Writers: Lennon-McCartney
Recorded: February 15, 1965
Released: April 19, 1965
11 weeks; no. 1

Lennon once claimed that “Ticket to Ride” — the first track the Beatles recorded for the soundtrack to their second feature film, Help!, on February 15th, 1965 — was “one of the earliest heavy-metal records.”

“It was [a] slightly new sound at the time, because it was pretty fuckin’ heavy for then,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. “If you go and look in the charts for what other music people were making, and you hear it now, it doesn’t sound too bad. It’s all happening, it’s a heavy record. And the drums are heavy, too. That’s why I like it.”

After playing mostly acoustic guitar on A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles for Sale, Lennon had picked up his electric guitar for “Ticket to Ride.” A chiming 12-string riff kicks off the song with a jangly psychedelic flourish, and the guitars strut and crunch through the verses over Starr’s grinding groove. The sound was probably inspired by bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Kinks, who were all exploding out of Great Britain at the time. But the Beatles were still ahead of the competition.

“Ticket to Ride” was the first Beatles recording to break the three-minute mark, and Lennon packed the track with wild mood swings. His singing and lyrics teeter between ambivalence and despair in the verses. The bridge is a powerful double-time burst of indignation (“She oughta think right/She oughta do right/By me”). Another surprise came in the fade, an entirely different melody and rhythm with the repeated line “My baby don’t care,” sung by Lennon at the upper, stressed top of his range. “We almost invented the idea of a new bit of a song on the fade-out,” said McCartney, who also played the spiraling lead-guitar part in the coda. “It was quite radical at the time.”

The Beatles now saw making records as a goal in itself — rather than just a document of a song — and were changing their approach to recording as they got more comfortable with the possibilities of the studio. Instead of taping songs as they would play them live, picking the best take and then overdubbing harmonies or solos, the band now usually began with a rhythm track and slowly built an arrangement around it. Considering that, “Ticket to Ride” took almost no time to record: The entire track, including the overdubs, was finished in just over three hours. “It was pretty much a work job that turned out quite well,” said McCartney. “Ticket to Ride” effectively became their new theme song: The title of their final BBC radio special was changed to “The Beatles (Invite You to Take a Ticket to Ride).”

Lennon always maintained that McCartney’s role in writing the song was minimal — “Paul’s contribution was the way Ringo played the drums” — while McCartney contended that “we sat down and wrote it together” in a three-hour session at Lennon’s Weybridge home. That might account for the different stories on where the title came from: An obvious explanation is that it refers to a train ticket. (When the Beatles belatedly filmed a promotional clip for the song in November 1965, they lip-synced the song against a backdrop of gigantic transportation passes). But Don Short, a British newspaper journalist who traveled with the Beatles, claimed that it dated back to the band’s days in the red-light district of Hamburg, Germany. “The girls who worked the streets in Hamburg had to have a clean bill of health, and so the medical authorities would give them a card saying that they didn’t have a dose of anything,” he said. “John told me he coined the phrase ‘a ticket to ride’ to describe those cards.” McCartney had a more innocent explanation: He said that it was a play on the name of the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight. One other possibility: On the day the Beatles recorded “Ticket to Ride,” Lennon passed his driver’s test.

Appears On: Help!

Main Writer: McCartney
Recorded: February 11, 1963
Released: December 26, 1963
11 weeks; no. 14 (B side)

When McCartney began hashing out the song that became “I Saw Her Standing There” on a drive to his Liverpool home one night in 1962, the first couplet he came up with was “She was just 17/She’d never been a beauty queen.” But when he played the song for Lennon the next day, “We stopped there and both of us cringed at that and said, ‘No, no, no, “beauty queen” is out,'” McCartney recalled. “We went through the alphabet: between, clean, lean, mean. . . .” Eventually, they settled on “you know what I mean,” which was good, he said, “because you don’t know what I mean.”

Though Lennon’s exact contribution is unclear (“I helped with a couple of the lyrics,” he said), “I Saw Her Standing There” is one of the songs that further cemented the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership. A September 1962 photo by McCartney’s brother Mike shows the pair in the front room of Paul’s house, working face to face with acoustic guitars, Lennon wearing the glasses he hated, scratching out lyrics in a Liverpool Institute notebook. McCartney wrote the song on his Zenith acoustic guitar, the first guitar he ever owned.

The original inspiration for the song was a girlfriend of McCartney’s at the time, dancer Iris Caldwell, who was in fact 17 when he first saw her doing the Twist — in fishnet stockings — at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton in December 1961. “Paul and I dated for a couple of years,” said Caldwell. “It was never that serious. We never pretended to be true to each other. I went out with lots of people. I was working away in different theaters at the time, but if I was back home we would go out. There were never any promises made or love declared.” Caldwell’s brother was Liverpool rocker Rory Storm, leader of the Hurricanes — whose drummer, Ringo Starr, would leave them to join the Beatles in August 1962. Caldwell said that McCartney intended to give “I Saw Her Standing There” to Storm, but Brian Epstein talked him out of it.

Under the title “Seventeen,” the song became part of the Beatles’ live act in 1962. Onstage, the tune would sometimes run for 10 minutes, with multiple guitar solos. McCartney borrowed the hard-charging bass line from Chuck Berry’s 1961 single “I’m Talking About You,” a staple of the band’s concerts. “I played the exact same notes as he did, and it fitted our number perfectly,” McCartney said.

When it came time for the Beatles to record their first album, Please Please Me, George Martin considered taping them live, possibly in front of the group’s home audience at the Cavern Club. Though he decided instead to set them up at EMI’s studios on Abbey Road, they chose a song list representative of the band’s live show. To set the mood, the album begins with McCartney’s blazing “one-two-three-faw!” count-off on “I Saw Her Standing There.” The Beatles outfitted the song, a veritable celebration of youth itself, with hand claps and the buoyant ooohs that would later show up on singles like “She Loves You.” The song, which also features Harrison’s first guitar solo on a Beatles record, was chosen as the B side for the “I Want to Hold Your Hand” single that topped the charts in America. It would also be one of the five songs that the Beatles performed on February 9th, 1964, on The Ed Sullivan Show before a television audience of 73 million people.

Lennon described “I Saw Her Standing There” as “Paul doing his usual good job of producing what George Martin would call a ‘potboiler,'” but the song would assume a greater meaning in his later life. In 1974, Lennon and Elton John made a bet that if Lennon’s “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” which featured John on harmony vocals and piano, made it to Number One, Lennon would join him onstage. When the song became Lennon’s first solo song to top the charts, he made good and appeared with John at his November 28th show at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Before the final song, Lennon said, “We thought we’d do a number of an old estranged fiance of mine called Paul,” and they closed the night with a rollicking version of “I Saw Her Standing There.” “I just wanted to have some fun and play some rock & roll,” Lennon said afterward. It would be the last song John Lennon ever performed in concert.

Appears On: Please Please Me

Main Writer: Lennon
Recorded: April 13, 1965
Released: July 19, 1965
13 weeks; no. 1

“Help!” was written to be the title track to the Fab Four’s second movie — a madcap action comedy originally conceived for Peter Sellers. But the note of desperation in the song was real. “I meant it,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970 (particularly lines like “And now my life has changed in oh-so-many ways/My independence seems to vanish in the haze”). “The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension.”

By 1965, Lennon was exhausted from the Beatles’ nonstop touring, recording and filming schedule. Off the road, Lennon felt trapped at his estate outside London with his wife, Cynthia, and young son, Julian. “Cynthia wanted to settle John down, pipe and slippers,” said McCartney. “The minute she said that to me, I thought, ‘Kiss of death.’ I know my mate, and that is not what he wants.” Lennon also was feeling “paranoid,” according to Harrison, about how he looked. “It was my Fat Elvis period,” Lennon said. “I was eating and drinking like a pig. I was depressed, and I was crying out for help.”

McCartney, in contrast, was taking full advantage of Swinging London, dating Jane Asher — a beautiful young actress from a prominent family who introduced him to high society — and seeing other girls on the side. John “was well jealous of [me] because he couldn’t do that,” said McCartney years later. “There were cracks appearing [in Lennon’s life with Cynthia], but he could only paste them over by staying at home and getting wrecked.”

Lennon wrote most of “Help!” by himself at his estate and then summoned McCartney to help him complete it, which they did in a couple of hours at one of their regular songwriting sessions in Lennon’s upstairs music room. Lennon originally wrote “Help!” as a midtempo ballad, but the Beatles decided to amp up the arrangement in the studio, with Harrison’s surf-guitar licks, Starr’s thundering tom-toms and the reverse call-and-response vocals that would become the song’s trademark. “I don’t like the recording that much,” Lennon confessed. “We did it too fast trying to be commercial.”

Making movies wasn’t as fun as it used to be either. “The movie was out of our control,” Lennon told Playboy. “With A Hard Day’s Night, we had a lot of input, and it was semirealistic. But with Help! [director] Dick Lester didn’t tell us what it was all about.”

The Beatles all admitted that it probably wasn’t the director’s fault that the band had so little input. “A hell of a lot of pot was being smoked while we were making the film,” Starr said. “If you look at pictures of us, you can see a lot of red-eyed shots; they were red from the dope we were smoking.”

“We were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period,” Lennon said. “Nobody could communicate with us. It was all glazed eyes and giggling all the time. In our own world.”

Appears On: Help!

Writers: Lennon-McCartney
Recorded: July 1, 1963
Released: September 16, 1963
15 weeks; no. 1

On the afternoon of July 1st, 1963, the Beatles were about to record “She Loves You” at EMI studios when all hell broke loose. As Geoff Emerick — then an assistant at Abbey Road, later the Beatles’ engineer — recalled, “The huge crowd of girls that had gathered outside broke through the front door. . . . Scores of hysterical, screaming girls [were] racing down the corridors, being chased by a handful of out-of-breath, beleaguered London bobbies.” The disruption may have been a blessing in disguise for the Beatles, who promptly banged out one of the most exuberant pop singles of all time. “[The chaos] helped spark a new level of energy in the group’s playing,” Emerick wrote.

Lennon and McCartney began writing “She Loves You” in a tour van, then did the bulk of the work in the Turk’s Hotel in Newcastle, sitting on twin beds with acoustic guitars. The breakthrough in the lyrics was the introduction of a third person, shaking up the typical I-love-you formula. The variation was inspired by Bobby Rydell’s “Forget Him,” a hit in the U.K. “It was someone bringing a message,” said McCartney. “It wasn’t us anymore. There’s a little distance we managed to put in it, which was quite interesting.”

Still, something was missing. “We’d written the song and we needed more,” Lennon said, “so we had ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ and it caught on. I don’t exactly know where we got it — Lonnie Donegan always did it. Elvis did that in ‘All Shook Up.'”

They completed “She Loves You” in McCartney’s house back in Liverpool. When his father heard the song, he said, “Son, there’s enough Americanisms around. Couldn’t you sing, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ just for once?” McCartney said, “You don’t understand, Dad. It wouldn’t work.”

For all the raw immediacy of its sound, the song also signaled a new level of sophistication for the band as songwriters and arrangers. “She Loves You” opens with the chorus instead of the first verse for extra punch — a George Martin suggestion. The final touch was the distinctive chord that ends the chorus — Harrison’s idea — which sounded “corny” to Martin. “He thought we were joking,” said McCartney. “But it didn’t work without it, so we kept it in and eventually [he] was convinced.”

The appearance by the Beatles on ITV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium on October 13th, 1963, culminating in the band’s performance of “She Loves You,” is often considered the tipping point of Beatlemania. The Beatles would go on to triumph after triumph as the 1960s went on, but in Great Britain, “She Loves You” remained the bestselling single of the decade.

Appears On: Past Masters

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I have included the 27 minute  episode THE AGE OF NONREASON by Francis Schaeffer. In that video 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)

Marilyn Monroe – Life After Death (Documentary 1994 – Full HQ)

At the 37 min mark in the above video Peter Max comments on Marilyn Monroe.

Featured artist today is Pauline Boty:

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Pauline Boty in Ken Russell’s film Pop Goes the Easel

(Monitor) Pop Goes The Easel – Ken Russell 1962

Pauline Boty i pop-art

Detail from The Only Blonde in the World by Pauline Boty

TateShots: Michael Bracewell on Pauline Boty

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PAULINE BOTY: POP ARTIST & WOMAN

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Friday, 27 April 2012

It’s a Man’s World I (1964) juxtaposes images of The Beatles, Albert Einstein, Lenin,Muhammed Ali, Marcel Proust, and other men, suggesting that despite male domination in Western society, the notion of masculinity itself might be fracturing.

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And what about Boty? Did her work deserve recognition? Would the panoply of pop art have been different had she lived? What we have to go on is largely the output of someone who was still learning, but she was certainly doing interesting things. Coon, who was given Boty’s paints by Goodwin, was struck by the colours of herpalette: ‘Cobalt Violet and Lemon Deep Yellow. If, like me, you went to pre-diploma in Northampton with a very classical training, where you were only allowed a palette of four colours including Burnt Sienna, coming across these vibrant colours was quite startling.’
With those colours Boty made big, loud images: ‘A generous, extrovert use of talent combined with a Gothic delicacy,’ says Coon. Mellor believes her originality lies in her painted collages – ‘that way of integrating ideas from collage while trying to stay with figurative painting’. Many of her pictures are brightly coloured scrapbooks of public and pop figures in ironic juxtaposition – Jean-Paul Belmondo, Johnny Hallyday, Profumo, Lenin, Lennon, Cassius Clay. In Scandal ’63 (now lost; it was commissioned anonymously), a painted representation of Lewis Morley’s photograph of Christine Keeler is mounted on male mug shots. In Cuba Si, a dark-haired girl with Boty’s face (interesting that even she objectfied herself) is surrounded by maps, Hispanic decorative fragments, images of Cuban insurgency. ‘It’s about thinking about history,’ says Mellor, ‘the dreamer meditating on images of dissent.’
Boty was also experimenting with images of women – ‘using women,’ says Blake, ‘in a way women hadn’t used women before’.(But as said Blake just lent one of her paintings to a mate, would he have done that with a Van gogh) It’s a Man’s World I and II is a diptych: I a jigsaw of male figures against an 18th-century landscape;  a pin-up swirl of naked female flesh. In the unfinished piece, Tom’s Dream, she was in the process of painting a woman, with pink painted nails, pulling a candy-floss chiffon nightie over her head; the shape of her crossed, upraised arms against the window frame behind her makes her look as though she were on a crucifix. ‘It was a new voice,’ says Mellor, ‘a new way of imagining. They’re pictures by someone wrestling with her own sexuality. It’s that that makes them so extraordinary. ‘Who’s to say how good she might have been? It reminds me of that Norman Mailer essay. Two nights after Kennedy was shot, someone at a party said to him: ‘The terrible thing is he was a great President.’ But Mailer said: ‘No. The terrible thing is we’ll never know.’We do know in my opinion that Boty would have been a great artist because she already was and Kennedy would not have been as regards his involvement in many underhand things like the Bay of Pigs .

Her illness took hold as her pregnancy progressed, but it wasn’t until after the baby was born in early 1966 that she became very ill. She had managed to look after the child to begin with – Nell Dunn remembers the baby in a basket at the end of the bed – but in her last dreadful months, her parents took over as she was shifted constantly between her house – a vast flat in the Cromwell Road – and the Royal Marsden. She became increasingly frail and was often in great pain. Despite this, many of her friends remained unaware of the seriousness of her illness until it was too late.
‘It was almost as if they covered it up,’ says a fellow student, Geoffrey Reeve, ‘as if the less they admitted it to themselves, the happier she was.’ The cancer was always hopeless, but a close friend, Natalie Gibson, remembers huge stacks of medical books in the bedroom and talk that the illness might take 10 years off her life. Others remember her despair. Massot, who visited every day, says: ‘At one point she asked me to bring her some pills, because she couldn’t stand it any longer. But I told Clive and he said no.’
Even in these last dreadful months, though, Boty continued to spar with life, spirited even under physical siege.
‘What shall I bring?’ asked Jane Percival, paralysed by a sense of inadequacy. ‘Bring that delicious cheese-cake,’ said Boty, even though she was too ill to eat it. She asked Natalie Gibson to bring veal and ham pie; others smuggled in ‘great big joints’.
Roger Smith remembers her exasperation at his diffidence. ‘She lost her temper; ‘For fuck’s sake, tell me what you’ve been doing,’ she shouted.’
Another time, painfully thin, she laughed and told him what a change it was to be slim: ‘It was typical of her, still managing to find something new in the experience,’ he says. The last time Jane Percival saw her, she was propped up in bed, which they’d brought down to the sitting-room, with a drawing-board on her knee, doing a sketch of the Rolling Stones.
A lot of people were in love with Pauline Boty. A lot remember her with fondness and nostalgia. She probably had many irritating habits, but they have been ironed out by the intervening years. She was an interesting artist, who led a legendary sort of life and died a tragic death. Her only fault, says Peter Blake, ‘was that she didn’t love me back.’
Pauline was put in her place from the very beginning. She was the youngest of four. She and her mother were the only girls in the home. Her stern father made sure she was well aware of her gender. He even disapproved of Pauline attending the Wimbledon School of Art
She lived for only a few weeks after the birth of her daughter. Her friends were devastated; many are muddled even now as to the nature of her illness. The death of a young, talented person is always horrifying, but in those pre-Aids days, the art world wasn’t used to it. The poet and translator Christopher Logue, who was a friend, remembers how ‘shocked and depressed’ he was by her death; it ‘made me cognisant with the fact that everyone has a death to face; which I would say is a fair step on from understanding your own position vis-a-vis this forthcoming event.’
Another friend, Penny Massot, says: ‘People just didn’t die.’ Even now, 27 years later, grown men with grey hair in dark houses in Notting Hill Gate cry at the sound of Pauline Boty’s name.

Pauline was Britain’s only notable female Pop art painter. Boty’s paintings and collages often demonstrated a joy in self-assured femininity and female sexuality, and expressed overt or implicit criticism of the “man’s world” in which she lived.

Her rebellious art, combined with her free-spirited lifestyle, has made Boty a herald of 1970s feminism.Boty had been  born in suburban south London in 1938 into a middle-class with intellectual aspirations and also a Catholic fear of God but had turned the tables on this ordin ary life and had lived her life as much as she could . It was a life of creativity, honesty and mistakes but above all a life of courage and decency.   Boty’s painting became more experimental. Her work showed an interest inpopular culture early on In 1957 one of her pieces was shown at the Young Contemporaries exhibition alongside work by Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Bridget Riley.

Boty was one of the stronger students in her class, and in 1960 one of her stained glass works was included in the traveling exhibition Modern Stained Glass organized by the Arts Council. Boty continued to paint on her own in her student flat in west London and in 1959 she had three more works selected for the Young Contemporaries exhibition. During this time she also became friends with other emerging Pop artists, such as David Hockney,Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips and Peter Blake.

While at the Royal College of Art, Boty engaged in a number of extracurricular activities. She sang, danced, and acted in somewhat risqué college reviews, published her poetry in an alternative student magazine, and was a knowledgeable presence at the film society where she developed her interest especially in European new wave

 cinema. She was also an active participant of the Anti-Ugly Action campaign, a group of RCA stained glass, and later architecture, students who protested against new British architecture that they considered offensive and of poor quality.

The two years after graduation were perhaps Boty’s most productive. She developed a signature Pop style and iconography. Her first group show, “Blake, Boty, Porter, Reeve” was held in November 1961 at A.I.A. gallery in London and was hailed as one of the first British Pop art shows. She exhibited twenty collages, including Is it a bird, is it a plane? and a rose is a rose is a rose, which demonstrated her interest in drawing from both high and low popular culture sources in her art (the first title references the Superman comic, the second quotes American ex-patriate poet Gertrude Stein).

The following spring Boty, along with Blake, Boshier, and Phillips, were featured in Ken Russell’s BBC film Pop Goes the Easel, which first aired on March 22, 1962. Although the documentary placed Boty at the center of the nascent British Pop art movement, unlike her male peers she did not get an opportunity to speak directly and intelligently about her work during the film.

Boty’s appearance on Pop Goes the Easel marked the beginning of her brief acting career. She landed roles in two Armchair Theatre plays for ITV and an episode of the BBC seriesMaigret. Boty also appeared on stage at the Royal Court in Day of the Prince and in Frank Hilton’s Afternoon Men at the New Arts Theatre. (Boty, a regular on ‘swinging 60s’ club scene in London, was also a dancer on Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go!). Although acting was lucrative, it distracted her from painting, which remained her top priority. Yet the men in her life encouraged her to pursue acting, as it was a more conventional career choice for women in the early 1960s. The popular press picked up on her glamorous actress persona, often undermining her legitimacy as an artist by referring to her physical charms. For example, Scene ran a front page article in November 1962 that read, “Actresses often have tiny brains. Painters often have large beards. Imagine a brainy actress who is also a painter and also a blonde and you have PAULINE BOTY.”

Her unique position as Britain’s only female Pop artist gave Boty the chance to redress sexism in her life as well as her art. Her early paintings were sensual and erotic, celebrating female sexuality from a woman’s point of view. Her canvases were set against vivid, colorful backgrounds and often included erogenous close-ups of red flowers, symbolic of the female sex. She painted her male idols—Elvis, French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo,

One short work of art gives one a better idea of Boty’s time than Darling does.Looking like an advert for Swinging London, Joe Massot’s 1965 short Reflections on Love mixes pop documentary with scenes devised by writer Derek Marlowe and (apparently) an uncredited, Larry Kramer. Though everything looks rather beautiful, it is such a terribly straight film, and considering the talent involved, and doesn’t really offer much love for the audience to reflect on. Then, this was the Sixties, when everything was new and exciting, and getting hitched in a registry office was daring and rad. O, how innocent it all seems. Massot went on to direct George Harrison’sWonderwall and later, Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains the Same. Kramer went on to script Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), and Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), before writing his novel Faggots in 1978. As for Marlowe, he wrote the classic double-agent spy thriller, A Dandy in Aspic, and followed this up with a series of idiosyncratic and stylish novels (from crime to Voodoo to Lord Byron), which are all shamefully out-of-print, and not even available as e-books – publishers please note.

 —as sex symbols, just as she did actresses Monica Vitti and Marilyn Monroe. Like Andy Warhol, she recycled publicity and press photographs of celebrities in her art. She exhibited in several more group shows before staging her first solo exhibition at Grabowski Gallery in the fall of 1963. The show was a critical success. However, Boty continued to take on additional acting jobs. She was a presenter on the radio program Public Ear in 1963-64, and in the following year she was typecast yet again in the role of ‘the seductive Maria’ in a BBC serial.

whom she met towards the end of her student days and had worked for.Their affair is said to have inspired the movie Darling (1966). Boty and Goodwin’s Cromwell Road flat became a central hang-out for many artists, musicians, and writers, including Bob Dylan (whom Boty brought to England) Hockney, Blake.