A Hard Day's Write
I'll stop with the A Hard Day's Night puns soon, I promise. But since several asked me about a post or recs on Beatles-related books, I felt compelled to deliver. Mind you: this is by no means a comprehensive "best of" list. There are gazillion books written on the subject(s), and I'm sure I've read only a small part of them. But here are some that stuck in my mind, with their pros and cons.
Hunter Davies: The Beatles. This was the authorized biography that appeared in 1968 (i.e. was finished in 1967), with the usual drawbacks of authorized biographies, especially in the 60s.; censorship by its subjects. On the other hand, Davies can write, did much of the groundwork for later biographers, and has the advantage of having interviewed everyone before the Beatles ended, which means nobody talks with hindsight or issues to settle. The portrait of John and Cynthia in Kenwood near the end is downright eerie with the foreshadowing without having been intended as such, because you can see this is a marriage in trouble. Also Jane Asher never gave any interviews about her relationship with Paul after their break-up, 40 years and counting, so Davies’ biography is the only one containing any comments from her on that at all.
Peter Brown: The Love you make. Peter Brown worked for Brian Epstein, and the Brian-related parts are really the best (and most reliable) thing about the book. Otherwise we’re in murky territory as far as reliability is concerned. This book advertises as a tell-all about all the sex scandals that didn’t make it into the biographies until that point, and there’s a lot of sex alright, but the problem is that not only does the musical side of things receive only a vague nod (Abbey Road, for example, is mentioned only once in passing), but Brown also writes about things he can’t know about as well as those he does and makes no attempt to produce sources for the former. (Say, a description of how Allen Klein responded when he heard Brian Epstein was dead. I don’t like Allen Klein any more than any other Beatles fan, and he sounds like he probably was gleeful, but the fact of the matter remains that Brown was nowhere near Klein when the later found out the man he wanted to replace as the Beatles’ manager was dead, nor was anyone else (in the scene, Klein is alone) and thus is just making it up.) Morever, this is a book featuring malevolent stalker!Yoko and ditzy groupie!Linda, which doesn’t inspire confidence, either. To conclude: read the Brian-related parts and also the legal showdown between Allen Klein and Lee Eastman, both of which Brown witnessed first hand, and skip the rest.
Philip Norman: Shout! The first major Beatles biography to be published after John Lennon’s death, and it shows. Entertainingly written (Norman, like Hunter Davies before him, is an experienced journalist), definitely includes the scandals, but biased as hell: basically, here we’re dealing with the tale of John-the-genius-and-martyr and the three other guys, Paul-the-soulless-ambitious-commercial-hack, enigmatic George and nice Ringo. Norman himself admitted to faults and distortions in his decades later Lennon biography, but what makes Shout! a valuable contribution is that this is the first serious biography to mount a credible Yoko defense, render a three dimensional portrait of her and basically include her point of view on things. (Norman interviewed her extensively both for this one and the 2008 John Lennon.) Her point of view at the time contained the “nobody hurt John as deeply as Paul did” quote that made even the anti-McCartney (at the time) Norman raise an eyebrow, given that we’re talking about Mr. Primal Scream, I’ll Never Get Over My Parents Making Me Choose Then Leaving Me here. (He concluded that “John might have longed to get away from Paul, but apparently for some reason he could never get over him”.) Since, however, the 2008 John Lennon is at least openly about John and doesn't claim to be a biography of all four, and has the advantage of being far more balanced (well: towards Paul; were I Julian Lennon, I'd be less than thrilled of being described as a child without either John's or later Sean's "charm and intelligence" and would wonder how Norman arrived that conclusion, since he never met Julian as a child), and covers much the same ground as Shout!, I would advise reading the later.
Jonathan Gould: Can’t buy me love: The Beatles, Britain and America. Now we’re talking. This is a recent Beatles biography which not only puts great emphasis on the cultural context of Britain and the US in the 1960s but is really good with the music even to lay people like me who simply enjoy listening to it. Also, Gould doesn’t have an axe to grind and doesn’t try to declare either of the two main song writers as the one true genius, and he doesn’t forget George and Ringo exist, either. The one thing he can be accused of is of not being a fan of Yoko musically (no evil!Yoko fallback in his description of her as a person, thank God). In other words, if he’s playing the “I like this ‘ship better than that ‘ship” game, it’s musically, as evidenced in this quote:
Previously, whether or not they were actively collaborating on a particular song, John and Paul had always served as the primary audience for each other's work. In Yoko, John had found a new sounding board, after which he appeared to lose all interest in Paul's opinion or critique of his songs.
The difference, of course, was that John's new sounding board knew little about music in general and less about rock 'n' roll. (....) Nor was Yoko in any position to be candid with John about his songwriting. As a pair of especially insecure artists united in the first flush of love, John and Yoko tended to function as a mutual admiration society, with each regarding whatever the other did as too marvelous for words. Paul McCartney, by contrast, had been assuaging his partner's insecurities, encouraging his partner's inspirations, and reining in his partner's excesses for many years. Left to his own devices, John tended to write in what he called "bits" : short musical phrases that he would play over and over to himself, searching out chords and lyrics, which he would then string together to form verses, choruses, and releases. Because he tended to develop the structure of his songs so empirically, he often got stuck for a line or a chord, and he had particular difficulty coming up with middles and endings. Paul was adept at hearing the musical possibilities suggested by John's bits, and he was often able to suggest a chord, a line, a transition, a countermelody, or, on several memorable occasions, an entire section that meshed with Lennon's work.
McCartney's problem was the opposite of Lennon's. Chords and melodies flowed out of him so easily that his facility as a musician often outstripped his facility as a lyricist. John's role had always been to get Paul to focus more intently on the language and sense of his songs, and to temper his self-acknowledged tendency toward the trite and the sentimental. Though John could be withering in his criticism, most of the time, his presence alone had been enough. Over the years Paul began to internalize his partner's editorial role, and his lyric writing was never better than when he was trying to impress John as a way of enlisting his participation in his work.
Cynthia Lennon: John. The second of her memoirs, the first of which was published in 1978, when John was still alive, whereas this one is rather recent The part that’s dealing with the pre-Beatles and Beatles years isn’t that different, with two exceptions: Aunt Mimi comes across as the mother-in-law from hell, which isn’t that surprising (as Cynthia herself says, it wasn’t personal; no woman was good enough for John; also, considering Mimi saw Cynthia, dismissed by male biographers as boringly good and normal, as a nephew-stealing vamp, you can imagine what she later thought of Yoko), and while in the first version she carefully avoided a comment on Yoko as a person, here she’s openly hostile (while also not describing Yoko as the sole reason for the breakdown of marital relationships; actually she predates the beginning of the end to John’s heavy drug use from 67 onwards). What’s new is the inclusion of the 70s and the rather depressing ups and downs of John’s relationship with Julian, with the so-called “Lost Weekend” era in 1974 and 1975 (i.e. those 18 months of temporary break-up between John and Yoko, when he was with May Pang) as a sort of golden age interlude as May, who had been in charge of playing with Julian on his visits when first an assistant working for John and Yoko in 71, seems to have done all she could to make John spend as much time with his older son as possible. 1950s and 1960s Cynthia and John come across very much as characters from Look back in anger, or an illustration on why falling for witty, sarcastic men who keep switching between verbal cruelty and neediness, and adhering to the “I just need to prove my unconditional love to him through thick and thin, and all will be well” principle is really not a good idea in real life. (I’m not sure our narrator realizes this completely, btw; not with her insistence that before he tripped on LSD all the time, they really were happy and he always was nice and apologized after the verbal outlashings.) 1970s Cynthia is mostly an increasingly angry mother, who sees 1970s John as a cruel humourless pod person preaching about peace while incapable of having a civil conversation with her or, the above mentioned Lost Weekend era aside, showing their son he cares for longer than five minutes. And then he’s murdered, which leaves her with all kind of unresorted feelings perhaps best summed up in the tale of a letter John wrote to her re: Julian mid-60s, before a concert. It’s a very touching one, actually, John at his best:
I really miss him as a person now - do you know what I mean - he's not so much "the baby" anymore he's a real living part of me now - you know he's Julian and everything and I can't wait to see him, I miss him more than I've ever done before - I think it's been a slow process my feeling like a real father! I spend hours in dressing rooms and things thinking about the times I've wasted not being with him - and playing with him - you know I keep thinking of those stupid bastard times when I keep reading bloody newspapers and other shit whilst he's in the room with me. He doesn't see enough of me as it is and I really want him to know and love me, and miss me like I seem to be missing both of you so much.
The problem was, as Cynthia puts it, she didn’t doubt he meant what he wrote, but he never changed vis a vis Julian. (Hence Julian stating he has more early childhood memories of Paul than of John playing with him.) During the 70s when she needed the cash and also was angry indeed, she sold that latter. After John’s death, the buyer, probably realising the new worth of Lennon memorabilia, put it up for sale again. Paul McCartney bought it and presented it to Cynthia and Julian as a gift (“an immensely thoughtful gesture we appreciated deeply”), bringing things full circle.
Julia Baird: Imagine This: Growing Up With John Lennon. You could also call this: Julia, the defense, as one of the main new contributions this memoir (issued in different versions) by John’s younger half sister brought to the Lennon tale was to challenge the previously established story of how he came to live with his aunt, i.e. that their mother Julia basically handed him over to her older sister Mimi because she couldn’t cope. Julia the younger says that this was not voluntary on her mother’s part but that Mimi, after the infamous showdown of the Lennon parents in Blackpool when they made five years old John choose (aka probably the most quoted trauma in Beatle history), called the social workers because Julia was living “in sin” with another man (the future father of the younger Julia and Jacqui and her common law husband for the rest of her life), and that was how Mimi got custody. In general, the book paints a vivid picture of the Stanley family, consisting of five sisters (Mimi was the oldest, and Julia the second youngest) with strong personalities, and also, Julia aside, a tendency to repress and sweep things under the carpet to a spectacular degree (younger Julia and Jacqui, ending up with Aunt Mater after Julia Lennon died, weren’t told their mother was actually dead for months, and ditto when their father, in a bizarre repetition, also was hit by a car some months later). The portrait of John as a boy and young man is very affectionate, and probably the most positive you’ll find in anyone’s memoirs; perhaps because she missed the late 60s and early to mid 70s period and only got into contact again once Sean was born, Julia the younger never got the hot and cold treatment but had a good sibling relationship with him.
May Pang: Loving John & Instamatic Karma. The later is a collection of photographs from the era she describes in the former (which is out of print). Opinions about May Pang are divided, with the two extremes being “the secretary John had sex with along with other women now out to aggrandize herself at Yoko’s expense” (Yoko’s assistant Elliot Mintz) and “the best thing to happen to Dad in the 70s” (Julian Lennon). Now, I’m inclined to take several statements in her book with a pinch of salt (such as the suggestion Yoko literally hypnotized John into coming back), and while I don’t doubt John did tell her he loved her (he would), it doesn’t need repeating three times. Also, as with Cynthia’s memoirs, you wonder while reading whether the narrator is aware the whole “he really loved me!” insistence comes across not as reassurance but part of a dysfunctional relationship given that you also get descriptions of extreme jealousy and the spectacular Lennon moodswings that make you wonder why on earth these women put up with this for so long. On the other hand, May when describing other things than their relationship has a lot of interesting stories to tell, from the filming of Yoko’s experimental movies in the early 70s (when she was working as an assistant to both Lennons) to the various rock stars John hung out with in the mid 70s (there’s a lot of the ups and downs of the George Harrison-Lennon relationship there, which in other people’s memories gets inevitably overshadowed (repeat chorus with me, “poor George”) by the Lennon/McCartney one) to some funny and some incredibly creepy encounters with fans. Generally, though, if you're interested in early to mid 70s John Lennon, I’d advise going for the photo book, which repeats the best anecdotes (though shortened) while avoiding the more self indulgent parts, and leaving Loving John in the library.
Pattie Boyd: Wonderful Tonight. Speaking of George, he’s definitely not poor George here. Pattie Boyd first shows up in the Beatles saga as one of the girls in A Hard Day’s Night (she was a successful model then, and you can see her in the scene in the train), where “the quiet one” promptly fell for her. Their marriage survived the Beatles madness years (she famously inspired “Something”) but fell apart in the 70s in a way that makes soap operas look tame. (Pattie feels neglected by George withdrawing into meditation and Indian philosophy and also suspects him of cheating. George’s best friend Eric Clapton falls for her, first gets turned down, starts to use heroin (blaming her for it) when he’s not writing love songs (“Layla”) for her, George withdraws some more, Pattie starts to correspond with Eric, George has an affair with, of all the people, Ringo’s wife Maureen, and says as much out loud in front of everyone when they’re visiting Ringo, Pattie moves in with Eric. Stay tuned for the next episode.) The prose is average (“I had to make a choice. Would I go to Eric, who had written the most beautiful song for me, who had been to hell and back in the last three years because of me and who had worn me down with his protestations of love? Or would I choose George, my husband, whom I had loved but who had been cold and indifferent towards me for so long that I could barely remember the last time he'd shown me any affection or told me he loved me?”) But it’s a story entertainingly told, and you can’t help but feel for Pattie (and conclude yet again needy geniuses are poison - by which I mean Clapton, btw, not Harrison).
Linda McCartney’s Sixties: Linda Eastman (and it still has to be said - no relation to Eastman Kodak, her father was born Lee Epstein before he changed his name) was a successful photographer before she met Paul, and this particular collection is a great illustration why, and interesting if you’re not so much into the Beatles as well (they only show up in the last section), covering as it does everyone from the Rolling Stones via Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin to The Who to Jimi Hendrix. What I appreciate most about them is that they don’t come across posed, as so many rock star photos do, and yet can be arresting character studies. When we do get around to the Beatles, you get both pictures that capture the alienation and pictures that capture the connection in spite of it all during those last years. (A case for the former is the picture Linda nicknamed “The four strangers” during a break of the photo shooting for the Abbey Road cover, and a case of the later the photos of John and Paul working on the Abbey Road medley, one of which later ended up in the National Portrait Gallery.) (Some of the photos in question.)
Danny Fields: Linda McCartney: A Portrait. Back in the late 1960s/1970, Yoko and Linda were co-stars cast as “The Women Who Broke Up the Beatles” (actual headline of an article at the time), with near equal bile towards both from fans and media. This subsequently changed (by the time Linda died, 30 years of marriage, vegetarianism and animals rights campaigning seem to have won the mass media over, whereas Yoko got called "a malevolent omnivore" in the recent The Beatles by Bob Spitz), but her friend Danny Fields’ book on her is still part love declaration, part defense. It doesn’t pretend at objectivity and isn’t always chronological; otoh, the very personal-ness (and the fact Fields had access to everyone concerned for his interviews for decades) is part of its charm. If Philip Norman gets the credit for being the first great Yoko champion, Fields does the same for Linda and makes his case for her as a rescuer. Case in point, a vivid descriptions of the Beatles breakdown and direct aftermath from the McCartney quarter, as with Pattie Boyd, not great style but engaging:
It was 1970 that was really the awful year, when Linda and Paul exiled themselves to Scotland and Paul nearly went to pieces, but for Linda's presence. (…)
Nothing in Linda's life had prepared her for the downside of her relationship with Paul; despised and envied worldwide, Linda now found herself with her Prince Charming losing confidence in himself and sinking into a deep depression. (…) 'I was very scared,' she told me. 'I didn't want to give up, but it was a mess, it was unreal, and I had to handle this all by myself. There was no choice. I had to try. We had two children, we'd just been married a year, and my husband didn't want to get out of bed. He was drinking too much. He would tell me he felt useless. I knew he was torturing himself, blaming himself for the break-up, and I was sure that he could get beyond it, but if he didn't believe in himself, what could I do? I could only try, that's all I could do. Let me tell you, my hands were full.'
As Paul told Joan Goodman in the Playboy interview: 'I was impossible, I don't know how anyone could have lived with me. For the first time in my life, I was on the scrap heap, in my own eyes ... I'd never experienced it before. It was bad on Linda. Let's say I wouldn't have liked to live with me. So I don't know how Linda stuck it out.'
Helplessly at first, Linda watched her husband virtually dying on the inside, mirroring the death of his band. (…) Looking back at those long months of depression and creative paralysis, Paul said, 'It was Linda who made me realize what a complete fool I was.' Between (and during) those awful periods of anxiety about the state of her husband and her household, Linda came up with the most simple and obvious reading of her partner's situation - it was about work. Work for Paul had always involved the Beatles, now there were no Beatles to work with, and hence no work; the consequence was a gaping vacuum at the centre of his universe.
It had never been a secret that although Lennon and McCartney were a team, many of the best Beatles songs were the product of one or the other of them. But whichever one of them did not do the major amount of creative work on any given song was always there to criticize, encourage, make suggestions, sing or play along with on the recording, split the royalties, no matter - he was there. Now for Paul John was no longer there, for the first time since he turned 15, and the natural crisis of confidence that one expects to arise from this sundering of so close a partnership had escalated and spilled over into the emotional picture. (…) Linda became relentless with Paul, trying to convince him that he was a great songwriter and that he had to do something besides making the odd repair to the farm buildings and worrying about the slow death of the Beatles. And so he roused himself from his torpor, renting small studios or working alone at Abbey Road on his first solo album, McCartney. The first song he wrote for it was 'The Lovely Linda'.
Barry Miles: Many Years From Now. A hybrid between memoirs and a biography, and probably the closest thing to a McCartney autobiography we’ll get, based on extensive interviews Miles - in the 1960s co-owner of the Indica Gallery, kickstarter of the International Times, and briefly involved with Apple as most of the Beatles friends were - conducted with Paul McCartney. On the pro side, this means the most extensive discussion of the Beatles songs around (Miles checked Paul’s memories against the various John quotes on the same songs - and as John gave as many as ten interviews a day in the early 70s and then again in 1980, there were a lot of those - and amazingly there were only two songs on which they had different collections as to who contributed what) as well as vivid descriptions of Liverpool in the 1950s and London in the 1960s. On the downside, there is, as with the Davies Beatles biography, the drawback of anything authorized, i.e. no “what the hell were you thinking?” about the infamous 1980 pot arrest in Japan kind of question. There is also an unmistakable note of “I discovered avant-garde years before John did and I’m sick of being regarded as the conservative one” (I’m paraphrasing, that’s not a quote) type of defensiveness throughout. But the general wealth of detailed memories and extensive quotes, where the mood can go from issues to nostalgia within a few lines, more than makes up for it. It’s just one thing to read some biographer’s descriptions and another read a direct reminiscence of ye early days in the summer of 1957, of Aunt Mimi and John, by Paul McCartney, such as:
“She (Mimi) would always refer to me as ‘Your little friend’. I’d look at her, she’d smile. I’d know what she’d done. She’d known what she’d done. I would ignore it. It was quite patronising, but she secretly quite liked me, she sort of twinkled, but she was very ware that John’s friends were lower-class. John mixed with the lower classes, I’m afraid, you see. She was the kind of woman who would put you down with a glint in her eye, with a smile. But she’d put you down all the same. (…) It was a very catty household; John liked cats. They had pedigree Siamese cats, which again is slightly middle-class, if you think about it, rather than a puppy. There was always this slight feeling. His was Aunt Mimi, ours wer all called Aunty: Aunty Edie, Aunty Jin, Aunty Milly, Aunty Flo. John had an Aunt Harriet, and Harriet was not a name we came across, especially when they called her Harrie! We never knew women called Mimi, she would have been called Mary. But Aunt Mary became Mimi, which is very sophisticated, very twenties and thirties, very jazz era. So it was Harriet and Mimi: I can imagine them with long cigarette holders. It was like Richmal Crompton’s Just William books to me. You read Just William books because you like that world. (…) So John was a particular attractive character in that kind of world. And John was the all-important year and a half older than me. We’d often get in the little glass-panelled porch on the front door looking out on to the front garden and Menlove Avenue. There was a good acoustic there, like a bathroom acoustic, and also it was the only place Mimi would let us make noise. We were relegated to the vestibule. I remember singing ‘Blue Moon’ in there, the Elvis version, trying to figure out the chords. We spent a lot of time like that. Then we’d go up to John’s room and we’d sit on the bed and play records, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry. It’s a wonderful memory: I don’t often get nostalgic, but the memory of sitting listening to records in John’s bedroom is so lovely, a nice nostalgic feeling. A young boy’s bedroom is such a comfortable place, like my son’s bedroom is now; he’s got all his stuff that he needs: a candle, guitar, a book. John’s room was very like that. James reminds me very much of John in many ways: he’s got beautiful hands. John had beautiful hands.
Hunter Davies: The Beatles. This was the authorized biography that appeared in 1968 (i.e. was finished in 1967), with the usual drawbacks of authorized biographies, especially in the 60s.; censorship by its subjects. On the other hand, Davies can write, did much of the groundwork for later biographers, and has the advantage of having interviewed everyone before the Beatles ended, which means nobody talks with hindsight or issues to settle. The portrait of John and Cynthia in Kenwood near the end is downright eerie with the foreshadowing without having been intended as such, because you can see this is a marriage in trouble. Also Jane Asher never gave any interviews about her relationship with Paul after their break-up, 40 years and counting, so Davies’ biography is the only one containing any comments from her on that at all.
Peter Brown: The Love you make. Peter Brown worked for Brian Epstein, and the Brian-related parts are really the best (and most reliable) thing about the book. Otherwise we’re in murky territory as far as reliability is concerned. This book advertises as a tell-all about all the sex scandals that didn’t make it into the biographies until that point, and there’s a lot of sex alright, but the problem is that not only does the musical side of things receive only a vague nod (Abbey Road, for example, is mentioned only once in passing), but Brown also writes about things he can’t know about as well as those he does and makes no attempt to produce sources for the former. (Say, a description of how Allen Klein responded when he heard Brian Epstein was dead. I don’t like Allen Klein any more than any other Beatles fan, and he sounds like he probably was gleeful, but the fact of the matter remains that Brown was nowhere near Klein when the later found out the man he wanted to replace as the Beatles’ manager was dead, nor was anyone else (in the scene, Klein is alone) and thus is just making it up.) Morever, this is a book featuring malevolent stalker!Yoko and ditzy groupie!Linda, which doesn’t inspire confidence, either. To conclude: read the Brian-related parts and also the legal showdown between Allen Klein and Lee Eastman, both of which Brown witnessed first hand, and skip the rest.
Philip Norman: Shout! The first major Beatles biography to be published after John Lennon’s death, and it shows. Entertainingly written (Norman, like Hunter Davies before him, is an experienced journalist), definitely includes the scandals, but biased as hell: basically, here we’re dealing with the tale of John-the-genius-and-martyr and the three other guys, Paul-the-soulless-ambitious-commercial-hack, enigmatic George and nice Ringo. Norman himself admitted to faults and distortions in his decades later Lennon biography, but what makes Shout! a valuable contribution is that this is the first serious biography to mount a credible Yoko defense, render a three dimensional portrait of her and basically include her point of view on things. (Norman interviewed her extensively both for this one and the 2008 John Lennon.) Her point of view at the time contained the “nobody hurt John as deeply as Paul did” quote that made even the anti-McCartney (at the time) Norman raise an eyebrow, given that we’re talking about Mr. Primal Scream, I’ll Never Get Over My Parents Making Me Choose Then Leaving Me here. (He concluded that “John might have longed to get away from Paul, but apparently for some reason he could never get over him”.) Since, however, the 2008 John Lennon is at least openly about John and doesn't claim to be a biography of all four, and has the advantage of being far more balanced (well: towards Paul; were I Julian Lennon, I'd be less than thrilled of being described as a child without either John's or later Sean's "charm and intelligence" and would wonder how Norman arrived that conclusion, since he never met Julian as a child), and covers much the same ground as Shout!, I would advise reading the later.
Jonathan Gould: Can’t buy me love: The Beatles, Britain and America. Now we’re talking. This is a recent Beatles biography which not only puts great emphasis on the cultural context of Britain and the US in the 1960s but is really good with the music even to lay people like me who simply enjoy listening to it. Also, Gould doesn’t have an axe to grind and doesn’t try to declare either of the two main song writers as the one true genius, and he doesn’t forget George and Ringo exist, either. The one thing he can be accused of is of not being a fan of Yoko musically (no evil!Yoko fallback in his description of her as a person, thank God). In other words, if he’s playing the “I like this ‘ship better than that ‘ship” game, it’s musically, as evidenced in this quote:
Previously, whether or not they were actively collaborating on a particular song, John and Paul had always served as the primary audience for each other's work. In Yoko, John had found a new sounding board, after which he appeared to lose all interest in Paul's opinion or critique of his songs.
The difference, of course, was that John's new sounding board knew little about music in general and less about rock 'n' roll. (....) Nor was Yoko in any position to be candid with John about his songwriting. As a pair of especially insecure artists united in the first flush of love, John and Yoko tended to function as a mutual admiration society, with each regarding whatever the other did as too marvelous for words. Paul McCartney, by contrast, had been assuaging his partner's insecurities, encouraging his partner's inspirations, and reining in his partner's excesses for many years. Left to his own devices, John tended to write in what he called "bits" : short musical phrases that he would play over and over to himself, searching out chords and lyrics, which he would then string together to form verses, choruses, and releases. Because he tended to develop the structure of his songs so empirically, he often got stuck for a line or a chord, and he had particular difficulty coming up with middles and endings. Paul was adept at hearing the musical possibilities suggested by John's bits, and he was often able to suggest a chord, a line, a transition, a countermelody, or, on several memorable occasions, an entire section that meshed with Lennon's work.
McCartney's problem was the opposite of Lennon's. Chords and melodies flowed out of him so easily that his facility as a musician often outstripped his facility as a lyricist. John's role had always been to get Paul to focus more intently on the language and sense of his songs, and to temper his self-acknowledged tendency toward the trite and the sentimental. Though John could be withering in his criticism, most of the time, his presence alone had been enough. Over the years Paul began to internalize his partner's editorial role, and his lyric writing was never better than when he was trying to impress John as a way of enlisting his participation in his work.
Cynthia Lennon: John. The second of her memoirs, the first of which was published in 1978, when John was still alive, whereas this one is rather recent The part that’s dealing with the pre-Beatles and Beatles years isn’t that different, with two exceptions: Aunt Mimi comes across as the mother-in-law from hell, which isn’t that surprising (as Cynthia herself says, it wasn’t personal; no woman was good enough for John; also, considering Mimi saw Cynthia, dismissed by male biographers as boringly good and normal, as a nephew-stealing vamp, you can imagine what she later thought of Yoko), and while in the first version she carefully avoided a comment on Yoko as a person, here she’s openly hostile (while also not describing Yoko as the sole reason for the breakdown of marital relationships; actually she predates the beginning of the end to John’s heavy drug use from 67 onwards). What’s new is the inclusion of the 70s and the rather depressing ups and downs of John’s relationship with Julian, with the so-called “Lost Weekend” era in 1974 and 1975 (i.e. those 18 months of temporary break-up between John and Yoko, when he was with May Pang) as a sort of golden age interlude as May, who had been in charge of playing with Julian on his visits when first an assistant working for John and Yoko in 71, seems to have done all she could to make John spend as much time with his older son as possible. 1950s and 1960s Cynthia and John come across very much as characters from Look back in anger, or an illustration on why falling for witty, sarcastic men who keep switching between verbal cruelty and neediness, and adhering to the “I just need to prove my unconditional love to him through thick and thin, and all will be well” principle is really not a good idea in real life. (I’m not sure our narrator realizes this completely, btw; not with her insistence that before he tripped on LSD all the time, they really were happy and he always was nice and apologized after the verbal outlashings.) 1970s Cynthia is mostly an increasingly angry mother, who sees 1970s John as a cruel humourless pod person preaching about peace while incapable of having a civil conversation with her or, the above mentioned Lost Weekend era aside, showing their son he cares for longer than five minutes. And then he’s murdered, which leaves her with all kind of unresorted feelings perhaps best summed up in the tale of a letter John wrote to her re: Julian mid-60s, before a concert. It’s a very touching one, actually, John at his best:
I really miss him as a person now - do you know what I mean - he's not so much "the baby" anymore he's a real living part of me now - you know he's Julian and everything and I can't wait to see him, I miss him more than I've ever done before - I think it's been a slow process my feeling like a real father! I spend hours in dressing rooms and things thinking about the times I've wasted not being with him - and playing with him - you know I keep thinking of those stupid bastard times when I keep reading bloody newspapers and other shit whilst he's in the room with me. He doesn't see enough of me as it is and I really want him to know and love me, and miss me like I seem to be missing both of you so much.
The problem was, as Cynthia puts it, she didn’t doubt he meant what he wrote, but he never changed vis a vis Julian. (Hence Julian stating he has more early childhood memories of Paul than of John playing with him.) During the 70s when she needed the cash and also was angry indeed, she sold that latter. After John’s death, the buyer, probably realising the new worth of Lennon memorabilia, put it up for sale again. Paul McCartney bought it and presented it to Cynthia and Julian as a gift (“an immensely thoughtful gesture we appreciated deeply”), bringing things full circle.
Julia Baird: Imagine This: Growing Up With John Lennon. You could also call this: Julia, the defense, as one of the main new contributions this memoir (issued in different versions) by John’s younger half sister brought to the Lennon tale was to challenge the previously established story of how he came to live with his aunt, i.e. that their mother Julia basically handed him over to her older sister Mimi because she couldn’t cope. Julia the younger says that this was not voluntary on her mother’s part but that Mimi, after the infamous showdown of the Lennon parents in Blackpool when they made five years old John choose (aka probably the most quoted trauma in Beatle history), called the social workers because Julia was living “in sin” with another man (the future father of the younger Julia and Jacqui and her common law husband for the rest of her life), and that was how Mimi got custody. In general, the book paints a vivid picture of the Stanley family, consisting of five sisters (Mimi was the oldest, and Julia the second youngest) with strong personalities, and also, Julia aside, a tendency to repress and sweep things under the carpet to a spectacular degree (younger Julia and Jacqui, ending up with Aunt Mater after Julia Lennon died, weren’t told their mother was actually dead for months, and ditto when their father, in a bizarre repetition, also was hit by a car some months later). The portrait of John as a boy and young man is very affectionate, and probably the most positive you’ll find in anyone’s memoirs; perhaps because she missed the late 60s and early to mid 70s period and only got into contact again once Sean was born, Julia the younger never got the hot and cold treatment but had a good sibling relationship with him.
May Pang: Loving John & Instamatic Karma. The later is a collection of photographs from the era she describes in the former (which is out of print). Opinions about May Pang are divided, with the two extremes being “the secretary John had sex with along with other women now out to aggrandize herself at Yoko’s expense” (Yoko’s assistant Elliot Mintz) and “the best thing to happen to Dad in the 70s” (Julian Lennon). Now, I’m inclined to take several statements in her book with a pinch of salt (such as the suggestion Yoko literally hypnotized John into coming back), and while I don’t doubt John did tell her he loved her (he would), it doesn’t need repeating three times. Also, as with Cynthia’s memoirs, you wonder while reading whether the narrator is aware the whole “he really loved me!” insistence comes across not as reassurance but part of a dysfunctional relationship given that you also get descriptions of extreme jealousy and the spectacular Lennon moodswings that make you wonder why on earth these women put up with this for so long. On the other hand, May when describing other things than their relationship has a lot of interesting stories to tell, from the filming of Yoko’s experimental movies in the early 70s (when she was working as an assistant to both Lennons) to the various rock stars John hung out with in the mid 70s (there’s a lot of the ups and downs of the George Harrison-Lennon relationship there, which in other people’s memories gets inevitably overshadowed (repeat chorus with me, “poor George”) by the Lennon/McCartney one) to some funny and some incredibly creepy encounters with fans. Generally, though, if you're interested in early to mid 70s John Lennon, I’d advise going for the photo book, which repeats the best anecdotes (though shortened) while avoiding the more self indulgent parts, and leaving Loving John in the library.
Pattie Boyd: Wonderful Tonight. Speaking of George, he’s definitely not poor George here. Pattie Boyd first shows up in the Beatles saga as one of the girls in A Hard Day’s Night (she was a successful model then, and you can see her in the scene in the train), where “the quiet one” promptly fell for her. Their marriage survived the Beatles madness years (she famously inspired “Something”) but fell apart in the 70s in a way that makes soap operas look tame. (Pattie feels neglected by George withdrawing into meditation and Indian philosophy and also suspects him of cheating. George’s best friend Eric Clapton falls for her, first gets turned down, starts to use heroin (blaming her for it) when he’s not writing love songs (“Layla”) for her, George withdraws some more, Pattie starts to correspond with Eric, George has an affair with, of all the people, Ringo’s wife Maureen, and says as much out loud in front of everyone when they’re visiting Ringo, Pattie moves in with Eric. Stay tuned for the next episode.) The prose is average (“I had to make a choice. Would I go to Eric, who had written the most beautiful song for me, who had been to hell and back in the last three years because of me and who had worn me down with his protestations of love? Or would I choose George, my husband, whom I had loved but who had been cold and indifferent towards me for so long that I could barely remember the last time he'd shown me any affection or told me he loved me?”) But it’s a story entertainingly told, and you can’t help but feel for Pattie (and conclude yet again needy geniuses are poison - by which I mean Clapton, btw, not Harrison).
Linda McCartney’s Sixties: Linda Eastman (and it still has to be said - no relation to Eastman Kodak, her father was born Lee Epstein before he changed his name) was a successful photographer before she met Paul, and this particular collection is a great illustration why, and interesting if you’re not so much into the Beatles as well (they only show up in the last section), covering as it does everyone from the Rolling Stones via Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin to The Who to Jimi Hendrix. What I appreciate most about them is that they don’t come across posed, as so many rock star photos do, and yet can be arresting character studies. When we do get around to the Beatles, you get both pictures that capture the alienation and pictures that capture the connection in spite of it all during those last years. (A case for the former is the picture Linda nicknamed “The four strangers” during a break of the photo shooting for the Abbey Road cover, and a case of the later the photos of John and Paul working on the Abbey Road medley, one of which later ended up in the National Portrait Gallery.) (Some of the photos in question.)
Danny Fields: Linda McCartney: A Portrait. Back in the late 1960s/1970, Yoko and Linda were co-stars cast as “The Women Who Broke Up the Beatles” (actual headline of an article at the time), with near equal bile towards both from fans and media. This subsequently changed (by the time Linda died, 30 years of marriage, vegetarianism and animals rights campaigning seem to have won the mass media over, whereas Yoko got called "a malevolent omnivore" in the recent The Beatles by Bob Spitz), but her friend Danny Fields’ book on her is still part love declaration, part defense. It doesn’t pretend at objectivity and isn’t always chronological; otoh, the very personal-ness (and the fact Fields had access to everyone concerned for his interviews for decades) is part of its charm. If Philip Norman gets the credit for being the first great Yoko champion, Fields does the same for Linda and makes his case for her as a rescuer. Case in point, a vivid descriptions of the Beatles breakdown and direct aftermath from the McCartney quarter, as with Pattie Boyd, not great style but engaging:
It was 1970 that was really the awful year, when Linda and Paul exiled themselves to Scotland and Paul nearly went to pieces, but for Linda's presence. (…)
Nothing in Linda's life had prepared her for the downside of her relationship with Paul; despised and envied worldwide, Linda now found herself with her Prince Charming losing confidence in himself and sinking into a deep depression. (…) 'I was very scared,' she told me. 'I didn't want to give up, but it was a mess, it was unreal, and I had to handle this all by myself. There was no choice. I had to try. We had two children, we'd just been married a year, and my husband didn't want to get out of bed. He was drinking too much. He would tell me he felt useless. I knew he was torturing himself, blaming himself for the break-up, and I was sure that he could get beyond it, but if he didn't believe in himself, what could I do? I could only try, that's all I could do. Let me tell you, my hands were full.'
As Paul told Joan Goodman in the Playboy interview: 'I was impossible, I don't know how anyone could have lived with me. For the first time in my life, I was on the scrap heap, in my own eyes ... I'd never experienced it before. It was bad on Linda. Let's say I wouldn't have liked to live with me. So I don't know how Linda stuck it out.'
Helplessly at first, Linda watched her husband virtually dying on the inside, mirroring the death of his band. (…) Looking back at those long months of depression and creative paralysis, Paul said, 'It was Linda who made me realize what a complete fool I was.' Between (and during) those awful periods of anxiety about the state of her husband and her household, Linda came up with the most simple and obvious reading of her partner's situation - it was about work. Work for Paul had always involved the Beatles, now there were no Beatles to work with, and hence no work; the consequence was a gaping vacuum at the centre of his universe.
It had never been a secret that although Lennon and McCartney were a team, many of the best Beatles songs were the product of one or the other of them. But whichever one of them did not do the major amount of creative work on any given song was always there to criticize, encourage, make suggestions, sing or play along with on the recording, split the royalties, no matter - he was there. Now for Paul John was no longer there, for the first time since he turned 15, and the natural crisis of confidence that one expects to arise from this sundering of so close a partnership had escalated and spilled over into the emotional picture. (…) Linda became relentless with Paul, trying to convince him that he was a great songwriter and that he had to do something besides making the odd repair to the farm buildings and worrying about the slow death of the Beatles. And so he roused himself from his torpor, renting small studios or working alone at Abbey Road on his first solo album, McCartney. The first song he wrote for it was 'The Lovely Linda'.
Barry Miles: Many Years From Now. A hybrid between memoirs and a biography, and probably the closest thing to a McCartney autobiography we’ll get, based on extensive interviews Miles - in the 1960s co-owner of the Indica Gallery, kickstarter of the International Times, and briefly involved with Apple as most of the Beatles friends were - conducted with Paul McCartney. On the pro side, this means the most extensive discussion of the Beatles songs around (Miles checked Paul’s memories against the various John quotes on the same songs - and as John gave as many as ten interviews a day in the early 70s and then again in 1980, there were a lot of those - and amazingly there were only two songs on which they had different collections as to who contributed what) as well as vivid descriptions of Liverpool in the 1950s and London in the 1960s. On the downside, there is, as with the Davies Beatles biography, the drawback of anything authorized, i.e. no “what the hell were you thinking?” about the infamous 1980 pot arrest in Japan kind of question. There is also an unmistakable note of “I discovered avant-garde years before John did and I’m sick of being regarded as the conservative one” (I’m paraphrasing, that’s not a quote) type of defensiveness throughout. But the general wealth of detailed memories and extensive quotes, where the mood can go from issues to nostalgia within a few lines, more than makes up for it. It’s just one thing to read some biographer’s descriptions and another read a direct reminiscence of ye early days in the summer of 1957, of Aunt Mimi and John, by Paul McCartney, such as:
“She (Mimi) would always refer to me as ‘Your little friend’. I’d look at her, she’d smile. I’d know what she’d done. She’d known what she’d done. I would ignore it. It was quite patronising, but she secretly quite liked me, she sort of twinkled, but she was very ware that John’s friends were lower-class. John mixed with the lower classes, I’m afraid, you see. She was the kind of woman who would put you down with a glint in her eye, with a smile. But she’d put you down all the same. (…) It was a very catty household; John liked cats. They had pedigree Siamese cats, which again is slightly middle-class, if you think about it, rather than a puppy. There was always this slight feeling. His was Aunt Mimi, ours wer all called Aunty: Aunty Edie, Aunty Jin, Aunty Milly, Aunty Flo. John had an Aunt Harriet, and Harriet was not a name we came across, especially when they called her Harrie! We never knew women called Mimi, she would have been called Mary. But Aunt Mary became Mimi, which is very sophisticated, very twenties and thirties, very jazz era. So it was Harriet and Mimi: I can imagine them with long cigarette holders. It was like Richmal Crompton’s Just William books to me. You read Just William books because you like that world. (…) So John was a particular attractive character in that kind of world. And John was the all-important year and a half older than me. We’d often get in the little glass-panelled porch on the front door looking out on to the front garden and Menlove Avenue. There was a good acoustic there, like a bathroom acoustic, and also it was the only place Mimi would let us make noise. We were relegated to the vestibule. I remember singing ‘Blue Moon’ in there, the Elvis version, trying to figure out the chords. We spent a lot of time like that. Then we’d go up to John’s room and we’d sit on the bed and play records, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry. It’s a wonderful memory: I don’t often get nostalgic, but the memory of sitting listening to records in John’s bedroom is so lovely, a nice nostalgic feeling. A young boy’s bedroom is such a comfortable place, like my son’s bedroom is now; he’s got all his stuff that he needs: a candle, guitar, a book. John’s room was very like that. James reminds me very much of John in many ways: he’s got beautiful hands. John had beautiful hands.