18 x 24″ Screen Print. Signed and Numbered Edition of 450. $70. Limit one per person/household. A portion of the proceeds go to the Spirit Foundations, Inc.
John & Yoko print by Shepard Fairey. They’re available for purchase 8/26/10.
(via Nerdcore)
We’re big Harry Nilsson fans here at Dangerous Minds and were thrilled to hear that director John Scheinfeld’s long-awaited documentary Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?
If you’re under 45-years of age, you might have little idea of who the great singer/songwriter/hellraiser Harry Nilsson was, but surely almost everyone has heard his biggest hits “Everybody’s Talkin’” (from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack), “Without You” (a Badfinger cover given its devastating emotional impact by Harry’s plaintiff three octave vocal range, later recorded by Mariah Carey) and “Coconut” which was used in dozens of movies (normally during a drinking scene) and in more than one 7UP advertising campaign.
Harry Nilsson was also responsible for co-creating the much-loved children’s TV movie, The Point
Another important thing to know about Harry Nilsson is that he was the favorite American musician of both John Lennon and Paul McCartney, no small achievement, that! After Apple Corps press officer Derek Taylor heard Nilsson’s autobiographical “1941” (from his 1967 RCA debut Pandemonium Shadow Show
The documentary, which features stellar interviewees such as Brian Wilson, Jimmy Webb, Van Dyke Parks, Yoko Ono, Paul Williams, Mickey Dolenz, Ringo Starr, The Smothers Brothers, and Pythons Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle, sees release in Los Angeles and New York City during the month of September and release on DVD in late October. I can’t wait to see this! You can watch the six-minute trailer for Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?
Mostly unknown on these shores, the late Jimmy Reid was a heroic Scottish union leader who came to international prominence in the early 1970s when he led the famous “work-in” of thousands of shipbuilders, in the process thwarting government efforts to close the profitable shipyards of the Upper Clyde river. The “work-in” was not a strike, the workers actually continued to do their jobs. If the shipyards were to lose their government loan, over 6000 jobs would have been lost. In a speech to the workers, Reid, a member of the Communist party, laid out the plan:
“We are not going to strike. We are not even having a sit-in strike. Nobody and nothing will come in and nothing will go out without our permission. And there will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying because the world is watching us, and it is our responsibility to conduct ourselves with responsibility, and with dignity, and with maturity.”
Reid’s principled leadership was essential in gaining the support of the majority of Glasgow’s residents. A demonstration in support of the union saw 80,000 people march through the city. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were amongst those who donated to the cause of the workers, giving £5,000, which was a substantial amount of money at the time. Reid and the shipbuilders won, and the Edward Heath government backed off on cutting the shipyard’s subsidies.
Another speech, one Reid made to students as rector of Glasgow University on “rejecting the rat race,” is a legendary piece of rabble-raising oratory. The New York Times printed the speech in full and declared it to be on par with the Gettysburg Address. It’s been republished lately in several British papers (here from The Independent) on the occasion of Reid’s death on August 10th and the memorial service held for him today. I highly recommend reading it. It’s surely as relevant today as it was when he first spoke these words. Fans of great writing and speechification, take note, you’ve not heard these thoughts expressed in quite this same way ever before and these words will move you and stay with you for a long time. Seriously, considering the shape the economies of the West are in and what this shitstorm has meant for the common and uncommon man alike, I think this should be considered MANDATORY READING right about now.
I can vividly recall listening to a BBC radio broadcast in 1983, during the apocalyptic miner’s strike going in Britain at the time. I was sitting in the sunny backyard garden of a squat where I lived in the Brixton area of south London. Jimmy Reid was the main guest. It was thrilling for me, as an American, to hear someone say such… Communistic things on the radio. One of the other people who lived there, a Scot himself, made a big deal of it and bought some beers and rolled some joints, insisting that I listen with him in quiet contemplation of what the heroic Jimmy Reid had to say. I was glad I listened and you’ll be glad, too, if you click here and read the entirety of Reid’s “rat race” speech yourself.
Here is an excerpt from Jimmy Reid’s famous speech. It’s a pity it’s not on YouTube, but there is a clip of a young Reid in his fiesty prime embedded below.
To the students [of Glasgow University] I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts, and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?”
Still irresistible, a working-class hero’s finest speech (The Independent)
Final farewell for Glasgow shipyard leader Jimmy Reid (includes video of comedian Billy Connolly’s eulogy and additional links to more reporting on Reid’s life) (BBC News)
Another winner today suggested by Paul Gallagher
John Lennon reading about Brian Jones death. 1969.
Backbeat. The Hours and Times. I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Fictionalized accounts of The Beatles constitute, by now, a genre of their own, and range in quality from the barely watchable to the dreadful (and while not a strict account per se, I utterly loathed Across The Universe). Joining those films in October is Nowhere Boy, a chronicle of the early days of John Lennon.
While the below trailer for the bio-pic looks, well, like a trailer for a bio-pic, the film stars the reliably amazing Kristin Scott Thomas as Lennon’s Aunt Mimi (a rare, ‘81 clip of the real Mimi Smith follows at the bottom).
I’m also somewhat intrigued by Nowhere Boy‘s director, Sam Taylor-Wood. She’s the British artist with a thing for decaying still-lives. If you’ve never seen her A Little Death video, an ode to “the transience of biological life” featuring a rapidly decaying cobra rabbit, check it out here.
After overcoming two bouts with cancer—breast and colon—Taylor-Wood is now in a relationship with Nowhere Boy‘s Lennon, actor Aaron Johnson, who’s 23 years her junior. The couple are expecting the birth of their first child somewhere around the time Nowhere Boy opens in the U.S.
A voyeuristic and mesmerizing tribute to key Fluxus
A Trove of Archival Performances by Charlotte Moorman (UBUWEB)
Very powerful and sad clip made by Yoko
Ringo Starr is saying “who cares” to the Vatican’s late embrace of The Beatles. Starr rolled his eyes at the Catholic Church, which praised the group and expressed forgiveness to John Lennon for his comments that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”
“Didn’t the Vatican say we were satanic?” Starr said during an interview with CNN. “And they still forgive us?”
“I think [the Vatican] has more to talk about than The Beatles,” he added, alluding to the child sex abuse scandal that continues to plague the church.
The Vatican offered its latest peace offering to The Beatles in its recent issue of L’Osservatore Romano, its official newspaper, on Monday.
“It’s true they took drugs, lived life to excess because of their success, even said they were bigger than Jesus and put out mysterious messages that were possibly even satanic,” the newspaper said.
But, “what would pop music have been like without The Beatles?” it reasoned, describing the band’s music as “beautiful.”
The Vatican doesn’t appear to be extending the same kind of olive branch to other popular bands, such as Pink Floyd, Queen, Black Sabbath and The Eagles.
In 1996, those groups were among several - including The Beatles - that Pope Benedict XVI warned youth against listening to when he was still a cardinal, claiming their music contained “subliminal” satanic influences.
Lennon’s full quote was “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” We suspect the late Beatle would feel the same about the Vatican’s volte-face as Starr does.
Ringo Starr tells Vatican to ‘Get Back’; dismisses effort to ‘forgive’ The Beatles (NY Daily News)
The Daily Telegraph in Australia reports that John Lennon’s lost LSD stash—the one he buried like psychedelic pirate treasure after the Beatles “gave up drugs” in 1967—has been located. Unfortunately, all the acid has dried up and so now you will never know what Tomorrow Never Knows.
HARDCORE fans of The Beatles legend John Lennon uncovered where in the grounds of his Surrey, southern England, home he hid his stash of LSD more than 40 years ago.
Builders digging up the lawn of his old house, Kenwood, came across the remains of a leather holdall containing several large broken glass bottles, The Sun reports.
Legend has it that Lennon buried a large quantity of the drug in his garden in 1967 when The Beatles declared they had given up drugs in favour of transcendental meditation.
But when the band returned from India, John decided he had been a bit hasty and tried to dig it up - but never found it.
Now fans are convinced these bottles contained the missing treasure - though they will never know for sure as the one bottle found intact had a cracked cork, so it was empty.
(Daily Telegraph: John Lennon enthusiasts uncover singer’s hidden LSD stash)
It may take 10 minutes for you to see it, but it’s there. Trust me.
(via The World’s Best Ever)
An open letter in the underground press that accused the Beatles of going soft and selling out to the establishment, comparing John Lennon’s call for pacifism in “Revolution” to a BBC radio soap opera, and conferring superior revolutionary credentials on the Rolling Stones, so incensed the Beatle that he spent six hours 40 years ago giving an interview to a couple of college students offering a rebuttal that was finally published today in the pages of the New Statesman magazine.
In 1968, Maurice Hindle and a friend hitch-hiked to Surrey to meet Lennon, who picked them up personally at the train station in his Mini Cooper. Yoko Ono fed them homemade macrobiotic bread and jam. Lennon spoke nearly continuously for six hours.
He says “Revolution” was no more revolutionary than Mrs Dale’s Diary. So it mightn’t have been. But the point is to change your head - it’s no good knocking down a few old bloody Tories! What does he think he’s gonna change? The system’s what he says it is: a load of crap. But just smashing it up isn’t gonna do it.
Hindle writes “Lennon demanded Black Dwarf publish his response, which took [writer John] Hoyland to task for his “patronizing” tone, and ended with the defiant challenge: “You smash it—and I’ll build around it.”
The full interview is only available in the print edition of New Statesman magazine.
Last Friday on Twitter, Yoko Ono announced that she’d answer questions tweeted to @yokoono on her website and mine was one of the ones she answered:
@RichardMetzger
Do you find that children ?¢‚Ǩ?ìget?¢‚Ǩ¬ù your conceptual art pieces better than adults?@yokoono
Not necessarily. There are kids who think they are grown ups and don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t want to know anything that smells like kids stuff. And there are grown-ups who are still kids at heart who clearly get my work.
I love Yoko Ono. I am a complete Yoko Ono fanatic, so this was a wonderful thing. It made my day! You can read the rest of the Yoko Q & A here.
And you can watch her perform “Whole Lotta Yoko” with “The Dirty Mac” (Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell, Keith Richards and John Lennon) as part of the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus below:
If TMZ had been around in the 60s, you can bet that D.A. Pennbaker’s famous film of John Lennon and Bob Dylan “clearly fucked up on junk” in the back of Dylan’s limo would have made it to their blog and been blasted all over the Internet. But it wasn’t until the mid-80s when the videotape trading underground really took off, that copies made their way into collector’s eager hands (I had a copy). Now it’s easy to see, of course, on YouTube.
I’d always read that Dylan was extremely drunk and that Lennon was tripping or else just stoned, but maybe they were on something stronger. Lennon would know, right? It would explain the vomit talk, I guess! Dylan is obviously out of his mind on something and makes little, if any sense. Lennon seems a little embarrassed but still willing to play along. Whatever surreal flights of rock god verbal fantasy they had planned for this filming, the results were something rather less than coherent.
This is history baby. Not like great history or anything, but history nonetheless…
Famous People on Drugs (YouTube link)
Famous People Still on Drugs (YouTube link)
The John Lennon Bit (scroll down)
Dylan vs Lennon (transcript)
I like how he’s confused by the rules of American Football. I doesn’t make any sense to me, either, and I’m American… (HT Mikki Halpin)
