Once more, it’s winter in Maine. The pond has been iced over for weeks now, along with the road into town. Deer tracks criss-cross the snow and the wild turkeys are regular visitors to the porch, where they share black oil sunflower seeds with the jays, chickadees, and red squirrels. This morning, walking in the woods with my dog, I came upon a fallen tree, its bark newly shredded by the resident porcupine...

It was early January when I wrote these opening words, enfolded in the solitude of our little house in the woods. Spring comes late here in Maine, but as I write this, the sharp edge of winter has broken. The ice on the pond is melting, and the turkeys and birds and squirrels visit less frequently now. And I know I should re-write that opening passage to reflect these seasonal changes.

But discordant as that passage reads now, I can’t bring myself to rewrite it. Despite the signs of new life that surround me, my spirit is still in deep winter, my walks in the woods truly solitary now, because my soul dog River is no longer at my side. And because she was such an integral part of my work on The Abbey, I can’t bear to erase her footprint from these pages.

And so those opening words remain — out of sync and out of time, a small semantic tribute to the remarkable being whom I’ve loved and shared my life with for the past twelve years. River was… River is… beautiful, and important, and I am diminished without her.

Inside our little house in the woods, I’m finding a measure of solace in researching Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, which I’ve been doing since we concluded Part One. Structurally unsound stacks of books once again weigh down my kitchen table. Virtual folders of additional material fill my hard drive — among them, those 8,433 jpegs from the Northwestern University Beatles archive that I’m gradually working my way through.

So what of Part Two, you might ask?

The best answer I can offer is that I’ll begin writing Part Two in earnest when I’m reasonably convinced that nothing I might uncover in further research will significantly impact what I’ve gathered so far. That will probably — hopefully — be in late summer.

Until then, here we are, with this unexpected little series that those of you familiar with Beautiful Possibility probably don’t quite know what to do with yet. If you’re one of those people, welcome back and I’m right there with you — I didn’t quite know what to do with Seven Levels either, when it seduced its way into my life and refused to leave until I wrote it.

I say “seduced” because time and again I’ve tried to fold Seven Levels into Part Two where it seems for all the world like it belongs — and time and again, it refused to go gracefully and insisted on being its own thing. And more than that, it insisted on being in the world not later, but now. It took me a long time to understand why this is. And it will take all of Seven Levels before we have enough context to be able to fully share that reason with you.

So now that Seven Levels is here, what is it exactly? And how does it fit into Beautiful Possibility?

The answer is that Seven Levels is a bit of a hybrid. It’s part of Beautiful Possibility and also at the same time a standalone series all on its own.

As part of Beautiful Possibility, the best way to think of Seven Levels is as a bridge that we need to cross to get from Part One to Part Two. Seven Levels builds on the foundation we established in Part One, and it covers important things that we need to cover before getting to Part Two.

But while Seven Levels is a necessary bridge to Part Two, it’s important to keep in mind that the approach in Seven Levels is very different from the way we’re going to tell the story in Part Two.

So if at any point, you find yourself wondering why we’re talking about what we’re talking about in the way we’re talking about it, I ask — as I did in Part One — for your patience and your trust that we are doing things in the way and in the order in which they need to be done, and that all will be made clear in the end.

On its own as a standalone series, Seven Levels is a deep dive into the events of August 28 1964, when — according to Beatles folklore — Bob Dylan arrived at the Delmonico Hotel in New York City and introduced The Beatles to cannabis for the first time.

We’ve arrived here somewhat by accident, or maybe — in view of that whole seduction business — synchronicity. For sure, Seven Levels was not part of the grand plan.

Seven Levels began as research into “Got To Get You Into My Life” — a song that Paul says he wrote about his discovery of cannabis. It was meant to be a bit of simple research, but I should know by now that nothing about researching the story of The Beatles is ever simple.

“Got To Get You Into My Life” led to researching the Dylan story, and researching the Dylan story led to— well, we’ll get to all of that. For here, let’s just say the whole situation was like tugging at a loose thread. The more I researched, the more the canonical story of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Delmonico Hotel began to unravel, revealing another, more complex narrative hidden beneath the surface.

This deeper narrative of the events and after-effects of August 28 1964 is a story that — as far as I can tell — is untold in both mainstream and countercultural Beatles writing. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes absurd, sometimes heartbreaking, it’s a story that I’ve come to believe is essential to our understanding of Lennon/McCartney — and of John and Paul — which is probably why it was able to seduce me in the first place.

In Seven Levels, I’d like to share that story with you.

Next week, we will get properly started with Seven Levels. But before we do, there are a few things it might be helpful to know in advance to get the most out of this series.

First, it’s more of a mini-series — four somewhat-longer-than-usual-length chapters with a Wrap-Up at the end. There are no Rabbit Holes. As with Part One of Beautiful Possibility, Seven Levels will be presented in both written and audio form. In keeping with our custom here on The Abbey, new chapters will be published Mondays at 7:57 a.m. US Eastern time.

Like Part One of Beautiful Possibility, Seven Levels is not a traditional “podcast,” in which each individual episode is meant to stand on its own. Seven Levels is a book presented in written and audio form. And because it’s a book, it works best in sequence, each chapter building on the one before, until we reach the final chapter where we’ll put together all the pieces we laid out in the preceding chapters.

To make it more clear that Seven Levels is a complete work in serialised form, you’ve probably already noticed that we’re switching from “episodes” to “chapters.” This means those of you who are either amused or annoyed at the way I pronounce “episode” will have less to be amused or annoyed by, but I trust we will all make the adjustment.

Because Seven Levels is both a standalone series and also a bridge between Part One and Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, it’s both necessary and also not necessary to be familiar with Beautiful Possibility in order to engage with Seven Levels. Which of the two it is depends mostly on you.

Part One of Beautiful Possibility established the foundation for everything that follows, whether officially part of Beautiful Possibility or not. And by definition, that means everything that follows after Part One assumes familiarity with what came before.

Stepping through everything we talked about in Part One was complex and delicate work, and it took us a very long time — 29.5 hours, to be exact. And of course, it’s not practical to review all 29.5 hours of material every time we talk about something new.

It would be ideal if I could solve that problem by offering you a quick “Cliff notes”—style summary of what we covered in Part One. But I haven’t found a practical way to do that — if I could summarize Part One in a few paragraphs, I wouldn’t have needed to write it all out the way I did in the first place.

More than not being practical, it’s ethically problematic to short-stroke the delicate and complex discussion we had in Part One. And I think it would be a disservice to Paul and John — and to this work and the story of The Beatles as a whole — to try.

All of that said, I’ll do my best to offer recaps of relevant parts of Part One when it’s possible to do so in a sentence or two, either in the main text or in a footnote. The trade-off for these recaps is that “as we talked about in Part One” is likely to replace “episode” as the expression that most annoys some of you — it’s certainly annoying me. I hope those of you already familiar with Beautiful Possibility can be gracious in allowing this small annoyance as a help those who are new to The Abbey.

So if you aren’t yet familiar with Beautiful Possibility, and you can deal with not knowing what came before and with the summaries as and when they’re possible, then you will have no trouble following along with Seven Levels. If on the other hand, you suffer from fear of missing out, you might be happier if you back up and read Part One of Beautiful Possibility before engaging with Seven Levels.

And while we’re on the subject, welcome, I’m glad you’re here.

If you’re already familiar with Beautiful Possibility and you’re here mostly for further exploration of the material we talked about in Part One, I promise we will get there in the final two chapters of this series. As with Part One, we have some groundwork to lay first.

Those of you who are already familiar with Beautiful Possibility will notice that a lot of the most important material we covered in Part One — especially related to the relationship between John and Paul — will be notably absent from the first two chapters of Seven Levels. For those of you who are mostly here for that part of things, I’m not trying to be coy by holding this part of things back, nor am I intending to backtrack from the progress we made in Part One. It’s just that I’d like to give the new people an opportunity to get to know — and hopefully trust — my work before we dive into the deep end of the pool. So once again, I ask for your patience — we’ll get there, because of course we will.

Okay, next thing.

Some of your emails over the past months suggest to me that it might be time to remind y’all that while I am the daughter of a historian, I myself am not a historian. Nor am I a musicologist or a music critic, although some of these elements will obviously find their way into Seven Levels as they find their way into Beautiful Possibility. What I am is, among other things, a mythologist, a storyteller, a wordsmith, a former professional researcher, and a student of human behaviour — and those are the frames through which we’re going to consider the events of August 28 1964.

Next, no Preface would be complete without my traditional nagging reminder about the footnotes.

Some of you already know that on The Abbey, we do footnotes a bit differently. They’re not just source citations, although you’ll find those as well. Footnotes are an ongoing conversation between me and those of you who read them. And as such, they’re something of a community in and of themselves.

Footnotes are often where the deeper story is told, and where you’ll find research and commentary that’s a bit too spicy or speculative or snarky to include in the main chapter. Footnotes are also where you’ll get peeks into future parts of Beautiful Possibility that aren’t shared anywhere else.

Perhaps most importantly for those of you who are mostly here for the discussion of the relationship between John and Paul, for the first two chapters, that discussion lives in the footnotes.

It’s easy to include the footnotes in your reading.

You can hover over the footnote number in the main text and the note will appear as a floating pop up window, without losing your place in the text. Like this➡️.1

Or to read the footnotes all at once, scroll down to where they begin, and click the number to see where the footnote appears in the main text to get the context. Then click the number again to return to the list of footnotes where you left off. Like this➡️.2

Next, a few notes about language.

As with Beautiful Possibility, there is occasional profanity in this series, from the Fabs and from me. I have a fondness for how we went over the profanity situation in the Preface to Part One, so I’m going to repeat that same language here—

As a wordsmith, words are the raw material of my craft, and to tell this story as it deserves telling, I need all the words, not just the polite ones — in the same way that a visual artist needs all the colours on the palette. Also, to offer some perspective, when it comes to things to be offended by, profanity is fairly trivial in comparison to the offensive realities of everyday life as it’s currently unfolding — and that is even more true now than it was the first time I pointed that out. Nonetheless, if there are tiny ears involved and you’re sensitive about exposing them to the full breadth and beauty of the English language, be forewarned.

Also, Seven Levels has not been formally proofread. Good proofreading is expensive, and my budget is limited. I chose to spend it on research rather than on finding misplaced commas. So you should probably expect some typos.

My writer’s vanity also once again compels me to apologize for the inconsistent verb tenses that appear throughout this series. As with Part One of Beautiful Possibility, the story we’re about to tell veers from past to present to future, often in the same sentence, and involves people on both sides of the veil. All of which makes the consistent use of past, present, and future tense virtually impossible, and I’ve long since given up trying to sort it out. It is what it is, and we’ll all have to live with it as it is.

I also need to warn you that language will fail me a bit in our discussion about Bob Dylan introducing The Beatles to— well, that’s the thing. Unsurprisingly, we don’t have a good word for cannabis in our language that’s not pretentious or dated or square or a little silly-sounding in a piece like this.

Much of the slang and terminology we use today didn’t exist in the Sixties, and would be anachronistic. And as for the words that were available during the Sixties, I feel a little silly using slang like “weed” and “pot” and even “marijuana.” There’s nothing wrong with those words — it’s just that none of them feel natural to me. And “cannabis” sounds to me like I’m writing a business prospectus or a scientific paper.

Fortunately, the outtake of “Baby, You’re A Rich Man” on Anthology 4 saved the day. If Paul and John could ask Mal for “cannabis” while recording at Abbey Road at the height of the Love Revolution, then surely I can get away with calling it “cannabis” here on The Abbey. So “cannabis” it will (mostly) be.

Before we wrap up here, I want to offer a before-the-fact thank you. Fab research assistant Robyn has been less available due to some personal obligations. And I’m deeply grateful to the small group of volunteer researchers who have stepped up as and when they can to help research Seven Levels — especially since they were justifiably confused about what Bob Dylan has to do with Beautiful Possibility.

I’d also prefer not to wait until the Wrap-Up to offer a mea culpa apology to my friends and colleagues. Between writing Seven Levels and the existential crisis of losing River, I’ve managed over the past few months to slag off, offend or annoy pretty much every single person in my life. Thank you to all of you for allowing me to be the Holy Fool in service of my passion for this story during an extremely difficult time.

And finally, to those of you whose emails I haven’t yet responded to and who have sent in questions about Beautiful Possibility that I haven’t yet answered, Seven Levels is the main reason for the delay. Thank you for your patience and I will get to all of you on the other side of this series.

Until next week, when we will get started in earnest.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

2

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It was supposed to be a bit of simple research — but I should know by now that nothing about researching the story of The Beatles is simple.

Like tugging at a loose thread, the more I researched, the more the canonical story of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Delmonico Hotel began to unravel — revealing another, more complex narrative hidden beneath the surface.

This deeper narrative of the events and after-effects of August 28, 1964 is a story that — as far as I can tell — is untold in both mainstream and countercultural Beatles writing. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes absurd, sometimes heartbreaking, it’s a story that I’ve come to believe is essential to our understanding of Lennon/McCartney — and of John and Paul.

I’d like to share that story with you.

Seven Levels

What really happened at the Delmonico Hotel on August 28, 1964?

A bridge between Part One and Part Two of Beautiful Possibility

Series premiere, Monday, April 27 7:57 a.m. US eastern time

Preface

Chapter 1: Midnight at the Riviera Idlewild Motel

Chapter 2: Of Emperors and Princes

Chapter 3: A Taste of Acid

Chapter 4: Dangerous Speculations

Wrap-Up: Why This Series?

It was supposed to be a bit of simple research — but I should know by now that nothing about researching the story of The Beatles is simple.

Like tugging at a loose thread, the more I researched, the more the canonical story of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Delmonico Hotel began to unravel — revealing another, more complex narrative hidden beneath the surface.

This deeper narrative of the events and after-effects of August 28, 1964 is a story that — as far as I can tell — is untold in both mainstream and countercultural Beatles writing. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes absurd, sometimes heartbreaking, it’s a story that I’ve come to believe is essential to our understanding of Lennon/McCartney — and of John and Paul.

I’d like to share that story with you.

Seven Levels

What really happened at the Delmonico Hotel on August 28, 1964?

A bridge between Part One and Part Two of Beautiful Possibility

Series premiere, Monday, April 27 7:57 a.m. US eastern time

Preface

Chapter 1: Midnight at the Riviera Idlewild Motel

Chapter 2: Of Emperors and Princes

Chapter 3: A Taste of Acid

Chapter 4: Dangerous Speculations

Wrap-Up: Why This Series?

Hi everyone,

Thank you to all of you for being patient with me while I struggle to adjust to a life without my best girl. I’m taking it one day at a time. And thank you to all of you IRL who have been gracious about my grouchiness and mood swings and many other less than lovely things. Despite what poets and fanfic writers might have us believe, grief is not romantic. It’s messy and ugly and there is no graceful way through it.

But I am finding my way back, and this week, I want to share a few very scruffy initial thoughts on “Days We Left Behind,” in case they might be helpful to those of you who are deconstructing the lyric.

Specifically, I thought it might be useful to take a close look at the part of the song that’s (rightly, imo) getting the most attention — the so-called “middle eight” that Paul has explicitly told us is about him and John—

"Songwriters, you know, and writers in general, what else can you draw on besides the past? I mean you could do the present, but still a lot of the past in that. So anyway, this is the past. It's just a lot of memories of Liverpool for me, and that involves a little bit in the middle about John, Forthlin Road, which is where I — the street I used to live on."1

Before we do that, though, a caveat—

I haven’t yet taken a close look at — much less considered — the full lyric of “Days We Left Behind,” or the wealth of imagery in the two videos released alongside the song.

Analyzing part of a song without considering the whole song is, obviously, less than ideal. Generally speaking, any individual part of any song is best considered in the context of the whole song (and ideally the whole album and even more ideally, the whole of an artist’s work). This avoids what Grail scholar Jessie L. Weston calls “criticism by isolation” — aka, interpreting the meaning of a single element of a larger work on its own without considering its relationship to the larger work.

What’s more, even a surface listen/watch suggests that “Days We Left Behind” is a piece of sophisticated lyrical work. I suspect there’s enough subtext, metaphor and symbolism in it to justify the kind of deep dive we did for “Bless You.” Alas that will have to wait until another day, since I don’t have quite the bandwidth to do that just now (which is also why the question about “However Absurd” is still pending, my apologies to the person who asked it 326 years ago…).

All of which is to say that — to paraphrase Shakespeare — discretion is the better part of valor, and I should probably keep my lyrical interpretations to myself until I’ve considered the whole song. And mostly I’m going to do just that.

But while there are hard limits to what we can do without considering the whole song, I think there are a few things we can notice about the middle eight, just based on how language works.

So this week — perhaps because I’m a bit addlepated by various things — I’m going to cast scholarly prudence to the wind and give it a go.

Okay, then. Here’s the “middle eight”—

We met at Forthlin Road

And wrote a secret code

To never be spoken

I stand by what I said

The promise that I made

Will never be broken

As per usual with McCartney and/or Lennon, the wordplay here is tricky to parse and not at all as simple as it might appear on first glance.

My initial thought was that the promise…that will never be broken is directly related to the secret code to never be spoken. Essentially, “I, Paul, promised you, John, that I would never reveal our secret code, and I will never break that promise.”

That fits grammatically. And John has acknowledged at least once that The Beatles used a secret code to communicate in public—

'We talk in code to each other as Beatles. We always did that, when we had so many strangers round us on tours. We never really communicated with other people. Now that we don't meet strangers at all, there is no need for any communication. We understand each other. It doesn't matter about the rest.”2

The existence of a secret Beatles code isn’t especially revelatory or conspiratorial, nor is it unique to the Fabs.

Public figures often have a system of verbal and nonverbal signals that they use to communicate with their inner circle while in public. There’s no reason to think The Beatles would be an exception to this — though I’d guess/hope a Fab code would be a bit more inventive than the usual “if I scratch my nose, it means I’m bored with the person I’m talking to so please come interrupt me” sort of code that high-profle people usually use with their teams.

The thing is, though, I doubt this is the kind of code that Paul is referring to in “Days We Left Behind.”

The “secret code” Paul writes about is self-evidently personal to Paul and John, and clearly holds a deep emotional significance for Paul and presumably for John. Whatever the secret code is, it seems all but certain it refers to something just between the two of them, rather than a more general “Beatles thing.”

And indeed, there are clues in the research that suggest that John and Paul had a separate secret code of their own.

There are, for instance, oblique references from those who spent time with them that John and Paul together often seemed to inhabit a world from which everyone else was excluded. For example, here’s what one of their teenage friends in Liverpool once observed about Paul and John together—

“On one occasion that still resonates for those involved, the Quarry Men went to a party in Ford, a village on the outskirts of Liverpool, out past the Aintree Racecourse. ‘John and Paul were inseparable that night, like Siamese twins,’ says Charles Roberts, who met them en route on the upper deck of a cherry red Ripple bus. ‘It was like the rest of us didn’t exist.’ They spent most of the evening talking, conducting a whispery summit in one corner, Roberts recalls.” 3

Roberts’ recollection certainly suggests that Paul and John’s relationship was intimate and exclusionary enough to inspire the creation of that sort of code, starting in the early days in which “Days We Left Behind” is set.

Obviously, given Paul has specified that this code was secret, we probably wouldn’t recognise the use of such a code if we heard or saw it in action. That’s rather the point of having a secret code. But it might be that we get occasional glimpses of it.

We’re probably witnessing a bit of the John/Paul code in Get Back — in those cryptic exchanges between the two of them that they seem to understand just fine, but that those around them (including us) don’t. These cryptic exchanges include inside references, nonverbal gestures and lots of eye contact — and perhaps most notably, snippets of song, which we’ll come back to in a minute.4

We might also be seeing an example of a secret John/Paul code in the “spider hands” clip from the June 1964 Adelaide press conference, where it’s obvious that a silent conversation is going on between John and a somewhat reluctant Paul.5

Watch their hands, their body language, and their eyeline. (Beyond the obvious, it helps if you turn down the volume.)

And, of course, Paul wrote a whole song about just such a secret code in 1986 —which could be about Linda, except it’s not clear why Linda would need a secret code to tell her lawfully-wedded husband that she wants some private time.

(YouTube link)

All of this is to say that it seems highly likely that Paul and John did indeed have a literal secret code between them. And it’s possible that the Forthlin Road promise in “Days We Left Behind” is simply Paul’s promise never to reveal that secret code to the world.

That is certainly possible. But I’m having all kinds of trouble buying it, because it seems more than a little lightweight, given the context.

In the middle eight, Paul is making a promise to John — and more than a promise, essentially a life-long vow — originally made in private and now, sixty years after the fact, reaffirmed in public. And that promise — that vow — is the emotional centerpiece of the song Paul chose to feature on what looks to be his most personal and confessional album — an album that promises “new revelations” about “the story before the story.”

Whatever this promise is, it’s clearly an important touchstone in Paul’s relationship with John. Maybe even a defining one, given it’s a life-long vow. So is Paul really telling us that the most important promise he made to John — the vow he made and is now reaffirming with the whole world as his witness — was never to tell anyone what spider hands means?

I mean, maybe, but…

Another possibility is that the secret code isn’t so much a literal code as a euphemism for their romantic relationship (assuming there was one) — “I, Paul, promise you, John, that I’ll never tell anyone about our secret love affair.”

This is, I think, the interpretation we’re most likely to reach for if we’re considering the middle eight through the frame of the lovers possibility. But I think this interpretation might be a bit of confirmation bias — seeing what we’re expecting to see, rather than what’s really there. And that confirmation bias/expectation is probably due to the presence of the word “secret” alongside the words to never be spoken in the overall context of a (possible) hidden love affair.

The problem is that to get this interpretation to work, we have to ignore the “code” part of “secret code.” Because “code” doesn’t fit this interpretation, if what’s being promised is never to reveal a secret relationship. Two people in a relationship might have a code, but the relationship itself isn’t a “code” — it’s, well, it’s a relationship.

To get the “I promise I’ll never tell anyone about our secret love affair” interpretation to work requires turning a blind eye to this discordant use of the word “code.”

But I hope it’s self-evident that ignoring words in a lyric just because they don’t fit our interpretation of the song is a bad idea. And it’s an especially bad idea to ignore words in lyrics when we’re dealing with Paul McCartney — one of history’s most accomplished songwriters, who’s been playing with double meanings and misdirection in lyrics (and in interviews) since before most of us were born.

What helps us out here is the word “wrote,” as in we wrote a secret code.

In this context, “wrote” initially seems an odd word to pair with “code.” Yes, technically one can write a code (and here Paul’s obviously talking about a cipher rather than computer code, although you can of course write that kind of code, too). So is Paul telling us that he and John literally sat down one afternoon at Forthlin Road with a notebook and wrote out a list of words and signals with which to communicate covertly in public?

Again, maybe. But it seems beyond unlikely that this kind of literal secret code would carry so much emotional weight sixty-plus years after the fact that Paul is reaffirming his promise to keep it secret.

Paul and John writing out a literal secret code also seems unlikely just for its formality.

If there was a “talking privately in public” kind of code between them — and probably there was — it seems far more likely that such a code would have developed organically over the years, as with any two people who’ve been in a relationship for a long time. The code would likely be the result of a shared history of inside references and experiences, rather than a deliberate “let’s sit down and write out a code” situation.

But of course, there’s a whole other meaning of “wrote,” when we’re dealing with Lennon and McCartney at Forthlin Road (along with the “cheap guitars” of the opening verse). And that meaning isn’t odd at all. In fact, it’s iconic.

So iconic, in fact, that the image of John and Paul writing together at Forthlin Road is perhaps the single most iconic image of the Lennon/McCartney partnership.

The context in which Paul has set his reference to the secret code — Lennon, McCartney, Forthlin Road, cheap guitars (in the opening verse), and writing — suggests to the point of certainty that the “secret code” Paul’s referring to is — obviously — in their songs.

This wouldn’t be a particularly big revelation. We talked at length in Part One of Beautiful Possibility about how there is overwhelming research to suggest Paul and John used their songs as a way to have a private conversation in public — which is exactly the function of a secret code.

And as we also talked in Part One, Paul and John seem to have communicated through song not just during and after the breakup, but throughout the entire history of their relationship — and still today, given we’re talking about Paul’s latest song written for John.

The next line — to never be spoken — makes it even more certain likely that the secret code refers to the songs of Lennon/McCartney.

Here’s that line in context—

We met at Forthlin Road

And wrote a secret code

To never be spoken

I stand by what I said

The promise that I made

Will never be broken

One interpretation of to never be spoken is the one we already talked about — Paul is promising isthat he will never reveal the secret code. But, again, I’m not sure that’s what’s actually happening here, for the reasons we already talked about, and also because within the structure of the middle eight, to never be spoken isn’t referring to the promise — it’s referring to the secret code.

And if the “secret code” is the songs of Lennon/McCartney — which it seems virtually certain that it is — then to never be spoken takes on a whole different meaning — because generally speaking, songs aren’t spoken, they’re sung.

It’s possible that to never be spoken is Paul is telling us (but really singing to us) that he and John immortalized their love story in their songs, and that the “secret code” is the truth of their story in those songs — a code that’s never spoken, but only sung. And more than that — a code that’s relatively easily decipherable for anyone motivated to look carefully at the deeper meaning and subtext of the songs of Lennon/McCartney.

And further, it’s possible that in this middle eight, Paul is letting us know that he’s decided to share some “new revelations” — whatever they might be — not in a spoken interview or a book or a documentary, but in the way that Paul McCartney has told us for decades is his preferred way of sharing the details of his life — in his music. And this is perhaps why he’s chosen “Days We Left Behind” as the introductory song for The Boys Of Dungeon Road.

So what then of the promise never to be broken?

Well, obviously, if the secret code is concealed in the songs of Lennon/McCartney, then by definition, the promise…that will never be broken can’t be to never reveal the code — it’s already been revealed in the songs. And it’s not like Paul’s steering us away from that code — he’s explicitly directed us to look for the truth of his life in his songs.

Here he is in 2002 in his introduction to The Lyrics—

“Over time I came to see each song as a new puzzle. It would illuminate something that was important in my life at that moment, though the meanings are not always obvious on the surface. Fans or readers, or even critics, who really want to learn more about my life should read my lyrics, which might reveal more than any single book about The Beatles could do.” (emphasis added)

If the promise Paul made to John was that he wouldn’t reveal the secret code, and if the secret code is in the songs, then telling us to go look for their story in the songs would be breaking that promise. And Paul tells us explicitly in the middle eight that he’ll never break that promise.

If the “secret code” is in the songs — which it very much seems to be — then the promise can’t be to never reveal the secret code. It’s already been revealed — for those who are willing — and Grail-fluent6 enough — to look.

So what is the promise that Paul is standing by?

Well, Paul doesn’t tell us that — at least not in the middle eight. And much as I would love to know, that’s probably how it should be because, of course, the promise is in all likelihood a private matter between Paul and John. Paul is already generous in even telling us of its existence.

But an artist can’t help but reveal themselves in their art, whether they intend to or not. And it seems virtually certain that a promise so consequential that Paul is reaffirming it sixty years after the fact is going to find its way into his songwriting. And that means that there are almost certainly more clues to the nature of that promise in other Paul McCartney songs. And Paul has directed us to look at his songs for the truth of his life, which means anything we find there is something Paul has given us permission to find.

Again, I haven’t had the opportunity yet to do a thoughtful search to see how the promise might appear in Paul’s catalogue of work — though that’s now been added to the “to do” list for researching Part Two of Beautiful Possibility. But the song that comes to mind immediately is “Get Enough” from the 2019 Explorer version of Egypt Station.

Here’s the opening verse—

There was a time when we walked by the docks

I told you I’d need you all of my life

And watching the chugs rolling by, together

Do you remember?

Do you remember the lights on the shore?

How they reflected the rain on the road

I believed that you loved me alone, it was real

Do you remember?

The docks were Liverpool’s defining geographical feature during Paul and John’s teenage years when Paul lived at Forthlin Road — certainly they were how Liverpool was most known to the rest of the world (before the Fabs, that is). Given Paul has not , to my knowledge, made a home in a city in which working docks are even a noteworthy feature since leaving Liverpool in 1963, it seems likely he’s writing about and to John.

While there are lots of reasons one might make a lifelong promise to someone we love, erotic and romantic fidelity is by far the most common motivation for such a promise. If “Get Enough” is indeed written about/to John, it suggests that Paul’s promise to John may simply have been, “I’ll love you forever” — which, of course isn’t a simple promise at all, and even more so if you’re a teenage boy in love with another boy in Liverpool in the 1950s.

And to push speculation just a step further, a pledge of fidelity and eternal love is, of course, the vow most commonly pledged in our culture, the only vow most people ever formally make — usually in the form of a wedding vow.

And while a legal wedding vow wouldn’t have been available to Paul and John at any point in John’s lifetime and for the majority of Paul’s lifetime, lovers — even secret ones — have throughout history pledged eternal love to one another in serious, binding ceremonies, whether that union was sanctioned by society or not.

Again, just speculation, for the beauty of it, and because Paul has invited us to do so.

Given Paul’s promise of a confessional album, they may well be more clues to the nature of the promise on The Boys of Dungeon Lane. We’ll need to wait to see what other revelations Paul chooses to share with us.

Whatever the specific meaning of the promise, one thing is sure—

This middle eight, all on its own, ought to dispel any lingering doubts that Paul and John’s relationship — romantic/erotic or otherwise — was intense, committed, long-term, and emotionally intimate.

In Part Two of Beautiful Possibility (and maybe even a bit sooner than that…😉), we’ll continue to explore the way in which that shared intimacy shaped the story and music of The Beatles, and thus our world and all of us.

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

Oh, and also—

And about “Now And Then”—

We’re gettin’ there. Now let’s just put 1 + 1 together…

I was hoping to resume normal updates this week, but I’m going to take a bit more time away — probably the rest of March. For twelve years, River and I were rarely apart, and the daily rhythms of our lives were so deeply intertwined that I’m struggling to find my footing without her.

But I am still faithfully at work on Part Two of Beautiful Possibility. And I’m increasingly hopeful that I’ll soon have an unexpected and quite substantial offering for y’all — not yet Part Two, but a substantial offering nonetheless.1

For now, here’s a favourite photograph of John and friend, from the filming of Magical Mystery Tour, when John, too, was struggling to find his footing.

Thank you for your patience, while I adjust to life without my best girl.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓🐾

Hi everyone,

This week’s update will be scruffier than usual, because a few days ago, I had to say goodbye to my beloved dog River.

This isn’t something I’d normally share on The Abbey. But this is a special circumstance — River was an important contributor to The Abbey and I probably should have credited her long ago. So I’m going to attempt to do so here, and I hope you’ll forgive me if my words are clunky.

I am, of course, grieving, but I also know that River’s passing is not a tragedy — she was 13 years old and she and I spent 12 of those years together, and she lived a life full of joy and adventure and love. She had what they’d call in Liverpool “good innings,” and then she was ready to go — even if I wasn’t ready to let her go.

River was a complex sensitive, joyful dog — part husky, part pittie, part coyote. Like me, she needed freedom and open spaces, and she inspired me to create a life for both of us in which she (and I) could have those things in abundance. Our journeys together took us from Southern California’s iconic Topanga Canyon to the stormy Oregon coast to the high desert of New Mexico, and finally, to the woods of Maine. It’s tricky to pin down an exact chain of cause and effect, but a credible case could be made that my willingness to take the risk of writing Beautiful Possibility happened because she taught me to see horizons rather than obstacles, to value curiousity more than security, and to choose love over fear.

I wrote much of Part One of Beautiful Possibility talking into my phone recorder while hiking with River on some forest trail. I edited all of Part One with her sleeping next to me. If you listen closely, you can hear her paws clicking across the wood floor in the background of more than one episode. I could have edited her footsteps out, but why?

So this week, with the clunky words that I’m able to find, I simply want to acknowledge River’s contribution to the work of The Abbey. She was more than my inspiration, she was… well, as so often happens, the English language doesn’t have good words. But some of you maybe know what I’m not finding the words for, because maybe you’ve loved a dog this way, too.

I also hope you won’t mind too much if I take next week off from updates, and maybe the week after as well. River’s passing was not a tragedy, but I nonetheless need some time to grieve and to begin to find my footing now that my best girl is on the other side of the veil. But whether it’s one week or two, be assured I will be back very soon.

In another lifetime, I was a professional photographer, so I have many, many “professional” photos of River from our 12 years together. But tonight, the one I love the most isn’t especially “professional.” It’s just River and her best friend looking out over her land, that she loved so much.

Thank you for indulging me this week. Until the week after next or the week after that.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

Hi everyone,

A few months ago when last I was in London, I came into possession of what I’m told is the only copy in existence of the agreement assigning US/Canadian publishing rights for “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to Duchess Music, for the price of one shilling (that’s about a quarter, I think, in 1964).

I don’t pretend to have enough understanding of the labyrinthian ways of cross-border music publishing to know how this worked or the implications thereof for Lennon/McCartney. But I can say that it was certainly a thrill — as it always is — to hold in my hands an original piece like this, and I’m grateful to have had the experience of doing so.

But as much as I love holding a piece of Beatles history in my hands, I also recognise that this document is in, an important way, not mine to keep — especially given it’s directly related to Paul and John’s lifelong quest to regain what should be their rightful control of the songs they wrote together.

Sadly, I don’t have the power to undo the damage done by exploitative publishing contracts — would that I did. But over the past week, I’ve completed arrangements to put this document into the hands in which it more truly belongs. I hope its rightful owner finds a tiny bit of healing in its return, even if it doesn’t change the overall situation.1

This is not a story I’d normally publish on The Abbey. I’m telling you about it only because there’s a second moral imperative to be considered.

Documents like this are part of our shared history. As such, I believe that this publishing agreement should be accessible to scholars, researchers, and anyone else who might be interested. So while I’m still officially its keeper, I’m posting the photographs of the document here.

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

Hi everyone,

This week, I thought I’d bring your attention to a quote from a 1982 interview with Paul McCartney, in answer to an interview question about whether or not “Tug Of War”— the title song from his 1982 album of the same name — is about John.

Before we get to the quote, let’s just notice that it would be a difficult case to make that “Tug Of War” isn’t about John. There are a number of reasons for that, most obviously the title and the opening verse—

It’s a tug of war

What with one thing and another

It’s a tug of war

We expected more

But with one thing and another

We were trying to outdo each other

In a tug of war

Which is probably why the journalist asked the question in the first place—

Q. Did you have John Lennon in mind [when you wrote “Tug of War”]?

PAUL: No. But halfway through it, John was killed. I can’t believe it to this day, I can’t even say those words... But “Here Today” is the only song specifically about that. Obviously, “Tug of War” ties in. And so does “Somebody Who Cares.” I remember being aware of John’s death while writing it.1

You may have noticed that recent updates have been usually Paul-focused. That’s because I’ve been working my way through the interviews with him in the research from the Northwestern archive. And this quote especially caught my eye because while Paul frequently hints indirectly that “Tug Of War” is about John, this is the example I’ve found in which he most explicitly acknowledges it.

On first glance, it might not seem that Paul is explicitly acknowledging that “Tug Of War” is about John, given the “no” at the beginning of it. And that’s the other reason this quote caught my attention — because it’s a good example of the sort of thing Paul routinely does when talking to the press, especially about the meanings of his songs, and especially about the meaning of his songs that might be about John.

Here’s what’s happening in this quote—

By starting with a clear and unqualified “no,” Paul establishes that “no” as his definitive answer to the question. And that means that anything Paul says after the “no” is in essence cloaked with an invisibility shield — because the “no” means that confirmation bias will cause the interviewer (and the reader) to hear what they expect to hear rather than what’s really there.

The net result is that Paul starts out denying that “Tug of War” was written for John, and ends up acknowledging that it was. No, he didn’t have John in mind, but yes, it ties into “Here Today,” which is, of course, without question written for John.

Paul has said that he likes to lie in interview, but it might be more accurate to say he likes to misdirect. This quote is a masterful example of that misdirection — though in this case, it’s hard to say if Paul’s misdirecting intentionally or just struggling to figure out how to talk about John post-1980. This was in 1982, and the interviewer opens the article by commenting that when talking about John’s murder, Paul “refers haltingly to ‘the event,’ to ‘John’s thing.’”2

Either way, I’m far from the first to point out that Paul has a remarkable ability to give one answer and make it seem like he’s giving another, or to give no answer at all and make it seem as if he’s been very forthcoming. One interviewer noted in 1986 that, “part of McCartney’s agility as a communicator has frequently been the paradoxical mastery of revealing nothing whatsoever of himself to journalists.”

This “Tug Of War” quote reveals quite a bit — though nothing that’s not obvious if you’re even a little bit Grail-fluent and willing to see what’s actually there rather than what we expect to see.

Paul’s answer to the “Tug Of War” question is an example of why researching Paul’s interviews is brain-twisting work. It’s also an example of why there hasn’t yet been a truly substantive interview with Paul McCartney and probably never will be, from this man who is reluctant to reveal his innermost thoughts outside of song.

Paul’s answer is also an example of why exact language matters. And why the editing of quotes, and worse, the gluing together of different quotes from different interviews and presenting them as a single quote — all-too-common in Beatles writing, even beyond Mark Lewisohn’s monkey business in his books and in Anthology — is so damaging to our ability to understand this story.

And it’s also maybe a good example of why Paul has explicitly told us that the truth of his life is not in books or interviews, but in his songs — like for example, “Tug Of War.”

(YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txBuoR3DzI4 )

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

PS — We talked briefly about “Tug Of War” in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — at the very end of episode 1:5 (He Said He Said Part 1) and in more detail in the Playlist Commentary Rabbit Hole.

2

If it was unintentional, it’s an approach he’s stuck with. Exactly four decades later, Paul uses the same technique, albeit a bit more obliquely and in longer form, in his discussion of “Tug Of War” in The Lyrics (Liveright, 2022).

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Hi everyone,

This week, I thought I’d share a little collection of unrelated things that caught my attention as I continue to research Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.

First, this quote, from music writer Jeff Fitzgerald—

Jazz in the 1950’s was to society as a negative is to a photograph, born of the same elements but quite different in makeup and appearance. The music began to take on a restlessness, reflecting an undercurrent of trepidation lying just beneath the surface. Jazz became more cerebral, more introspective, more likely to get you some leg from a Vassar College undergrad. It was the music of a generation in transition, searching for its identity in a world populated by increasingly invisible, intangible perils. In a world living under the shadow of the atomic bomb and the creeping menace of Communism (not to mention the constant threat of Rock Hudson movies), and an increasingly automated society feeling the control of its own daily existence slipping away with the push of every button, it is perfectly logical that the music should reflect that nameless angst. And that’s as close to real insight as you’re likely to get out of me.1

We didn’t talk much about how jazz fits into the musical/mythological timeline that we laid out in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, but this is more or less what I might write, if I were to write backwards into that era — minus the Rock Hudson reference.

What the above passage hints at is the likely reason the beatniks connected much more deeply to jazz than to rock-n-roll — jazz was popularized initially as the direct expression of the lived fear/death trauma of two world wars, whereas early rock-and-roll was more the reaction to that trauma from the children born to into the post-war world. Put another way, one might say jazz was the expression of the fear/trauma and rock-and-roll was (among other things) the distraction from the fear/trauma.2

And this, in turn, causes me to wonder if we might be on the cusp of a resurgent interest in jazz, or if there’s something else happening in popular music today that’s expressing collective, widespread fear/trauma in the same way jazz did back then.

I for sure wouldn’t plant a flag on my off-the-cuff analysis of Fitzgerald’s quote — I’m not researching jazz for Part Two (or for any other reason), and I only happened on this quote in a book about the advertising revolution of the 1960s (The Real Mad Men: The Renegades of Madison Avenue and the Golden Age of Advertising, Andrew Cracknell, Running Press, 2012.). But it’s an interesting passage that brings up interesting thoughts for me, and I hope maybe also for you.

In addition to reading about 1960s advertising, I’ve been working through Paul McCartney interviews from the Northwestern archive.

Here’s Paul in 1985 telling us that John told him that he wrote “Jealous Guy” for Paul. A not-insignificant moment of candor, given it’s the only time I can remember Paul revealing this.

[The breakup] was a weird time. The people who were managing us were whispering in our ears and trying to turn us against each other and it became like a feuding family. In the end, I think John had some tough breaks. He used to say, ‘Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon.’ He wrote “I’m Just a Jealous Guy,” and he said that the song was about me. So I think it was just some kind of jealousy, I had to try and forgive John because I sort of knew where he was coming from. I knew that he was trying to get rid of the Beatles in order to say to Yoko, ‘Look, I’ve even given that up for you. I’m ready to devote myself to you and to the avant-garde.’ I don’t know if it’s true. One thing I’m really glad about is that I didn’t answer him back. It’s very difficult to do that when someone is attacking you. But I would have felt sick as a dog now if I had.3

We haven’t discussed “Jealous Guy” in detail yet, but as I suggested in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, given its context and when we consider the breakup through the softer gaze of the Grail (aka sensitivity to emotional subtext), it seems fairly obvious that John wrote the song for Paul.

And how lovely and telling it is, that “Jealous Guy” shares an album with “How Do You Sleep?”, showing us that even in the worst of their estrangement, things were far more complicated — and more loving — than the distorted “John vs Paul” narrative claims. Which, of course, is what both John and Paul have said about the post-breakup era, even in interviews at the time.

It’s curious that this is the only example I’ve found so far in which Paul explicitly acknowledges that John told him “Jealous Guy” is written for him, especially given what a powerful antidote that is to the distorted narrative. Then again, maybe it’s not so curious that Paul stopped telling this story, given “Jealous Guy” is a song about romantic/erotic jealousy.

(John’s personal jealousy of Linda is well-documented and discussed in detail in episode 1:6 of Beautiful Possibility. And John’s creative jealousy of Paul is discussed in “Unscrambling ‘Yesterday'.”)

For our next item, I just finished reading Beatles biographer Hunter Davies’ 2018 memoir, A Life in the Day: Memories of Swinging London.

Those of you who are familiar with Part One of Beautiful Possibility might remember our discussion of Hunter Davies in episode 1:8 — about how not long after John’s murder, Paul called Davies to express his distress at having to deal with the distorted “John/more vs Paul/less” narrative, thinking he was confiding in a trusted friend, but in actuality Hunter Davies was taking notes without Paul’s consent which he used to write a tabloid article entitled “The Private Pain of Paul McCartney,”4 after which he added his mocking and derisive account of the call as a coda to a new edition of what-was-supposed-to-be an authorized Beatles biography.

I was a little bit concerned when I shared that story that maybe my own confirmation bias meant I wasn’t giving Davies enough credit. Maybe I was assuming the worst relative to his actions. Maybe it was a misunderstanding — Davies thinking the conversation was on the record and Paul thinking otherwise. When you have a friend who’s also a journalist, it’d be easy for a situation like that to get confusing.

Well, here’s a quote from that memoir of Davies that I just finished reading, in which Davies shares his journalistic method when it comes to handling sensitive material—

When they say this is off the record, and then tell you something juicy, you nod and put down your pen. Then later, when they say they love children and always help old people across the road, instead of writing that down you write down the juicy bit they came out with earlier.5

So, not a misunderstanding. How do you sleep, Mr. Davies?

And finally, on a lighter note, as anyone who does any kind of deep research knows, sometimes we find little gems that we have absolutely no purpose for, but that are too good to let languish in a research folder.

Here’s Paul in 1997—

On our farm, I’ve got some woods. I’m being accused now of harbouring killer pigs. It turns out there are killer pigs from Ashford, thirty miles away. These wild boar got away from a zoo, and they’re flourishing. They have this thing called Chestnut Coppice, where you put it down every twenty years, and then you don’t go in there for twenty years, it just grows up — so the boar love it. Anyway, I won’t shoot ‘em. Because I don’t fancy shooting them. Plus I haven’t got a gun. I could snare them, but what you find is that local people get really crazy, like as if I’ve invented these pigs. They say they kill lambs, but I’ve got a lot of sheep and I don’t think they’ve killed any of mine… But a fox’ll kill a sheep. It’s nature. Even though I’m a veggie, I understand that a hawk kills something. I don’t go, oh you naughty hawk. It’s his gig. But it’s not necessarily mine.6

I don’t know if this is intended as a parable, a cautionary tale, or an existential meditation on the brutality of life. But I do know this — anyone who thinks Paul McCartney is anything less interesting than a wildly eccentric and iconoclastic genius really hasn’t been paying attention.

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

I’m a little short on extra words just now, while I work on a larger project that I hope will benefit all concerned. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I once again borrow someone else’s words.

This week, I want to share with you a review of Revolver published in the November 13, 1966 issue of Punch magazine. I’m sharing it because it’s perceptive and Grail-fluent, and because it includes passages like this—

Whatever the complexity Brian Epstein and Nems Enterprises, Ltd., and of course they are vast, intricate and far-reaching, the songs themselves seem to have been conceived and brought forth in the pure, simple spirit of mystical innocence, like paintings by Chagall — and perhaps somewhat less like the philosophical happenings staged by Dr. Timothy Leary. The songs are honest, direct, imaginative, original, unique, and intimately universal.

A yellow submarine just is. Children readily understand, and so do gurus entranced by the sound of one hand clapping. There is something about that frivolously gaudy, escapist, anti-authoritarian, unwarlike warship that appeals to almost everybody. In my own small private world, Mr. Hathaway, a Gloucestershire gardener in his sixties, sings “Yellow Submarine” as he prunes the roses, in a voice neither worse nor very much better than Ringo’s; when the official recording is played, my one-year-old daughter seizes a hi-fi speaker with both hands and rocks herself and it in perfect non-verbal sympathy.

The full review is below.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

Would the Beatles’ music last if the Group split up? PATRICK SKENE CATLING talks to Paul McCartney about the Lennon/McCartney sound.

Paul McCartney, resting in his comfortable Victorian mansion in an electrically locked high-walled compound in St. John’s Wood, was patiently discussing the present state of the Beatles and their songs, which, in my opinion, is entirely admirable, enviable even, but difficult. So much has been achieved; so much is expected.

It is difficult, for example, when their public, the whole world, subjects their lightest, most casual utterance, musical or conver-sational, to searching critical analysis. What were the socioeconomic, political, psychological and religious implications of a yellow submarine? Did the disc jockeys approve? Did the Board of Trade? Did the Navy? Did God?

Whatever the complexity of the commercial considerations of Brian Epstein and Nems Enterprises, Ltd., and of course they are vast, intricate and far-reaching, the songs themselves seem to have been conceived and brought forth in the pure, simple spirit of mystical innocence, like paintings by Chagall — and perhaps somewhat less like the philosophical happenings staged by Dr. Timothy Leary. The songs are honest, direct, imaginative, original, unique, and intimately universal.

A yellow submarine just is. Children readily understand, and so do gurus entranced by the sound of one hand clapping. There is something about that frivolously gaudy, escapist, anti-authoritarian, unwarlike warship that appeals to almost everybody, in my own small private world, Mr. Hathaway, a Gloucestershire gardener in his sixties, sings “Yellow Submarine” as he prunes the roses, in a voice neither worse nor very much better than Ringo’s; when the official recording is played, my one-year-old daughter seizes a hi-fi speaker with both hands and rocks herself and it in perfect non-verbal sympathy.

“The idea was just to do a children’s song,” McCartney said, smiling calmly though perhaps a tiny bit peeved by people who insist on elaborate interpretations. “But there is a yellow submarine place, it’s real even if it is only a hallucination.”

Hallucinations have a reality and a genuine importance of their own. They can be powerfully persuasive. The idea obviously fascinates him and the others, and it has begun to show, in a carefully controlled way, in some of their music, most notably in the Lennon-McCartney composition “Tomorrow Never Knows.” To hallucinate, to wander in the mind, to perceive experience beyond the senses, may sombrely suggest morbid delusions. Positively, on the other hand, it represents total mobility and absolute freedom. No matter how far the rockets fly, the only way out of the world is inwards. The mind, and only the mind, can encompass the universe.

Saints have achieved hallucinosis by starving and scourging themselves and by hypnotically repetitiously praying. Madison Avenue executives have achieved it less successfully with vodka martinis and slogans. A distinguished London anaesthesiologist has told me that mescalin and certain other non-addictive hallucinatory drugs are as safe and as dangerous as one’s own existing psychic tendencies, an assurance that makes me want to try them, a warning that makes me dare not. The Beatles now provide an encouraging musical nudge in the direction of infinite personal liberation. Pop goes the ego. The sensation is not at all unpleasant. I think that Bernard Handelsman’s cover this week is profoundly significant.

I choose to detect a similar message in Klaus Voormann’s brilliant sleeve design, partly pen-and-ink drawing, partly photographic collage, for the Beatles’ latest LP, “Revolver.” It shows them on a dream safari through the jungle tendrils of their own famous hair. “Revolver” revolves, making one as dizzy as a whirling dervish, and in the blood-red daze appears a glint of happy enlightenment.

“Turn off your mind, relax and float down-stream,” the lyric of “Tomorrow Never Knows” urges you. “It is not dying…” In a letter to McCartney, Kenneth Tynan, the critic and Literary Manager of The National Theatre, has called the song, as the Beatles perform it, “the best musical evocation of LSD I’ve ever heard.’’ Judging it by the testimony of a friend who used the drug under medical supervision, I feel sure that Tynan’s reaction was justified.

The Beatles were not the first musicians to write a song of this sort. Murray Grand, a sensitive and witty New York lyricist who used to write in an urbanely Cole Porterish style, wrote a song called “Long Sweet Dream,” with music by Ralph Burns. But the Beatles carried the idea farther forward, using impressionistically exotic sounds, the uncanny buzzing drone of a tambura, a four-stringed Indian instrument that looks like a bloated outsize wooden barometer, the heavy blurred thump and hard rattle of drums, the moaning and honking of reeds, the Orientally nasal chanting of John Lennon’s voice filtered and distorted by an unimaginably cunning microphone. The music comes and goes in mysterious, vertiginous waves, creating a frightening but thrilling sense of warped space and time, like a supernatural unconscious vision in an operating theatre.

“When we wrote it,” McCartney said, “John had just read Leary’s book on psychedelic experience, a manual based on the Tibetan book of the dead. To us it was just great. It’s difficult to speak the truth, but there are these people around, the great people who speak the truth. Some of them are bums. It’d be nice to meet Leary before he’s God.”

But if they did meet him, McCartney acknowledged fatalistically, no doubt there would be an international outcry of protests that the Beatles were now taking drugs.

“Once we’ve done a song it goes out and that’s it.” he said. “We don’t want to argue about it. We don’t feel as though we’re answerable. If you don’t like our kind of thing don’t listen. The good thing is that actually we started out with the assumption that we’d never talk down. We hated people in gold lame suits. You can get caught up in the whole machine of it all and turn into Paul Getty in the end. Nothing but money. We like commercialism, but it can be something else as well. What we’ve always wanted to do is do what we want to do. At twenty-four I’m very lucky that I can do what I want. A lot of people expect us to live up to our Beatle mop-top image. But we’ve changed. We either had to adapt and try new things or else go potty.”

Accustomed to the round cherubic softness in early pictures of McCartney, I adjusted to recognition that he has changed visibly. The face today is leaner and firmer and more mature. There was really no need for the anarchic experimental moustache that he grew on last month’s holiday.

The Beatles have come a long way since 1955, when Lennon, a fifth-former at Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool, acquired an old guitar and formed a skiffle and rock ‘n’ roll group called The Quarrymen. McCartney joined the group that summer, George Harrison joined three years later, and Ringo Starr joined them as The Beatles in 1962.

“We had a lousy limiting range and we got fed up with it,” McCartney said.

He was expressing himself unduly harshly, perhaps, but it is true that nowadays some of the first records, “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” “From Me To You” and “She Loves You,” sound primitively crude in comparison with recent inventions. But the enthusiasm, energy and imagination were overwhelming right from the beginning. Other musicians were quick to appreciate The Beatles. Ella Fitzgerald, after recording their song “Can’t Buy Me Love,” said: “Paul and John are perhaps even better as writers than you think. This song has almost a blues sequence in it. The words are good, but the jazz sequence is a gas — and that’s not even counting the beat.”

The more they succeed, the freer they feel to attempt daring innovations, the more they succeed. Rivals and imitators are repeatedly made to look flat-footed, ham-fisted, slow-witted, embarrassed and dull. Now they’re desperately trying to get that Indian sound.

McCartney enjoys playing with sounds. He has made tape-recordings of weird “space noises” and “electronic music” reminiscent of some of the stuff produced by the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. He once set up a line of tumblers containing different amounts of water to record the sounds made by wet fingers rubbing around the rims. He has made multi-track tapes of himself singing, playing the piano, lead guitar, bass and drums.

“But we don’t care so much about just pure sound,” he said. “We like notes.”

At the same time, Lennon’s words have gone far beyond the conventional limited scope of pop songs. After the fragmentary adolescent journal, “The Daily Howl,” after the dark thoughts of loneliness and insecurity expressed in the Joycean punning fables of “In His Own Write” and “The Spaniard in The Works,” he now seems to be confident enough, and certainly he is able, to write sermons and diatribes as well as today’s best love songs. There’s nobody else anywhere writing songs like “Dr. Robert,” about a mercenary National Health panellist, except, of course, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

When we had talked ourselves out, McCartney took me down to the basement and showed me some of his home movies, informally entitled “Till Next Spring Then” and “The Defeat of The Dog.” They were not like ordinary people’s home movies. There were over-exposures, double-exposures, blinding orange lights, quick cuts from professional wrestling to a crowded car park to a close-up of a television weather map. There were long still shots of a grey, cloudy sky and a wet, grey pavement, jumping Chinese ivory carvings, and affectionate slow-motion studies of his sheep-dog, Martha, and his cat. The accompanying music, on a record-player, and faultlessly synchronised, was by the Modern Jazz Quartet and Bach.

Having enjoyed the afternoon. I asked for a signed record. He got out a copy of “Revolver.” “To anyone special?” he asked, pen poised. “Oh, just anyone,” I said, dimpling coyly. I didn’t look at the inscription until I was in the taxi. The sleeve was inscribed:

“To Anyone, Kindly, James Paul Augustus McCartney of Britain.”

The Beatles have a deadly sense of humour.

“The Pop Guru: Patrick Skenne Catling talks to Paul McCartney about the Lennon/McCartney sound,” reprinted from Punch, Nov 23, 1966.

One of my first published pieces on The Beatles was a review of Revolver, written way back in the mists of time before Beautiful Possibility. I don’t know if I still agree with all of it, or if it’s any good, but it might be, and the link is here.

This week, I’ve been haunted by a 1991 article in Musician magazine — an in-depth exploration of Paul’s creative process in writing Liverpool Oratorio, his first full-length classical piece.

The article is centered around an extended and startlingly candid interview with his collaborator on the project, British composer/conductor Carl Davis. Davis’ interview is so candid, in fact, that I’m surprised that Paul still seems to have a good relationship with him.

It’s a two-part piece, spread over two issues of the magazine. And imo, the full piece — and especially part 2 (Oct 1991) — is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand Paul McCartney after the breakup — and especially after 1980. Davis’ unique perspective as arguably Paul’s most serious collaborator since John provides a remarkable and poignant insight into the damage that the “John/more vs Paul/less” distorted narrative has done to Paul’s self-confidence as a collaborative partner.

(The evolution of “John/more vs Paul/less” and the damage that it’s done to our world — and especially to Paul — is a central theme of Part One of Beautiful Possibility, and especially episodes 1:8/1:9.)

There are download links to the full versions of both parts of the article at the end of this update. And below you’ll find an excerpt of the most relevant passages. (⚠️PLEASE NOTE: What follows is not a continuous excerpt nor is it the full article — it’s a cut-up piece, constructed out of relevant passages, arranged into a coherent order.)

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

So what was the actual working process between McCartney and Davis that produced the Liverpool Oratorio?

“I began by playing some ‘Hey Jude’-style chords on the piano,” says Davis, “and he said, `No, no, no, absolutely not, forget it. I want more dissonance than that.’ So he started singing and tried to convey an aural picture to me of what he imagined. I tried to get it out of him, so that it would all be very McCartneyish. Then I said, ‘ I’ll take it home and flesh it out.’”

McCartney would have none of it: “I told Carl, ‘No, we can’t do it like that because it’s going to be too much input from you. Let me be with you through every little second.’ He said. ‘ It’s going to be really boring? ‘ It won’t be, I’ve done this before. I like it. I sat with George Martin arranging the string quartet for “Yesterday,” the strings for “Eleanor Rigby” and things like that.’ So I sat with Carl through eyerything—through the arrangements, through the texts, through the violin solo. I didn’t actually let him have one minute on his own. I thought if he did, it would start to become more his work. He was happy to do it that way. but he kept warning me how boring it would be. ‘You’ll have to just sit there while I write these 30 bars,’ he’d say. yeah, that’s great. no problem.’ It was very interesting to me and very educational, actually. I learned a lot.”

It became increasingly clear to Davis that his own role in the work was going to be larger than he had at first anticipated. Not only was McCartney largely unfamiliar with the classical tradition, but he didn’t read or write a note of music.

“The music I write I don’t actually write down,” McCartney says. “I don’t notate music. I can hear it, think it, orchestrate it. But when it comes time to actually write it out I have a sort of musical dyslexia. I just can’t associate those little dots with what I hear in my head; it just seems like two different worlds.”

“No big thing,” was Davis’ gung-ho response to McCartney’s reluctance to learn to read and notate. “I told him, ‘Look, I could teach you everything there is to know in about 48 hours; there are really only about 12 things to learn. It’s easier than typing.’ He wouldn’t have any of it and kept saying, ‘No, no, I really, really don’t want to.’ Why?’ ‘Well, I kind of want to preserve my innocence. I really want to wonder at all this.’

“I kept telling him, ‘But you’ll be able to express yourself so much more clearly,’ but he was adamant. I even thought of giving his 13-year-old son a few lessons in the hope that Paul would be lurking about and catch on. He’s absolutely fascinated by it, but terrified at learning it. That photograph in the program with us both at the piano is him riveted by my writing things down in notation, just riveted. I kept saying, it’s no process at all, it’s just five lines and this is the C, the E and the G on the lines, and between the lines are D, F, A and C. If you write an open note with a stem, it’s two beats, without one it’s four beats. It’s just a language.’ He’d say, ‘Oh no, no.’

“Paul frankly did get very uptight that because everyone knew that I was the one conducting, I was the one who [notated the score]. He got terribly worried — which comes over him in waves — that people will think that he did not play a major part in this and that it was all really me. But in fact, that is not the case. We tried to make it as much his work as possible.”

“We certainly didn’t want this to be thought of as ‘McCartney arranged by Davis,’” says Davis. “I let him take the lead, which was very difficult for him because he still suffers from the aftermath of the Lennon collaboration, of having this highly critical loved-hated friend and colleague. He feels that with the martyrdom of Lennon, Lennon is given the credit for all of the writing and innovation of the Beatles, and Paul suffers from this. I know, after spending two and a half years with him, that the McCartney songs are his own, and that he is his own man.

“I feel in his black moments,” [Davis said.] “he somehow dumps that on me, and I’m not really competitive in this situation. I’ll say, ‘How should this go?’ and push and pummel him. I did some really naughty things like, ‘Okay, Paul, it’s time for the hit single, right now.’ To see him back away looking extremely frightened while I was being sadistic was fun. That’s how I got ‘Save the Child.’ I hope the world thinks like I do, that it’s really something.”

As Davis’ role as McCartney’s collaborator grew, he assumed that they were writing the “Liverpool Oratorio” by McCartney and Davis. Here, Davis was in for a surprise. McCartney insisted that the piece be called ‘Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio’ by Paul McCartney and Carl Davis. “It’s something that Paul insisted on and that I’ve had to live with,” admits Davis. “It was, in a sense, the contract breaker. He felt that he had to be the primary element in it, that people had to perceive him as driving the vehicle.”

But doesn’t calling it that indicate a certain — ”Worry, I know,” [Davis agrees.] “I wish he hadn’t done it, because it hurts him as well. At the time when it came up, I didn’t see a way of arguing it, and of course, McCartney is a name to conjure with. McCartney above the title will attract more attention to the work and will make more noise commercially, so I live with it. He felt very strongly that that was how it had to go. It was a question at the contractual stage of there being no movement possible on that. It was really up to me. I’ve actually reached a psychological stasis: I live with it. But I can tell that in some ways it’s an equal worry for him, because he has to keep justifying the title. I think it’s a pity.”

“What I’m hoping is that the composing process was so joyous — and we did so enjoy working together — that we can actually get past this. It’s the only thing between us that is difficult. I think a lot of this is his reading, ‘Lennon was the interesting factor of the Beatles, it was Lennon that was innovative,’ which is really not the truth. He carries that wound, that burden in that nothing he does can now be equal with anyone, and people have to know that his was the decisive voice in all of this. So I’m patient about it. You have to let him come around, and realize that it’s not going to hurt the work. It’s very strange for a writer to use his own name in a title, except ironically. It’s very tricky, and it simply has to do with what he needs.”

“And,” adds Davis, with an obvious heartfelt affection, “I like him. That’s the other thing, I actually like him. Past all of this, he’s a good-hearted man. The causes he supports and the things he wants out of life are really very benign, helpful and civilized.

“The really courageous and wonderful thing about McCartney is that he strives to maintain a certain normality in his life: the family, his wife, the children, a day-to-day routine of living a very simple life. Sometimes, of course, when he’s rolling and you have the big tour going on or this kind of event, you are aware of the reserves he can draw upon professionally, and then it’s something else. But in his day-to-day life, it’s not grandeur, it’s simplicity. In a way, thinking about the work we’ve done, that is the message: family life and being together, a very simple basic appeal for normality. He is very entwined with being near the people that he loves, and can’t abide separation from them.”

[Jerry Hadley, who sang Shanty in Liverpool Oratorio, had this to say about working with Paul]—

“[Leonard Bernstein] was not afraid of sentiment, in the best sense of the word, and neither is Paul. I’m not talking about heart-on-the-sleeve, overly saccharine kind of sentiment, I mean real honest, human sentiment. Also, Paul has one of the keenest musical minds I have ever encountered. He has one of the most profoundly clear visions of what he is creating of anybody I’ve ever met, on a level equal to Lenny’s. In the essence of creativity, perhaps it’s the clarity that all the greats have had. West Side Story did not happen by accident. The ‘Liverpool Oratorio’ and the great McCartney pop songs did not happen by accident. These people don’t flail in the dark.”

What McCartney isn’t saying out loud, at the moment, is how much the climax of the piece is similar to what actually happened to him and his wife Linda (the Yorkville role of Mary Dee, sung by te Kanawa) as newlyweds immediately after the breakup of the Beatles. Those were the days when McCartney wouldn’t get out of bed, would go out on nightly drunken and drug rampages, all the while expecting his first baby. “I was the most miserable I had been since the death of my mother,” he says of that time.

Also not so obvious is that McCartney has penned a gorgeous black-spiritual-like piece for mezzo-soprano that intones the last words spoken to John Lennon as he lay dying of gunshot wounds in the back of a New York police car-”Do you know who you are?”

McCartney gets a bit choked up at one point when he reveals, “Not a day goes by when I don’t think of John. He would have loved the spirit of doing this after 30 years of rock ‘n’ roll; he would have loved the idea of risking such a huge gamble.”

[Davis recalls,] “One day we were passing by a church [near Penny Lane] when he said, ‘Here’s the Church of St. Barnabas — I sang there as a choir boy.’ There are hidden depths and things he does not admit to.”

McCartney may have been able to make St. Barnabas, but he couldn’t get into the Cathedral choir because he couldn’t sight-read. Thirty-eight years later, a much larger audition looms over him in the same building. And Paul McCartney, for the first time in many years, is again forced to face a novice’s fears.

Faith note: A big thank you to writer Dennis Polkow for his work here. Other than Davis’ unsettling comment about how “fun” it was to have frightened Paul during the creative process (which is Davis, not Polkow), this is an unexpectedly Grail-fluent — aka emotionally sensitive — article, especially given it was written in the darkest years of the distorted narrative.

Musician 1991 09

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Musician 1991 10

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Further reading/listening:

A Micro-Rabbit Hole on why it’s not unusual that Paul doesn’t read/write formal musical notation—

An exploration of the damage the distorted narrative has done to Paul McCartney (and how we can help to heal that wound)—

While researching Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, I recently discovered the poem “Portland Coliseum,” by Allen Ginsberg. I’m not sure how I missed it up until now, but such are the vagaries of deep research on a big topic.

Ginsberg wrote “Portland Coliseum” after attending The Beatles’ concert at, well, Portland Coliseum, on August 22, 1965. This week, I’m sharing it with you.

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

PS — Weekly updates might be a little skint for the next month or so — but if all goes well, it’ll be worth your while.

PORTLAND COLISEUM
by Allen Ginsberg

A brown piano in diamond
white spotlight
Leviathan auditorium
iron run wired
hanging organs, vox
black battery
A single whistling sound of ten thousand children’s
larynxes asinging
pierce the ears
and following up the belly
bliss the moment arrived
 
Apparition, four brown English
jacket christhair boys
Goofed Ringo battling bright
white drums
Silent George hair patient
Soul horse
Short black-skulled Paul
with the guitar
Lennon the Captain, his mouth
a triangular smile,
all jump together to End
some tearful memory song
ancient-two years,
The million children
the thousand words
bounce in their seats, bash
each other’s sides, press
legs together nervous
Scream again & claphand
become one Animal
in the New World Auditorium
—hands waving myriad
snakes of thought
screetch beyond hearing
 
while a line of police with
folded arms stands
Sentry to contain the red
sweatered ecstasy
that rises upward to the
wired roof.

– August 27, 1965

Shareable image for this update:

As most of you know, I stay away from the public discussion of Beautiful Possibility outside of The Abbey, mostly because I’m easly distractable and easily influenced by feedback (good and otherwise), and I need to avoid both of these things so I can stay focused on researching and writing the work itself. And since I lack both the bandwidth and the temperament to do any sort of self-promotion, I rely on all of you to share Beautiful Possibility with the wider world (and a huge thank you to those of you who are doing that. ❤️).

I’m aware, though, that sharing Beautiful Possibility can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, because people tend to prejudge the lovers possibility based on what they think is true rather than on the actual research.

Recently, one supporter of Beautiful Possibility mentioned to me that when he’s looking to persuade people of the credibility of the lovers possibility, he reaches for what he calls “the Paris excerpt.” This is the section from episode 1:4 “Are You Afraid Or Is It True?” that steps through much of the research related to John and Paul’s 1961 trip to Paris.

So to make it easier for those of you who are doing the invaluable work of sharing Beautiful Possibility with the often-sceptical wider world, I thought I’d lift the Paris excerpt out of the episode to make it more easily shareable. It works pretty well on its own, and this way, you have a single “this is the Paris excerpt” link to share when you’re engaging with people online about the lovers possibility.

With that said, then —

excerpted from 1:4 Are You Afraid Or Is It True

Before we move on to talking specifically about the credibility of the lovers possibility, there’s a caveat, and a big one — because one of the challenges here is that while there’s a substantial body of research to support it, most of the individual data points can be explained in some alternate non-lovers possibility way, if you’re motivated to do so and if you aren’t aware of the full scope of the research surrounding that data point.

So for example, I could tell you that in 1961, John and Paul took a trip to Paris, just the two of them, in honour of John’s twenty-first birthday. And while that might raise an eyebrow, you’d probably say, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t prove anything about the lovers possibility, and you’d be right about that.

Best friends do sometimes take trips together, just like Paul and George used to hitchhike places, just the two of them. Maybe John and Paul just wanted to go to Paris — you certainly don’t have to be lovers to enjoy visiting the City of Love. And maybe John took Paul because John had never been out of the UK before and he didn’t want to go on his own and he couldn’t take his then-girlfriend Cynthia because in 1961, no respectable middle-class Liverpool parent would let their young, unmarried daughter go to Paris alone with her boyfriend — especially if her boyfriend is John Lennon.

All those things are valid, and if you’re looking for a reason to discredit the lovers possibility, it’s easy to look at the Paris trip in isolation and simply choose the alternative explanation.

But individual data points can’t be considered in isolation, when they’re part of a larger story. And when we put the Paris trip in its full context, we get a very different picture.

When you also know that it wasn’t a mutual decision, but rather John inviting Paul to come with him to Paris, and that John paid for almost everything, and that they stayed there together for almost two weeks, just the two of them, in a little hotel in Montmartre—

—And when you know that John and Paul returned to Paris in 1964 on The Beatles’ first international tour at the beginning of global Beatlemania, and that they stayed in a luxury suite at the George V Hotel, which is as posh as it sounds, and that it was there that, in beautiful synchronicity, they learned that “I Want To Hold Your Hand” — a song about a longing to hold hands, presumably in public — had reached number one in the US, meaning they’d made it to the toppermost of the poppermost together, and that multiple people who were on tour with them, including George Harrison, have written about how John and Paul spent an unusual amount of time alone in their suite in Paris to the point that it became a problem,⁴ and that staying in that posh hotel, Paul to this day recalls thinking of their first Paris trip, staying in a cheap hotel with only a hundred pounds in their pocket.⁵ And when you know that when they at last emerged from their self-imposed seclusion in their posh 1964 hotel suite, they’d written the song “Can’t Buy Me Love”1 —

And when you know that a decade later, Linda McCartney asked John if he missed living in the UK, and John’s answer was, “I miss Paris,”2 and in a separate interview, said he loved Paris because of how people could be so openly affectionate and romantic, kissing and holding hands in public, and when you know that same-sex love was legal in France in 1961, so two boys could hold hands and kiss and show affection in public the way, if they possibly wanted to, they couldn’t in England3—

And when you know that in the ‘70s, John wrote a story about his memories of meeting his lover in Paris for a secret rendezvous4 and that there’s a home recording of John in the late ‘70s singing a parody of an old French love song in which he calls Paul’s name and riffs about his romantic memories of Paris and a “cafe on the Left Bank,”5 and when you know that in 1978 Paul wrote and recorded a song titled “Cafe on the Left Bank” inspired by their trip6 —

And when you know that the diary page Paul chose to feature in his Lyrics book and in his Eyes of the Storm exhibition (and I do mean featured, as in displayed in the centre of the room in a glass case) is from that original 1961 Paris trip, on which he and John wrote their names together in various configurations exactly like two teenagers in love, and that in 2007, Paul was interviewed on French television and asked what his idea of heaven was, and his answer was his trip with John to Paris in 19617 —

When you know all of that, the Paris trip starts to take on a different context.

Mainstream Beatles writing doesn’t put those pieces together though — if they even know this research exists. Instead, writers just mention that John and Paul met up with a friend from Hamburg in Paris and that he gave them what became the Beatles haircut — relevant information, to be sure, but it rather misses the larger point.

Whatever else happened between them in Paris, their first trip there together is clearly a significant and cherished part of their relationship story for both of them, and I don’t think it’s because they got their hair cut.

When a shared experience becomes deeply emotionally significant in a relationship, it becomes a shorthand for everything that experience represents about that relationship. And when it then appears in other contexts relative to their history, it carries all of that meaning along with it.

The most iconic example of this, of course, is from Casablanca. In the famous final scene at the airport, Humphrey Bogart’s character tells Ingrid Bergman’s character as she’s about to get on the plane with her husband that, “We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have... we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.”

When he says “Paris,” Bogart isn’t talking about the city, not directly. He’s referencing their shared emotional experience and memories of Paris — what Paris means to their love affair — and he shorthands all of that to just the name of the city where that experience happened and where those memories were made. And because the experience is so significant to both of them, she instantly knows what he means — and so does the audience.

Paul and John seem to reference Paris in the same way as Bogie and Bergman do in Casablanca.

Just like in Casablanca, Paris is never just Paris when it appears in this story relative to John and Paul — and without understanding that, we miss the significance of those references and what they might tell us about the story, as well as the music that was being written at the same time.

For example, events like John “honeymooning down by the Seine” with Yoko in 1969, as he wrote in “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” and then asking Paul to help him record the song, become far more emotionally complex when we know that Paris is always more than just Paris between the two of them.

Without understanding the collection of experiences and emotional associations that’s referenced every time Paris appears in the story relative to John and Paul, I don’t think it’s possible to understand the meaning of that trip, or the meaning of “Can’t Buy Me Love” or “Ballad of John and Yoko,” or John taking Yoko to Paris,8 or John’s feelings about living in New York, or a host of other significant parts of the story. Without an awareness of the lovers possibility, the fuller context and meaning of those events remains invisible, and out of reach.

And without being sensitive to romantic and emotional subtext, you can’t put those pieces together. Paris becomes just a story about a haircut.

I’ve occasionally heard people protest that the problem with the lovers possibility is that it makes a complex relationship too simple. Putting aside that this isn’t in and of itself a reason to discount it — just because we don’t like what something does to a story doesn’t mean it’s not true — the Paris trip is an example of how it’s the other way around. It’s by stripping the lovers possibility out of the story that we oversimplify it — and miss the more beautiful story.

When we focus only on individual pieces of information without doing the work of putting together the whole puzzle in its broader context, we miss the bigger, more complete and complex — and more beautiful story. And this is why it’s difficult to present supporting research for the lovers possibility, because most of that research requires context to be fully understood.

THE FULL EPISODE (including the audio version) IS HERE:

And all of the episodes of Beautiful Possibility in sequence are here:

https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/beautiful-possibility.

And here is a graphic if you’d like to use it to share—

This week, it’s back to answering your questions. (And yes, I still have a backlog and probably always will. I promise I’ll do my best to get to all of them eventually.)

Here’s a (streamlined) version of the question—

Do you have anonymous sources? If so, how do you handle the information they give you?

The answer to the first question depends on the definition of “anonymous sources”.

If an “anonymous source” means a source who has given me information with no indication or context as to who they are and how they might know this information, the answer is— no, I have no anonymous sources.

But I suspect that by “anonymous,” what the questioner really means is, do I have sources that I know the identity of, but who are giving me information that’s “off the record” — aka, information I can use only if I don’t share the identity of the source? And the answer to that question is — yes, I do have several sources like that.

These off-the-record sources are not people I’ve intentionally sought out, for reasons we’ll get to shortly. But as the only mainstream Beatles writer seriously exploring the possibility of John and Paul as a romantic couple (for now at least), I’m not a difficult person to find, for those who have information that they want to share. In other words, while I don’t go looking for them, these off-the-record sources sometimes find me.

As for the second question about how I handle information given to me by off-the-record sources, the answer to that question was covered in part in the Research Methodology Rabbit Hole —

In the course of my research, I’ve had people share information with me off the record. While that information has sometimes informed the direction of my research, none of it has been used in this series unless I was able to verify it independently through publicly available sources, and those publicly available sources are what I cite. I’ve also found and been told plenty of gossip, hearsay and rumour about the lovers possibility, some of it dating back to the 50s and ‘60s. None of that appears in this series because gossip and rumour is not what we’re doing here.

The reason I don’t use information from off-the-record sources on The Abbey is simple — doing so would violate both the research standards and the ethical standards I’ve established for The Abbey.

Here, also from the Research Methodology Rabbit Hole, is my research standard—

All the research cited in Beautiful Possibility is from publicly available material and from primary sources, verified by tracing the research back to the original source of publication.

And—

Basically what I mean by a primary source is that if someone said something, it has to be sourced at the original place where they said it — whether that’s an interview, a conversation, or a piece of their own writing. If something happened, the account of that event has to be sourced to someone who was there when it happened.

When I say verified at the original source, I mean pretty much this: if I can’t trace the quote or the information back to where it first came from — the first person who said it in the first place it was said, or to an account from someone who lived through the events firsthand, it doesn’t make the cut for Beautiful Possibility.

An off-the-record source would meet the “primary source” part of that research standard, assuming they were present when the events they’re describing happened.

As for the “publicly available” part, for our purposes here, what I mean when I say “publicly available’ is that the information must have been originally intended to be shared publicly — in other words, there was an expectation on the part of the person involved that the information would be made public.

So, for example, the Northwestern Beatles archive contains unpublished handwritten notes from interviews with Paul and Linda McCartney. Those interview notes weren’t published, per se, but they were written during an interview in which Paul and Linda (presumably) knew they were speaking to a journalist who intended to publish a story based on that interview. The information in those handwritten notes is, then, “publicly available” in that it’s information that was intended to be made public, even if it ultimately didn’t appear in the finished article.

Also, those interview notes are publicly available to qualified researchers who are willing to invest the time and resources to access the archives. That, too, makes those notes public — but again, only because Paul and Linda were speaking on the record in the interview the notes originated from.

An off-the-record source can rarely, if ever, meet the “publicly available” part of my research standard. First, because I can’t cite the original source of the information. And second, because the information wasn’t (generally) intended to be made public.

For example, if an off-the-record source were to tell me about a private conversation they had with Paul McCartney, the reasonable assumption would be that (absent information to the contrary) Paul did not intend for that conversation to be made public. And thus that’s not information I could ethically use on The Abbey, no matter how credible or valuable that information might be.1

And since I wouldn’t be able to publicly cite the source of the information. I’d have to say, “someone told me X, but I can’t say who, so you’ll have to trust that X comes from a credible source.”

This is, obviously, not how we do things on The Abbey. Given the overall carelessness with which research tends to be handled in Beatles studies (both mainstream and countercultural), no one should believe any scholar who can’t (or won’t) show you exactly where and from who their information came from — and this is, of course, especially true when dealing with a subject as sensitive as the lovers possibility.

All of this is why almost all of the research used in Part One of Beautiful Possibility comes directly from Paul and John — from on-the-record interviews that are (and are obviously intended to be) public, and from their music, because they’ve both explicitly told us that their music is where we should look for the truth of their story.

It’s also why, unlike most Beatles writers, I generally don’t seek out interviews with sources who knew John and Paul. I’d have to ask questions that aren’t mine to ask, in an attempt to obtain information that’s not theirs to tell, because John and Paul presumably never intended for that information to be shared with the world.

These guidelines got me safely (so far at least ) through Part One. But this all gets significantly trickier, when we set out to re-tell the story of The Beatles — and especially John and Paul — in Parts Two and Three of Beautiful Possibility.

For example, what do I do with the private letters between Stu Sutcliffe and Astrid that I’ve accessed in the archives of the Museum of Liverpool? Or what about John’s Dakota recordings, or the answering machine tapes that include Yoko and John’s voicemail messages that are also in the Northwestern archive? Does it make a difference if the information was never intended to be public, but already is because someone before me has made it so? Does it make a difference if that someone is in a position to grant that access — Stu’s mother, for example? Does the standard change when the person in question has been dead since 1967? What about when the person in question has been dead since 1980? Is it different if the information itself is beautiful and life-affirming or… less beautiful?

These are just some of the difficult questions, with lots of shades of grey, that I’m weighing as I research and write Part Two. All are legitimate questions for anyone writing about The Beatles, but they’re especially weighted and consequential when writing about the lovers possibility.

All of that said, even if the information can’t be cited in a published piece of work, off-the-record sources can still be valuable.

As I mentioned in the Research Rabbit Hole, if I’ve been given information from an off-the-record source that I think might be credible — meaning the source is who they say they are and they are/were in a position to know what they claim to know — I do sometimes use that information as a research guide, aka an arrow pointing in a possible direction. I can then follow that arrow to see if it leads anywhere — meaning is there credible, publicly available research to support the claim? If there is, it’s the publicly available research I’ll cite, not the off-the-record source.

In this way, off-the-record sources (as well as anonymous sources) can be valuable as waymarkers. But here’s the thing — they aren’t essential.

As I hope you’ve started to see in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, there is a significant — and even overwhelming — body of research in the public record to support the credibility of the lovers possibility. So much so that if it were any other topic, it would already be part of the accepted narrative. And in Part Two, we’ll continue to do the work of considering that research, when we attempt to re-tell the story of The Beatles through the frame of John and Paul as a romantic couple.

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

PS This update was a little egg-heady, so for your entertainment, here’s a publicly-available, primary source photo of Paul McCartney in a coconut bra, published in NME, July 5, 1975. Photo and “biro jiggery-pokery” (aka doodling) by Linda McCartney.

February 9, 1967. St. John’s Wood, London.

Paul McCartney is home at Cavendish when the bell on the front gate rings. He answers it, because — as he’ll explain years later — I always used to answer it to everyone. If they were boring I would say, “Sorry, no,” and they generally went away.

On this night, the caller is not boring.

“I’m Jesus Christ,” he tells Paul.

“Oop,” Paul answers, slightly shocked. "Well, you'd better come in then."

Once inside, Paul makes the man a cup of tea, then sits and talks with him until it’s time to leave for the studio. But instead of sending the man away—

“If you promise to be very quiet and just sit in a corner,” Paul offers, “you can come."

And the man does promise, and so Paul takes him to the studio. And the man sits quietly while The Beatles record “Fixing A Hole.”

I never saw him after that, Paul will recall later. There were a lot of casualties about then. We used to get a lot of people who were maybe insecure or going through emotional breakdowns or whatever.1

You might wonder why Paul answered the door so readily, why he welcomed a stranger who might be emotionally unstable into his home? Why he took the time to serve him tea, and talk with him? Why he invited him into the studio?

Paul’s answer is simple—

I thought, well, [he] probably isn't Jesus Christ. But if he is, I'm not going to be the one to turn him away.

The practice of radical hospitality — or “welcoming the stranger" — is woven into every major spiritual and mythological tradition, including that of the Love Revolution.2

A divine/magickal being — cloaked in rags — knocks at the door asking for food and shelter. It’s a test. To pass, the person who answers the door must offer the hospitality of the house. More importantly, the stranger — however disreputable they appear to be — must be treated not like a beggar, but like a king. The reward for passing this test is the attainment of spiritual enlightenment (often symbolized by being anointed with royal status).

The message of radical hospitality is simple and profound — we welcome the “Christ” inside ourselves (in whatever way you want to interpret that archetype) by welcoming the “Christ” in others. When we open the door, and let ‘em in.

This holiday season, I wish each of you the most beautiful of holidays, and the gift of a knock at your door.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

This week, I’d like to wrap up my scruffy semi-travelogue from my most recent research trip by talking about the Fox and Hounds.

Some of you may recognise the Fox and Hounds as the pub — owned by Paul McCartney’s cousin Betty and her husband Mike — where, in the spring of 1960, Paul and John gave their only (as far as we know) performance as an acoustic guitar duo, aka the Nerk Twins. We talked about this trip in the Nerk Twins Rabbit Hole in Part One of Beautiful Possibility.

Visiting the Fox and Hounds has long been on my list of things to do while in London, and this trip, I finally had room on the schedule to explore this unusual stop on the Beatles pilgrim trail.

Full disclosure — my ulterior motive for this update is to encourage those of you planning a Beatles pilgrimage to include it on your list of stops. This is an important persuasive effort, because while I was there, I talked with Kevin, the owner of the Fox and Hounds. And Kevin shared with me — with no small amount of disappointment — that very few Beatle people have actually visited the Fox and Hounds, despite its unique and enchanting place in the history of The Beatles (and in the history of Paul and John, although Kevin and I did not talk about that part of things).

I think the reason for the lack of Beatle people at the Fox and Hounds is that the pub is located in Reading (pronounced Red-ing, like the colour red). And on the map, Reading looks like it’d be hard to get to, especially without a car.

Looks daunting, yes? But in fact, Reading is not at all hard to get to.

The Fox and Hounds is a 24-minute train ride from Paddington Station in Central London (followed by a very short and beautiful walk along the Thames from the train station to the pub). That’s about the same amount of time it takes to ride the Underground from Paddington Station to Abbey Road.

So in service of encouraging y’all to make that short trip to the Fox and Hounds, I thought I’d offer you a bit of a virtual tour.

First, here’s the exterior, which isn’t that different from how it used to look, when John and Paul were there—

Inside, the layout of the pub is the same as it was when John and Paul were there. Here’s the main room—

In addition to performing, Paul and John worked behind the bar during their stay, and please let’s all take a moment to imagine John Lennon as a bartender—

To the best of the recollection of those who were there at the time, Paul and John performed in the adjacent room—

Kevin is a friendly pub owner, as all pub owners ought to be, and more than happy to welcome Beatle people and show them around. Here he is in 2017, when the Fox and Hounds was awarded the coveted blue plaque, denoting a place of significance to the history of Britain—

Now is a good time to tell you that the Fox and Hounds won the 2024 Pub of the Year award from the Campaign for Real Ale. I didn’t sample their ale, but their hard cider is first-rate, as is their food, which isn’t posh but includes some of the best pepperoni pizza I’ve ever had. (A friend who came along would like me to also mention that the beer-battered cauliflower was amazing.)

Then there’s the matter of the upstairs, where Paul’s cousin Betty and her husband Mike and their kids lived, and where Paul and John stayed in that “little single bed” that we spent so much time talking about in the Nerk Twins Rabbit Hole. That same upstairs is available for rent as an Airbnb, and yes, of course I rented it for a night — which brings me to my special prezzie for the Beatles studies counterculture.

My friend who recommends the beer-battered cauliflower also happens to have experience in both construction and drawing floorplans. While the interior of the upstairs has been somewhat modified over the years, the footprint of the original layout remains. Sadly, the room in which Paul and John stayed is currently a storage room, but Kevin was kind enough to show it to me anyway. Also, Kevin knew a little bit about what had been added over the years in terms of extra walls and such, and was happy to fill us in.

So taking all of that into account, I traded my friend an order of beer-battered cauliflower in exchange for a sketch of the floorplan for what was likely the original layout of the upstairs living quarters, when the Nerk Twins were in residence—

I have little doubt that the passionate and able scholars in the Beatles counterculture will glean some new insights about the Nerk Twins trip from this floorplan. I know I did.

So if you’re going to be in London, I encourage you to take the short, 24-minute train ride to the Fox and Hounds. It’s well worth your time (and if enough Beatle people start arriving, maybe Kevin could even be persuaded to restore the store room to its original state, complete with that little single bed).

Finally, I’ve been slowly making my way through the research material I gathered in the archives of Northwestern University. Among that research is a collection of ‘60s teen fan magazines. One of those magazines published a regular “The Beatles Answer Your Questions” feature where readers could send in their questions to have them answered by an actual Beatle.

While I think it’s highly unlikely that the actual Beatles did, in fact, answer these questions themselves, and thus all of them should be taken with the requisite grain of salt, I came across this one that seems appropriate to share here—

Is it true that Paul McCartney studied anatomy at school on a skeleton called Fred Nurk? (Kathryn Walter, East Ham, London, E.6.)

The Beatles answer: Yes, indeed, and Fred later gave his name to John and Paul when they appeared together at a Reading concert as The Nurk Twins.1

I submit this tidbit for your consideration, with no clue whether it’s true or not because I haven’t done the research to find out. The alternative spelling of Nurk Twins with a “u” instead of an “e” suggests that the answer is not, in fact, composed by anyone Fab. Still, I think it’s at least possible this is rooted in some vague kind of truth.

The most plausible explanation would seem to be that the name Nerk Twins takes its inspiration from the British slang term “nerk,” meaning a stupid or objectionable person, a word that was frequently used on the Goon Show (popular at the time with teenagers, including Paul and John). So I could see a clever grammar school student naming a school science skeleton Fred Nerk.

If anyone is inspired to do the legwork of verifying the existence of Mr. Fred Nerk/Nurk, the Skeleton, and comes up with the goods, please do email Robyn and let her know. It’s not of any relevance whatsoever to Beautiful Possibility, but it’s a good story, and I’d be curious to know if this is really the origin of the name.

Until next week, here’s the link to the Fox and Hounds.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

“When he died that day, I was so horrified, I just had like, stage fright all day. Some of it was just fright, like ‘Are you next?” That was a question whipping around the three of us, but also the complete emptiness and the finality of it.

“Someone stuck a microphone in the window of the car as I was leaving the studios that night; I was just beginning to wrestle with it and it was just sinking in, and someone said, ‘What d’you think of the death of John Lennon?” And I really couldn’t think of anything more to say than ‘It’s a drag’ and it came out really slow. But of course when it got printed — ‘Paul McCartney, asked for his definitive version of how he felt, said, “It’s a drag”“ — it looked so callous in print. You can’t take the print back and say, ‘Look, let me just rub that print in shit and pee over it and then cry over it for three years, then you’ll see what I meant when I said that word.’

“I should have said, ‘It’s the most unholiest of drags, and it might have been better. What I meant was, ‘Fuck off! Don’t invade my privacy.’ But I managed to pull something together, but unfortunately it was something that would add to the McCartney idiot myth, some soppy guy who doesn’t care about anything, ‘Oh, it’s a drag!’

“When I got home I wept buckets, in the privacy of my own home. I controlled it all during the day, but that evening when it was on the news and all the in-depth shit, and all the pundits were coming out, trotting out all their little witticisms, I did a lot of weeping. I remember screaming that Mark Chapman was the jerk of all jerks. I felt so robbed and so emotional.”

Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now, 1997.

As you can perhaps tell from the title of this update, I’m still struggling to recover after a month of travel across time zones (along with a nasty sinus infection I picked up along the way). 🤒 So I hope you’ll forgive me if I take one more week off from more substantive updates.

Meanwhile, I hope this photograph of Beatle elephants in Copenhagen might compensate (oh, the things one can find in archives) —

Until next week, when hopefully I will be closer to normal fully functional.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

I’m back and jet lagged and thus don’t have an update for you this week but I hope y’all are enjoying Anthology 4 —

Until next week, when we’ll (probably) either talk about my visit to the Fox and Hounds in Caversham or the challenge of dealing with anonymous sources.

Peace, love and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

As you read this, I’m on my way back from Liverpool to Maine.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the return journey is always difficult for me. There’s no painless way to leave behind a city that holds so much of my heart in its history and its hands. And returning this time is more difficult than ever, given things as they are in the US, and also that it might be until after Part Two is finished before I can return (which will be awhile, especially given the new research I’ve gathered).

As a solitary person by nature, I’m also more than a little dazed at a solid month of domestic and international travel and almost nonstop human interaction — two things that are difficult for me at the best of times and especially for such a long stretch and with such emotional and intellectual demands as have been required this past month.

All of which is to say that I don’t have an update per se for you this week. I’m far too dazed and wrung out to do justice to anything substantive that I’d want to share with you. So instead, I’ll share a few tidbits of possible interest.

First, I was so happy to discover that the windows of the (still empty) Bus Shelter are now covered with a lovely series of panels depicting scenes from the song— more or less what I proposed in the Abbey piece I wrote a few months back. (To be clear, the artwork was in place before I wrote that piece, so I can take no credit. It’s a case of a good idea arriving in two minds at the same time).

A heartfelt thank you to the artist, Susannah Rachel,1 for her love and care in making this happen. And also to the owner of the Bus Shelter for allowing it to happen. This is the first time I’ve returned to Penny Lane to find it better than it was before. In a world where most things seem to be getting worse all the time, seeing some care and attention given to the Bus Shelter was a beautiful sign of hope.2

Second, there’s a gorgeous new mural of John on Mathew Street.

Third, in addition to some useful Beautiful Possibility research in the archives of the City of Liverpool and the Barry Miles collection at John Moores University, I was also able to finish the last bit of research I needed for the Complicated Passion piece on Strawberry Field(s). So (hopefully) it won’t be long until that’s finished and there will be something new on The Abbey other than these scruffy updates.

I’m not sure there will be much of an update next week. I may need a bit of time to reset.

Meanwhile, peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

PS If you’re not sure what I’m referring to relative to the Bus Shelter, here’s the original piece. I’m told it’s better listened to than read —

2

Also, I can’t resist pointing out the inclusion of “finger pies” on one of the panels as a culinary menu item. As some of you may know, a “finger pie” is not, in fact, a variety of English street food, but a sexual reference. I’m curious as to whether this panel is meant ironically or not.