This evening veteran rocker Steve Miller will be inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Miller has had a high-profile career as the singer/songwriter/guitarist of The Steve Miller Band. Few people are aware of the fact that a young Miller collaborated in the studio with Paul McCartney a year before the break-up of The Beatles.

Miller was in London in May 1969 to record Brave New World, the third album of The Steve Miller Band and the first one since the departure of band member Boz Scaggs. The day of 9 May 1969 marked a bitter fight among the four members of The Beatles. The previous day, Lennon, Harrison and Starr had signed financial management contracts with Allen Klein but Paul did not toe the line. The three stormed out of Olympic Studios leaving McCartney alone there to stew. Steve Miller happened to come in ahead of time, and had a conversation with McCartney, who needed a sympathetic ear. Miller asked if he could use the studio, and Paul agreed if he could play drums. Miller’s producer Glyn Johns arrived shortly thereafter and together Miller and the Beatle recorded the song “My Dark Hour” on which Paul provided bass, drums, guitar and backing vocals. Miller handled all the other instruments. McCartney was not credited under his own name, but rather under Paul Ramon, his occasional pseudonym from 1960 in the struggling days of the band that would soon be known as The Beatles.

McCartney also provided backing vocals on the track “Celebration”. In addition, the song “Space Cowboy” features the exact primary riff as “Lady Madonna”, which naturally has always fueled speculation that McCartney gave Miller permission to do so because they were working in the studio together.

The Fab Four bass player elaborated on his collaboration with Steve Miller in the book Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now by Barry Miles:

“Steve Miller happened to be there recording, late at night, and he just breezed in. ‘Hey, what’s happening, man? Can I use the studio?’ ‘Yeah!’ I said. ‘Can I drum for you? I just had a terribly unholy argument with the guys there.’ I explained it to him, took ten minutes to get it off my chest. So I did a track, he and I stayed that night and did a track of his called My Dark Hour. I thrashed everything out on the drums. There’s a surfeit of aggressive drum fills, that’s all I can say about that. We stayed up until late. I played bass, guitar and drums and sang backing vocals. It’s actually a pretty good track.”

It would take The Steve Miller Band almost another five years to crack the Top 40 in the U.S. after numerous entries on The Billboard Hot 100. “The Joker” reached # 1 on January 12, 1974 and stayed in the top slot for a week. His second number one hit was “Rock ‘n Me” which topped the charts for the week of November 6, 1976. His third and final number one hit, “Abracadabra”, spent two weeks on the top of the charts during the first two weeks of September 1982. Also, Toto keyboardist Steve Porcaro wrote the music and words to the hit song “Human Nature” on the famous album, while handling synthesizer chores on four tracks.

Miller’s highly popular song “Fly Like An Eagle”, which has been used in several television ad campaigns over the last forty years, just missed the mark as it stayed in the number two position for two weeks in 1977 but could not make the jump to the top slot; it was kept out of the top position by “Love Theme From ‘A Star Is Born’ (Evergreen)”, the Barbara Streisand hit she co-wrote with famed songwriter Paul Williams. The main guitar hook in “Fly Like An Eagle” was actually first used in “My Dark Hour”.

In total Miller scored nine songs in The Top 40 between 1973 and 1982. The others were “Take the Money and Run” (# 11 in 1977); “Jet Airliner” (# 8 in 1977); “Jungle Love” (# 23 in 1977); “Swingtown” ( # 17 in 1977); “Heart Like a Wheel” (# 24 in 1981).

Not wanting to release a double album, Miller released two albums within a year of each other; songs for both albums were recorded during the same studio sessions. The album Fly Like an Eagle was released in May 1976 while Book of Dreams was released in May 1977.

The Steve Miller Band was officially formed in 1966 and has had countless members in a revolving line-up since then. Longtime Miller friend Boz Scaggs was an original member of The Steve Miller Band, appearing on the first two albums and playing with the band at the famous Monterey Pop Festival, the three day festival held in June 1967. Scaggs left The Steve Miller Band in 1968 en route to a successful solo career. Scaggs’ highly successful album Silk Degrees is considered one of the top albums of the 1970’s, and spawned Top 40 hits like “Lido Shuffle” and “Lowdown”. For the Silk Degrees album and tour, Scaggs was backed up by a group of young musicians who started playing during their early high school years in the Los Angeles area. Following the tour, they went out on their own as a band under the name Toto. Five years later, their 1982 album Toto IV would win seven Grammy Awards, including “Album of the Year”, “Record of the Year”, and “Producer of the Year”. The album that would win the Grammy for “Album of the Year” the following year was Michael Jackson’s legendary Thriller. Ironically, members of Toto served as studio musicians for several of the tracks on Thriller, such as “The Girl is Mine”, the duet by Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, which was the first single released from Thriller and peaked at number two on The Billboard Hot 100.

The bond between Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs goes back to high school in Dallas when Scaggs was a freshman and Miller was a sophomore at the elite St. Mark’s School of Texas. St. Mark’s was founded by Dallas businessmen who had attended elite prep schools in New England and wanted to create a school in the mold of a New England private school so that their own sons could have that type of educational experience without having to leave Dallas. While at St. Mark’s, Miller and Scaggs formed their first band which was appropriately called The Marksmen. Steve Miller went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the following year Scaggs enrolled at Madison after his graduation from St. Mark’s. A few years in back of Miller and Scaggs at St. Mark’s was future Oscar-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, who enrolled at Harvard after graduating from St. Mark’s. Many years later actors Owen and Luke Wilson went to St. Mark’s, too. In 1969, Tommy Lee Jones was Al Gore’s real-life roommate at Harvard; the following year, after graduating, he played Ryan O’Neal’s Harvard roommate in the classic movie Love Story. However, Jones was already famous in his own right at Harvard because he was an offensive lineman on the famous 1968 Harvard football team that was 16 points down against Yale in the final minute and tied it. The headline in the Harvard Crimson was “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29”, a headline recycled as the title of the 2008 documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 about the famous 1968 game, which was directed by Kevin Rafferty.

Steve Miller deserves this induction tonight. Be assured that no media coverage of this event will mention his unique collaboration with Paul McCartney during the Beatle years.

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While it is well known that Paul McCartney and John Lennon helped out other artists on songs during the Beatle years, the one and only time that they ever helped out on song together was in 1967 on The Rolling Stones hit “We Love You”. The song is for the most part unknown in the U.S., but it reached # 8 on the British pop charts. In the U.S., it only reached # 50 on the Billboard Hot 100 and therefore was off the radar screen because it fell short of the coveted Top 40.

“We Love You” is definitely “interesting”. Its Moroccan influence is obvious. One critic at the time described it as a “psychedelic collage of jail sounds.”

The song was written in response to the drug arrests of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones on 12 February 1967 at Richards’ country home in Sussex. The band made an accompanying video that was a re-enactment of the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde for indecency. Needless, to say the BBC immediately banned the video, or “promotional film” as was the term back then.

“We Love You” was a brazen and public “thank you” to The Beatles, The Who and the editorial page of the London Times for taking the bold initiative to voice public support for the three members of The Rolling Stones after their drug arrests. Since the song was written in part for The Beatles, Paul McCartney and John Lennon were asked to help out with backing vocals, marking the first and only time that these two Beatles would help out on a song together.

Interestingly, Stones lead guitarist Brian Jones played the Mellotron on the track.

The backing vocals provided by John Lennon and Paul McCartney went uncredited.

A 24 October 2010 article in the Daily Mail entitled “How the Acid King confessed he DID set up Rolling Stones drug bust for MI5 and FBI” shed light on the infamous 1967 drug bust. Also, the drug raid was the subject of a 2012 book, Butterfly on a Wheel: The Great Rolling Stones Drug Bust by Simon Wells.

Check out the song that never made the Top 40 in the U.S., and the promotional film the Stones made for it:

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Several days ago, Joe Garagiola, a former major league baseball player who became much more famous as a broadcaster in his post-baseball career, passed away at age 90. Obituaries in major U.S. newspapers did not mention Garagiola’s very minor role in Beatles history. For instance, the New York Times obit of the baseball player-turned-broadcaster, “Joe Garagiola, a Cather Who Called the Game Better“, made no mention of the highly memorable Beatles incident.

Immediately after the formation of the band’s own label Apple Records in 1968, and shortly after the band members returned from their memorable trip to India to “visit” the Maharishi, John and Paul went to New York for a few days for issues relating to Apple Records. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which was still based in New York and would make the switch to Los Angeles in 1972 after spending a decade in New York after Carson took over the show from former host Jack Paar in 1962, contacted the band’s management and asked if John and Paul would appear on the show on May 14, 1968 during their trip to New York. Since members of the Beatles had never appeared on the famous Tonight Show – either as a band or as individuals – John and Paul thought it would be a good thing to do both for the band and to get the word out about the new Apple Record Corps.

To make a long story short, the whole thing was a total disaster. Producers of The Tonight Show did not inform John or Paul or Neil Aspinall that Johnny Carson would be on vacation on May 14, and that Joe Garagiola, someone totally unknown to them, would be the host. Needless to say, John and Paul were not pleased upon learning this and contemplated canceling out, but decided to go through with it. In later years, both John and Paul described Joe Garagiola as being very nice, warm and gracious. However, it was obvious to John and Paul, and the American public, that Garagiola definitely was not the right person to interview John Lennon and Paul McCartney on their first and only appearance on the famous Tonight Show during the Beatle years. John and Paul deserve much credit for being good sports. Another part of the equation was that aging actress Tallulah Bankhead was also a guest; she was totally intoxicated and asked the two boys some stupid questions.

The NBC television network destroyed many tapes of various shows from that era due to storage limitations, a move which has been universally criticized since. No authentic tape of the infamous May 14, 1968 show exists. However, in the pre-VCR era, some industrious Beatles fans taped the audio of the show on a tape recorder and did a makeshift filming of the visuals on their television screen with a Super-8 home movie camera.

An excellent article about John and Paul appearing on The Tonight Show appeared last year on the website UltimateClassRock.com. The article, “47 Years Ago: John Lennon and Paul McCartney Appear on the Tonight Show”, is most informative and includes a link to the dialogue of the infamous 1968 episode of the famous show. UltimateClassicRock.com has a wealth of fascinating articles on The Beatles, in addition to countless informative articles on other rock bands that fall under the “classic rock” label.

The Tonight Show fiasco with Joe Garagiola is known among Beatles fans but has not been widely covered. For instance, two major books of the last decade, The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz (1968) and John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman (2008), make no mention of the incident.

In an indirect way, The Tonight Show has another connection to The Fab Four. Original host Steve Allen stayed from 1954-1957. He was succeeded by Jack Paar (1957-1962) who turned the 90 minute NBC daily weeknight late show into an absolute staple of American culture. Johnny Carson took over the show from Paar in 1962, as the American public was dismayed that the wildly famous Paar would give up the show after only five years. Johnny Carson’s reign lasted thirty years until his 1992 retirement, which brought Jay Leno as the new host. Leno retired in 2009 and was replaced as host by Conan O’Brien; Conan started in June 2009, but the network replaced him the following January by bringing back Jay Leno, who stayed on under an agreement from March 2010 until February 2014 when he was replaced by current host Jimmy Fallon.

After leaving NBC’s The Tonight Show in 1962, the network did not want to lose the popular Paar to another network, so they offered him a weekly one hour show on Friday nights. The Jack Paar Program, debuted in the fall of 1962 and ran until June 1965. Paar is a definite footnote in Beatles history as his weekly show was the first show in the U.S. to showcase The Beatles. Of course, The Ed Sullivan Show was famously the band’s first live appearance on American television, but one month beforehand The Jack Paar Program featured film footage of the group and told how they had taken their native England by storm. At the time, the group did not have any hit records in the U.S., but of course that would change in a matter of weeks. The January 3, 1964 recorded appearance on The Jack Paar Program has naturally been obliterated in history by the famous February 8, 1964 live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Actually, the first appearance of The Beatles on U.S. television was a straight news story. On November 18, 1963, the daily evening news program The Huntley Brinkley Report on NBC did a news segment on The Beatles and how the young group was creating hysteria in England. There was no video footage, as the segment was accompanied by only still photographs. There was an audio clip of “From Me to You” of one of their UK concerts, complete with the music being drowned out by the hysteria of the crowd.

The fact that the footage of John and Paul appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson with guest host Joe Garagiola was destroyed seems ironic. John and Paul totally wanted to forget the episode, and it is highly likely that Joe Garagiola did, too.

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This posting was inspired by meeting a couple recently who hail from Leicester in England. We were talking about the scene in Britain in 1977 with Kevin Keegan being the top footballer in all of Europe, as well as Keegan sparking a national hairstyle craze among men.

In terms of ex-members of The Fab Four in 1977, a significant event happened. That August Paul McCartney and Wings’ guitarist Denny Laine co-wrote “Mull of Kintyre”, a song which has no significance to people in the U.S. It was recorded by Wings in September and appeared on their London Town album.

The song was inspired by the Kintyre peninsula in Argyll, Scotland where McCartney had a home and recording studio since the Beatle days.

The song was a hit before, during and after Christmas 1977, staying in the # 1 position on the British charts for nine weeks. The song overtook “She Loves You” as the biggest-selling single in British history. “Mull of Kintyre” held this distinction until 1984 when Band Aid scored big with their charity hit “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” However, “Mull of Kintyre” remains the biggest-selling non-charity single in British history. The 1977 hit was the first single in UK history to sell over two million copies.

Surprisingly, the song was invisible in the U.S., only reaching # 33 on the charts in 1977 and leaving the Top 40 portion of The Billboard Hot 100 after only one week. McCartney has specifically not played the song on concert dates in the U.S., while playing it in Canada and most other countries. For instance, he could do a concert in New York one night and not play the song, then do a concert two nights later in Toronto and play the song.

Almost forty years after its release, “Mull of Kintyre” remains totally unknown to the American general public. Unrelated to the famous song about this beautiful location in Scotland,, an October 8, 2013 article in the Daily Mail entitled “How Mull of Kintyre Lost Its Magic for Paul McCartney” paints an interesting scenario for the location of the Mull of Kintyre, where McCartney has owned his High Park Farm since 1966.

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Last Sunday BeatlesHistorian.com had the great fortune of being profiled in a syndicated column in the U.S. “The Word Watch” column by Robert Kyff is one that has been around for 25 years and examines the world of words. Originating in the Hartford Courant, a newspaper in the Tribune Corporation family of publications, this column appears in many other newspapers in the U.S. as well. The article is entitled “Beatles Lyrics Gave Fans Brit Speak to Decipher” and addresses the usage of quirky British terms in lyrics.

In terms of the Americanisms in Beatles lyrics, there is the famous story of when John and Paul finished “She Loves You” in Paul’s house and played it to Paul’s father, Jim McCartney. Jim McCartney was not at all pleased with the refrain “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” and urged them to change it to the grammatically correct “Yes, Yes, Yes”. In a 2012 interview with National Public Radio, Paul repeated the famous story that his father boldly stated, “There are enough of these Americanisms around”.

Kudos to The Word Guy of “The Word Watch” column!

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BeatlesHistorian.com joins the worldwide Beatles community in sending out thoughts and prayers to the family of Sir George Martin. His contribution to the Beatles’ success was immeasurable. This is a past blog post entitled “Four Post-Beatles Number One Hits in the U.S. Produced By George Martin” from July 28, 2014.

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In the last few months, there have been two novels in which members of The Beatles are central characters, Beatlebone by Kevin Barry and Get Back: Imagine Saving John Lennon by Donovan Day. Both of these 2015 novels have been reviewed many times.

The second novel from Irish writer Kevin Barry, Beatlebone covers a fictitious trip to the west coast of Ireland by John Lennon in 1978. In real life, John Lennon purchased a small island called Dorinish in Clew Bay, County Mayo in 1967 for the sum of 1,550 pounds. A November 22, 2015 review in the New York Times “In Beatlebone, An Imagined Trip with John Lennon” gave interesting insight into the novel, “…..is about John Lennon. It follows him closely for around 200 pages, through a few comically calamitous days in 1978, as he travels through western Ireland to an island off its coast, bought on a lark 11 years earlier……a few days alone on his island, he hopes, will bring him the peace that marriage and fatherhood, though he loves them, haven’t. The poignant knowledge that this is an end-of-life crisis , not a middle-of-life one: that belongs to us not to him.”

An extremely interesting review of Beatlebone, “John Lennon, 1980 and me; an appreciation of Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone”, appeared on a blog in the online version of The Guardian on February 10, 2016. It is eye-opening to say the least.

The second novel that is a fictional work about The Beatles was also published in late 2015. Get Back: Imagine…..Saving John Lennon by first-time novelist Donovan Day has received equally positive reviews. The plot centers around 17 year-old Lenny Funk who uses time travel to go back to the 1960’s to befriend the Fab Four. One moment it is 2015 and he is listening to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” on his iPod, and the same day he is in London, soon to befriend The Beatles at the height of their fame. The dialogue from 2015 New York to London in the 1960’s is right on target. Showing John Lennon his smartphone and all its features as something from the future, the Beatle is amazed. On the subject of the future, John quizzically asks Lenny, “What is going to happen to me?”

The passage about John being told what a selfie is conveys how successful Lenny is is transitioning from 2015 right back to London in 1964:

“Uh, how about we take a selfie?”
“What in God’s name is a selfie?”
“It’s a photo of us together that we take ourselves.”
He crosses his arms. “Show me.”
I toy with the settings a moment, reach out my arm, and move my head closer to John’s. “Okay, smile.”
Incredibly he does, looking at our image on screen as if mesmerized. I take the photo and show it to him – me and John Lennon side by side. I am ecstatic. This is real proof no one can deny.
………..He smiles proudly. “I don’t know if you are lying to me or if you are a lunatic, but you are different, I’ll say that much. This thing, this phone or camera, or whatever it is? If you invented this thing, you need to come work for us. Brian can set you up in his office.”

Lenny Funk’s travel back to save John Lennon from being murdered on the ill-fated day of December 8, 1980 becomes the focus of the plot and will have readers turning the pages of the book very quickly. The book review “Get Back: A Time-Travel Adventure to Save Lennon” by Shelley Germeaux gives a good appraisal of this young-adult novel.

The fact that John Lennon is a main character in both of the recent novels Beatlebone and Get Back: Imagine Saving John Lennon should be of interest to Beatles fans. Both novels are good reads.

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All Beatles fans – and the world at large- know that Yoko Ono is Japanese, but the majority may not know her family’s background. A previous post on this blog, “Linda McCartney vs. Yoko Ono: Rivalry and Comparisons” mentioned the irony that while Yoko and Linda may have had a healthy rivalry, they were similar in so many ways: both came from wealthy families who lived in the posh NYC suburb of Scarsdale, NY; both attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY but both left to pursue their artistic interests prior to earning a degree; both came from wealthy families with a father who was a high-achiever and with a mother who hailed from “old money”. That blog post about Linda McCartney and Yoko Ono gave a glimpse into Yoko’s largely unknown world in Japan.

Born in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko Ono was born into a family that had been well-known throughout Japan for generations. Yoko’s mother was a Yasuda, a family name associated with the powerful zaibatsu, financial, commercial, and industrial worlds that fueled Japan’s business empire. Her great-grandfather was Zenjiro Yasuda, the founder of the Bank of Tokyo.

Yoko’s maternal grandfather was Zensaburo Iomi who married the daughter of Zenjiro Yasuda. Zenjiro Yasuda, the founder of the Bank of Tokyo, was by far the wealthiest businessman in Japan. Upon marrying into the family, Zensaburo Iomi was appointed chairman of the family bank and elected to the House of Peers. Some years later, as was not unheard of in the circle of the wealthy Japanese elite, Zenjiro Yasuda cut his daughter and son-in-law out of his will, which at the time was estimated to be the equivalent of one billion dollars, which was more money than the wealthiest person in the U.S. at the time had. Yasuda cut them out of the will immediately before he was assassinated by a radical leftist in 1921.

Zensaburo Iomi and his wife had to carry on with the stigma of the public knowing they had been cut out of a gigantic fortune. The couple’s eighth and final child, Isoko, grew up in extreme privilege with a mother who was a Yasuda.

Isoko married Eisuke Ono, who though not wealthy was from a long line of famous samurai warriors. The Ono family produced many famous academics, musicians and painters; in addition, Eisuke’s mother, Tsuruko, was considered Japan’s foremost pioneering feminist.

Eisuke Ono was a nationally ranked golfer and classically trained pianist who attempted to pursue a career as a concert pianist prior to choosing the more practical business route. A graduate of University of Tokyo, he spoke English and French fluently, which was a definite asset as he began his banking career with the prestigious Yokohama Specie Bank. He was posted to work in his first overseas assignment in the U.S. in 1933 to run the bank’s operation in San Francisco, which meant he did not see his daughter Yoko until after she was two years old. Ironically, Yoko’s uncle, Kese ,was the first Japanese ambassador to the United Nations.

Eisuke Ono’s career brought him back home to Tokyo in 1937, but then he moved his family back to New York in 1940 and then to Hanoi. The Ono family returned to Tokyo in 1943.

Yoko’s academic career in Tokyo began at the famous Gukushuin school in Tokyo. After returning from New York, she went to primary school at the highly prestigious Keimei Gukuen, an exclusive Christian primary school run by the famous Mitsui family. After the war, Yoko re-enrolled at the Gukushuin, after it re-opened. The school was near the Imperial Palace and one of Yoko’s classmates and close friends was Prince Akihito, who of course was the future emperor.

Yoko’s academics during high school at Gukushuin were impressive enough that she was offered acceptance into Gukushuin University’s philosophy department in 1951, becoming the first woman ever to enroll in the program. However, she only stayed two semesters before leaving to join her parents in Scarsdale, New York, as her father was named president of the Bank of Tokyo in the U.S. and worked in Manhattan’s financial district.

While living in Scarsdale with her parents, she attended Sarah Lawrence College. She left Sarah Lawrence in 1956 without a degree to both pursue her artistic interests and elope to marry famous composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, whom she would formally divorce in 1963 after a couple of years apart. In the age of YouTube, Toshi Ichiyanagi’s vast works are very well represented on the internet.

While most people may not be aware of Yoko Ono’s powerful family background in Japan, needless to say when she connected with and later married John Lennon, people in Japan were totally aware of her family background to say the least.

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The George Harrison song “This Song” receives little airplay among the catalog of solo hits by ex-Beatles. It entered the Top 40 of The Billboard Hot 100 and reached # 25. It was the first single released off of the album Thirty-three and 1/3.

“This Song” and Thirty-Three and 1/3 got a boost when Paul Simon hosted the November 20, 1976 episode of Saturday Night Live and George was the musical guest. The video for “This Song” was played on Saturday Night Live, giving the ex-Beatle’s new song national exposure via the medium of rock video some five years prior to the 1981 launch of MTV. On this episode of Saturday Night Live, for the musical segment Simon and Harrison did a duet of both the Simon and Garfunkel classic “Homeward Bound” and the Harrison-penned Beatles classic “Here Comes the Sun“.

George Harrison wrote “This Song” in response to the lawsuit filed against him for alleged plagiarism on account of his 1971 number hit “My Sweet Lord” sounding similar to the “He’s So Fine”, the classic by The Chiffons that topped the charts for four weeks in March/April 1963. It was written by Ronald Mack.

Marc Shapiro’s 2002 biography Behind Sad Eyes: The Life of George Harrison contains the passage, “On September 7, 1976, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Owens found that while he did not feel that George had ‘deliberately’ plagiarized the song ‘He’s So Fine’, there was substantial evidence that he did infringe on the song’s copyright. George was found guilty and ordered to pay damages in the amount of $587,000.”

It quotes George as cynically saying in the aftermath of the court’s decision. “I don’t even want to touch the guitar or piano in case I’m touching somebody’s note. Somebody might own that note, so you’d better watch out.”

A full examination of this notorious copyright infringement lawsuit is not possible in a blog post as the subject matter is too lengthy not to mention controversial. It is safe to say that after a week of testimony in federal court in Manhattan, George Harrison channeled his feelings of frustration and anger in the proper way by writing “This Song”, which is an obvious reaction to the lawsuit.

The following lyrics are a good indication of Harrison’s frame of mind while writing the song immediately after spending a week in the court room:

This song has nothing tricky about it
This song ain’t black or white and as far as I know
Don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright, so
This song, we’ll let be, this song is in E
This song is for you and
This tune has nothing bright about it
This tune ain’t bad or good and come ever what may
My expert tells me it’s okay
As this song came to me unknowingly
This song could be, you could be
This riff ain’t trying to win gold medals
This riff ain’t hip or square, well, done or rare
End up one more weight to bear
But this song could well be
A reason to see that
Without you, there’s no point to this song
But this song could well be
A reason to see that
Without you, there’s no point to this song

After the line, “This song could be”, Monty Python’s Eric Idle chimes in with, “Could be ‘Sugar Pie Honey Bunch’? Naw! Sounds more like ‘Rescue Me’”. In the video, Idle’s line is lip-synched by Ronnie Wood, who the previous year joined The Rolling Stones after the dissolution of Faces. Wood is dressed up as a woman in the video.

The line “This tune has nothing bright about it” is a reference to Bright Tunes, which owned the rights to “He’s So Fine” and initiated the infamous lawsuit.

Olivia Arias, a year away from becoming Mrs. George Harrison, plays Lady Justice, appearing as a blindfolded woman in a toga holding the scales of justice. Veteran drummer Jim Keltner plays the judge.

The next song off Thirty-three and 1/3 was “Crackerbox Palace”, which reached number 17 in the U.S. in the spring of 1977.

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When David Bowie tragically died of cancer on January 10, 2016, tributes poured in from fellow rock musicians all over the world, as well as from heads of state and major religions. The most touching tribute came from Yoko Ono who praised Bowie as being a “second father” to her son Sean. Rolling Stone ran an article the day after the flamboyant musician’s death entitled, “Yoko Ono on Bowie: ‘David Was as Close as Family’”, while Billboard published their article “Yoko Ono: David Bowie Was a ‘Father Figure’ to My Son.”

While the strong friendship between John Lennon and David Bowie cannot be adequately examined in a single blog post, this post will cover the song “Fame”, the hit song that was Bowie’s first number one hit in the U.S., and the important role that John Lennon played in the song’s creation and success.

David Bowie met John Lennon in 1974 at a party given in New York by Elizabeth Taylor. Since the ex-Beatle was an early idol of a young Bowie, the two became friendly. At the time, Bowie was experiencing a down phase in his career due to a poor management contract. Bowie’s manager at the time, the famous Tony Defries, and his management company left Bowie financially responsible for tens and tens of thousands of dollars for unsuccessful concert bookings, putting the future superstar on the brink of financial ruin. It was John Lennon who convinced Bowie to break ties with Defries and seek new management.

Bowie and Lennon had many of the same interests artistically, and they identified with their shared Irish Catholic heritage, despite neither one being a Catholic. Both stars had multiple great-grandparents who immigrated to England from Ireland. Bowie regularly spoke of the influence in his early life of his maternal grandfather, James Burns, a retired British military officer who was heavily into Irish culture and heritage.

The song “Fame” was credited to Bowie, Carlos Alomar and John Lennon. Alomar wrote a great riff and Lennon came up with the word “aim” to go along with it. Bowie changed that to “Fame” and the rest was history on the way to Bowie’s first chart-topper on The Billboard Hot 100. In the song John Lennon repeats “FAME, FAME, FAME” through a fast track and then through a slow track. It is reported that the ex-Beatle repeated the word “Fame” 23 times, and each time on a different note.

In his 2008 biography John Lennon: The Life, author Philip Norman described the magnitude of Lennon’s contribution to “Fame”, “The word and the riff gave Bowie his first number one single in America and helped launch the strutting, narcissistic disco style that would dominate record charts and pack dance clubs around the world for years to come. From rock-‘n’-roll nostalgic, John found himself suddenly catapulted to the cutting edge.”

“Fame” entered the Top 40 section of The Billboard Hot 100 on August 2, 1975, spending a total of fourteen weeks in the Top 40. It would top the Billboard charts on September 20, 1975 and stay in the top position for two weeks.

The previous two Bowie entries into the Top 40 did not fare too well. In early 1973, his famous “Space Oddity”, then four years old, was released as a single in the U.S. and climbed to # 15. A few months before “Fame” hit # 1, his “Young Americans”, which featured Luther Vandross on backing vocals and David Sanborn on saxophone, reached # 25 on the Billboard charts in May 1975. “Young Americans” mentioned both the show Soul Train and the hair product Afro-Sheen, which was a major sponsor of the weekly show Soul Train. Small wonder than that a few months later Bowie was invited to perform “Fame” on Soul Train, making him only the second Caucasian to perform on the show; Elton John had broken the race barrier on Soul Train a few months beforehand. Bowie’s famous appearance on Soul Train was covered in a January 16, 2016 Boston Globe article entitled “When David Bowie Played ‘Soul Train’”.

It should also be noted that Bowie’s first entry onto The Billboard Hot 100 was “Changes”, from the 1971 Hunky Dory LP, which was released as a single in the U.S. in January 1972. Despite peaking at # 66 and missing the coveted Top 40 by a long shot, “Changes” over time would be Bowie’s most widely played single in the U.S. The song peaked at # 15 on the UK Singles Chart.

It should be noted that “Fame” had its debut on U.S. national television on November 7, 1975 on The Cher Show. The former number one song at that point was down at number 41 on The Billboard Hot 100, but after its endorsement on national television by Cher, it shot back up to number 20 the following week.

A third single off of the Young Americans album, “Golden Years”, reached number ten on the charts in early 1976.

Bowie’s only other number one hit in the U.S. would come eight years later when “Let’s Dance” topped the charts for the week of May 21, 1983. The Let’s Dance album, produced by producer extraordinaire Nile Rodgers, also yielded the hits “China Girl” and “Modern Love”.

In the 2011 biography David Bowie: Starman, author Paul Trynka addressed Bowie’s strong friendship and working relationship with the ex-Beatle in the aftermath of “Fame”:

“For David, the album marked a happy change of setting; he never officially left Berlin, but he was fired up by his return to New York, where he could hang with a younger generation of arty New Wavers and also resume his friendship with John and Yoko under happier, more relaxed circumstances for both of them. John’s respect for David had only increased with the success of “Fame”, which put the ex-Beatle back on the charts; David still considered John, along with Mick Jagger, a role model, but his admiration for John was not intermixed with rivalry, as it was with Mick. Lennon brought out a better side of David, and he knew it. Happily, John started writing again; David admired the unique lifestyle he’d carved out, with his and Yoko’s elegant, white-carpeted, minimally furnished apartment in the Dakota, by Central Park, where John and Yoko could wander undisturbed.”

John Lennon’s influence on “Fame” is so obvious. He helped write the song, played guitar on the track, provided backing vocals, in addition to receiving a credit as a co-producer.

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