My fellow technical writer Earl Rich and I didn't always email each other about politics, literature and physics. Sometimes he would say something that made you feel understood.
From January 23, 1995:
Nancy,
Sometimes I can envision you sitting on the other side of that wall, your overactive mind desperately searching for some outlet of creativity while forced to produce the mindless yet logical step-by-step instructions involved in Navigating a Dialog Box.
This is what really made him special, well beyond his physical beauty. Today is the 29th anniversary of his death, and I am thinking of him, on the other side of that final wall.
I'm sorry it took so long because Lennon does "Yer Blues" with a bunch of other famous musicians, not in the Beatles, and it's great.
I've never heard anybody else remark on this, and maybe it's too obvious to point it out, but I think the entire Get Back project was strongly influenced by Rock and Roll Circus, with Lennon performing for the first time in public for an audience that wasn't all screaming adolescents.
You can see the audience at the end of this performance, and while enthusiastic, it is much smaller and more subdued than anything the Beatles had experienced in the previous 5 years. Here is a comparable kind of venue three years earlier. It's amazing how different Lennon looks in only three years.
I think the Beatles were hoping to capture that Rock and Roll Circus ambiance, with their various schemes to perform live, and the roof of Abbey Road Studio was the closest they could get. Which was still pretty good.
