The Last Bass Outpost

"Really? I thought Sgt. Pepper was stale the day I first heard it. Different strokes."

It was - and still is - magical to me. Mind-opeening like a trip holding hands with Alice in Wonderland. I heard Magical Mystery Tour before I heard Sgt. Pepper (but the two came from the same sessions or at least the same period and could have well been one album) - I was seven or eight years old, my nine year older brother had the EP - and stuff like Fool on the Hill and Your Mother Should Know mesmerized me. Lennon's rallying call at the start of Magical Mystery Tour gave me shivers. The music was to me as radical a transition from what I had heard before as color TV was to black & white TV. It was no less than cinemascopic.

I know part of this was once discussed in another thread before.  But through the years I sometimes was puzzled when I saw criticism of "Fool On the Hill" and "Your Mother Should Know."  It seemed to me that these were two unique songs by Paul.  They actually were mesmerizing.  That is true.  That could be said for the whole of the "Magical Mystery Tour" album itself, IMO., although it wasn't actually designed to be an album in the strictest sense. 

My mother was also born in 1930.  She did actually like the Beatles okay, but leaned more toward other music.  My father never could fathom why anyone would like the Beatles.  then after "Back in the U.S.S.R. he actually seemed to believe they were Communists.  My sister  did like especially some of the early Beatles, but her favorite genre has always been R & B.  I can remember when I was a teenager one of her friends I had never seen before and never saw again since popped in and attempted to stage some kind of musical intervention on my behalf one day.  The gist of it all is I should seriously consider R & B much more and rock much less.  Then many years later, when my sister's daughter came on the scene, she attempted to convert everyone to hip-hop.  Out of all music,though, I think she disliked the Beatles the most

However, among my friends almost all of them viewed the Beatles and the Allman Brothers as being the top bands in the world.  In addition to that, I also liked Hendrix and Cream.

Some of the Beatles music was outdated by the early 70s. OTOH I think their straight ahead rock is still fresh now and I still love it.

The flip side of the people saying people who liked them in the 60s were deluded, are the people claiming that everybody loved them and that you're an asshole who needs to shut up if you don't acknowledge that they were the greatest ever and that all music today comes from them. Again, people know what they liked or didn't like. The Beatles weren't universally loved by people in my generation, much less our parents.

The Beatles weren't popular at all with a great number of people.  Even when they were supposedly reaching their peak.  Also, it is absurd to exaggerate their importance.  However, I think one of my pet peeves is other people trying to tell me what I'm thinking as if somehow they know what is going on in my brain better than I do.  I know what I'm thinking and why I like or dislike certain kinds of music.  So trying to tell people that they liked the Beatles because they were duped into it is taking being presumptuous to quite an extreme.  People may not know precisely why they like a certain kind of music.  But it often has to do with how it makes them feel--how it affects their emotions.  Usually they don't need another person to try to help them understand that.  I think much of the time when we like music it happens spontaneously and isn't even the result of conscious decisions.  Or maybe we are all really being subliminally manipulated and can't decide which bands we like or dislike on our own. 

Nice video. Klaus Voorman makes it look easy. 

That song solidified my already negative feelings about John Lennon.

The Beatles probably made more life-decision mistakes after the band broke up than when they were together.  In my opinion, Ringo is the only ex-Beatle who came out smelling like a rose.  As for that particular song, he strongly objected to it.   He said something like --"That's enough, John." 

John Lennon stating years later that this song was really about himself rather than Paul McCartney, is, of course, absurd.  Just as absurd as George Harrison saying "Something" was really a song about God rather than Pattie Boyd. 

Ted Turner was playing acoustic guitar on this song on some of the takes, possibly just on the final version on the "Imagine" album.  He also played on "Crippled Inside," the album's second track. 

https://www.jambase.com/article/the-beatles-john-lennon-george-harrison-in-newly-surfaced-video

I may have mentioned this before. About 1996-97, fooling around with my old slothead EB-0L after a gig, a neighbor made a noise complaint. Cops came and thought there was a party with a loud boombox b/c the awnings over my front door and windows were literally moving up and down. Nope, just me, the bass and my Mesa rig. 

I can imagine!

I had my EB-0F for part of the same time as my EB-0L, the longer scale was noticeably clearer but had just as much boom.

I've had the police come many times during band practices, but never when I'm just playing alone.  When it's just me, I usually don't turn up much.  That's a funny story, though, and it isn't hard for me at all to imagine how that happened.   

In that case, we're using the same term to describe basses that are almost exact opposites.

The SB-300 I played was clear in tone but low in output and had almost no sustain. Lifeless. An EB-0 is muddy, high output, unfocused unless you use some radical EQing, and has tons of sustain since it will drive any amp into overdrive at all but the lowest setting.

A totally accurate description of an EB-0.  When playing one, pets, small children and fragile objects need to be kept at a safe distance.  Depending on the volume and, of course, what it's being played though, it has the capability of shaking the foundations of the earth.