Michael Lindsay-Hogg: Luck and Circumstance: A coming of age in Hollywood, New York and points beyon

Nov 26, 2011 15:24

The art of writing in an interesting fashion about your own life is still severely underestimated. Having had an interesting life doesn't do the trick, as I found out many years ago when I slogged through Marlene Dietrich's memoirs, which were deadly dull, despite the facts of her life being certainly of the fascinating kind. But not many people ( Read more... )

michael lindsay-hogg, mick jagger, orson welles, luck and circumstance, book review, brideshead revisited, keith richards, geraldine fitzgerald, beatles

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Comments 23

blackbirdfan November 26 2011, 15:07:09 UTC

These few passages about the Beatles confirm a few things for me:

1. "George didn't want to do it, didn't see the point - what did it have to do with anything? "

Gees, George could be such a pain in the ass. For a spiritual man, he sure did spend a lot of time pissing and moaning.

2. But one voice had not been heard from. Eyes under lids looked toward that person. Time froze. "Fuck it," John said. "Let's do it."

And in a few short sentences, this underscores that the Beatles broke up because John and Paul broke up. Nothing happened in that band unless John and Paul wanted it to happen, and as soon as John stopped supporting Paul, the band was over.

It's a shame Lindsay-Hogg wasn't more honest about his own Yoko resentment. But then few people want to make themselves look bad in their memoirs. Thanks for this review.

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selenak November 26 2011, 15:49:15 UTC
1.) To be fair, George earlier in Let It Be had made a great deal of team effort. He encouraged, supported and helped Ringo a lot with writing Octopussy's Garden (you can see a bit of that in the film, and the transcripts show a great deal more), and worked a lot harder on possible arrangements for John's Don't Let Me Down than John himself had done. (It probably didn't thrill him that John tended to shoot his suggestions down while accepting Paul's.) Moreover, it was George who brought in Billy Preston after his own walkout and return, to revitalize the sessions and give everyone a reason to pull themselves together.

2.) Well, yes. If you have a main axis like that and it stops functioning, you can't drive anymore. Or, to get less technical and more Ray Connolly's favourite comparison for them: Mum and Dad getting a divorce, not son's rebellious attitude was what did the family in.

re: honesty - we're all a bit hypocrites like that, I think, wanting to believe we were the ones open minded and impartial, and it was the others who ( ... )

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blackbirdfan November 26 2011, 19:50:57 UTC

I'm probably too hard on George. But sheesh, why complain about having to play live when you're a musician? George sometimes reminds me of that line from The Empire Strikes Back where Yoda tells Luke Skywalker, "Always with you it can't be done." ;)

And that anecdote about John saying "Let's do it" reminded me of that Mum and Dad analogy, too. Mum is coming up with the ideas to keep things going but it all depends on Dad agreeing. And George often played the angry teenager.

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selenak November 27 2011, 05:18:50 UTC
You know, I can see George as Luke Skywalker. Complete with Toshi Power station complaint. But also with readiness to rescue friends and take a chance on Dad whom everyone else has written off.

He did have his adolescent moments during Let it Be, and "what's the point?" sounds like one of them, but as I said - he also had a lot more moments where he tried to make the project work, and this despite the fact that a) he hadn't wanted to do it in the first place, and b) his dissatisfaction about not getting more room for his own songs on Beatles albums was ever more fueled. Let's not forget, these were the sessions where George offered "All Things Must Pass" and met monumental indifference, whereas things like "Dig It" or "Yer Blues" ended up on the album, plus Paul was already starting to work on Maxwell's Silver Hammer. I'm not anti Maxwell and think both John and George were unfair about it, but if I were George, had just written some of my undeniably best songs, and got zero reaction while John and Paul were busy with less than ( ... )

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larainefan November 26 2011, 23:46:22 UTC
This afternoon I was just playing around on google, looking up things on George, and I ran across an older essay you'd written which began as about George and turned into a history of George-meets-Paul. It was nicely-done! I had to laugh where you mentioned the woman with Paul, the one whose clothes John cut up and destroyed, you said somewhere in Hamburg is that woman who has never spoken out about it! Because I too have always thought, somewhere in Hamburg, if she's still alive, is George's first experience, and she's never spoken or shared her story either. I wonder what her name and age was, what she looked like ( ... )

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selenak November 27 2011, 05:35:24 UTC
re: George's first experience, chances are she was a professional or a barmaid or both, and definitely older than George because no 17 years old or younger would have been allowed to work on the Reeperbahn. Re: Guiliano's claim, for starters, how does he want to know? He only met George once, for five minutes, and George would be the only one who could say with any authority how he felt at that point. Moreover, considering that George according to the ghastly doctor who made him sign his son's guitar when poor George was dying joked with Paul about that night of losing his virginity in Hamburg during Paul's last visit, I'd say it was a pleasant, not a traumatic memory ( ... )

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larainefan November 27 2011, 05:57:41 UTC
Sometimes I feel badly, wishing George's first time had been more special for him, lol! Probably he himself didn't even care one way or the other, do guys, generally speaking, even care about things like that? I don't know.

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ljlorettamartin November 28 2011, 22:48:50 UTC
[ Giuliano's claims that George was not really ready to lose his virginity but felt pressured into it by John, John wasn't going to have a "queer" in his band, according to the account]

Wow. I sure hope that's true.

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itsnotmymind November 27 2011, 15:33:07 UTC
Sounds like an interesting memoir. I can see from those excerpts what you mean about it having a style.

The stuff about Mick and Keith was interesting to me because I don't know a lot about the Rolling Stones. I've always wondered why they managed to stay together while the Beatles split up, what was different for them.

George wanting to make a "Rosebud" video was amusing. The Beatles really thought they were capable of anything back then.

I had heard about John playing the recording of him and Yoko having sex to the rest of the group, but it was still. Um. I really don't know what to say to that, actually.

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selenak November 27 2011, 17:53:50 UTC
Well, if you believe Mick who was asked that same question a couple of times over the years, it's because the Stones had a clear boss, i.e. himself. (I think it was Tony Bramwell or some of the other Beatles sidekicks who argued that one of Allen Klein's mistakes was that he automatically equated the Stones' power structure with the Beatles, John with Mick, and thought if he had John on board, everyone else would automatically follow suit. He didn't take into account that the Beatles simply didn't work that way, or that it had been Paul who'd been keeping the band together at that point. Michael Lindsay Hogg writes about Mick elsewhere: I was aware of how much I liked my collaboration with him, he with the face of a Botticelli cosh boy; his intelligence was quick, his imagination and cultural appetite wide-ranging; he was funny and knew where every penny went.The last part, imo, also made a difference. Not for nothing did Mr. Jagger study at the London School of Economics. Whereas the Beatles were clueless about money until it was too ( ... )

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itsnotmymind November 27 2011, 20:11:16 UTC
Interesting information about Mick Jagger. I guess the Stones didn't have the same epic battles about who would manage them. The Beatles probably could have avoided those battles if Brian had survived, but no such luck.

The Stones had Klein managing them for a few years, didn't they? John in his Lennon Remembers interview gives that as the reason for why he didn't believe the bad stories he heard about Klein: I had heard about all these dreadful rumors about him but I could never coordinate it with the fact that the Stones seemed to be going on and on with him and nobody ever said a word.

My understanding is that the Stones ended up regretting having Klein as their manager, so I guess John should have been a little more careful.

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selenak November 29 2011, 07:58:29 UTC
Keith Richards in his memoirs is pretty much relaxed about Klein, on a "yes, he robbed us blind, the old rascal, but he made us lots of money first" note, whereas legend has it Mick Jagger chased Klein down a hotel floor when he found out Klein had taken their entire 60s song catalogue.

Paul says Mick did warn him about Klein but when asked to repeat the warning in front of John waffled, and instead said: "He's alright if you like that sort of thing." And Marianne Faithfull says the reason for Mick's volte face was that he hoped if Klein was busy with the Beatles, they could get rid of him without losing too much money.

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Part I ljlorettamartin November 29 2011, 00:13:55 UTC
[every time I come across a memoir that isn't just interesting in terms of reported content but actually has style, I'm over the moon.]

I agree, and I threw a couple other examples in a comment to your post on jhp.

[make for a surplus of father figures regarded with varying emotional investment, and that's not touching on Geraldine's lovers without possible fatherhood like Robert Capa or Henry Miller,]

And in the end, the warmest relationship he has with an adult man as a child is with the old Russian guy who babysat him when he was small. It's the one real father-son-like photo that's included, and MLH makes a point to say how safe and loved he felt with the man, unlike with the three men who could actually make a claim on the "father" title.

Interestingly, MLH's "fatherlessness" defines him just as much as John Lennon's did him, though in very different ways. For John it was a chip on the shoulder, for MLH it was this disconnection and longing.

[One of the things I find in writing about people who are dead is that, after a ( ... )

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Re: Part I selenak November 29 2011, 07:52:30 UTC
Agreed re: MLH and Vladimir Solokoff ( ... )

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Re: Part I ljlorettamartin November 29 2011, 15:22:33 UTC
Very interesting about OW's father situation - I had no idea. I want to make some connection to the metaphor in Citizen Kane, as you did, but I actually haven't studied the movie or seen it more than once :-).

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Re: Part I selenak November 29 2011, 17:36:50 UTC

Part II ljlorettamartin November 29 2011, 22:58:55 UTC
Two other thoughts about the book:

The scene where MLH has to pitch the an idea for a promotional film to the Beatles, where they all sit around an elegant table eating and ignoring him, and he eventually pulls up a low, heavy ottoman to sit on at the table, dragging it and hurting himself in the process, is hilarious. It gives a taste of the Beatles in their royal mode. I wished I could have included it in my other post, but it had nothing to do with j/p, really.

I got so fed up with MLH's failure to grasp what was, to me, obvious about his family. I mean, how many more anvil-sized hints did he need? He's one of these people whose worldview doesn't include people keeping secrets, so he has to keep nagging because he expects someone will eventually give him a straight answer. Hello? If it were true, why would anyone tell you directly, ever? Try to consider the context for one or two seconds, buddy!

Other than that, he's a great, perceptive writer, LOL. We're all blind to our parents, I guess.

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Re: Part II larainefan November 30 2011, 11:41:36 UTC
I've peeked into this book through Amazon, and I like the rest of that passage, where George offers water because George is "courteous by nature." I ran across something yesterday by a woman who helped organize the George tribute in Liverpool, talking at length at how George was kindness personified, and that he was that way from a child, it had nothing whatsoever to do with him finding religion or Hinduism, etc., he was just born a naturally sweet person. That's why I will always think of George as a very spiritual person long before he went to India, he was spiritual even during Hamburg and Beatlemania and various excesses, just based on his behaviour as a child---he just hadn't realized himself as a spiritual being yet, perhaps. And yes, I'm aware he had many lapses and was not perfect, but I'm just in awe of what a gentle tender person he aspired to be, not realizing he already was that person.

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Re: Part II selenak December 3 2011, 09:07:24 UTC
If you want to read about the flipside of Michael's family situation, I just put up a review of Chris Welles' memoirs, wgich includes descriptions of Geraldine and Michael, as well as comments by her mother on the Geraldine/Orson affair: http://selenak.livejournal.com/742886.html

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