No excuse for shooting the bugger, though.

As for Eminem/Slim Shady/Marshall, etc - yeah, that “different characters” thing was getting pushed, but in my experience it was mostly offered as a defense for offensive comments or what have you (”Oh, I’m in character as Slim Shady…”) - certainly not something that connected the audience more strongly to the audience.

In the case of British number one singles, less than a year (”Back Home”).

This kind of thing can only happen when the performer has truly crossed the line into being a superstar, an omnipresent cultural figure. In Eminem’s case he pulled this off partly by it being his goal from day one - since all of his produced work was explicitly about him, you could get caught up on the main biographical talking points pretty fast. But for “John and Yoko” to make any sense, it has to be literally true: the men from the press were following them around, and the listening public was hanging on every printed word. In other words, “John and Yoko” going #1 may be a final, astounding testament to just how fucking big the Beatles were. Not in the sense that their fanbase was so huge that it would send anything they put out to the top of the charts (see “Strawberry Fields”) - but in the sense that they were so inescapable as celebrities that a song cleverly (?) restating recent facts about one of their members would be something relevant and pleasurable.

And I may be verging into really obvious territory here, but I think this all plays up how the perceived role and place of a rock star had changed in the wake of the Beatle era. Can you imagine Brian Epstein or any other proper business type letting this sort of lyric (even without the swear) through in 1964? The Beatles weren’t even supposed to let on that they were married, let alone the details of their sordid romps around Europe. (”Oh, where do you go to, my Yoko…?”) It’s easy to point to “Help!” or “Nowhere Man” and repeat the tired cliche that here, here is the spot where pop first entered the nascent stages of being “confessional” - but you need “John and Yoko” at the other end of the story, the proof that there actually was a change afoot, and probably not for the better. Again, how much did this big shift matter, chartwise, if it takes three decades for anybody to again enchant the public with a bouncy recapitulation of well-known factoids?

(Plastic Ono Band aside, McCartney ends up coming off much better for sticking to the original plan of writing charming songs that don’t Mean much to the singer or his fans…. )

Anyway, to return to Tom’s first sentence above, this is “the Beatles’ last number one”. It’s worth stepping back a moment here to look around and see just how enormously different the pop music landscape was at this point to the way it was seven years earlier on the eve of their first release. Music had gone in so many directions unimaginable in 1962, and almost every act in the chart in 1969 had been in some way inspired or influenced by the Beatles. As someone who just missed out on experiencing that era, I’m amazed by the fact there were only, say, three years between “From Me To You” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”, just a few years between Dylan’s first album and “Like a Rolling Stone”, between the Grease era and the hippy era, between the Shadows and Black Sabbath. Has pop or any other form of music ever developed so radically and so quickly at any other time? And what was behind it – did the drugs work, or was it the complex Sixties social development of which music was just a part? Listening to something as modern-sounding as the Pretty Things or Them developing from the blues in 1964-65, and leading on to US garage rock, would all this have happened anyway without the Beat Boom or did the Beatles influence the whole thing?

Sort of Britpop Sonny & Linda Sharrock for the first twenty minutes or so (i.e. Lulu to Sharrock’s Aretha) then Stevens and Tchicai storm in towards the end and, er, wipe the floor with the other two.

however i think life w.the lions (which documents the miscarriage) = rec.AFTER ballad yet rel.before (=2 may), in which case an even faster release (the point being that the “unfinished” LPs were uncrafted verite snapshots or something)

i have to say that — while lennon-ono material veers v.wildly across the quality spectrum (as ditto work by the others) — i still find the entire break-up era more fascinating than failure… ie i somewhat buy into the concept-art idea of “emotional map”, esp.the way it punches across from chartpop and protoprog into a fairly celebral array of good and bad art and music avant-gardes… except to read it well you have to look at EVERYTHING (which obv Popular is not well set-up to do)

my teen interest in this stuff is certainly a major route into WIRE for me, and what i wanted to do with it

anyway the private joke aspect is that john is if anything even MORE judgmental about what’s good and what’s not in this era: bcz of course “it’s valid” doesn’t mean “it’s good”, but to prejudge based on the apparent form was to be a “hung-up square” (or “rockist” as it is now known)

i’m not sure if i ever heard the free jazz jam on side one of “life w.the lions” f.john stevens and john tchicai — but i bet marcello has! is it any good?

the problem being that he (not to mention rock) needed “fun throwaway tunefulness” as a mode to get his own best songs ambivalent enough (i think there’s actually more jokiness in his solo work than comes across — but very often it’s kind of a private joke at the expense of the listener, which gets very tired very quickly)*; he can still write very pretty melodies eg i’m fond of “oh yoko” and “oh my love”, but the content and intent of both is fairly yucky if you listen to words (which i mostly don’t luckily)

also there’s something interestingly pathological and contradictory about someone rejecting the conventions of effective popcraft in the name of bluesy rawness and truth, at the same time he’s so relentlessly machine-processing his own natural voice — and plus insisting on working with SPECTOR

(yoko’s gallery and conceptual artwork is way more deft [and just funny] around this date than lennon’s, tho it too gets increasingly infected by lennon’s sense of political [or let's say pseudo-political] inadequacy — haha he was always the hippie to her protopunk)

Without working through the whole discography, I can’t recall offhand an earlier use of heavy echo on John’s vocal - but it’s really just a continuation of John’s fondness for concealing his voice which he’d been doing since about 1966, be it through multi-tracking, phasing or just mixing. I can grant you one piece of production trivia though; this was their first stereo 45 in Britain.

Was this the first use of the bathroom echo effect on John’s voice? If so, it is an occasion to be mourned, since it managed to make nearly unlistenable my favorite rock and roll voice. (When he started imitating David Bowie’s phrasing a few years later, that didn’t help, either.)

The annoying production effect aside, my favorite aspect of this single is the harmony singing of John and Paul. The Beatles did so many things so very well, it’s easy to overlook how wonderful their harmonies were, almost without fail. Paul’s re-introduction of his “Lady Madonna” voice, pitched at an odd harmonic interval to John’s melody, and with Paul’s own touch of impishness in his delivery - all of that adds up to what is probably the most enjoyable part of the record for me at this late date.

On the down side, apart from what others have mentioned, I’d point out John’s lead guitar. I enjoy what he did on “Get Back,” but here he sounds an awful lot like the lead guitar player on the Bonzo’s “Canyons of Your Mind.” (They *meant* to be funny, of course - I don’t think John did.)

Having said all that, I’d still choose “The Long and Winding Road” (a.k.a., “The Long and Lawrence Welk”) as the band’s weakest #1, had that single done as well in the UK as it did in the States. Drippy melody, bombastic production, and lyrics that don’t make sense leave me grasping for anything to recommend on that one.