Paperback writers
Jun. 11th, 2011 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakMore catching up with reviews. I did buy two historical novels in England as well, plus some Big Finish DW audios, but I couldn't resist acquiring four Beatles-related books I had heard from and read excerpts of, but had not read before, since they were all available in paperback. Two memoirs (Alistair Taylor's With the Beatles and Tony Bramwell's Magical Mystery Tours), one book of academic essays (The Cambridge Companion to The Beatles), and because I was in such a great mood that I felt ready to confront an entire book devoted to that most depressing of subjects, You Never Give Me Your Money about the Beatles break-up and subsequent decade. (Actually the book is about the subsequent decades, but given that two thirds of it covers the 70s and the rest hurries through the other decades after John's death, I think the description is fair.) Which means, oh patient readers, you're in for more Beatles talks and reviews.
The memoirs first, because they make quite an entertaining compare and contrast. (And another illustration of the Rashomon effect when it comes to recalling the same people and events.) The credentials of the two authors as eye witnesses are pretty good - Alistair Taylor (not to be confused with Derek Taylor, the Beatles' press officer) worked for Brian Epstein in his record store, then was his P.A., then a general Mr. Fixit, then after Brian's death worked as an Apple manager until Allen Klein came on board and fired about two thirds of the old Liverpool gang, while Tony Bramwell (not to be confused with Tony Barrow, yet another Epstein employee who wrote yet another memoir) knew three of them from childhood onwards and was a pal of George's originally, then moved on to work for Brian Epstein as well, became one of the Apple people, as opposed to poor Alistair did not get fired during the great Klein purge and went on to work for various other people in the business for a pretty long time, including (this might interestlikeadeuce) young Bruce Springsteen. (Working for the Beatles and Bruce should earn him some kind of musical record, I suppose?) Given that one got fired and the other did not, it's not surprising Taylor is more bitter than Bramwell, but that's far from the only thing they disagree on. Allow me to illustrate, sometimes with paraphrases, sometimes with quotes.
re: the famous story of how Brian was alerted to the Beatles' existence via a teenager named Raymond Jones asking for the record they had made with Tony Sheridan:
Tony Bramwell: "Despite rumours to the contrary, Raymond Jones existed: not only had I seen him around, but a photograph of him was published in Bob's 1962 biography."
Alistair Taylor: "I got so fed up with people asking if we had a record of 'My Bonnie' by the Beatles and having to say No that I put through an order for it myself under a name I simply dreamed up. Brian refused to order records unless there was a firm order. (...) I know that I invented the name and put it into the order book. But now Liverpool people claim to know 'the real' Raymond Jones and a chap with that name can miraculously recall palcing the order. Rubbish."
Alistair Taylor: Brian was not in love with John. Never ever ever did he have the slightest non-platonic feeling for one of the boys, and certainly not for John. THEY DID NOT HAVE SEX IN BARCELONA. Also, I loved Brian, but not in a gay way. The mere idea of gay sex disgusts me, but my wife says I loved Brian more than her, in a heterosexual way. And Brian never ever had gay thoughts about John. That's vile slander.
Tony Bramwell: Brian? Totally crushing on John and obsessed with him, with the devotion of a pure masochist. Though I don't think they got it on in Barcelona, simply because John was too mean for that. BTW, how come Brian never hit on me? Not that I would have said yes because I'm completely heterosexual, as everyone else in this story except for Brian.
Alistair Taylor: John was a deeply misunderstood sensitive soul, whom you wanted to protect all the time, and all that talk about what a lousy husband he was to Cynthia and how cruel he was to Brian is totally exaggarated. She wanted to get to bed early and he simply behaved as any self-respecting rock star would. Also, he was a genius while Paul is just a brilliant talent.
Tony Bramwell: John was fun, but crazy. I mean clinically so. Also, he was a complete bastard to Cynthia, dead lazy and wasn't the genius legend later made him into. Paul, on the other hand...
Alistair Taylor: I didn't see much of John and Yoko together but I thought they were adorably in love.
Tony Bramwell: "An artist of mass destruction named Yoko Ono", vile stalker extraordinaire, evil manipulator, changed John into a pod person and probably used hypnosis on him. Wanted John all to herself. I HATE HER FOREVER AND EVER.
Alistair Taylor: Linda was "this hard faced star-chaser from the USA", vile stalker extraordinaire, evil manipulator, changed Paul from practically my younger brother into my boss and broke my heart. DIE, Linda! Err, wait. Anyway, she wanted Paul all to herself and was stuck up.
Tony Bramwell: Linda was the best thing that ever happened to Paul, totally unpretentious, friendly and great with sharing the pot. They were so adorably in love.
Alistair Taylor: I really thought Paul and Jane would make it. When she caught him with Francie the groupie, he was utterly heartbroken and cried on my shoulder for months. BEFORE LINDA CAME ALONG, THE EVIL BITCH.
Tony Bramwell: I really knew Paul and Jane were doomed from the start and could smell the break-up miles away. I bet he deliberately let himself get caught with Francie the groupie and was really relieved when it was over. And then we had some weird months. Until Linda came along, thank God.
And so on, and so forth. They do agree on some characterisations. Brian Epstein, for starters, comes across the same way in their respective memoirs; the question of the platonic nature of his devotion to John aside, they do agree he loved the entire group to bits, was brilliant and charming at his best but also tormented and full of self-loathing which got worse once they stoped touring and he didn't feel himself useful anymore. George is George the neglected and Ringo is Ringo the great mate in either version, and Allen Klein gets loathed by both of them. And they agree on the John and Paul closeness in ye early days. Forget what happened later, writes Taylor, at that time, they were closer than any two men I've ever known. The four Beatles were all rock solid mates in those early days. That's how they got through it all. But John and Paul were like brothers. In fact, they were a lot closer than most brothers.
Narrative voice wise, Bramwell is funnier, but also inclined to spin a good yarn while he's at it, never letting the facts get into the way of a good story. In addition to the Raymond Jones incident (where I believe Taylor), Tony B. can't resist placing himself and George Harrison at the scene of the first Lennon/McCartney encounter at the Woolton Fete. Now all the other eye witnesses might have neglected to mention Tony Bramwell's presence, but you'd think someone would have mentioned it to anyone if George had been present. Starting with George. A few years later, when Paul meets Linda for the first time in a night club, Tony Bramwell also happens to be around at the precise moment they encounter each other. And still later you get a real clunker when he says Paul and Linda, after meeting Linda's father and her stepmother, visited Linda's mother as well. Considering Linda's mother had died in a plane crash when she was 17, that would have taken some necromancy to accomplish. Otoh, he's always good for a witty turn of phrase, such as the Beatles' original impression of producer George Martin: "We saw George Martin as Q in the James Bond films. You could imagine him saying, 'Don't fiddle with those knobs, Double-O-Lennon, you'll blow us all to smithereens, there's a good chap.' By that time, of course, John's head was so full of controlled substances that George would probably have been right." It's also noticable that as opposed to Taylor, who mostly uses standard Beatles publicity photos for illustration, Bramwell uses personal photos under his own copyright which I haven't seen anywhere else, and he is also good for the occasional astute psychological observation, such as his take on the bonding-over-dead-mothers thing between John and Paul, why this would make them each other's outlets beyond the music: The loss of their mothers had an enormous emotional impact that they bottled up and couldn't discuss with anyone. In quieter moments, they sometimes shared their feelings, something they couldn't do with their other friends. I only came to recognize how this was years later because Liverpool kids were tough. (...)(We) would have been embarassed to show our feelings, certainly not to each other. We had an expression, 'Don't get real on me, man,' which meant, 'Keep your feelings to yourself.' It was all bottled up inside and we just grew up and got on with life.
But good lord, the Yoko hatred. Seriously. Taylor isn't any less vehement with the Linda hate but he keeps it to the last chapter, whereas Bramwell starts taking shots at Yoko from the middle of his book onwards. He, along wiith John's childhood pal Pete Shotton, seems to have been the source of the story that Yoko and her second husband Tony Cox conspired to have Yoko "hook" John and split the money she could get out of him. Considering that T. Cox went on the run with his and Yoko's daughter Kyoko in 1971 and Yoko isn't likely to have told them such a thing, either, I do wonder how they want to know such a thing. Anyway, the most ironic thing is of course that the same Tony Bramwell who paints a portrait of Yoko as Madame Evil and her relationship with John as the most neurotic enslavement ever goes cheerfully on to narrate how he, post-Beatles, worked for Phil Spector; if you want to talk about obsessively jealous spouses who literally imprison their significant others in the music scene of the day, Spector wins every time, something Bramwell isn't unaware of. To stop her running away, he locked Veronica 'Ronnie' Ronette up like she was some black Transylvanian princess in a tower and not the beautiful girl who sang 'Baby I love You,' and won the hearts of millions. But while making her the Prisoner of Mulholland Drive, Phil forgot to lock up his scret licquor cabinet, which Ronnie, bored to death, accidentally discovered. Soon she was out of it, on whiskey and broken dreams. It was all Raymond Chandler in black-and-white, like The Big Sleep. Sometimes, when I warrived, Philip would be firing guns down the long drive. And re: Spector's 2003 arrest for murder: I know one thing: whoever is still left from the old days will not be surprised. I am tempted to comment, Tony, old chap, if you're working for Phil Spector knowing all that, then frankly you're not in a position to pass judgment on Yoko Ono even if all you say about her should be true, which I doubt, given the above mentioned fibs in far more minor matters.
As for Alistair Taylor's Linda issues, the big charge seems to be that she a) wanted to refurnish the ground floor of Paul's house ("which looked exceptionally elegant due to the exquisite taste of Miss Jane Asher", so clearly the only reason why Linda would want to redecorate would be a sinister one) and b) she checked the bill afterwards and accused Taylor of overcharging. I can see how he would find this insulting, but given the sheer rate at which the Beatles lost money at that time with everybody and their drug mule sponging of them via Apple and otherwise (one of the things the 1970 lawsuit was about and pointed out was that after Brian's death, nobody bothered to keep any accounts, and the way it looked was that despite all those millions of records sold they would not be able to meet their tax obligations because nobody kept an overview about where all the money went), I can see where Linda would get the idea from. However, for Taylor, this meant that "There may have been more singularly manipulative people around than Linda Eastman, but I've never met them. She might well have loved Paul, but she sure as hell hated anyone else", which is of course the exact same charge Bramwell lays on Yoko's door (replace "Paul" with "John", of course). Meanwhile, here's the impression another woman (not working for the Beatles and not romantically involved with any of them) had, to wit, Twiggy in her descriptions of photographers she worked with: In the late 1960s I got a call from my friend Paul McCartney. His new American girlfriend Linda was coming to live in London with her daughter. He was concerned that she didn't have any female friends over here and asked if I'd get together with her. We met for lunch at San Lorenzo, hit it off immediately and there started a 30 years friendship.
Anyway, back to the memoirists. Neither of them is a musician, or worked in the studio, so while there are some bits about the songs, they don't have to say that much about their production (Here, there and everywhere by the engineer Geoff Emerick is the book for that, and of course George Martin's memoirs), but what they did have a lot to do with was managing the everyday craziness of the Beatles' lives, and the descriptions there are certainly vivid. So, before I turn to the other books, two shorter passages for Taylor and a longer one for Bramwell:
Alistair Taylor: Before any gig, it became a habit for children in wheelchairs to be brought in and sort of presented to them. It was very sweet and at teh start they meant it most sincerely. But the frightening thing was that parents becan to believe that if one of the Beatles touched their child then he or she would be healed. This soon became quite a sick practice. It turned my stomach and I didn't like it. Neil Aspinall would line it all up. He would check up the corridor to see if they were all waiting then he would come inside the dressing room and, mimicking John's humour and, mimicking John's humour and purely to get the Beatles' attention he'd shout, 'OK, guys, spastic time.' They and Neil felt very uncomfortable about all this. They used their black humour to disguise their real feelings but Paul told me how much he hated the way people used to use crippled or handicapped children to get backstage.
'It started out innocently enough,' he said. 'These kids have mostly had such a shit deal from life they deserve the best seats in the house. That's fine, but it never stops there. They want to come into the dressing room, to meet us before the show, and they start to think we've got healing hands or something. We don't want to do a damn thing to hurt any kid, sick or otherwise. That includes John. He might make some sicko jokes but when it comes down to it he's about the softest guy I know about any sort of suffering. But if there is any hint about us not co-operating, then we get threats of guys going to the papers. It's just cruel to tell kids that touching a Beatle will make them better.
And more on the bright side, about when John and Paul got the Ivor Novello Awards (well, one of those occasions): I got a panic call from Brian at the office at 11.00 am on the day of the ceremony. Did I know that John and Paul were due at the Savoy at 12.30 pm for the premier British song writing award? Yes, of course I did, it was in the diary. The only problem was that Brian had insisted he was going to tell the boys and he had uncharacteristically forgotten. Could I get them there on time? I said it was impossible but that wasn't a word Brian understood. The idea of delivering a public snub to the whole of the music and entertainment establishment was simply unthinkable. Just get them there on time, Alistair. Oh, and don't tell them that the panic is because I forgot. Invent some cover story, please.
In Brian-speak, this translated as 'accept the blame for the mistake yourself and pretend that you forgot.' John was out at home in Weybridge so I rang him first as he had further to travel. At least, he would have had if he'd had the slightest intention of going anywhere. My explanation about the last minute call to the Savoy sounded desperately lame so I was hardly surprised when the Lennon response was a brief 'Fuck off', followed by the line going dead.
That left Paul. The telephone rang in the elegant Asher household in Wimpole Street for what seemed like an age. I knew Paul and Jane had been out late the night before and, as the phone rang and rang, my heart sank further into my boots. Eventually Jane's charming but very protective mother answered. She couldn't possibly disturb Paul as early as this, whatever the crisis. Could I ring back later? All the time, I could imagine the guests arriving at the Savoy happy int he knowledge they would soon be seeing the two song-writing Beatles in person. (...) I firmly insisted that Mrs. Asher wake Paul - please. She reluctantly agreed and a minute or so later a sleepy and very grumpy Paul came on the phone. I burbled out the story I had been practising for the past hour and there was then a very long pause from the other end of the line. For a horrible moment or two, I was terrified he had gone back to sleep. But then Paul said, 'OK, be round in a cab to pick me up in ten minutes' time.' Thank you, Paul, I thought, and when my taxi arrived at Wimpole Street about 15 minutes later there was Paul to answer the door holding a piece of toast but he was suited and booted, Beatled up and ready to go.
'What's the problem? Do I ever let you down?' said his super-cool expression. But we were still late and by the time the cab struggled through the busy lunchtime traffic the organisers were starting to get very worried indeed. I was so fired up by then I manhandled Paul through the pack of reporters and photographers so he was able to get his seat on the top table just as lunch was about to start. Phew. But my ordeal wasn't over. Paul insisted that I had to have John's seat and share the glittering company of David Frost, Billy Butlin and others. I know they wondered who on earth I was but by then I didn't care. I 'd got one Beatle there on time.
Tony Bramwell's story I picked because we have confirmation of it from several other sources, because it was a rare happy and relaxed break during the craziness of 1968, and because among other things it illustrates the point I made in an earlier post about the enthusiasm the 60s musicians had for each other:
In a discussion we had about the Stones once, I think it was Ringo who said, 'You listen to the likes of 'Honky Tonk Women' and 'Brown Sugar' and tell me it doesn't make you wanna dance, and I'll tell you, you need help.' The Beatles were all fans of great music. Cruising along the limo listening to 'Jumping Jack Flash' blasting out of a little speaker, even Martha started to move. Derek Taylor tried to get up, gave up, and settled for grooving along in the corner, but Paul went nuts. That was the first time we'd heard it and it was a revelation. Mick and Keef may have been short of new songs when they asked for 'I wanna be your man' from J & P, but my God, how they had caught up! (...) We were just pulling into a gas stationwhen it ended and Paul turned to me. Reverting to type he said, 'Bloody hell! That's a bit tasty. 'Ere, Tone, do you think you could go and call up Alan Freeman and get him to play that again?'
'You want me to promote the Stones?'
'Yeah, why not?'
(...) I called 'Fluff' Freeman as directed, and almost immediately, to our surprise, he announced on air, 'Tony Bramwell of Apple Records has just called in from some gas station in the middle of nowhere. He's with Paul McCartney and they've made a request to play 'Jumping Jack Flash' again.' And he turned to his producer, Dennis Jones and asked, 'Can we do that?' Dennis said, 'Why not?' So they did. We just sat there in teh Daimler in this gas station listening. It was still fantastic. (...) By the time we reached Berfordshire, we had been driving for a long time on the A6 and were a bit bored. Paul wanted to let Martha stretch her legs, and to tell the turth, it was such a glorious day I don't think we were in any particular rush to return to London. Paul got out the road map and opened the page. He stuck a finger on it and we all looked. 'Harrold,' said Paul. 'That sounds nice. Let's go and visit Harrold.'
We struck lucky. Harrold was a most beautiful little medieval English village along the Great Ouse River. We drove through but all the pubs were closed. On the way out, we spotted a man cutting a hedge around a charming house. Paul said, 'Stop!'
We all tumbled out of the car and Paul asked if there was anywhere we could get a snack. 'And Martha needs some water,' he said.
The man, a dentist, said, 'There's nowhere open. But it's nearly teatime. Would you care to join us?'
We all trooped indoors, where the wife was preparing sandwiches and putting a cake or two on plates. She glanced up and smiled. If she recognized Paul she didn't say. They were far too polite. The children were called in from playing in the back garden. The oldest one, a very pretty little girl of about seven, recognized Paul like a sot, but again, had been nicely brought up and she didn't comment. However, she did have a guitar that was leaning up in a corner of the room, and after tea, Paul picked it up and, playing left-handed, sang 'Blackbird' and 'Rocky Raccoon' and a few other songs for the children, who clustered around him as if he were the pied piper.
After a while the dentist suggested that since the pubs would now be open we could have a drink. We strolled out in the dusk and down the High Street, passing a fourteenth century church with a fine spire. The dentist, who was well versed on local history, told us the village was first founded in the time of King Stephen. While Martha splashed happily about in the rushes, he pointed over the brdige. 'Chellington lies over there, or what's left of it,' he said. He went on to tell us the strange story of a disappearing village. (...) By the time we got to the pub, the word had spread and it was fairly packed. We drank beer while Paul sat at the piano and played a repertoire of Beatles songs, McCartney songs and a lot of rock and roll until closing time. I think in the back of his mind Paul would have liked to put tomorrow off indefinitely.
Given that "tomorrow" by that point meant arguments, arguments, arguments, I bet he did. You never give me your money by Peter Doggett has been praised as that rarity, a book that manages to do justice to all four Beatles and Yoko Ono without either bashing or glorifying any of them, despite the fact that the break-up time and the long aftermath is hardly the period where anyone was at their best. It deserves the praise, but I think having once read it through I'll handle it like the Let It Be film, only going back for excerpts, never the whole, because the whole is just too damn sad. Some choice excerpts:
About John's Lennon Remembers interview of 1970: Intrinsic to his philosophy was rejection of the past, which in the arithmetic of Primal Scream Therapy equalled pain. If, as he believed, Janov's therapy had liberated him from his inner torment and the defense mechanisms he'd erected to conceal it, then he needed to rid himself of all the other encumbrances he'd gathered in recent years. None of them weighed or imposed more than the Beatles. (...)He raged against the way that Harrison and McCartney had treated Ono, dismissed George Martin' s claim to any credit for the Beatles' music and attacked his most loyal friends at Apple for not realisng that they weren't Beatles, merely hangers-on. 'That was a pity,' Derek Taylor noted years later, 'because the one thing Neil Aspinall and I did know was that there was a difference between us and them. We at Apple weren't feeling good anyway; because Apple had failed, and here was one of our friends teling everyone who reads Rolling Stone that we were cunts. In the end we had to say, 'Well, we're not.' John later retracted some of it, and we became friends again. And I forgave him. He would forget he'd said it, and expect to forgiven, by us, by Paul, by everyone, as he always was.'
During his final meeting with Lennon, George Martin also confronted him about the Rolling Stone confessional: 'We spent an evening together, and I said, 'You know, you were pretty rough in that interview, John.' He said, 'Oh Christ, I was stoned out of my fucking mind.' He said, 'You didn't take any notice of that, did you?' I said, 'Well, I did, and it hurt.' I was very incensed about that interview. I think everybody was. I think he slagged off everybody, including the Queen of England. I don't think anyone escaped his attention.' (...)
(The Rolling Stone) interview had claims to being his last great piece of concept art, the final occasion on which he would focus every ounce of his being onto a single purpose without losing concentration or lapsing into self-parody. John Lennon was fully Johnn Lennon; and in the process he destroyed almost every close relationship in his life. From now on Yoko Ono would have to carry the weight of being Lennon's companion, co-creator and saviour, a burden that left precious little space for her own artistic ambition and ego. The Rolling Stone interview stood at his testament, for the next decade at least, defining in the public eye his attitude to his fellow Beatles long after he had mellowed into his views. For Paul McCartney, who had already endured the loss of Lennon as musical partner and friend, the interview represented the end of the affair. 'It's just like a divorce. It's that you were so close and so in love that if anyone decides to start talking dirty - great, then Pandora's box is open. That's what happened with us. In the end it was like, 'Oh, you want to know the truth? Right, I'll tell you.'
Cue gory musical battle of 1971, about which I wrote a past post. Typical for Doggett's take on that period is: There was a sense that Lennon's emotions were running out of control. In the same month that he wrote 'How Do You Sleep' he came across a publicity booklet about the Beatles compiled by a hapless member of the Apple staff. Lennon went berserk. When he couldn't find anyonen willing to claim responsibility, he grabbed a felt pen and began to deface the booklet. 'This is to prejudiced against John and Yoko that I want to know who put it together and fire them,' he scrawled. He added a speech bubble to a shot of the 21-year-old McCartney: 'I'm always perfect.' Alongside a reference to a McCartney visit to Hollywood, he wrote bitterly, 'Cuts Yoko and John out of film!' There was a line about the McCartneys' wedding, which Lennon altered to read 'funeral'. It was the work of a jealous child rather than an artist who had been freed of pain by Primal Scream Therapy.
Regarding the Lost Weekend reconciliations culminating in an almost reunion before John returned to Yoko, Doggett writes:
In January 1975 the McCartneys and Wings, rebuilt as a quintet after the traumas of 1973, travelled to New Orleans. Once McCartney was settled, he phoned John Lennon in New York. Lennon had already agreed to work with David Bowie in California, and for the first time he was prepared to contemplate a reunion with McCartney. Singer Art Garfunkel had recently worked with Paul Silmon for the first time in six years. Lennon invited Garfunkel to dinner and told him, 'Im getting calls from my Paul. And he wants to know if I'm available for the recording. What should I do?' Garfunkel told him, 'John, I would do it - put all personality aside and go with the fun of the blend. Make music with somebody you have made a sound with. A great pleasure is the thing to stick with.'
Lennon asked May Pang a similar question: 'What would you think if I started writing with Paul again?' As she recalled, 'My mouth fell open and I said, 'Are you kidding? I think it would be terrific.' When Lenon wrote to former Apple press officer Derek Taylor, he told him in his inimitable approximation of typewritten English, 'Bowies cutting 'universe' (Let it Beatle). Am a gonna be there (by request of courset). Then possibly down to New Orleans to see the McCartnees.'
It was the perfect moment. Their business quarrels were settled, Lennon had shown imself a master of contemporary soul styles on Walls and Bridges, and McCartney was recording in a haven of rhythm and blues. (...) Both men had recently proved themselves superior craftsmen, but together they might rekindle the spark that had fired the Beatles. (...) The affection between the two men was genuine, as long as nobody mentioned Apple or Allen Klein. So was Lennon's willingness to consider revisiting the Beatles catalogue. 'Ive lost all that negativitiy about the past,' he conceded. I'd be as happy as Larry to do 'Help!'. I've just changed completely in two years. I'd do 'Hey Jude' and the whole damn show.'
A key factor in the rapprochement between Lennon and McCartney was the fact that the McCartneys had no history of tension with May Pang. JohnandYoko had the power to make McCartney feel insignificant; John and May were simply an old friend and his attractive young partner. But the past was about to claim a stake in the future. Lennon and Pang had now been together for 18 months, and planned to buy a ottage in Montauk on Long Island in early February, but Ono still rang Lennon constantly. As Pang recalled, Ono phoned Lennon at the end of January and 'told him she had a method to help him stop smoking, an dthat he should come over to the Dakota. I told him I didn't like him going over there, and he said, 'Stop it!' He was yelling at me, 'What's your problem? I'll be home by dinner; we'll go have a late dinner, and then we'll make plans to go to New Orleans and see Paul and Linda.'
In Lennon's account, 'I was just going to visit (Yoko). I visited her many times before. And I just walked in and thought, I live here, this is my home. Here is Yoko, and here is me.' Elsewhere he said simply, 'it fell in place again, it was like I never left.' (...) When he returned that night, Pang said, 'He was a different person about Paul. It wasn't the same. He was saying, Oh, you know when Paul and Linda used to visit us? Well, I couldn't stand it,' Obviously something had happened on the other side of Central Park.' Within a day or two he had moved back into the Dakota. 'I was so numb,' Pang recalled. 'He told me Yoko would still allow me to see him. But it didn't make any sense to me. I kept asking him, 'What about our love?' We were just about to buy a house together, but he just shrugged and said, 'it'll be alright.' JohnandYoko was reborn, and there was no trip to New Orleans. Lennon, it seemed, had to choose between Ono and McCartney: he couldn't have both.
About Paul after John's death: McCartney was an enigma. Fiendishly talented, driven to near-obsession by a work ethic implanted in early childhood, the proud owner of a pure seam of creativity almost unmatched in the history of popular music, he was also insecure, clumsy in front of the media, a natural entertainer and a born ham. Ex-employees dubbed him a control freak. But his melodic gifts outweighed all his human frailty. So too did his determination, which siometimes overwpowered his artistic judgment. This medley of traits and characteristics combined to make him the most successful songwriter of all time. But on some level of his psyche none of this counted if he did not have the respect of John Lennon. With Lennon gone, he was locked into intimate partnership with a woman whom he had never understood, and who seemed never to have valued him or his talent. (...) Personal grief was only one of his curses; for the rest of his life McCartney would be battling Yoko Ono for his place in history. There were now three Beatles, and one saint. Perhaps that was McCartney's cruellest fate: he desired nothing more than to regain Lennon's love, but now he was condemned to compete with Lennon's memory for the recognition that, rightfully, should already have been his.
On the other hand, Doggett thinks Yoko wins when it comes to dead John tribute songs:
Harrison took a song he had originally offered to Starkey entitled 'All those Years Ago' and wrote new lyrics pertaining to Lennon. He invited the McCartneys and Denny Laine to add background vocals, and George Martin to supervise the session. 'All those years ago' was banal and inappropriately jaunty, but hte fact that it featured all three Beatles ensured it was seen as their official tribute to their fallen colleague. Meanwhile, McCartney channelled his impossible feelings into another song, 'Here Today'. 'Paul is a complex guy,' Denny Laine commented later. 'He is the best person I have met in all my life at hiding his innermost feelings.' His lyrics, with their imaginary characters and cartoon situations, often reinforced Laine's judgment. But 'Here Today' came from a different place. It was self-conscious, perhaps because McCartney wasn't used to expressing his emotions so clearly and without disguise. But his sincerity was unmistakable, as he told Lennon what he could never have said to his face: I love you.
(...) Yoko Ono released Seasons of Glass, a chillingly fragile album haunted by the tragedy. (...) One song, 'No No No', tackled her grief via the language of sexual dysfunction. Where Harrison was glib and McCartney sentimental, Ono had the courage to be real.
After reading about the sad end and aftermath, it was a relief to turn to The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles, full of essays by different authors which focus on the music and the years of its creation which is why we care to begin with. Some also deal with public perception (for example, The Beatles as Zeitgeist by Sheila Whitney, who is the sole female contributor) and biographical background (Dave Laing's "The Formative Years" essay), but the majority tackles the songs, and the musical evolution visible over a decade. There is just one essay that's too abstract for this laywoman reader, Any time at all: the Beatles' free phrase rhythms, and the rest are all very interesting and fun to read, whether or not you agree with the author's interpretations of the various songs. Where they touch biography, they do so only as much as it relates to the music. This does include the break-up, of course, and here Steve Hamelman in On their way home: The Beatles in 1969 and 1970 comes up with a perfect way to express the great paradox:
No matter how battered and bruised by the collapse of empire, image, and friendship, the band limped toward death singing like the swans of ancient fable, sweetly, beautifully, of their own demise. 'There's no sucess like failure,' Bob Dylan had song in 1965, 'and failure is no sucess at all' - unless you were the Beatles. Unimaginably gifted, they wrested marvelous songs from the jaws of their abject failure as friends and business partners. As musicians, each one channelled the negativity needed to break free from what had become a claustrophobic collective into music as fine as anything else recorded in rock history.
Hamelman loves his comparisons in general. Here's a part of his description of the song Come Together from Abbey Road: With John bouncing back from his springtime peevishness, Paul and Ringo respond by laying it down for his rock and roll word-gumbo. Ringo delivers dead on time through the blend of high-hat /snare triplets at the top of each verse with, everywhere else, a four beat tom/snare tattooo anchored by a dry bass drum figure. Humming between high and low registers, Paul's bass coils around John's voice like a vine encircling a swaying limb in a steamy swamp.
I'm also fond of his take on Two of Us: George's wish that the Beatles could make music on the order of the Band is realized. In a manner that can only be called 'laid back' but without the term's pejorative shading, Paul pulls off the neat trick of writing a billet doux to Linda in the verse and an open letter to John in the six-bar bridge. Paul sings of 'chasing paper, getting nowhere' with Linda, and to John he reflects, 'You and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches out ahead.' As he and 'you' make their 'way back home,' Paul posits another identity for 'you': every member of the audience. 'Goodbye', the sotto-spoken last word in the fade-out, sets the valedictory mood for the rest of the album, just as it embraces with typcial Beatles generosity every fan who has traveled so far for so many years with the band. We are all on the same road home somewhere, suggests Paul, twisting nostalgia into a sentiment close to ahappy closure and hope.
And he pulls out all the rethorical stops for Let it Be (also, just in case you hadn't noticed who Mr. Hamelman's favourite Beatle is before...): To summon the courage to push past the collapse of his band, which happened to be the greatest in history, and to muster the strength needed to keep his head held high as lawyers and best friend John Lennon closed in on him tooth and claw, Paul invoked for guidance the spirit of his long-deceased mother Mary McCartney. Glorious melody notwithstanding, the miracle of 'Let It Be' is that it lacks self-pity or cheap sentiment. 'I' is the only pronoun Paul has at his disposal; but the 'I' in the opening clause - 'When I find myself in times of trouble' - identifies much more thjan he himself; it is the universal 'I' channeled through the voice of the Beatle most sympathetic to the suffering of his fellow human beings. This is why 'Let It Be' is not a pity-party for Paul McCarntey. He knows that to 'let it be' is to 'let go', to accept every manifestation and facet of loss, and, as Emily Dickinson suggested, to do that is the hardest thing a person ever has to do. At once simple and profound, comparable to Mozart's 'Sonata Facile' or a late painting by Mark Rothko, 'Let It Be' is both medium and message of courage and compassion.
Sheila Whitley's Zeitgeist essay wittily opens with a comparison of Top Ten Lies statistics, i.e. the Top Ten (later admitted) lies people who grew up in the 60s tell as opposed to people growing up in the 70s and 80s. In case you're curious and also because I find the lies in question as telling and amusing as Ms Whitley does:
Top Growing up in the 60s lies:
- was a hippy
- experimented with soft drugs
- meeting someone famous from the Beat Generation
- knowing someone who took part in a love-in
- seeing the Beatles live
Whereas the teenagers of the 70s later lied about:
- regularly in the disco
- wore platform shoes
- hated prog rock
- meeting someone famous
- avoided orange or brown interior furnishing
(What, and no one lies about having had pornstaches, perms or mullets?)
And the 80s teens and young adults, which would be my generation, lied about:
- didn't watch Charles and Diana's wedding on tv
- didn't wear shoiulder pads
- didn't vote Tory
- owned a computer
- attended Live Aid.
The essay then goes into song-zeitgeist capturing analysis, though: Lennon and McCartney also provided a particular take on the loneliness that characterized so many women's experience at the time. Paradoxically, it is a trck on which the group made no instrumental contribution. Rather, it is tethered by an austere string arrangement by George Martin, and has an acute sense of observation which resonates with both pathos and social realism, invoking both a nostalgic and monochromatic portrait of loneliness. This is enhanced by the matter-of-factioness of the lyrics, where descriptions of the mundane ('darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there') fill the two-bar phrases, culminating in a sense of resignation as the final syllable is held over the next bar and followed by a pragmatic evoluation of personal worth (the 'nobody came' of Eleanor Rigby's funeral; the 'what does he care' of the equally lonely priest. The mood of austerity and restraint is particularly evident in George Martin's string writing, where a heavy use of repetition - similar to the chromaticism and unresolved dissonances in Bernard Herrman's music for Psycho - creates suspense and underpins the ferences to death: 'Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave.' Forty years on, the inclusion of a classical infrastructure within a popular song is less than revolutionary. At the time, it gave 'Eleanor Rigby' a freshness of approach in terms of musical arrangement which was also appropriate to the mood of the lyrics, which, in turn, resonated with the experience of countless women who had neither family, friendship nor support from that bastion of respectability, the established church. And this, surely, is why this is a political, cultural and socially conscious song.
She concludes the essay with: This raises the question of the extent to which the Beatles can be considered an intrinsic part of the decade's sociocultural zeitgeist. With regard to popular music, there is no doubt that their songs became the foremost expression of the poetry of everyday life. Written in the vernacular, they revealed a world of colorful images, with McCartney constructing stories and characters and Lennon writing first person testimonies, including his exploration of the metaphysical through hallucinogenics. Their albums opened up new avenues within popular mmusic: pastiches of goodtime twenties songs, simple rock and roll, folk songs, tongue-in-cheek parodies, country and western ballads, hints of Elizabethan romanticism, surrealism, comedy, wit, and sentimentality. Yet, as much as the Beatles offered a mood of contemporaeity - not least in their engagement with Carnaby Street culture, psychedelia, and hippy philosophy - they also provided insights into their past. In 'Polythene Pam' Lennon recalls his Liverpool club days, 'Lovely Rita' eulogizes a 'meter maid', while 'Penny Lane' and 'Strawberry Fields Forever' are lasting reminders of the Liverpool of their youth. It is, however, their stubborn northern-ness, their Liverpool humor, and tehir disregard an dcontempt for the pomposity of class-based social relations that situate them ost accurately in teh zeitgeist of the sixties. As Mick Jagger observed at the time, 'The Stones might speak to one's personal condition in a way the Beatles did not, but the Beatles were universal.' They may not have offered solutions to the problems of a society which revolved around materialism, repressive affluence, and individual conformity, but they nevertheless provided insights, celebrating what was, for their countless fans worldwide, a cheerful alternative.
John Kinsey's "The Beatles for Sale and for Keeps talks about the evolving post-mortem (as it were) images of the band through the decades. He can't resist taking a shot at Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone there which I must admit is fun for me (not a Wenner fan): Wenner hitched his magazine's wagon to the Lennon-Ono star in 1971 with the publication of the book-length interview, 'Lennon Remembers'. In his introduction to the new edition (2000), Wenner writes: 'The publication of these interviews was the first time that any of the Beatles, let alone the man who had founded the group and was their leader, stepped outside that protected, beloved fairy tale and told the truth about the sugar coated mythology of the Beatles and Paul McCartney's characterisation of the breakup.' Some of the tropes deployed here have become crude common sense about Lennon and the Beatles. According to Wenner, Lennon is the founder, leader, and truth-teller, while the Beatles, and McCartney in particular, are sugar-plum fairies. Note too that the structuring opposition - courage and risk-taking on one side, sentimentality and scheming on the other - is heavily gender-coded. This reproduces rock orthodoxy's masculinist agenda, where those things read off as 'feminine' and are disdained as mere 'pop'. (...) Indeed, the stock narrative that pits Lennon the uncompromising rocker against McCartney the calculating showman is a version of rock's never-ending story, the conflict between 'being real' and 'selling out'. According to George Martin, that story reduces both parties to caricature and arguably says more about the workings of rock ideology than it does about teh Lennon-McCartney partnership. Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head portrays McCartney as the 'de facto musical director' of the band from Revolver onwards. In his recent memoir, 'Here, There and Everywhere': My Life Recording the Beatles', Geoff Emerick, the band's chief engineer, concurs: 'It might have been John's band in the beginning, and he might have assumed the leadership role in their press conferences and public appearances, but throughout all the years I would workwith them, it alwas seemed to me that Paul McCartney, the soft-spoken bass player, was the real leader of the group and that nothing got done unless he approved of it.'
'Summer of Love', George Martin's account of the makilng of 'Sgt Pepper', paints a similar picture. In the face of what Emerick calls 'conventional wisdom' (coined, among others, by Jann Wenner) about the Beatles, such accounts amount to an emerging counter-narrative.'
By and large, the various authors avoid the Lennon versus McCartney game, though. To quote Kenneth Womack's introduction, and to conclude my post: Long before Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play - long before the pressures of real life had reached their fever-pitch - there were two boys in love with music, gazing upon a brave new world, and upon each other's imaginations, under the blue suburban skies of a Liverpool churchyard. In many ways, the narrative of the Beatles is - and always will be - their story.
The memoirs first, because they make quite an entertaining compare and contrast. (And another illustration of the Rashomon effect when it comes to recalling the same people and events.) The credentials of the two authors as eye witnesses are pretty good - Alistair Taylor (not to be confused with Derek Taylor, the Beatles' press officer) worked for Brian Epstein in his record store, then was his P.A., then a general Mr. Fixit, then after Brian's death worked as an Apple manager until Allen Klein came on board and fired about two thirds of the old Liverpool gang, while Tony Bramwell (not to be confused with Tony Barrow, yet another Epstein employee who wrote yet another memoir) knew three of them from childhood onwards and was a pal of George's originally, then moved on to work for Brian Epstein as well, became one of the Apple people, as opposed to poor Alistair did not get fired during the great Klein purge and went on to work for various other people in the business for a pretty long time, including (this might interest
likeadeuce) young Bruce Springsteen. (Working for the Beatles and Bruce should earn him some kind of musical record, I suppose?) Given that one got fired and the other did not, it's not surprising Taylor is more bitter than Bramwell, but that's far from the only thing they disagree on. Allow me to illustrate, sometimes with paraphrases, sometimes with quotes. re: the famous story of how Brian was alerted to the Beatles' existence via a teenager named Raymond Jones asking for the record they had made with Tony Sheridan:
Tony Bramwell: "Despite rumours to the contrary, Raymond Jones existed: not only had I seen him around, but a photograph of him was published in Bob's 1962 biography."
Alistair Taylor: "I got so fed up with people asking if we had a record of 'My Bonnie' by the Beatles and having to say No that I put through an order for it myself under a name I simply dreamed up. Brian refused to order records unless there was a firm order. (...) I know that I invented the name and put it into the order book. But now Liverpool people claim to know 'the real' Raymond Jones and a chap with that name can miraculously recall palcing the order. Rubbish."
Alistair Taylor: Brian was not in love with John. Never ever ever did he have the slightest non-platonic feeling for one of the boys, and certainly not for John. THEY DID NOT HAVE SEX IN BARCELONA. Also, I loved Brian, but not in a gay way. The mere idea of gay sex disgusts me, but my wife says I loved Brian more than her, in a heterosexual way. And Brian never ever had gay thoughts about John. That's vile slander.
Tony Bramwell: Brian? Totally crushing on John and obsessed with him, with the devotion of a pure masochist. Though I don't think they got it on in Barcelona, simply because John was too mean for that. BTW, how come Brian never hit on me? Not that I would have said yes because I'm completely heterosexual, as everyone else in this story except for Brian.
Alistair Taylor: John was a deeply misunderstood sensitive soul, whom you wanted to protect all the time, and all that talk about what a lousy husband he was to Cynthia and how cruel he was to Brian is totally exaggarated. She wanted to get to bed early and he simply behaved as any self-respecting rock star would. Also, he was a genius while Paul is just a brilliant talent.
Tony Bramwell: John was fun, but crazy. I mean clinically so. Also, he was a complete bastard to Cynthia, dead lazy and wasn't the genius legend later made him into. Paul, on the other hand...
Alistair Taylor: I didn't see much of John and Yoko together but I thought they were adorably in love.
Tony Bramwell: "An artist of mass destruction named Yoko Ono", vile stalker extraordinaire, evil manipulator, changed John into a pod person and probably used hypnosis on him. Wanted John all to herself. I HATE HER FOREVER AND EVER.
Alistair Taylor: Linda was "this hard faced star-chaser from the USA", vile stalker extraordinaire, evil manipulator, changed Paul from practically my younger brother into my boss and broke my heart. DIE, Linda! Err, wait. Anyway, she wanted Paul all to herself and was stuck up.
Tony Bramwell: Linda was the best thing that ever happened to Paul, totally unpretentious, friendly and great with sharing the pot. They were so adorably in love.
Alistair Taylor: I really thought Paul and Jane would make it. When she caught him with Francie the groupie, he was utterly heartbroken and cried on my shoulder for months. BEFORE LINDA CAME ALONG, THE EVIL BITCH.
Tony Bramwell: I really knew Paul and Jane were doomed from the start and could smell the break-up miles away. I bet he deliberately let himself get caught with Francie the groupie and was really relieved when it was over. And then we had some weird months. Until Linda came along, thank God.
And so on, and so forth. They do agree on some characterisations. Brian Epstein, for starters, comes across the same way in their respective memoirs; the question of the platonic nature of his devotion to John aside, they do agree he loved the entire group to bits, was brilliant and charming at his best but also tormented and full of self-loathing which got worse once they stoped touring and he didn't feel himself useful anymore. George is George the neglected and Ringo is Ringo the great mate in either version, and Allen Klein gets loathed by both of them. And they agree on the John and Paul closeness in ye early days. Forget what happened later, writes Taylor, at that time, they were closer than any two men I've ever known. The four Beatles were all rock solid mates in those early days. That's how they got through it all. But John and Paul were like brothers. In fact, they were a lot closer than most brothers.
Narrative voice wise, Bramwell is funnier, but also inclined to spin a good yarn while he's at it, never letting the facts get into the way of a good story. In addition to the Raymond Jones incident (where I believe Taylor), Tony B. can't resist placing himself and George Harrison at the scene of the first Lennon/McCartney encounter at the Woolton Fete. Now all the other eye witnesses might have neglected to mention Tony Bramwell's presence, but you'd think someone would have mentioned it to anyone if George had been present. Starting with George. A few years later, when Paul meets Linda for the first time in a night club, Tony Bramwell also happens to be around at the precise moment they encounter each other. And still later you get a real clunker when he says Paul and Linda, after meeting Linda's father and her stepmother, visited Linda's mother as well. Considering Linda's mother had died in a plane crash when she was 17, that would have taken some necromancy to accomplish. Otoh, he's always good for a witty turn of phrase, such as the Beatles' original impression of producer George Martin: "We saw George Martin as Q in the James Bond films. You could imagine him saying, 'Don't fiddle with those knobs, Double-O-Lennon, you'll blow us all to smithereens, there's a good chap.' By that time, of course, John's head was so full of controlled substances that George would probably have been right." It's also noticable that as opposed to Taylor, who mostly uses standard Beatles publicity photos for illustration, Bramwell uses personal photos under his own copyright which I haven't seen anywhere else, and he is also good for the occasional astute psychological observation, such as his take on the bonding-over-dead-mothers thing between John and Paul, why this would make them each other's outlets beyond the music: The loss of their mothers had an enormous emotional impact that they bottled up and couldn't discuss with anyone. In quieter moments, they sometimes shared their feelings, something they couldn't do with their other friends. I only came to recognize how this was years later because Liverpool kids were tough. (...)(We) would have been embarassed to show our feelings, certainly not to each other. We had an expression, 'Don't get real on me, man,' which meant, 'Keep your feelings to yourself.' It was all bottled up inside and we just grew up and got on with life.
But good lord, the Yoko hatred. Seriously. Taylor isn't any less vehement with the Linda hate but he keeps it to the last chapter, whereas Bramwell starts taking shots at Yoko from the middle of his book onwards. He, along wiith John's childhood pal Pete Shotton, seems to have been the source of the story that Yoko and her second husband Tony Cox conspired to have Yoko "hook" John and split the money she could get out of him. Considering that T. Cox went on the run with his and Yoko's daughter Kyoko in 1971 and Yoko isn't likely to have told them such a thing, either, I do wonder how they want to know such a thing. Anyway, the most ironic thing is of course that the same Tony Bramwell who paints a portrait of Yoko as Madame Evil and her relationship with John as the most neurotic enslavement ever goes cheerfully on to narrate how he, post-Beatles, worked for Phil Spector; if you want to talk about obsessively jealous spouses who literally imprison their significant others in the music scene of the day, Spector wins every time, something Bramwell isn't unaware of. To stop her running away, he locked Veronica 'Ronnie' Ronette up like she was some black Transylvanian princess in a tower and not the beautiful girl who sang 'Baby I love You,' and won the hearts of millions. But while making her the Prisoner of Mulholland Drive, Phil forgot to lock up his scret licquor cabinet, which Ronnie, bored to death, accidentally discovered. Soon she was out of it, on whiskey and broken dreams. It was all Raymond Chandler in black-and-white, like The Big Sleep. Sometimes, when I warrived, Philip would be firing guns down the long drive. And re: Spector's 2003 arrest for murder: I know one thing: whoever is still left from the old days will not be surprised. I am tempted to comment, Tony, old chap, if you're working for Phil Spector knowing all that, then frankly you're not in a position to pass judgment on Yoko Ono even if all you say about her should be true, which I doubt, given the above mentioned fibs in far more minor matters.
As for Alistair Taylor's Linda issues, the big charge seems to be that she a) wanted to refurnish the ground floor of Paul's house ("which looked exceptionally elegant due to the exquisite taste of Miss Jane Asher", so clearly the only reason why Linda would want to redecorate would be a sinister one) and b) she checked the bill afterwards and accused Taylor of overcharging. I can see how he would find this insulting, but given the sheer rate at which the Beatles lost money at that time with everybody and their drug mule sponging of them via Apple and otherwise (one of the things the 1970 lawsuit was about and pointed out was that after Brian's death, nobody bothered to keep any accounts, and the way it looked was that despite all those millions of records sold they would not be able to meet their tax obligations because nobody kept an overview about where all the money went), I can see where Linda would get the idea from. However, for Taylor, this meant that "There may have been more singularly manipulative people around than Linda Eastman, but I've never met them. She might well have loved Paul, but she sure as hell hated anyone else", which is of course the exact same charge Bramwell lays on Yoko's door (replace "Paul" with "John", of course). Meanwhile, here's the impression another woman (not working for the Beatles and not romantically involved with any of them) had, to wit, Twiggy in her descriptions of photographers she worked with: In the late 1960s I got a call from my friend Paul McCartney. His new American girlfriend Linda was coming to live in London with her daughter. He was concerned that she didn't have any female friends over here and asked if I'd get together with her. We met for lunch at San Lorenzo, hit it off immediately and there started a 30 years friendship.
Anyway, back to the memoirists. Neither of them is a musician, or worked in the studio, so while there are some bits about the songs, they don't have to say that much about their production (Here, there and everywhere by the engineer Geoff Emerick is the book for that, and of course George Martin's memoirs), but what they did have a lot to do with was managing the everyday craziness of the Beatles' lives, and the descriptions there are certainly vivid. So, before I turn to the other books, two shorter passages for Taylor and a longer one for Bramwell:
Alistair Taylor: Before any gig, it became a habit for children in wheelchairs to be brought in and sort of presented to them. It was very sweet and at teh start they meant it most sincerely. But the frightening thing was that parents becan to believe that if one of the Beatles touched their child then he or she would be healed. This soon became quite a sick practice. It turned my stomach and I didn't like it. Neil Aspinall would line it all up. He would check up the corridor to see if they were all waiting then he would come inside the dressing room and, mimicking John's humour and, mimicking John's humour and purely to get the Beatles' attention he'd shout, 'OK, guys, spastic time.' They and Neil felt very uncomfortable about all this. They used their black humour to disguise their real feelings but Paul told me how much he hated the way people used to use crippled or handicapped children to get backstage.
'It started out innocently enough,' he said. 'These kids have mostly had such a shit deal from life they deserve the best seats in the house. That's fine, but it never stops there. They want to come into the dressing room, to meet us before the show, and they start to think we've got healing hands or something. We don't want to do a damn thing to hurt any kid, sick or otherwise. That includes John. He might make some sicko jokes but when it comes down to it he's about the softest guy I know about any sort of suffering. But if there is any hint about us not co-operating, then we get threats of guys going to the papers. It's just cruel to tell kids that touching a Beatle will make them better.
And more on the bright side, about when John and Paul got the Ivor Novello Awards (well, one of those occasions): I got a panic call from Brian at the office at 11.00 am on the day of the ceremony. Did I know that John and Paul were due at the Savoy at 12.30 pm for the premier British song writing award? Yes, of course I did, it was in the diary. The only problem was that Brian had insisted he was going to tell the boys and he had uncharacteristically forgotten. Could I get them there on time? I said it was impossible but that wasn't a word Brian understood. The idea of delivering a public snub to the whole of the music and entertainment establishment was simply unthinkable. Just get them there on time, Alistair. Oh, and don't tell them that the panic is because I forgot. Invent some cover story, please.
In Brian-speak, this translated as 'accept the blame for the mistake yourself and pretend that you forgot.' John was out at home in Weybridge so I rang him first as he had further to travel. At least, he would have had if he'd had the slightest intention of going anywhere. My explanation about the last minute call to the Savoy sounded desperately lame so I was hardly surprised when the Lennon response was a brief 'Fuck off', followed by the line going dead.
That left Paul. The telephone rang in the elegant Asher household in Wimpole Street for what seemed like an age. I knew Paul and Jane had been out late the night before and, as the phone rang and rang, my heart sank further into my boots. Eventually Jane's charming but very protective mother answered. She couldn't possibly disturb Paul as early as this, whatever the crisis. Could I ring back later? All the time, I could imagine the guests arriving at the Savoy happy int he knowledge they would soon be seeing the two song-writing Beatles in person. (...) I firmly insisted that Mrs. Asher wake Paul - please. She reluctantly agreed and a minute or so later a sleepy and very grumpy Paul came on the phone. I burbled out the story I had been practising for the past hour and there was then a very long pause from the other end of the line. For a horrible moment or two, I was terrified he had gone back to sleep. But then Paul said, 'OK, be round in a cab to pick me up in ten minutes' time.' Thank you, Paul, I thought, and when my taxi arrived at Wimpole Street about 15 minutes later there was Paul to answer the door holding a piece of toast but he was suited and booted, Beatled up and ready to go.
'What's the problem? Do I ever let you down?' said his super-cool expression. But we were still late and by the time the cab struggled through the busy lunchtime traffic the organisers were starting to get very worried indeed. I was so fired up by then I manhandled Paul through the pack of reporters and photographers so he was able to get his seat on the top table just as lunch was about to start. Phew. But my ordeal wasn't over. Paul insisted that I had to have John's seat and share the glittering company of David Frost, Billy Butlin and others. I know they wondered who on earth I was but by then I didn't care. I 'd got one Beatle there on time.
Tony Bramwell's story I picked because we have confirmation of it from several other sources, because it was a rare happy and relaxed break during the craziness of 1968, and because among other things it illustrates the point I made in an earlier post about the enthusiasm the 60s musicians had for each other:
In a discussion we had about the Stones once, I think it was Ringo who said, 'You listen to the likes of 'Honky Tonk Women' and 'Brown Sugar' and tell me it doesn't make you wanna dance, and I'll tell you, you need help.' The Beatles were all fans of great music. Cruising along the limo listening to 'Jumping Jack Flash' blasting out of a little speaker, even Martha started to move. Derek Taylor tried to get up, gave up, and settled for grooving along in the corner, but Paul went nuts. That was the first time we'd heard it and it was a revelation. Mick and Keef may have been short of new songs when they asked for 'I wanna be your man' from J & P, but my God, how they had caught up! (...) We were just pulling into a gas stationwhen it ended and Paul turned to me. Reverting to type he said, 'Bloody hell! That's a bit tasty. 'Ere, Tone, do you think you could go and call up Alan Freeman and get him to play that again?'
'You want me to promote the Stones?'
'Yeah, why not?'
(...) I called 'Fluff' Freeman as directed, and almost immediately, to our surprise, he announced on air, 'Tony Bramwell of Apple Records has just called in from some gas station in the middle of nowhere. He's with Paul McCartney and they've made a request to play 'Jumping Jack Flash' again.' And he turned to his producer, Dennis Jones and asked, 'Can we do that?' Dennis said, 'Why not?' So they did. We just sat there in teh Daimler in this gas station listening. It was still fantastic. (...) By the time we reached Berfordshire, we had been driving for a long time on the A6 and were a bit bored. Paul wanted to let Martha stretch her legs, and to tell the turth, it was such a glorious day I don't think we were in any particular rush to return to London. Paul got out the road map and opened the page. He stuck a finger on it and we all looked. 'Harrold,' said Paul. 'That sounds nice. Let's go and visit Harrold.'
We struck lucky. Harrold was a most beautiful little medieval English village along the Great Ouse River. We drove through but all the pubs were closed. On the way out, we spotted a man cutting a hedge around a charming house. Paul said, 'Stop!'
We all tumbled out of the car and Paul asked if there was anywhere we could get a snack. 'And Martha needs some water,' he said.
The man, a dentist, said, 'There's nowhere open. But it's nearly teatime. Would you care to join us?'
We all trooped indoors, where the wife was preparing sandwiches and putting a cake or two on plates. She glanced up and smiled. If she recognized Paul she didn't say. They were far too polite. The children were called in from playing in the back garden. The oldest one, a very pretty little girl of about seven, recognized Paul like a sot, but again, had been nicely brought up and she didn't comment. However, she did have a guitar that was leaning up in a corner of the room, and after tea, Paul picked it up and, playing left-handed, sang 'Blackbird' and 'Rocky Raccoon' and a few other songs for the children, who clustered around him as if he were the pied piper.
After a while the dentist suggested that since the pubs would now be open we could have a drink. We strolled out in the dusk and down the High Street, passing a fourteenth century church with a fine spire. The dentist, who was well versed on local history, told us the village was first founded in the time of King Stephen. While Martha splashed happily about in the rushes, he pointed over the brdige. 'Chellington lies over there, or what's left of it,' he said. He went on to tell us the strange story of a disappearing village. (...) By the time we got to the pub, the word had spread and it was fairly packed. We drank beer while Paul sat at the piano and played a repertoire of Beatles songs, McCartney songs and a lot of rock and roll until closing time. I think in the back of his mind Paul would have liked to put tomorrow off indefinitely.
Given that "tomorrow" by that point meant arguments, arguments, arguments, I bet he did. You never give me your money by Peter Doggett has been praised as that rarity, a book that manages to do justice to all four Beatles and Yoko Ono without either bashing or glorifying any of them, despite the fact that the break-up time and the long aftermath is hardly the period where anyone was at their best. It deserves the praise, but I think having once read it through I'll handle it like the Let It Be film, only going back for excerpts, never the whole, because the whole is just too damn sad. Some choice excerpts:
About John's Lennon Remembers interview of 1970: Intrinsic to his philosophy was rejection of the past, which in the arithmetic of Primal Scream Therapy equalled pain. If, as he believed, Janov's therapy had liberated him from his inner torment and the defense mechanisms he'd erected to conceal it, then he needed to rid himself of all the other encumbrances he'd gathered in recent years. None of them weighed or imposed more than the Beatles. (...)He raged against the way that Harrison and McCartney had treated Ono, dismissed George Martin' s claim to any credit for the Beatles' music and attacked his most loyal friends at Apple for not realisng that they weren't Beatles, merely hangers-on. 'That was a pity,' Derek Taylor noted years later, 'because the one thing Neil Aspinall and I did know was that there was a difference between us and them. We at Apple weren't feeling good anyway; because Apple had failed, and here was one of our friends teling everyone who reads Rolling Stone that we were cunts. In the end we had to say, 'Well, we're not.' John later retracted some of it, and we became friends again. And I forgave him. He would forget he'd said it, and expect to forgiven, by us, by Paul, by everyone, as he always was.'
During his final meeting with Lennon, George Martin also confronted him about the Rolling Stone confessional: 'We spent an evening together, and I said, 'You know, you were pretty rough in that interview, John.' He said, 'Oh Christ, I was stoned out of my fucking mind.' He said, 'You didn't take any notice of that, did you?' I said, 'Well, I did, and it hurt.' I was very incensed about that interview. I think everybody was. I think he slagged off everybody, including the Queen of England. I don't think anyone escaped his attention.' (...)
(The Rolling Stone) interview had claims to being his last great piece of concept art, the final occasion on which he would focus every ounce of his being onto a single purpose without losing concentration or lapsing into self-parody. John Lennon was fully Johnn Lennon; and in the process he destroyed almost every close relationship in his life. From now on Yoko Ono would have to carry the weight of being Lennon's companion, co-creator and saviour, a burden that left precious little space for her own artistic ambition and ego. The Rolling Stone interview stood at his testament, for the next decade at least, defining in the public eye his attitude to his fellow Beatles long after he had mellowed into his views. For Paul McCartney, who had already endured the loss of Lennon as musical partner and friend, the interview represented the end of the affair. 'It's just like a divorce. It's that you were so close and so in love that if anyone decides to start talking dirty - great, then Pandora's box is open. That's what happened with us. In the end it was like, 'Oh, you want to know the truth? Right, I'll tell you.'
Cue gory musical battle of 1971, about which I wrote a past post. Typical for Doggett's take on that period is: There was a sense that Lennon's emotions were running out of control. In the same month that he wrote 'How Do You Sleep' he came across a publicity booklet about the Beatles compiled by a hapless member of the Apple staff. Lennon went berserk. When he couldn't find anyonen willing to claim responsibility, he grabbed a felt pen and began to deface the booklet. 'This is to prejudiced against John and Yoko that I want to know who put it together and fire them,' he scrawled. He added a speech bubble to a shot of the 21-year-old McCartney: 'I'm always perfect.' Alongside a reference to a McCartney visit to Hollywood, he wrote bitterly, 'Cuts Yoko and John out of film!' There was a line about the McCartneys' wedding, which Lennon altered to read 'funeral'. It was the work of a jealous child rather than an artist who had been freed of pain by Primal Scream Therapy.
Regarding the Lost Weekend reconciliations culminating in an almost reunion before John returned to Yoko, Doggett writes:
In January 1975 the McCartneys and Wings, rebuilt as a quintet after the traumas of 1973, travelled to New Orleans. Once McCartney was settled, he phoned John Lennon in New York. Lennon had already agreed to work with David Bowie in California, and for the first time he was prepared to contemplate a reunion with McCartney. Singer Art Garfunkel had recently worked with Paul Silmon for the first time in six years. Lennon invited Garfunkel to dinner and told him, 'Im getting calls from my Paul. And he wants to know if I'm available for the recording. What should I do?' Garfunkel told him, 'John, I would do it - put all personality aside and go with the fun of the blend. Make music with somebody you have made a sound with. A great pleasure is the thing to stick with.'
Lennon asked May Pang a similar question: 'What would you think if I started writing with Paul again?' As she recalled, 'My mouth fell open and I said, 'Are you kidding? I think it would be terrific.' When Lenon wrote to former Apple press officer Derek Taylor, he told him in his inimitable approximation of typewritten English, 'Bowies cutting 'universe' (Let it Beatle). Am a gonna be there (by request of courset). Then possibly down to New Orleans to see the McCartnees.'
It was the perfect moment. Their business quarrels were settled, Lennon had shown imself a master of contemporary soul styles on Walls and Bridges, and McCartney was recording in a haven of rhythm and blues. (...) Both men had recently proved themselves superior craftsmen, but together they might rekindle the spark that had fired the Beatles. (...) The affection between the two men was genuine, as long as nobody mentioned Apple or Allen Klein. So was Lennon's willingness to consider revisiting the Beatles catalogue. 'Ive lost all that negativitiy about the past,' he conceded. I'd be as happy as Larry to do 'Help!'. I've just changed completely in two years. I'd do 'Hey Jude' and the whole damn show.'
A key factor in the rapprochement between Lennon and McCartney was the fact that the McCartneys had no history of tension with May Pang. JohnandYoko had the power to make McCartney feel insignificant; John and May were simply an old friend and his attractive young partner. But the past was about to claim a stake in the future. Lennon and Pang had now been together for 18 months, and planned to buy a ottage in Montauk on Long Island in early February, but Ono still rang Lennon constantly. As Pang recalled, Ono phoned Lennon at the end of January and 'told him she had a method to help him stop smoking, an dthat he should come over to the Dakota. I told him I didn't like him going over there, and he said, 'Stop it!' He was yelling at me, 'What's your problem? I'll be home by dinner; we'll go have a late dinner, and then we'll make plans to go to New Orleans and see Paul and Linda.'
In Lennon's account, 'I was just going to visit (Yoko). I visited her many times before. And I just walked in and thought, I live here, this is my home. Here is Yoko, and here is me.' Elsewhere he said simply, 'it fell in place again, it was like I never left.' (...) When he returned that night, Pang said, 'He was a different person about Paul. It wasn't the same. He was saying, Oh, you know when Paul and Linda used to visit us? Well, I couldn't stand it,' Obviously something had happened on the other side of Central Park.' Within a day or two he had moved back into the Dakota. 'I was so numb,' Pang recalled. 'He told me Yoko would still allow me to see him. But it didn't make any sense to me. I kept asking him, 'What about our love?' We were just about to buy a house together, but he just shrugged and said, 'it'll be alright.' JohnandYoko was reborn, and there was no trip to New Orleans. Lennon, it seemed, had to choose between Ono and McCartney: he couldn't have both.
About Paul after John's death: McCartney was an enigma. Fiendishly talented, driven to near-obsession by a work ethic implanted in early childhood, the proud owner of a pure seam of creativity almost unmatched in the history of popular music, he was also insecure, clumsy in front of the media, a natural entertainer and a born ham. Ex-employees dubbed him a control freak. But his melodic gifts outweighed all his human frailty. So too did his determination, which siometimes overwpowered his artistic judgment. This medley of traits and characteristics combined to make him the most successful songwriter of all time. But on some level of his psyche none of this counted if he did not have the respect of John Lennon. With Lennon gone, he was locked into intimate partnership with a woman whom he had never understood, and who seemed never to have valued him or his talent. (...) Personal grief was only one of his curses; for the rest of his life McCartney would be battling Yoko Ono for his place in history. There were now three Beatles, and one saint. Perhaps that was McCartney's cruellest fate: he desired nothing more than to regain Lennon's love, but now he was condemned to compete with Lennon's memory for the recognition that, rightfully, should already have been his.
On the other hand, Doggett thinks Yoko wins when it comes to dead John tribute songs:
Harrison took a song he had originally offered to Starkey entitled 'All those Years Ago' and wrote new lyrics pertaining to Lennon. He invited the McCartneys and Denny Laine to add background vocals, and George Martin to supervise the session. 'All those years ago' was banal and inappropriately jaunty, but hte fact that it featured all three Beatles ensured it was seen as their official tribute to their fallen colleague. Meanwhile, McCartney channelled his impossible feelings into another song, 'Here Today'. 'Paul is a complex guy,' Denny Laine commented later. 'He is the best person I have met in all my life at hiding his innermost feelings.' His lyrics, with their imaginary characters and cartoon situations, often reinforced Laine's judgment. But 'Here Today' came from a different place. It was self-conscious, perhaps because McCartney wasn't used to expressing his emotions so clearly and without disguise. But his sincerity was unmistakable, as he told Lennon what he could never have said to his face: I love you.
(...) Yoko Ono released Seasons of Glass, a chillingly fragile album haunted by the tragedy. (...) One song, 'No No No', tackled her grief via the language of sexual dysfunction. Where Harrison was glib and McCartney sentimental, Ono had the courage to be real.
After reading about the sad end and aftermath, it was a relief to turn to The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles, full of essays by different authors which focus on the music and the years of its creation which is why we care to begin with. Some also deal with public perception (for example, The Beatles as Zeitgeist by Sheila Whitney, who is the sole female contributor) and biographical background (Dave Laing's "The Formative Years" essay), but the majority tackles the songs, and the musical evolution visible over a decade. There is just one essay that's too abstract for this laywoman reader, Any time at all: the Beatles' free phrase rhythms, and the rest are all very interesting and fun to read, whether or not you agree with the author's interpretations of the various songs. Where they touch biography, they do so only as much as it relates to the music. This does include the break-up, of course, and here Steve Hamelman in On their way home: The Beatles in 1969 and 1970 comes up with a perfect way to express the great paradox:
No matter how battered and bruised by the collapse of empire, image, and friendship, the band limped toward death singing like the swans of ancient fable, sweetly, beautifully, of their own demise. 'There's no sucess like failure,' Bob Dylan had song in 1965, 'and failure is no sucess at all' - unless you were the Beatles. Unimaginably gifted, they wrested marvelous songs from the jaws of their abject failure as friends and business partners. As musicians, each one channelled the negativity needed to break free from what had become a claustrophobic collective into music as fine as anything else recorded in rock history.
Hamelman loves his comparisons in general. Here's a part of his description of the song Come Together from Abbey Road: With John bouncing back from his springtime peevishness, Paul and Ringo respond by laying it down for his rock and roll word-gumbo. Ringo delivers dead on time through the blend of high-hat /snare triplets at the top of each verse with, everywhere else, a four beat tom/snare tattooo anchored by a dry bass drum figure. Humming between high and low registers, Paul's bass coils around John's voice like a vine encircling a swaying limb in a steamy swamp.
I'm also fond of his take on Two of Us: George's wish that the Beatles could make music on the order of the Band is realized. In a manner that can only be called 'laid back' but without the term's pejorative shading, Paul pulls off the neat trick of writing a billet doux to Linda in the verse and an open letter to John in the six-bar bridge. Paul sings of 'chasing paper, getting nowhere' with Linda, and to John he reflects, 'You and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches out ahead.' As he and 'you' make their 'way back home,' Paul posits another identity for 'you': every member of the audience. 'Goodbye', the sotto-spoken last word in the fade-out, sets the valedictory mood for the rest of the album, just as it embraces with typcial Beatles generosity every fan who has traveled so far for so many years with the band. We are all on the same road home somewhere, suggests Paul, twisting nostalgia into a sentiment close to ahappy closure and hope.
And he pulls out all the rethorical stops for Let it Be (also, just in case you hadn't noticed who Mr. Hamelman's favourite Beatle is before...): To summon the courage to push past the collapse of his band, which happened to be the greatest in history, and to muster the strength needed to keep his head held high as lawyers and best friend John Lennon closed in on him tooth and claw, Paul invoked for guidance the spirit of his long-deceased mother Mary McCartney. Glorious melody notwithstanding, the miracle of 'Let It Be' is that it lacks self-pity or cheap sentiment. 'I' is the only pronoun Paul has at his disposal; but the 'I' in the opening clause - 'When I find myself in times of trouble' - identifies much more thjan he himself; it is the universal 'I' channeled through the voice of the Beatle most sympathetic to the suffering of his fellow human beings. This is why 'Let It Be' is not a pity-party for Paul McCarntey. He knows that to 'let it be' is to 'let go', to accept every manifestation and facet of loss, and, as Emily Dickinson suggested, to do that is the hardest thing a person ever has to do. At once simple and profound, comparable to Mozart's 'Sonata Facile' or a late painting by Mark Rothko, 'Let It Be' is both medium and message of courage and compassion.
Sheila Whitley's Zeitgeist essay wittily opens with a comparison of Top Ten Lies statistics, i.e. the Top Ten (later admitted) lies people who grew up in the 60s tell as opposed to people growing up in the 70s and 80s. In case you're curious and also because I find the lies in question as telling and amusing as Ms Whitley does:
Top Growing up in the 60s lies:
- was a hippy
- experimented with soft drugs
- meeting someone famous from the Beat Generation
- knowing someone who took part in a love-in
- seeing the Beatles live
Whereas the teenagers of the 70s later lied about:
- regularly in the disco
- wore platform shoes
- hated prog rock
- meeting someone famous
- avoided orange or brown interior furnishing
(What, and no one lies about having had pornstaches, perms or mullets?)
And the 80s teens and young adults, which would be my generation, lied about:
- didn't watch Charles and Diana's wedding on tv
- didn't wear shoiulder pads
- didn't vote Tory
- owned a computer
- attended Live Aid.
The essay then goes into song-zeitgeist capturing analysis, though: Lennon and McCartney also provided a particular take on the loneliness that characterized so many women's experience at the time. Paradoxically, it is a trck on which the group made no instrumental contribution. Rather, it is tethered by an austere string arrangement by George Martin, and has an acute sense of observation which resonates with both pathos and social realism, invoking both a nostalgic and monochromatic portrait of loneliness. This is enhanced by the matter-of-factioness of the lyrics, where descriptions of the mundane ('darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there') fill the two-bar phrases, culminating in a sense of resignation as the final syllable is held over the next bar and followed by a pragmatic evoluation of personal worth (the 'nobody came' of Eleanor Rigby's funeral; the 'what does he care' of the equally lonely priest. The mood of austerity and restraint is particularly evident in George Martin's string writing, where a heavy use of repetition - similar to the chromaticism and unresolved dissonances in Bernard Herrman's music for Psycho - creates suspense and underpins the ferences to death: 'Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave.' Forty years on, the inclusion of a classical infrastructure within a popular song is less than revolutionary. At the time, it gave 'Eleanor Rigby' a freshness of approach in terms of musical arrangement which was also appropriate to the mood of the lyrics, which, in turn, resonated with the experience of countless women who had neither family, friendship nor support from that bastion of respectability, the established church. And this, surely, is why this is a political, cultural and socially conscious song.
She concludes the essay with: This raises the question of the extent to which the Beatles can be considered an intrinsic part of the decade's sociocultural zeitgeist. With regard to popular music, there is no doubt that their songs became the foremost expression of the poetry of everyday life. Written in the vernacular, they revealed a world of colorful images, with McCartney constructing stories and characters and Lennon writing first person testimonies, including his exploration of the metaphysical through hallucinogenics. Their albums opened up new avenues within popular mmusic: pastiches of goodtime twenties songs, simple rock and roll, folk songs, tongue-in-cheek parodies, country and western ballads, hints of Elizabethan romanticism, surrealism, comedy, wit, and sentimentality. Yet, as much as the Beatles offered a mood of contemporaeity - not least in their engagement with Carnaby Street culture, psychedelia, and hippy philosophy - they also provided insights into their past. In 'Polythene Pam' Lennon recalls his Liverpool club days, 'Lovely Rita' eulogizes a 'meter maid', while 'Penny Lane' and 'Strawberry Fields Forever' are lasting reminders of the Liverpool of their youth. It is, however, their stubborn northern-ness, their Liverpool humor, and tehir disregard an dcontempt for the pomposity of class-based social relations that situate them ost accurately in teh zeitgeist of the sixties. As Mick Jagger observed at the time, 'The Stones might speak to one's personal condition in a way the Beatles did not, but the Beatles were universal.' They may not have offered solutions to the problems of a society which revolved around materialism, repressive affluence, and individual conformity, but they nevertheless provided insights, celebrating what was, for their countless fans worldwide, a cheerful alternative.
John Kinsey's "The Beatles for Sale and for Keeps talks about the evolving post-mortem (as it were) images of the band through the decades. He can't resist taking a shot at Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone there which I must admit is fun for me (not a Wenner fan): Wenner hitched his magazine's wagon to the Lennon-Ono star in 1971 with the publication of the book-length interview, 'Lennon Remembers'. In his introduction to the new edition (2000), Wenner writes: 'The publication of these interviews was the first time that any of the Beatles, let alone the man who had founded the group and was their leader, stepped outside that protected, beloved fairy tale and told the truth about the sugar coated mythology of the Beatles and Paul McCartney's characterisation of the breakup.' Some of the tropes deployed here have become crude common sense about Lennon and the Beatles. According to Wenner, Lennon is the founder, leader, and truth-teller, while the Beatles, and McCartney in particular, are sugar-plum fairies. Note too that the structuring opposition - courage and risk-taking on one side, sentimentality and scheming on the other - is heavily gender-coded. This reproduces rock orthodoxy's masculinist agenda, where those things read off as 'feminine' and are disdained as mere 'pop'. (...) Indeed, the stock narrative that pits Lennon the uncompromising rocker against McCartney the calculating showman is a version of rock's never-ending story, the conflict between 'being real' and 'selling out'. According to George Martin, that story reduces both parties to caricature and arguably says more about the workings of rock ideology than it does about teh Lennon-McCartney partnership. Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head portrays McCartney as the 'de facto musical director' of the band from Revolver onwards. In his recent memoir, 'Here, There and Everywhere': My Life Recording the Beatles', Geoff Emerick, the band's chief engineer, concurs: 'It might have been John's band in the beginning, and he might have assumed the leadership role in their press conferences and public appearances, but throughout all the years I would workwith them, it alwas seemed to me that Paul McCartney, the soft-spoken bass player, was the real leader of the group and that nothing got done unless he approved of it.'
'Summer of Love', George Martin's account of the makilng of 'Sgt Pepper', paints a similar picture. In the face of what Emerick calls 'conventional wisdom' (coined, among others, by Jann Wenner) about the Beatles, such accounts amount to an emerging counter-narrative.'
By and large, the various authors avoid the Lennon versus McCartney game, though. To quote Kenneth Womack's introduction, and to conclude my post: Long before Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play - long before the pressures of real life had reached their fever-pitch - there were two boys in love with music, gazing upon a brave new world, and upon each other's imaginations, under the blue suburban skies of a Liverpool churchyard. In many ways, the narrative of the Beatles is - and always will be - their story.
