NOTE: for those of you listening, I apologize that the audio is a bit uneven in spots. Getting a consistent vocal tone/level in a two hour episode is challenging. #learningcurve
“London belonged to the young. All the old class structures of our parents’ generation were breaking down. All the old social mores were swept away. No one cared where you came from or what school you’d gone to, what accent you spoke with or how much money you had. All that mattered was what you could do, what you could create. Bohemian baronets smoked grass openly, dukes’ daughters went out with hairdressers, and everyone put two fingers up to the conventions of their youth, and the expectations of their families. The capital was abuzz with creativity, bristling with energy. Everything was possible — and money was not the key to every door. Painters, poets, writers, designers, admen, media figures, and, of course, musicians expressed themselves with fearlessness, freshness and freedom. They wore fabulous frocks and flowery shirts and grew their hair long. They weren’t going to knuckle down and wear the uniform of their class. The rule book had been thrown away.”1 — Pattie Boyd, ‘60s “It’” girl, model, photographer, and former wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton
It would be hard to overstate the impact of the “earthquake” that hit the world in 1964. The cultural revolution of the Sixties, sparked by the explosion of Beatlemania, changed our world instantly, radically, and though it might not seem like it at the moment, permanently.
It was a matter of speed as much as scale. For only the second time in human history, the foundational mythology of Western civilization was almost completely rewritten, and unlike the other time — the ascent of Christianity, which had taken hundreds of years to reshape the riverbed of the culture — the revolution of the Sixties would do it in less than a decade.
When we talk about the influence of the Sixties, we tend to focus on the artistic renaissance of those years — first and foremost, of course, The Beatles’ reinvention of pop music, and the resulting innovations in the visual arts, fashion, film, literature, journalism, and virtually every other part of Western culture — and always with The Beatles at the centre, setting the pace, continually a step ahead, in their refusal to repeat themselves, pushing the revolution further, faster, onwards.
And then there were the social justice and political uprisings that led — within only a handful of years — to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the Peace Movement that helped force the end of the Vietnam War, and the birth of the environmental, second-wave feminist and contemporary LGBTQ movements.
Here’s cultural historian Shawn Levy—
“[In the Sixties] There was the sense that social wrongs could not stand: racial and sexual and class oppression, bullying warfare, unchecked savaging of the environment. In England during the Swinging London years, homosexuality was decriminalized, capital punishment banned, divorce law reformed and censorship of the arts curtailed. Governmental, corporate and social institutions that weren’t utterly abolished seemed suddenly pervious to mass criticism: the class system, colonialism, the Darwinian dictates of capital. These changes — wrapped up gaily, set to a danceable beat and glowing with the optimism of youth — were genuine steps into a more just modernity. If Swinging London was a place where you got a hip haircut and outfit and danced the latest step to a groovy new 45, it was also the place where you opened your mind to a better world.”2
All of these are, of course, important reasons why the Sixties hold a unique and iconic place in our history, and rightly so. But these relatively surface-level advances are not why the Sixties was a mythological earthquake.
Mythological, riverbed-changing earthquakes only happen when our way of viewing the world and our definition of what defines a successful life are fundamentally changed.
The Sixties did that, and this is by far its most important legacy. Even if we don’t consciously realise it, even if it all happened long before we were born, every single one of us has had our lives profoundly shaped by the cultural revolution of the Sixties. We are all fundamentally different people leading fundamentally different lives because of what happened in those brief, shimmering years.
But wait, stop, ‘ang on a second. If you’re thinking we just skipped over, y’know, the main thing we're all here for, well, you're not wrong. It would be better storytelling and much more dramatic, if at this point we could just start with... “On July 6, 1957, two boys who loved rock-and-roll met at the St. Peter’s Church Fete in Liverpool...”
I, too, wish very much that we could do that. And in a perfect world, we could. But this is not a perfect world, and that’s intimately related to the way in which the story of The Beatles is broken. And to tell the more complete story of The Beatles, we first need to understand how and why that story as it’s currently told is broken, why it’s been made to stay broken all of these years, and what we can do to fix it.
I also want to caution you up front that while this episode is going to take us to some lovely places, it’s also going to get a bit bleak, and I know those of us in the US especially are overloaded with bleakness right now, myself included, and you’ve probably tuned in for a series about The Beatles as a bit of an escape and an antidote to the pain.
And that is what this will be — the antidote part, at least — because I have no wish to cause any of us more pain. But if you’re at all familiar with the story of The Beatles, you already know it’s not possible to talk about The Beatles in any depth without encountering pain. And you can take comfort in the title of this series. Although our journey to get where we’re going will sometimes be painful, ultimately this series will be all about beauty, and about the healing power of love.
All of that said, then, onwards.
Imagine all the people, living for today3 — John Lennon
The cultural revolution of the Sixties made the radical suggestion that life doesn’t actually have to suck, and that instead of blindly following the rules and delaying happiness until retirement and a pension or even worse, an afterlife, it might make sense to live more fully in the present.4
This was such a new idea for most people that there aren’t good words for how new it was. And if it doesn't sound all that new, well— that’s because of the Sixties.
You may have noticed in the prior episode that both the pagan mythology and the faux-Christian mythology that replaced it began with “life is hard.” Prior to the Sixties, “life is hard” was an assumption that had never before been questioned on any large scale. It was taken as an axiom — life was hard, and made somewhat deliberately so by the powers-that-be. Suffering was inevitable. The only issue was how to cope with it.
The original pagan foundational myth said, “life is hard, appease the gods and maybe it’ll get a little easier.” The faux-Christian mythology that replaced it — and remember, that mythology had very little to do with the actual teachings of Jesus — promised, “life is hard, but if you follow the rules, you’ll be rewarded after you die.” And the Protestant work ethic adjusted that to, “life is hard, but if you follow the rules, you'll be rewarded in your old age, and after you die.”
But in 1964, after two World Wars and their brutal aftermath, not to mention the assassination of a charismatic young American president who’d promised a new era of opportunity only to be murdered in cold blood before he could deliver, the younger generation had had enough of the suffering. And as for “rewards later,” the long shadow of the atomic bomb made it all too possible there might not even be a later.
The rejection of “suffer now, rewards later” wasn’t in and of itself new. Since the First World War, the younger generation’s growing anger at continual suffering with delayed and often nonexistent rewards had led to scattered outbreaks of rebellion — most notably in America where these sorts of things tend to happen.
During the between-the-wars Roaring ‘20s and the Jazz Age, the Swing Era, and post-war rock-n-roll ‘50s, young people had pushed back the pain of “suffer now rewards later” and the trauma of two “might makes right” wars by dancing, singing and shagging their trauma into temporary oblivion — and note, by the way, how each of those movements took music as its defining element.
Sixties’ activism wasn’t new, either. There’d been a steady push for reform on a variety of social issues throughout the Western world during the first half of the twentieth century. But with a few notable exceptions like the labor movement and first wave feminism, those pushes for reform were short-lived and relatively ineffective. And none of them fundamentally changed the pattern of most people's lives, or their expectations of what a good life should be — meaning that none of them got anywhere close to challenging “suffer now, rewards later” as the foundational myth of Western culture.
So what was different this time? Why didn’t the Sixties just fade into history like every other movement before it? Why did the Sixties — sparked by The Beatles — become a culture-changing earthquake, when all the prior attempts for the past two thousand years had failed? And why do we still hold onto so tightly to it today, in a way we don’t with even the rock-and-roll ‘50s?
Well, to begin with, the people doing the dancing and singing and shagging and the people pushing for social change had never before been the same people. It had always been two separate movements, each pushing against the other — the young people dancing and singing and shagging, and a disapproving contingent of the older generation urging social reform, often because they viewed the dancing and singing and shagging as a symptom of the social ills they were trying to fix. “We wouldn’t have these problems with our young people,” the thinking went, “if only we could fix the _____ social problem.”
In the Sixties, for the first time on any meaningful scale, it wasn’t a battle between the kids who wanted to dance and shag the night away and the stern moralising forces for social reform who wanted those same kids to get serious and help make the world better. Instead, it was the kids who were dancing and shagging who wanted to make the world better. And more than that, those dancing, shagging kids were proposing the stunningly subversive idea that the singing and dancing and shagging is what will make the world better — not just for a night of escapism, but in real, substantial, long-term ways.
When it comes to how we live our actual lives, day-to-day, this might be the single most transformational and revolutionary idea humanity’s ever come up with.
The pagans, most notably the ecstatic mystery cults of Bacchus and Dionysus, understood that music and dancing and sex made life a little less hard, and that it was important to the stability of the culture to offer a socially-acceptable release for our primal urges. The pagans also saw music and dancing and sex as powerful ways of connecting directly with the gods by inducing altered consciousness, and we’ll come back to that in a bit.
But before the Sixties, it had never been suggested by anyone other than a few fringy outliers that music and dancing and sex — and more specifically, the ecstatic joy these experiences give us — might themselves actually be the way to create a better and more meaningful life here on earth.
That’s not even the most revolutionary part of it, though.
Even more radical was the introduction into all that music and dancing and sex and social consciousness — of love. For the first time ever, love became the central organising idea for a global cultural revolution — and by “love,” I don’t mean vague, abstract spiritual love, but human love for our fellow humans, including erotic love.
Love, erotic or otherwise, had never before been the defining element of a revolution, or even a major social movement. Sex, yes — there was plenty of that in the Roaring ‘20s and in the rock-and-roll ‘50s. But never love — and especially never erotic love.
The Christian authorities had ruthlessly stripped from the story of Jesus any suggestion of erotic love, and made it clear that just the mere thinking of sexy thoughts would keep you out of Heaven. And even the “courtly love” of the Middle Ages was about love as a poetic abstraction, a way of styling oneself in the world, rather than a living force in the lives of the people involved.
Humans have, it seems, had a lot of trouble over the course of history acknowledging the power of love.
There’s a lot more that needs to be said about the role of love in all of this, including what we even mean by a word that encompasses everything from our feelings about ice cream to our relationship with the divine. We’ll talk about that in the next episode, along with why — for the Sixties to happen as it did and to become what it’s become — a very specific kind of love was required that was (and remains) unique to The Beatles.
For now, it’s enough to notice that in the Sixties, for the first time ever, the same young people who were dancing and shagging and making music were the ones leading the call for substantive social change in the name of love. “Revolution,” proclaimed a student journalist in 1968, “is the ecstasy of history,”5 and in the Sixties, that was literal. It all came together in a heady, frothy, sexy, joyful, free love “make love, not war” earthquake that healed a generations-old death trauma and, along the way, just happened to completely change everything about what we — and I just might mean the whole world now, not just Western culture — expected and demanded out of life.
For most of us, regardless of our spiritual beliefs, it’s no longer enough to follow someone else’s rules, get married, have kids, slave away for a lifetime at a job we hate, retire with a pension, and hope our suffering earned us a place in some vague promise of Heaven — or even Florida. That approach still works for some people, but most of us no longer feel that’s a description of a life well lived.
Instead, starting with the Sixties, our measure of a successful life began to prioritise happiness and meaning — not in some vaguely defined future or afterlife, but right here in the present. It was the beginning of what almost every single one of us now takes for granted, because it’s all most of us have ever known— the freedom to define our lives by our own, individual standard of happiness and meaning, what we sometimes shorthand as, “you do you.”
Here again is cultural historian Shawn Levy—
After the [Sixties], anything you wanted to do, pretty much, you could — or at least try — in music, fashion, hair, sex, food, living arrangements, you name it. And people would give it a minute’s thought, at least, and not just write it off as a waste of time. Forever after, you would have the license to dress, express and entertain yourself, give yourself over to sensation, investigate a wider world or things beyond it. Doors had opened — hundreds of them — and the hinges were removed from the jambs.6
Everyone alive today in Western civilization — and in most of the world — has inherited from the Love Revolution an unshakeable expectation that we have the right to live our way whether the mainstream culture likes it or not. Obviously, not all of us have embraced this inheritance, but even when we fail to extend that right to others, we recognize that a fundamental injustice occurs when we ourselves are denied the right to live according to our own values.
That right to define our own individual happiness is arguably the single most radical idea humans have ever come up with, and it’s a way of thinking that didn't exist in any widespread form before the Sixties.
It’s not hard to see why this new idea was an easy sell, especially in a world deeply scarred by the consequences of “suffer now, rewards later.”
Two thousand years prior, “life is hard and you’re going to suffer, but at least there will be guaranteed rewards” was a major upgrade from “life is hard, it’s all chaos.” But in the Sixties, “life doesn’t have to be hard and you don’t need to suffer at all” was an even bigger upgrade from “suffer now, rewards later.” The Sixties said fuck suffering altogether, live, love and be happy today.”
All of this was a red-alert threat to the political and economic powers that be, though it took them a while to realise it.
Remember, mythology shapes history, and whoever controls the mythology of a culture controls that culture. If people could no longer be controlled by the promise of rewards in exchange for dedicating the majority of their lives to advancing the interests of those at the top, then all bets were off as to what might happen next. For sure, the low-paid labour that the rich people at the top required in order to generate that wealth would evaporate, if workers got wind of the possibility of a happier, more meaningful life in the now.
Almost as threatening to the old order was the spiritual aspect of the Love Revolution.
In the Sixties, music and dancing and sex as a way of experiencing and expressing ecstatic love sparked a widespread interest in exploring alternative consciousness with mind-expanding hallucinogens. This in turn led to Western culture’s first widespread exposure to Eastern spiritual practice, sparked by The Beatles’ interest in meditation and their iconic and still-mysterious trip to the Maharishi’s ashram in India — which yes, we will do a deep dive into when we get there in future episodes.7
What we need to know for now is that while it might be hard to believe today, when yoga and meditation are recommended by physicians and therapists and corporate HR people, those things used to be considered sinful and scandalous by the mainstream culture. The Beatles’ interest in Eastern spirituality set off alarm bells among the Establishment, when it introduced meditation to the mainstream Western world as a simple way of being more present in the here and now, rather than as self-sacrificial suffering to obtain a reward in the afterlife.8
Meditation and Eastern spirituality — combined with mind-expanding music, ecstatic dance and the psychedelic movement — reclaimed the power of direct encounter with God (in whatever form you want to use that word) from the institutional Church, which had for thousands of years held onto power by insisting that only priests and other religious authority figures were permitted to talk to God directly, and everyone else had to get the message secondhand — trust us, we’re the only ones who know what God wants, and thus the only ones who know for sure what will get you into — or keep you out of — Heaven.
The rejection of an institutional authority between humans and God wasn’t new — it was in many ways a reversion to original paganism. And of course, every major religious tradition including Christianity has a mystical subculture that seeks out direct encounter with the divine. But direct communication with God had never before happened in such a freeform, open and widespread “do your own thing” way — or for that matter, with as good a soundtrack.
You might already see that this collective discovery of direct access to spiritual revelation and higher consciousness significantly weakened the hold of “suffer now, rewards later.”
Especially for the younger generation, organised religion and its dogmatic, restrictive rule book that had dictated morality for two thousand years became irrelevant almost overnight. No longer did people need to trust church authorities — or any authorities — for instructions on how to live. Beginning with the Sixties, everyone was free to talk directly to whichever God they chose — or not to talk to or believe in God at all — and it turns out there was sod all the Church could do about it.9
When the American Bible Belt burned their Beatles records in 1966 in response to John’s comment that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus, it’s this radical shift away from the faux-Christian “suffer now, rewards later” story that the record-burners and those who whipped them into frenzy were reacting to. And it’s this seismic shift that John is referencing in what he said, although it’s by no means clear he consciously understood it quite that way at the time.10
It was the beginning of “spiritual not religious” as the dominant “religion” in Western culture, and most of us have never looked back.
Two thousand years prior, the pagan-era casino had been traded in for into the corporate factory of “suffer now, rewards later.” But the Sixties offered, if not paradise on earth, then at least the hope that we might be seriously on the way there for the first time ever — and all we had to do to get there was sing and dance and shag. It was the best deal humanity had ever been offered, and for most people, then and since, “suffer now, rewards later” didn’t stand a chance.
Peace, love, freedom, joy... if all this sounds overly simplified and romanticised, well, yes.
Obviously, the Sixties wasn’t paradise fully realised — not in England, not in America, not anywhere. Social problems — poverty, injustice, war, prejudice — didn’t get solved in a magic haze of patchouli incense. And not all of the “live, love and be happy today” ethos was for high-minded, make-the-world-better reasons or even healthy personal reasons. There was the expected share of self-destructive, narcissistic behaviour — plenty of people who just showed up to party and didn't even bother to bring along some good weed to share with everyone else.
Even The Beatles themselves don’t seem to have been looking first and foremost to change the world with their music, at least not consciously and not more than any other artist does. They, along with everyone else involved, had simply been seeking an alternative to the “suffer now, rewards later” lives that were expected of them in the culture they’d grown up in. Creating a new and better world was just a bonus gift with purchase.
What the Sixties was, was a start. A genuine, tangible, substantive, joyful, collective start. And that’s more than had ever happened before in any widespread way.
More than that, remember that we’re looking at all of this not through the hard, granular lens of history, but through the softer, fuzzy — and in this case, more useful — gaze of mythology. And it’s the shift from the hard facts of history to a simpler, softer, more fairytale-like story that signals that the events of history have become something bigger, something mythological. And mythology, as with most of what shapes our perception of the past, tends to be far less about what actually happened and far more about what people think — and even more than that — what people feel happened.
Just like our individual lives are more influenced by our feelings about our fuzzy memories of the past than by the actual facts of what happened, the complex historical reality of the Sixties matters far less than what we remember about those years and how we feel about those memories — even when those “memories” are imprecise, and/or second and third hand.
Regardless of the messy complexities of its reality, the admittedly overly simplified, romanticised story of a revolution of “peace, love and understanding set to a Beatles soundtrack” is more or less how we collectively experience the Sixties.
And that simplified story, rather than the details of the history, forms the mythological riverbed, in much the same way that the “gospels” of the Bible were written by people who didn’t live through the actual events and relied on cultural “memories” of the events being described to craft the Christian mythology. That’s how the soft gaze of mythology works, and it’s that softer gaze that we need if we’re to understand the deeper and more profound effect of this story, and of The Beatles, on our world.
But even so... you might be thinking my fuzzy mythologist’s gaze is so fuzzy that I’ve completely missed something rather big. The promise of the Love Revolution was not realised — peace, love and happiness did not win the day. All the soft focus memories don’t change that the Sixties imploded in a haze of napalm, tear gas, overdoses, assassinations — and of course, the bitter public breakup of those four lads from Liverpool who’d started it all.
And while the Love Revolution did permanently change our definition of a good life, and while that was a mythological earthquake, it’s also true that despite our near-universal expectation that life ought to be about more than just suffering for some undefined future reward, relatively few people actually get the chance to live a life that’s more than “suffer now, rewards later.” And too many people are suffering with no reward at all. And as you’re reading these words today, at least in the US, we’re about as far from the age of peace, love and understanding as we’ve ever been.
So yeah, I did notice that we’re not exactly living in the Age of Aquarius, because I, too, live in the present, albeit reluctantly.
The question is, what the hell happened? How did we fall so far so fast — from the transformative life-affirming ecstasy of the Love Revolution to where we are now, trapped in another bleak chapter in history defined by hatred and violence and despair — increasing numbers of us suffering without any real prospect of reward? Is there a way back to where we once belonged, or is the promise of the Sixties lost to us forever?
To answer those questions, we need to get back to where we started with all of this — back to the question of how and why the story of The Beatles, and thus of the Sixties, is broken, although as we’ll see, wounded might be a more accurate word.
“It's not a great disaster. People keep talking about it as if it's the end of the earth. It's only a rock group that split up, it's nothing important.”11 — John Lennon, 1971
“I would never believe in anything else the way I believed in this music.”12 writer/journalist Alan Light
As we talked about in the first episode, the relationship between a culture and its foundational myth is symbiotic — mythology shapes history and history shapes mythology. Or to return to our analogy, the riverbed shapes the flow of the river, and the flow of the river also shapes the riverbed.
It might be tempting to dismiss the symbiotic relationship between mythology and culture as superstition — like the pagans believing that it was the gods who control the weather. But this dismissal is the result of our mythological illiteracy. The relationship between a culture and its mythology isn’t superstition or magic, any more than it’s superstition or magic that the riverbed determines the flow of the river.
Put another way, because a culture’s foundational myth sets the pattern for the culture, there is a direct cause and effect relationship between the health of a culture's foundational myth and the health of that culture.
If the foundational myth of a culture is healthy and coherent and life-affirming, the culture is overall healthy and coherent and life-affirming. The inverse is also true — if the foundational myth is wounded, then the culture is also wounded. And even more specifically — and this is really the key point in all of this — when the foundational myth is wounded, the culture is wounded in the same way as the foundational myth.
It’s this symbiotic, reciprocal relationship between a culture and its mythology that makes mythology predictive. Just like we can determine the flow of a river by mapping the contours of its riverbed, we can identify the wound in a culture by understanding the wound in the foundational myth of that culture.
To put it more simply, we can understand what’s wrong in a culture by looking at what’s wrong in that culture’s mythology.
Again, this isn’t superstition. In future episodes, we can and will get very, very specific about how this works relative to The Beatles and the Sixties. For now, I’ll suggest that it’s no coincidence that the story of the Love Revolution unfolds almost exactly in parallel with the story of The Beatles. And that it’s no coincidence that the Love Revolution began with Beatlemania and ended with the breakup.
When we say The Beatles conquered the world in 1964, all of this is what we mean. Culture is shaped by whoever controls the mythology. And from the explosion of Beatlemania that became the Swinging Sixties, to the lush, romantic psychedelia of Sgt. Pepper that sparked the Summer of Love, to the fragmented confusion of the White Album that defined the gathering darkness, to the farewell couplet on Abbey Road that wrote the epitaph for both The Beatles and the Sixties, and all of the hundreds of moments in between, The Beatles, more than anyone else, defined the mythology of the Sixties.
All of this is also why the breakup of The Beatles is the most famous — and by far the most culturally traumatic — breakup, not just in music history, but perhaps in all of history. Most bands eventually break up of course, for the usual list of reasons. But this band — and this breakup — that was and continues to be a different thing entirely.
It’s hard to find words for how deeply the breakup of The Beatles broke our collective hearts. When I tell people I’m a Beatles scholar, by far the most frequent question I get is “can you please tell me why they broke up?”
In my experience, this question is never asked out of casual curiosity. There’s a quiet desperation to it, like a lost soul asking a priest why God lets bad things happen to good people, a longing for some kind of explanation for the unhealed pain that’s haunted them for so long that they’ve forgotten that there’s another way of being.
Some of the intensity of our grief can be measured by our depth of love for what we lost.
In the fragmented culture we live in today, where we share next to nothing in common in terms of collective emotional experience, it might be hard to grasp just how passionately and universally we — and by “we,” I really do mean the whole world — fell in love with The Beatles. I don’t think we’ve ever, as an entire culture and maybe an entire planet, loved anyone or anything in quite the same way and with the same intensity with which we fell for those four boys from Liverpool and the music they made together.
We fell fast and we fell hard — fierce and possessive and sometimes violent and out-of-control and on a scale never experienced before or since. Cultural infatuations come and go — that’s the way of things — but for sixty years, through it all, our love affair with The Beatles — and as biographer Peter Carlin put it, “the joyful noise that came so easily to them” — remains way beyond compare.
Maybe even more than the music itself, we fell in love with the unapologetic way the four of them loved and found joy in one another. That love and joy is captured forever in the film footage we have of those early days — in concerts and press conferences and interviews and films, the four of them laughing, teasing, dancing together on that wide open field in A Hard Day’s Night to the ecstatic backbeat of “Can’t Buy Me Love.”13 That joyful, exuberant love is what healed the death trauma of World War II. And it’s what — still today — we can’t get enough of, what we listen for in their music, what we eagerly blur our vision to see the last traces of in Get Back, even as it was all coming apart.
Our collective wounding relative to the breakup comes in large part from the stark contrast between their easy and fierce affection for one another, and the extreme emotional and sometimes physical violence of that breakup. How the four of them — and especially John and Paul — could go from one extreme to the other, from such deep love and affection to bitterness and anger, and especially so quickly and for no clear or obvious reason, is, I think, what we struggle most to come to terms with.
Witnessing that love fall apart — and so viciously — violates our deepest and most fundamental beliefs about how the world is supposed to work. Love like the love we witnessed between the four Beatles — and again, especially between John and Paul — simply isn’t supposed to end with that kind of ugliness. It violates everything we intuitively understand about love.
The breakup unsettles our experience of the music, too. If John, Paul, George and Ringo were no longer in love with one another — or worse, if it’s true that they never had been — then listening to a song like “Because” becomes an experience of cognitive dissonance. The inexplicable but unmistakable ‘blood harmony’ of their voices, blending into a whole greater than the sum of its parts, is as close to a miracle as we’ll likely ever see. How do we reconcile that with how it ended, without making the music itself dishonest?
“Why did they break up?” is by far the biggest and most-asked question in The Beatles’ story, because even if we’re not consciously aware of all the other ways the story doesn’t make sense — and we’ll get to most of them eventually — virtually everyone who knows even a little bit about The Beatles knows that the breakup as we’ve had it explained to us — but really not explained to us — makes perhaps the least sense of all.
When it comes to the breakup, most writers — and even The Beatles themselves — mostly shrug, say “it’s complicated,” and mumble things about business differences and creative tensions and Yoko eating George’s digestive biscuits without his permission. None of it satisfies, and all of it only rubs salt in the wound, because in some ways, an unconvincing or trivial explanation is worse than no explanation at all.
When we lose something we love in a way that makes no sense to us, we struggle to find any kind of solid footing for healing from our grief. Remember, this is one of the reasons story matters so much — stories help us survive trauma by giving us a context for making sense of our pain. If we understand the reason for the pain, it still hurts, but it isn’t experienced as random suffering, and that makes it easier to recover from.
When we suffer a traumatic loss, we need a coherent explanation, so we can heal from our loss. This is why every spiritual tradition includes an explanation for suffering — whether that explanation is that it’s God’s will or as the karmic consequence of our own sins.
Later in this series, we will, of course, devote an entire episode — and likely more than one — to the intricacies of the breakup. But we’re not going to do that yet, because we don’t yet have anywhere close to enough context. And even when we do, we’ll almost certainly never know for sure exactly what happened. As with the breakup of any long-term relationship, no matter how famous the people involved, the vast majority of what took place was behind closed doors, and wasn’t and will never be shared with the world, and that’s probably how it should be.
What matters here isn’t the details of what happened, but our collective emotional experience of the breakup. Whether we lived through it in real time, or whether, like me and probably you, we only know what happened secondhand, through the story as it’s been handed down to us, the breakup was and continues to be a deeply traumatic loss — to the culture overall and to every single one of us, whether we’re conscious of that trauma or not.
Witnessing those once-joyful boys tear each other apart shattered the new idea born out of the Sixties that the transcendent power of love is strong enough to change the world.
If The Beatles, who’d started and led the Love Revolution, had become bitter enemies feuding over money and power across conference tables and in courtrooms and throwing bricks through each other’s windows — the very same “might makes right” they’d led a revolution to get rid of — what hope did the rest of us have to do any better? Why even bother to try to change the world, if the best hope we ever had to escape “might makes right” and “suffer now, rewards later” imploded so disastrously after just a few short years?
And as if the breakup itself wasn’t painful enough, it’s made still more painful by the apparent permanence of it. The specifics are a catechism of loss, knife cuts into an already-bleeding wound. We’re told that after 1969, John, Paul, George and Ringo never played together again. And after 1970, they were never again together in the same room. After he moved to New York in 1971, John never again set foot in England. The last time John and Paul were together in person was in 1976. Every “last time” and “never again” piling on more pain, culminating in the “never again” of John’s murder, which closed the door forever on any chance of seeing those four boys-now-men together again.
The public face of the breakup was painful to witness, but because most of it happened behind closed doors and out of view of the public eye, most of our experience of the breakup, at the time, came from what The Beatles themselves chose to tell us about it.
Ringo, never one to talk publicly about band politics anyway, didn’t say much of anything about it, and was numbing his pain with alcohol and trying (with limited success, it seems) not to take sides.
Paul was doing what Paul seems to do in times of trouble — taking shelter in his music and trying to pretend the whole thing wasn’t happening and that everything was fine... just fine... just as his brother has described him doing when his mother died,14 and as, if we were paying even a bit of attention, we all saw him doing (also with limited success) in Get Back and Let It Be.
George was busy recording his backlog of songs that would become his triple album, All Things Must Pass, but he took more time off than we might wish, to share his thoughts — that he was tired of being Fab and The Beatles weren’t that great, and Lennon/McCartney wasn’t anything special, and Indian music is superior in every way to pop music, and how much better it was to make music with Eric Clapton—
— and honestly, I adore George, of course I do, we all do. I adore deadpan Beatle George and bitchy Anthology George, and I even adore Indian raga music George, because I can relate to anyone whose passion is so all-consuming that it takes over their whole life.
But listening to George’s post-breakup interviews, I want to sit him down on one of his meditation cushions and remind him that he was the lead guitarist in the most important band in history, and that he was a key part of recording the most influential music in history, and that he learned his songwriting craft from the most successful and influential songwriting partnership in history, and that when he did get to record his songs, he was the only person in the world ever who had John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as his backup band, Paul McCartney as his musical arranger, and George Martin as his producer. So really, seriously, some perspective and tiny tad bit of fucking gratitude would not be inappropriate.
But I digress.
George’s comments are less-than-fun to read, but they’re really just George being George the way George has always been George— which is to say there’s a bit of an Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh quality to them, and especially from the perspective of distance, they don’t have much bite.15 Mostly they’re the comments of a man weary of fame and overwhelmed by years of garden-variety jealousy.
I wish George’s spiritual searching had offered him more of that perspective and gratitude — but in all fairness, however much George presented himself to the world as a sort of junior wiseman,16 even Beatles are human and fallible. And while it’s easy to wish he’d have been more grateful, none of us can truly know what it would have been like to attempt to carve out a creative identity in the shadow of Lennon/McCartney, which is why it’s dangerous to judge anyone through a microscopic glass, as George was fond of saying.
And then there was John.
John’s breakup-era interviews were not just John being John. In fact, they were the opposite of John being John — or at least the opposite of the John we fell in love with during the Beatles years.
The breakup seems to have changed all of them — how could it fail to? — and in some ways, it seems to have changed John most of all. It’s hard to reconcile Breakup John with the John who’d gazed soulfully at us from the gatefold of Sgt. Pepper as he sang us into a new and better world of strawberry fields and girls with the sun in their eyes. Breakup John seemed an entirely different person, humourless and resentful and cruel, intent on lashing out at the world in what seemed like a deliberate, methodical campaign to hurt everyone he loved and everyone who loved him.
Unlike George, John didn’t just give occasional interviews to promote specific projects. He more or less took the breakup itself on an extended promotional tour, talking to anybody who would listen — which given he’s John Lennon, was pretty much everybody.
John’s breakup anger — rage might be a better word — was big and raw and all-consuming. John would later compare it to the bursting of an infected abscess, and that’s an apt description.17
Over the extended run of his “I’m So Happy I Could Die” Breakup Tour, John pronounced the Love Revolution a meaningless waste of time, and anyone who still believed in it childish and delusional. He declared the Beatles to be “nothing,” insisted that the new music his former bandmates were putting out was rubbish (especially Paul’s), told us that being a Beatle had been “a big letdown” a “sell out” and a “complete humiliation,” and that all four of them had resented their fans. Most significantly, John claimed that Lennon/McCartney was a fiction, that he and Paul had completely stopped writing together in 1962, before they even set foot in a recording studio. And it’s this last thing that — as we’ll see — did far and away the most harm to to the story and to everyone touched by it — which is every one of us.18
Breakup John is the poster child for why creative geniuses in the midst of a mental breakdown probably shouldn't have unsupervised access to the world’s press, but it’s important to be absolutely crystal clear that John is not the villain of this piece — far from it.
It doesn’t take more than basic emotional literacy to recognise that at the core of John’s lashing out was the terrified, deeply insecure little boy of his childhood, in extreme psychological crisis, and whose coping mechanism of choice was to bury his pain in drugs and denial and hostility — all of it made worse still by the mind and personality-altering effects of heroin and aborted primal scream therapy (which was already dodgy to start with), as well as PTSD from unprecedented fame. And maybe most of all, as we’ll talk about in detail when we get there in the story, unmoored by the breakup and by the breakdown in his relationship with Paul.
To cope with all of it, John did what many people do in a difficult breakup. He painted himself as the wounded, innocent party while looking to do maximum damage to his ex — in this case, both The Beatles and Paul, and even maybe the Sixties — as payback and as a defence against the pain.
It’s a testament to John’s strength of character that he managed to live through that time period, much less remain even remotely functional. And it’s a testament to his genius that in spite of everything — or maybe because of it — he was able to write and record what might be music’s most iconic confessional solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.
So again, John is absolutely not the villain here, and understanding the pain he was in does, at least for me, make his breakup interviews easier to take.
I’m also not suggesting that the breakup is entirely John’s fault, or that he’s the only one who acted badly as it was happening. No one is on their best behavior during a bad breakup, and while The Beatles are an exception in many ways, they’re not an exception when it comes to this.
But none of that undoes the damage done as a result of those interviews.
Whether we lived through the actual breakup or not, John’s breakup interviews made all of us into the abandoned and betrayed children of the twentieth century’s most brutal and consequential divorce, sat down and told by our parents not only that they didn't love each other anymore and were going to live apart, but that they’d never loved each other, or for that matter, us. That it was all an act, a lie, and we're on our own from here on out, good luck, fuck off and goodbye.
John’s denouncement of the Love Revolution was especially painful, delivered as it was alongside images on the nightly news of body bags and assassinations and overdoses and riots. It sent a clear message — the joyful revolution that had inspired a new generation to begin to create a better world had been nothing more than a foolish fantasy. The dream was over, it wasn’t a new world after all, and it was time to wake up and grow up. After all, John Lennon told us so and he ought to know, if anyone would.
Do you see what’s happening here?
First, an earthquake completely disrupts the mythological “riverbed” through which our culture had flowed for thousands of years — a joyful, beautiful, hopeful earthquake, powerful enough to make us believe that life doesn’t have to be an endless grind of “suffer now, rewards later.” That “might makes right” doesn’t have to prevail. That love is more powerful than fear. For a brief shining moment, we believed — truly believed — that the world we long for could really happen. And more than that, we set to work, or rather to play, making it happen — only to have that better world crumble into ruins around us for no clear reason. And on top of that, we were told by none other than one of the creators of that new and better world — by the co-writer of “All You Need Is Love”19 — that the whole thing was a childish delusion and get over it already.20
Again, if you have any kind of emotional intelligence, the truer message of what John said isn’t hard to see. He was almost certainly talking about himself, that he felt he’d been foolish, to believe in the power of love. And if it was all a lie, then there’s no loss when it’s gone. It’s fine, I’m fine. Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about. I never loved you anyway, and you never loved me.
But that’s not the message that we got from the way the breakup was reported in the press. The journalists who interviewed John didn’t understand that kind of emotional subtext, and they mostly don’t seem to understand it even today. Music journalism has rarely been about making sense of the intricacies of the human heart. That’s never been part of the job description — though maybe it ought to be, given making sense of the intricacies of the human heart is arguably the whole point of music.
Instead, journalists simply took John at his word. John was the founder and perceived leader of the band that had started and shaped the whole thing. And if he said this is how it was, then this is how it was. Or at least it was how he felt it was.
The problem is, that it wasn’t how John felt, not really. And it certainly isn’t how it was.
“From some corner of his broken heart, John gave the most bitter interviews, full of hurt and resentment, covered over with the language of violence.”21
John was what they call in journalism “a good interview,” in part because he said whatever he was thinking and feeling in the moment with little to no filter or concern for whether it would still be true five minutes later — which by his own admission, it often wasn’t.
It’s been my experience that while most of us are familiar with John’s breakup interviews, at least in broad strokes, even many Beatles writers aren’t aware that he either contradicted or retracted virtually every negative thing he said on his breakup tour — sometimes in the exact same interview in which he said it.
I certainly wasn’t aware of John’s retractions when I started researching this story. In fact, I put off researching this part of the story for a very long time, because I was angry at John for his breakup interviews and for the damage those interviews had done to the story I loved so much.
That anger is why there are no standalone pieces about John on The Abbey. In the earliest days of writing about The Beatles, I didn’t know how to write about John without my anger bleeding through.
But eventually I had to do the research into John’s breakup tour. And when I did, I found those retractions and contradictions.
John’s retractions of his breakup interviews are going to matter a lot to our story about the story — so before we continue, let’s look at a few examples of why we may want to think twice about believing without question John’s breakup-era version of events.
By far the most infamous stop on John’s Breakup Tour is his extended 1970 interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner. This interview — subsequently published in book form as Lennon Remembers — essentially stands as John’s post-breakup manifesto. And in that same interview in which he said most of the things we just listed off, John also said—
“You know, we all say a lot of things when we don’t know what we’re talking about. I’m probably doing it now, I don’t know what I say. You see, everybody takes you up on the words you said, and I’m just a guy that people ask all about things, and I blab off and some of it makes sense and some of it is bullshit and some of it’s lies and some of it is — God knows what I’m saying.”22
We’ll come back to this, but it’s worth noting before we move on that John’s warning that he was an unreliable narrator was omitted from the article as originally published in Rolling Stone, and only included in the book version.
The Rolling Stone interview wasn’t the only time John acknowledged that he was an unreliable narrator in interviews. John had been warning journalists about his tendency to be less than truthful in interview for years.
Here he is in 1968, talking about his contributions to the official Beatles biography that had been published in 1967—
“So I’m not answerable to everything I said to Hunter Davies. There’s a few bits in there that I said how I felt that day. But do I have to stand by that for the rest of me life because it’s in print?”23
And here he is with Yoko on The Dick Cavett Show, in 1971—
“Well, you see with people like me and yourself, if you're in a certain mood and reporters are sort of asking questions which are angled to get an answer that they need to sell their paper and you're in a certain mood, you'll say certain things to them. And then people bring it back five years later: ‘So you said this, did ya?’ But you've forgotten all about it. You've changed your mood, it's a different day, it's a different year, you know, and you're feeling entirely different. So you're always held up to what you've said before. And half the time you don't know what you're talking about when you're talking to reporters.”
After an interjection by Dick Cavett, John goes on to finish the thought—
“It's like if everybody's words were recorded as they were saying it, there's lots of things you say that either turn out to be silly or you didn't mean it or it's spur-of-the-moment or you meant it or you had foresight or didn't. And it varies, but when people bring it back, you've forgotten all about it. ‘I don't know what you're talking about.’”
John’s making it pretty clear here that we shouldn't take him at his word in interview. But it’s the exchange that follows that makes the point in classic Lennon-esque fashion.
Understandably concerned for the integrity of the interview, Cavett asks John, “Which are you doing now?”
John answers, “How do you mean?”
Cavett clarifies, “I mean, what you’re saying now you actually mean?”
John answers with a non-answer, addressed to Yoko— “I don’t know what he’s talking about. What’s he talking about?” And then back to Cavett— “What do you mean?”24
Instead of answering, Cavett goes to commercial break. John never does answer the question, at least not on camera, and in not answering the question, he’s answered the question. He doesn’t mean any of it, really. He’s John Lennon, he’s playing with words.
John also got specific about retracting his breakup narrative. Here he is in 1972, a year after his pronouncement to Rolling Stone that “The Beatles were nothing” —
“I think [Beatles music is] fantastic. I hear things I hadn't heard for a long time. I get off on a little guitar solo or a lick I've done in the past. "Oh, I didn't know I could play that." Or there's some stuff Yoko hasn't heard which is especially good. I say, "Listen, listen, you've not heard this," because she couldn't possibly have heard all that music... And it's fantastic.”25
I won’t quote it at length here, but John goes on in the same interview to talk excitedly about exactly how one should go about listening to Beatles music to get just the right effect, encouraging people to listen to the UK albums rather than the US albums because—
“ —if you're really going to get into it, it’s best to get them English albums. That's the progression, because as they were recorded, naturally they're in that order. But over here they got jumbled, and you get one year's work mixed up with the year before. So if you're really getting into that, what is it, chronology, you couldn't do it because it was so messed up here.”
John’s love and pride in the music he created with Paul, George and Ringo shines through in this 1972 interview. His words tumble over one another, eager and earnest, and he sounds like any of us when we’re trying to explain to a friend how exactly to listen to music we desperately hope they’ll love as much as we do.26
In 1974, John was asked about his comment during the Breakup Tour that recording with The Beatles meant working on “draggy tracks.”27
Here’s John’s answer—
“It’s not draggy tracks. It’s like draggy tracks as opposed to just completely enjoying it. And that’s the job I’ve chosen to do, is to record and write songs... (sic) If I’m feeling draggy... (sic) I mean, when I say I wrote ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ or something like that, and I didn’t like it, and I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it as a whole; it was a job of work. But I got enjoyment from doing it. But you can’t pin people like me down on every literal thing that’s said in print like that.”28
Here’s John in 1974, interviewed by Ray Coleman for Melody Maker magazine, in one of my favourite moments in all of John’s post-Fab interviews — when Coleman asks John whether he still regrets being a Beatle, as he’d claimed during his Breakup Tour.
Here’s John’s answer, edited slightly for length but mostly intact in all its rambly, retractive glory—
“No, no, no... I’m going to be an ex-Beatle for the rest of my life so I might as well enjoy it, and I’m just getting around to being able to stand back and see what happened. A couple of years ago I might have given everybody the impression I hate it all, but that was then. I was talking when I was straight out of therapy and I’d been mentally stripped bare and I just wanted to shoot my mouth off to clear it all away. Now it’s different. When I slagged off the Beatle thing in the papers, it was like divorce pangs, and me being me it was blast this and fuck that, and it was just like the old days in the Melody Maker, you know, ‘Lennon Blasts Hollies’ on the back page. You know, I’ve always had a bit of a mouth and I’ve got to live up to it... Now, we’ve all got it out and it’s cool. I can see The Beatles from a new point of view. Can’t remember much of what happened, little bits here and there, but I’ve started taking an interest in what went on while I was in that fish tank. It must have been incredible! I’m into collecting memorabilia as well. Elton [John] came in with these gifts, like stills from the Yellow Submarine drawings and they’re great. He gave me these four dolls. I thought, ‘Christ, what’s this, an ex-Beatle collecting Beatle dolls?’ But why not? It’s history, man, history!’”
John goes on in the same interview to add—
“So y’see, all that happened when I blew my mouth off was that it was an abscess bursting, except that mine as usual burst in public... When we did a tour as The Beatles, we hated it and loved it. There were great nights and lousy nights... I’ve got perspective now, that’s a fact.”29
Here he is again in that same interview—
“I went through a phase of hating all those [Beatles] years and having to smile when I didn’t want to smile, but that was the life I chose and, now I’m out of it, it’s great to look back on it, man. Great! I was thinking only recently – why haven’t I ever considered the good times instead of moaning about what we had to go through? And Paul was here and we spent two or three nights together talking about the old days and it was cool, seeing what each other remembered from Hamburg and Liverpool.”30
After slagging off the Love Revolution in 1970, here’s what John has to say about it in 1980—
“The seeds that were planted in the 60s—and possibly they were planted generations before—but the seed...{sic} whatever happened in the ‘60s, the flowering of that is in the feminist, the feminization of society. The meditation, the positive learning that people are doing in all walks of life... (sic) that is a direct result of the opening up of the ‘60s.”31
And in another 1980 interview, his famous quote—
“If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that should have been left behind in the 60s, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.”32
Here he is in 1972—
“I still believe in the fact that love is what we all need, that makes us all so desperate, frenetic, or neurotic, et cetera, et cetera. But I still believe there's many ways of getting to that situation. There's a lot of changes in society to come before we can ever get to a state of even realizing that love is what we need, you know? But I still believe in it. And I've read cracks about, "Oh, the Beatles sang 'All you need is love, but it didn't work for them,’ you know. But nothing will ever break the love we have for each other, and I still believe all you need is love.”33
John’s reaffirmation of the love the four Beatles had for each other brings us to arguably the most infamous and, as we’ll see, ultimately the most damaging, part of John’s Breakup Tour — the bitter and often dismissive things he said about Paul in those interviews.34 Those comments and their context require a much longer conversation, and we’ll dive into that in a big way in an upcoming episode, because in many ways, it’s the deeper wounding in all of this and the focus of this series.
For now, let's talk about that infamous claim John made to Rolling Stone that he and Paul stopped writing together in 1962.
As we saw earlier with Lennon Remembers, John was not only an unreliable narrator from year to year and even interview to interview, he frequently contradicted himself within the same interview — not that anyone seemed to notice or care.
First of all, John contradicts himself on this literally five seconds after he’s said it. Then he says it again and five seconds later, contradicts himself again. Because, as he admitted later, he was lying and he knew it.
Wenner asks him when his songwriting partnership with Paul ended. John answers—-
“That ended … I don’t know, around 1962, or something, I don’t know. If you give me the albums I can tell you exactly who wrote what, and which line. We sometimes wrote together. All our best work — apart from the early days, like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” we wrote together and things like that — we wrote apart always. The “One After 909,” on the Let It Be LP, I wrote when I was 17 or 18. We always wrote separately, but we wrote together because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes, and also because they would say well, you’re going to make an album, get together and knock off a few songs, just like a job.”
In the space of a single quote, John contradicts himself three times. The partnership ended in 1962, but “we sometimes wrote together.” And actually, “all our best work... we wrote together.” “We always wrote separately, but we wrote together because we enjoyed it a lot.”
As if there wasn’t enough, a little later in that same interview, Wenner asks, “what songs really stick in your mind as being Lennon-McCartney songs?”
John answers with—
“I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “From Me To You,” “She Loves You” — I’d have to have the list, there’s so many, trillions of them. Those are the ones. In a rock band you have to make singles, you have to keep writing them. Plenty more. We both had our fingers in each other’s pies.”35
We’ll talk more about those finger pies in the next episode, but for now, once again a little later in the same interview, Wenner asks about Sgt. Pepper and John answers—
“[Sgt. Pepper] was a peak. Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on “A Day In The Life,” that was a real… (sic) the way we wrote a lot of the time: you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, like “I read the news today” or whatever it was. Then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it. Then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa. [Paul] was a bit shy about it because I think he thought it was already a good song. Sometimes we wouldn’t let each other interfere with a song either, because you tend to be a bit lax with someone else’s stuff, you experiment a bit. So we were doing it in his room with the piano. He said, “Should we do this?” “Yeah, let’s do that.”36
There are more references like this in the Rolling Stone interview, relative to specific songs. It’s not clear if Wenner even notices the contradictions, because he doesn’t press John on them or even ask him to clarify.
Here’s John again in 1976, talking with friend and DJ Elliot Mintz about his public fight with Paul during the breakup—
“It's not that we didn't like each other. It's that I've compared it to a marriage a million times and I hope it's understandable for people who aren't married, or in a relationship. It was a long relationship. It started many many years before the American public or the English public for that matter knew us. Paul and I were together since he was 15 and I was 16, and George was whatever, you know. It's a long long time for the four of us were being together. And what happened was, through boredom and through just the too much of everything and people bothering us with business, the whole pressure of it finally got, you know, like people do when they're together, they start picking on each other. You know, it was like, it's because of you, you got the tambourine wrong, that my whole life is a misery, you know. It became petty, but the manifestations were on each other 'cause we were the only ones we had.”37
And here he is again, in 1980, when interviewer David Sheff specifically asks him about that same “we stopped writing together in 1962” comment—
“No, no, no. I said that, but I was lying. By the time I said that, we were so sick of this idea of writing and singing together, especially me, that I started this thing about, ‘We never wrote together, we were never in the same room.’ Which wasn’t true. We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball. Like in 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher's house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had 'oh, you-u-u ... got that something ...' And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, 'That's it!’ I said 'Do that again!' In those days we really used to absolutely write like that - both playing into each other's noses.38
While the John of later years still frequently allows his insecurities get the better of him when he talks about Paul, he also doesn’t seem all that committed to it when he does. If he was, as he claims, lancing an abscess during the Breakup Tour, then by 1972, there’s a sense that he’s performing it in an increasingly detached way, like an actor playing a character he no longer identifies with.
Maybe that’s rooted in his comment about having a reputation as a loud mouth and needing to live it to it, but there’s also a much more intriguing possible explanation that we’ll talk about when we get there in the story, for why John may have felt the need to continue to perform his “feud” with Paul even after their reconciliation.
Still, it’s the original comment in Lennon Remembers that did far and away the most harm. I suggested earlier in the episode that we can identify very specifically when the wounding to the story happened. This comment — that they’d stopped writing together in 1962 — more than any other from John’s Breakup Tour is the beginning of ithat wounding, and we are all still suffering the fallout from it to this very day. It’s the moment when John made Lennon/McCartney into the fiction, and we’ll spend the rest of part 1 of this series — off and on — working our way through what happened as a result and why it matters.
For now, let’s close this section with John’s comment in 1968, at the beginning of all the breakup madness—
“People are going to be writing about us for the rest of our lives probably, and after we’re dead, so I tend to either confuse the issue so much they never knew what was going on or to try to keep shoving out bits and pieces of what happened, and how the different things happened as a result of this or that or how I was influenced or not influenced. So whoever is bothered to be looking at it in the future, if they ever do... (sic) But people that really know will sort that out... (sic) They’ll know what was going on with it, and they won’t have to go through a million, million things, y’know? Just like that.”39
You might want to come back and revisit this quote after the next episode, but for now, in part because of John’s tendency to confuse the issue, and journalists’ tendency to believe him, we do in fact have to go through a million million things to find out what was going on, y’know? Just like that.
Untangling the contradictions and retractions in all of John's interviews, and especially from the breakup all the way through to 1980, would in and of itself take an extended episode, a bulletin board and lots of red string. But I think you get the gist.
These are just a few of the more obvious examples — there are many, many more. It’s not that big an exaggeration to say that John spent the second half of the ‘70s — to the extent he said anything at all — telling everybody he didn’t mean what he’d said in the first part of the ‘70s.
The retractions and contradictions I’ve shared here are not obscure, and finding them doesn’t require any specialised research or access. I’ve made a point of deliberately pulling them from major interviews that are easily accessible — most of them included in a widely available 2017 collection of John’s major interviews.
The point here is that over and over again, John warned interviewers he was an unreliable narrator. Over and over again, sometimes in the same interview, he contradicted and retracted his bitter, distorted breakup narrative.
And it’s also worth noting that John consistently retracts and expresses regret only for his negative comments. I’ve found no examples whatsoever in which he’s ever retracted or expressed regret for a positive comment, whether about the Beatles, the Sixties, or about his relationship with Paul.
I get that the journalists who conducted these interviews didn’t have the ability to understand the emotional subtext of why John said what he did on his Breakup Tour. But one would hope they’d at least have had the ability to listen to their own interviews and to what John was actually saying and to realise that at the very least, it was more complicated than it was made out to be to the press.
But with one exception — which I’ll footnote — no.40
For reasons we’ll get to in a future episode when we have more context — and including the simple fact that conflict and negativity sells newspapers — journalists believed the worst of what John said, took it at face value, rejected almost everything else, and wrote their articles and interviews accordingly.
As for the Rolling Stone interview, one might think that, especially as publisher and editor-in-chief, Jann Wenner would have taken the time to actually listen to what John said in the interview before deciding how to approach its publication, especially considering how inflammatory so much of it was.
But also — no.
Instead, Wenner turned the interview into not one, but two separate cover stories spanning two issues of the magazine. And no sooner was the ink dry, then he also released it — over John’s repeated objections — in book form.
The flyleaf of the original 1971 edition of the book begins with a quote from journalist Andrew Kopkind about how John’s interview “breaks through the layers of dream-webs which have solidified around the culture, freak consciousness and political revolution.” That's a pretentious way of saying, stop being so naive and grow the fuck up.41
On the back flyleaf, Kopkind weighs in again, calling the interview “a revival of honesty.”
In his own comments on the flyleaf, Wenner starts, of course, by waxing poetic about all the groupie sex The Beatles supposedly had, because... priorities. He then goes on to call the interview, “the honesty of an amazing man in a world gone mad” and “one of the most extraordinary manifestos from an artist at any time in history about his own hopes and fears and the sources of his vision.”
Honesty, honesty, honesty. Wenner seems to be trying to convince himself.
But it’s a single sentence in the introduction that’s really the coup de grace. Writing in 1971, Wenner calls Lennon Remembers “the statement (he italicizes the the for emphasis) about the end of the Beatles, because John was the leader of the group.”
In November 1971, following the publication of Lennon Remembers, John wrote the following letter to Wenner—
“As your company was failing (again), and as a special favor (Two Virgins was the first), I gave you an interview, which was to run one time only, with all rights belonging to me. You saw fit to publish a book of my work, without my consent—in fact, against my wishes, having told you many times on the phone, and in writing, that I did not want a book, an album or anything else made from it.”42
John requested that the letter be published in Rolling Stone as his response to the publication of the book. Wenner refused.
Lennon Remembers is still in print today. The year 2000 edition features that same introduction, as well as the usual collection of blurbs on the back. And also a new introduction, in which Wenner offers no corrections, no addendums, no acknowledgement of John’s retractions and regrets, and no acknowledgement of John’s objection to its publication or explanation for why he chose to publish it the first time, much less a second time.43
Instead, Wenner says he remains “enchanted” by the interview, and calls it “passionate, unnerving and honest.” “Lennon Remembers,” writes Wenner, “overwhelms you with a real sense of the man, who he was and what he felt like.” Wenner goes on to say that “other than in some of his records, this interview is the only place I’ve had such a sense of John Lennon.”44
By the way, Yoko adds her thoughts, too, and in this case, she’s the only one who gets it right, when she says, “people with weak stomachs should close the window before reading. You might just feel like jumping out.”
That about covers it, yeah.
In his memoir, published in 2022, Wenner recounts the story himself. He leans heavily — again no surprise — on how “truthful” it was, saying that “to read it is... to know John Lennon.” He acknowledges only in vague terms John’s retractions, saying he was “sure John would have liked to take back some of what he said,” as if John hadn’t tried to take it back even in the interview itself, and over and over in interviews that followed. Wenner offers only a lukewarm acknowledgement of the devastation that the interview visited on Paul’s life, with no acknowledgement at all of how Rolling Stone continued for decades to savage Paul’s career with its vitriolic reviews.
The icing on the poisoned cake is Wenner’s claim that publishing Lennon Remembers against John’s wishes “tore him apart” and “made him feel sick inside”— a claim that rings fairly hollow, given John had been clear that the interview was not to be published beyond the one time, that no one was forcing Wenner to publish it as a book, and that he’d boasted a few paragraphs earlier that the interview sparked a flood of toxic headlines and put Rolling Stone on the musical map.45
I suspect that even beyond the desire to sell books with a sensationalist marketing campaign, it's really, really important to Jann Wenner to believe that John was being honest in this interview, and we’ll talk about why in the next episode.
I’m not suggesting here that the original Rolling Stone interview shouldn't have been published. The interview stands as an important record of John’s state of mind at a pivotal moment in history. And while the interview that became Lennon Remembers is longer than his other breakup interviews, it’s not substantially different.
The book is another story. Publishing it over John’s objections, and worse, as an honest reflection of who John Lennon is as a person for all time, which is what Wenner has chosen to do, is another matter altogether.
The damage here extends beyond the book itself. Out-of-context quotes from Lennon Remembers and other breakup interviews are endlessly recycled into headlines on YouTube videos and on the trashy, click-baity music websites that play fast and loose with the truth in order to sell ad space, and all of those click bait headlines emphasize and revel in the toxicity of John’s distorted narrative.
If you’re surfing the web and you see some kind of nasty headline about how The Beatles didn’t like each other or John hated Paul or anything else of that ilk, you can bet that it’s based on a single, out-of-context quote from John’s Breakup Tour — and probably from Lennon Remembers.
I realize that for some of you, as painful as John’s words are, it feels disloyal to suggest that he was not telling the truth in those interviews, in spite of all of his retractions. Part of John’s cultural power is the perception that he’s a truth teller — and in his art, he unquestionably was because great art is by definition founded on truth.
But we do John, Paul, this story and everyone affected by it — which is all of us — a grave disservice when we hold him to those words.
Lennon Remembers, and really all of the breakup interviews, was John at his absolute worst — bitter, angry, heartbroken, confused, disoriented, struggling with depression, low self-esteem and fear of abandonment. Over and over, John told interviewers he regretted his distorted breakup narrative. Over and over, he said it wasn’t honest, that he hadn’t meant to do harm, that it wasn’t who he really was.46
What would it be like, to have your worst self, your rawest, least considered, most-regretted words spoken at a moment of deep pain and confusion enshrined forever as the “honest” story of your life?
The breakup interviews stand not as a testament to the real John Lennon, but as a testament to the way in which over the past fifty years, the music press has distorted and corrupted this story — this foundational myth of our modern world. To be fair, it wasn’t only the press that did this, but it’s too soon to talk about anyone else — you and I don’t know each other well enough yet.
So for now, let’s talk about the press and how they’ve twisted this story out of its truth and into anger, pain and resentment, hurting people in the process — mostly, as we’ll see in a future episode, Paul, but also John, and everyone who loves them and this music. Partly out of ambition and a desire to sell more magazines, but mostly — as we’ll see in a future episode — out of fear.
“John raised his voice for peace. For love. For brotherhood. How I wished he had gone into the bowels of hell where kids were on lethal drugs and taken them by the hand and healed them. He could have done it, more than anybody I know. But what he couldn't do on earth, maybe — God willing — he can do in death.” — essay by a fan in a tribute magazine shortly after John’s murder47
As if the breakup-era interviews hadn’t done enough damage, John’s murder in 1980 made things so, so much worse — I mean, obviously. But also because losing him so unexpectedly and violently inevitably canonised him into a secular saint whose every word was now a holy and infallible revelation to be treated as gospel (and wouldn’t John have been both amused and irritated by that).
Of course, this would have happened regardless — but the breakup interviews added a new and damaging dimension to it.
It’s likely that in the wake of his murder, questioning John’s honesty felt disrespectful — not just because of the “don’t speak ill of the dead” convention, but because no one wanted to diminish his genius by questioning the truthfulness of his words.
It’s also probably that, as we’ll talk about in a later episode, the image of John that was canonised was the edgy, truth-telling revolutionary, and the breakup interviews fit into that image.
And I wonder if it might have been a bit more than that, too — if maybe the reluctance to question John’s version of the story also had to do with knowing we’d never get any new words from him. The ones we had would have to last us forever, and discrediting any of them meant there was that much less of him in the world to hold onto.
John’s murder also had consequences for the story of The Beatles. The global outpouring of grief had brought the Fabs back into the forefront of the zeitgeist, and that in turn inspired the writing and publication of the first serious biographies since Hunter Davies’ official biography in 1967.48
And when those post-1980 biographers did their research, they of course looked to John’s breakup-era interviews as source material. And because Saint John the Infallible’s word was now gospel — and also for a few other reasons we’ll get to — John’s distorted breakup narrative became the core of those biographies. And now that narrative wasn’t just in faded magazines and newspapers from a decade earlier, it was in big, important-looking books on the New York Times bestseller list.
And so it was that the first wave of Beatles biographies introduced a whole new generation to the distorted breakup narrative — which in turn formed the core of the story as it’s been told for the past forty years. A story that has at its heart John’s wounded, angry, heartbroken — and inaccurate — version of events.
And given that the story in question also happens to be intertwined with the foundational myth of our culture, this is, as maybe you’re starting to see, a big, big problem.
Or maybe you’re thinking I’m making too much of this. Maybe it’s not a problem, other than as a cautionary tale about never trusting the press to tell the truth if the lie sells more newspapers. Maybe the decades-old writing of past generations of journalists and biographers, however distorted, is old news and that this is an old wound, largely healed, and there’s no point in dredging it up and picking at it when we all know better now.
But this isn’t an old wound, nor is it healed over.
And while Get Back made some headway in overwriting the distorted breakup narrative, far too many people still believe that those breakup interviews and those books based on them are true. Online Beatles forums are still cluttered with people who believe the John’s breakup version of events — either because they lived through the breakup in real time and believed those original interviews, or because they read the books that perpetuated the distorted narrative into the next generation.
And unfortunately, the believers in the distorted breakup narrative continue to be the loudest voices in the comment sections — which isn’t really surprising. When you’re attracted to a story of anger and bitterness, it’s because that tends to be the way you interact with the world.
Worse than that, as much as Get Back has been a tipping point away from the old story and towards a healthier and (despite its creative editing) a truer one, when people who don't know The Beatles’ story watch Get Back and go looking for more info on the Fabs, it doesn’t take long till they run into the distorted breakup narrative.
Most of those first post-1980 books are still considered “definitive,” and many of the writers of those books are still considered “Beatles authorities,” despite much of what they wrote being provably false. Their books continue to top the list of “best books about The Beatles” and continue to be cited as credible sources on sites like Wikipedia. And that’s an especially big problem, because when people want to learn about The Beatles, the first stop is usually Wikipedia, and the next stop is usually a well-known biography chosen off of one of those lists.
And so those books with their toxic, distorted version of the story, built on John’s grief and pain and rage, infect yet another generation, and the cycle of wounding continues. And now AI is learning about The Beatles off of that material, too, thus further embedding the infection into the story.
Before we go further, I want to add on a personal note that talking about all of this is a little complicated for me. I’ve exchanged emails with several first generation Beatles writers, and for the most part, they’ve been nothing but helpful and kind. They didn’t know the specifics of this series when they were being helpful and kind, and maybe they wouldn't have been so helpful and kind if they had known, but regardless, they did help and they were kind. And I deeply appreciate their generosity and encouragement.
And it's also true that those first generations of Beatles writers are the ones who kept the story alive during the dark years after the breakup, when everyone in Pepperland was sad and no one, least of all The Beatles themselves, were paying attention to preserving their legacy. Given the importance of this story, we owe that original generation a debt of gratitude for that.
None of that changes, though, that the narrative the first generations of Beatles writers built around John’s distorted breakup narrative did and continues to do harm. And given that the story in question is the source material for the foundational myth of our culture, the harm done in all of this is — as we’ll see — far from trivial.
Again, I get that it’s too big of an ask that those original journalists and biographers would have had the emotional literacy to recognise the pain behind John’s “burn it all down” breakup interviews. But if at least they’d have noticed and factored in the contradictions and retractions, instead of publishing John’s interviews as the gospel truth, things would be so much better now.
The breakup would still have been traumatic, but at least the pain of it might have had a chance to heal clean. Relationships do end, after all, even when the love is real. And a divorce in which everyone still loves everyone and is sad to see it end is healthier than a divorce in which people throw bricks through windows, literal or otherwise.
But the wound didn’t heal clean.
Mythology shapes history. Because a culture’s foundational myth sets the pattern for the culture, when that foundational myth is damaged, the culture is damaged, and more than that, the culture is damaged in the same way.
To reach for yet another metaphor, think of the foundational myth as one of those voodoo dolls in a bad horror movie, where if you stick pins in its arm, the arm of the actual person whose likeness it is hurts in the same way. What we do to the story, we do to the culture, and thus to all of us, and to our children.
So when the foundational myth of a culture is infected with grief, pain and anger — and as we’ll see — fear, the culture itself becomes infected with grief, pain, anger and fear. For the past fifty years, we’ve all been living in a slow-motion replay of the breakup of The Beatles as told through John’s heartbroken, angry, distorted breakup narrative. One might say that the last fifty years has been our Lost Weekend, with no end in sight.
The breakup of The Beatles and the collapse of the Sixties was the pivot point, when our newborn and still-fragile collective belief that life could be beautiful and happy and filled with purpose, that we could make things better if we work together, that peace is stronger than violence and love is stronger than fear, was shattered. It’s the moment when our collective psyche fractured and our timeline divided into what might have been and what now is.
From a mythological perspective, it’s not in any way an exaggeration to say that the breakup of The Beatles broke us, as a culture.
Because of the twisted narrative, an entire generation lost faith in the transformative power of love, and passed that loss of faith on to the next generation and the one after that. In the Sixties, love found its voice in the larger culture and became an active, powerful source of change. Today, with barely anyone remaining with enough faith — and enough cultural power — to speak for love, it’s not even invited into the room. Why bother, if it’s all a childish fantasy?
Still, we’re changed inside, every single one of us, because of The Beatles and the Sixties. Our definition of what constitutes a good life is entirely different now — and arguably markedly better — than the “suffer now, rewards later” expectations of generations prior. We define a good life as a life in which we’re free to live according to our authentic nature, and to make the choices that offer us individual meaning and happiness—
But we can’t seem to make that good life a reality on the outside. We want a more meaningful and joyful life free of “suffer now, rewards later.” We want a world of peace, love and understanding, where we work together for the common good while celebrating difference and authenticity. But most of us don’t believe these things are possible — not really, not deep down. If we really believed love could change the world, we’d be doing a lot more of it.
That’s what the twisted breakup narrative took from us. That’s why the breakup still hurts like hell and why nothing we’re doing to fix what’s broken in our world seems to be working. In fact, given recent events, one might say what we’re doing is spectacularly not working.
Point is, we’re stuck and we’re going to keep on being stuck. Without a healthy and whole foundational myth rooted in love rather than anger and fear, there’s nowhere to go, no solid ground to stand on, no way forward. The psyche of the culture fragments and descends into chaos — literal madness, and not the happy trippy “Lucy in the Sky” kind.
Half a century later, the breakup still tears a hole in the fabric of our world. The collapse of the Sixties and the breakup of The Beatles are inseparably intertwined in our psyches. Together, these twin tragedies are a generational trauma that transcends generations, a collective mythological wounding — a soul sickness — that we haven’t healed from, even if we’re not consciously aware of it, even if we think we aren’t affected, even if we have only a passing familiarity with the story, even if it all happened long before many of us were born.
Stories matter. Mythological stories matter more. Broken foundational myths break the world.
“Ultimately, a broken heart or an obstructed love is proof of life, for there is nothing as wildly expansive as the yearning heart. It proclaims our existence as part of the universe. We hurt deeply because we love deeply. The dead heart, the dull heart, the cynical heart, the unimaginative heart, the unredeemed heart, resides outside the law of life, disconnected and unnatural, for we are creatures made to love, duty-bound to do so.” — Nick Cave49
The situation is not good. But it's not hopeless. In the struggle for our collective future, we have the advantage — if we choose to stop getting in our own way about it.
For one thing, “suffer now, rewards later” took several centuries to completely displace the pagan tradition. The Sixties — sparked, shaped and led by The Beatles — replaced “suffer now, rewards later” as the definition of a good life in just a few short years. That’s how mind-blowingly powerful The Beatles were — and still are — as mythological change agents.
And if the love contained in this story is powerful enough to have deposed two thousand years of “suffer now rewards later” — which it demonstrably was — it’s for sure powerful enough to overcome the hatred and violence that’s determined to erase the legacy of the Love Revolution.
But the main reason I have hope — not faith, mind you, but hope — that we can turn all of this around is that when it comes to our love for The Beatles and the Sixties, we’re gloriously and intractably stubborn. It’s that stubbornness, rooted in the healing power of love, that will save us — if we're willing to listen to the truth of our hearts instead of our fearful, too-easily misled heads.
The Sixties is the only era in human history that we collectively can’t let go of, that we’ve never stopped longing for. Our enduring fascination is usually assumed to be nothing more than simple nostalgia — a naive, escapist desire to live in the past when fashion was groovy, sex was fun, drugs were free and legal, and music was... well, I don't need to tell you what the music was.
But I hope by now you’re seeing that our bond with the Sixties — and with The Beatles — is far more profound than that. Our hunger is far more than just nostalgia or even the recognition of the enduring genius of the world’s most influential band— because our hunger is for the story as much as it is for the music. It’s rooted in our instinctual longing to somehow find a way to return to the moment just before it all went wrong, so we can get a second chance to get it right.
Stories are how we make sense of the world. We return to a story over and over again when it offers us something we desperately need and can’t find anywhere else.
We instinctively seek out what we need at its source, and this is how we seek out the Sixties — with a bone-deep, soul-deep longing we don’t seem able to satisfy in any other way. The story of the Sixties and The Beatles, wounded though it may be, is the primal fire we’re drawn back to, year after year, decade after decade, the life-giving warmth of what could have been and almost was, set against the bitter cold of what now is, reminding us that the power that created a new world is still there, still waiting for us to reclaim it — if we can find our way home.
Not everyone is happy with the sweeping cultural revolution of the Sixties, because there will always be people who are happiest with the constraints of “suffer now, rewards later.” But for most of us, those shimmering, ephemeral years represent the best proof we have that the better, kinder, more just world we imagine might be possible.
The Love Revolution is the closest we’ve ever come, in recorded history anyway, to getting it right, to creating a society in which we’re decent to each other, and a world in which there’s more to life than being a cog in the machine of “suffer now, rewards later,” working ourselves into the ground at a job we despise in hopes of some vague future reward while AI writes poetry and paints and makes music and billionaires fly to the moon on the backs of our labour.
For a few years, love won out over fear. Songwriters, poets and artists — the actual human kind — became the world’s most important and compelling voices, proving beyond doubt the power of music and poetry and visual art — and love — to change the world.
For a few years, we remembered our birthright — that being alive on this beautiful planet in this moment is its own reward, and that music and art and laughter and love, including erotic love, matter more than money and social conformity. That life is to be lived, not suffered, and that it’s okay — more than okay — to step off the endless assembly line of productivity and feel the grass beneath our bare feet and the sun on our skin.
For a few years, we remembered that love really does have the power to change the world — because one time, it did.
For a few years, we were free.
And then there’s our 60-year-and-counting love affair with The Beatles. Our raw, desperate longing, even still, for them to, somehow, find their way back together and set things right again — nakedly evident in our hunger for anything that gets anywhere even close to undoing the pain of the breakup, whether it's a new remix of a Beatles album, or hearing the four of them together again on “Now and Then” or seeing the four of them together in Get Back, or Paul and John’s virtual duet onstage during Paul’s Got Back tour, or just watching that film footage of the four of them dancing together on that field in A Hard Days’ Night and remembering what they once were, what the world once was.
This longing is not without its pain — that’s the paradox of nostalgia, which isn’t actually simple at all. In its original form, the word “nostalgia" describes the pain of being unable to return home. That pain is deep and real. But that pain and longing is also where the hope is, and the opportunity for redemption — because it signals that we still know where home is.
If we allow it to, our longing to return home to this story can crack us open and let the light back in. Our longing for the Sixties, our unquenchable hunger for anything related to The Beatles, our lingering pain at the breakup, our need to understand what really happened, shows us very clearly that this story is still a living thing in our hearts and in our culture.
And as long as a story is alive, it can be healed.
We’ve been trying to find a way to turn back time for a do-over on all of this since 1970, even as we know we can’t change the past. Except that we can, because that's the magick of how mythology works — because stories, and especially mythological stories, are how the past lives into the future.
Changing the foundational mythology of a culture changes our experience of the past, and changing how we experience the past changes how we experience the present. And healing this story, and then passing it on, healthy and whole into the next generation — as a restored, vibrant foundational myth rooted in love and joy rather than pain and anger — changes the future. It is, in fact, the best gift we can give our children, because it’s the raw material from which to construct a better, kinder, more just world. And by the looks of things, they’re really going to need that.
And all of that is time-travel of a very real kind, with very real effects.
This isn’t just theoretical magic, but actual, practical magick of the most powerful variety. I'm speaking here from hands-on, real world experience. As a predictive mythologist — a term I made up because there isn’t one — I worked for many years to reshape the smaller mythologies of our culture to affect change, finding ways to re-tell whatever mythological story was at play in a specific scenario so as to create the desired result. I know from years of experience that this opportunity to change the past and thus the future by changing how we tell the story of The Beatles is not an abstraction or a fantasy. My clients, unfortunately, weren’t usually interested in abstractions and fantasies.
We can heal this story, or at least a good bit of it. And in doing so, we can make a real start at healing our broken world. And making a start on that healing is what this series is all about.
What I’m suggesting, dear reader, is that despite what we’ve been told, it’s not too late to get the band back together.
Changing the mythology of a culture isn’t without its risks. Healing the wounded story of The Beatles will take us into risky and controversial territory. And I confess I’ve never meddled with the awesome power of a foundational myth before. And we know from every time travel story ever written that we change the past at our peril. This isn’t something to do casually or capriciously — the proof of that is in the damage that’s been done to this story already, and the consequences of that damage in all of our lives, and the lives of future generations if we don’t mend it.
Certainly the breakup of The Beatles is not the only loss that’s left a wound on our culture. And certainly it will take much more than just healing the story of The Beatles to fix what’s gone wrong in our world. It would be naive to suggest otherwise.
But the breakup of The Beatles is unique in our collective psyche because it’s a wound to the foundational myth of our culture, and that makes it a source wounding in a way that does unique and deeper harm. And that’s also why healing it has the potential to do unique and deeper good — in ways that we can and will get very specific about in this series. And when we look closer at that wound — which we’ll do in future episodes — the cause of all of it isn’t mythological at all, but very human.
I suggested earlier that there’s something uniquely powerful about the love that The Beatles put into the world, something special to them, beyond the obvious fact of their genius. Something that I’ve come to believe explains more deeply and profoundly why it is that The Beatles — and only The Beatles — could have become the earthquake that became the world-changing Love Revolution of the Sixties.
It’s this very specific and uniquely powerful kind of love that I believe holds the key to healing this story, and thus to making a start at healing our broken world. And that’s what we’ll talk about in the next episode, which I promise will be filled to overflowing with love and light and joy.
Until next week, peace, love and strawberry fields. We can get through the madness, with a little help from the Fabs.
Faith
Pattie Boyd, Wonderful Tonight, Crown Archetype, 2007.
Shawn Levy, Ready Steady Go: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London, Doubleday, 2002.
“Imagine” grips our imagination in part because it’s one of the clearest and most accessible articulations of the new story that The Beatles and the Sixties were creating to replace “suffer now, rewards later.” It’s often criticized for being too simple, but it’s because it’s simple that it communicates the mythology at play. Simplicity is the heart of its power.
The Beatles’ music , together and solo, as well as their interviews, are full of references to this shift in the underlying mythology from “suffer now, rewards later” to the focus on living a meaningful life in the present.
Here’s John in 1966—
“John’s been reading a book about pain and pleasure, about the idea behind Christianity – that to have pleasure you have to have pain. “The book says that’s all rubbish; it often happens that pain leads to pleasure, but you don’t have to have it, that’s all a drag. So we’ve written a song about it. ‘Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure/ Did she understand it when they said, that a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure/ will she still believe it when he’s dead?’”
NOTE: That song is, of course, “Girl.” from Rubber Soul.
And here’s Paul in that same interview—
“One thing that modern philosophy, existentialism and things like that, has taught people, is that you have to live now. You have to feel now. We live in the present, we don’t have time to figure out whether we are right or wrong, whether we are immoral or not. We have to be honest, be straight, and then live, enjoying and taking what we can.”
John Lennon and Paul McCartney, interview w/ Michael Lydon for Newsweek: Lennon and McCartney: Songwriters — A Portrait from 1966 (March, 1966). (unpublished)
And here’s an interview with John and George from 1967—
“GEORGE: The whole point of this meditation is for now, you know. Because it’s now all the time. It’s present, and past has got nothing to do with it.
JOHN: Not to lie to get into heaven by being a good boy, or to go to hell, just to live better as you’re living, do whatever you’re doing better. And live now, you know, not looking forward to the great day, or whatever it turns out to be.”
David Frost, The Frost Programme, Sept 29, 1967, transcript published in George Harrison on George Harrison, edited by Ashley Kahn, Chicago Review Press, 2020.
Quote by Angelo Quattrocchi, reporting on the student uprisings in Paris in May of 1968, quoted in Hippie Hippie Shake, Richard Neville, Bloomsbury, 1995.
Shawn Levy, Ready Steady Go: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London, Doubleday, 2002.
The Beatles themselves didn’t start the psychedelic movement. The Beatniks had been exploring altered consciousness since the ‘50s, through various channels including esoteric spirituality, cannabis and magic mushrooms. And Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey & His Merry Pranksters had been exploring the mind-expanding potential of LSD since the early ‘60s, prior to The Beatles and the Love Revolution. But it was The Beatles’ embrace of psychedelia and, later, their interest in learning meditation from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi that brought those ideas into the consciousness of the larger culture for the first time.
The Beatles also didn’t start the interest in Eastern spirituality among Westerners. That had always been there on the fringes. The Maharishi was already drawing interest from the counterculture by the time The Beatles met him — it’s how The Beatles met him. And before that, the Beatniks had experimented with Eastern spiritual practice, inspired in part by Alan Watts at Berkeley and Joseph Campbell at Sarah Lawrence. And most famously relative to this story, Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience was modeled on The Tibetan Book of the Dead and in turn became the inspiration for “Tomorrow Never Knows). It was published in 1964, while The Beatles were still mop-topping.
But it’s The Beatles trip to the ashram that introduced meditation and Eastern spiritual practice on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post and in the pages of Life Magazine, the two most influential mainstream magazines of the era. To paraphrase legendary editor Lewis Lapham, because of The Beatles, people in Scarsdale were doing yoga.
Also, before you get too excited, I don’t know what happened in India. Probably no one but John and Paul, and maybe George and Ringo, knows what happened in India. But I do have some thoughts and some research that suggests some plausible scenarios that haven’t to my knowledge been explored before, and we’ll get there when we get there.
I’m by no means an authority on Eastern spiritual practice, but most of us are aware that there’s a strong element of suffering in much of it, most notably in the extreme lengths that yogis sometimes go to to achieve enlightenment, which aren’t that different from what mystics in any tradition do to induce higher states of consciousness — fasting, celibacy, the renouncement of earthly comforts and physical pain.
There was some of that happening at the Maharishi’s ashram, too. The Beatles were encouraged to meditate for hours and even days on end, through all kinds of physical and emotional pain, and we’ll see when we get to what happened in India how big a problem that might have been, relative to the breakup.
But the teachings that the Maharishi was preaching to the larger culture outside of the ashram — and what first seems to have attracted The Beatles to study with him — was the promise that just sitting in meditation for twenty minutes twice a day would be sufficient to make life happier. And of course, psychedelics provided the same sort of instant ticket to ride.
The exploration of alternate consciousness that happened as part of the Love Revolution included little-to-no mention of doing any of this for rewards in the afterlife, and certainly nothing about suffering, which would have been a hard pass for the Love Generation, just as it is for most of us today.
George’s “Awaiting on You All” speaks directly to the new idea of not needing a middle man to find God.
Christianity will go," [John] said. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." John Lennon, interviewed by Maureen Cleave, “How A Beatle Lives,” The London Evening Standard, March 4th 1966.
NOTE: Christianity hasn’t yet vanished, of course, despite John’s prediction. It’s doubtful it will ever completely will, because old mythologies rarely disappear entirely. But it's almost certainly the notable decline in the appeal of its restrictive worldview — at least as interpreted by the institutional church — that’s triggered its increasingly frantic and extremist movement trying to turn back the mythological clock to the “good old days” before the Love Revolution changed everything. It’s also probably no coincidence that much of the imagery coming from the “might makes right” side in the present day White Christian nationalist movement borrows from the Crusades. What we’re experiencing now is, in many ways, nothing more than an extreme replay of record burnings in response to John's comment.
This too shall pass — but only if... well, back to our story.
Interview with Davig Wigg , Scene and Heard, BBC 1 Radio, Oct 25, 1971.
In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs, edited by Andy Blauner, Penguin Random House, 2017.
We don’t realise it, because it’s become so familiar as a love song, but in our consumerist society, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” remains a deeply subversive and revolutionary song. And especially so given the scene in A Hard Day’s Night, when the four of them have found freedom and joy in playing on the grass, only to have the Establishment in the form of the owner of the field tell them to get off his lawn.
It’s probably not coincidental that John, Paul, George and Ringo all named the scene in the field dancing to “Can’t Buy Me Love” as their favourite part of A Hard Day’s Night. (Hear The Beatles Tell All, LP, Vee Jay Records, 1964). The idea that arguably the most essential thing in life can’t be bought with our economic labour is maybe the biggest possible threat to ‘suffer now, rewards later.’ In a very real way, “Can’t Buy Me Love” is history’s most successful and influential protest song. It’s also an anthem for the entire Love Revolution, right alongside “All You Need Is Love.”
Mike McCartney re: Paul after Mary died “But the guitar was Paul’s chosen instrument. When he picked it up he would get lost in another world, particularly after Mum died. It was useless talking to him. In fact I had better conversations with brick walls around this period. He even took it with him to the bogs, and sometimes paddled around the bath in it. But people he could converse with were fellow musos...(sic) George from school and rebel Johnny ‘Moondog’ Lennon the original punk rocker personified... (sic) and why not, they were nice people who loved music.” Mike McCartney, The Macs, Delilah Communications, 1981.
a few samples of George’s breakup and post-breakup interviews:
“George: Everybody got on a trip, you see, that was the thing. We were just four relatively sane people in the middle of madness. People used us as an excuse to trip out, and we were the victims of that. That’s why they want the Beatles to go on, so they can all get silly again. But they don’t have consideration for our well-being when they say, “Let’s have the Fab Four again.”
Q: You wouldn’t want to go through it again?
George: Never. Not in this life or any other life. I mean, a lot of the time it was fantastic, but when it really got into the mania it was a question of either stop or end up dead. We almost got killed in a number of situations – planes catching on fire, people trying to shoot the plane down and riots everywhere we went. It was aging me.
“A Conversation with George Harrison,” Rolling Stone, April 19, 1979.
~~
“There was a point in my life where I realized anybody can be Lennon/McCartney. Because being part of Lennon/McCartney, really, I could appreciate how good they actually are and at the same time see the infatuation the public had or the praise that was put on them. I could see everybody as a Lennon/McCartney if that's what you wanna be. I don't know if I'm explaining... (sic) The point is that they're nobody special. There's not many special people around. And if Lennon and McCartney are special, then Harrison and Starkey are special too. That's really what I'm saying is that I can be Lennon/McCartney too, but I'd rather be Harrison.”
Radio interview, Howard Smith, The Smith Tapes, May 1, 1970.
~~
“Since I made All Things Must Pass, it’s just so nice for me to be able to play with other musicians, and having played with other musicians, I don’t think the Beatles were that good. I think they’re fine, you know.”
Los Angeles press conference, Oct 23,1974.
~~
“And then also we passed out of that '60s period, where there was something that happened in the '60s which brought the flower power and the hippies and the whole Love Generation. This is what kills me now, is when I see these people who supposedly, a few years ago, loved me and I'm supposed to love them. And I see them, they're just dropping apart at the seams with hate. I'm talking about Rolling Stone, actually, talking about Jann Wenner.
But this is the thing though, God, we all came through so much in the '60s, and we all wanted so much to create something positive, something good. It's hard to... (sic) when we come out into the '70s, we find it's hard to go on. A lot of these people were only part-time hippies or part-time lovers. The badness of the world, or in them, caught up on them too soon, and you find that they'll just turn around and they all start stabbing each other in the back. It's like, we all need to support each other in many ways in order to exist.
and from the same interview—
Herman: Don't you think what happened in those late '60s, that great selling of optimism did, in one way, light the world and change created consciousness and raised awareness in a subtle way that the world will never be the same again?
Harrison: Definitely, definitely. And that's the thing. Maybe the thing that disappointed me was there might have been a million people who showed signs of being that, and now in the '70s, out of the million, there may only be a hundred left. The thing that's sad is what happened to the other 990,000?
Dave Herman, WNEW-FM, April 19 and 20, 1975, re-published in George Harrison on George Harrison, edited by Ashley Kahn, Chicago Review Press, 2020.
~~
“I love the Rutles, you know, just because it was a way of liberating me from that whole thing. You know [being in] The Beatles was sort of... (sic) OK, it was a good thing at the time, but it goes on and on and on, and people get too serious about it, and I think the good thing about comedy, you can make jokes at anything.”
Radio interview, Roundtable, BBC Radio 1, February 9. 1979.
~~
George: Now we’re all pretty much at ease about the Beatles, because so much time has lapsed. But there was a period when we were persecuted for years by the public and the press, and then we persecuted ourselves with all the lawsuits and stuff, until there was a point when just a mention of the word “Beatles used to make my toes curl.”
Timothy White, November 15, 1992, originally published in Billboard, full version published in George Harrison on George Harrison, edited by Ashley Kahn, Chicago Review Press, 2020.
Thank you to friend and former HeyDullBlog editor Michael Gerber for the phrase.
“John Lennon: The Man, The Memory,” Dave Sholin, Dec 8, 1980, RKO Radio Network, broadcast December 14, 1980.
WENNER: What do you think the effect was of the Beatles on the history of Britain?
JOHN: I don’t know about the “history”; the people who are in control and in power, and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeoisie is exactly the same, except there is a lot of fag middle class kids with long, long hair walking around London in trendy clothes, and Kenneth Tynan is making a fortune out of the word “fuck.” Apart from that, nothing happened. We all dressed up, the same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin’ everything. It is exactly the same.
We’ve grown up a little, all of us, there has been a change and we’re all a bit freer and all that, but it’s the same game. Shit, they’re doing exactly the same thing, selling arms to South Africa, killing blacks on the street, people are living in fucking poverty, with rats crawling over them. It just makes you puke, and I woke up to that too.
The dream is over. It’s just the same, only I’m thirty, and a lot of people have got long hair. That’s what it is, man, nothing happened except that we grew up, we did our thing – just like they were telling us. You kids – most of the so called “now generation” are getting a job. We’re a minority, you know, people like us always were, but maybe we are a slightly larger minority because of maybe something or other.
“John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 2 — ”Life with the Lions,” interviewed by Jann Wenner December 1970, published February 4 1971.
~~
[re: the song “God”] “Yes, I was going to leave a gap, and just fill in your own words: whoever you don’t believe in. It had just got out of hand, and Beatles was the final thing because I no longer believe in myth, and Beatles is another myth. I don’t believe in it. The dream is over. I’m not just talking about the Beatles, I’m talking about the generation thing. It’s over, and we gotta — I have to personally — get down to so-called reality.
“John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 1 — Working Class Hero,”interviewed by Jann Wenner December 1970, published January 21 1971.
NOTE: John is using “myth” in both senses of the word here — as something that’s not true and also in the larger mythological sense.
~~
“The Beatles haven’t had a future, for me, for the last two years,” John said after all this hit the papers. “All of us are laboring under this delusion about Beatles and McCartney and Lennon and Harrison and Starr. But, you know, we all have to get over it, us and the public. It’s a joke. What we did was what we did, but what we are is something different.” — John Lennon
Jann Wenner, “THE BEATLES BREAK UP — The Beatles: One Guy Standing There, Shouting ‘I’m Leaving’,” Rolling Stone, May 14, 1970.
~~
Blackburn: I got the impression in your interview [with Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner] that when you were a successful Beatle, when you were playing the game, you didn't even know you were so successful. I mean, I suppose the most fantastic success of the mid-twentieth century but you still were oppressed by it.
Lennon: Oh, Jesus Christ, it was complete oppression. We had to go through humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classes and show biz and lord mayors. It was complete humiliation for me, because I could never keep me mouth shut. (Ono laughs). I'd always be drunk or pilled or something to counteract this pressure. And it was hell.
Ono: He actually deprived more than anything. It's not like he was enjoying the success and being happy.
Lennon: It was a very miserable feeling. Apart from the first blush of making it. Your first number one record— thrilling; first to break into America— thrilling. That was some sort of objective: "Well, I want to be as big as Elvis” or something like that. Moving forward was the great thing, But actually attaining it was a big letdown.”
Tariq Ali & Robin Blackburn, January 21, 1971, Tittenhurst Park, excerpts published March 8, 1971 in The Red Mole (UK), reprinted in Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, edited by Jeff Burger, Chicago Review Press, 2017..
~~
Lennon: Well, you say it... I mean, those people do owe them their life 'cause that is their life, y'know. And they'll revolve 'round it probably for the rest of their life in one form or another. So to them, the public is that. And even though a lot of it is just a lot of PR whitewash, y'know, "my great public" and that... We did a lot of that when we were hating the public, in the madhouse days. We were under such pressure, we didn't give a damn about anybody-just surviving, y'know. But we'd say, "Oh, this is great, we love our fans! Just get them off my roof, or my garden, or my back!" or anything. "Get away from me!" Like that.”
Maurice Hindle & Friends, December 2, 1968, brief excerpts published Jan 1969 in Unit (UK) Lennon on Lennon.
~~
I resent being an artist, in that respect, I resent performing for fucking idiots who don’t know anything. They can’t feel. I’m the one that’s feeling, because I’m the one that is expressing. They live vicariously through me and other artists, and we are the ones… even with the boxers— when Oscar comes in the ring, they’re booing the shit out of him, he only hits Clay once and they’re all cheering him. I’d sooner be in the audience, really, but I’m not capable of it.
One of my big things is that I wish to be a fisherman. I know it sounds silly— and I’d sooner be rich than poor, and all the rest of that shit— but I wish the pain was ignorance or bliss or something. If you don’t know, man, then there’s no pain; that’s how I express it.
“John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 1 — Working Class Hero,”interviewed by Jann Wenner December 1970, published January 21 1971.
~~
“I saw a film the other night,” he continued, “the first television film we ever did…and there we were in suits and everything … —it just wasn’t us, and watching that film I knew that that was where we started to sell out.
“We had to do a lot of selling out then. Taking the MBE was a sellout for me.” Lennon says he stalled on accepting the MBE when the Beatles first got notice from the Royal Palace of the award——”I chucked the letter in with all the fan-mail”——until Epstein and others persuaded the Beatles to accept.
It was hypocritical to take the MBE, Lennon said, “but I’m glad, really, that I did, because it meant that four years later I could use it to make a gesture.”
While the Beatles did accept the MBE in 1965, Lennon said, they did manage to refuse “all sorts of things that people don’t know about.” For example, the group did a Royal Variety Show and was asked to make it a yearly thing——”but we always said ‘stuff it.’ So every year there was a story in the papers saying: ‘Why no Beatles for the Queen?’ which was funny, because they didn’t know we’d refused it.”
“Beatles Splitting? Maybe, Says John,” Rolling Stone, January 21,1970.
~~
“John: The Beatles was nothing, it was like—
Yoko: — the Beatles situation was cutting him down into a smaller size than what he is.”
Lennon Remembers, Straight Arrow Books, 1971.
NOTE: We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, in a way, but things need to be said relative to Yoko's participation in the Breakup Tour, because virtually every breakup interview was a joint interview with John and Yoko.
I’m an appreciator of Yoko’s conceptual art — I think she has interesting things to say and she often says them in interesting ways, and that’s more or less the definition of a good, if not a great, artist. Speaking as someone who once submitted an egg as my final project for an art class on the grounds that nature is the ultimate artist, I can appreciate her economical approach. I visited her retrospective at the Tate Modern in London in 2024, and ended up spending half a day there because it was the most engaging art exhibition I’ve seen in a very long time. And I will always defend Yoko against the misogyny and racism that she’s been subjected to, as I’d defend anyone subjected to any kind of bigotry.
But being an interesting artist and a woman of color does not make a person incapable of doing harm.
In her joint interviews with John, Yoko frequently speaks with authority on The Beatles, as if she’d been a member of the band and as if she’d been present in the room when the events being discussed happened, and that’s a problem because of course, she wasn’t. And what she has to say is almost invariably both inaccurate and derisive.
Interview footage and transcripts make it clear that Yoko was as much an architect of the angry, bitter breakup narrative that developed out of those interviews as John was, and often more so because she made her remarks without John’s deep love and affection for the other three that acted as a bit of a check on his bitterness.
Yoko also, by her own admission, had a lack of understanding for what The Beatles gave to the world and the unique nature of their cultural power, and her view of their role in the Love Revolution was less than sophisticated. She certainly didn’t recognise the transgressive power of their story when, for example, in a 1971 interview for The Red Mole, she called the music of The Beatles “a twentieth century folk song within the frame of capitalism” which sounds profound but doesn’t actually mean anything other than that The Beatles were a pop band that sold records. (John pushes back by correcting her that they were the trojan horse, and he uses that literal metaphor).
We’ll come back and talk more about Yoko’s contributions to distorting the story in a future episode. But it’s worth noting that in interviews, John frequently corrects her, especially when it comes to Paul .
~~
WENNER: When did your songwriting partnership with Paul end?
LENNON: That ended … I don’t know, around 1962, or something, I don’t know. If you give me the albums I can tell you exactly who wrote what, and which line. We sometimes wrote together. All our best work — apart from the early days, like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” we wrote together and things like that — we wrote apart always. The “One After 909,” on the Let It Be LP, I wrote when I was 17 or 18. We always wrote separately, but we wrote together because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes, and also because they would say well, you’re going to make an album get together and knock off a few songs, just like a job.
“John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 1 — Working Class Hero,” interviewed by Jann Wenner December 1970, published January 21 1971.
I’m aware that the standard thinking is that John wrote “All You Need Is Love” on his own. But the credit is Lennon/McCartney for a reason, and in a future Rabbit Hole, we’ll talk about how in a very real way, there’s no such thing as a “John song” or a “Paul song” in the way the terms are usually used. That said, in this series, I’ll occasionally delineate them in that way based on who wrote the majority of the song, when it’s relevant.
It didn’t help that a few years later, John chose to sign the official final divorce papers at Disneyland, declaring that “the dream is over.” Of course, by then, he was right.
Long Night’s Journey Into Day: A Conversation with John Lennon, Pete Hamill, Rolling Stone, June 5, 1975 (conversation early 1975) reprinted in Lennon on Lennon, edited by Jeff Berger, Chicago Review Press, 2017.
Lennon Remembers, Straight Arrow Books, 1971.
NOTE: John made this comment in response to a question about the Maharishi, but it’s pretty clear from the context and from other iterations of this same comment in other interviews that he’s speaking more generally about the interview and his approach to interviews as a whole.
Wenner chose to edit it out of the original version of the interview that appeared in Rolling Stone.
Maurice Hindle & Friends, December 2, 1968, brief excerpts published Jan 1969 in Unit (UK), full interview published in Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, edited by Jeff Burger, Chicago Review Press, 2017.
The Dick Cavett Show, recorded September 8, 1971, ABC Studios, broadcast Sept 11, 1971, re-published in Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, edited by Jeff Burger, Chicago Review Press, 2017.
“Lennon: I think it's fantastic. I hear things I hadn't heard for a long time. I get off on a little guitar solo or a lick I've done in the past. "Oh, I didn't know I could play that." Or there's some stuff Yoko hasn't heard which is especially good. I say, "Listen, listen, you've not heard this," because she couldn't possibly have heard all that music. I mean, the Americans got thirty albums out of it; we only made about ten, I think, but somehow there's thirty. And it's fantastic.
Ono: I get very emotional about it, too, because there's some parts that you can see obviously that they're going very well, just beautiful. In other words, it was like under the name Beatles, somehow they all threw in their talents together, you know? And in some cases, it's just blossoming, you know. And for anybody, it's very sad that that's gone. I get emotional about that, too.
Lennon: But they play the new stuff too, so...
Ono: Yeah, the new stuff is beautiful, too.”
Howard Smith radio interview, Jan 23, 1972, broadcast Jan 23, 1972 WPLI-FM New York, reprinted in Lennon on Lennon, edited by Jeff Berger, Chicago Review Press, 2017.
Here’s another one, from a 1973 interview with Capitol Radio in London—
“Q: If you look back on some of the things you created like, four or five years ago, is there something there that really still grabs you, and you say, yeah, that is so great? Something you —something that you—
JOHN: Yeah, lots of it. There’s lots of stuff I like.
Q: Like what?
JOHN: Well, of my own, I like “All You Need Is Love,” I like “Walrus,” I like “Strawberry Fields,” I like “Hey Jude.” What the hell, there’s so many of them. I like “Yellow Submarine.” You know, I mean, they all have meaning for me, objectively as well as subjectively. There’s just too many to mention. I like lots of Beatles’ stuff. you know. What do you want, a list?
I think we all had a little bit of [?] from our divorce at that period and it was all rather painful to hear about it or listen to the music. but I think if you spoke to Paul now, you might hear a different story. Because I mean we’re just humans and we want changes, you know, some days, you like to hear stuff and some days you don't. But I think the story might be different now, just by his records. “
NOTE: John is not saying that he wrote “Hey Jude.” The pause in his voice indicates he’s moved on to talking more generally about Lennon/McCartney songs.
I haven’t found the “draggy tracks” quote, but it’s similar to other things he said during the breakup about recording with The Beatles being less than fun, especially in later years.
Maurice Hindle & Friends, December 2, 1968, brief excerpts published Jan 1969 in Unit (UK), full interview published in Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, edited by Jeff Burger, Chicago Review Press, 2017.
The quote goes on— “Like this guy [John Hoyland in Black Dwarf, a UK socialist newspaper] said it was a con job. Now, I say it is a con job and in the terms of reference that I mean by con, I say Picasso was conning them and so was Beethoven, and having a laugh up their sleeve, because they were. Anybody that’s as great as they were knows where it’s at, and they know that all this drivel that’s written about our songs and the Stones and Dylan and all that... (sic) Dylan knows where it’s at. We know where it’s at in regards to our songs and what people write about them. And that is the con job.”
NOTE: It’s not clear to me what John is getting at here, but the point is, he’s not saying The Beatles are nothing. He’s comparing them to Picasso and Beethoven, as he’ll do frequently throughout the rest of his life.
“Do you regret being a Beatle and having to live with it forever, John?”
“No, no, no,” he answered and he meant it. “I’m going to be an ex-Beatle for the rest of my life so I might as well enjoy it, and I’m just getting around to being able to stand back and see what happened. A couple of years ago I might have given everybody the impression I hate it all, but that was then. I was talking when I was straight out of therapy and I’d been mentally stripped bare and I just wanted to shoot my mouth off to clear it all away. Now it’s different.
“When I slagged off the Beatle thing in the papers, it was like divorce pangs, and me being me it was blast this and fuck that, and it was just like the old days in the Melody Maker, you know, ‘Lennon Blasts Hollies’ on the back page. You know, I’ve always had a bit of a mouth and I’ve got to live up to it. Daily Mirror: ‘Lennon beats up local DJ at Paul’s 21st birthday party’. Then we had that fight Paul and me had through the Melody Maker, but it was a period I had to go through.
“Now, we’ve all got it out and it’s cool. I can see The Beatles from a new point of view. Can’t remember much of what happened, little bits here and there, but I’ve started taking an interest in what went on while I was in that fish tank. It must have been incredible! I’m into collecting memorabilia as well. Elton [John] came in with these gifts, like stills from the Yellow Submarine drawings and they’re great. He gave me these four dolls. I thought, ‘Christ, what’s this, an ex-Beatle collecting Beatle dolls?’ But why not? It’s history, man, history!’
“I went through a phase of hating all those years and having to smile when I didn’t want to smile, but that was the life I chose and, now I’m out of it, it’s great to look back on it, man. Great! I was thinking only recently – why haven’t I ever considered the good times instead of moaning about what we had to go through? And Paul was here and we spent two or three nights together talking about the old days and it was cool, seeing what each other remembered from Hamburg and Liverpool.
“So y’see, all that happened when I blew my mouth off was that it was an abscess bursting, except that mine as usual burst in public.
“When we did a tour as The Beatles, we hated it and loved it. There were great nights and lousy nights. One of the things about therapy I went through a few years ago is that it cleans you by forcing you to get rid of the negatives in your head it wasn’t all that pie and cookies being a Beatle, there were highs and lows, but the trouble is people just wanted bigmouth Lennon to shout about the lows. So I made a quick trip to uncover the hidden stones of my mind, and a lot of the bats flew and some of them are going to have to stay. I’ve got perspective now, that’s a fact.”
Interview with Ray Coleman, “Lennon – a night in the life,” Melody Maker, September 14th, 1974.
interview with Ray Coleman, “Lennon – a night in the life,” Melody Maker, September 14th, 1974.
“John Lennon: The Man, The Memory,” Dave Sholin, Dec 8, 1980, RKO Radio Network, broadcast December 14, 1980.
“An Ex-Beatle Starting Over,” Barbara Graustark, Newsweek, December 22, 1980.
Lennon: I still believe in the fact that love is what we all need, that makes us all so desperate, frenetic, or neurotic, et cetera, et cetera. But I still believe there's many ways of getting to that situation. There's a lot of changes in society to come before we can ever get to a state of even realizing that love is what we need, you know? But I still believe in it. And I've read cracks about, "Oh, the Beatles sang 'All you need is love, but it didn't work for them," you know. But nothing will ever break the love we have for each other, and I still believe all you need is love.
Smith: It worked for a long time—
Lennon: I don't have to live with three guys to prove that love is the basic necessity of all of us.
Radio interview with Howard Smith, broadcast Jan 23, 1972 WPLI-FM New York, reprinted in Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, edited by Jeff Burger, Chicago Review Press.
I was dreading reading the breakup interviews because I’d heard so much about how they included specific comments from John about how he and Paul never liked each other and were never close.
So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that John doesn't seem to have ever said anything of the sort, at least not that I’ve found. We’ll talk about what he did say in a future episode, because it did damage. But even at his most vicious, John is always very careful to make it clear that he loves Paul. And he’s also, as we’ll talk about, resistant to anyone else criticising Paul — including Yoko.
The only evidence I’ve found of the existence of a “we never liked each other” quote is in Albert Goldman’s controversial 1988 biography, The Lives of John Lennon. In it, Goldman claims that John once likened his relationship to Paul to being in a foxhole in combat — a bond that came of forced proximity under stress and didn’t sustain when the stress was lifted. Goldman then goes on to assert a bunch of things that allegedly prove the lack of a bond between John and Paul — none of which are actually supported by the research, but all of which have been widely repeated as fact despite Goldman’s book being discredited overall.
Goldman doesn’t list a source for the “foxhole” quote, but I assumed the quote would be easy to find, given its vivid and specific imagery. It turns out to be very difficult to find — so difficult that I now question whether it even exists.
The assumption among Beatles scholars has been that it’s in the two-part 1970-71 interview Goldman did with John for Charlie magazine, which is long out of print and not available in any online archives that I’ve found. My research assistant Robyn was able to locate copies of both parts of the interview in the special collections at Northwestern University, and the archivist was kind enough to email me scans of both parts of the interview. But the quote is not in the Charlie interview, and several extensive (and expensive) searches have not turned it up anywhere else.
It’s worth noting that Goldman doesn’t quote John verbatim in his book. He summarizes the gist of what he claims John said using the foxhole metaphor, and the way it’s phrased, it’s not possible to determine if the “foxhole” metaphor is Goldman’s or John’s. It’s possible Goldman reached for the foxhole metaphor on his own as a way of describing his take on the cumulative meaning of John’s breakup comments relative to his relationship with Paul — but again, if so, this is a misread. John never once that I can find ever said anything even remotely close to what Goldman’s implying.
If the “foxhole” quote does exist, it would be a singular example of John overtly claiming he and Paul were never close. If you know of the original source of this quote, please let me know. But even if it does exist, we’re about to talk about how not only is it demonstrably untrue, but John likely didn’t even mean it when he said it.
“John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 2 — Life with the Lions,” interviewed by Jann Wenner December 1970, published February 4 1971.
“John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 2 — Life with the Lions,” interviewed by Jann Wenner December 1970, published February 4 1971.
interview with friend and broadcaster Elliot Mintz, Earth News, January 1976.
All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, interviewer David Sheff, St. Martin's Griffin, Mar 26, 2000, p. 137-8.
NOTE: Quoting from the Sheff interview is problematic. There are two versions of this interview, conducted in September of 1980 — the condensed and edited version that appeared in Playboy and the full-length book version entitled All We Are Saying. There are also a few audio snippets floating around that were included in the radio series, The Lost Lennon Tapes. These audio snippets reveal that the editing — even in the supposedly complete book version — seems to be aggressive enough that it sometimes distorts the meaning of John’s comments.
I’m not in any way suggesting this was done with any intention to mislead, but nonetheless, the editing is misleading in places.
This is a problem in particular because the Sheff interview is, as it’s billed, the last major interview with John before his death — a bookend to Lennon Remembers — and thus far too important a historical record for us not to have the full, unedited version, in audio and transcript.
I conveyed this concern to David Sheff via email, and he was receptive to the need to release the full unedited audio transcript and said he’s considering doing so.
Unfortunately, until he does release it, without knowing how much the editing changed the meaning of John’s comments, it’s not possible to fully treat the Playboy interview as a reliable source, which is why I quote from it only sparingly and in situations where the overall meaning is clear and consistent with other things John said during that time period. This quote falls into that category.
This is a good example of the problem with having important historical source material in the hands of private individuals rather than in a public archive. A consequence of having treated this story as a pop culture phenomenon rather than a riverbed-shaping mythological story that defines our culture.
Maurice Hindle & Friends, December 2, 1968, brief excerpts published Jan 1969 in Unit (UK), full interview published in Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, edited by Jeff Burger, Chicago Review Press, 2017, p. 52.
I say “for the most part” because there was one Rolling Stone writer who got it right. Credit where credit is due—
“From some corner of his broken heart, John gave the most bitter interviews, full of hurt and resentment, covered over with the language of violence.”
Long Night’s Journey Into Day: A Conversation with John Lennon, Pete Hamill, Rolling Stone, June 5, 1975 (conversation early 1975) reprinted in Lennon on Lennon, edited by Jeff Berger, Chicago Review Press, 2017, p 355.
Lennon Remembers, Straight Arrow Books, 1971.
full quote: “When gods fall, the earth shakes. Lennon’s attempt—in his record and his length interviews in Rolling Rolling — to demystify himself, the Beatle and rock cultism has a force and urgency which breaks through the layers of dream-webs which have solidified around the new culture, freak consciousness and political revolution.”
The full account of John’s attempts to stop the publication of Lennon Remembers is detailed in Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine (Joe Hagen, Random House, 2017, pp. 172-174.
Wenner also ignored his own felt experience—
“John had never seen Let It Be. Jane and I took them to an afternoon showing in a nearly empty theater, sitting together in silence. The movie so obviously forecast the Beatles’ impending breakup—you could see them coming apart right in front of your eyes. John said nothing. When we walked out, the four of us stood on the sidewalk, arms around each other in a huddle. John cried, and then all of us joined in.”
Jann Wenner, Like A Rolling Stone: A Memoir, Little Brown, 2022.
The Rolling Stone interview is available in full on the John Lennon website, which is where I’ve linked to it. The blurb at the top calls it “one of the most legendary rock interviews ever, thanks to Lennon’s brutally honest thoughts on the Beatles’ then-recent breakup and much, much more.”
One might think that an interview that shows John in his worst light and that he retracted virtually in full and that he didn’t want published in book form because he regretted having given it wouldn’t appear anywhere on his official website. But of course John doesn’t get a say in what appears on his website, or in how his story is told, and there are, as always with this story, competing interests involved who have a vested interest in downplaying the role of The Beatles in John’s life — another reason why it’s hard to sort through the hall of mirrors to find the truer story.
Jann Wenner, Like a Rolling Stone, Little Brown, 2022.
“I called the interview “Lennon Remembers,” after the memoir that had just been published, Khrushchev Remembers. I liked the direct echo with Lenin and couldn't think of anything better. Because of his anger at the time, he focuses on the dark side. He is describing the inside of a never-seen, sealed-off world. Imperfect and incomplete as the interview was, it stands as Lennon’s memoir of the Beatles. The piece hit front pages. The End of the Beatles! Satyricon, Lennon Claims! I Don’t Believe in Beatles Says Lennon; I Broke Up, Not Paul—banner headlines for days in England, splashed on every newsstand, and throughout the world.
Paul was hurt the most. In a later Rolling Stone interview he said, “I sat down and pored over every little paragraph, every sentence. And at the time I thought it’s me… That’s just what I’m like. He’s captured me so well. I’m a turd.” I had an awkward relationship with Paul for years because I was the handmaiden to this “last testament” of John’s, where he defined what he thought should be Paul’s legacy. I’m sure John would have liked to take back some of what he said. He started calling the interview “Lennon Regrets.” But it was all truth, his truth, and to read it is to know that and to know John Lennon.
Rolling Stone was more visible than ever, once again because of John and Yoko. We published the interviews as a book the following fall, against John’s wishes. I had the clear right to do so. I suspect John had not expected the blowback from the interview. He had hurt and disparaged people he knew and who had helped him. Later he said, “It’s just me shooting my mouth off. I’ll say anything. I can’t even remember it.”
To refuse the wishes of someone who had conferred an unquantifiable recognition on us, through the status of his own legitimacy, tore me apart. We had been given a sanctified role in a sacred ritual called the Beatles. It made me sick to feel as if I was “betraying” John. He accepted it but wouldn’t talk to me. His relationship with Rolling Stone remained, which was a comfort. He signed off his later letters to me with “Lennon remembers!” It was playful and I took it as a sign of reconciliation.”
This is probably closer to who the real John was, when he wasn’t in psychological crisis and dealing with everything he was dealing with during the breakup —
Prior to the apology press conference for his “bigger than Jesus remarks”:
“Never before or afterwards did I see John in such a distraught state, not because he believed he owed anyone an apology, but because he knew that the tour could be cancelled unless he swung the media over and gained their support at the imminent conference. After hearing what we had to say, John leant forward in his chair and fell silent, his head in his hands. We realised that he was sobbing and Brian put a comforting arm around his shoulders. John raised his head: "I'm willing to apologise if you tell me that's what I must do. I'll do anything, whatever you say. How on earth am I to face the others if this whole tour is called off just because of something I've said? I didn't mean to cause all of this."”
Tony Barrow, John, Paul, George, Ringo & Me, Andre Deutsch Pub, 2005.
“John Lennon Beatles Memory Book,” (UK), Harris Publications, 1981.
It’s worth noting here that Hunter Davies’ official biography was somewhat... directed... by the Fabs, in terms of the truth of the story. That, plus John’s unwillingness to stand behind some of what he told Davies means we’d be wise not to take the official biography as the Gospel According to the Fabs and no more than we should with Anthology — which we’ll get to eventually.
Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, Issue 311, January 2025.
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