But bringing people together is what music has always done best.
We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don’t know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don’t need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can’t. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people’s psychic hearts.
So you get less shy about how hard you have to try. And you don’t bother hiding your Kotter tapes. Sure, they expose some of my appalling deficiencies. But my appalling deficiencies are all I have to offer. Is there such a thing as romantic love that does not depend on someone embracing my deficiencies? I hope I will never find out.
That’s why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain’t private.” That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least I don’t have another miserable person to worry about. I figured if you give up your private place and it still turns out to be lonely, you’re just screwed. So I felt safer not even thinking about it.
The bassist – always the bassist.
But if you listen to outtakes from the sessions, you can hear the Beatles worked out harmonies for “Eight Days a Week” – beautiful harmonies, in fact. Yet they cut the harmonies and sang in unison, to make the song sound like it took less work than it did. They spent seven hours in the studio tinkering with “Eight Days a Week,” adding and subtracting, until they got that unrehearsed feel. So much guile went into making the song sound like a moment’s exhalation.
When you’re a Catholic kid, the nuns teach you that when something is annoying you, you “offer it up”, as a sacrificial gift.
That Jim Morrison song gets it all wrong. People are strange when you’re a stranger, but it’s not because they ignore you – it’s when they notice you and smile, that’s when you realize you’re alone out here. Their kindness is what makes you notice how weak you are. That’s when you know it’s not the city’s fault, it’s yours. These people are in the same strange town, but they’re not letting the strangeness eat them up and turn them into robots. That’s just you.
There’s only the one, see. When you fall in love with a girl, she’s the bloody White Album. That is what you whisper to yourself, when you don’t understand her at all. You just keep telling yourself, she’s the bloody Beatles White Album and there’s only one of her.
I’m sure the Sixties Beatles were great. But I bet not as great as the Nineties Beatles.
I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.
Everything was changing, that was obvious. The world was so full of music, it seemed we could never run out. ‘Twas bliss in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and overworked and underexposed and stuck in a nowhere town was very heaven. It was our time, the first one we had to ourselves. It was a smashing time, and then it ended, because that’s what times do.
Anything can be a love song as long as two people care about it.
As the old saw goes, the Irish songs are full of happy wars and unhappy lovers.
The early Seventies were a gold rush for double-vinyl samplers from Sixties heavyweights – the Stones’ 1971 Hot Rocks, the Kinks’ 1972 Kink Kronikles, the Doors’ 1972 Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine, the Beach Boys’ 1974 Endless Summer. Best of all: Bob Dylan’s 1971 Greatest Hits Volume II, with virtually no hits, just deep cuts chosen by the artist.
It was a smashing time, and then it ended, because that’s what times do.
A whole generation of southern girls, raised on the promise of Michael Stipe.
But being born on the same planet as the Beatles is one of the ten best things that’s ever happened to me.
It’s not human to let go of love, even when it’s dead.
The Rubber Soul woman stays up late drinking wine on her rug after midnight, until it’s time for bed. She speaks languages he can’t translate. She’s not impressed by the Beatle charm – when you say she’s looking good, she acts as if it’s understood. She’s cool. She makes the Rubber Soul man feel like a real nowhere boy.
God bless Mother Nature, she’s a single woman, too.