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1967

#DO CRIME #FIGHT CRIME #DESTROY THINGS #TOUCH HANDS #SING HARMONY #BREATHE #mclennon #absolutely too much

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the revolution wasn't bad we hit the streets with all we had

#OH GOD YES THANK YOU WELL #ALL MY HEART #so beautifully footaged and perfectly put together #<333333 #fanvids

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"How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin" by Leslie Woodhead. ________________________________________________________

"Before the Beatles came life didn't have any apparent meaning."

"The Beatles were like bread for us."

"It's like you meet friends after being alone for a long time."

"I went into a state of shock. Everything except the Beatles became pointless."

"They opened the whole world."

"It's like dogs and cats: they don't understand what you say, but they feel your feeling. Russians were the same with John Lennon and Paul McCartney."

"Russian people were over-whelmed by the Beatles."

"Their music was a great source of freedom - a piece of God's soul come to earth."

He remembered a girl student from Minsk who had written an open letter saying: "In this filth we call a Socialist society, the Beatles are the only thing that helps me to survive."

"The Beatles hardly sang about politics, and they didn't think about the collapse of the Soviet empire, but the fall [wouldn't have been] possible if people hadn't been freed inside. They helped to make that possible."

"The Beatles transformed me very quickly from being a good young Communist, and I understood that I lived in a very strange country."

"Those secret tapes we made of Beatles songs hanged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - because they couldn't control the tapes. It was the beginning of the end."

"In attacking something the whole world had fallen in love with, they isolated themselves even more. It made us more doubtful that our beloved country was right after all."

"John is about pain. Russia is full of pain, so for us his songs are like folk music."

"We had no religion in the Soviet Union, so we had a gap in our souls. The Beatles filled that gap."

He struggled for a moment to find the words. "It was something that allowed me to feel complete."

"I don't think the Beatles thought about all this. But they did it. So I say thank you very much."

_________________

I loved this book, but the documentary he made is just as good and much quicker. But then, if you liked the documentary, the book is just like that but longer. It does paint a brilliant alien picture of what the world is like if the Beatles show up and you're not allowed to scream; if you're threatened with being arrested if you even sing along. It's desperately insane, trying to keep Beatles from people, and it wasn't just a couple of years, it was decades. And it created this generation of people who were just desperate to try and put into words how much it had meant.

In fact, through the whole book, Leslie is slightly britishly embarrassed about how openly the "Beatles Generation" in Russia talk about the Beatles with almost religious love, and with the sense of real meaning, and sincerity. He's not judgemental about it, it feels like he's jealous of their being open about something that he definitely feels but thinks he should be cynical about.

Leslie himself met the Beatles in 1962, when he went to film them in the Cavern. He had to stop his car on the way home to be sick, because he was so overcome from being near them. We absolutely forget and pretend the Beatles weren't genuinely extraordinary, but they were, and old Russian men are still happy to say so.

(It is almost entirely men, I think the author at some point noticed that he wasn't talking to any women, as though they hadn't been there, or hadn't noticed, but he either thought that was normal or didn't manage to do anything about it.)

#people have been reblogging this and I've remembered how much the beatles are like bread and how much we forget that #leslie woodhead literally pulled over his car to vomit when he was driving home from first seeing the beatles #because he was overwhelmed by their existence in his world #and then he spent MONTHS trying to persuade his tv company that they should definitely televise this incredible band that made him vomit

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This is what g-d looks like and does all day

#HAPPINESS

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Ringo Starr + John Lennon in the studio recording Hey Jude (30th July 1968)

#everything is ringo #everything is very very ringo #lennstarr

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#Happy Easter One and All #Happy Easter John and Paul

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As a fellow Beatles fan (I assume), how do you still love the boys despite some of the bad things they have done, allegedly done, and/or are tied to but we don’t know if they have actually done?

I love them and their antics, but this trips me up every now and then

oh anon.

you correctly assume my fellowship.

we perhaps need a master post to link people to all the answers every beatles blog has to this same anonymous worry.

but my thought pattern is:

a) everyone's terrible it's not just the beatles

and by 'everyone' I mean men. I do get where you're coming from, I have my days, but at the same time it almost surprises me what a big issue this is for people, because all men are awful*. Pretty much any man put in the beatles situation would have been at least as awful - and many worse - than the Beatles.

I'm not saying that to mean 'so they're not that bad!' I'm saying it to mean that every man around you is as bad as they are. Yes even the modern ones. So the thing you're actually dealing with is 'the awful nature of men'... so it's hardly even a question about liking the Beatles and coping with that. It's just about existing in a world where you know what men are like - and coping with that. So you cope with it however you generally make peace with the fact that men don't like women very much... and if you struggle with that you have to read the books where we keep actual feminism, not tumblr.

b) it doesn't matter that much

your enjoyment of the beatles isn't going to bring about world ruination, you don't need to be some pure moral absolute, you're not going to hurt anyone by finding joy in some dickhead from the sixties! you don't pick your favourite with your moral compass, y'know? turning away from them isn't going to change anything that happened, or make anyone feel better, or even make you a better person with more inner peace. you're fine.

it's just about not getting defensive or pretending things didn't happen, or somehow arguing like it doesn't even matter that they hurt people because they could have been worse, or pretending it's all blown up from nothing. that's when fandom becomes a bit shit and ridiculous. it's just very possible to be aware of the terrible things the beatles did and still feeling the thrill of the universe flood through you when Paul screams.

* The bots will find me! The bots will "not all men!" me. You don't have to worry about it or do it yourself, the bots will do it. I will be suitably told off for generalising about the terrible menfolk who are statistically + anecdotally + factually definitely worse than the womenfolk, and I'll be reminded that just because it's true doesn't mean you can just say it, because we're meant to pretend. So you can just scroll by and not worry that I might not get told.

#asks #the beatles #the problematic beatles #the problematic universe

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"...he was crying, tears were rolling down his pretty cheeks, and they're pretty to me just like they are to the rest of the world. I think he's a very handsome boy and always did. He's even handsomer when he's crying."

Carl Perkins describing the first time he played “My Old Friend” for Paul is truly touching, but I’m sorry the fact that part way through Carl goes into detail about how handsome Paul looks and how pretty his cheeks are will always be funny to me.

Scan of the story below:

— Goldmine Magazine, November 1998

#OH CARL PERKINS #GOD LOVE YOU #“paul is pretty and my eyes are aware of it - JUST LIKE EVERYONE'S EYES - it doesn't mean I'm gay - he was CRYING and I FELT THINGS” #John Lennon's ghost following Paul out by the pool #never seen him cry before #drinking him in #wrapping around him #just to have paul be like #HE NEVER SENT ME A MESSAGE OR ANYTHING #Mclennon to the end #jp #carl perkins

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I’m sorry but you know this was the edit MLH wanted but he knew he had to put Ringo in between cause it would’ve been too nasty for tv

#mclennon

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Don’t mind me, just feeling emotional about the direct quote selected from this George Martin interview for the title:

#george martin #TOO MUCH GEORGE MARTIN #brian and george being proud of them is too much

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“By some extraordinary twist of fate, the jukebox is playing She Loves You as George Harrison walks into the pub. A small group of men in overalls are hunched over a snooker table. Another lot are nursing light and bitters over by the dartboard. George settles himself at an ash-strewn, vinyl-topped table, brushes aside a few empties and turns to examine the draught beers. What does he fancy? ‘A pint of crème de menthe please. Remember that old Monty Python sketch?’ […] And now he’s driven his jet black Mercedes 500 SEL, complete with smoked glass windows, round to the small pub in the centre of the sprawling Shepperton complex to kill time before a dinner date with, remarkably, Paul and Ringo at a Chinese Restaurant in the Finchley Road. The carpenters, lighting engineers and set builders who patronise the pub have rubbed shoulders with their fair share of household names, but they’ve clearly never clapped eyes on one of *them* before. Background chat has dwindled to low murmur. George Harrison, now well into his second pint of Guinness, is making loud and amazingly frank pronouncements about the group he now drily refers to as The Fabs. ‘People think I did fuck all in the band,’ he declares with a smoky chuckle, ‘but it just wasn’t true.’ Conversation canters across a wide variety of topics: the rough cuts of the White Album he still has locked away at home; tales about working with Jeff Lynne (who co-produced Cloud Nine); how it hurts to see Sotheby’s unwittingly selling Beatles’ autographs that were forged by their roadies; entertaining Bob Dylan when he dropped in at Henley on Sunday (‘What do you mean, I’m in awe of him. I hope he’s in awe of me.’); and the Henley Music Mafia - a collection of neighbors including Dave Edmunds, Deep Purple’s Ian Paice and Jon Lord, Alvin Lee, Mick Ralphs, Joe Brown, Dave Gilmour and Gary Moore - with whom he occasionally convenes for the unpolished playing of 'old 12 bars, Everly Brothers and the odd bit of Django Reinhardt.’ […] a small throng has now gathered proffering pens and pieces of paper. Harrison gladly obliges. He signs not once but four times: the neat spidery “George Harrison”, the more expansive “Paul McCartney”, “Ringo Starr” - complete with the star, and “John Lennon” with the small sketched face beneath it. Four exact replicas of The Fabs’ original signatures. It’s a bizarre spectacle; a little eerie, too. On the next one he even signs “Bob Dylan” as well. The bloke is completely overwhelmed. He didn’t have any Beatles autographs and now he’s 'got the set’. He’s going to get them framed and hang them in the living room. It’s rapidly become a free-for-all. It’s not for me, it’s for a friend! Tell you what, you should never have left The Rolling Stones - and you ought to stop going around with all those young girls as well! One man slides awkwardly on to the seat beside him. It’s like meeting God, he says. 'No it isn’t.’ It is, George. You were like Gods to me. 'God is in everyone.’ Well he’s not in me, mate. And so it goes on… As George signs this bloke tells him, perhaps a little tactlessly, about his greyhounds. One’s called Mind Games, he says, one’s called Walls And Bridges and one’s called Double Fantasy. 'Well you’d better call the next one Cloud Nine,’ suggests Harrison. 'After all, this is a promotional visit!’”

— Mark Ellen, Q magazine (1988)

#signing each others autographs is somehow so soft #I know it's not #but it is #how lovely if you collected a full set #of each of them #signing all of them #george harrison #It is George. You were like Gods to me

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Paul’s Bass Face™️ Appreciation

#I think in the universe where paul got shot and john lived #these are the pics that john has papered his home studio with #there's so much paul here

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#oh god paul #the walrus #jp

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#I think for a minute I forgot how fucking beautiful they are #but god they are

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Paul McCartney in New Zealand, 2017 🔙

#klsjdfoijowiejfo jsoidjf #yeah I know #we're gonna let you go #we're saving you #IT IS JUST VERY NICE WHEN PEOPLE TALK SOFT TO ANIMALS VERY NICE - ALSO VERY NICE WHEN PEOPLE ARE CASUALLY PAUL MCCARTNEY

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Paul McCartney Q&A with Mary McCartney

#my favourite vegetable... might be... BROCCOLI #what he means is that ringo is his favourite drummer #and his favourite beatle #and his favourite person #his favourite comfort food #and his favourite vegetable #whore

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the stuff that screams are made of

#lkfjosijdfwefsd #they are so shiny