Wrap-Up

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

Hi everyone,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLOUCESTER I see it feelingly.

LEAR What, art mad?

(King Lear, Act V, Sc 6)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Likely to be the actual words — but not guaranteed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the quote I’m going to keep quoting it until we know it by heart, Paul has told us, explicitly and directly, that “fans or readers, or even critics, who really want to learn more about my life should read my lyrics, which might reveal more than any single book about The Beatles could do.”²⁶

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lyrics are an entirely different story.

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

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

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

There’s more, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nineteenth century Romantic poet John Keats understood the gifts of “what if” when he wrote that “at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...”³⁴

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

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

The gift of uncertainty is why Beatles historian Robert Rodriguez’s conclusive statement that there remain only “a handful of unsolved Beatles mysteries”³⁵ might be the saddest and most damaging statement I’ve ever read from a mainstream Beatles writer (and that’s saying something).

Rodrigez’s assertion that, essentially, we know almost everything there is to know about this story is especially sad because it’s so obviously counter to The Beatles’ own unquenchable curiosity. So at odds with their constant, restless desire to avoid repeating themselves, to discover what they don’t yet know, to find out what happens if they play this note or make that sound or push that button on the mixboard that no one before them had ever pushed in quite that way before.³⁶

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

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

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

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

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

Gappiness is Shakespeare’s dominant and defining characteristic. And ambiguity is the oxygen of these works, making them alive in unpredictable and changing ways... His works hold our attention because [emphasis added] they are fundamentally incomplete and unstable... ‘Shakespeare’ is here less an inert noun than an active verb: ‘to Shakespeare’ might be defined as the activity of posing questions, unsettling certainties, challenging orthodoxies, opening out endings.³⁷

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

If nothing else I’ve offered persuades you to embrace the gifts of uncertainty, then consider this — it’s only the practical magick³⁸ of uncertainty — the ability to tell this story as a “what if” rather than a “for sure” — that allows us to talk about the lovers possibility at all, without stepping on John and Paul’s right to tell (or not tell) their own story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until then.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

1. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: Autobiography of the Years, 1919-39, Hogarth Press, 1967.

full quote: “The moment one begins to investigate the truth of the simplest facts which one has accepted as true — about one’s own life, for instance — it is as though one had stepped off a firm narrow path into a bog or quicksand — every step one takes one sinks deeper into the bog of uncertainty.”

2. In Chapter One, I referred to Ivor Davis having been present at the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy, Jr., when of course, I meant Robert Kennedy (no Jr.). An obviously significant difference.

Also in Chapter One, I misquoted the date of the “that was a night!” conversation between Derek Taylor and Bob Dylan as having taken place “in the 70s” — in fact, the actual quote from Derek Taylor is that after having lost touch in the ‘70s, and then reconnecting in 1987.

3. The Beatles, Hunter Davies, McGraw-Hill, 1968.

full quote: “”We got to London about ten o’clock at night and found our hotel, the Royal, off Russell Square. Then we went for a drink. We tried to get a meal in some place in the Charing Cross Road. We all went in, a right gang of scruffs we were, and sat down. It said six bob for soup and we said, you’re kidding. The bloke said we’d have to go. So we had to.

We went to Trafalgar Square and saw all the New Year’s Eve drunks falling in the fountain. Then we met two blokes in Shaftesbury Avenue who were stoned, though we didn’t know it. They had some pot, but I’d never seen that either. We were too green. When they heard we had a van they asked if they could smoke it there. We said, no, no, no! We were dead scared.’”

4. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ sentences were commuted shortly after they were handed down. Only Robert Fraser served his full six month prison sentence (which he claims to have greatly enjoyed).

5. The “we” in question presumably refers to himself, The Beatles (with Pete Best instead of Ringo) and roadie Mal Evans.

6. Here’s another example of what we talked about in the final footnote of Chapter 1— Steinem calling what was actually a hotel a “motel” — and not just a motel, but a “motor inn,” which I think is a level down even from a motel, based on intel from my Texas grandmother, but that my creative partner thinks is a level up based on his New England upbringing. You make the call.

Either way, it’s all part of blurring the details to make it less factually accurate, but a better — and more mythological — story.

And in this case, Steinem’s adjustment of the name of the Riviera Idlewild — consciously or subconsciously — is also an example of how quickly that mythologizing began to happen. She’s not misremembering because it was such a Long time ago. This is 1964 — the leading edge of the first global explosion of Beatlemania. Steinem was at the Riviera Idlewild not long before writing her article. This is the first wave of the mythologizing that would happen over the next sixty years and counting.

7. Freeman worked regularly with The Beatles during their early years, most notably as the photographer for five of their album covers. He published two books of photography that included short pieces of narration offering context to the photographs.

8. Gloria Steinem, “The Beatle With A Future,” Cosmopolitan, December 1964.

full quote: “The door to the next room opened and Taylor, who seemed to remember everybody else’s problems in spite of his own exhaustion (”I’m worried about him,” confided the matron, “he’s slept hardly at all for five days”), ushered me in and introduced me. It was four A.M. and the small group — Lennon, Ringo, American folk singer Bob Dylan, Dylan’s manager, the tall girl from San Francisco, photographer Bob Freeman who designed the titles of the Beatles’ movie and Lennon’s book, and an unidentified, bearded journalist — were in the combined grip of fatigue and a crisis involving Brian Epstein.”

NOTE: The “crisis” was — at least according to Derek Taylor — that Brian and Taylor had one of their frequent arguments, and this latest one was bad enough that Taylor had resigned his position (and meant it). I don’t think this situation with Brian and Derek Taylor is relevant to the Dylan story, but since we don’t actually know what happened at the Riviera Idlewild (or for that matter, at the Delmonico), there’s probably no way to know that for sure.

9. If the “tall girl from San Francisco” is Joan Baez, it’s strange that Steinem doesn’t identify her by name (especially given Steinem’s feminist worldview). Surely Steinem would have known who Joan Baez was — by 1964, Baez had already recorded three gold albums and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine.

10. Robert Freeman, The Beatles: A Private View, Barnes & Noble, 1990.

“Back in New York I took a break from the Beatle carnival and went to a party given by the photographer Mel Sokolsky. There I met Ali McGraw, an aspiring actress, who at that time was working as Mel’s stylist. Ali mentioned that a friend of hers, Gloria Steinem, had wanted to interview John Lennon but hadn’t been able to make contact with the Beatles’ press officer: the phone was permanently engaged. I arranged for Gloria to meet me at the Riviera Motel, near Kennedy Airport, where the Beatles were staying before their departure because by this stage no other hotel would take them.

John was reluctant to meet yet another journalist until I explained that Gloria was an attractive and intelligent writer who could produce a more interesting profile than was usual in the press at that time. Having had the nod from John, I escorted her through the crowded ante-room — as Gloria later described it: ‘Bob’s endorsement was as magical as an okay from the Mafia.’ Arriving in the room she found herself confronted not only by John Lennon, but by Bob Dylan as well.

Dylan was an admirer of the Beatles and had organized a clandestine meeting with John on the last night of their tour.”

11. The Beatles and Me On Tour, Ivor Davis, Cockney Kid Publishing, 2014.

“The tour finally over, Brian could stop worrying. He had booked the entire top floor for the entourage, and it was finally time to let our hair down. Several radio reporters and DJs appeared on the top floor because Derek had foolishly promised some last minute interviews. Included in the parade of journalists was Gloria Steinem, who needed a wrap-up interview with John for her six-page Cosmopolitan cover story (“The Beatle with a Future’), which ran in December, 1964. She was quickly whisked in and out. Notably missing was Al Aronowitz.”

NOTE: Ivor Davis died during the writing of this series. Despite his having been present at multiple culturally significant events, including the Watts Riots and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the lede/headline on virtually all of his obituaries and tributes was that he was embedded with The Beatles on their early tours.

12. To be credible requires acknowledging one’s own biases. So for those of you not yet familiar with Part One of Beautiful Possibility, yes, I’m swept away by the possibility of John and Paul as a romantic couple and I very much want the lovers possibility to be true. But in this case, as a Grail-fluent counterbalance to the fear of softness that distorts the research away from the lovers possibility, that desire on my part is as much or more an asset as a liability — and we talk in detail about why that is in episode 1:4 (“Are You Afraid Or Is It True?”).

13. Since I suspect there’s a significant overlap between those of you who read the footnotes and those of you who are interested in the meta conversations about the research, discussion of research issues will continue in the footnotes. It’ll be a bit of a “choose your own adventure” experience.

14. John’s very John-like attitude towards his interview comments is discussed in detail in episode 1:2 (“Love Lies Bleeding”).

15. This is not relevant to Steve Turner (I don’t think), but while we’re here—-

The importance of exact language is another reason, beyond being taken out of context, why frankenquotes are so destructive. When quotes from different interviews are glued together, the language is adjusted to stitch them together. In essence, the words are rewritten to make them appear to be seamless. In doing this, the exact language of the original quotes is destroyed — and, again, as we’ve seen in our consideration of the Dylan story, exact words matter a great deal when it comes to understanding what the person being quoted actually intended to say.

16. For an in-depth example of the way in which mainstream Beatles biography takes quotes out of context as part of dismissing the lovers possibility, see Rabbit Hole: Immovable Heterosexuality.

17. This “lawmower effect” of stripping out of the emotional truth is why even a small hint of the lovers possibility in a press interview is significant, all out of proportion to its actual form. If after the “lawnmower” has done its work, that hint has survived, that suggests that whatever is left was probably quite a bit more obvious than the little bit that made it to the published interview.

In an odd way, this actually makes press interviews a pretty good primary source — but this is a Lennon-esque pretzel of reasoning that I thought best to save for those of you who are adventurous enough to read the footnotes.

18. According to Derek Taylor (in a quote I’ve temporarily misplaced, but I’ll add it when I find it back), his other major source was the dodgy fan magazines of the era, which often fictionalized their stories from whole cloth to the point where the details were often barely recognisable as being about The Beatles.

In other words, we’d be wise to take Cellarful of Noise as a work of speculative fiction rather than a biography written in the first person.

19. The Lyrics is similar to Many Years From Now in this regard — poet Paul Muldoon edited a series of interviews with Paul into the book and the companion podcast. And John’s brief (and very tongue-in-cheek) autobiography in Skywriting by Word of Mouth was edited by Yoko prior to publication.

20. Also, other people besides the person telling their own story and their possible collaborator/ghostwriter can and do exert influence over an autobiography. Sometimes a writer changes or omits material to avoid upsetting others in their lives — for example, that “protect the wives and girlfriends” reason given by Paul for The Beatles’ choice to fictionalize a third to half of their story, which presumably carries over to individual autobiographies like Many Years From Now.

In another well-known example, John gave his Aunt Mimi the right to demand editorial changes to the content of the 1968 then-authorized version of Hunter Davies’ biography of the band.

21. Paul McCartney, asked by Simon Pegg and interviewed by John Wilson for BBC 4’s Mastertapes, May 24, 2016

22. In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we considered a lot of research from both John and Paul that they write autobiographically and that they’d both prefer that we look to their songs rather than interviews for truth about their lives. For John in particular, it’s less about a single quote and more about the collective body of what he’s had to say over the years about his songs vs what he says in interview. All of that is discussed in the two-part episode “He Said He Said.” (the first part re: Paul and the second re: John). Rather than try to requote that research in this Wrap-Up, I refer you to that episode.

23. Again, see the two-part episode, “He Said He Said.”.

24. I am, of course, well aware that lyrics are only part of a song, and that the music, too, conveys meaning. As with many artists but more masterfully than most, The Beatles (along with George Martin) were very aware of the way in which musical cues could convey messages about the song. We saw that in our consideration of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” when we noticed that the trumpet fanfare would seem to make clear that Paul is singing a message meant to be heard, rather than having an inner dialogue with himself.

We could say everything we’ve said and are going to say about lyrics as primary source material about the music, as well. But for our purposes here, we’re going to stick to talking about the lyrics — if only because we’ve got enough on our hands with those, and because the absence of language makes musical interpretation even more subjective than lyrics.And a deeper analysis of the music requires delving into music theory — the “grammar” of music, and while I know a bit about music theory, I probably know just enough to get myself in trouble. So we’ll leave that territory for someone else and another day.

25. That confirmation bias goes both ways. In the case of Lennon/McCartney, lyrical interpretation has also historically been vulnerable to the distorted narrative and fear of softness and lack of Grail fluency — mostly in the refusal to consider their songs as primary source material at all.

Again, all of this is considered in detail in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — primarily in episodes 1:4, 1:5 and 1:6.

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

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

Over time I came to see each song as a new puzzle. It would illuminate something that was important in my life at that moment, though the meanings are not always obvious on the surface. Fans or readers, or even critics, who really want to learn more about my life should read my lyrics, which might reveal more than any single book about The Beatles could do.”

NOTE: Paul is presumably including his own books here, given his reluctance to share his innermost thoughts outside of song.

27. Again, for a more detailed discussion and research — https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/15-he-said-he-said-part-1

28. And perhaps even more so are their lyrics-in-progress, because these have the additional benefit of revealing their initial thoughts and feelings, prior to being adjusted for the final draft.

29. In his introduction to The Lyrics, Paul also claims he’s never kept a diary. But also in The Lyrics, he includes a few pages of his diary entry for his and John’s trip to Paris. Maybe that means he, like many of us, tried as a teenager to keep a diary and gave up the effort. Maybe he means he doesn’t have diaries he’s willing to share, or he has diaries but they’re not consistent enough to serve as a reliable roadmap of his life. Or maybe — also like many creative people — he combines his famous notebook that he keeps with him to write down lyrics (which is now maybe his phone) with his day-to-day diary entries and they’re really one and the same thing.

There’s another intriguing possibility, too.

John, as we know, did keep a diary during his years of exile at the Dakota during the second half of the 1970s. But as far as we know, that’s the only time in his life he kept a diary. It’s also — and this we do know — the time in his life he was the least active as a songwriter. The overlap of timing of these two things suggests that John took up a traditional diary as an outlet for thoughts he used to put into lyrics. (And while I haven’t yet seen John’s diaries myself, it’s my understanding that much of his diaries are about Paul — which is perhaps another clue about just how many of John’s songs are also probably about (and for) Paul.)

Which brings us back to Paul and whether or not he keeps a diary — because the only extant diary we have of his is from October of 1961. While John and Paul were already writing together by this point, they weren’t writing together terribly prolifically at this time, it seems. It’s possible that once they began writing songs in earnest, Paul had no further need for his diary since, like John, he used his songwriting to fill that role in his life.

Just something to think about.

30. In light of this analogy, maybe it’s just as well mainstream Beatles writing mostly avoids lyrical interpretation.

The Beatles studies counterculture, on the other hand, does a far better job of lyrical interpretation — maybe because many countercultural Beatles scholars are themselves poets and songwriters and visual artists and also often professors of literature — in other words, to varying degrees Grail-fluent in the language of softness. And also maybe because Beatles counterculture scholars tend not to be quite as fearful of what they might find if they go looking for emotional truth in the lyrics.

31. For a detailed consideration of what the photographs and film clips of John and Paul together tell us about the lovers possibility, see episode 1:3 (“Hope of Deliverance”) and the accompanying Rabbit Hole on how the lovers possibility might provide an explanation for Beatlemania.

32. George, too, has said that the truth of his life is in his songs rather than in interviews—

Q: Why don’t you grant personal interviews?

George: There’s nothing to say, really, I’m a musician, not a talker. If you get my album it’s like Peyton Place, I mean it’ll tell you exactly what I’ve been doing. (LA Free Press, November 1974.)

33. For the “shoebox of memories” discussion, see episodes 1:8/1:9 (“Ecce Cor Meum”).

34. John Keats, letter to his brothers, December 21 1817.

35. Robert Rodriguez, Revolver: How the Beatles Re-Imagined Rock ‘n’ Roll, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.

“Despite decades of research and thousands of books published, there remain a handful of unsolved Beatle mysteries: Why does “Help!” exist with two different lead vocals? What became of Mal Evans’s book manuscript? Will “Carnival of Light” ever be released? To that list we can add the recording of “She Said She Said”: Why did Paul McCartney, in a fit of pique, walk off Revolver just before the finish line?”

NOTE: Notice that only that last entry on this maddeningly short list has to do with emotional truth, rather than nuts and bolts factual detail. And yes, we will talk about Paul leaving the studio during the recording of “She Said She Said” when we get there in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility. For now, let’s just notice that this is probably not that big of a mystery — “She Said She Said” is one of the few songs co-written by John and George, about an experience they had in Los Angeles during their first intentional acid trip, and written during that time period we talked about throughout this series — when John and George were bonding over their LSD experiences and Paul was, by his own account, feeling on the outside looking in.

36. Thus adding yet another layer of metaphor to that scene in the film, Yellow Submarine.

37. Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare, Pantheon, 2019.

NOTE: “Sometimes, Shakespeare’s plays register the gap between older visions of a world run by divine fiat, and more contemporary ideas about the centrality of human agency to causality, or they propose adjacent worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible” is a reference to the shift in the foundational mythology of Western culture from the events of our lives being controlled by the whims of capricious gods to the “suffer now/rewards later” mythological story of institutional Christianity. We talked about this shift in detail in the first two episodes of Beautiful Possibility.

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

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