1:8/1:9 Ecce Cor Meum

All the episodes of Beautiful Possibility in sequence are here.

These two episodes are the conclusion/climax of part one of Beautiful Possibility, in which we put everything together that we’ve talked about over the past months. So obviously you’ll get the most out of “Ecce Cor Meum” if you’re familiar with what’s come before.

But given the importance of what we’re discussing in these episodes, I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from listening. Just know that if you haven’t fully caught up with what’s come before, it will likely be an incomplete and less persuasive read/listen. And if you haven’t yet listened to the full series, I hope you’ll be inspired to start from the beginning to understand the full weight of why — in spite of all the danger — I chose to be a fool for love by writing Beautiful Possibility.

Hi everyone,

Before we get started, a few housekeeping notes.

You’ve probably noticed that this week’s release includes both episode 1:8 and episode 1:9.

The reason is that the two parts of “Ecce Cor Meum” together are an especially entangled form. Together, they’re an emotional and analytical journey that will eventually take us to the answer — or at least my answer— to the ethics of restoring the lovers possibility to the story.

As such, these two episodes simply won’t work if they’re separated from one another. And since y’all have proven yourselves wildly unreliable when it comes to listening to two-part episodes in order, I’ve stitched episodes 1:8 and 1:9 together into a single, extended episode. Think of it as a double A-side.

There is also a very short Rabbit Hole and playlist that goes with this two-part episode. You’ll find it at the end of the episode, before the footnotes, for similiar reasons.

These are the final two episodes of part one of Beautiful Possibility. And because they are the formal conclusion of part one, I think it’s likely a good idea to let them linger in the air for a bit. Also, writing and recording these two episodes was an emotionally intense experience, and I could use a bit of time to regroup. So I’ll be back in two weeks with the wrap-up and Q&A for part 1.

My fab research assistant Robyn is still collecting questions for the Q&A. So if you have questions about any part of this series, or about me, or about my work, or about The Beatles, you can send them to Robyn. You can find her email on my personal website at faithcurrent.com.

So with all of that said, thank you to everyone who’s come along on our long and winding journey to arrive here — at the reason for all of it.

And now without further delay—

In a castle, the king lies bleeding.

Lost and alone, Percival wanders through the Wasteland, stripped of his honour and trying to find his way back to the Grail Castle. Years pass, and then decades, and still he searches for the Grail, the Wisewoman’s words as he’d left the castle spurring him on — “you had the power to heal the kingdom and instead you chose silence.”

One dark night, exhausted and in deep despair, Percival falls to his knees, pleading for another chance to make right what he’d made so wrong. Finishing his prayer, he looks up to see the Grail Castle shining on the hill, where he’s certain it hadn’t been a moment ago.

As before, Percival approaches the castle, and as before, he’s granted entry. His horse is tended to and he’s offered shelter for the night. As before, he’s directed to the banquet hall, where the same nobles are feasting on the same rich food and wine as if no time has passed at all. And if they recognise him from his past dishonour, they make no mention of it.

As before, the Grail procession appears. But this time, Percival turns away from the feast and approaches the Grail Princess — who is, of course, the Wisewoman in her younger incarnation.

“I beg forgiveness for my previous inattention, ” he offers, bowing low. “Pray tell me, Princess,¹ who is it that the Grail serves?”

There is an intimate relationship between mythology and fairy tales. Much like the “entangled form” of Lennon/McCartney, mythology and fairy tales are so intimately intertwined with one another that it's sometimes hard to separate one from the other, especially when it comes to their role as a reflection of — and a model for — human behavior. Which is why the rules of mythological stories often, though not always, follow the same rules as fairy tales.

One of the rules of fairy tales is that whatever it is the hero or heroine of the story is most in need of will be found in the one place they’ve been explicitly warned never, under any circumstances, to go.

The legend of the Grail is both mythology and fairy tale. And to heal the king and restore the lifeforce to the kingdom, the Grail Knight must do the one thing that a visitor to a foreign castle is not, according to the rules of chivalry, under any circumstances supposed to do — he must ask an impertinent question of his host, by asking the purpose of the Grail procession through the banquet hall.

The question the Grail Knight must ask is the most profound and iconic question in all of Western mythology — “who does the Grail serve?”

Asking whether or not John and Paul were lovers is, of course, an impertinent question. When it comes to the story of The Beatles, it’s maybe the most impertinent question of all. And asking that question brings us, finally, to the ethical question that’s been pending throughout Beautiful Possibility — how do we heal the story by restoring the love between Paul and John to the heart of it, when that love story is Paul’s and John’s story — and only Paul and John’s story — to tell?

Who does the Grail serve? John and Paul, or the world that’s bleeding out as the result of the distorted, angry breakup narrative?

This tension between understanding an artist and infringing on their privacy isn’t unique to Lennon/McCartney, of course — it’s inherent to the study of art. As we talked about when we considered their lyrics, to fully understand the art requires understanding the artist. And who an artist loves and desires is fundamental to who they are — which is why studying the personal lives, including the romantic lives, of great artists has long been a legitimate, accepted part of understanding an artist’s work.

This is true of any great artist, but it’s especially true when the great artist in question is a partnership in which the partners are self-evidently in love and deeply obsessed with one another. How can we possibly hope to understand “Yesterday” and “Here, There & Everywhere,” “If I Fell,” “Girl,” “In My Life” “Oh! Darling” and “Hey Jude,” or songs like “Bless You” and “No Words,” without understanding the nature of the love and desire and heartbreak that inspired those songs?

And more than that, how do we understand this story — this foundational mythology that shapes the “riverbed” of the world we live in — if we don’t understand, at least in broad strokes, the relationship between the two men who most deeply and directly lived and created that story?

The inconvenient reality is that, as we’ve seen over the past seven episodes, it’s simply not possible to ignore or discount the lovers possibility and still expect to understand Lennon/McCartney, much less write coherently or honestly about their partnership or the music or the new world that was created out of it.

But even when it comes to world-changing artists, it’s also true that it’s inherently problematic to poke around in someone’s personal life, and especially their romantic life, and especially if we’re sharing a more or less contemporaneous timeline with them, without their explicit consent. It’s all very well to speculate about the love life of Shakespeare. But it gets a little trickier, when Shakespeare’s making margaritas and mashed potatoes on social media—

—which is why we need to talk about the shoebox.

In a prior episode, we considered Paul’s acknowledgement of his difficulty in sharing his feelings outside of his art, and also his wish to keep his innermost life private. Remember this quote from episode 1:5, when Paul was asked if he’s uncomfortable sharing personal details in his music—

“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.”

The challenge for Paul, of course, is that being a Beatle comes with many, many benefits, but privacy is not, it seems, one of them. Since 1964, journalists, historians, biographers and fans have been hungry for any scrap of information about the complex, enigmatic partnership of Lennon/McCartney. If John and Paul were indeed lovers, that’s maybe the only part of their relationship that’s remained largely untouched — the only part of Lennon/McCartney that’s truly theirs and theirs alone.

What if Paul’s choosing not to talk more openly about his relationship with John for the same reason someone might keep a literal shoebox filled with memories of a secret love affair hidden away from the prying eyes of the world? And what if what we’re doing by exploring the lovers possibility is coming in through the bathroom window and opening that shoebox without Paul’s — or John’s — okay?

The possibility of a “shoebox of memories” — but really, of course, a “shoebox of feelings” about those memories — is especially problematic when many of those memories and feelings are deeply painful and traumatic. There was undeniably a lot of joy in John and Paul’s relationship — we can see that for ourselves in their interactions. But one thing we know beyond doubt is that this is not a story of two lovers living happily ever after.

When I first began considering the ethics of the lovers possibility, the “shoebox of memories” seemed the most convincing reason to leave it alone. I don’t buy the argument that famous people lose their expectation of privacy, even if our justice system and our tabloid culture think otherwise. I believe we all have a right to our secrets.

But it gets a bit more complicated than that, because while Paul has made it clear that his innermost thoughts are his own, he’s also explicitly told us that he shares those innermost thoughts in his songs. Here’s the rest of the “innermost thoughts” quote—

“But in a song, that’s where you can do it. That’s the place to put [those innermost thoughts]. 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.”²

And to make things still more complicated, far from warning us off, Paul has specifically directed us to look to his songs for the truth of his life, instead of in books and scholarly writing. Remember his 2022 comment in his foreword to The Lyrics, when he tells us 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.”³

And as we saw in detail in prior episodes, when we look at those lyrics without the confirmation bias of the distorted narrative and with the soft gaze of the Grail, Paul’s lyrics consistently — often fairly explicitly — point towards a romantic relationship with John.

So obviously, it’s going to take a bit of work to sort out the shoebox problem. But the one thing Paul seems to have made clear in all of this is that anything we find in his lyrics is fair game for scholarly inquiry. And that gives us some solid ground to start with, when it comes to the ethics of the lovers possibility.

They can't take it from me, if they try

I lived through those early days

So many times I had to change the pain to laughter

Just to keep from getting crazed

In the prior episode, we talked about the damage the distorted, divisive narrative of ‘John vs Paul’ has done to our world. In his 2013 song, “Early Days,” Paul McCartney testifies to the damage ‘John vs Paul’ has done to his own life.⁴

“Early Days” is one of Paul’s most confessional songs, and for me at least, one of the songs that’s the most painful to listen to. In it, Paul writes about the cost of a life spent carrying the weight of a mythological story that also happens to be the story of his early life with John. Raw and intentionally imperfect,⁵ haunted by the beautiful and terrible ghost of memory, Paul sings about walking the streets of Liverpool with John,”dressed in black from head to toe, two guitars across our backs... seeking someone who would listen to the music we were writing down at home.”⁶

What elevates “Early Days” beyond simple nostalgia is the tension between Paul’s quiet defiance and his vulnerability in sharing his pain so explicitly. There’s a tentativeness in his voice, as if he’s not sure he’ll be believed or if he’s allowed to tell the story he’s telling. Because despite the song’s protests to the contrary, ‘John vs Paul’ has in very real ways, taken this story from Paul.

In the final verse, which Paul has called “wildly defensive,” he warns us not to venture into the dangerous territory of thinking we understand his relationship with John — another iteration of the “don’t look here” fairy tale rule.

Now everybody seems to have their own opinion

Who did this and who did that

But as for me I don't see how they can remember

When they weren't where it was at

“It’s just this idea of people robbing your history from you,” Paul told an interviewer in 2013. “These people say who did this and who did that. Well, that is very definitely about people telling me what I did and what John did. And I think you know it was much more equal.”⁷

When Paul says, “I think you know it was much more equal,” he is, of course, referencing the angry, divisive false narrative of ‘John vs Paul.’ And more than that, the narrative of ‘John/more vs Paul/less.’

The answer to the ethics of restoring the possibility of Paul and John as lovers to the story — or at least the answer I’ve arrived at over the past three years of considering this question — is found in this ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative. And more specifically, in Paul’s experience of having carried the weight of this toxic, distorted narrative for most of his life, and perhaps especially in the years following John’s murder.

This is, as I mentioned, the episode that makes me lose sleep at night. Because if we’re going to explore the lovers possibility with any kind of integrity, there’s no way around visiting this difficult part of the story. But we’re going to venture into this difficult territory with extreme care and respect, and only as far as we need to, to find the answers we seek, and always with an awareness that we’re uninvited guests in the privacy of Paul’s innermost thoughts, at least when they’re expressed outside of his art.

So with all of that said, let’s open the door we’re not supposed to open, and see what we might find by way of an answer to the ethics of the lovers possibility. And to do that, we need to pick up the story of ‘John vs Paul’ where we left off — in the years following John’s Breakup Tour, as Paul built a new life with Linda and a new band with Wings.

These days, John features prominently in every interview Paul gives, but it wasn’t always so. Whatever his private thoughts about ‘John vs. Paul’, or about John, in the ‘70s, whole interviews went by without Paul even mentioning John’s name.

In the years after the breakup, while John was offering his version of events to what seemed like anyone with a microphone, Paul retreated to his farm in the Scottish countryside and remained mostly silent about all things Fab and about his relationship with John. Paul focused his attention — at least publicly — on rebuilding his career and his reputation and his pride in the shadow of ‘John/more vs Paul/less.”

John, too, went silent in the latter part of the ‘70s, retreating into the Dakota and offering virtually no interviews for several years following his Lost Weekend reconciliation with both Paul and Yoko.

With no new interviews and no new music from John, the ‘John vs Paul’ narrative subsided a bit during this period. Those Grail-phobic critics still slagged off Paul’s solo work, still called it all kinds of names that really meant soft. But their criticism fell off sharply with the stunning success of Band On the Run, and Paul’s having built Wings into the top touring act of the decade.

The ‘John vs Paul’ narrative was also blunted a bit by the fact that — strange as it sounds now — the world wasn’t thinking that much about the Fabs in the latter part of the ‘70s. The initial pain of the breakup had dulled to a chronic ache, and it would be years before we began to understand the unprecedented scope and scale of The Beatles’ influence on our world. In the second half of the ‘70s, The Beatles were largely viewed as — in John’s words — “just a band that made it very, very big, that’s all.”⁸

But that all changed in the fall of 1980. ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ flared back to life, when John returned to the interview circuit to promote his first new album in five years, Double Fantasy. This was big news, and of course, journalists — looking to sell some newspapers with some inflammatory “John vs. Paul” stories — picked up where they’d left off after the breakup, goading John with provocative questions about his relationship and rivalry with Paul.

And because his years as a househusband seemed to have done little to diminish John’s creative insecurity relative to Paul, John obliged the press with his usual — although somewhat tempered — references to Paul’s music as soft and insubstantial compared to John’s. In his promotional interviews for Double Fantasy, John compared Paul’s music to the popular folk music of John Denver⁹ and suggested that Paul’s last creative gasp of genius was 1969’s “Long and Winding Road,” the one and only instance I've found in which John explicitly denigrates Paul’s talent.¹⁰

In November of 1980, Paul was asked in an appearance on Good Morning America about John’s “Long and Winding Road” comment. Apparently not expecting the question, Paul is visibly uncomfortable as he gropes for an answer—

“Um… I don’t know, I can guess and stuff, you know, but I’ll tell you, after all of that stuff has sort of gone down over the years, I actually keep a bit quiet now, ’cause anything I say, he gets resentful of. So I don’t know really, I mean, uh… it’s just a weird one. I don’t quite know why he thinks like that. I mean, what do you do about that? I —I really just shut up these days. I think it’s the best policy.¹¹

Can we stop and let Paul's answer sink in for a moment? Because of the distorted ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative, Paul McCartney, of Lennon/McCartney, feels so disenfranchised from telling his own story — the story of Lennon/McCartney and The Beatles — that he declines to say anything at all in his own defence.¹²

A little more than a week after this interview, John was dead.

December 8, 1980 was, to grossly understate the most obvious possible thing, a very very bad day in Paul’s life. And it would be hubris of the most extreme kind to think we could ever fully understand Paul’s pain on that horrific day. But to even approach understanding it requires taking a closer look at how the world experienced John’s murder, relative to the distorted narrative of ‘John/more vs Paul/less.’

One of the predictable and probably inevitable effects of John’s murder was that he was instantly canonised into a secular saint. That’s not surprising, of course. Canonising John was an instinctive reaction to losing him so suddenly and violently, not to mention that tragic premature death in general lends an additional aura of power and glamour.¹³

But, of course John wasn’t just a celebrity who died a tragic and premature death. He was a Beatle — and for many people in thrall to ‘John/more vs Paul/less,’ he was the Beatle. And more than that, mythologically, John was the co-creator of the new world that had reshaped the riverbed of Western civilization. And creating new worlds is a job singularly reserved not for humans, but for gods. And that meant that the reaction to John’s death was a little different from the usual halo effect of the tragic and premature death of a celebrity.

Most of this canonisation was implicit, but it sometimes surfaced overtly. The most striking example I’ve found is a multi-page essay in a tribute magazine published shortly after John’s murder, in which the writer offers a blessing for John’s testicles, calls on him to heal drug-addicted kids from beyond the grave, and positions Yoko as the Virgin Mary giving birth to the second coming of Christ.¹⁴

I hope by now it’s obvious that I’m not sharing any of this to disparage John’s memory. Far from it. But I think even Grail-phobic Beatles writers know by now that John was no saint — and despite his hand in co-creating the new mythological riverbed of Western civilization, certainly not a god — any more than any artist is. And thankfully so.

There’s a reason there are no saints who are also great artists, and no great artists who are also saints. As with virtually all great artists who create personal work, much of the best of John’s work — and especially his solo work — is found in his stark and often brutally honest confessions of his flaws and vulnerabilities, and his willingness to explore the shadow side of his character, beginning with “I used to be cruel to my woman” in “Getting Better.” That line is powerful because of its raw honesty, and because it documents John’s lifelong journey and his struggle with his demons — which as he’s pointed out, is where his best work tends to be found.

And remember also that — as we’ve considered at length in this series — this is the same man who repeatedly expressed confusion and irritation that people would take his words in interview as the gospel truth, when he usually just said whatever was top of mind in the moment, regardless of whether it was true five minutes later, which as we know from prior episodes, it frequently wasn’t.

If there is an afterlife and if John is keeping up with what’s going on here on planet earth in his absence, I think it’s a safe bet he’s alternately amused and exasperated and sometimes pissed off (but also maybe secretly flattered) by our insistence in making him into a saint, when the power of his art and his persona is found in the exact opposite.

But none of that mattered much, in the global surge of grief in the aftermath of John’s murder.

During the ‘70s, John’s “I’m the only one allowed to say bad things about Paul, no one else can” that we talked about in the last episode was a bit of a hedge against the distorted ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative. But with John’s — and I can’t believe I’m saying this but — tempering voice now gone, and with John himself now replaced by “Saint John,” there was nothing to stop the ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative from amping up to even greater proportions.¹⁵

This also isn’t surprising, given we tend to miss what we’ve lost more than we value what we still have, and all the more so if the loss is unexpected. And still more if we already believe that what we lost is more important than what we still have — which ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ falsely led many people to believe, even before John’s murder.

In the wake of John’s murder, nothing but nothing would be allowed to step on John’s status as the fabbest, edgiest, most brilliant, most important Beatle — and certainly not the inconvenient reality that Lennon/McCartney was an equal partnership, and that half of that equal partnership was still very much alive.

And as we’ve seen, one of the devastating and catastrophic effects of ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ is that it seems to bring out the worst in people. And by far the most grotesque example of that is what was written in the aftermath of John’s murder by Village Voice senior editor Robert Christgau.

I’m not going to call Christgau’s exact words into being. I’m not even going to footnote them. So if you want them, you’ll have to find them on your own. For our purposes here, let’s just say Christgau shared his disappointment — in very specific and unambiguous language — that it was John instead of Paul who lost his life on that terrible day.¹⁶

Christgau’s words are not the words of a healthy person, and they’re certainly not the words of anyone who has any business telling anyone what to think and how to feel about art. And they weren’t an ill-considered outburst in a moment of pain and regretted in the moment after. They were written with deliberate intention and malice aforethought. The tribute article was published in the December 22 issue of the VIllage Voice — a full two weeks after John’s murder. And since there is, in print magazines, a lag between writing and publication, Christgau had at least a few nights to write his tribute, edit it, oversee the layout of it, and sleep on it. And as senior editor, he had full editorial control of his words. As such, there is no defence for what he chose to say.

But by far the most memorable words following John’s murder were the ones spoken by Paul himself, when a mob of reporters ambushed him outside the studio the day after John was murdered and proceeded to do what reporters tend to do in these situations — they shoved microphones in Paul’s face and demanded he perform his grief for the camera.

It went about as well as you’d think.

I won’t call Paul’s words into being either, because while they’re technically true, they’re not true in any meaningful way, when it comes to the depth of what Paul without a doubt felt in that moment. His refusal — and his inability — to formulate a sincere enough sound byte for how he felt about the murder of the man he’d loved since he was 15 years old is human and understandable, especially from someone who is deeply private about expressing his emotions anywhere outside of his art.¹⁷

But for many people, Paul’s words on that day provided what seemed absolute proof that the toxic breakup narrative was true, especially since it was interpreted in the most negative, most uncharitable possible way. If Paul cared so little about John’s murder as it seemed from that unfortunate sound byte, then clearly the bond between them had all been an act — Paul and John had never liked, much less loved, one another. Their relationship had indeed been just professional, all about competition and rivalry, rather than partnership and love. All the affection between them that we’d fallen in love with — those little glances over their shared microphone, their obvious joy in one another, both of them saying they planned to still be writing together when they were sixty-four — all performed for the cameras. None of it, real.¹⁸

It was the breakup wound all over again, but magnitudes worse. And it’s a wound that continues to bleed today, right alongside the original wound. There are still people right now — maybe even reading this — who are still angry with Paul for not performing his private grief to their satisfaction on that terrible day.

If I can pause here for a moment and offer some thoughts to anyone who is still angry about what Paul said to the press on that day—

I know those words hurt, and that they weren’t what you wanted — and needed — to hear. But however painful John’s murder was for you, there’s not a single person on the planet who was hurting more than Paul on that horrific day. And most of us will never have to face a mob of reporters when someone we’ve loved for most of our lives has just been murdered in cold blood, and — if Paul and John were a romantic couple — someone whom we aren’t permitted to grieve properly in public. What’s more, if any of us ever does have the extreme misfortune to be in that situation, our answer will likely be forgotten by the next news cycle. It won’t be held up for the rest of our lives as “proof” that we didn’t really love the person whose death we were grieving so deeply we could barely find the words to speak.

And it's worth mentioning, too, that it’s doubtful John would have handled that situation any better, if — as that angry, fearful Village Voice editor wished for — it had been Paul who’d been killed instead.

All of that said, in the end, nothing anyone said about anything changed the reality that John was gone. Now it was only Paul, and a toxic ‘John vs Paul’ narrative that had now become ‘Saint John vs. shallow, uncaring Paul.’

Paul had spent the ‘70s struggling with his grief over the breakup, struggling to claw his way out from under ‘John/more vs Paul/less.’¹⁹ Now he was forced to do it all over again in the most final of final ways, in being forced — with the eyes of the world on him, analysing the sincerity of his every word and gesture — to come to terms with the murder of the man he’d been deeply in love with for two decades, and unable to publicly acknowledge the nature and depth of that loss.

For a private person already uncomfortable with revealing his innermost feelings to the world, the days and weeks and months and years — and decades — after John’s murder must have been excruciating torment, the stuff of Paul’s worst nightmares.

The situation was made harder still, when the renewed interest in The Beatles as a result of John’s murder produced the first round of serious books and biographies about the band. And you probably won’t be at all surprised that — from what I can tell — every single one of those books was written by a Grail-phobic writer who unapologetically took John’s side in ‘John/more vs. Paul/less,’ and who diminished the strength of the bond between Paul and John to either “a professional relationship” or to not even liking each other at all.

We’re not going to talk about all of these books, but there are two that demand special mention.

In 1981, Philip Norman — of “immovable heterosexuality” fame — published Shout!, his biography of The Beatles. None of the four Beatles cooperated with Norman in its writing, and Shout! has the unfortunate distinction of having introduced the ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative to a new generation.

When I’ve said in the past that Philip Norman, along with Jann Wenner, is a principal architect of ‘John/more vs Paul/less,” it’s in large part because of the damage done by Shout!. Because even today, almost forty years later, Shout! (along with Norman’s other, only slightly less distorted biographies of John and Paul) still frequently appears on most of those lists of “best books about the Beatles.” I’m not going to quote from Shout! because I don’t want to give it more airtime than it‘s already had. But to give you an idea of the bias with which it’s written, as part of the promo for the book, Norman declared on national TV that “John was three-quarters of the Beatles.”²⁰

The second book that needs specific mention is the 1985 updated re-release of the originally officially sanctioned Beatles biography by Hunter Davies, originally published in 1967. The biography itself was written with the cooperation of all four Beatles, who signed off on its content, though not — as Davies explains in his introduction to the updated edition — without some sanitising.

But it’s the coda to the 1985 update that matters to our story here. Because in that coda, Davies shares the details of an hour-long private phone call with Paul that took place in May of 1981 — only six months after John’s murder — in which Paul confided to Davies his distress over the distorted ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative that was, in the wake of John’s murder, becoming so baked into the story of The Beatles that it had become canon.

“People are printing facts about me and John, “ Paul told Davies during that call. “They're not facts. But it will go down in the records. It will become part of history. It will be there for always. People will believe it all.”²¹

After Davies characterizes Paul's frustration with the distorted ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative as Paul “moaning” and “going on,” Davies concludes the call by making the suggestion that Paul write down “what he thinks” is the truth of his relationship with John. Not to publish, mind you, but to “stick it in a drawer and forget it.”²²

Meanwhile, while he was counseling Paul to put what Paul had just told Davies in a drawer and forget it, Davies himself then published his notes on the call, painting Paul’s emotional distress in a markedly uncharitable light — in not only a tabloid article entitled “The Private Pain of Paul McCartney,” (italics added) and then added it as a coda to the formerly-officially sanctioned biography of the band.

Given experiences like the phone call with Davies, along with the seemingly unstoppable momentum of ‘John more vs Paul/less’ in the aftermath of John’s murder, it’s not surprising that when Paul was asked in a 1984 Playboy interview if he felt able to talk about his partnership with John or John’s murder, Paul answered by saying, “It’s … it’s just too difficult … I feel that if I said anything about John, I would have to sit here for five days and say it all. Or I don’t want to say anything.”²³

In the years after the Playboy interview, Paul did nonetheless occasionally attempt to share his story about his partnership with John. But it didn’t go well, in part because in grief we are often our own worst enemy.

During the Beatle years, Paul had been near-flawless in his handling of the most intense and prolonged media spotlight that anyone had ever endured. He’d once been so confident in dealing with the press that he told off a German reporter who’d accused the Fabs of being snobby, and did such a masterful job of it that he earned the applause of the other reporters in the room.²⁴

But not surprisingly, given the crushing weight of the no-win ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ situation that Paul was struggling with, along with his grief over losing John, Paul’s interviews in the 1980s were often less than masterful.

Beneath the charming facade — which seems to be Paul’s coping mechanism as much as faux-masculinity and bluster is John’s — the pain is all too evident, if you’re fluent in the softer language of emotional subtext. Paul’s stress and discomfort — his hesitation, his fear of saying the wrong thing and making things worse, his apparent longing to be loved again like he’d been loved in the ‘60s — is heartrendingly difficult to witness.

But taking their cue from the Grail-phobic breakup narrative, much of the world saw something different. They saw Paul stumbling between defensiveness and something akin to desperation, too eager to please, tripping over his words, repeating himself, talking too fast and too much, and concealing all of it behind his facade of relentless positivity — which inevitably felt insincere because in important ways, understandably and heartachingly, it was. And it had to be—

—because even if Paul had felt comfortable sharing his innermost feelings with the world, how could he possibly articulate his love and grief for John to the broken, wounded “might makes right” world that had made it clear they preferred the narrative that John and Paul didn’t even like each other?

Most difficult of all to watch is how oblivious the interviewers seem to be to Paul’s pain, so willing to see what they expect to see — “Paul McCharmley,” always positive spin master extraordinaire, while oblivious to the pain and grief that was just beneath the surface and available for anyone to see — if only we would look with the softer gaze of the Grail.

Musically, Paul’s pushback against ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ wasn’t going well, either. In the years immediately following John’s murder, he continued to record and release music, but it would be thirteen years before he toured again.

Coming off the road for so long was a major setback, because live performance had always brought out the best of Paul’s rock-and-roll edge. And like many artists, Paul seems to be at his most alive when he’s performing live — which is probably why he was the last to vote to stop touring during the Fab years, and why he was the one during the Get Back sessions who was pushing the band to return to live performances.

But in the absence of his concerts to remind us otherwise, it wasn’t at all clear that the Paul of the 1980s even still had his rock-and-roll edge. The Paul McCartney of the 1980s was a jarringly long way from the Paul McCartney who’d whipped the world into erotic ecstasy by screaming ”Long Tall Sally” out to 35,000 fans at Shea Stadium, or the Paul McCartney who’d broken stadium attendance records in the ‘70s with the highest grossing concert tour of the decade.

In the wake of John’s death, that light had gone out, at least temporarily.

The groundbreaking, revolutionary artist who had rewritten the future of music by defying every rule now passively surrendered to the marketplace demands of mainstream ‘80s pop — no longer leading or even innovating, just trying to keep up. It didn’t suit him, and there’s no reasonable way it had anything to do with anything other than losing John. And to make things worse, all of it made for a tough sell that Paul had in fact once been an equal partner in creating the music that had sparked a world-changing revolution.

Paul’s creative choices were, of course, his to make, and he had every right to make them. We get to grieve in whatever way we need to. And just as had been the case after the breakup, Paul’s way of grieving always seems to include making and sharing music. And as we talked about in the prior episode, just like after the breakup, our expectations for Paul in the wake of John’s murder were unreasonably and cruelly out of proportion — when we expected that Paul should somehow manage to create at peak ability while struggling with a devastating personal loss. I doubt any of us in that situation — or John, for that matter — could have handled that pressure any better than Paul did.

But that didn’t change the reality that alongside “The Frog Chorus” and “Say Say Say” and “Ebony and Ivory,” Paul’s attempts to correct ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ were viewed as little more than a callous, manipulative — and most importantly — unearned power grab, an attempt to ret-con Lennon/McCartney into an equal partnership, which it increasingly seemed self-evidently not to have been.

The whole mess got bad enough that Paul confessed in a 1986 interview that at times he felt humiliated at feeling that he needed to justify still being alive²⁵ — the unspoken finish to that comment being, of course, “instead of John.” Do you doubt Paul read Christgau’s ‘why couldn't it have been Paul instead of John’ Village Voice editorial? I don't. Paul seems to have always read his own press, sometimes pouring over every word. And the press tends to forget — or just doesn’t care — that there are humans with the capacity to feel pain on the other end of their words.

Some of Paul’s feeling that he needed to apologise for being alive was almost certainly survivor’s guilt. In his song “Take It Away,” released a little over a year after John’s murder, Paul writes explicitly about the burden of being the lonely “sole survivor carrying the load” with “a hundred miles to go.” Despite the generally playful feel of the song, there’s a forced happiness in it, and a hint of mania in his voice as he sings the chorus that makes me wonder if there’s a double meaning in the title — a plea to whatever god he believes in to take the pain away.²⁶

In 1988, The Beatles were inducted into the newly-established Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Paul, George and Ringo were set to attend, along with Yoko representing John. It was, needless to say, going to be a big deal. But in a last minute change of plans — as in just before the ceremony — Paul released a statement citing the ongoing legal issues between himself, George and Ringo, and claiming he’d “feel like a complete hypocrite waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion."²⁷

Paul’s not attending the Hall of Fame ceremony reopened an old wound in a new way, when it came to the breakup.

John had acknowledged as far back as his 1970 interview with Jann Wenner that he, John, had been the one who’d broken up the band.²⁸ But the press and the world in general had blamed the breakup on Paul, because of Paul’s 1970 press release announcing his first solo album, McCartney.

The press release didn’t announce the breakup in so many words, but it may as well have. On his stark list of questIons and answers, it’s that one question — Do you see a time when Lennon-McCartney becomes an active songwriting partnership again? — and its one-word answer — No — in its cold-blooded finality, that broke our hearts. Because whatever else the press release claimed, no Lennon/McCartney means no Beatles.

In a 1986 interview with British GQ, Paul talks about the circumstances of the McCartney press release—

“I’ll tell you what was unfortunate was the method of announcing it all. I said to Peter Brown, I’ve got an album coming out called McCartney. And I don’t really want to see too much press. Can you do me some question-and-answer things? So he sent all those questions over and I answered them all... I see it now and shudder. At the time it was me trying to answer some questions that were being asked and I decided not to fudge those questions.”²⁹

In 1997, Paul was more candid about his feelings at the time (edited for length) —

“I didn't want to do a press conference to launch the album because whenever I'd meet a journalist, they always floored me with one question: they'd say, "Are you happy?"' and it almost made me cry. I just could not say, "Yes. I'm happy," and lie through my teeth, so I stopped doing interviews... I [told Peter Brown], "Okay, look, you write some questions that you think the press wants to know. Send 'em over to me and I'll fill it out but I can't face a press conference." So the questionnaire came, and Peter Brown realised that the big question was The Beatles, so he put in a couple of loaded questions and rather that just say, "I don't want to answer these," I thought, Fuck it. If that's what he wants to know, I'll tell him.”³⁰

The press release was, without question, a major miscalculation — the 1970 equivalent of breaking up with someone via social media. And things got worse when, in order to extricate The Beatles from shady manager Allan Klein, Paul had no choice but to file the formal divorce papers — a lawsuit against John, George and Ringo for the dissolution of the partnership.

The world, led by the press, reacted to all of this by putting the full weight of its collective grief — transmuted to anger — onto Paul as responsible for the breakup of the band. And this, of course, made it all too easy for the press and the public to believe John’s distorted breakup narrative, even without the hard/soft situation.

Paul’s refusal to attend the Hall of Fame ceremony in 1988 — and worse, his lawsuit-related reason for doing so — re-opened that wound. The occasion was to have been the first public appearance of all of The Beatles together— with Yoko standing in for John — since the Rooftop Concert. And Paul’s statement seemed to signal that he cared more about money and lawsuits and business than he did about his lifelong friends, about John, and about The Beatles and their place in history.

But as is often the case with this story, if we turn the soft gaze of the Grail onto Paul’s eleventh-hour refusal to attend the induction ceremony, things look a little different.

By the accounts of those in a position to know — meaning Paul, George and Ringo — the three were getting along just fine at the time of the Hall of Fame induction. And the lawsuit seems to have been more of a pro-forma situation than any kind of major new rift between them. In fact, Paul told interviewer Paul DuNoyer that when he told George and Ringo he wanted to come to the ceremony, but felt odd about doing so given the lawsuit, George responded by saying, “‘Sit tight, don’t rock the boat, don’t worry” — not exactly the sort of thing George would say in the middle of some kind of serious falling out over a lawsuit.³¹

In a talk show appearance not long after the ceremony, George — who never seems to have had a problem telling the world when he and Paul weren’t getting along — tells the host that he’s “the closest I've been with Paul now for say the last ten, twelve years.”³² And in a television appearance with Ringo around the same time, George tells the interviewer that although he and Paul didn’t get along “for about ten years” — which Ringo laughingly corrects to “ten minutes” — George adds, “I love Paul, he's my mate, and it doesn't matter what they say in the papers, [the press] is not going to get much mileage out of that one.”

And in the same interview, Ringo makes an elaborate point of seeking out the camera, looking directly into the lens, and telling Paul — twice — that both he and George love him. Much of their joint interview is George and Ringo playing around, but that moment does not feel playful. It feels very much like he and George are offering comfort and reassurance to a friend in distress.³³

None of this sounds at all like the dynamic Paul is describing as his reasons for not attending. So as usual, something doesn’t add up, between Paul’s very unlike-Paul refusal to attend the ceremony and George and Ringo making the rounds of the talk show circuit to emphasise how much they love Paul and how close they all are.

But looking at the situation with the soft gaze of the Grail, it’s probably self-evident why Paul would have been deeply ambivalent about attending, so much so that he withdrew at the last minute, despite having said he very much wanted to go—

And it goes back to Paul himself pointing out that the Hall of Fame ceremony would have been his first public appearance as a Beatle alongside his fellow Beatles since the Rooftop Concert in 1969. And that means it would also have been Paul’s first public appearance as a Beatle without John at his side.

Regardless of personal opinion about the legitimacy and value of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and I certainly have one, given the behind-the-scenes political games, the competitive/sports parallel, and who the founder is — it’s also true that seeing The Beatles’ names alongside the artists who originally inspired them to make music — artists like Elvis and Buddy Holly and Little Richard — would almost certainly have been a complicated tangle of emotions for Paul.

Paul’s description of wanting so very much to go and deciding at the last minute not to suggests the kind of agonizing decision that we make out of emotional necessity. And there’s little-to-no doubt that what Paul would have wanted more than anything that night would have been to go to that ceremony with John.

What if at the last minute, Paul felt it would be too painful to stand on a stage with George and Ringo — without John at his side — and especially given the significance of the moment, as their names were linked to those of their childhood heroes?

And more than that, what if Paul also feared being overcome with the emotion of that empty John-shaped space at his side? And what if he was afraid of saying the wrong thing again, when the press asked the inevitable questions — how does it feel to be here without John? What do you think John would say, if he were here today?

And even if Paul had somehow, against all odds, performed his feelings to the media’s satisfaction — this man who struggles to express his feelings outside of song on the best of days — the world would inevitably have micro-analyzed his every word and gesture for evidence of whether or not he really meant whatever he said. It would have been another painful, intrusive round of “did they even like each other?”

If there’s any validity to this line of reasoning — which, to be clear, is educated speculation, but speculation nonetheless — then of course Paul wouldn't have wanted to give his real reason for not attending — in part because it might have felt too revealing, and in part because it might not even have been believed, in 1988, when the ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative was at its most vicious and unforgiving. And in part because maybe he wasn’t even entirely conscious of that as the reason and allowed himself to invent a made-up — and obviously bogus — reason not to attend. That’s the sort of thing people who have trouble expressing their emotions — even to themselves — often do.

Again, this is speculation, but it’s far more consistent with what we know about Paul, George and Ringo in 1988, and with what actually happened on that night and afterwards, than the official story is. And it’s another small example of how the lovers possibility resolves inconsistencies in the story as it’s currently told, because — again, if this speculation is valid — Paul’s eleventh-hour decision not to attend, almost a decade after John’s murder, is far more consistent with grief at losing a lover and a life partner than a friend.

The larger point here is that whatever he chose to do relative to the Hall of Fame induction, it was a case study in the damage done by the distorted ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative — which is why we took time to step through it in detail.

Paul was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. If he’d gone to the ceremony, he’d have subjected himself to an intense onslaught of media pressure — not the pressure of the day John was murdered, but not that far off, either, given it would have been the first “Beatles reunion” since the breakup. But by not attending, Paul gave those who were already on the John side of ‘John vs Paul’ more reason to feel as they did, and thus both the ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ and the ‘Saint John vs cold, uncaring Paul’ narratives notched another win, when the press inevitably criticized Paul for not attending, without a thought to the no-win situation he was in — a situation that the press themselves had created.

As you’ve probably deduced from all of this, when it comes to the story of The Beatles, the ‘80s started out bleak and stayed that way — and we’ve only hit the highlights, or rather the lowlights.

But by the first half of the 90s, Paul appeared to have regained his creative confidence.

He started the new decade with his promising though ill-fated collaboration with Elvis Costello — which Paul seems to have ended because it reminded him too much of working with John.³⁴ He followed that up with a successful, high-profile 1991 appearance on MTV Unplugged. And he was commissioned to write his first long-form classical piece, Liverpool Oratorio, which had its premiere at the Liverpool Cathedral and reached number one on the classical charts in the UK and the US.

In the early ‘90s, Paul also began another, more enduring collaboration with experimental rock producer Youth. Over the next decade, they released three electronica albums as the Fireman (a reference to Penny Lane). All three albums became underground darlings — though unfortunately, since they were released under a pseudonym, most people missed them entirely, even after Paul acknowledged the Fireman’s true identity.³⁵ But lest you think this marked some sort of sea change, as per usual, once they knew who was behind them, the ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ critics, including our friend at the Village Voice, went out of their way to pan them.

By the mid-1990s, Paul — along with George and Ringo — had evidently had enough of other people telling their story for them and doing it badly. And so it was that “The Threetles” (Threatles?) reunited and set out to finish the documentary that was started and abandoned in the early ‘70s, when everyone was too angry and brokenhearted to work on it. Titled Anthology, it was to be their story, told entirely from their point of view — the Word of God carved on stone tablets and sent down from on high to lead the faithful out of the wilderness of confusion.³⁶

By Paul’s own account, Anthology — and more specifically, working on the two new tracks, Free As A Bird and Real Love — re-awakened something in Paul. Working alongside George and Ringo, and perhaps even more than that, collaborating across time with John via that cassette of half-finished songs inspired Paul to be Paul McCartney again.³⁷

What followed was one of Paul’s most beloved and critically-acclaimed solo albums, Flaming Pie.

Like “Early Days,” the title song of the album is a song about, well, the early days. But in “Flaming Pie,” the hesitation of “Early Days” is replaced by a resurgence of Paul’s legendary McCartney confidence.

“Flaming Pie” addresses itself directly to John and his story about how the name “Beatles” had come to be.³⁸ “Go ahead, have a vision,” Paul taunts in the hook of the song, “I’m the man on the flaming pie.” I’m the reason it all happened just as much as you are, John, and fuck anyone who says otherwise, including you.

Paul’s angry at John, of course he is, even as he’s fond — and that anger is often obvious in the interviews in the years after John’s murder, albeit subtly. Angry for the breakup and “we never even wrote together,” for Yoko,” for “How Do You Sleep?”,³⁹ for getting stuck in New York, for not coming to New Orleans, for dying just when they were starting over and leaving him alone to deal with the fucked-up ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ aftermath, and for the pain that comes with loving so deeply a wounded, iconoclastic, drug-addicted genius with serious impulse control problems.

And on the title song of Flaming Pie, Paul’s not stuffing that anger down, even as he's doing it with a wink and a nod. And if there’s any justice at all in the world, when Paul recorded it, Saint John the Perpetually Fab smiled down from the Great Beyond and shouted back, “About fuckin’ time, Macca!”

The critics and the public agreed⁴⁰ —Flaming Pie, the album and the song, was an unqualified triumph. Paul McCartney was back.

I took the time to tell you about “Flaming Pie” this way because we've been talking about painful things and we have painful things yet to talk about. And somehow in the middle of all that pain, there’s this line — this simultaneously angry and joyful and confident line that turns “Flaming Pie” into a healing song — hopefully for Paul and maybe for John, and for sure for everyone bleeding from the wound of the breakup and John’s murder, which is all of us.

But this is not a “happily ever after” in our story, because the disciples of ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ didn’t give up so easily — they have too much at stake. Acknowledging his genius as a songwriter and his talent as an artist was one thing, but when it came to Paul’s relationship with John, the accusations of revisionism were harder to get rid of — because those accusations were and still are— as we’ve talked about — rooted in the fear of softness. And fear of any kind doesn’t go away that easily, especially with that being the only story told in the mainstream Beatles world for the past fifty years.

And so it was that — maybe because of his work on Anthology — Paul finally decided to take part of Hunter Davies’ advice and tell his story of his relationship with John — or at least the part of the story he wanted to, and felt he could, share at the time. But Paul didn’t, as Davies had suggested, “stick it in a drawer and forget it.” Instead, he chose to tell his story by contributing to the first major biography of his life, written by long-time friend and Sixties icon Barry Miles.

Many Years From Now was published in 1997, almost exactly a year after the release of Anthology. Miles is credited as the sole author, but the book’s extensive use of direct quotes from Paul — sometimes several pages long —and his sign-off on the final version, as confirmed to me by Barry Miles via email — have the net effect of making Many Years From Now into Paul’s quasi-memoir of his Beatles years.⁴¹

The back cover of Many Years From Now features a quote from Paul—

I'd like to say this is just as I remember it, if it hurts anyone or any families of anyone who's got a different memory of it. Let me say first off, before you read this book even, that I loved John. Lest it be seen that I'm trying to do my own kind of revisionism, I'd like to register the fact that John was great, he was absolutely wonderful and I did love him. I was very happy to work with him and I'm still a fan to this day. So this is merely my opinion. I'm not trying to take anything away from him. All I'm saying is that I have my side of the affair as well, hence this book.⁴²

Emboldened by his reclaimed creative confidence, Paul was once again pushing back directly against the toxic ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative. But the damage lingered, and the confidence of Flaming Pie is notably absent in this mission statement of Many Years From Now. Paul’s words are tentative, as if yes, he has the right to tell his story, but he still doesn’t want to impose by telling it — that “all he’s saying” is that this is “merely his opinion” about his own life.

But he does tell his story. For all that Barry Miles is the biographer-of-record, Paul offers an extended version of the back cover quote in the book’s acknowledgements in which he overtly tells us that, yes, this is him telling his life story directly. In that passage, he explicitly pushes back against ‘John/hard vs Paul/soft’—

“When George Harrison wrote his life story, I Me Mine, he hardly mentioned John. In my case I wouldn't want to leave him out. John and I were two of the luckiest people in the twentieth century to have found each other. The partnership, the mix, was incredible. We both had submerged qualities that we each saw and knew. I had to be the bastard as well as the nice melodic one and John had to have a warm and loving side for me to stand him all those years. John and I would never have stood each other for that length of time had we been just one-dimensional.”

The centrepiece of Many Years From Now is a lengthy chapter documenting Paul’s involvement with the avant garde counterculture of Sixties London and the ways in which that involvement inspired The Beatles’ music. It’s a chapter Barry Miles was well-qualified to write, because it’s in large part his story, too. Among other things, Miles was the co-founder, along with John Dunbar, of the International Times, remembered by those in a position to know as Europe’s first countercultural newspaper. Miles was also, along with Dunbar, the founder of the Indica Bookshop & Gallery, where John first encountered Leary’s Psychedelic Experience and where — so the story goes — he first met Yoko.⁴³

Paul had finally told his story — or at least part of it — but it wasn’t going to be that easy to undo the damage of ‘John/more vs Paul/less.’

The reaction to Many Years From Now was about what you’d expect from the disciples of the distorted breakup narrative — essentially, don’t confuse us with facts, we’ve already made up our minds. The ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ writers who continued to control the narrative (and still do to this day) branded the book as little more than self-serving revisionism — Paul’s attempt to style himself as John’s artistic equal when “everyone” knew he was just the “cute Beatle” sidekick to the great master himself.

Many Years From Now also reignited Paul’s cold war with Yoko, which seems to have simmered down somewhat before and during the making of Anthology — at least enough for Yoko to have provided the demos for the Anthology project.⁴⁴

But when it came to Many Years From Now, Yoko was — predictably, as we talked about in the “immovable heterosexuality” Rabbit Hole — not at all happy about Paul having presented Lennon/McCartney as an equal partnership. And of course, the press was eager to hear her thoughts — but, given the whole Yoko-as-oracle perception, what they interpreted as John's thoughts — on the whole situation.

As we talked about last week, in the wake of John’s murder, the press and the public had — bizarrely — implicitly begun to treat whatever Yoko said about what John had thought or felt as if it was coming directly from John himself — as if Yoko was somehow channeling John from beyond the veil. And a side effect of this was that because the distorted breakup narrative anointed John as the truth teller and sole genius of The Beatles — and because that perception was canonised into holy scripture when John was murdered — the Beatles world began taking Yoko’s words about all things Beatles as immutable truth, in the same way it took John’s words as immutable truth.⁴⁵

As if she had been a Beatle herself and had been there from the start, Yoko suggested that Paul was in effect suffering delusions of grandeur by confusing making phone calls to schedule studio time with actual creative work. “John did not make the phone calls,” Yoko declared. "He was not on that level as a leader — he was on the level of a spiritual leader. He was the visionary and that is why The Beatles happened.”

Putting aside that Yoko seems to know an awful lot about the private creative processes of a band she claimed not to have ever even heard of when she first met John in 1966,⁴⁶ she then went on to suggest that Paul was having trouble coming to terms with being Salieri to John’s Mozart — the reference being the 1984 movie Amadeus, in which court composer Antonio Salieri is a second-rate wanna-be consumed by jealousy at Mozart’s genius.⁴⁷

Yoko obviously has no standing to make pronouncements on what happened in studio sessions she wasn’t present for, recording music she wasn’t present for the writing of, with a band she wasn’t a member of, during a time when she hadn’t even met John — but that didn’t matter even a little bit to the press, which happily printed her comments as re-affirmation of their own ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ point of view.

As we talked about in the prior Rabbit Hole, I’m aware that for some of you, criticising Yoko in any way is de facto off limits. But again, just because someone has also been the victim of sexism and racism doesn’t make everything they do above reproach, and it doesn’t make every criticism of them sexist or racist. Sometimes stories are different from what we’d wish them to be, and again, I can’t protect Yoko from her own words, or from the jealousy that so obviously motivates them.

And while she has also sometimes been gracious in her words to Paul,⁴⁸ when it comes to the distorted narrative, these quotes (and others like them) make it pretty clear that Yoko is at or near the top of the list of people who have done damage in Paul’s life and to the story as a whole — especially since they’re often seen as reflecting John’s point of view. And if we’re going to tell this story in a more truthful way than it’s been told in the past, then I can’t make all of that less true than it is, just because it would be more politically correct to do so.

But back to Many Years From Now.

The chapter on Paul’s involvement with the avant garde didn’t go over with the ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ faction. But what really twisted people’s knickers was Barry Miles taking Paul through the entire Lennon/McCartney catalogue and asking Paul who wrote what in each song. And especially irritating to, well, almost everyone, actually, was the use of percentages to do this — as in, “I wrote X percent of this song and John wrote Y percent of that song.” And it didn’t help that this was done against the backdrop of Paul’s increasing preoccupation with reversing the credit order on songs he’d contributed more to than John had — most notably, of course, “Yesterday.”

And look, I get why it doesn’t sit right — this credit thing, this whole percentages situation. It goes back to our Rabbit Hole on the ‘entangled form’ of Lennon/McCartney, and how in a very real way, there’s no such thing as a ‘John song’ or a ‘Paul song.’

We talked in some detail about this part of Many Years From Now in that Rabbit Hole, but the short version is that even if it were possible to sort out who wrote what, which in an intimate, long-term partnership it isn’t, “who wrote what” takes us inside something that’s arguably more magickal not to be inside of — the intimate, ineffable creative process of Lennon/McCartney, guitars and notepad on those hotel room beds, staring into each other’s eyes as they search their connected minds for the music that only they hold the keys to unlock in one another. Not to mention, if they were writing those songs for and about each other, that process was likely even more intimate than we’ve understood up till now.

Instead, the percentages reduced the mysterious, alchemical magick of Lennon/McCartney to a sterile mathematical formula. Worse, that Paul seemed able to offer such precise percentages made it seem as if all the while, he’d been keeping score, secretly logging the details of all those intimate songwriting sessions in a little ledgerbook, like some kind of creative miser hoarding credit against the day when he could tell the world who really wrote all those songs.

It was not, as they say, a good look.

I think it’s safe to say this is not at all what Paul intended — and I also get why the credit order bothers him so much. After decades of being bludgeoned by ‘John/more, Paul/less,’ the opportunity to set the record straight would have been hard for anyone with any kind of functional creative ego to resist.

But remember from the “entangled form” Rabbit Hole, those same critics who accused Paul of credit-grabbing conveniently overlooked that John had done exactly the same thing (minus the actual percentages) in his last major interview.

In 1980, seventeen years prior to Many Years From Now, journalist David Sheff took John through almost every song in the Lennon/McCartney catalogue and asked him who wrote which part of it — exactly as Barry Miles did with Paul. What’s more, as we talked about in the Rabbit Hole, despite close to two decades between the 1980 interview and Many Years From Now, John and Paul agreed on “who wrote what” for almost every song.

By now, you probably won’t be surprised that John got virtually no pushback at all for his “who wrote what” interview. Part of this was no doubt because the interview was published literally the same day he was murdered, and obviously no one was going to say anything about that kind of thing at the time — and rightly so.

But I suspect even had that awful day never happened, there still wouldn't have been much, if any, backlash towards John for his “who wrote what” interview. From the breakup on, ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ meant that John (and Yoko on John’s behalf) was and is allowed to say whatever he chose about Lennon/McCartney — and to be believed when he said it — and Paul simply wasn’t, and in too many people’s minds, still isn’t.

It was a tidy little trap that the press set for Paul, with no way out. If Paul said nothing in his own defence, the ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative did its damage unimpeded. If Paul pushed back, he was accused of attempting to distort the story in his favour, in the absence of John there to provide the “truth.”

It would almost certainly have been far better for everyone, including Paul and John, if they’d both protected the impenetrable mystique of their partnership and honored the Lennon/McCartney credit by refusing to tell us who wrote what — and even better if they’d acknowledged that the “entangled form” of their partnership meant every song belonged in an important way to both of them.

Can we take a minute — before we continue — to imagine how even more extraordinary this story would have been, had both John and Paul held fast to the magick and not allowed their demons to overcome the better angels of their nature. If instead, when asked who wrote what, they’d simply said, “It was Lennon/McCartney. We wrote those songs together.”

Imagine the influence that might have had on a generation teetering on the brink, choosing between the competition of the Lance and the cooperation of the Grail as the Love Revolution hung in the balance. Given the unprecedented scale of The Beatles’ influence, Paul and John’s modeling of what partnership looks like and what it can accomplish might well have changed everything.

But of course, that’s not what happened, because understandably but unfortunately, in the wake of the breakup, neither Paul nor John have been especially good at listening to the angels of their better natures when it comes to talking about their partnership. Instead, John’s 1980 interview and Paul’s percentages ended up being just another iteration of the toxic narrative of ‘John vs Paul’ — thus further devolving the most revolutionary and consequential creative collaboration in history into ‘mine vs yours” instead of “ours.”

Things are better now, relative to ‘John vs. Paul.” Paul is, finally, rightfully, and near-universally acknowledged for both his genius and his equal stature as one-half of Lennon/McCartney. I’ve seen frequent mentions of Paul as the greatest composer of the 20th century, and frequent mentions of his name in the same breath as Beethoven and Mozart — which is all the more reason why it matters that we understand, as much as we can, this art and this artist, and the way that art was created.⁴⁹

But to this day, those books by those Grail avoidant writers still top the lists of “best books about The Beatles.” And there are still those who accuse Paul of “revisionist history” whenever he tells his own story and the story of his partnership with John, without understanding that the actual revisionist history was the tragic choice by those original writers to strip the love and partnership out of the story.⁵⁰

Those believers in the toxic breakup narrative are still the loudest and most obnoxious voices on social media, getting angry at the mere suggestion that Lennon/McCartney was a pairing of equals, too fearful of the Grail to be willing to see that the original story — the true story — and the world-changing power of the music has always been about partnership, collaboration and love.

That’s how this broken story has broken us, that there is anger at the suggestion of collaboration over competition, that there are significant numbers of people who prefer a bitter rivalry over a joyful and loving partnership — their fear driving them to choose “might makes right” over the better and more inclusive world offered by the Love Revolution that The Beatles sparked and shaped.

And obviously over the past fifty years, no one has carried the weight of that toxic narrative of ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ more directly and more personally than Paul McCartney.

"He loved as loud as he could in a world that wanted a love like theirs to be silent." — Beatles countercultural writer⁵¹

I realise that for many of you, the first part of this episode — which is the whole of episode 1:8 — has been difficult to read. It was difficult to research, write and record. But I took us through all of this in detail because I needed us — as much as anybody who isn’t Paul McCartney can — to have a felt sense of the pain the distorted breakup narrative has caused Paul over the past five decades.

Empathy and compassion are part of the language of the Grail, and there hasn't been much of either in the telling of this story in the mainstream Beatles world over the years — for either Paul or John. It’s easy to forget that even beyond the mythological damage, real people are hurt by the collective obsession with ‘John vs Paul.’

And more than that — given that the central ethical question regarding the lovers possibility turns on the right of Paul and John to tell their own story, I needed for us to have a felt experience and understanding of how it might feel for Paul to have spent the past forty years fighting for the right to tell his own story.

We have arrived at the deeper door in the fairy tale that we’ve been warned not to open. Because to understand the ethics of restoring the lovers possibility requires making a speculative — and hopefully Grail-fluent — guess about Paul’s motivation for, so far at least, having chosen not to tell his story about his relationship with John — if there is a story to tell, of course. And the clues to that motivation are found less in Paul’s lyrics, and more in the perilous and private landscape of Paul’s innermost thoughts, beyond what he’s invited us to notice in his songs.

This is what we’ve been leading up to since the first episode of Beautiful Possibility. It’s the reason for Beautiful Possibility existing in the first place. And it’s also the part of all of this that makes me lose sleep at night — because if I’m wrong about the rest of this episode, then I’m really wrong in ways that Paul will probably be less than happy about.

And yet the rules of mythology and fairy tales are clear on this point. The one place we’ve been warned to stay away from is inevitably the one place we must go — because mythologically and psychologically, what’s behind that locked door in all those fairy tales is the forgotten, neglected part of ourselves, waiting for us to pay attention to its pain and thus to tend to our deepest wounds, for everyone wounded by the story as it's currently told, and maybe even including Paul.

Let’s step through this carefully, because it’s delicate.

Without question, Paul and John have the right to tell — or not tell — their own story. And if they were indeed a romantic couple, then Paul has a beautiful and deeply consequential, if also painful, love story to tell.

And because the ‘John vs Paul’ narrative has compromised Paul’s right to tell his own story, if Paul wants to tell that story — and yes, I’m aware that’s still a big “if” —the reality is that as we’ve seen, without John at his side to confirm it, a sizable portion of the Beatles establishment — the portion that still controls the narrative — simply would not believe him, because their fear of softness would not allow them to believe him. It’s the same fear of softness that makes so many of them announce so conclusively that John and Paul could not possibly have been lover, despite being in no position at all to make that statement.

This is why the question of ethics is more complicated than it seems, and why it took us until now to be able to answer it. If my work on this series is even close to accurate — and that too is an “if” — the answer to the ethics of restoring the lovers possibility to the story is not subjective. It’s not opinion. It’s just cause and effect.

If John and Paul were lovers, and if Paul told that story, he would almost certainly be once again accused of self-serving revisionism. Not by everyone, probably not even by the majority. But by the fearful and often-bullying and disproportionately vocal minority that still controls the narrative in both the popular imagination and in formal scholarship. This angry, vocal minority who can still barely wrap their mind around the two of them even liking each other — much less being in love, much less acting on that love — would protest that claiming that he and John were lovers is nothing more than a self-serving and desperate gambit by Paul to try to make his relationship with John into more than it was.

And it’s at least possible that the Grail-phobic writers know this. That might be why — consciously or not — they work so hard to distort the narrative away from the lovers possibility, so as not to open the door for Paul to be believed, should he choose to tell his story.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of Grail-fluency to understand — again, if there’s truth to the lovers possibility — that Paul might be especially reluctant to share more openly his love for John, given that doing so would again make him vulnerable — and in the most personal and intimate way possible — to that pain that he’s spent so many years suffering under the weight of, especially when he’s fought so hard and for so long to get past the worst of it, and when he’s finally reclaimed his rightful place in the story as John’s equal creative partner.

And it’s a bit worse than that, even.

Paul McCartney shouldn’t need to prove anything to anyone at this point, least of all the truth of his own story. But because of the whole revisionism situation, without John to back him up, he’d likely be called on by that angry, fearful minority to produce some kind of “proof.” And to do that he’d have to violate that private shoebox of memories — again, assuming there is one — by making public their love letters or photographs or recordings or maybe an engraved piece of jewelry that he’d prefer to keep private, and that he has every right to keep private and should not need to produce, to be believed about a story he knows better than anyone — because it’s his.

Can you feel how painful that would be for Paul, if he shared his and John’s love story, only to be disbelieved because John can’t be here to stand beside him as he tells it. And if he were forced to violate his private shoebox of memories to prove that love. That would be yet another wound on top of a grievous wound on top of a grievous wound.

If John and Paul were a romantic couple, it’s the same double bind as with ‘John/more vs Paul/less.’ If Paul says nothing, he loses the right to love and to grieve John openly — and his and John’s truer and more beautiful story is lost to history. But if Paul tells that story — again if there is a story to tell— he opens himself up once again to the revisionism accusations that were so painful that he once felt he had to justify even being alive.

It’s a cruel trap, and all of us who ever believed any portion of the distorted breakup narrative had a hand in setting it. And that trap is my reason for writing this series. Because it might not be an inescapable one. Because here’s the thing—

If the lovers possibility is already viewed as credible independently of anything Paul says about it, and if Paul then chooses to tell that story, he’s far less likely to be accused of revisionism. And if it’s widely understood that the lovers possibility is credible based on what we know about the story already from the existing research, then Paul wouldn’t need to violate his shoebox of memories to prove it, because he’s just confirming what we already know might be true.

Or to put it more simply, what I'm saying is that If John and Paul were lovers, and if Paul wants to tell that story, we may need to tell it first.

The ethical objection that we can’t talk about the possibility that Paul and John were lovers because it’s Paul and John’s story to tell fails to factor in the ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative, and thus gets the situation exactly backwards. Again, if my analysis and research over the past three years is even close to accurate — and again, that’s an “if” — it's by continuing to leave the lovers possibility out of the story — as a possibility, not a certainty — that we continue to take away Paul and John’s right to tell that story.

Put another way, including the lovers possibility in the story doesn’t take away Paul’s right to tell his story, it restores it. Acknowledging that the lovers possibility is legitimately credible based on what we already know frees Paul to tell his story fully, in any way he wants, without fear of revisionist accusations.

The mythological frame for all of this is, I believe, accurate and important. And as a mythologist, I obviously also think it’s beautiful, and I hope at least some of you think so, too. And it gives us a frame on which to hang all of this. But the reason Beautiful Possibility exists is to show that the lovers possibility is credible — not proven, not “for sure,” but simply credible as a possibility — and thus to restore Paul’s right to tell his own story his own way — again, if there is a fuller story and if he chooses to tell it — without being brutally trapped in the revisionism problem.

And this is why I made the difficult and kind of terrifying choice not to reach out to Paul in advance of publishing this series. But really, why I couldn't reach out to Paul first, if I wanted this work to do good in the world rather than harm.

In the course of my research, I’ve been offered several opportunities to connect with Paul. I’ve carefully not pursued those opportunities — even though, as you might imagine, I very much would have preferred to, because the absolute last thing in the world I want to do is to hurt Paul McCartney.

And not hurting Paul means — paradoxically — that at least the first part of this series — and maybe all of it, I haven't yet fully figured that part out — had to be written and released into the world with absolutely no contact whatsoever with Paul, which meant risking his displeasure by not seeking his blessing.

If you have a good head for strategy, you might already see why I couldn't ask Paul for his blessing in advance, and why this is the source of my sleepless nights — because, again, if I'm wrong about this, then I’m really wrong about this, and that means I will have majorly overstepped Paul’s explicit ground rules about exploring his private life. But given what's at stake, for the chance to heal this story, for all of us, and for Paul and for John, it seems worth the risk. And if nothing else, if I’m wrong, at least I’ll have been a fool for love. I can’t think of anything better to be a fool for.

If you're sceptical, at the risk of too much meta, let’s game it out.

If there is truth to the lovers possibility, we’ve already established that Paul probably can't tell that story until someone else does, if he doesn’t want to be accused of revisionism and wants to be believed and doesn’t want to have to violate his “shoebox of memories” to prove it.

So the next logical step would seem to be for Paul to share his story with someone else and ask them to write it instead. Maybe a trusted friend who could be relied upon to tell it accurately and without the bias of the distorted narrative — like Barry Miles did as the writer-of-record for Many Years From Now.

But that’s not actually the next most logical step, because no matter who Paul asked to tell his story on his behalf — and perhaps especially if it was a trusted friend — Paul would be risking the same backlash that happened with Many Years From Now, when he was accused of manipulating the story “behind the scenes” by getting Barry Miles to do the supposed-revisionism on Paul’s behalf.

To avoid this problem, whoever establishes the credibility of the lovers possibility needs to — at least initially — do so without any participation at all from Paul, including Paul not having any advance knowledge at all about the project. And more than that, ideally it’s someone who has no connection to Paul at all, someone who has never even spoken to Paul, not even to ask for his blessing, or tacit permission, or a wink, or a nod, or anything whatsoever.

So to sum up, the only way that the lovers possibility can be established as credible — and thus the only way for Paul to be able to safely tell his story (if there is a story to tell) — is for someone who is not Paul and who has never met or spoken with Paul to first show that it’s credible. And since no one else seemed willing to be the first to do that, I decided it might as well be me.

All of this is why, before telling the story through the frame of the lovers possibility, as we’ll do in the next parts of the series, we took so much time in the first part of Beautiful Possibility to establish the credibility of the lovers possibility, and to do a deep dive into the history of the distorted breakup narrative and ‘John/more vs Paul/less,’ and into the ethics of writing the lovers possibility, and also why it matters. All of that is intended to begin the work of clearing the way for Paul to tell his story — if he chooses to, and if there is a story to tell.

This is why it matters so much that those of you who are connecting with Beautiful Possibility share it not just within the counterculture (where everyone already knows the lovers possibility is credible), but even more importantly, in the mainstream, where people either don’t know about the lovers possibility, or — because of the distorted narrative — don’t believe it’s credible.

Sharing the credibility of the lovers possibility in the mainstream is how we clear the way for Paul — because we all know by now that the Grail-phobic mainstream Beatles writers are not going to make room in the story for the lovers possibility, because of their fear of softness and their lack of Grail fluency and because they have too much vested in the distorted narrative.

If we want to fully restore Paul’s right to tell his own story, it’s up to those of us who have done the research on the lovers possibility to show the rest of the world that it’s credible — and that it’s beautiful and ethical and that it matters, all things we’ve (hopefully) established in part one of Beautiful Possibility.

And ideally, for all of this to go a bit faster — which is maybe important — it wouldn't just be Beautiful Possibility talking aboveground about the lovers possibility.

This is a big part of why I’m doing my best to coax those of you who are doing such extraordinary and groundbreaking work on this in the Beatles counterculture to publish aboveground with your own names and credentials, on mainstream platforms where people can find your work, and where people will view it as credible when they do. That’s how we establish the credibility of the lovers possibility and that’s how we clear the way for Paul to tell his story. We do it together, and we do it now, right away.

By going first, as an example, and publishing this series under my own name on a credible, mainstream platform, I’m hoping to show you that the world won’t end if you do the same. And so far so good — fingers crossed and knock on wood — though I suspect this episode will test that state of things, hence the whole losing sleep situation. So I suppose we’ll all have to see what happens next.

All of this is, obviously, something of a leap of... well, faith. And I’m fortunate to be in a position to be able to take that leap, and more than willing to do so. But we’re not quite done — because the really big hitch in the giddyup, as my actual Texas grandmother actually did say, is that if Paul and John were a romantic couple, how do we know Paul wants to tell us that story? Because if he doesn’t, we’re right back where we started, with it not being anyone else’s story to tell.

Over the past weeks, we’ve looked at a lot of the apparent clues that Paul and John seem to have left as breadcrumbs, relative to their relationship. But even so, obviously we have no way to know for certain whether Paul wants to tell his story of him and John, any more than we can know for certain whether there is a story to tell. And to add to the complicated ethical calculus, it’s not like I can ask him directly, even if he’d tell me, which of course he probably wouldn’t — even if he knew and trusted me, which he doesn’t — because that would take us back to the whole “secret revisionism” problem.

As with the question of whether they were a romantic couple, when it comes to the question of whether Paul wants to tell the story of him and John, I can only rely on my own fluency in the language of the Grail, when considering what he’s got up to for the past few years—

And what a past few years they’ve been. This might be the best time since being there in real time to experience this story and this music.

Since 2016, we’ve been treated to the Super Deluxe reissues and Giles Martin/Sam Okell remixes, Ron Howard’s documentary on the touring years and the restored re-issue of Live at the Hollywood Bowl, Get Back (though we still very much need the director’s cut), the Beatles ‘64 documentary, Paul’s Lyrics book and podcast, his Eyes of the Storm photography book and exhibition, and his virtual duet with John on the Got Back tour. And of course, the (maybe) “last Beatles song,” “Now and Then.”

This abundance of Fab treasure is largely thanks to Paul’s outsized work ethic, along with his loving and steadfast commitment to caretaking The Beatles’ legacy — and of course, by extension, his own legacy, and understandably so. It's the natural sort of thing a man of stature does in this phase of his life.

But I think maybe there’s something else happening here, too.

In 2016, Apple produced the feature-length documentary, Eight Days a Week, about the touring years, 1964 through 1966. Here’s director Ron Howard, talking about his pre-production process—

“The only request that came to me was from Paul McCartney. In a phone call he said, “you know, if we’re looking at the touring years, I would just like you to view the relationship that John and I had through that lens. I’ve only begun to do this in the last few years. I’ve seen a couple of YouTube videos that fans made that just reminded me of how good friends we were. There’s so much acrimony that came later that continues to reverberate, it even colours my thinking today if I allow it. But I’ve begun to separate that from these years that you are going to be making a film about, and it’s the only thing that I’d ask you to try and search out and find.”⁵²

Over the past few years, I’ve watched many of the YouTube videos Paul is referring to — for pleasure and as part of researching this series. While some of them do focus on “bromance” type friendship and love, the vast majority focus fairly obviously on Paul and John as a romantic couple — soundtracked to classic love songs and including lots of hearts and featuring a collection of those photos and videos that we talked about in a prior episode — of the two of them gazing at each other, brushing hands, sitting right up against one another, in each other’s laps and back pockets.

Now, I wasn’t researching the lovers possibility in 2016, and maybe things were different back in those long-ago days of yore. But I doubt it, given that the online JohnandPaul community dates back to long before 2016.

Still, maybe Paul somehow only found the bromance videos and not the far more numerous videos that make the lovers possibility abundantly clear, though the numbers and YouTube’s “watch next” algorithm make this unlikely. Or maybe Paul is so clueless about all of this that he watched the more romantic videos and somehow missed the iconography — though I have a hard time believing that Paul McCartney, who's written many of the world’s most iconic love songs, could for even a moment be that emotionally illiterate, especially when it comes to John.

What Paul’s phone call to Ron Howard suggests is that, from at least 2016 on, Paul has been aware, at least in broad strokes, of the discussion in the Beatles studies counterculture of the lovers possibility, and that he’s not only okay with it and has done (as far as I know) nothing to interfere with it, but that he’s also steered Ron Howard in the direction of the lovers possibility as creative guidance for Eight Days A Week.⁵³

And then there’s Get Back.

As we talked about in episode 1:3, Get Back is the first time we’ve seen Paul and John interacting together outside concerts and press conferences and for an extended period of time. And despite the tension in the Get Back sessions, the connection between the two of them onscreen is undeniable.

Get Back focuses near-continuously on the bond between Paul and John. In some ways, “Two of Us” is the musical theme of Get Back — as much, if not more, than the title song. And even though “Two of Us” is ultimately a song of regret and separation, watching Paul and John working on it, hour after hour, excluding virtually everyone else from their process, makes the intimacy and strength of their bond unmistakable to all but the most Grail-phobic eyeballs—

—those extended sequences of John and Paul gazing at one another, mirroring each other’s body language, sharing private jokes, playing fragments of songs to one another in what seems to be their secret musical language, John telling director Michael Lindsay-Hogg that he hopes this project will bring him and Paul back together, Paul in tears when John fails to arrive on time and Paul's worried he won’t arrive at all, John giving his all to make Paul laugh when he does arrive, their smiles to one another on the Rooftop as for those few precious minutes, they do indeed get back to where they once belonged (in all of its many interpretations) — playing music together, side by side, as perfectly in sync as ever.

I suspect this — and so many more moments between them — is why we experience Get Back as a “feel good” movie, even though what’s actually going on is, as we’ve talked about, anything but. Seeing Paul and John so completely wrapped up in one another offers us the healing we desperately need, because it pushes back against the distorted, toxic ‘John vs Paul’ narrative, both in terms of their creative equality and in terms of the strength of their bond.

More than that, Get Back seems to have been a tipping point for awareness of the lovers possibility. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve told me, unprompted, that it was watching John and Paul interact in Get Back that first caused them to wonder if the two of them were lovers. And as I’ve shared with you already, it was watching Get Back that first inspired me to ask the question as well.

None of this is surprising, because even beyond the obvious connection between the two of them throughout the series, director Peter Jackson also chose to include a significant number of overtly erotic moments between them.

I’ll let you have the pleasure of a rewatch to find most of them for yourself, but just to name a few of the more obvious ones—

There’s John telling Paul about the dream he had the night before, the dream of touching Paul that felt so real he wondered if Paul had actually been in his dream with him, and the awkward exchange that follows when George asks if it was sexual, Paul gets flustered, and George Martin quickly changes the subject to Ringo’s new song — maybe because everyone remembered about the cameras and all the people not in their inner circle within earshot.⁵⁴

There’s John commenting to Paul relative to the songs they’re working on — “Get Back,” “Oh! Darling,” “Two of Us,” and “Don’t Let Me Down,” that “it’s like you and me are lovers,” and another awkward moment that follows.⁵⁵

And then there’s what’s come to be known in countercultural Beatles studies as “the microphone conversation,” in which — and apologies, this is more explicit that I’d prefer for this series, but it is what it is — John simulates oral sex with the microphone as he and Paul talk about what happened in India and whether Paul has any regrets. And yet another awkward moment follows as the others attempt to react to this in front of the cameras.⁵⁶

There’s a lot more of this sort of thing happening in Get Back, but I think maybe you get the picture. These moments aren’t subtle, and they aren’t especially subjective, and they aren’t “blink and you miss it.” As one of my (straight male) Beatles colleagues who is Grail-fluent put it, “you’d have to close your eyes not to see it” — and by “it” he means the romantic and erotic connection between John and Paul in Get Back.

In fact, because those moments are so unsubtle, and because all of them are initiated by John and because John knows damn well about the cameras, those moments actually feel a little performed, like John’s maybe trying to force something, relative to Paul — and we’ll get to that when we re-tell the story in the next part of this series.

The point here isn’t that these moments prove the lovers possibility, though of course, they add to the accumulating body of supporting research. The point here is that none of these more overtly erotic moments needed to be included for Get Back to make sense, or to counter the ‘John vs Paul’ narrative, or to show the intense emotional and creative bond between them.

Outside of Get Back, no one but the relatively few of us familiar with the Nagra audio tapes of the Get Back sessions are even aware of these more overtly erotic moments. They weren’t included in the original 1970 documentary Let It Be, and could easily have been left out of Get Back as well.⁵⁷ And with sixty-plus hours of footage to choose from, it’s not like Peter Jackson lacked raw material.

That matters, because documentaries aren’t just objective records of what happened. Documentaries advance a narrative — a point of view. And the way that’s mainly done is in choosing what to include and what to omit.

There are any number of storylines Peter Jackson could have crafted with that sixty hours of footage. While he couldn't have completely cut around the way John and Paul gazed at each other through all of Get Back — there’s no practical way to conceal that over the course of eight hours — it would have been easy to make it less obvious, as Michael Lindsey-Hogg did in Let It Be. And Jackson could certainly have told a story of Paul and John as deeply bonded best friends and creative partners without including John’s dream about touching Paul or “it’s like we’re lovers” or the microphone conversation. And in fact, all of that would have worked better, if that’s what he was after, because those more erotic moments directly counter the platonic interpretation of their relationship .

But Jackson did include those moments. And in marked contrast to Let It Be, Get Back was edited not to hide those long, lingering gazes between Paul and John, but to highlight them, and not just in passing, but in fully realised form — which is why so many of us watched Get Back and recognised the lovers possibility in what we saw.

It’s hard to believe Peter Jackson didn’t notice what was playing out on the screen for the world to see, when he edited Get Back this way.⁵⁸ And it’s even harder to believe Paul didn’t notice. And it’s also hard to believe Peter Jackson would have taken it upon himself to include those overtly-erotic moments without Paul’s encouragement to do so, even if only indirectly as he did with Ron Howard. Get Back is an official Apple/Beatles release and the footage belongs to Apple, not to Disney. If Paul doesn’t want to encourage speculation on the lovers possibility, those moments simply wouldn’t be in Get Back because Paul would have vetoed them.

If Get Back is our first-ever extended look at Paul and John interacting with one another, then Eyes of the Storm, the 2023 exhibition and book of Paul’s Beatlemania photographs, is equally revelatory — because it’s our first-ever look at John through Paul’s eyes.

The photographs Paul chose to include in Eyes of the Storm feature the whole gang, of course — George and Ringo, Brian and George Martin, Cynthia and Jane, and more, as well as documentary photos of Paris, New York, Washington and Miami. But of course, for most of us, it’s the photos of John that catch our attention. Because Paul photographs John differently than he does anyone else, including his then-girlfriend, Jane Asher.⁵⁹

For a few years in another lifetime, I was a professional portrait photographer. There’s something unique that happens when we look at another person through the lens of an actual camera — and it’s something that doesn’t happen, even for a professional photographer, when taking photos with our phones.

When we look through the viewfinder of a solid, substantial camera, it creates something of a bubble, concentrating our attention — there’s that word again — away from the rest of the world and completely onto the person we’re photographing. For those few moments when our lens is focused on a single other person, and especially if that person is aware of being photographed, everything else fades away and the world shrinks to include only photographer and subject. It’s an intimacy that, at its most intense, is not dissimilar to the intimacy of lovemaking and the focused attention of deep meditation. And in that intimacy and attention, it’s possible to see aspects of the person we’re photographing that aren’t otherwise visible.

Through a combination of intuition and skill, a master portrait photographer (which to be clear, I’m not claiming to be) knows how to choose the right moment to click the shutter and capture that intimacy in the finished photograph, even with people they’re not intimately connected with outside of the camera lens.

Paul is a markedly above-average photographer. He has solid technical skills, an artist’s instinctive eye for composition, and a willingness to break compositional rules to create an interesting image. But Paul is also not a master portrait photographer, and he acknowledges this in so many words in the foreword of the book.

His photographs of George and Ringo, for example, are good and sometimes better than good. But they’re documentary photographs, not portraits, not especially revealing in that more intimate way. I can’t speak for you, but I don’t feel like we learn new things about George and Ringo from Paul’s photographs, because that connection between photographer and subject — that focused attention — is notably absent. When Paul looks through the lens at George and Ringo — or Jane Asher — they’re not really looking back.

Paul’s photographs of John are a whole different thing.

The John in Paul’s photographs is Paul’s John, the one Paul describes in his interviews, distinct from every other John we’re familiar with — relaxed, warm, often gently amused at being photographed. More than that, the John we see through Paul’s eyes is looking back at Paul — and thus at us — with a trust and vulnerability that’s entirely absent in any other photograph of him that I've seen, even those by master portrait photographers Richard Avedon and Annie Lebowitz.

The reason Paul’s photographs of John are as tender and revealing as they are might be that there’s another way, besides being a master portrait photographer, to capture the intimacy between photographer and subject in a photograph — and that’s by photographing someone you’re in love with and who’s in love with you.

I’ve had that experience as a photographer, as maybe some of you have, too. The trust between two people in love, communicating with one another through a camera lens, shrinks the world to just two — the photographer gazing at their beloved through the lens, the beloved gazing back — because for that moment, as in the act of making love, they are the only two people in the world. And this is almost certainly why those photographs of John are so striking.

The most obviously revealing feature of Paul’s photographs of John is the settings he chooses — many of which, as Paul points out, no outsider could have had access to. Some of those locations — in the backs of limousines, backstage, on airplanes — are shared with George and Ringo and the inner circle and select members of the press.

But I’m talking here about the photographs of John in his and Paul’s shared hotel room — newly awakened from sleep, brushing his teeth, shaving in front of the bathroom mirror. The hotel room photographs are without question the most intimate and private exchange we’ve ever seen between Paul and John, and maybe the most genuinely intimate John has ever been on film. These are not situations in which one would photograph just anyone — I have a hard time imagining Paul photographing George or Ringo that way. If he did, he chose not to share them.

contact sheet from Eyes of the Storm

There’s a bit more to notice, too, about Paul’s photographs of John.

Paul also frequently photographs John in soft focus, which in photography is used almost exclusively as a visual representation of... well, softness, of tenderness and vulnerability. And, if it’s an adult being photographed, romance. We almost certainly wouldn’t photograph a co-worker or a friend or a bandmate in soft focus — the idea probably wouldn’t even occur to most of us, because we understand intuitively that soft focus carries with it a romantic subtext.

Of course, soft focus can also be a technical mistake by a new photographer learning how to use the camera, which Paul certainly was. And maybe Paul’s soft focus photographs of John are just accidents. But even if the soft focus photographs of John are technical mistakes, these are the photographs Paul has chosen for the exhibition. And more than that, Paul’s soft focus photographs are only of John. And in having chosen them, technically-imperfect photographs become not mistakes, but intentional in being chosen as “keepers” — and that choice carries with it the romantic subtext associated with that style of photography.

There’s one more thing happening in Paul’s photographs of John, and it’s a little harder to explain in words.

I'm talking here about Paul’s photographs in which there’s another person in the frame who is — according to the rules of composition — the more formal subject of the photograph, usually because they’re in focus and/or in the centre of the image, but in which John is nonetheless the actual subject of the photograph.

Or to put it another way, imagine wanting to photograph one person in a group but feeling like you can’t be too obvious about it. So you focus your camera on someone else while capturing the person you really want to photograph in the background.

Again, Paul only does this with John. He seeks John out in the frame, through and past other people, past obstacles and distractions, in a way that he doesn’t with anyone else — sometimes in soft focus, sometimes not. But always and clearly the focus of Paul’s attention, if not the formal focus of the image.

In a sense, Paul’s photographs of John in Eyes of the Storm seem to be a visual representation of those “secret love” songs we talked about in the episodes on their lyrics. Through soft focus, close-ups, an unconventional shift of subject, and a choice of more private settings, Paul is using the universal language of visual subtext to communicate that his relationship with John is intimate, tender — and, it seems, overtly romantic.

Created by Paul in 1964, curated by him in 2023, Paul’s portraits of John are portraits not just of John, but of Paul and John and what’s between them, made visible, for those of us who see with the softer gaze of the Grail. It’s the only time— excepting John’s equally-revealing film footage of Paul in India — that we’ve seen the connection between them from the inside of their circle of two. And what we see in Eyes of the Storm feels very much like a visual love song to John.⁶⁰

As with the editing in Get Back, I’m not suggesting these photographs are proof of the lovers possibility, though again, they add to the body of supporting research. What I’m pointing out here is that Paul chose to share these photographs of John in Eyes of the Storm, in the same way he chose to allow those moments in Get Back, and in the same way he asked Ron Howard to take his creative direction from those YouTube videos of him and John. And that starts to suggest a pattern and an intention.

Let’s look at a couple more examples, before we put it all together. Like, for instance, Paul’s Got Back tour.

There’s a lot we could say about the Got Back tour, relative to John, because John was unmistakably a tangible presence throughout, in the song selection and the stories Paul told throughout the show.

The thing I want to mention here is the 30-minute video before the concert that took us through Paul’s musical life, from childhood through the present day.

The video was projected onto a massive, three-story high screen alongside the stage. And featured in that video was one of Paul’s close-up portraits of John from Eyes of the Storm. In the portrait, John is in his tailored suit, looking off camera, with an almost-but-not-quite smile and his eyes filled with with the tenderness and vulnerability he only shows through Paul’s lens — and also just a trace of the sadness of a lost little boy swept up in something beyond his control.

The photograph of John in Paul’s pre-show video took up the entire width of the multi-story high screen and it was the only photograph to do so. And drifting slowly across the top of that photograph was a small red heart — the only heart in the entire 30-minute video. (Paul’s photograph of John appears at 10:21)⁶¹

And then there’s “Now and Then,” intended for Anthology but left unfinished in 1994 due to sound quality and George.⁶²

When “Now and Then” was released in 2023, the PR that went with it was that it was a love song from John to Paul. And this PR angle came not just from fans or from the Beatles studies counterculture, but — surprisingly —from Apple itself.⁶³

Giles Martin, the producer-of-record for “Now and Then,” commented in his promotional interviews that, “I do feel as though ‘Now and Then’ is a love letter to Paul written by John. That’s why Paul was so determined to finish it.”⁶⁴ (And, of course, Paul’s work to finish it can be heard as a love letter back.)

Giles Martin’s comments aren’t those of some random person speculating. He's the officially credited producer of “Now and Then.” And officially credited producers don’t generally get to go off and say whatever they want about their projects in promotional interviews. Part of their job is to work the agreed-upon PR strategy that the production company has decided on, because when talking about work commissioned by a production company, producers are de facto spokespeople for that company. In the case of “Now And Then,” that company is Apple and the work in question is a Beatles record. And if it’s coming from Apple and it’s a Beatles record, it’s approved by Paul.

And finally, I mentioned in a prior episode that, along with the “soft edges talking to each other” comment, there’s one other public remark by Paul that seems to get closest to acknowledging in interview (rather than in song) the romantic nature of his relationship with John. It’s quite a few years before the more recent series of events we’ve been talking about, and it’s not quite in the same category, but it’s so striking it would be remiss to leave it out.

In 1998 — not long after Anthology and Many Years From Now — Paul participated in a reader Q&A for Q Magazine. The questions were submitted in written form, and one of those questions was, “if John Lennon could come back for a day, how would you spend it with him?” (and notice the questioner assumes that John would choose to spend his single day back on this side of the veil with Paul)

Now I don’t know about you, but if I had to guess what Paul’s answer would be, my first thought is “writing a song” and/or having that all-important “I love you” conversation that Paul seems to long for. Other obvious possibilities include “sitting around playing music together,” “sagging off together like we used to in the early days,” or “introducing him to my kids.”

But Paul chooses to bypass all those obvious and safe answers to the question. Instead, in answer to how he’d spend one more day with John, Paul responds with a simple, two-word answer: “In bed.”⁶⁵

There’s been a fair amount of speculation on the meaning of these two words, though not (that I’m aware of) by any mainstream writers or scholars, who conveniently — as usual — ignore it entirely. And when “in bed” is speculated about in mainstream online discussions, that speculation veers towards suggesting that Paul was taking the mick, maybe as a tongue-in-cheek reference to John and Yoko’s bed-ins for peace.⁶⁶

While it’s certainly possible that “in bed” is Paul being playful, I have a hard time believing that— especially in the wake of the fallout from his comments on the day of John’s murder — Paul would be casual or snarky in response to such a deeply personal and emotional question. And I have an even harder time believing that his answer to a question about spending one more precious day with John would reference anything at all related to John’s relationship with Yoko.

But lost in the speculation about what “in bed” means is the more useful point — that we’re speculating about what “in bed” means in the first place. Because whether Paul was being playful or not, there’s no credible way in which Paul didn’t know where our minds would go when he said “in bed.”

In our Rabbit Hole on the Nerk Twins trip, we talked in detail about how in our culture, sharing a bed is culturally weighted and thus never neutral. Unless it’s qualified with some other phrase — like, as we saw in the Nerk Twins example, “had to” or “innocently as children” — two adults of any gender not related by blood sharing a bed by default implies a romantic and erotic situation. Regardless of whether Paul meant “in bed” playfully or not, the culture and the limitations of language means there’s simply no way around that erotic subtext. And it’s highly unlikely that Paul McCartney — the writer of many songs containing far more sophisticated erotic innuendo than that — didn't know what he was doing, when he offered his answer.

And more than that, “in bed” isn’t Paul getting caught out and saying something on impulse that he didn’t mean to say. Paul has been managing intrusive media questions since he was 21 years old. He could easily have ignored this question entirely — he was certainly under no obligation to answer every reader-submitted question whether he wanted to or not. But he did choose to answer it, and to answer it in a way that by default includes a romantic and erotic subtext.

If Paul is looking to shut down speculation about whether he and John were lovers, “in bed” is not how you do that. Instead, “in bed” feels a lot like the same kind of “if that’s what they want to know, then fuck it, I”ll tell them” moment that Paul described relative to his McCartney press release.

Teasing the lovers possibility in Q Magazine. Sending Ron Howard off to watch romantic JohnandPaul YouTube videos, editing Get Back to highlight the intense, erotic bond between them, the intimate photographs of John in Eyes of the Storm, the little red heart drifting slowly over John’s portrait in Paul’s pre-show video, Apple’s PR campaign framing “Now and Then” as a love song from John to Paul.

I’m not suggesting these things are proof of the lovers possibility, though I do think they're pretty strong confirmation that — whether acted on or not — the love between John and Paul was romantic in nature.

What I am suggesting is that at the very least, all of this suggests that Paul seems more-than-okay with restoring the lovers possibility to the story. And more than that, it seems he’s actively doing the work of restoring it himself — in the only way he perhaps feels he safely can, given the revisionism problem, and in the way someone who shows their innermost feelings through their art might be inclined to do. And in the same way that he told us in the foreword to The Lyrics that we should look to his art, rather than any books written about The Beatles, for the truth of his life.

What I’m suggesting is that over the past few years, by making his love for John more obvious and more romantically-themed with each successive project, Paul himself seems to be opening his shoebox of memories just a wee little bit for the world to see.

I was in the audience for Paul’s concert at Fenway Park in June 2022. After his virtual duet with John on “I’ve Got A Feeling,” Paul said, “That’s pretty special for me. I know it’s only virtual, but for that minute, we’re together again.”

Paul’s voice seemed to waver a little on the last bit, and maybe that was just fatigue at the end of a three-hour show, but I don’t think so. I think it’s because that’s how it feels when we talk honestly and openly about someone we love and whom we’re still grieving. And I think it’s at least possible that part of why Paul seemed so reluctant to wrap up the tour is that every show was one more time he got to sing onstage with John. Because for that minute, they were together again.

Paul talks about John all the time these days. There isn’t an interview that goes by without him mentioning John, and usually multiple times, and in answer to questions in which he wouldn't necessarily need to mention John (and no complaints, mind you).

In the past few years, Paul has told us he frequently dreams of John.⁶⁷ That if he’s going to see a face in one of his paintings, it’s going to be John.⁶⁸ Four decades after John’s murder, Paul still keeps photographs of him and John where he can see them daily.⁶⁹ He collects John Lennon memorabilia — not just Beatles memorabilia, but John memorabilia.⁷⁰ And at one point, he had a mass market calendar of John in his kitchen⁷¹ and a life-sized photo of the two of them on his wall.⁷² Paul married his wife Nancy on October 9, 2011, which would have been John’s 71st birthday, and I doubt that’s a coincidence, when he had 364 other days to choose from.

And as a purely subjective observation, but one that I’m far from the only one who’s noticed, it seems to me no one else has ever said John’s name in quite the way Paul does — because Paul doesn’t say John’s name like a name, he says it like a caress.

If you’re fluent in the language of the Grail, it’s not hard to recognise what’s going on here. Because these are the sorts of things we do to keep an absent lover close to us. Forty years after that bleak and terrible December day, it’s clear Paul is still deeply grieving John, and is almost certainly still deeply in love. And the enduring depth of that grief and love gets more obvious with each passing day.

Perhaps he’s less able to hide it. Perhaps he’s simply less willing to.

When we’re grieving the loss of someone we love, talking about them, looking at their photos, saying their name, are among the best ways we have of keeping them close. For those fleeting moments when the name of our beloved is on our lips — in song or in conversation — they’re here with us again, if only, as Paul says, for a minute. Maybe that’s why the final line of “Here Today” — which Paul features as a centrepiece (his words) in every concert — is "you were here today because you were in my song.”

Maybe that’s another reason why Paul continues writing songs about and for John, why he keeps whispering through that most impenetrable of all walls.

It seems clear that the three great loves of Paul McCartney's life have been John, Linda, and music. Paul has lost two out of three of those loves, but even in his darkest times, it seems he’s never lost the music. Maybe for an artist who speaks his truth through music, writing for John and singing to and about John is another way Paul creates opportunities to keep John’s name on his lips, with every song, and every opportunity, telling John... I miss you. I love you. I wish you were — as the original line read — “here with me.”⁷³

Paul has lost John at least three times over. The first was the breakup of the band — and with it the life he and John had built together, as Lennon/McCartney, their partnership as formal and binding as any marriage, each taking the other’s name alongside their own and giving that name to their creative children — their songs.

The second loss was John’s murder, which stole from both of them, finally and forever, the chance to start over.

And the third loss, which I’ve not seen recognised as a loss outside of the Beatles studies counterculture, is Paul’s loss of his equal partnership with John. And because when we feel we aren’t allowed to talk about our love for the person we’re grieving, and especially when we have to pretend that love is something less than it is, Paul’s loss of his right to tell that story, and to be believed in its telling — is also a loss of John. It steals John from Paul all over again, by forcing Paul into silence to appease someone else’s fear.

And there’s a fourth loss, too, that’s generally unacknowledged even in the counterculture.

Time and time again, John made it clear that Paul and Yoko were the two most important relationships of John’s life. And while I'm still in search of verification for the elusive “Paul was the first love of my life, Yoko was the second” quote, in all of John’s comments about Paul and Yoko, he makes little effort to distinguish the nature of one relationship from the other. John talks about both Paul and Yoko in the same breath, without qualification. And as we saw in prior episodes, he tends to reserve his erotic and romantic metaphors for talking about his relationship with Paul.

We’ve collectively decided to ignore the implications of that equivalence, when we fail to accord Paul equal status with Yoko as a surviving partner, outside of a creative relationship.

You might be thinking that’s the way it should be. After all, even if John and Paul were a committed, long-term romantic couple, and even if they were either still together or back together in 1980 — as there is some research to suggest — it’s Yoko who was legally married to John at the time of his murder. And even if John and Paul had — in a better world — been legally married before that, it’s not like former spouses get equal treatment as current ones. Cynthia doesn't get the same cultural status as Yoko either, relative to John.

But as often happens when considering the lovers possibility — even in the Beatles studies counterculture — that way of thinking is an inaccurate imposing of our current cultural mores onto the past.

If John and Paul were in a long-term, committed romantic relationship, they wouldn't have had the option to give that relationship more public legitimacy. Outside of those two precious weeks in Paris in 1961,⁷⁴ they wouldn't have been allowed to present themselves as a public couple in mainstream culture. And they wouldn't have been legally allowed to marry, because during the entire span of their years together, same sex marriage was illegal.

Whether they would have married or not isn’t the point here — there’s no way for us to know that, absent Paul or John telling us so.⁷⁵ What matters is that they didn’t have that choice because the culture didn’t give it to them. And because they didn’t have that choice, John and Paul had no option to claim more legitimate cultural recognition and status for what they meant to one another. And the damage of that lack of cultural status carries over into the present day.

If there is truth to the lovers possibility, then since Paul wasn’t legally married to John, or even allowed by the culture to be a public romantic partner, he’s lived the last forty-plus years being denied the cultural status of a bereaved life partner, and without the compassion and sensitivity that comes with that status. Instead, Paul is only accorded the lesser status of “best friend, bandmate and songwriting partner,” or worse, “former best friend, former bandmate and former songwriting partner.” Or worse still, “competitor, rival, didn’t-even-like-each-other bandmate and songwriting partner.”

This lack of status matters.

Grieving a loss of a life partner is painful and difficult. Even with the cultural respect accorded to a surviving partner, losing a life partner is at the very top of the “Life Stressors” scale.⁷⁶ And it’s self-evidently and exponentially more painful and difficult when the surviving partner is denied cultural respect and validation as support for their grief.

For example, no one shoved a microphone in Yoko’s face on the day John was murdered and demanded a reaction, as they did to Paul, because widows are — or at least were in 1980 — afforded a deference that friends and former songwriting partners are not.

And for the past forty years, Yoko’s been the only one who gets the exclusive right to speak for John in death and to be the steward of John’s music and legacy, even though the vast majority of that music and legacy was created in partnership with Paul, and in a relationship that both John and Paul have explicitly described as a marriage.

For the past forty years, Yoko’s been the one who gets to share memories of her years with John as a love story, without fear of... well, without fear.

Fear is at the core of the wounding in this story — fear of softness on one side and well-meaning but ultimately counterproductive fear of violating Paul and John’s right to tell their story on the other.

And the consequence of unexamined fear is always loss — and that unexamined fear points to yet another loss — our failure to allow Paul the space to tell his story of his relationship with John in the way he’d like to tell it, without being accused of revisionism — when we, like Hunter Davies, tell him to stick what he “thinks” is the truth about his relationship with John in a drawer and forget it.

So many losses in this story, so many of them times when John and Paul lost one another. But unlike the losses that came before, this loss is one we can fix by choosing — starting quite literally right in this moment — to tell a different story.

In 2005, on his album Chaos and Creation In The Backyard, Paul included a song called “Too Much Rain.” In it, he sings about what it’s like to struggle with more grief and pain than any one person should be asked to shoulder in a single lifetime.⁷⁷

“Too Much Rain” is written in the second person, and maybe it was meant in part for someone else in his life who was struggling with grief. But “Too Much Rain” also seems to be written for Paul himself, as a song of comfort alongside “Let It Be,” “I’ll Follow The Sun,” “Golden Slumbers,” “Fool On The Hill,” and “Hey Jude.”

There’s been too much rain in Paul McCartney's life — and far too much of it was put there by all of us, in allowing our collective fears on both sides to turn us away from the love at the heart of the story.

We can’t bring John back in the most literal sense. But it seems to me the very least we can do — and I really do mean the very least we can do — is to give both John and Paul the gift of not letting their love story die in the toxic river of our collective fears, on both sides. And more than that, we can give that gift now, so Paul can — if he so chooses — have this precious time to love and grieve John openly, the way he has every right to do.

For everything Paul and John have given us, it’s way past time to give a gift back.

If we choose to open our hearts and our minds to the beautiful possibility of John and Paul as lovers, we can restore to Paul what’s always been rightfully his and should never have been lost in the first place — his right to tell his own story without fear. And, if he and John were indeed a romantic couple, his right to love — and to grieve — John openly and publicly and with the cultural support for that grief that makes healing so much more complete than if it’s done in secrecy and silence and fear.

And this isn’t only about Paul. If Paul and John were lovers, then it’s John’s story to tell, too. And John loses the right to have his legacy told more honestly, when we deny the love between him and Paul, or when we force it to be brotherly or platonic, without even considering the many hints from both of them that it might be considerably more.

If John and Paul were indeed lovers, do any of us doubt that if John were indeed here today, he and Paul would have told their story together, hand in hand, and probably years ago?

I like to think that in a better and more just world, today they’d be a grey-haired couple, still writing songs together, just as they’d said they planned to do, still smiling as they tug on each end of the creative rope, holding hands in public on vacation to Paris — or maybe the Isle of Wight — and maybe even really and truly older and newly wed.

But if they — and we — can’t have that, then we can at least open ourselves up to the possibility of that love. We can restore John’s right to love and be loved more openly by Paul — the man for whom he probably wrote, among many others, “In My Life” and “If I Fell” and “I Know (I Know)” and “Bless You” and “(Just Like) Starting Over.”

And this matters more than we might think, because — and we’re definitely getting way ahead of ourselves here — the ability to love and be loved openly by Paul, to have the world know that Paul loved him, may have been what John longed for most in the world. And that’s maybe the more specific pain behind Paul’s “I couldn't say I love you” regret. And as we’ll see in the next part of the series, being prevented from showing that love more openly by a culture afraid of softness might be what broke up The Beatles and set this whole slow-motion tragedy in motion in the first place.

All of this brings us, finally, to this—

There’s a book sitting next to me, worn and dog-eared and filled with margin notes. It’s titled Homophobia: A History.⁷⁸ But it could just as easily be titled “Fear of Softness: A History.”

The book is, among other things, a 500-plus page exhaustive, detailed catalogue of the humiliations, injustices and atrocities inflicted over the past two thousand years on men who had the courage to desire and love another man. It’s one of the most painful books I've ever read. And before I started writing this series, I forced myself to read every word of it. And I’ve kept it sitting on my desk throughout the writing of this series as a reminder that it’s not reasonable to expect any kind of bright line moral clarity whatsoever on this issue. Same sex love has historically been kept private for a reason.

The story of the love between Paul McCartney and John Lennon is not just any story — and nothing about this is without its risk.

But set against that obscene and gruesome history is the way in which the tiptoeing around the lovers possibility, even often by those of us who recognise its power and its beauty, implies that the love between Paul and John is some kind of unsavoury, shameful secret that has to be covered up or talked about only in euphemisms, or whispered under cloak of anonymity — rather than as the life-affirming, courageous, world-creating love story that it actually is. And that is in and of itself a wounding. It’s as if we’re whispering about some unspeakable crime that “dare not speak its name,” rather than a story of such enduring love and passion that it gifted us with a new world.

That we’ve allowed our collective fears on all sides to come dangerously close to erasing the lifeforce love at the heart of this story, and that so many on one side are angry and threatened by the very idea of that love, and so many of us on the other side are afraid to talk publicly about even the possibility of that love, tells us most of what there is to know about what’s so catastrophically wrong with our world today.

And how did those of us who do understand the love at the heart of this story get it so wrong — that we think love needs to be whispered about in dark corners, rather than celebrated in the light of day?

So many of us who see and feel the power of that love more consciously believe we’re protecting it by whispering in dark corners of the internet where no one can hear or see it. But how is it more ethical for those of us who recognise this beautiful possibility to continue, decade after decade, to sit passively by and watch as the mainstream Grail-phobic writers continue to perpetuate a false and poisonous story of unresolved anger and pain?

I can't help but wonder how Paul feels about all of this — because when we whisper about the lovers possibility as if it were some kind of shameful and scandalous secret that can’t be spoken aloud in public, we’re sending a message to Paul that he’s right to be fearful of the reaction, if he chooses to tell his story, and if there is one to tell. For sure, we’ve sent no meaningful signals that it’s safe for him to do so.

Instead, by whispering about it in hushed voices in the counterculture, we’ve sent Paul the clear signal that even those of us who do recognise the love between Paul and John, and who are most deeply moved by it, are too afraid to speak up in defence of that love. And thus that there will be no one to stand with him, if he chooses to tell his story.

While I can only speak for myself, it seems to me our ethical obligation here is not to remain silent until and unless Paul chooses to tell this love story. Our ethical obligation is to commit an intentional act of love by creating a space in which the love between Paul and John — acted on or not — is celebrated in the mainstream conversation, in part to set the stage in case Paul wants to tell the story, and in part for the beauty of the possibility for its own sake. And both of which are what this series and The Abbey were created to do.

On the eve of my first research trip to Liverpool, a friend asked me what I expected to find that others hadn’t already found. “I expect to find quite a bit that others haven’t found,” I answered. “Because I’m looking with a different gaze.”

Like Dorothy discovering that the ruby slippers that she’s worn all along hold the power to get her home, the answer to the ethics of the lovers possibility has been in the title of Beautiful Possibility all along, waiting for us to catch up to it. Because that, too, is a rule of fairy tales — that at the end of our quest, we often discover we’ve had what we sought all along. We just needed the journey in order to recognise it.

Mythology and fairy tales unfold in the liminal space of the “in between” — which is why every culture opens its stories with some version of “once upon a time.” And “once upon a time” is a way of talking about possibility. A way of asking, “what if.”

These two words — “what if” — possess a unique and powerful magick of their own, not unlike the title of John’s most beloved solo song. ” Because like ‘imagine,” “what if” holds a power unique to the human experience — the ability to imagine a beautiful possibility, without requiring proof.

“What if?” is an exercise in informed imagination — a question, as Nick Cave once said, “caught between doubt and wonder and unencumbered by an answer.” And unlike the fearful and unearned arrogance of those Grail-phobic writers who steadfastly insist that Paul and John were absolutely not lovers, when they could have no possible way to know that, “what if” is also an acknowledgment of the limitations of our knowledge and the limitations of our ethical right to tell this story that is both ours and at the same time, very much not ours, to tell.

“I like fairy tales,” Paul told Life Magazine, in 1971.⁷⁹ And we know John did, too, at least the fractured kind, which of course, the story of The Beatles very much is. And while only Paul and John can confirm the lovers possibility, I think maybe somewhere between “for sure they were lovers” and “for sure they weren’t,” somewhere between Paul’s reluctance to share his innermost feelings, and his and John’s invitation — their directive, really — to look for the truth of their lives in their art, somewhere in their wordplay and double meanings and games with reality and Paul’s increasingly frequent sharing of his shoebox of memories, somewhere in all of that, there is just enough space for “what if.”

When it comes to the lovers possibility, I think we’ve been granted limited license by both Paul and John to speculate but not to conclude.

All of this — and more — is what’s behind that locked door that we’ve been warned not to open, the door that conceals the very answers we’ve been seeking relative to the lovers possibility. And since we’re trespassing anyway — albeit for the highest good of all concerned — I hope you’ll allow me to push my luck a little further, and wrap up this most perilous and wildly presumptuous of episodes — our last formal episode of part one — with some personal thoughts.

French philosopher Gabriel Marcel once suggested that “to love someone is to say to them: ‘You will not die.’”⁸⁰ Paul’s love for John has an intensity and a stubborn persistence I’ve never encountered before. Tested but ultimately stronger than breakups and death, intolerance and insecurity and fear — and often by John himself — it’s that love, far more than its mythological implications, that inspired me to take the considerable risk of writing this series.

I have a difficult relationship with love in my own life. Paul’s courage in loving so deeply in the face of so much fear has been a profound influence on the writing of this series and on my own experience of what it means to love not just as a feeling, but as an intentional action. As a verb.

Paul’s determination to restore his and John's love for one another to the story in the face of the distorted and angry breakup narrative is a profound act of intentional love. And as such, it, too, is a Grail quest — visible in his careful stewardship of The Beatles’ music and of their story — insofar as we’ve allowed him to steward his own story, anyway.

That intentional love is visible in the stubborn constancy with which Paul continues to express his love for that story and for the music, and for George and Ringo, and most of all, for John — year by year, project by project, song by song — despite the fear of softness and Grail-phobic writers and ‘John vs Paul’ and Paul’s own reluctance to share his innermost thoughts.

And of course, most of all, Paul’s intentional act of love for this story and for John is in his songs. Not just in his “I couldn't say I love you” regret songs, but in his entire body of work, from the first songs he ever wrote right through to today.

I can’t help but think it must hurt Paul so deeply, to have his love songs, so many of which seem to have been for John, held up by the world — and even by John himself — as trivial and inconsequential, when in fact the opposite is true. Because those songs, more than anything else, are the footprints of Paul’s lifelong Grail Quest. And as we’ve talked about at length now, the quest for the Grail is the most difficult and dangerous quest a man in Western culture can undertake — and the damage done to Paul by the Grail-phobic press and public stands as incontrovertible proof of that danger.

If you’re still tempted to label Paul McCartney as lightweight for wanting to “fill the world with silly love songs,”⁸¹ consider how much it has cost him to keep his attention on the lifeforce love of the Grail while so many others — including those Grail-phobic biographers and journalists — have turned away out of their fear of softness. And consider how much courage it takes to stand against a bullying mob who continues to insist that love is less authentic and less important and less admirable than a fist raised in anger, and that a man expressing love is less than a man for choosing love over anger — when the exact opposite is true. Because not only is the Grail quest the most difficult and dangerous for a man in Western culture, it’s also the most noble and the most worthy.

I said in a prior episode that Paul changed so much during the breakup that it was disorienting, and that’s true. But it’s also in a very real sense, not true.

Despite the pain and the loss and the march of time, Paul is still in a very real way that same beautiful, joyful boy dancing on the field in A Hard Day’s Night to the song he and John wrote together in that Paris hotel suite in 1964.

That Paul has managed to hold onto that joy and that love — or maybe more accurately, if that’s the public Paul McCartney that he’s willing to continue to be for our sake, so we have that to hold onto still — that’s his intentional act of love as a verb. And it’s possibly his greatest gift to our broken world. And it’s probably what saved his life during the breakup, along with Linda’s love and care. And love as a verb can save us, too, if we let it — not because it’s a platitude, but because it’s the only thing that ever has.

This is who the Grail serves — Paul and John, and me, and maybe you. All of us who struggle to hold onto and express love in a world that has made it clear on all sides that it has no use for anything other than a clenched fist. Because once we’ve connected with the power of the Grail, we can no longer live without it. As the Grail Knight Percival does when he wanders the wilderness for decades in search of the Grail castle, we’re driven to find it again or die trying.

We have nothing to lose and everything to gain by restoring the lovers possibility to this story — this foundational mythology of our modern world. We're already wounded. Everyone's already bleeding out.

We have an opportunity with all of this to do better, by recognising not just the credibility of the lovers possibility, but the beauty and power of it. And by standing up for that love against anger and blindness and ridicule and fear.

Even without considering the mythological implications, and whether they acted on it or not, the love story of John Lennon and Paul McCartney is easily one of the most beautiful and consequential love stories in human history. And if Paul chooses not to tell his story — or if there ends up being no story to tell — there is nothing lost and everything gained in embracing this beautiful possibility, because there is no way in which making room for love makes this story anything other than more beautiful, more complex, and more breathtaking in its scope, its courage, and its sheer miraculous healing existence.

Whether we find that courage or not, whether Paul chooses to tell his story or not, it gives me healing — and I hope it gives Paul healing as well — to know that there is at least one way in which fear has failed— and will forever fail — in its attempt to cover up and trivialise the love at the heart of this story. And that’s simply this—

For as long as we last on this tiny, fragile planet, in the same way that we stand awestruck before the Taj Mahal or are moved to tears by the tragic lovers in Romeo & Juliet, humans will be listening to Paul McCartney and John Lennon sing their love for one another.

In the end, nothing can change that the music of The Beatles, and especially all of those “silly love songs,” holds the very essence of the healing lifeforce power of the Grail as perhaps nothing before or since ever has.

Not for nothing is the motto on Paul’s coat of arms, “ecce cor meum” — Latin for “behold my heart.” Not for nothing does the knight who asks about the Grail become a king.

Because in the end, love isn’t silly. It isn’t silly at all.

Peace, love and strawberry fields,

Faith ❤️🎸

“This is how I choose to remember us, together and alive.”

Lauren Saxon, “On Sunday”

RABBIT HOLE: Paul McCartney, post-1980

One of the ways in which ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ has caused damage, both to Paul and to all of us, is that there are too many people — including, I’ve discovered a lot of Beatles writers — who stopped paying attention to Paul’s solo career after 1980. That’s too bad, because in addition to offering a wealth of autobiographical material, Paul’s solo career has been varied, iconoclastic and eccentric, and whatever your personal tastes, there’s some extraordinary music to be found there.

So for these final episodes, instead of the usual kind of Rabbit Hole, I want to share a carefully curated sampler of Paul’s solo work after 1980. This playlist has, over the years, opened more than a few ears to Paul McCartney as a solo artist.

As a thought exercise, imagine “Winedark Open Sea” on Revolver, or “English Tea” on Sgt Pepper. Imagine “Two Magpies,” or “Jenny Wren” or “Run Devil Run” on The White Album, or “Beautiful Night” or “A Certain Softness” on Abbey Road. You might start to see how the distorted narrative has seriously screwed with our perception, when it comes to how we experience the songs of Paul McCartney.

These are not necessarily “JohnandPaul” songs, although some of them are probably about and for John — we already did that in a prior Rabbit Hole. These songs are just good music that you probably haven’t heard, written by a master composer and sung by one of the best voices in rock and roll and who’s not afraid to take risks. And most importantly, these are songs that the distorted breakup narrative and the writers who perpetuated it stole from those who believed that narrative, and stopped paying attention to Paul after John’s murder.

I hope that, if you’re not yet familiar with Paul’s solo work after 1980, instead of the time you would have taken to listen to a Rabbit Hole, you’ll take the time to listen to this playlist. It’s an easy and fun way to begin to repair some of the damage done by the distorted breakup narrative.

PS The playlist is intended to be listened to in sequence. And also, I refine this playlist obsessively, searching for the elusive perfect sequence. This is as close as I’ve come so far, and if this is an iteration that you particularly like, I recommend copying it to your own playlist so you don’t lose it.

1. In honour of the J/P world ;)

2. Asked by Simon Pegg and interviewed by John Wilson for BBC 4’s Mastertapes, May 24, 2016.

full quote: “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.”

3. Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.

4.

5. “[Paul] thought [his vocal] was too rough sounding. I had to persuade him and say ‘Paul, the vocal sounds great, it’s really powerful because it’s not perfect’. In my role as producer, that’s what I wanted to hear from Paul; a sort of beautiful imperfection.”

Interview with Ethan Johns, Manchester Evening News, July 5, 2014.

6. In the music video for “Early Days,” (which is well worth watching in general) Paul dresses as John was dressed on the day they met, complete with flannel shirt and quiff, in a mock-up of Paul’s Forthlin Road living room.

While we’re here, the phrase “early days” is an echo of John’s line in “(Just Like) Starting Over,” “why don’t we take off alone/like we used to in the early days.” It’s not clear that Paul is echoing John here, but given the subject matter and the possibility and even likelihood, as we discussed in the Playlist Commentary Rabbit Hole that “(Just Like) Starting Over” is written for Paul, it’s at least possible that Paul is quoting John here.

7. full quote: “It’s just this idea of people robbing your history from you, But in my case, it started off with the idea of ‘They can’t take it with me because I lived through those early days. I was there.’ And then it went into describing some early days, some memories of me and John, walking along or listening to the records in the record shop and all of that. But then the last verse is wildly defensive, which is like these people say who did this and who did that. Well, that is very definitely about people telling me what I did and what John did. And I think you know it was much more equal.” Paul McCartney, interviewed for

Paul McCartney interviewed for Absolute Radio interview, October, 2013

8. “John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 1 — Working Class Hero,” interviewed by Jann Wenner, December 1970, published January 21 1971.

9. Some of you know from scoping out my Spotify playlists that I have a side interest in John Denver as a culturally subversive artist in the ‘70s, so I hope you’ll allow me a footnote to indulge that interest here for a moment relative to this quote from John — because it’s not often I get to talk about both The Beatles and John Denver at the same time,

The quote in which John compares Paul to John Denver is from the Sheff interview. Sheff asks him who wrote what on “Blackbird,” and John answers with:

JOHN: Enough said. I gave him a line on that one.

SHEFF: Do you like the guitar work there?

LENNON: Yeah, he's good at that stuff, you know. So is John Denver.”

This is often interpreted as a derisive comment, and certainly it’s an example of highlighting Paul’s music as “soft,” given John Denver’s public brand, which given fear of softness means it’s interpreted as derisive whether it’s intended that way or not. But I’m not at all convinced that John means this comparison in an ironic or pejorative way, because there’s a bit more context to John’s reference to Denver here than most people who read this quote (and Sheff himself) may realise.

It’s not often remarked on, but John Denver was an accomplished acoustic guitar player, often managing, among other skills, to make one guitar sound like two guitars. For example, if you’ve not heard his live version of “Bells of Rhymney” on 12-string guitar, here’s a link:

As a guitar player himself — both electric and acoustic — John (Lennon) recognises good guitar playing when he hears it. So when John expands on his appreciation of Paul’s guitar playing on “Blackbird” by mentioning John Denver, he’s referencing another acoustic guitar player with serious chops. Given this, the comparison to John Denver may not have been meant entirely as a slag, but rather as a backhanded compliment to both Paul and John Denver.

I also wonder if John (Lennon) might have confused “Blackbird” with “Mother Nature’s Son.” Both songs were on, of course, on the White Album and both are acoustic guitar songs in a similar style.

On his 1972 album, Rocky Mountain High, John Denver covered “Mother Nature’s Son.” The song wasn’t released as a single, but it went on in subsequent years to become one of his signature songs in his concerts. And of course, given John Denver’s persona, and his deep, very public lifelong love of nature, and that he was literally “born a poor young country boy,” the song suits John Denver as if written for him. So it’s not surprising that Denver understands the song as if it were his own, and that understanding is reflected in his interpretation.

John Denver was for a few years in the mid-70s the most popular artist in the world, and Rocky Mountain High is one of his most critically and commercially successful albums. And “Mother Nature’s Son” is a Lennon/McCartney song, so John (Lennon) shared (and still shares) in the songwriting royalties from Rocky Mountain High (which would have been considerable).

All of which means that John (Lennon) was almost certainly familiar with John Denver’s cover of “Mother Nature’s Son" despite it not being a single. So it’s possible he may have been thinking of “Mother Nature’s Son” when he said what he said about Paul’s guitar work on “Blackbird.”

This footnote is a tangential indulgence, I know, but since we’re here, if you’re interested in hearing the real John Denver, beyond “Annie’s Song” and “Take Me Home Country Roads” (for which he only wrote the middle eight), and before we was more or less ruined by bad management and a record label that didn’t understand him, here’s a playlist:

Thank you for indulging my JD fixation. And now back to the Fabs.

10. PLAYBOY: “Long and Winding Road”?

LENNON: Paul again. He had a little spurt just before we split. I think the shock of Yoko and what was happening gave him a creative spurt including “Let It Be” and “Long and Winding Road,”’cause that was the last gasp from him.

All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, David Sheff, St. Martin’s Press, 1980.

NOTE: The usual disclaimer here that the Sheff book is edited aggressively and isn’t entirely reliable relative to exact quotes. In this case, it’s probably okay, because the gist of it is the same regardless of which specific question John might be responding to.

As mentioned already, this comment is unusually vicious as one of the only times John explicitly denigrated Paul’s talent in an interview. It’s especially unusual in 1980, at a time when John’s negative remarks about Paul in interview seemed overall more performative, and at a time when they were apparently reconciled and planning to work together again. It’s not clear why the viciousness here, but it might relate to some guilt on John’s part relative to that time period — given that “Long and Winding Road” seems fairly obviously to be a song about John, and Paul has more or less said as much in Many Years From Now when he acknowledged he wrote it about the breakup—

PAUL:.. It's a rather sad song. I like writing sad songs, it's a good bag to get into because you can actually acknowledge some deeper feelings of your own and put them in it. It's a good vehicle, it saves having to go to a psychiatrist. Songwriting often performs that feat, you say it but you don't embarrass yourself because it's only a song, or is it? You are putting the things that are bothering you on the table and you are reviewing them, but because it's a song, you don't have to argue with anyone. I was a bit flipped out and tripped out at that time. It's a sad song because it's all about the unattainable; the door you never quite reach. This is the road that you never get to the end of.

Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.

11. “HARTMAN: Paul, there’s a new interview out that John – you mentioned John a while ago – and he talks very openly. Without going into details, he seems to have a lot of resentment, competition, with you. And he says you kind of died creatively in a way, and he didn’t keep track of you, he said ‘The Long And Winding Road’ was your last gasp. He seems resentful of you. Do you know why, or—?

PAUL: Um… I don’t know, I can guess and stuff, you know, but I’ll tell you, after all of that stuff has sort of gone down over the years, I actually keep a bit quiet now, ’cause anything I say, he gets resentful of. So I don’t know really, I mean, uh, it’s just a weird one. I don’t quite know why he thinks like that. I mean, what do you do about that? I —I really just shut up these days. I think it’s the best policy, David.”

Paul and Linda McCartney interviewed on Good Morning America, November 27, 1980.

12. It’s possible that there’s more going on here than there seems to be, given what we talked about just a little bit relative to “(Just Like) Starting Over” apparently being written for Paul. We’ll get there, but it’s important to keep in mind that the research surrounding 1980 is so contradictory that it’s impossible to gauge what’s really happening between them from any of their public statements. For our purposes here, let’s just assume it is what it seems to be.

13. Paul bought just a bit of his own trouble here, when — apparently as part of an experiment in randomness in art, which was a Thing in the Sixties — he pulled random lines from the newspaper for his blurb on the back of Two Virgins — “When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience. The long battles to prove he was a Saint.”

14. “John raised his voice for peace. For love. For brotherhood. How I wished he had gone into the bowels of hell where kids were on lethal drugs and taken them by the hand and healed them. He could have done it, more than anybody I know. But what he couldn't do on earth, maybe — God willing — he can do in death.”

“Yoko was the Virgin Mary who gave birth to the new, the reborn John Lennon.”

And here’s the writer ‘channeling’ John: ”Yeah, I did a few rotten things in my life. Like too much boozing. Too much acid. Too much fucking (hey, I shouldn’t say that now) with the wrong women. They were only bodies. Meant nothing to me, God. Nothing. Like relieving myself when I needed to piss. Or shit. Or throw up. That’s all those bodies meant to me, God. Just relief from pressure in my balls. Nothing else, God. You know there was only one body for me. Yoko’s body. But you didn’t want me to have her anymore. Her nearness. Her niceness. Her genius that built a flame in my mind. In my soul. In my testicles.”

“John Lennon Beatles Memory Book,” (UK), Harris Publications, 1981.

NOTE: I’m not intending to point this out in any way as a way of ridiculing the writer. As a mythologist, I've suggested several times that the story of The Beatles is a sacred story. I’m also never going to discount the validity of mystical experience relative to this story or any other. And as we’ve seen in those initial episodes, there are mythological parallels between the story of Jesus and the story of The Beatles, in that they’re the only two stories that have changed the riverbed of Western civilization.

But what’s going on with this particular article may be another iteration of what we talked about in the Beatlemania Rabbit Hole — an immature psyche of the writer, overwhelmed by the mythological power of a story. In this case, not the erotic lifeforce love between John and Paul that sparked and shaped the Love Revolution, but the grief of losing John, of course, and more broadly, the grief of losing the opportunity for healing of the story (although this last part is almost certainly not conscious in the mind of the writer). It’s similar to the global response to the death of Princess Diana in 1997, which was also a subconscious reaction to a major death in a mythological story.

15. Here’s a sample of some of the more egregious quotes from the tribute magazines published immediately following John’s murder:

“John’s voice was hard, firm, distinctive —but not cute like Paul’s.” Lennon: A Memory, Arda Inc., 1980.

“Lennon and McCartney were the songwriting team of the Beatles, John contributing the weighty messages and ideas, and Paul writing the lighter material.” “John Lennon and the Beatles, A Loving Tribute,” 16 Magazine, 1981.

“John Lennon was one of four members of a singing group and yet he seemed to rise above all the others because of his immense talent and ability to define new areas in music — and define, indeed, a lifestyle that has sustained itself even into the eighties.” John Lennon Tribute, Collectors’ Issue, Woodhill Press, winter 1980.

“McCartney seemed rather small potatoes as Paul's great declaration of independence. It was homemade domestic trifle with Paul overdubbing all the parts. If not terribly ambitious, it was enjoyable enough, and did feature one of his greatest songs, "Maybe I'm Amazed" with its classic guitar break.

John said he considered the album "rubbish." His own egocentric debut was forged in contrast and attack. Where Paul had rafted rather glibly into domestic bliss, John staged an assault on the myths he was deserting. His debut disc was stark and uncompromising-he unleashed all the pain, rage, and pride that had been contained and tailored in the Beatles. John's debunking of the Beatles myth took the form of a brutal psychic disrobing that made Paul's homespun reveries look coy and pallid.Lennon's "God," with its thundering litany of disowned icons (climaxing with "I don't believe in Beatles. I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that's reality"), was a painful awakening from the dream of the Beatles. Paul's winsome ballad "Man We Was Lonely" (with its reassuring rejoinder "but now we're fine all the time") was more of a hackneyed lullabye.” John Lennon & the Beatles: A Special Tribute, 1980-1981 (UK mag).

And a lot of wildly revisionist history:

“After John and Paul had been playing together for some months, they decided to expand their repertoire. The only songs they knew, though, were either the ones they had heard on the radio, or ones which either of them had on record. John explained to Paul that he had written a few little songs that maybe they could include in their act. Paul listened attentively, and liked what he heard. It had never occurred to Paul McCartney that songs had to be written in order to be performed, and for the first time in his 16-year-old life he considered the possibilities of writing some of his own. Little did he know that in his field he possessed the talent of the supernatural.

The first few songs he wrote were not very good. He found that he was able to write so much, but that when, for example, he got to the middle, he was lost. At this point he turned to his friend and, in his eyes, “experienced songwriter,” John Lennon. John willingly helped Paul over the hump by writing in chords that had never before occurred to Paul. The result (? sic)... the first Lennon/McCartney composition.”

John Lennon: A Man Who Cared (The Fabulous Story of John Lennon and the Beatles), 1980.

NOTE: They’re literally just making stuff up in this last one, because virtually nothing in this account is true. Just to name a few examples of the alternate reality being constructed here, John has acknowledged that Paul started writing songs before he did, and as we all know, it was Paul who taught John his first real guitar chords. And, of course, Paul has always had a special gift for writing middle eights.

These tribute magazines are the usual fluffy, disposable mass market exploitation of people’s grief, and thus seemingly trivial in all of this. And much of what was written in them isn’t that different from the ‘John/more vs. Paul/less’ stuff that was written as a result of John’s Breakup Tour. The difference here is that tribute magazines are the sort of thing that people in a moment of emotional vulnerability tend to read and buy (and save). We tend to be more emotionally receptive when we’re grieving, and that means things like the tribute magazines make more of an indelible impression on our psyches than things we read when we’re not in extremis. And as a result, what people read immediately after John’s murder about John and about his relationship with Paul almost certainly made a deeper impression on them than anything else they read before or after.

Even more damaging is that for many people too young to have experienced the events firsthand, these tribute magazines gave them what was probably the first exposure to the story of The Beatles (remember, no one was really talking much about The Beatles in the ‘70s). And first impressions can be especially hard to shake, even if we later learn a truer version of the story. Combine that with the more-receptive-than-usual effect of grieving, and it’s easy to see why these magazines were so influential in calcifying ‘John/more vs. Paul/less’ for a new generation.

16. Technically, Christgau quoted his wife — approvingly.

I reached out to Robert Christgau via email to ask if he’d like to comment on this remark in hindsight. He hasn’t responded.

17. Which is probably why Paul chose to keep his recording date at the studio on that day — another choice that’s occasionally seen as callous, when ther reality is that it’s probably the only place Paul felt safe in expressing his feelings, by recording music with Linda, George Martin and the band.

18. Paul talks about this moment, as much as he could outside of song, in Many Years From Now (H. Holt, 1997)—

“When [John] died that day, I was so horrified, I just had like stage fright all day. Some of it was just fright, like "Are you next?"' That was a question whipping around the three of us, but also the complete emptiness and the finality of it. Someone stuck a microphone in the window of the car as I was leaving the studios that night; I was just beginning to wrestle with it and it was just sinking in, and someone said, "What d'you think of the death of John Lennon?"' And I really couldn't think of anything more to say than

"It's a drag" and it came out really slow. But of course when it got printed "Paul McCartney, asked for his definitive version of how he felt, said, "It's a drag"" it looked so callous in print.

You can't take the print back and say, "Look, let me just rub that print in shit and pee over it and then cry over it for three years, then you'll see what I meant when I said that word." I should have said, "It's the most unholiest of drags," and it might have been better. What I meant was, "Fuck off! Don't invade my privacy."

But I managed to pull something together, but unfortunately it was something that would add to the McCartney idiot myth, some soppy guy who doesn't care about anything, "Oh, it's a drag!"

When I got home I wept buckets, in the privacy of my own home. I controlled it all during the day, but that evening when it was on the news and all the in-depth shit, and all the pundits were coming out, trotting out all their little witticisms, I did a lot of weeping. I remember screaming that M*** C******** (asterisks are mine, in accordance with Yoko’s wishes and my own, too, not to speak or write his name) was the jerk of all jerks; I felt so robbed and so emotional. It shocked me for months afterwards and you couldn't talk to me about guns. Any mention of the word "gun", "rifle", "pistol", "shoot", just shocked me, sent a wave of reverberation through me like a little echo of the pistol shot. You couldn't even say, "That's a good shot," about a photograph, it just rang through.”

Journalist Barbara Graustack (perhaps not coincidentally one of the only female journalists who wrote about The Beatles during this time period) had enough Grail fluency to observe—

“Paul McCartney, appearing on national television here, seemed to many almost flippant in calling the Lennon killing a "drag," but others suspected that the death of Lennon — the big brother who had turned him away — had left McCartney too devastated to risk betrayal of his true feelings.”

Vic Garbarini, Brian Cullman, Barbara Graustark, Strawberry Fields Forever: John Lennon Remembered, December 1980.

19. “Stella McCartney was in tears when she watched the [Get Back] film with her father. “It did occur to me, watching it, that we spent a lot of our childhood with Dad recovering from the turmoil and the breakup,” she told me. “Can you imagine being such a critical part of that creation and then having it crumble? And, as children, we were part of a process in which our dad was mourning. It was not an easy thing for Dad, and it lasted for a lot longer than we probably knew.””

“Paul McCartney Doesn’t Really Want to Stop the Show,” David Remnick, The New Yorker, October 11, 2021.

20. Here’s a sampling of Philip Norman’s Grail phobia from his introduction to his 2016 biography of Paul, about his role in creating ‘John/more vs. Paul/less,’ beginning in the early 1970s—

“Otherwise I echoed the view that Paul McCartney had turned into a self-satisfied lightweight and mourned the loss of his Beatle magic, and his increasing attacks of sentimentality and whimsy. Soon after the release of ‘Mull of Kintyre’, I wrote a satirical poem about him in the Sunday Times Magazine whose last verse now looks horrifically tasteless:

Oh, deified scouse with unmusical spouse

For the cliches and cloy you unload

To an anodyne tune may they bury you soon

In the middlemost midst of the road.

NOTE: Now it looks horrifically tasteless? What was it before? But unlike Christgau, at least Norman admits that wishing for Paul’s actual, literal death, is horrific. And Norman does offer a kind-of-sort-of mea culpa for his role in constructing ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ in the introduction to his 2016 biography of Paul.

But that mea culpa lives in the footnotes because its language is tepid and its timing is suspiciously opportunistic. Having written biographies of The Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, he seems to have wanted to complete the set (presuming he’s not working on a Ringo bio) with a biography about Paul — and given his reputation as one of the most ardent adherents to ‘John/more vs Paul/less,’ if he wanted anyone close to Paul to talk with him for the book, he needed Paul’s permission, which he wasn’t going to get that without some sort of contrition. And indeed, Paul did give his — as Norman quotes in his intro to the Paul biography — “tacit” permission, meaning Paul wasn’t especially thrilled, but didn’t stop anyone from talking with Norman as research for the book.

I reached out to Philp Norman asking him if he’d share his thoughts on all of this for Beautiful Possibility. As I mentioned in a prior footnote, Norman declined.

21. By “told” I mean that Davies is recounting from his written notes after the call, as he specifies in the book.

22. I initially wondered if Davies’ “stick it in a drawer” suggestion was because he was aware of the lovers possibility. He did, in the ‘60s, write a guide to Swinging London that included a section of where men could meet up to have sex with other men, which suggests a certain awareness of and empathy for that world. But Davies was not a close associate, and he was also a journalist, and it seems highly unlikely that, if there is truth to the lovers possibility, that secret would have been shared with him.

More likely, this is just the same old fear of softness, which isn’t surprising, really. Like Philip Norman, Davies is an architect of the ‘John/more vs. Paul/less’ distorted narrative — though on a lesser scale. At the time of the phone call, Davies was a colleague of Philip Norman’s at the Sunday Times, and Davies shared his research with Norman during Norman’s writing of Shout! Shortly before Paul called him, Davies had done a TV interview to promote Shout! in which he advanced the ‘John/more vs Paul/less’ narrative, and it was that interview that had — according to Davies — motivated the call from Paul.

I reached out to Hunter Davies asking him if he’d share his thoughts on why he chose to publish his notes on what seems to have been intended at least in part as a private phone call. He has not responded to my email.

23. full quote:

PLAYBOY: Paul, it’s been nearly four years since John Lennon died and youhaven’t really talked about your partnership and what his death meant to you. Can you talk about it now?

PAUL: It’s … it’s just too difficult … very feel that if I said anything about John, I would have to sit here for five days and say it all. Or I don’t want to say anything.

Interview with Paul and Linda McCartney, Playboy magazine, January 1, 1984.

24. Paul’s comment to the reporter was,“You expect nice answers...but if the questions aren't nice questions, they don't have to have nice answers. And if we don't give nice answers, it doesn't mean we're snobby. It just means we're natural."

The full press conference stands as perhaps the definitive example of why the Fabs stopped doing press conferences after ‘66. It’s worth watching or reading for the absurdity of journalists asking the most influential artists of the twentieth century who have just released arguably the most influential album in music history if they wear long pants in the winter and how many girls they’ve slept with on tour. Then there’s John wishing the“anti-baby” Pill had been available a few years ago (he married Cynthia in 1962 because she was pregnant), and George saying Revolver is good, but “it’s not gonna change the whole musical world, is it."

Here’s the complete transcript: http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/db1966.0626.beatles.html

25. “I feel as though I have to justify living, you know, which is a bit of a piss-off. I don’t really want to have to sit around and justify myself; it’s a bit humiliating.” “Paul McCartney: An Innocent Man?” British GQ, October, 1986.

Note the title of the article, including the question mark.

26. Even beyond the lyrics, the video makes it clear “Take It Away” is a song about The Beatles, and at least in part about his partnership with John. The video opens with a recreation of their earliest band practices at Forthlin Road, right down to the detail of Paul wearing a quiff and a workingman’s shirt similar to the one John wears in the pictures of him at the St. Peter’s Church Fete on the day he and Paul met. RIngo and George Martin are in the band, and an actor plays the part of “impresario” Brian Epstein on his first visit to the Cavern, now recreated as the Hollywood Bowl with its iconic arch-shaped stage. And the after hours club looks remarkably like photos of the Top Ten Club, one of the clubs they did a residency at in Hamburg. There are other clues, too, but you get the idea.

27. “Moments before the start of the dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, a representative for McCartney distributed a statement in the press room that indicated McCartney wouldn’t be joining Ringo Starr and George Harrison at the ceremony.” Los Angeles Times, January 22,1988.

I haven’t been able to find an official press release, but the words quoted in the media were, “: "After 20 years, the Beatles still have some business differences, which I had hoped would have been settled by now. Unfortunately, they haven't been, so I would feel like a complete hypocrite waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion."

28. “John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 1 — Working Class Hero,”interviewed by Jann Wenner December 1970, published January 21 1971.

Wenner: You said you quit the Beatles first.

John Lennon: Yes.

Wenner: How?

John Lennon: I said to Paul, “I’m leaving.”

29. “Paul McCartney: An Innocent Man?” British GQ, October, 1986. (Again, note the title and the question mark)

full quote: “I’ll tell you what was unfortunate was the method of announcing it all. I said to the guy at the office. Peter Brown, of book fame, I’ve got an album coming out called McCartney. And I don’t really want to see too much press. Can you do me some question-and-answer things? So he sent all those questions over and I answered them all. We had them printed up and put in the press copies of the album. It wasn’t a number. I see it now and shudder. At the time it was me trying to answer some questions that were being asked and I decided not to fudge those questions.”

30. Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.

full quote: “I didn't want to do a press conference to launch the album because whenever I'd meet a journalist, they always floored me with one question: they'd say, "Are you happy?"' and it almost made me cry. I just could not say, "Yes. I'm happy," and lie through my teeth, so I stopped doing interviews. Peter Brown, who was at Apple at that time, said, "What are you going to do about publicity?"' I said, "I don't really want to do any." He said, "It's a new album. You'll kill it. Nobody'll even know it's out at all. You should do something." I said "Well, how do you suggest we do it?"' He said, "Maybe a questionnaire?"' I said, "Okay, look, you write some questions that you think the press wants to know. Send 'em over to me and I'll fill it out but I can't face a press conference." So the questionnaire came, and Peter Brown realised that the big question was the Beatles so he put in a couple of loaded questions and rather that just say, "I don't want to answer these," I thought, Fuck it. If that's what he wants to know, I'll tell him.”

31. “I wanted that to be the reunion night. If you can drop this lawsuit, guys, or show me something that you love me … Give me a sign, a wink, and I’ll do it. It just went and went, and I kept ringing. George was in Hawaii and I got a message from him, ‘Sit tight, don’t rock the boat, don’t worry.’ But that was no good to me. I had to ring him up and say, ‘I can’t come to the Hall of Fame.’ No way am I standing up on the stage going ‘Yo! United!’ when I know they’re suing me.”

Paul McCartney interviewed in Conversations with McCartney, Paul Du Noyer, Turabian, 2016.

32. Here’s George on Midday with Ray Martin (Australia), Feb 10, 1988.

Martin: And yet we have the Hall of Fame, the reunion of you and Ringo there, and Paul McCartney didn't turn up for that one, he sent a telegram saying that he thought it was a fake reunion and he'd feel like a hypocrite going.

Harrison: Well, unfortunately, you know, Paul is a hypocrite sometimes because right before we had that Hall of Fame thing, you know, we'd not been friends for a number of years and we spent a long time really getting to know each other again, and it was so sad really that Paul should use an old business kind of thing and superimpose it on that situation with the Hall of Fame. And it's sad really that he's like that. But it's really sad because we spent a long time this last year and the early part of—well, just the end of the year right before I came away from London, we had lots of dinners and meetings and we were all really on a great course, which we still are in a business sense of solving every problem we ever had, finally, after all these years. And it was just a shame that Paul should use, like, a sort of political sort of situation. Because I think all he's done is miss a great night out, miss meeting Little Richard, and all the old guys, and Dylan. And also, I think it put another nail in his own coffin as far as him as a person because, you know, as Bob Dylan said at the Hall of Fame, "Love and peace is one thing, but we all have to have forgiveness too.

Martin: It’s hard for Australians, I’m sure, when you think of the Beatles tours to Australia—it’s hard for Australia to believe that you three guys who remain don’t get on. You were so much a team.

Harrison: But we do actually, we do get on. I mean, at this point in time, I'm the closest I've been with Paul now for say the last ten, twelve years, and that's why it seems so silly what he did. But in spite of that I still love him, and it doesn't matter; I'm going to continue my friendship with him regardless of his attitude because I don't have time to screw around anymore, you know.

33. George Harrison and Ringo Starr on Aspel & Company, March 5, 1988—

Aspel: Set the record straight about today's situation. The press are keen to imply rifts. How do you and Paul get on?

Starr: We get on very well

Aspel: George?

Harrison: Yeah, no, we do actually, we, I mean... (sic)

Starr: In fact, we love you. [leans off-mic toward Harrison.[ Which camera is it, for Chrissake, it’s bobbing around. ... (sic) That’s it! [sincerely to camera] We love you. That's it!

Harrison: For like about ten years, I didn't really... (sic)

Starr: [chuckles.] Ten minutes.

Harrison: ... (sic) I didn't really know Paul and never really saw much of him through the last ten or twelve years. But more recently, we've been hanging out and getting to know each other, going for dinner and meeting and having a laugh, and it's absolutely not true what they said in the News of the World, last Sunday. Somebody... (sic) Actually, I was in San Remo the day before Paul arrived, and I got a phone call. Somebody— the Daily Mail phoned up and they said, "George." I said, "No, sorry, George just left," and I pretended I was somebody and they said, "There's some people down here who are trying to this rumor started about you and Paul....(sic)" So, I told him that we weren't... (sic) the reason why we weren't there together was because we didn’t even know each other was going to be there anyway, and we all were there on different days. But it's definitely just one of those things that these people sit around and think, "Let's have a fight between George and Paul, now," you know. But actually, I love Paul, he's my mate, and it doesn't matter what they say in the papers, they're not going to get much mileage out of that one.”

NOTE: As you’ve noticed, George also says some less-than-kind things about Paul not attending the ceremony, before he goes on to say how close they are and how much he loves him. This happens so often that at this point in my research I'm almost prepared to say this pattern is some secret Beatle thing that doesn't mean what we think it means. Maybe it’s to avoid looking too “soft” — say something not nice before you say something nice, or maybe it’s for some other mysterious reason known only to those who are Fab.

34. “I felt he was the nearest to John and I get a lot of journalists asking me this.Yeah, there are similarities between them...’ But I got pissed off after a while and I ended up answering, ‘yeah they both wore glasses.’ No matter how anyone reminds me of John, they're not John.”

Paul McCartney interviewed in Conversations with McCartney, Paul Du Noyer, Turabian, 2016.

NOTE: The demos of these sessions were officially released in 2017 on the Archive Edition of Flowers In The Dirt.

35. This isn’t a music podcast and I’m not by any means a music critic or even a music writer, and it doesn't really matter for our purposes what I personally think of Electric Arguments, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to evangelize Electric Arguments.

I’m by no means the only one who thinks it’s one of Paul McCartney's most inventive (and Beatle-esque) solo albums, in the sophistication of its arrangements and in its extraordinary diversity. Electric Arguments proved definitively that Solo Paul is indeed the same Paul McCartney who’d been the creative engine behind Sgt. Pepper and indisputably the equal of John Lennon in the Lennon/McCartney partnership — or it would have, if, y’know, people had actually heard of it. Which my field research indicates that even today, even many music writers haven’t. But now you have.

36. Anthology is a gorgeous project in all its forms, and I’m so grateful the Fabs gifted it to us. But it did not, in fact, lead the faithful out of the wilderness of confusion. Quite the contrary.

With any other band, a project like Anthology might well have been taken as authoritative, even definitive. The book itself, when released five years later, was big, heavy, substantive, and its size underscored their point — this is how it was, and how it ever shall be.

But the problem was, of course, that there’s no reasonable way it could be definitive, precisely because it came directly from The Beatles, tricksters and unreliable narrators extraordinaire, with their acknowledged track record of playing games with their story in the press (in this sense, this whole distorted narrative predicament is a classic case of reaping what you sow). As a result, Anthology was about as definitive as any other spiritual text, which is to say, not very, not even close.

And even beyond their trickster nature, likely out of deference to George, the collaboration of the four of them was emphasised at the expense of Lennon/McCartney, and likely out of deference to Yoko — whose unseen presence couldn't help but hover over the project given the democratic structure of the band and Yoko having John’s vote — the bond between John and Paul ,and thus the creative equality between them, ended up also being significantly downplayed. And because the ‘John vs. Paul’ narrative was so entrenched in the story by now, and people see what they expect to see, even had it pushed back harder against the distorted narrative, it might not have made that much difference.

And thus it didn’t solve the problem of the distorted narrative, not even a little bit — because much of what’s in it contradicts what they’ve said subsequently and elsewhere, and much of it contradicts what we know to be true from the public record.

37. “I came off the back of the Beatles Anthology with an urge to do some new music. The Anthology was very good for me, because it reminded me of the Beatles’ standards and the standards that we reached for the songs. So, in a way, it was a refresher course that set the framework for this album.”

Press kit, Flaming Pie, 1997.

38. “Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? Ugh, Beatles, how did the name arrive? So we will tell you. It came in a vision - a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them 'From this day on you are Beatles with an 'A'. Thank you, mister man, they said, thanking him.

John Lennon, “Being A Short Diversion On The Dubious Origins Of Beatles (translated from the John Lennon),” Mersey Beat Magazine, July 1961.

39. We tend to forget, when considering the damage done to the actual humans involved in all of this, that George and Ringo played on “How Do You Sleep?” Ringo walked out, to his credit, but George didn’t. Hearing that song, knowing that George and Ringo were part of it, must have been searingly painful for Paul.

40. minus the usual rogue’s gallery, that is

41. Barry Miles was kind enough to share with me via email the specifics of Paul’s involvement with the book. He confirmed for me that prior to publication, Paul reviewed the manuscript and signed off on it, after requesting only minimal changes.All of which, by any definition I’m aware of, makes Many Years From Now Paul’s authorized quasi-autobiography, which is why I’ve been referring to it that way throughout this series.

42. The nuance of this is that the back cover does not include the first sentence, but it’s included in the quote as it appears in the book. Explaining that in the actual text of the episode turned out to be too convoluted, so it lives in the footnote instead.

Also, Paul’s use of the word “affair” is an odd word choice, and it’s interesting that it was selected for the back cover quote, given it's not the sort of word one would normally use for a story about even a close friendship. Maybe it’s just Paul’s flair for the poetic, but at the very least it has an unavoidably romantic connotation in the context in which it’s being used. And it’s also worth mentioning that in the 1960s, “affair” was code in the gay world for a formal (albeit not legalised) marriage between two men—

“‘Married’ homosexual couples are usually called “affairs,” and there is an unwritten code of honour which respects such partnerships.”

Queer People: The truth about homosexuals in Britain, Douglas Plummer, Citadel, 1965.

NOTE: I’m not bringing this up as part of speculating on John and Paul’s personal sexual orientations, or to suggest that they were part of the queer subculture. I’ve found little-to-no research to suggest the latter — which is another reason why we can consider the lovers possibility without going anywhere near Paul or John’s sexual orientation.

But the countercultural world both John and Paul moved in during the ‘60s had significant overlap with queer culture, as artistic, countercultural, theatrical and bohemian circles tend to do. And more specifically, a disproportionate number of both Paul and John’s friends and associates were gay — most notably manager Brian Eptein and art dealer and social connector extraordinaire Robert Fraser (the latter of whom was especially influential in Paul’s life).

In addition, for reasons that I still haven’t fully wrapped my mind around, Polari (the slang language used in the queer world of Britain in the ‘50s and ‘60s) shares common roots with Liverpool Scouse slang, which potentially creates even more linguistic overlap between the two worlds.

Given all of this, it seems at least possible that — especially given John and Paul’s mutual and lifelong interest in words and language and their tendency to magpie — some of the slang from the queer subculture may well have entered their vocabulary.

43. This doesn’t seem to be where John first met Yoko, and we might get to all of that at some point. Let’s just say for now that, as we talked about in the Rabbit Hole on Norman’s “immovable heterosexuality” quote, it would be wise to adjust expectations to the likelihood that a striking percentage of the JohnandYoko story is at least as nonsensical and demonstrably fictional as the story of the Fabs — though almost certainly for different reasons.

44. I suspect that wasn’t generosity, so much as a desire to be seen as — as Yoko put it when she talked about providing the demos for Anthology — the one who got The Beatles back together after having been blamed for the breakup. But let’s give the benefit of the doubt in this case, and say that her motivations in helping with Anthology were probably, like everyone in this story, complicated.

45. Yoko doesn’t seem to have done much to discourage this perception — she rarely, if ever, qualifies her “John would have thought” musings with “might” or “possibly” or “while I can’t know for sure.” To be fair, it’s easy to understand why she’d accept her status as John Oracle — that’s a difficult superpower to turn down, if it’s offered on a platter. But I hope it’s also obvious that Yoko does not, in fact, speak unerringly for John.

46. Yoko’s claim that she’d never heard of The Beatles is another one of her colorful adventures in alternate universe fanfic. Putting aside that it’s not even remotely credible that an artist in the counterculture in London in 1966 wouldn’t know who The Beatles were, Paul tells the story that Yoko initially approached him, not John — before she and John were a couple — asking for handwritten Lennon/McCartney lyrics for a charity project. Obviously she had to know who The Beatles were, if she’s asking Paul for Lennon/McCartney lyrics.

Also, I forgot to edit the reference to John meeting Yoko in “1966”. It’s not at all clear when she met John, as there several different versions of the story (not all of them from Yoko) that put the initial meeting at wildly different times.

47. The programme that includes Yoko’s comments was broadcast on January 6, 1998 on BBC2, The O Zone: The Ballad of John & Yoko. I haven't found the original broadcast, and the quote is slightly different in various places. The most credible source seems to be from The Beatles Diary Volume 2: After the Break-Up 1970–2001 (Keith Badman, Omnibus, 1990)--

YOKO: “I know Paul thinks he was leading, or something like that. The way John led the band was very high level, on some kind of magical level. Not on a daily level like Paul said. ‘Oh, but I was the one who told them all to come and do it. I made the phone calls.’ John didn’t make the phone calls. John was not on that level of a leader. He was on a level of a spiritual leader. He was the visionary and that’s why The Beatles happened. He [Paul] is put in a position of being Salieri to Mozart. And it’s sad.”

NOTE: What’s sad is this whole fucked-up ‘John vs. Paul’ situation and the ugliness it brings out in people, relative to a band that was all about love.

48. A few examples of Yoko’s better angels winning the day (it’s not clear that the last line is meant in a complimentary way, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt based on the rest of the quote)--

“Paul, in his way, probably felt he had to disguise his feelings. He is like that, and I’m sure he knows it, too. He is his own worst critic. People who know him know how he expresses himself. But if you don’t know him, it may look very bad. But the face he shows to the world and the face he shows to someone like John are very different.” — “The Lost Yoko Ono Interview,” Barbara Graustack, Rolling Stone, October 1, 1981.

also in the same 2015 Daily Beast interview we considered in the prior Rabbit Hole —

“I mean, [Paul] must have suffered a lot, just like I suffered more or less the same thing in a way. So I understand. I'm sympathetic to him for having all sorts of pain. Most people think that Paul or me should not have any pain at all because we are so privileged. But it's not true. The degree of pain is always there."

“Yoko Ono: I Still Fear John’s Killer,” The Daily Beast, interviewer Tim Teeman, Oct 13, 2015.

NOTE: While it’s always possible I missed something, I can find no examples until very recently of Paul publicly criticizing Yoko— and even then very diplomatically and with his usual understatement, when he suggested in his Life In Lyrics podcast that Yoko involving herself without invitation in the creative process during Beatles recording sessions was “workplace interference.”

Also notice that Yoko, just as John does, draws a direct equivalence between her and Paul, relative to John. That is, in and of itself, support for the lovers possibility.

49. In fact it's maybe a little bit out of balance the other way now. Paul often tends to get a little more credit than John, musically and creatively. And in our well-meaning but often over-zealous quest to defend the vulnerable, we are frequently less forgiving collectively of John's foibles and vulnerabilities and stumbles and less-than-ideal coping mechanisms than we used to be — and I will write at some point about our unreasonable and self-destructive insistence that an artist should have no shadow side and no flaws, and the damage that’s done to our collective ability to experience the full richness of the human experience and the power of art, not to mention our capacity for forgiveness and humility and grace.

50. As an example of how deeply embedded the “revisionist” perception is still today, in a recent email exchange I had with a mainstream Beatles writer (who was very helpful and generous in sharing her research with me), she accused Paul of revisionism in his 2022 book The Lyrics. When I asked her to be specific, she cited several minor errors of fact of the kind that are inevitable when someone is recounting from memory something that happened over fifty years ago — and which probably occur in her own books as well, as they do in all nonfiction writing, including Beautiful Possibility.

51. quoted, as always, anonymously because the writer publishes anonymously. If you’re the writer of this gorgeous quote, I’d love to credit you by name, if you’d let me know how to do that.

52. Source: https://www.facebook.com/siriusxm/videos/10155600141610929/

53. Paul also showed his awareness of the online “JohnandPaul” community ((and more than that, his apparent delight, despite what came before in the interview in which he expresses frustration, in the context of “Early Days,” that people get the story wrong) when talking about “Early Days” in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone — “It’s me remembering walking down the street, dressed in black, with the guitars across our back. I can picture the exact street. It was a place called Menlove Avenue. (pauses) Someone’s going to read significance into that: Paul and John on Menlove Avenue. Come onnnnnnn.””

“Paul McCartney: The Long and Winding Q&A,” Rolling Stone, July 17, 2014.

54. Get Back, The Beatles, (January 26, 1969 session), Apple, 2021.

Enter Paul, Linda and six-year old Heather.

John: [to Paul] Hey... (sic) did you dream about me last night?

Paul: I don’t remember.

John: Very strong dream. We both dreamt about it... (sic) Amazing. Different dreams, you know. I thought you must have been there. I mean, I was touching you.

George: Was it sexually oriented?

Paul: Oh, you know, John, don’t worry about it.

John: There’s nothing to worry about.

George Martin: [to Ringo] Do your song again.

NOTE: Both the Get Back series and the book have been heavily edited and dialogue does not necessarily appear in the place and order in which it happened. This makes Get Back as a source of specific research nearly impossible. The Nagra tapes — the sound tapes of the sessions — are much more complete and, of course, in sequence, and are available via bootleg. A few people have tried transcribing the full 96 hours of Nagra tapes, but I have yet to find anyone who’s made it all the way through. A worthwhile project, for someone committed to seeing it through to the end to take on. But in this case, it doesn’t matter so much what was actually said as it does what Peter Jackson (and thus Apple and thus Paul) chose to include in Get Back and how that was edited.

55. Get Back, The Beatles, (January 24, 1969 session), Apple, 2021. (see note in prior footnote)

Paul listing “Don’t Let Me Down” as part of the same “story” as he puts it, as “Get Back,” “Oh! Darling” and “Two of Us” is another pretty good hint that “Don’t Let Me Down” is at least in part a song to Paul. It’s possible that — like “Isolation” — the verses are about Yoko but the song is sung to Paul.

56. Get Back, The Beatles, (January 25, 1969 session), Apple, 2021.

As with much of Get Back, the “microphone conversation” has been heavily edited in both Get Back and Let It Be (John fellating the microphone does not appear in Let It Be, probably for obvious reasons, in 1970, in a different social climate and where the parties involved had very different narratives they wanted to advance). But the overall gist of the conversation as it’s presented in Get Back seems to be relatively accurate, based on the Nagra tapes, and on the careful comparisons of the various edits that have been done in the Beatles studies counterculture.

The “microphone conversation” points to another popular theory relative to the lovers possibility — that India is where John and Paul first became lovers, and that’s the disruptive shock that precipitated the breakup (and therefore that Paul’s line in “However Absurd” — “when we made love the game was over” — refers to India and the breakup).

This is, in some ways, a plausible read, and in this way, the “microphone conversation” is markedly at odds with the rest of the research — or at least seems to be — and I’m still working on piecing together that part of the story.

Overall, if I had to say one way or the other right now, I’d say that while that “it started in India” makes sense in some ways, the greater body of supporting research — some of which we’ve talked about in this series — suggests a long-term, sustained love affair that began much earlier in the story.

57. To clarify, part of the “microphone conversation” was included in Let It Be, but the key moment of John fellating the microphone was edited out, and the conversation was edited in such a way as to minimize the erotic subtext.

58. I am aware that most directors don’t edit their own projects. But as director, Jackson had oversight over the editing, and this is what I’m referring to here.

59. Notably, while there are several photos of Jane Asher in Eyes of the Storm, in none of them is she looking directly into the lens.

60. It’s worth noticing also that it’s photographs of John that open and close the book — perhaps in and of itself significant, from an artist who’s been sequencing albums and concerts for sixty years and understands the arc of experiencing a collection of art, whether it’s songs or photographs.

61. I took a bit of poetic license here in the interests of simplicity. As you’ll see, the red heart was followed by a cascade of hearts in all the colours of the rainbow. But those are the only hearts in the entire show, and of course, it’s notable that the red heart is first. And the rainbow colours may also be relevant, but that takes us into places that we don’t need to go to make the point we’re making here.

62. It’s pretty well-known that it was George who halted work on “Now and Then” out of concerns for the audio quality, but here’s one of the more fun (and George-like) versions of the story from Paul—

“PAUL: But there were three that we liked. Uhm, “Free as a Bird,” “Real Love” - and so those were the two that we did. And there was another one that we started working on, but George went off it.

(imitating George muttering) "Fucking hell. Fucking rubbish, this is." (chuckles) It's like, "No, George, this is John!" (imitating George) "It's still fucking rubbish." "Oh, okay then." (laughs) So that one, that one's still lingering around somewhere. I'm gonna nick in with Jeff and do it, finish it. (pauses) One of these days.”

Interview clip of Paul (undated) “The Beatles: the recording of 'Free As A Bird' and 'Real Love' by Jeff Lynne, Paul McCartney & Ringo,” YouTube, excerpt from “Mr. Blue Sky: The Story of Jeff Lynne & ELO.”

63. I’d love to talk more about traces of the lovers possibility in the “Now and Then” video and the mini-documentary, because I have little doubt they’re there in abundance. But I can’t do that, because — full confession — I haven't watched either. I’ve also avoided all analysis and commentary on “Now And Then,” both in the mainstream and in the Beatles studies counterculture, because I know watching the video for “Now And Then” is going to be that kind of joy that’s indistinguishable from pain, and having been immersed in this story for three years, I’m more or less at my limit with that kind of joyful pain/painful joy. So if there are more traces of the lovers possibility in the video or the mini-doc — as, again, I suspect there are — you will need to find them on your own.

64. “The last Beatles song, “Now and Then”, is a decades-long echo of John’s last words to Paul,” GQ Magazine, November 23, 2023.

NOTE: relative to the title of the article, it seems unlikely that “think of me now and then, my old friend” were in fact John’s last words to Paul, unless they were meant tongue-in-cheek.

We don’t yet have enough context to get into it here, and it’s too big a thing to fit in a footnote, so we’ll need to wait until we sort out the ‘70s and 1980 in future parts of the series. But if, like me, you find those last words almost unbearably heartbreaking, at the very least, putting aside any romantic implications, there is strong evidence that John and Paul were planning to record together in January of 1981 and that John was preparing to return to England, perhaps permanently. That makes it unlikely that John’s last words to Paul would be something so grave and disconnected — again, unless they were tongue-in-cheek.

It’s far more likely John’s last words were related to the logistics of their recording dates or John’s pending move back to England. Or, perhaps, given the admittedly contradictory research relative to the lovers possibility during this time period, something a bit more intimate than Paul wants to — or maybe feels he can — share.

65. Cash for Questions with Paul McCartney, Q Magazine, January 1998.

66. This is another iteration of what we talked about in the “immovable heterosexuality” Rabbit Hole, in which whenever the lovers possibility comes up in the mainstream Beatles world, it’s instantly dismissed as something— anything — other than a legitimate expression of John or Paul’s desire or love for another man. And with regard to “in bed,” there isn’t any context whatsoever to help them with their rationalisations. There are just those two unambiguous two words, sitting there all on their own, so the Grail-phobic crowd really has to work to spin it away from the lovers possibility — and they do.

On the other hand, there is no meaningful speculating about “in bed” in the Beatles studies counterculture — because in truth it doesn’t seem to be especially ambiguous.

67. “Paul McCartney Often Dreams of John Lennon,’ The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, September 24, 2019.

Colbert: How often do you think about John?

Paul: Quite often, yeah. I dream about him.

Colbert: Really? Would you mind sharing one?

Paul: No.

Colbert: Okay.

Paul: I mean, the thing is, you know, when you've had a relationship like that for so long, such a deep relationship, you know, I love it when people revisit you in your dreams, so I often have band dreams, and they're crazy. I’m often with John just talking about doing something, and I come to get my bass ready to play, and it's covered in sticky tape. You know, dreams!

Colbert: Sure, I know.

Paul: So you know, I'm picking this stuff off and trying to talk to him. I’ve had a lot of dreams about John, and they're always good.

68. Paul McCartney - Interview by Diane Sawyer, ABC news, November 2, 2000.

“PAUL: If I’m going to see a face in a painting it’s highly likely to be [John’s].

INT: Do you think of him during the day or did this come, is this an unusual thing?

PAUL: I think of John a lot. Yeah. Because we were such good friends for so long. I also used to do little caricatures of his... (sic) him. It was quite easy to draw, this long aquiline nose and the sort of glasses and he used to have big sideburns, as you call them. Sideboards is what we call ‘em. Um, so I used to draw him quite a bit. When we were just sitting around I’d do caricatures.”

69. "MPL's [Paul's London office] interior style is quietly art deco. Its walls are hung with modern paintings, or framed photos by Linda McCartney, and pride of place goes to her famous shot of Paul and John, laughing and grasping each other's hands at a Sgt. Pepper party in 1967."

Paul McCartney interviewed in Conversations with McCartney, Paul Du Noyer, Turabian, 2016.

"Children's artwork hung on the walls and above the doors. He was a guy who could afford Picassos, but chose to display his kids' finger-paintings. A big jukebox shone from his sitting room. On the bulletin board in the kitchen were personal photos of McCartney with John Lennon." http://www.meetthebeatlesforreal.com/2014/09/one-fans-secret-paul-adventure.html

70. “There is an old Bing Crosby song called ‘Please’, and the opening line is ‘Please lend your little ear to my pleas’. Even if you’d never heard the song before, you would hear – aha, okay – two meanings at work. We both enjoyed wordplay. I recently bought a lot of drawings and writings by John. I have them on the wall so I get to look at them all the time, and it’s just pun city. That was part of John’s cleverness. Anything that could be distorted, was.”

Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.

“The fondest Beatles memories came flooding back for Paul McCartney as he wrote tracks for his new album - because he composed songs on John Lennon’s old stool at the same old upright piano he played Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band hits on. McCartney realised he was sitting at his father's old piano, which he used to compose tracks for Memory Almost Full, as Sgt. Pepper took off. And his piano stool was extra special too. He says, "It's a little stool that my kids gave me, which was John's stool. They found it at an auction. "I've got it sitting in front of my dad's old piano."

Wire release, StarPulse News Blog, June 30, 2007.

71. "A quick scan of his studio kitchen reveals a copy of Mary McCartney’s recipe book and a John Lennon calendar; March’s pin-up is “Moody John” in sunglasses posed against the New York skyline."

Interview with Paul McCartney, Mark Blake, Q Magazine, “Songs In the Key of Paul,” May 2015

NOTE: If you want to try your hand at a bit of lovers possibility a priori analysis on your own, see what happens when you consider the various scenarios in which Paul might have acquired this calendar.

72. "McCartney tells me he treasures a six-foot-tall print of a photo he has of himself and Lennon, taken by Linda during the White Album sessions. "I've got the pad and I'm writing, and he's just looking over at me, and you can see the body language and everything: These guys love each other. That picture is just so emotional for me, because I'd started to think, 'Oh, we did argue…'—yeah, we'd argue, but the upshot of it was that we really, all of us, had a pretty deep love for each other."

“The Untold Stories of Paul McCartney,” GQ Magazine, September 11, 2018.

also—

Colbert: You mentioned your friend John. Here's a beautiful picture of the two of you. That's a really lovely picture of the two writers together. Do you remember this moment?

Paul: I do, yeah, and that's a very special picture for me, actually, because, when The Beatles broke up, a lot of the talk was that, like, I was the villain and that John and I didn't really get on well, and it was a lot of down talk about it because everyone was sad The Beatles had broken up. And I kind of bought into it.

Colbert: That you were the villain?

Paul: A little bit, you know, because when you're called it enough, you start saying, well, maybe I was, you know. So I had to do a lot of sort of wrangling with was I, wasn't I? Did I know John? Were we friends? You know, knowing really we were, but there were so many rumors about it. And that photo, when I saw that, it's like, yes, we were friends. And it's a beautiful photo for me because it just reminds me of us working together and how cool it was.”

“Paul McCartney Often Dreams of John Lennon,’ The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, September 24, 2019.

photo by Linda McCartney

John seems to have had a similar inclination to keep photographs of Paul nearby. For example, the only photograph displayed in his studio at Kenwood was a photo from the David Bailey session of John and Paul. (PS — I realise this looks photoshopped, but it’s not — this is how it appears in Beatles Monthly Magazine.)

73. The original handwritten lyric sheet for “Here Today,” Paul’s on-the-record ‘love song to John’ (his words), shows “here with me” rather than “here today” in the opening verse. (The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.)

74. Coming back from Paris in 1961 may, in fact, have been a fifth loss — the loss they suffered when they returned from being able to be an anonymous public couple to becoming The Beatles, losing forever the chance to be together in any sort of legitimate, culturally-approved way.

One of the most intriguing areas of study in the Beatles studies counterculture is the possibility that John and Paul didn’t intend to come back, when they went to Paris in 1961. We may devote an entire episode to the Paris trip in the next part of the series, and if so, we’ll explore that possibility — because whether it’s true or not, it offers some interesting insights into that time period in Beatles history that aren’t visible without considering the lovers possibility.

75. As a reminder, I include John always because there is always the possibility of a letter surfacing. Paul has said, for example, that he has private letters from John — and that in and of itself is interesting and counter to the story as it’s currently told, and we’ll get to that in future parts of the series.

76. In 1967, psychologists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe developed a scale of life stressors that impact our health and well-being. At the very top of it, with a score of 100, was “death of a spouse”-- that event was considered so disruptive and stressful that it became essentially the baseline comparison for every other stressor. And while that scale was created during a time when “spouse” meant only someone of the opposite gender, of course it applies in any long-term, deeply intimate romantic partnership, whether legally recognised or not.

77.

78. Homophobia: A History, Byrne Fone, Metropolitan Books, 2000.

79. "People said, 'It's a pity that such a nice thing had to come to such a sticky end.' I think that too. It is a pity. I like fairy tales. I'd love it to have had the Beatles go up in a little cloud of smoke and the four of us just find ourselves in magic robes, each holding an envelope with our stuff in it.”

Paul McCartney, “The Ex-Beatle Tells His Story,” Life Magazine, April 16, 1971.

80. slightly paraphrased from a longer passage, with a bit of poetic license. Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagen, Faith, Hope and Carnage, Picador Press, 2023.

81. “Silly Love Songs” is, of course, another song about longing to express love, and thus probably about John.

In particular, there’s the repeated line — chanted like a mantra — “how can I tell you about my loved one.” If Paul’s “loved one” in the song refers to Linda, there’s no “how” about it. He can just do so. Men have been telling the world very publicly about loving women for thousands of years. But “how can I tell you about my loved one” takes on a different and more powerful meaning if it’s written and sung by a man about another man. And an additional meaning, in the context of years of being bludgeoned for singing about “inconsequential” love songs trying to express his love for John to a world not interested in hearing about anything other than rivalry.

Paul has told us that his story is in his songs more than in any books — and “Silly Love Songs” is a clear example of that (and I probably should have included it in the Playlist Commentary).