Meet the Beatles, again

The Beatles Anthology brings some fresh perspective on the band, the phenomenon and the breakup.

By BILL DURYEA

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 5, 2000

The Beatles Anthology (Chronicle Books, $60) offers few fresh facts but brings together a variety of material, one Beatles expert says.

Today, bookstore shelves around the country are groaning under the weight of The Beatles Anthology, the newest and certainly one of the heaviest books (6.4 pounds) ever published about the world's most-documented rock 'n roll band.

"It is a delicious book to look at. Yet, it is even more delicious to read," gushes the publisher in a press release accompanying an advance copy. "Here in your hands, for the first time ever, is the story of the Beatles in their own words. . . . The Beatles Anthology is by turns hilarious, exciting, insightful, startling, warm, tragic -- everything that makes for great, classic drama."

Well, maybe for those unaware that the band broke up.

In a search for something fresh, the St. Petersburg Times asked Bill King, publisher of Beatlefan magazine (15,000 readers), to pore over the more than 340,000 words and 1,300 pages. King, a fan since the Beatles appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, pronounced the work "the best coffee table book of the season for baby boomers or anyone who likes classic rock."

Times: So, did the book break any ground?

King: No, not really in terms of any facts that we didn't know of a major sort. It mostly elaborates on things that we already knew. It has some fresh stories. It also has some timeworn, very familiar stories.

Times: Give me an example of one of the fresh stories.

King: The section on Hamburg, basically all the facts we've known before, but there's the story of George losing his virginity while the others are lying on bunks in the same room and then applauding when he was finished. That's fresh, but the fact that they had sex in Hamburg is not new. . . . In general, I'd say the George Harrison quotes are the freshest.

Times: Why is that?

King: He hasn't talked about these things quite as much as Paul (McCartney) and Ringo (Starr) have. It's a little bit newer with him. Paul's quotes are the least fresh because Paul has already talked about this stuff time and time and time again. The John (Lennon) quotes, his were assembled from things he said over the years, and (the editors) helpfully have dated them. The 1970-71 quotes are a lot more acerbic than the others because that's when he was in his trash-the-Beatles-phase, but (the editors) counter them nicely. You'll have Paul and George saying, "That was just John running off at the mouth; that's not really the way it was," or "John never said that at the time. He only said that years later."

Times: Was there anything you went to the book specifically looking for, an answer or a gap to be filled?

King: I was interested in what they said about the break-up. Nothing too startling there. It doesn't say, "Oh, that's the way it was. We've been wrong all these years."

Times: Does the book rehabilitate Yoko's image at all?

King: Not really. There's a quote from George from that period that's pretty frank. He says, "Yoko didn't really like us because she saw the Beatles as something that was between her and John. She was a wedge that was trying to drive itself deeper and deeper between us." They're pretty frank about the fact that it was disruptive to suddenly have one of their girlfriends in the studio with them. That had always been their private sanctum. Outsiders might come in for a visit, but the wives and the girlfriends did not sit there while they recorded.

Times: Much less sleep under the piano.

King: People tend to think that it was McCartney that was the most upset about (Yoko), but from everything that I've read it appears to have been Harrison who really couldn't tolerate that.

Times: Why would people think that Paul was the most responsible?

King: Because Lennon and McCartney were a team, and the easy popular view was that Yoko and Linda broke up the team and that basically John dropped Paul and took Yoko.

Times: I noticed that one quote from Lennon was quite magnanimous. If Linda and Yoko broke up the band, then they should also get credit for all the good music we made individually after we broke up.

King: There are quite a few in there. People tend to think of things in sound-bite history. People have this image that John and Paul became bitter enemies and couldn't stand each other and John didn't like anything that Paul did. Sometimes (Lennon) would be dismissive, but he also would praise things. About Here, There and Everywhere, he'd say, "That was one of Paul's, and that was always one of my favorites." That doesn't fit the black and white stereotype that has grown over the years.

Times: I was surprised to learn that, compared to the other three, Lennon came from a rather better off background.

King: Yes, one of them even makes that point. John wrote Working Class Hero, and he was the least working class of the bunch. There again, that's something hard-core fans are well aware of, but others might be surprised to find out that John basically grew up in a middle-class neighborhood where there were doctors and lawyers living.

Times: I was surprised that Lennon wanted to leave the band as early as 1966, around the time he made the movie How I Won the War. Is that new?

King: No, that's not new. Even in their 1968 authorized biography, some of John's quotes in there indicated that he was a bit fed up with the whole routine, but at the same time he didn't have anything to replace it, so he just sort of went along. After the touring years, John was not so much the leader of the group any longer. He basically abdicated the throne. He simply couldn't be bothered. More often than not it was Paul who instigated things.

Much was made in the British press when they started publishing excerpts . . . that it was John who left the Beatles first, that it wasn't Paul who broke up the Beatles, it was John. To fans this is not news. John in the fall of '69 said to them, "I want out. I want a divorce." Though he didn't really make any moves to do anything.

The final Beatles recording sessions were Paul, George and Ringo. They were finishing off a song of George's (I, Me, Mine) that was in the Let It Be movie that they had never done a proper recording of. In January 1970, John was off in Denmark on holiday.

Paul says that in those months they would keep calling each other and saying, "Are we going to do anything? Is this it? Is it over?" Nobody was really sure. (The actual breakup) didn't happen until they had the spat over the timing of the release of Paul's solo album (in April 1970), and Paul decided to make it public. John, of course, was peeved because here he had been saying for months he wanted out and now Paul's the one grabbing headlines and uses (the breakup) to sell an album.

Times: There's the funny and sort of sad story Ringo tells about when he quit the band. He goes over to Lennon's house and says, "I'm not playing well and you three are getting along so well." And Lennon says, "I thought it was you three." What do you make of that?

King: That was, of course, in the Anthology TV series and was one of Ringo's more memorable stories. There again, among students of the band it was well known that while they were recording The White Album, Ringo walked out and went off on holiday in Greece and a week and a half later comes back and they welcome him with flowers.

George walked out during the recording of what became Let It Be. What's actually kind of funny is that they buy into their own legend. The legend is that George walked out because Paul was being bossy, and if you listen to the actual studio recordings, what actually spurred George to walk out is that he was so fed up with John because John was basically on heroin and wasn't interested in what was going on and wouldn't participate. They all at different times were disenchanted, but Paul was probably the one who would have kept it going the longest.

Times: I forget who said this, but their studio sessions became more difficult because after they stopped touring they were less and less in practice. They would snipe at each other as they tried to work something out that perhaps they might have worked out on the road.

King: I don't know that I buy that, because I think that their playing improved immeasurably after they stopped touring. As they say in this book, they got to be bad during the touring years because they couldn't even hear themselves. Neil Aspinall notes the afternoon show in Tokyo was the first time in years they played for an audience that wasn't screaming, and they were shocked at how bad they sounded. By the evening show they had gotten it together and sounded a little bit better. In the studio years, what it became more of was that it was no longer as collaborative a process. Instead of the Beatles doing a song, it was, "This is Paul's song and the other three are his sidemen. Then it's John's song and the other three are his sidemen, and so on."

Times: Should we believe Paul McCartney when he says, "The basic thing in my mind was that for all our success the Beatles were always a great little band, nothing more, nothing less." Is that just false modesty or is there some truth to that?

King: No, I think there's some truth to that. That's how they kept their sanity. They talked about being in the eye of the hurricane. George says, "Everyone else was insane. We were the only sane ones."

Times: In the book there are a number of instances in which the band members ridicule people who overinterpret their songs. Ringo even disparagingly refers to America as "the land of interpretive people." What are Beatles fans to think when their idols are making fun of their obsession?

King: It's not so much the fans' obsession as it was the pretentious critics. That's who they usually were making fun of. There's the oft-quoted example where the Times (of London) critic was using all these highfalutin music terms like "aeolian cadences." The Beatles didn't have the slightest idea what an "aeolian cadence" was. They did things because it sounded good. They did slip things into their lyrics and people would totally miss it, and things that were just made up on the spot and just sounded fun would have great significance attached to them after the album came out. They wrote a song, Glass Onion, on The White Album that is essentially talking about that whole situation.

Times: The last words in the book were Lennon's from 1967. "I'm no loner searching for God. I'm no longer searching for anything. There is no search. There's no way to go. There's nothing. This is it. We'll probably carry on writing music forever." Do you think that's supposed to be some ironic commentary on the fact that they didn't go on writing music forever?

King: Well, it is in a way. It's also a commentary on the fact that, here we are 30 years later and we're still talking about them and they're still talking about them. In a way they did go on forever, not writing music, but the music they did write has gone on forever. If you look at the very, very back of the book, there's something from one of John's schoolboy books: "By hook or by crook, I'll be the last in this book." I thought that was a nice touch. It summed up the way John was. It's a Beatle-esque touch.

Times: You've called it a coffee table book.

King: It's a coffee table book in terms of the size, and it's beautifully presented. It's not a coffee table book in terms that most people think of them as picture books. This is very dense text. This will take you a long time to read.

Times: Emphasis on dense. I'd be careful what coffee table I put it down on.

King: This is one where middle-age people definitely want to pull out the bifocals.

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