Hi everyone,
As I mentioned last week, I'm going to try to post at least a short update every Monday. But please don't hold me to either the frequency or the day of the week. I’ve proven myself unreliable at long-term posting on a regular schedule. And as I also mentioned, these updates will be very scruffy — and that you can hold me to. More precariously, they won’t be vetted by a second pair of eyes, as everything formally posted on The Abbey is. So it’s likely I’ll get myself into trouble doing these updates — at least that part will be good theatre.
Anyroad, things are looking good for being able to post a new chapter of A Complicated Passion in the next week or two. As I mentioned in the Part One Wrap-Up, that project is also dear to me and unlike Beautiful Possibility, it has the notable advantage of being publishable (which helps with the credibility of The Abbey). So I’m going to try to make some serious progress on it through the summer, while I continue to outline and research Part 2 of Beautiful Possibility.
The most important thing to say about that research is a big thank you! to those of you who have emailed offering to help.
As fab as my fab research assistant Robyn is, the tragic reality is that I simply do not have the budget just now to pay for the research this series requires, and there is a lot still to be done for Part 2. So if Beautiful Possibility is going to make it into the world in any reasonable length of time (and by “reasonable,” I mean sooner than the three years it took for Part One), I'm going to need help.
Part of the research that needs done is the In Search Of list that I posted a few weeks ago. To make that list easier to access, I’ve given it its own page on The Abbey, and you’ll find that link in the menu bar. I’ll keep it updated with new additions, as well as updates when items are found.
And on that note, I want to thank Sofia who has found two of the lost-long In Search Of quotes within a week — the one in which Denny Laine Lane acknowledges that everybody in the industry knew that Wings was Paul's band, rather than a “band” proper—
AC: Does Wings deserve to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?
DL: No, because Wings was never a band. I’m sorry, it wasn’t. It was a Paul McCartney project. You have to know that. We were known as Paul McCartney & Wings, but we weren’t actually a band. We weren’t like the Moody Blues, all equal members. It was Paul’s band. That’s the end of it. Although I stuck around for all those years, it wasn’t a group. In the public eye it was, but in business, we weren’t. It was the Paul McCartney project. That’s why he got inducted as an individual artist. Wings is part of his induction, separately to the Beatles, actually. (“Denny Laine Saves The World,” Austin Chronicle, April 26, 2018)
This is not, BTW, a bad thing, though Denny obviously sees it differently. Paul McCartney obviously had every right and standing in the world to have his own band after the breakup. There are complex psychological reasons why Paul seems to have felt he needed a band rather than continuing to present himself as a solo artist — many of them not that different from John’s reasons for collaborating with Yoko, which we’ll talk about in a future episode.
Sofia also found the quote that I very much wanted for the Entangled Form Rabbit Hole, in which John acknowledges that he writes the way he writes because of his long-term partnership with Paul—
“I copped money for Family Way, the film music that Paul wrote while I was out of the country making How I Won The War,” Lennon remembers, laughing. “I said to Paul ‘you’d better keep that,’ and he said ‘don’t be soft.’ It’s the concept. We inspired each other so much in the early days. We write how we write now because of each other. Paul was there for five or ten years, and I wouldn’t write like I write now if it weren’t for Paul, and he wouldn’t write like he does if it weren’t for me.” (John Lennon interview, Melody Maker, April 19, 1969.)
Note also John sharing with the press, even in 1969 when they were estranged, that Paul called him “soft” to suggest that John shouldn’t share in the profits from The Family Way. This is Paul - and John both acknowledging that even music written “entirely” by the other person is in a meaningful way written by both of them. It is, imo, one of the most beautiful quotes in the body of Beautiful Possibility research.
Both of those quotes and their footnotes have now been incorporated into the written version of Beautiful Possibility, though not into the audio version as corrections/additions to the audio would be time-prohibitive at this point.
So thank you again to Sophia. I'm starting to hope she might be able to find the original source of John’s “Paul was the first love of my life” quote that has for decades eluded not just me, but the entire Beatles studies counterculture, as well as the mainstream (not that the mainstream is especially interested in finding it, mind you). No pressure though. ;-)
In terms of sources for in Search Of quotes, Robyn and I found an archive of rare Beatles interviews dating from 1962 all the way to the present. And it’s likely some of those quotes are in those interviews. Volunteer researcher Ruth has been working her way through that archive looking for those quotes, as well as other things, for a while now. But she is understandably a little bit burned out. So if somebody would like to take over that project, email Robyn and let her know. And thank you to Ruth for having made a big dent in that project.
I, meanwhile, have been working my way through Ken Womack’s two-volume biography of George Martin.
This might surprise some of you, since I don’t normally read biographies cover-to-cover because of all of the biases and distortions we talked about at length in Part One of Beautiful Possibility. Not only is it usually not a good use of time, but it’s also hard on my nervous system.
But in this case, I thought perhaps I could make an exception, since (I hoped) the distorted narrative would not be a big factor in a biography of George Martin. And also, I didn’t detect much distorted narrative bias in Womack’s Mal Evans biography. But alas, my optimism was misplaced.
Much of the biography of George Martin is devoted to a detailed, day-by-day, track-by-track account of the recording of every Beatles song. And while many of John’s songs are detailed as (not inaccurately) as a genre-bending musical or lyrical breakthrough, Paul’s songs are virtually always written off with clinical and perfunctory detachment. And if their artistic merit is acknowledged at all, it’s virtually always to talk about how important John’s (George’s or George Martin’s) contribution was to making them what they were.
I’ve only read through Revolver, so maybe that pattern changes with Pepper. But even if things improve, that still means Womack has dismissed as artistically inconsequential every song primarily composed by Paul through 1966, including “Yesterday,” “Here There and Everywhere,” and “Eleanor Rigby.”
I’m not going to take up our time with specific examples, because by now y’all know the score. But if there’s any doubt about Womack’s bias, he reveals himself in the following quote—
Yet at the same time, “one felt under pressure when doing one of George’s songs.” It was as if Martin were unduly concerned about giving his principal and most accomplished songwriters as much space as they required to develop their ideas, yet he also recognized that Harrison was all too cognizant of his place in the pecking order. Like all great coaches, Martin didn’t want his third-string player to feel slighted at not playing at the top of his game, which was clearly on the upswing in early 1966. (Kenneth Womack, Sound Pictures: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin, The Later Years, 1966–2016, Chicago Review Press, 2018.)
We’ll wait to talk about the situation relative to George’s songwriting when we get there in the story. What caught my attention in this passage is the phrase, “third string player.” Because if Womack is calling George Harrison the Beatles’ third string composer, then by definition, there must be a second string composer — and guess who Womack thinks that is?
This is, once again, a biographer inserting their own “John/more vs. Paul/less” bias into the narrative where it doesn’t belong. Sound Pictures is meant to be a biography of George Martin. But Womack’s “third string” comment doesn’t seem to reflect George Martin’s point of view. Here’s just one quick example of what Martin said in his own autobiography—
I must emphasise that it was a team effort. Without my arrangements and scoring, very many of the records would not have sounded as they do. Whether they would have been any better, I cannot say. They might have been. That is not modesty on my part; it is an attempt to give a factual picture of the relationship. But equally, there is no doubt in my mind that the main talent of that whole era came from Paul and John. George, Ringo and myself were subsidiary talents. We were not five equal people artistically: two were very strong, and the other three were also-rans. In varying degrees those three could have been other people. (George Martin, All You Need Is Ears, St. Martin’s Press, 1979.)
So I think it’s pretty clear we can add Ken Womack to the running list of biographers whose research and writing has been — perhaps subconsciously, but nonetheless — distorted by the “John/more vs. Paul/less” narrative. And notice that Sound Pictures was published in 2018. The “John/more vs Paul/less” distorted narrative is still very much alive and doing its destructive work.
This is a major problem for all the reasons we talked about in Part One, and especially in episodes 1:8/1:9.
It’s a particular problem because Ken Womack seems to have taken over from Mark Lewisohn as the quasi-official, blessed-by-Apple Beatles authority. This begs the question of why Apple can’t seem to anoint a writer who isn’t under the thrall of the distorted breakup narrative. And the answer is because presumably they haven't found one. (And on that note, here's a good reminder to please keep sharing Beautiful Possibility.).
The more personal reason why it’s unfortunate that Womack is compromised by the distorted narrative is that he’s one of the writers who was kind and helpful to me during the researching of Part One. Sadly, I’m guessing those days are over.
That’s it for this week. Thank you again to those of you who are reading, listening, sharing and subscribing. This is how we heal the story.
Together.
Peace, love, and strawberry fields,
Faith ❤️
