I think the post you are referring to was sarcasm. He’s been in a lot of things since then. The cop series (The Job) was over 20 years ago. It was a good show. Much more successful was his show Rescue Me. Also a good show. The one he’s on now, not so good.
A TV show (the Irrational) mentioned a myth that Katy Perry is JonBenet Ramsey grown up. I have never heard of that before.
When I heard that, I thought they must have made that up for the show.
Oh?
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Julian Lennon’s drawing with the words “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” exists and can easily be found via a Google search.
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Julian’s classmate Lucy also exists, and has been interviewed as an adult.
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The dispute about “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” has nothing to do with whether it’s “about drugs” or not. A great many songs of that era were informed by their composers’ drug use, whether explicitly or implicitly. It’s not a stretch to posit that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is among them.
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Furthermore, Lennon freely admitted in contemporary interviews that he had taken LSD and other drugs. He had nothing to hide or be coy about.
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The issue with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” has always and only been whether its title was intentionally devised by Lennon to cache a reference to LSD. He swore it was not, and the existence of Julian’s painting bolsters his case.
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What militates against this accusation just as strongly is the notion that John Lennon would ever do something as completely lame as this. It’s possible to find many faults with Lennon, but this kind of extreme corniness isn’t one of them.
Oh. Yes.
A song can have more than one inspiration. OK, maybe the initial inspiration was the drawing, but the lyrics? I’m sorry, but no one can convince me the lyrics are not LSD-inspired or generally psychedelia-inspired. And the name? Maybe the name was an interesting coincidental use of the initials thought up by his son. But Julian probably heard references to LSD mentioned very often in his world, thought ‘hey I have a friend named Lucy, I’ll call my drawing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!’ And Lennon, seeing the happy syncronicity of the initials, went with it, in a circular reference going a full 360.
Sure, that’s all pure conjecture on my part. It’s just my opinion. Maybe you’re 100% right and I’m 100% wrong. But I don’t buy your argument that “he already admitted he did LSD, so why would he lie about this”. Why? Because he was a curmudgeon and fabulist who had such contempt for his fans who had the gall to try to find deeper meanings in his lyrics, that he later admitted he wrote nonsense lyrics to mock them (unless he lied about that).
You said “It’s possible to find many faults with Lennon”. Yes, one of them being that he was not a reliable narrator of his own life. Song’s about drugs.
Back in 2016 there was a rumor going around that Limp Bizkit was going to play a free concert at a Sunoco gas station in Dayton, Ohio. Hundreds of people showed up to the gas station, only to discover… there was no concert.
Of course it is, the book of psychedelia inspired late 60’s songs is very thick.
The question is whether John intended the song to be about an acid trip because the name spells out LSD, or whether he intended the song to be wildly imaginative because it was inspired by a child’s fanciful drawing.
Without knowledge of the drawing or Julian’s classmate named Lucy, the first seems straightforward. With the drawing and classmate, and John’s direct statement about it, I think the second is by far the more likely case.
Frankly this:
is beyond silly. A 4 year old created a name specifically as an oblique reference to LSD?
Really? I admitted that was pure conjecture on my part, but I don’t think it’s that far-fetched of a notion. When I was a kid, there used to be little red oval ‘STP’ stickers everywhere- it was a popular motor oil additive associated with racing. Since I had no idea what STP actually stood for, I used to make up 3-word phrases for what it might mean (unfortunately I didn’t record them for posterity in a drawing, so I don’t remember exactly what they were).
STP is a brand name for a consumer product that was heavily advertised in public.
LSD is an illegal drug that is never advertised, and the claim is that John had so many LSD based conversations where he said LSD aloud in front of his kid that the child became fascinated with the Three Letter Acronym and started making things up to match.
Why not? Kids listen to adults talk. No adult would have a second thought about saying ‘LSD’ and having a kid overhear it, because they’re just initials, what can the kid know? I imagine the term ‘LSD’ was mentioned constantly in the 60s: on the TV news, anti-drug posters, newspaper articles (yes a 4 year old can’t really read yet, but they can see the initials ‘LSD’ prominently appear in print and wonder what the mysterious initials stand for). Julian came up with the phrase ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ from somewhere. Could be pure random coincidence, sure. But I don’t think it’s all that crazy of a notion that he could have picked it up from being familiar with the initials ‘LSD’.
Fair enough, I’ll back of on my criticism. I still think it’s unlikely, but not entirely out of the question.
Regardless of whether it was intentional, I suspect Lennon was secretly delighted with the assumption. Nothing sells records like being banned by the BBC.
And again, it’s purely conjecture on my part. I could very well be completely wrong. I just don’t think it’s all that far-fetched of a notion, that’s all.
Exactly. Even setting aside the chicken-and-egg argument over the name origin, and assuming that it was completely random, innocent and free from any knowledge of or influence from LSD, Lennon must have loved that it contained those initials.
“Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” wasn’t banned. “A Day In The Life” was.
There are a host of stories about the origins of the Kinks song Lola. My favorite - which Ray has denied, and I believe him - is that it arises from him going on a date with Candy Darling. I mean, that would just be too good to be true.
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Showing my age here but I recall a rumor that The Mothers of Invention and The Fugs were going to join up and be “The Mother Fuggers” but that never happened. Junior High humor, y’know?
The version I heard was that their bassist at the time, John Dalton, met a lady in a club (I don’t know if it was down in old Soho), and late in the night/early in the morning took her to his room, only to notice stubble on her chin in the morning light. He told this story to the band, and Ray made a song out of it. But that’s just a story I heard, so take it with a grain of salt.
Around 2000 a Louisville radio station as an April Fools joke said there was a free concert with Leonard Skinner. He was the teacher that inspired Lynryd Skynrd. But everyone assumed (as they expected) that people would assume it was Lynyrd Skynrd. And they weren’t happy when it was the school teacher. Because of the public reaction, they did sponser a free concert with the real group.
Wasn’t the original, or perhaps intended or mooted, name of The Mothers of Invention, The Motherfuckers?
Which reminds me of something that I suppose is more of a misconception than a myth: “Frank Zappa didn’t drink or do drugs.” While it’s true he didn’t partake in illegal drugs, he was not a teetotaler. He drank on occasion.