Claudio story footnotes
FOOTNOTES
[1] Much, much later this experience would receive a name, autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR for short.
[2] Think about the deeper implications of a couple saying, “this is our song,” just as one example.
[3] There is currently a delightful Twitter trend of people finding their parents in the Saville Row street footage that appears at the end of Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary. Within the Beatles myth, there can never, ever be enough identifying and cataloging of everyone and everything who falls inside the borders of the grand saga.
[4] In the endless analysis of the decade, people often point to both the Manson murders and the end of the Beatles as the moment “the sixties ended.” It is an incredible, troubling revelation to learn that they, essentially, both happened on the same day.
[5] The next time a rock album would play such a significant role in a trial would be 1980’s Judas Priest civil suit wherein two teenage boys made a suicide pact — with one succeeding — after detecting hidden, backwards message instructing them to do so in the band’s songs. It’s an odd coincidence that in the early 80’s, Judas Priest ended up recording an album at Tittenhurst where Claudio had once confronted Lennon about secret messages in his music in 1971.
[6] For our purposes here, at its simplest definition, a myth is a “symbol that evokes and directs psychological energy” as Joseph Campbell once defined it. Myths are “public dreams” that express a culture’s fears, joys, hopes and anxieties and help us understand and place the present moment into a context we can understand.
[7] It’s a classic Bangs counterintuitive combo of absolute praise and derision, the kind that often cropped up when he wrote about Lou Reed, who is referenced several times in the review: “He’s among those increasingly rare pop squakers (Lou Reed’s another) who, no matter what else you might be able to say about. ’em, is at least SINCERE. John still believes, and is still placing himself in some measure on the line.”
[8] The man in the blue shirt visible in the majority of the footage is Dan Richter, a personal assistant of John and Yoko’s at the time whose previous job was performing the role of Moonwatcher in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Richter, a trained mime, was hired to perform the role of the main ape in the film’s opening sequence — the one that throws the bone up into the air. “I spent a lot of time at the zoo, in front of the chimp cage and the gorillas. I got all the footage of Jane Goodall’s work and watched it over and over again,” he told Vulture in 2008.
[9] Two notable omissions from the original presentation of the moment are 1) When Claudio asks about the line “Well, you can radiate everything you are” from “I Dig a Pony” and Ono interjects that she wrote that particular line, with Lennon agreeing, and then qualifying it all as “fun with words.” They cut around this moment very tightly, showing what was said right before and after it, indicating, perhaps, that there was extreme sensitivity around the idea that Yoko Ono wrote some Beatles lyrics in 1988. 2) A moment where Claudio makes Lennon laugh when he asks about the Hare Krishna line from his solo song “I Found Out.”
Claudio: Yeah. And your ‘Hare Krishna has nothing on you’?
John: [laughs] Yeah, well he don’t. I mean. You’re it.
[10] Nine years later, during Lennon’s press for he and Ono’s 1980 comeback album Double Fantasy, he was speaking in a much grander and magical way about the mechanics of his songwriting: “The real music, the music of the spheres, the music that surpasses understanding, comes to me and I’m just a channel. But in order to get that clear channel open again, I had to stop picking up every radio station in the world, in the universe.”
[11] If you’re ready to stop reading because you think I’m a deluded hippie no more rational than Claudio, hear me out and think about what music actually is and how it affects you: someone you do not know and have never met creates a series of sounds and combinations of words that, once recorded, you might eventually hear and it will bring you absolute joy, or cause your body to move wildly, or reduce to you to tears, or create an unbreakable bond between you and another person, often times achieved in about three minutes or so. If there is such a thing as magic in this world, this is a solid example of it.
[12] It’s pretty understandable on some level, I mean, remember, we have to admit: the Beatles were pretty good at their jobs.
[13] And don’t lots of John Lennon’s lyrics come off as aspirational self-talk rather than declarations of what he knows or has already achieved? Even in “Instant Karma,” with its rah rah motivational speaker-esque messages all being directed at “you,” doesn’t it feel like John is giving himself a pep talk there?
[14] The published letters in response to the piece were evenly split between “I’m sad that my hero has changed” to “This fucking writer has a lot of nerve.” Here’s a sample of the latter: “One would be hard pressed to find a finer example of a nonstory than Laurence Shames’s ‘John Lennon, Where Are You?’…Calling someone to task for being successful is a mid-Sixties cheap shot; so is asking him to live up to your artistic expectations. John Lennon has had a profound influence on me, too. But that doesn’t give me any right to point a pistol at his feet and say, ‘Create!’”
[15] There are reams of research and writing about Chapman’s possible motivations, the extent of his mental instability, and what happened each hour in New York leading up the shooting. If you are unfamiliar or want to get further into those details, all of that material awaits you elsewhere.
