Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

by Rob Sheffield

They sincerely tried breaking up—it just didn’t work.

zest. If you keep changing, letting your perspective get altered by time or drugs or a little imagination, you can find new marvels anywhere—the barbershop, the bank, the fire station, the nurse selling poppies—even on a street as ordinary as this one.

The Beatles take you everywhere.

Mick always resented not being a Beatle, the way John resented not being a Stone; these songs were his dandy’s revenge.

conquer. The Stones were Stonesier. The Beatles were merely better.

(Note the superbly Pauline irony of spending thirty-two years futzing over an album called Let It Be.)

PAUL HAS NO SCRAP OF RELIGIOSITY DISCERNIBLE IN HIM—HE has no grudge against it, certainly. But he seems like one of those enviable cases who never wooed or jilted a god, never got haunted by one, never struggled to get free of one. He just never seems to have been troubled by the idea. His freedom from religion is effortless.

John was a real fucking Jesuit about these things. A religious debate with him made me realize I was a boy wrestling a man.

Something about Paul will always make people suspicious.

Paul selected a life, closed the menu, and then lived the fuck out of that life without worrying his pretty little head about the other adventures he could be chasing.

That’s some serious baggage—playing your songs every night is hard work, but it must be even tougher when you carry the weight of so many dead friends with you. Especially when your taste in friends is pushy bastards who give you no peace, not even when they’re gone.

Yoko and Paul, who went through a phase of talking on the phone a lot and wondering if maybe this shared tragedy would finally make them friends (it didn’t), both tell the story in the form of a riddle they puzzle out as they sing. Did they really know this person? They haven’t gleaned any meanings from their grief. They feel stupid and small and quiet. They didn’t come away with any revelations to share. They have learned nothing, except that what they lost will remain lost. Despite their vastly different personalities, both saw themselves as cheerleaders with a duty to uplift and inspire. Paul called his next album Starpeace, or maybe that was Yoko’s Pipes of Peace, or maybe it was It’s Alright (I See Rainbows) or Flowers in the Dirt—at any rate, both were control freaks who liked to keep things positive. Neither wanted to write a song like this and both would have ducked it if they could—they would have much rather treated John’s death like a teachable moment the way George did. Not a soul would have blamed them if they’d been tempted to fake it. But they didn’t fake it, which says something about whatever kind of honesty John represented to them. These songs are two fragments of a broken story, not even complementary halves—just pieces of something they shared.