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

by Rob Sheffield

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.