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The Beatles at Apple Studios, Savile Row, London on Thursday 30 January 1969

This is not the first time I have written about Timothy Leary but I wanted to point out his connection with the Beatles in this post. What did Timothy Leary have to do with one of the songs on ABBEY ROAD ALBUM and what was Leary’s interaction with Francis Schaeffer? Read about it later in this post.

The following photographs are previously unseen images of John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their “Bed In” for peace at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel in June 1969. Here, Tommy Smothers, an unknown friend, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Rosemary Leary and Timothy Leary.

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November 29, 2012

“Come Together” – the Timothy Leary campaign slogan that became a famous Beatles song…

The best-known slogan coined by Sixties counterculture celebrity Timothy Leary is the one he created to promote the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”In 1969, Leary came up with another slogan that was eventually made famous, though not by him.

Three years earlier, actor Ronald Reagan had been elected Governor of California.

Leary figured that if a Hollywood celebrity could run for Governor and get elected, maybe the times were right for a Hippie celebrity to take a shot at it. Besides, he loved publicity.

So, he threw his mushroom cap into the ring and announced that he planned to run against Reagan in the 1970 gubernatorial election.

Leary came up with the tongue-in-cheek campaign slogan, “Come together, join the party.”

In June of 1969, while visiting John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their legendary Montreal “Bed-In,”  Leary asked Lennon to write a campaign song to go with his slogan.

Lennon agreed. And, during the Montreal Bed-In days, in addition to writing and recording “Give Peace a Chance,”Lennon wrote an initial version of the song “Come Together.”

The melody was basically like the Beatles song we know today, but the original chorus was different.

It went: “Come together, right now. / Don’t come tomorrow. / Don’t come alone.”

Lennon made a demo tape of the campaign song for Leary. Leary gave copies to local underground radio stations in California and the song got some airplay.Shortly thereafter, Leary’s campaign got derailed due to his mounting legal troubles from a past marijuana bust, forcing him to, er, drop out of the Governor’s race. (Lucky for Ronnie.)

So, Lennon took the song to his bandmates, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, when the Beatles were recording songs for the upcoming Abbey Road album.

Together, they reworked it a bit and changed the lyrics to those all Beatles fans are familiar with:

“Here come old flattop, he come groovin’ up slowly
He got ju-ju eyeballs, he one holy roller
He got hair down to his knees
Got to be a joker, he just do what he please
He wear no shoeshine, he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger, he shoot Coca-Cola
He say, I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together, right now, over me.”

The first line of the song (Lennon’s homage to a similar line from Chuck Berry’s 1956 rock hit, “You Can’t Catch Me”) and the chorus — “Come together, right now, over me” — became famous pop culture quotations.

“Come Together” was released as a single in the US on October 6, 1970 and reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart on November 29, 1969 — which is how, by a trippy route, Tim Leary’s gubernatorial campaign slogan became the subject of posts for those dates on ThisDayinQuotes.com.

Come Together- The Beatles

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Never Before Published Transcript of a Conversation Between John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Timothy Leary and Rosemary Leary – at the Montreal Bed-In, May 1969

Below is a scan of the cover page for the manuscript of an anthology Tim was considering putting together for publication around 1978 with the title, “Heroes of the Sixties: Meetings with Remarkable WoMen.”

A draft of “Part II: The Agents” from the table of contents is below. This transcript was intended to be added to a previously published piece, “Thank God for the Beatles” (The Beatles Book, 1968), “an essay about the Beatles as evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with mysterious power to create a new human species” (Leary Bibliography, B18). The article and transcript was to be Chapter 16 under a new title, “The Beatles As Unconscious Evolutionary Agents (with Conversation with John-Yoko).” The anthology, a collection of previously published magazine articles and book excerpts, with a few new chapters, was never published.

Michael continues: “After researching the publications in which it most likely would have appeared (the underground press and Rolling Stone) in the late spring and summer of 1969, and in the bibliography and the archives housed at the New York Public Library, I determined that the transcript of this ‘conversation’ has probably never been published.”

Another piece of evidence is a handwritten note on the permissions list when the project was in a very early stage: “Hitherto Unpublished.”

Michael’s guess is that Tim was given a copy of the tape at the time it was made, or later, and had it transcribed by one of his assistants, whose penciled editorial notes appear on the first two pages, and on the contents and permissions sheets. Michael remembers Tim invited him to assist on the project, “ but he (Tim) was too involved in the Future History Series, where some of these chapters ended up in one form or another, and abandoned ‘Heroes of the Sixties: Meetings with Remarkable WoMen.’”

Montreal Bed-In and what was going on in the lives of the four of them when they held the conversation in John and Yoko’s Suite of Rooms 1738-1744 in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel

The conversation took place in the middle of John and Yoko’s week-long Bed-In, on May 29th, 1969. That makes Lisa 6 months old at the time, and it’s a year before Michael met Tim face-to-face for the first time, visiting him in prison, and became his archivist. Chronologically, it was two weeks after the People’s Park Uprising in Berkeley and less than three months before the Woodstock Music Festival. The Vietnam War was raging. The Black Panther Party was being attacked by the FBI. Less than a month later, the Weather Underground formed, calling for armed revolution to stop the war. Hippies were being busted for pot and acid. The Chicago 8 were under indictment for inciting a riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Aug. 1968.

Michael points out: “The enormous personal and political pressures on the four of them are evident here. Despite (or perhaps because of) their global fame, both couples had a difficult time getting through Canadian customs. Both had been busted for marijuana possession the previous year – John and Yoko in London, and Tim and Rosemary in Laguna Beach. A few months after the Bed-In, John would leave the Beatles and move with Yoko to the U.S., where they were closely monitored by the FBI and threatened with deportation. Ten months later, Tim would be in prison; Rosemary would be putting on benefits to raise money for his appeal.”

The Bed-In – An Archetypal “Occupation”

Michael: “The ‘60s was a decade of occupations. Perhaps the strangest and most original was the Bed-In that took place in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, in 1969, 43 years ago, this Spring. John Lennon and Yoko Ono occupied a bed for seven days and nights in a “Bed-In For Peace” as a symbolic protest to end the war in Vietnam, which culminated in the writing and recording of the antiwar anthem, ‘Give Peace a Chance.’

“Prior to the Bed-In, in the early sixties, leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, there were Sit-Ins in the South, occupying “white only” lunch counters; Be-Ins, beginning with the one in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (1967), and Teach-Ins on college campuses. The Yippies led occupations at the NY Stock Exchange (1967) and the grounds of the Pentagon (1967), and later, Smoke-Ins in Washington DC and elsewhere. A half million antiwar protestors occupied the mall in front of the Washington Monument, six months after the Bed-In. The 1990s witnessed Digital Be-Ins, and wars in the Middle East brought Die-Ins. These were some of the precursors of the Occupy Movement that began in Zuccotti Park last September.”

Thanks to the fame of the couple and the novel concept of their activism, the event got media coverage well beyond the small number of participants involved.

The film Bed Peace was made available for free on YouTube in August 2011 by Yoko Ono, as part of her website “Imagine Peace.” Tim and Rosemary’s participation is also documented in  another video on YouTube (also courtesy of Yoko’s Imagine Peace website), where they are seen singing on the recording of “Give Peace A Chance.”

John Lennon wrote another song that week, the earliest version of “Come Together,” for Leary’s campaign for Governor of California against Ronald Reagan. It was the prospect of Tim debating Reagan on television that, as much as anything, led to his imprisonment for a miniscule amount of marijuana. With the campaign aborted, John decided to rework the song for the Beatles’ Abbey Road.

This conversation, published here for the first time, is a time capsule from an era that has powerful and poignant correspondences to our own.

Conversation between John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Rosemary Leary and Timothy Leary, Hotel Queen Elizabeth, Montreal, Canada, May 29, 1969

TIMOTHY: Living in a teepee is great. It’s pretty basic. It’s the first artificial habitat, after all.

ROSEMARY: It’s the sexiest building ever invented.

TIMOTHY: It’s like being in a sailboat, because you have to know exactly where the wind is. You raise the fluttering banners, and just look up through the smoke-flap and you can see how the wind blows. If you don’t have the flaps the right way, the wind will blow the smoke down. We always have to be aware of the wind.

JOHN: Yeah, Yoko had this plan for us two. To blindfold ourselves for two weeks, y’know, and just work it out. We might do that when we get to the new house and find out about it.

ROSEMARY: Yes, it’d be a fantastic way to learn about it.

TIMOTHY: Also, of course, we live with rattlesnakes. That’s groovy because it requires absolute consciousness. You just can’t go thumping through the brush, thinking of what you’re going to do tomorrow. You have to realize that you’re intruding on their territory. We don’t want to hurt you. We don’t want to stumble in and step on you. So your consciousness has got to be focused. And of course it’s always helpful to have dogs. We learn a great deal from animals.

JOHN: How long have you been there, in the teepee? I mean, before you sussed the wind and everything, and you know, got your senses back?

ROSEMARY: We had to put the teepee up three times before it was right. It’s like you can touch it, and it resounds like a drone, and then it’s perfect, the canvas. It’s a wind instrument that plays like a drone.

TIMOTHY: You would really love the teepee, because it’s a work of art which involves all the senses. You start with white canvas. Then you get the pine. Each man has to strip the bark so you get the wood smooth, smooth. You have to line the poles carefully. There are fifteen of these poles, and if you do it wrong you end up with too big a hole. It’s sculpture. Then once you’ve got it built, it’s a light show, because the moon shines through the smoke hole and you can see the stars.

ROSEMARY: If you placed it properly to the east, the sun rises right over the opening, so at one point during the day the sun is full blast down into the teepee.

YOKO: Is it very wide?

ROSEMARY: It’s a little narrower than the width of this hotel room.

TIMOTHY: And at night you have a fire. All right. We’re sitting around, with the fire here in the center. That means your shadow is thrown on the screen behind you, big, and I’m gesticulating like this and you catch my shadow. And the silhouettes flicker. The fire’s dancing. So, if you are outside, you can tell a mile away what’s going on. Then you get the wind coming. It creaks a little. The door, by the way, is shaped like the yoni and you have to bend your head down as you come in, in honor of it.

ROSEMARY: The only thing that comes through the yoni is the sun and the stars and the moon; actually only people go through the lower exit and entrance.

TIMOTHY: It’s a sexy place.

YOKO: All those nasty magazines in London, they all call me Yoni.

JOHN: Yeah. Yoni Ono.

YOKO: John Lingam and Yoni Ono.

TIMOTHY: We sent a message to you, through Miles, that said that next time you come to the United States, if you wanted to get away for a few days, there’s a place…

JOHN: We never got the message from Miles. [Footnote: Barry Miles, UK countercultural activist, helped launched Indica Bookshop and International Times.] We miss a lot. Yeah, we’ve got it now. And if we come…

TIMOTHY: It would have to be done in a way that no one would know you’re there. Once you just get into the valley, it’s another world. Of course, we’ve been doing nothing but studying consciousness for the last seven or eight years, and at Millbrook, we had this large estate. You probably heard about it–this big 64-room house. It became like a mecca for scientists and barefoot pilgrims.

“We’ve been doing nothing but studying consciousness for the last seven or eight years.”–Tim

YOKO: I’ve heard of Millbrook. I mean, it’s famous.

TIMOTHY: Yes, and police informers and television people. But then we saw how geography was important. The land north of the house was uninhabited. As you got there, you got farther away from the people, and the games, and the television, and the police. What we’ve been trying to do is create heaven on earth, right? And we did have it going, for a while–in the forest groves where there were just holy people. Just people going around silently eating brown rice or caviar, and when you went there, you would never think of talking terrestrial. You never would say, “Well, the sheriff’s at the gate.”

Francis and Edith Schaeffer at  l’abri with two friends below:

Francis and Edith Schaeffer at  l’abri

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Ordained Servant Online

Your Father’s L’Abri: Reflections on the Ministry of Francis Schaeffer

Gregory E. Reynolds

The year 1968 was a momentous year for me—revolution was in the air. I was a freshman architectural student in Boston. Having been raised with generally conservative morality in a liberal Congregational church there was nothing to prevent me from being radicalized. I soon joined the Boston Resistance and felt sure that I was part of a movement as important as the American Revolution. I was there in the Boston Public Garden when radical Abby Hoffman referred to the John Hancock building as that “hypodermic needle in the sky.” It was the Boston Tea Party all over again. This was actually the name of a live-rock night spot—a worship place for the revolutionaries—where the hymnody of Cream and the Velvet Underground stoked us for battle.

Raised to believe that Christian ethics were attainable without the supernatural religion of the Bible, I soon affirmed the moral and spiritual relativism that came with the American countercultural amalgam of eastern religiosity and American idealism. All religions were heading for the same glorious summit. The autonomous spirit of modernity was taking on a new form in reaction to the impersonal mass cultural tendencies of the technological society. Postmodernity was emerging. The Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and the Incredible String Band were a way out of the mono-dimensional culture of the late Enlightenment in its Eisenhower military-industrial form. We were on the cutting edge of history—an avant-garde altering civilization for the better. We believed in nothing less than changing the world—but nothing more, ultimately, than ourselves.

Ironically, the same generational conceit that we exuded is present in the title of the article in the March 2008 issue of Christianity Today, “Not Your Father’s L’Abri.”[1]Your father’s L’Abri may not be outmoded like his Oldsmobile. I lived at your father’s L’Abri for six months, so I thought a first-hand reflection to be in order.

Enter Francis Schaeffer: Cultural Apologist and Evangelist

Living in a communal setting for a summer in Oregon chastened my naïve understanding of humanity’s ability to better itself. I returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 1970, literally singing the blues, feeling abandoned by my own ideals. I settled into the cynical Jack Kerouac’s macabre New England temper. This is where Unitarianism and Transcendentalism lead. My forays into the I-Ching and other versions of eastern mysticism left me with a yawning emptiness of soul.

My personal bankruptcy lead me to open my Bible—the one religious book I had neglected—late one night in the winter of 1971. My blues proved themselves to be a revelation of my own sin. That was the real problem with the world—my rebellion against my Maker, and my sadness that happiness thus eluded me. My existential despair was my alienation from God. There in my basement room gospel light shown brightly on my dark soul and I realized that the Christ of Scripture was the true and only Savior from sin and death. This was truth like no other I had ever encountered—yes, as Schaeffer would say “true truth,” unlike the murky mysticism I had lost my way in. This gospel was true and all else I had believed was not. This was the living and true God—one to whom I could speak, and who spoke to me in his Word, the Bible.

I returned home to New Hampshire on weekends to attend my mother’s Baptist church. She had become a Christian just before I left for college. Still wrestling with the questions of my generation, I found little understanding of my concerns in the church, until one day a perceptive member gave me a book titled The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century by Francis Schaeffer. Here was a Christian who understood my world and spoke my language. I rapidly devoured everything Schaeffer had written up to that point, as well as Edith Schaeffer’s The L’Abri Story. These equipped me to speak with the others in my cooperative living situation about my newfound faith—a Kierkegaardian existentialist, a Vietnam vet who considered himself a warlock, a high-strung cellist, an argumentative law student, a sensitive poet, and two feminist lesbians. The exclusive claims of the gospel were offensive to most, but several became Christians, recognizing the wonder, beauty, and liberating power of Jesus Christ. By August 1971 I was at L’Abri. For someone with no theological or philosophical training this was truly a high-altitude experience…

Apart from the breathtaking beauty of the setting, at an elevation of three thousand feet in the Swiss Alps, overlooking the Dent du Midi and the Mont Blanc Massif, three refreshing realities were present, which in many ways stood in stark contrast to my experience in the fundamentalist churches I had briefly known in America and my communal experience as a hippie. First, L’Abri was a genuine community where true Christian faith was practiced—where people worked, studied, and discussed together. Second, earnest engagement of the mind was fostered, but never in a merely academic way. There was no one like Schaeffer in our day. He filled a niche. Third, along with intellectual nurture, the Schaeffers encouraged a true appreciation for, and involvement in, creativity and the arts. Edith’s Hidden Art helped rescue my mother from the culturally suffocating influence of her fundamentalist church. It was easy to think of L’Abri as a kind of Mecca. But as my English friend Tony Morton later reminded me, “You don’t have to go to L’Abri to enter the kingdom of God.” L’Abri wasn’t for everyone, nor was it without its faults, although it was not easy for me to see this at the time…

I had occasion to meet the painter Francis Bacon in a pub in Soho on my trip home from Switzerland. Bacon’s Head IV appeared on the cover of Hans Rookmaaker’s (close friend and colleague of Schaeffer’s) Modern Art and the Death of Culture (1970). Reinterpreting Velasquez’s portrait of the pope, Bacon distorts the once dignified head and face, which is depicted being sucked upward through the top of a translucent box in which the man is sitting—his humanity is disintegrating. The futility, horror, and despair portrayed in the painting were verified in my conversation with Bacon. Hopelessness was written all over Bacon’s melancholy face. My explanation of the gospel elicited only scorn. But Schaeffer had prepared me for this encounter.

(Francis Bacon)

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Francis Bacon’s Head VI, 1949 below:

Schaeffer had a private meeting with Timothy Leary in the fall of 1971. Leary, for those who don’t remember, was a Harvard professor of psychology who dropped out, advocating the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs, and became a counterculture guru. He was in Switzerland evading drug charges. Nichols and I were privy to his visit with Schaeffer because we lived in Schaeffer’s chalet (October 2, 1971 according to my journal entry). At dinner, Leary was very self-absorbed and not a little blown out from all of the LSD he had taken. He proved to be very obnoxious company. But Schaeffer had been compassionate enough to spend an afternoon in conversation with him about the gospel, telling no one of his encounter with this famous man.

Endnotes

[1] Molly Worthen, “Not Your Father’s L’Abri,” Christianity Today (March 2008): 60-65.

Gregory E. Reynolds is the editor of Ordained Servant, and serves as the pastor of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire. Ordained Servant, October 2008.

The Beatles were looking for lasting satisfaction in their lives and their journey took them down many of the same paths that other young people of the 1960’s were taking. No wonder in the video THE AGE OF NON-REASON Schaeffer noted,  ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” 

How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason)

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At their website we read, “L’Abri is a French word for ‘shelter’. L’Abri was founded by Francis and Edith Schaeffer in Switzerland in 1955 when they opened their home to people as a spiritual and intellectual ‘shelter’, a place where people culd be hepled both to know and to live in the truth of biblical Christianity. From that time on other communities based on the same ideas have grown up in Europe, America and Asia. Today there are seven residential branches including Korean L’Abri and two resource centers. The atmosphere is relaxed and personal, and we are a study centre in that our days are a healthy mixture of work, study and discussion.”

A Day at Swiss L’Abri – pt 1

Uploaded on Nov 20, 2007

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A Day at Swiss L’Abri – pt 3

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A Day at Swiss L’Abri – pt 4

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Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

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A Day at Swiss L’Abri – pt 5

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A Day at Swiss L’Abri – pt 6

Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and John C. Lilly in 1991.

Timoty Leary – Return Engagement – Part 1

“William Burroughs and Timothy Leary, Lawrence, Kansas, Friday, March 13, 1987,

Timoty Leary – Return Engagement – Part 2

Timoty Leary – Return Engagement – Part 3

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There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true as Schaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This link shows how to do that.

The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt 42 min)

You want some evidence that indicates that the Bible is true? Here is a good place to start and that is taking a closer look at the archaeology of the Old Testament times. Is the Bible historically accurate? Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription. 3. Taylor Prism (Sennacherib Hexagonal Prism), 4. Biblical Cities Attested Archaeologically. 5. The Discovery of the Hittites, 6.Shishak Smiting His Captives, 7. Moabite Stone, 8. Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, 9A Verification of places in Gospel of John and Book of Acts., 9B Discovery of Ebla Tablets. 10. Cyrus Cylinder, 11. Puru “The lot of Yahali” 9th Century B.C.E., 12. The Uzziah Tablet Inscription, 13. The Pilate Inscription, 14. Caiaphas Ossuary, 14 B Pontius Pilate Part 2, 14c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology., 

September 19, 2011

By Elvis Costello

My absolute favorite albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. On both records you can hear references to other music — R&B, Dylan, psychedelia — but it’s not done in a way that is obvious or dates the records. When you picked up Revolver, you knew it was something different. Heck, they are wearing sunglasses indoors in the picture on the back of the cover and not even looking at the camera . . . and the music was so strange and yet so vivid. If I had to pick a favorite song from those albums, it would be “And Your Bird Can Sing” . . . no, “Girl” . . . no, “For No One” . . . and so on, and so on. . . .

Their breakup album, Let It Be, contains songs both gorgeous and jagged. I suppose ambition and human frailty creeps into every group, but they delivered some incredible performances. I remember going to Leicester Square and seeing the film of Let It Be in 1970. I left with a melancholy feeling.

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‘Get Back’

Central Press/Getty Images

Main Writer: McCartney
Recorded: January 23, 27, 28 and 30, February 5, 1969
Released: May 5, 1969
12 weeks; No. 1

The plan for the Beatles’ January 1969 sessions was that they would get back to their roots as a live rock & roll band, so when McCartney came up with a song called “Get Back,” it was a perfect fit. It was also the last song the Beatles played at their 10-song, 42-minute final gig on the roof of the Apple Records building on January 30th.

The original lyrics to “Get Back” satirized the anti-immigrant sentiments in England at the time: “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs” went one line. McCartney dropped the parodic race-baiting, leaving the tales of wandering Jo Jo and gender-flipping Loretta Martin. Lennon called “Get Back,” which features his bluesy lead guitar as well as a funky keyboard solo from Billy Preston, “a better version of ‘Lady Madonna’ . . . a potboiler rewrite.” But he also suspected that the song was secretly aimed at Yoko Ono: “You know, ‘Get back to where you once belonged.’ Every time [Paul] sang the line in the studio, he’d look at Yoko.”

Appears On: Let It Be and Past Masters

Related

Paul McCartney “For No One” Great Version!

The Beatles – For No One (Lyrics)

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‘For No One’

Manchester Daily Express/SSPL/Getty Images

Main Writer: McCartney
Recorded: May 9, 16 and 19, 1966
Released: August 8, 1966
Not released as a single

McCartney wrote this quiet classic in the second person, as if he were addressing, but not quite comforting, a friend abruptly abandoned by a lover: “You want her, you need her/And yet you don’t believe her/When she says her love is dead.” He was talking to himself: “For No One,” written in March 1966 while he and Jane Asher were on vacation in Switzerland, was about an argument they had. The intimacy of the production and performance — a kind of exhausted acceptance — stand out amid the accelerated experimentation everywhere else on Revolver. McCartney and Starr were the only Beatles present at the session; they cut the backing track — McCartney’s piano and Starr’s minimalist percussion, plus overdubbed clavichord — in a single night. George Martin later suggested a dash of brass, so they called in Alan Civil of the London Philharmonia, who played the song’s brief, moving French-horn interjections. Civil was paid about 50 pounds for his efforts, but got something more valuable: a rare Beatles-album credit on Revolver‘s original back cover.

Appears On: Revolver

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Feature on artist Paul McCartney

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Good article

Unfinished Symphony, 1993.

Paintings Author : Paul McCartney Editor : Bulfinch Press, Boston-New York-London Date : 2000 Language : English Pages : 150 ” I don’t think there is any great heroic act in going in slavishly every day and saying, “I must do this.” So what I find is that I do it when I am inspired. And that’s how I can combine it with music. Some days the inspiration is a musical one and other days it has just got to be painting. ” — Paul McCartney, from the interview. Overview  ” For more than seventeen years Paul McCartney has been a committed painter, finding in his work on canvas both a respite from the world and another outlet for his drive to create. His painting, like much of his life, has been a very private endeavor.

In April 1999 he exhibited the work for the first time in Siegen, Germany, where it met with critical acclaim, which led to his decision to share the work through the publication of this volume.Full of life and intense color, these paintings reveal McCartney’s tremendous positive spirit as well as a visual sophistication and bold handling influenced by his friendship with Willem de Kooning. He carves, scratches, and sculpts the paint, creating complex and layered works. Faces abound in the paintings, from the many lovely abstract portraits of Linda McCartney to irreverent, affectionate portraits of the Queen of England. Humor plays against more somber imagery — masks and Celtic motifs — while his landscapes radiate a sense of place.Beautifully designed and produced, the portfolio of paintings is accompanied by candid photographs by Linda McCartney other husband in the studio. A collection of texts by contemporary critics and curators place the paintings within context, while a long and insightful interview allows McCartney’s own voice to be heard. Frequent points of crossover between his music and visual explorations will intrigue those interested in the artistic process. Rarely is one able to find an artist working with such confidence and skill in such diverse media. All followers of McCartney’s will be delighted to see these exuberant works unveiled and to experience this unexpected and accomplished expression of his creativity. ” —  from the back jacket.  Yellow Linda With Piano, 1988.  Arizona, 91, with “Red Abstract White Moon” Paul and Willem de Kooning in 1983 (left) and in 1984 (right).  De Kooning was a family friend and Paul and Linda would always visit him when they were on Long Island. It was probably watching de Kooning in action that inspired Paul to do his first canvases. Boxer Lips, 1990.  Essays & InterviewPaul McCartney’s work is analyzed through a series of essays and through an interview in which Paul comments on each of his  83 paintings that are exhibited in this book.ContentsForeword: Paul McCartney And The Courage To Get Lost by Brian Clarke Paul McCartney In Context by Julian Theuherz Exposure And Influences In The Paintings Of Paul McCartney by Barry Miles From Line To Color – From Gesture To Picture by Wolfgang Suttner Interview: “I Don’t Know – It Looks Like A Couch” Wolfgang Suttner speaks with Paul McCartney Paul McCartney : Reverses And Other Advances by Christoph Tannert Long Island painting, East Hampton, 1990 Brian Clarke   Born in 1953, Brian Clarke is a painter and creator of large – scale colored glass works for architectural projects. Time magazine has said about him that he “collaborates with some of the most internationally recognized architects as one of the world’s leading glass artists.” He lives and works in London, New York, and Munich.Barry MilesBorn in 1943, Barry Miles is a freelance writer living in England and France. He is cofounder and editor of the International Times, an underground British magazine. Supported by McCartney, he created the Indica Bookshop and Gallery in London, a center for artistic and avant-garde literature. Later he led Zapple, the experimental literary label from Apple Records. Miles is author of the McCartney biography Many Years from Now and works about Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs.Christoph Tannert   Born in 1955 in Leipzig, Christoph Tannert studied art history and archaeology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. An art critic and exhibition curator, he lives in Berlin and writes regularly for the newspaper Berliner Zeitung. Since 1991 he has been project leader for the Bethany artists’ house in Berlin.Wolfgang Suttner   Born in 1951, Wolfgang Suttner, head of the cultural department of the county council district of Siegen – Wittgenstein, Germany, studied art, psychology, and German philology and has been organizing exhibitions and art shows for twenty years. He also founded the Siegen Art Society, is a board member of the Association of German Art Societies, and has been publishing and lecturing for the past twenty years on twentieth-century art and artists.    Wolfgang Suttner collaborated with Paul McCartney on cataloging and documenting the latter’s artistic oeuvre and directed the world’s first exhibition of McCartney’s paintings in the Lyz Art Forum, Siegen, Germany. Long Island brushstroke, East Hampton, 1990Julian TreuherzJulian Treuherz is Keeper of Art Galleries for the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside, responsible for the Walker Art Gallery, Sudley House, and the Lady Lever Art Gallery. He was previously Keeper of Fine Art at Manchester City Art Gallery. He is the author of numerous books and articles, with a concentration on aspects of nineteenth – century British art. Paul McCartney’s Paintings There are 83 paintings pictured in this book. Here follow some excerpts of these paintings with the commentaries made by Paul about each of them in his interview with Wolfgang Suttner. Father Figure, 1992.   Unspoken words Wolfgang Suttner: How important was drawing for you before you started painting?Paul McCartney: I used to draw a lot, not necessarily from life but from imagination. And all my days through school I could always draw quite well. I used to do drawings of women for classmates, but we shouldn’t talk about that — I was the guy who could draw gorgeous naked women, you see, so for young boys this was a good attraction, and they used to ask me to draw for them. But I have always enjoyed drawing, often cartoon faces. I like the line, not necessarily the content. I like quick lines, very spontaneous lines. I like the circle, a couple of eyes, a mouth, and just characters in the faces, so I have done that quite a bit.Wolfgang Suttner: Do you now do drawings as a preparing process for your painting?Paul McCartney: No, I don’t normally; most of the story happens on the canvas while I am painting. It has to do with what the paint does, so sometimes I prepare a shape and a rough composition with some lines or with some drawing if I know I want a definite face or something like that, or I put that on with charcoal or a pencil. But then I used to find that the charcoal would pick up in the colors and it would make the yellow muddy, so I started to look for a little process to stop the charcoal moving, and I got interested in turpentine on it, which takes most of the line away. You wipe it away, the turpentine, but it does some interesting things and it stops it blending into the colors, so, yes, I do most of the drawing on the canvas. ” Unspoken Words “Wolfgang Suttner: This is 100 percent composition—it isn’t in every picture.Paul McCartney: As you can see, it is very spontaneous and I didn’t really have any preconceived ideas when I started it, but I started with blue behind it and then I drew some faces on top of that and then just worked on them, just the three faces, and turned it round a lot when I was working. I turned it lots of ways, upside down often.Wolfgang Suttner: You turned the canvas upside down?Paul McCartney: Yes, I turned it on its side and upside down, just to get a look at the composition, to see if it worked. A lot of the drawing, these blue marks, were done from the upside-down position, and then in the end I decided it seemed like a woman. It had a kind of grille across it, stopping it from talking, so it was something to do with forbidden speech. And this guy definitely has a cross, the face on the right: his mouth seemed to pick up the same theme, something forbidden. And then this face on the left has got an S mouth, which is a similar thing, so that became the theme. Unspoken Words, 1994.  Boxer Lips, 1990.  ” Boxer Lips “Wolfgang Suttner: I like this. It has an absolute richness in red colors, bright and earthy colors, and those colors give us certain meaning.Paul McCartney: What kind of meaning do you think—hot, sensual, violent?Wolfgang Suttner:Mystic…Paul McCartney: The shape of the head is a bit improbable… and again you have the two sorts of eyes. It wouldn’t have been as interesting to me to just have the one eye, or both eyes closed, or both eyes open. He looks like a boxer possibly after losing a fight; there is a bit of a battering in that left eye, isn’t there? So he is a sort of hero figure, a warrior figure, like comic-book heroes. I could almost imagine, like Marion Brando. But I like these white streaks behind it, like highlights, like lighting on him.Wolfgang Suttner: Do you remember when you did this picture?Paul McCartney: No. What I will do with all of these things is I will try and guess; I can often figure it out. The smaller canvases tend to be a bit earlier because probably at this time I wouldn’t have a big canvas, just do lots of little ones, but then I felt more comfortable with the bigger canvases. Wolfgang Suttner: He is really perfect.Paul McCartney: He is really nice. There is something of me in this, I don’t know why, I don’t know how to describe it, but a lot of these ideas you can see the germs of back in my schoolbooks, old schoolbooks I have: little scrawlings, rude ladies, naked girls, things I was awakening to, and the thrill was being able to conjure them up like an illusionist. I like the word primitive because a lot of what I do is primitive. Because when I started out in music, I never took lessons but I learned in a primitive way to make music. I learned the piano, the guitar in a primitive way. So when I do things like sail a boat, again it reminds me. I imagine myself like the first man who had a boat and put a sail up, and the same wind that blows me is the same one that blew him. I like that ancient connection. It is like your heritage going right back. And in the same way in painting—the rock painters, cave artists, I love their work. ” Yellow Linda With Piano “Paul McCartney: A couple of people who have looked at my book singled this one out, a couple of women who said that is the picture they would like, and I am not sure why but I like it. This is Linda relax- ing in my room at home where I have the piano, and she is sitting on the couch and she was in yellow. So I made everything yellow. The piano isn’t really yellow, but I just thought it would be nice. Her hair was yellow, her blouse was yellow, so I made them all yellow. So it became a very yellow picture. It didn’t need brown or any of their real colors. This is interesting because this little stool here, this little piece here, was Rene Magritte’s. That was in a sale of the contents of his studio, and in this little thing here are his charcoals and his drawing pens and pencils exactly as he left them, including his spectacles. Maybe it was the atmosphere they liked. It’s very peaceful. I enjoyed making it. It is a very typical pose of Linda’s: the legs — this foot is slightly strange, but I like it — this shoe. Yellow Linda With Piano, 1988.  Unfinished Symphony, 1993.  ” Unfinished Symphony “Paul McCartney: This relates to the couple of other pictures where I use musical things. There is one called C minor and one called Key of F, and it was an idea I had to take something I knew very well in music, a chord, and try and paint the feeling it gave me. So C minor might be a rather lonely- looking picture because it can be a bit of a sad chord. This came on from those ideas, but this was then to try and paint a whole symphony. The whole thing rather than one chord; a musical explosion; an orchestra playing something. Abstract rather than specific. So for that I just applied a lot of paint and smudged it around and had a lot of fun with it.Wolfgang Suttner: This picture has so many different greens and different structure. It is like you had a lot of chaotic things and then you have parts that are calm, like a little concept.Paul McCartney: Well, you know, one of my big inspirations is nature. I love nature and I love what it does. If you go down on the seashore and watch the water, see what it does to the sand, it bubbles up and goes back — what you could call chaos. And yet it’s so beautiful, it leaves beautiful marks on the sand. I kind of trust to that, and that is a large part of painting abstracts —to try and think of myself as nature itself, without a mind, a sophisticated mind that knows how to play a piano or drive a car… It is very spontaneous, I don’t think there was a lot of thinking about that. But, you know, my composition generally is spontaneous. Some people I talk to will ask, “Do you do sketches beforehand?” And I will say, “No, it is alla prima.” You know, I just love to play around with the paint and let the paint show me the way, and I sense they are not as impressed if they think I did it spontaneously. So I had thought once or twice of making sketches after I had done the painting. Do little sketches, show shapes, rub them out and change them, and say, “Oh yes, these are preparatory sketches.” List Of Paul McCartney’s Paintings Pintos in the sky with desert poppy 1991 Acrylic on canvas 152×120.5 cmHome territory 1990 Acrylic on canvas 101.5×86.5 cmMr. Magritte’s ruler 1995 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cmReclining woman 1987 Acrylic on paper 30×25 cmPigtail 1988 Acrylic on paper 30×25 cmRed eye 1988 Acrylic on paper 30×25 cmA handbag? 1988 Acrylic on paper 30×25 cm Is this Bernard Miles? 1988 Acrylicon paper 61×46 cm Blue face 1988 Acrylic on paper 61×46 cm White dream 1990 Oil on canvas 101.5×127 cm Father figure 1992 Acrylic on canvas 121.5×91.5 cm Big mountain face 1991 Acrylic on canvas 152.5×120.5 cm Red abstract white moon 1991 Acrylic on canvas 121.5×90.5 cm Mountain landscrape 1991 Acrylic on canvas 60.5×50.5 cm Is this a self-portrait? 1988 Oil on canvas 35.5×28 cm Andy in the garden 1990 Oil on canvas 60.5×90.5 cm Sea god 1990 Oil on canvas 76×61 cm Twin freaks 1990 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Yellow bow tie 1989 Oil on canvas 56×40.5 cm Scratch man 1989 Oil on canvas 51×40.5 cm Shock head 1989 Oil on canvas 46×35.5 cm Red yellow face 1989 Oil on canvas 56×40.5 cm Black scratch I 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Black scratch II 1994 Oil on canvas 151×121 cm Black scratch III 1994 Oil on canvas 151.5×121 cm Tara’s plastic skirt 1992 Acrylic on canvas 121.5×186 cm Unfinished symphony 1993 Oil on canvas 151.5×120.5 cm Yellow Linda with piano 1988 Oil on canvas 56×41 cm Large yellow face 1990 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cmChinaman 1990 Oil on canvas 121.5×75.3 cmOak apple twenties man 1988 Acrylic on canvas 35×45 cmPrehistoric antelope 1989 Acrylic on canvas 61×50.5 cmEgypt station 1988 Acrylic on canvas 40.5×51 cmLinda yellow red cross 1991 Oil on canvas 127×101.6 cmStanding Stone story 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cmChief rug 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Celtic eloquence 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Ancient connections 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm White Celts 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Celts 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Celtic fertility 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Yellow Celt 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Black singer 1991 Acrylic on canvas 152.5×120.5 cm Upturned critic framed 1988 Oil on canvas 61×45.5 cm Bowie spewing 1990 Oil on canvas 50.5×41 cm The Queen after her first cigarette 1991 Acrylic on canvas 56×46.5 cm The Queen getting a joke 1991 Acrylic on canvas 51×40.7 cm A greener Queen 1991 Acrylic on canvas 56×45.5 cm Patti Boyd 1989 Acrylic on canvas 91×70.5 cm Mr. Kipps 1988 Oil on canvas 61×64 cm Man o’ the sea 1988 Acrylic on canvas 76×61 cm Elvish me 1989 Oil on canvas 91.5X 91.5 cm Beach boy 1988 Acrylic on canvas 76×61 cm Red triangle sand 1992 Acrylic on canvas 101.5×101.5 cm Beach towels 1990 Acrylic on canvas 101.5×101.5 cm   Shark on Georgica 1993 Acrylic on canvas 91.5×92 cmUnspoken words 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cmDark faces 1991 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cmRobot and star 1995 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cmAbstract coloured twenties man 1989 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cmBlue mask 1989 Acrylicon canvas 61×50.5 cmWhite cross face 1990 Oil on canvas 121.5×61 cmJohn’s room 1990 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Green jacket with cross on shoulder 1989 Oil on canvas 81.5×81.5 cm Bald head 1990 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Insect face 1989 Oil on canvas 61×45.5 Green head 1988 Acrylic on canvas 101.5×76 cm Green kiss 1988 Acrylic on canvas 61×49.5 cm Oast kiss 1988 Acrylic on canvas 61×51 cm The kiss 1988 Acrylic on canvas 61×49.5 cm Blue kiss 1988 Oil on canvas 61×49.5 cm Grey head vision 1992 Acrylic on canvas 60.5×60.5 cm Housepaint clown 1992 Oil on canvas 91.5×71 cm Blue tooth 1991 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm Three blue faces in red sky 1990 Oil on canvas 91×91 cm Angry red face 1989 Oil on canvas 56×40.5 cm Skull face 1989 Oil on canvas 56×40.5 cm Scared red head 1990 Oil on canvas 76.2×60.9 Half red fog face 1990 Oil on canvas 51×46 cm Boxer lips 1990 Oil on canvas 40×30 cm Brains on fire 1994 Oil on canvas 121.5×121.5 cm C minor 1993 Oil on canvas 122×122 cm Key of F 1993 Oil on canvas 152×122 cm

Paul and Willem de Kooning in 1983 (left) and in 1984 (right).  De Kooning was a family friend and Paul and Linda would always visit him when they were on Long Island. It was probably watching de Kooning in action that inspired Paul to do his first canvases.

Long Island painting, East Hampton, 1990

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