My Favorite Beatles Lyric + Thoughts on Lennon/McCartney during the Let It Be Sessions
My favorite Beatles lyric is from Girl. Well, for pure emotion, I go with "You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead" from Two of Us. But for a lyric as a lyric, it's Girl
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I can see that, and not surprisingly, I think Julia (without meaning to) formed the way John loved people, and what he expected/feared/believed. Also why complete devotion and submission, a la Cynthia and May, wouldn't in the long term do the reassurance trick, and why the balance was so difficult to achieve. On the one hand, John required believing that he, and no one else, was your absolute No.1. emotional priority, otoh, he also required having to work for your attention, or else he'd bulldozer you over. Yoko managed for good. Paul managed for a while but then the balance was lost. With Julia, there was always competition, and in terms of how that shaped John's later relationships, I think it's significant this competition didn't just come in the form of Julia's common-law second husband (John would have been too young to recall Julia's earlier boyfriends), but specifically her second family. Because it proved that Julia could, ( ... )
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But also: by antagonizing instead of reconciling from 1968 - 1971 or thereabouts, he actually could believe he was Paul's emotional priority. In a negative way, but what do they say about neglected children and negative attention?That's a good point. By falling apart and become super needy when John withdrew, Paul encouraged John to user withdrawal as a tool to get undivided affection. I wonder if this was a factor even as far on as when John refused to sign the contact to dissolve the Beatles, as the stars weren't right? Poor George. I mean, being stuck in the middle of that dynamic ( ... )
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It was part of the reason, yes. I mean, he did get another job again later (and let's not forget, actually gave John some pocket money now and then after, which Lewisohn also notes, noting that for two people who didn't like each other much, they held on to the vestiges of a family relationship amazingly long after Julia had died), but at the time of Julia's death, he was unemployed and completely unable to cope emotionally as well. But that he didn't fight for his daughters after being employed again, well, search me. I mean, Younger Julia, Julia Baird, blames the Stanleys, but that's an easier emotional out than blaming her dead father, so who knows.
I wonder who they would have handled it has Julia lived. What would they have told John?There isn't really a good way to say "Bobby's been sacked, please don't show up again until he's got another job, we can still meet at Mimi's", but it would have been some variation thereof, one assumes. As for ( ... )
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I've always suspected that John blamed Bobby Dykins for the fact that he went to live with Mimi (which, if the whole story about him being removed because Julia was keeping him in the same room as her and Bobby is true, that's true, as well). I do think This Boy was written by someone who blamed his stepfather for taking his mother away from him (and then he turned around and did the same thing with Yoko and Julian...). But that doesn't mean he didn't feel some connection to Bobby Dykins on a personal level.
(Sidenote: I've sometimes wondered if maybe part of the reason John abandoned Julian at age five was because at age five was when John's mother left him. And Julian had a mother who put him first. And according to May Pang John really didn't like it when Cynthia came with ( ... )
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