Chris,
Your posting this morning was both thoughtful and thought-provoking and also brings us back, neatly and appropriately, to the entire trajectory of the Beatles’ career. In other words, to the book we’re supposed to be reviewing.
What comes across forcefully if one reads The Beatles Anthology from cover to cover, as you and I have had to do, is how profoundly distorting it was to be a Beatle. To have become the most famous (and most closely observed) people in the world just as they were emerging from adolescence, to have been given so much wealth, so much power, and so much unstinting idolatry so early … they had no experience of adult reality against which to judge what was happening to them. It may seem paradoxical, but to have experienced such success so precociously retarded the normal process of emotional maturation.
With this in mind, their breakup is perfectly understandable and was, as you suggest, inevitable. Most of us can remember the way our friendships were scrambled with the onset of puberty. Girlfriends and boyfriends came between best friends. Inseparable companions became mutually uncomprehending aliens. New intellectual interests superseded previously shared enthusiasms. One’s position in the world–or at least within one’s high school social hierarchy, the only world we truly occupied–shifted in unpredictable ways.
It seems clear to me that this common process was delayed by almost a decade for the Beatles. During the height of Beatlemania, they were imprisoned within a bubble that protected and isolated them from the world at large, and the only people upon whom they could rely, the only people with whom they could deal as equals, were each other and possibly Brian Epstein. Once they wanted a measure of autonomy, once they started to fall in love, once they felt impelled to branch out as artists and as independent adults, the intimacy they shared and the chrysalis in which they shared it inevitably became a hindrance and an irritant. So the reasons for the breakup that you cite–Yoko, artistic rivalry, and the growing inequality among the band members (to which I would add assorted legal and financial disagreements)–seem to me to be proximate rather than underlying causes. Something was going to do it. It was time for them to leave home.
And as we all know, when it’s time to leave home, a certain angry rebellion facilitates the move.
They said enough terrible things about each other in early ‘70s, and sang enough vicious songs directed at one another, that one could characterize their rupture as a sort of messy divorce. And, in fact, one of the things I found most moving about TheBeatles Anthology TV series is how affable George and Paul were with one another as they reminisced together. There was a time when they weren’t even on speaking terms. Now they seemed able to recollect those tempestuous emotions in tranquility and even in comradeship.
John’s contributions to the book suffer in this regard. Of tragic necessity, they are derived from interviews conducted prior to 1980, and many of them reflect the proximity of the breakup and the emotional disorientation that unavoidably followed. They reveal a bitterness toward the whole Beatle period that, one might reasonably expect, would have mellowed with the years. It’s certainly pretty to think so.
It’s ironic that so many people regard the Beatles as harbingers of political radicalism. There’s no denying the radicals of the period regarded them as allies. But as we’ve both observed, their fundamental social outlook was actually quite bourgeois. It’s true they opposed the war in Vietnam–as did plenty of conservatives–and it’s true they let their hair grow long, wore funny clothes, and took a lot of drugs; but, except for John during the period of greatest personal turmoil in the ‘70s, they never espoused especially radical political positions. As early as 1966, George wrote “Taxman,” which can even be interpreted as a protest against the welfare state, and John Eastman, Paul’s brother-in-law and manager, once observed, “Paul’s a kind of Republican.” Of course, it’s not really so simple as that, and I have no idea how (or even if) the surviving Beatles vote, but in any case, celebrating peace and love isn’t intrinsically a clarion summons to the barricades. The most radical thing about them, I suppose, is their implicit message that having fun is a good thing (“the one thing that money can’t buy”). That was a message that resonated and continues to resonate.
As, of course, does the music.
This has been a very great pleasure, Chris.
Best wishes,
Erik
P.S. I had intended, before we began, to devote a paragraph or two to Paul’s extraordinary bass-guitar playing, a great and profoundly influential part of the band’s legacy. Our conversation, however, has branched out in others directions. Nevertheless, the clip I had chosen to illustrate the point remains an awfully nice way to end things. It’s a lovely reminder of the spirit of the Beatles at their height, when they were an indivisible unit, when they were inseparable mates. And just listen to the bass!
Listen to audio A Little Help From My Friends
