PorterhouseMusic
Mitakuye Oyasin
Marketing I reckon. But kinda fun. The future is here.
New Beatles track
- Thread starter PorterhouseMusic
- Start date
Just a matter of time before we see ‘new previously unreleased’ SRV concerts. All AI driven of course.,
TalismanRich
Well-known member
PorterhouseMusic
Mitakuye Oyasin
60's guy
Well-known member
That wouldn't surprise me in the least!Just a matter of time before we see ‘new previously unreleased’ SRV concerts. All AI driven of course.,
The AI constructed images of the Fab Four playing together is impressive, but it isn't at all reality.
The true reality of the song, in my opinion, is that John Lennon perhaps wrote those lyrics as a tribute to his mother. Others may argue it that he simply missed being a Beatle.
I would have much more been impressed if Julian Lennon had produced a recording of Father and Son finally singing together.
McCartney and Starr should be ashamed of themselves.
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
I'd rather not !
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
So, which is better, "Now and Then" or "Hackney Diamonds" ?
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
Actually, now that you mention it, what material did the Stones release after a member died that wasn't part of the sessions for the album that came out around the time the member {Brian Jones and Charlie Watts and at a stretch, Ian Stewart} did actually die ?
PorterhouseMusic
Mitakuye Oyasin
‘Now and Then, I Miss You’: The Love Story at the Heart of the Last Beatles Song
By Ian Leslie
Nov. 5, 2023, 9:00 a.m. ET
Mr. Leslie is writing “John and Paul: A Love Story In Songs,” a book about the relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Sixty-one years after releasing their first single, “Love Me Do,” the Beatles have released their last. “Now and Then” mirrors, in the three beats of its title, its antecedent, which is on the other side. The single accompanies a new version of the group’s Red and Blue greatest hits albums.
It may be considered a cynical marketing ploy, but the story of its long gestation suggests otherwise. Inside the story of “Love Me Do” to “Now and Then” is the love story of John Lennon and Paul McCartney — which is our story, too.
Over a half a century since the Beatles split up, their songs still permeate our lives. We sing them in nurseries and in stadiums; we cry to them at weddings and funerals, and in the privacy of our bedrooms. The appeal is multigenerational; Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish are avowed fans.
Beatles songs still speak to us so directly because they are vehicles for the transmission of feelings too powerful for normal speech. Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney were intense young men who grew up in an era before men were encouraged to speak about their feelings, either in therapy or to one another. They gained their emotional education from music, especially the music of Black artists like Smokey Robinson, Arthur Alexander and the Shirelles. Almost everything they felt — and they felt a lot — was poured into music, including their feelings about each other.
“Now and Then” was not intended as a Beatles song. Well after the band’s breakup, Mr. Lennon wrote it at the piano sometime during his retreat from the public eye in the late 1970s. It was recorded on a tape machine and squirreled away. In 1994, his wife, Yoko Ono, uncovered a pair of cassettes of her husband’s demos and contributed them to the Beatles retrospective project “Anthology.” On the label of one, Mr. Lennon had scrawled “Now + Then,” as if to make a note of that song in particular. But because the sound quality was very poor (George Harrison called it “rubbish”), “Now and Then” didn’t get far.
But Mr. McCartney never forgot about it. He sent the demo to Peter Jackson, the director of the Beatles documentary “Get Back,” who used cutting-edge audio technology to clean the tape so thoroughly that it sounded as if Mr. Lennon was back in the room.
“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” Mr. McCartney said. “It’s quite emotional.” Mr. McCartney and Ringo Starr, now in their 80s — and George Harrison, posthumously — added parts.
Why did Mr. McCartney pursue this project for so long? He is busy enough, having worked on solo albums, a memoir, a stage musical and a global tour in the past five years alone. “Now and Then” is a sweetly melancholy song, but perhaps not at the level of the Beatles when they were together. Giles Martin, producer of this new track and son of the legendary Beatles producer George Martin, has a theory: “I do feel as though ‘Now and Then’ is a love letter to Paul written by John,” he said, and believes “that’s why Paul was so determined to finish it.”
Although it has been variously framed as a friendship, a rivalry or a partnership of convenience, the best way to think about the relationship between these two geniuses is as a love affair. As far as we know, it wasn’t a sexual relationship, but it was a passionate one: intense, tender and tempestuous.
Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney met as teenagers in 1957. They were gifted, charismatic and damaged. Mr. McCartney had recently lost his beloved mother to cancer; Mr. Lennon had been passed around from mother to father to aunt without ever feeling wanted. His mother, Julia, whom he adored, was killed by a careless driver the year after.
Bereavement bound these motherless boys together, and laughter, too. But music was the strongest binding force of all. They decided to write songs with each other, a promise they mostly kept until the Beatles split, and dreamed a whole private world into being.
Within a few years, the world became their dream. The micro-culture that germinated between them became the ethos of the Beatles, which left an enduring imprint on all of us. We might not be as optimistic as they were then, but we are imbued with their relentless curiosity, wild imagination and belief in the possibilities of love.
Throughout their relationship, Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney used songs to tell each other things they probably didn’t feel able to say face to face. Mr. Lennon said he wrote the 1968 song “Glass Onion” (“the walrus was Paul”) as a way of letting Mr. McCartney know they were still friends. After the band’s breakup, they maintained a dialogue at a distance, in songs full of recrimination, regret and affection. Stung by the barbs that Mr. McCartney had embedded on his album “Ram” (“You took your lucky break and broke it in two”), Mr. Lennon recorded “How Do You Sleep?,” a spiteful, excoriating attack on his former songwriting partner (“the only thing you done was yesterday”). Mr. McCartney responded with “Dear Friend,” a wistful call for an end to hostilities (“Is this really the borderline?”).
After this, a truce was called. For the rest of the decade, until Mr. Lennon’s death, in 1980, they made halting efforts to re-establish their friendship from different sides of the Atlantic. Mr. McCartney and his wife, Linda, visited Mr. Lennon in America, but they may still have saved their true heart-to-hearts for songs. In “Let Me Roll It,” Mr. McCartney performs a virtual Lennon impression. In “I Know (I Know),” Mr. Lennon sings, “Today, I love you more than yesterday,” over a riff based on their last direct songwriting collaboration, “I’ve Got a Feeling.”
“Talking is the slowest form of communicating,” John Lennon said in 1968. “Music is much better.” In a sense, the music of the Beatles, which brings so much joy and consolation, is the glorious fruit of male repression. We like to think we live in a more emotionally enlightened age. We have learned to talk it out. Yet sometimes I think that is itself a kind of avoidance, or a failure of nerve. We’ve awakened from the dream, and yet seem to be more confused than ever.
Carl Perkins, the rockabilly guitarist and singer, and a hero to the Beatles, collaborated with Mr. McCartney in the wake of Mr. Lennon’s death. One day, he played Mr. McCartney a song he had written for him with the line, “My old friend, won’t you think about me every now and then?” At this, Mr. McCartney teared up and left the room, leaving Linda to reassure a startled Mr. Perkins. “She said [those were] the last words that John Lennon said to Paul in the hallway of the Dakota building,” he told Goldmine magazine toward the end of his life. Mr. Lennon “patted him on the shoulder, and said, ‘Think about me every now and then, old friend.’”
We can see why a song called “Now and Then” might be so important to Mr. McCartney, and we can guess what he hears in Mr. Lennon’s lyrics:
If we must start again / Well we will know for sure /That I will love you … / Now and then, I miss you / Now and then
/ I want you to be there for me.
On those last two lines, we can hear Mr. McCartney’s aged voice joining that of his old friend.
Last year I was in the audience at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey for a McCartney show. The first encore of the set was a virtual duet with Mr. Lennon on “I’ve Got a Feeling,” using footage of the 1969 rooftop concert.
It could have felt cheap, a gimmick, but as Mr. McCartney turned toward the giant image of his friend as a young man, I cried, along with thousands of others.
Technology can revive the dream state, if only for the length of a song.
Ian Leslie writes the newsletter The Ruffian and is the author of, most recently, the book “Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes.” He is writing a book, “John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” about the relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
By Ian Leslie
Nov. 5, 2023, 9:00 a.m. ET
Mr. Leslie is writing “John and Paul: A Love Story In Songs,” a book about the relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Sixty-one years after releasing their first single, “Love Me Do,” the Beatles have released their last. “Now and Then” mirrors, in the three beats of its title, its antecedent, which is on the other side. The single accompanies a new version of the group’s Red and Blue greatest hits albums.
It may be considered a cynical marketing ploy, but the story of its long gestation suggests otherwise. Inside the story of “Love Me Do” to “Now and Then” is the love story of John Lennon and Paul McCartney — which is our story, too.
Over a half a century since the Beatles split up, their songs still permeate our lives. We sing them in nurseries and in stadiums; we cry to them at weddings and funerals, and in the privacy of our bedrooms. The appeal is multigenerational; Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish are avowed fans.
Beatles songs still speak to us so directly because they are vehicles for the transmission of feelings too powerful for normal speech. Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney were intense young men who grew up in an era before men were encouraged to speak about their feelings, either in therapy or to one another. They gained their emotional education from music, especially the music of Black artists like Smokey Robinson, Arthur Alexander and the Shirelles. Almost everything they felt — and they felt a lot — was poured into music, including their feelings about each other.
“Now and Then” was not intended as a Beatles song. Well after the band’s breakup, Mr. Lennon wrote it at the piano sometime during his retreat from the public eye in the late 1970s. It was recorded on a tape machine and squirreled away. In 1994, his wife, Yoko Ono, uncovered a pair of cassettes of her husband’s demos and contributed them to the Beatles retrospective project “Anthology.” On the label of one, Mr. Lennon had scrawled “Now + Then,” as if to make a note of that song in particular. But because the sound quality was very poor (George Harrison called it “rubbish”), “Now and Then” didn’t get far.
But Mr. McCartney never forgot about it. He sent the demo to Peter Jackson, the director of the Beatles documentary “Get Back,” who used cutting-edge audio technology to clean the tape so thoroughly that it sounded as if Mr. Lennon was back in the room.
“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” Mr. McCartney said. “It’s quite emotional.” Mr. McCartney and Ringo Starr, now in their 80s — and George Harrison, posthumously — added parts.
Why did Mr. McCartney pursue this project for so long? He is busy enough, having worked on solo albums, a memoir, a stage musical and a global tour in the past five years alone. “Now and Then” is a sweetly melancholy song, but perhaps not at the level of the Beatles when they were together. Giles Martin, producer of this new track and son of the legendary Beatles producer George Martin, has a theory: “I do feel as though ‘Now and Then’ is a love letter to Paul written by John,” he said, and believes “that’s why Paul was so determined to finish it.”
Although it has been variously framed as a friendship, a rivalry or a partnership of convenience, the best way to think about the relationship between these two geniuses is as a love affair. As far as we know, it wasn’t a sexual relationship, but it was a passionate one: intense, tender and tempestuous.
Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney met as teenagers in 1957. They were gifted, charismatic and damaged. Mr. McCartney had recently lost his beloved mother to cancer; Mr. Lennon had been passed around from mother to father to aunt without ever feeling wanted. His mother, Julia, whom he adored, was killed by a careless driver the year after.
Bereavement bound these motherless boys together, and laughter, too. But music was the strongest binding force of all. They decided to write songs with each other, a promise they mostly kept until the Beatles split, and dreamed a whole private world into being.
Within a few years, the world became their dream. The micro-culture that germinated between them became the ethos of the Beatles, which left an enduring imprint on all of us. We might not be as optimistic as they were then, but we are imbued with their relentless curiosity, wild imagination and belief in the possibilities of love.
Throughout their relationship, Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney used songs to tell each other things they probably didn’t feel able to say face to face. Mr. Lennon said he wrote the 1968 song “Glass Onion” (“the walrus was Paul”) as a way of letting Mr. McCartney know they were still friends. After the band’s breakup, they maintained a dialogue at a distance, in songs full of recrimination, regret and affection. Stung by the barbs that Mr. McCartney had embedded on his album “Ram” (“You took your lucky break and broke it in two”), Mr. Lennon recorded “How Do You Sleep?,” a spiteful, excoriating attack on his former songwriting partner (“the only thing you done was yesterday”). Mr. McCartney responded with “Dear Friend,” a wistful call for an end to hostilities (“Is this really the borderline?”).
After this, a truce was called. For the rest of the decade, until Mr. Lennon’s death, in 1980, they made halting efforts to re-establish their friendship from different sides of the Atlantic. Mr. McCartney and his wife, Linda, visited Mr. Lennon in America, but they may still have saved their true heart-to-hearts for songs. In “Let Me Roll It,” Mr. McCartney performs a virtual Lennon impression. In “I Know (I Know),” Mr. Lennon sings, “Today, I love you more than yesterday,” over a riff based on their last direct songwriting collaboration, “I’ve Got a Feeling.”
“Talking is the slowest form of communicating,” John Lennon said in 1968. “Music is much better.” In a sense, the music of the Beatles, which brings so much joy and consolation, is the glorious fruit of male repression. We like to think we live in a more emotionally enlightened age. We have learned to talk it out. Yet sometimes I think that is itself a kind of avoidance, or a failure of nerve. We’ve awakened from the dream, and yet seem to be more confused than ever.
Carl Perkins, the rockabilly guitarist and singer, and a hero to the Beatles, collaborated with Mr. McCartney in the wake of Mr. Lennon’s death. One day, he played Mr. McCartney a song he had written for him with the line, “My old friend, won’t you think about me every now and then?” At this, Mr. McCartney teared up and left the room, leaving Linda to reassure a startled Mr. Perkins. “She said [those were] the last words that John Lennon said to Paul in the hallway of the Dakota building,” he told Goldmine magazine toward the end of his life. Mr. Lennon “patted him on the shoulder, and said, ‘Think about me every now and then, old friend.’”
We can see why a song called “Now and Then” might be so important to Mr. McCartney, and we can guess what he hears in Mr. Lennon’s lyrics:
If we must start again / Well we will know for sure /That I will love you … / Now and then, I miss you / Now and then
/ I want you to be there for me.
On those last two lines, we can hear Mr. McCartney’s aged voice joining that of his old friend.
Last year I was in the audience at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey for a McCartney show. The first encore of the set was a virtual duet with Mr. Lennon on “I’ve Got a Feeling,” using footage of the 1969 rooftop concert.
It could have felt cheap, a gimmick, but as Mr. McCartney turned toward the giant image of his friend as a young man, I cried, along with thousands of others.
Technology can revive the dream state, if only for the length of a song.
Ian Leslie writes the newsletter The Ruffian and is the author of, most recently, the book “Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes.” He is writing a book, “John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” about the relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Mick Doobie
Resist We Much
Why do they insist on making everything ghey?
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
If by the legal entity you mean John, Paul, George and Ringo, then yes. That is precisely why this new recording isn't the Beatles. They had a rule that unless something was OK'd by all 4 of them, it didn't happen. For example, John wanted "I Am the Walrus" as a single and he wanted "Revolution 1" as a single but he didn't have George and Paul on board, certainly with the latter. Well, that legal entity was dissolved in the High Court as part of the lawsuit Paul brought in 1970. George's refusal to carry on with the song alone would have kept it from going any further.
Incidentally, while I've not yet come across anything George ever said about "Why don't we do it in the Road ?" John is on record {no pun intended} as saying he liked the song. In '72, he told Hit Parader that it was one of Paul's best songs and in '80 he told Playboy that he enjoyed the song.
I think you run into a cul-de-sac of your own argument here.
As human beings, especially as human beings that don't know one another personally, there are signs that a person can give that indicate where they may be at, at a certain point in their life. They might talk about it and we have the benefit of interviews, films and books. For example, we can say some definitive things about Hitler's state of mind as the Russians made their way into Berlin, just by the fact that he shot himself. In the case of Lennon, it is instructive to look at his thoughts about Paul McCartney, Beatle songs and life going on in that period of 10 years when the Beatles had ceased to exist. Interesting little observations like [Paul] "was the one that wanted the Beatles most," "I think he wanted to show that he was the Beatles," "Paul thought he was the fuckin' Beatles and he never fucking was, never," "Paul isn't the Beatles," "It wouldn't matter to me if I saw them [the other Beatles] often or if I never saw them again [he said this just before he died]," "I don't give a shit what Wings are doing," "He wanted us to go back to the dance halls and experience that again. But I didn't," "I haven't really talked to him in 10 years. Because I haven't spent time with him," "I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past...." And when asked if it wouldn't be interesting to have a reunion with Paul just for old times' sake, he replied "I never went to high school reunions !"
One of the last things he said, before he died, was "I will talk about the Beatles forever and ever. I will discuss them intellectually and what they mean and what they don't mean. That doesn't bother me. What does is the idea that people think we can recreate it for them - for the kids who keep writing me saying 'I'm only 14 now and I missed it.' I think that's pathetic. I mean, forget about that. Listen to the Beatles records, but dig Queen or Clash or whatever is going on now....the sixties is over and the Beatles is over." Interestingly, he was saying the same thing 10 years previous when he declared "The dream is over."
So actually, he was pretty consistent in certain things over a 10-year period and that gives a window into what he may have felt at the time of his death ~ given that many of those quotes come less than 3 months before he was killed. His 2023 thoughts are largely irrelevant because he died 43 years before that and so it's to those latter-day thoughts that one must turn in order to answer your question.
That's a huge assumption that runs into a dead end. He didn't know he was going to be murdered. He didn't know he was going to die at the time he did. If he wanted it worked on, it would have been worked on by him.
Or Ringo !
rob aylestone
Moderator
I asked our drummer, who hates the Beatles. He said he absolutely NOT listened, despite that being very difficult with the BBC, which he calls the Beatles Broadcasting Company!
CrowsofFritz
Flamingo!
My statement that it wasn’t in writing was facetious—because the assumption is just as ridiculous as saying he would disapprove. It doesn’t matter what he said all the way up to his death. He’s DEAD. He doesn’t have a choice.If by the legal entity you mean John, Paul, George and Ringo, then yes. That is precisely why this new recording isn't the Beatles. They had a rule that unless something was OK'd by all 4 of them, it didn't happen. For example, John wanted "I Am the Walrus" as a single and he wanted "Revolution 1" as a single but he didn't have George and Paul on board, certainly with the latter. Well, that legal entity was dissolved in the High Court as part of the lawsuit Paul brought in 1970. George's refusal to carry on with the song alone would have kept it from going any further.
Incidentally, while I've not yet come across anything George ever said about "Why don't we do it in the Road ?" John is on record {no pun intended} as saying he liked the song. In '72, he told Hit Parader that it was one of Paul's best songs and in '80 he told Playboy that he enjoyed the song.
I think you run into a cul-de-sac of your own argument here.
As human beings, especially as human beings that don't know one another personally, there are signs that a person can give that indicate where they may be at, at a certain point in their life. They might talk about it and we have the benefit of interviews, films and books. For example, we can say some definitive things about Hitler's state of mind as the Russians made their way into Berlin, just by the fact that he shot himself. In the case of Lennon, it is instructive to look at his thoughts about Paul McCartney, Beatle songs and life going on in that period of 10 years when the Beatles had ceased to exist. Interesting little observations like [Paul] "was the one that wanted the Beatles most," "I think he wanted to show that he was the Beatles," "Paul thought he was the fuckin' Beatles and he never fucking was, never," "Paul isn't the Beatles," "It wouldn't matter to me if I saw them [the other Beatles] often or if I never saw them again [he said this just before he died]," "I don't give a shit what Wings are doing," "He wanted us to go back to the dance halls and experience that again. But I didn't," "I haven't really talked to him in 10 years. Because I haven't spent time with him," "I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past...." And when asked if it wouldn't be interesting to have a reunion with Paul just for old times' sake, he replied "I never went to high school reunions !"
One of the last things he said, before he died, was "I will talk about the Beatles forever and ever. I will discuss them intellectually and what they mean and what they don't mean. That doesn't bother me. What does is the idea that people think we can recreate it for them - for the kids who keep writing me saying 'I'm only 14 now and I missed it.' I think that's pathetic. I mean, forget about that. Listen to the Beatles records, but dig Queen or Clash or whatever is going on now....the sixties is over and the Beatles is over." Interestingly, he was saying the same thing 10 years previous when he declared "The dream is over."
So actually, he was pretty consistent in certain things over a 10-year period and that gives a window into what he may have felt at the time of his death ~ given that many of those quotes come less than 3 months before he was killed. His 2023 thoughts are largely irrelevant because he died 43 years before that and so it's to those latter-day thoughts that one must turn in order to answer your question.
That's a huge assumption that runs into a dead end. He didn't know he was going to be murdered. He didn't know he was going to die at the time he did. If he wanted it worked on, it would have been worked on by him.
Or Ringo !
As far as them not liking it. I’m not talking about the song itself; im talking about the fact that they didn’t know Paul was doing this all himself while those two were away.
I don’t understand why people get so hung up on what a dead man MIGHT think if he were alive—especially when they don’t personally know any of the people involved (who were all closest to him at some point in his life) Im the one that isn’t assuming anything and accepting it as is—both legally (green) and morally (gray at worst). I don’t personally know any of them.
Why is everyone else acting like they’re personal friends of John and are experiencing outrage at his dead behalf?
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
Clearly. As was my reply about Ringo. But many a true word is said in jest and often underscores some slightly more serious bedrock.
For the purposes of the discussion, I think it does.
As funny as that sounds, it's true.
Well, it's an interesting talking point. It's not about being hung up on it. We're expressing opinions that we hold. Famous Beagle is of the opinion that because it's Paul saying John would be on board with it, that makes it acceptable. I happen to think there's another side of the story which makes for some interesting conclusions. I've no idea what Lennon would have thought if he were around 43 years on from the last words we have of him. But the point is that Paul is the one that brings up that John would love it. And for me, there was enough stuff that John said in his latter years that throws a lot of doubt on that. And so it makes for a good talking point and we explore various angles about it and state why we think what we think.
I didn't bring it up and wouldn't have done so if it hadn't come up.
To be honest, I could care less about what John would have thought had he not died. He thought the tracks of "Ticket to ride" and "Lucy in the sky with Diamonds" were crap and that "Across the Universe" was badly recorded and realized. I heartily disagree. And I've expressed on these pages since 2009 what I think of remixes and remasters of songs and albums that have been part of the fabric of my life for 4 or 5 decades.
My basis for raising a quizzical eyebrow is that, while I can see the value in, say, the anthology albums that came out in the '90s {even though I thought the overwhelming majority of the outtakes were lame}, I have long detected a penchant in people of all shades and hues to re-write history or to not let sleeping dogs lie. I dig Paul McCartney greatly but like Mick Doobie pointed out a few months ago, he does have a tendency to try to co-opt history. I find that interesting about him. I don't think John was being entirely unfair when he said that he thought he was the Beatles.
But unlike many of the threads that descend into really nasty name-calling and bad feeling, I don't think we're hung up on anything. Personally, I find this an interesting topic, nothing more, nothing less. I'm not going to invade Sweden because of "Now and Then."
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
One thing I will say though, this song could end up being a blessing in disguise for home recorders. The tech that exists to "unbake the cake" as it were, could mean that if we can afford it or it becomes commonplace, we could apply it to drums of any song and then write one's own songs around them and hardly anyone need ever know. And who cares if it's cheating ? The Beatles did it !
Oh come on, where’s your sense of adventure? You know.. rape, pillage, and plunder. Sweden does have some of the world’s most beautiful women.
Eh, maybe I’ve been watching too many Viking shows.
60's guy
Well-known member
A blessing in disguise? AI is the way of the future? I certainly hope not. Is AI produced music the future?. I certainly hope not.
The majority of home recordists are primarily interested in learning how best to use their stand alone tape or digital recorders, or DAW, to record themselves. Recording oneself is a personal journey of learning and experimentation.