Do You Want to Know a Secret: Book Review

July 13, 2016, 4:35 pm

Billy J. Kramer's autobiography, Do You Want to Know a Secret, tells his story of being a kid in Liverpool who became one of the key players in the Merseybeat Invasion of 1963. It also tells of his struggles with drugs and alcohol and how he re-invented himself.

The first thing you realize about Billy J. Kramer was that he did not really like being famous. He wasn't comfortable with the screaming fans. He really disliked his backing band, The Dakotas. They did not get along at all. He also did not get along with George Martin and he did not always see eye to eye with Brian Epstein.

Who did he get along with? The Beatles. From the moment he saw them in concert in December 1960, he knew they were going to make it big. He became friends with John, who gave him the "J" initial (which John said stood for Julian). In those days Billy didn't write his own songs. so he sang several Lennon-McCartney originals. Three of those songs reached #1 on the charts right away, making Billy J. the first artist to do so with a Lennon-McCartney song that wasn't sang by the Beatles. Billy J. is an introvert and he was not comfortable with his new-found fame.

After his three big hits, he struggled to do it again. He wasn't getting along with those around him and began drinking and became an alcoholic. It was many years of suffering until Billy J. sought help and got sober.

I really felt like something was missing from this book, but I never could put my finger on it. It is a very short book and you get a feeling that he left out a lot of information. I also do not think he has been completely honest with himself, as he places blame on others but doesn't ever point out that he could have been at fault as well.

Things I enjoyed in this book were some of the Beatles things Billy witnessed. He was at Paul's infamous 21st birthday party and tells what John did after the fight with Bob Wooler. You also hear the story up until the fight, but Billy was there for the entire thing. I also loved Brian Epstein while reading the book. While Brian and Billy argued from time to time, Brian never stopped caring about him. It was obvious that Brian did whatever he could to help and encourage the singer. Even after the Beatles stopped touring, Brian was working to get Billy J. gigs. I think that it wasn't until after Brian's death that Billy began to appreciate all he had done for him and came to understand just how special Brian Epstein truly was.

Do you want to know a Secret was an interesting book, and it was worth reading. However, I am sure it will be a book that sits in my Beatles library and won't get read again.

You can purchase the book through Amazon or if you want a signed copy, you can get it through The Fest.

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30 Rock

July 14, 2016, 3:46 pm

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Martha and friends

July 14, 2016, 3:56 pm

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Bottle in hand

July 14, 2016, 4:01 pm

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Press snaps in Detroit

July 14, 2016, 4:08 pm

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The All you need is love dolls

July 14, 2016, 4:12 pm

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More information on these cute "All you need is Love" dolls has surfaced thanks to former Apple Boutique employee, Jeni Crowley. Here is what she posted on facebook about them:

They were made by The Fool and they represented all 4 Beatles in one doll. George's ears, John's glasses, Ringo's nose and Paul's moustache. When the shop opened, they sat in the shop windows and when the shop closed for good I got one large & one small male doll, (it was called Clarence, but I don't know why) and a large & small female version Clarissa (Red hair, like Jane Asher, etc.)

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Chilling out

July 18, 2016, 3:46 pm

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Who wears short-shorts?

July 18, 2016, 3:53 pm

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Paul wears short-shorts!

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Rushing Ringo

July 18, 2016, 4:35 pm

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Happy times

July 18, 2016, 4:37 pm

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A Visit with Aunt Mimi

July 18, 2016, 5:00 pm

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Before I post this article about Aunt Mimi, I want to take the time to remember a wonderful friend of this blog, Kathy Burns, who passed away last week. Kathy was a Beatles fan from the beginning up until her death---she was a John girl and rad the Cyn Lennon fan club in the 1960's. Kathy wrote a great book about her friendship with Aunt Mimi called "The guitar's All Right as a Hobby, John" Kathy was a very nice woman and she is going to be missed by everyone that knew her.

A Visit with Aunt

By Alanna Nash

Freelance writer Alanna Nash of Louisville, KY. Wrote the following account of her 1971 visit to Mimi Smith, John Lennon’s famous aunt. By the way, she says she took no photos that day at Aunt Mimi’s because “I got the impression that she didn’t want nay made.” (The truth is, she was pretty intimidating). Aunt Mimi also was none too pleased with Lennon’s activist lifestyle at that time.

When John Lennon was gunned down in front of his New York apartment building on December 8, 1980, his widow, Yoko Ono, made three phone calls.

According to Newsweek magazine, she called “the people that John would have wanted to know.” – his 17 year old son Julian, from his marriage to Cynthia Powell; his former partner Paul McCartney, and his aunt, Mimi Smith, who reared him from the age of four.

Twelve years ago, as a college student studying in England, I paid Mary Elizabeth Smith—Aunt Mimi—a visit in her Sandbanks, Dorset, home. During my teen years, when Beatlemania was at its height, I had carried on a long correspondence with George Harrison’s parents. But my only communication with Aunt Mimi had been a brief postcard she’d sent me some years back in response to my many letters.

Still, I figured that was enough to get me through the door, and I invited a fellow exchange student to go along. Once we got to Sandanks, a mechanic at a corner garage pointed the way to Aunt Mimi’s home- a large, $50,000 “holiday cottage” on Poole Harbor that Lennon had originally bought for himself.

“Mrs. Smith?” I began. She peered around the door the way women in Hitchcock films to just before they become victims. I quickly dredged up the ancient postcard and while Mrs. Smith stood there teetering between entry and denial, my friend, a tall soft-spoken boy with a Beatle haircut and round, Lennon like spectacles, convinced her we didn’t mean any harm, that we were just “into the Beatles.”

Slowly the door opened, and we got our first good look at her. What struck me most was how much older she looked than in Beatle days, but her resemblance to Lennon was unmistakable – the same straight, narrow nose, the same shaped eyes and face, the same intellectual bearing. “You can only stay a little while, I’m afraid.” I remembered that six hours later as we packed up to leave.

Aunt Mimi told us she lived alone, except for a housekeeper, who had the day off. She showed us the living room, a cozy room furnished with good pieces that looked as though they’d gotten a lot of use, and excused herself to make a pot of tea. I remember that the room was filled with books – and with Beatles mementos, displayed tastefully on the walls and shelves. We were looking at the awards – including a 1963 Billboard magazine plaque for Most Promising Group – when Mrs. Smith returned with the tea and asked us to look over the mantle. There hung a plaque that an anonymous American fan had sent immortalizing her famous words, “The guitar’s all right as a hobby, John, but you’ll never make a living at it.”

We started out slowly, exchanging pleasantries and asking questions about the Beatles early days (“the boys had talent, yes, but they had a lot of luck, too. When they first played me ‘Love me Do’ I didn’t think much of it), but soon Aunt Mimi was ready to move along to stormier topics.

“I don’t know what all this business between John and Paul is about,” she said of their breakup. “But I don’t dare ask John. I did ring Paul about it, and he told me things would straighten up. The boys have been friends so long. I remember them coming home from school together on their bikes, begging biscuits. I’m sure they’ll get back together again. This is just a phase they’re passing through.”

If Mrs. Smith was really certain of that, she was, however, disturbed by much of her famous nephew’s behavior. “I’ve just quit reading the papers now,” she said. “Apple sends me his records, but I won’t play them. And I’ve asked my friends not to tell me about them. That shameful album cover (Two Virgins) and that art show of his,” she said referring to Lennon’s London gallery exhibit of erotic lithographs. “He’s been naughty and the public doesn’t like it, and he’s sorry for it. Now he wants sympathy. That’s why he’s come out with these fantastic stories about an unhappy childhood.”

“It’s true that his mother wasn’t there and there was no father around,” she continued, “but my husband and I gave him a wonderful home. John didn’t buy me these furnishings,” she said with a sweep of a hand, “My husband bought these things. John and Paul and George wrote songs together sitting on the sofa you’re sitting on now, long before you ever heard of The Beatles. Why, John had a pony when he was a little boy! He certainly didn’t come from a slum! None of the boys did! The Harrisons weren’t as well-off as the other families, perhaps, but George wasn’t from a slum, either, the way the press had it. And that’s why you never see photographs of John’s boyhood home! We certainly weren’t impoverished, the way John’s talking now!”

I asked what she thought had changed him. Mrs. Smith leaned toward us and whispered as if there were someone else in the house who might hear. “She’s responsible for all this,” she said. “Yoko. She changed him, and I’m sure she and Linda are behind this split with John and Paul. Cynthia was such a nice girl,” she added, smiling, “When she and John were in art college, she’d come to my house and say, ‘Oh, Mimi, what am I going to do about John?’ She’d sit there until he came home. She really pursued him. He’d walk up the road and back until she got tired of waiting and went home. I think he was afraid of her, actually.”

With that, I said something about what a different man he had become, writing songs like ‘Power to the People’ and staging a “bed in “ for peace. Mrs. Smith became visibly enraged, “Don’t talk to me of such things!” she said. “I know that boy. He doesn’t know what he’s saying! It’s all an act. If there were a revolution, John would be first in the queue! First to run! Why, he’s scared to death of things like that! That’s Yoko talking, not John!”

“I had a fan tell me she went up to John and Yoko on the street for an autograph, and Yoko said she could have the signatures, but a far better thing for her to do would be to go up the street and jump in the fountain and feel the water of life rush over her!” Yoko, Aunt Mimi concluded, was not exactly right in the head.

“Every time John does something bad and gets his picture in the papers, “ she continued, “he rings me up to smooth me over. See that new color television? It was a Christmas present, but he had it delivered early. A big present arrives every time he’s been naughty.”

I remember reading that before Lennon returned his M.B.E. award to the Queen in protest again Britain’s involvement in Biafra and Vietnam, it sat on Aunt Mimi’s T.V. set. I mentioned that, and Mrs. Smith took us into the music room - John’s bedroom when he lived there. She opened the closet, and there in a haphazard pile on the floor lay John’s gold records. Mrs. Smith picked up a frame nearby. “He sent back the medal, but I still have this,” she said handing me the M.B.E. certificate. John had crossed out the Queen’s signature with red ink and neatly returned the paper to its frame.

“I usually have a large photograph of John hanging in there,” Mrs. Smith said on the walk back to the living room. “When he’s a good boy, it’ll go back up again.”

Five years later, in 1976, I recalled that visit to Rick Mitz, my editor at a now defunct magazine. We talked about my writing a story about it, and decided we’d better first find out if Aunt Mimi was still alive. Rick dashed off a letter to John at the Dakota, and back came the following reply:

Dear R.M.

She’s alive

I’m busy

Luv, John Lennon

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More with Rumi

July 19, 2016, 3:53 pm

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Sentimental Journey Home

July 19, 2016, 4:00 pm

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A rare moment on tour

July 19, 2016, 4:05 pm

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Toronto '65

July 19, 2016, 4:07 pm

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Ex-Beatle George: Dark Horse, Pale Rider

July 19, 2016, 4:14 pm

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This article about George Harrison's 1974 press conference before the tour was found in "The New Beatles Fan Club" fanzine and they found it in the February 1975 issue of 'Teen magazine.

Ex-Beatle George: Dark Horse, Pale Rider

He was always the most reticent Beatle. Indeed, some might even say, “surly.”

Unlike Paul, John and Ringo who could always be counted on once in a great while to charm the collective pants off the press, he was the one in those dear, dead days of Beatlemania who would put down a reporter for asking an idiotic questions – as most of them were – with a snarky one-liner that stung.

Yet when George Harrison held his first press conference in years to mark the kickoff of his recent major tour, all was sweetness and light. And heaven knows he had provocation enough.

Let me set the scene: The Champagne Room of the Beverly Wilshire hotel in where else but Beverly Hills. Gathered there are maybe 100 journalists, a couple of camera crews and what seems to be the entire Hollywood photographers’ corps. Much excitement in the air as we wait for the star to arrive for, face it, the magic of the Beatles lives on even if the band itself does not.

And besides…well there’s the added spice of scandal hovering in the air.

The rumor has been free-floating for several months now that George’s wife Patti left him for his best friend, Eric Clapton. And reporters being a compulsively nosy pack of characters (you think it’s normal to ask total strangers about the most intimate working of their lives?) there’s the strong chance that one of us is going to come right out and ask if it’s true. Then there’s the tricky Harrison temper –still extant, one understands, despite all that meditation – to contend with. Talk about your shudders! Well of course he came, he saw, he conquered.

Looking more kempt, as a matter of fact, than we’ve seen him of late: hair shorter, neat moustache, wearing a spiffy baseball jacket that had the logo of his new record company Dark Horse emblazoned on the back.

Smiled a lot, too, he did, despite all those flashbulbs popping in his face and the generally inane line of most of the questions.

You know the sort of thing: will the Beatles ever get back together? Now, they’ve only restated it ‘till they’re blue in the fact that there’s no way they’ll play together as a band again. But he’s cool. He replied, “Only if we’re broke.” A not desperately likely occurrence.

Then he expanded his views on the whole Beatle fan phenomenon and his present relationship with the other guys. “I realize, “he said, “that the Beatles did fill a space in the ‘60’s and all the people the Beatles mean anything to have grown up. It’s like anything. If you grow up with something you get attached to it. One of the problems in our lives is that we get attached to things. I can understand that the Beatles did nice things and it’s appreciated that people still like them. The problem comes when they want to live in the past, when they want to hold on to something. People are afraid of change. To tell you the truth I’d join a b and with John Lennon any day, but I couldn’t join a band with Paul McCartney. But it’s nothing personal; it’s just from a musical point of view.”

He was asked if there wasn’t a dichotomy in the fact that he was really into a spiritual trip, yet the atmosphere that surrounds a touring band is anything but spiritual. “It is difficult,” he admitted. “It’s good practice, though to be in the world through not of the world. You can go to the Himalayas and miss it completely. Yet stuck in New York you can be very spiritual. In a place like that you have to look within yourself, otherwise you’d go crackers.”

Then—oh horrors—a little old lady who prefaced all her questions with, “this is for the Woman’s Page” as though that excused the asininity of what was asked, walked right into it. “Tell me,” she clucked, “does your wife cook for you?” Well naturally those among us who like to think we’re hip and collect gossip about the stars to pass along to show we’re “in” just gasped. This was it. Ball up on the slates time, people. How he was going to field this one, we wondered.

With style, actually. “I don’t have a wife anymore,” he said graciously. Someone else wondered if he’d be getting divorced, “No. That’s as silly as marriage.”

Since he was being so fractious about it, a few hardier souls decided to press a little harder. Clapton, it appeared, had once hinted in an interview that he’d written “Layla” for Patti. “Will there be,” asked the plucky reporter, “some kind of musical rebuttal in your new album I mean, to ‘Layla?”

“Pardon—a rebuttal? How do you mean? That sounds nasty. Eric Clapton’s been a close friend for years. I’m very happy about it. I’m still friendly with him.”

“How can you still be friendly?” pondered one innocent, perhaps not wise to the cool one acquires what with a vegetarian diet and meditating and all.

“Because he’s great,” answered an unshakable George. “I’d rather she was with him than some dope.”

There’s no stopping some people. The Woman’s Page person wondered if when Patti WAS with George did she cook for him?

The man’s patience is inexhaustible. Still he was all gentle charm, “She used to cook sometimes,” he said, “I learned to cook myself. I cook vegetarian Indian food. I don’t eat fish, chicken or meat. That’s why I’m so pale and thin.”

Then after a few more questions about his touring band – and an hour of answering some of the silliest questions I’ve heard – he was whisked off by his publicity man, and as we reporters drifted out we could hear the phrase, “Hey a really nice guy” all over. And I’m willing to wager he is.

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