Thursday, November 18, 2021

More Macca on the Atacca

"I Can't Goddam Wait for The Beatles Get Back Documentary to Air on Thanksgiving Month" rolls on, and here we see a quote from Paul McCartney about the area businessmen in London who were annoyed at their legendary rooftop concert in January of 1969:

...the Beatles could still tease out the prejudices of age and class. This is shown by the responses of a gaggle of businessmen who gather in the doorway of 2 Savile Row. “I think it’s a bit of an imposition to absolutely disrupt all the business in this area."

When I ask Paul McCartney about these scenes, he mentions a sequence from the first Beatles film, 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night. The four are portrayed confronting a bowler-hatted commuter who objects to sharing space with them in a train compartment. He responds to Ringo Starr blaring music from a radio with a line that, back then, was common currency: “I fought the war for your sort.”

“There’s always the guy in the bowler hat who hates what you’re doing,” says McCartney. “But you’ve got to remember, as we always did, there’s the people who work for that guy. There’s the young secretaries, the young guys in the office, or the tradesmen or the cleaners. Those are the people who like us. We always knew that there’s the establishment, then there’s the working people. And we were the working people. Working people tended to get us, and understand what we were doing. And occasionally, you would get the kind of snob who would get angry. In a way, that was part of the fun.”

Here's the scene. Enjoy, people of Earth!

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