Skip to main content

Volume 9 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

And then we reach 1980.  It's been a decade since they broke up, and as the decade progressed there were more and more opportunities for them to collaborate.  Ringo seemed to be the impetus for a lot of those collaborations including at least 3 songs that would've been released on his Stop And Smell The Roses release had Mark David Chapman not chosen to close off this chapter by murdering John Lennon.  

With the exception of the songs from McCartney II, the albums these songs were pulled from were released after Lennon's death (Somewhere in England in May, Ringo's Stop And Smell the Roses in October, and Lennon's posthumous Milk and Honey in 1984).  

Lennon was clearly settling into a new happy direction in his life and writing beautiful and personal songs that further highlight the tragedy of his death.  John Lennon had always been the most direct and upfront in his songs, and the songs on Milk and Honey, with about half being Yoko Ono tunes, do just that.

It's unclear why Paul disbanded Wings, but McCartney II just features him and is certainly not a Wings album as it features some lo-fi choices and the prescient and entirely fabulous "Temporary Secretary"

George Harrison rewrote the lyrics to "All Those Years Ago," after Lenoon's assassination, but Somewhere in England is a middling one in my opinion.  Yes, "All Those Years Ago" is a great tune.  Even better Somewhere in England also features the beautiful "Life Itself" and a really good cover of Hoagy Carmichael's "Baltimore Oriole" (not included in this project), but the rest is just sort of so-so.

Volume 9-44 Minutes

Albums:

  • Milk and Honey
  • McCartney II
  • Somewhere In England
  • Stop And Smell The Roses
Songs:

  1. Borrowed Time (JL)
  2. Life Itself (GH)
  3. One Of These Days (PM)
  4. Nobody Told Me (JL)
  5. Waterfalls (PM)
  6. Sure To Fall (In Love With You) (RS)
  7. Coming Up (PM)
  8. Temporary Secretary (PM)
  9. You Belong To ME (RS)
  10. I'm Stepping Out (JL)
  11. All Those Years Ago (GH)
  12. Grow Old With Me (JL)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"That's Scaughtland for ya!"

The United Kingdom Up at the top of that map, basically the top half, is a tiny nation with a big footprint.  With roughly the same population as Minnesota, Scotland has a land mass the size of South Carolina, yet there are more people in the United States that have Scottish and/or Scotch-Irish ancestry than live in Scotland. My family is one of those. In the course of growing up, I was indoctrinated to celebrate my Scottish ancestry (primarily by my grandmother but we'll talk about that later).      So a year ago, my wife took a trip with her mother to Japan.  I looked at the pictures that she posted, and when I'd talk to her on the phone, I noticed something.  She was happy.  This is not to say she's always unhappy, but this was different.  She was having a good time, engaged in the world, curious, and happy-like no matter what the challenge.  And traveling to Japan with her mother posed some interesting challenge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keith Jarrett: The Koln Concert and What it says about Creativity

Life is about listening.   Sometimes what life is saying comes at you in in strange ways.   On Friday, I was reading this story on Salon.com and it mentioned that few jazz musicians have the same clout as they once did.  Of the few who still draw considerable audiences, it mentioned Keith Jarrett .   I don't know Keith Jarrett, but I've been trying to school myself on jazz for the better part of a year now.   Since I'm relatively new to this jazz thing, I want to make sure I'm really listening to what people think of as "great."   With that in mind, I bought a book:   The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings .   Under Keith Jarrett they mention the album,  The Koln Concert as his best album (part of any enthusiasts' "Core Collection").   So, when I saw the album while perusing Mecca Records in ABQ, I knew I had to buy it.   Life was talking. The Koln Concert  (So, go ahead and ...
2 comments
Read more

The Day the War Began

Originally written shortly after the protest in 2003, an audio of this was broadcast on KUNM on the year anniversary of the war's inception. Hopefully, reasons for writing about this will become fewer and fewer. The Day the War Began.             Three deep and two dozen across, the Albuquerque police department blocked eastbound Central Avenue. They wore Army fatigues, gas masks and helmets, held black batons, yet had no badges or name tags that identified each as a person, an individual. Judging from the surrounding army of police cars and police horses, and the four cruisers that closed Central further to the east, their function was clear. Not only do the authorities want to silence dissent, but they want to keep those not politically vocal from becoming aware of dissent at all.             One of the cops held what looked like a toy water cannon and swung it back and fo...
Post a Comment
Read more