Who is your favorite Beatle?

[Kerry]

 

[[[Ringo!]]]

[ifyoucantfixit]

       This poll puts me in the mind of someone asking a parent which is their favorite child...!

[Ellemeno]

Good point, Janice! 

[serious crayons]

My favorite Monkee is Mike. 

I once would have said the same. I thought he was the cutest (though I always wished he would ditch the cap), the most talented ("Different Drum"! music videos!) and had the most inventive mom (Liquid Paper!).

But then a few years ago I interviewed Peter Tork by phone and was totally charmed. He was intelligent, candid, funny, friendly, self-deprecating, mildly flirtatious in a nice way and -- according to photos on his website -- still cute. So now he's my favorite. Who would have thought it would take 30 years to figure out my favorite Monkee!!

[Brown Eyes]

I like "Revolution" quite a lot.  I like the "grungier" sound to that track.

[Lynne]

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
                    --John Lennon

Edit:  You go for grungy, Amanda...I'll go for sappy 

[dot-matrix]

I like Blackbird and Paperback Writer... 

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.

Blackbird fly Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird fly Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly

All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.


Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It's based on a novel by a man named Lear,
And I need a job,
So I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

It's a dirty story of a dirty man,
And his clinging wife doesn't understand.
His son is working for the Daily Mail
It's a steady job,
But he wants to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
Paperback writer, paperback writer.

It's a thousand pages, give or take a few.
I'll be writing more in a week or two.
I could make it longer if you like the style.
I can change it 'round,
And I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

If you really like it you can have the rights.
It could make a million for you overnight.
If you must return it you can send it here,
But I need a break,
And I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

Paperback writer, paperback writer.
Paperback writer, paperback writer.
Paperback writer, paperback writer.
Paperback writer, paperback writer.
Paperback writer...

[Brown Eyes]

I like "All the Lonely People" too. 


Do folks have a favorite Beatles movie?

I've always loved Yellow Submarine and I quite enjoy the Monty-Python-esque humor in Hard Day's Night.
 

[Rayn]

I saw them in 1965 at Shea's Stadium in New York, their last concert, I was 13 and screaming my head off ,, Paul, Paul... My mother was with me...  She smiled and looked confused!  LOL....I had his pics plastered all over my bedroom walls.  My Dad would come in sometimes, look around and leave shaking his head in disbelief.  LOL ... Poor Dad...

 Later, when I matured a bit, I realized John was way more profound and right on politically, so he became my fav, but I do love George now too for his deep spirituality, and Ringo for his fun loving personality.  I guess John is still my all time favorite, but I'm glad I got over Beatlemania!

I never want to be a teenager again!   

[serious crayons]

And you interviewed him?  How cool!  What was it for?  If you published it, I'd really like to read it.

Sorry for the delay, SKJ. The piece ran a few years ago in the Carleton College alumni magazine, which assigned me to write about people who attended Carleton and became famous. I tried to get a copy of the published piece from the magazine's archives, but I couldn't access it, but here's what I wrote before it was edited, etc.
 

He still gets recognized, nearly 40 years after his primetime gig in a made-for-TV rock band. He was in a Walmart in Bozeman, Mont., when a sharp-eyed clerk identified the now-62-year-old customer as former Monkee Peter Tork.
 “By the time it was all over,” he said, speaking by phone from California, “I think I’d signed more than a dozen autographs for women who’d grown up on the thing.”
 For those who didn’t, “The Monkees” was an NBC sitcom about a wacky rock band, loosely modeled after the Beatles. Tork played the cheerful mop-headed dimwit. It ran only from 1966 to 1968 (with rerun revivals in later decades) but was hugely popular, winning an Emmy, selling millions of records and turning its stars into teen idols. Overnight, the “folk-singing hippie kid” found his picture on lunchboxes across the country.
 Until then, fame had not been among Tork’s goals. “I did not give it any thought one way or another.”
   He was still Peter Thorkelson in the early 1960s at Carleton, where he performed in a small folk group, served as Friday morning DJ on KARL, and “chased women -- with zero success.” Exhilarated with college social life after living in a small town in Connecticut, he neglected his classes, with predictable results: “I flunked out.”
  He moved to New York and played guitar in Greenwich Village coffee shops. One day his friend Stephen Stills (later of Crosby, Stills and Nash) mentioned that he’d auditioned for a sitcom about a rock band.
 “Stills was turned down … he was told his hair and teeth wouldn’t work for television,” Tork said. “They asked if he knew anybody who looked like him whose hair and teeth were in order, and he called me.”
 Like some ancient precursor to reality TV, “The Monkees” straddled fiction and life. The band’s first album, with its hit single “Last Train to Clarksville,” topped the charts even before the show aired, though none of the four actors played on it (they did put on live concerts, and eventually recorded together). The fictional pop stars became actual ones, and Tork’s life changed instantly.
 “I couldn’t snag a date to save my ass and suddenly they were throwing themselves at me like there was no tomorrow,” he said.
 They, unfortunately, were shrieking teeny-boppers – underage and overwhelming. Tork recalls standing on a hotel mezzanine and spotting a few fans below. He beckoned them up for autographs, not realizing a much bigger crowd stood just out of view. Throngs pushed up the stairs, shoving Tork back against a railing for a few terrifying moments – “plucking at my shoes, shoving paper and pencils in my face so fast that I could barely make a checkmark on each one” – before security guards came to his rescue.
    Amid the frenzy, Tork had fun. “I loved making television, I loved making records, I loved the business of being on the road and entertaining.”
    After the series ended, Tork withdrew to the relative quiet of Marin County, Calif. He played in small clubs, dropped out of show business for a while, struggled with alcoholism (he’s been sober for 23 years), participated ambivalently in Monkees reunions. Nowadays, he tours the country with a blues band called Shoe Suede Blues. Although promoters occasionally tout his Monkees connection, Tork does not emphasize his past.
 “My fame has been almost no use to my Shoe Suede Blues life,” he said. “People who like the blues are a little bit snobbish about pop phenomena.”
 He’s content now with just enough fame as he needs to get gigs. “I think fame was just one of those chapters in my journey, for better or for worse."

Looking back, I see that for some reason I didn't include what I thought was one of his more memorable remarks. I asked if he still hung out with the other Monkees socially. He said, "Never have, never will." Even when the series was in full swing, he said, the Monkees weren't friends in real life, just coworkers.
 

By the way, have you seen "Head"?

Nope.