WESTON RECORD STORE OWNER´S TRIBUTE TO JOHN LENNON HELPS TO RAISE MONEY FOR SPALDING & HOLBEACH MACMILLAN CANCER SUPPORT

A record store owner has paid homage to a musical legend while also raising money for a good cause.

 

Alan Barnsdale has created a tribute wall to John Lennon at Uptown Records to mark what would have been the Beatles star’s 80th birthday.
He is also raising money for the Spalding and Holbeach’s Macmillan Cancer Support group by selling copies of the Imagine single from his store in Baytree Craft Centre at the Weston garden centre.
The charity is close to Mr Barnsdale’s heart after losing his brother Michael to cancer and his partner Sharon Roberts has also been battling the disease.

Sharon has undergone two operations, including one at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in the spring.
Mr Barnsdale said: “It is important to me to support this charity as my brother died of cancer and my partner had two major cancer operations and she is very lucky to be here.We had a check-up three weeks ago and they can’t find any.”

Mr Barnsdale has created the wall using an enlarged print of the legendary singer songwriter, who would have turned 80 on October 9 but was killed in New York in December, 1980.

The print has been surrounded by singles and the tribute will be in place until Christmas.
Mr Barnsdale said: “Other musicians have come and gone but the Beatles have stood the test of time.” Lorraine Hill and Anne-Marie Carter are running a fundraising area at the Baytree Craft Centre for Macillan.

Chairman of the Spalding and Holbeach committee Lorraine Buckingham said: “We are incredibly grateful to Alan and everyone at Baytree Craft Centre for their support as we are unable to get out in the community to undertake our usual fundraising.”

THIS IS PAULMCCARTNEY´S FAVOURITE JOHN LENNON SONG

“You know if you know someone that long,” Paul said whilst in conversation with Sean Lennon, celebrating John’s recent 80th birthday celebration on BBC Radio 2. “From your early teenage years to your late twenties, that’s an awful long time to be collaborating with someone and you grow to know each other and even when you’re apart you’re still thinking about each other, you’re still referencing each other,” McCartney added.

 

Sean was eager to discover what song from Lennon’s solo career holds the biggest place in McCartney’s heart and his answer didn’t disappoint. “Obviously ‘Imagine and ‘Instant Karma’ is great and the nice thing was, when I listen to the records, I can imagine him in the studio and go, ‘Oh ok, I know what he’s done’. I’m often asked for my favourite tunes kind of thing, and I always include ‘Beautiful Boy’,” McCartney revealed.

The Double Fantasy track was famously written for Sean by John and the song full of messages of self-improvement like “Every day and in every way, I am getting better and better”, which has become somewhat of a self-help mantra. The honest lyrics also feature the famous line, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” — it’s a track that sees Lennon truly lay his heart on the line in.

McCartney wasn’t just being polite by saying it was his favourite Lennon song because it was written about his former bandmate’s passionate adoration for his son who he was in the company of — he has been banging the drum about ‘Beautiful Boy’ for decades.

During an appearance on Desert Island Discs back in 1982, just two years after John’s death — a grief-stricken Macca picked the beautiful song as one of his choices, “I haven’t chosen any Beatles records but if we had more than eight I probably would have. I haven’t chosen any of my records so to sum up the whole thing I have chosen one of John Lennon’s from Double Fantasy which I think is a beautiful song very moving to me. So, I’d like to sum up the whole thing by playing ‘Beautiful Boy’.”

Almost forty years on from when he made that initial statement about ‘Beautiful Boy’ being the song from the entirety of The Beatles Universe which means the most to him, his adoration for the John, Sean and the song remains the same.

GEORGE HARRISON´S FINAL INTERVIEW

The interview with John Fugelsang took place in 1997 ,sadly, Harrison’s passing from throat cancer just a few years later would mean this would be his last public interview and performance and remains a poignant piece of history. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the nineties, following the unprecedented success of MTV, a new television channel emerged. The channel was VH1. On it they would host illustrious guests of the classic rock era such as Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton and often Fugelsang would allow them space to chat about new projects, reflect on old ones and play some tunes. He later said of the gig that with it he had the opportunity to host “the most incredible all-star concerts that nobody would watch”.

A host of incredible acts took up the invitation, with some of the biggest names in the business all filling up slots in their diary. However, during this period, many of the featured artists had not quite completed their revolution of the cool wheel and were not as memorable as you might hope. However, the interview with George Harrison would go down with some extra gravitas attached.

George had popped into the studio just to complete a “sound byte” interview which was expected to last a little under ten minutes. Instead, what VH1 and Fuglesang got was George Harrison, accompanied by legendary Sitarist Ravi Shankar talking about a wide range of subjects and even performing some songs. They talk about everything from The Beatles to his solo work, from spirituality to charity and, at one point, George even finds time for an off the cuff performance of the classic track ‘All Things Must Pass’. He even debuts a new solo song as well as a lesser-heard Travelling Wilbury’s track.

Some 50 years on from the album All Things Must Pass, Harrison’s first solo record, the album still ranks as one of the best ever written and is the largest selling solo Beatle record of all time. Featuring songs such as the title track, ‘My Sweet Lord’ and ‘What Is Life’ it is a lasting testament to George’s belief in the interconnecting power of music and spirituality. For George, there was no separating the two. Reflecting on Shankar’s album, he says: “And that’s really why for me this record’s important because it’s another little key to open up the within. For each individual to be able to sit and turn off, um…’turn off your mind relax and float downstream’ and listen to something that has its root in a transcendental, because really even all the words of these songs, they carry with it a very subtle spiritual vibration. And it goes beyond intellect really. So if you let yourself be free to let that have an effect on you, it can have an effect, a positive effect.”

The interview continues and reflects on the epic 1970 album All Things Must Pass as a seminal moment in Harrison’s career. 

Not only was this the year his Phil Spector record dropped but it would also be the year that he and Shankar would launch the Concert for Bangladesh, a gig in which George debut much of his early solo material. It’s a heartwarming and in-depth look into the life of George.

 

 

 

Watch the performance of George Harrison VH1, 1997... Here

HOW NINA SIMONE TRANSFORMED GEORGE HARRISON´S SONG "ISN´T IT A PITY"

The track, one of Harrison’s finest songs, originally featured on his 1970 record All Things Must Pass which confirmed his ability as a spectacular songwriter to anyone who still doubted him. The song was one of the oldest to feature on the album with Harrison, he even considered giving the track away rather than using it for himself and almost handed it over to Frank Sinatra before having second thoughts. The song would go on to be covered a whole host of times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“‘Isn’t It A Pity’ is about whenever a relationship hits a down point,” Harrison once confessed. “Instead of whatever other people do (like breaking each other’s jaws) I wrote a song. It was a chance to realise that if I felt somebody had let me down, then there’s a good chance I was letting someone else down. We all tend to break each other’s hearts, and not giving back – isn’t it a pity,” Harrison added on the track.

“It’s just an observation of how society and myself were or are,” he also said to Billboard about the origin of ‘Isn’t It A Pity’. “We take each other for granted – and forget to give back. That was really all it was about. It’s like love lost and love gained between 16- and 20-year-olds,” he added.

“But I must explain: Once, at the time I was at Warner Bros. and I wrote that song ‘Blood From A Clone’, that was when they were having all these surveys out on the street to find out what was a hit record. And apparently, as I was told, a hit record is something that is about ‘love gained or lost between 14- and 19-year-olds,’ or something really dumb like that. So that’s why I wrote ‘Isn’t It A Pity’ I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll get in on that!’”.

Harrison was reportedly a huge fan of Simone’s version of the track, which she released in 1972 and he even took influence from the cover. In his autobiography, Harrison says he was influenced by Simone’s treatment when he came to record his song ‘The Answer’s at the End’ in 1975 which bears a similar arrangement to her cover of ‘Isn’t It A Pity’.

Listen ‘Isn’t It A Pity’ by Nina Simone , Here.

GEORGE HARRISON´S DECISION TO PULL HIS "DON´T LET ME WAIT TOO LONG" SINGLE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While 1970 marked the end of The Beatles, it also marked the beginning of four solo careers of the band’s former members. And George Harrison was the first of the bunch to notch a Billboard no. 1 single with “My Sweet Lord,” which peaked on the charts in December ’70.

 

 
All Things Must Pass, George’s debut No. 1 album, sold better than the first LPs by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr. After so many years of getting limited space on Beatles records, Harrison was thriving as an artist outside of his old band’s confines.

 
After devoting so much time and energy to the Concert for Bangladesh in ’71, George returned with Living in the Material World (1973). Once again, Harrison found a receptive audience for the album and its lead single, “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).”
That summer, he teed up “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long” as the second single from the record. However, for reasons never clearly explained, George never released it.

 

George stopped release of the ‘Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long’ single in fall ’73
Harrison showed his knack for pop songcraft and commercial appeal before he left The Beatles. Between the two tracks he composed on Abbey Road (1969), one represented his first Beatles A-side and the other has become the Fab Four’s most-streamed song.

 
Clearly, George knew how to write and produce hits. He proved that again with the top-five singles he produced for Ringo (“It Don’t Come Easy”) and Badfinger (“Day After Day“). And he seemed to have another coming with “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long.”

 
Between the catchy opening guitar hook and the simple, pleading lyrics, Harrison didn’t try to confound anyone with “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long.” And he seemed to give a nod to his former producer (and elite hitmaker) Phil Spector with the track’s drum parts.

 
Harrison obviously saw commercial potential for the track. At some point in summer ’73, he had the single prepared for release. That included producing an acetate and record getting a catalogue number on the Apple label. But he stopped it prior to its planned September release date.

 
George never explained why he halted the ‘Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long’ release
In reviews for Living in the Material World, critics showered “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long” with near-unanimous praise. If Harrison was waiting for feedback on his album before releasing a second single, he had plenty of reasons to pick this song as the follow-up.

 
But it never happened. The millions who’ve bought the album over the years found the track as the fourth of six songs on side 1. Beyond that, radio listeners and single buyers never got hit with any special promotion for “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long.”

 
Whether George considered it too much like “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” or he simply didn’t like the timing of the release, he never revealed why he kept “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long” from its time in the spotlight.

PAUL MCCARTNEY SAYS DITCHING MEAT FOR JUST ONE DAY A WEEK IS EQUIVALENT TO NOT DRIVING YOUR CAR FOR A MONTH

Paul McCartney launched his campaign Meat Free Monday in 2009 to urge people to eat more plant-based meals.

Here he explains why changing your diet for even just one day a week can make a big difference...

 

Our beautiful planet Earth has become home to millions of species of plants and animals including us humans.

 
We’ve learnt to harness the power and the bounty of the planet, but with our great success as a species comes enormous responsibility to preserve the delicate balance to which we owe our existence.

We’ve heard it all before: Our way of life is destroying the planet. Fossil fuels used for transport and industry are to blame.
That’s true, but what we often don’t hear about is animal agriculture, which results in vast amounts of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere.
It requires increasingly unsustainable levels of precious resources, including land, water and energy.

Animal agriculture is a major contributor towards global environmental degradation and climate change. And it’s not just livestock-rearing that’s a problem. Industrialised fishing destroys marine ecosystems as miles of nets sweep up anything in their path.
It’s time to ask ourselves the question: What can we as individuals do to help?

Well, there’s a simple but significant way to help the planet and its inhabitants and it starts with just one day a week.

One day without eating animal products can have a huge impact in helping maintain that delicate balance that sustains us all.

An area of rainforest the size of 100 football pitches is cut down every hour to create room for grazing cattle.
A third of all cereal crops and more than 95 per cent of soy is turned into feed for animals.
It can take 2,350 litres of fresh water — that’s 30 bath tubs — to produce just one beefburger.
 

If you give up meat for one day a week for a year it reduces your carbon footprint by the same equivalent amount as not driving your car for a month.
So try Meat Free Monday. I believe we can all play our part. Just try a day, just one day a week.
It can make a world of difference.
It’s compassionate to animals, it’s good for your health and it’s damn good for the planet. So pledge to eat less meat.

PAUL MCCARTNEY: "IF THERE WAS ANY GROUP THAT WAS NOT RACIST, IT WAS THE BEATLES”

As well as writing the song ‘Blackbird’, a track which Paul said: “I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird,” when writing it, adding: “Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.’”
Paul wrote "Get Back". 

 

And he included the lyrics “don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs” in one of the first iterations of ‘Get Back’ it was written with the right intent in mind. A later version of the song also made a similar reference, with the lyrics: “Meanwhile back at home too many Pakistanis/ Living in a council flat/ Candidate Macmillan, tell us what your plan is/ Won’t you tell us where you’re at?”. When the bootlegs of the ‘Get Back’ recordings were brought to light, Paul said: “When we were doing Let It Be,” “there were a couple of verses to ‘Get Back’ which were actually not racist at all – they were anti-racist.”  

He added: “There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats – you know, living 16 to a room or whatever,” continued the singer, highlighting the sensationalist racist headlines that sadly still grace the front of many right-wing papers in 2020. “So in one of the verses of ‘Get Back’, which we were making up on the set of Let It Be, one of the outtakes has something about ‘too many Pakistanis living in a council flat’ – that’s the line. Which to me was actually talking out against overcrowding for Pakistanis.”   

Paul McCartney said in 1986: “If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles.”

JOHN LENNON : "C’MON MISTER, ALL THE WAY FROM BALTIMORE, YOU CAN DO THIS"

 

Stuart Zolotorow remembers Lennon telling him. 

 

 

 

When John Lennon’s antiwar politics earned him a place on the Nixon White House “enemies list,” Pikesville teenager Stuart Zolotorow rallied to his cause.

Lennon and Yoko Ono had been living in New York for a year by the time Richard Nixon ran for re-election in 1972. Opposition to the Vietnam War was peaking and the former Beatle and his wife were singing “Give Peace a Chance” at antiwar demonstrations and telling their fans that the best way to end the war was to cast a ballot against the sitting president. Concerned Lennon might sway newly minted 18- to 20-year-old voters, the Nixon Administration responded by wiretapping him and ordering his deportation over a trumped up cannabis charge back in England.

Lennon’s immigration attorney, Leon Wildes (by coincidence Zolotorow’s rabbi’s college roommate), believed a public petition would help champion his client’s cause. An aspiring guitarist at the time, Zolotorow went to work, spending two years gathering signatures for The National Committee for John and Yoko before the deportation order was finally revoked in 1975.

“There were petition pages in the back of a [music] magazine, my father was a rep for the publisher, and that’s how I got started,” Zolotorow recalls. “I’d get signatures from everyone, firemen, police officers, college students. I would send one or two petitions to New York and they would me send me one or two back.”  He also stayed in touch with one of Lennon’s and Ono’s assistants.

Fast forward five years. Zolotorow heard that Lennon, who had taken five years off from the hustle and bustle of the music industry to help raise his youngest son, was recording again—what would become his acclaimed Double Fantasy album. Now 24 and a budding photographer—Zolotorow was employed at the Zepp Photo Center in the Reisterstown Plaza and shooting the occasional concert at the old Painters Mill Music Fair—he pitched the idea of traveling to the Big Apple to snap a picture of Lennon and Ono to the couple’s assistant. The assistant did not encourage Zolotorow to make the trip, but did say he could use her name if he made the pilgrimage.

Forty years ago this fall, shortly before Lennon was killed on Dec. 9, 1980, he did just that. “I took the train up, walked into The Dakota [apartment building], and told the doorman to tell them it’s Stu Zolotorow, I’d come all the way from Baltimore, and gave him the assistant’s name. I told him if he rang them, I’m sure they’d say they were expecting me.”

Not exactly true, though Lennon said that they’d be down in 10 minutes. When they reached the lobby, Zolotorow handed him a mock album cover he’d made with a photo of Ono and their son Sean, which broke the ice. Then Lennon explained they happened to be working on a song (“Beautiful Boy”) about Sean.

“When they came downstairs, I asked if we could go outside for the photograph,” Zolotorow says. “I was so nervous I kept fumbling with all my equipment. The harder I tried, the worse it got. But John saw how nervous I was and made jokes and laughed and tried to put me at ease, which was impossible. He said, ‘C’mon, Mister-all-the-way-from-Baltimore, you can do this.’ Then he told me to take an extra shot to be sure I got something good.”

Zolotorow got one great shot (above), which he sent to Linda McCartney after Lennon’s death. When she included it in a magazine she edited, it became his first published photo. “I was not, and I’m still not, very political,” Zolotorow says. “I relate more to John as an artist and musician. But he was a beautiful person. All he said was ‘Give peace a chance.’ How can you not like a guy like that?

During the brief shoot, Zolotorow, who went on to photograph Sinatra and Springsteen in his four decades as a professional lensman, noticed a small crowd had formed outside The Dakota as he struggled to capture the famous couple. Turning back, he realized that one of the women standing in the group was Gilda Radner.

“So I asked if I could take her picture,” Zolotorow recounts. “She had seen everything that had unfolded with John and Yoko. She said sure, ‘As long as you can pull yourself together before my ride gets here.’”

JOHN LENNON AND YOKO ONO DEFINE ‘BAGISM’ ON THE DAVID FROST SHOW

Before The Beatles had officially split, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had found their own niche away from the group. The two artists had not only join their lives when they had married but their ideals too. It meant that Lennon and Ono now often came as a pair and they often had a message to share when they did. The same could certainly be said of their 1969 appearance on The David Frost Show.

The episode was recorded on Jun 14th, 1969, and saw Lennon and Ono in their usual mood of dodging, reflecting and enjoying the questions from their interviewer. Never missing an opportunity to spread their message of peace and love, the duo saw the perfect chance to again speak to a huge audience with the offer of joining Frost on his acclaimed show. The filming began well enough, the pair arrived to applause and began throwing acorns into the audience, aided by Frost, proclaiming “acorns for peace week!” and then wished the Queen a happy birthday. The scene was set.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The gifts weren’t over by the time the pair sat down though and ONo passed over a “box of smile” for Frost which was a small box containing a mirror designed to reflect his own smile back at him. Frost then turned to the matter at hand and discussed the duo’s album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, joking about the controversial cover and the slightly loopy allure of love. The album was widely banned, something Lennon joked meant its price was skyrocketing on the black market.
Frost asked Lennon and Ono about Bagism. “I thought he was clever!” proclaims Lennon to a gleeful audience, happy of the continued inclusion. “The message I had from John and Yoko the other day, when we were planning the programme, was a message with a nice picture that said “Love + Peace = Bagism”. I need to know more, John.”

Lennon answers: “What’s Bagism? It’s like a tag for what we all do, we’re all in a bag, you know, and we realised that we came from two bags—I was in this pop bag going round and round in my little clique and she was in her little avant-garde clique going round and round and you’re in your little telly clique and they’re in their…you know?” At this point, we’re fairly certain that nobody knew. We all intellectualise about how there is no barrier between art, music, poetry… but we’re still all – ‘I’m a rock and roller’, ‘He’s a poet’. So we just came up with the word so you would ask us what bagism is – And we’d say we’re all in a bag, baby!” Ono does her best to more clearly explain the idea of ‘Bagism’, a term used to describe a world without prejudice.

“You know,” begins Ono, “this life is speeded up so much and the whole world is getting tenser and tenser because things are just going so fast, you know, so it’s so nice to slow down the rhythm of the whole world, just to make it peaceful. So like the bag, when you get in, you see that it’s very peaceful and your movements are sort of limited. You can walk around on the street in a bag.” Finally, Lennon cracks it and provides a real-life interpretation that the entire audience can understand.
“If people did interviews for jobs in a bag they wouldn’t get turned away because they were black or green or long hair,” claims Lennon. “It’s total communication.” Frost, as sharp as ever, of course, replies: “They’d get turned away because they were in a bag.” After a little toing and froing, which is clearly beginning to irritate Lennon who had spent so much time being implicitly understood.

John continues to explain how he and Ono were at a press conference in Vienna and were in their “own bag” when “the press came in, sort of expecting Beatle John and his famous wife, and we were in the bag singing and humming.” It can be easy to have your head spun by the sheer volume of the word ‘bag’ being used but perhaps an easier assessment of the theory is to think of being in your ‘bag’ as being in ‘your own world’. The theory of ‘Bagism’ became an integral part of the duo’s peace campaign.

Of course, another vital part of that was the pair’s Bed In for Peace campaign. It’s naturally something Frost is keen to expand on: “How has this thing gone with the sleep-ins you’ve been having. Those are what? To draw attention…” Lennon quickly interjects, “We’re trying to sell peace, like a product, you know, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks, you know, the only way to get people aware that peace is possible and – It isn’t just inevitable to have violence, not just war, all forms of violence. People just accept it and think ‘Oh, they did it’, or ‘Harold Wilson did it’ or ‘Nixon did it’, they’re always scapegoating people.”

“we’re all responsible for everything that goes on, you know, we’re all responsible for Biafra and Hitler and everything. So we’re just saying ‘Sell PEACE’. Anybody interested in peace – just stick it in the window, it’s simple but it lets somebody else know that you want peace too, because you feel alone if you’re the only one thinking ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was peace and nobody was getting killed’. So advertise yourself that you’re for peace if you believe in it.”