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another and one game-changing single after another, 214 tracks recorded in seven crowded years in a kaleidoscope of styles. This
how the Beatles repeatedly married cutting-edge originality with immense mainstream popularity, when for almost anyone else
these are mutually exclusive, and how (and why) they ditched their winning ideas every time the world raced to copy them; • how they did everything with down-to-earth humor, honesty, optimism, style, charisma, irreverence, intelligence and a particularly spiky disdain for falseness; how they were articulate, bold, curious, direct, instinctive, challenging, blunt, sharp, polite, rude, prickers of pomposity, rule-breakers never cowed by convention; • how they created a profound
and sustained connection to their public, and how they resisted branding, commercial sponsorship and corporate affiliation and hype: the Beatles were free of artifice and weren’t the product of market research or focus groups or TV talent shows, they were original and develop...
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John and Paul drove the bus and wrote the catalog, and theirs is an especially fascinating tale—two needle-sharp grammar-school boys and then young men steeped in postwar British culture but with a passion for America and its great music, close friends with a deep admiration for each other’s talent and understanding of each other’s moods and personalities. Their determination, their egos and their creative rivalry made them the greatest songwriters of the age,
The Beatles manifestly rejected labels and categories in all they did, so it doesn’t matter if you call them the ultimate rock band or the ultimate pop group or whatever else. They just were, and theirs is the best story.
Lennon radiated a life-force that turned heads everywhere: he was wickedly funny and fast with it, he was abrasive, incisive and devastatingly rude, and he was musical, literate and beguilingly creative. Whether painting, conceiving strangely comic poems, or committing cruel drawings and odd stories to the written page, he was a boy beyond convention and control, a lone ranger.
they decided early on that if they couldn’t remember something the next day, they could hardly expect it to stick in the mind of anyone else, in which case it was “crap” and deserved to
go.
But sometimes Paul wrote atmospheric directions. For one song it was “...
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John’s Aunt Mimi, his surrogate parent since the age of five, told him “possessions don’t bring happiness but they make misery a lot easier,”
Their musical group was formed in John’s image and driven ever onward by his restlessness, but without Paul he would have upset too many people too many times to make the progress they both craved. Paul’s other strengths were his great talent, his burning ambition and his high self-regard … and when John felt them becoming overbearing he’d pull him down a peg or two, as only he could.
Many were repulsed by his attitude and behavior—uncompromising, unpredictable, rude, cynical, sarcastic, anti-authoritarian, quickly bored—but to others he was sensational: a perpetual high-wire act who lived and communicated without a safety net, a faithful friend, generous, honest, gifted, literate, articulate and hugely funny. He dressed and looked tough and was no stranger to fighting, but his hostility was mostly verbal: he could shout louder than anyone else and lacerate with a brevity and wit that took the breath away. “You didn’t banter words with John or you were on a loser before you
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Violent Playground,
In total, inside just fourteen weeks, they’d rocked Hamburg for about 415 hours—like 276 ninety-minute shows or 830 half-hours—and every night tried not to repeat themselves. No one stopped to realize it, and there was no way of knowing anyway, but the Beatles had to be the most experienced rock group in the world, not just Liverpool. And Hamburg didn’t only multiply their repertoire, it toughened their voices, seasoned their characters, enriched their personalities and strengthened their stamina. Four months earlier they would have struggled to play more than a couple of hours, now it was a
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“Every group had a lead singer in a pink jacket singing Cliff Richard–type songs. We were the only group that didn’t … and that was how we broke through, by being different.”
Another difference was that most groups used an echo unit (all the rage since the Shadows’ breakthrough) and the Beatles didn’t. In his December 1960 letter to Stu, George had said he was planning to buy one, but he hadn’t, and now they decided they wouldn’t.
In his place, John, Paul and George came to be more reliant on the Bests than they could ever have imagined. If Pete was busy or out, Mona handled the bookings; the Beatles’ amps and drums were kept at the Bests’ house; and any one of three Best family friends provided transport, to ensure they and their equipment got
to
every...
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Lennon’s big wink was a new instrument in his stage armory, transmitting maximum sarcasm and provocation in one move. It was a music-hall wink, a wink with built-in windup, with attitude, accompanied always by a sideways chasm in the mouth, a great gaping oval. It was seldom impotent, and
if a fight wasn’t already in the air, this could kick one off—inciting tempests that to John, as blind as a bat, were but a violent blur.
Paul was reliably effective in a role familiar and necessary from four years of Lennon friendship: pouring oil on his troubled waters, taking the heat out of his steam, pulling him—and often all of them
from brinks to which they were so recklessly propelled.
That heart and strength—John, Paul and George—went back to 1957–8 and advanced from there through a thousand shared experiences: they were mates, tight, fine-tuned to a frequency unfathomable to others, which was all right by them. Pete didn’t think this
way and didn’t share their attitudes; to the three of them, quite simply, he wasn’t one of us, and they knew it now as surely as they knew it when they’d first met him at the Casbah in 1959, and when, out of sheer pragmatism, they grabbed him as their last choice for Hamburg a year later.
was nothing to do with quality of character—Pete was “a good skin,” decent, well brought up, hard to dislike—it was about fitting in, simple chemistry. “Pete was a bit slow,” John said. “He was a harmless guy but he was not quick. Al...
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And Pete’s onstage personality also presented difficulties. He’d settled into a role he hardly ever varied, booking after booking, night after night—playing with his head down, avoiding eye contact, not smiling, projecting the study in moody shyness he knew would win girls’ hearts. Fine, but it was bound to wear thin for the other Beatles. Sometimes they wanted to see a spark when they turned around, some vibrancy, emotion, an engagement of eyes or mind.
those who saw them actually heard a broad variety of musical styles—country and western, rhythm and blues, instrumentals, tender ballads, standards and much more.22 Their set constantly evolved, and so great was its range that people never saw the same show twice.
The Beatles, John and Paul in particular, identified a challenge and turned it to their advantage. They decided to find obscure songs the other groups didn’t know, numbers they alone would do, to stay different and ahead of the pack.
The Beatles’ blending of “Goon” humor with their own native Liverpool wit was yet another distinction between them and other groups. Though much of what they did and said was for self-amusement, they were rarely not funny to everyone else. Pop stars liked to mumble (as directed) that they hoped to become “all-round entertainers”—by implication, a singing career alone wasn’t enough—but the Beatles achieved it naturally and while remaining true to themselves and their music. They were never anything so specialist as a comedy-rock group (such combinations did exist), they were simply a group who
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Sometimes John joined in with fine harmonies, but mostly he took the piss. Pete says that during one Cavern performance of “Over the Rainbow,” John leaned back on the piano, pointed to Paul, burst into raucous laughter and shouted, “God, he’s doing Judy Garland!” Paul had to keep singing in the knowledge that John was pulling crips and Quasis behind his back or making strange sounds on his guitar to interrupt him. Yet, if Paul stopped in the middle of the number, John would stare around the stage, the essence of innocence.42 There were always several simultaneous reasons why an audience
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Paul took such behavior from no one but John, but also he gave it back and was strong-minded enough to carry on doing what he wanted, knowing how much the audience liked it.
John really had a go at Paul for singing this—but didn’t try to stop him doing it, recognizing there was scope for all kinds of music in this group, to please all kinds of audiences … just so long as no
“The Beatles were terrible when they ganged up on you—all of them, Pete Best as well. Their tongues could be savage.”
“Being A Short Diversion On The Dubious Origins Of Beatles.” Once upon a time there were three little boys called John, George and Paul, by name christened. They decided to get together because they were the getting together type. When they were together they wondered what for after all, what for? So all of a sudden they all grew guitars and formed a noise. Funnily enough, no one was interested, least of all the three little men. So-o-o-o on discovering a fourth little even littler man called Stuart Sutcliffe running about them they said, quote, “Sonny get a bass guitar and you will be
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Jackie Salamone-Bailey liked this
But before we could go we had to grow a drummer, so we grew one in West Derby in a club called Some Casbah and his trouble was Pete Best. We called “Hello, Pete, come off to Germany!” “Yes!” Zooooom. After a few months, Peter and Paul (who is called McArtrey, son of Jim McArtrey, his father) lit a Kino (cinema) and the German police said “Bad Beatles, you must go home and light your English cinemas.” Zooooom, half a group. But even before this, the Gestapo had taken my friend little George Harrison (of Speke) away because he was only twelve and too young to vote in Germany; but after two
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Jackie Salamone-Bailey liked this
John, Paul and George—buddies, friends and pals, to use their own expression—
John planted his feet wide and didn’t budge an inch. He held his guitar high and his upper body tilted this way and that as he played, knees flexing, shoulders back,
head forward—an authoritative presence peering down his bony nose while singing with complete commitment to the blur beyond.
Kings before they left, they’d taken their performance to another, higher level: now a foursome, all in leather, even more dynamic, packing yet more punch and charisma, and bursting with the experience that only another 503 extraordinary hours on the Hamburg stage could have given them.‖
The running total from their two Hamburg visits: 918 hours’ playing—the equivalent of 612 ninety-minute shows or 1,836 half-hours—in just twenty-seven weeks.
John and Paul became closer once Stu left the Beatles. He’d come between them
for eighteen months and now the rift was
closed. John loved Stu as a friend but didn’t miss his musical contribution—he’d ended up a fair bass player but Paul overtook him in no time at all. John and Paul forged ahead with ambition, drive, dedication, humor and so much more, even drawing mutual strength from being motherless. It was something only they could laugh at, and they enjoyed watching people squirm when inn...
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The lunchtime sessions strengthened Beatle friendships tighter than ever. They didn’t only see one another at night, like other groups, but often spent entire days
together, best mates.
Wooler saw the Beatles two or three lunchtimes/afternoons a week, and most evenings, and he’d always be clear and adamant that the Beatles “nearly split up in the summer of 1961, because they felt they were getting nowhere.” It’s an extraordinary statement.
They needed someone to channel their energies, their ideas. It called for somebody who was prepared to put up with the Beatles, and they were such a handful because they were strong willed. They had their own ideas. Whoever took on the Beatles had to knuckle down to the Beatles—and the breed of person who will submit to that sort of control is rare.
