Was [Yer Blues] deliberately meant to be a parody of the English blues scene?
John Lennon: Well, a bit. I'm a bit self-conscious — we all were a bit self-conscious and the Beatles were super self-conscious people about parody of Americans which we do and have done. I know we developed our own style but we still in a way parodied American music... there was a self-consciousness about singing blues. We were all listening to Sleepy John Estes and all that in art school, like everybody else. But to sing it was something else.
Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner (8 Dec 1970)
Links
Music Icons Magazine - The Beatles The Story Behind Every Song (2015):
ReplyDeletePart blues parody, part soul-bearing confessional, “Yer Blues” was written in Rishikesh while Lennon was feeling suicidal. “The funny thing about the camp was that although it was very beautiful and I was meditating about eight hours a day, I was writing the most miserable songs on earth,” Lennon said. He may have been trying to obscure this naked emotion by casting the song as a satire of the then burgeoning British blues scene.
Quite possibly trying to obscure - he was at Rishikesh with his wife while writing songs about Yoko...
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