Genius is pain - the origins

I plan to write a future music post that will emphasize the point that genius is pain, but some people may not be familiar with the origin of the line.

Back during the heyday of the National Lampoon (before the low days of the National Lampoon), one of their albums included a rather wicked parody of John Lennon's primal scream period, entitled "Magical Misery Tour." A downloadable MP3 of the parody can be found at this 2005 WFMU post.

Since it IS the Lampoon, it probably goes without saying that there is a language warning here. My favorite line, however, is "The sky is blue." Oh, and a reference to the "the Walrus was Paul" line from "Glass Onion." The latter song, of course, was the one that made fun of all the Beatles rumors...but a year later became the basis for the biggest Beatles rumor of all, the one about the death of Paul McCartney.

That's not funny, that's sick.

But returning to the other National Lampoon album, the lyrics to "Magical Misery Tour" were not written by the Lampoon, but by...John Lennon:

This is an unrelentingly brutal parody of John Lennon made all the more pointed due to the fact that the lyrics are Lennon's own words taken from an interview he granted to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone in 1970. The interview itself is legendary. At the time it was conducted, Lennon was still hopelessly trapped under the vast, oppressive shadow of The Beatles, and he was angry, whiney, and petulant. With his characteristic cutting wit and candor, Lennon held nothing back and unearthed intensely personal details about his experiences with LSD, heroin, his petty ego issues with Paul and Mick Jagger, and the pain of seeing Yoko publicly maligned and almost universally hated.