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October 3 - November 4, 2023
They invented a form of rock and roll in which boys wanting to be girls (be as real as girls, as honest as girls, as deep as girls, as cool as girls, as rock and roll as girls) was the absolute crux of male identity.
The Beatles invented most of what rock stars do. They invented breaking up. They invented drugs. They invented long hair, going to India, having a guru, round glasses, solo careers, beards, press conferences, divisive girlfriends, writing your own songs, funny drummers. They invented the idea of assembling a global mass audience and then challenging, disappointing, confusing this audience. As far as the rest of the planet is concerned, they invented England.
Fifty-five, to be precise—that’s one yeah per 2.4 seconds, which has to be maximum yeah density.
One day, one of them started screaming hysterically. She couldn’t stop. They fired her on the spot. She had just opened Elvis’s tax return.
After decades of adulation, the world found out we had been underrating the Beatles. And that’s a cultural shock that hasn’t worn off.
While Paul does his people-watching on Penny Lane, John is a mile away, hiding in the tall grass of Strawberry Field. His voice is shell-shocked with grief. His childhood has followed him everywhere, leaving him stranded in an adult life where nothing is real. He does not want to be rescued.
When U2 covered “Helter Skelter,” Bono announced, “This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealin’ it back!”
(Note the superbly Pauline irony of spending thirty-two years futzing over an album called Let It Be.)
In his twenties, he faced a menu of infinite choices for how he could spend the rest of his life; it was the free-love boom, a boom he’d done quite a bit to create. What he chose to do was marry Linda, raise some kids, and stay uncomplicatedly in love with her through the entire Players Only Love You When They’re Playin’ era. They never spent a night apart until the week he went to jail.
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.
Back in the late Seventies, it had still made sense for Rolling Stone to commission a lavish oversize coffee-table history of the Beatles—cover art by Andy Warhol, introduction by Leonard Bernstein—and put Paul’s smiling face on the front cover, with John relegated to the back. The book was published in November 1980, the last possible moment when it would have been thinkable. It was the worst-timed Christmas product since Jesus was still alive.
proved that three things never change: (1) people love the Beatles, (2) it’s a little weird and scary how much people love the Beatles, and (3) even people who love the Beatles keep underestimating how much people love the Beatles.
which is probably where we should depart this line of inquiry.
🤣🤣🤣
Even now you hear people argue that the Beatles are ancient history, that yesterday’s fans already closed the book, there’s no room left in this music, it belongs to the past. And the music’s reply is always, Sorry we hurt your field, mister.
But when someone tells you that the Beatles are used up, you don’t even need to bury that argument, because grass is already growing out of it. The field always wins. It grows over the lines we paint on it. That’s one of the things the Beatles keep forcing us to relearn. The field is forever.
