“The moment one begins to investigate the truth of the simplest facts which one has accepted as true, it is as though one has stepped off a firm narrow path into a bog or quicksand — every step one takes one sinks deeper into the bog of uncertainty.”1 — Leonard Woolf, 1967.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to our Wrap-Up for Seven Levels. As with the Wrap-Up for Part One of Beautiful Possibility, this is going to be pretty scruffy. It’s an opportunity, mostly, to explain why this series is a bridge between Part One and Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, and to share some thoughts about what happens next with all of this.

Before we get to all of that though, let’s do this in the reverse order from how it’s usually done, and take care of thank you’s right up front — because as always with work like this, making it happen took a lot of people besides me.

First and foremost, thank you to all of you who have, over the past year, read and shared Beautiful Possibility and who continue to do so. Since I lack both the temperament and bandwidth to do any kind of promotion for this work, I’m dependent on y’all to take it into the wider world. That means you passing it along to the next person is vital — this is how we heal the distorted narrative and restore the love to the centre of the story, one by one, person to person, together.

My long-time creative partner Matt Keener has once again been invaluable and irreplaceable in offering his insights and feedback during the writing of this series. In addition to believing in the importance of this work, his ability to spot confirmation bias and faulty or incomplete reasoning and missed opportunities has saved me more than once. None of this would be half what it is without his contributions.

Fab research assistant Robyn has been, as always, invaluable. As are the volunteer researchers for Beautiful Possibility who — as and when they could — tracked down obscure pieces of research, despite having no clue why I needed them. Thank you to all of you — and most notably Michelle and Michelle 2.0, Mason, Will, Hanna, Amelia, Sofia, and Jessica — your time, talent and love for this story is deeply appreciated.

That said, in a long-form piece of work like this, errors are virtually inevitable, and any errors are entirely my own. Thank you to those of you who have pointed out a few of them — nothing that changes anything, but important nonetheless. Corrections have been made in the written version (though not the audio version) and noted in the footnotes.2

Some of you have also sent me after-the-fact pieces of research relative to the Dylan story, which is always appreciated — for the material itself, and also because it’s a tangible sign that this work is engaging enough to motivate a closer look at the research.

Two pieces of additional research caught my attention as being especially worth a mention.

One person wrote in to remind me that while Neil Aspinall seems to have had nothing to say about the Dylan story, he did have this to say about The Beatles’ trip to London for their Decca audition on December 31 1962 (edited for length)—

“We got to London about ten o’clock at night and found our hotel, the Royal, off Russell Square. Then we went for a drink...We went to Trafalgar Square and saw all the New Year’s Eve drunks falling in the fountain. Then we met two blokes in Shaftesbury Avenue who were stoned, though we didn’t know it. They had some pot, but I’d never seen that either. We were too green. When they heard we had a van, they asked if they could smoke it there. We said, no, no, no! We were dead scared.”3

Aspinall shared this anecdote in Hunter Davies’ biography of The Beatles. That biography was published in 1968. And in 1968, cannabis was still very illegal and subject to harsh prison sentences, and authorities in London were aggressively going after leaders of the Love Revolution for possession of illegal substances. Remember this is the same time period as the Redlands bust, in which Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Robert Fraser were given inordinately harsh prison sentences for possessing extremely small amounts of various mind-altering substances, including cannabis.4

The extreme illegality of cannabis in the UK in 1968 means that anything Neil Aspinall might have had to say at the time on the subject of The Beatles and weed is suspect, to say the least. Because there’s probably no way the protective and notoriously discreet Aspinall is going to tell a biographer in 1968 that The Beatles had been well-acquainted with weed since 1962, even if that is in fact the case.

What caught my attention in Aspinall’s account is that while most of his story is told as “we,”5 he switches to “I” when he says he’d never seen cannabis before. That use of “I” instead of “we” makes Aspinall’s anecdote weak support for John and George’s early days Liverpool version of the story, though only by virtue of a single “I” — the thinnest of thin support, as far as it goes, but support nonetheless.

It’s also maybe worth noticing that Aspinall’s description of being “dead scared” might refer less to being offered cannabis, and more to the experience of being approached late at night in an unfamiliar city by a pair of glassy-eyed strangers asking to get into the van — something that would be unsettling to most people, regardless of whether there was cannabis involved.

The thing is, though, that by December 1962 when this anecdote takes place, The Beatles were already not “most people.” By that time, they had (without Neil Aspinall) completed multiple extended residencies on Hamburg’s infamous Reeperbahn — considered at the time one of the most violent and dangerous districts in all of Europe. After that experience, it seems doubtful the Fabs would be “dead scared” of a couple of stoned guys approaching them, unarmed, on a London street.

What seems likely to be happening here is that by suggesting that “we were dead scared,” Aspinall is subtly reinforcing an image of The Beatles as clean-cut, innocent kids from Liverpool awed at being in the big city for the first time and uncorrupted by the temptations of the underworld — despite that not being in any way an accurate description of the situation. And that might be, once again, motivated by Aspinall’s commitment to protecting The Beatles’ image, in 1968 as the Establishment crackdown on illegal substances is becoming a very big problem.

It’s also possible Aspinall was the only one who was “dead scared.” Unlike The Beatles, Aspinall had not spent time on the Reeperbahn and was an accounting student before signing on as the Beatles’ first road manager — maybe he doesn’t want to admit being the only one who was shaken by the experience, so he’s saving face by broadening it out to include everyone.

In short, all of this suggests that Aspinall is not speaking for The Beatles, but is instead talking mostly about his own lack of familiarity with cannabis and his own perception of the London experience — which is why I chose not to include it in the main chapter.

Still, in hindsight I should have included it anyway, at least as a footnote. even if it doesn’t amount to much relative to the Dylan story — if only because Aspinall is an important source and this is his only word on the subject.

The other piece of research that caught my attention is from a fellow Beatles writer, who sent me a December 1964 Cosmopolitan magazine article written by Gloria Steinem before she was “Gloria Steinem.”

I was aware of Steinem’s article prior to writing this series, but I’d forgotten that in the article, Steinem writes about having been at what she terms the “Riviera Motor Inn” on the final night of the 1964 tour — which, as you might remember from Chapter 1, is when Ivor Davis says the Great Initiation happened.6

According to Robert Freeman, a photographer embedded with The Beatles on their 1964 tour7, John had granted Steinem an interview by virtue of her being a guest of Freeman’s.

In her Cosmo article, Steinem mentions that after waiting the whole night for an interview, she was — at 4 a.m. the following morning — admitted to the inner sanctum to meet with “Lennon, Ringo, Dylan’s manager, the tall girl from San Francisco, photographer Bob Freeman... and an unidentified, bearded journalist.”8

“Dylan’s manager” is presumably Victor Maymudes, who was not (I don’t think) Dylan’s manager in a Brian Epstein kind of way, but rather a road manager in the Neil Aspinall/Mal Evans kind of way — a distinction probably lost on most reporters in 1964 when the modern managerial hierarchy of a rock band was still in the process of being invented.

The “tall girl from San Francisco” seems likely to be folksinger Joan Baez, who is (according to some highly unscientific internet research) 6’3” and from Palo Alto. Baez was in a relationship with Dylan at the time, which probably explains her presence at the Riviera Idlewild.9

As for photographer Robert Freeman, he acknowledges he was at the Riviera Idlewild, but all he has to say in his books about that night is that, “Dylan was an admirer of the Beatles and had organized a clandestine meeting with John on the last night of their tour.”10 This lack of detail isn’t at all surprising, given the reportedly off-the-record nature of the celebration.

Curiously, despite having been embedded with The Beatles throughout their 1964 tour, Freeman says nothing whatsoever in his books about the Delmonico Hotel. And in both of his books, he appears to conflate The Beatles’ first visit to America in February 1964 with their full US tour in August/September of that year. So it’s possible he’s conflating the Delmonico and the Riviera Idlewild as well.

All of these inconsistencies are, as we know, pretty much situation normal in terms of the primary research on the Dylan story. But what’s most interesting to me about Steinem’s article — and what you maybe noticed, too — is her reference to an “unidentified bearded journalist.”

It’s not clear why Steinem uses the word “unidentified,” given she also claims to know he’s a journalist. “Unidentified” implies that she’d tell us his name if she knew it, but that she does not know it. So how does she know his profession, but not his identity? Was he wearing a badge that just said “PRESS” like in the cartoons? Or did someone point to him and say, “He’s a journalist,” but somehow not offer his name?

It’s possible Steinem just isn’t going to name anyone who isn’t a Beatle in her article — given she also didn’t name “the tall girl from San Francisco.” But that doesn’t fit, because she does name Robert Freeman. So maybe she’s simply following some sort of unwritten rule that says you don’t name a reporter from another paper in your article — but that doesn’t fit with “unidentified.” Maybe Steinem just didn’t think the journalist’s name was relevant to the proceedings — but again, the “unidentified” part would seem to nix that. Or maybe she wanted to emphasize his beard as part of setting the scene — unlike today, beards were a controversial choice for a man at the time. But then why take the trouble to add the “unidentified”?

Al Aronowitz had a very prominent beard in 1964, though — you might recall that photograph of Aronowitz and his beard arriving at the Delmonico with Dylan and Victor Maymudes on August 28.

Aronowitz doesn’t mention being present at the Riviera Idlewild, at least not in his book. And if he had been there, that very much seems like the sort of thing he’d mention in his book — if only to squeeze every drop of cultural status out of the situation.

Maybe Aronowitz just somehow forgot he was at the Riviera Idlewild as well as the Delmonico. Or maybe he chose to omit his presence at the Riviera Idlewild for some reason we’re not privy to. Maybe — but there is, once again, the matter of Ivor Davis.

Davis, who is not mentioned by either Steinem or Freeman — and who does not seem to have had a beard in 1964 — goes out of his way to tell us in his book that Al Aronowitz was “notably missing” from the Riviera Idlewild. Davis is even a little smug about how he shares that information — it’s tagged onto the end of his description like a “gotcha” at the conclusion of a murder mystery.11

In other words, despite disagreeing about almost everything else relative to the Great Initiation, Aronowitz and Davis seem to be in agreement that Aronowitz was not present at the Riviera Idlewild.

So maybe Steinem’s “unidentified bearded journalist” is some other guy. Aronowitz probably wasn’t the only journalist with facial hair interested in writing about The Beatles in September 1964.

The problem is, this isn’t the Delmonico, in the middle of Manhattan in the middle of the tour with the press swarming over the hotel and The Beatles, Brian, and Derek Taylor in full-throated PR mode — the “eye of the storm” situation that makes the Delmonico such an implausible setting for the Great Initiation.

Instead, we’re talking here about the Riviera Idlewild, an out-of-the-way motel on the final night of the tour, a handful of press invited by Derek Taylor, and an ‘inner circle only’ private celebration. Or at least, an ‘inner circle and guests of inner circle only’ private celebration.

Whoever the owner of the beard was, he was ‘guest of inner circle’ enough to have been invited behind closed doors while most everyone else — including Steinem — was kept out.

Aronowitz would qualify as a guest of the inner circle by virtue of being with Dylan, who was a guest of The Beatles and also he was Bob Dylan. But if it isn’t Aronowitz, then who is it? And how did an “unidentified bearded journalist” who seems to be a guest of no one get himself in a private hotel room with The Beatles, Dylan, and — possibly — a bag of highly illegal weed?

I have no good answers for these questions — nor did I go looking for any for fear that if I did, I would not find my way home. So barring additional research, the identity of the “unidentified bearded journalist” Steinem claims was at the Riviera Idlewild seems likely to join the ever-expanding list of Beatles mysteries, big and small.

What matters about all of this relative to the Dylan story is what’s notably absent in both Gloria Steinem and Robert Freeman’s accounts of the Riviera Idlewild — any mention whatsoever of anyone smoking weed.

We won’t go much further down this rabbit hole here, except to say the omission of anything cannabis-related isn’t surprising relative to the Steinem article. In 1964, no journalist in her position would have written about The Beatles and Dylan getting high even if they were in possession of that information — which Steinem almost certainly wasn’t, given she was kept waiting until 4 a.m. the following morning before being granted an audience. By that time, those who’d inhaled had presumably floated down from the ceiling and opened the windows to air out the room before admitting journalists who aren’t unidentified bearded guests of the inner circle. And indeed, Davis tells us in his book that Steinem was “whisked in and out” — though I gotta say Steinem’s article doesn’t sound especially, um, whisk-y.

As for why Freeman doesn’t mention cannabis in his books, maybe he, too, was simply being discreet. Or maybe he wasn’t included. Or maybe nothing happened to be discreet about or included in. Neither he nor Steinem offers us enough information to know.

I bring these additional pieces of research up not because I’m looking to do a complete survey of all of the primary research on the Dylan story — which is very much not what we’re here to do — but because these additional pieces of research are good examples of what we talked about in the first chapter — that once there’s credible research on either side of a contradiction, new information doesn’t generally resolve the contradiction, it just stacks more on either side.

And that brings us to my promised answer for how and why this series is a bridge between Part One and Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.

The inconsistencies and contradictions in the primary source research on the Dylan story are not unique to the Dylan story. Those same sorts of inconsistencies and contradictions appear throughout the entire story of The Beatles, in ways big and small.

And of course, these contradictions and inconsistencies are in addition to the much bigger problems we talked about in Part One — the distorted “John vs Paul” narrative and the fear of softness that further distorts the research and the story, especially when it comes to the possibility that John and Paul were lovers as well as creative partners.

These problems with the research were, in an odd sense, not a problem in Part One — because Part One dealt in large part with how those problems came to be, especially relative to the lovers possibility.

But in Part Two, we’re going to shift away from the meta conversation about the story to focus on the story itself, told through the frame of the lovers possibility. And that means that these problems with the primary research are going to become... problematic —

—because you can maybe see that these problems seriously limit how much credible primary research there is to work with. And that in turn is going to have a big impact on how we re-tell the story in Part Two.

We could, of course, have waited until Part Two to talk about all of this, interweaving the meta discussion about the research into the telling of the story — as we did here with the Dylan story. But I’d much prefer not to continually interrupt the telling of what might be history’s most consequential love story with meta discussions about research and source bias. And I’m guessing you’d prefer I didn’t do that, either.

And that’s the practical reason for the existence of this series, and why it’s a bridge to Part Two. Because far better, I think, to talk about all of the problems with the research beforehand. This way, when we get to Part Two, you’ll already get what those problems are and why we’re doing things the way we’re doing them, and we can focus on the story itself.

But I didn’t just want to tell you about all of this in the abstract. I suspect most of you would have found that discussion somewhat less than captivating. I certainly would have found it less than captivating to write.

I also didn’t want to ask you to trust me blindly — when we get to Part Two — about which research I’ve chosen to include and which research I’ve chosen to set aside, without offering any rationale for those decisions.

Especially given the unavoidably provocative themes of Beautiful Possibility, I think it’s important to show my work in terms of how I make decisions about research — and to show how those decisions shape the telling of the story itself. Without showing my work, it could easily look as if I’m cherry-picking the research that supports the lovers possibility and ignoring the rest.

So given all of that, it seemed to me that the best solution would be to do a deep dive into a specific example of how those research problems affect our ability to understand this one specific part of the story, and use that specific example as a way to show my process in separating the credible research from the not-so-credible research. (And if in the process, we also created the opportunity to acknowledge some disenfranchised grief and suffering, all the better.)

I’m hoping that by having stepped through that vetting process in detail using the example of the Dylan story, you’ll have some degree of trust when we get to Part Two that the choices I’m making about which research to include and not to include are (I hope) thoughtful and credible, and not just selected out of confirmation bias because they happen to support my point of view or what I want the truth of the story to be.12

All of which is to say that this series has been, in part, a more detailed version of the wildly popular (where’s the irony emoji when you need one?) Research Methodology Rabbit Hole from Part One of Beautiful Possibility — but with The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and weed as a spoonful of sugar to help the meta go down.

The payoff is that by taking the time now to talk through the problems with the primary research, we’ll be free to re-tell the larger story in Part Two, without (for the most part) needing to interrupt with detailed explanations about why some research is credible and other research isn’t.13

With that payoff in mind, let’s talk more specifically about how all of this affects Part Two of Beautiful Possibility. And because I realise that what follows may be of less interest to those of you who are mostly here for the lovers possibility, as another spoonful of sugar, once we’re finished with our meta discussion of the research, I’ll share a little about what Part Two of Beautiful Possibility might look and feel like in the context of all of this, relative to our re-telling of the story through the frame of John and Paul as a romantic couple.

So thank you for your patience — I ask for it often and y’all always extend it and it’s always appreciated. Now let’s finish up our consideration of the primary research — and then we don’t need to do this again. At least so goes my optimistic plan.

LEAR Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light, yet you see how this world goes.

GLOUCESTER I see it feelingly.

LEAR What, art mad?

(King Lear, Act V, Sc 6)

As I’ve said before, the contradictions and inconsistencies we found in the primary research relative to the Dylan story are not unique to the Dylan story. Those contradictions and inconsistencies appear — in ways big and small — throughout the entire story of The Beatles.

One of the main causes of those contradictions and inconsistencies is that virtually every primary source — from the outermost fringes to the heart of the inner circle — has a motivation (or two or six) to bend the story in a particular direction. And that includes the four people at the centre-most of the centre of the circle — The Beatles themselves.

John, Paul, George, and Ringo are, of course, the most important primary sources when it comes to the story of The Beatles. But as we saw in our discussion of Anthology, The Beatles are far from the most reliable source — given their own frequent contradictions and inconsistencies and the many blank spots they skip over altogether. And also given the small matter of them having intentionally fictionalized half (or more) of their own story, with no demonstrated interest whatsoever in telling us which half is which.

What’s more, re-telling the story of The Beatles through the frame of the lovers possibility means that — both practically and ethically — John and Paul are, obviously, the two most important primary sources — which is why it’s largely through their words that we’ll re-tell that story of in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.

But as we talked about in detail in Part One, despite Paul having given thousands of interviews and published two substantive autobiographies — and come to think of it, four, actually, if we count Eyes of the Storm and the Wings book — he’s told us repeatedly that he’s not comfortable with or willing to share his innermost thoughts and feelings in those interviews and autobiographies. And mostly, he doesn’t, choosing instead to share a carefully curated selection of very safe and very carefully-told stories, mostly about him and John.

John didn’t get the opportunity to write his full autobiography. But in his interviews, he’s told us repeatedly that he often doesn’t mean what he says in those interviews for longer than the time it takes him to say it. John also frequently expressed frustration that people expected what he said in interview to be true for all time, rather than just what he felt like saying in the moment.14

You might already see that that all of this combined adds up to something of a problem, relative to Part Two of Beautiful Possibility — because how do we even begin to re-tell the story of The Beatles through the frame of the lovers possibility, when the two people most important to that story appear to be among its most unapologetically unreliable narrators? And when those closest to them aren’t necessarily all that much more reliable?

This problem is — maybe self-evidently — not entirely solvable.

For one thing, there’s not much that can be done about the contradictory research, other than to give more weight to the more credible stuff. As we saw relative to the Dylan story, at this point, the research is more or less what it is, gone blurry and imprecise with the passage of time, the fallibility of primary sources, and the evolving of the story into mythology.

Also, as I keep reminding us because it keeps being relevant, even if we did have consistently reliable primary research, we’ll still never know most of what went on in private between John and Paul — and, of course, this is as it should be. The vast majority of what happens between two people in a relationship — romantic or otherwise, famous or otherwise — isn’t intended for the inquisitive minds of journalists or historians or heretical mythologists. And that’s even more true if that relationship is a same sex love affair that was by necessity carefully and consciously concealed from what was then a mostly unaccepting larger culture.

The inevitable result of all of this is that any even remotely cohesive telling of the story of The Beatles — and especially a story told through the “what if” frame of John and Paul as a romantic couple — is going to require a fair amount of speculation—

—because as with the Dylan story, following the thread of any part of The Beatles’ story long enough tends to lead to a big question mark (or two or six) — and the only way to continue on past that question mark is to venture into speculation.

And for that speculation to remain both useful and within ethical boundaries, it obviously needs to be careful and credible — to separate it from gossip and fanfic-style romantic fantasy and mainstream Beatles biography.

One of the main things that makes speculation credible is the quality of the primary research on which that speculation is based. And the quality of primary research is largely determined by three things — the overall reliability of the primary source, how likely it is that the source is in a position to know what they claim to know, and how much of the material as shared by that source remains intact and accessible in its original form — meaning word-for-word accurate to what the source actually said.

Part of what I hope our deep dive into the Dylan story has shown is that when it comes to understanding this story, exact words matter a lot. Maybe even — along with the context in which those words were said — more than anything else.

If we don’t know for sure exactly how someone said something — along with the context in which they said it — we run into the same problems that Steve Turner ran into with his “Got To Get You Into My Life is about acid” theory — we take words out of context without noticing either the larger pattern or the fine detail of how those words are being used by the person saying them.15

For example, exact language is what allows us to notice the pattern of Paul consistently excluding the Tara Browne trip from his positive descriptions of LSD. And without Paul’s exact words in their full context, it would have been difficult-to-impossible to notice his experience of cannabis as a psychedelic or his possible heightened sensitivity, and we’d have lost the insights that follow from having noticed these things.

Exact language will be especially important in the re-telling of the story through the frame of the lovers possibility. This is because the nuance of language is where the majority of emotional truth in research is found — often in the form of subtext that requires both exact language and context to be visible. And if we’re going to tell a love story, then obviously emotional truth — how people feel about what they’re talking about — is especially important.

The basic math here is that the more we have of the original, exact language the person in question actually said, the more visible the emotional truth, the more accurate our speculation based on that research will be.

When it comes to exact language and its accompanying emotional truth, the least useful source is, no surprise, third party writing about The Beatles — meaning traditional biographies, commentary, magazine articles, etc. that reference research (primary and otherwise), but don’t themselves contain much, if any, original research.

By putting third party writing at the bottom of the list, I’m not intending to suggest that this kind of work is de facto not legitimate or important. I’d be damning my own work if I said that, because The Abbey, too, falls into this category. Obviously, third party analysis and interpretation is an important and necessary part of understanding any great artist.

In putting third party writing at the bottom of the list of reliable sources of credible primary research, I’m only intending to observe that third party writing tends to be the least likely to include verbatim, word-for-word, in-its-full-context primary research. So for example, if you want to quote any of the research I cite on The Abbey, please go to the original source and quote it in its full context. That’s part of what the source information in the footnotes is for.

Third party writing also mostly doesn’t include footnotes or source citations that can be used to track down and verify that research in its full context. And probably not unrelated, third party writing is where most of the monkey business with the research happens — the frankenquoting and the inaccurate paraphrasing and the taking things out of context and the erasing of the traces of the lovers possibility that we’ve talked about in this series and in Beautiful Possibility — all of that mostly happens in third party writing.16

The tendency for the monkey business to happen mostly in third party writing is why I established the “primary research only” standard for Beautiful Possibility and also for this series. I hoped that by sticking to primary research — verified at the original place it was said by the original person who said it — we could avoid the worst of the monkey business and all would be well.

But as we’ve seen in our consideration of the Dylan story, all is not well. There are plenty of problems with the primary research, too. And the worst of those problems is found in press interviews.

Press interviews — whether online, print, video or audio — are, in theory, word-for-word conversations with the person being interviewed, in which their answers are given in more or less exactly the words the person actually said. Or at least that’s the perception.

But it’s in the “more or less” that the trouble is found. Because press interviews are almost never word-for-word transcripts of the interview. Instead, they’re almost always edited for publication.

This editing is sometimes nefarious, if it’s done to adjust what was actually said to align with the editorial viewpoint of the journalist or publication. But mostly the editing of press interviews is practical and well-intended — smoothing out the language and flow of thought to create a better read, or cutting parts out for length/space considerations. And again, this is true of virtually all online, print, audio and on-camera interviews.

When it comes to press interviews, there are at least two layers of editing between the person being interviewed and us reading or hearing their words — the journalist and at least one editor. And with every added layer of editing, the exact words that the person said become — by definition — less exact.

These layers of editing are especially problematic because emotional truth is maybe the most fragile of all nuances in language, and the easiest to erase with a less-than-sensitive edit.

And even a light edit — intended only for style and an easier read — does damage. Emotional truth often shows itself in stammers, ums and uhs, hesitations, interrupted thoughts, repeated words and awkward phrasing, overly long, overly short or rambly answers and in what seem like offtopic diversions but probably aren’t, when it comes to emotional subtext. All of these nuances of language are exactly the kinds of things that are virtually always smoothed over or edited out of published interviews.

And since the people doing the editing of media interviews are not necessarily Grail fluent, there’s no guarantee or even likelihood that they’re editing with an eye towards preserving emotional subtext. And that’s even more true when it comes to traces of a possible hidden love affair that said editors are almost certainly not even aware is a possibility, because of all the similarly edited things they’ve read in the past.

The consequence is that unless we have access to the raw, unedited recording or transcription of an interview, we have no way to know exactly how and in what context something was said, or whether the original meaning has been preserved in the edited version of the interview. We lose forever that larger context. And we lose forever the opportunity to notice the emotional truth in the original, unedited language.

The net result of all this less-than-sensitive editing is a bit like the aftermath of running a lawn mower over a field of wildflowers — the fragile complexity of emotional truth has been largely crushed beneath the unsubtle blades of pop journalism.17

The other obvious problem with media interviews is that — as John in particular likes to remind us — just because someone is asked a question in an interview doesn’t mean that person is going to give a truthful answer — and nor (of course) are they under any particular obligation to do so. Though we often seem to believe there is such an obligation, a press interview is not a court of law — there’s no such thing as perjury if an interview subject chooses not to give a truthful answer to a question posed by a journalist, and especially a “pop” entertainment journalist.

Also, someone might be especially motivated to be less-than-completely honest with a journalist if a third to half of their story has been fictionalized, and also if they like playing games with the press, and also if they have a well-documented reluctance for sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings, and also if they have had bad experiences with the press since they are a teenager and very bad experiences with the press since 1970, and also if they’re possibly talking around a hidden love affair at the heart of their story.

None of this means press interviews aren’t useful. Like third party writing, they have their place in the scheme of things. Primarily — assuming it’s a reputable media source — press interviews are useful for a sense of a person’s general point of view. But the editing in press interviews means they’re usually not a place to go for the nuances of exact language and the insights into the emotional truth of a situation that we can gain from that language.

The better category of primary research, when it comes to exact language, is autobiography. Instead of a biographer writing about the person whose story it is, an autobiography is, of course, the story told directly by the person themselves.

Better still, if the person telling their story is important enough — as, of course, The Beatles and those closest to them are — there’s usually minimal editorial interference from a publisher in how that story is told. No editor, for example, is going to tell Paul McCartney what to write in his own autobiography. And that means what we read in an autobiography (or a memoir) is likely to be the actual words the person said, the way they chose to say them.

Likely to be the actual words — but not guaranteed.

Most people important enough to merit an autobiography are not themselves possessed of the time, interest, or specialised skill required to write one. So a lot of “autobiographies” are either co-authored on the record, or ghost written anonymously.

For example, Brian Epstein’s 1964 autobiography, A Cellarful of Noise, was ghostwritten entirely by Derek Taylor based in part on conversations with Brian.18 Derek Taylor has also ghostwritten for George Harrison. And Paul’s Many Years From Now is on-the-record credited to Barry Miles and it’s Miles who wrote the third person prose in the book, though Many Years From Now also includes extensive (though curated and probably lightly edited) passages transcribed from conversations from Paul.19

And of course, in either situation, the thoughts of the person whose story it is are filtered through the pen of a collaborator or ghostwriter — both of whom often act as an editor as well as a co-writer. In this way, an autobiography that’s either co-written or ghostwritten — however sensitively — is nonetheless not the exact words of the person telling the story.

But even here, if an autobiography is co-authored or ghostwritten, the person whose story is being told still almost always signs off on the final version. And that means that — generally speaking — we can take an autobiography as an accurate reflection of the story the person wanted to share with us at the time the book was written, in the words that person chose to use to tell that story. And that’s valuable information. How someone chooses to tell their story is, in and of itself, a bit of emotional truth.

And yet just because someone is famous enough to merit interest in their life story doesn’t mean they’re going to share every single detail about their life and their thoughts and feelings about that life in their autobiography — nor, again, do they have any obligation to do so.

And that means the emotional truth we’re looking for in order to re-tell the story through the frame of the lovers possibility may not necessarily show up in its full form in — even a candid and sensitively-edited autobiography. And that emotional truth might especially not show up in the autobiography of someone like Paul, who has told us repeatedly in so many words that he’s not interested in sharing his innermost thoughts in interviews or in books.20

I keep referring to Paul having told us he’s not interested in revealing his innermost thoughts, but looking back, I see it’s been since Part One of Beautiful Possibility that we’ve heard directly from Paul on the subject. So here again is the most explicit of his “innermost thoughts” quotes, from a 2019 interview in which Paul is asked how he feels about revealing himself in his songs—

.

“It’s funny because just in real life, I find that a challenge. I like to sort of, not give too much away. Like you said, I’m quite private. Why should people know my innermost thoughts? That’s for me, they’re innermost. But in a song, that’s where you can do it. That’s the place to put them. You can start to reveal truths and feelings. You know, like in ‘Here Today’ where I’m saying to John “I love you”. I couldn’t have said that, really, to him. But you find, I think, that you can put these emotions and these deeper truths — and sometimes awkward truths; I was scared to say ‘I love you.’ So that’s one of the things that I like about songs.”21

Paul’s quote brings us, finally, to those songs. The place where we probably should have started, because it’s the place that both Paul and John have told us to start, when we’re looking for the truth of their story.22

We’ve already talked in Part One of Beautiful Possibility about lyrics as primary source material, and why it seems all-but-certain that John and Paul wrote more than just a handful of angry breakup songs about and for one another. We obviously won’t repeat all of that here — other than to notice again that despite the reluctance of the mainstream Beatles world to do so, there’s nothing especially unusual or inappropriate about looking for the artist in the art, especially when the artists in question have told us to do so.23

For this Wrap-Up, let’s put lyrics in the context of our consideration of primary research, exact language and emotional truth. And let’s start by acknowledging that as primary source material, song lyrics have some obvious weaknesses.24

Even when an artist is consciously writing autobiographically, lyrics don’t usually spell out what we think of as literal truth. Instead, lyrics are storytelling through verse. And like any good storyteller, artists take liberties with factual detail. They embellish, rearrange and blur separate events together. They frequently reach for symbolism and metaphor that’s idiosyncratic to their personal experience and thus potentially means something different to the artist than it does to us — “a secret code,” as it was recently phrased.

And all of this is especially true if the artist in question is writing about a hidden and transgressive love affair, and has a self-acknowledged love of both misdirection and playing games with language, and when that artist has told us in so many words that “the meanings are not always obvious on the surface.”

The indirect and often idiosyncratic nature of lyrics means that lyrical interpretation, even with a Grail-fluent understanding of the nuances of language, is inevitably at least somewhat subjective. And that means lyrical interpretation is vulnerable to the same gremlins as any other kind of speculation, including confirmation bias — the tendency to see what we want or expect to see rather than what’s really there.25

But lyrics as primary source material also have advantages that even the best traditional primary source material does not have —not even when that traditional source material is directly and verifiably word-for-word from Paul or John.

For one thing — and I know we just said this, but I’m not sure it’s possible to repeat it often enough, given we continue to ignore it — lyrics are very specifically where both Paul and John have — each in their own way — explicitly told us to look for the truth of their lives.

In the quote I’m going to keep quoting it until we know it by heart, Paul has told us, explicitly and directly, that “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.”26

As we talked about in detail in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, John hasn’t told us quite as directly to consider his lyrics as a source of truth about his life. But he doesn’t really need to tell us that directly. John has repeatedly told us he writes confessionally about what’s happening in his life at the time, and he’s also told us repeatedly not to take seriously what he says in interview. Combine those two things together, and you get essentially the same message as Paul’s more explicit directive.27

As we also talked about in Part One, both Paul and John have said they consider songwriting a form of therapy, a safe place for exploring and dealing with difficult emotions. And again, both have also made clear — in this case John more explicitly and directly than Paul — that they feel no particular obligation to tell the exact truth about their lives anywhere other than in song. Like, say, in interview and autobiography.

But, of course, lyrics aren’t factual biography, per se. When Paul tells us his songs reveal the truth of his life, and when John tells us he writes confessionally, I doubt either of them are referring to tangible ‘who/what/where/when’ biographical detail. John and Paul’s lyrics are not likely to be where we’ll learn, for example, whether the Great Initiation happened at the Delmonico or the Riviera Idlewild. For the most part, lyrics are not the best place to look for that kind of detail.

Instead, both John and Paul have explicitly told us that the value of their lyrics as biographical material is as a reflection of the emotional truth of their lives. Paul, for example, has specifically said that each of his songs “illuminate(s) something that was important in my life at that moment.”

And relative to the lovers possibility, Paul and John’s emotional truth contained in their songs presumably includes the emotional truth of what was without question the most consequential, tumultuous, and defining relationship in both of their lives — their relationship with one another. Because for an artist, there’s rarely a source that reflects their emotional truth as honestly — and effectively — as their art.

There’s another, very practical reason to consider the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney as important primary source material — when it comes to exact language, song lyrics are about as exact as it gets.

We’ve talked about many of the problems with the research, both in this series and more so in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — the monkey business with the quotes, the confirmation bias of Grail-phobic writers hampered by the fear of softness, the damage done by the distorted “John vs Paul” narrative, and the unreliability of primary sources, including the Fabs themselves — all of it appearing all throughout traditional research.

Lyrics are an entirely different story.

While lyrical interpretation is vulnerable to the gremlins of subjectivity and confirmation bias, the lyrics themselves are immune to every single one of the problems that compromise and corrupt other sources of primary research.

The lyrics of Lennon and McCartney — together and solo — are exactly, word-for-word as they were originally recorded, with not so much as a single word altered, not even by the lyricists themselves. Despite decades of monkey business and confirmation bias and distorted narrative and fear of softness and lack of Grail fluency and that whole situation at the Riviera Idlewild Motor Inn, the lyrics of Lennon/McCartney remain unedited, un-paraphrased, un-frankenquoted, and just plain overall un-monkeyed-with. And barring a future I’d prefer not to even entertain the possibility of, those lyrics will remain that way for all of human history, till we fall into the sun.

And that means that — without question — the lyrics of Lennon/McCartney are the purest, least corrupted “exact language” we have or will likely ever have to work with, when it comes to understanding this story and this music.28

There’s more, too.

Unlike autobiographies (and unless you’re Leonard Cohen), songs don’t generally take years to write. Compared to other kinds of biographical writing, songs tend to get written comparatively quickly — sometimes in a few minutes, usually in a matter of hours or days, or at most, weeks or months.

Also, Paul and John both began writing songs as teenagers, making their catalogue of songs a continuous archive of emotionally-revealing diary entries from each of them — beginning in their teens and spanning their entire lives.

This, together with the preservation of their exact words and the emotional truth contained in lyrics, makes the songs of Lennon/McCartney the equivalent of an exceptionally revealing, legitimately publicly accessible diary that — as Paul points out in the introduction to The Lyrics — captures the evolving emotional truth of their lives better than any autobiography or interview ever could.29

This diary-like quality of John and Paul’s catalogue of songs is especially relevant given the disorienting effects of Beatlemania and the way that likely distorted their ability to clearly remember the events of that era. However scrambled their chronological recall might be, their songs — written, as they have told us, about what was happening for them in the moment — are impervious to the distortions of time and the fallibility of memory, just as they’re impervious to all the monkey business.

In other words, song lyrics are the only place in which Paul and John are the consistently reliable narrators we need them to be in order to attempt to tell their love story — because in song lyrics, they consistently share their emotional truth in a way they only occasionally do anywhere else.

All of this combined makes Lennon and McCartney’s catalogue of songs (together and solo) the most credible — and really only — complete, real-time source of uncorrupted emotional truth we’re ever likely to get when it comes to the relationship between John and Paul, and the story of The Beatles that’s shaped by that relationship.

The only real problem with lyrics as a primary research source — beyond the imprecision of lyrical interpretation — is the resistance to considering them as a primary research source, and the less-than-sensitive way in which they’re interpreted on the rare occasions when those lyrics are considered as primary research.

Despite their unique value as a source of research, and for all the reasons we talked about in Part One, the mainstream Beatles world continues to willfully ignore both Paul and John’s request that we look to their lyrics rather than relying only on traditional sources. In fact, one of the most common excuses given for discrediting the lovers possibility and the work of those of us who write about it is that we frequently draw from lyrics as supporting research — which btw, is why my emphasis on lyrics is not without its risks in terms of the credibility of this work, which is why we’re taking so much time to step through all of this here.

This refusal by the mainstream Beatles world to consider the art when studying the artist would be absurd if it wasn’t also so heartbreaking. To give you an idea of just how absurd and heartbreaking, here’s a little thought exercise—

Let’s say someone decides to write your biography. They go looking for research with which to write that biography, and you tell them that the truth of your life is found mostly in your diaries. And not only that, you literally hand them your diaries — all of them that you’ve kept for your entire life since you were a teenager, and invite them to use anything they find in those diaries as source material.

But instead of believing you and accepting your invitation to do a deep dive into the complex and raw emotional truth of your personal diaries, your would-be biographer flips through a few pages here and there, scribbles a few quick notes about some obvious stuff (mostly stuff you’ve already told them anyway), and then ignores those diaries completely. What’s more, they snicker at the suggestion to look closer at those diaries.

Instead, your would-be biographer pulls all of their research from your social media accounts, believing every word you posted there — despite that being where you’ve specifically told them you very intentionally do not share the truth of your life.

Then, after your would-be biographer has read through all your social media accounts, they go off and write their book. And the PR department of the publishing company slaps a “definitive” label on the cover, and voila! the biographer becomes an expert on your life, cited on Wikipedia and called on for press interviews that then get used as research material for other biographies.

This is, as near as I can tell, an accurate description of virtually every single Beatles biography ever written — including biographies that attempt to tell the love story of John and Paul by considering their songs. Little wonder The Beatles are not big fans of third party biography and decided to fictionalize their own story rather than outsourcing the job.

What I’m suggesting — with a bit of snark to keep myself sane — is that If we truly believe Paul and John have the right to tell their own story — which they inarguably do — then it seems to me that the way to respect that choice isn’t to turn away from the lovers possibility (for whatever reason), but to turn towards the one place Paul and John have told us to look for the truth of their story — and to do so with an open mind and a Grail-fluent perspective on what we might find there.

If we could collectively manage that, we’d see that the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney are a time capsule like no other — the only complete, credible, chronological, word-for-word source of emotional truth in the entire body of available research on The Beatles, spanning almost the entire breadth of the story, from John and Paul’s teenage years through their entire lives.

Put another way, and to frame this situation in mythological terms — if, as I suggested in Part One, The Beatles are the creators of our modern world, then one could say that the lyrics of Lennon/McCartney are the closest we’ll probably ever get to received truth — and by “truth” I mean the emotional truth of the story of Lennon/McCartney.

But, of course, even beyond the fear of softness and resistance to the lovers possibility, there’s a reason why journalists, biographers and historians tend to avoid looking at the lyrics — journalists, biographers and historians don’t generally come equipped with the skillset required to do complex lyrical interpretation.

Again, this is not intended as a slag on journalism, biography and history as disciplines — all three are valuable and important in their own ways. But the Grail-fluent ability to understand and interpret artistic nuance and complex emotional and lyrical subtext isn’t generally a required skill in those “hard fact”-based disciplines — though maybe it should be, if the subject being studied is great art and the artists who created it.

This skillset mismatch is probably why lyrical interpretation — on the rare occasions it happens in mainstream Beatles writing — tends to be oversimplified and hamhanded and limited to what’s easily noticeable on the surface, combined with believing whole cloth what either John or Paul has said the song is about, in those interviews that they don’t tell the truth or reveal their innermost feelings in.

By way of yet another analogy, it’s as if a plumber attempted to do open heart surgery — no matter how skilled a plumber is at plumbing, as a heart surgeon, they’re inevitably going to end up killing the patient.30

To return to our hypothetical biography of you, what your would-be biographer doesn’t tell you — and maybe doesn’t tell themselves — is that the reason they ignored those diaries of yours is because those diaries are written in a language that the biographer doesn’t know how to read. So rather than admit their ignorance and take the time to learn how to read the language your diary is written in, they just grabbed the few bits that they felt like they understood and retreated to the safer and more familiar territory of those social media accounts for the rest of their research.

All of this brings us, at last, to what all of this has to do with Part Two of Beautiful Possibility — though at this point the answer might be somewhat self-evident.

I’m still working on exactly what Part Two is going to look and feel like — but let’s gather up what we have to work with, when it comes to credible primary research in re-telling the story of The Beatles through the frame of the lovers possibility.

We’ve got whatever press articles and interviews that seem credible and aren’t edited within an inch of their useful lives — which is a fairly small fraction of the total.

We’ve got autobiography and memoir — from Paul and from George and a little from John and Ringo, and of course, from virtually everyone who ever breathed the same air molecules as the Fabs — much of which is usable (and sometimes very usable), if only because how someone chooses to tell their story is in and of itself valuable information even if they’re not telling it entirely truthfully.

We’ve got the evidence of our eyeballs in the thousands of publicly-available photographs and film clips of John and Paul together, that we talked about in detail in Part One as being in and of themselves pretty strong confirmation of the credibility of the lovers possibility.31

And we have their catalogue of song lyrics — Lennon and McCartney, together and separately, and also George’s songs, which we haven’t talked about much here, but will get to when we get to the breakup.32 Their musical diaries documenting their emotional truth from their first meeting as teenagers through to the present day, pristine and un-monkey-ed with, each word exactly as they intended it — and revealing what appears to be the complete arc of a relationship, from initial attraction and falling in love through commitment and mature marriage, estrangement, reconciliation, separation by death and reunification by spirit.

And although we didn’t talk about them specifically, let’s not forget John’s letters and artwork, and Paul’s paintings and his poetry — those, too, are impervious to monkey business, in the same way as their lyrics.

And finally, we have, well... me and my willingness to be the Holy Fool in service of this work, along with my Grail fluency and skill at lyrical interpretation and the nuances of language — all of it imperfect, but fortunately supported by the Grail fluency of my colleagues who lend their talents to help with Beautiful Possibility.

All of that combined means that Part Two is probably going to look a lot like what we did in this series — minus (for the most part) the detours into the meta of the research, and including a lot more discussion of the mythological elements of the story.

To re-tell the story of The Beatles through the frame of the lovers possibility, we’ll consider the credible primary research, using the same process of discernment we used in our consideration of the Dylan story, along with the relevant lyrics, using the same sort of deep lyrical interpretation within the context of the story that we did with “Got To Get You Into My Life”.

And when we run out of research to draw on, we’ll do our best to fill in what we can’t know with educated, researched, and (hopefully) responsible speculation, based on what we know (or at least can be reasonably confident of knowing) about the psychology and relationships of the people involved and the context in which events are unfolding.

I hope our consideration of the Dylan story has shown that despite the many problems in the research, there is a richer and more complex narrative waiting to be discovered, beyond the oversimplified and distorted “John vs Paul” narrative that’s traditionally told. But that narrative is only visible if we’re willing to consider this story and this music with a softer — and ultimately more revelatory — gaze.

And in that context, let me remind you that our consideration of the possible consequences of Paul’s “seven levels” cannabis experience is only a preview of Part Two. We’ll return to these events when we have more context and greater insight into what might have happened between Paul and John in 1965 that might have resulted in and had you gone.

But all of that said, I hope you’re also seeing that while this softer and more Grail-fluent approach can offer us access to insights and complexities in the story not otherwise visible, there are also inherent limitations to how far we can go, even with these more sensitive and revelatory tools.

In giving us explicit permission to look for the truth of their lives in their songs, Paul and John have — directly and indirectly — invited us to speculate on what we find in those songs, relative to the emotional truth of their relationship. But what Paul and John have not given us permission to do is to make definitive conclusions, offered with unshakeable certainty, about what we find in those songs or anywhere else in the primary research.

Practically speaking, this ethical license to speculate but not conclude isn’t actually all that limiting. Other than continuing to ignore the lovers possibility altogether, speculating-but-not-concluding is more or less the only way we can explore the lovers possibility anyway — given the limitations of the research and the inherently private nature of a relationship between two people, and particularly this relationship between these two people.

And even if at some point we get confirmation of the lovers possibility, we’ll still probably never know the full story of Lennon/McCartney, and how that relationship shaped The Beatles and thus the Love Revolution and thus our modern world and all of us. It’s the nature of a love story to hold back some — and even most — of its secrets, tucked away in that private “shoebox of memories” we talked about in Part One.33 And again, that’s how it should be — frustrating though that limitation might sometimes feel.

If this unavoidable uncertainty seems like a bad thing, you’re not alone in thinking so. We live in a culture that puts a premium on the certainty of hard fact. Uncertainty is branded as a liability, a problem that needs fixing. And in our black-and-white culture that rewards rigid and inflexible points of view, an acceptance of that uncertainty often feels like an act of cultural heresy.34

And if some part of you is disappointed — and maybe even a little heartbroken — at the suggestion that we may never know for sure whether John and Paul acted on their love and desire for one another, you’re not alone in that, either. I know first-hand that coming to terms with that particular uncertainty is often painful. And it’s perhaps especially painful for those of us with a felt awareness of how much healing that particular certainty could bring to the story and to our increasingly broken world and — as we talked about at length in the final episode of Part One — to Paul and John.

But frustrating and disappointing and a little heartbreaking though the lack of certainty might sometimes be, it’s not without its gifts.

The shortage of consistent, credible primary research — along with the practical and ethical requirement to speculate but not conclude — essentially forces us out of “for sure” and into the liminal space of “what if.”

Nineteenth century Romantic poet John Keats understood the gifts of “what if” when he wrote that “at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...”35

Now, Keats is almost certainly taking poetic license when he suggests that it’s “irritable” to reach for fact and reason — both of which obviously have a vital place in understanding The Beatles (and for that matter, Shakespeare and John Keats). We’ve done a lot of reaching for fact and reason in both this series and Part One of Beautiful Possibility, and we’ll continue to reach for fact and reason in Part Two — because fact and reason are what prevents lyrical interpretation from becoming fantasy-fullfillment, and speculation from becoming gossip.

But what Keats might be getting at with his unfortunately named “Negative Capability” is that we lose something important when we prejudice certainty over lack of knowing. Because it’s our lack of knowing that allows us to be open to new interpretations — whether of a song or a play or piece of art, or a story, or life in general. Discovering those new interpretations doesn’t happen — can’t happen — without the uncertainty of an open mind. The understanding that we don’t — and can’t — have all the answers.

The gift of uncertainty is why Beatles historian Robert Rodriguez’s conclusive statement that there remain only “a handful of unsolved Beatles mysteries”36 might be the saddest and most damaging statement I’ve ever read from a mainstream Beatles writer (and that’s saying something).

Rodrigez’s assertion that, essentially, we know almost everything there is to know about this story is especially sad because it’s so obviously counter to The Beatles’ own unquenchable curiosity. So at odds with their constant, restless desire to avoid repeating themselves, to discover what they don’t yet know, to find out what happens if they play this note or make that sound or push that button on the mixboard that no one before them had ever pushed in quite that way before.37

Like all great artists, The Beatles seem to have had an intuitive understanding of what Rodriguez and other devotees of the cult of certainty don’t seem to recognise — that the acknowledgment of Not Knowing is a profound act of both humility and creative liberation. A sacrificing of the Self in exchange for access to deeper and more profound knowledge. An embrace of uncertainty is an acceptance that there are limits to what we can know for sure. And more than that, an embrace of uncertainty is arguably an inherent quality of genius, as well as a requirement for its full expression.

Conversely, when we allow our desire for certainty to close the door on possibility, when we decide all questions have been answered, all mysteries solved, when we close our minds to anything that doesn’t align with what we’ve already decided is “for sure” true, we lose the opportunity to learn anything we don’t already know. We lose the opportunity to connect with the consciousness-expanding experience of possibility.

It’s probably not coincidental that so much of what’s written about the similarly fractured world of Shakespeare scholarship also applies to Beatles scholarship. In yet another example of that similarity, I was struck by what Oxford Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith had to say about the gifts of uncertainty in her book This Is Shakespeare. Here’s a bit of what she wrote (edited for length)--

“Lots of what we trot out about Shakespeare and iambic pentameter and the divine right of kings and ‘Merrie England’ and his enormous vocabulary blah blah blah is just not true, and just not important. They are the critical equivalent of ‘dead-catting’ in a meeting or negotiation (placing a dead cat on the table to divert attention from more tricky or substantive issues). They deflect us from investigating the artistic and ideological implications of Shakespeare’s silences, inconsistencies and, above all, the sheer and permissive gappiness of his drama... Shakespeare’s plays are incomplete, woven of what’s said and what’s unsaid, with holes in between...

Sometimes, Shakespeare’s plays register the gap between older visions of a world run by divine fiat, and more contemporary ideas about the centrality of human agency to causality, or they propose adjacent worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible. These gaps are conceptual or ethical, and they open up space to think differently about the world and experience it from another point of view.

Gappiness is Shakespeare’s dominant and defining characteristic. And ambiguity is the oxygen of these works, making them alive in unpredictable and changing ways... His works hold our attention because [emphasis added] they are fundamentally incomplete and unstable... ‘Shakespeare’ is here less an inert noun than an active verb: ‘to Shakespeare’ might be defined as the activity of posing questions, unsettling certainties, challenging orthodoxies, opening out endings.38

Though the study of the works of Shakespeare is not perfectly analogous to the telling of a passionate love story that reshaped the foundations of our modern world, you might nonetheless recognise much of what we’ve been talking about in Emma Smith’s words. Though she uses the word “gappiness” rather than “uncertainty” or Keats’ “Negative Capability,” what Emma Smith is talking about here is the power of Not Knowing. The boundless possibility and scope for the imagination found only in the liminal space of “what if” and — mythologically speaking — the “once upon a time” of fairy tales — which is where all possibility — including the lovers possibility — lives.

If nothing else I’ve offered persuades you to embrace the gifts of uncertainty, then consider this — it’s only the practical magick39 of uncertainty — the ability to tell this story as a “what if” rather than a “for sure” — that allows us to talk about the lovers possibility at all, without stepping on John and Paul’s right to tell (or not tell) their own story.

And maybe the most profound magick of all in the “what if” of the lovers possibility is that — as we talked about in Part One — even just acknowledging as credible the possibility of a romantic relationship between John and Paul goes a long way towards healing the wound at the heart of the story, for Paul and for John and for all of us, too.

Including the lovers possibility — not the certainty, just the possibility — in our consideration of the story of The Beatles instantly transforms the toxic, distorted “John vs. Paul” narrative of competition, bitterness and rivalry into a far more beautiful and more powerful story rooted in cooperation and partnership and love. And — by definition — is a truer story, because love is what all four of The Beatles have explicitly told us their music was meant to be about.

In other words, simply acknowledging the credibility of the lovers possibility — along with all of its uncertainties — is in and of itself an act of profound healing that sets us well on the way towards the telling of a more truthful — and life-affirming — story.

And with that thought to ponder, we’ve now completed our crossing of the bridge to Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, which I must now return to researching — sifting through piles of straw to find the gold.

It will be awhile before Part Two is ready, but in the meantime, there are the weekly updates, scruffy as they tend to be. I call them “updates” even though that’s not an especially descriptive word. While they do include updates on Part Two and such, they’re mostly micro-rabbit holes, interesting pieces of research, answers to reader questions, and other things that caught my attention and might catch yours.

If you subscribe to The Abbey, you get those weekly updates in a once-a-month digest email so you don’t have to remember to check the website when new things are posted.

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Coming up while I work on Part Two is a more substantive piece in answer to a pending-for-too-long reader question about “However Absurd,” and also some follow-up thoughts on the lyrical analysis of “Bless You” from Part One. There’s also the potential for a very short (like “a series of interrelated scruffy updates” short) late summer miniseries that I’d love to publish just because it would bring me joy to do so. Oh, and possibly another chapter or two of my perpetually-in-progress memoir about The Beatles and pilgrimage, A Complicated Passion.

But before any of that, I’ll be taking the remainder of June off. Weekly updates will resume on Monday July 6, the 69th anniversary of a summer’s day when — in the “what if” language of fairy tale —once upon a time, two boys who loved rock and rock met, and fell in love and changed our world forever.

Until then.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

39

“Magick” spelled with a “k” to distinguish it from the performative magic of stage magicians, illusion, and sleight of hand.

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“John was always the jumper, the suicide man, the one off the cliff, he always had to be bigger and bolder and brighter, which was what excited people about John. We like those people, we like high-risk people, that’s how John was and that was the radical difference between us. I’ve always made that conscious decision. It’s like the Cyril Connolly quote, “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than a pram in the hall.” I’ve always said, “Well, I obviously can’t be that interested in art then because I’m not fucking ruining my life just for a song or for a painting, particularly when I’ve done so well anyway.”1 — Paul McCartney, 1997.

We’ve arrived at the final chapter, in which we’ll put together the pieces we’ve laid out over the course of this series into a possible answer for Whatever Happened between John and Paul in 1965 that, in turn, may have motivated the urgent desperation — and the and had you gone — of “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

Our untangling of the Dylan story concludes with this chapter. Two weeks from today, we’ll do a series wrap-up in which we’ll answer the meta questions — what all of this means relative to Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, and the practical reasons why this series is in the world as its own thing, rather than as part of Part Two.

So let’s pick up our story where we left off — with Beatles engineer Norman Smith’s observation that sometime between Help! and Rubber Soul, “there’d been one hell of a change” in the relationship between John and Paul — and that the change Smith observed was so upsetting to him that he took the extreme step of resigning his position as The Beatles’ studio engineer on the cusp of their most consequential musical innovations.

In later years, Norman Smith offered more detail on this change he saw between John and Paul in the studio—

“The change, by the time they recorded Rubber Soul, was that it was taking so much longer to put down each song. I also noticed there were musical clashes coming in. What I mean by that is it seems that Paul wanted to go one way and John wasn’t maybe too keen. There was a certain turbulence that I didn’t like. It wasn’t in the songs themselves. Certain things came up when we were recording. Things didn’t seem eye-to-eye between John and Paul. I suppose I didn’t know more than that. John wanted to go into a deeper message or psychological type of thing, and Paul still wanted to keep in the middle of the road. I guess that’s what I sussed out.”2

First, let’s notice Smith’s complaint that “it was taking so much longer to put down each song.”

That’s a very strange complaint for a sound engineer to have — and especially a sound engineer charged with recording the world’s most influential artists as they began in earnest their work of revolutionizing the way music is recorded. It’s also a pretty dodgy reason to quit, given Smith himself was no slouch as a producer, and that his next gig after leaving the Fabs was to produce Pink Floyd’s first album, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn — not exactly a “just push the record button” project—

In other words, the circumstances of Smith’s departure strongly suggest that something unusual did indeed motivate him to quit The Beatles on the leading edge of their musical revolution.

Smith doesn’t seem especially confident in his analysis of what that something unusual was, though — what with his “I suppose I didn’t know more than that” and “I guess that’s what I sussed out.” And it’s to his credit that he’s not stating something as categorically true when he isn’t certain about it, and when — given his limited perspective — there’s no reasonable way he could be certain about it.

That lack of certainty is an example of why I tend to consider Norman Smith an overall credible source, despite his often-eccentric and cryptic writing style. When someone acknowledges that they’re not sure of something, we can take them more seriously when they claim to be sure about something else. That’s still not a guarantee that what they’re sure of is, in fact, accurate — but an acknowledgement of fallibility is a good indication that they’re consciously trying to get it right. And that’s probably all we can reasonably ask for, from a primary source.

Also, as we talked about in the prior chapter, Smith’s position as a studio engineer may have afforded him a unique perspective as a “wildlife observer” — but as is usually the case with primary sources, his ability to interpret what he observed is less reliable. And Smith is right to be unsure of his stated reason for the tension between Paul and John in the studio during this time — because it’s demonstrably inaccurate.

Smith is talking here about Rubber Soul — the album that by virtually universal consensus, began in earnest The Beatles’ revolutionizing of popular music. That revolution would evolve into Revolver, and then into Sgt. Pepper and what might be Paul and John’s most brilliant and influential collaboration, “A Day In The Life.”3

Rubber Soul also saw the ascendance in earnest of Paul’s groundbreaking melodic bass lines, which redefined the use of the bass guitar in popular music. And Rubber Soul also marked the beginning of Paul’s exploration of the musical avant garde, which he and John together would bring into the studio in the form of the tape loops, reverse and varispeed recording, and (with the help of George Martin and, of course, George and Ringo), non-traditional arrangements and instrumentation.

So dramatic was Rubber Soul in its innovations that the album would compel Brian Wilson to attempt to outdo it with Pet Sounds, which would in turn be a major influence on Sgt. Pepper, which would in turn — by some reports — drive Wilson into a literal nervous breakdown in his unsuccessful efforts to top it.

By definition, an artist who’s in the midst of reinventing the foundations of popular music can’t at the same time be “middle of the road.” And reinventing popular music was without question what Paul — and indeed all four of The Beatles (along with George Martin) — were doing as they embarked on the recording of Rubber Soul.

So why and how did Smith come up with his ‘Paul wanted to be middle-of-the-road and John wanted to explore a deeper message’ analysis?

If you’re familiar with Beautiful Possibility, you’ll almost certainly recognise this duality as an iteration of the distorted “John vs Paul” narrative that we talked about at length in Part One. More specifically, you might recognise it as an iteration of the especially distorted narrative of “John/hard vs Paul/soft.”

It took us multiple episodes in Part One to step through the evolution of the distorted “John/hard vs Paul/soft” narrative — and as usual with that sort of thing, it’s not practical to repeat the full analysis here. But we can step through a quick refresher, keeping in mind that the following is very, very oversimplified—

Even during the worst of the breakup — when John was doing what angry, heartbroken exes have done since the beginning of time and hurting the person he felt had hurt him — John was nonetheless unfailing in his acknowledgement of Paul’s genius.

Instead, John’s way of doing damage during and after the breakup was to imply that Paul’s music was less interesting and important compared to John’s. And John did this by painting his own songs as “hard” — edgy, angry and political — and Paul’s songs as “soft” — all those “silly love songs.” This is, for example, the “working class hero” vs. Englebert Humperdinck comparison that John made in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview.

Despite being demonstrably untrue, John’s strategy was heartbreakingly effective — in part because, as we also talked about at length in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, our culture has long held that artists who make “hard” music are more important and interesting than artists who make “soft” music. And largely because of this hard/soft cultural bias, journalists tended to believe John’s distorted narrative of Lennon/McCartney and wrote their stories accordingly.

And because the wider public took their version of the breakup from how the press covered it, over time this distorted “John/hard vs Paul/soft” narrative became the core of the traditional story — the mythology — of The Beatles, passed down in mainstream writing from the breakup onwards — that Paul is the superior musician and the superior craftsperson, but that John is the mad artistic genius whose work is more profound and substantive.

Again, this summary of the evolution of the distorted hard vs. soft narrative is extremely condensed and oversimplified. And also again, demonstrably inaccurate. So if you haven’t yet read Part One of Beautiful Possibility, I encourage you to do so for a fuller analysis of the complex dynamic we’re talking about here.

There is no reason to think Smith was immune to the effects of the distorted “John/hard vs Paul/soft” narrative — especially since he claims to have maintained his friendship with John past the breakup and into the 1970s when John was actively advancing that narrative to anyone who would listen. Like almost everyone else at the time (and too many people even now), it’s likely Smith allowed “John/hard vs Paul/soft” to colour his interpretation of his memories, when he offered his guess about what was happening between John and Paul in the studio during Rubber Soul.

In other words, Smith’s ‘middle of the road vs deeper meaning’ analysis — offered in the late 1990s — is probably an example of retroactive confirmation bias — Smith looking back on his memories of recording Rubber Soul from a perspective that includes decades of exposure to the “John/hard vs Paul/soft” distorted narrative. Because when it comes to interpreting past events, we tend to see what we expect to see rather than what’s really there.

So why are we bothering to talk about this Smith quote at all, if Smith himself doesn’t even seem to believe it, and if it’s not supported by the actual music and is instead rooted in the distorted narrative?

Well, we’re talking about it because even though Smith’s analysis of the actual nature of the tension he observed between Paul and John during Rubber Soul is demonstrably inaccurate, I think we can believe him when he says this is what he saw happening between Paul and John in the studio—

—because while it’s self-evidently not true that Paul was “middle of the road” during Rubber Soul, “middle of the road” is exactly the sort of thing John tended to accuse Paul of when John was feeling especially creatively insecure — as we just briefly noticed relative to John’s breakup interviews.

And that brings us back to “Yesterday.”

In “Unscrambling Yesterday” — which is an informal part of Beautiful Possibility — we took a less scholarly, more lyrical look at the “cycle of insecurity” that seems to have played out between John and Paul from the day they met right up through the present day.

Here’s the most relevant passage from “Unscrambling Yesterday”—

As geniuses often are, John is deeply insecure about... well, everything, actually, but mostly his talent, especially relative to Paul’s (tbf, this club contains multitudes, John is just the charter member). This insecurity compels John to undermine Paul’s work, usually passively-aggressively but occasionally overtly.

Since John is Paul’s self-proclaimed biggest influence, John’s undermining does indeed cause Paul to doubt his own talent. And since Paul’s own insecurity manifests itself in his extreme work ethic, Paul responds by working even harder to impress John. This makes John even more insecure, which ratchets the whole cycle up to the next level where it starts all over again.

This cycle of insecurity has been festering since the day they met at the fête , when Paul made such an impression that John was worried about letting him in the band for fear Paul would take over even as John knew he needed Paul if the band was going to go anywhere. “Yesterday” is the first significant public surfacing of this cycle.

“Unscrambling Yesterday” goes on to consider (again in a more lyrical form) the role “Yesterday” has played in the relationship between John and Paul over the decades. We obviously won’t repeat all of that here, but the most important thing to know is that when the cycle of insecurity between John and Paul flares up in a way that’s prominent enough to be visible in the research, “Yesterday” is virtually always somewhere in the mix.

Every single one of us has been richly rewarded by this cycle of insecurity. It’s partly responsible for the revolutionary work by both of them that was to follow close on the heels of “Yesterday,” beginning in earnest with Rubber Soul. But that same revolutionary work that ascended The Beatles into musical and mythological immortality came at a very high price for both John and Paul.

“John came to my loft and he was all excited... He said, ‘I think I finally wrote a song with as good a melody as Yesterday. Yesterday drove him crazy. People’d say, ‘Thank you for writing Yesterday, a beautiful song ... ‘ He was always civil, but it drove him nuts.”

Sat at piano, Lennon revealed a title — ‘Imagine’ — but only a smattering of lyrics. For the rest he sang “scrambled eggs” — just as McCartney had when inspired to write Yesterday.

“He played it through and asked me what I thought. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘But is it as good as Yesterday?’

‘They’re impossible to compare.’

So he played it again. And again. And he said, “You’ll see, it’s just as good as Yesterday.”4

— journalist Howard Smith

Unlike the creative unfurling that happened for Paul after his “seven levels” experience with Dylan, there’s little to no indication that cannabis on its own had a similarly transformative effect on John’s creative life. And indeed, when asked in 1970 about the “big change-over” in The Beatles’ music that began in 1965, John answered by saying that—

“I suppose it was pot then... (sic) I don’t remember any change-over. Other than when you take pot you’re a little more less (sic) aggressive than when you take alcohol.”5

Of course, as we just talked about, there was without question a radical change-over with Rubber Soul. And this quote— along with its slightly scrambled logic — is from the infamous Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner that we discussed at length in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, in which John dismisses the entirety of The Beatles’ music and legacy, as well as his partnership with Paul, only to retract virtually everything he says, sometimes even before he’s finished saying it.6

We’d be wise to take everything in this interview — and any interview with John, really, but especially this one — with a very large grain of salt. But I think we can lean towards believing John when he says that cannabis was not a transformative experience for him — because John has been consistent over the years in his attitude towards cannabis as recreational rather than revelatory.

For example, John said essentially the same thing to biographer Hunter Davies in 1967, well before the breakup—

“Drugs7 probably helped the understanding of myself better, but not much. Not pot. That just used to be a harmless giggle. LSD was the self-knowledge that pointed the way in the first place. I was suddenly struck by great visions when I first took acid. But you’ve got to be looking for it, before you can possibly find it. Perhaps I was looking, without realizing it, and would have found it anyway. It would just have taken longer.”8

This passage makes clear that when it came to mind-expanding substances, John reserved most of his — for lack of a better word — enthusiasm for LSD. In the same 1970 Rolling Stone interview, John recounted his first LSD trip and concluded by saying it was “terrifying, but fantastic.”9

And a decade later in 1980, John told journalist David Sheff that—

“We must always remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD, by the way. That’s what people forget. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it? They brought out LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. But it sure as hell performs them.”10

John goes on in the same Rolling Stone interview to claim that his romance with LSD “went on for years. I must have had a thousand trips.”

Now, “a thousand trips” is almost certainly a classic Lennon-esque exaggeration.11 And indeed, when Wenner asks John to clarify whether it was really a thousand trips, John answers with, “Lots. I used to just eat it all the time,”12 which — despite its lack of specifics — is probably an accurate characterization of John’s approach to anything he took a fancy to.

But like Paul with cannabis, John’s feelings about LSD reveal themselves less in what he said and more in what he did. And by all accounts, by the end of 1965, when John and Paul began to write songs for Revolver — including “Got To Get You Into My Life” — John was tripping regularly on LSD, as well as... well, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Here’s Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, in her 2005 autobiography (edited for length) —

“In the following months [after his first trip in spring of 1965] John took LSD regularly. He was hungry for new experiences and never afraid to experiment. George had found it fascinating too and he also took it again, as did Paul and Ringo, but John felt it gave his life a whole new dimension. The other Beatles were much more cautious, but John threw himself into it with abandon, convinced that this was the way to greater enlightenment, creativity and happiness... (sic) Within weeks of his first trip, John was taking LSD daily and I became more and more worried. I couldn’t reach him when he was tripping, but when the effects wore off he would be normal until he took it again.”13

And in a self-penned 1994 Hello! magazine article, Cynthia claims that —

“John by [1966] had become a heavy user of LSD. He wanted to be a genius, he wanted to travel outside his body, he wanted to prove to the world that he had a unique gift. Acid stimulated his creativity and opened up his mind to previously undreamed-of wonders, he believed.”14

Cynthia’s observations of the effect LSD had on John are somewhat inconsistent. In her 1978 memoir, A Twist of Lennon, she writes that once John began tripping on LSD, he became—

“ —like a little boy again. His enthusiasm for life and love reached a new peak; he had opened the floodgates of his mind and had escaped from the imprisonment which fame had entailed. In many ways it was a wonderful thing to watch. Tensions, bigotry, and a bad temper were replaced by understanding and love.”15

Then later in the same memoir, she also says that, “as far as I was concerned the rot began to set in the moment cannabis and LSD seeped its unhealthy way into our lives.”16 And Cynthia has also claimed in later years that she went along with John’s interest in meditation because “I’d do anything to get him off this horrible LSD and get my old John back”17 — which, again, seems somewhat contradictory to her prior claim that LSD turned John into a more open and loving person.

Cynthia’s differing observations on LSD’s effects on John might be because she sometimes blames John’s drug use for the collapse of their marriage, or because she had bad trips both times she tried LSD. Or the contradictions may simply be because the effects of LSD are themselves inconsistent — dependent, as Timothy Leary observed, on “set and setting.”

But regardless of Cynthia’s inconsistencies relative to the effects of LSD on John, one thing she is rock solid consistent about is that once John got a taste of the mind-expanding effects of LSD, it became a regular part of his life. And she’s far from the only one to comment on John’s passionate embrace of LSD.

Here’s Merseybeat founder Bill Harry, who’d known John since they were students together at art college—

“I was the first one to call John a genius and it was justified. He wanted to create so much all the time. Some people need a stimulant to get them going, and initially with John it was alcohol. A few beers would release his inner creativity and provoke him to create something new. He wasn’t drunk, but he searched for that inner soul that held the secrets of his creativity. It started with alcohol in Liverpool, and then it was Preludin in Hamburg, marijuana, LSD, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Primal Scream therapy. I believe John wasn’t just abusing his body, he was seeking an altered state of consciousness to stimulate his inner creativity to find out more and more. He was the opposite to George, who believed in inner peace and that meditation would bring out his creative genius.”18

And here’s John’s childhood friend Pete Shotton, who remained close to John throughout the Beatles years and often stayed over at the Lennon home in suburban Weybridge—

“[John] saw acid as a godsend—a magical key to uncharted regions of his own imagination, and a potential cure for most of his psychological problems. It gave almost tangible form to his lifelong perception of the world as a surrealistic carnival, and it enabled him—instantaneously, effortlessly, and without leaving his chair —to experience the semblance of mystical visions and even communion with God. By the time the Beatles started working on Revolver, in the spring of 1966, both John and George were taking the drug on an almost daily basis.19

Unlike Cynthia’s mixed messages, Pete Shotton seems to have felt LSD was an unqualified positive influence on John, at least at the beginning—

“If anything, LSD’s influence on John seemed, at the time, to be a salutary one. It brought enthusiasm back into his life, and inspired him to write the most brilliant songs of his career; it also served to smooth away some of the rough edges of his personality, virtually curing him of his arrogance and paranoia. He took to leaving the gates of Kenwood open, allowed his fans to wander the grounds, and, on occasion, actually inviting them in for tea. John even got into the habit — for a while, anyway — of rising with the sun every morning.”20

Some of John’s immersive embrace of LSD was, no doubt, simply the zeitgeist of the times. Some of it was undoubtedly a way to cope with the stress of Beatlemania, as well as other problems in his life at the time that we’ll get to in a bit. And some of it might just be that this is John Lennon — as he himself has acknowledged, moderation isn’t exactly in his vocabulary.

Also — as Paul, Cynthia, Bill Harry, and Pete Shotton point out — John was possessed of a lifelong pull to explore the darker corners of his own psyche. This pull, of course, manifested most brilliantly in his songwriting. In later years, it manifested more destructively in his pull towards heroin, primal scream therapy, and other elements we’ll talk about when we get there in Beautiful Possibility.

And because this is John, it’s also virtually certain that much of his pull towards LSD was in reaction to his lifelong creative insecurity.

Consider Cynthia’s recollection that John was “convinced that [LSD] was the way to greater enlightenment, creativity and happiness,” and that he embraced it as part of wanting to “prove to the world that he had a unique gift” and that LSD “stimulated his creativity.” And then there’s Bill Harry’s suggestion that John’s use of mind-altering substances was primarily motivated by a desire to “stimulate his inner creativity” — nearly the identical language to Cynthia’s. And Pete Shotton’s observation that John saw acid as “a magical key to uncharted regions of his own imagination.”

And that brings us back, once again, to “Yesterday,” and to Norman Smith’s observation that something happened between Help! and Rubber Soul to fundamentally change the relationship between John and Paul.

Let’s take a look at the timeline of the events, relative to “Yesterday” and John’s use of LSD, that unfolded during that time period between Help! and Rubber Soul —

• August or September 1964 (depending on whether you believe the Delmonico or the Riviera Idlewild version of the story) — Paul has his first “mind-blowing” “seven levels” cannabis experience with Dylan in New York.

• October 1964 through February 1965 — sometime during these four months, Paul dreams the music for “Yesterday.”

• February 1965 — The Beatles begin recording the soundtrack album for Help! It’s the first Beatles album on which Paul’s creative contributions outnumber John’s, if only just barely.21

• Also in February 1965 — Filming of the movie Help! begins, during which Paul frequently plays “Yesterday” on the house piano as he works on the lyrics to the song.22 Paul remembers that during the filming of Help!, while listening (most likely) to songs they wrote for the film, John told him that “I probably like your songs better than mine.”23

• (probably) late March/early April 1965 — John, along with George, experiences his first (nonconsensual) LSD trip at a dinner party given by his dentist.24

• early April 1965 — John (with some input from Paul) writes “Help!,” a song about John’s struggle with depression and an explicit plea for, well— help. The song includes the lyric, I’ve opened up the doors, which is magpied from The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book on the psychedelic experience.25 This suggests that the line in “Help!” may be a reference to John feeling a new emotional vulnerability and openness in the wake of his first LSD experience, similar to what Paul seems to have experienced during his cannabis-fueled “seven levels” trip.

• June 14 1965 — The Beatles record Paul’s “I’m Down” and “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” and Paul records “Yesterday,” the first Beatles song that involves no Beatles other than Paul in either its composition or recording.26 Although he has no active part to play, John is present for the recording.

• August 1 1965 — The Beatles appear on the UK variety show Blackpool Night Out. Paul performs “Yesterday” live for the first time — solo under a single spotlight. During Paul’s rehearsal of “Yesterday,” John heckles from the wings, resulting in a very public argument with Paul.27

• August 24 1965 — John claims this is when he (along with George and Ringo) takes his first intentional LSD trip, in Los Angeles during their US tour. (Note: Cynthia claims this is inaccurate, and that John began tripping regularly “within weeks” of his first LSD experience — see footnote.28)

• September 13 1965 — “Yesterday” is released as a single in the US. It sells a million copies within the first five weeks.

• October 9 1965 — John’s 25th birthday. And also the day “Yesterday” reaches #1 on the US Billboard chart and stays there for four weeks.

• October 12 1965 — With “Yesterday” still topping the Billboard chart and about to top the Cash Box chart as well, The Beatles begin recording Rubber Soul. By now, John is, by all accounts, tripping on LSD on a regular basis.

This is a slightly incomplete timeline, because there’s one event that I’m holding back until later in the chapter when we have more context. The point here is that I doubt this correlation between “Yesterday” and John’s embrace of LSD is a coincidence. I think it’s cause and effect, fueled by the cycle of insecurity and by what “Yesterday” represented —

—the unfurling of Paul’s genius, at the exact same time John was struggling to write enough new material to meet the expectations from George Martin, EMI, Brian and the world — and perhaps most of all, Paul. For the past three years, John and Paul had struggled together to meet those expectations. It must’ve seemed to John that, after being turned on to cannabis, Paul now could so easily meet those expectations all on his own that he was literally composing masterpieces in his sleep.

Here’s how that cause-and-effect might have played itself out—

The mind-opening psychedelic effects of cannabis — which Paul seems to have had a heightened sensitivity to — unlocked a radical unfurling of Paul’s innate musical genius in a way it didn’t for the other three Beatles. That unfurling was so intense and revelatory that it flooded Paul’s conscious mind and spilled over from his waking life into his sleep, causing him to dream the music for “Yesterday” (and possibly other songs that he wasn’t able to consciously recall).

So radically did cannabis unfurl Paul’s creative genius that John — already struggling with chronic creative insecurity and sinking into the (probably not unrelated) depression that would torment him for the rest of his life — panicked. And if you’re even a little bit Grail-fluent — meaning fluent in emotional subtext — it’s easy to see why.

Not only did Paul dream the complete melody for “Yesterday,” but he also recorded the song with no tangible involvement from John. Given John’s insecurity, it’s all but inevitable that “Yesterday” — given its critical and commercial success and John’s lack of active involvement in its creation — would have signalled to John that Paul no longer needed him in order to stay at the toppermost of the poppermost.

Remember here the anecdote we touched on in the timeline — that Paul remembers John confessing to him upon hearing what was most likely songs from Help! that he thought Paul’s songs were better than his own.29

“Yesterday” may have felt to John like “proof” — right there, sitting atop the charts for all the world to see — that Paul was the true — and only — genius in The Beatles, and that John himself was a fraud. And that (from John’s point of view) unless John came up with the goods to match Paul, he’d be made irrelevant in his own band — the band that he (not Paul) founded.

And this need to keep up with Paul in the wake of “Yesterday” — and to save face in front of a world that had its eyes on both of them — would likely have spun John into creative crisis and supercharged his embrace of LSD.30

All of this would have been festering in John’s mind as The Beatles recorded Rubber Soul. And unlike Paul, John was not the sort of person to suffer in silence.

Instead, John had a demonstrated, lifelong habit of striking out at others to cope with his own demons — which is why it was probably inevitable that John’s “Yesterday”-fueled insecurity spilled out in the studio, just as it spilled out during the Blackpool Night Out TV appearance where John heckled Paul from the wings as he rehearsed “Yesterday.” And just as it would spill out during the breakup when — as we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — John masked his own insecurity about his solo work by likening Paul to middle-of-the-road balladeer Englebert Humperdinck.

And because accusing Paul of being “soft” seems clearly to have been John’s go-to coping mechanism when he felt insecure relative to his partner — and because people don’t tend to change their coping mechanisms under stress, and not without a lot of conscious effort to do so (which there’s no indication that John had done, in 1965) — it’s unlikely John came up with a whole new and different way of expressing that insecurity during the recording of Rubber Soul.

From his “wildlife observation blind” in the control booth, Norman Smith would have been in a position to witness these exchanges between John and Paul. But Smith almost certainly would not have had the Grail fluency or the context to interpret what he was witnessing as part of the cycle of insecurity. It’s not clear from his writing that Smith even understood that John suffered from creative insecurity in the first place.

So several decades later — when the distorted narrative was in full force — Smith probably did what almost every other outsider did — he rejected the evidence of his own ears, and instead interpreted what he remembered hearing John say as the literal truth, despite the fact that the actual music being recorded told the truer story.

The pressure John put on himself to keep pace with Paul’s prolific and seemingly effortless creative output must have been extreme — especially given the deep emotional and creative enmeshment between the two of them. I doubt John would have said no to anything he felt would help him keep up with Paul, as well as the world’s and his own expectations for himself. And it seems all-but-certain that in his embrace of LSD, John was intent on unlocking a similar creative unfurling in his own psyche — mostly to keep up with Paul, whom John perceived as having eclipsed him as a songwriter.

This struggle to write new material would torment John for the rest of his life, even as LSD helped to — as Pete Shotton put it — “inspire some of the most brilliant songs of John’s career.”

You might remember from Part One of Beautiful Possibility, this quote from Beatles press agent Tony Barrow —

“Beneath the bullet-proof exterior I had found a pitifully insecure man who doubted his own abilities and couldn’t concentrate long enough on his songwriting to complete more than a fraction of his best work. He had heaps of unfinished songs surrounding him throughout the time I knew him best in the Sixties.”31

Before we continue, I hope it’s clear that I’m not suggesting John’s creative insecurity was warranted — it self-evidently wasn’t, especially given he was yet to write his most iconic and important songs, including “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and much of “A Day In The Life.”

But we’re talking here not about our perception of John’s genius, but about John’s. And it’s demonstrably true that from this point on — maybe because of LSD — John writes at a higher level but writes less. And Paul — maybe because of cannabis — writes at a higher level and writes more. And given the cycle of insecurity, there’s no way John’s going to be okay with that imbalance. And there’s also probably no way he’s going to pass up any opportunity to go all in on anything he thinks might fix it. And since cannabis didn’t unfurl John’s talent as it unfurled Paul’s, John turned to LSD — intent on unlocking a similar creative unfurling in his own psyche.

What I’m suggesting is that “Yesterday” — as the symbol in John’s mind of both Paul’s creative unfurling and John’s creative insecurity — is likely the inciting incident for the Whatever Happened that motivated and had you gone, and thus the truer, deeper way in which “Got To Get You Into My Life” is about cannabis and also a love song — but really a song of reassurance — to John.

If so, was Paul’s merging together of his cannabis-fueled creative unfurling with the tension in his relationship with John in “Got To Get You Into My Life” a conscious choice? In other words, did he deliberately write the song with both meanings in mind as an intentional message of reassurance to John, alongside an acknowledgement of the transformative power of cannabis in Paul’s life and the way it permanently changed things not just for Paul, but for John, and for their relationship? Or was Paul’s newly unfurled creative genius working below conscious awareness, as creative genius often does — making him conscious of some of these elements, but not all of them?

There’s probably no way to know — unfortunately, these aren’t the sorts of questions interviewers ask Paul McCartney, and it’s possible he wouldn’t have the answers if they did. But the careful insertion of and had you gone into the lyrics — combined with the ever-present ghost of “Yesterday” haunting the timeline — certainly suggests that the double meaning was intentional on Paul’s part, consciously or otherwise.

We will come back to and had you gone, because I’m aware we have a ways to go to link that to what we’re talking about here. But first, there’s more to notice about the interconnection between “Yesterday” and “Got To Get You Into My Life,” and the cycle of insecurity that likely spun John into his extreme embrace of LSD.

In “Unscrambling Yesterday,” I suggested that “Yesterday” isn’t about the past at all. That it’s a hymn of prophecy — Paul sensing into the future that the cycle of insecurity will ultimately be the cause (or at least one of them) of a breakup with John.

What I’m proposing with that suggestion is that there’s a sort of a time travel loop happening — not literally, of course, but in the sense that it’s the knowledge of a future event that in and of itself causes that event to happen. And more than that, that it’s the saying out loud of the anxiety about the event that causes that event to happen.

By the time Paul writes I said something wrong / now I long for yesterday, he’s already having a lived experience of John’s reaction to the melody — which, remember, before finishing the lyrics, Paul played incessantly in the weeks or months after dreaming it, including on the set of Help!). The same melody that John was obsessed with in the Howard Smith quote that opened this section.

In this way, “Yesterday” itself is the I said something wrong that Paul is worried will ultimately make it all fall apart.

In other words, by having dreamed the melody of the song, Paul unintentionally sets into motion the very sequence of events that he writes about in the lyrics of “Yesterday.”

There’s nothing paranormal about this “time loop” situation. Or rather, there doesn’t need to be. It’s essentially another way of describing a self-fullfilling prophecy — we sometimes create the future event we’re anxious to avoid by being so anxious to avoid it.

But we’re not quite finished yet. Because I don’t know about you, but I’m unconvinced that the cycle of insecurity sparked by “Yesterday” and Paul’s cannabis-fueled creative unfurling would have been— on its own — enough to trigger the and had you gone situation in “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

It’s certainly possible, but would John really have almost left The Beatles — and Paul — solely due to creative insecurity?

The research does seem to make clear that John saw “Yesterday” as an existential threat to his own genius. But John had struggled with creative insecurity since the day he and Paul met — when despite their instant connection, John hesitated to ask Paul to join the band out of fear that Paul would take over. If creative insecurity was a deal-breaker, The Beatles would never have happened in the first place.

John’s coping mechanisms for keeping his demons at bay don’t seem to have included walking away when he felt threatened. Instead, as we’ve talked about, John’s preferred method of coping with his insecurity seems to have been to search for ways to spark his own creative unfurling — most successfully and enduringly, with LSD.

But whereas Paul’s tendency towards moderation and his (possible) heightened sensitivity motivated him to experiment cautiously, so as not to break anything along the way, John’s temperament seems to have driven him to take chances to enhance his creative genius — even when those chances came with increasingly dangerous risks to his personal safety.

“I was like an artist that went off — have you never heard of... Dylan Thomas and all them who never fuckin’ wrote but just went up drinking and Brendan Behan and all of them, they died of drink— everybody that’s done anything is like that. I just got meself in a party, I was an emperor, I had millions of chicks, drugs, drink, power and everybody saying how great I was. How could I get out of it? It was just like being in a fuckin’ train. I couldn’t get out... I was enjoying it, and I was trapped in it, too. I couldn’t do anything about it, I was just going along for the ride. I was hooked, just like a junkie.”32 — John Lennon, 1970.

When it comes to drug overdoses, LSD is on the safe side of the spectrum. Doing too much of it doesn’t cause death, other than by misadventure. So-called “acid casualties” in the Sixties were rare, a relative handful of cases sensationalized by the mainstream press — including as we saw in a prior chapter, the Daily Mirror — as evidence of the “evils of drugs.”

But though acid casualties in the ‘60s were rare, they were not unheard of. Tripping without experienced guidance, and tripping too often or in the wrong circumstances — all of which John did repeatedly — carries the very real risk of long-term psychological damage in someone not emotionally stable enough to handle the experience.

John’s “why do it when I can overdo it” approach to life made him especially vulnerable to the sometimes less-than-transcendent effects of LSD. “I’ve always needed a drug to survive,” he said in 1970. “The others too, but I always had more. I always took more pills, more of everything because I’m more crazy probably.”33

Drugs are, of course, an important part of the Beatles’ story, and there’s a lot of primary research on the Fabs’ experiences with LSD. And when it comes to John’s use of LSD — and the extremity of it — that research is across-the-board consistent.

Here’s the continuation of a quote from Cynthia that we considered earlier (edited for length)—

“Within weeks of his first trip, John was taking LSD daily and I became more and more

worried. I couldn’t reach him when he was tripping, but when the effects wore off he would

be normal until he took it again...

Soon he was bringing home a ragged assortment of people he’d met through drugs. After a

clubbing session he’d pile in with anyone he’d picked up during the evening, whether he knew

them or not. They were all high and littered our house for hours, sometimes days on end.

They’d wander around glassy-eyed, crash out on the sofas, beds and floors, then eat whatever

they could find in the kitchen. John was an essentially private man, but under the influence of

drugs he was vulnerable to anyone and everyone who wanted to take advantage of him.

I knew I couldn’t go on like that indefinitely. Our home was being invaded by people I neither liked nor wanted to know. I was afraid for Julian and myself. I didn’t want to hear loud music all night, or pick my way through semi-conscious bodies when I brought my son down for his breakfast.

But every effort I made to put an end to it was met by a brick wall. A gulf was opening between me and John and I had no idea how to bridge it. I wasn’t going to give up on my marriage without trying everything I could, but I couldn’t live with a man who was constantly in another dimension.”34

And here she is again in 1994, talking about John later in 1966 —

“At home things went from bad to worse. I used to dread it when John went out at night. I’d lie awake waiting for his return just knowing what was in store. Sure enough, about four in the

morning a string of cars would pull into the drive and decant 15 to 20 people all high on acid, pot and whatever else they could lay their hands on, ready to party. I’d get up at breakfast time to find the place littered with drugged bodies and Julian, little soul that he was, couldn’t understand what was going on.

It was a nightmare period. I didn’t want to lose John and I feared for his health but I was desperately worried about Julian. I didn’t know how to handle it. My mother, who’d moved to London by this time, and often came to stay, saw what was going on and was appalled. But both of us felt helpless.”35 36

Cynthia isn’t the only one to weigh in on the extremity of John’s drug use. Pete Shotton, John’s childhood friend and occasional long-term houseguest, remembers that, “by the time the Beatles started working on Revolver, in the spring of 1966, both John and George were taking the drug on an almost daily basis.”

Shotton is probably wrong about George, who was articulate and consistent in his descriptions of having tripped infrequently and intentionally, and who — unlike John — was not prone to exaggeration. But there’s little doubt Pete Shotton is right about John—

—because there’s also Barry Miles, Indica Gallery owner and a mutual friend of both John and Paul. Miles shared in a 2021 interview that he thought John was “in grave danger of being an acid burnout at one point.”37

And a bit later in the timeline, Brian’s former personal assistant Peter Brown describes visiting John and finding him “crumpled on the curved sofa on the sunporch at Kenwood. He had been up for three consecutive days, tripping on LSD, and he had not washed or shaved in seventy-two hours.”38

Again, like all consciousness-altering experiences, LSD is largely context and mindset dependent. As Leary wrote in The Psychedelic Experience, avoiding a bad trip generally requires a positive “set and setting.” And despite the heady joy of reaching the “toppermost of the poppermost” — and despite John’s apparent closeness with Paul during this time period — by 1965, John was in many ways in a very bad place.

We’ve already talked about John’s creative insecurity during this time period, as well as the pressure to meet expectations and to keep up with Paul’s creative unfurling. But the demons tormenting John in 1965 didn’t stop there.

John was also struggling with the unprecedented explosion of Beatlemania, and his conflicted feelings about fame and Brian’s “respectability makeover” that allowed Beatlemania to happen in the first place.39 Then there was the unrelenting tour schedule Brian insisted on maintaining long past the point where it was necessary to build The Beatles’ career. And let’s not forget John’s weight gain during the Help! era — what he later called his “fat Elvis” period — which was probably related to his depression at the unwanted domestic burden of being a husband and father in stockbroker suburbia, while Paul was lighting up the society pages as the Prince of Swinging London and immersing himself in the cultural avant garde with Jane Asher on his arm.40

And, of course, if there is truth to the lovers possibility, there would also have been the constant “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” (also on Help!) stress of concealing John’s romantic relationship with Paul from a world that adored them only as long as they pretended to be something they weren’t, and that despised who they really were to one another.

And of course, all of this is in the context of John’s lack of an internal governor that might have told him when enough was enough.

Nonetheless, LSD doesn’t necessarily seem to have been— on its own — the problem. Or at least not the whole problem. As we’ve seen, Cynthia, Pete Shotton and John himself recall that LSD (along with cannabis) helped John soften his anger and frustration. And as we already noticed, LSD seems to have been responsible for John’s own creative unfurling that led to the most iconic work of his career.

The bigger problem might have been that John’s embrace of LSD didn’t mean he gave up alcohol, or the pills that all four Beatles — and John most of all — had been taking since Hamburg in order to keep up with their grueling performance schedule.

Ivor Davis, whom you may recall from an earlier chapter as the one who claims Dylan actually turned The Beatles on to pot at the Riviera Idlewild rather than the Delmonico, remembers that during the 1964 tour—

“ — John had been popping Preludin, which he kept in a little black bag tucked away in the

bathroom. He called them “my belly warmers.” He and all the Beatles swallowed the “Prellies,” as they called the uppers, like jellybeans, ever since their days in Hamburg, where they needed them to sustain the ten-hour, seven-day-a-week sessions in the clubs.”41

On its own, dependence on pills is a risky proposition. The list of fatalities is too long to list here, and includes Brian Epstein, and a decade later, Elvis Presley. But while acid casualties may have been far and few between, combining LSD with pills and alcohol — and doing so for an extended period of time — is another situation altogether.42

John’s mixing of pills and LSD seems to have started from his very first LSD trip, when — as he recalls in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview — he was also on an amphetamine high.43 And for someone with John’s unaddressed psychological traumas who did not have a tendency towards moderation, the risks of that volatile cocktail of pills, alcohol, and LSD would have increased exponentially.

It’s a part of the story that’s generally whitewashed and glamorized as part of John’s “hard” and edgy image. But the reality is that by the time The Beatles began recording Rubber Soul in October of 1965, John’s drug abuse was already putting him in the red alert danger zone.

“And had you gone, you knew in time we’d meet again.” — Paul McCartney

We’re finally ready to put the pieces together that we’ve laid out over these four chapters. But before we do that, a few cautions.

First, let’s remind ourselves — as we did in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — that there is a limit to how much we can know, looking in from the outside, about any relationship between two people, even when the two people in question are as famous as John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Given the countless words written about The Beatles, It’s easy to forget that we only know — and will only ever know — a tiny fraction of what went on in their private lives, together and separately. And of course, that’s how it should be.

Long-term, intimate relationships tend to be messy and complicated. By its nature, even without factoring in the lovers possibility, the relationship between John and Paul is more complicated than most. We can put pieces together, identify patterns, and offer educated — and hopefully respectful — speculation about cause and effect. But in the end, we only get to see what we get to see.

The second caution is that to put the pieces together, we’re going to need to say out loud some uncomfortable truths about what was likely happening with John and Paul in late 1965 and early 1966 — uncomfortable truths that never quite make it into those mainstream books about The Beatles, and rarely even into the Beatles studies counterculture.

One of those uncomfortable truths is that even in our paranoid and puritanical modern age, we tend to view John as more artistically interesting in part because of his reckless use of drugs — and we tend to view Paul as less artistically interesting in part because of his caution relative to those same drugs. Paul himself even seems to view things that way. You might remember the quote that opened this chapter — Paul’s self-deprecating and explicitly apologetic comment that he’s not willing to risk his life or his family for the sake of being “the suicide man, the one off the cliff,” as he described John.

But that duality of seeing John as edgy and cool for his drug use and Paul as less so for his caution is blind (Grail-blind, in fact) to the reality of what it would have been like for Paul to be the intimate partner of — and I say this with deep respect and compassion and love for John — an emotionally unstable drug addict with chronic insecurity, an intense fear of abandonment, and a dangerous lack of impulse control.

To understand how this volatile dynamic may have played out between Paul and John, let’s go back to Part One of Beautiful Possibility, where we talked about John (and others) having acknowledged that Paul and Brian were the only two people able to keep John emotionally and psychologically stable enough to function — in the band and in life in general.44

We will, of course, talk more about Brian and John in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility. For here, let’s note that by the time we get to the sequence of events we’re talking about here, Brian seems to have already begun his own spiral into the dangerous territory of dependence on drugs to get through his own depression, and was thus hardly in a position to offer support or stability to John.

You might have noticed that Cynthia is not on John’s very short list of people who were able to keep him stable and functional. That’s probably because Cynthia herself has acknowledged— as we saw in the prior quotes — that she did not have the ability to handle John’s psychological problems or his drug addiction. And even if she had known how to help, there’s no indication that John would have trusted her to do so — John and Cynthia’s marriage seems to have been over in all but name long before the time period we’re talking about here.45

So with Cynthia and Brian unable to help, that left Paul — along with protective “Beatle bubble” that had been built around the four of them — as John’s only stabilizing influences.46

And that brings us back to Paul’s relationship to LSD vs cannabis.

As we talked about in a prior chapter, Paul has repeatedly identified the longer duration and intensity of an acid trip as what he most disliked about LSD, and as the main reason he didn’t trip very often, and also as one of the main reasons he preferred cannabis.

But there’s another, more sobering reason — beyond his natural temperament and possible heightened sensitivity — why Paul might have opted for the shorter, more controllable psychedelia of cannabis over LSD. And that reason might have been as much about John as it was about Paul.

As John’s primary stabilizing influence, Paul would have had to keep his head at least relatively clear in order to function as John’s tether to reality. Like any partner of an addict — romantic or otherwise — Paul couldn’t have afforded to “turn off his mind, relax and float downstream,” at least not on any kind of regular basis, not if he wanted to keep John stable and functional.

And that brings us to another of those uncomfortable truths. Because given John’s habitual, long-term mixing of LSD, pills, and alcohol, paired with the lack of an internal governor to tell him when enough was enough, it seems certain that John occasionally — and maybe more than occasionally — pushed things too far.

I say “it seems certain” somewhat out of habit — because this is not, in fact, speculation. We know of at least one such incident.

Journalist Larry Kane, who was embedded with The Beatles on their ‘64 and ‘65 tours, tells the following story in his book Ticket To Ride, about being backstage at the taping of their 1965 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show —

“The door to their dressing room opened, and lanky Malcolm Evans emerged with a worried look on his face. Evans almost never looked worried, even during those miraculous great escapes and close calls.

I said, “What’s going on?”

[Mal] answered, “[John’s] sweating, shaking, looks like too many pills and shit.”

I said, “Pills?”

“Yeah, uppers, downers, pain stuff, I think, y’know.”

Up until that point, I had never heard of any pills—over-thecounter, prescription or illegal — associated with the Beatles. So I was genuinely shocked. There had been some marijuana cigarettes around, but as far as I was concerned, the pills were something new. But they weren’t really, apparently. Later, John Lennon would talk about having taken pills of some sort since he was a young teenager

“How bad is he?” I asked Mal.

“Don’t say anything. The other boys are cool, they think he’s just nervous,” Mal said. “The boys are always nervous. They get nervous just before, you know.”47

There’s no particular reason to doubt Larry Kane’s overall description of this incident, though his recall of the conversation is almost certainly not word for word accurate, given he’s writing in 2003 about an event in 1965. But as a journalist, he probably did take notes at the time, especially given the unusualness of the incident and his acknowledgement that he was shocked by the experience. And that he seems generally a credible source with at least a bit of sensitivity to the situation he’s describing, and thus he seems unlikely to fabricate this kind of story.

In Kane’s account, Mal is fairly obviously downplaying the severity of John’s condition, sidestepping Kane’s “how bad is he?” with a deflection to “the boys are always nervous.” And maybe this is why Kane doesn’t name this incident as what it self-evidently and without question was — a drug overdose, serious enough that it came close to making John unable to perform and scared even the generally unflappable Mal Evans.

John’s Ed Sullivan Show overdose happened in August 1965, during the gap between Help! and Rubber Soul that Norman Smith specifies — and not too many months before Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life.” And — maybe not coincidentally — the set list included Paul’s solo performance of “Yesterday” — his first US performance of the song — after which John couldn’t resist offering the passive-aggressive but also perhaps telling, “thank you, Paul, that was just like him.”

And despite Mal’s claim that the other three Beatles didn’t know what was happening relative to John’s overdose, it’s unlikely that was in fact the case — if only because of the extreme closeness between all four of them during this time period and that they would likely have been very aware of the effects and quantity of the pills John was taking, given those pills had been part of their lives since Hamburg.

Mal telling Larry Kane that “John’s just nervous” and “don’t say anything” also strongly suggests the Ed Sullivan overdose might not have been an entirely new problem. That kind of protective familiarity with what was happening — along with a priority on covering it up rather than seeking medical assistance — are signs that the situation was perhaps not an unprecedented emergency, but the latest in an established pattern for which there was a well-worn protocol — which included protecting the Beatles’ image by minimizing the seriousness of what was happening outside of the inner circle.48

But first time or not, there’s no indication that the Ed Sullivan overdose served as any kind of a wake-up call for John, given the accounts from Cynthia, Peter Brown and Barry Miles that John’s drug abuse only grew more extreme in the months and years that followed.

And that means that given there was one overdose during this time period, there were likely others. And those other overdoses might have been even more extreme, with the very real chance John might not wake up from whatever haphazard cocktail of drugs he’d taken. And in the context of John’s deepening depression, maybe even times when the overdose was perhaps not entirely accidental — when he didn’t want to wake up at all.

And now let’s recall Cynthia’s account of how LSD made John vulnerable to “a ragged assortment of people he’d met through drugs.” Cynthia’s recollection suggests that John wasn’t just indulging in his toxic cocktail of LSD, pills, and alcohol within the relative safety of the Beatles bubble — as in the case of the Ed Sullivan overdose — but that John was engaging in this dangerous pattern of behaviour unsupervised and in the company of that “ragged assortment of people,” both at home and elsewhere.

And that brings us back once again to Paul, and his role as John’s partner and primary support person.

Given the intensity of the bond between them — even excluding the lovers possibility — it seems likely that Paul was the one who was called on (maybe along with Mal) to deal with John if/when he was in a bad way, just as it was Paul (along with Mal) who took John home to Cavendish after his accidental trip in the studio in 1967 — when you might recall, that accidental trip happened because John mixed up which drug he was taking and took LSD instead of, presumably, speed.

All of this would mean Paul was by necessity on constant alert, in case one of those calls for help came. And even putting aside whether Paul was the one called to deal with the situation, it’s virtually certain that Paul lost no small amount of sleep when he and John weren’t physically in the same place, not knowing where John was or what he was doing, and worrying that John might overdose or meet with some misadventure, either intentionally or accidentally — as he might well have on the night of the “emperor of eternity” trip, had Paul and George not sprinted up to the roof of EMI Studios to save him from plummeting over the edge.

And that brings us back, once again, to the distorted “John/hard vs Paul/soft” narrative. Because obviously, that kind of constant vigilance doesn’t leave much room for trippy, reckless lifestyle choices — not even for Beatle Paul, the Prince of Swinging London.

Because while there was no language in the 1960s to describe the relationship between a drug addict and their co-dependent partner (romantic or otherwise), the co-dependency itself certainly existed. And the reality is that for decades, Paul has carried the weight that all partners of addicts shoulder — being labeled as less interesting because of a need to stay centered and sober so as to be able to support and stabilize a volatile partner.

When it comes to Paul’s use of mind-altering substances, the truer truth might be that — in combination with his natural caution and possible heightened sensitivity — it was John’s drug use that forced Paul to be “less interesting” relative to experiments with altered consciousness during the Beatles years, because that was the only way to keep the band together, and possibly the only way to keep John alive.

I’m grateful that I’ve not personally had the experience of being the co-dependent partner — romantic or otherwise — of an addict. But even from the outside, it’s not hard to see that the years-long 24/7 vigil required to keep someone you love safe from their own demons is — to say the absolute least — exhausting.

As difficult and scary as that time period was for John, it must have been equally — and in some ways, perhaps even more — frightening for Paul, perpetually on alert for a phone call telling him that John was in danger or unspeakably worse, never able to quite relax unless John was with him, and even then, knowing that relief was only temporary.

This, in turn, might have contributed to Paul’s feeling that he couldn’t afford to relax or let his guard down that we talked about in a prior chapter. What if John needed him, and Paul couldn’t respond because he was floating downstream on an LSD trip that he couldn’t find his way out of, because it was too intense and lasted too long?49

And even beyond what was happening with John, Paul had his own stresses during this time — the same stresses and demands of Beatlemania and touring, his own childhood traumas arising from the death of his mother and his often-tense relationship with his father, Paul’s stage fright that we talked about in a prior chapter, and his role of being the one to get everyone into the studio to record — taken on, like his role as the bass player, because none of the other three were willing to do it.

And of course, if Paul and John were a romantic couple, there was the constant stress of hiding that love away from a world that adored them only as long as they didn’t too openly reveal their love for one another outside of their songs.

All of this adds up to Paul being in no way in a position to devote the necessary time, care and psychological support to someone with serious, unaddressed mental health and substance abuse issues. And that’s true even if Paul had the insight to know what to do to help John — which he almost certainly didn’t, because, again, at that time there was little understanding of the psychology of addiction, and no real opportunity for Paul to access that understanding even if it did exist.

Paul’s need to keep constant vigil relative to John in case of an emergency also offers us yet another, deeper perspective on the “acid wars” that we talked about in an earlier chapter. Because Paul’s role as the 24/7 “designated driver,” along with the need for Paul to moderate his own drug use in order to keep John stable, may have gone unacknowledged — and also maybe unappreciated — by the other three.

If this is the case, this lack of acknowledgement and appreciation would certainly not have been because the others lacked empathy for either John or Paul — it’s self-evident that the four of them cared deeply for one another.

But Paul’s demonstrated tendency to stuff down his feelings and pretend that nothing is wrong means that even those closest to him probably didn’t have a fair chance to understand the toll that constant vigil and worry was taking on Paul — especially given the lack of widespread awareness at that time of the complex psychological entanglement created between an addict and those closest to them, an entanglement that, of course, George and Ringo were trapped in as well, even if they weren’t quite as “on call” as Paul might have been.

All of that easily translates into another possible reason why the peer pressure was so wearing on Paul — and maybe even why he called it “fear pressure”50 — and why the pressure would have added to Paul’s burden—

Not only would he have been worried about John’s safety while juggling his own stresses, but he also risked his own credibility within the band and as a co-leader of the Love Revolution, if he didn’t embrace LSD. Regardless of what Paul chose to do, he was putting at risk something or someone he cared about, whether it was John, The Beatles, or his own mental and emotional well-being and creative process.

As we talked about, Paul is still — to this day — paying the price for his choice to stay sober, in the form of the distorted narrative that paints John as “hard” and edgy for his drug use and overall recklessness, and Paul as “soft” and less interesting for his caution and moderation.

And that brings us to the most important reason why I’ve chosen to put this series into the world now and as its own thing, rather than as part of Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.

Over the past months, as my initial research into “Got To Get You Into My Life” and the Dylan story unfolded into this more complex and difficult narrative, I spent my requisite sleepless nights worrying about whether or not to publish this final chapter — which, by the way, we’re not finished with yet, in terms of putting the pieces together. I’m well aware that in delving into all of this, I might be edging up against my own, self-imposed ethical boundary of not speculating on the intimate details of Paul and John’s personal relationship.

I originally intended “intimate” to refer to erotic details — specifics about their (possible) sex life. But what I hadn’t fully considered when I established that boundary is that, of course, intimacy goes far beyond the bedroom. And to me at least, the details of how Paul and John might have dealt with John’s drug abuse would seem to qualify as intimate. And while I think Paul has explicitly given us permission to speculate on anything we find in his songs — including the and had you gone of “Got To Get You Into My Life” — I’m not at all clear how many degrees of separation away from the song Paul’s directive permits us to go, in considering what we find in those songs.

I’m not yet fully sure how to sort all of that out — that’s work I’m still doing relative to determining how to approach Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, in which we’ll re-tell the story of Lennon/McCartney through the frame of the lovers possibility.

But obviously, I’ve chosen to push that “intimate details” boundary here. And I’ve made that choice — after much soul-searching — for one reason only — because of the healing that comes from giving attention to a fellow human being’s unacknowledged suffering, especially when the rest of the world seems determined to turn a blind eye.

In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked about how, for a wound to heal, it first needs to be acknowledged — which is why Beautiful Possibility exists in the first place. And when it comes to the wound of John’s drug abuse, I think it’s far past time to acknowledge the pain of that wound — for both John and Paul. And more than that, I think it’s important to acknowledge that pain not from the cold, hard, dispassionate perspective of history and journalism, or out of a self-serving desire to sell books by sensationalizing sordid details for shock value — but rather from a Grail-fluent perspective of compassion and empathy and love for the actual, vulnerable human beings who lived this story and gifted us with this extraordinary music at such a tragic cost to both of them.

I suspect it’s in part the mythological status of The Beatles that makes it easy to forget that real people lived the story that we’re all so justifiably enchanted with. Because while there’s a lot written about John’s drug use, I haven’t seen much empathy outside of the Beatles studies counterculture for the pain and anguish that led John to take dangerous chances with his life in a desperate bid to dull his pain and overcome his creative insecurities.

Nor have I seen much of anything — not even in the Beatles studies counterculture, which is overall very Grail-fluent about these sorts of things — that acknowledges Paul’s profound act of love and sacrifice in keeping The Beatles together and keeping John safe, functional and alive at the expense of Paul’s own cultural credibility and emotional well-being.

In the final episode of Part One of Beautiful Possibility, I made the case that acknowledging the possibility that Paul and John were a romantic as well as a creative couple matters in part because it restores Paul’s right to have the true nature of his disenfranchised love and grief for John acknowledged for what it might more truly be — that of a surviving life partner. And I suggested that Paul deserves the profound healing that comes with a rightful acknowledgement of that status, and the respect, and sensitivity that goes along with it, rather than being afforded only the lesser status of John’s former best friend, bandmate, and songwriting partner.

The story I’ve shared with you in this series — and again, we’re not quite done with that story — is another example of unacknowledged pain. In this case, it’s the pain that both Paul and John almost certainly experienced in dealing with John’s drug abuse — and the price they both paid, and that Paul continues to pay, as a result.

I think it’s long past time for us to right this wrong and to heal this particular wound in the story — and far better to do so sooner rather than later — which is the more profound reason this series is in the world now, instead of not at all, or as part of Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, which is still a ways off in coming.

I’d also make a gentle suggestion here that most of how we interact with this story and this music amounts to mindless and unending taking — whether that taking is primary sources concerned mostly with positioning themselves close to The Beatles to score some cultural status, or Beatles writers who seem to care more about the ego boost of being called “definitive” and catering to their fear of softness than doing justice to the complexity of the story and the music and the people who lived it. Or even the way I get grouchy and sad about the research-related problems with Anthology, and often forget to appreciate that Anthology exists in the first place.

Part of my hope in writing The Abbey is that it might help us find our way to a more mature relationship with this story and this music — a relationship that includes giving back, not only by being better and more responsible stewards of the story, but also by keeping in mind George’s words in Anthology—

“It was a very one-sided love affair. The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but The Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give.

In some way we helped calm the places we went to, or we focused the energy on a positive energy, but for ourselves we were in the eye of the hurricane, weren’t we? Everybody saw the effect of The Beatles, but nobody really ever worried about us as individuals, or thought, ‘I wonder how the boys are coping with it all?’”

We could maybe wrap all of this up right here, with George’s plea for empathy and compassion. But we’re not quite done yet — because there’s still the matter of and had you gone.

Acknowledging again that there’s probably no way we’ll ever know for sure — and that it’s probably good and right that we don’t — in the final section of this final chapter, I’m going to offer you my best and most educated guess about Whatever Happened between John and Paul that may have led to and had you gone.

Please take what follows for what it is — speculation, though educated and researched and hopefully responsible speculation. And as something to think about, relative to that need for greater empathy and compassion.

So with that caution, and offered in service — once again — of witnessing unacknowledged suffering as a way of affecting healing, let’s finish putting the pieces together.

“Art is the agent best equipped to bring light to the world. That is its purpose. That is its promise. That it is predicated upon a unique suffering that is somehow linked to drink and drugs is self-serving, self-piteous nonsense. Don’t fall for it.”51 — Nick Cave

Hold a match to a powder keg for long enough, and it will eventually — inevitably — cause an explosion.

This menage a trois between Paul and John and John’s drug abuse spanned not weeks or months, but years. And if we add in that this “household of three” played itself out beneath the glare of maybe the whitest, hottest spotlight in human history — and if we also factor in Paul’s self-acknowledged tendency to stuff down his emotions outside of song and John’s tendency to not stuff down emotions anywhere — it’s probably inevitable that somewhere along the line, the situation reached a breaking point.

And the most likely way that breaking point was arrived at is the way breaking points are always arrived at, by virtue of being breaking points. That Paul — exhausted and terrified (and exhausted from being terrified) that John was going to burn out his brain, injure himself, or worse — expressed his fears and frustrations directly to John.

And given Paul’s self-acknowledged difficulty in sharing his innermost thoughts, and given how breaking points tend to go in general, it seems likely that Paul’s direct expression of his fears and frustrations was — might we say — somewhat less than diplomatic. An unplanned moment of desperation in which Paul might have said the sorts of things people say in that situation. Because while there was no commonly understood language for addiction and co-dependency in 1965, confronting a partner about their substance abuse probably sounds pretty much the same in any era—

“I’m tired of constantly worrying about you. And I’m tired of being the one who cleans up after the chaos you leave in your wake, and I’m tired of always having to be the grown up and carrying more than my fair share of the relationship when I have stresses, too. And most of all, I’m tired of being constantly afraid that the last time I saw you is the last time I’ll see you. This needs to stop, John.”⚠️52

Given the obvious affection and warmth that we see between Paul and John during the time period we’re considering, it’s difficult to place exactly when this breaking point might have happened. Maybe it didn’t happen during this period at all — maybe Paul’s creative unfurling, along with the other stressors in John’s life, was indeed sufficient to motivate him to consider leaving Paul and The Beatles during this time period.

But given the personalities involved, that breaking point seems almost certain to have happened at some point.

Maybe it happened as early as late 1965, when John’s drug abuse was escalating and he started to become unstable enough to jeopardize an Ed Sullivan Show appearance because he’d overdosed on some haphazard combination of somethings.

Maybe the Ed Sullivan overdose itself was the breaking point — John jeopardizing a significant US television appearance would almost certainly have been an especially alarming signal to Paul that the situation was spiraling out of control. Or maybe what motivated the breaking point was another, more serious, incident where there wasn’t a reporter present to document it decades after the fact.

Regardless of the specific circumstances, if Paul did reach that kind of a breaking point, and if he did communicate it to John, it’s virtually inevitable that John — with his insecurities and low self-esteem and lifelong fear of abandonment — would have interpreted what Paul said in the most negative way possible — not as fear or exhaustion or desperation or love, but as rejection—

—and not just any rejection, but rejection by the one person John most relied on to keep him centered and steady The one person most inextricably intertwined with John’s own creative process. The one person in John’s life that he loved and trusted and relied on above all others.

Regardless of how diplomatically Paul might have phrased his words, being confronted about your substance abuse by an exhausted, terrified partner also probably feels the same in any era — which is why it seems all-but-inevitable that whatever Paul actually said and however Paul actually said it, what John heard would have been something like this—

“You’re no good. You’re not lovable or wanted. You’re too much trouble and not worth it, especially since I can now compose masterpieces in my sleep and therefore no longer need you. I have more important things to do than to deal with you, like hanging out with all the beautiful people in Swinging London while you rot away in the stockbroker suburbs, unnecessary and unwanted. Go away, John, and stop bothering me.”⚠️53

And if that’s what John heard Paul say — even though Paul virtually-for-sure did not say anything like that — then that’s going to sound an awful lot like what five-year-old John might have believed his father said when he left his family to go to sea, and what John might have believed his mother said, when she (so John was apparently told) gave him away to his Aunt Mimi to raise while continuing to raise his two half-sisters. And it might be what his Aunt Mimi actually said, overwhelmed and frightened in much the same way as Paul, when teenage John got himself in yet another scrape due to his unacknowledged and unhealed childhood trauma.

And this brings us, finally, back to and had you gone.

Because in the wake of that kind of perceived rejection, it’s highly likely John would have threatened to do what people with low self-esteem and a fear of abandonment tend to do in situations where they feel unwanted and rejected — leave before he got left. Which is why John’s response would almost certainly have been something like — “If I’m so much of a fucking burden, Paul, then I’ll leave and you can go on being a Beatle and the Prince of Swinging London without having to worry about me.”⚠️54

And this “fuck you” response from John would have been motivated not by a lack of love for Paul, or by any desire to actually leave, but because he felt too humiliated and insecure — and too untrusting of Paul’s love — to stay.55

There’s also another possible read of and had you gone that I’d be negligent not to point out, though it’s an even less beautiful possibility than the scenario we’ve just stepped through.

Given Mal’s apparent minimizing of John’s condition during the Ed Sullivan overdose, we’ll probably never know just how serious that overdose was. It seems to have been serious enough to have rattled the generally un-rattle-able Mal, but also demonstrably not serious enough to keep John from being able to perform on the show not long afterwards with minimal signs of distress.

And as we’ve already talked about, the nature of addiction and the primary research both suggest pretty strongly that the Ed Sullivan overdose wasn’t a singular event, and that there were other, more serious overdoses we don’t know about because there wasn’t a journalist there to report on it years after the fact.

And we also know from what those around John have said that his drug use only escalated after late 1965. Maybe that escalation was in part a reaction to this potential breaking point with Paul (if it did indeed happen) — combined with the ascent of “Yesterday” — an attempt to numb the pain of what he perceived as rejection from the person he loved and trusted most.

Whatever the details, if John did indeed have even more serious overdoses in the immediate time period after (or even before) the Ed Sullivan incident in August 1965, then it’s possible that Paul’s euphoric relief in “Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t just relief that John didn’t leave the relationship, but relief that John didn’t leave the planet. That John was, at that time, literally still here — still alive.

Paul’s deeper relief might be that John didn’t become the literal “suicide man” that Paul describes in the opening quote of this chapter — either by overdose — as in the Ed Sullivan incident — or by misadventure — as in the “emperor of eternity” incident in which John could easily have jumped or fallen from the roof of EMI Studios.

In this read of and had you gone, the lines that follow — you knew in time we’d meet again for I had told you, etc. — would take on a heightened and especially urgent meaning. They’d be Paul’s reassurance to John that no matter what happens — in this lifetime or in any other — their love for one another is eternal, and that not even death will separate them.

Either of these possible reads of and had you gone would, of course, inspire pretty much any composer to write a song —and especially a composer who has repeatedly acknowledged that he uses songwriting as both therapy and a way to communicate his feelings.

And not just any song, but a very specific kind of song in which Paul says everything he doesn’t know how to say outside of song — about how very much John is not a burden, and about how much he loves John and how much he wants to be with John every single day of his life — and more than that, how he wants John to be with him every single day of his life — and about how Paul felt on the day they met and how he still feels that way, in spite of all the danger.

And that brings us to the part of “Got To Get You Into My Life” that we haven’t yet talked about — the title, which is also the hook of the song.

At the beginning of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” the hook seems to refer to the joyful memory of Paul and John’s first meeting at the fête— Paul reminding John of their instant, passionate, mutual connection. But by the end of the song — on the other side of and had you gone — that hook seems to have morphed into something quite different.

By 1966, Paul and John were living an hour’s drive apart — for the first time ever not within easy reach of one another.

During this time, John was living with Cynthia and two-year old Julian in a 22-room mansion an hour outside of London, in Weybridge — also known as the “stockbroker suburbs” — which was (and probably still is) as white bread Establishment as the nickname suggests.

You only need to know the basics about John Lennon — iconoclast, rebel, and as Paul described in the opening quote, always needing to be “bigger and bolder and brighter” — to know that any place described as the “stockbroker suburbs” was in every way the wrong place for John to be in 1966 or at any other time.

But just in case imagination is not sufficient to paint the picture of how much of a mismatch this was—

—musician/writer Robyn Hitchcock was a teenager in Weybridge at the same time John lived there — though Hitchcock and his family lived on the less posh side. To give you some idea of just how white bread Establishment it was, here’s Hitchcock’s description of life in Weybridge during that time period—

“We are living in... a semi-detached white house opposite a cricket green, next door to the newsagent and tobacconist. Every night, my father comes home from work on the train and changes out of his city garb; then he puts on old clothes and paints pictures from his imagination while listening to the BBC Home Service on the wireless.”56

While the Love Revolution John was shaping and and leading was in full swing in London, John himself spent much of his time on the couch in his sunroom, reading, watching television, and tripping on LSD and presumably dipping into his handfuls of pills, trapped in a marriage he didn’t want with a child he didn’t know how to relate to and a wife who wanted a pipe-and-slippers, time for tea and Meet The Wife husband.57

Add to that John’s diminishing capacity to write new material, his sense of insecurity and abandonment, and his separation from Paul by that hour’s drive — and it’s not hard to see why John comes up with “Nowhere Man.”

Meanwhile, as we’ve already talked about, Paul was living in the heart of Swinging London, immersing himself in the emerging avant garde scene, attending lectures and theatre and experimental music performances, usually with Jane rather than John at his side. And perhaps most significantly, building a new friendship with gallery owner and influencer extraordinaire Robert Fraser, who drew Paul into his world of international art and culture.58

In the shadow of all of this, and in the context of and had you gone, I wonder if Paul’s “got to get you into my life” — repeated at escalating levels of urgency as the song progresses — might be more than an expression of desire to spend more time with John, or a callback to the memory of meeting at the fête .

I wonder if “got to get you into my life” might be Paul’s plan to fix the problem.

We’ve seen multiple times throughout The Beatles’ story that one of Paul’s go-to ways of dealing with an emotional crisis — in addition to writing a song — is to propose a tangible, actionable solution. After Brian’s death, that solution was Magical Mystery Tour. During the breakup, it was the Get Back project and the proposal to go back on the road and play small clubs in northern England. After the breakup, it was Wings.

What if “got to get you into my life” — the phrase itself and the entire song, along with lines like I want you to hear me say we’ll be together every day — is a pledge to himself and to John to make a better effort to include John in Paul’s social life in London, rather than leaving him languishing in the stockbroker suburbs with his TV and his handfuls of LSD and pills and the parade of dodgy and exploitative strangers looking to take advantage of John’s vulnerability?

What if “got to get you into my life” is Paul’s best idea for keeping the band together — and, possibly, for keeping John alive?

If so, it seems to be a plan that Paul made into reality.

In March of 1966 — right around the time he likely wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” — Paul moved out of the Asher house and into Cavendish, his London townhouse in St. John’s Wood near EMI Studios. And according to the accounts of the Apple Scruffs who stood witness at the gates to Cavendish, pretty much as soon as Paul moved in John became a frequent visitor, as well as a frequent overnight guest.59

What if getting John into his life — including John regularly spending nights at Cavendish — wasn’t only about relieving John’s isolation and depression, or out of a simple desire to spend more time together? What if “got to get you into my life” was Paul’s plan to have John close by — in London and at Cavendish — so Paul could keep an eye on his drug use, and prevent an otherwise possibly inevitable tragedy?

There’s a good chance we’ll never know the answers to these questions. But whether or not this was indeed Paul’s plan, here’s where Norman Smith made his miscalculation, in quitting The Beatles on the eve of Revolver. Because history has shown us without question that his assessment of the breakdown of the creative partnership of Lennon/McCartney was, at the very least, wildly premature—

—not only because Paul and John went on to create some of their most iconic collaborative work in the years that followed, but because Paul himself has named Rubber Soul, along with Revolver, as a time when The Beatles were especially happy in the recording studio60 — which suggests that by the time “Got To Get You Into My Life” was recorded, Paul and John had worked through — at least temporarily — the Whatever Happened between them that may have gone so very wrong.

And this is maybe why John was so caught up in the power of Paul’s vocal that he couldn’t stop himself from bursting out of the control room to shout his encouragement — evidence of, as Geoff Emerick observed, “the camaraderie and teamwork that was so pervasive during the Revolver sessions.” Maybe John’s outburst was as much John letting Paul know that Paul’s reassurance had been received as it was about Paul’s vocal performance. Maybe John was as relieved as Paul, that they’d found a way to work it out.

There is certainly plenty of suggestion of a reconciliation in their songs during this time period — in the tender affirmation of “In My Life,” and in “Here, There & Everywhere,” a lover’s lullaby, written — as Paul has told us — while John was sleeping.

And then there’s the “giggle take” of “And Your Bird Can Sing,” on which Paul and John — probably both very high on some very potent weed — record an entire take of the song laughing so irrepressibly at whatever inside joke they’re sharing that they can barely get the lyrics out, enjoying themselves too much to interrupt the recording, and John commenting at the end “that was it, wasn’t it?” as if the giggle take was the perfect articulation of their shared creative vision—

—which, on that night in April 1966, with and had you gone temporarily in the past and John safely at Paul’s side, making the music together that would change the world, is possibly — beautifully — exactly what it was.

(YouTube link: “And Your Bird Can Sing” giggle take)

I’ll be back in two weeks with the Wrap-Up. And remember the footnotes.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

60

“Q: In terms of atmosphere in the studio and relations within the band, what were the happiest and least happiest Beatles albums to record?

PAUL: It’s a good question, but also a difficult one because time is a great healer, and looking back on the Beatles I tend to think that it was all great fun. And that’s not whitewash, it’s just the way that memory goes. You can have a terrible holiday, it might rain all the time, but years later if someone asks, “Did you ever go to the south of France?” you would say, “Oh yes, I had a great time .. .”. So, relatively speaking, they were all great to record, and I wouldn’t take one degree off any of them. But, to answer the question, “Revolver” and “Rubber Soul” were especially nice. It was still early days and we were coming good as an album band, so they felt very fresh. On the other hand, the “White Album” and “Let It Be” had to be the most difficult because the group was starting to break up.” (Paul McCartney interviewed in Record Collector, February 1995.)

NOTE: Notice here how Paul is articulating the process of turning a story from history into mythology by blurring detail — and how, when it comes to our personal memories, it’s our individual worldviews that determine specifically how that detail is blurred. Paul is talking about blurring towards the positive as if that’s universal, but of course, that’s Paul’s particular worldview, and not necessarily the way the blurring happens for others.

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“More times than I can count, I’ve been asked to write an autobiography, but the time has never been right. Usually I was raising a family or I was on tour, which has never been an ideal situation for long periods of concentration. But the one thing I’ve always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is write new songs. Some people, when they get to a certain age, like to refer to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have is my songs - hundreds of them - which serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life, because even at the age of fourteen, when I acquired my first guitar in our little house in Liverpool, my natural instinct was to start writing songs. Since then I’ve never stopped.

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.”1

— Paul McCartney, 2022

In the prior chapter, we left off with the suggestion that Paul’s creative unfurling — likely sparked by having been turned on to pot by Dylan in 1964 — led to tension in his creative relationship with John. To explore that possibility, the next thing we need to do is to consider the lyrics of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” the song that Paul claims he wrote in the “first flush” of his discovery of cannabis.

Before we get started with that, though, a very big meta note. This chapter will assume that you’re comfortable with two major elements that we stepped through in detail in Part One of Beautiful Possibility.

Most notably — or maybe I should say, most notoriously — Part One of Beautiful Possibility included an extended discussion of the possibility that John and Paul were a romantic as well as a creative couple.

Our discussion of what we shorthanded as “the lovers possibility” took 29.5 hours of Part One to step through — and unfortunately, it’s not something that I’ve found a way to summarize. If I could say in a paragraph or two all of what we talked about in those 29.5 hours, I wouldn’t have needed to write Part One of Beautiful Possibility in the first place.

And more than not being practical, it’s ethically problematic to short-stroke the delicate and complex discussion we had in Part One about the lovers possibility. 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.

But that said, if the possibility that John and Paul were a romantic couple is new to you or if you’re not yet sure how you feel about it, let me do what I can to reassure you just a little about how we deal with that possibility here on The Abbey. The following is not in any way a substitute for 29.5 hours of material, nor is it a summary of what we talked about in Part One, but—

Beautiful Possibility is — as far as I’m aware — the first in-depth, serious, mainstream consideration of whether John and Paul were a literal romantic couple. Part One included multiple episodes in which we stepped through an extended, research-based analysis of why that possibility is credible, and why it’s important that the lovers possibility — not the certainty, just the possibility — be included in the story.

Perhaps most importantly, I proposed a way in which we can talk about the lovers possibility ethically — without “outing” anyone and without stepping on Paul and John’s absolute and inarguable right to tell (or not tell) their own story. Again, it’s not possible to summarize all of that here, but here’s what I can tell you, with regard to the ethics of talking about the lovers possibility —

When discussing a possible romantic relationship between Paul and John, only publicly available, primary research is cited (mostly from Paul and John themselves). There is no speculation re: sexual orientation or the intimate details of their relationship. And Beautiful Possibility does not seek to prove that John and Paul were lovers — only to show that the possibility is credible, and that it’s important that possibility is included in the story.

If you’re comfortable with a respectful consideration of the lovers possibility within these tightly-constrained ethical boundaries — and if you’re open-minded enough to consider the lovers possibility as credible without needing to be shown the research and analysis that supports that possibility — then you don’t need to be familiar with Beautiful Possibility before engaging with the last two chapters of Seven Levels.

If, on the other hand, you’re not yet comfortable with any of that, I definitely recommend reading Part One of Beautiful Possibility before continuing on with Seven Levels.

In Part One, we also stepped through, over the course of several episodes, the credibility and importance of using lyrics as primary source material for understanding the story of The Beatles — and more specifically, the story of Lennon/McCartney. And we also stepped through in detail why it’s virtually certain that — whether they acted on their feelings for one another or not — Paul and John would have written many songs about and for one another, beyond a handful of explicitly acknowledged, angry breakup songs.

We shouldn’t have needed to step through why lyrics are legitimate primary source material at all. There’s nothing controversial about looking for the truth of the artist in the art — and were it any artist other than Lennon/McCartney, doing so is not something we’d need to justify.

But bizarrely enough, in mainstream Beatles writing and scholarship, it is controversial — and even a frequent subject of ridicule — to suggest we look for deeper meanings in the songs of Lennon/McCartney.

As with the credibility, ethics, and importance of the lovers possibility, I haven’t found a good way to summarize the analysis and research that we stepped through in Part One for why we’d be wise to look to their songs to understand Lennon/McCartney. But for our purposes here, it might be enough to notice again what Paul has to say about his lyrics in the quote that opened this chapter, from his introduction to his 2022 memoir, The Lyrics, in which he explicitly says that his songs are a personal diary of his life—

“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.”2

I’m going to keep sharing this quote like a catechism until we all know it by heart — because this quote is the rock on which Beautiful Possibility and the final two chapters of Seven Levels are built.

This quote is Paul McCartney giving us explicit permission — and more than that, explicit direction — to look for the story of his life and work less in published interviews or biographies, and more in the lyrics to his songs.

There is no ambiguity here. This passage from The Lyrics is not a frankenquote. It’s not spoken casually in an interview, nor it is filtered through the agenda of a third party. It’s an intentionally written, self-authored passage in the introduction to Paul’s own book about his life’s work and legacy — a book that, by the way, tells his life story through his lyrics. And that’s made even more explicit in the title of the podcast based on the book — A Life In Lyrics.

What’s more, when Paul tells us that the meanings of his songs “are not always obvious on the surface,” he’s making clear that the truth he’s telling us to look for will not be easy to find. Instead, that truth will be hidden under more obvious and easy-to-spot meanings.

And finally, by opening the introduction to his book with this passage, Paul seems to be making it implicitly clear that while he’s not interested in sharing his innermost thoughts with us directly (as is his right and privilege), anything we’re able to deduce from his lyrics is fair game for speculation and study.

In this chapter, we’ll be taking Paul up on his invitation — on his directive, even — with our deep dive into the lyrics of “Got To Get You Into My Life” — a song that in 1980, John called, “one of [Paul’s] best songs... because the lyrics are good and I didn’t write them... when I say he could write lyrics if he took the effort, here’s an example.”3

John’s quote is — as usual for John — something of a backhanded compliment. But it’s also a pretty big hint that there’s more to “Got To Get You Into My Life” than meets the eye — if John Lennon, master of wordplay and misdirection and one of history’s most sophisticated lyricists, considers it one of Paul’s best lyrics. And it’s also important to notice that both John and Paul agree that the lyrics are entirely Paul’s. That’s going to become important, too.

Finally, before we get started on our deep lyrical dive into “Got To Get You Into My Life,” one quick housekeeping note — as with our deep dive into “Bless You” in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, this chapter includes a piece of complex lyrical interpretation. To keep the analysis as uncluttered as possible to follow along with, I’ve once again put most of the supporting research in the footnotes rather than the main text.

So with all of that said — and with both Paul and John’s blessing — here’s the opening verse (plus a little) of “Got To Get You Into My Life” —

I was alone I took a ride

I didn’t know what I would find there

Another road where maybe I

Could see another kind of mind there

Ooh then I suddenly see you4

One thing is certain about the opening verse to “Got To Get You Into My Life” — it’s unambiguously Paul describing a passionate meeting with someone for whom he felt an instant and powerful connection. And given the and I suddenly see you part of things, maybe even an experience of love at first sight.

As we talked about in the prior chapter, Paul has said that he wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about his discovery of cannabis. And his “seven levels” experience strongly suggests that he experienced cannabis — at least some of the time — as a psychedelic.

And this first verse certainly includes language that suggests that Paul is writing about his enthusiastic relationship to cannabis, and about its psychedelic properties — in phrases like I took a ride and another kind of mind.

The problem is, though, that we still have that unresolved timing problem that we noticed in the prior chapter.

Paul’s “seven levels” experience took place in August or September of 1964. But he’s also made it clear — and everything about the song makes clear — that he wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about what was happening in his life at the time. And since Paul almost certainly wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” in early 1966 — or at the earliest in late 1965 — that means there’s a year-and-a-half gap between Paul getting turned on to cannabis and his writing of the song.

A year-and-a-half gap between a new discovery and a song about that new discovery is a very long gap indeed. And this in turn makes it chronologically questionable that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” during — as he claims — the “first flush of” his discovery of pot.

So if “Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t about LSD, and the timeline suggests it’s not likely to be about Paul’s discovery of cannabis, then what gives? And why are we talking about it at all, relative to untangling the deeper narrative of the Dylan story?

The answers to those questions are, as usual, not as simple as they might seem.

As we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, great art by definition includes multiple layers of meaning. And John’s comment about the song being one of Paul’s best lyrics suggests pretty strongly that there are multiple layers of meaning in “Got To Get You Into My Life.” Because it’s unlikely John Lennon — again, one of history’s most sophisticated lyricists — would offer such effusive praise for a song that has only one easy-to-discover meaning.

Any lyric of Paul’s that impressed John enough to name it as one of Paul’s best would need to hold its own with others of Paul’s lyrics that John has also singled out — including “Eleanor Rigby,” “Fool On The Hill,” and “Penny Lane” — all of which are works of lyrical sophistication that contain multiple layers of meaning.

The other thing to notice here is that while the language in the opening verse does indeed evoke the imagery of psychedelic altered consciousness, after the opening verse, that language disappears almost entirely. The majority of the lyric is what appears to be a straight-forward and somewhat non-specific love song.

In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked about the common tendency among artists to conflate their initial inspiration with what a finished work actually ends up being about.

As an example, we talked about “Hey Jude,” which Paul has said was inspired by a young Julian Lennon’s struggle with his parents’ divorce — but in which only the first two lines of the finished song are in any way applicable (or appropriate) to sing to a seven-year-old boy. And we also talked about “Two of Us,” a song that Paul says was inspired by a drive in the countryside with Linda — but in which all but the first few lines point pretty clearly to the “two of us” in question fitting the relationship between Paul and John far better than the relationship between Paul and Linda.

Simply put, if an artist is inspired by apples to write a song, but everything other than the opening verse is about bananas, the finished song can reasonably be said to be inspired by apples but written about bananas. And as plain as that distinction might seem to be, artists themselves often tend to get those two things confused in their own minds, when they talk about what a piece of art is about.

Given the timing issue, the absence of cannabis-related imagery in the majority of the lyric, and the unlikelihood of John naming a song with only a single meaning as one of Paul’s best lyrics, “Got To Get You Into My Life” appears to be an example of this tendency to conflate inspiration with meaning — at least relative to Paul’s public statements on what the song is about.

So having taken the prior chapter to consider — in a more general way — Paul’s enthusiastic discovery of cannabis, we’re now going to see what happens if we set that interpretation aside and consider “Got To Get You Into My Life” as a love song.

In considering this first verse as a verse about a “love at first sight” experience, the first question to ask is, love at first sight for who? Is it possible Paul’s writing the song for Jane Asher, whom he was dating at the time it was written?

There are a lot of things we could notice about Paul’s relationship with Jane Asher, but this series is for sure not the place to get into all of that. What we can say without question is that nothing in what we know about Paul’s initial meeting with Jane suggests that meeting was anywhere near the sort of passionate “love at first sight” encounter — at least not on Paul’s part — that Paul is writing about in the first verse. And more practically, none of the details of the first verse even get close to matching the details of Paul’s first meeting with Jane.

When Paul met Jane, he was not alone, nor was he taking a ride, nor did he not know what he would find there. Instead, Paul met Jane in what might be the most ordinary possible circumstances for a rising pop star — backstage with the rest of the band, at one of The Beatles’ many BBC-TV appearances.5

Then there’s the problem, again, of the timeline.

Paul met Jane in 1963 — which is even further in the past than his discovery of cannabis. And again, everything about “Got To Get You Into My Life” — including Paul specifying that he was writing about what was happening for him at the time — suggests that Paul is writing about a feeling that he’s experiencing in real time — in the present — rather than a nostalgic memory of an event years in the past.

And finally, there’s the another kind of mind that Paul is hoping to find when he takes a ride.

While there is, of course, no way to know for sure the private details of Paul’s relationship with Jane — and again, we don’t have room here to explore the full contours of that relationship — I’ve found nothing whatsoever in Paul’s descriptions of that relationship to indicate that Paul’s attraction to Jane was based on recognising her as another kind of mind.

Instead, Jane Asher is perhaps the very picture of a very Establishment girl from a very Establishment (if somewhat eccentric) upper middle class family. And all of that is borne out in virtually everything she’s done since she first stepped into the public eye, all of it the virtual definition of respectable British upper middle class. In other words, Jane is — at least by all visible criteria — very far from the another kind of mind that Paul is hoping to meet in the first verse.

This very brief consideration of Paul and Jane’s relationship is, of course, far too short-stroked — and we’ll almost certainly talk more about Paul and Jane in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility. What matters for our purposes here is that nothing about the first verse suggests Paul’s talking about his first meeting with Jane.

Which brings us — probably not surprisingly — to the possibility that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about and for John, who seems to be the only other person in Paul’s life at the time for whom Paul felt an intense-enough emotional connection to inspire the passionate urgency of the song.

One of the initial inspirations for the writing of Seven Levels, was a suggestion from a volunteer researcher for Beautiful Possibility that “Got To Get You Into My Life” might be a fête song — a song about the day Paul and John met.

Given the language of the first verse, it’s easy to see why she made that suggestion.

I was alone, I took a ride does indeed fit nicely with teenaged Paul riding the bus (or his bike, we don’t know which) to the fête, without any knowledge of what the day would bring or its extraordinary impact on his life — I didn’t know what I would find there — and possibly also with the hope/anticipation of meeting someone there who might be a match for Paul’s budding, as-yet-unfocused musical genius — another road where maybe I could find another kind of mind there — the “someone” who turned out to be John Lennon, the very definition of another kind of mind, and who would, starting on that day — to borrow from another Revolver song — change Paul’s life with a wave of his hand.

I don’t know about you, but I can easily imagine Paul (and John, too) thinking something akin to “got to get you into my life!” on the way home from the fête, head filled with the potential of having (at last!) met that longed-for another kind of mind. “The music meant more to John and Paul than anyone else I’ve ever known,” observed original Quarry Man drummer Colin Hanton. “They were on track almost from the moment they met.”6

So the opening verse does suggest “Got To Get You Into My Life” as a possible fête song. And if that’s so, then it’s a companion to another possible fête song — “I Saw Her Standing There.”

Both songs seem to be defined by the breathless, all-consuming ecstasy of falling in love at first sight — then I suddenly see you... I saw her standing there... say we’ll be together every day... how could I dance with another? — which is more or less how both Paul and John seem to have experienced their first meeting.7

But just as I think it’s oversimplying to call “Got To Get You Into My Life” an “ode to pot,” I also think we’d be oversimplifying to interpret “Got To Get You Into My Life” as a cannabis-infused update of “I Saw Her Standing There.”

For one thing, there’s that pesky timing issue again. Paul met John in 1957 — and that’s a significantly bigger gap than his initial meeting with either Jane or Mary Jane. And remember, Paul has told us that this isn’t a nostalgia song, it’s a song about what’s happening in Paul’s life at the time. And even if Paul hadn’t told us as much, the urgency and immediacy of the musical arrangement and Paul’s vocal makes it pretty clear that — unlike, say, “Penny Lane” — “Got To Get You Into My Life” is not a gentle meander down memory lane.

Still, “I Saw Her Standing There” isn’t exactly a gentle meander down memory lane, either — and that, too, was written years after their first meeting. It’s certainly possible that despite the timing issues— and as with “I Saw Her Standing There” — Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” retrospectively, about his memory of falling in love at first sight with someone he’s still very actively in love with.

Let’s leave that as an open possibility while we consider the next part of the song—

Ooh then I suddenly see you

Ooh did I tell you I need you

Every single day of my life

This, again, appears on first glance to be a straight-forward— even clichéd— declaration of love. But as with most Lennon/McCartney songs, there’s more going on here than might seem.

First, this section adds a new character to the mix — the you of then suddenly I see you.

When Paul tells the story of searching for his soulmate in the opening verse, it turns out he’s not talking to us, as we initially assumed. Instead, Paul’s telling the story to that soulmate, the another kind of mind he longed for when he took a ride.

And what Paul is telling his soulmate — aka, his beloved — is that he (Paul) needs the two of them to be together every single day of his life.

This is — by any measure — an extreme statement to make to another person, and especially to a new love whom you’ve only just met — then I suddenly see you — and with whom you aren’t yet in a formal relationship. But it’s also the sort of exaggerated pledge of devotion consistent with both a “love at first sight” experience and with the drama of first love — and especially teenage “love at first sight” first love. Which suggests that “Got To Get You Into My Life” is still on track to be a fête song.

But something unexpected happens in this then I suddenly see you section of the song. And to understand what that something unexpected is and why it matters, we need to again — as we did with our deep dive into “Bless You” — talk about (I’m very sorry about this) grammar.

In addition to introducing a new character, then I suddenly see you also shifts verb tense. The first verse of “Got To Get You Into My Life” was set entirely in the past — I was alone, I took a ride. But the line then I suddenly see you shifts the focus to the present, where Paul has told us the song is set.

If the grammar is confusing — and you’d be in good company if it is — here’s another way of understanding what’s happening here:

Any story can be told in (at least) two ways — as a story happening in real time or as something that happened in the past. So for example—

Past tense: I ran down the street and I sang a song.

Present tense: I run down the street and I sing a song.

In both cases, we’re still “in the story” as it’s being told. It’s just a question of whether the narrator is telling it to us as it happens or in retrospect. In present tense or in past tense.

Usually a writer would be consistent in using one or the other of these perspectives throughout a piece, whether it’s a story or a song. But in “Got To Get You Into My Life,” Paul appears to be mixing the two, past and present — and not just in the same song, but in the same verse. In writing then I suddenly see you, did I tell you I need you what Paul has written is essentially —

I run down the street, and I sang a song.

If that sounds awkward, it’s because it is awkward. By its nature, an abrupt shift of verb tense feels disorienting — it literally disrupts our ability to orient ourselves in the time and place of the story. It’s the grammatical equivalent of a sudden and unexpected flashback or flashforward in a movie — are we in the past or the present? We don’t know and that’s largely the point of those kinds of abrupt shifts in time.

This verb tense is, btw, consistent with the disorientation of a psychedelic experience, so there’s maybe still some of that original inspiration at play here. And it’s also possible this verb tense shift from past to present is un-intentional on Paul’s part. Verb tenses tend to be one of the most difficult parts of a language to master, and even accomplished writers sometimes get themselves tangled up in sorting it out.

But we’re not just dealing with “accomplished writers,” we’re dealing with Lennon/McCartney. And as we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, the safest and most sensible way to engage with art created by a genius-level partnership is to presume mastery of craft. In other words, our default is to presume that when we’re dealing with the work of a great artist, their creative choices are intentional, whether consciously or subconsciously, and not merely sloppy writing or choosing a word or phrase — or a verb tense — just because it rhymes or fits the metre of the song.

This default presumption of mastery of craft does not, of course, mean that there aren’t wobbly bits in their songs —the Lennon/McCartney catalogue is extensive, and even geniuses aren’t infallible. But by definition, those wobbly bits appear far less frequently in the work of geniuses. And as we discovered when we looked in-depth at “Bless You” and “No Words” in Part One, presuming mastery of craft yields insights not otherwise available to us — so it’s a presumption worth continuing with here.

Also, now’s a good time to remind ourselves again that John called “Got To Get You Into My Life” one of Paul’s best lyrics. And again, I’m not sure we get better confirmation that “Got To Get You Into My Life” is a masterful lyric than John Lennon — one of music’s most iconic and sophisticated lyricists — referencing those lyrics as being especially well-crafted.

So with our usual (and useful) presumption of mastery of craft, let’s presume that the shift in verb tense that happens with then I suddenly see you is intentional, and see what that might tell us about what’s going on in the song so far.

Certainly, the abrupt shift in verb tense fits the overall vibe of the song up to this point. A sudden shift from past to present tense significantly heightens the zing! impact of Cupid’s “love at first sight” arrow as it strikes the young lovers — which again, is consistent with both Paul and John’s recounting of their meeting at the fête.

Abrupt shifts in verb tense are also the sort of scrambled, disordered language we tumble into when we’re so emotionally caught up in telling a story that we can’t be bothered to care about proper grammar — which both the music and Paul’s vocal delivery suggests is the case here. And indeed, the next line — did I tell you I need you — switches back to past tense, suggesting that the verb tense change was intentional in creating this sense of jumbled, excited disorientation.

But the shift in verb tense is even more disorienting than it might appear, because did I tell you I need you doesn’t shift fully back to past tense.

When Paul writes then I suddenly see you, he’s shifted his verb tense to the present, but he’s still “inside” the story he’s telling about what happened in the past — maybe at the fête — when he first laid eyes on his beloved, the another kind of mind from the first verse.

Put another way, when Paul writes then I suddenly see you, he’s in the present telling a story about the past to his beloved, also in the present.

Then the next line, did I tell you I need you, is Paul, still in the now-actual present day of the writing/singing of the song, asking his beloved — also in the now-actual-present — whether he (Paul) has, at any point in the past, told his beloved that he (Paul) needs him every single day of his life.

If you can wrap your mind around all of that — and remember, disorienting us might be part of the point — you may recognise this as Paul being concerned that he hasn’t done a good job of sharing his feelings with his beloved. And if you’re familiar with Beautiful Possibility, you might recognise that expressing concern that he hasn’t done a good job of sharing his feelings holds special significance, in a Paul McCartney song.

We stepped through the following in detail in Part One, so we’re not going to go into it in detail again here — but as a quick re-up, you may remember from episode 1:5 that Paul frequently acknowledges in interview his lifelong struggle to share his innermost feelings outside of song. And you might also remember that virtually the only example Paul brings up of this struggle is his worry that he wasn’t able to fully express to John that he loved him.8

In that same episode, we then noticed that Paul’s struggle to share feelings, along with a regret that he may have failed to share them, seems to be a central struggle in his life — and therefore, not surprisingly, a central theme in his songwriting. And again, the only example Paul offers of this regret is his regret that he feels he didn’t do a good job expressing his love to John. And when we put those pieces together, it strongly suggests that when themes of struggle-to-express-feelings or regret about not having expressed feelings appear in one of Paul’s songs, that song is (very) highly likely to be about John.

Did I tell you I need you every single day of my life is — without question — Paul wanting to share his feelings, and unsure and maybe a little worried about whether he’s succeeded. Thus the struggle-to-share-feelings theme — combined with the obvious references to the fête in the opening verse — suggests that “Got To Get You Into My Life” is (very) highly likely written for John.

But if you’re familiar with the public history of Paul and John’s relationship, you’ve also maybe noticed that something feels off here — or at least a little different from what we might expect. Because we also talked in Part One about how the emotional arc of Paul and John’s songs — together and separately — tends to match up with the emotional arc of their relationship more than it does with their relationships with their public romantic partners. Happy love songs when Paul and John are in a good place and not-so-happy love songs when they aren’t — regardless of what’s going on with their other relationships.

In other words, Paul’s struggle-to-share-feelings and regret songs tend to appear when Paul and John don’t seem to be in a good place — that’s part of how we discovered the “tell” of them in the first place. The theme of struggle-to-share-feelings/regret appears most frequently in Paul’s songs during and immediately after the breakup, disappears after their reconciliation during the Lost Weekend, and then reappears again after John’s murder and continues throughout Paul’s solo work up through the present day.

But that pattern doesn’t seem to hold here, because the story as it’s usually told suggests that — other than the “acid wars” — Paul and John were in a good place together during the late 1965-early 1966 time period when “Got To Get You Into My Life” was likely written. So the interpretation of the song as a struggle-to-share-feelings song doesn’t quite seem to add up.

The reason for this disconnect might simply be that — despite the obvious urgency of the song as a whole — did I tell you I need you seems to be a comparatively small struggle-to-share-his-feelings moment. Maybe the sort of passing concern anyone in a relationship might have, even during the good times — something along the lines of, “I’m so happy to have you in my life, have I ever told you how much I love you?”

Also, so far in the song, Paul seems to be doing a better-than-average job of sharing his feelings — he’s more or less shouting them from the proverbial rooftop (not that rooftop). He’s maybe even a little... manic about it — as if maybe “Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t so much fueled by a mellow cannabis high but by having just scored a handful of Prellies off the ladies room attendant at the Kaiserkeller.

Maybe that’s just the mania of love at first sight, but even so, “Got To Get You Into My Life” seems to be somewhat singular for Paul McCartney — a song about struggling to share feelings in which there’s no apparent struggle to share feelings, during an era when there’s no apparent urgent need to share feelings — at least not relative to his relationship with John.

We’ll get back to this curious situation a bit later. For now, let’s also notice that — to add to the disorientation — when Paul asks, did I tell you I need you, it’s not clear which past he’s referencing with the did I tell you part.

Is Paul asking whether he told his beloved on the day they met that he wanted the two of them to be together every single day of my life? As we noticed earlier, that’s a pretty extreme statement to offer to someone you’ve only just met, even (and perhaps especially) if you’re a self-conscious lovestruck teenager — and perhaps even more especially if you’re a self-conscious lovestruck teenage boy newly in love with another teenage boy.

So maybe did I tell you I need you is just Paul generally checking in to make sure that — at some unspecified time in the past — he has communicated to his beloved his desire to be together every single day of his life. But this, too, feels a bit off, since up to now he’s been talking about all of this in the context of a specific event — in this case, the day he and his beloved first met.

So maybe Paul isn’t talking directly to his beloved at all. Maybe the song — at least so far — is an internal dialogue in which Paul is obsessing to himself — privately — about whether he’s told his beloved about his (Paul’s) need to be with them every single day of his life.

But this also feels unlikely.

“Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t a whisper in the dark like, say, “Yesterday.” Nor is it a tender lullaby like “Here, There and Everywhere,” in which Paul sings softly enough not to wake his (maybe) sleeping lover as he muses on their relationship. “Got To Get You Into My Life” is clearly built to make a statement — to be heard. Paul is announcing his feelings to his beloved and to the world with a literal trumpet fanfare — Listen up!!! I’m expressing my feelings!

Clearly, at this point in the song, we don’t yet have enough information to know what’s going on in “Got To Get You Into My Life.” In fact, by the end of this second section, we’re more disoriented than we were before about who’s talking to who about what, when and why. It’s no surprise John thought so highly of this lyric — we’re only a little ways in and it’s exactly his favourite kind of down-the-rabbit-hole mind-fuckery.

But we do have enough information— because of this shift in verb tense — to at least begin to question whether “Got To Get You Into My Life” is really a song about the ecstatic feeling of falling in love, despite its opening verse and its possible references to the fête.

And this brings us back to the timing problem.

We don’t know exactly when Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life,” but because of their constant struggle to meet expectations for new material that we talked about in the prior chapter, it was almost certainly during the first part of 1966, or at earliest, the final months of 1965. And by that time, Paul and John have been involved in a deeply intimate relationship — in whatever way you choose to define that phrase — for close to a decade.

If “Got To Get You Into My Life” is written to John, and if Paul is this worked up in 1966 that he’s writing a song with the intense emotional firepower of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” and if — almost ten years into their relationship — he still has a desperate need to make sure John knows that he (Paul) wants to be with him every single day of his life, that starts to shift “Got To Get You Into My Life” away from the simple ecstasy of new love to the more complicated landscape of long-term, deeply-enmeshed romantic/erotic obsession, starting on the first day they met. And this, of course, is solidly on-brand for Lennon/McCartney, whether or not they physically acted on that obsession.

Before we move on to see if things clear up in the second verse, let’s talk a little meta about this grammar business.

Especially if you aren’t yet familiar with the Beautiful Possibility episode about “Bless You” you might be thinking it’s unreasonable to hold Paul McCartney — or any artist — to the conventional rules of grammar. And it’s maybe especially unreasonable to hold artists who rewrote the rules of popular music and sparked a cultural revolution to the conventional rules of anything, including grammar. And it might be especially unreasonable to hold Paul to the conventional rules of grammar in a song inspired by (and possibly under the influence of) altered consciousness, and also maybe the disorienting euphoria of romantic and erotic obsession.

So let’s do a quick re-up of what we talked about relative to grammar when we considered “Bless You.” The short version goes something like this—

In their lyrics, both Paul and John play games with the conventions of the form — including the conventions of the English language. That’s part of the revolutionary genius of their music — they (along with Dylan) literally rewrote the rules for how songs are written. But no matter how revolutionary an artist might be, for lyrics to make sense to anyone other than the artist themselves, those lyrics still need to follow the basic rules of grammar.

Grammar is essentially the instruction manual for how to communicate in a particular language. If language doesn’t follow the same rules for everyone, it’s not language — it’s pointless gibberish.

“Got To Get You Into My Life” is obviously not pointless gibberish. It’s not even absurdism. Like “Bless You,” it seems to be intended as a direct, literal message to Paul’s beloved that— well, actually, we don’t know what it’s intended to be a message about yet.

Let’s see if Paul tells us more in the next verse—

You didn’t run you didn’t lie

You knew I wanted just to hold you

And had you gone you knew in time

We’d meet again for I had told you

There are lots of things we could notice in this verse. Maybe most unusual is Paul’s joy that his beloved didn’t lie to him during their first meeting.9

That’s another odd thing to say about a first meeting — except it’s maybe not so odd if the song is for John. Obviously, a same sex attraction in 1957 is something a teenage boy probably would have felt compelled to “lie” about, especially to another boy that he’s just met. And yet, if Paul is indeed writing about the fête, then he seems to be implying that right from the start, he and John were aware of their mutual romantic attraction to one another.10

We’ll talk more about the lie vs. truth theme in a bit. For now, notice that the first part of the verse — you didn’t run you didn’t lie / you knew I wanted just to hold you — is Paul talking about the past to his beloved in the present. This is similar to what Paul wrote in the prior verse — except that in this case, he’s talking not about literal events, but about the emotional quality of that first meeting.

Except not quite.

Up until now, Paul has talked only about his own personal experience of meeting his beloved. But with you knew I wanted just to hold you, Paul has shifted to telling his beloved about how his beloved experienced their first meeting. He’s shifted from “this is how it was for me” to “this is how it was for you.”

That’s a highly unusual perspective in a love song. Love songs virtually always deal with what the writer thinks and feels about the person they’re in love with. And of course, there’s a good reason for that — telling the person we’re in love with what they think and feel about us, instead of letting them speak for themselves, is more than a little bit presumptuous.

But to my ear — and this is admittedly subjective — “Got To Get You Into My Life” doesn’t come off as presumptuous. A little manic, yeah, as we mentioned already, but not presumptuous.

Maybe that’s just because we’re in the hands of a master songwriter. Let’s see if the rest of the verse clarifies things. Here’s the second half of it again—

And had you gone you knew in time

We’d meet again for I had told you

A Beatles countercultural writer recently observed that even the most tender of Paul McCartney’s love songs tends to come spiked with a taste of vinegar.11

This “sweet with a taste of sour” is, of course, the “pairing of opposites” frequently evoked to define Lennon/McCartney. And this John/sour vs Paul/sweet tension is often referenced as part of the distorted “John/more vs Paul/less” narrative that we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility (because in our fear-of-softness culture, “sour” is falsely perceived as edgier and more interesting than “sweet”).12

But distorted narrative or not, that pairing of opposites does seem — to some extent — accurate. Paul himself often evokes the sweet/sour tension in his example of John adding it can’t get no worse to Paul’s it’s getting better all the time — though, as Paul has also observed, this duality crudely oversimplifies their creative dynamic.

John/sour vs Paul/sweet also crudely oversimplifies Paul’s own work. Because that sweet/sour tension appears independently of Lennon/McCartney, in both Beatles songs primarily composed by Paul, and in his solo work — which is why we’re talking about it here, in a song for which John and Paul both agree that Paul wrote all of the lyrics on his own.

The “taste of vinegar” paired with the sweet is present in the very first songs Paul wrote — it’s in the title of “In Spite Of All The Danger,” and in the references to suicide and imprisonment in “A World Without Love,” and in the passive-aggressive someday you’ll know I was the one of “I’ll Follow the Sun.”

That spike of vinegar appears throughout Paul’s Beatles-era work. It’s essential to creating the tension that helps to elevate so many of his love songs out of craft and into art — and often into high art. Virtually all — and maybe actually all — of Paul’s most iconic love songs are marinated in a touch (or more) of vinegar — “Long and Winding Road,” “I Will,” “Hey Jude,” and, of course, “Yesterday,” to name only a few.

The taste of vinegar extends throughout Paul’s solo catalogue, too — all the way to his 2021 “Deep Deep Feeling,” where Paul alternates between experiencing intense love (and the expression of it) as a transcendent feeling and a hell he can’t escape from.13 And of course, it’s in the bittersweet acceptance of the passage of time of his 2026 song, “Days We Left Behind.”

These sour moments are especially evident in Paul’s Revolver songs.

We can hear the sweet/sour tension most obviously in the weary resignation of “For No One” — which is essentially sour with a touch of sweet.14 It’s more subtle in “Here, There and Everywhere,” where the tenderness of stroking his possibly-sleeping lover’s hair is set against the tension of she doesn’t know he’s there... And it’s equally subtle in the deceptively euphoric “Good Day Sunshine,” where the simple pleasure of a shared walk in the sun is undercut by the pain (and perhaps foreshadow) of his feet burning as they hit the ground.

With the phrase and had you gone, we’ve arrived at the sour taste of vinegar — the acid, if you will — at the heart of “Got To Get You Into My Life.” Not the LSD kind of acid, but the emotional kind.

We don’t consciously recognise this sour taste, tucked away as it is in the romantic urgency and musical/vocal pyrotechnics of “Got To Get You Into My Life.” But it’s there — and it’s the first hint in the lyric of trouble between the lovers. And by slipping and had you gone into the lyric as he does, Paul instantly and completely transforms the entire meaning of the song.

To understand how and why that transformation happens, we need to (I’m sorry to tell you this) talk just a bit more about grammar.

And had you gone is similar to a couplet in Brian Wilson's “God Only Knows” — if you should ever leave me / life would still go on believe me — in which the writer is speculating about a hypothetical event — his beloved leaving him — that has not happened but might happen in the future.15

And had you gone is also hypothetical. Paul is speculating about an event — also his beloved leaving him — that has not happened. But in this case, the hypothetical event is not in the future, but in the past.

And because Paul is speculating not about the future but about the past — and especially because he’s chosen to say “had you gone,” rather than the more speculative “if you had gone” — the most likely read of and had you gone is that Paul is referring not to some vague, abstract possibility that his beloved might have at some point in the past left him, but rather that there was an actual, specific time in the past when his beloved might have left, but didn’t. In other words, that the leaving in question did not happen, but almost happened.

And if this is the meaning that Paul is intending, it suggests an answer to the timing question — because judging by Paul’s manic, adrenaline-fueled vocal, that almost-leaving likely happened in the fairly recent past. Recently enough that Paul still sounds seriously freaked out about it, but distant enough that it’s become an almost-happened rather than a still-might-happen or an in-the-process-of-happening.

And it’s that almost-happened that drives the urgency of “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

And had you gone is, without question, the sour taste of vinegar that turns “Got To Get You Into My Life” from a joyful song of new love — or perhaps more accurately, longer-term romantic/erotic obsession — into something darker and more complex. In other words, a lyric that John Lennon might especially admire.

And had you gone is also likely the sort of thing Paul was talking about when he said, “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.”16

— because if “Got To Get You Into My Life” is written to and about John — as it seems to be, given the references to the fête and that it’s a struggle-to-share-feelings song — then and had you gone would seem to tell us that there was an actual, specific moment, probably sometime in the later part of 1965, when John got very close to ending his creative and personal relationship with Paul. And, by extension, breaking up The Beatles.

And obviously Lennon/McCartney almost breaking up sometime in 1965 — when the global cultural earthquake they were shaping and leading was only just getting started — would be a significant new piece of information when it comes to understanding the music and the story that shaped our modern world.

If this is an accurate read of and had you gone, it is — by any measure — an unexpected plot twist that Paul has inserted into the lyric. Let’s continue on, and see how this interpretation fits into the overall song.

Here’s the next section—

Ooh you were meant to be near me

Ooh and I want you to hear me

Say we’ll be together every day

Taken on its own, this triplet would be an ordinary declaration of love — albeit intense, obsessive love, which, of course, isn’t all that ordinary. But this triplet is not on its own. It’s set in the context of and had you gone — the sour, vinegar-spiked ghost that haunts “Got To Get You Into My Life,” fundamentally changing the meaning of everything else in the song, including this triplet.

Grammatically, there are at least three ways to interpret these three lines, which — depending on how they’re read — are maybe the most structurally complex part of the lyric. So let’s take it slow and go step by step.

The first interpretation is that the triplet is a self-contained section, and that within the triplet, the first two lines are a separate thought from the third line. In this read, Paul wants his beloved to hear him when he says that his beloved was meant to be near him. Paul then follows that stated desire with a request — and maybe even a demand — that his beloved promise that the two of them will be together every day.

Here’s the triplet written out in prose, with slightly adjusted language to clarify this interpretation—

You were meant to be near me, and I want you to hear me. [Tell me, my beloved] we’ll be together ev’ry day.

This read works well with our working interpretation of and had you gone. If Paul’s beloved almost left sometime in the not-too-distant past, then it makes sense that Paul would be pushing for assurance that his beloved won’t leave in the future, and will promise to be with him every day.

The second way of reading this triplet assumes, again, that the triplet is a self-contained section of the song. But in this version, all three lines are united into a single thought — which means the third line is not Paul asking for assurance that his beloved will be with him every day. Instead, it’s the opposite — it’s Paul who is now doing the assuring.

Once again, here’s the triplet written out in prose, again with a small adjustment help to clarify this interpretation—

You were meant to be near me, and I want you to hear me [when I tell you] we’ll be together ev’ry day.

A third possible read is similar to this one, in that all three lines again form a single thought. But in this read, the triplet is not self-contained within the song. Instead, these lines are a continuation of the prior and had you gone verse that ends with you knew in time we’d meet again for I had told you.

In this third version, Paul is reminding his beloved of what he (Paul) has said in the past — for I had told you— which he’s now reaffirming once again in the present — that he wants the two of them to be together every day.

Again, to help clarify, here’s the section of the song we’re considering, converted to regular prose with some adjusted language—

And had you gone, you knew in time we’d meet again, for I had told you you were meant to be near me, and I want you to hear me [when I tell you] we’ll be together ev’ry day.

This third read — which seems the most elegant of the three — also echoes the struggle-to-share-feelings line from earlier in the song, did I tell you I need you every single day of my life, as Paul continuing to reassure his beloved — and perhaps himself — that he did indeed tell his beloved these things in the past, and that his message was received, even as he continues to try to get that message across in the present day — I want you to hear me [when I] say we’ll be together every day.

The musical cues in the song suggest this third read as the correct read. We won’t go into the music theory of what’s happening here — we’ve got enough on our hands with just the grammar — but you can probably intuitively sense that up-speak at the end of the verse — on the “you” of for I had told you — suggests that Paul isn’t finished with his thought at the end of that verse — and that his thought instead continues on into the first line of the triplet — you were meant to be near me.

But despite the clear musical signal that this is the correct read, this reassurance doesn’t seem to quite fit, in the context of and had you gone. If Paul’s beloved almost left, then it makes sense for Paul to ask for assurance that his beloved will stay with him in the future. But if Paul’s beloved almost left — and if Paul is deeply upset about that almost-leaving, as the song suggests that he is — then why would Paul need to reassure his beloved that he (Paul) won’t leave?

It seems we’re going to need a bit more context to determine which of these three meanings is the more likely, so let’s see what happens in the next verse—

What can I do what can I be

When I’m with you I want to stay there

If I am true I’ll never leave

And if I do I know the way there17

To start with, let’s notice that if I am true I’ll never leave is a parallel/contrasting line to you didn’t lie in the prior verse. Those two phrases — contrasting truth and lies between the two lovers — are very nearly a split couplet, which is a term we invented when we talked about “Bless You” to refer to two lines that are separated in the lyric, but intimately related in their meaning.

As we touched on earlier, the question of truth and lies in a romantic relationship is obviously profoundly relevant to a story of two boys growing up in a culture in which same sex love and desire was illegal and widely condemned, and thus mostly had to be hidden away. Lied about, if you will.

In this context — and if Paul is indeed writing to John — what can I do what can I be / when I’m with you I want to stay there would be a poignant articulation of the confusion and anguish of being unable to express love honestly and openly in a culture that does not allow a man to express romantic or erotic love to another man.

And that might offer us a clue about and had you gone — that whatever happened to motivate and had you gone might be related to Paul’s struggle to be emotionally truthful — his struggle to share his innermost feelings with John in a larger culture in which those particular innermost feelings are especially dangerous to share.

And that, in turn, might offer insight into the triplet we just considered — the one where Paul seems to be reassuring his beloved that he (Paul) will not leave, despite it having been his beloved who almost left in the past.

In the song, Paul is equating his beloved’s role in the relationship with truth — you didn’t lie — and his own role as involving a struggle with truth — if I’m true. If Paul is writing about and for John, then Paul’s association of John with truth and himself with the lie — or at least with a struggle with truth — is a hint that right from the start, John may have been more willing to be truthful — both with Paul and with the rest of the world — about how he felt than Paul was able to be with John.

If the song is written for John, then maybe from John’s point of view, Paul is the one who “left” — not literally, but in terms of his inability to be more committed and emotionally forthcoming in the relationship, both because of the cultural restrictions on committing to a same sex relationship and also because of Paul’s own personal difficulties with expressing his innermost feelings outside of song.

And if this is an accurate interpretation, then this is consistent with what we know about their relationship from those videos and photographs we looked at in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — where John’s obviously erotic/romantic gazes at Paul are far more frequent and more easily noticed than Paul’s gazes back at John.18

In this context — as the musical cues tell us — the third and more interconnected read of the prior triplet — in which Paul is reassuring John that he (Paul) wants to be with him every single day — makes all kinds of sense. Combined with the overall extreme willingness to share his feelings in the song as a whole, the I want you to hear me triplet can easily be understood as Paul reassuring a romantic partner that he (Paul) is now — in light of the near-miss of and had you gone — prepared to offer the emotional presence and commitment that’s necessary in an intimate relationship.

All of this might be the more specific reason why “Got To Get You Into My Life” is strikingly different from most of Paul’s struggle-to-share-feelings songs.

As we noticed earlier, Paul’s struggle to share his feelings in “Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t about being tentative or emotionally-distant — not by any measure. It’s not I can’t tell you how I feel or I couldn’t say the words or even the gentle metaphor of a language barrier in “Michelle.”

The difference in Paul being tongue-tied versus willing/able to share his feelings so urgently and openly might be the presence of and had you gone.

If “Got To Get You Into My Life” is indeed written to John, then Whatever Happened to shake John’s faith in the relationship was clearly a near-miss that scared the hell out of both of them. It seems to have scared John enough to threaten to leave, and it seems to have scared Paul enough to motivate him to overcome his fear of expressing his emotions, so as to plead for John to stay.

And had you gone makes it clear that the intensity of both the lyric and Paul’s performance of it is not the ecstatic, breathless euphoria of new love — or even romantic/erotic obsession — but the dizzying relief of having barely averted the devastating loss of that love.

And had you gone is why Paul doesn’t have the luxury of being tentative or indirect about his feelings. What can I do what can I be / When I’m with you I want to stay there — but really, the whole song — is Paul giving (literal) full-throated voice to his frantic need to convince his beloved of the constancy of his love, and the urgent need to do whatever is necessary to keep whatever happened from happening again.

What can I do what can I be is the sort of thing we say when we feel we’ve fucked up with our beloved and we’re pleading for something — anything — that we can do to make it right again. Essentially — “Tell me how to make it better. Anything, you name it and I’ll do it. Just please, whatever you do, don’t go.”

This is what it’s like, when we’re desperate to win back the trust of our beloved, when we’re willing to promise anything, but we’re afraid we won’t be heard or believed. We repeat ourselves, one word tumbling over the next — what can I do what can I be? — urgently grasping for the words to fix what’s broken, saying the same thing in multiple ways — you were meant to be near me... we’ll be together every day — hoping we’ll somehow stumble upon the combination of words that will make things right before we lose our beloved forever.

In this way, “Got To Get You Into My Life” might more accurately be a companion song to “Oh! Darling” — Paul pleading his case of love and fidelity — I’d never do you no harm... if I’m true, I’ll never leave — to a partner whose trust in the relationship has been shaken.19

What’s different from “Oh! Darling” is the manic urgency of “Got To Get You Into My Life” — in the song itself and in Paul’s vocal. And that difference reveals itself in the two parallel phrases in each of the songs — and had you gone, sung for a lover who almost left but didn’t, and “Oh! Darling”’s if you leave me — sung for a lover who’s partway out the door. And unlike “Oh! Darling,” where Paul lingers on every phrase as if stalling for time before the inevitable happens, in “Got To Get You Into My Life,” Paul doesn’t even have time to finish one word before moving on to the next, fueled — perhaps — by the euphoria of that last-minute stay of execution.

“Got To Get You Into My Life” ends with a repeat of the “fete” intro verse — the verse that includes the “love at first sight” imagery of I was alone, I took a ride, etc. It’s bookended on either side by—

Ooh, then I suddenly see you,

Ooh, did I tell you I need you

Every single day of my life?

If “Got To Get You Into My Life” is written for John — as it appears to be — then maybe the return to their meeting at the fête is simply Paul reminding himself of the joy of their first meeting. Maybe Whatever Happened to shake the foundations of Lennon/McCartney in 1965 got Paul thinking about — and longing for — the magick “love at first sight” of the day they met, before the world exploded around them and made it all so very complicated.

But in the context of and had you gone, recalling that joy might also be part of Paul’s what can I do what can I say strategy. And it might also offer us an explanation for that quasi-presumptuous second verse in which Paul tells his beloved — can we just say John at this point? — how he, John, felt on the day they met. Essentially — “let me tell you the story of the day we met and fell in love as part of proving to you how much I love you, and maybe also reminding you of how much you love me.”

Paul sings the fête verse very differently this final time — faster, louder, ragged and raw-throated, pushing the edge of his vocal and emotional control, as he pleads his case with escalating fervor — as if sensing that Whatever Happened might not be as much in the past and fixed as he hoped.

And then there’s did I tell you I need you, which initially appeared to be a relatively minor articulation of Paul’s struggle-to-express-feelings — but in the context of and had you gone, turns out to be not so minor after all.

In the context of and had you gone, it’s now easy to hear did I tell you I need you every single day of my life for what it might more truly be — Paul’s reassurance to his beloved — to John — whose faith in the relationship has been shaken and who is deeply insecure about being abandoned, and who feels the need to be loved by someone who will offer 100% of his time and attention every single day of his life — which based on what we see in the observable history, seems to be a pretty accurate description of John’s (and Paul’s) expectations of a romantic relationship.

“Got To Get You Into My Life” does not seem to be a simple, generalised love song, nor does it seem to be an ecstatic and nostalgic celebration of love at first sight. What it seems clearly to be is a testament — Paul’s proof-of-love to his beloved — to John — in the aftermath of a near-miss end to their love affair. And he’s building his case for the constancy of their love around evoking their first meeting — I was alone I took a ride — when they fell in love at first sight — then I suddenly see you. “Remember,” Paul is urging, “remember how good it felt, how real it was for both of us, right from the start. How real it still is, for me and hopefully for you.”

And if there’s no specific regret in this struggle-to-share-feelings song, it’s only because Paul is leveraging the full force of his musical and lyrical genius and emotional courage to ensure there will be nothing to regret.

As we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, Paul will spend much of the rest of his creative career — right up to the present day — attempting to reassure John of his love. Song after song, reassurance after reassurance — perhaps reassuring himself as much as John — that Paul did say “I love you” and that John did hear it, in the end.

All of this, of course, begs the question — if this analysis is accurate, what was the Whatever Happened that motivated Paul to write “Got To Get You Into My Life”? Because it’s hopefully self-evident that if Lennon/McCartney almost imploded in 1965, that’s a missing piece that matters a great deal in our understanding of the music and the story.

The answer to that question doesn’t appear in mainstream Beatles writing, because mainstream writing doesn’t even notice and had you gone because mainstream Beatles writers refuse to consider lyrics as primary source material and don’t pay attention to pesky details like that and wouldn’t know what to do with them if they did.

Norman Smith, The Beatles’ first studio engineer, paid attention, though. Here he is in an interview published in 2006—

“After the first LP in 1963, the following albums had been wonderful. But the Rubber Soul album was the most difficult one for me. It was much less enjoyable. I can’t remember how long the gap was between Help! and Rubber Soul, but there certainly had been one hell of a change in the relationship between the boys — mainly between John and Paul. It was very noticeable, and it made me quite sad in actual fact. Something had happened between those two albums, but I’m not sure what it was. That was the beginning of the end, really. That’s when it started.”20

Smith’s observation also hasn’t made it into the story as it’s usually told. And before we consider his observation about the “something that happened” between John and Paul during this time period, it’s worth considering how seriously to take Norman Smith as a primary source.

The job of a studio engineer includes observing for long hours from behind glass in the relative isolation of the control room. That set-up provides a uniquely valuable perspective on the people being observed and their interactions with one another. In some ways, it’s not unlike a “blind” that field biologists use to study animals in the wild to avoid disrupting their natural behaviour patterns.

What’s more, the unusual layout of Studio 2 — where The Beatles did most of their recording — is especially suited to this kind of “wildlife observation.” The control room is set high above the studio floor, which means the engineer has a good view of the artist, but the artist usually can’t see the engineer — so it’s easier to forget the engineer is there.21

We talked about this in Part One of Beautiful Possibility relative to Geoff Emerick, who replaced Norman Smith as the Beatles studio engineer at the end of 1965. But unlike the later albums that Emerick worked on, The Beatles’ early albums that Smith engineered were recorded in extremely short bursts of time — sometimes as short as a single day.

That means that unlike Emerick, Smith didn’t spend long hours observing John and Paul in the studio. But also unlike Emerick, Smith seems to have socialized with them at least a little bit outside of the studio. Smith writes a lot about his friendship with John in particular in his self-published 2008 memoir, John Lennon Called Me Normal — though given Smith is rarely mentioned in any of the research, it’s hard to know from his book if he’s exaggerating the significance of that relationship in an effort to position himself closer to a culturally significant event.

Also, observing behaviour is one thing. Interpreting that behaviour is quite another. And both Smith and Emerick consistently fall short when it comes to their “Grail fluency” — aka, their ability to perceive and interpret emotional subtext.

So maybe Smith is just misinterpreting his observational data — as Emerick frequently does. Maybe there was no big Whatever Happened between John and Paul. Maybe what Smith observed was just a passing storm cloud between two volatile artists working together under intense pressure and tight time constraints — the affectionate “tug of war” that George Martin talks about, surfacing for the first time in earnest as The Beatles gained confidence as recording artists and started calling their own shots in the studio.

In other words, it would be reckless and irresponsible to conclude anything about the relationship between John and Paul — in 1965 or at any other time — based on a single quote from Norman Smith, and a single, oddly-placed grammatical phrase in a single song written during a time period when John and Paul seemed from what we can see with our own eyeballs to have been getting along just fine.

But we have a bit more than just this single quote.

We also know from observable history that Norman Smith did indeed quit working with The Beatles after Rubber Soul — just as The Beatles were getting started in earnest on their revolutionary musical innovations that would culminate in Sgt. Pepper, when virtually any studio engineer in the world would have done virtually anything to sit in that chair. And even factoring in that Smith occasionally says he left to pursue other professional opportunities, his timing strongly suggests that something unusual precipitated his resignation.

We also have more than just a single phrase in a single song. Because there’s the matter of that emotional arc that we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — where the emotional arc of Paul and John’s songs, together and solo, seems to mirror the emotional arc of their relationship with each other better than their relationships with their public romantic partners.

And this brings us to another hard limit on the usefulness of even primary research.

In the prior chapter, I suggested that the story of The Beatles is first and foremost a story of human relationships — between John, Paul, George, and Ringo. And — as we’ve talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — even more so, between John and Paul. And the reality is that the vast majority of what happens between any two people in a relationship — famous or otherwise, romantic or otherwise — happens in private.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney are two of history’s most famous people, and together, one of history’s most famous couples — but nonetheless, we’re never going to know most of what happened between them in private, which is, of course, as it should be. That’s a secret code never to be spoken — as Paul has made clear.22

Mostly what we get are glimpses of their relationship — in photographs and videos, occasionally but not really in interview — because John and Paul are especially guarded when talking about their relationship. Have you noticed that despite the length and depth and intensity of their partnership, and the multitudes of interviews, separately and together, they’ve given us only a tiny handful of anecdotes about their time together, mostly from Paul — who carefully repeats the same handful of stories about him and John over and over?

All of this is almost certainly why Paul has told us to look to his songs — to their songs — for the truth of his life, and by extension, the truth of his relationship with John.

And when we consider those songs with a Grail-fluent gaze, it becomes obvious that since the emotional arc of their songs so closely matches the emotional arc of their relationship when we seem to have a good sense of the state of their relationship — for example, during the breakup — that same emotional arc in their songs might work in reverse. It might point us to what’s happening between them when it’s not otherwise visible (except apparently, to Norman Smith).

This correlation might be what Paul is talking about, when he says that the truth of his life is in his songs, rather than in the written history.

We need to be very careful here though, because there’s an obvious danger lurking. It’s easy to let that correlation drift into selectively choosing which to believe — the songs or the research — depending on what we want to believe. When the songs match the research, ah ha! see, the songs match the research. When the songs don’t match the research — well, that’s because the research is wrong.

This sort of confirmation bias is a danger common to all fields of study and a danger that all scholars are vulnerable to. It’s why there needs to be a constant back-and-forth, checking one kind of research against another. And as we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, it’s the confirmation bias that Grail-phobic writers are caught in, when they categorically reject the credibility of the lovers possibility by dismissing as not credible the considerable body of research that points in that direction, because it points them in a direction they do not want to — and do not know how to — go.

But with that caution in mind, it’s an indisputable truth that art reflects the life of the artist and that Paul has directed us to look at the songs more than the research. So let’s take a quick look at some of the songs in the time period before “Got To Get You Into My Life” when the Whatever Happened that might have motivated the and had you gone would likely have happened.

Before we do, though, a caution — Paul’s told us that in looking to his songs for the truth of his life, “the meanings aren’t always obvious on the surface.” And that in turn means that — especially since we’re dealing with world-class wordsmiths — it takes time and effort to tease out meanings from their lyrics, as maybe you’re seeing with “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

It’s also always dangerous to pull a single line or couplet out of a song instead of considering the whole song and its context — as again, hopefully you’re seeing with “Got To Get You Into My Life.” And the songs during the Rubber Soul period — which would be just prior to Revolver — are especially hard to untangle because of the disintegration of Paul’s relationship with Jane during this time.

All of which is to say that the following is not the way lyrical interpretation should really be done, especially relative to Lennon/McCartney — so please bear that in mind.

But that said, it’s possible that Whatever Happened between them might be the sour taste of vinegar in the Rubber Soul-era single “We Can Work It Out,” and it might be the cause of Paul’s desperation to communicate his feelings in “Michelle,” the lyrics of which were written in 1965—

I need to I need to I need to

I need to make you see

Oh what you mean to me

Until I do I’m hoping you will know what I mean

—which you might recognise could easily be a verse of “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

And while we for sure don’t yet have enough context to talk about “Girl,” it’s hard not to notice this verse—

When I think of all the times I’ve tried so hard to leave her

She will turn to me and start to cry

And she promises the earth to me and I believe her

After all this time I don’t know why

Factoring in the by-necessity gender-swapped pronouns, you might now recognise this verse of “Girl” as an almost beat-for-beat retelling (or foretelling) of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” in which Paul does indeed “promise the earth” to his beloved — only this time, the story is told from John’s perspective.

If “Girl” is written about Paul — as it may well be — John seems to be referencing a pattern of behaviour — all the times I tried so hard to leave her — rather than a single, acute incident. But crises in relationships generally don’t rise up out of the blue. And overall this is virtually the identical narrative that Paul is telling in “Got To Get You Into My Life”— except in “Girl,” it’s told from the perspective of an insecure, skittish John Lennon, in love but on the verge of leaving, and coaxed into staying — and she promises the earth to me and I believe her — by his own enmeshment in the relationship and by his partner’s panicked, over-the-top declarations of love and devotion.

And let’s also notice “Here, There & Everywhere.” In the context of and had you gone, language like I want her everywhere / And if she’s beside me I know I need never care / But to love her is to need her everywhere is easily read as yet another iteration of “Michelle” and “Got To Get You Into My Life” — Paul’s reassurance, tender and plaintive this time, that he’ll never abandon his beloved.

Again, we’re short-stroking a lot here and these are possibilities only. While I do think John and Paul wrote these songs for and about one another, I’m aware that I’m not fully making the case for that here, based only on a few lines from the lyrics. Each of these songs — and especially “Girl” — could itself be considered in a deep lyrical analysis like the one we’re currently doing for “Got To Get You Into My Life.” And we will, of course, revisit this part of the story in context in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.

But there is certainly a pattern here. And that pattern is consistent with both Norman Smith’s observation of new tension between John and Paul during Rubber Soul, and with the lyrics of “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

Before we continue, I want to point out that all of this is another example of why we do a disservice to the story and the music by dismissing both the lovers possibility and Paul’s explicit directive to look for the truth of his life in his songs. Dismissing one or the other is bad enough — but dismissing both together starts to feel... purposeful, maybe because the best way not to find something you don’t want to find is to refuse to go looking for it in its most likely location.

But when we settle for superficial interpretations of the lyrics of Lennon/McCartney, we lose the opportunity to see the more complex — and I’d suggest, more beautiful — layers of meaning in their songs. Without the willingness to notice the specific and complex grammar of and had you gone and how it sets the context for the rest of the lyric, “Got To Get You Into My Life” is just an “ode to pot” and a simple, relatively generic love song.

What might be most masterful about “Got To Get You Into My Life” is that with one tiny phrase — and had you gone — Paul completely flips the emotional ‘direction’ of the song. Written as a song of obsession/possession, “Got To Get You Into My Life” is Paul begging to get something from his beloved — “please tell me you’ll never leave me.” But and had you gone turns “Got To Get You Into My Life” into a song of reassurance, Paul offering something to his beloved — “please take this song as proof that I love you.”

That’s not, of course, an either/or — great art has multiple layers, and “Got To Get You Into My Life” is no exception. Both the “getting” and the “giving” are contained in the song, lyrically and musically, making it a complete cycle of love, loss, regret and redemption— which might be one of the many reasons John cites it as one of Paul’s best lyrics.

We’re nearly done with our lyrical deep dive into “Got To Get You Into My Life.” But you may have noticed there’s one last part we haven’t yet talked about — the hook that’s also the title, repeated throughout the song in escalating intensity and fragmentation.

To understand what might be the deeper meaning of the title — and to answer the question of Whatever Happened between Paul and John that troubled Norman Smith so much he quit The Beatles on the eve of their musical revolution and that may have motivated the and had you gone of “Got To Get You Into My Life” — we need to go back and pick up the thread we left hanging in the prior chapter, with the Dylan story and Paul’s creative unfurling and “Yesterday.”

Because the truth of the artist might be in the art, but not always all of it — which is why things are about to get a little tricky.

In the final chapter of this series, we’ll look at what was happening in the time period between Help! and Rubber Soul that Norman Smith specifies. And I’ll offer you my best and most educated guess about how all of what we’ve talked about to this point might have come together to become the Whatever Happened that might have led to and had you gone.

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

PS You’ll get more out of the final chapter of Seven Levels if you’re familiar with the history of “Yesterday” as it relates to Lennon/McCartney, considered in the piece below—

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For more on the “secret code” and why it’s almost certain Paul is referring to his and John’s songs, see https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/secret-codes-and-promises.

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“Got to Get You into My Life” was one I wrote when I had first been introduced to pot. I’d been a rather straight working-class lad but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting. It didn’t seem to have too many side effects like alcohol or some of the other stuff, like pills, which I pretty much kept off. I kind of liked marijuana. I didn’t have a hard time with it and to me it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding.

So “Got to Get You into My Life” is really a song about that, it’s not to a person, it’s actually about pot. It’s saying, “I’m going to do this. This is not a bad idea.” So it’s actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret. It wouldn’t be the first time in history someone’s done it, but in my case it was the first flush of pot.”1 — Paul McCartney, 1997.

In this chapter, we’re going to continue our deep dive into the events of August 28 1964, when — according to the folktale, anyway — Dylan first met The Beatles at the Delmonico Hotel in New York and turned them on to cannabis. And we’re also going to begin our unfolding of the deeper and more complex story that I’ve hinted is waiting to be discovered beneath the Dylan story as it’s generally told.

And given that Paul says he wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about his discovery of cannabis, this song seems like something we ought to look into — especially since Paul has explicitly told us that his songs are where to look for the truth of his life, rather than in all those books about The Beatles in which the Dylan story is told.2

Next week, we’ll talk more about understanding the artist through the art, when we take a close look at the lyrics to “Got To Get You Into My Life.” But first, in this chapter, we’re going to consider the context of the song — and whether it is, in fact, about what Paul says it’s about.

I don’t have any preliminaries for you this time, other than to remind you that while you do not need to be familiar with Part One of Beautiful Possibility to engage with Seven Levels, there will in this chapter be occasional references that you may not get if you’re not familiar with Beautiful Possibility. And I’ve done my best to help with that in either the main text or the footnotes.

So let’s get started.

It seems all-but-certain that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” in early 1966. And right away, that suggests at least one significant inconsistency, because Paul claims he wrote the song about — and more importantly, during — the “first flush of” and “when he’d first been introduced” to cannabis.

As we talked about in the prior chapter, when it comes to cannabis, “being introduced to” and “the first flush of” — which is another way of saying “turned on to” — describe two potentially very different experiences. Paul uses both phrases in his description of the inspiration for “Got To Get You Into My Life.” So is Paul referring to The Beatles’ likely introduction to cannabis — the one John and George describe in their pre-fame bad weed quotes (such as they are)? Or is Paul referring to The Beatles getting turned on to cannabis with Dylan in 1964?

This is — for once — an easy question to answer. Given the context and everything we covered in the prior chapter, it seems all-but-certain that Paul is referring here not to the early Liverpool experience, but to being turned onto cannabis by Dylan in 1964 — whatever the specifics of where and when that happened.

So if “Got To Get You Into My Life” was written in early 1966, that adds up to a gap of almost a year and a half between the inspiration for the song and the writing of the song.

A year and a half is a significant gap for a song about a brand new discovery — and especially a song with the urgency of “Got To Get You Into My Life.” And a year is even more of a gap in the ultra-compressed world of 1960s Beatle time, where — given the speed of their creative evolution — a year is more like five years.

So maybe despite its obvious urgency, “Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t a song about a new discovery at all. Maybe it’s a nostalgia song — Paul writing in 1966 about his first time getting turned on to cannabis in 1964. There’d be nothing unusual about that, in and of itself. Artists frequently draw creative inspiration from their past memories, and Paul is no exception. It’s what he did with, among other songs, “Penny Lane.”

But “Got To Get You Into My Life” as a nostalgia song doesn’t seem to quite line up.

Paul has explicitly told us he wrote the song about what was happening for him in the present — not that we should take the artist’s word for that sort of thing, especially when the artist in question is fond of offering wildly contradictory meanings of his work, depending on whatever it depends on in a Paul McCartney interview.3

But while Paul’s on-the-record interpretations of his songs are often wildly inconsistent with the actual song, everything about “Got To Get You Into My Life” supports his claim that he was writing about what was happening for him at the time the song was written.

While the lyrics do sometimes reference the past, absolutely everything else about “Got To Get You Into My Life” — from the title to the arrangement to Paul’s incendiary vocal performance — suggests that he’s very much in the present. In fact, urgency seems to be the overall theme of “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

So maybe Paul didn’t write “Got To Get You Into My Life” in 1966. Maybe he wrote it soon after the Dylan story took place in 1964, but didn’t record it until 1966. Maybe it’s one of those songs written years prior to being included on an album — like “I’ll Follow the Sun” and “Michelle” and “One After 909.”

This scenario is certainly possible. But it, too, seems unlikely.

As was standard for pop stars of the era, The Beatles were expected to record two 14-song albums a year and a double-sided single every three months. That’s forty new songs a year — very nearly a new song every single week.

By today’s standards, that’s obviously an unreasonable expectation. But in the early 1960s, before The Beatles rewrote the rule book, pop music worked very differently than it does today.

Back then, it was assumed — especially in the UK — that even the most successful pop star’s career would last at most a few years. The thinking was to make as much money as quickly as possible — mostly for the record company and the manager — before the star’s popularity waned and they were replaced by a new face. This is why reporters continually asked The Beatles “what will you do when the bubble bursts?” Everyone — including The Beatles — assumed it would.

But of course, The Beatles were not the usual kind of pop stars. The rules that worked for, say, Cliff Richard or Tommy Steele, didn’t work quite so well for the Fab Four.

For one thing, no one seems to have thought to adjust this two albums/four singles a year expectation for artists who wrote most of their own material — because until The Beatles, there hadn’t been any, at least not in the UK and only a handful in the US.4 Instead, artists of the era were expected to record songs chosen for them by their producers and managers — covers of songs already released by other artists, along with new songs written by professional songwriters who were not themselves recording/performing artists and could thus spend all day every day writing a steady stream of new material.

Time to write new material was not something The Beatles had a lot of in the early years, given their relentless touring and public appearance schedule. This is why from 1964 through 1966, Paul and John struggled to find time to compose enough songs to meet their contractual obligations. That struggle is why they filled out their first few albums with cover songs like Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” and Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.”

By the time they recorded Beatles for Sale in August 1964 — just before leaving for their first US tour during which the Dylan story takes place — Paul and John were scavenging their unfinished material for anything they could quickly shape into a recordable song.5

All of which makes it a pretty safe bet that if a song with the voltage of “Got to Get You Into My Life” had been floating around at any point prior to spring of 1966, it would already have been recorded for an earlier album. At the least, there’d likely be studio outtakes of attempts at recording it prior to its finished version, as there are of the March 1963 recording of “One After 909.”

The most intriguing explanation for the year-plus gap between the Dylan story and “Got To Get You Into My Life” is that Paul didn’t write “Got To Get You Into My Life” about cannabis at all, and that’s why the timing doesn’t match up.

John doesn’t believe “Got To Get You Into My Life” is about cannabis. He thinks Paul wrote it about LSD, or at least that’s what he told David Sheff in 1980—

“Paul’s again. That— I think that was one of his best songs too, because the lyrics are good and I didn’t write ‘em, you see? I mean, so when I say that he could write lyrics if he took the effort, then there’s the occasional song like that where he says “I took a ride...” and — and you know, I mean it’s— it’s— it’s not sort of wishy-washy, it actually describes his experience on taking acid. I think that’s what he’s talking about, really. But I couldn’t swear to it, but I think it was a result of that.6

We’ll get back to the part about it being one of Paul’s best lyrics in the next chapter, when we do our deep dive into those lyrics. For here, what matters is that if John is correct that Paul wrote the song about LSD rather than cannabis, then “Got To Get You Into My Life” is tangential to the Dylan story and we don’t need to consider the two in relation at all.

So to explore the possibility that “Got To Get You Into My Life” is, in fact, about LSD, let’s temporarily bid farewell to 1964 New York and travel forward in time to Swinging London and another party, this one hosted by socialite Tara Browne,7 and another first — this time, Paul’s first experience with LSD.

Here’s Paul telling the story in his quasi-memoir Many Years From Now—

Tara was taking acid on blotting paper in the toilet. [already this is less poetical than the Dylan story....😎] He invited me to have some. I said, “I’m not sure, you know.” I was more ready for the drink or a little bit of pot or something. I’d not wanted to do it, I’d held off like a lot of people were trying to, but there was massive peer pressure. And within a band, it’s more than peer pressure, it’s fear pressure. It becomes trebled, more than just your mates, it’s, “Hey, man, this whole band’s had acid, why are you holding out? What’s the reason, what is it about you?”’ So I knew I would have to out of peer pressure alone. And that night I thought, well, this is as good a time as any, so I said, “Go on then, fine.” So we all did it. We stayed up all night. It was quite spacy.8

The Beatles began recording “Got To Get You Into My Life” in April of 1966. Paul goes on in Many Years From Now to date the Tara Browne party as having taken place in 1966. He doesn’t offer a more specific date — though it would obviously have been prior to Tara Browne’s death in August of that year. So it’s not clear from Paul’s account alone whether Tara Browne’s party happened before or after Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

But we do have some clues about the date of the Tara Browne party from other primary sources.

Viv Prince, the drummer for Pretty Things, claims he also took his first LSD trip at the Tara Browne party. Prince told Beatles biographer Steve Turner that he remembers this party taking place not in 1966, as Paul claims, but in December 1965.

Now maybe Viv Prince is another example of someone trying to buy themselves some cultural status by falsely claiming to have been present at a culturally significant event — in this case, Paul McCartney’s first acid trip. But I don’t think that’s what Prince is doing.

I won’t quote Prince’s entire story, as it’s lengthy and filled with detail we don’t need to worry about right this second— but I’ll footnote it for those of you who want to read it.9 The thing to know here is that Prince backs up his recollection with verifiable, time-specific details about how he happened to be at the party. And more than that, those details match the recollection of another as-far-as-I-can-tell credible primary source — Tara Browne’s former wife Nicki, who also dates the party to 1965, although she remembers it being in November, not December.10

Because November or December of 1965 is not long before Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life,” Beatles writer Steve Turner — like John — also believes the song is not about Paul’s first experience with cannabis, but about his first experience with LSD. And in his book Beatles ‘66, Turner presents his supporting analysis for his theory.

Turner’s theory gets a lot of traction in the Beatles world — mainstream and countercultural. And it’s increasingly cited as — here’s that word again — definitive. And that means it’s not going to work to talk about “Got To Get You Into My Life” in the context of the Dylan story if many of you are thinking Paul wrote the song about LSD. So before we begin unfolding the deeper narrative I’ve been hinting at, we need to first take some time to consider whether or not Turner’s theory is credible.

After presenting Viv Prince’s account of the Tara Browne party, here’s what Turner writes in his book—

“Paul has agreed with John’s statement that no one is the same after taking LSD and had called his experiences “amazing” and “deeply emotional.” In 1967 he told the Daily Mirror that his initial trip was “quite an incredible experience” that lasted for six hours; he said, “[It] opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God” and “made me a better person.”

The first of Paul’s songs recorded by the Beatles after December 1965, and therefore almost certainly the first song he composed after tripping, was “Got to Get You Into My Life.” Believing he first took LSD in late 1966, he has said in interviews (and in his book Many Years from Now) that the song was about pot, but the language of taking “a ride,” seeing “another kind of mind,” and not knowing what he “would find there” is more consistent with the language of a psychedelic trip than a marijuana high. In the song he’s talking about getting this new perspective, this new consciousness, into his life. “Far from harming me,” he told the Daily Mirror, “it helped me to see a lot more truth. I am more mature. I am less cynical. I have started to be honest with myself.”11

It turns out that John was right after all when he told Playboy, “It [“Got to Get You Into My Life”] actually describes his experience taking acid. I think that’s what he’s talking about. I couldn’t swear to it, but I think it was a result of that.”12

Notice first that unlike John, who qualifies his interpretation with an acknowledgement that he doesn’t know for sure if he’s right, Turner concludes with absolute certainty that his theory is accurate and that “Got To Get You Into My Life” was written about LSD, full stop.

You’re probably already sensing that this rock-solid certainty isn’t going to end well for Turner. But before we go further, it’s important to acknowledge that Turner is doing a lot of very good things here — things that most mainstream Beatles writers do not bother to do.

Turner bases his theory on primary research, and looks beyond the established narrative to a more careful read of Paul’s lyrics as a source of the truth of the story. In doing so, he implicitly acknowledges the obvious truth that — bizarrely enough — most mainstream Beatles writers refuse to acknowledge — that the art reveals the artist, and that the lyrics of Lennon/McCartney are a legitimate source of primary research when it comes to understanding their story.13

Most of all, Turner doesn’t just advance his theory and expect us to take his word for it, as happens so often in mainstream Beatles writing. Instead, he shows his work for why he thinks Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD and then offers his conclusion based on that work.

All of this is cause for amen and hallelujah (even if it feels somewhat Grail-phobically14 in service of proving Paul “wrong” and John “right,” as Turner puts it).

But Turner gets himself into dangerous territory when he presents his theory with absolute certainty. Because I hope you’re starting to see that absolute certainty is dangerous when it comes to— well, most things, actually, but especially the story of The Beatles, in which almost nothing is certain. And sure enough, a more careful look at the research Turner cites to support his theory reveals that none of this is quite as straightforward as he makes it out to be.

On the surface, Turner’s theory (along with John’s not-so-certain guess) sounds highly plausible.

Paul frequently claims to have trouble with dates, and given that the 1965 date is corroborated (within a month) by both Viv Prince and Nicki Browne, it’s very possible that Paul has conflated the two experiences in his mental timeline. Dylan in New York and Tara Browne in London are maybe not that different, if you’re a Beatle in the eye of the storm of Beatlemania wherein the passage of time is not at all the same as for non-Fab people like Viv Prince and Nicki Browne (and for that matter, Steve Turner).15

But for Turner’s theory to work, it’s not enough to show that Paul took LSD for the first time a few months prior to writing “Got To Get You Into My Life.” Turner also needs to show that that first trip — almost certainly Paul’s only LSD experience prior to writing the song — was sufficiently transformative to inspire him to feel he needs it — as he writes in the lyric — every single day of my life (factoring in, of course, that Paul might be exaggerating a bit for dramatic effect).

And to his credit, Turner does attempt to show that Paul was transformed by the Tara Browne trip — in part by quoting what he claims are Paul’s descriptions of that first trip from a 1967 Daily Mirror article.

Here that’s passage from Turner’s book again, just to refresh our memory—

“In 1967 [Paul] told the Daily Mirror that his initial trip was “quite an incredible experience” that lasted for six hours; he said, “[It] opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God” and “made me a better person.”

Okay, so y’know how I keep going on about all the monkey business with the quotes, and about how that’s one of the reasons we can’t trust biographies because that monkey business means there’s no way to know for sure if what the person being quoted said is actually what the person said, or what the context was if they did say it?16

Well, I’m sorry to say that here we are again.

Turner doesn’t footnote his work (which is especially problematic when presenting a new theory), but fortunately, this article is relatively easy to find. Or I should say articles plural, because the quotes seem to be taken from two different articles published a day apart — one in the Sunday Mirror and the other a UPI wire service article that might have run in the Daily Mirror but as far as I can tell, did not. A small quibble, to be fair, but nonetheless.

Before we look at the quotes themselves, it’s maybe worth mentioning that I’m not convinced it’s the bestest idea ever to base theories of any kind on quotes from newspaper articles, and especially Daily Mirror articles, and especially Daily Mirror articles related to LSD.

Granted, I’m considering this from a non-British perspective many years in the future, but I’ve scanned through dozens of editions of the Daily Mirror from the 1960s, and it definitely doesn’t present itself as a serious news source. It looks and feels like a tabloid, not unlike the New York Post — complete with sexy pictures of girls in bikinis and clickbait headlines and sensationalist stories about horrifying things happening to people who violated society’s norms.

For example, in the June 20 1967 edition — only two days after the Sunday Mirror article Turner quotes in his book — there’s a full page story titled “Taking a Trip To Danger” and filled with lurid accounts of accidental deaths, insanity and murders allegedly caused by LSD.

Even in respectable newspapers and magazines, interview quotes tend to be aggressively edited to fit the length, format and sensibility of the newspaper or magazine. And that’s especially problematic in a tabloid like the Daily Mirror (or in this case, the Sunday Mirror) where odds are high that Paul’s actual words have been distorted to fit the Mirror’s clickbait agenda.

So keeping that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the quotes themselves.

The articles that Turner quotes were published on June 18 and 19 1967. Those articles were a reaction to a June 16 1967 Life Magazine story titled “The New Far-Out Beatles,” in which Paul publicly acknowledged for the first time that he’d tripped on LSD. Paul’s “confession” triggered an Establishment media freak-out that included a series of news articles based on at least two follow-up interviews that Paul gave about his LSD experiences.17

Turner quotes Paul as having told reporters that his “initial trip” was “quite an incredible experience” that lasted for six hours and that “[it] opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God.” That language doesn’t seem to have been printed in the Daily Mirror, but it does appear in a June 19 1967 UPI London wire report published in The Independent.18

Turner also quotes a Sunday Mirror story published on June 18 1967 — Paul’s 25th birthday — in which Paul is quoted as saying that LSD “made me a better person” and that “far from harming me... it helped me to see a lot more truth. I am more mature. I am less cynical. I have started to be honest with myself.”

So far so mostly good. That all sounds like it supports Turner’s theory. But remember, these interviews are from 1967, a year and a half after the Tara Browne party. And that’s where right away Turner’s theory is in a bit of trouble—

—because, again, it’s not enough to quote Paul as having said positive things about his experience with LSD in general. For Turner’s theory to work, Paul has to have said those things specifically about the Tara Browne trip — almost certainly his only experience with LSD prior to writing “Got To Get You Into My Life.” And indeed, Turner claims that Paul is specifically referring to his “initial trip” when he references his transformative spiritual experiences.

The problem is that the words “initial trip” do not appear in the articles Turner is citing. Nor — as far as I can tell — do the words “initial trip” appear in any of the news coverage from that time period — not in the Daily Mirror or the Sunday Mirror or The Independent or anywhere else. And that means that the words “initial trip” are almost certainly not Paul’s words, but rather Turner’s interpretation of Paul’s words.

Turner is probably getting his “initial trip” interpretation from the following passage, which does appear in the June 18 1967 Mirror article—

“I had read a lot about LSD and finally I decided to try it. It was right here in this room. Each session lasted about six hours.”19

Paul’s phrase, “finally I decided to try it” does suggest he’s going to tell us about his first LSD experience — and, again, this is probably where Turner is getting his “initial trip” language from, since it doesn’t seem to appear anywhere else.

But Paul isn’t saying what Turner claims he’s saying — not in the article Turner is citing, and nowhere else that I’ve found either.

Instead, Paul goes on to specify that “each session lasted about six hours.” And while that language could be inclusive of his first trip, it’s not specific to his first trip. That’s the crucial distinction — because again, for Turner’s theory to work, it doesn’t matter how Paul felt about LSD in general. It only matters how he felt about his first trip —aka the Tara Browne trip, almost certainly the only trip he took before writing “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

In other words, the language in the article doesn’t disprove Turner’s theory, but it doesn’t prove it, either — because Turner’s “initial trip” language is not an accurate paraphrase of what Paul is actually saying. And what Paul is actually saying doesn’t specifically link his descriptions of his LSD experience with his initial trip.

But you might have noticed that the bigger problem for Turner is Paul’s reference to all of his trips having taken place “right here in this room.”

For absolutely sure, “this room” isn’t in Tara Browne’s house — because by the time Paul gives this interview, Tara Browne has been dead for six months. And in fact, the Sunday Mirror article that Turner quotes from specifies that Paul is giving the interview at Cavendish, his London townhouse.

And that means that in saying all of his trips took place “in this room,” Paul isn’t just not including the Tara Browne trip, he’s specifically excluding that trip from his descriptions of his experience with LSD.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the Tara Browne trip didn’t happen. There’s no reason to think either Viv Prince or Nicki Browne are making anything up. By specifying that all of his trips happened at Cavendish, Paul may simply have been protecting the other party guests from possible legal consequences, not to mention the media harassment he himself was being subjected to on the heels of his acknowledgement about using LSD.

There would be precedent for this.

The day after the Sunday Mirror article, Paul gave an on-camera interview to ITV. In it, he declines to answer a question about who gave him the LSD — and the reason he gives for refusing to answer is that he’d be implicating someone else in a criminal act. And not doing that might have been especially on Paul’s mind—

— because this was all playing out against the backdrop of the infamous “Redlands bust,” in which Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and gallery owner Robert Fraser — all friends of Paul’s — were arrested for drug possession. In the Redlands bust, Keith Richards was charged not with possessing drugs himself, but with being the owner of a property at which illegal drugs were used, regardless of where those drugs came from.

All of which is to say it’s very possible that Paul is setting all of his trips at his own home to protect his friends from arrest.

But regardless of why Paul is excluding the Tara Browne trip from his recollections in the Sunday Mirror interview, the fact remains that he is excluding it. And that means — again, absent another article I haven’t found — that while none of these quotes disprove Turner’s theory, they certainly don’t prove it, either.20

There’s one more thing to notice about these 1967 newspaper articles. Turner doesn’t quote this part, but in the June 19 UPI wire story, Paul says he’s tripped on LSD four times. If his first trip was in December 1965, that’s four trips over a timespan of a year and a half. And that would seem to be wildly inconsistent with wanting it every single day of his life, as he writes in “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

What’s more, Paul has said that after the Tara Browne party, he didn’t take LSD again until March 1967. And unlike the Tara Browne trip, Paul is for sure not confusing the timing of that second trip, which is uniquely memorable and also tied to a specific, locked-in-time event — and also one of the few examples in the story of The Beatles in which everyone who was involved agrees on what happened, where, and when.

We’ll get back to that second trip later in this chapter. For here, remember again that unless Magic Alex built a time machine to transport Paul forward to his future LSD experiences, and then back to spring of 1966 to write the song, any LSD experiences that Paul may have had after writing “Got To Get You Into My Life” obviously don’t count towards Paul having written the song about LSD. Only that first trip at Tara Browne’s party counts — because it’s almost certainly Paul’s only trip prior to writing the song.

Let’s also notice that Paul waited over a year after the Tara Browne party to try LSD a second time.

That year-plus gap between his first and second trips wasn’t because Paul lacked motive or opportunity. By late 1965 when the Tara Browne party happened, George and especially John were tripping regularly, and pressuring Paul to do the same21 — which means Paul could easily have gotten LSD into his life at any point after the Tara Browne party, had he chosen to do so. And he does not seem to have chosen to do so.

And in fact, so notoriously did Paul not choose to seek out LSD after the Tara Browne trip that during the Anthology interviews — almost three decades after the fact — George was still bitching about how few trips Paul took compared to him and John.22

But let’s give Turner’s theory every chance — because again, he did a lot of things right in presenting it. And to be fair, he’s not just relying on the Daily but really Sunday Mirror et al. He also pulls language from Paul’s quasi-memoir Many Years From Now, pointing out that Paul has called his LSD experiences “amazing” and “deeply emotional.” And this is accurate — Paul did say those things in Many Years From Now.

Here’s the complete version of the passage Turner is quoting from—

“Then I had [LSD] on a few occasions after that [the Tara Browne party] and I always found it amazing. Sometimes it was a very very deeply emotional experience, making you want to cry, sometimes seeing God or sensing all the majesty and emotional depth of everything. And sometimes you were just plain knackered, because it would be like sitting up all night in a train station, and by the morning you’ve grown very stiff and it’s not a party any more. It’s like the end of an all-nighter but you haven’t danced. You just sat. So your bum might be sore, just from sitting. I was often quite wiped out by it all but I always thought, Well, you know, everybody’s doing it. This is why I am always keen to warn people about peer pressure. I’ve certainly experienced it.

It was quite freaky but I guess it was something I wouldn’t want to have missed in many ways. I had mixed feelings about it, certainly, but we took it and in songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, when we were talking about “cellophane flowers” and “kaleidoscope eyes” and “grow so incredibly high!”, we were talking about drug experiences, no doubt about it.”23

As always, context is everything. Because maybe you noticed already that Paul’s language in this passage is wildly contradictory.

Paul does say that his LSD trips were “always... amazing” but in the same passage, Paul goes on to specify that what was “amazing” was the “few occasions after” the Tara Browne trip. And by specifying that he’s talking about the “few occasions after,” Paul is not only not including the Tara Browne trip in his “amazing” description, he’s specifically excluding it — just as he did in the 1967 interviews.

It’s possible Paul’s exclusion of the Tara Browne trip in this passage is just a bit of awkward phrasing. As with the Sunday Mirror article, this isn’t Paul writing his words out in formal prose. Paul’s extended quotes in Many Years From Now are transcriptions of taped interviews — much like the written version of Anthology.

There would be precedent for Paul getting his words tangled. Despite his reputation as a smooth “PR man,” Paul (like many of us) frequently gets tangled up in his thoughts in interview, especially when talking about deeply emotional experiences — probably because of his self-acknowledged lifelong struggle with sharing his innermost feelings that we talked about at length in Part One of Beautiful Possibility.24

But I don’t think this is what’s happening here, because it’s not the only time in this passage that Paul excludes the Tara Browne trip from his descriptions — there’s also the part that Turner quotes in which Paul calls his LSD trips “deeply emotional.”

Again, context is everything. Because what Paul actually says is that “sometimes” his trips were “deeply emotional.” “Sometimes” is not all the time — and it probably doesn’t include the Tara Browne trip because Paul’s “sometimes” is, again, in the context of “a few times after that” — the “that” referring specifically to the Tara Browne trip. Meaning that Paul is — once again — taking care to exclude that first trip from his description of LSD as a deeply emotional experience.

I don’t think this is Paul getting his words tangled — because he excludes the Tara Browne trip not once, but twice in the same passage. And this repeated pattern makes it pretty clear that it’s not a misspeak, but an intentional exclusion.

I also think it’s unlikely that Paul is scrambling his words because he’s overcome with emotion. Later in the passage, Paul likens his LSD experiences to sitting awake all night in a train station — which I suppose is deeply emotional if you count boredom, fatigue and a sore arse as deep emotions.

And more than that, Paul concludes the passage by saying tripping on LSD was “freaky.” It’s not clear in this context if “freaky” is a good or a bad thing — but it’s probably not that good a thing, given Paul adds that he “guesses” he wouldn’t have wanted to miss it “in many ways. It’s as if Paul starts off each thought trying to muster enthusiasm, but by the end of it, he sounds like he’s been made to wait all night in a train station.25

There’s more, too — because Paul makes a similar distinction in his actual description of the Tara Browne trip, also in Many Years From Now, which Turner also references in presenting his theory.

Here’s part of Paul’s description of the Tara Browne trip—

“Everything becomes more sensitive. Later, I was to have some more pleasant trips with the guys and outdoors, which was nicer. I was never that in love with it all, but it was a thing you did. I remember John saying, “You never are the same after it,” and I don’t think any of us ever were. It was such a mind-expanding thing. I saw paisley shapes and weird things, and for a guy who wasn’t that keen on getting that weird, there was a disturbing element to it. I remember looking at my shirtsleeves and seeing they were dirty and not being too pleased with that, whereas normally you wouldn’t even notice. But you noticed and you heard. Everything was supersensitive.”

There’s a lot to notice in this passage. Most notable is Paul’s repeated reference to being “supersensitive” — which we’ll come back to, because that’s going to be important in our unfolding of the deeper story.

What matters here is that Paul offers us two specific pieces of information about his Tara Browne trip. First, that he saw “paisley shapes and weird things” and that he was “disturbed” by this. And second, that he noticed dirt on his shirtsleeves and “wasn’t too pleased.”

Turner ignores Paul saying he was “disturbed,” and “displeased,” and instead, focuses on the dirty shirtsleeves — which, oddly, Turner interprets as proof of his theory, citing it as evidence that “there suddenly seemed to be so much more to be gleaned from the simple things of life—depths of experience that he had so far ignored or glossed over.”26

I mean.... it’s just... forgive me for the lapse in scholarly dignity, but what is Turner even talking about here? I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but this might be one of the silliest examples of confirmation bias I’ve encountered in Beatles writing and that’s saying something.

I suppose what Turner’s suggesting is technically true — but it’s a pretty big reach to suggest that Paul being displeased and disturbed by dirt on his sleeves is evidence of an “amazing” and “deeply emotional” experience of spiritual enlightenment, especially since there’s no indication that Paul viewed it that way. Obsessing over dirty sleeves is certainly not an experience one would want every single day of their life. Or even any single day of their life.

Also notice that the only positive language Paul uses in this description of his first trip once again excludes his first trip. It’s only the “later” trips — again, after the Tara Browne trip — that Paul remembers as “more pleasant” and “nicer,” two words that — again — do not suggest any kind of deep emotional experience.

Paul has been remarkably consistent in his descriptions of the Tara Browne trip. In every example I’ve found — from his 1967 newspaper interviews to his two published memoirs in 1997 and 2022 — Paul has made it explicitly clear that his positive experiences of LSD do not include his first trip at Tara Browne’s party. And that trip, remember, is the only trip that matters when it comes to whether Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD — because it’s almost certainly Paul’s only LSD experience prior to writing the song.

What Turner is consistently doing in order to make his case is cherry-picking the parts of Paul’s descriptions that support his theory and ignoring the rest of what Paul has to say about his LSD experiences — lifting the words out of the context in which they were said and misinterpreting them on their own to mean something they were explicitly not intended to mean.

Without those quotes meaning what they clearly do not mean, Turner isn’t left with much of anything to support his theory, other than the date of Tara Browne’s party. And the date alone is insufficient to make his case that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD.

Before we move on, there’s another piece of primary research relative to the Tara Browne party that wasn’t publicly available when Turner wrote his book. Remember that Tara Browne’s wife Nicki was also at the party that night — and it turns out she also doesn’t seem to think Paul had an especially good trip.

Here she is talking with Paul Howard for his 2016 biography of Tara Browne—

“What Paul did was he spent his whole trip looking at this art book of mine called ‘Private View.’ He wasn’t interested in any of the females there. He wasn’t interested in listening to music either. He was just staring at this art book. I wish it had been more fun for him.”’27

Nicki Browne’s quote here is somewhat ambiguous. On one hand, her regret that Paul didn’t have “more fun” and her disappointment that he “wasn’t interested in any of the females there” suggests that her definition of a good trip is less spiritual and more... recreational.

Nicki Browne also gives a title to the art book that Viv Prince told Steve Turner he noticed Paul being lost in — Private View, which is a 1965 coffee-table style book on the history of British art.

Private View includes a lot of trippy, brightly coloured abstract photographs and paintings.

That’s certainly the sort of book one could easily get lost in while tripping, especially if you’re deeply sensitive to visual aesthetics, as Paul has shown himself to be. Given her focus on fun over spiritual enlightenment, Nicki Browne might not have recognised Paul’s focus on the art book as a deeper and more profound experience than shagging the party guests.

What’s more, I can easily imagine Paul — who as a boy chose a book on modern art as his prize for winning a school essay contest28— being enraptured in a book like that even without LSD.

But Nicki Browne also noticed that during his trip, Paul wasn’t interested in music — which certainly suggests something was amiss at a deeper level, because I’m not sure it’s possible for Paul McCartney to have a profound spiritual experience in which he loses his interest in music. That would be as unlikely as— well, as Paul McCartney losing his interest in music.

The only time we know for sure that Paul lost his interest in music was in Scotland during the darkest days of the breakup, when he was so immobilized with grief, anger, heartbreak, and depression that he could barely get out of bed and drank too much when he did. That was for sure a “deep emotional experience” — but, again, not exactly an amazing one that he’d want to have every single day of his life.

Also, to add a personal and admittedly subjective observation, Nicki Browne’s description makes my heart ache a bit at the thought of Paul sitting alone with his art book, working his way through the disorienting effects of LSD in the midst of a Swinging Sixties party crowd looking for “fun” and casual sex, and not at all in the right mindset to support Paul through the experience.

There’s one more thing to notice about Paul’s Tara Browne trip — or rather not about Paul’s Tara Browne trip.

Not only does Paul consistently exclude that first trip from his positive experiences of LSD in contemporaneous interviews and in Many Years From Now, he also seems to have found it so unmemorable that by 2022, he’s erased it from the story altogether, claiming instead that his first LSD trip wasn’t until 1967, and that it was with and for the benefit of — this should not be a surprise by now — John.

Here’s Paul in The Lyrics—

On the subject of coloured landscapes, I was the last in the group to take LSD. John and George had urged me to do it so that I could be on the same level as them. I was very reluctant because I’m actually quite straitlaced, and I’d heard that if you took LSD you would never be the same again. I wasn’t sure I wanted that. I wasn’t sure that was such a terrific idea. So I was very resistant. In the end I did give in and take LSD one night with John.29

If you’re at all versed in Beatle Lore, you’re probably familiar with this incident. It’s one of the handful of events in the story of The Beatles in which everyone involved tells it more or less the same way—

One night during a late night recording session for Sgt. Pepper, John accidentally took LSD instead of speed. George Martin — by his own admission clueless about such things — took John up to the roof (not that roof) and left him up there alone to clear his head. After Paul and George rescued John from potentially plummeting to his death, Paul took John home to Cavendish and tripped with him.

Everyone involved agrees that this trip with John at Cavendish happened in March 1967 — the timing of which isn’t hard to verify given we know it was during the Pepper sessions and we have the studio logs for the night in question.

In Many Years From Now, Paul gives a more detailed account of that night at Cavendish — although in 1997, Paul’s still (just barely) recalling it not as his first trip, but as his first trip with John.

Here’s Paul’s account of that trip. It’s a lengthy passage, and because the full description is important, it’s not edited for length—

“I thought, maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with [John]. It’s been coming for a long time. It’s often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John’s on it already, so I’ll sort of catch up.

It was my first trip with John, or with any of the guys. We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot. Me and John, we’d known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other’s eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mindboggling. You dissolve into each other. But that’s what we did, round about that time, that’s what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You’re looking into each other’s eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn’t, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.

There’s something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, “How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?” And the answer is, you don’t. After that you’ve got to get trepanned or you’ve got to meditate for the rest of your life. You’ve got to make a decision which way you’re going to go. I would walk out into the garden “Oh no, I’ve got to go back in.” It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But “I’ve got to do it, for my well-being.”

In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great but I wanted to go to bed after a while. I’d just had enough after about four or five hours. John was quite amazed that it had struck me in that way. John said, “Go to bed? You won’t sleep!” “I know that, I’ve still got to go to bed.” I thought, now that’s enough fun and partying, now ...(sic) It’s like with drink. That’s enough. That was a lot of fun, now I gotta go and sleep this off.

But of course you don’t just sleep off an acid trip, so I went to bed and hallucinated a lot in bed. I remember Mal coming up and checking that I was all right.30 “Yeah, I think so.” I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably.”

Notice — once again — Paul’s ambivalent feelings about LSD, in both of his descriptions of his trip with John. Just as with the Tara Browne trip, Paul describes his trip with John as “great’ and “a good trip,” and also remembers that it was “disturbing” and “tiring.” He also expresses concern about how it permanently changes a person’s outlook — a concern he repeats in both descriptions that we’ll come back to in a bit.

For here, what matters is that when Paul told the Sunday Mirror in June 1967 that he took all of his trips “in this room,” he’s excluding the Tara Browne trip — but he’s including his second trip —which is also his first trip with John. He’s replacing his memory of his first trip with Tara with his memory of his first trip with John.

Paul’s erasure of the Tara Browne trip in favour of the “Emperor of Eternity” trip is most likely related to what LSD guru Timothy Leary called “set and setting” — meaning how we experience LSD depends on both our internal state of mind and also the external conditions — where and with whom we take the trip. Paul is talking about set and setting when he shares that the later trips “with the guys” (meaning the other three Beatles) and “outdoors” were “nicer” and “more pleasant” for him — which again, while positive, isn’t especially enthusiastic.

There seems little doubt that for Paul, gazing into John’s eyes at Cavendish after a recording session is a “set and setting” more conducive to a positive experience than tripping with casual friends and strangers looking for sex and fun rather than spiritual connection. And it’s likely this less-than-ideal “set and setting” is why Paul confined his Tara Browne trip to sitting alone in a chair lost in an art book and contemplating his dirty shirt sleeves.

But what’s most striking is that in both of his published memoirs, Paul makes it explicitly clear that his motivation for the “Emperor of Eternity” trip was less about seeking out a connection with LSD and more about seeking out a deeper connection with John.

And if you add in Paul’s repeated references to the pressure he felt from John and George — but let’s be real, probably mostly from John — to try LSD, and also that John was pressuring Paul not long before the Tara Browne party,31 then a credible argument could be made that a desire to connect more deeply with John is the only reason Paul tried LSD at all—

—because maybe you noticed that in his description of the “Emperor of Eternity” trip, Paul reserves his most vivid and emotional language not for LSD itself, but for the intense and apparently emotionally overwhelming connection he felt with John when they tripped together.

Consider again this passage—

“We looked into each other’s eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mindboggling. You dissolve into each other. But that’s what we did, round about that time, that’s what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You’re looking into each other’s eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn’t, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.”

Paul is without question describing a powerful emotional and spiritual experience.32 What’s not at all clear is whether Paul’s crediting that experience to LSD.

When Paul says that dissolving into one another’s eyes is “what we did, around that time, that’s what we did a lot,” it’s not clear if he’s saying that he and John frequently tripped on LSD while dissolving into each other’s eyes, or that they frequently dissolved into each other’s eyes independently of LSD, and that LSD heightened and prolonged the intensity of that habitual experience.33

This might sound like a trivial distinction, but it’s not — it goes to the heart of Paul’s relationship with LSD and his relationship with John. So let’s take a minute to see if we can figure out which is more likely to be the intended meaning.

On one hand, Paul’s told us a few sentences earlier that this was the first time he and John tripped together. And that means that, grammatically, Paul’s “that’s what we did, around that time, that’s what we did a lot” refers to something that regularly happened prior to that first trip — aka, spending long hours together dissolving into each other’s eyes, with or without LSD. And note the repetition and the emphatic addition of “a lot.”

Maybe that grammatical structure is just a bit of scrambled language. After all, this isn’t an intentionally crafted song lyric, it’s a taped interview with Barry Miles.

But while this is a quote from an interview, it isn’t a one-time interview with a random journalist, where Paul didn’t have the opportunity to go back and correct his words — like, say, the Sunday Mirror. This is a passage from Many Years From Now, Paul’s formal, authorized biography, written and edited by his close friend Barry Miles in multiple drafts over the course of multiple years and signed off on by Paul.

And as with Anthology, Paul’s official stamp of approval on Many Years From Now (including Paul having written the introduction in the first person) makes clear that he’s signed off on his language in the book. And that’s true even if Barry Miles hadn’t confirmed as much for me in an email exchange. And that means we can take Many Years From Now as a credible primary source.

That doesn’t, obviously, mean that everything in Many Years From Now is word-for-word accurate to what happened, or even that it’s a 100% accurate reflection of Paul’s memories of what happened. But the method by which Many Years From Now was written does tell us that Paul’s description of staring into John’s eyes as being something the two of them did “a lot” is intentional — especially given that it’s a memory that’s clearly deeply emotionally resonant to Paul. And especially because it’s a memory related to his relationship with John.

Paul likely took extra care with the passages related to his relationship with John in Many Years From Now, given that Paul made it clear at the time that his main reason for cooperating with Many Years From Now was to correct the distorted “John vs Paul” narrative that was at its peak when the book was published.34 Correcting that distorted narrative is the explicit reason Paul gives in both his first-person introduction to the book and the pull quote that appears on the back cover.

There’s a bit more to notice in Paul’s “Emperor of Eternity” passage from Many Years From Now — like that Paul repeats himself when it comes to the part about “staring into each other’s eyes,” when he says “that’s what we did” and “that’s what we did a lot.”

When we repeat something — especially within a single sentence — it’s often out of a need to make sure we’ve been understood. And when we’re taking care to make sure we’re understood — especially about an emotional truth — it’s virtually always because we’re communicating something that’s important to us.

Whether LSD-inspired or not, the “Emperor of Eternity” story is easily Paul’s most detailed and emotionally explicit description of his LSD experiences. It’s also among his most detailed descriptions of an intimate memory of his relationship with John. That’s significant, because given Paul’s self-acknowledged lifelong reluctance to share his innermost feelings, it’s unlikely he’d be willing to overcome that reluctance if his feelings about the incident weren’t genuine.

We’re stepping through this in detail — and again, thank you for your patience — because when it comes to understanding Paul’s LSD experiences, his description of his and John’s “Emperor of Eternity” trip — along with his consistent omission and eventual erasure of the Tara Browne trip in those descriptions — tells us something far more valuable than just the small-t truth about what might have happened at Cavendish Avenue on that night in 1967.

In the prior chapter, as well as in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked about how memory — and thus history and even more, mythology, be it personal or cultural — is shaped not by what literally happened, but by what we remember having happened. More importantly, memory is shaped by the even softer contours of how we feel about what happened. We tend to remember what matters to us, what we have a strong emotional reaction to, and we forget the rest — which is why what a person chooses to remember tells us a great deal about what’s important to them.

Paul makes explicitly clear in both of his published memoirs that the most memorable part of tripping with John is the way in which LSD deepened the connection between the two of them. And it’s significant that Paul reserves his most intense, detailed, and emotional descriptions of LSD for his trip with John —which is probably why the “Emperor of Eternity” trip has, over the years, gradually replaced the Tara Browne trip in Paul’s memory.

Absent extreme trauma, we don’t tend to replace memories we care about with memories we care less about. And when it comes to Paul’s memories of LSD, it’s not LSD that takes centre stage — it’s John.

We’ll talk a lot more about how Paul and John’s relationship factors into all of this beginning in the next chapter. For now, let’s wrap up our consideration of Turner’s “Paul wrote ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ about LSD” theory — which hopefully you’re seeing doesn’t appear to hold together, when we consider the research Turner cites in its full context.

If there’s a moral to our deconstruction of Turner’s theory, it might be that it’s risky business, making black-and-white declarative statements about Beatles theories (or anything else, really) — which is why it would be foolish of me to say that I knew for sure whether Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD. But Turner certainly hasn’t proven that he did.

While it’s always possible I’ve missed something, nothing in what we know about Paul’s trip with Tara Browne — other than the proximity in time of the two events — even remotely suggests that Paul’s first LSD trip with Tara Browne was anywhere near memorable or significant enough to inspire a song like “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

I want to emphasize again that Turner is doing a lot right here. He’s questioning the established narrative, and he’s attempting to show his work in support of his theory rather than just expecting us to take his word for it. And he’s naming his sources (well, sort of).

Most of all, he’s making an attempt to be Grail fluent — meaning able to recognise and interpret emotional subtext — by considering the emotional implications of Paul’s language. He’s at least wrestling with his fear of softness — meaning the fear of being receptive to emotion — even if he’s not overcoming it altogether. And if you’re familiar with Part One of Beautiful Possibility, you know that’s no small thing, for a man in Western culture.35

The problem is that Turner’s absolute conviction that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD seems to be the same sort of faulty cause-and-effect based on a misread of the primary research, that plagues virtually the entire story of The Beatles as it’s currently told. And as we’ve seen and will continue to see, that faulty cause-and-effect is the result of a couple of things that are epidemic in mainstream Beatles writing.

First — and I don’t say the following with any malice, but I do say it with frustration and no small amount of sadness — I think there’s an arrogance, albeit probably unintentional, on the part of most mainstream Beatles writers, and especially those of a certain generation who have not for the past sixty years had their right to control the narrative questioned in any serious way.

You can probably see how this unearned arrogance might have come to be — and to be fair, not all of it is because of the writers themselves, at least not directly.

However well-intentioned a Beatles writer might be at the start, the inevitable result of having controlled the narrative for so long is that it leads to the temptation to cut corners with their research and analysis, expecting the public to simply take them at their word when they assert that their work is credible and their theories are accurate. It’s easy to start to believe your own PR about how “definitive” your work is, when that claim is splashed across the top of your book cover and press releases.

Paired with that arrogance is what I think is the deeper cause of the faulty cause-and-effect that appears throughout mainstream Beatles writing — and that’s a lack of fluency in the softer language of the Grail — aka the ability to recognise and interpret emotional subtext and a willingness, or in this case, an unwillingness to acknowledge the importance of emotion, and especially love, in the story.

This lack of Grail fluency is also, strictly speaking, not the doing of the writers themselves. As we talked about in depth in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, this lack of Grail fluency is the direct result of the fear of softness — aka the fear of being receptive to emotion and again, especially love. That fear of softness has for thousands of years been beaten and brainwashed into all of us in Western culture — and especially men.

But while again, that fear of softness is not the doing of the writers, it is their choice not to take steps to get past that fear. And that’s a fatal flaw, when it comes to understanding The Beatles and indeed the story of any artist — because what is art but the expression of human emotion?

That fear of softness, and the “hard” culture that results from that fear, has also taught us — and again, perhaps especially men — that being anything other than rock-solid sure about a theory is a sign of weakness.

The fear of appearing less-than-confident in his own work is probably the root of Turner’s need not just to present his theory as a possibility, but as rock-solid definitive proof that Paul was for sure “wrong” and John was for sure “right” — even though Turner’s research and analysis does not in any way prove that. And even though he can’t possibly know for sure what’s in Paul’s head or what happened at events he wasn’t even present for — any more than I can be rock-solid sure of my own theories relative to the deeper relationship dynamics between John and Paul that we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility.

Before we leave Turner behind and begin the unfolding of our deeper narrative, I want to add one more observation about his unqualified pronouncement that Paul for sure did not write “Got To Get You Into My Life” about cannabis, and that he for sure wrote the song about LSD.

It’s one thing to suggest that an artist’s stated interpretation of their work may not be accurate — either because the artist isn’t consciously aware of the deeper meaning in their work, or because the artist has chosen not to share that meaning with us outside of the work itself.

That kind of speculation, done respectfully, is fair game —artists are often not consciously aware of or willing to disclose the meaning of their art. And that kind of speculation is especially fair game when it comes to Paul’s lyrics, given that Paul has explicitly told us that the truth of his life is hidden in meanings of his songs that “are not always obvious on the surface.” And that he has specifically and explicitly invited — and even directed — us to go looking for that truth.

But it’s another thing entirely to tell an artist that they are for sure wrong about what their art is about. That’s not respectful speculation — that’s a clear violation of personal agency.

Any time we decide that we know for sure what someone else is thinking or feeling — be it Paul McCartney or anyone else — we’re trespassing on that person’s right to be their own person, by suggesting — erroneously — that we know better than they do about their own thoughts and feelings.

And that goes to the ethical guidelines we established in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — that while that it seems clear that both Paul and John have given us license to speculate about their lives and their art, they haven’t given us the right to conclude definitively that we know better than they do about the truth of their lives and their art.

And while I confess it’s been a while since I’ve read Turner and I can’t know what in his head or heart any more than either of us can know what’s in Paul’s, and while I don’t recall his position on the “John vs Paul” distorted narrative, I can’t help but wonder if he’d be as confident in his theory if he didn’t believe it “proved” Paul wrong and John right.

All of this is why my frequent use of words like “consider” and “maybe” and, yes, “possibility” are not just decoration. And those words are certainly not about being wishy-washy or indecisive, nor do they indicate a lack of confidence in my work.

Those modifying phrases appear in abundance throughout Beautiful Possibility and in Seven Levels and on The Abbey in general because I think “consider” and “maybe” and “possibility” is the only respectful and ethical way to talk about the truth of another person’s life.

Those modifying phrases are also the only “truth” a responsible scholar can offer in any field. I can leverage the full weight of my intellect, along with my ability to interpret language and emotional subtext, to tell you that I don’t think Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD and I can show you that the research doesn’t support that theory. But I can’t know for sure one way or the other — and neither can Turner.36 And acknowledging that lack of certainty isn’t a sign of weakness — it’s an acknowledgement of the limitations of even primary research, when it comes to knowing why Paul wrote the song as he did.

We’ll come back to all of this and its implications for Part Two of Beautiful Possibility in the Wrap-Up to Seven Levels. For now, let’s continue on with our quest to unfold the deeper narrative of the Dylan story and “Got To Get You Into My Life.” Because while Paul’s feelings about LSD seem at best conflicted, and his experience with LSD limited to a handful of occasions, Paul’s experience with cannabis is an entirely different story.

“For the pot smoker is more than a hedonist bent upon wringing the last drop of pleasure from his jaded senses ... or obliterating his awareness in alcoholic escapism. He is an individual who, in a very personal way, has discovered that muffled entryway into the secrets of his own mind which this mildest of the psychedelics opens up.” — Open City, Sept 20 1967

We’ve covered a bit of ground in this chapter, so before we continue, let’s refresh our memory on what Paul has said about his discovery of cannabis, relative to “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

Here he is in Many Years From Now in the quote that introduced this chapter—

“Got to Get You into My Life” was one I wrote when I had first been introduced to pot. I’d been a rather straight working-class lad but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting. It didn’t seem to have too many side effects like alcohol or some of the other stuff, like pills, which I pretty much kept off. I kind of liked marijuana. I didn’t have a hard time with it and to me it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding. So “Got to Get You into My Life” is really a song about that, it’s not to a person, it’s actually about pot. It’s saying, “I’m going to do this. This is not a bad idea.” So it’s actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret.

And here’s Paul in The Lyrics—

“This song is my ode to pot. It was something that entered our lives, and I thought it would be a good idea to write a song with ‘Got to get you into my life’, and only I would know that I was talking about pot. Many years later I told people what it was about, but when we made the record it was just, ‘I was alone, I took a ride / I didn’t know what I would find there’. It was very joyous at that time. The scene turned darker a few years later, as the whole drug thing did, but it started off as a rather sunny-day-in-the garden type of experience.

The obvious thing to notice is that Paul’s language here is significantly more positive than his descriptions of LSD, in that there’s a conspicuous absence of the negative. In fact, Paul goes out of his way to say that for him, when it came to cannabis, there were/are no negatives. Instead, he describes his experience of cannabis as “uplifting” and “very joyous,” and compares it to “chocolate or a good claret.”

That also doesn’t sound like the stuff of which the passionate urgency of “Got To Get You Into My Life” is made. But notice also that in this passage, Paul describes cannabis as “mind expanding, literally mind expanding” — and notice Paul’s repetition (and the use of the word “literally”) for emphasis, making sure we get the message about what’s important to him about the experience. And notice also his lack of qualification or contradiction relative to those glowing descriptions. Some of them are more glowing than others, but all of them are unambiguously positive.

We’ll get back to the “mind-expanding” part, because there’s more to talk about relative to that. For here, let’s point out that Paul’s use of that language probably isn’t a big surprise. We know from what all four of them and those around them have said that once the Fabs got their hands on the good stuff — whenever and wherever that was — they took to cannabis like the paisley-patterned, technicolor avatars of the Love Revolution that they were.

None of The Beatles, though, embraced the lovely Mary Jane with more enthusiasm than Paul. While Paul’s feelings about LSD seem consistently and deeply ambiguous and contradictory, there seems to be nothing ambiguous or contradictory about Paul’s feelings about cannabis.

In fact, I’m not sure Paul has ever said a bad word about cannabis. For sure, I’ve not found any examples whatsoever, other than his occasional half-hearted comments about how people shouldn’t smoke it — which he always makes clear (sometimes with a literal wink37) he’s only saying to pacify the moralizing minority, as if he’s being made to do some sort of hostage video against his will.

Over the years, Paul has acknowledged experimenting — cautiously — with alcohol, benzedrine, Preludin, sleeping pills, cocaine, heroin, STP, LSD, and cannabis. But cannabis seems to be the only consciousness-altering experience that captured Paul’s imagination enough for him to continue to consume it anywhere close to every single day of his life.

As we saw in the first half of this chapter, during the Great Media Freakout of June 1967 Paul offered a relatively restrained public endorsement of LSD — including many qualifiers that of course he wasn’t suggesting that everyone else try it, only that he had chosen to do so.38

In contrast, less than a month later, Paul signed, and got the other Beatles (and Brian Epstein) to publicly sign their names to a full-page ad — paid for by the Fabs — in The Times of London advocating for the legalization of marijuana.39 And he’s continued to advocate for its legalisation through the “Just Say No” ‘80s and ‘90s right up to the present day.40

But we don’t need to look further for evidence of Paul’s enduring relationship with cannabis than his history of arrests, court appearances, fines, and — most infamously — nine days in a Japanese jail cell in 1980 facing the possibility of a multi-year prison sentence for bringing a bag of cannabis into the country.

John and George were both convicted of cannabis possession in the ‘60s, but we tend to forget that of the four Beatles, it’s Paul McCartney who has by far the longest “rap sheet” — and with the exception of speeding tickets, all of those offenses involve possession of cannabis.41 In fact, if my research is correct, Paul’s been arrested for cannabis possession more often than that most famous of cannabis possessors, Willie Nelson.42

And that brings us back to the Dylan story, and to my suggestion in the prior chapter that Paul’s version of the Dylan story differs in an intriguing way from that of the other three Beatles. Because when it comes to the Dylan story, Paul seems to have had a very different experience from the other three.

Whatever the exact circumstances and whether or not it was their first encounter with cannabis, John, George, and Ringo’s memories are remarkably similar in describing their emotional experience of the Dylan story.

George’s memory is that “we all got on very well and we just talked and had a big laugh.”43 And in that same interview, he also described the effects of cannabis as the equivalent of “having a couple beers.”44 Ringo remembers that “we got high and we laughed our asses off.”45 And John recalls that The Beatles and Dylan “did nothing but laugh all night” and describes cannabis overall as a “harmless giggle.”46

Paul also talks about the laughter and fun of partying with Dylan — but he then goes on to tell a very different story. Here he is, in Many Years From Now (reluctantly edited for length) —

“I spent the whole evening running around trying to find a pencil and paper because when I went back in the bedroom later, I discovered the Meaning of Life. And I suddenly felt like a reporter, on behalf of my local newspaper in Liverpool. I wanted to tell my people what it was. I was the great discoverer, on this sea of pot, in New York. I was sailing this sea and I had discovered it.

So I remember asking Mal, our road manager, for what seemed like years and years, “Have you got a pencil?”’ ...I eventually found it and I wrote it down, and gave it to Mal for safekeeping. I’d been going through this thing of levels, during the evening. And at each level I’d meet all these people again. “Hahaha! It’s you!” And then I’d metamorphose on to another level.

Anyway, Mal gave me this little slip of paper in the morning, and written on it was, “There are seven levels!” ... And we pissed ourselves laughing, I mean, “What the fuck’s that? What the fuck are the seven levels?”’ But looking back, [“there are seven levels”] is actually a pretty succinct comment; it ties in with a lot of major religions but I didn’t know that then. We know that now because we’ve looked into a lot of that since, but that was the first thing.”

Obviously, Paul’s telling of the Dylan story is radically different from the other three — and indeed, radically different from any other descriptions of the Dylan story from anyone. He’s the only one who describes an experience of being shown the meaning of life, even if that revelation was a little fuzzy the morning after. As much as Paul tries to laugh it off at the end, this clearly wasn’t just “party time” for him. And indeed, Paul acknowledges this when he says (also in Many Years From Now) that, “The first time I took [marijuana] I got very high indeed. It was quite a breakthrough, it was something different.”

We’ll get back to Paul’s “seven levels” story in a minute, but first, there’s a lot happening in this short quote. Just as Paul erased his first LSD trip with Tara Browne in favor of his “Emperor of Eternity” trip with John, so, too, is Paul erasing what was likely his first cannabis experience in early days Liverpool in favor of the Dylan story. And he’s probably doing so for similar reasons, because—

Paul’s right, when he says his “seven levels” experience is “something different” from a garden-variety cannabis high. It’s also in marked contrast with the fun-and-games descriptions of the other three. Individual results may vary, but most people most of the time seem to experience cannabis less as “mind-expanding” and more as mind-relaxing — not so much taking you to another world as making this world a little softer, a little easier to live in, like chocolate or a glass of good claret.

But while there’s no way to know for sure exactly how another person experiences cannabis, what Paul is describing in his “seven levels” experience certainly doesn’t sound like chocolate or a good claret.

Instead, Paul’s description of having his mind expanded by being shown the meaning of life sounds much more like an experience in altered consciousness. It sounds like— well, it sounds like what he writes about in the opening verse of “Got To Get You Into My Life” — that same language that Turner observed — accurately — was more indicative of an LSD trip than a marijuana high.

And since it’s highly un-likely Paul’s writing about an LSD trip, this in turn offers an intriguing possibility — that Paul may be among the small minority who naturally experiences cannabis not just as a mind-relaxant, but as a mind-expander — as a psychedelic. And this might be why he’s called the impact of cannabis in his life “mind expanding, literally mind expanding.”47

It seems likely that what happened that night with Dylan is that John, George, and Ringo enjoyed some mighty potent weed that floated them, laughing and giggling, to the ceiling — while Paul had his consciousness blown open.

And if that’s what happened, then that is indeed “quite a breakthrough” for Paul McCartney of The Beatles in 1964. Because Paul’s “seven levels” trip pre-dates John and George’s initial encounter with LSD by almost six months, and it predates Ringo’s first LSD trip by exactly a year.48

And that — if my read is accurate — makes Paul the first of the four Beatles to have an experience of higher consciousness. And given their status as leaders of the world-changing cultural revolution of the Sixties, to say that’s a culturally significant event is a massive understatement.

When Paul says in Many Years From Now that his “seven levels” insight was “the first thing,” it’s not clear if he’s speaking only about his own spiritual journey, or if he’s also intending to suggest that his experience was the inciting incident for what would evolve into the widespread exploration of altered consciousness and spirituality that became so much a part of the Love Revolution.

If Paul is speaking more broadly, that “first thing” observation is more accurate than it might seem.

Paul ends his “seven levels” story with all four of the Fabs laughing off his insight. As with the laugh track at the end of George’s “Within You Without You,” this reads to me like a self-conscious attempt to puncture the profound nature of the experience he’s describing, lest it come across as either ridiculous or pretentious.49 It’s exactly the sort of thing someone afraid of expressing their innermost feelings outside of song might do. But in this case, he who laughs first laughs best — fast forward a year or so, and John and George will be talking like that, too.

Now, obviously The Beatles were not the first to explore higher consciousness — humanity has been doing that since before the beginning of recorded history. The Beatles weren’t even the first to explore higher consciousness during the Love Revolution — the beatniks got there long before the Fabs, along with a lot of others in the counterculture, including Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

But Paul’s “seven levels” experience seems quite clearly to mark the true beginning of The Beatles’ exploration of higher consciousness. And that’s a seriously culturally significant event for The Beatles, and thus also for the Love Revolution, and thus ultimately, for all of us — because as we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, while The Beatles didn’t invent do-it-yourself spirituality, they were and still are, without question, its most influential ambassadors.

To simplify all of this more than we probably should, the Fabs’ explorations into higher consciousness led ultimately to their involvement with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s transcendental meditation movement and The Beatles’ iconic visit to his ashram in India in the spring of 1968.

And (again, oversimplying a bit) because of the unprecedented influence that The Beatles had in the wider culture — meaning in all of those suburban living rooms we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, including things like being pictured meditating with Maharishi on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post — their very public spiritual explorations were a major catalyst — maybe the major catalyst — for the spread of mainstream interest in personal spiritual exploration outside the structure of organized religion.

And this widespread discovery and integration of Eastern spirituality into mainstream Western culture is, in turn, the flashpoint for the ascendance of “spiritual but not religious” as more or less the default “religious” affiliation of much of the Western world.50

In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked in some detail about the ascendence of “spiritual but not religious.” Prior to the spiritual revolution of the Sixties, it was not considered acceptable in mainstream culture to seek out spiritual connection to the Divine outside of organized religion — which had always functioned as a sort of “middle man” between humanity and God (in whatever way you want to define that word). Anyone who rejected that middle man and sought a direct connection with the Divine was considered to be on the extreme fringe of society.

These days, because of the spiritual revolution of the Sixties, seeking connection to higher consciousness outside of organized religion is not only acceptable, it’s more or less the norm — as is evidenced by the many self-help spirituality books and lifestyle practices widely available everywhere from your local discount store to the meditation group and yoga classes available at your local community centre. We take that sort of thing for granted now, but it simply did not exist in any mainstream way prior to the Beatles’ trip to India.51

What I’m suggesting is that Paul’s “seven levels” experience — and thus the Dylan story as a whole — might be more than just a colourful folk tale about Dylan turning The Beatles on to the feel-good delights of cannabis. It might be a seminal event in the world-changing mythological earthquake that became the Love Revolution.

All of this is, of course, directly relevant to the larger story we told in Part One of Beautiful Possibility. But what I want to talk about in this series is the impact of Paul’s “seven levels” experience on his own life, and more than that, on his creative process and on the dynamic of both The Beatles and Lennon/McCartney—

—because what’s also undeniably true is that Paul’s experience that night was a seminal inciting event in the musical development of The Beatles—

— because as we all know, the Dylan story happens on the cusp of the revolutionary breakthroughs of Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper. And as we’re about to explore, the effects of cannabis on Paul during this time period — beginning with his consciousness-expanding “seven levels” experience — may also have been a seminal event in the eventual disintegration of Lennon/McCartney.

To explore that not-so-beautiful possibility, the next question to consider relates, once again, to Leary’s “set and setting.”

Why was Paul able to have what seems to have been a profound consciousness-opening experience in the middle of what everyone involved, including Paul, has described as a raucous party? The “set and setting” certainly doesn’t seem to have been all that much more conducive to a meaningful spiritual experience than the Tara Browne party — although being safely enfolded in the inner circle and the generally good vibes was almost certainly a crucial difference. And it might also matter if the setting was the out-of-the-way Riviera Idlewild at the end of the specularly-successful, history-making 1964 tour.

But I wonder if the more important explanation for why Paul was able to have a “seven levels” experience in the middle of a party might be found by taking a closer look at the specific language that Paul uses to describe his experiences with LSD, cannabis and other mind altering substances.

As we saw earlier in the chapter, Paul has sometimes had positive and profound things to say about LSD. But he inevitably follows those positive and profound things with a lot of less-positive and less profound qualifications. I think there might be a specific and unique reason for Paul’s self-evidently conflicted feelings about LSD.

In Paul’s description of his LSD trip at Tara Browne’s party, he remembers that “everything becomes more sensitive” and then repeats for emphasis that “everything was supersensitive.” Paul has also described tripping on LSD as sometimes being “a very very deeply emotional experience,” repeating for emphasis that it made him see “the emotional depth of everything.”

And then there’s his “Emperor of Eternity” trip with John, where Paul remembers going to bed with the sense that he “could feel every inch of the house.”

Paul has also consistently described tripping on LSD as “oppressive,” saying he felt “wiped out” and “heavy,” and “wishing it would wear off, discovering it wouldn’t.”52 And as we already considered, perhaps most memorably, that his LSD trips tended to end with him feeling like he’d waited all night in a train station.

In the late 1990s, Paul told Robert Fraser’s biographer Harriet Vyner that—

“The thing I didn’t like about acid was it lasted too long. It always wore me out. But they were great people to be around, a wacky crowd. My main problem was just the stamina you had to have. I never attempted to work on acid, I couldn’t. What’s the point of trying, love?’”53

Both Paul and Nicki Browne also remember that Paul had a severe LSD hangover the morning after the Tara Browne party. And that hangover was debilitating enough that — uncharacteristically for Paul — he asked her to phone Brian and cancel his schedule for the day with the excuse of having the flu.54 That suggests a level of fatigue consistent with feeling “wiped out” and “heavy” and not having the stamina for it.

Paul’s descriptions of experiencing mind-altering substances as heavy and oppressive aren’t confined to LSD.

Here he is talking about his experience with Preludin — which is an amphetamine, aka “speed” — during The Beatles’ early days in Hamburg—

“I knew that [Preludin] was dodgy. I sensed that you could get a little too wired on stuff like that. I went along with it the first couple of times, but eventually we’d be sitting there rapping and rapping, drinking and drinking, and going faster and faster, and I remember John turning round to me and saying, ‘What are you on, man? What are you on?’ I said, ‘Nothin’! ‘S great, though, isn’t it!’ Because I’d just get buoyed up by their conversation. They’d be on the prellies and I would have decided I didn’t really need one, I was so wired anyway. Or I’d maybe have one pill, while the guys, John particularly, would have four or five during the course of an evening and get totally wired. I always felt I could have one and get as wired as they got just on the conversation. So you’d find me up just as late as all of them, but without the aid of the prellies.

This was good because it meant I didn’t have to get into sleeping tablets. I tried all of that but I didn’t like sleeping tablets, it was too heavy a sleep. I’d wake up at night and reach for a glass of water and knock it over.”55

Again, notice the language Paul uses. “You could get a little too wired,’ “I’d maybe have one pill, while the guys, John particularly, would have four or five,” “I always felt I could have one and get as wired as they got.” And also notice Paul’s mention that he tried sleeping pills, but found them to be “too heavy a sleep.”

Paul concludes his Hamburg Preludin story with—

“So I suppose I was a little bit more sensible than some of the other guys in rock ‘n’ roll at that time. Something to do with my Liverpool upbringing made me exercise caution.”

Paul frequently acknowledges that when it came to experimenting with mind-altering substances, he was more cautious than John, George, and Ringo (and George and Ringo were, in turn, far more cautious than John). As in the quote we just heard, Paul often attributes that caution to his “Liverpool upbringing,” and specifically to his father having impressed on him both the dangers of drugs and the virtue of moderation in all things.56

“Don’t do drugs” is, of course, standard parental advice in any generation, and Jim McCartney’s conservative, working class sensibility is well-documented. But I’m sceptical that Paul’s father’s advice on its own would have been enough to discourage Paul, had he wanted to experiment more heavily with prellies or LSD or anything else. As we’ll explore in future parts of Beautiful Possibility, Paul’s willingness to either follow or reject his father’s advice as it suited him is one of the pivot points on which the story of The Beatles turns.57

Instead, Paul’s language in his descriptions of his experiences with mind-altering substances suggests a more intriguing explanation for his caution than simple cultural conservatism.

The following is, of course, only educated speculation. But based on his own descriptions, it’s possible that Paul is “more sensible” about mind-altering substances because he’s more sensitive to mind-altering substances. And that because of his heightened sensitivity to their effects, Paul is therefore more cautious about using them. Maybe Paul has heeded his father’s advice on moderation not because it’s coming from his father, but because Paul himself has found it to be good advice based on his own unique experience.

A heightened sensitivity would easily explain Paul’s preference for cannabis over LSD. For someone who’s naturally tuned in to its psychedelic properties — and given the right strain — cannabis offers something akin to a softer, more controllable, shorter-duration version of an acid trip. LSD-Lite, if you will. Except maybe not so light, if you’re unusually sensitive to its effects.

We’ll come back to the “shorter duration” part in the final chapter, because that’s going to matter a lot in putting all the pieces together. For now, let’s notice that if Paul is indeed unusually sensitive to the effects of mind-altering substances — and if he also experiences cannabis as a psychedelic — then that offers a new perspective on much of what we’ve talked about so far in Seven Levels.

Most obviously, it’s easy to see how Steve Turner might have come up with his theory and why he states it so definitively. Without knowing that cannabis can also be a psychedelic, it’s easy to make the assumption that the psychedelic experience hinted at in the lyrics to “Got To Get You Into My Life” automatically means LSD.

Also, Paul’s unusual sensitivity might be why Turner got confused about Paul’s contradictory descriptions of LSD — which, in view of that possible heightened sensitivity, might not be so contradictory after all.

When Paul says that LSD was a “deeply emotional” experience, we take for granted that’s a good thing. But for someone who is both highly sensitive and also uncomfortable with overt expressions of emotion, an intense and prolonged emotional experience from which they cannot escape is not a positive experience.58 Instead, it would feel — as Paul has said it did — draining and overwhelming. And perhaps even more draining and overwhelming in the company of people who are just looking to have “fun” and who are not trusted intimates.

All of this is maybe why Nicki Browne was concerned that Paul wasn’t having “fun” at Tara Browne’s party, and instead chose to quietly isolate himself with an art book. Maybe she was sensitive enough herself to recognise that Paul was isolating himself with a book not because he was enraptured by the imagery or because he was having a “bad trip” in the classical sense, but because he was overwhelmed and possibly even frightened by the experience he was having — simply because it was a lot for a highly sensitive person uncomfortable with intense emotion to handle. And at a party where people were just out to have fun, there would have been little to no support available to help Paul through the experience.

And of course, Paul’s heightened sensitivity would be a more specific explanation for why he woke the next morning feeling “wiped out” and like he had the flu. An intensely emotional experience — especially lasting many hours and even more especially when you cannot make it stop — is a draining experience for virtually anyone. And perhaps even more so for someone with Paul’s discomfort with strong emotion and also his (possible) heightened sensitivity.

There’s more, too.

Paul’s heightened sensitivity might also be why, despite the obviously profound connection he felt with John during the “Emperor of Eternity” trip, Paul has also acknowledged feeling like he needed to give himself some distance. You might remember his descriptions of repeatedly walking out to the garden and back in again — which he noted he needed for his “well being” — and his description of eventually going to bed, even though he knew he wouldn’t sleep.

And this might be why John, having observed this reaction from Paul, made clear that he wasn’t sure that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD. And also why John said in a 1970 interview that he thought maybe Paul regretted taking it.59

Paul’s heightened sensitivity might also be why he expressed special concern about reports — including from John and George — that LSD permanently changes how a person’s mind works.60 And that change might be even more dramatic if someone is especially sensitive to LSD’s effects.

It’s probably obvious that a concern over having his mental process permanently affected is not trivial for a creative genius in the midst of leading a world-altering cultural revolution — and for whom his mind is his creative workshop, and who — as we’ll get to shortly — was not having any trouble whatsoever composing revolutionary music in that workshop.

It’s possible Paul was less hesitant to experiment with cannabis because it doesn’t come with any such reported dangers in terms of permanently altering one’s mind — although a deep and profound psychedelic experience virtually always alters one’s worldview.

And finally, Paul’s possible heightened sensitivity — combined with his experience of cannabis as a psychedelic — also offers a new perspective on the so-called “acid wars” that were happening in and around Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Pepper — during which John and George were frustrated at Paul’s reluctance to try LSD, and pressured him to trip with them so that he could be “on the same level,” as Paul put it.

We often unconsciously assume that other people’s experience of a particular event is the same as our own. But of course, this is a false assumption — and even more so when it comes to the highly individual and language-defying experience of a psychedelic trip. An experience of altered consciousness is like the taste of a strawberry — we can try to describe it, but the only way to know for sure how a strawberry tastes is to taste one ourselves.

This is one of those things that’s simple to understand, but hard to explain even with our strawberry metaphor. So let’s go step by step.

Here’s how the “acid wars” might have gotten started— and keep in mind this is educated speculation, based on Paul’s possible heightened sensitivity and his experience of cannabis as a psychedelic —

When Paul got turned on to cannabis with Dylan, he almost certainly had no prior psychedelic experience with which to compare his “seven levels” trip. And given most people don’t realise cannabis can be a psychedelic, Paul almost certainly hadn’t had any advance coaching from anyone in recognising the unique experience of psychedelic higher consciousness.

That means Paul likely didn’t realise his experience of cannabis that night was unusual, or that it was an altered consciousness or psychedelic experience — because, again, those words aren’t generally associated with cannabis. And because those words aren’t generally associated with cannabis, Paul also likely would not have realised that his experience was markedly different from John, George, and Ringo’s.

And because John, George, and Ringo seem to have experienced a more traditional cannabis high — remember their references to laughter and it being “like having a few beers” — the other Fabs in turn likely didn’t realise that Paul was having a different experience from theirs.

Paul’s sharing of his “seven levels” note the following morning would have been the opportunity to resolve this disconnect by sharing his experience with John, George, and Ringo — which he seems to have very much wanted to do, given his memory, even decades later, of seeing himself as a “great discoverer” who “wanted to tell his people” about his discovery, and his preoccupation with preserving his insights by writing them down.

But any hope of sharing his experience in a more profound way seems to have evaporated when Mal read the note out loud and the group ridiculed it — ridicule that was possibly incited by Paul himself, who might well have felt too exposed and vulnerable in having his apparently very different and very personal experience exposed in that way.61 62

And if Paul didn’t realise he was more sensitive than the others to the effects of cannabis, and if he also didn’t realise that he was having a psychedelic experience that the other three weren’t having, and if the other three didn’t realise it either, this lack of communication easily translates into the peer pressure that Paul talks about relative to trying LSD.

A few months after the Dylan story, when John and George took their first trip on LSD and had their own first psychedelic experience, they likely assumed — incorrectly — that Paul had not yet had that experience because he hadn’t yet tripped on LSD.

And because John and George believed — correctly — that once someone has had that experience, it becomes very difficult to relate to someone who hasn’t, they wanted — needed — Paul to have that experience, too, so the band could maintain the close bond they’d always shared — a bond built in large part on their uniquely shared experience as Beatles.63 An experience of higher consciousness was another important shared experience, though considerably less unique than being Fab.

So in an effort to protect the unique bond between the four of them, John and George pressured Paul to take LSD — but what none of the four likely realised was that they all already shared the experience. The only difference was Paul was getting it from cannabis instead of LSD.

All of this is, of course, educated speculation, but if it’s accurate, that would mean that the “acid wars” were a classic and unfortunate case of false assumptions and a failure to communicate — all of it put in motion by Mal’s reading out loud of the “seven levels” note the morning after the Dylan story, and the self-conscious ridicule that ensued.

And you can maybe also start to see that Paul’s “seven levels” experience also offers a likely explanation for why Paul tells a more detailed version of the Dylan story than the other three — and also why he’s the only one of the three who has completely erased the early days Liverpool experience and replaced it with the Dylan story as his first encounter with cannabis. Because, quite simply, it meant more to Paul than it did to the other three. And we tend to remember what matters to us and forget the rest.

And that, in turn, is probably why it’s Paul’s version of the Dylan story that’s become the traditional telling. And also why we experience it as the Delmonico rather than the Riviera Idlewild — simply because, for whatever reason and accurately or not, that’s where Paul has chosen to set the Dylan story.

There’s one more thing to notice about Paul and cannabis.

Whether or not Paul experienced cannabis as a psychedelic, it’s not mutually exclusive that he also experienced it in its more traditional form as a mind-relaxant — which in turn contributes to its powers as a psychedelic.

Timothy Leary makes this explicit in his book The Psychedelic Experience, in which he advises that in order to have the best possible experience of higher consciousness, one should — and this language will probably sound familiar — turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. Because of course, when our minds are relaxed, we are by definition more open to new perspectives. Leary is talking specifically about LSD, but his advice holds true for any psychedelic — or indeed, any new experience that has the potential to change our worldview.

And even setting aside the psychedelic effects, cannabis as a mind relaxant seems to have had a significant impact on Paul, well beyond the impact it had on the other three Beatles. Not just because of his possible heightened sensitivity, but because of who we know Paul McCartney to be.

“Paul is the definition of “you’re lucky you’re pretty.” For most people that phrase means they don’t have much else going on. But for Paul, it’s because he has TOO much else going on. He’s the magician and the magician’s assistant all at once — and somehow also the rabbit. He’s the whole magic show.”64

Let’s start with an axiom — aka a statement of fundamental truth — and maybe one of the few available to us with regard to all of this.

Paul McCartney is, by any definition, an overachiever. And given he’s also, among many other things, the co-creator of the foundational mythology of our modern world, he may well be the most influential overachiever in the history of overachievers (not that it’s a competition, of course.😎).

But one thing that — by his own admission — seems to be absent from Paul’s long list of natural gifts is the ability to relax.

Here he is in Many Years From Now, talking about his early days with Linda—

“I remember very early on apologising because I was so tired, I said, “I’m really tired, I’m sorry.” She said, “It’s allowed.” I remember thinking, Fucking hell! That was a mind-blower. I’d never been with anyone who’d thought like that: “It’s allowed.” And it was quite patently clear that it was allowed to be tired. I think I’d trained myself never to appear tired. Always to be on the ball. “Sorry I’m yawning. I’m sorry,” which is complete bullshit. It’s a Beatles thing, you had to be there, you had to be on time.”65

Paul is, of course, right that being “on” was a “Beatles thing.” The Beatles were in large part defined by their seemingly indefatigable work ethic and — especially during their “mop top” era — their collective joie de vivre. Journalist and friend Maureen Cleave made this explicit in 1966 when she observed that “what the Beatles have, and what has always distinguished them from other people in show business, is their enthusiasm and their energy.”66

Now of course, what made The Beatles what they were and are is quite a bit more profound and complicated than just enthusiasm and energy. But it certainly didn’t hurt that all four of them — including, in the early years, John — possessed that energy and enthusiasm in abundance. Without it, they likely wouldn’t have survived Beatlemania. And come to think of it, without it, there likely wouldn’t have been a Beatlemania to survive.

The story as it’s told takes for granted that of the four, Paul had the least trouble with the pressures of Beatlemania and the unprecedented fame that came with it.67 And it’s true that Paul (maybe along with Ringo) seems to have handled the screaming crowds, performing and touring much better than the others did — which is probably part of why he was the last to agree to stop touring, and why in later years he was the one pushing for them to tour again, and also part of why he’s still touring today.

But for all his apparent ability to handle the pressures of being a Beatle, it only takes watching a few live performances and early interviews of the four of them together to see that Paul is, shall we say... coiled somewhat more tightly than the other three, and that Paul’s need to be “on” all the time might have been (and still is) more than simply having trained himself to be Fab on command.

In those early interviews, it’s Paul who speaks the fastest, each word tumbling over the one before as if there’s never enough time to say everything he wants to say, his hands and body constantly in motion, fidgeting, biting his nails and his bottom lip, squirming in his chair.68 It’s the same onstage — of the four, Paul is the only one in constant motion, dancing, twitching, singing along even when he’s not on the mic, flirting constantly with the audience (and with John and even occasionally with George), fully inhabited by the spirit of the music, which of course, he was and still is.

All of this is why I was surprised to discover that Paul suffers from stage fright — and that it was so extreme in the early years that he considered quitting the band over it.69 Paul has confirmed this repeatedly over the years — and that stage fright would almost certainly have been particularly intense in the white hot spotlight of Beatlemania.

Added to this already volatile cocktail of nervous energy and performance anxiety, let’s also mention Paul’s demonstrated tendency to solve — or, if I might gently suggest, repress — emotional problems by working on new creative projects, and it’s pretty clear why Paul has acknowledged that relaxing his mind is not among his many natural abilities—

—which is why even beyond Paul’s experience of cannabis as a psychedelic, the mind-relaxing quality of a cannabis high may have had an especially strong impact on Paul. And it might be why Paul uses similar language to describe Linda’s permission to relax — “mind-blowing” — as he does to describe cannabis — “mind expanding.”

Once again, what I’m getting at here is simple to understand, but tricky to explain. A non-Paul-related analogy might help.

If someone who is really, really fearful does something really, really brave, that act of bravery is going to transform their life more instantly and more radically than it would for someone who’s already brave anyway. In the same way, for someone as tightly-wound as Paul, the relaxing effects of cannabis are going to make a more instant and more radical difference than they would for someone who’s naturally more relaxed — like for example, John, George and Ringo.

All of which is to say that even absent the psychedelic effects, interesting things happen when a tightly-coiled, emotionally-inhibited overachiever with lots of nervous energy who also happens to be a creative genius and who is especially sensitive to its effects, experiences the mind-relaxing qualities of very high-grade cannabis.

It’s self-evident from the music that followed that all four of The Beatles experienced the liberating creative effects of cannabis — George in particular has explicitly said as much.70

This creative liberation isn’t surprising. Even without factoring its psychedelic properties, artists have a long history — stretching back well before the Fabs — of embracing the mind-relaxing effects of cannabis as part of the creative process. For an artist, our consciousness is our workspace, and the more relaxed we are, the more expansive that workspace is, the more room we have to create and play.

But of the four Beatles, cannabis seems to have had an especially transformative effect on Paul’s creative process, allowing him to access his creative unconscious in a way he hadn’t previously had access to, And in a way that, combined with his genius, created an unusually immediate and strong impact beyond that of the other three — an effect that would repeat itself a few months later when John had a similar experience with LSD, and we’ll get to that in the final chapter.

We could point to a number of examples of the transformative effect cannabis seems to have had on Paul McCartney’s music — in his songwriting, his basslines, and his musical arranging. But when it comes to the rewards of Paul’s newly-relaxed mind and expanded consciousness, we only need to consider a single example—

The origin story of “Yesterday” is, of course, another iconic Beatles folk tale — but more of a fairy tale, really, given its drop of magick.

Paul wakes up in the garrett of the Asher house, having dreamed the completed music for “Yesterday.”71 Half-asleep, he stumbles to the piano, works out the chords, and — depending on which version of the story and who’s telling it — spends the next weeks or months writing the lyric and playing it for various people to make sure it’s truly his composition and not a remembered melody from his childhood.

Paul’s “seven levels” experience with Dylan took place in either August or September of 1964. And we know that Paul already had the melody for “Yesterday” during the filming of Help!, which began production in February of 1965.72 Sometime in the few months between those two events, Paul dreamed the music for “Yesterday.”73

It was, as Paul has recalled, the first time he’d ever dreamed a complete melody.74 And given the way in which cannabis relaxes the mind and allows greater access to our subconscious — and given we’re talking about Paul McCartney — I doubt that timing is a coincidence.

On June 14 1965, Paul recorded “Yesterday” during what might be the most astonishing day of recording in Beatles history.75 In the course of two three-hour sessions, The Beatles recorded three of Paul’s songs — the proto-metalpunk “I’m Down,” the lush, lyrical folk rock “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” and the harrowing, stripped-down lament, “Yesterday.”76

The breadth of stylistic and musical genre and musical sophistication contained in these three songs — all written during the same time period of just a few months, and recorded in a single day — is an almost unfathomable artistic evolution by any artist over an entire career, never mind within a matter of months. It’s a stunning demonstration of — to borrow a phrase from writer Ian Leslie — a young composer unfurling the majesty of his talent.77

And if you’re familiar with the history of “Yesterday” that we stepped through in “Unscrambling Yesterday,” then you already know the unfurling of that talent is going to cause a few problems, when it comes to Paul’s relationship with John.

We’re going to leave this thread hanging for now, but we’ll come back to it in the final chapter. To understand the role “Yesterday” plays in the deeper narrative that begins with the Dylan story, we need to first turn our attention to the song that started this chapter — “Got To Get You Into My Life”—

—because we’re not quite done with our acid trip. I’m going to suggest to you that “Got To Get You Into My Life” is indeed about acid. It’s just about a very different kind of acid than the kind that floats your mind downstream. I’m talking here about the kind of acid that’s to do with erotic obsession and romantic desperation. And most of all, it has to do with love.

In the next chapter, we’ll continue to unfold the deeper narrative of the Dylan story, as we venture — with caution, respect and no small amount of trepidation — into the softer and more perilous landscape of the vulnerable human heart, with a deep dive into the lyrics of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” and what those lyrics might tell us about Paul’s relationship to cannabis — and more importantly, his relationship to John.

Meanwhile, there is as usual a lot of additional material in the footnotes, including a short explanation of how my personal experience with cannabis as a psychedelic informed this chapter.

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

77

“You were once above me, he says, but not today. This makes sense in the context of McCartney’s relationship with a woman from a higher social class. It can also be read as a demand that Lennon recognise the majesty of his unfurling talent. McCartney was coming into his own, as an adult and as an artist, and demanding to be seen.” (Ian Leslie, John & Paul, MacMillan, 2024.)

Also let’s note that George did a fair amount of “unfurling” during this time period, as well — including his interest in the sitar and Indian music, and the leap forward that his songwriting took on Rubber Soul, with “Think For Yourself” and “If I Needed Someone.” George probably only got two songs on Rubber Soul because John and Paul were short on material, but nonetheless, an unfurling it clearly was.

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“In August 1964, Bob Dylan was taken to meet The Beatles in Manhattan.

It was not a casual arrangement. It was at night, with the curtains closed, in a hotel suite thick with anticipation and smoke.

Having misheard the phrase ‘I can’t hide’ in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ as ‘I get high’, Bob Dylan, who did, thought they did. But they didn’t. So the young poet and his friends, Al Aronowitz and Victor Maymudes, rolled up to the Delmonico Hotel, rolled up a storm and made sure it was a night to remember for The Beatles.

Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans and Brian Epstein were there, and it changed their lives, too.

I was in the suite next door, running a very courtly, if tense, holding operation with a lot of extremely nice Greenwich Villagers and suchlike who were eager to get to hang out with The Beatles, these Rough and Tumble Exquisites from over the ocean. At that time I didn’t know anything at all about marijuana except what I’d heard in legend and the yellow press: that foreigners gave it in ‘reefers’ to unsuspecting virgins in drinking-dens in seaports and ruined their lives.

Scarcely able to restrain my guests, and knowing that under no circumstances were the experimenting Beatles to be ‘invaded’, I went next door alone to find out what was going on and try to arrange some wider access later.

In The Beatles’ lair, I was immediately aware of a very unusual atmosphere. In the middle of it, somehow epitomising it, was the bright eyed Dylan: very thin, dressed in black, and laughing; a mysterious fragile bird of youth.

‘It’s as if we’re up there,’ Paul said to me, grabbing my arm and pointing to the ceiling. ‘Up there, looking down on us!’ George Harrison, the Quiet One of Beatles Myth, wrote later: ‘It was an amazing night and I woke up the next day thinking: “What was that? Something happened last night. I felt really good. That was a hell of a night.’”

Now, if they could not hide, The Beatles could and did get high. It was a great day’s night.”1

This is how the story is told — on August 28 1964, at the Delmonico Hotel in New York City, Bob Dylan met The Beatles for the first time, and introduced them to cannabis.

This telling of the story — the version above is from former Beatles publicist Derek Taylor — is taken as definitive in virtually every book and documentary about The Beatles.

That word “definitive” is tossed around a lot in mainstream Beatles writing, usually by PR departments at publishing companies who know they can lure buyers — not to mention fluff up the egos of their writers — by splashing that word on book jackets.

But “definitive” is a dangerous and foolish word to use in proximity to the story of The Beatles. And as we’re about to discover, the story of The Beatles, Dylan, and the Delmonico Hotel is a very good example of why.

In researching the events of August 28 1964, I’ve discovered that almost nothing we’ve been told about those events is quite what it’s been said to be. And that there’s a deeper and more profound story hidden in plain sight beneath the version of the story that’s been told all these years.

Untangling this deeper story will take us from pre-fame Liverpool to the eye of the storm of Beatlemania to the studios of Abbey Road and eventually — although we will snip the thread before we get there in this series — to the breakup of The Beatles and the breakdown of the relationship between John and Paul.

Before we get started with all of that, a few meta notes.

First, if you haven’t yet read the Preface to Seven Levels, I encourage you to do so before continuing on with this chapter. While I get the desire to skip the introductory formalities, I think you will be happier if you begin at the beginning, because this series is a little unusual—

—as we talked about in the Preface, Seven Levels is something of a hybrid. It’s a bridge between Part One and Part Two of Beautiful Possibility and it’s also a standalone series all on its own.

That means that you do not need to be familiar with Beautiful Possibility to follow along with Seven Levels. But at the same time, because Seven Levels builds on what we covered in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, you will, of course, have a richer experience if you’re familiar with what came before.

Much of what we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility was complex and often delicate, and required all of Part One to step through. As such, it’s difficult and often impossible to summarize that material in a respectful and accurate way. That said, for those of you who are not yet familiar with Beautiful Possibility, I’ll do my best to help you out with some quick summaries as we go along — in the main text if it’s not too distracting, and in footnotes otherwise.

Those of you who are already familiar with Beautiful Possibility will notice that in these initial chapters, we’re going to hold back any discussion of the major themes of Part One — most notably about the relationship between John and Paul. This is not because we’re backing away from progress made in Part One. It’s to give new people a chance to get to know and hopefully trust what we’re doing here on The Abbey before venturing into more provocative territory. But we will catch up with what we talked about in Beautiful Possibility beginning in Chapter Three.

The other obvious question, of course, is why I’m choosing to tell this story on its own instead of folding it into Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.

Answering that question will need to wait until the end of Seven Levels, when we’ll put all of the pieces together, including why this series is what and when it is relative to Part Two. Until then — as I did in Part One — I ask for your patience and trust that we’re doing things the way we’re doing them for a reason.

Finally, before we get started on our trip back to August of 1964, I should caution you up front that we’re going to need to get a bit egg-heady for most of this first chapter and a bit of the second. Some of you enjoy that part of things, and bless you for it because so do I. But I know others of you are here for less wonky reasons. So again, I ask for your patience and trust that there’s a reason for the way we’re doing things — and we’ll get to that reason at the end of the series.

To help make our story easier to follow and also because these are going to mostly be longer-than-usual chapters, I’ve put most of the supporting research throughout the entire series in the footnotes, rather than in the main text.

So with all of that said, it’s time to get started by winding the clock back to New York City on August 28 1964, where The Beatles and their royal court are ensconced in a luxury suite at the Delmonico Hotel.

Before we can tell the deeper story hidden beneath that accepted story, we first need to understand what’s wrong with the accepted story. And that means we need to take a look at what the primary research — meaning the research from people who claim to have been there — tells us about the events of August 28 1964, or what we’ll shorthand as “the Dylan story.”

Of the four Beatles, only Paul seems to have told the Dylan story in any kind of detail, at least as far as I can tell from my research — so let’s begin with his telling of it.

Paul tells an extended version of the Dylan story in his 1997 quasi-memoir Many Years From Now and a shorter but still detailed version in his 2022 book, The Lyrics, and also occasionally in interview. He’s been rock-solid consistent with how he tells it over the years — which is in and of itself unusual when it comes to anything the Fabs say about their own story.

Here’s the first part of Paul’s most recent telling of the Dylan story, from The Lyrics (edited for length) —

“Until we happened upon marijuana, we’d been drinking men. We were introduced to grass when we were in the US, and it blew our tiny little minds... We were just drinking, as usual, having a little party. We’d ordered drinks from room service — Scotch and Coke and French wine were our thing back then — and Bob had disappeared into a back room. We thought maybe he’d gone to the toilet, but then Ringo came out of that back room, looking a bit strange. He said, ‘I’ve just been with Bob, and he’s got some pot,’ or whatever you called it then. And we said, ‘Oh, what’s it like?’ and he said, ‘Well, the ceiling is kind of moving; it’s sort of coming down.’ And that was enough.”2

Paul has a lot more to say about this night, and we’ll get to that in the next chapter — because what he has to say is different from the other three Beatles in ways that are going to become important.

For now, let’s notice again that Paul has been both specific and consistent over the years — in both of his published memoirs and, as far as I can tell, in interview — in claiming that The Beatles were introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan during their first American tour in 1964 — though he doesn’t specify a date — and that the Great Initiation took place in Manhattan at the Delmonico Hotel.

Paul’s detailed and consistent account of the Dylan story makes it understandable that his version is considered definitive in Beatles writing — both mainstream and countercultural. In fact, Paul’s telling of the story is so detailed and consistent that even mainstream writers who are otherwise not in any way inclined to ever believe Paul about anything else believe Paul’s version of the Dylan story.3

But as usual when it comes to the story of The Beatles, things are not quite what they seem. And to understand what I mean, let’s for the moment set aside Paul’s version of the Dylan story and consider what the others who were there have to say about that infamous night.

We’ll come back to what John, George, and Ringo have to say about all of this — because John, George, and Ringo’s versions are also not what they seem. For now, let’s consider the accounts of those in The Beatles’ royal court who were reportedly there that night — Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, roadies/personal assistants Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, and press agent Derek Taylor.

Neither Brian, Neil, nor Mal appear to have ever publicly told the Dylan story — which isn’t surprising, given the extreme vigilance all three of them demonstrated in protecting The Beatles from any hint of scandal.4 Remember that in mainstream culture during Brian, Mal, and even Neil’s lifetimes, smoking cannabis was both very scandalous and very illegal.

That sort of thing did not, it seems, trouble press agent Derek Taylor. We began this chapter with Taylor’s telling of the story, and you might remember that he begins with, “It was not a casual arrangement. It was at night, with the curtains closed, in a hotel suite thick with anticipation and smoke...” which is vintage Derek Taylor-style storytelling in that it’s light on detail and heavy on ambience.

And that means that already things are tricky, because even beyond his tendency to sacrifice precision for poetry, taking Derek Taylor as a reliable primary source is an iffy proposition.

On one hand, he seems to possess the unique ability to be both unfazed by the dazzle of his proximity to The Beatles, while still somehow being fully in thrall to that dazzle. This duality gives Taylor a certain passionately dispassionate clarity of vision absent from that of most primary sources.

But Derek Taylor was also a publicist, not just by profession but — it seems — by natural temperament. In modern parlance, he’d be termed a spin doctor — but what he more truly was, I think, was an especially good storyteller. And that means that — by his own admission — he sometimes nudged a story a little bit to get it where he wanted it to go. And that means that despite his overall ability to see past the stars in his eyes, Derek Taylor is a source to be careful with when it comes to taking his words literally.5

All of that said, what detail Taylor does offer is consistent with the accepted version of the story — The Beatles, Dylan, the Delmonico Hotel, the introduction to cannabis.

Beyond the Beatles’ royal court, there is, of course, Bob Dylan, who was obviously there as well, and whom one might think would have something to say about all of this. But it seems not. Dylan doesn’t mention the story in his autobiography, nor in any of the interviews I’ve found — though admittedly since I’m not a Dylan scholar, I’m probably not looking in the best places.

Instead, we’re left to consider Dylan’s take on the Great Initiation based on what others have said about what Dylan said — which is, of course, less than ideal, but it’s what we’ve got.

Derek Taylor talks in It Was Twenty Years Ago Today about reconnecting with Dylan in 1986, and Dylan asking him for the name of the hotel where Dylan and The Beatles first met. “The Delmonico,” Taylor reminds him. “That was it!” Dylan reportedly replies. “That was a night!”6

It’s tempting to take Dylan’s “That was a night!” as confirmation of the accepted version of the Dylan story, especially since Taylor shares his conversation with Dylan as the grand finale of his own telling of that story. And it’s possible that’s exactly what it is. But we can’t know for sure, because Dylan’’s “That was a night!” is non-specific — it’s a generic comment on the vibe of the evening, and Taylor doesn’t give us enough information to know what Dylan was specifically referring to.

You might be thinking that all of this is splitting hairs — of course Dylan was including the Great Initiation in his pronouncement. And I’m inclined to agree — except consider this story from musician Mike Campbell, formerly of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers.

Campbell remembers being in the studio with George and Dylan in 1987, and George teasing Dylan about having turned The Beatles on to cannabis in New York. Campbell describes George and Dylan going “back and forth about it like old pals on a park bench, laughing and squabbling,” and the exchange ending with Dylan looking over to Mike Campbell, shaking his head, and “dismissing [the suggestion] completely.”7

Campbell also specifically remembers George telling Dylan that “we came to New York and you turned us all on to grass,” which is probably not an exact quote given Campbell is writing in 2025 about a conversation in 1987. But it’s nonetheless weak confirmation of the accepted version of the Dylan story — albeit from George, not Dylan.

We’ll come back to George later in this chapter. What we’re concerned with here is the contradiction between Mike Campbell and Derek Taylor. In Campbell’s account, Dylan flatly denies the Delmonico story, and in Taylor’s account, Dylan enthusiastically recalls it. And there’s no particular reason to think one version is more credible than the other — because while we know something about Derek Taylor as a source, I don’t know much about Mike Campbell as a source and I don’t know how reliable he is compared to Derek Taylor.

There are multiple potential ways of resolving this contradiction. We won’t go through all of them, but here’s the one I think is most plausible—

Paul mentions in a 2020 podcast interview that he’s heard that Dylan doesn’t like being labeled as the person who introduced The Beatles to pot.8 Paul’s reference to having “heard” this piece of information suggests it’s a bit of gossip that he’s getting second or third or fourth hand, rather than something he heard directly from Dylan. If that gossip is true, then Dylan’s reluctance to be identified with the Delmonico story might be why he denied it to George in the Campbell anecdote, and also why he didn’t mention it in his autobiography or — again, as far as I know — in interview.

As far as why Dylan might have been willing to acknowledge the Great Initiation to Derek Taylor but not to George, the difference might be between a private and a public setting.

Derek Taylor’s exchange with Dylan appears to have been a private conversation between two old friends who’d shared a unique experience that night in 1964.

Conversely, the conversation with George — obviously also an old friend who’d been there that night in 1964 — was in a recording studio in the presence of Campbell, who might have been an old friend (I don’t know), but who was not there when the events happened. If Dylan doesn’t like being known as the person who turned The Beatles on to pot, it’s possible — and even likely — that he was performing his denial for Campbell’s benefit (and also maybe to take the mick out of George).

Dylan’s road manager Victor Maymudes (basically Dylan’s “Mal Evans”) doesn’t seem to have shared Dylan’s reluctance about telling the story of the Great Initiation. Again, not being a Dylan scholar, I don’t know how reliable Maymudes is as a source — but in recordings made before his death in 2001, Maymudes tells a detailed story of the events of August 28 1964.

Maymudes’ story is similar to the accepted version — that Dylan met The Beatles for the first time at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan during The Beatles’ 1964 tour, and turned them on to cannabis. In fact, Maymudes claims he was the one carrying the weed, a not-inconsiderable risk, in 1964.9

But Maymudes’ version of the story differs from Paul’s and Derek Taylor’s versions in one notable way — Maymudes claims Dylan did not smoke a joint at the Delmonico. Instead, “Bob had a couple of drinks and within an hour, he passed out on the floor.”10

Given that Maymudes was essentially Dylan’s Mal Evans, he was presumably not inclined to make up details that make Dylan look less than cool. So it seems likely this is an accurate recollection, and also maybe why Dylan doesn’t like telling the story.

To conclude our roll call of people claiming to be in attendance (conscious or otherwise) at the Delmonico Hotel on that historic occasion — minus the other three Beatles, which we will get to — there seems to have been at least one journalist present. And this is in and of itself odd, given the potential consequences if word about The Beatles (and Dylan) smoking cannabis had gotten out at the time. But then again, maybe it’s not so odd, given the general discretion of the journalists around The Beatles at the time.

Saturday Evening Post writer Al Aronowitz claims in his 2003 self-published book that he was the one who orchestrated the first meeting between The Beatles and Dylan, and that — again — the Great Initiation took place at the Delmonico Hotel in New York City, on August 28 1964, and that Aronowitz was present for that meeting.

This is consistent with the version of the story told by Paul, Derek Taylor and Victor Maymudes, minus the part about Dylan passing out, and also maybe consistent with Dylan’s version if Derek Taylor is right, and George’s version, if Mike Campbell is right and Dylan was taking the mick.

So if Paul and Derek Taylor and maybe George say Dylan introduced them to cannabis in New York in 1964 at the Delmonico Hotel, and if Victor Maymudes and Al Aronowitz agree, then what’s the problem? And with all due respect, Faith, why are you bothering us about all of this?

This is more or less the position that Beatles writers — mainstream and countercultural — tend to take. And in light of all this agreement, it’s easy to see why this version of the Dylan story is considered definitive in Beatles writing.

But as I’ve suggested, things are a bit more complicated than they might seem.

For one thing, there’s the matter of Ivor Davis, a freelance investigative journalist who was embedded with The Beatles on their 1964 US tour.

Davis agrees that Dylan and The Beatles smoked pot together in 1964. But Davis claims — with a significant amount of credible detail to support his claim — that while Dylan did first meet The Beatles at the Delmonico, the Great Initiation happened not in August of 1964 at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan, but a month later at the “unpretentious Riviera Idlewild Motel” in — wait for it — Jamaica, New York, on their final night of the tour.

Oh, and Davis claims he was the only journalist present for that occasion, and that Al Aronowitz is making his version of the story up.11

Davis and Aronowitz’s accounts of the Great Initiation are, obviously, mutually exclusive. The first time The Beatles smoked pot with Dylan was either in August at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan or in September at the Riviera Idlewild Motel in Jamaica (New York) — but it can’t be both.

So what gives? How is it possible for anyone — especially a journalist supposedly trained in the powers of accurate observation — to be flat-out wrong about whether they were in attendance when Bob Dylan turned The Beatles on to pot?

I doubt very much that this is a simple failure of memory on either Davis or Aronowitz’s part. Paul and Derek Taylor might simply be getting their dates and places confused, because if you’re Fab — or even Fab-adjacent — in 1964, even the historic occasion of being introduced to pot by Bob Dylan would have been just another very busy day in the life, with almost every night in a different city, and all of it at the white hot centre of the global firestorm of Beatlemania.

But the Dylan story would not have been just another day in the life of a humble journalist — be it Davis or Aronowitz — who was privileged to witness the event. So what’s going on here?

The obvious explanation for the disparity in the two journalists’ accounts of the Dylan story is, of course, ego — or to put it more charitably, the desire to bask in the reflected glory of having been there when it happened—

—which is exactly what Davis accuses Aronowitz of, relative to the Dylan story.

There’s a lot of reflected glory in being able to claim that you were present at a culturally significant event — especially when you’re a journalist, and especially when that culturally significant event involves being present in a 1964 hotel room with The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and a fat baggie of Acapulco Gold.12

This gets to what we talked about in Part One relative to the challenge with primary sources — that virtually everyone in a position to have anything first-hand to say about The Beatles is continually angling to position themselves as having been closer to the centre of the circle than the next person. And often closer than they themselves actually were.

The math here is simple — the closer to the center of the circle, the more cultural status is up for grabs, and the more authoritative the person in question can claim their version of events to be. This is easily seen in the disproportionate number of book promos that begin with “______ was there when The Beatles ______.”13

And indeed, the title of Aronowitz’s book is Bob Dylan and The Beatles, and the first words are “In which I introduce the Beatles to both Bob Dylan and the evil weed, something that makes me believe (here he goes to ALL CAPS) — THE ‘60S WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN THE SAME WITHOUT ME.” And the first line of Aronowitz’s Wikipedia entry tells us that “he was best known for introducing the Beatles to Bob Dylan.”

But this is a bit of a pot/kettle/black situation. Because Davis, too, has built his professional brand on having been present at culturally significant events. In fact, the opening paragraph of his biography on his website describes him as “a hybrid Forrest Gump” — Forrest Gump, of course, being shorthand for accidental presence at multiple culturally significant events.14 The title of the documentary made about Davis’ life is I Was There — A Reporter’s Story. And the title of Davis’ own book is The Beatles and Me On Tour, which is another way of saying “Ivor Davis was there when The Beatles...”

To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of this in and of itself. Assuming that what’s being reported is accurate, being present at culturally significant events and then writing about them is literally what journalists are supposed to do. And as a Beatles scholar, I’m grateful that both Davis and Aronowitz have chosen to share their stories, even if they are contradictory. Also, if I’d been the one to introduce the Fabs to both Bob Dylan and weed, I’d likely be eager to bask in some reflected glory, too.

The problem is that just because someone could plausibly have been present for a culturally significant event doesn’t mean they actually were. And given the cultural status (and book sales) up for grabs, it’s easy to give in to the very human temptation to embellish — or just flat out invent — first-hand knowledge of the events of the story.

By definition, this is what either Aronowitz or Davis (or maybe both) are doing with the Dylan story. Because again, the first time Dylan smoked pot with The Beatles was either in August at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan or in September at the Riviera Idlewild Motel in Jamaica (New York), but it can’t be both.

To try to sort this out, let’s first notice that even before we get to the Dylan story, there’s a significant credibility gap between Aronowitz and Davis.

Al Aronowitz lived an undeniably colourful life as a rock journalist who managed the Velvet Underground and hung out with Ginsberg and Kerouac, and of course, Bob Dylan, and maybe one night, also with The Beatles. Unlike Davis, when it came to the 1964 tour, Aronowitz was not an embedded journalist with inside access, except insofar as he was friends with Dylan — not that Davis probably had that much inside information either, given the famously impenetrable Beatles’ inner circle and their tendency to play games with the press.

Also, Aronowitz acknowledges in his book that in later years, both Dylan and Maymudes stopped returning his phone calls. Maybe that’s because Aronowitz made up stories about having been there when Dylan turned The Beatles on to weed, or maybe for some other reason. But it certainly suggests that neither Dylan or Maymudes was happy with what Aronowitz wrote about his time with Dylan.

Davis, on the other hand, was an investigative journalist and New York Times correspondent back when that actually meant something. He was on the ground during the Watts Riots of 1965, covered the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968,15 and embedded himself undercover with the Manson family in 1969 — an assignment, btw, not without its dangers. And Davis was among the handful of press embedded with The Beatles on the 1964 tour, and he was also reportedly present the following year when The Beatles met Elvis.16

Davis’ version of the Dylan story is also semi-corroborated by Victor Maymudes, who mentions the Riviera Idlewild Motel in his book, though not by name—

“Later on that week, Bob and I were at a hotel with the Beatles by the airport in Brooklyn. Brian Epstein was hanging out with us now, mainly because the schmoozing was over and it was just the guys, Bob and me. All the other celebrities and industry people had left. John and Paul talked Brian into getting stoned, so he had a couple of hits and then went bananas! He was instantly in the corner freaking out and telling people to leave him alone. He went nuts; he was an extremely insecure guy and the pot exposed that.”17

I say semi-corroborated because it’s not clear to me what Maymudes is claiming in this passage. He makes no specific reference to anyone other than Brian getting high — and while we’re on the subject, his version differs from the accepted narrative in two ways—

First, it places Brian’s newbie weed freak-out at the Riviera Idlewild rather than at the Delmonico. And second, it frames Brian’s newbie weed freak-out as a newbie weed freak-out — a negative experience for Brian, rather than the positive one that’s usually related in the accepted story.

As for The Beatles themselves, presumably John and Paul talking Brian into partaking means that they, too, inhaled, along with Dylan and maybe George and Ringo. And that’s what Maymudes seems to be implying. But again, he doesn’t say that in so many words. Still, it’s weak confirmation of Davis’ version of the story.

But by far the strongest reason to trust Davis over Aronowitz might be what Davis himself has to say about that in his book—

“Among other things, it is most unlikely that Dylan and crew would have risked bringing pot into a five-star hotel under the vigilant eye of not only upwards of one hundred of New York’s finest, but also the intense scrutiny of a beefed-up army of security guards. Additionally, smoking it, even in the privacy of their suite, certainly would have been hazardous to their legal status at a time when arrests for possession of marijuana were frequent and could lead to sentences slightly less than life without possibility of parole.

Then there was Brian — a constant nervous Nellie forever worrying that any bad publicity might capsize not only the spitting-clean image of his boys, but the whole tour. The Beatles were barely a third of the way into a long tour; they had a concert to perform in less than a day, and while uppers and downers were part of their daily diet, any further experimentation could have been considered a tad too reckless.”18

That all sounds about right — and it also matches up with Maymudes’ observation about Brian being willing to let his guard down at the Riviera because it was the conclusion of the tour.

Davis’ analysis gets us to what — for me — is by far the most convincing reason the Delmonico story isn’t credible — which has less to do with primary sources and more to do with simple common sense. As Davis points out, the Delmonico story contradicts virtually everything we know about The Beatles, and especially The Beatles in 1964.

It’s easy to forget that in New York in 1964, possession of cannabis was a serious crime that risked serious prison time — as Davis put it, “slightly less than life without parole,” which isn’t much of an exaggeration. And even if The Beatles avoided prison by virtue of being Fab — which they might well have in 1964 — an arrest for cannabis possession would have made it difficult, if not impossible, to return to America on a future tour, as John, Paul, and George all discovered in the 1970s.

All of this matters, when it comes to the credibility of the Delmonico story — especially given this was America, the “toppermost of the poppermost” that The Beatles had dreamed of and worked towards since 1957.

And if we need a reminder of just how much America meant to them, consider this story from Joe Flannery, an early days Liverpool friend of the Fabs (edited for length) —

“[John and I] would frequently drive down to the Pier Head... and stand at the railings, eating one of those terrible meat pies that they used to sell there and looking out over the narrow expanse of the River Mersey and the vaster margins of the Irish Sea. John was forever dreaming of America. It was as if his spiritual home was across the Atlantic; he ached to play in the USA, the great source of his inspiration...: “I want to be over there; I can almost taste it now... With Brian it feels like it might just happen.”19

In pursuit of their American dream of the toppermost, The Beatles endured the filth of Hamburg, countless low-paying gigs at often violent dance halls, the punishing pace of the touring schedule Brian set for them, and the indignities of their sanitized “mop top” image — all in service of reaching and ultimately redefining that toppermost.

What’s more, in 1964, Beatlemania was still shiny and new and the Fabs weren’t yet jaded and cynical over the frenzy. Consider their celebration in Paris, when “I Want To Hold Your Hand” reached #1 on the US charts — by all accounts an all-night affair overflowing with triumph and joy.

What I’m saying is, The Beatles were not in any way whatsoever motivated to fuck this situation up by getting themselves arrested for weed during the tour or at any other time.

There’s more, too, as Davis also points out.

When The Beatles stayed at the Delmonico in August 1964, they were in the middle of their first and most important tour of the US. They had a performance the following day at Forest Hills Stadium, which was without question the most important concert of the tour because it was in New York City, which was without question the most important city of the tour, because New York at that time was without question the most culturally important city in the world.

Obviously, The Beatles took much of their unprecedented fame with a wink and a snarky comment, which is part of why the world’s press fell in love with them. But the one thing they never seem to have done — ever — was to be intentionally careless or unprofessional with their music, either in the studio or in concert. Whatever else was happening between and around them, The Beatles took their music seriously and they were fiercely protective of their ability to make that music, rejecting anything they believed would compromise the recording and performance of it.

I’m not sure how much we need to document that protectiveness, but here are just a few of many examples—

When The Beatles signed with Brian, they made clear that he was not allowed to mess with their music, which was notably different from other management-artist relationships of the time.20

During their first recording session at EMI in June 1963, instead of going to lunch during the midday break, The Beatles stayed behind in the studio to rehearse— something the studio staff has said they’d never heard of any group ever having done before.21

After the 1965 Shea Stadium concert, immediately upon leaving the stage, Paul reportedly told photojournalist Robert Whitaker that “I wish we could have given them more.”22

Even in later years, when The Beatles became jaded and cynical about the absurdities and indignities of touring, that professionalism and dedication to the music never wavered.

When an unexpectedly respectful Japanese audience allowed their music to be heard rather than screamed over, The Beatles realised their musicianship had slipped. They fit an extra rehearsal into their tight schedule so they could perform the following night’s concert at the standard they expected of themselves.23

And at the end of the ‘66 tour, when The Beatles made the decision to stop touring and to focus exclusively on studio work, that decision was made in large part because the public hysteria was compromising their musicianship.24

In the studio, The Beatles had a strict policy of not allowing their experiments with mind-altering substances to compromise their music. If anything — as we’ll talk about in the next chapter — their primary motivation for experimenting was to enhance their creative process.25

It’s true that The Beatles have acknowledged being too stoned to function on the set of the movie Help! — which was not long after the end of the 1964 tour.26 But there are no reports whatsoever — during the recording of the soundtrack for Help! or at any other time — of the Fabs being too stoned to record their music in the studio — with one accidental exception, which we’ll get to in a later chapter. Maybe there were occasions like that, and maybe those occasions were covered up — but I don’t think so. I think it’s simply not who The Beatles were, either as a band or as individuals.

The Beatles’ commitment to the quality of their performance was demonstrably true even in the midst of the breakup. The White Album, the Get Back sessions, and Abbey Road speak for themselves. And as Ringo told Dan Rather in 2018, “We had rows. But it never got in the way of the music. No matter how bad the row was, once the count-in, we all gave our best.”27

And if all of that was true during the worst of their times together — when they were burned out and exhausted and estranged — then it was certainly true in 1964, when they were still savouring having not only reached, but redefined, “the toppermost of the poppermost,” the focus of their aspiration and ambition since the first notes they ever played together.

And even if all of that wasn’t true, in 1964 The Beatles were still obedient to their subversive “mop top” image, and to Brian’s directives on maintaining that image.28 And as Davis points out, it’s highly unlikely that Brian — assuming he was indeed present for the Delmonico party — would have allowed “his boys” to risk everything just for the sake of an experiment in altered consciousness.29

This is, of course, speculation — on Davis’ part and on mine — but I think only just barely. Simply put, the Delmonico version of the story is contrary to common sense, emotional truth, and The Beatles’ own careful stewardship of their image and — more importantly — their music.

On the other hand, the Riviera Idlewild Motel was after the conclusion of the tour, on The Beatles’ final night in America — an out-of-the-way motel near the airport and far from the spotlight of downtown Manhattan. There are no reports of fans or press (other than Davis) discovering their location, and no reports of the massive police and security presence that accompanied them at the Delmonico.

And with the pressure of a triumphant, history-making tour behind them and no immediate need to perform or record, The Beatles would almost certainly have been ready to unwind and celebrate, and free to do a little lifestyle experimenting with minimal risk to their image, their music, and for that matter, their personal freedom.

All of which is to say that I don’t think there’s any doubt that the Riviera Idlewild is the more credible setting for the Dylan story, and by a large margin.

But if you’re thinking this clears everything up, it doesn’t—

—because none of that common sense reasoning explains Derek Taylor agreeing with Aronowitz and Victor Maymudes that the Great Initiation happened at the Delmonico. Nor does it explain George insisting to Dylan that it happened at the Delmonico — if Campbell’s story is accurate. And it doesn’t explain Paul insisting for at least the past three decades that the Great Initiation happened at the Delmonico. For sure, The Beatles don’t need to feed their egos by claiming to have been present at a culturally-significant event. The Beatles are the culturally-significant event.

One possible explanation is that the Fabs’ memory of the two nights could have blurred together into a single night.

It’s easy to see how this might have happened, and it goes back to that “just another day in the life” situation. Meeting Dylan at the Delmonico vs getting high with Dylan at the Riviera Idlewild Motel might be a relevant difference to a journalist or a Beatles historian. But it’s maybe not such a relevant difference if you’re a Beatle — or a Beatle press agent — on that first tour of America in 1964 in the eye of the global tsunami of Beatlemania, during which being introduced to weed by Bob Dylan was just one in a seemingly endless succession of extraordinary, unprecedented events.

The problem is that an accidental blurring of two nights into one doesn’t explain why Paul, George, Derek Taylor — and for that matter, Al Aronowitz — all individually conflated those two nights into a single night in almost exactly the same way — especially since Maymudes, Aronowitz and Davis were not Beatles. And for anyone who was not either Fab or Bob Dylan, being there when The Beatles were introduced to weed by Bob Dylan would not have been just one in a seemingly endless succession of extraordinary, unprecedented events that all blur together — but rather a peak experience that would define their professional identities for the rest of their career (as it has for both Aronowitz and Davis).

So maybe the conflation from two nights into one wasn’t accidental, but intentional. Maybe The Beatles decided it was simpler to leave the Riviera Idlewild out of the Dylan story entirely and set the whole of it at the Delmonico. And maybe The Beatles instructed their inner circle — which by a loose definition included Derek Taylor — to go along with the revised story.

But that doesn’t work, either. Because if the conflation of the two nights into one night was intentional, that doesn’t explain why Maymudes claims the Great Initiation was at the Delmonico, if that’s not where it actually happened.

Maymudes wasn’t anywhere close to being in The Beatles’ inner circle, and he was thus not subject to any edicts the Fabs may have handed down to their royal court on how to tell the story. For the intentional conflating of two nights into one explanation to work, Maymudes would need to be misremembering those events accidentally in exactly the same way that The Beatles were rewriting them intentionally—

—because while it’s theoretically possible that Maymudes was asked to alter his version of events, it seems beyond unlikely that The Beatles would have bothered to chase down every single person who was with them at either the Delmonico or the Riviera Idlewild to make sure everyone had their stories straight. That would be weird — weird enough that by now we’d probably have heard about it from someone. Probably Ivor Davis.

All of which is to say that I don’t think we’re ever going to know for sure whether the Great Initiation happened at the Delmonico or the Riviera Idlewild Motel or both or some whole other place. Nor are we likely to know who inhaled on which of the two nights.

I got us lost in this maze of contradictions so you’d have a real-time, felt experience of the way primary sources jostle to position themselves as close as possible to The Beatles — and how that makes researching The Beatles deeply problematic. And this is a relatively simple and contained example that doesn’t even factor in the overall biases we talked about at length in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — the distorted narrative and the fear of softness and the refusal to consider other aspects of The Beatles story that challenge the established narrative.

We’re not quite done with the primary sources for the Dylan story — because even if we could determine for sure where and when the Great Initiation happened and who was there, it’s not at all clear that it even was a Great Initiation at all.

And that brings us — at last — to what John, George, and Ringo have to say about all of this. But if you’re thinking they’re going to swoop in and fix the inconsistencies, well — not exactly.

If you’ve read Anthology recently, you might remember that while John agrees that The Beatles met Dylan in 1964 in New York and a good time was had by all, John does not agree that the occasion was their introduction to cannabis—

“The drugs were around a long time. All the jazz musicians had been into heavy dope for years and years — it’s just that they got in the media in the Sixties. People were smoking marijuana in Liverpool when we were still kids, though I wasn’t too aware of it at that period. All these black guys were from Jamaica, or their parents were, and there was a lot of marijuana around. The beatnik thing had just happened. Some guy was showing us pot in Liverpool in 1960, with twigs in it. And we smoked it and we didn’t know what it was. We were drunk.”30

George also doesn’t seem to think that 1964 was The Beatles’ first time smoking pot. Here’s his version of the story, also from Anthology—

“We first got marijuana from an older drummer with another group in Liverpool. We didn’t actually try it until after we’d been to Hamburg. I remember we smoked it in the band room in a gig in Southport and we all learnt to do the Twist that night, which was popular at the time. We were all seeing if we could do it. Everybody was saying, ‘This stuff isn’t doing anything.’ It was like that old joke where a party is going on and two hippies are up floating on the ceiling, and one is saying to the other, ‘This stuff doesn’t work, man.’”31

George doesn’t give us a specific timeframe for this memory, but we can take a pretty good guess. Assuming he’s got the venue right, The Beatles played Southport regularly between 1960 and 1963, and given the Twist reference, George’s memory is most likely from sometime in 1962.

And then there’s Ringo, whose telling of the Dylan story closely matches Paul’s version — except that it doesn’t.

Ringo doesn’t speak to the Dylan story in the printed version of Anthology, but he has occasionally told the story in interviews. And when he does, his version loosely matches the accepted narrative — Dylan at The Delmonico in 1964.32 But in episode four of Anthology, Ringo also says that New York in 1964 was the first time he “really” smoked pot, implying that there was at least one time before the Dylan story that wasn’t quite so “really.”33

Ringo’s account might be somewhat less relevant here, because he’s speaking only for himself — “the first time I really smoked pot” — whereas both John and George are speaking for the band as a whole, with their use of “we.” Since Ringo didn’t become a Beatle until the latter half of 1962, he might not have been part of that “whole band” experience that John and George describe, which may pre-date Ringo’s joining the band.34

So let’s focus on John and George’s stories, which are similar enough and imprecise enough about timeframe that they’re likely both remembering the same occasion, in recollections offered decades apart and distorted through the vagaries of memory, time, and the haze of pot smoke.

The generally accepted way in which John and George’s Anthology quotes are reconciled with the Dylan story is what we’ll call the Bad Weed Theory.

Victor Maymudes subscribes to the Bad Weed Theory, so I’ll let him give us the details—

“That first night wasn’t actually [The Beatles’] first time trying it, like everyone believes. They had tried it before but they didn’t get high. The stuff they had was cheap and low quality. They knew about hash, that kind of stuff was more popular in Europe. But until that night, they never had the rush. They’d never laughed till tears rolled down their faces.”35

Maymudes’ description is a bad summary of the effects of weed and a good summary of the Bad Weed Theory.

The problem is that Maymudes doesn’t tell us how he came by his information — at least not in his book. It’s possible and maybe even likely that The Beatles told him directly — it’s certainly consistent with the Anthology quotes. But since Maymudes’ recordings were made shortly after the publication of Anthology, it’s also possible he’s adding the Bad Weed Theory after the fact, based on Anthology. Maymudes died in 2001, so there’s probably no way to know.

That said, you can probably already see that the Bad Weed Theory has some merit.

John’s reference to “twigs” certainly suggests they were smoking low potency ‘stems-and-seeds’ rather than the good stuff. And George’s description of whatever they smoked in early days Liverpool “not doing much” suggests the Baby Fabs were not especially inspired by the experience. That is, until 1964, when— so the theory goes — Dylan showed up in New York with the grade-A good stuff and — as Paul puts it — “blew our tiny little minds.”

But based on just John and George’s accounts, the Bad Weed Theory is far from solid.

George’s likening of their early days experience to the two hippies floating on the ceiling saying“this stuff doesn’t work man” suggests that the cannabis they smoked in Liverpool worked just fine and they simply didn’t realise it. And the reason for that might be found in John’s observation that “we were drunk.” Because while for most people, being drunk is a markedly distinct experience from being high, it’s also generally a much more brute-force experience that can easily mask the more subtle effects of cannabis — especially if you’re new to those effects.

Whether or not The Beatles actually experienced the more nuanced effects of a cannabis high during their early days experiment matters. Because there’s a big difference between Dylan “introducing” The Beatles to cannabis and Dylan “turning the Beatles on” to cannabis — and that difference is going to become important in future chapters.36

Up till now, we’ve been using the terms “introduced to” and “turned on to” somewhat interchangeably. But those two terms are not actually interchangeable. Being “introduced to” vs “turned on to” cannabis are as different from one another as losing your virginity vs having your first orgasm — two experiences that, for a woman, rarely, if ever, coincide.37

Either way — “introduced to” or “turned on to” — at the least, the John and George Bad Weed quotes seem to make clear that The Beatles were introduced to cannabis well before they met Dylan. And you might be wondering why it’s taken us so long to get to those quotes. After all, both are from Anthology, which is the official story of The Beatles, told by The Beatles in their own words. When it comes to primary sources, that’s as good as it gets, right?

Well... here’s where we need to talk about Anthology — which I keep putting off because Anthology gets me grouchy because, really, it gets me sad and I get grouchy when I’m sad, which is why I keep putting off talking about Anthology.

But we need to talk about Anthology to get to the bottom of the Bad Weed Theory — because these two quotes seem to be the only extant examples of John and George talking about their early days Liverpool cannabis experiments.38

So let’s take a few minutes now and do that, and then we’ll get back to talking about what the Baby Fabs might have got up to in early days Liverpool.

And while we’re here, a reminder that while we still need to be wonky for a bit longer, all of what we’re talking about here are necessary steps on the way to unfolding the deeper, more complex story hidden beneath all of this madness.

“During an interview with Paul McCartney, he explained how nearly forty years ago the Beatles agreed on a “version of the facts” that would serve as their story, and they stuck to — and embroidered upon — it ever since.” — Beatles biographer Bob Spitz writing in 200839

As most of us know, Anthology is made up entirely of direct quotes, mostly from the Fabs and occasionally from others in the inner circle. It’s literally intended to be The Beatles telling their own story in their own words. The back cover of the original book even says so, in almost exactly those words. And that means Anthology is often cited by both mainstream and countercultural scholars as a rock solid primary research source.

And oh, if only that were true. But as usual, things are not quite that simple.

Some of you might already know that there are two different kinds of quotes in Anthology.

The first kind has a small number at the end of it that looks exactly like a footnote. These footnote-like numbers appear on all of John’s quotes — including the one about The Beatles having first tried cannabis in early days Liverpool — and also on some of Paul, George, and Ringo’s quotes.

One might reasonably assume these footnote-like numbers are, well, footnotes. But they are not footnotes. Instead, they’re the year in which the Beatle being quoted allegedly said the thing he’s quoted as saying. And that in turn tells us that these quotes are from an external interview, rather than from the interviews Paul, George, and Ringo did specifically for Anthology.

Put another way, that means the original source for these quotes is not Anthology, but the publication or program where the quote first appeared.

This matters, because since these “footnoted” quotes are not original to Anthology, they’re not primary research. And that means that to meet the research standard for Beautiful Possibility, we need to be able to verify them at their original source.

The problem is that without actual functional footnotes and with only the year to go on, finding the original source of these quotes is the proverbial needle in a haystack situation.

So for example, John’s early days bad weed quote is “footnoted” as being from 1975. That’s useful — but only just barely, because it doesn’t narrow the search down much. Without an actual footnote, the only way to verify John’s quote is to search through every interview John did in 1975 — which is not reasonably possible, even for a highly motivated researcher who is literally willing to cross oceans for the cause. Many interviews seem to be either no longer available at all, or only available in archives that require special access that the majority of Beatles writers and researchers — including me — do not have.

We won’t go down the rabbit hole of my lengthy search for John’s early days bad weed quote. For those of you interested in the gory details, I’ll put them in a footnote. 40The summary is that the search yielded no results whatsoever, though I did have a nice chat with a very helpful archivist at the National Audiovisual Institute in France.

And that dead-end search means that John’s early days bad weed quote remains — for me, at least — unverified research, despite its inclusion in Anthology.

You might reasonably be questioning why we’d need to verify Anthology quotes at all. This is The Beatles, telling their own story in their own words. Surely the monkey business that happens elsewhere in Beatles writing isn’t happening in Anthology. It’s not like we’re dealing with, oh... say for example, Mark Lewisohn and his history of manufacturing frankenquotes.

But, in fact, that’s exactly who we’re dealing with — Mark Lewisohn is the one who compiled the research for Anthology. And this is why talking about Anthology gets me grouchy-but-really-sad.

We talked in Part One of Beautiful Possibility about the problems with Lewisohn’s research. As I mentioned then, the work done to uncover those problems is not my work — so if you’re interested in those gory details, I’ll put the link in a footnote so you can read the original research.41

The short version is that Mark Lewisohn has a well-documented, decades-long habit of creating “frankenquotes” by gluing together different quotes from different interviews — sometimes years apart — into a single quote and presenting that quote as if it was the exact words that the person being quoted actually said in a single interview at a single point in time, when that is not in fact the case. And to be clear, frankenquoting of the kind Lewisohn engages in is an absolute no-no in any kind of legitimate, credible research and scholarship.

It would be lovely to think that these frankenquotes do not occur in Anthology. But it seems pretty clear that they do.

For example, John’s description of The Beatles smoking pot with Dylan in New York is almost certainly a frankenquote — which is why I haven’t used it in this chapter. As far as I can tell, John never said the words he’s quoted as saying in a single interview. Instead, his Anthology quote about the Dylan story is manufactured from at least two and maybe three different interviews, glued together and presented as if it’s a single quote.42

If there’s one frankenquote in Anthology, there’s almost certainly more. And that means we absolutely do need to verify these quotes before we can trust them as usable primary research. Until and unless we can do that, they’re essentially “ghost quotes” — quotes that might be legitimate, but that can’t be verified.43

And then there’s George’s early days bad weed story, which belongs to the second category of Anthology quotes. These are the quotes taken from the on-camera interviews done with Paul, George, and Ringo specifically for Anthology — the same interviews we see in the Anthology documentary series. In theory, that makes these quotes primary research.

I say “in theory” because we don’t have access to all of the filmed Anthology interview footage — only what was included in the documentary series. The book includes a lot more material than the series does, which by definition means that most of the quotes included in the book aren’t included in the documentary. And that, in turn, means we can only assume that the non-”footnoted” quotes are from those Anthology interviews. And that might not be a safe assumption.

Beatles scholar Jonathan Knott has found a quote from George about The Beatles’ Greek trip that’s supposedly from the Anthology interviews, but that differs from what George says on camera in significant ways that change the meaning of the quote.44 Most likely, this is simply an alternate take of the interview. The problem is that without access to that footage, there’s no way to know for sure. And once again, if there’s one quote like this, there’s likely to be more.

So how do we solve a problem like Anthology?

Well, one thing we do know for sure is that Paul, George, and Ringo signed off on every word of Anthology. And that means that even if we don’t know for sure the original source of much of that material, and even if some of the quotes are frankenquotes, they’re still words that Paul, George, and Ringo agreed to as part of the story they chose to tell — at least at the time Anthology was published. And that includes George’s bad weed quote.

But it doesn’t include John’s bad weed quote, because John wasn’t there to participate in the making of Anthology — so he obviously couldn’t sign off on what was in it. Instead, John’s quotes were approved by — it seems — Yoko, and also, I’d guess/hope, Paul, George, and Ringo, given they were the ones who were actually there for the events John describes.

Now obviously Paul, George, Ringo, and Yoko all knew John intimately, each in their own way. But however well they knew John, none of them are John. And no one other than John can know for sure how he intended his words at the time he said them, or how he’d want them presented — if it all — two decades later. This is true of anyone, but it’s especially true of John—

In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we took a close look at John’s interviews, especially during and after the breakup. And we discovered that John frequently expressed frustration that the press and public insisted on holding him to things he’d said in interview as if they were true for ever and ever, when oftentimes he didn’t even mean what he said in the moment he said it.

Let me add here that I’m not in any way intending to suggest Paul, George, and Ringo did anything wrong in including John’s quotes in Anthology. Obviously Anthology wouldn’t have been possible without including John’s voice. And the only way to do that, short of a seance, was to pull from his past interviews — even if they aren’t interviews he’d necessarily have stood by twenty-plus years in the future, when the book version of Anthology was first published.

And fortunately, Anthology does a good job of working around the worst of John’s distorted breakup-era interviews — probably because Paul, George, and Ringo knew John well enough to understand what was happening with those interviews and that he didn’t mean most of what he said at the time.45

Nonetheless, we’d be wise to treat John’s contributions to Anthology with the same caution as everything else he ever said to the press — as a snapshot of what John felt like saying in the moment and not necessarily reflective of his more considered thoughts on the subject. And more than that, many of John’s Anthology quotes are likely to be frankenquotes and thus not the words he actually said in the order and context in which he said them — and thus not usable at all in the form in which they appear in the book version of Anthology.

So what does all of this mean for Anthology as a whole? Is it even possible to use it as a research source at all?

I think the answer is yes — but only if we adjust our expectations for what it is and what it isn’t.

Despite The Beatles’ stated desire to set the record straight about their own story, Anthology is not a work of scholarship and was never intended to be — hence the lack of footnotes and sources. Nor is it an objective biography — not that there is such a thing anyway.

What Anthology is, is The Beatles telling their own story. And anyone who tells their own story — Fab or otherwise — gets to decide how to tell that story. And that includes which words to use and in what order and from which sources and whether to tell all of the story or just part of it and whether or not to tell it 100% accurately.

The Beatles have told us in as many words that they have chosen not to tell their story accurately.

Paul has been candid in acknowledging that as much as half of the story as told in Anthology is fiction, mutually agreed on by the four Fabs as far back as 1967, in order to — as Paul put it to Beatles biographer Bob Spitz — “protect the wives and girlfriends.”46

That is, by any measure, an unusual and startling admission. And it obviously begs the question, why would The Beatles feel the need to fictionalize up to half of their story, and to stick with that fictionalized story for fifty years and counting?

Those of you familiar with Part One of Beautiful Possibility probably have a pretty good idea of why The Beatles might have felt the need to fictionalize half the story to “protect wives and girlfriends.” But regardless of the motivation, what matters here is that a third to a half of Anthology being fiction is — by any standard — a lot. And given Paul’s tendency to understate, it might be even more than that.

In the end, what Anthology is, is a beautifully presented “attractive nuisance,” to borrow a piece of legal lingo. A tantalizing, hard-to-resist confection of spun sugar and sleight of hand that looks like a primary source, but is mostly a work of speculative fiction — aka, a fanfic — set in an alternate universe constructed by the Fabs and based loosely on, but not identical to, real events. And that fictionalizing on the part of the Fabs may or may not include the Bad Weed Theory — we simply don’t have enough information to know.

But all of that said, while Anthology can’t tell us the facts of what happened, and while virtually all of John’s Anthology quotes have to be thrown out unless they can be verified as single quotes and not frankenquotes, Paul, George, and Ringo’s quotes are a different story. They’re valuable — not because they tell us the literal truth, necessarily, but because they tell us how Paul, George, and Ringo have chosen to tell the story. And as we’ll see in the next chapter, sometimes how people choose to tell their story is as insightful as the literal facts of the matter.

So what does all this mean for the Bad Weed Theory? Did Dylan introduce The Beatles to cannabis or turn them on to it or both or neither?

To answer those questions, let’s next take a look at what others have said about what the Baby Beatles got up to, in those pre-fab Liverpool days.

In 2008, Cavern compère Bob Wooler had this to say about music scene in Liverpool in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s—

“We didn’t have a strong drug scene by any means. Originally, it was just purple hearts, amphetamines, speed or whatever you want to call it. When the Beatles went down south, they sometimes brought back cannabis and gradually the drug scene developed in Liverpool.”47

In his later years, Bob Wooler regularly expressed frustration with primary sources who embellished their stories. And indeed, Wooler built his brand on his claim to be a trustworthy source who absolutely did not distort or exaggerate his recollections of The Beatles in any way.

That would be lovely — and a bit of a singular miracle — if it were true. And since Wooler is an important early days primary source, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and explore the scenario he’s proposing.

Bringing cannabis to Liverpool from ”down south” would, of course, require The Beatles to travel “down south.” There is a bit of research to suggest that John and original Beatles bass player Stu Sutcliffe made a few trips to London during John’s art school years. And, of course, John and Paul traveled together at least twice to southern England to stay with Paul’s cousin Betty and her husband Mike.

But since Wooler is talking about The Beatles as a whole, not just John and Paul or John and Stu, the most likely timeframe for the scenario Wooler is describing is sometime after The Beatles began to tour extensively on the national dance hall circuit. And that would be consistent with John and George’s Anthology timeframe. By 1962, The Beatles were traveling semi-regularly throughout the country, including “down south.”

So far so good for Wooler’s claim.

If The Beatles were motivated to bring cannabis up from the south of England, that means they were having a good enough time smoking it that they’d be motivated to bring cannabis up from the south of England. That, too, weighs in favour of Wooler’s story. But it also weighs against the Bad Weed Theory — there’s little point in taking the risk of acquiring illegal marijuana if you don’t enjoy its effects.48

The thing is, though, Wooler doesn’t just suggest that The Beatles were bringing weed up from “down south” for their personal enjoyment. He’s also claiming they were importing it in sufficient quantities to create — all on their own — a “drug scene” among Liverpool musicians. Given the rapidly expanding Liverpool music scene in 1962, on the cusp of the Merseybeat explosion,49 that’s a lot of weed. You could start to see why they needed Neil Aspinall’s van.

I don’t know about you, but I’m somewhat charmed by this wildly implausible scenario. So let’s have a little fun and continue to explore how what Wooler is proposing might have happened.

It’s doubtful the perpetually strapped-for-cash Baby Beatles were keeping the Liverpool music scene supplied with weed out of the goodness of their hearts. Like all successful supply-and-demand capitalists, they’d need to sell it to afford to keep buying it.

The Baby Fabs keeping themselves in cigarettes and guitar strings by dealing pot to the Liverpool music community is an intriguing and romantic vision, but there are — obviously — a few problems with Wooler’s scenario.

Just as in New York in 1964 — and like today, only more so — dealing in cannabis in 1960s Britain was extremely illegal. The Beatles would have risked serious prison time for a weed smuggling operation, even if they had the organizational skills to pull it off — which they demonstrably did not. These are the same four people who would, less than a decade later, be responsible for the psychedelic trainwreck of Apple when they tried to “play businessman” and who shot a whole feature film with only a hand-drawn pie chart as their guide.

Mostly, though, the reason we’d be wise to be sceptical of Wooler’s suggestion that the Baby Fabs are responsible for introducing the Liverpool music scene to weed is that the Liverpool music scene had already been introduced to weed — and by a much more likely source than The Beatles.

Liverpool club owner and early Beatles quasi-manager Allan Williams has this story to tell about managing his club, The Jacaranda, which was a regular early days haunt of The Beatles—

“When things at the door became a little less hectic I went down to the basement to see what was going on. You could hardly see across the room for the cigarette smoke. Now and then there was a strong whiff of the very distinctive smell of marijuana. My West Indian boys in the steel band were partial to the stuff, and as long as they didn’t pass it round I made no fuss. Lots of people in Liverpool were on the stuff for years before it became trendy.”50

Now it must be said that Allan Williams has a reputation in Beatles circles for his, shall we say, creative embellishment of the truth — and he does not categorically deny this. In this sense, Williams is like the anti-Bob Wooler. And in fact, Williams is the person Bob Wooler mostly carps about when it comes to primary sources making stuff up in exchange for some reflected glory — although a lot of this rivalry seems to have been mach shau (aka, making a show).

But just as Bob Wooler isn’t quite as rock-solid credible as he claims to be, Allan Williams isn’t quite as not-credible as he’s accused of being — at least not with regard to the Liverpool weed scene.

As a major port city, Liverpool in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s had a significant Caribbean music scene. And Williams’ suggestion that the Caribbean musicians brought cannabis culture with them from their homeland when they arrived in Liverpool isn’t especially farfetched. That’s how cannabis has always traveled throughout the world, and there’s no reason to think Liverpool — again, a major port city — would be an exception. And of course, John and Paul were regular visitors to the Jacaranda during this time period.51

Pre-Fab Liverpool also had a thriving African music scene, and there was significant overlap between the Caribbean and African musicians who were part of both of those scenes. And it’s well-documented by the musicians themselves that John and Paul, usually together, were frequent visitors to Liverpool’s African music and social clubs during the early pre-fame days.52

While I’ve found no specific research to indicate that cannabis was part of the Liverpool African music community, it seems highly likely that it was. First, because the Caribbean and African communities were intertwined and cannabis culture is inherently social.

And second, because the smoking of cannabis has deep roots in African culture — in fact, the idea of smoking cannabis in a water pipe originates in prehistoric Africa.53 And if the Caribbean musicians continued that tradition in Liverpool, it seems likely the African musicians did as well.

Now, as John and George have pointed out in their Anthology quotes (such as they are), just because there was cannabis in Liverpool in the early 1960s doesn’t mean it was any good. It’s possible that supply chain issues to what was then considered the remote wilds of northern England meant good quality cannabis wasn’t readily available.

But cut-rate weed is still weed. And it’s a stretch to think anyone would bother smoking it regularly — as Williams claims was happening at the Jacaranda — if it didn’t have any effects. And again, cannabis culture is inherently social — it’s built around, as Williams also observed, “passing it around.”

So it seems highly likely The Beatles tried it at least once, and highly unlikely that they were only offered a single opportunity to partake — or that they didn’t have good coaching on how to smoke even cut-rate weed properly, given William’s recollection that the Caribbean musicians were well-versed in the ways of the leaf.

All of this is plausible. But again, it’s not that simple.

Contrary to William’s recollection, Royal Caribbean Steel Band founder Everett Estridge is adamant that in all of the times his group played the Jacaranda, he never encountered any cannabis whatsoever.54

And Al Aronowitz claims that The Beatles “sort of considered pot smokers to be the same as junkies. Like the DEA, they put-grass into the same category as heroin,” which suggests that The Beatles did not try it prior to Dylan schooling them otherwise—55

—which is maybe why, in an early 1980s interview with Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, Allan Wiliams claims that despite the ubiquitous presence of cannabis in his club, The Beatles didn’t get into cannabis until 1964 — by which time they were no longer in Liverpool, and which is, of course, the year they met Dylan.56

But while this might be, Williams’ assertion that he knows for sure that The Beatles did not inhale in pre-fame Liverpool is nonetheless a logical fallacy — and a common one in Beatles scholarship.

While it’s possible for Allan Williams to know for sure that The Beatles did smoke pot in Liverpool, it’s not possible for him to know for sure that they didn’t — unless for some reason The Beatles made a habit of checking in with Allan Williams every time they smoked pot. After all, they told Al Aronowitz they’d never smoked pot before, too, and that probably isn’t actually true.57

So here’s what we’ve got, in terms of primary research on the Dylan story—

• Paul says The Beatles’ introduction to cannabis was in New York with Dylan in 1964.

• John and George claim The Beatles (possibly without Ringo) were introduced to cannabis by an unnamed source in pre-fame Liverpool — but we only know that because it’s in Anthology, which means we don’t actually know that.

• Ringo more or less tells the traditional story, but he also hints that it wasn’t his first time, though he isn’t specific beyond that.

• Derek Taylor says the Great Initiation took place at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan in August of ‘64.

• Journalist Al Aronowitz agrees that the Great Initiation happened at the Delmonico, and says he was there and arranged the whole thing, and that it was The Beatles’ first experience with cannabis.

• Victor Maymudes mostly agrees with Aronowitz, except that Maymudes also agrees with John and George that it wasn’t the first time The Beatles had tried pot — though he doesn’t say where he gets this information from.

• Journalist Ivor Davis says Aronowitz (and by extension, Paul, Victor Maymudes, and Derek Taylor) is full of bollocks, and that the introduction to cannabis took place a month later at the end of the tour at the Riviera Idlewild Motel in Jamaica (New York) and that Davis was there and Aronowitz wasn’t.

• Allan Williams agrees with Paul, Derek Taylor and Al Aronowitz that The Beatles first smoked pot with Dylan in 1964, but he also doesn’t say how he knows this — which isn’t surprising because there’d be no reasonable way for him to know this.

• Everett Estridge doesn’t think there was any pot to smoke in Liverpool in the first place.

• Bob Wooler thinks there wasn’t any pot in Liverpool, either — until The Beatles started some kind of ad hoc smuggling operation to import it from the south of England.

• Brian, Neil Aspinall, and Mal have nothing to say about it whatsoever.58

• And neither does Dylan, apparently, except that Derek Taylor thinks that Dylan thinks he smoked pot with The Beatles at the Delmonico, and Mike Campbell thinks that Dylan doesn’t think this ever happened at all.

• And finally, just to put a cap on all of this, Dylan was asked in a 1978 Playboy interview about a press report that he turned Ringo (and thus the Fabs) on to pot by sharing a joint with Ringo at JFK Airport. In the interview, Dylan flatly denied this story, but in a testament to how the game of telephone works, a 1985 book on the history of LSD repeats the airport story — except this time it’s John at Heathrow instead of Ringo at JFK.59

Let’s pause here while the room stops spinning. And also to point out that the Dylan story is a very good case study for why even careful consideration of the primary research does not necessarily resolve the inconsistencies and contradictions in the story of The Beatles.

If at this point, you’re expecting me to pull a rabbit out of the hat and offer you an explanation that resolves all of these inconsistencies into a single, coherent version of events, I don’t have one. Unless I’m missing something — always possible — these contradictions do not appear to be resolvable.

So does all of this mean we need to reconcile ourselves to never knowing the factual truth of the Dylan story — or for that matter, the factual truth of the story of The Beatles as a whole?

Well... yes, actually, that’s exactly what it means.

While most of the first-hand accounts of the Dylan story are plausible, the biases of the people involved, along with the vagaries of memory and the individual agendas in the mix, means there’s no way to know for certain which — if any — of these accounts is actually true.

What’s more, further research likely wouldn’t resolve those contradictions and inconsistencies. If there is credible research on either side — as there is with the Dylan story — all more research is likely to do is pile more information on either side of those contradictions.

As for the desire on the part of primary sources to position themselves as close to The Beatles as they can — even when doing so requires claiming to have been witness to an event they weren’t present for — that desire is a testament to how strong of a hold this story has on our collective psyche. And that desire is virtually always going to get in the way of being able to rely too heavily on traditional research — even limiting it to primary sources.

And that means that there can be no “definitive” version of the Dylan story — and anyone who claims otherwise is doing so in ignorance — willful or otherwise — of the actual research.

What most Beatles writers do with the Dylan story is ignore these contradictions and inconsistencies and simply pick a version — virtually always the traditionally told version — and assert it as fact.

But the reality is that when writers claim that The Beatles were introduced to pot by Bob Dylan at the Delmonico Hotel in 1964, there’s actually no part of that that’s consistent and verifiable in the primary research — other than Dylan’s presence at the Delmonico on August 28 1964, which we know for sure mostly because we have a photo of it. And since history deals with what actually happened, if we aren’t able to verify what actually happened, the Dylan story is — by definition — not a historical event. And it makes little sense to write about it as if it were.

The Dylan story is not an isolated example of this sort of contradictory and unverifiable research. When it comes to the story of The Beatles, it’s more or less situation normal — and also somewhat inevitable, given that Paul has acknowledged that as much as half or more of the story of The Beatles as it’s told in all those “definitive” books is fiction.

This is, in effect, one of the hard limits of the traditional tools of history, biography and journalism. There’s rarely a way to know much of anything for sure, based only on writing down what people have said happened and taking them at their word, because — and I realise this is shocking news — people do not always tell the truth when they talk to journalists and biographers.

And that’s perhaps especially true when it comes to the story of The Beatles — because while writing down what people say is true is a useful approach for a news article or an oral history project, it’s woefully insufficient when it comes to untangling a complex story in which everyone involved has a motivation to distort the truth one way or the other, and when the people at the centre of that story have told us that as much as half of what they’ve told us about that story is fiction.

Having said all of that, I want to clarify something before we move on.

I know that many of you reading are historians, and I want to emphasize that I’m not intending in any way to diminish the value of history as a discipline. Remember, my father was a historian, and I grew up with a deep respect and appreciation for the importance and the beauty of history as a way of understanding our world and ourselves.

But as I’ve talked about frequently in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, I think history is the wrong perspective from which to understand The Beatles. And I mean that in several ways. And here is where if you’re not familiar with Beautiful Possiblity, I might lose some of you for a few minutes. Please bear with me.

First, as I hope I’ve succeeded in showing in Part One, by far the most significant and enduring impact of The Beatles on our world is mythological rather than historical. The impact of The Beatles is simply too big to be understood with the smaller and more limited perspective of history.

And second, I think things get problematic when history is used to understand the actual story of The Beatles. As I hope I’ve shown you in this chapter through the example of the Dylan story, there’s simply not enough consistent, reliable, accessible primary source research to be able to use traditional historical methods to tell any kind of coherent, accurate story.

And third, as I’ve also suggested several times in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, the tools and the worldview required to understand art — and especially great art — and the artists who create that art are fundamentally different from those required for studying history. Historians, like journalists, are trained to be dispassionate observers of factual events.

But artists — and especially artists important enough to be worth studying — are anything but dispassionate. Artists — and especially great artists — live in the world of passionate expression of their art. And that requires a softer, more nuanced set of tools than the study of history generally allows for or requires.

And finally, more than most stories, the story of The Beatles is — as we began to explore in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — first and foremost, a story of human relationships, primarily between John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but also between the four of them and those in their inner circle. And the (theoretically) impartial gaze of history is simply not suitable for understanding the complexities of the human heart any more than history is suited to understand the passionate expression of those relationships in art.

What I’m suggesting is not that history isn’t valuable or important — it is — but that when it comes to understanding The Beatles, history is simply the wrong tool for the job, in the same way one wouldn’t use a power drill to fix a broken wristwatch, or a thermometer to measure the speed of a train.

Stories are the current of meaning, the river through which consciousness and culture move.60 — Dawna Markova, PhD.

There are multiple reasons why we took such a detailed look at the primary research relative to the Dylan story. Some of those reasons need to wait until the end of Seven Levels when we have the necessary context to talk about them.

But there is one reason I want to share with you now, in light of what we’ve stepped through in this chapter.

In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked at length about how the story of The Beatles, intertwined with the story of the Sixties, has evolved from a historical event into a mythological story — and more than that, how these two intertwined stories form the foundational mythological “riverbed” that shapes our modern culture and all of our individual lives.61

By doing a deep dive into the Dylan story, I wanted to offer you a specific, tangible example of how the story of The Beatles has evolved in our collective experience from history into mythology. Because it’s one thing for me to tell you that evolution is happening, it’s another for you to see — and maybe even experience — it happening in real time.

A better understanding of that evolution might be helpful in understanding on a deeper level much of what we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, relative to the mythological role of The Beatles in shaping our culture. And that better understanding will for sure be helpful when we get to Part Two, when we’ll re-tell the story of The Beatles — and specifically the story of Lennon/McCartney — in part through that mythological frame.

I chose to focus us on the Dylan story because it’s a self-contained and especially strong example of the way history sometimes evolves into mythology. The sorts of contradictions and inconsistencies that we just stepped through are among the earliest signs of that evolution.

In the earliest stages of the evolution of a historical event into a mythological story, the complexities of historical fact begin to blur into a simpler — and often internally contradictory — version of the story.

Over time — if there’s enough mythological mojo in the story for it to endure in the collective zeitgeist — the small-t truth of a historical event continues to decompose. The fine detail is smoothed over and all but the most vivid and essential details fade, until only the elemental bones of the original historical event remain.

This loss of detail and cohesion tends to make historians uncomfortable, and understandably so. That’s one of the clear, bright lines between history and mythology, and why I keep reminding y’all that I’m not a historian, but a mythologist. Because when it comes to history, this lack of detail and cohesion is a bug. But when it comes to mythology, it’s a defining feature — at least in the early stages.

If that story is vital enough to a culture, and if it affects enough people, over time, those elemental bones re-knit themselves into a new story — a fuzzy, fragmented, and often not-quite-cohesive telling of what used to be a historical event, but is now part of the mythological tradition of that culture.

When I suggested in Part One that history shapes mythology and in turn mythology shapes history, this is part of what I meant. And we could also add that if a mythological story is big enough and consequential enough, it not only shapes, but replaces history.

One way to understand how this works is to bring it down to a more individual level.

Think of someone you know — a friend or relative or maybe you yourself — who is a particularly adept storyteller. When that storytelling friend or relative tells a story about the past, they instinctively shape that story away from the more prosaic reality of the situation and towards a better story — erasing the boring parts, smoothing over the bumps, and enhancing the best parts, aka the parts that make it a story worth telling in the first place. Oftentimes, the sequence of events is reshuffled to make those events less coincidental and more interconnected — to make it a better story.

Eventually, over repeated tellings, as the actual events that inspired the story fade further into the past, the story of those events becomes more real and more present in our lives than the events themselves — and therefore far more influential than the actual factual events in shaping our perception of — and our reaction to — those events. And when eventually there’s no one left who remembers the actual events, the story itself replaces those actual events in our collective memory.62

In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked about how this transmutation happened on a grand scale, relative to the Love Revolution. Within the timespan of less than a decade — and even while it was still in the process of unfolding — the complex and messy history of the 1960s softened and blurred into the simplified, romanticized story of the era that most of us now experience as “the Sixties.” So stunningly fast did this evolution — but really revolution — happen, and so radical was the change that even as it was still happening, the Love Revolution became the new foundational mythology of our culture.63

The Dylan story is set within the larger mythological universe of both the Love Revolution and The Beatles. And as such, its telling has evolved in much the same way as the story of the Love Revolution and The Beatles — albeit on a much smaller scale.

The passage of time and the mythological stature of those involved have combined to smooth over the complex and contradictory details of the research. We’re left instead with a simplified, bare bones, and rearranged version of the actual events.

We opened this chapter with a telling of the Dylan story from Derek Taylor — storyteller and mythologizer extraordinaire. And I’d like to close this chapter with another telling of the Dylan story, again from Derek Taylor, this time from FIfty Years Adrift—

“The room was quite dark, lit only by a couple of lamps and some candles; the atmosphere was thick and fragrant with incense. Epstein, reeling around holding a flower, appeared to have gone mad. The visitors stood in a mystic threesome by a small table. The bearded and stout Aronowitz, my dear practical friend, was still recognisably sensible, though silent, immobile and beaming. The saturnine Maymudes was a romantic figure in exotic clothes; while between the two of them, thin and beaked, with the beady-eyed gaze of a little bird, stood Bob Dylan. Strange, thin cigarettes were being passed round and everyone looked very happy. Brian came over to me and said I must try it, this wonderful stuff that made everything seem to float upwards.”64

After our long way around through the first-hand accounts of the two possible settings for the Great Initiation — the Delmonico Hotel and the Riviera Idlewild — you might recognise in Taylor’s account the individual traces of the two nights. The presence of Aronowitz from the Delmonico, Brian Epstein’s newbie weed freak-out (now transmuted to the positive) and the now-practiced ritual passing of the joint from the Riviera Idlewild — all of it softened in its detail, blurring together from two nights into a single night. A single story — that on August 28 1964, Bob Dylan met The Beatles at the Delmonico Hotel and introduced them to cannabis.

There is, at this point in the evolution of the Dylan story, almost certainly no untangling these threads from one another. Like the entangled form of Lennon/McCartney that we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, the events of the Delmonico and the Riviera Idlewild have grown roots around one another that reach deep into the individual agendas and memories of those telling the story, and deep into our collective cultural imagination.

In this way, the Dylan story as it’s told is becoming truer in our collective experience than the actual events themselves. And with every re-telling, it continues to shed its small-t truth of detail and fact, blurring... softening... from history into a folktale, loosely based on historical events. A mythological story, communicating a larger, Capital-T truth about who we are as a culture.65

The question hanging unanswered in all of this is, why did The Beatles choose to set the Dylan story at the Delmonico, rather than the Riviera Idlewild? And given the lack of definitive research as to when and where the Great Initiation took place, why is it the Delmonico that’s become rooted in our collective imagination?

In the next chapter, we’ll discover a possible answer for those questions, when we begin our unfolding of that deeper story I’ve been hinting at — by turning our attention to the second half of Paul’s account of the Dylan story, and to the song he says he wrote about that night.

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

63

One of the unique aspects of the historical 1960s is that already during the era itself, many people had a clear and certain sense that they were not just living through, but creating a mythological story.

There are lots of examples of this, including a 1967 special issue of Look Magazine entitled “Youth Quake,” in which the evolution of The Beatles is told in the language of a fairy tale. (see below)

Another striking example is the November 13 1966 cover of Punch Magazine, which features The Beatles with their instruments rendered as saints in the stained glass arch of a church window, evoking the iconic arched ceiling of the Cavern. (NOTE: Punch is primarily a humour magazine, but the cover illustration is probably not intended as irony, as it’s consistent with a serious, contemporaneous review of Revolver that echoes the mythological overtones of the cover.)

65

A footnote bonus. A postcard of the Riviera Idlewild from the 1960s — notice that it’s a “hotel” rather than a “motel.” Nonetheless, I chose to refer to the Riviera Idlewild Motel throughout the text to offer one final tangible example of the way mythology blurs detail.

All of the primary sources remember it as a motel — and a motel, of course, is more interesting, more countercultural than a hotel when it comes to secret initiation rituals. In other words, “motel” makes for a better story, which is probably why that detail, too, has been adjusted in the telling of the Riviera Idlewild version of the folktale of the Dylan story.

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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

Hi! Now click on the number to the left and it’ll take you back where you came from.

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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

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?