So the other night -- i.e., the sad 30th anniversary of the death of John Lennon -- I was chatting via the intertubes with a certain frequent commenter about the relative merits of John's Beatles stuff versus the solo work, a subject we needn't get into here for a number of reasons. In any event, I did allow that "Real Love," the John tune from his Dakota house husband period that the surviving Beatles finished for Anthology in 1995, was one of my favorites among the later stuff, and that the Beatles version is something I genuinely cherish. Seriously -- I think it stands up very nicely against anything that they did as a group back in the day.
Anyway, by chance, later that evening I stumbled across this radically different acoustic guitar version John did of the song -- from the sound of it, quite a bit earlier than the piano demo the Fabs overdubbed. Which I hadn't heard before.
Not epochal by any means -- in fact, pretty ragged, actually -- but by the time John started whistling I must confess to kind of losing it.
