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Beatles, Music of the 60s, Today in history

Beatles Let It Be

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Beatles Let It Be

&
“The Long and Winding Road”
June 13, 1970

The Beatles were essentially no more in 1970. Only a few recordings and slim hopes remained.

Apple had released the Let It Be album on May 18. It had the highest number of advance orders for any album in the US record industry, with an astonishing 3,700,000 orders placed. The album retailed at $7, creating a gross sales figure of $25,900,000 before it was even released. [Beatle Bible article]

Despite crushed hopes, on June 13, 1970 we fans gave our musical brothers two #1s: a single and an album.

Beatles Let It Be
YouTube “Long and Winding Road”
Beatles Let It Be

Long and Winding Road

Their last #1 single.

“The Long and Winding Road” single seemed to say it all. Especially when Paul sang, “The wild and windy night that the rain washed away/Has left a pool of tears crying for the day/Why leave me standing here, let me know the way.”

Wasn’t he singing what we were thinking?

Beatles Let It Be

Tells the story

In an ironic twist, the song reflects the progression of the Beatles’s demise. First, Paul McCartney did have the Beatles’s disharmony in mind when he wrote it. They (and Billy Preston) first recorded it in January 1969. It was a simpler version than the one that Phil Spector produced in April 1970. Those orchestral embellishments upset and maddened McCartney. So much so, that later, in his legal citations for the break up, he used those embellishments, done without his permission, as one of the reasons.

Allan Pollack says this (and much more) about the single:  in spite of his [McCartney’s] unabashed and sometimes even shameless sentimentality, he comes up with an affecting, durable torch song with “The Long And Winding Road”. The secrets of his success are to be found in the manner in which novel approaches to form and harmonic structure underscore the emotional core of the song, and belie whatever curbside surface clichés it has which may initially turn you off.

Beatles Let It Be

Let It Be

The Let It Be album was released on May 8, 1970. The Beatles last release. They had already broken up. The date most often used for that breakup is Paul’s public announcement on 10 April 1970.

They had actually recorded the album before the previous one, Abbey Road, thus forever creating fodder for fans to argue that Let It Be is the penultimate and Abbey Road the last.

Horseshoes and hand grenades.

Get Back was Let It Be’s original title  and intended, like its name suggested, to be a return to their musical roots. The single Get Back certainly gave that impression. A proposed album cover echoed their first album’s cover:

Beatles Let It Be

Disruption after dissension delayed and delayed again the completion of the album.  Abbey Road intervened.

As they say in baseball, “You need a scorecard.”

Let It Be was not a critical success. However as I said previously about John and Yoko’s Some Time In New York City,  the Beatles on a bad day were always better than any critic on any day.

Beatles Let It Be
John Lennon, Music et al, Today in history

Plastic Ono Some Time NYC

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Plastic Ono Some Time NYC

John Lennon
Released June 12, 1972
“New York City” live @ Madison Square Garden Que pasa, New York?
Plastic Ono Some Time NYC

Life after the Beatles

The last Beatle album, Let It Be, was  already more than two years old. Each of the individual Beatles had been active since the breakup. Elvis met President Nixon and asked for a badge to be a drug czar. The FBI was investigating Lennon to back up a plan to deport him.

Life for John Lennon and Yoko Ono had become political. It is no surprise that Some Time in New York City happened.

Ironically, Lennon pursued this political avenue at the same time that traditional political singers such as Joan Baez and Judy Collins had moved away. No matter.

Plastic Ono Some Time NYC

In Your Face

The album was not a subtle one and smacked us right in the face with its first track: “Woman Is Nigger of the World.” To say some stations wouldn’t play it is an understatement.  The National Organization for Women awarded Lennon and Ono a “Positive Image of Women” citation for the song’s “strong pro-feminist statement” in August 1972.

The album cover resembled a newspaper with articles reflecting the songs. I’m sure the picture of President Nixon and Chairman Mao dancing nude didn’t help get Lennon off of Nixon’s Enemies List.

Plastic Ono Some Time New York City

Plastic Ono Some Time NYC

Some Time in New York City

It was a double-album with the second disc live material. The studio tracks were the main statements. All were co-written by Lennon & Ono except where noted:

Side one
  1. “Woman Is the Nigger of the World”
  2. “Sisters, O Sisters” (Ono)
  3. “Attica State”
  4. “Born in a Prison” (Ono)
  5. “New York City” (Lennon)
Side two
  1. “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
  2. “The Luck of the Irish”
  3. “John Sinclair” (Lennon)
  4. “Angela”
  5. “We’re All Water” (Ono)

Yoko Ono’s influence, presence, and art continued to rankle some fans and critics. Even today it seems de rigueur and reflexive for many to mock and demean her at the mention of her name .

Rolling Stone magazine still held powerful sway over what fans felt. Stephen Holden’s July 20, 1972 review read in part, ““except for ‘John Sinclair’ the songs are awful. The tunes are shallow and derivative and the words little more than sloppy nursery-rhymes that patronise the issues and individuals they seek to exalt. Only a monomaniacal smugness could allow the Lennons to think that this witless doggerel wouldn’t insult the intelligence and feelings of any audience.”

Time has been kinder than Holden, but still few today think of this work as Lennon’s best. [All Music review] [Ultimate Classic Rock review]

Having said that, Lennon on a bad day is far better than nearly all of us on any day.

Plastic Ono Some Time NYC
Today in history, Vietnam

Monk Thich Quang Duc

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Monk Thich Quang Duc

7th grade daydreams

It was Tuesday 11 June 1963. I was about to finish 7th grade and envisioned 8th grade and imaginary girlfriends. That afternoon’s Bergen Evening Record would be light. My paper route done quickly enough to have time to play basketball on the side of my house with a few friends.

The sun set that evening at 8:27. I don’t remember that, of course, but it meant that I might have gone out after dinner despite it being a weekday.

President Kennedy

On June 11, 1963, John F Kennedy was President. November 22 164 days away.

I don’t know if the name Vietnam meant anything to me. Unlikely. The Gulf of Tonkin was 418 days away. That would be the day that many more Americans would learn the name Vietnam.

Little did they realize that it would be 3,100 days before the signing of the Paris Peace Accord. What would they have thought had they known?

Monk Thich Quang Duc

Civil War…religious persecution

Vietnam was in turmoil. Ho Chi Min’s northern forces faced a series of leaders in South Vietnam.

In 1961, when Malcolm Wilde Browne arrived in Vietnam, he  was Associated Press’s first permanent correspondent there. The large majority of South Vietnamese were Buddhist, but the current President, Ngo Dinh Diem, was Roman Catholic and had instituted repressive Buddhist policies.

On May 8, 1963 South Vietnamese soldiers had opened fire on a group of Buddhists who were flying the Buddhist flag–a violation of a government ban. Nine were killed. Protests followed.

Monk Thich Quang Duc

Thich Quang Duc

The evening of June 10, Browne and a few other correspondents received a message that something important would happen the next day.

On June 11 they witnessed a peaceful protest with about 350 monks marching and carrying banners demanding religious equality.

Among the monks was Thich Quang Duc, a senior leader who had helped establish many Buddhist temples.

After the march had gone a few blocks, the monks formed a circle and Thich Quang Duc took the lotus position at the center. Another monk poured gasoline over Thich Quang Duc who moments later lighted a match and self-immolated.

Before closing my eyes…

In a letter he left, Thich Quang Duc wrote: Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngô Đình Diệm to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally. I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organize in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.

It took 15 hours over 9,000 miles of AP WirePhoto cable for Malcolm Browne’s pictures to reach the USA. [images via rarehistoricalphotos dot com]

Buddist Monk Thich Quang Duc
photos by Malcolm Browne

Media reporting

Monk Thich Quang Duc

Other Buddhist monks later did the same and inspired a few Americans to do the same in protest to the undeclared war.

I was in 7th grade and had no idea what the next 3,100 days were bringing to Americans.

Monk Thich Quang Duc