My dear readers/listeners,
We need to talk about the footnotes.
This week, a devoted reader/listener of Beautiful Possibility (who is also a prominent and insightful Beatles countercultural scholar) expressed surprise when I mentioned that there is a significant amount of bonus material in the footnotes to each episode/rabbit hole.
Y’all, I gotta tell you — I’m at a bit of a loss here.
I feel like I’ve pointed out the bonus material in the footnotes so often by now that it’s practically a trope. I’m starting to wonder if there’s an interwebs gremlin or maybe a sun flare that somehow blanks out the transmission every time I mention the footnotes. Or maybe Magic Alex has managed, from beyond the grave, to invent some sort of Beautiful Possibility footnote cloaking device.
Whatever the explanation, this week I want to remind you once again that if you’re finding value in these weekly updates, you can find lots (and lots!) more of the exact same sort of content in the footnotes of Beautiful Possibility.
If you’re mostly here for the lovers possibility, footnotes are also where I tend to include material that pushes the boundaries just a little bit — analysis that’s a bit more speculative and research that’s a bit more provocative than is quite the thing for the main body of the episode.
For example, in episode 1:4 (Are You Afraid Or Is It True?), you’ll find a Micro-Rabbit Hole that debunks the widely held misconception in mainstream biography (and even in the Beatles studies counterculture) that John and Paul did not room together on tour—
One of the first pieces of “fact” often offered to dismiss the lovers possibility is that John and Paul did not share a hotel room on tour. Debunking this is straying a bit too much into places I’m being careful not to go, but because it’s so often trotted out as the #1 piece of “ah ha!” information relative to the lovers possibility not being credible, it’s not possible to avoid it completely.
The insistence that John and Paul did not share a hotel room together on tour is categorically false. One of the tells that it’s false is that it’s information that’s only offered secondhand by Grail-phobic biographers and others who were not in a position to know firsthand.
There are only a handful of people who would know this firsthand. And of that handful of people, only a few have said anything at all about it, and of those few who have commented, all have said that John and Paul did indeed share a hotel room on tour. Notable is tour manager Bob Bonis, who literally booked their hotel rooms—
“They always had a suite. George and Ringo stayed together in one room, and John and Paul in the other bedroom, and a big, big room in between.” (https://www.classicbands.com/BobBonisInterview.html)
Here’s a snippet from an interview with John and Paul in 1963 —
“Paul sleeps with his eyes open though,” Lennon said with a frozen smile.
“Yeah— and you speak in whole sentences in your sleep,” McCartney countered.
“What kind of sentences?” I asked.
“It seems,” Lennon replied loftily, “that my most frequent phrase is ‘Well, get on that bloody bus then.”
(“The Big Beat Craze,” Daily Mirror, September 10, 1963)
And of course, we have lots of anecdotes from John and Paul themselves about writing songs in hotel rooms on tour — too many to list in a footnote — including the two of them sequestered in their shared suite at the George V in Paris and emerging having written “Can’t Buy Me Love.”
And then there’s this anecdote from their 1964 Australian tour—
“At the Sheraton, Malcolm Searle was given privileged access for his daily 3AK bulletins. Reporting from the kitchenette of the penthouse suite, he chatted to Paul, John and George, as Paul cooked steak and spuds for his and John’s dinner. The conversation turned playfully camp when Searle called Paul “a regular little housewife” and described the gingham apron he was wearing. “Does he cook for you very much?” John (indignantly): “Don’t say it like that, it sounds funny.” (Andy Neill and Greg Armstrong, When We Was Fab: Inside the Beatles Australasian Tour 1964, Woodslane Pty Ltd., 1964.)
Note that this is Paul cooking for himself and John, not for the four of them. Also note that this is Paul cooking in the first place, at the height of Beatlemania with room service as well as an entourage of helpers available to get them any kind of food they want, just the wave of a hand away.
Of course, room arrangements are flexible, when you have the whole floor, and what’s signed on the hotel register doesn’t necessarily reflect reality. Tony Barrow, who also occasionally traveled with them on tour, observed that—
“[The Beatles] hated to have separate suites when they were on the road. They happily doubled up to share a couple of bedrooms between the four of them and the pairing off was a random business that took place on the spur of the moment.” (John, Paul, George, Ringo & Me, Tony Barrow, 2005.)
And while it’s maybe a bit much to go into here, it’s also worth noting that maybe there was some incentive to put it into the press that John and Paul didn’t regularly share a room, if they are being managed by someone who is well-aware of the need to keep that sort of thing private.
One of the things I keep pointing out is that in a very real way, the deeper story of Beautiful Possibility is told in the footnotes.
For example, also in episode 1:4, you’ll find a brief discussion of a 1990 reference in mainstream Beatles writing to John and Paul as lovers, along what it might tell us about John’s motivations for remaining in NYC—
Sandra Shevey interviewed John and Yoko over the course of two days in 1972 and is notable for being the only mainstream Beatles writer ever to openly suggest that John and Paul were lovers (not that anyone seems to have noticed outside the Beatles studies counterculture) —
“Whilst the Beatles had always been marketed as a heterosexual group - in contrast with the Stones, whose image was androgynous - they were sympathetic to the homosexual population. Lennon himself was alleged to have had affairs with both men and women, and although he never openly admitted it to me, his condemnation of Britain as a land which feeds on a homosexual subculture persuades me at this late stage that he was speaking from experience. The fact remains that he refused to entertain any of his old cronies and continued in his vehement rejection of Paul McCartney when the junior partner grew in stature and confidence and began dictating the creative course of the Beatles. I am sure that the break-up of the Beatles, or, more specifically, of John and Paul, must have been more traumatic than any of us suspect.” (Sandra Shevey The Other Side of Lennon, Pan Macmillan, 1990)
NOTE: Shevey’s book is overall wildly inaccurate, as far as I can tell. The interview portion rings true, though, and I think her analysis in this quote is perceptive —
The Beatles were given an MBE for economic service to the Crown and everyone from the Queen to the Prime Minister wanted an association with them because it boosted Britain’s global status to be the country that gave birth to the Beatles. But if that same country had known about John and Paul’s love affair — again, if there was one — that Establishment culture that had honoured them with medals would have turned on them.
If John and Paul were a romantic couple, then it’s easy to see how John might be angry at the hypocrisy of the British Establishment. Britain was happy to claim the credit and 90-some percent tax rate on their income, as long as they concealed their love affair and pretended to be something they weren’t so as not to scare the neighbours.
You could also see how that would be further incentive for John to remain in New York rather than return to England — which means this is another example of how the lovers possibility offers us perspectives on major events in this story that aren’t available otherwise.
Footnotes often include Micro-Rabbit Holes.
For example, In the “Entangled Form” Rabbit Hole, you’ll find a Micro-Rabbit Hole about another deeply connected creative pairing— Buck Owens and Don Rich — in which we consider how Buck Owens talks very differently about his partnership with Don Rich than Paul and John do about Lennon/McCartney—
Another pairing where this intertwined trees/entangled form effect seems to apply is the partnership between Bakersfield sound innovator Buck Owens and his creative partner Don Rich. Unlike Lennon/McCartney, the bond between Owens and Rich seems to have been strictly platonic/brotherly. But as with John and Paul, the partnership ended tragically, when Don Rich was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1974, and Buck Owens was never the same afterwards.
Here’s Buck Owens in his autobiography, Buck ‘Em (Buck Owens and Randy Poe, Backbeat Books, 2013) about his first meeting with Don Rich:
“I started to sing the song again, and Don started sing-ing right along with me. I couldn’t believe my ears. Our voices blended and matched perfectly. Somehow, he knew exactly the way I was going to sing every word. He came in at exactly the right times. If I slurred a word, he slurred the same word in harmony with me. He had the great-est ability to anticipate that I’d ever heard in my life. I swear to you, somehow he could tell even that very first time we sang together-what I was going to sing and how I was going to sing it.”
and later in the same passage—
“When me and Don finished singing ‘Above and Beyond,’ I knew right then and there that I had found the sound I’d been searching for. I knew ‘Above and Beyond’ was going to be a hit. I knew Don was going to be my musical partner for life. I knew that the two of us would be having hit records together for years to come.”
Buck Owens and Don Rich are also an example of a deep, intimate (seemingly at least) platonic/brotherly friendship of the kind people often ascribe to John and Paul.
While it’s certainly true that a relationship between two men can be intimate and intense without being erotic and/or romantic, the two kinds of relationships present dramatically differently — and the difference between John and Paul vs Buck Owens and Don Rich seems to be a textbook example of this.
Buck Owens talked about Don Rich completely differently from the way John and Paul talk about one another. Buck Owens didn’t , for example, use sexual and romantic metaphor to describe his partnership with Don Rich. And Buck Owens and Don Rich did not look at each other in the overtly erotic way in which John and Paul did (as discussed in both episode 1:4 and the Rabbit Hole on Beatlemania), nor did Buck Owens and Don Rich seek out physical contact with one another in the same way John and Paul did. Buck Owens did not spend two weeks with Don Rich in a little hotel in Paris, nor did he ever get within light years of saying that he looked back fondly on sharing a bed with Don Rich. And as far as I can tell, though he mourned Don Rich’s death all of his life, Buck Owens never wrote a love song for him, either.
The footnotes also include lots of expanded, non-lovers possibility discussion — as well as previews of Part Two — like this from episode 1:7 (The Measure of a Man) —
As much as it showed intimacy and trust, the shared writing credit — like the collaborative nature of the band — may also have been, for John, a way of concealing his insecurity. It’s likely John feared from the beginning that Paul was a better songwriter. By sharing every song equally, John may have thought to hide his own — from John’s point of view — weaker talents by intertwining them with Paul’s stronger ones.
and also this—
Whether John actually believed that Yoko was a musical genius is a subject for a future day, but it seems doubtful — or at least it seems doubtful he’d have believed it if he hadn’t been in psychological crisis and strung out on heroin to dull his pain. And btw, I don’t think we can fault Yoko even a little bit for going along with it — John Lennon tells the world you’re a musical genius, I doubt anyone would be able to resist going along with it.
Declaring Yoko a genius and collaborating so closely with her may have been in part John attempting to reconstruct the buffer of The Beatles and Lennon/McCartney — either consciously or not — so as to hide whose contribution was whose, lest John’s not be good enough to satisfy expectations. And of course, it might also have been the sort of thing estranged lovers do — showing the other person that you don’t need them, when in fact, the opposite is true.
If you’re mostly here for the mythological thruline, in episode 1:1 (Kairos), you’ll find a mention of why I don’t consider Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” ‘monomyth’ the foundational mythology of Western culture —
If you’re familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell, a foundational myth is different from Joseph Campbell’s “mono myth,” which he identifies as the “hero’s journey.” But this way of thinking about how mythology functions in a culture appears to be both overgeneralized and oversimplified. Cultures virtually never have just a single mythological story at play, any more than human beings have only one “story” that’s being told in our lives. Every culture has many mythologies at work, but usually only one dominant one — the foundational myth, which is why I think this is a more useful term. And more than that, the hero’s journey isn’t a riverbed-defining story — it’s a spin-off of “might makes right.”
And in 1:3 (Hope of Deliverance), there’s a short discussion of how the stories of people bringing their terminally ill children to be touched by The Beatles in hopes of affecting healing relates to the ancient mythological traditional of the royal touch—
That need to get close to the source of the lifeforce is also likely the reason for the stories about the cripples and terminally ill people who believed that a touch from The Beatles would heal their illness.
When it comes to mythology, the line between literal and metaphorical is razor thin and often nonexistent.
The belief that an idol can heal with a touch isn’t unique to Beatlemania, although the scale of it might have been. It’s rooted in the belief that the touch of royalty has the power to heal because royalty is anointed by God — and mythologically speaking, for “God,” read the lifeforce, the spark of creation that animates all life. And if the Beatles were the conduit for that lifeforce, then it makes sense that those who were suffering from terminal and debilitating diseases would believe the touch of a Fab would heal them, in a literal enactment of the collective psychological healing of the death trauma that was taking place with Beatlemania.
Footnotes are also where you’ll fiind more general musings — like this, also from episode 1:7 (The Measure of a Man) —
It’s a bit of an aside to the aside, but it’s worth considering that maybe we ought to think twice about writing about or critiquing art of any kind unless we’re emotionally moved by it. How can we have anything meaningful to say about art if we’re not connected to its essence? Maybe the best thing to do with art we’re not moved by, or that we think “fails to deliver” on our expectations is to leave it alone entirely. Let someone else write about it who is moved by it and thus understands it. And if no one’s moved by a piece of art, then let it wither by inattention rather than scorn, and let the artist live to create again. The power of the Grail will out. Great art endures, with or without critics telling us so.
If you have questions, you might find the answers in the footnotes (if not, feel free, as always, to email Robyn).
For example, in episode 1:4, there’s a footnote that answers a question about why I avoid the use of the word “evidence” when discussing the research in support of the lovers possibility —
I’m avoiding the use of the word “evidence.” It’s maybe obvious why — “evidence” is a word we think of as associated with proving someone guilty or not guilty of a crime. And it’s also what we look for when we’re trying to prove something in general.
Neither of these situations apply here. We’re not trying to prove that John and Paul were lovers — ethically and practically, we can’t do that. And while same sex love was a crime for much of the span of John and Paul’s relationship, it’s not a crime and should never have been a crime, and to suggest that it is would be a further injustice. And more than that, it would suggest that there’s something other than beautiful about two men being in love, when the opposite is true. All of which is why I’m carefully saying “supporting research” instead of “evidence,” even though it’s already annoying me because it’s awkward as hell.
And finally, if you’re offended by something in the main episode, it might be because you haven’t read the footnotes.
For example, in the “Immovable Heterosexuality” Rabbit Hole, the footnotes answer the question of why I refer to Yoko by her first name and Philip Norman by his last name—
For those of you who notice such things, I’m referring to Yoko using only her first name as a shorthand, and Norman with either both names or just his last name not to diminish Yoko in relation to Norman, but for the same reason I refer to Paul and John by their first names. Because of how woven into our culture this story is, as the foundational mythology of our culture, our relationship to the people who lived it tends to be on a first name basis, starting with “John, Paul, George and Ringo,” and widening to include Yoko, Linda, Cynthia, Jane, Mal, Neil, etc. On the other hand, our relationship with the writers of Beatles biographies is not an intimate one. Hence, Philip Norman or Norman.
So this week, I invite you to return to your favourite episode of Beautiful Possibility, and spend some time exploring the footnotes. Substack makes it easy to do this — simply hover your cursor over the little footnote number in the main text and the content will pop out in a separate box. Like this — 1
Here’s hoping Magic Alex and the sunflares will allow this transmission through. 🪄
Until next week,
Peace, love and strawberry fields,
Faith 🍓
See?
