles as late as 1970, that said that McCartney was dead. The Abbey Road cover was introduced as evidence for this assertion. (One probably believed by the same folks who think that UFOs are here from other planets, the Cubans or the Mafia killed Kennedy, and Milli Vanilli were talented.) The four Beatles crossing the street by the EMI studios where they'd recorded from the beginnings of their careers, were said to be forming an Indian funeral procession with Lennon as priest and Starr as undertaker. The bodies of the dead in India, we were told ominously, were always left shoeless in such processions. Note: Paul is barefooted! Harrison, in his jeans, was also said to represent lower-caste mourners for the departed. No, in fact, Macca was saying in 1993, "Paul is [a]live and performing live." (As he told Chris Farley in one of those wonderful faux talk shows Farley used to do on Saturday Night Live, "I wasn't really dead.")

On the 1993 cover, McCartney is being pulled along by an English sheep dog like the one he owned in the 1960s, a dog named Martha. Martha gave its name to the Beatles' 1968 tune, Martha My Dear.

Self-parody is the best way for celebs to inoculate themselves against others' putdowns and from the usually-plausible charge of taking themselves too seriously. (This was something George Harrison tried, to no avail, to teach Madonna and Sean Penn when he produced a movie in which the then-married couple starred for him.) JFK was a master of self-deprecating humor and the Beatles, who conquered America five months after Kennedy's assassination and who were not short on ego, have been as well.

Here and here are sites that display LP covers imitating Sergeant Pepper's and Abbey Road.

I suppose that the real question about these and other parodies or all artistic imitation, for that matter, is why it happens. There are probably several reasons. One is that some works of art, whatever the idiom, are touchstones. They grab us by the lapels--assuming we have lapels--and won't let go. Musically, Sergeant Pepper's and Abbey Road did that, as did their cover art. Both were celebrated and are viewed as iconic.

Secondly, not everybody is as creative as the Beatles or the LP cover artists with whom they closely worked once Beatlemania hit. The Beatles' monstrous success allowed them to roam like kids in the candy shop through the entire musical process--production, arrangements, packaging. Before Beatles LPs like Revolver or Rubber Soul, album covers were fairly boring and predictable. The Beatles changed that.

But, of course, few can match the Beatles for creativity or the freedom accorded them by the suits. For four-and-a-half decades now the Fab Four have been imitated and parodied, but never matched.

[Also see here.]

[UPDATE: Go here to see something totally unnecessary: a live webcam transmission from the Abbey Road studios, now seventy-seven years old and still a site that attracts artists from around the world.]

Of Lennon, McCartney, Feuds, and Grudges

Rummaging through my old vinyl LPs tonight, I found this photograph, included as a stand-alone pic in the original 1971 release of John Lennon's Imagine album.

In spite of the supposedly irenic intentions of the title track, Lennon's posing with a pig is a less than kind slam at his former Beatle bandmate and co-composer Paul McCartney.

Such are the sorts of things that happen in the wake of messy divorces and the break-up of the Beatles was among the biggest messy divorces of all time.

Lennon's pic was a send-up of the cover of McCartney's 1971 LP, Ram.

By 1971, Lennon was in the second year of his hipper-than-thou campaign, attempting to prove himself the avant garde rocker to Macca's bland Muzak Man. He did this most notably in the famed interview he gave to Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner. Oddly, he seemed to convince the Rock and Roll intelligentsia of the accuracy of his spin in spite of the body of Beatles work, which showed both McCartney and Lennon to be equal part rockers and balladeers.

Because the Rolling Stone interview was turned into a book which probably sold even more copies after Lennon's tragic murder, his assessment of McCartney became a sort of textus receptus for music critics and other Rock elites. McCartney-bashing went hand-in-hand with Lennon-eulogizing in spite of the fact that the two "divorcees" had reconciled long before that fateful day in December, 1980.

I've no doubt that it was, in part, because of the early post-Beatle spinning of Lennon, along with some of the regrettable bubble gum pop produced by McCartney in the mid-1980s, that the latter's entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist was delayed. (McCartney finally was admitted into the hall in 1999, four years after he was first eligible.)

Feuds can produce headlines. They can cause others to line up to take sides. They even bring in revenue.

But, my reaction to the Beatles feuding and clash of egos is similar to that of U2's Bono. I once heard him say that a motivator for his bandmates and him to stay together is that they wonder what might have happened had the Fab Four stuck it out.

We'll never know, of course.

But, Lennon's death, so tragic and unexpected, which came before he and another Beatle, George Harrison, could reconcile, also serves as a pointed warning to us all to drop our grudges at the earliest opportunities. Tomorrow never knows, as Lennon famously sang; but more significantly, we can't know even if we have a tomorrow in this life. Better to reconcile than to live or die with regrets.

There's more than music or financial success at stake when any of us refuse to forgive others, though. Jesus Christ says that we can't count on God's forgiveness when we fail to forgive those who've done us wrong:

"If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses" (Matthew 6:14-16).

Of course, because we're all sinners, having the forgiveness God offers to those who turn from sin (repent) and entrust their lives to Christ (believe) is critically important. Unforgiven, we stand before God in our sins, unworthy for fellowship with God and for eternity with Him. Forgiven, covered with Christ, we're reconciled to God...forever.

Is there any grudge we hold so worth holding onto that we're willing to walk away from God and all His blessings?

When we consider just how totally God offers to forgive in Christ, it only makes sense to drop our grudges. I only pray that God will help me to always remember that! (See here.)

[Click the images above to see them enlarged.]

Sippican Quotes Me

I'm honored.

He's right that George Martin, the Beatles' producer, admits to having been beastly to George Harrison in the early years. The youngest member of The Beatles, very much in the shadow of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, Harrison's early songs weren't stellar, most of them never recorded.

But Harrison became a more than competent songwriter, of course. Frank Sinatra called Something the greatest love song ever written and the Chairman of the Board knew something about love songs. (The rhymes on Harrison's last LP, posthumously released, are often stunning, though overall, I found the release so unsatisfying that I couldn't justify buying it.)

What was frustrating about Harrison as a solo artist to me is that he produced LPs that were either altogether wonderful or almost completely crap, those in the latter category occasionally containing only a salvageable tune or two. 33-1/3 and Extra Texture were particularly horrible, Dark Horse only marginally and sporadically better. All Things Must Pass, though far too long (the same complaint that Harrison made to McCartney of the latter's concert appearances, by the way), is an undeniable classic, and Cloud Nine, produced by ELO's Jeff Lynne, is a fun listen. Of course, Harrison's first Traveling Wilbury project with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Lynne was simultaneously fresh and thick with nostalgia. Harrison's compositions on the first release were outstanding. (The second release was mediocre.)

To his credit, after the breakup of the Beatles, instead of returning comfortably to form, Harrison developed his own signature guitar style. Think high-pitched whole notes. That's the post-Beatles Harrison way of playing guitar. I never particularly cared for that sound, but it was his, an important statement from a proud man insistent that he wasn't George Beatle.

The Wilburys projects point out an important fact about Harrison: Although he was a curmudgeonly personality who, as McCartney said, "didn't suffer fools," he also was someone who loved to collaborate with others. It was he, sickened by the egomania he saw especially in McCartney, who invited Billy Preston to sit in on the often contentious Let It Be sessions. It was he too, who asked Eric Clapton to add that haunting solo to While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Harrison was also an innovator in the Beatles days. He brought a sitar into the studio with the Fab Four for the first time and he was the one who suggested the use of synthesizers on Abbey Road.

Harrison was usually contemptuous of the Beatles, claiming that he'd worked with much better musicians than his old bandmates ever were. (He probably did. But he never worked with any set of musicians who were more impressive complete packages: performers, composers, arrangers, personalities.) When he wrote his autobiography, Harrison was feuding with Lennon and so, that Beatles bandmate was largely overlooked in his book, an unaccountable oversight. That's always stunned me and demonstrated how hateful Harrison could be when he wanted to be. (This isn't to argue that Lennon was any less so. In fact, I suspect that the only one of the four I might like as a person is Ringo Starr.)

For all of Harrison's acidic dismissals of "the Four Moptops" though, he relished the airing of the massive video history on the Beatles. Before its release, he boasted that it would show mere mortals like U2 what real musical success was like.

Sippi may be right that It Don't Come Easy, the 45 which triggered this whole discussion, is mostly a Harrison tune, though recorded and co-composed by Ringo Starr. But another great rock ditty, Back Off Boogaloo, based on a buzz word of Mark Bolen's, is pure Ringo.

Anniversary of John Lennon's Death: The Dream is Over

Like most people my age, I suppose, I remember precisely what I was doing on December 8, 1980, when I received word that John Lennon had been killed.

Just eleven months before, I had started seminary, after graduating from Ohio State five years earlier.

That evening, a classmate spent part of the afternoon and the early evening with my wife and me. We lived off campus and I think that he enjoyed escaping to the "real world" that we inhabited for a while. I had taken him back to his apartment, returned to our house, and mindlessly turned on the Monday Night Football game when I heard Howard Cosell say that John Lennon was dead.

At first, I was sure that there must be some mistake and flipped through the channels on our Warner Qube cable box to learn more. But nothing I did could change the fact that Lennon really was gone.

Throughout my teens and into my twenties, there were really only two musical choices to be made. One either listened to the Beatles or other people. The Beatles were in a category all their own. Their sound and their words got to me in ways nobody else ever had. Almost everybody else sounded like Muzak.

This feeling continued even as I listened to their sometimes unexceptional solo work. The imprints of their personhood, or at least hints of their personhood--or perhaps, their adopted public personas--were in their music. Unlike the dehumanized warbling of homogenized pop (or of compromised rock), you had the sense that there were real human beings on the other sides of those Abbey Road microphones.

That sense went way beyond the eerie countdown and cough at the beginning of George Harrison's Taxman or Ringo Starr's weary protest of "I've got blisters on my fingers!" at the end of McCartney's Helter Skelter. In spite of the screaming girls who made them almost inaudible, when I saw the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show on that February Sunday in 1964, they looked and sounded like real people. Real people with extraordinary talent.

It was no doubt in part to recover his personhood that Lennon grew tired of the Beatles and at first, didn't lament the band's passing. "The dream is over," he sang in a song called God on his first post-Beatles LP. (By the way, U2 later produced a composition called God, Part 3, in response to Lennon's song.)

When I listen to God today, its litany of things in which Lennon claimed not to believe--a list that included Jesus, Buddha, Zimmerman, Elvis, and Beatles--sounds like the defiant confession of a man being deprogrammed after time spent in the clutches of a cult. Talk to anyone who has been held hostage by some legalistic religion, even legalistic Christian belief--though in any genuine expression of Christianity, that's an oxymoron--and you hear an unwillingness to believe or trust in almost anything. Recovering cultsters don't want to get burned again and so they tend, initially at least, to dismiss all belief, all faith, all trust. In the song, Lennon moves from nihilism to narcissism. "I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that's reality," he says.

Lennon had been doused in the flames of Beatlemania, something which he himself had rightly seen as being akin to religion back when he had proclaimed in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. He probably was right at that singular moment in time. But more to the point, the adulation the band received then was very much like religious worship. In God, Lennon was saying that he was having none of it. (Although he was now worshiping himself and Yoko, surely as tenuous as objects of worship as the Beatles had been. That's another story.)

But once you willingly take on the mantle of deity and once you seem to show your true self to the world, it isn't easy to run away. People keep insisting on putting you back on their altars and placing you in tabernacles of their choosing.

Even after five years as a househusband, an ordinary guy who took his baby on stroller rides through Central Park, Lennon couldn't escape others' expectations of him. There's a scene in Imagine, in which an obviously disturbed young man shows up on Lennon's doorstep, convinced that on an old Beatles cut, Lennon had sent a personal message to him. "How could I?" Lennon asks him, seeming to attempt to both kindly and firmly give the kid a bracing slap of reality, "I don't even know you."

We probably all thought we did, though. Mark David Chapman, Lennon's killer, apparently thought he knew Lennon. Psychologists have said that Chapman had come to so identify with Lennon that he thought he was Lennon. The real Lennon's existence therefore, became an unacceptable reality, which he eliminated on that December night a quarter of a century ago. (I've always thought that the chilling link song on McCartney's first LP after Lennon's death was about Chapman: "The one you wanted to be, is now the one you see.")

Even in people unlike Chapman, people who aren't mentally or emotionally disturbed, there is a subtle and disrespectful objectification that happens to those we choose to worship. When they don't act or say the things we want from them, we can become angry or disillusioned.

Several years before Lennon died, I had transferred out of the First Church of Beatlemania and surrendered to a different deity. The God revealed in Jesus Christ turns out for me to be the only God worthy of worship or able to bear the weight of glory. Today, I can enjoy the extraordinary body of work of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starkey as great human achievements, no matter who they may have been as people.

Since his death, Lennon has been eulogized and beatified with rock and roll sainthood. Though he would have loved the attention, he would have ultimately felt imprisoned by the worship, especially that offered by the rock and roll intelligentsia.

The dream is over, folks. Lennon would like us all to know that. But if you're looking for a different deity, I know One Who, even after he was murdered, wouldn't stay dead...and He promises to be with us always.