A Beatle related drawing a week for a year... "There's
nothing you can do that can't be done"...but this is something I can do. I'm a big Beatle fan, and a working caricaturist
for thirty years. I thought a nice way to combine the two is to steal a page from "Julie & Julia" and commit
to doing one new image related to the Beatles per week for the next year. I'm not doing one a day in strict homage, as I don't
think I could keep that pace for the next 365 days. 52 pieces of art seems more realistic, and might allow for more time intensive
media occasionally (painting, etc.) , though I expect most of the images will be ink on paper. There will also be non Beatle
drawings here on the blog, and my definition of "Beatles related" is elastic (if not fully Plastic Ono;-). So, key
people and family members outside the Fab Four will appear. In some rare instances, I may work
digitally which means there will be no "original" per se, but apart from that, most of these images will be available
for purchase. Email me if you are interested, and comment at will. Some Beatles links when
you're done here:
The Beatles' own website
BeatleLinks - The Beatles Internet Resource Guide
Artwork of Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe for sale
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Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Everybody Must Get Stoned On August 28th, 1964, Bob Dylan visited the Beatles in their suite at the Delmonico
Hotel in New York, after the band had played Forest Hills. He brought them a gift of “something new”: marijuana.
Peter Brown gives this account in his book : “The Love You Make”:
Dylan lit the joint, gave them
instructions on how to smoke it, and passed it on to John. John took it from him but was too scared to try it himself and
passed it on to Ringo, whom he called "my royal taster". Ringo Held onto the joint and finished it himself while
Dylan and (Al) Aronowitz rolled half a dozen others.
Ringo started laughing first and set the others off. Like many novice
pot smokers they found many trivial things funny. Dylan watched for several hours as the Beatles broke each other up, sometimes
with something authentically funny, often at nothing more than a look or a word or a pause in the conversation. For a while
they all laughed at Brian, who kept saying, "I'm so high I'm on the ceiling. I'm up on the ceiling..." After the
smoke had cleared out they allowed a room-service waiter to come in to clear the dining room and found everything he did reason
to convulse them with laughter. Months later "Let's have a laugh" became the code for "Let's get stoned".
(not pictured: Mal, Neil & Victor Mamoudas)
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Friday, May 21, 2010
Let's get 
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|  | A few quick sketches of some cast memebers of one of the greatest shows ever to run on network TV: LOST. Pictured
here are Terry O'Quinn as Flocke, (Old Smokey), Josh Holloway as Sawyer, and Ken Leung as Miles (who I also enjoyed during
his run on The Sopranos). Can't wait for the finale, in 48 hours... |
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
I believe in Zimmerman When the Beatles cannonballed their way out of Liverpool and Hamburg, their influences
were powerful, and almost all American: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis, Roy Orbison, Fats Domino and the Everly Brothers
come to mind.
But once they became an international sensation and were on their way to becoming the greatest and
most influential band in human history, there was one main contemporary influence. He was working on the folk side leaning
to rock at the same time they were on the rock side leaning to folk (and many other variations that broadened the limits of
popular music): Robert Allen Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan.
The Beatles heard Dylan, and Dylan heard the
Beatles, and out of that came the musical legacy of the 60s. Bob steered his ship of folk off course to include a sense of
humor and psychedelia, and the Beatles brought pop music to new heights of import and substance.
John’s writing
showed an occasional strong influence, and that opened the doors for him to delve deeper into his own psyche and take it places
even Bob never knew. George would hang with Bob & the Band in Woodstock, and find the rapport with his mates lacking when
he returned to the sniping of the “Let It Be” sessions. George returned to record on a few occasions with Bob,
and also welcomed Bob to his Concert For Bangla Desh.
Later Lennon would record a biting rebuttal to Bob’s
embrace of Christianity that was “Serve Somebody”. John in the Dakota, reminded us to “Serve Yourself”.
You mattered if Lennon took the time to take a swing at you.
Here’s a salute to the guy from Hibbing, MN,
born on May 24th! This was drawn from the Scorcese doc “No Direction Home”, the performance of “Like a Rolling
Stone”, 5/21/66, facing the lions at Newcastle in the persona that Allen Ginsberg later called a “methedrine clown”.
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Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Blues for LenMac
| As I noted below, I’m enjoying the Carlin McCartney bio, and I’ve just
got to the point where John is killed in 1980. Back in the Beatles, Lennon was for Paul “the one critic
who truly mattered to him had granted his approval and everything else was just everything else”
As
a Lennonist, I guess I was so wrapped up in Lennon, that I tended to view McCartney in terms of his partner. Paul was famously
awkward in some of his comments to the press at John’s death: “It’s a drag, innit?”
But
the Gemini Paul was always back and forth on John: proving he could stand on his own two feet musically, but always with one
eye out for his old partner’s opinion. John’s death was an echo of his mother Mary’s death that pushed him
into the Beatles, and an echo of the band’s crumbling as well.
Ames is eloquent on this point:
“Paul
wanted, maybe even craved, that interplay, that connection to the one person he trusted to see into his soul and separate
the brilliant from the stupid. Paul needed that now more than ever.
And now it was gone, torn away so abruptly so brutally,
before they ever had a chance to talk it over to set things straight." |
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
james paul mccartney I am a Lennonist as a Beatle fan (and was before December 1980), but that said, it’s
time to show some love for Sir Paul. I’m currently reading Peter Ames Carlin’s bio of Paul: Paul McCartney,
A Life. It suffers like all biographies of living persons, from the wariness of that person peering over
the writer’s shoulder, I think. Paul emerges as the canny businessman, and Lennon’s mirror image in personality
as well as the way they held their guitars. While John was famously sharp & nasty, he had a tender heart in many encounters.
And while Paul was always eager to handle the PR aspects of the business, and play the lovable fab as needed for the press,
he could also be bloodless when he needed to be. I caught this image from the Anthology, episode 6 on the DVDs, Paul doing
his Little Richard whoop (“a bit of the old woogily woo” as Dana Carvey once put it so well in his impersonation).
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