The Webbs and The Beatles, the untold connection (1 Viewer)

mjp

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One day perhaps an article will surface where Jon Webb is interviewed and doesn't once mention how poor he is, and how much he suffers for art.

One day...

Until then, enjoy this one! ;)
 
Nice find, mjp!
So, even Lennon and McCartney were costumers. It must have been very flattering for the Webbs, and of course, Webb had to mention it, since it's good PR.
 
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There is no proof that they were. It makes a good story. Of course, it could be true, but it seems like something that was 100% made up...

Bill
 
I'd agree that it seems made-up, but it also seems plausible. Round about this time, Sir Paul was a roving beatnik; very into London's underbelly and into anything alternative, as it were. Seems a logical connection if someone in London were hip to Loujon. At that time, Lennon would likely have still taken Paul's recommendation for hip shit.

But, given Jon's penchant for, *cough* embellishment, it also smacks of BS.
 
Maybe more than being into Loujon they were interested in Miller and wanted some expensive Miller books (or they told someone that worked for them, "Get me every Henry Miller book").

That was my first thought, and why it seemed somewhat plausible to me. Jon was a con man, but pinning up a fake order from two Beatles to the wall before the newspaper reporter comes by...that would be very clever if he did it on purpose.
 
Jon was a con man, but pinning up a fake order from two Beatles to the wall before the newspaper reporter comes by...that would be very clever if he did it on purpose.
That would really be conning it with style, hehe.

Very nice, thanks a lot.
 
Thanks, mjp. I believe the Webbs were dirt poor. How could you not be poor doing what they did? But I'm sure they must have painted it worse than it actually was at times, for effect. It makes a good story. The Beatles also talked about issuing a record of Richard Brautigan reading (or did that happen? -- I forget). Anyway, they were tuned in to the literary underground.
 
Well, Barry Miles writes in his book The Sixties that he got the OK from Paul and John for a "Zapple" recording of Buk a bit after this, so it's not completely unbelievable.
 
I believe the Webbs were dirt poor. How could you not be poor doing what they did? But I'm sure they must have painted it worse than it actually was at times, for effect.
I'm sure they were. It just irritates me when people voluntarily choose a way of life that makes them poor, then constantly steer the subject of any conversation toward how much they don't have, and how much they suffer.

You pay a price to do whatever you want to do in life. To please yourself. So pay that price and shut up already. If you aren't happy about the results of that choice, go get a paying job. And shut up. It's infantile to whine and shake your fist at the sky because you aren't being properly rewarded.

I'm glad the Webbs did what they did. Honestly though, their work is a bit tainted (for me) by the legacy of complaint and self-imposed martyrdom.
 
True. It was a choice they made, and they wore it like a badge. I recall the poverty and struggle being a subject they usually (always?) elaborated on in the colophons of their books.
 
I cannot help but envy those of you to whom the name Webb holds any aged-retention. Would any of you older patrons care to give an account (if possible) of what growing up around the Beatles-era was like? I am a product of the bygone & now cannot sleep.



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Golly, that's a big subject. It was a vastly different time, growing up in the 50s - 60s. Things were much slower, and there was far less information. You heard music on the radio, and if you liked it, you went to the record shop and bought the record. You got your news from tv, radio, newspapers and magazines. More complex information from books. So it might take you years to find out the details about any given subject. Now you can Google it and know in seconds. I think the biggest difference between then and now was the concentration of power in the mass media. There was mainstream and almost nothing else. The underground press was just that: underground and not visible to the masses. My finding out about Bukowski in the 60s was a small miracle. It was much more likely I would never have heard of him. My older brother picked up copies of The L.A. Free Press on his trips into L.A. (probably visits to record stores in black neighborhoods), and Buk's "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" columns were in there. Later, in college, when a friend mentioned Bukowski's poetry, the name was familiar to me and I looked into it, discovered Black Sparrow Press, etc. Anyway, it was nothing like today, for better or worse.
 

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