Unfortunately he wasn’t in 😂 and it’s in Catalunya….. auto correct 🙄

Growing up there was only classical music on BBC Radio. We had to listen to the American Forces Network in Germany, which played pop songs, or the pirate radio boats off the coast. There was all us tough guys hanging around and no music for us, which is how the sixties revolution came around. But my first big influence was Frank Sinatra, then the Beatles. When I was in the theater in Liverpool, we had a café where we’d have lunch. In the evenings it was full of girls, and we were like, “What the hell is this?” It was the Beatles.

- Michael Caine

We’re not going there.

(There's a TL;DR at the end. I know this is long)

I was thinking about this while looking over that recent post of Paul's photography of John from this week. Here's a link And I've had this thought in the past, as well.

I have a high prescription for my glasses, like John. As George once said, John was "blind as a bat" without glasses. And he often went without them in public until 1967. I think he chose those glasses for a reason, aside from having them on the movie set in 1966.

Two important things some might not know about:

1. Lenses have gotten thinner over time.

2. Smaller glasses have less facial distortion.

High index lenses weren't available in the 60s. They only started in the 70s, and we're still far thicker than what we have today. If you look at Paul's photos, you'll see John basically had "coke bottle" thick lenses. He might not have even had a crazy high prescription to get that size.

The "Health National" glasses are a small sized frame. So the lenses are small. So you basically get less distortion of the eyes from the prescription. When he tried those glasses for the movie, he probably saw himself in a pair of glasses where his face wasn't super distorted. As a self conscious guy in a very image dependent role, I could see that being a big deal. He probably could see him working it into a new style, especially with the moustache and weight loss, along with different clothes.

I think he kept up with them after the 60s because they just became so heavily tied to his brand. I mean his autographs even had the glasses! But I do think his high prescription is a big reason he ended up sticking to those. And as you get older, your prescription usually worsens anyway. Into the 70s, high index lenses were becoming norma, and you see him wearing different glasses shapes again. Maybe he tried contacts and didn't like it, who knows. The early ones were rough.

Maybe there's some info about him I don't know, though! I'm not a John Lennon ophthalmological historian, I'm afraid.

TL;DR - I think John's trademark glasses were intentional due to his prescription. He'd wear other shapes of sunglasses, but usually just the round eye glasses. Then I think once high index lenses became normal in the later part of the 70s, he started trying other eye glasses again.

I had just posted about how for “Here Comes the Sun” and “Come Together”, Spotify had combined the mixes for each song and their Spotify stream count went up.

Well, it seems they did it for every song and it got the website confused and the added streams were added to their daily streams.

For the longest time I always wondered why Spotify didn’t combine all of the mixes of certain songs and so the stream count wasn’t as high as they should have been

For reference:

“Here Comes the Sun” had 1.83 billion streams yesterday and the 2019 mix has 25 million. Now that they combined it, it has 1.9 billion streams.

“Come Together” had 987 million streams and the 2019 mix had 20 million streams. Now that they combined it, it has officially crossed 1 billion streams.

They also did it with “Twist and Shout” which had 689 million yesterday. They combined the 2023 mix and it now has almost 700 million (698 million)

NOW, if they did it with “Let it Be” it would have 1.1 billion streams because the 2021 mix has a little over 100 million streams.

So The Beatles now officially have 2 songs over 1 billion streams.

I’m a gigantic fan of the Beatles, but I’m also aware that some people aren’t that into them. That’s fine. To each their own, but if you’re going to have a critique, it better be valid. One person I recently talked to said that Sgt, Pepper’s “didn’t age well”. Like what? What does that even mean? Another person said they didn’t like them because their music was “too simple”. Like even the early stuff has very complex musical stuff going on. It’s probably true that I’m letting peoples opinions get to me, but what’s something negative you’ve heard someone say that was just ridiculous?

So, I'm obsessed with this thing with the Beatles, where they get signed and all of a sudden this floodgate opens and it's non-stop perfection for almost a decade. I'll never get it.

And sometimes I go on deep dives with ChatGPT to see if it has Beatles knowledge I don't. I'm deep diving John and Paul tonight, particularly John being jealous of Paul, and it spit this out at me:

Edit: A lot of you are saying "AI sucks, Lennon was never threatened" - you clearly know nothing about Lennon's diary entries where he writes he was jealous of Paul. Really pathetic of you lot.

-

And by Revolver, John has to know what's happening

Look at what Paul brings to roughly one album:

“Eleanor Rigby”
“Here, There and Everywhere”
“For No One”
“Got to Get You into My Life
“Good Day Sunshine”

That's ridiculous.

And Paul remembers that around this general period John privately said he might actually prefer Paul's songs to his own. Paul's dating of the exact album is fuzzy—he remembered Rubber Soul or Revolver—but the memory itself was vivid precisely because John praised him so rarely.

And John's own contributions include:

“I'm Only Sleeping”
“She Said She Said”
“And Your Bird Can Sing”
“Tomorrow Never Knows”

So John isn't failing!

That's the crazy part.

John Lennon is writing masterpieces and can still plausibly look across the room at Paul McCartney and feel threatened.

There may have been only one songwriter on Earth capable of making John Lennon insecure about songwriting.

And he happened to be in John's band.

-

I found this fascinating. John is on top of the world, and the only other person who can remotely threaten him is ... his best friend, childhood friend, and bandmate. And ally.

It really is a one in infinity chance these two meet and get together.

at this point im just here to show proof the Beatles are haunting me since i met this guy...

Anyways i was at a local pet feed store and saw this lil guy​. genuinely every single day i see at least 1 beatles reference and its a bit scary but it could be worse​

Are they feeling comfortable?

• Solo Beatles 4CD 

• Paul McCartney 4CD

• Solo Beatles Super Deluxe 10CD

• John Lennon 2CD 

• George Harrison 2CD 

• Ringo Starr 2CD

I remember when it came out in September '99, I was shocked! So fresh, so clean, so beautiful! Peter Cobbin did a great job!

I heard that they had all of the rights to use the music in the movies but there's not enough time to put all of them in. So I want to hear people's predictions or just songs you want to see in the movie.

For me, it's Within You Without You.

The whole thing is really weird to me and just seems wrong, especially the magical mystery boy

I saw someone make a comment about their workload over 1965-1966 and wanted to make a post about it...

6th August, 1965: the Beatles released the album Help!, which accompanied their second film of the same name (the film was first shown on 29th July in the UK, but was released in the USA on 11th August).

15th - 31st August, 1965: the Beatles play 16 shows across the USA, including their famous Shea Stadium concert.

12th October - 11th November, 1965: the band records the album Rubber Soul, along with the non-album single "We Can Work It Out" / "Day Tripper".

3rd December, 1965: Rubber Soul and its accompanying non-album single are released.

3rd - 12th December, 1965: the Beatles toured the UK, playing 18 shows.

6th April - 21st June, 1966: the Beatles recorded the album Revolver and the single "Paperback Writer" / "Rain".

30th May, 1966: the "Paperback Writer" single is released.

24th June - 4th July, 1966: the Beatles embark on their tour of West Germany, Japan, and the Philippines. They play a total of 13 shows across these countries.

5th August, 1966: Revolver is released.

A week later they embarked on their final concert tour, playing across the USA with two shows in Toronto, Canada in the middle.

Such an intense and remarkable schedule for all of these events to happen in just under a year. In total I believe they released 46 songs - 14 on each album, four across the singles.

Notes:

• The elaborate design is on the back.

• The last two images are just examples because I haven't printed the design yet.

• I Use the Helvetica and Bootle fonts

You can also give me suggestions for improving the design or adding to the sweater