Julian Lennon just posted this a few hours ago:
Article on Cynthia Lennon:
… and the average age of the Rolling Stones is now higher than that of the Supreme Court justices! The artists we loved and personalities we followed in our youth are… quite simply… becoming old men and women.
A weird thought, if a banal one.
That tribute by her son was pretty darn touching. Gave me a lump in my throat.
While sad, she was 76 and Julian himself is 52. Sounds like she had a good long life.
I like to think of the whole thing in light of what The Beatles meant in the world back when those guys and these women were young kids. Maybe it was the power of radio & tv that shifted the level of popularity up in a generation, from the localized hysteria for Frank Sinatra to the national exuberance for Elvis to the worldwide overwhelming status of those four guys.
I remember a story from a guy who played on a Sgt. Pepper session: showing up late at night, which is when the guys worked because their lives were reversed from normal, and finding them all dressed in costumes and asking if they were going to a party and being met with blank looks because that’s how they dressed in their weird world.
None of us can imagine having to deal with that degree of attention. Not for the guys. Not for their girlfriends and wives.
I remember watching a talk show with Ringo and him trying to explain how different it was for the group. He couldn’t because words can’t describe how obsessed the entire world was with them.
Still seems young to me. My dad is 78 and has more energy than I do. I’m sure not ready to lose him yet.
She didn’t have a good long life. That’s the point. She was young and fell for a boy that was trouble, got knocked up; he beat her physically and was horrible to Julian, threw his affairs in her face and didn’t provide economically for Julian. She said at the end of her book something to the effect of - I love Julian dearly but if I’d known what taking up with John Lennon meant, I should have walked away and not looked back. She played a good Beatle wife as well as she could. It’s a shame all around.
Where did you read they dressed in costumes for rehearsals? I’m pretty much a Beatles freak and I’ve never heard that cited - and I’ve read all the books by their producers and sound engineers like Geoff Emerick. The videos of their rehearsals also show them wearing casual clothing of the day. Yes, they’d wear a costume if there was a specific performance being taped, but they didn’t appear to wear costumes otherwise. For A Day in the Life, they dressed silly but that was a “happening.”