Dreaming the Beatles Quotes

“The world couldn’t have been hungrier for Anthology, with a ten-hour documentary and three huge-selling volumes of outtakes, turning into a joyous global celebration. The Anthology double-CD packages might have been more purchased than played (everybody back then bought more music than they had time to listen to). They included two new songs, Lennon tape fragments that the others finished: “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” The flaw was Jeff Lynne’s production—George Martin wasn’t invited, because Harrison flatly refused to work with him. It’s ironic that when you watch Anthology, the only music that sounds dated is from 1995. But no matter how blasphemous the idea seemed, both songs were disarmingly beautiful, as was the documentary, to the point where you could drop in on any random hour (or binge all ten) and enjoy. One of the wisest decisions of Anthology was”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“But being born on the same planet as the Beatles is one of the ten best things that’s ever happened to me.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“PAUL IS SOMEBODY WHO DOES THINGS WITH ENTHUSIASM, which makes people feel appalled and insulted at things he chooses to do. If you’re under thirty, you have never heard of a song called “Spies Like Us,” and I am a horrible person for being the one to tell you. It was the theme for a big-budget Hollywood spy comedy starring Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. Nobody saw the movie, but Paul’s theme was worse than the movie could have been. MTV played it constantly during the 1985 holiday season, though radio wouldn’t touch it. Paul does a rap that goes something like, “Oooh oooh, no one can dance like you.” In the video he plays multiple roles as members of a studio band, mugging and biting his lower lip. The drumming is where his cheeky-chappy act gets profoundly upsetting. You see this video, you’re going to be depressed for at least ten minutes about the existential condition of Paul-dom. His enthusiasm makes you doubt the sincerity of his other public displays. It makes you doubt yourself. You might think it’s a cheap laugh but it will cost you something.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“The Rubber Soul woman stays up late drinking wine on her rug after midnight, until it’s time for bed. She speaks languages he can’t translate. She’s not impressed by the Beatle charm—when you say she’s looking good, she acts as if it’s understood. She’s cool. She makes the Rubber Soul man feel like a real nowhere boy.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“The early Seventies were a gold rush for double-vinyl samplers from Sixties heavyweights—the Stones’ 1971 Hot Rocks, the Kinks’ 1972 Kink Kronikles, the Doors’ 1972 Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine, the Beach Boys’ 1974 Endless Summer. Best of all: Bob Dylan’s 1971 Greatest Hits Volume II, with virtually no hits, just deep cuts chosen by the artist.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“And complaining about Paul is what the rest of us do. That’s his role in our lives. We prosecute Paul for the flaws we despise in ourselves. In real life I’ve always been attracted to Paul types because they don’t sit around and talk about the shit they’re going to do—they get it done. They’re quick to say “good enough” and move on. Paul was a closer, not a tinker-forever artist like Brian Wilson, who set out to top Sgt. Pepper with Smile but failed because he couldn’t tell himself “pencils down” and let go. He couldn’t stop doing retakes of tracks he’d already finished. The musicians’ joke at the Smile sessions: “Perfect, just one more.” Brian had the melodies, but lacked the killer instinct. So people decided Brian was a heavier artist. There’s something uncool about closers. It’s hard to trust them.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“24. The Rutles, “Cheese and Onions” (1978) A legend to last a lunchtime. The Rutles were the perfect Beatle parody, starring Monty Python’s Eric Idle and the Bonzos’ Neil Innes in their classic mock-doc All You Need Is Cash, with scene-stealing turns by George Harrison, Mick Jagger, and Paul Simon. (Interviewer: “Did the Rutles influence you at all?” Simon: “No.” Interviewer: “Did they influence Art Garfunkel?” Simon: “Who?”) “Cheese and Onions” is a psychedelic ersatz Lennon piano ballad so gorgeous, it eventually got bootlegged as a purported Beatle rarity. Innes captures that tone of benignly befuddled pomposity—“I have always thought in the back of my mind / Cheese and onions”—along with the boyish vulnerability that makes it moving. Hell, he even chews gum exactly like John. The Beatles’ psychedelic phase has always been ripe for parody. Witness the 1967 single “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” by the genius Brit comedy duo Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, from Beyond the Fringe and the BBC series Not Only . . . ​But Also, starring John Lennon in a cameo as a men’s room attendant. “The L.S. Bumble Bee” sounds like the ultimate Pepper parody—“Freak out, baby, the Bee is coming!”—but it came out months before Pepper, as if the comedy team was reeling from Pet Sounds and wondering how the Beatles might respond. Cook and Moore are a secret presence in Pepper—when the audience laughs in the theme song, it’s taken from a live recording of Beyond the Fringe, produced by George Martin.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“But the intimate candor of their voices, the wit of the guitars and drums—it all makes Rubber Soul my favorite story they had to tell. Even the American version—this is the only case where the shamefully butchered U.S. LP might top the U.K. original, if only because it opens with the magnificent one-two punch of “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “Norwegian Wood.” I still can’t decide which Rubber Soul is my favorite, having had a mere lifetime to make up my mind.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“But if you listen to outtakes from the sessions, you can hear the Beatles worked out harmonies for “Eight Days a Week”—beautiful harmonies, in fact. Yet they cut the harmonies and sang in unison, to make the song sound like it took less work than it did. They spent seven hours in the studio tinkering with “Eight Days a Week,” adding and subtracting, until they got that unrehearsed feel. So much guile went into making the song sound like a moment’s exhalation.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“If you tell people you’re writing a book about the Beatles, at first they smile and ask, “Another one? What’s left to say?” So I mention “Baby’s in Black,” or “It’s All Too Much,” or Lil Wayne’s version of “Help” or the Kendrick Lamar battle rhyme where he says “blessings to Paul McCartney,” or Hollywood Bowl, or Rock ’n’ Roll Music, or the Beastie Boys’ “I’m Down”—but I rarely get that far, because they’re already jumping in with their favorite overlooked Beatle song, the artifact nobody else prizes properly, the nuances nobody else notices. Within thirty seconds they’re assigning me a new chapter I must write. And telling me a story to go with it. Every few days, I get into a Beatles argument I’ve never had before, while continuing other arguments that have been raging since my childhood. And though I’ve spent my whole life devouring every scrap of information about them, I’m constantly learning. I guarantee the day this book comes out, I will find out something new. Things like that used to pain me. But that’s what it means to love the Beatles—you never run out of surprises.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“I’m sure the Sixties Beatles were great. But I bet not as great as the Nineties Beatles.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“As your life grows longer, and your memory gets fuller, The Beatles come with you, and mutate along the way. They define the extremes of your memory; they are with you when you are just discovering music, too young to know better, and they remain with you, on top of all the other heart noise crowding your chemistry, when you are supposedly too old for surprises.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“Listening to music—it takes time. Human bodies respond to music over time in different ways, and that’s where the surprises are.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“I Saw Her Standing There’ is the best first song on a debut album, ever.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“It all culminated in the 1995 Anthology, which would have seemed like an embarrassing defeat only a few years earlier. The record company had figured out how to treat the catalog as a prestige item; the 1982 Reel Music compilation was the final U.S. release that could be described as a rip-off. The “drop-T” logo belatedly became a thing, with its elegant serifs—it never appeared on any original Beatle albums, but in the Nineties it became a brand as powerful (in a different way) as the Black Flag bars. The 1994 Live at the BBC, two CDs of radio tapes (proving, as Robert Christgau wrote, “in addition to everything else, they were the funniest rock stars ever”), was a tantalizing hint of how many goodies still remained in the vaults.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“Whatever music you were into, it was exploding in the Nineties. Guitar bands, hip-hop, R&B, techno, country, Britpop, trip-hop, blip-hop, ambient, illbient, jungle, ska, swing, Belgian jam bands, Welsh gangsta rap—every music genre you could name (or couldn’t)—(and a few that probably didn’t really exist) was on a roll that made the Sixties look picayune and provincial. We can argue all day whether Nineties music holds up, but fans devoured—and paid for—more music than ever before or since. The average citizen purchased CDs in numbers that look shocking now, and even shocking then. Every week, thousands of people bought new copies of the Grease soundtrack, from 1978, and nobody knew why. Even critics had trouble finding things to complain about (though we sure tried).”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“Side One of 1967–1970 is up there with Side Three of Hot Rocks in the annals of great vinyl sides. (“Strawberry Fields,” “Penny Lane,” “Sgt. Pepper,” “With a Little Help,” “Lucy,” “A Day in the Life,” and “All You Need Is Love” vs. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Gimme Shelter.” Damn.) For the Beatles, it was just another rip-off repackage.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“John didn’t score his first Number One hit until 1974, the fourth Beatle to reach this milestone (Ringo beat him twice), but he got over with “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” with a big assist from Elton John. It’s not a famous song anymore, for the understandable reason that the final line is “Don’t need a gun to blow your mind.” After December 1980, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” dropped off the radio and hasn’t been heard since. But the most shocking thing isn’t the gun line—it’s the lush pop feel. The song it really resembles is the Wings hit “Listen to What the Man Said,” with the same yacht-rock studio sheen. Both serve love-is-the-answer platitudes, though attractively warmhearted ones: “Whatever gets you to the light, ’sall right” vs. “I don’t know but I think love is fine.” Both hit Number One, for just one week. John’s sax solo is Bobby Keys, Paul’s is Tom Scott, though they could have traded places without anyone noticing. Yet I loved both songs as a boy, and still do—Elton, always the kindliest-sounding of rock megastars, sings on John’s hit, and sounds like the guiding spirit of Paul’s, as if he’s a yenta nudging them together.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“Silly Love Songs” wanders on for a bizarre and very unpop six minutes. Paul was passionate about music-making, which is different from being passionate about music.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“I’d have too much John (“Oh Yoko!,” “I’m Steppin’ Out,” “Oh My Love,” “New York City,” “Nobody Told Me”) and too much Paul (“Jet,” “Friends to Go,” “Flaming Pie,” “Too Many People,” “We Got Married,” “Simple as That,” “Hi, Hi, Hi,” “You Gave Me the Answer”).”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“Give Me Love” was a hit around the same time as Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken,” a superficially similar hippie-dad prayer, yet I violently hated “Morning Has Broken,” just hated it, despised the choked sobs and prissy whispers, still hate it, because it sounded to my ears (and might still sound, if I had the stomach to investigate) like a phony version of what “Give Me Love” does for real. All four Beatles were surrogate dads to Seventies kids, which partly why we fantasized about them so much, and if George was the dad who’s perpetually disappointed in you, “Give Me Love” is a song that did and still does make me fantasize about what a world fathered and raised by George might look like. Yet it’s the kind of song George distrusted—a song that could get people’s hopes up, making promises he was scared he couldn’t keep.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“Some records turned out better than others: Off the Ground quite rotten, Flaming Pie and New and Chaos and Creation in the Backyard quite excellent. One of my favorites is Run Devil Run, from 1999, the year after Linda died,”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“CARY GRANT IS THE MCCARTNEY OF MOVIE STARS—HIS STORY has much to tell us about Paul’s. They share a spiritual connection, beyond their pronunciation of “Judy.” (Paul described his “hey Judy-Judy-Judy” ad libs as “Cary Grant on heat.”) They dazzled Americans as the ultimate English dream dates—yet both were self-inventions, street guys who taught themselves to pose as posh charmers. Both grew up working-class in hardscrabble industrial cities; both lost their mothers at a young age. (Grant, whose real name was Archibald Leach, was nine when he was told his mother had gone on a trip; more than twenty years later, after he was famous, he learned she was locked up in an institution and got her released.) Both dropped out of school to fight their way into the sleaziest sewers of show biz—Grant joined a troupe of traveling acrobats, which must have been an even rougher scene than the Reeperbahn—yet to them it was a world of freedom and excitement. But both found lasting fame by turning on the charm for Americans who saw them as dapper gentlemen. “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” Grant once said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“But “God” is the best song any Beatle wrote about religion, with all due respect to George’s “My Sweet Lord.” Both were produced by Phil Spector the same year—with Ringo on drums. (Talk about ecumenical.) “God” is where John does his most beautiful singing, reaching for a doo-wop tremble straight out of his beloved Rosie and the Originals, with that “Elvis echo” on his voice. It’s one of the two or three songs I’d play if I had ten minutes to convince a jury that John was the greatest of rock and roll singers-as-singers. Along with “Girl,” and maybe “Ticket to Ride.” Or “You Can’t Do That”? “Money”? “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”? “Oh My Love”? “I’m So Tired”?”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“Even George Clinton sounded befuddled by “Mind Games” when he covered it on the very odd 1995 tribute album Working Class Hero, where he joined the likes of Blues Traveler and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to raise money for the cause of spaying cats and dogs. (You’d think the sound of Toad the Wet Sprocket doing “Instant Karma” would be enough to neuter any animal.)”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“always loved this sentence in Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Eighties edition I had in college: “The previous edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves included a brief section on astrological birth control, which just doesn’t work.” So much going on in that sentence, dispatched with no drama. Maybe a shade of irony, but no hand-wringing—just a change of mind announced as efficiently and discreetly and decisively as possible.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“But Ram was mostly recorded in NYC, in a top-dollar studio during nine-to-five business hours, with two sidemen he’d never met before. It was a professional approach to music designed to sound unprofessional. It worked, too, with Hugh McCracken playing that great guitar break in “Too Many People.” (My favorite McCracken solo, except maybe Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen.”) For Paul, country life meant stretching himself. He kept featuring”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“Despite all the solo vocals, each using the others as a back-up group, the White Album still sounds haunted by memories of friendship—that “dreamlike state” they could still zoom into hearing each other sing. They translated Rishikesh into their own style of English pagan pastoral—so many talking animals, so many changes in the weather. One of my favorite British songwriters, Luke Haines from the Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, once told me in an interview that his band was making “our Wicker Man album.” He was miffed I had no idea what he meant. “You can’t understand British bands without seeing The Wicker Man. Every British band makes its Wicker Man album.” So I rented the classic 1973 Hammer horror film, and had creepy dreams about rabbits for months, but he’s right, and the White Album is the Beatles’ Wicker Man album five years before The Wicker Man, a rustic retreat where nature seems dark and depraved in a primal English sing-cuckoo way. They also spruced up their acoustic guitar chops in India, learning folkie fingerpicking techniques from fellow pilgrim Donovan, giving the songs some kind of ancient mystic chill.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“(five). The Esher demos are a real treasure trove; they mined it for years. Songs that got worried to death on the album are played with a fresh one-take campfire feel, just acoustic guitars and handclaps”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“THE WHITE ALBUM IS THE BROKEN ALBUM, THE DOUBLE-VINYL mess, a build-your-own-Beatles kit forcing you to edit the album yourself. They even made the audience come up with the title. (Nobody has ever called it The Beatles.) In the predigital days, everybody made their own cassette for actual listening, with each fan taping a different playlist.”
― Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World