All the episodes of Beautiful Possibility in sequence are here.
This Rabbit Hole works pretty well on its own without earlier episodes, but a few specific references and the larger context will make more sense if you’ve read/listened to episode 1:4 Are You Afraid Or Is it True?
Welcome to this week’s Rabbit Hole. As a reminder, Rabbit Holes are shorter, and much scruffier than the main episodes, and are meant to go deeper into something we didn’t have room to talk about in the main episode.
In this week’s main episode, we talked about the way the fear of softness — meaning the fear of being receptive to emotion — has distorted the story of The Beatles by stripping the possibility that John and Paul were lovers out of the story. And we talked a bit about how this happens — how a reluctance on the part of mainstream Beatles writers to consider the lovers possibility creates a bias in what’s included and what’s left out of the story, and in how the story is told.
We already saw a bit of this bias in action when we talked about John and Paul’s 1961 trip to Paris, and how omitting the context around that trip robs us of our ability to see and understand the full meaning of Paris for John and Paul, and thus the full meaning of Paris whenever it appears in their story and in their music. We saw how when we look at the Paris trip through the softer gaze of the Grail and put it in its fuller context, we get a richer and more complete and more beautiful story than the oversimplified version that’s currently told — which is limited to Paris being where they first got their iconic Beatles haircuts.
In this week’s Rabbit Hole, we’re going to look at how a single, relatively minor event is described by various writers of those “definitive” books, and how those descriptions reveal the underlying bias that inaccurately distorts the story away from the lovers possibility.
In the spring of 1960, Paul and John traveled together, just the two of them, to visit Paul’s cousin Betty and her husband Mike in the south of England. If you’re familiar with Beatles history, you might be familiar with this trip. It’s famous for being the occasion of what might be the only performances of “The Nerk Twins,” the name Paul and John gave themselves when they performed for a few nights, as an acoustic guitar duo, at the Fox and Hounds, a pub owned by cousin Betty and Mike.
I haven’t found any instances of John talking about the Nerk Twins trip,1 but Paul occasionally talks about it. Here he is in 1997 in his quasi-memoir, Many Years From Now—
“John and I used to hitch-hike places together, it was something that we did together quite a lot; cementing our friendship, getting to know our feelings, our dreams, our ambitions together. It was a very wonderful period. I look back on it with great fondness. I particularly remember John and I would be squeezed in our little single bed, and Mike Robbins, who was a real nice guy, would come in late at night to say good night to us, switching off the lights as we were all going to bed.”2
And here’s Paul in his 2022 book The Lyrics —
“It was great fun to visit [Mike and Betty], so John and I hitchhiked down to Ryde, and when we wrote [Ticket to Ride] we were referring to the memory of this trip. It’s very cute now to think of me and John in a little single bed, top and tail, and Betty and Mike coming to tuck us in.”3
The first thing to notice relative to Paul’s tellings of the Nerk Twins trip is that neither version mentions the Nerk Twins performances — which would seem by far the most significant and interesting part of the adventure, given it’s (as far as we know) the only time he and John performed publicly as a duo.
Instead, in both versions, the centrepiece of Paul’s story — the memory he reaches for as most meaningful to him — is the part about sharing a “little single bed.” And note that Paul uses the same language in both tellings, though the two stories are told over two decades apart.
Paul does occasionally tell the NerkTwins story without including the sleeping arrangements, but it’s notable that the version he tells in both of his published memoirs — Many Years From Now in 1997 and The Lyrics in 2022 — focuses on sharing the bed with John and doesn’t even mention the Nerk Twins’ performances, despite the historical importance of that part of the story.
Before we go further, let’s be clear that we’re not here to speculate on anything relative to the personal details of this anecdote. If Paul and John were lovers, the details of that love affair are none of our business, and that includes the Nerk Twins trip. And if this story was all we had, this is easily a story of best mates with a flexible concept of personal space — not unlike the “puppies in a basket” metaphor that Beatles biographer Philip Norman frequently uses in his books. The sharing of the “little single bed” would be an unremarkable detail at best.
But by making the part about sharing a little single bed with John the focus of his telling of the Nerk Twins adventure in both of his published autobiographies, Paul has directed our attention to this detail. That’s clearly what that stands out for him — or at least it’s the detail he chose to share with us. And because of that, if we want the story to be an accurate reflection of the emotional truth of the people who lived it, we have an obligation to pay special attention to that detail — just as Paul does.
And to their credit, biographers do tend to include the sleeping arrangements, when they relate the story in their books.
And because the “little single bed” detail is so contained and specific, the way various writers choose to describe that detail is an easy and clear example of how the fear of softness distorts this story away from the lovers possibility, at the expense of accuracy.
Here’s how Philip Norman describes the Nerk Twins trip, in what’s often referred to as a “definitive” biography of John, written in 2008. Pay attention particularly to his description of the sleeping arrangements—
“Thanks to the combined rival attractions of Cynthia and Stu, Paul McCartney had recently felt himself taking “a bit of a back seat” with John. But the Easter vacation of 1960 brought a major rebonding between them. Packing up a few clothes and their guitars, the pair hitchhiked two hundred miles south to stay with Paul’s relatives Mike and Betty Robbins, who were now running a pub, the Fox and Hounds, in Caversham, Berkshire. They spent a week helping out at the pub, sharing a bed in an upstairs room as innocently as children.4
Overall, this is an uncharacteristically tender account from an otherwise Grail-phobic writer — but note the inclusion of the phrase “innocently as children” that Norman uses to describe their sharing the bed. It’s telling that Norman feels the need to add a descriptor at all, and we’ll get to that. For now, let’s notice that “innocently as children” is a somewhat clunky tag-on — and an odd one, given that at the time, John was 20 and Paul was 18.
Let’s be clear again that we’re not here to speculate about whether “innocently as children” is an accurate description of the situation or not. If Paul and John were lovers, the details of that love affair are, again, none of our business.
We’re talking about this because of Philip Norman’s already established bias relative to the lovers possibility — remember he’s also the writer who insisted in his “definitive” 2016 biography of John that John and Paul had a strictly professional relationship and rarely spent time together outside of their songwriting.5
How he reconciles that statement with the Nerk Twins trip, or with Paul saying in Many Years From Now that it was one of many trips he and John took together, or with Paris, or with John spending so much time at Paul’s London house during the recording of Sgt. Pepper, or with what virtually everyone who knew them said about the closeness of their bond, or with any of the many other examples of them spending time together is for only a Grail-phobic writer to know.
Anyroad, back to our Nerk Twins example.
Norman recycles the exact same “innocently as children” language in his also-supposedly “definitive” 2016 biography of Paul.6
But where is Norman getting this phrase from?
Unless I’ve missed something — which is always possible — John seems never to have brought up the Nerk Twins in interview at all. And I’ve found no interviews with cousin Betty or Mike that describe the sleeping arrangements. Paul seems to be the only person who’s ever told this part of the story — so Paul is almost certainly Norman’s only primary source of information for writing about it.
But Paul hasn’t — again, to my knowledge — ever used the words “innocent” or “children” to describe sharing the single bed with John. I’ve found only those two instances of him talking about this at all, again, in his two published memoirs. In 1997, he says that he remembers it “fondly,” and in 2022, he looks back on the memory as “cute.”
But “cute” and “fondly” are not the same as innocent, and the difference between those two words, relative to the lovers possibility, is extreme. “Cute” and “fondly” is a man looking back on his teenage adventures with the mature perspective of age. “Innocent” is something altogether different — because of course, the opposite of innocent is “guilty,” and in this case, given the context, that so-called ”guilt” that Norman is directing the anecdote away from would be of a romantic nature.
Still, maybe Norman conflated “cute” with “innocent,” and thought he was accurately reflecting Paul’s account of the bed-sharing. Except that Norman didn’t have Paul’s “cute” version of the anecdote when Norman wrote his biographies. Norman published his biography of John in 2008, and his biography of Paul in 2016. Unless Norman had a time machine that transported him forward into 2022 to read Paul’s “cute” version of the story, and then back again to write his book, he didn’t have access to the “cute” version when he wrote the biographies of John in 2008 and Paul in 2016.
Norman didn’t have direct access to Paul for either biography. Paul refused to cooperate with Norman for the John biography, presumably because Norman has a longstanding negative bias towards Paul in his writing — which we’ll talk about in a future episode. And in the foreword to his 2016 biography on Paul, Norman acknowledges that bias, and that Paul declined to be interviewed for that biography, as well.
Now maybe Paul used “innocently as children” in some other version I haven’t found, but it’s doubtful that Norman spent much time researching — for a biography of John — an anecdote that’s a relatively minor event in Beatles history and that John never seems to have spoken about.
And since Norman uses the identical “innocently as children” language in both the 2008 John biography and the 2016 Paul biography, it’s pretty clear he just recycled the language from the first book to the second.
Since only the 1997 version of the Nerk Twins trip was published when Norman wrote both books, and since Norman did not have access to Paul directly, it’s highly likely he’s taking the details of the Nerk Twins trip from Paul’s Many Years From Now.
And Paul’s telling of the Nerk Twins adventure in Many Years From Now doesn’t say anything at all about “cute” or “innocent.” He just says he and John shared a bed and that Paul has fond memories of doing so.
All of which is to say that “innocently as children” is almost certainly entirely Norman’s phrase, inappropriately imposed on the Nerk Twins trip without any factual basis. And in doing so, Norman is skewing the Nerk Twins anecdote away from the lovers possibility — and he’s doing it counter to the only actual research we have.
This isn’t the only time Norman does this. In a future Rabbit Hole, we’ll look at another phrase he inappropriately inserted into the narrative that’s caused all kinds of trouble. But for right now, let’s look at a couple more examples of how biographers describe the Nerk Twins trip.
This next example is from Tune In, Mark Lewisohn’s 2013 biography of the early years of the band. As we talked about in the Rabbit Hole on research methodology,7 Lewisohn has other problems at the moment, but we’re concerned here not with manufactured franken-quotes, but with how Lewisohn describes the Nerk Twins trip, and more specifically, the sleeping arrangements—
“Having twice been away with George, this was Paul’s first holiday with John — and John’s first with either. They hitch-hiked with some difficulty: each had his guitar and Paul also had the Elpico, and drivers didn’t want to pick them up (guitar players = delinquents). Once they realised the problem they hid the gear in a bush until finally someone stopped. They had to share a single bed at the pub, where (despite their age) Mike Robbins liked to come into their room and bid them good night, at which point Paul would engage him with questions about his entertainment career, like when he sang with the broadcasting vocal group the Four Jones Boys.”8
Before we deal with Lewisohn’s “had to share a single bed,” here’s Ray Connolly, in his 2018 biography of John, using similar language —
“In fact that Easter of 1960 John and Paul would even sing as a duo, when they hitch-hiked to Caversham in the south of England where a friend was running a pub. For a week, John and Paul, who had to sleep together in the same single bed, would entertain the regulars under the name the Nerk Twins. They were best friends and there was a mutual admiration between the two.”9
Both Lewisohn and Connolly use the exact same language — that Paul and John “had” to share a single bed. And it’s the word “had” — seemingly so, well, innocent in its simplicity — that’s the reason for this Rabbit Hole.
Again, to my knowledge, the only information we have about how either Paul or John felt about sharing that “little single bed” is that Paul looks back on it as a fond memory — and again, even Paul’s “cute” version wasn’t published until after both of these biographies were written.
More than that, Paul has expressed fairly clearly and repeatedly over the years that he enjoyed being physically close to John — and so has John relative to Paul.
Paul has told fond stories of the “Beatle sandwich,” when the windshield of their van blew out on an early days winter tour of Scotland and they had to pile on top of one another to stay warm.10 He frequently talks about his memories of writing with John on their childhood beds, or squashed together into a bathroom or a vestibule. 11And he speaks affectionately — and it seems, somewhat longingly — about his memories of John hugging him.
And of course, in this week’s’ main episode, we looked at the photos and film footage of Paul regularly initiating physical contact with John — sitting on his lap, playing with John’s scarf, adjusting his tie and his hair, putting his arm around him.12 And as was detailed in an extended footnote in that episode, contrary to what Norman et al claim, Paul and John regularly shared a hotel room long past the point where they could easily have afforded separate suites — remember, for example, the story about the two of them sequestering themselves in their shared Parisian hotel suite in 1964.”
And remember, even if we didn’t have all of that context, even if all we had was Paul’s telling of the Nerk Twins trip, nothing he’s said about sharing that “little single bed” with John fits with “had to.”
When Lewisohn and Connolly say Paul and John “had to share a single bed,” they’re insinuating that neither Paul nor John wanted to share a bed, but that there was no other alternative.13
Presumably the attic had only the one bed, and maybe Paul and John “had” to share that one bed, in the sense that otherwise one of them would have had to kip on the floor, or sleep elsewhere.
But they could easily have chosen at least the first one of those options. If they didn’t want to share a bed, it’s easy enough not to. They were teenage boys, and they were about to spend two months sleeping in a filthy storeroom with no heat in Hamburg in one of the coldest winters on record. Compared to that, the floor of an attic in the British countryside wouldn't be that big a deal. And more importantly, most teenage boys, especially of that era, would go out of their way not “have to” share a bed — even if not sharing means one person is less comfortable.
But despite all of this — despite Paul having said he thinks fondly back on the experience, despite the primary research we have from Paul and John that they enjoyed being physically close, despite neither of them choosing the option not to share by sleeping on the floor — Lewisohn and Connolly have both taken it upon themselves to insert the unsupported claim that neither Paul nor John wanted to share that single bed. And that’s contrary to literally the only actual information we have — which is from Paul.
This is an example of what I meant, when I suggested in the main episode that the fear of the softness is what motivates Grail-phobic writers to not only omit most of the research in support of the lovers possibility from the story, but also — whether consciously or subconsciously — to write the story to exclude the chance of anyone else seeing that possibility.
These writers are not telling us what happened. They’re not even telling us how Paul and John felt about what happened. They’re telling us how they — the writers — want John and Paul to have felt about what happened, even though it’s, again, contrary to what we know from the only person who’s offered any information at all about this situation.
And it’s hard not to think the reason for inserting this unfounded claim about how Paul and John felt about sharing a single bed into the story is that the writers recognise the lovers possibility lurking nearby — even if only subconsciously — and are perhaps... less than interested in encouraging people to notice it.
I haven’t yet read Connolly in full, but his stilted “they were best friends and there was a mutual admiration between the two” certainly doesn’t suggest a sense of being especially fluent in the language of the Grail.
Both Norman and Lewisohn have demonstrated their Grail-phobia all throughout their books. And no way is a Grail-phobic writer going to write that Paul has fond memories of sharing a single bed with John — even if that’s what Paul said is true.
So to get around having to do that, it seems clear that — again probably subconsciously — all three writers skewed the narrative to assuage their fear, rather than making it consistent with Paul’s recollection, or at the least, making it neutral.
But even here, it’s not that simple. And it’s this last bit that, for me as a wordsmith, makes this example especially interesting. Because even if everything I’m suggesting is true about the motivations of those biographers, it’s still not entirely their fault that they got themselves twisted into a pretzel on how to write about all of this—
—because I’m not sure there is a way to write neutrally about the sleeping arrangements, without biasing the story either towards the lovers possibility or away from it.
Let me show you what I mean.
The most neutral possible way to describe their sleeping arrangements in our example is to say simply, “they shared a single bed.” But do you see how that’s not actually neutral at all, if it’s a man and a woman or two men who aren’t related by blood?
In contemporary Western culture — and by “contemporary,” I’m including the time period when the Nerk Twins trip took place — there is no way to say that two adults, male or female, shared a bed and have it be neutral — not because the language doesn’t allow it, but because the culture doesn't allow it.
Unlike past eras, we no longer share beds unless we’re very young children — hence Norman’s “innocently as children” — or unless we’re romantically involved with the person we’re sharing the bed with. So if two young adults — remember John was 20 and Paul was 18 — are sharing a bed, and if that’s all the information we have, the assumption by default leans towards the romantic.
Because of this assumption, if Norman and Lewisohn and Connolly had written “they shared a single bed” and nothing else, that would by default have skewed the story towards the lovers possibility.
The only way to avoid the romantic subtext — which Grail-phobic writers are highly motivated to do — is to add some kind of modifier. “Innocently” is the obvious one, though it’s maybe a bit too obviously going the other direction — it sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb in Norman’s version, dangling there at the end of the sentence as it does.
The least intrusive possible modifier is “had to,” which is what Lewisohn and Connolly — to their credit as wordsmiths — chose. And while “had to” might seem neutral, as we just talked about, it’s very much not — because it now distorts the anecdote in the other direction — away from the lovers possibility.
Because sharing a bed is so culturally weighted, there is no neutral. It’s one or the other — it’s innocent or it’s... not. Which is why the way in which the bed-sharing situation is described becomes a litmus test for the bias of the writer relative to the lovers possibility. There’s simply no way to describe it without planting a flag on one side of the lovers possibility or the other.
The bed-sharing on the Nerk Twins trip is a tiny example of the way the story is skewed away from the lovers possibility, even when doing so is contrary to the available research. And it’s because it’s so small — and so subtle — that it’s notable, because almost no one will consciously notice it, but it will have its intended effect all the same.
Norman, Lewisohn and Connolly probably didn’t consciously notice all of this, either. They’d probably have added the “innocently as children" and the “had to” without consciously realising they were doing it — as a consequence of their fear of softness.
That fear of softness is so relentlessly ground into a man’s psyche, so deeply embedded in what we teach men about what it means to be a man, that it’s automatic and reflexive to write this example as they did, out of self-protection if nothing else. And that’s going to happen even if the man in question is an enlightened thinker who genuinely believes we ought to love whom we love — as perhaps those three writers do when they’re not busy covering up the lovers possibility.
The Nerk Twins bed-sharing situation is a small example, but it’s not an insignificant one. It matters.
The skewing the story away from the lovers possibility — and contrary to the actual research — shows up in little examples like “had to share a bed” and “innocently as children.” It shows up in bigger examples like the Paris trip. It shows up in their assertions that Paul and John only had a "professional relationship,” despite there being no credible evidence whatsoever to support that assertion, even absent the lovers possibility.
The fear of softness bias shows up in many, many other examples, too, many of which we’ll look at when we re-tell the story in the second part of this series. And I don’t think it's a coincidence that these examples tend to congregate in places where the story of The Beatles doesn’t make sense as it’s currently told. I sometimes call these places “John and Paul shaped holes,” but what they really are, of course, is Grail-shaped holes — places where the fear of softness, along with a lack of Grail fluency, distorts the story to avoid having to see the lovers possibility — and thus to preclude anyone else from seeing it, either.
All of these examples — big and small — add up, when there are many, many of them all through the story. And from that, you can maybe start to see how this fear of softness twists the story away from the actual research — research that supports the lovers possibility — towards the harder, angrier and less-accurate breakup narrative — you know, the one that John subsequently told us over and over again wasn’t true, and yet that Grail-phobic writers cling to, so as to avoid looking at what might really be there.
And that in turn distorts the story of The Beatles — this foundational myth of our culture — away from love and towards something much less loving. And in a future episode, we’ll get very specific about what that something is, and why it might be at the root of much of what’s gone so wrong with our world, and why turning this story back towards love is so crucial to healing that world.
Again, I’m not suggesting this Nerk Twins example was conscious on the part of these writers — maybe it was, probably it wasn’t. For our purposes here, it doesn’t much matter which it was. Conscious or unconscious doesn’t make the skewing of the story away from the lovers possibility any less what it is. Or change the damage it did — and continues to do.
Because, again, the books we’ve talked about here are considered “definitive” and their writers are considered Beatles authorities. Other writers and researchers use these books as source material, what with them being labeled “definitive” and all.
And that means that even if the new generation of writers is no longer afraid of the lovers possibility — and would maybe be even a bit swept away by it if they saw it — they don’t get the opportunity to see it, because the actual research has either been omitted or distorted away from them being able to see it.
The new generation of Beatles writers don’t get the opportunity to even make up their own minds about the lovers possibility, much less experience the joy and healing from it that those of us in the Beatles studies counterculture have experienced. The Grail-phobic first generation writers have — because of their fear — stolen that opportunity from them - and from you.
All of this is the longer answer for why I only use primary research for this series — in the case of the Nerk Twins trip, that means only what Paul has said. Because until we untangle the clusterfuck that all of this fear has caused, primary research is the only valid research available to us.
Next week, in the first of a two-part episode, we’ll continue to do some of that untangling, by focusing on the place both Paul and John have explicitly told us is where we should look to find the truth of their story — in their songs.
And as some fun advance prep for that, I have a playlist for you. It includes all the songs we’ll be looking at in that two-part episode. At the end of the two parts, the Rabbit Hole will be an extended commentary on this playlist. But I thought some of you might appreciate being able to hear these songs in advance — you’ll definitely get more out of the next two episodes if you’re freshly familiar with the songs we’re talking about.
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Until next week, peace, love and strawberry fields,
Faith
These early trips with Paul might be the “early days” John is referencing in “(Just Like) Starting Over,” which we’ll get to when we have, yes, context.
Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H.Holt, 1997.
Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.
NOTE: Paul may be conflating two different trips here. Mike and Betty owned a pub in Caversham/Reading in Berkshire, and also a pub in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. Paul has said that he and John hitchhiked to both places — and maybe more than once, since he mentions it’s something they did frequently. The Fox and Hounds where the Nerk Twins performed is in Caversham, but Paul’s mention of Ryde makes it at least possible that there was more than one Nerk Twins residency. It doesn’t matter for our purposes, but the confusion makes researching this trip a little tricky.
John Lennon: The Life, Philip Norman, Harper Collins, 2008.
John really loved Ringo,” Maureen Cleave remembers.“And he often said how much he loved George, which was a slightly unusual thing for a man to come out with in that era.” He tended to socialize much less with Paul; theirs was always first and foremost a professional relationship.”
Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life, Harper-Collins, 2008.
“[Paul and John] hitch-hiked the 200 miles to Berkshire, taking along their guitars,and spent a week at The Fox and Hounds, sharing a small single bed as innocently as children. Last thing each night, Mike Robbins would come into their room and tell them stories about his years with a radio vocal group called the Jones Boys before switching off the light.”
Philip Norman, Paul McCartney: The Life, Little Brown and Co., 2016.
NOTE: Norman really likes to remind us that everything was innocent. The word appears 23 times in his biography of Paul, and 26 times in his biography of John. In contrast, “innocent” appears only nine times in Ray Connollly’s biography of John, only twice in Connolly’s biography of Paul, and only 16 times in the 1,728 pages of the two-volume extended version of Lewisohn’s Tune In.
Here’s Norman on page 333 of the John bio, although here he’s talking about the four of them — “After years of sharing bedrooms—and often beds—they had the innocent physical intimacy of puppies sprawled over each other in a basket.” (John Lennon: The Life, Harper Collins, 2008)
It’s almost like Norman is trying to reassure himself or something.
https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/rabbit-hole-notes-on-research-methodology
Mark Lewisohn, Tune In, Extended Special Edition, Little Brown and Co., 2017.
NOTE: It’s not clear why Lewisohn thinks it’s the first trip Paul and John took together. Maybe Paul has said so somewhere I haven’t found yet, but that seems unlikely. By all accounts of those who knew them in the early days, by the spring of 1960 when the Nerk twins trip took place, Paul and John had been close for almost three years. Also they’re about to go to Hamburg and become The Beatles, and will thus have less time for this sort of thing in the future than they might have had in the years prior. This will become relevant when we talk about the songs in the next episodes, but mostly it’s another potential example of how the bias of Beatles biographers skews the story away from the lovers possibility.
Ray Connolly, Being John Lennon, Pegasus Books, 2018.
NOTE: It’s a small thing and not directly relevant here, but the pub was owned by Paul’s cousin and her husband, not just a “friend.”
“I mean what you used to get, you get the kind of thing where, if it was cold— I remember once going up the motorway in England, and it was it was like, it’s Christmas again, it was very foggy, and we were going up the motorway in a van and a pebble hit the windscreen and knocked the windscreen out. And, you know, it can get like Canada or New York and stuff there, really, you know, below zero, and it was. And we were all freezing, but we had to reach Liverpool, we still had like 100 miles to go in this van, and the heating wasn't doing much, you know, the wind screen out, it was, like, not a lot. So we ended up actually lying on top of each other. That was the only way we could keep warm. I’ve just got this image you know us, of just how, you know, feeling warmer. A little Beatle sandwich.”
NOTE: Paul tells this story with obvious fondness. It’s clear it’s a happy memory for him.
“We'd often get in the little glass-panelled porch on the front door looking out on to the front garden and Menlove Avenue. There was a good acoustic there, like a bathroom acoustic, and also it was the only place Mimi would let us make noise. We were relegated to the vestibule. I remember singing 'Blue Moon' in there, the Elvis version, trying to figure out the chords. We spent a lot of time like that. Then we'd go up to John's room and we'd sit on the bed and play records, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry. It's a wonderful memory: I don't often get nostalgic, but the memory of sitting listening to records in John's bedroom is so lovely, a nice nostalgic feeling, because I realise just how close I was to John. It's a lovely thought to think of a friend's bedroom then. A young boy's bedroom is such a comfortable place, like my son's bedroom is now; he's got all his stuff that he needs: a candle, guitar, a book. John's room was very like that. James reminds me very much of John in many ways: he's got beautiful hands. John had beautiful hands.”
Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H.Holt, 1997.
“It’s good talking with you,” McCartney says at the end of one session, then recalls an encounter with Lennon a few years after the band broke up. “He hugged me. It was great, because we didn’t normally do that. He said, ‘It’s good to touch.’ I always remembered that – it’s good to touch.”
Paul McCartney Looks Back, Rolling Stone, August 10, 2016.
NOTE: By the way, John has a quite different memory of the hugging situation—
'We do need each other a lot. When we used to meet again after an interval we always used to be embarrassed about touching each other. We'd do an elaborate hand shake, just to hide the embarrassment. Or we did mad dances. Then we got to hugging each other. Now we do the Buddhist bit, arms around. It's just saying hello, that's all.”
John Lennon, interviewed by Hunter Davies, The Beatles, WW Norton, originally published 1968, republished 2006.
Derek Taylor also has a different memory of the hugging situation: “It was the Beatles who taught me to hug other men.”
Interviewed in 1980 in All You Need Is Love, St. Martin’s Press, 2024.
Connolly doesn’t use “had to share” anywhere else in his biography of John. But Lewisohn uses it three times. It’s here that we can see that Lewisohn does seem to mean “had to” as in “didn’t want to.”
In addition to the Nerk twins trip, Lewisohn also claims — almost certainly correctly— that Paul did not want to, but “had to” share a room with Pete Best in Hamburg in 1960. John, Stu and George had the larger room, relegating Paul and Pete to the smaller room. If this seems at odds with the lovers possibility, it is... and it also isn’t. We’ll get to that when we get to Hamburg.
Lewisohn also uses “had to” as in didn’t want to in describing Paul sharing a childhood bedroom with his younger brother Mike, when he says that the two boys squabbled about how to share the space. He makes the leap of logic from that to the boys sharing only because of space considerations (which may or may not be true — Paul and Mike also shared a bedroom at Forthlin Road through the end of 1960, despite there being an extra, unused bedroom that was used as storage and that later became Paul’s).
Beautiful Possibility
the story of the story of The Beatles
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