Three Memoirs, Three Reviews
More leftover from my Brückenau days: book reviews. One of the books in question I’d browsed through before but hadn’t read it properly, the other two were new to me. What the three have in common is, aren’t you surprised, a Beatles connection; otherwise they’re widely different, though each struggling with the opening sentence ofDavid
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Good God, whether one cares for Yoko's music or not, how could anyone think with all that going on, I could barely hear the background conversations!
Quite. This is why I understand everyone in this situation. Were the other three sexist towards Yoko? Sure, but this would have tried the patience of the most equal-minded saint. (And they were far from saintly.)
Pattie as a London model would have been the perfect girlfriend for Beatle George, but would she have been the perfect girlfriend for working-class-origin George, which always lurked beneath the Beatle veneer. Again, the class differences.
It's interesting that the Ringo/Maureen marriage is the only one a Beatle made (during the 60s) that wasn't "upwards". Even Cynthia was slightly - not much, but slightly - higher on the social scale than John was, and John was the most middle class Beatle anyway. And of course both Yoko and Linda came from very rich background, though I suppose the fact neither of them was English removed them from the class system; whereas Pattie and Jane Asher were part of the system and indeed from completely different worlds than George and Paul came from. Jonathan Gould in his Beatles biography makes the interesting point that if Astrid, Klaus and the other Hamburg students had been English instead of German it's questionable whether the Beatles at that point of their lives would befriended them as intensely and opened up to them as quickly as they did, because the class issues and resentments could have kicked in with a vengeance (and at that point, they didn't have success of their own to make them more relaxed) - all the Exis came from upper class wealthy families, incredibly posh, but because they were German, not English, the class barrier wasn't there.
Paul and George (and John): I think it's often forgotten that they knew each other longest, and before John arrived on the scene, they must have been each other's closest musical friends. I think the older/younger factor was there before John already, though not as pronounced. If you think about it, nine months really isn't a lot, but being in different grades is at that age, and also the fact George was the baby in his own family whereas Paul was the big brother in his probably ensured they brought these attitudes into their early friendship. (Having been a big sister, I know a bit of what this is like, and how it colours your behaviour.) Still, given that they did all that teenage hiking together (and there is that hilarous story of George head-butting one of Paul's friends declaring "he's not worthy of your friendship") I'd say we can say early on that worked out for them, and they must have been pretty close.
Then when John showed up a few things changed. For starters, everyone's default attitude to John seems to have been to hero-worship him (and George did that for years; honestly, I don't think he ever stopped, though later in his life he wouldn't have admitted to it so openly anymore), but Paul (who wasn't immune to that at age 15 but was better at hiding it than George) was the only one who also challenged him and that ensured an equal (or almost equal) status despite the two years age difference whereas George remained the kid - for both of them. Not that Paul dumped George (on the contrary, he pestered John into letting George into the group - btw, the whole tale of George joining the Quarrymen is an interesting contrast to how things later went with Stu, because despite Paul and George having been friends no biographer ever doubted he campaigned for George because he was (correctly) convinced George would be a musical asset, wheras nobody doubted John making Stu join was simply because Stu was his friend, not for any other qualifications of Stuart).
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