Why The Beatles Broke Up

~excerpts from Mikal Gilmore’s seminal review for Rolling Stone magazine

What actually happened, I’ve come to believe, was something different and worse than divorce. I started work on this story well over a year ago, making my way through over 65 texts and taking (exactly) 1,440 pages of notes. Not surprisingly, the various historians, critics, biographers, musicologists, sociologists and journalists I read had strong views about whose motives accomplished what in the debacle, who was guilty and who was simply helpless in the sweep of events. In truth, there were good guys and no villains, but because these were fallible people, they certainly made some grievous errors. Through all my research, certain conclusions became inevitable, and they managed to surprise me a bit: The Beatles’ end was an accident, a maneuver by John Lennon that went horribly wrong.

It’s long been known that the Beatles in fact ended when, in September 1969, Lennon announced to his bandmates, to his wife Yoko Ono and to manager Allen Klein that he was leaving his famous group, even as the album Abbey Road was meeting with the biggest sales the Beatles had yet known. Several months later, as this article chronicles, Paul McCartney also announced he was leaving the Beatles, though unlike Lennon, he said so publicly.

Though there are numerous moments in the group’s chronology of dissolution that were crucial events, this move by Paul was perhaps the most critical of them all. He had loved the Beatles more than the others had — he had certainly loved John more than John had loved him — and it was due to Paul’s resourcefulness and tenacity that the Beatles held together and moved forward so remarkably after the death of the manager who had made them famous, Brian Epstein. Though Lennon is more commonly regarded as the Beatles’ true genius (which is inarguable: he wrote the bulk of their masterpieces and until the last couple years of their career, wrote the best tracks on their albums), it is also fair to say that without McCartney, the Beatles would not have mattered in history with such ingenuity and durability. Also, unlike Lennon, McCartney understood that the Beatles’ four members would never create so much wonder separately as they had collectively. So for Paul McCartney — the only Beatle who had never left the group in a fit of pique or out of whim — to leave meant, in fact, the Beatles were over. He wasn’t about to play any games about his love for what the Beatles were, nor was he going to dishonour his own pain.

McCartney had simply been forced into an impossible position by John Lennon, George Harrison and Allen Klein. At least two of those men should have loved Paul as much as he loved them, but instead they had come to resent what they saw as his drive and his domineering ways. Who knows what Lennon and Harrison thought would have become of the Beatles had it not been for McCartney — the only opinion they ever offered on the matter was that they had never expected to survive past Epstein’s demise. The fact that they did is also what made them great forever, but no doubt in the midst of their unprecedented reality, any outside perspective was impossible; they were, after all, a notoriously insular outfit.

To the degree that any of this is tragedy — given that all things must pass — then it’s indeed a manifold tragedy. Harrison and Lennon were profound men who understood the necessity for hope and fellowship, and yet they were also men who could be profoundly petty and ungrateful. Both of them early on came to dislike the reality of the Beatles’ massive audience — “Fucking bastards, sucking us to death,” John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970 — and both men became uncharacteristically obsessed with financial eminence near the group’s end.

But what I found most troubling, most tragic, in all of this was two things: Both Lennon and Harrison (Lennon, clearly, in particular) did their best to sabotage the Beatles from mid-1968 onward, and when it all came irrevocably apart, I believe that both men regretted what they had wrought. I don’t think that John Lennon and George Harrison (but Lennon, again, in particular) truly meant the Beatles to end, even though they might not have known it in the moment. I think they meant to shift the balance of power, I think they meant for the Beatles to become, in a sense, a more casual form of collaboration, and I think they clearly intended to rein in Paul McCartney. But they overplayed their hand and — there’s no way around it — they treated McCartney shamefully during 1969, and unforgivably in the early months of 1970.

The immediate aftermath was as dramatic as everything that led up to it, though that isn’t something we had the room to track much in this article, given its already considerable length. Lennon was furious and hurt when Paul said he was leaving — he too knew there would be no repairing this, even though he had already been indicating he thought the band would resume — and he and McCartney soon launched into some sour exchanges in interviews and in song.

When McCartney sued to dissolve the band’s partnership, the three other Beatles claimed in court papers that they saw no reason to dissolve, that there was no real incompatibility that would prevent them all from continuing to make music together. They were saying this for legal and financial reasons, of course, but on some level, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr almost certainly meant it. They had thrown away something special, and the man they chose to align themselves with, accountant and manager Allen Klein, turned out to be somebody they lost faith in. After that happened, they again had Paul McCartney to thank, because his legal actions at the end probably saved their legacy. But the other Beatles never apologized to McCartney for how they handled him in 1970. Some things healed with time, but some losses were eternal. Near the end of his life, John Lennon said, “My partings are not as nice as I’d like them to be. I regret a bad taste to it.”

Unbecoming or not, though, I’ve never come across a story that fascinated or moved me more than this particular one. The end of the Beatles was convoluted and acrimonious, but it was also transcendent: No matter their problems, no matter how much they viewed one another with suspicion in their last year or two, the Beatles still knew how to talk to each other through their music, and nobody else has truly matched that heart-to-heart they achieved. Describing working with them at the very end, on Abbey Road, their longtime producer George Martin said, “There was an inexplicable presence when all four were together in a room. Their music was bigger than they were.”

©Copyright 2009 Rolling Stone

Touching Is Good

It was unfortunate for Julian. I’d been fortunate to be around a lot of kids. I’m from a big family so your cousins would dump a baby on you and you’d know you have to jiggle him on your knee. You couldn’t go, ‘Oh no, I’m scared of babies!’ You had to jiggle it and you became good at it. I used to like playing with kids a lot. One of my enduring memories of when the Beatles first hit… you’d go to people’s houses and they’d say, ‘Would you just say good night to the kids? Would you? The babies won’t go to sleep till you do.’ So I’d always go up and say, ‘Good night, sleep well.’ I enjoyed it, it was a very calm, fulfilling role for me. I’ve enjoyed being a parent, just never had a problem with it, touch wood. I’ve had problems with parenthood, like anyone does, but my mind was never set against children or kids, they never frightened me, whereas I think they did with John, even his own son.
            

We’d gone on this Greek holiday once to buy an island and Julian and I spent a lot time playing around on the boat. I used to play cowboys and Indians with him, and he’d love it: a grown-up who would go, ‘Now you chase me, and I’ll chase you, but after you’ve caught me, not before, okay?’ And you were totally in this mad magic game. I remember John coming up to me once and he took me aside and said, ‘How do you do it?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?” He said, ‘With Julian. How do you play with kids like that?’ I remember feeling a wave of sorrow coming over me, like uhh, I’d love to be able to tell you. Then I tried to give like the potted version, you know, ‘Play, pretend you’re a kid. Play with him.’ But John never got it. Never got the hang of it. John was always a man. I see a lot of parents like that, still, to this day. They can’t make the break to realise that it’s great to give so much of yourself to a kid, because you get it all back in triplicate. Some people just don’t know that. John was a single child so he didn’t necessarily know that and he didn’t get much education afterwards.
           

  When we saw him with May Pang, I remember him coming up to me and hugging. He said, ‘Touching is good. Touching’s good,’ and if I ever hug anyone now, that’s a little thing that sticks in my mind. He was right, but the thing is, I actually knew it more than John did. He only was saying it because he was discovering it. I don’t think he had a lot of cuddling, certainly not from his mother, because he wasn’t even allowed to live with her.

Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now

Abbey Road

 Iain Macmillan’s outtake photos from the Abbey Road album photo session, including Paul’s original concept drawing.

Now and Then

McCartney has spent nearly 30 years with “Now and Then” lingering in the back of his mind — amazingly, the time separating its release and “Real Love” is longer than the distance between “Free as a Bird” and “The Long and Winding Road,” the final single the Beatles released in their lifespan — so it should come as no surprise that the finished product hardly sounds haphazard. It’s deliberate and sumptuous, studio wizardry savvily disguising the distance between Lennon’s original tape and McCartney’s new vocal.

One place where there’s an additional word is when McCartney sings “then we will know for sure I will love you” at the close of a verse, an addition that buttresses a melody that dissipated during this moment on the original Lennon demo. That is also the only moment where McCartney’s voice can be distinctly recognized. Throughout “Now and Then,” the voices of the other Beatles are more felt than heard, with McCartney teasing out the song’s inherent emotion with his arrangements, letting his bass, Ringo’s rhythms and George’s chugging strums, not their vocal harmonies, carry the weight.

Robbed of the opportunity to participate in a true final collaboration with his greatest muse, McCartney instead elevates this suggestion of a song into a realized record, one where its elegant, softly psychedelic flow lets Lennon’s longing linger in the subconscious. That regret is articulated clearly in a chorus of “Now and then, I miss you / Now and then, I want you to be there for me / Always to return to me,” words that sharpen John’s original intention with its second newly written clause. It’s a passage where Lennon’s yearning for McCartney intertwines with Paul’s mourning for John, a shared grieving for the partnership that defined both their lives. In that sense, “Now and Then” does provide something of a fitting conclusion to the Beatles’ recorded career — not so much a summation but as a coda that conveys a sense of what the band both achieved and lost.

She Was Crawling On All Fours…

Excerpt from The Boston Globe:

It was September 12, 1964, the very height of Beatlemania, and 14-year-old Debbie Chase was exactly where every Beatles fan on the planet wanted to be: in the same room as John, Paul, George and Ringo. But the Newton eighth-grader was determined to get even closer. And soon, on the strength of an audacity she marvels at to this day, she was indeed up close and personal with the Fab Four — thanks to a Globe reporter, Jack Thomas, who still occupies a special place in Chase’s memory.

Having recently released A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles were in town to perform at the Boston Garden. A psychiatrist had been quoted in a Globearticle claiming the Beatles and their music had a pernicious effect on girls. In response, young Debbie wrote an indignant letter to the newspaper, defending her mop-topped heroes. “Nobody could have been a bigger fan,” she says, noting that her scrapbook was already bulging with newspaper clippings about the Beatles. Her devotion to one of them in particular ran deep: “Paul was my everything,” Chase said in a recent interview over Zoom. “I dreamt about him every night.’’

Pouncing on the opportunity for a feature story, a Globe editor decided to have a staff writer chaperone Debbie to the concert. For the assignment, he chose a 25-year-old reporter who was then writing under the byline John C. Thomas but would become known to generations of Globe readers as Jack Thomas, forging a celebrated career that included stints as a columnist, TV critic, feature writer, and more. Thomas was and is a man of eclectic, wide-ranging musical taste, and in 1964 he was himself a Beatles admirer who had recently bought a copy of A Hard Day’s Night.

He picked Debbie up at her house in the Auburndale section of Newton, and off they headed to Boston. He took her to a pre-concert news briefing with the Fab Four in a second-floor conference room at the Madison Hotel. Thomas inquired whether Debbie wanted to ask the Beatles a question through him, but, she says today, “I couldn’t think of anything that I didn’t already know.” So, Thomas situated her in the back of the room, told her sternly, “Don’t you move six inches till I get back,” and went over to join a knot of fellow reporters.

A few minutes later, Thomas was startled by an unexpected sight: “I looked across the room, and she was crawling on all fours, under TV wires and extension cords as if it was a big cobweb.” To his astonishment, the girl he had brought to the news conference had steadily made her way to a piano adjacent to the table where the Beatles sat, then crouched down behind it. “I’m [on the floor] next to John Lennon, and he’s looking down at me like What the?, and I’m waving at him,” recalls Chase. A couple of minutes later, she says, she grew even bolder, inching out from beneath the table and touching the bottom of the pant leg of each Beatle in turn, before crawling back beneath the piano. At last, Debbie stood up, standing between McCartney and George Harrison. As flashbulbs began popping, the enormity of the moment finally hit her. Seeing the girl’s panicky expression, McCartney put his arm around her and said solicitously: “What’s the matter? You’re shaking. Everything’s going to be OK.” On an impulse, Debbie asked him: “Can I kiss you?” McCartney bent down, tapped his cheek several times, and Debbie kissed him on the cheek.

“He was so kind,” Chase says. Then Ringo Starr came over, extended his hand to the girl, and said in his friendly way: “Hey, glad to meet you.’’ The next day, Debbie discovered that she had attained celebrity status at her middle school. “Everybody wanted to touch the hand that had touched the Beatles, wanted to kiss the lips that kissed the Beatles,” she says. But it’s something simpler about her encounter with the most famous band of the 20th century that stays with Debbie Chase now, six decades later. “What struck me was how nice and kind they were,” she says, then pauses. “I’m going to cry right now. It’s coming back to me. I don’t know if anyone could have had a more special experience than I had. It lives in my heart.”

The View From Inside Beatlemania

Many have argued that the Beatles embodied feminism or, in any case, advanced it. (“The feminine side of society was represented by them in some way,” Yoko Ono once said.) Partly this was a product of their own femininity—their androgynous appearance, their tenderness, their songs’ endless lyrics about loving women, learning from women, the sympathy, the compassion:

Whether it came from Lennon and McCartney’s relationships with their mothers or from Brian Epstein, their manager, who was gay and had his own sense of the fluidity of gender, this quality would only grow, sometimes appearing as a throaty neediness, sometimes as a solemn, wistful longing. And then there was the ecstasy of listening to it, the sexual release—“Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you / Tomorrow I’ll miss you”—or, for the very lucky, the almost unbearable excitement of getting a glimpse of the Beatles themselves, each frenzy taken as yet another symptom of the New Madness.  

The band had planned to fly to Washington, but a snowstorm forced them to take the train instead. McCartney took some of his best photographs on the trip. One image, from a Pennsylvania train station, shows two Black men taking a break from shovelling snow; in another, a Black worker strokes his chin on a station platform, a cargo car hulking behind him. In England, McCartney said, he’d seen scenes of civil-rights protests, the footage at Little Rock, “the two Black girls going into the school and the baying mob.” Now the more the band saw of America, the more they saw segregation. “It was, like, ‘God, is that really true?’ ” McCartney said.

Brian Epstein had warned the Beatles never to discuss politics in public; it would narrow their appeal. But there was no real way to avoid the questions of race and racial justice. The band knew that they’d brought something old, something American, back to America. “We used to laugh at America except for its music,” Lennon said. “It was Black music we dug.” 

Their contracts, at this point, included a non-segregation clause—though, technically, any segregated concert would have violated the new Civil Rights Act. “Segregation is a lot of rubbish,” Starr said. McCartney continued to be shocked by America. “Off in the woods somewhere, there would be these Nazis, and you’d go, ‘Oh, fucking hell, they’re loonies these Americans,’ ” he told me. “You knew about the Ku Klux Klan, you’d heard all that history about the lynchings and stuff. But you thought it was all over. You thought it was all better.” And then you found out it wasn’t all better.

From The New Yorker, 2023

Suddenly We Were In Wonderland

Anyone who rediscovers a personal relic or family treasure is instantly flooded with memories and emotions, which then trigger associations buried in the haze of time. This was exactly my experience when seeing these photos, all taken over an intense three-month period, culminating in February 1964. It was a wonderful sensation because they plunged me right back. Here was my own record of our first huge trip, a photographic journal of the Beatles in six cities, beginning in Liverpool and London, followed by Paris (where John and I had been ordinary hitchhikers just over two years before), and then what we regarded as the big time, our first visit as a group to America – New York, Washington DC and Miami – to the land where, at least in our minds, music’s future was being born.

The truth is that I have always been interested in photography, from the time I was very young, when our family owned a little box camera in the 1950s. I used to love the whole process of loading a roll of Kodak film into our Brownie camera. I would ask my brother, Mike, to take a picture of me outside a hotdog store – an American export to a country that had never previously known hotdogs. And from those early years, we would use the camera to take pictures of each other. This was not just a McCartney family hobby. Every family we knew would take a camera on holiday, as in “Here we are on holiday in Blackpool” or “Here I am with Auntie Dilys and Uncle Harry”, as we did when we went to Butlin’s holiday camp. As our group made its way to DC and then to Miami, my camera was attracted to this new American universe of common people. There’s a man with a shovel in front of the Pennsylvania freight car in Washington DC, standing raptly watching, or four aeroplane mechanics clad in white at Miami airport. These are my people. This is where I’m from. I grew up in a working-class family in Liverpool, so I could never detach myself from people like these. I wanted to be right in the middle of them. My relatives were exactly like these people. You’ll find them – the bus driver, the postman, the milkman – not only in my songs but in many of these photos.

Although we had no perspective at the time, we were, like the world, experiencing a sexual awakening. Our parents had fears of sexual diseases and all sorts of things like that, but by the middle of the 60s, we’d realised that we had a freedom that had never been available to their generation. Travel was one thing our parents had never done. They never had money, either; you have to appreciate how hard things were both during and after the war. You might be surprised to learn that I was the first person in my branch of the family who ever had a car. People just didn’t have them; they depended on public transport, which all of us were used to in Liverpool. Only later did I come to realise that we were in the forefront of these new changes, this abrupt shift in the youth that in hindsight seems to have crystallised in 1964. Rediscovering the photographs I took in my early 20s inevitably makes me reflect on much larger questions. I think it’s the same as it would be for anyone, that when you look at pictures of yourself when you were younger – in my case, a lot younger – there are a lot of emotions. On the most basic level, you think, “Boy, didn’t I look good?”, but we all look beautiful when we’re young, and I’m proud to have been through that and to now have the privilege of revisiting so many of those moments. I realise that many people get sad when they pore through old family albums, but I don’t feel that sense of loss, even though quite a few of the people who are portrayed here have died. It’s not so much a feeling of loss but a joy in the past. When I look back and think, I have to say, “Wow” – we did all that, and we were just kids from Liverpool. And here it is in the photographs. Boy, how great does John look? How handsome is George and how cool is Ringo, wearing that funny French hat? I’m also drawn to the pictures of the photographers, who were never our enemy. They bring back memories of what it was like being in New York for the first time, being taken down to Central Park, with all those hard-bitten cameramen shouting out, “Hey Beatle, hey Beatle, hey Beatle.” And we’d look at them and they’d take the picture, and then one more, always just one more.  I’m reminded of so many things: of an England that was more my parents’ generation than my own; of the early concerts and those original fans; of “Beatlemania” and of a London that in 1963 spoke of promise and ambition and everything new to four young men from the north. And I’m reminded of an America that I know still exists, somewhere. I remember all those stories, some of them real, others imagined, from looking out of the train window, seeing American freight trains, American railway yards. I like American trains to this day. I like to think that I can hear “that lonesome whistle blow”.  

“It was still slightly shocking for us to see a gun in real life.”

~From Eyes of the Storm by Paul McCartney

The Press and Paul McCartney

Whatever Paul McCartney says or does is news. In September, when he went to give a concert in Israel—making up for the Beatles concert that the Israeli government forbade at the last moment, 43 years ago—he was attacked by some pro-Palestinian critics for ”singing to the enemy.” No matter the ”enemy” audience was perhaps 20 per cent Arab, or that he also used his trip to visit Edward Said’s music school on the West Bank. When he sang, he also—in his trademark low-key, non-preachy way—pointed his audience in the direction of compromise and healing.

One of the prices of Paul’s fame is to see his honest words and thoughts twisted almost out of recognition. I saw this happen close up last week when my long conversation with him was published in Prospect. It seems that the press has a mindset about the McCartney-John Lennon relationship that demands anything that Paul says be squeezed into a mould—even if the words don’t really fit at all.The story was spun a certain way in the British newspapers, led by the Sunday Times. Then the wire service, Associated Press, carried the story around the world, where it was printed in literally hundreds of papers. One report, and the world is given misleading information by editors too uncaring or unmotivated or just plain lazy to make a call to Prospect to ask for the original wording. Not one journalist called me.

The fact is that the interview carries not a word of rivalry with John Lennon. Nor does it say anything about which Beatle discovered the Vietnam war first, (the main themes of the Sunday Times/AP story). There is no foundation for the allusions the story made to McCartney’s (mythical) claim, at Lennon’s expense, to have written the best of the Beatles’ tunes.The interview runs to about 5,000 words. The discussion on the Vietnam war is perhaps a dozen lines of that. There is one mention of Lennon—when Paul describes how he returned from a conversation with Bertrand Russell to tell the other three what he had heard from the old philosopher about the evils of the war in Vietnam.I met Paul at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys over 50 years ago. We were classmates. We played cricket together and I witnessed the first Beatles’ concert when he and George Harrison (in the year behind us) played for our class on the the last day of school. We yelled like groupies!

We have stayed in touch. In May, I sent Paul the column that I wrote on the newspaper hype about the 40th anniversary of the student rebellion in Paris. We decided to meet and discuss our lives and what had made us want to fight racism and war.We met twice and talked—about school, the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, right through to the Russian invasion of Georgia. On the way we discussed literature and the impact of FR Leavis on the writing of “Eleanor Rigby” and Paul’s feelings on the likelihood that his songs will still be sung in 500 years’ time.Paul is a self-effacing, intelligent man. He may grab the spotlight on the stage. But he has no need to twist history. And neither should the press when reporting on him.

Johnathan Power, Prospect Magazine, 2008

At the intersection of #HairStudies and contemporary Dad Discourse lies Paul McCartney’s beard. Get Back, Peter Jackson’s meticulous and beautiful reimagining of footage from the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions in early 1969, has forever altered the old narrative that the Beatles absolutely hated each other at this moment in time, a narrative that even McCartney and Ringo Starr have publicly said they believed. In its place, across more than eight hours of footage that manages to be both banal and thrilling, Jackson bequeaths viewers with a sense of a band maturing through and past each other who still, despite everything, loved one another deeply. And his team’s restoration of the formerly “chunky, grainy desaturated” film, long moldering in Apple’s vaults, has given viewers another gift: a full appreciation of the beauty and symbolic power of Paul’s beard.The beard appears as subtext for the first episode’s initial twenty or so minutes, until George Harrison tells Paul what we’re all thinking: “I think your beard suits you, man.” Paul grins and says nothing, which is rare, so I think we can assume he’s pretty chuffed.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: George is right. Paul’s beard does really suit him. It perfectly balances out his glossy, glossy hair and big giraffish eyes. He has a penchant for dressing in black during this period, the better, it seems, to offset the beauty of his whole head situation.

To understand the cultural currency of Paul’s Beard, in 1969 and today, we need to look to a general semiotics of Beatle facial hair. The boys were pointedly cleanshaven during their astronomical rise to fame. Paul was the first Beatle to grow a mustache, which was intended to hide the facial injuries resulting from a dangerous spill off a moped in 1966. “It caught on with the guys in the group: if one of us did something like growing his hair long and we liked the idea, we’d all tend to do it. And then it became seen as a kind of revolutionary idea, that young men of our age definitely ought to grow a moustache!” Paul recalled in Anthology. The mustache covered a wound, but it also allowed the Beatles to disassociate themselves from their Fab Four identities and invent a totally new group, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to inaugurate a new sound in rock ’n’ roll.Beatle facial hair is always an act of collective expression; it only acquires meaning within the context of the group. In this way, we might think of one aspect of the cultural currency of Beatle facial hair as akin to that of queer facial hair, particularly the “Castro clone” look that would coalesce among gay men in the 1970s. Despite the dismissiveness inherent in the “clone” appellation, the look that came to dominate male queerness in the decade after the Beatles broke up embraced collective sameness of appearance, a uniform of sorts, to subvert traditional masculinity and coalesce a queer community aesthetic.

While the Sgt. Pepper’s mustache did not signal homosexuality, it did allow the four lads from Liverpool to express a horizontal intimate homosociality among themselves, one in which power was shared equally and songs were written “eyeball to eyeball,” as John said of his collaboration with Paul. This bodily entwining was key in how the Beatles figured their own closeness: John also liked to say that he and Paul wrote songs by “playing into each other’s noses.” Meanwhile, genesis stories about the band’s early days in Hamburg always emphasize the boys’ physical proximity, living in bunkbeds over the club where they played. Entwined literally and figuratively in each other’s lives since they were teenagers, the Beatles offered, in their songs, films, and public personae, an idealized version of male friendship that deliberately marketed to and cultivate an embodied reaction from fans. 

Paul’s Get Back beard marks another epoch in Beatle self-fashioning, its symbolic status highlighted by the circumstances that lead George to remark on the beard in the first place. George’s praise occurs while he, Paul, and Ringo are flipping through their own fan magazine, mocking the articles but also, clearly, interested in themselves as public personae. A photograph of a beardless, dreamy, simulacrum Paul in the fan mag inspires George to compliment his real friend’s new look. Jackson is deeply interested in these moments when the Beatles, the most famous people in the world, do a thing you imagined but never hoped the most famous people in the world might do, like reading their own press and making fun of their own old songs. The film even opens with John saying “Who’s that little old man?” about George’s (mostly hairless) Hare Krishna friend, a reference to A Hard Day’s Night that constitutes a private joke about the ongoing public performance of their lives.

And the ongoing public performance of Beatleness was of course always a public airing of hair—shaking it, mocking it, cutting it, not cutting it. Amidst this group of men who care a lot about their hair in a way that embraces (white) femininity* is the Beatle who was and always will be known as “the cute one”—the Beatle who was once described in an SNL sketch as “the one who looks like a broad.” We know from Sianne Ngai that cuteness is an aesthetic category aligned with powerlessness, and, concomitantly, femininity. It is also, in Ngai’s words, a “commodity aesthetic, with close ties to the pleasures of domesticity and easy consumption.” Paul’s cuteness was intrinsic to selling the Beatles, for turning a band into a cultural and capitalist phenomenon. Paul is cute in the photo from the fan magazine, the print object selling the Beatles to the world, but that was then; George acknowledges that bearded Paul is now something different. 

Exerpts from From Jill Spivey Cadell’s article “On Paul McCartney’s Beard.

#9 Dream

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TVGuide: Do you think about [John] a lot?

 PM: Yes. I dream about him frequently, yeah. He’s such a central character in my life.

 TVGuide: Do you have vivid, inspiring dreams of people you love? 

PM: I do, really, yeah. There was actually one a couple of years ago where John…there was a song that I was listening to John do in the dream, and when I woke up, I thought, “I don’t know that song.” It was like it was a new song, and I was going to write it with John. I did vaguely remember it and tried to put down a little demo of it, but it didn’t really click. But I still have a little demo. And it was quite cute. I do dream about John quite often. It’s always very nice.

Interview with Paul and TV Guide, May 2001