Perfectly round acoustic guitar...

JF-30

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Those guys lived a life we will never know. Your the most famous 4 people in the world and everyone wants a piece of you. You have more money than god and you cant go out your door to go out and enjoy your life. The record company just wants you to make the next record and single to make them money. And John started doing smack at the end of his tenure with The Beatles. The LSD won't kill you (maybe make you looney). Just a little to much horse that one time and your another statistic.
 

adorshki

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And Yoko, don't care about her art or the so called music she made. Maybe she should go back in the bag for a while.

"I never thought I would go into the dance charts"
"When people don't understand my work I don't feel like explaining"
“Try to say nothing negative about anybody:
a) for three days
b) for forty-five days
c) for three months
See what happens to your life.”

----Yoko Ono

"The only people who can truly call themselves artists are the ones who've actually produced some.
Where's your body of work?"

---Adorshki

The LSD won't kill you (maybe make you looney).
As a matter of fact, LSD CAN kill you through toxic overdose:
"HUMAN STUDIES: LSD has significant cardiovascular effects owing to its sympathomimetic actions. Tachycardia, hypertension, arrhythmias, shock, and respiratory arrest occur with severe overdose."
It's just that nobody who's ever had enough material to actually do it (kill themselves), has.
That we know of.

And John started doing smack at the end of his tenure with The Beatles.
John was already doing smack during the making of the White Album, hardly the "end of his tenure".

https://www.beatlesbible.com/albums/the-beatles-white-album/1/
 
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walrus

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Nice post, Al.

There's a great story about Lennon and LSD while they were working on "Getting Better". If you jump off a roof while tripping, LSD will certainly kill you.

The Beatles worked out the song’s instrumental track during two sessions at EMI’s Abbey Road studios before arriving – sans Ringo Starr – on the evening of March 21st, 1967, to record the backing harmonies. To prepare himself for yet another marathon all-night session, Lennon reached into his silver art-nouveau pillbox and pulled out what he thought was an amphetamine. Unfortunately, he accidentally picked the wrong tablet, dosing himself with LSD. “It’ll certainly keep him awake for a while!” Harrison wryly noted on a 1992 episode of ITV’s The South Bank Show.“I thought I was taking some uppers and I was not in the state of handling it,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. “I said, ‘What is it, I feel ill?’ I thought I felt ill and I thought I was going cracked … then it dawned on me that I must have taken some acid.” He informed producer George Martin that he was unwell. Never guessing that Lennon’s troubles were pharmaceutical in origin, the older gentleman responded with old-fashioned common sense. “‘Come on, John,’ I said, ‘What you need is a good breath of fresh air!'”

With unnatural intensity, Lennon began to climb the staircase from the studio floor to meet Martin in the control room above. “It seemed to take John a long time to get up the stairs; he was moving as if he were in slow motion,” recalled engineer Geoff Emerick in his book, Here There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. “When he finally walked through the doorway into the control room, I noticed that he had a strange, glazed look on his face. He appeared to be searching for something, but didn’t seem to know what it was. Suddenly he threw his head back and began staring intently at the ceiling, awestruck. With some degree of difficulty, he finally got a few not especially profound words out: ‘Wow, look at that.’ Our necks cranked upward, but all we saw was … a ceiling.”

Martin led his befuddled charge up through a series of passageways to the platform on top of EMI’s studios for what would become the second-most famous rooftop incident in the Beatles saga. Martin, naïve to the world of drugs, was still unclear what was the matter, though he did notice Lennon “swaying gently against my arm and resonating like a human tuning fork” – a condition that isn’t usually cured by fresh air. “If I’d known it was LSD, the roof would have been the last place I would have taken him!” he laughed in the Beatles Anthology documentary. “But of course I couldn’t take him out the front because there were 500 screaming kids who’d have torn him apart. So the only place I could take him to get fresh air was the roof. It was a wonderful starry night, and John went to the edge, which was a parapet about eighteen inches high, and looked up at the stars and said, ‘Aren’t they fantastic?’ Of course to him I suppose they would have been especially fantastic. At the time they just looked like ordinary stars to me.”
Several minutes later Martin returned to the studio to continue work, leaving Lennon to his own devices on the roof. McCartney and Harrison, well aware of what their bandmate had done, carried on for a short time before they grasped the full impact of the situation: Lennon was tripping alone on an unguarded roof! Instantly they sprinted up the stairs to rescue him. “They knew all too well that the rooftop had only a narrow parapet and that, in his lysergically altered state, John could easily step over the edge and plummet thirty feet to the pavement below,” Emerick writes. Thankfully, Lennon was found intact, quietly contemplating the universe on his own.
Safely back in the studio, Lennon realized he was in no state to record. “I said, ‘Well, I can’t go on. You’ll have to do it and I’ll just stay and watch,'” he later told Rolling Stone. “I got very nervous just watching them all, and I kept saying, ‘Is this all right?’ They had all been very kind and they said, ‘Yes, it’s all right.'” The session recommenced briefly, but soon it was deemed useless without a capable Lennon and the group decided to break early for the night.
But there was a problem. Lennon’s driver wasn’t due to return to Abbey Road for several hours, and his wife Cynthia was fast asleep. To keep watch over his vulnerable friend, McCartney decided to take him back to his own home on Cavendish Avenue, a short walk from the studio. “Paul’s thoughtfulness in going home with John was typical of one of the best sides of his character,” Martin reflected in his memoir, All You Need Is Ears.


walrus

 

bobouz

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Began thinking about Skip Spence doing heavy drugs at an age where his mental illness was probably just coming into full fruition.

It reminded me of a friend in the 11-12th grades ('68-'69) who was friendly, smiling, & enjoyed a good conversation - until he started dropping acid on a regular basis. A switch was flipped, and the person he had been became unrecognizable.

A very scary prospect, to consider anyone we might have known who piled serious drugs on top of a serious mental issue.
 

adorshki

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Nice post, Al.

There's a great story about Lennon and LSD while they were working on "Getting Better". “Paul’s thoughtfulness in going home with John was typical of one of the best sides of his character,” Martin reflected in his memoir, All You Need Is Ears.
Beatles Bible has this additional tidbit about that incident:

"In fact, the session was stopped once The Beatles realised that Lennon was tripping. Lennon's car was not at the studio, and so McCartney took him to his nearby home at Cavendish Avenue. This became the first occasion on which Lennon and McCartney took LSD together, with the trusty Mal Evans looking after them.
'I thought, Maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him. It's been coming for a long time. It's often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John's on it already, so I'll sort of catch up. It was my first trip with John, or with any of the guys. We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot.' "
 
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adorshki

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Makes me want to trip again lol but really no ,well unless it can be verified pure something with no lasting after effects !

Pure as the "driven" snow?

Gamme-PGV-1022TRC.jpg
 
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adorshki

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I don't care for her music - except stuff like "Walking on Thin Ice" - but he loved her, that's all that matters. I hope no one would ever treat my wife the way she was treated.
And you can't argue with their overall and constant voice for peace.
walrus
Yeah.
And love means accepting the flaws.
Even after I was ready to commit to monogamy I wasted 25 years holding out for "perfection".
When I finally loosened up a little, it (she) found me.
One thing I really like about Yoko is that she's probably the only human on the planet who could make one of these things run away whimpering with its tail tucked between its legs, just by singing to it:

overprotective-dogSIZED.jpg


:eek-new:
 

Grassdog

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I'm perfectly willing to keep my opinions about Yoko to myself as long as she (and others) stop perpetuating the myth that she's an artist. She was every bit a con artist as Magic Alex was - two characters that came into John's life about the same time, as I recall.

What about Cynthia Lennon as an artist, does anyone remember that? Look at her work, she actually had some talent.

And as far as Yoko's philanthropy, well it's an easier proposition when you've inherited more money than you know what to do with. I doubt you'll see her give everything away.

Like I said earlier, John loved her and that's fine. But it doesn't mean I have to buy into this pro-Yoko propaganda that she was some sort of genius.
 

adorshki

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I'm perfectly willing to keep my opinions about Yoko to myself as long as she (and others) stop perpetuating the myth that she's an artist.
It's no myth.
Just the fact that it's being debated is proof she IS.
This is just more evidence that some people are so arrogant as to consider that their like (or lack thereof) of an artist's work is a valid measure of its legitimacy.
Or maybe they're so narrow-minded and under-exposed as to confuse their tastes in art or music with the quality of same.
Thank God it didn't stop Van Gogh or Mondrian or Kandinsky or Pollack.
Wassily-Kandinsky-via-ibiblio-org.jpg

Jackson-Pollock-Convergence.-Image-via-jackson-pollock.org_.jpg

Or Hendrix.
Yeah some of Yoko's stuff sounds as messy as some people think those paintings look.
Some of whom still steadfastly deny it's art.
But without 'em we'd probably still be living in a world where anything that wasn't strictly representational wouldn't qualify as art.
Funny thing, in Communist Russia non-representational art was considered counter-revolutionary.
THEY knew what was dangerous to the status-quo of mind control.
I'll take Yoko over the generic southern rock of Lyrnrd Skynrd and other formula-driven institutionalized "classic rock" any day of the week.
But then I listen to the jazz an classical stations now too because the eternal repetition of a top 100 songs gags me to death.
I need new content.
Not repackaged Big Macs.
 
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walrus

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It's no myth.
Just the fact that it's being debated is proof she IS.
This is just more evidence that some people are so arrogant as to consider that their like (or lack thereof) of an artist's work is a valid measure of its legitimacy.
Or maybe they're so narrow-minded and under-exposed as to confuse their tastes in art or music with the quality of same.
Thank God it didn't stop Van Gogh or Mondrian or Kandinsky or Pollack.
Wassily-Kandinsky-via-ibiblio-org.jpg

Jackson-Pollock-Convergence.-Image-via-jackson-pollock.org_.jpg

Or Hendrix.
Yeah some of Yoko's stuff sounds as messy as some people think those paintings look.
Some of whom still steadfastly deny it's art.
But without 'em we'd probably still be living in a world where anything that wasn't strictly representational wouldn't qualify as art.
Funny thing, in Communist Russia non-representational art was considered counter-revolutionary.
THEY knew what was dangerous to the status-quo of mind control.
I'll take Yoko over the generic southern rock of Lyrnrd Skynrd and other formula-driven institutionalized "classic rock" any day of the week.
But then I listen to the jazz an classical stations now too because the eternal repetition of a top 100 songs gags me to death.
I need new content.
Not repackaged Big Macs.

+1.

From the usual source: "Public appreciation of Ono's work has shifted over time and was helped by a retrospective at a Whitney Museum branch in 1989[SUP][2][/SUP] and the 1992 release of the six-disc box set Onobox. Retrospectives of her artwork have also been presented at the Japan Society in New York City in 2001[SUP][3][/SUP], in Bielefeld, Germany, and the UK in 2008, Frankfurt, and Bilbao, Spain, in 2013 and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2015. She received a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale in 2009 and the 2012 Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Austria's highest award for applied contemporary art.

walrus
 

adorshki

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What about Cynthia Lennon as an artist, does anyone remember that? Look at her work, she actually had some talent.
Yep, nice safe non-threatening representational stuff,
NO intellectual challenges there, thank god.
And maybe the real reason for the evaporation of the marriage?
(And don't get me wrong, I like it, but it won't keep giving me insights like Pollack would)

lf


And as far as Yoko's philanthropy, well it's an easier proposition when you've inherited more money than you know what to do with.
AS a matter of fact SHE was responsible for salvaging John's decimated portfolio and making the real estate investments that were a significant percentage of the estate.
And the income generated therform of which allows her to continue to make philanthropic contributions of her money according to her definitions of worthy causes.
I doubt you'll see her give everything away.
Would YOU?
Which by the way would simply be the philanthropic equivalent of killing the goose laying the golden eggs.
 
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Grassdog

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Thank God it didn't stop Van Gogh or Mondrian or Kandinsky or Pollack

I don't think any of the afore-mentioned had to latch themselves onto a world famous established artist to gain any notoriety.

Yoko's name mentioned in the same context as Hendrix? Okay, now, I give up. I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this.
 

walrus

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Yoko's investment advice:

"Besides Beatles income, Lennon's solo estate also creates its own earnings. His wife, Yoko Ono, turned her husband’s estate into a behemoth. How did she make his already impressive wealth into a well-oiled business machine pulling in around $12 million per year?

The answer is simple: cattle and real estate. Sometime in 1977, the couple, under Ono’s advice, bought a herd of 122 Regis Holstein cows, 10 bulls, breeding equipment, and real estate in Delaware County, New York to house their livestock. They also bought a mansion in Palm Springs and, of course, their famous Upper West side digs in the Dakota, which will, no doubt, go for quite a handsome sum whenever Ono decides to move out."


Al, I know you are not a fan of "Imagine" (the song). You gotta love the irony of Lennon singing "imagine no possessions"...

walrus
 
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bobouz

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Never paid much attention at all to Yoko, but 60 Minutes just recently did a piece on Canadian Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, who is drawing crowds & positive reviews from many corners. She yells, screams, and makes guttural throat sounds that have their roots in the cultural history of her people.

Is it musically artistic? A lot of people agree that it surely is. I personally don't want to listen to it - but thankfully, art comes in many forms.
 
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adorshki

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I don't think any of the afore-mentioned had to latch themselves onto a world famous established artist to gain any notoriety.
NO the point was they all stuck it out in the face of massive negative reaction.
Even Hendrix had massive negative reaction in the greater culture at large.
And Yoko'd already been hooked up with a world (western hemisphere, anyway) famous established artist: John Cage.

Yoko's name mentioned in the same context as Hendrix? Okay, now, I give up. I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this.
Fair enough, and in fact I respect your non-confrontational posture in light of my irritated and contentious replies to some comments.
Honestly I suspect most of them were made without being aware of Yoko's life history, I mean before she met John.
There's a lot of misconception out there about who she really is, largely created by journalists with axes to grind and their own agendas involving getting published.
But she has never wavered from her chosen life course and to me that spells integrity.
If she'd never met John she'd still be committed to her art and probably unrecognized.
Just like Hendrix before Chas Chandler.
But sure if I had to choose yes I'd keep my Hendrix catalog over Yoko.
But I'd like to be able to keep "Walking On Thin Ice" at least.
 

adorshki

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Yoko's investment advice:

The answer is simple: [/COLOR]cattle and real estate.

I know you must have been looking for that link while I was composing post #113, and the corroboration's welcome.
Al, I know you are not a fan of "Imagine" (the song). You gotta love the irony of Lennon singing "imagine no possessions"...
walrus
It occurs to me it IS a fantasy, after all.
Obviously composed under the influence of oxytocin.
NO, not OxyContin, Oxytocin, sometimes known as the "Bonding" or "Warm and Fuzzy" hormone.
I actually learned it and used to busk it because audiences loved it so much but I became ashamed that I was prostituting my art for mere money, and stopped.
:biggrin-new:

Never paid much attention at all to Yoko, but 60 Minutes just recently did a piece on Canadian Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, who is drawing crowds & positive reviews from many corners. She yells, screams, and makes guttural throat sounds that have their roots in the cultural history of her people.
Is it musically artistic? A lot of people agree that it surely is. I personally don't want to listen to it - but thankfully, art comes in many forms.
And in fact throat singing techniques are also known from Tibet to Mongolia (bet the Inuks brought it with 'em across the land bridge)
And Yoko's "yodeling" actually has roots and formal training in classical Japanese opera.
Another one of those little details journalists like to leave out when they want to deny her creds as an artist.
It occurs to me I might want to store a couple of her cuts to cellphone to use for Chihuahua repellant.
Like you said, "thankfully, art comes in many forms."
:glee:
 
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JF-30

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There are two types of anything. Things you like and things you don't like. That goes for everything - food, music, art, TV shows, ect.
 

adorshki

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There are two types of anything. Things you like and things you don't like. That goes for everything - food, music, art, TV shows, ect.

I disagree.
.
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:glee:

OK joking aside I also want to thank you for staying calm after I snarked out.
Like Popeye, "I can stands so much and I can't stands no more", and the Yoko thing is a recurring topic.
I think it's pretty obvious where I stand, I try to keep a balanced viewpoint about her myself.
Nobody's a saint, not even John Lennon, and he's even one of my top 5 heroes.
And still it doesn't mean I blindly accept everything he did just because he did it.
But when it comes to Yoko, I think the reverse is true, most critics cite their opinions as being based on one or 2 negative listening experiences or stories, ergo, she's not an artist and never will be.
So very few from "our generation" go looking to see if there was anything there to actually like (artistically).
In my case they became a couple during a critical formative period of my own life, I was listening to the AM radio when "The Ballad of John and Yoko" came out, and I got it.
And like others mentioned, if she was good enough for John she was good enough for me, and I always looked at her through that lens.
lennoncoverposthumous.jpg

And like Walrus said, I think she literally saved his life, too.
Without her (or somebody who could give him a similar channel for self-repair) he would have self-destructed.
Far from being an opportunist she took a lot of doody from him herself.
Oh well, enough.
I propose that we've concluded our annual Yoko-bashing contest with yet another draw.
:glee:
We now return to our regularly scheduled thread.
Guitars:
Which sounds better: square or round?
Or how about the corollary:
Are square guitars capable of producing undistorted sine waves?
?
 
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