Sexy Sadie – Julian Velard

July 7, 2010 in Podcast, The Beatles

Recorded on June 6, 2010, original version recorded on July 19, 1968.

Julian Velard: Vocals, Piano, Wurlitzer, Synth Bass
Roger Greenawalt: Ukulele, Loudspeaker Painting

Produced by Roger Greenawalt at Shabby Road Studio in Brooklyn, NY

About the Song

Sexy Sadie is a tidy little ditty about a dirty old man.

It is also a particularly juicy John Lennon J-accuse* Jeremiad**.

In the late summer of ‘67, The Beatles were reeling from the death of their manager, mentor, and father figure, Brian Epstein. Epstein, and to a much lesser degree George Martin, were the only grownups left with any appreciable influence over them. Lennon, their leader, and the most powerful post- adolescent on earth, was free to run amuck. Enter Eastern Mysticism.

The Beatles had distinct phases, their gimmick was authenticity, and their chief characteristic was ever accelerating change. The future never came fast enough for the Fabs. They went out and grabbed it and became the first to show tomorrow to us peasants stuck here in the present. They were concretely the most important cultural curators of the era. If The Beatles paid attention to anything, it was automatically essential.

Transcendental Meditation was one of those essential fads. A very chic and sophisticated cult, TM was begun in 1956 by the squeaky self proclaimed Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (Isn’t it funny that the two main villains in the Beatles mythos, Yoko and The Maharishi, are tiny and foreign with farcical voices? They both sound like an imitation of Peter Sellars imitating a Japanese or Indian person; they are that comic. And who knows, perhaps the Beatles were so susceptible to sound that a strange voice could literally hypnotize them?) By 1967 TM had spread to the glamorous worlds of celebrities and the young heirs and heiresses of great fortunes. Exactly the circles The Beatles moved in.

TM is still big. Howard Stern and David Lynch are among the best known adherents.

The Beatles actually went to India. For months. The Maharishi did not come to them. This sent the symbolic signal that TM was bigger and above The Beatles. But this was not true. That unreality could not stand. John says so in the song,

“We gave up everything we own just to sit at a table.”

They gave up mansions, groupies, limousines, shopping, and world travel for this? Sitting at a table in Rishikesh chanting a meaningless word over and over again? I don’t think so.

Structurally, John was never going to allow any other man to be an alpha for long in his immediate territory. Impossible. And when it came time to make the break, and confront The Maharishi and tell him they were leaving, it was John who did the telling. Which is telling.

Lennon wrote Sexy Sadie as fuck off to The Maharishi for allegedly making a pass at a woman in The Beatles traveling party. Talk about the cock calling the kettle black. In the famous 1970 Spin Interview with David Sheff, Lennon described The Beatles on tour as “like Fellini’s Satyricon.” He claimed relations with “hundreds of women”.

I personally doubt the story of John and George peeping through a bungalow window and catching The Maharishi red-handed dilly-dallying some girl’s gully. Powerful people don’t peep. They have their people peep for them. I believe the dubious Magic Alex or some such shady character concocted this story for his own purposes and that John Lennon accepted it for his own ulterior purposes.

Now let’s get one thing straight. What exactly is the point of being a guru or charismatic leader of any sort if you don’t use that power for good? By good I mean getting laid as often as possible by super hot much younger devotees. Where is the surprise in this?

This is what alpha dogs like John Lennon do. That is their job description. (See Chamberlin, Wilt***, and Simmons, Gene****)

Sexy Sadie comes from a pissed off place. Anger is always a reliable inspirational energy for Lennon. And in that spirit, how I wish he had kept the original scatological opening line, first instinct, best instinct,

“Maharishi, you little twat…”

Maharishi and Sexy Sadie of course scan similarly. And Sexy Sadie is such a mean spirited and cruelly clever knick name. So Lennon. So Shock tactic. So true.

Back here in boring 2010, The Beatles just keep on getting bigger. Poor beleaguered bad luck Obama had to recently borrow some of Paul McCartney’s universal popularity just to get through another shitty day. (Check out Paul’s girlfriend Nancy. Nice.)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/president-obama-honors-paul-mccartney

Darlings, we’re all doomed. There is no joy in Mudville. We are getting very near the end. All I can offer you is another Beatle cover. Enjoy Julian Velard! He’s the best. Catch his upcoming shows at the new Rockwood Music Hall Friday June 18, and Saturday June 19, at 9PM. See you there.

*J’accuse (“I accuse”) was an open letter published on January 13, 1898, in the newspaper L’Aurore by the influential writer Émile Zola.

The letter was addressed to President of France Félix Faure, and accused the government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, a French General Staff officer sentenced to life penal servitude for espionage. Zola pointed out judicial errors and a lack of serious evidence. The letter was printed on the front page of the newspaper, and caused a stir in France and abroad. Zola was prosecuted and found guilty of libel on February 23, 1898. To avoid imprisonment, he fled to England, returning home in June 1899.

As a result of the popularity of the letter, even in the English-speaking world, J’accuse! has become a common generic expression of outrage and accusation against a powerful person.

**A jeremiad is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in poetry, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society’s imminent downfall. As in “Sexy Sadie, you’ll get yours yet!”

The word is an eponym, named after the Biblical prophet Jeremiah, and comes from Biblical works attributed to him, the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations. The Book of Jeremiah prophesies the coming downfall of the Kingdom of Judah, and asserts that this is because its rulers have broken the covenant with the Lord.

The Lamentations, similarly, lament the fall of the kingdom of Judah after the conquest prophesied by Jeremiah has occurred:

“How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!
She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.
Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude: she dwelleth among the heathen, she findeth no rest: all her persecutors overtook her between the straits.
The ways of Zion do mourn, because none come to the solemn feasts: all her gates are desolate: her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted, and she is in bitterness.”

Sounds like the lyrics to a reggae song about 9/11. By the Afflicted Virgins!

***Although shy and insecure as a teenager, adult Chamberlain became well-known for his womanizing. As his lawyer Seymour “Sy” Goldberg put it: “Some people collect stamps, Wilt collected women.”[5] Swedish Olympic high jumper Annette Tånnander, who met him when he was 40 and she 19, remembers him as a bona fide pick-up artist who was extremely confident yet respectful: “I think Wilt fucked everything that moved…[but] he never was bad or rude.”[5] Many of Chamberlain’s personal friends testified he had a “magnetic personality”, once had 23 women in 10 days, had no problems organizing a threesome (or more), and particularly enjoyed a TV skit on the show In Living Color in which a mother and her daughter approach a Vietnam Wall-like list of women who slept with him, both of them pointing out that their names are on it, as well as a 1991 Saturday Night Live sketch where MC Hammer played Chamberlain in “Remembrances of Love”, where Chamberlain spoofs a soap opera with romances with women that are usually over in five minutes.[5] However, Los Angeles Times columnist David Shaw claimed that during a dinner with Shaw and his wife, Chamberlain was “rude and sexist toward his own date, as he usually was,” adding that at one point Chamberlain left the table to get the phone number of an attractive woman at a nearby table.[14]

In 1991, Chamberlain wrote his second autobiography, A View from Above. There, the lifelong bachelor claimed he had sex with 20,000 women. For this to be true, he would have had to have had sex with 1.14 women per day from the age of 15 up until the day of his death, a rate of almost eight women a week. (One jokester asked if that number was “regular season only, or does that include the playoffs?”) Quickly, he became target for jokes and jibes, and fellow African-American tennis superstar Arthur Ashe was highly critical, blasting Chamberlain for embarrassing black men and fueling prejudices about their sexual behavior. Chamberlain defended himself: “I was just doing what was natural—chasing good-looking ladies, whoever they were and wherever they were available” and pointed out he never started a relationship with a married woman.[15] In a 1999 interview shortly before his death, Chamberlain regretted not explaining the sexual climate at the time of his escapades, and warned other men who admired him for it, closing with the words: “With all of you men out there who think that having a thousand different ladies is pretty cool, I have learned in my life I’ve found out that having one woman a thousand different times is much more satisfying.”[16] Chamberlain also acknowledged he never came close to marrying, and had no intention of raising any children.

****Rocker Gene Simmons has managed to hold down a long-term relationship for over two decades only because his partner allows him to sleep with as many women as he wants. The KISS star, who claims to have had sex with an estimated 4,600 women, has been with his girlfriend Shannon Tweed for 22 years and believes the only reason they’re still together is because they never got married. The 56-year-old says, “I have been happily unmarried for 22 years and we have two great kids but neither of us has dominion. Loving someone and caring about someone does not mean they have the right to own you. She will mount the milkman if she wants, so relax, why torture each other? You have to be committed to a marriage. If that doesn’t sound like a madhouse, I don’t know what does.”

“I am the only one I know who has never been divorced. The biggest cause of divorce is marriage.”