The Walrus Was Paul

I readily concede that John Lennon, namesake of Liverpool’s international airport, was a remarkable singer, with extraordinary power and even musicality, as witness his swoon-inducing Smokey Robinsonisms before the last chorus of Eight Days a Week. Maybe most remarkably, he never sounded like anyone but himself, even while Paul McCartney, after whom no airport has yet been named, occasionally aped the likes of Little Richard and Fats Domino. But there were dozens of sensational singers in the British beat boom of the early 1960s, and only a knucklehead would say that Lennon’s iconically fervent, soulful vocal on Twist and Shout was more fervent and soulful than, for instance, Ray Ennis’s on The Swinging Blue Jeans’ Hippy Hippy Shake? 

Lots of groups had great singers, but what made The Beatles (and The Hollies) ultradeluxe was that they also had a terrific harmoniser. Imagine If I Fell, for instance, without McCartney’s harmony part. Do you suppose it would be even half as glorious?

In the beginning, they’d both written highly derivative rock and roll songs. Which of Lennon’s — the perfectly awful One After 909, maybe? — has endured as McCartney’s I Saw Her Standing There has?

When he was ingesting too much LSD, Lennon defiantly stopped making sense and channeled Lewis Carroll. Some of his wordplay was fun galore, but was any of it much better than that in McCartney’s I’ve Got a Feeling? And which wrote the most poignant third-person song in the Beatles canon, Eleanor Rigby, and who the band’s most heartfelt and affecting song about emotional desolation, For No One? 

A lot of people, following Lennon’s lead, disdain McCartney’s cute vaudevillisms — When I’m 64, for instance, and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. They are so brazenly non-rock, dude! As though there’s something sacrosanct about rock and roll. Well, I, for one, find them considerably more enjoyable than Lennon’s studied thuggishness in, say, She’s So Heavy or Yer Blues. Can we not agree that, in the post-touring era, Lennon wrote far more than his share of crap — Good Morning, Good Morning, anyone, or Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite?

As melodists, there was no comparison. Lennon’s Across the Universe is exquisite, but I’d venture to say his output of exquisite melodies was maybe a tenth that of the man Aunt Mimi is famous for having called “your little friend.” And how very lazy Lennon could be, as at the beginning of the verses of Help!,, in which, rather than devising a proper melody, he sings the same note nine times in a row. Or is it 10?

McCartney, on bass, was a revelation. Lennon’s lead guitar playing on the unspeakable Ballad of John and Yoko, the worst song in Beatles history — if you don’t count such Harrison creations as You Like Me Too Much, Blue Jay Way, and Not Guilty — is appalling. Behold the difference! 

We remember and scoff at McCartney’s icky post-Beatles expressions of the perfection of his and Linda’s love, but are they really more cloying than (let alone as incomprehensible as) Lennon’s expressions of devotion to Yoko, for whom I have not yet, 50 years after the fact, managed to develop a taste?

It all began for America, of course, when The Beatles appears on The Ed Sullivan Show.  Spend half an hour on YouTube and tell me which Beatle exuded infectious joy at being where he’s always wanted to be (in the spotlight), doing exactly what he’s always wanted to do (sing and play rock and roll). Tell me which of them, by exuding that joy, was principally responsible for The Beatles being THE BEATLES!!! 

“The Walrus,” John Lennon sarcastically “revealed” in Glass Onion, “was Paul.” Well, if you ask me, The Beatles were largely Paul. 

[It was naughty of you not to have read this 24 hours ago in my new ezine!]

Pupusas! Where Salvadoran Cuisine and Rock and Roll Intersect

I hadn’t wanted to admit this before now, as I’m a little embarrassed about the whole thing, but for around 10 months at the very end of the 1970s, I was a (disguised) member of a Los Angeles punk band, The American Lesion. 

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The band had begun a few years before as Preen, a typical preening Hollywood hair metal outfit in leopard print spandex jeans, big hair, and, you know, attitude, which manifested itself in behaving on stage as though the mere thought of us got gals sopping, and acting as though we were doing the audience a huge favour by having shown up. The guitarist played lots of 16th note triplets at the top of his fretboard while making the sort of face most commonly glimpsed while enjoying conferred oral sex. The singer imitated Robert Plant imitating a piglet in agony. We thought we’d ticked all the boxes, but even audiences in polyester didn’t seem to cotton to us. 

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We changed our name and approach the week Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols entered the Billboard sales chart at No. 3. We played everything 50 percent faster than before, and gave ourselves fancifully repulsive names. The singer became Dennis Diarrhea, the guitarist — a recent refugee from El Salvador (where ABBA was very popular) — Billy Ulcerous. I opted for Johnny Truculent, with which both Dennis and Billy were displeased because truculent is a big word known only to the erudite, and erudition was much disdained in punk circles, and  even rectangles. 

We tried to compensate for not having a genuine psychopath in the group by becoming addicted to heroin, and by trying to be more disgusting than our rivals on the circuit. Billy’s uncle owned an outhouse-pumping business, and we tried to get him to spray our audiences with the contents of one of his truck’s tanks while we performed, but he was pretty sure he’d get in trouble with The Board of Health, and refused. The punks seemed to sense our inauthenticness, and by the spring of 1980, having read somewhere that 100 percent of the population of Los Angeles was going to be Latino by 2016, changed our name to Los Hombres (Spanish for the men), and learned a repertoire of Santana and Julio Iglesias numbers. The problem was that we mispronounced hombres in the way most American do — as AHM-brayz (rather than the correct OHM-brayz). Hambre is Spanish for hunger, and our audience took to pelting us with pupusas and empanadas de leche as we played, much as British teenagers had pelted The Beatles with jelly beans in the 1960s, and spat on such punk pioneers as The Clash a decade and a half later. Dennis suffered second degree burns when one over-zealous fan hurled a bowlful of steaming sopa de pata at him at our show at El Monte Legion Stadium. 

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As our reputation grew, we started seeing in our audiences record company talent scouts who’d read the same article about demographic trends that we’d read, and we were invited to come confer with the powerful manager Saul Scheinbaum in his swank Century City penthouse office overlooking the smog. He beamed at us as his former Miss Universe runner-up receptionist showed us into his office, and urged us to call him Shiny, as no less than Madonna and Sonny & Cher did. That accomplished, he got on his intercom and told Miss Universe to “send ‘em in,” whereupon we found ourselves surrounded by charming young women with attractive figures. But some of us were married, and others of us were gay, though we didn’t know at the time. The two we later found out were gay claimed to have headaches, and we left Century City without having signed anything. Which turned out to be a good thing because Scheinbaum was later discovered to be less than forthright, a rarity in a music biz manager.

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