#don't care for John Cage eh

[terrence-silver]

Imagining high school sweetheart!beloved and Terry getting married before he gets shipped off to war and Beloved always sending letters to Terry while he’s away

Bonus: Terry comes back home after the war and finds Beloved’s unsent letters to him that were written when he was M.I.A. and sees how worried she was about him

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I feel nobody would believe Twig is married because he's, well...Twig!

He's so young! So shy! So wide eyed! Scrawny! The idea of Privates infinitely more experienced and worldly than him only just being in the stage of sharing correspondence back home with their respective sweethearts and go-steady girlfriends while this kid here is already legally married is straight out of the Twilight Zone for most of his fellow soldiers who immediately wrote him off as a sore loser, perhaps with the rare exception of John Kreese who stands up for him and defends him when he's teased and called a liar who just about invented a full-blown Missus for himself to seem cool and less of a wimp in the eyes of everyone else, the letters he receives from beloved deemed fabricated one way or another even though they're actually entirely legitimate, the parcels bearing the seal of the military mail, arriving the same as everyone else's packages do.

''Did your momma write those?''

Someone might cruelly jest right before Kreese gives them a look, telling them to step off.

Gets slightly worse during POW captivity. All the members of Twig's platoon are in the same mess but it doesn't prevent in-fighting and the day-to-day cruelty and microaggressions from continuing even inside of a cage when validly, once communications are entirely cut off and they're trapped deep in enemy territory, there is no way for beloved's letters or anyone's as for that matter to come in and circulate, and the soldiers and even Twig's own Commanding Officer Turner never let him forget that like he's somehow to blame (And in their mind's eye, he is. They feel he's got them all captured through his negligence and incompetence. There will be payback for that. If the Vietcong don't do him in, his own will. For all Turner cares, Terry Silver got them here and pray to God, in the following weeks, he'll make this kid's life so difficult in this cage he'll wish the Vietcong ended him day one, bullet to the brain, same as Ponytail and what better way to utilize psychological warfare than to use the boy's own spouse against him the way he later tries with John and Betsy), finding it an apt pastime to pester one of their own even when facing death, torture and execution from the Vietcong that captured them. It's easier in a weird and very sick sense; poking and prodding at the weakest link in the hierarchy of things to better endure the gravity of the situation and just forget for a while.

You do some pretty awful things under duress.

''Guess the love letters stopped now, eh, Twig?'' Turner mocks.

''Momma back home ran out of ink?''

The older man laughs into his own chin as Twig scoots further back against the bamboo bars of their shared jail, missing beloved so badly he can feel the ache of it in his bones, loathing the fact he has no control of anything going on and John Kreese, witnessing the sight and having stood up for his friend countless times vows that one of these days, he's gonna give their Commanding Officer a piece of his mind even if he ends up court martialed for it after they're released seeing as how John can vouch that if the other soldiers are boneheads Captain Turner has enough intel on his own men to know for a fact Twig never lied and that he is in fact married back home. That beloved's real the same way his Betsy is real. Man has no excuse for the hell he's putting Twig through just because he can. John gets his chance to retaliate for the abuse a few weeks later once the Vietcong force them to fight over an open pit of snakes.

As for Twig?

Once they're rescued from the POW camp, he is finally reunited with the stack of letters beloved's been sending him back at base and it's like being reunited with a missing limb. When he gets home, beloved gives him a package of unsent mail just around the time he was captured and gone missing. Everything he's been made fun of entirely real and genuine; not one word of it a lie or made up. Everything right there, in black and white, written down with beloved's own pen. Every bit of concern. Fear. Care. Of course, it only serves to turn him a little more...well...Terry Silver as we know him. No point in being truthful if he won't be believed anyway, even when he is. Might as well fabricated. Might as well manipulate. Everyone who ever laughed at him died. And he's here. He survived. He is loved. He's won. And he'll keep winning and winning.

He hugs the stack of letters and beloved close to his chest with a vice grip.

The first seeds of something very dark have long been sown.

[delightfullyatomicfest]

John interviewed in Melody Maker, 6 December 1969

Last week I spent some time with John, during which he told me the truth about the early days, the current relationships within The Beatles, and his consequent need for independence, and a host of other subjects. We begin with the group’s rise to fame, and John’s feelings about the way it was achieved. 

“In the beginning it was a constant fight between Brian [Epstein] and Paul on one side and me and George on the other,” he told me. “Brian put us in neat suits and shirts, and Paul was right behind him. I didn’t dig that, and I used to try and get George to rebel with me. I’d say to him, ‘Look, we don’t need these suits. Let’s chuck them out of the window.’ My rebellion was to have my tie loose, with the top button of my shirt undone, but Paul’d always come up to me and put it straight. 

“I saw a film the other night, the first television film we ever did. The Granada people came down to film us, and there we were in suits and everything - it just wasn’t us, and watching that film I knew that that was where we started to sell out. We had to do a lot of selling out then. Taking the MBE was a sell-out for me. You know, before you get an MBE the Palace writes to you to ask if you’re going to accept it, because you’re not supposed to reject it publicly and they sound you out first. 

“I chucked the letter in with all the fanmail, until Brian asked me if I had it. He and a few other people persuaded me that it was in our interests to take it, and it was hypocritical of me to accept it. But l’m glad, really, that I did accept it- because it meant that four years later I could use it to make a gesture. 

“We did manage to refuse all sorts of things that people don’t know about. For instance, we did the Royal Variety Show once, and we were asked discreetly to do it every year after that- but we always said, ‘Stuff it.’ So every year there was always a story in the newspapers saying ‘Why No Beatles For The Queen?’, which was pretty funny, because they didn’t know we’d refused it. 

“That show was a bad gig anyway. Everybody’s very nervous and uptight, and nobody performs well. The time we did do it, I cracked a joke onstage. I was fantastically nervous but I wanted to say something, just to rebel a bit, and that was the best I could do.” 

Was there, in fact, anything at all that he enjoyed about the years of Beatlemania? 

“Oh sure. I dug the fame, the power, the money, and playing to big crowds. Conquering America was the best thing. You see, we wanted to be bigger than Elvis - that was the main thing. At first we wanted to be Goffin & King, then we wanted to be Eddie Cochran, then we wanted to be Buddy Holly, and finally we arrived at wanting to be bigger than the biggest - and that was Elvis. 

“We reckoned we could make it because there were four of us. None of us would’ve made it alone, because Paul wasn’t quite strong enough, I didn’t have enough girl appeal, George was too quiet, and  Ringo was the drummer. But we thought that everyone would be able to dig at least one of us, and that’s how it turned out.” 

When John returned his MBE in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Vietnam and Biafra conflicts, he added, “And against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.” 

Does that mean that “Cold Turkey” is a specially important record for you? 

“Yes, because it’s MY record. When I wrote it I went to the other three Beatles and said, ‘Hey lads, I think I’ve written a new single.’ But they all said, ‘Ummm... arrrrrr. . . welll. . .’ because it was going to be my project, and so I thought, ‘Bugger you! I’ll put it out myself.’ 

That had happened once before, when I wanted to put ‘Revolution’ out as a single, but ‘Hey Jude’ went out instead.” 

Does that mean that Plastic Ono Band is, for John, a kind of alternative Beatles, particularly in view of Ringo’s refusal to go on tour again? 

“Yes, I suppose so. It’s a way of getting my music out to the public. I don’t bother so much about the others’ songs. For instance, I don’t give a damn about how ‘Something’ is doing in the charts - I watch ‘Come Together’, because that’s my song.” 

Can he ever conceive of a time when he wouldn’t want his songs to be on the same album as Paul’s or George’s? 

“I can see it happening. The Beatles can go on appealing to a wide audience as long as they make albums like Abbey Road, which have nice little folk songs like ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ for the grannies to dig. 

“About ‘Maxwell’s Hammer’ - well, all I can say is that I dig Engelbert Humperdinck as much as I dig John Cage, and I don’t listen to either of them,” he said with a marvellously relevant irrelevance. “I always wanted to have other people on our records, like the Stones and our other friends. But some of the others wanted to keep it tight- just like The Beatles, you know? But you wait - it’s starting to get looser, and there should be some fantastic sessions in the next few years. That’s what I wanted all along.” 

Going back to the past, did he enjoy doing The Beatles’ two films, Help! and A Hard Day's Night ? 

“I dug Hard Day's Night, although Alun Owen only came with us for two days before he wrote the script. He invented that word ‘grotty’ - did you know that? We thought the word was really weird, and George curled up with embarrassment every time he had to say it. But it’s part of the language now-you hear society people using it. Amazing. 

“Help! was a drag, because we didn’t know what was happening. In fact [Richard] Lester was a bit ahead of his time with the Batman thing, but we were on pot by then and all the best stuff is on the cutting-room floor, with us breaking up and falling about all over the place.” 

The present: has Allen Klein made an agreeable difference to Apple, which was bothering John the last time I spoke to him? 

“Oh, it’s really marvellous. People were very scared of him to start with - and some still are - but that’s probably good. He’s swept out all the rubbish and the deadwood, and stopped it being a resthouse for all the world’s hippies. He won’t let people order antique furniture for their offices and so forth; he’s really tightened it up and it’s starting to work a lot better. 

“He’s noticed that The Beatles had stopped selling records as they were doing around the world, and he found out that it was because the record company simply wasn’t bothering to push them. They thought that our records would sell themselves, and they were wrong. They don’t. If you can get to No 1 in Turkey, Greece, Switzerland and a couple of other countries then that’s as good financially as getting a No 1 in Britain - they don’t realise that. 

“Klein’s very good - he’s going to make sure they stop sitting on the records and actually release them. He’s even keeping tabs on me - I usually make mistakes about who to get in to survey my house, and I can spend a fortune without getting anything done. He’s making sure that I do it the right way.” 

Richard Williams 

Melody Maker, 6 December 1969. 

Source: https://archive.org/stream/TheHistoryOfRock1969/TheHistoryOfRock1969_djvu.txt

Quoted in Rolling Stone in December 1969: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/beatles-splitting-maybe-says-john-182489/

Lots of this is quoted on the John Lennon website here: http://www.johnlennon.com/news/cold-turkey-plastic-ono-band/