Publisher at The American Bystander
is Blogmom of Hey Dullblog. His novels and parodies have sold 1.25 million copies in 25 languages. He lives in Santa Monica, CA, and runs The American Bystander all-star print humor magazine.
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Everybody’s favorite Liverpudlians (except perhaps for Mrs. Marsden) perform “Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey”, “I’m a Loser,” and “Boys” for a remarkably restrained London studio audience, on October 7, 1964. According to the internet, the audience were members of the Beatles Fan Club. I think this footage might have been colorized after the fact?
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Beep beep yeah!
It looks colorized. It has that creamy colorized look.
Not the usual “Paul and George on the left, John on the right” lineup. And I think John’s vocal mic was supposed to pick up his acoustic guitar? I didn’t see a cable on it.
Nice to see John’s harp before he finally got embarrassed and tired of it.
Tasteful English production values. The Shindig dancers have a real art school look with those heavy sweaters. In the U.S., the producers would have had them in bikinis or something.
Watching John grin his way through I’m A Loser my first impression was “Ah, another Lennonesque cry for help from the depths of Beatlemania!” but then I thought “Nah, it’s just them trying to write one of those ‘woe is me’ American country laments like Act Naturally. Or maybe both impressions are correct.
@HologramSam, I think it’s definitely one of John’s earliest songs about being unhappy. He would tell us that it was specifically because of Beatlemania, but I think there’s a bit more to it than that. By August 1964, John realized that being the most famous pop musician didn’t solve whatever made him want to be the most famous pop musician in the world. And so began the rest of his life.
It’s forgotten how good a pop songwriter John was before he became an “artist” in 1968. Yes, his melodies are more horizontal than Paul’s, but how many other rock musicians consistently wrote melodies like this? I count only four: Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Ray Davies, and young Pete Townshend.
And here’s a sneak peek from Mr. Jackson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UocEGvQ10OE
During “I’m A Loser”, it looks like Paul is helping John with the lyrics, more than merely singing along. I’ve read that John was notorious for forgetting lyrics, and if you watch, Paul is looking at John, clearly mouthing the words to him.
I first saw this on YouTube, and it was in black and white.
I WONDERED ABOUT THIS TOO! 🙂
“Beneath this mask/I am wearing a tie”
I’ve always thought “I’m A Loser” was an attempt at making a “Tears of a Clown” by the Miracles.
If John was singing about himself, surely it was subconsciously.
The instrumentals seem to be prerecorded. If you listen and watch, when they come to the instrumental break in I’m A Loser, right at the point where it goes from harmonica to guitar, John pulls back from the brace but there’s an extra harmonica note.
Cringeworthy moment from John during KC with the mocking disabled individuals noise that he would do occasionally. It’s in poor taste today and was in poor taste then. Certainly not funny (though he was trying to get George to crack up)
As someone with cerebral palsy, I noticed. I always notice. That is the world we live in.
When people asked me why I hate Trump so much, I say simply, “Disabled people are the first ones they kill.”
I just can’t reconcile in my own head why he would do this. It’s beyond belief revolting especially on a stage during a concert. I don’t feel this is solely the biting cruelty that would surface often…but rather a way he was coping with perhaps a phobia he had of those who were noticeably different in some way. And his reaction to it was bizarre. Remember him discussing Julia’s boyfriend John Dykins and how John would say derogatory things about a disorder that he had. So his issues with this go back pre Beatles
Paul, Brian etc must have spoken to him about this.
Paul would probably be the last one to talk to him about it, I think. There is a picture of him giving John a hand with his cripple routine, and he admitted that they both were mean to ‘Twitchy’.
As for John doing this onstage, it may have been an FU to parents who brought their disabled children to concerts in the hope that the Beatles could cure them. He found this appalling.
In 1972, John headlined the One to One benefit concert for the mentally disabled.
@Dave, our cultural sensitivity towards such things is so very recent. Poking fun at disabled people was as common as racial/ethnic humor, and springs perhaps from the same fears and insecurities.
There is I think something very deep and even biological going on with making fun of the sick, the weak, the disabled. Culling the herd? Testing the strength of a suspect individual?
But this is, after all, the point of civilization–to think more deeply and live more wisely than a mere upright monkey stumbling across the savannah. To the degree that its disabled are not cared for, that culture is still savage; and the joke is a knife sheathed in words. Like racial/ethnic humor, there is something lethal in it, to be sure.
Yes. My father was a WWII prisoner of war. When he was liberated from a German camp he weighed 95 lbs. He never really recovered from his PTSD. My nephew, profoundly disabled because of a preventable accident at birth, cannot speak or read, and can barely walk. He’s 52 now. My wife is a teacher. I was a journalist. I’ve got all sorts of reasons for my hatred.
I hated him for decades before he became #45, but my hatred deepened when he assumed the role of “statesman”.
When I was a kid and I’d see Lennon do his spastic act, I saw it as a parody of Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant Igor. I thought it was harmless because there was all sorts of comedy around one-eyed, peg-legged pirates or grotesque witches, or physically eccentric people like Dr. Strangelove. But looking back now, I understand what John was doing, and I don’t really like it.
I agree with Dave that it was a phobia. I remember one of the biographies. Cynthia had just given birth to Julian and noticed a birthmark on the baby’s head, and she was terrified of how John would react when he saw the “imperfection”. And when John wrote Crippled Inside I think he was trying to communicate his loathing and fear that he too was disabled. That his particular disability was buried deep, like a cancer.
That’s a really insightful comment, Sam. I agree that Lennon’s mockery seems like a phobia rooted in self-loathing. If he’d lived longer, I wonder if he would have had an opportunity to deal with it in a constructive way.
He’s cute though. I forgive him.