"Happiness is a warm gun..." — Lennon–McCartney

"Sometime in late 1968, Charles Manson was listening to 'The Beatles,' to use the proper name of what’s most often called the White Album, and decided that 'Helter Skelter,' an upbeat rocker about a roller coaster at an English amusement park, was a call to black insurrection in America, to be set off by the brutal murders of an actress, a hairdresser, a coffee heiress, and several other innocents.
     The question that this horrible incident has always provoked was not just: How could anyone have thought anything so murderously insane? It was also: Why was Charles Manson listening with such hallucinative intensity to an album whose other highlights were John Lennon’s delicate bossa-nova ballad to his mother Julia, Paul McCartney’s lyrical invocation of Noël Coward, and George Harrison’s mystical celebration of the varieties in a box of English chocolates[…]
     These questions come to mind in reading David Shields and Shane Salerno’s heavily hyped biography Salinger (Simon & Schuster), not least because, in one of the most bizarre sections of a bizarre book, they themselves raise the issue of murder-by-bad-reading, in connection with the murder (fearful symmetry!) of the Beatles’ John Lennon by Mark Chapman, who happened to have hallucinated a motive within The Catcher in the Rye. Shields and Salerno’s own peculiar view of Salinger forces them to insist that Chapman was not just a crazy hallucinant, but in his own misguided way an insightful reader, responding to the 'huge amount of psychic violence in the book.'”
– Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
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"… all the puddles on the street"

"On a recent summer evening, on the second-floor suite of the Refinery Hotel, in midtown, Yoko Ono, who is eighty but looks sixteen, was perched on the edge of a couch wearing very dark black sunglasses, a military-style black denim jacket, and a fedora jauntily cocked to one side. She was about to walk into a party celebrating her new book, Acorn, a hundred haiku-like instructions ('Count all the puddles on the street / when the sky is blue.') accompanied by intricate dot drawings of organic, amoeba-like shapes that twist and turn lightly on the page….

     Rose Salane and Alice Yang, two twentysomething women wearing casually stylish outfits who are about to enter their senior year at Cooper Union, are waiting in line to have their books signed. They finagled invitations from a friend. Ono is one of their artist-heroes for her bold sixties performances, like 'Cut Piece.' As they edge closer to Ono, Yang remarks drily that Acorn 'feels like the stuff you do after a break-up.'...
     Salane withdraws a popsicle from her bag—clear blue with a touch of red. She places it on the table in front of Ono, who peers at it over her sunglasses, then looks up at its maker. 'It’s a sculpture,' Salane explains, 'made of rubber.' Ono touches it gingerly, and says thank you. Her assistant, who is seated next to her, picks it up. 'I’ll just put this away for now,' he says. Salane looks a bit dejected."
— Claire Barliant, The New Yorker
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"It took me years to write, will you take a look?" — Lennon–McCartney ("Paperback Writer")

"Philip Norman, a prolific biographer whose Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation is considered by many to be among the most absorbing and comprehensive biographies of the group, and whose John Lennon: The Life was widely admired, has been signed by Little, Brown and Company to write a biography of Paul McCartney.

     The book, which is due in 2015, is being written with what Mr. Norman described in an e-mail as Mr. McCartney’s 'tacit approval.'
     'He is not directly co-operating,' Mr. Norman wrote, 'but not objecting to my interviewing close friends, colleagues, etc.'
     In a way, Mr. McCartney’s consent to the project suggests the extent to which his relationship with Mr. Norman has warmed in recent years. When Shout! was published Mr. McCartney disdained it, partly because it advanced some unusual theories, including one in which the death of the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, which was ruled as accidental, was actually the result of a murder plot."
— Allan Kozinn, The New York Times (Arts Beat)
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"It was __ years ago today..."

B&W photo from: Breathing Books

"I grew up with these books [In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works by John Lennon], as they had been lying around the house from the time of their publications, 1964 and 1965. Luckily their warped, occasionally sick humour, and what would now be racism and sexism beyond the pale, did not scar me for life, but there were occasions when I wondered whether they would. No one seemed to mind at the time, in those innocent days when Lennon could do no wrong. If anyone got upset or asked for their money back I haven't heard of it. And as he later did with 'Revolution 9' a few years later, Lennon capitalised on the world's fascination with almost everything the group did to smuggle a work of subversive originality into the mainstream."

— Nicholas Lazard, The Guardian
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"9.00am, Friday 9 April 1965 […]. The first song released to the public from The Beatles' forthcoming 'Help!' album was the 'Ticket To Ride' single, released as Parlophone R 5265.
     The b-side was 'Yes It Is,' John Lennon's attempt to rewrite his earlier 'This Boy.'
     The single entered the UK charts on 15 April. The following week reached number one, where it remained for three weeks. In all it spent 12 weeks in the hit parade.
     'Ticket To Ride' was released on 19 April 1965 in the United States."
— The Beatles Bible
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Also on this day, in 1970, Paul McCartney told the world that The Beatles had decided to split up.

See a related post here...