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

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.

Paul and John

 

There are sweet moments between all of them—Paul playing piano while Ringo does a spontaneous soft-shoe, George and John having an animated conversation about watching the newly formed Fleetwood Mac on a late-night TV show, Ringo slyly laying his hand overtop of Paul’s and Linda’s in the control room as they listen back to the rooftop recordings, which turns into a playfight. But the romantic friendship between Paul and John, fraying yet unbroken, is the band’s, and the film’s, emotional center. It’s constantly flickering in their eyes, in the physical chemistry between them, in the rhythms they fall into that leave everyone else a few inches outside.  

Late into the project, Paul notices the theme about coming apart and returning home extending through many of their songs, and John cocks an eyebrow. “It’s like you and me are lovers,” he says drily, then pauses: “We’ll have to camp it up for those.” Often when John goes into his habitual kooky voices and Goon Show-style surreal comedy routines, the oft-abandoned Liverpool kid in him seems to be defending against such moments of intimacy and vulnerability with Paul. That particularly comes up on “Two of Us,” which I’ve always thought of as their love duet; in rehearsals they’ll do it in Scottish brogues, or through goofily grotesque clenched teeth, almost any way but straight.

Carl Wilson review of Get Back for Slate Magazine

Paul’s Lament

Most music performed by a group is the product of constant, gracious compromise. In the Beatles circa 1969, Paul McCartney is the negotiator-in-chief, and he’s aware of every eggshell he has to walk around or smash to achieve greatness or just to get shit done… But contrary to the prissy picture that’s sometimes been painted of him during the Beatles’ latter days, he comes off as surprisingly aware of the minefield of sensitivities around him, if sometimes a beat or two after the fact… and he’s certainly beyond aware that he’s paying a cost to be the boss. He’s a domineering older brother to George and rival/BFF/frenemy to John, and now he’s playing de facto manager to everyone — not necessarily because he’s taken pole position in the band on merit alone, but because Lennon is suddenly more invested in a woman than he is in being in even the world’s greatest boy band. Seeing McCartney recognize and articulate all these shifts, and soldier on while he gets a little bit sad about them, is one of the pleasures of “Get Back.” If you don’t come away from this with just a little more admiration for Paul, you may just be too in the bag for John and Yoko and their bag-ism, but that’s all right. 

Why The Beatles’ Get Back May Go Down As The Most Essential Roc Doc, Variety.

Paul McCartney Doesn’t Want To Stop The Show, The New Yorker, October 2021

McCartney greets his guests with the same twinkly smile and thumbs-up charm that once led him to be called “the cute Beatle.” Even in a crowd of the accomplished and abundantly self-satisfied, he is invariably the focus of attention. His fan base is the general population. There are myriad ways in which people betray their pleasure in encountering him—describing their favorite songs, asking for selfies and autographs, or losing their composure entirely.

Dad vs His Boys

[About two years before their mother’s death], the boys were caught stealing apples at a farm near the city. They were with a gang of boys, all about to swarm up the tree and pick the apples, when the farmer appeared. The gang took off, leaving Paul stuck up a tree. Mike ran back to help him, and the farmer caught both and, with a show of great indignation, locked them up in his barn, then called their father.

Jim came out and the farmer explained his situation. “Not that their such bad kids, but maybe you want to teach them a lesson.” Jim did, and in front of the barn he and the farmer put on an act for the boys inside. In raised voices they discussed the possible consequences of the theft–‘do you think they’ll get a long sentence?’ Should we spank them now and not call the police?”

Julius Fast, The Beatles:  The Real Story, 1968

We used to do our fair share of knocking off apples in a nearby orchard –it was called Chinese Orchard and it was in Horseshoe Woods. That day there were four of us altogether— Paul and I, a neighbouring tearaway called Roger the Dodger–and our shaggy dog, Prince.

We were doing very nicely when Prince suddenly started barking. We turned and saw a man lurching towards us, shouting. We all dropped the apples and ran. Prince got clear and Roger the Dodger vaulted the fence like a greyhound and I wasn’t far after him. But Paul, because of his weight, got stuck on top of the fence and couldn’t get over in time. The man grabbed him and yelled after us: “Come back, all of you or I’ll take it out on your pal!” Trust me, of course. Like a nutter, I ran back. The man locked us both up in a dark shed until Dad came for us. This time he simply read us the riot act–which made a greater impression on us than half a dozen hidings.

Mike McCartney, Portrait of Paul, Woman Magazine, 1965

A Portrait of Paul–Part 1

Paul was Mr. Bathroom and I was the Lord Mayor and we were playing a game called Winning Prizes with our five-year-old step-sister, Ruth.

Portrait of Paul, Part 2

Everybody was quite confident that Paul would pass the eleven-plus–for Mum and Dad thought of him as the brains of the family. And of course, he didn’t let us down, because he was a natural at exams. When I passed in my turn, it was so unexpected, apparently, that Mum burst out crying–I think the idea that she had two “intelligent” sons was too much for her! They say sensitivity often goes with intelligence and certainly I’d say this was true of Paul.

Portrait of Paul–Part 3

Paul and George used to lend each other records and, in general, help each other along. After school, they’d hold sing-songs together. I couldn’t help but get interested, too, and at home Paul and I tried harmonising. We weren’t at all bad. We often sang at family parties, our big number being “We are Siamese, if you please” from Walt Disney’s Lady and the Tramp. 

Where’s Waldo

In my perennial search for interesting Beatle material, I came upon an interesting find, with a bit of a mystery attached.

Apparently a fellow by the name of Mike Tree (or Mike Medeirose/a, according to his Dakota ID) was writing a book called John Lennon:  Barefoot in Utopia, which he claims was going to “dispel all the misinformation about John during his reclusive years.” He claimed he was a personal friend of John, going to Bermuda with him and Sean, and was at the Dakota to answer phones following  John’s death.

Here’s where it gets interesting:  he’s disappeared, as has the website promoting his book. His last post on his facebook page simply says “THIS PAGE IS NO LONGER ACTIVE. THANKS FOR YOUR INTEREST.  As far as I can tell, his book has never been published.

His brief stint on facebook includes photos  taken by Fred Seaman of John when they were in Bermuda, and other interesting photos and anectdotes about life with the Lennons during that last summer of 1980.

Tree also posted an interesting tidbit about the iconic New York City photo of John taken by Bob Gruen.  Tree claims that May Pang took the original photo but John wanted it redone by Gruen. A reader corrected this version, stating that Capital needed a 35 mm shot and Gruen had the proper camera.

Anyhow, here’s the now defunct facebook page.  I’d be interested in finding out what happened to Mike Tree and his book.