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My White Album

6:00 AM GMT 28/07/2008

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Glass Onion

Daily LSD use behind him, Lennon wakes up and smells the coffee. Surprise: it’s bitter.

Neal Casal (New Jersey songster):
“It’s that classic vicious Lennon cynicism laced with surrealism, you know? He was starting to demistify The Beatles for the first time, realising what a monstrous phenomenon they’d become. I think he was completely freaked out by all that and was writing about it – a totally new kind of song really. In 1968, you could hear things turning dark, and here was Lennon signalling the end of the whole thing.

“I don’t think anyone wrote about being sick of things better than John Lennon. “Fixing a hole in the ocean?” – what a line! The ultimate pointless exercise. And “standing on the cast iron shore” – it’s the name of a stretch of the Mersey’s river bank, but it sounds even worse than that. It sounds like the grimmest place you could possibly be. Meanwhile, he’s perpetrating treachery: you can take that Strawberry Fields and bin it ‘cos I did that but I’m not sure if I believe in it any more. I’m totally pissed now and I’m unapologetic about it. Here you go, motherfuckers, this is what we’re talking about this year.

“As a musician, it’s easy to find The Beatles daunting. They came from a tough background, a hard-working band that played every night – 3, 4, 5 sets a night. I don’t think 99 per cent of bands working now can even relate to what those guys had to go through. And for them to take those experiences and turn them into what they did, and to just continually open their minds year after year, staying inspired, being inventive and constantly coming up with new ways to explore their music while still keeping an immediacy. They would open an entire universe to you in 2 and half minutes. They had it covered from the haircuts to the very last note on the very last record. No-one else has ever been that good.”

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Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 28/07/2008


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Neal Casal , The Beatles

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