Alternate history - Lennon is alive and well

Pick up his career from Double Fantasy onward. Try to keep it grounded and less "LOLs" unless the LOLs are organic.

1) Lennon reunites with McCartney in 1996. They do an MTV unplugged show. The drummer is Matt Cameron. It is mildly successful. Rumors, unfounded, spread about a possible Beatles reunion.

But....

They probably would have reunited by the 80’s for Live Aid or an Amnesty International benefit

Lennon subsequently revives his acting career with a small role in Bruce Robinson’s How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989)

Who, if not Lennon or Paul, might have been a holdout to a reunion, even if no album recording, just tours?

Ringo maybe

i very much doubt that

Does George still die in this scenario

I think he would have said some impolitic things in public about women by this point

George still dies yes

i mean ringo's been hauling ass all over the state fair oldies circuit with his all star band for years doing beatles stuff and classic rock covers you think he would have baulked at a beatles reunion?

Jack Douglas claims they were headed for a reunion, and to be fair Yoko said John did express privately how much he missed writing with Paul and suggested he was possibly headed in that direction as well.

FWIW, it's here, when he talks about John working on Ringo's album:

https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/producer-jack-douglas-talks-about-his-last-night-with-john-lennon-some-a-hole-shot-him-when-he-got-home

If you watch the Beatles Anthology you will see who least wants to be there, and it's George.

I thought George fully committed to Anthology and that reunion after he needed the money due to his business partner in Handmade Films screwing him over? That would still probably happen, so if John was alive I can see George being up for a full Beatles reunion begrudgingly.

Wonder if it is challops to say that Ringo always seemed to be the easiest to get along with, with George a close or distant second.

Mark Chapman shoots Todd Rundgren instead.

although there was that one Mark Hudson story about the head shake controversy

lennon's and to a lesser extent mccartney's later behaviour only makes sense to me through a gay/bi panic lens (mutual and/or compounded by unrequitedness from lennon's pov) so the fate of the 90s reunion depends on how both they and the public did or didn't deal with that

Wonder if John would've inserted himself into Traveling Wilburies somehow.

Believe George might have had something to say about that.


Found it! The Cowsills vs The Partridge Family

i guess I was just wondering if Ringo prefers doing that Beatles-era stuff live now because he's in charge of how it goes , and his band is a collective with members coming and going at will over time, and there's not a power vacuum....to doing it with the real Beatles, in a scenario where John had survived and had written things like "How Do You Sleep?" before said reunion.

no expert on the man, but that was the angle I was coming at.

Jack Douglas claims they were headed for a reunion

During the late 1980 lawsuit against the producers of Beatlemania, Lennon said the following in a sworn affidavit: “I and the three other former Beatles have plans to stage a reunion concert, to be recorded, filmed and marketed around the world.”

(from Peter Doggett’s You Never Give Me Your Money.)

No doubt inspired by Elvis’s Aloha From Hawaii.

My understanding is that Ringo’s guests always get to do a few of their own signature songs so, um, actually I am not sure exactly what you are saying.

lennon's and to a lesser extent mccartney's later behaviour only makes sense to me through a gay/bi panic lens (mutual and/or compounded by unrequitedness from lennon's pov) so the fate of the 90s reunion depends on how both they and the public did or didn't deal with that

― your original display name is still visible (Left),

wait what now

My understanding is that Ringo’s guests always get to do a few of their own signature songs so, um, actually I am not sure exactly what you are saying.

I managed to see Ringo back during the summer, right before I saw McCartney. (I think I bought the Ringo ticket back in 2019 and just held on to it.) It was my first time seeing any of his shows, and yes, everyone does their signature tunes. Ringo sung maybe a total of 40 minutes, broken up with a long set in between that put the spotlight on his guests. It was kind of a weird experience, the visual equivalent of someone randomly spinning the dial on your radio and seeing what pops up on the older radio stations. Edgar Winter, Men at Work, Average White Band, Toto, etc.

If Lennon was alive today I think we can all safely assume he would be 82 years old

Lennon would've been involved in Anthology and would've inspired even more "Fuck this fuckin' guy" expressions from George.

LMAO

That would have been the title of one of John's home recordings.

Favorite part of that Douglas interview is when he talks about listening to John's demos for what would become Double Fantasy:

(Yoko) handed me an envelope that said, “For Jack’s ears only.” And I took it home and he called me at home the next day and asked, “What do you think?” And my honest opinion was that they were very primitive, a whole bunch of cassettes, there was narration in it, he talked me through it. The songs all began with an explanation, a lot of it funny, and all of them ended with, “What a piece of crap. I’m going to give it to Ringo for his solo album.”

This clip will never stop delivering the laffs b/c at 2:21 we can see George visibly losing his patience with his boy Paul's cute act.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wrgrm1eabI

lol well he did intend "Nobody Told Me" for Ringo

Haven't clicked but oftentimes when Paul finally stops mugging and actually sings I can still think "wow, what a voice he has!"

Ironically, the informal acoustic session — with the stipulation that no Beatles songs be played — was George’s idea. He just wanted to enjoy playing with them again minus any weird heaviness. However peeved he may have been, his voice slides under Paul’s so perfectly that you realize, oh right, they started singing together when they were 14.

wait what now

lennon was in love with mccartney and spent the rest of his life desperately trying to deny it in public. something either happened or didn't happen between them in india and it changed things forever at least in his mind. this is more or less the tumblr mclennon theory (but versions of it go back decades) which is half slash fiction wank fantasy and half better analysis and historiography than professional beatle writers (cishet boomers) seem capable of

I see.

Lennon had his gay panics which he's copped to (i.e. beating up the guy in the early '60s who intimated he was gay), and I can accept him as bi-curious, but the idea of Lennon pining for McCartney is actually the opposite of what you said: it's the kind of bargain bin Freud beloved of biopic writers who think it's The Aleph.

Lennon was probably a little bi-curious, else why would he have gone to the beach with Epstein

A reminder that The Hours and the Times is one of the funniest, saddest queer flicks.

I don't know what else to make of (for example) the multiple times he said yoko was a better creative partner than paul because he could fuck her or that if he was gay he could have had a perfect unspecified past relationship or his constant obsession with mccartney's looks or his often violently expressed jealousy towards mccartney's partners or his sudden onset hetero macho posturing circa 69/70 or...

you can explain away 1 or 2 of these but it just keeps going

xxp It is. The guy playing Brian Epstein is wonderful, I wish someone had cast him in more movies Oscilloscope and Sundance financed a restoration with the UCLA Film Archive in 2019 - it looks great and that restoration is currently on Kanopy. (You can also get a deluxe edition with a bunch of extras from Oscilloscope too.)

a lot of that could just as easily be framed as standard-issue straight guy shit tbh

what else can I say
everyone is gay

See what you did there

I think he would have seen Bowie coining it in with a retrofitted old school r&b record in 83 and tried something similar.

I don't think Lennon would have made it to 82; he was in poor physical health when he died, and still smoked Gitanes like a chimney. I think it's safe to say he'd have been a nightmare on Twitter though. Others have advanced speculation that he would have ended up on the Trump/Brexit side of things as the kind of self-styled free thinker that ages out of understanding normal people, and I think that fits. What I will say is that Harrison absolutely would have been in lockstep with Clapton on COVID.

Harrison's politics were inscrutable when they weren't reactionary, but I can't imagine him endorsing Brexit or opposing lockdowns -- the guy was pretty locked down already!

At some point he has a comeuppance or at least some level of accountability for domestic violence and emotional abuse if he makes it to the #metoo movement, if not before.

Maybe not Brexit, but George also did not like government telling him what to do.

Lennon / Partridge collab

Now, I can imagine him defending "Eric."

xxp Well, we know for sure that George did not enjoy paying taxes.

Lennon / Partridge collab

Alan or Andy?

xp IIRC "Taxman" came about when George found out 95% of the Beatles income was (up to that time) lost to taxes, which sounds crazy ridiculous to me. Anyone familiar with the UK tax code of that time? How come their taxes were so high?

Because rich people need to bled dry.

I very much doubt any rich person in the UK in the 60s ever paid 95% of their income in taxes.

also isn't it "maya" to care about any of that shit? spiritual beatle my arse

xp That might have been the highest marginal rate, i.e., the rate on the very highest level of income. It was about that high in the U.S. in the 50s.

yeah that strikes me as normal and desirable

I found this response - answer was more complicated than I thought:

It was justified as a temporary measure that lasted for the 1965-66 tax year only. At the time the top rate of tax was 40%, but there was also a “surtax” added on top of that for very high earners. The surtax rates were:

1948-49 to 1964-65 = 50%
1965-66 = 55%
1966-67 to 1971-72 = 50%

For nigh on twenty years after the Second World War, high earners were used to paying 90% tax, then for one year it went to 95%, before falling back to 90% again. OK, it did mean that effectively high-earners only got to keep half of what they got in previous years, but was only for one year.

Such high tax was not unique to the UK. During the 1950s US federal income tax topped out at 91%. Most people in these tax brackets were well aware of what they were paying, but they surprised those from more modest backgrounds who found themselves paying them. A lot of them got a nasty shock, as they had been spaffing their money up the wall, not realising that they owed most of it in tax.

I was gonna say, there's a reason the Stones largely lived in France

was it cause they were paedos