Tag Archives: Pete Best

May 23, 2025 · 7:00 am

TMBP Extra: You are here

Gazing at 20 Manchester Square in London, I squinted trying to visualize the Beatles hanging over the stairwell, flashing their grins. They did it in 1963. They did it again in 1969. What a backdrop was EMI House!

At the same time, my then-13-year-old son stared at the same building standing today at 20 Manchester Square, a structure decidedly not EMI House, which was torn down at the turn of the century.

This was his breaking point. The Mad Day Out had little on our Furious Day Out.

We had been in England nearly two weeks, and on this Wednesday morning, 20 Manchester Square was the second location we purposely visited over the previous five minutes that was purely a street name and number. The first Apple Records headquarters once stood at 95 Wigmore Street, literally in shouting distance of 20 Manchester Square, and in the place of the former Beatles HQ, another modern construction rose where a historic Beatles site once stood.


20 Manchester Square, today

“These aren’t even the buildings the Beatles went to!” he screamed at me – I was very much in shouting distance. “Why are we here? Why do even you care? It doesn’t make sense!”

And to a point, he was right, even if I wasn’t crazy about my teenager yelling at me in Marylebone. While we were in England, we visited Hadrian’s Wall, Stonehenge and the Rosetta Stone precisely because they survived centuries and millennia. The kids never asked to see the site of the Euston Arch or Crystal Palace, and I get why they didn’t.

95 Wigmore St, Apple’s first HQ (early ‘68). That building is gone; the one here was built in 2013. It’s Colliers UK’s head office.

I knew the names, and I looked up the numbers. But much as I wanted to see where the Beatles made their magic and soak in that residue, 20 Manchester Square and 95 Wigmore Street remain merely addresses on a map. Still, to paraphrase one of my favorite Liverpudlian philosophers: Some places have gone while some remain, and all of them had their moments.

***

I always planned to write about my trip to England. My family of four traveled for two weeks June 2024, mostly split between Liverpool and London and with various Beatles pilgrimages at the center of the itinerary, which included several other non-Fab (but still fabulous) destinations. I’m not convinced you want to read How I Spent My Summer Vacation, but I think I can interest you in a broader review of precisely how I did end up spending my summer vacation, even if you’re from Merseyside or the capital or know the Beatles every bit as much as I think I do.


Yes, I bought several cans of Let It Bean.

This is a result of some deep reflection, and will be part-essay, part-travelogue and complete expression of child-like wonder at how exciting it was to step in the Beatles’ footsteps and unlock an understanding of who and what they were and are and why that matters to me.­­

The trip was special. I gazed at the rooftop and stood by the basement. I crossed the road. The lane was in my ears and in my eyes. There was so much more.

I was very fortunate. I shared a few hours with a man who was on that rooftop. I spent time alone in a very different, but more formative basement. I visited a lot of places that had their moments, and a lot of locations that once did – but really always will, even just as addresses on a map.

I’m not going to tell this story chronologically. How I planned my trip really only mattered to my schedule and ultimately doesn’t matter. This should read as an evergreen story, as we say in the business. But hopefully there’s a tip or two in here if you’re planning your own journey. Extroverted as I am, I hate writing about myself, but without it, this won’t be much of a story.

***

The most striking thing about being in the Beatles’ England was how it felt mundane, in so many ways. At once, I appreciated them and their music much more deeply, although at the same time recognizing I didn’t need to be there to understand that.

I wasn’t expecting grandeur, necessarily, though as I write this out, maybe I was? The Beatles are on that historically vital level. Buckingham Palace, Salisbury Cathedral — these are larger than life destinations I admired in person. So what does that make Mendips or 34 Montague Square? The Beatles certainly mean more to me than the monarchy and Anglican Church.

At the beautiful Chapter House at Salisbury Cathedral (where one of the Magna Carta originals is housed), decorative cushions ring the perimeter, and I was able to compile one variant of the set. 

It’s one thing to view, say, John Lennon’s Epiphone Casino behind glass at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (which I’ve done multiple times!). It’s another to see the rooftop, basement and front door of 3 Savile Row as part of its surrounding environment. There it stands between other buildings that have their own rooftops, basements and front doors, too.

The Rosetta Stone stands behind glass at the crowded British Museum, while about a mile away, 3 Savile Row — as important as it is — does not. We have to already know it’s special, blue plaque notwithstanding.

***

It’s really hard to change a first impression. Liverpool long cast to my aging eyes in black and white, its sounds blared in mono. That’s the Beatles’ Liverpool I’ve always known from photographs and films.

The city as viewed (by me) from the Wheel of Liverpool

Personal experience broke that bias. I found the city – our first stop on the trip — lively and electric, full of the color missing in my expectations. It’s not an exaggeration when I say it was a spiritual experience to walk the streets and follow in the footsteps of the Beatles.

Mathew Street, Liverpool

So full of magic, one of Liverpool’s incredible tricks is to effortlessly convince you of something Apple has subtly promoted for years, most recently with the “Now and Then” experience: The Beatles never really split.  This is the city of John, Paul, George and Ringo. And Pete. And Stu! Brian Epstein lives. It’s Mathew Street stuffing decades of history over just a tenth of a mile. It’s at once authentic, reconstructed and behind glass.

The Brian Epstein statue is just footsteps away from the former location of NEMS.

The Beatles’ entire origin story happened in Liverpool: childhood, crossing paths, forming a band and superstardom. You can retrace their origins to the depth of your own desire and timetable.

My favorite Mathew Street location was the Liverpool Beatles Museum, which carries a breathtaking, unique collection. It’s a must-visit if you’re visiting Liverpool.

As displayed at the Liverpool Beatles Museum.

The National Trust conducts tours of John and Paul’s childhood homes only in conjunction. While not the same route they would have taken in their day, we were bussed between the two houses. The Lennon/McCartney partnership, forged when they called these places home, lives in perpetuity as a combined experience.

“It was important then whether you lived near each other or not,” Paul recalled in the Anthology book. “There were no cars for kids in those days.”

Our first stop on the Lennon-McCartney house tour was John’s childhood home at 251 Menlove Ave. Despite Mike McCartney growing up on Forthlin, it was Mendips that was enveloped in scaffold.

I found no light bulb on visiting the childhood homes of, oh, the way this room is laid out is why Paul learned to play things this way. Or John became that way because of the kitchen. The acoustics in the McCartney bathroom, as good as they may have been, didn’t create Lennon-McCartney.

However that magic manifests itself, though, it lingers.

We played Paul’s piano. No, not his childhood piano – that’s now at one of his own homes. But it’s a piano played by Paul, and that’s good enough for me. Who cares when he played it?

20 Forthlin Road

By their natures as simple residences, the Lennon-McCartney homes stood among the more pedestrian destinations, even with some things behind glass: The spot where Paul slept (though probably not his original bed). The room where John ate (though probably not the table).

12 Arnold Grove

Privately owned, George’s and Ringo’s childhood homes were only street-level photo-ops, but just experiencing these neighborhoods added depth to their stories. Seeing the Empress Pub step out of the Sentimental Journey LP cover only a few footsteps away from 10 Admiral Grove in the Dingle was added value.

The Casbah Club is very much alive, with Pete Best and his family literally welcoming you into his childhood home. We visited a couple months too early to stay there (it opened as an Airbnb in August 2024). It’s in the Casbah’s basement that the colors of Liverpool perhaps glow most bright, the paint jobs of the Quarrymen (plus the future Cynthia Lennon) still adorning the walls and star-studded and Beatle-etched ceilings. The club area and the spaces where the Quarrymen and Beatles played stand claustrophobically small when you allow yourself to visualize the crowded houses they played for. Mona Best’s incredible legacy looms and lives strongly.

The remarkable Casbah Coffee Club. What a destination! Thanks to Roag Best Jr. for the fab tour inside.

But beyond the artifacts Beatles once handled and spaces they occupied, the locations they chose to be inspired by made their mark.

Like both sides of the greatest single in pop music history. We visited Penny Lane and Strawberry Field consecutively, with Paul’s contribution our first needle-drop.

Your host at Penny Lane. Squint close and you’ll see Paul’s signature on the sign. Also, gaze upon the shelter in the middle of the roundabout, the one-time bank and the barbershop. 

The magic of “Penny Lane” speaks in that the song doesn’t have to be taken as personal at all. It’s observational, and we can see the same surface elements today. The barbershop, the (former) bank building, the roundabout’s shelter – these are tangible, ordinary locations like ones I have in my own town, and every one I’ve ever lived in. We don’t really need to know the motivations of the banker or firefighter or nurse to really understand the song, which still creates a relatable story.

No wonder “Strawberry Fields Forever” made such a natural flip side, it really was the opposite experience, even today as Strawberry Field itself remans a functioning Salvation Army facility that’s also a popular tourist destination. You can still experience the quiet isolation John sought, and find your own tree after a wander in the garden.

Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Field. 

Rather than demystify these destinations, walking through I found them enhanced, spotlighting the proximity of the Beatles’ world. Strawberry Field sits so close to Mendips. And then seeing the central terminus that’s Penny Lane plus John and Paul’s childhood houses in the same short afternoon — on a long tour as led by Dave Bedford, bursting with of endless insight and access – it was beyond expectations.

Penny Lane and Strawberry Field weren’t just name checks. These places mattered to the Beatles, but being there put it in such a better context. It’s something they evoked themselves, and they tried to give us an idea to the context on the single’s sleeve and promotional materials (depending on the country).

As seen in Cashbox in February 1967.

“A lot of our formative years were spent walking around those places,” Paul said in Anthology. “Penny Lane was the depot I had to change buses at to get from my house to John’s and to a lot of my friends. It was a big bus terminal which we all knew very well.”

Penny Lane mattered enough to John as a location to originally appear in the the draft lyrics to “In My Life,” along with several other locations.

In his 1980 interview with David Sheff, John recalled how a basic rollcall of locations didn’t work.

‘In My Life’ started out as a bus journey from my house at 250 Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning every place I could remember. I wrote it all down and it was ridiculous. This is before even ‘Penny Lane’ was written and I had Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Tram Sheds — Tram Sheds are the depot just outside of Penny Lane — and it was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did On My Holiday’s Bus Trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all. I cannot do this! I cannot do this!

But then I laid back and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember. Now Paul helped with the middle-eight melody. The whole lyrics were already written before Paul had even heard it. In ‘In My Life,’ his contribution melodically was the harmony and the middle eight itself.

“Ordinary” Beatles should not have been a surprise to me. I study the Nagra tapes the most of anything Beatles, and that is them at (what I always assumed) was their most mundane — talking about TV, food, the news and anything else. I find ordinary Beatles to be extraordinary Beatles.

Want to know why I believe John when he said “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was based after a drawing by Julian and not LSD?  Because of the ordinary things they wrote about otherwise.

So much of the Beatles has to do with their time. I couldn’t turn back the clock, but I could get to their place.

Like St. Peter’s in Woolton. It’s the Church of the Immaculate Conception, at least when it comes to the Beatles. Your own bias will say whether this is where Paul met John or John met Paul. Lucky us, the doors to the church hall were unlocked (maybe they always are, I don’t know!) and we stood in the very spot – at least our best guess within a few feet – of the Big Bang.

St. Peter’s

Strip away the origin story, and it’s today a rec room sincerely not unlike any other at this kind of church community building. Here children’s Sunday School scrawls are given equal status to placards documenting the fête-ful encounter in 1957. This could be a room in any one of our hometowns.

Outside the building at the church’s cemetery was one more bit of inspiration, even if the Beatles didn’t realize it deliberately. RIP Eleanor Rigby.

“I don’t remember seeing the grave there, but I suppose I might have registered it subconsciously.” Paul wrote in Lyrics. “We visited her grave in a much more deliberate fashion.”

***

What Liverpool enjoyed and embraced but London lacked is a broad Beatle presence. This wasn’t a surprise, but was certainly tangible after spending time in Liverpool.  It’s a big city. I get it, I’m from New York. There’s a lot going on.

I’d been to London before, as a teenager in the 1980s. I had a lot of places I wanted to see myself this time around, with one obvious destination circled several times.

Myself at 14, crossing you-know-where. It was 1989, but I’m not sure when my fashion sense was from.

I’ve been writing about the Get Back sessions since January 2012, a long while after Let It Be hit theaters (May 1970), and a quite a bit before Peter Jackson’s Get Back revitalized the sessions into the mainstream (November 2021). My visit to 3 Savile Row – the centerpiece of our busy London visit — was a powerful moment to become a 21st century Apple Scruff and linger outside the building; there was no entry.

I wasn’t waiting for anyone to arrive or depart, but simply loitering delivered a unique satisfaction. This went beyond the rooftop performance. And that in and of itself was very powerful. The roof didn’t feel as high as it appeared in Let It Be and Get Back. Really, it felt short. It was five stories, like other buildings on the same block and any other five-story buildings in my hometown or anywhere else. I know the Beatles played a concert on that particular one.

The Apple of my eye: 3 Savile Row

And obviously that’s what made it a powerful moment. I was very surprised – like I was at so many Beatles-related destinations – at how few people were there to pay tribute. I visited around 1 p.m. on a Wednesday (the Beatles played at around the same time on a Thursday).  Unlike January 1969, Savile Row was very quiet this afternoon in June 2024.

There was a small tour group listening to a stock spiel about the Beatles and the rooftop. If anyone around needed to know the building was special, they could have looked at my idiot self photographing it from all angles, peering into the basement, dodging back and forth across the narrow road – it wasn’t much wider than Mathew Street – and rubbing the metal No. 3 bolted to the front door as I insisted I could absorb the building’s mojo and mystically ascend to the road that stretches out ahead. I made sure to inhale whatever Beatle dust lingered.

The proximity was interesting: The Heddon Street location where David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust LP cover was shot pretty much stands around the corner from Savile Row. From there it was a 10-minute walk to the former location of Trident Studios, where not only Bowie made his mark, but the Beatles cut “Hey Jude,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and a few others. Depressingly it looked like an office today. I could see a printer, but no piano. But that obscures the point: Everything was right there.

The same day we made it to St. John’s Wood — and it was a day, spanning more than 15 miles by foot alone — we did the least surprising thing possible and lined up to cross Abbey Road. It should have occurred to me before but I never thought about it: It was only as I crossed the road that I realized I was – in the Beatles’ footsteps – walking away from the studio. (But they all left together, at least.)

Of every Beatles-related location I visited over two weeks – and there were many – only the rebuilt Cavern rivaled Abbey Road for walk-up crowds. We fans had each other’s backs, gladly offering to take pictures for strangers so we all could have that killer crosswalk photo.

A kind Australian nailed for posterity my family’s crossing in two takes.  The reckless New Yorker I am, I giddily stood in the middle of the street, forcing traffic to dodge me – not the other way around – taking photos to make sure a couple from Los Angeles had the perfect picture. It took four takes, and I would have done a fifth. Iain MacMillan I’m not, but I tried.

Abbey Road

Paul famously lived just down the road, and we recreated the quick walk to Cavendish, surprising ourselves at just how close Paul lived to EMI Studios on Abbey Road (not even half a mile).

The home today didn’t seem much different than description in Hunter Davies’ biography of the band, published in 1968:

The front of the house has a paved courtyard with an old-fashioned lamp-post. On the left, attached to the house, is a double garage in which he keeps his Mini Cooper and Aston Martin. The house is guarded by a high brick wall and large double black gates controlled from the house. You speak into a microphone, someone inside answers, and if you say the right thing, the doors swing open and then clank shut again to keep out the fans.

I did talk like an absolute maniac at his security system, but I wasn’t surprised the gates did not swing open.  We were the only fans on Cavendish. And this was helpful to give the space to consider things and experience the proximity like the band did – I tried to do this at every destination.  We considered crashing Billy Fury’s old place, which was just a few houses down, when the door opened to welcome guests in.

London’s Cavendish Avenue, featuring the homes of Liverpool’s Paul McCartney and Billy Fury

It wasn’t deliberately scheduled this way, but Abbey Road and Cavendish were the last two main Beatles-related destinations on our trip (we left England a couple days later). They were also two of the remaining locations that were as they were when it was the Beatles’ England in their time. Music continues to be recorded at Abbey Road, and Paul still has the keys to Cavendish today.

***

I walked in the footsteps of the Beatles on Abbey Road and rubbed the door at 3 Savile Row for the best of luck. But can a place really leave magic? Do people leave some of their essence? I thought about this a lot when I was in Liverpool, and again when we got to London, especially in Mayfair. When my teenager lost it outside the former EMI House, our next destination was the fascinating Handel Hendrix House.

George Frideric Handel called 25 Brook Street home from 1723 until his death in 1759, composing “Messiah,” “Water Music” and many other lasting pieces in that building, where his legacy is lovingly preserved. I’m no Handelhead, but the site was terrific.

The other half of the Handel Hendrix House is named for James Marshall Hendrix – you know him as “Jimi” – who lived at the adjacent 23 Brook Street more than 200 years later.

Handel, with care: The Handel Hendrix House was a definite highlight among Beatle-adjacent destinations

“I didn’t even know this was [Handel’s] pad, man, until after I got in,” Hendrix told the Daily Mirror on January 6, 1969, in an interview published five days later. “And to tell you the God’s honest truth I haven’t heard much of the fella’s stuff. But I dig a bit of Bach now and again.”

Handel wasn’t any kind of musical inspiration on Hendrix, so if the composer left any juice for Jimi, we can only guess — although Jimi did reveal he once saw “an old guy in a nightshirt and gray pigtail” walk through a wall.

When Jimi moved in, it wasn’t even the most historically significant thing that happened in Greater London rock history that day. Because on January 2, 1969, as Jimi Hendrix schlepped his guitars and other belongings up the stairs into his new pad – it was actually his girlfriend’s apartment — the Beatles began the Get Back sessions 10 miles away in Twickenham. So is there magic in a time, and also a place?

***

While I could approach some places, I could never get to the Beatles’ time. But I could spend moments in my own time with someone who was in the Beatles’ circle.

Milton Keynes wasn’t out of the way as we drove from Stoke-On-Trent, the base for our visit to the amusement park Alton Towers, toward London. Paul McCartney adopted sweet pup Martha in Milton Keynes, and dog-lover I am, that’s reason enough to give the town a nod. But I’d be lying if I said it was on our original itinerary.

On a trip filed with journeys to places that mattered, at this vacation’s heart was one destination that didn’t matter at all – it was the person there that gave it meaning. This moment was right in the middle of the trip, between our Liverpool and London legs.

All thanks go to Robert Rodriguez, who you know as the host of the Something About the Beatles podcast and author of several books (buy his newest one now!). He’s also a kind human being who incredibly connected me with someone who was in the middle of it all: Kevin Harrington, former Beatles equipment manager. If you know him for nothing else, you’d recognize him as the young redhead on the rooftop and throughout Get Back/Let It Be.


Our man Kevin Harrington holding court in Milton Keynes.

Kevin spent what he called “three, four years out of a long life” working for Brian Epstein and later the Beatles.  We spent about 2 ½ hours at a pub in Milton Keynes. He said it wasn’t his local, and that set the tone for the conversation – he felt he could speak with candor. This wasn’t an interview, but a conversation. I asked about his time working with Tina Turner, Motörhead and Kid Creole and the Coconuts.  We talked about instant replay in sports, navigating roundabouts and his recipe for herb sausage.


John, George and Kevin on the roof, January 30, 1969.

Obviously, we talked most about those three, four years with the Beatles and the incredible cast of characters that surrounded (and included) him. It was clear there were some “pub stories” not meant for broadcast, and I will hold them near and dear.

In a remarkable happenstance, not even 48 hours before we met, the Lennon Estate released the promo video for “You Are Here” as part of the Mind Games reissue campaign. One of the first recognizable heads in the clip is Kevin Harrington. The very existence of the video – which is drawn from John’s 1968 exhibition of the same name — was news to him.

In a very big life filled with outsized experiences, Kevin watched himself, on my 6.1-inch phone screen, hauling a giant, round canvas down a London street nearly 56 year earlier, during a weekend in the midst of the White Album sessions.

Kevin named every face he remembered as they were shown on screen, a roll call bringing true flesh to the conversation.  It was one of those moments when cardiologists be damned, I blindly allowed my heart to skip a few beats.


Wherever he was, he was there: Kevin watches John’s “You Are Here” video for the first time

Going into our afternoon together, I knew how Kevin would approach this sort of meeting. From his 2015 memoir “Who’s The Redhead On The Roof….?”:

The time line is a bit hazy. Do I wish to look up all that happened in those far off days to check dates and so on? Honestly no, I don’t. I’ll leave that to the experts. Maybe if we meet one day you can tell me exactly what I was doing, when and where. I can only tell you what it was like for an 18 year old to work for the biggest band in the world.

Kevin wasn’t a docent speaking from a memorized script. When he talked about John Lennon or Derek Taylor or Mal Evans or former boss Brian Epstein — who more than a half-century later he still referred to formally as Mr. Epstein, just like the Beatles would — those were memories. There’s something to speaking to a person that’s so much more fulfilling than to going to a place or searching for a time.

***

It’s deep into spring now, after a long, cold, lonely winter. I couldn’t get myself motivated to finish this piece.  I love to write, and I love to write about the Beatles. Yet, here I am, more than 4,000 words in and not sure if I had anything to say.

In true Get Back/Let It Be fashion, this unfinished mess of words (in my case) sat shelved. I’ve reworked and revised, and I’m still not sure I like any of the finished product. Scraps of unrealized points, salient and otherwise, lay saved in text files, waiting for an eventual bootleg leak.

There’s no Glyn Johns or Phil Spector to bail me out. And where is the ending? To put it in John’s words, I’m afraid “it was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did On My Holiday’s Bus Trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all. I cannot do this! I cannot do this!”

A few weeks after the trip, I saw Pete Best perform live at a venue just 15 minutes from my own home in Ohio (more in the last post about our interaction). I didn’t have to travel across the world to be in a Beatle’s world.

Pete Best in Kent, Ohio, in July 2024.

Pete Best (and my family) in Kent, Ohio, July 2024

But that’s not an ending, just an epilogue.

Our trip ended quietly. A week after seeing Kevin in Milton Keynes and on the heels of nearly a week in London, we flew out of Heathrow and returned home. The night before our flight, I had to run out to fill our rental car. We were staying in Slough, which I know best from The Office, but it also was once home to the former Adelphi Cinema. One of the Beatles’ performances there was the night after their iconic 1963 Royal Variety Show performance, which prompted this exchange between Paul and the Queen:

“The Queen Mother said, ‘Where are you playing tomorrow night?’ I said, ‘Slough.’ And she said, ‘Oh, that’s just near us.’”

I didn’t even have to go out of my way to see the former venue, driving right by it on the way to the petrol station. The ex-Adelphi was another address on a map, a building under reconstruction literally before my eyes. One of the running themes took us to the very last stop.

It’s OK for things to change. The Beatles switched drummers. John gave “In My Life” a rewrite – he made it less a travelogue and much more personal. I found inspiration in that.

I would have rather seen 3 Savile Row’s windows dressed in daffodils and the basement door surrounded by Scruffs than its current state, and I wish the original Apple HQ at 34 Montague Square was there to be gazed upon. But it’s just not reality.

I lived in two different houses over the course of my childhood. Both have since been torn down. They’re only addresses now, but I don’t need the buildings to have the memories of the people and things that went before.

There’s a magic in a time and a magic in a place. Most of all, the magic is in the people. Huw Spink – you know him as Teatles —  guided me around his Liverpool, centered in particular around beautiful and essential Sefton Park, just hours after I arrived in the city. This set the tone for just how great this trip would be. We talked Beatles, we talked friends and family. We had tea.

Paul Abbott – you know him as half of The Big Beatles and 60s Sort Out podcast – showed me his Liverpool shortly before we left Liverpool. It reinforced how lovely the people, transplants or not, are. We talked Beatles, we talked friends and family. We had beer(s).

These places didn’t mean anything without the people. Whether it was our AirBnB hosts in Liverpool who gifted us a Beatles T-shirt in our unit simply because they knew that’s why we were in town or Kevin and his incredible generosity with his time.

It reinforced so much of what this trip exposed to me.

Places can be ordinary. And times aren’t special in isolation. It’s the people at those places and living in those times that make them worth returning to, something I think that’s easy to lose sight of.

The Beatles unlocked the magic of these places in their own time with the people they surrounded themselves with. Now, these locations are inseparable from the people and my own time, like Kevin Harrington and Milton Keynes last summer.

That’s why it’s just another front parlour on Forthlin Road if Paul didn’t write songs in it. No one, I think, would talk about a particular tree at Strawberry Field if it wasn’t John’s.

For me, it’s my wife loving life on the Steeplechase and Valhalla at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, my youngest enjoying baseball at London Stadium.

And it’s my oldest at 20 Manchester Square, no matter what is standing there today.

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October 28, 2024 · 10:44 pm

TMBP Extra: Get to the bottom

This article originally appeared in Issue 4 of the new TEATLES magazine, published October 2024, and was written by Dan Rivkin (me, They May Be Parted) and Dianne Ketler (@wouldride on IG). Check in with Teatles Huw if you have interest in a copy.

There’s a story behind every important photo of the Beatles. This is a story – a mystery – about what’s literally behind the Beatles in one of those photos.

The Fab Five — John, Paul, George, Pete and Stu – enliven the foreground, leather-clad and handling their tools of the trade. After more than 60 years, there’s not a lot new to say about Astrid Kirchherr’s photos of the band posing in Hamburg for the definitive portrayals of the savage young Beatles. Only thing is, one photo also has a roller coaster in the background.

I married a roller-coaster person, and the same enthusiasm a Teatles reader has for the Beatles a coaster enthusiast has for the ride. A coaster isn’t just a coaster, it’s one of the last three remaining Arrow shuttle loopers in the world, or it’s an RMC hyper-hybrid, or an out-and-back Gravity Group woodie that runs PTC trains (for instance). I get it. We could come up with a thousand descriptors for John or Paul that aren’t merely “guitarist” or “songwriter.”

So when a conversation between me and my wife naturally turned to the Beatles and amusement parks – did they ride, are there any photos of them on a coaster? – I was able once again to prove there is a Beatles connection to anything.

Even roller coasters. We know Astrid took this iconic photo in November 1960 at the Hamburger Dom “Fun Fair” as part of what amounted to the Beatles’ initial photo shoot during the first of several formative Hamburg residencies. It may not even be obvious they were standing in front of a roller coaster, but the uncropped photo makes it clear.

Studying the photo, my wife was able to determine it was a “side-friction” coaster – an early model that used side-friction wheels in addition to weight-bearing wheels under the trains, allowing the coaster to navigate curved track with more ease. There is one remaining side-friction coaster of the figure-8 variety in the world, which is also the planet’s oldest operating coaster: 1902’s “Leap the Dips,” located at Lakemont Park in Altoona, Pennsylvania, which, sadly, did not open for the 2024 season and whose future is unknown. In the early 20th century, however, the model was much more common.

So the Beatles stood in front of a roller coaster. But what was that ride called? Coaster people don’t have a definitive answer. The enthusiast’s online guide of record, Roller Coaster Database (RCDB), references a side-friction ride at Hugo Haase Park (“H.H. Park”), which operated from 1914-1922 in Stellingen, a Hamburg neighborhood. But we’re looking for a ride in 1960 in a different part of Hamburg, so RCDB doesn’t hold our answer. Beatle people justifiably can’t deliver an answer either.

Our growing interest in the photo dovetailed with our first trip to Liverpool, and the image followed us around town.

Astrid’s photo of the Beatles and the coaster hung framed on the wall at John’s childhood home, Mendips – and if a house can have a name, certainly this roller coaster must, too. A life-size image of Astrid’s photo was on display at the outstanding Liverpool Beatles Museum. The same photo appeared on T-shirts (we bought one) and 8x10s autographed by Pete at the incomparable Casbah Coffee Club.

Astrid’s photo, as blown up at the Liverpool Beatles Museum

But everyone we asked – the National Trust guide at Mendips, museum employees and Roag Best Jr. at the Casbah – offered the same answer when we asked if they knew the coaster’s name: “I don’t know.” Dave Bedford, who brilliantly led us around Liverpool and wrote a section of a book on the Beatles’ Hamburg, didn’t have a name either.

A clue to the coaster’s provenance could be the railcar the boys are sitting on, emblazoned with HUGO HAASE – HANNOVER. Haase, the German showman and “Karussellkönig” (“Carousel King”) of Lower Saxony, made his name building carousels and other rides, including the first transportable roller coaster – perfect for building at a fair for people to enjoy, then dismantling to move to the next town in a historic tradition of German traveling fairs and showmen that continues to this day.

Haase built “Roller Coaster,” which still operates at Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach in Norfolk. That ride debuted in Paris and was subsequently moved to the UK; Madness fans will remember it from the 1982 “House of Fun” video. (Haase’s remarkably beautiful 1907 three-step “El Dorado” carousel, ridden by Theodore Roosevelt, made its way to Coney Island in 1910 and then to Tokyo in 1969, where it operated until 2020.)

Haase pioneered a figure-8 track, which the coaster behind the Beatles strongly resembles. His “Figur-8 Bahn” and “Deep to Deep” models made their way onto colorful and artistic period advertisements, postage stamps and postcards, one of which lists Figur-8 Bahn’s location as “Altona – Hamburg Lurup.” Altona, which is not far from the Heiligengeistfeld where the Dom is held, was also where Astrid and her mother lived and, in a stunning coincidence, might have influenced the naming of the town of Altoona – the present-day home of “Leap the Dips.” A photograph of Haase’s Figur-8 Bahn can be seen on the Hamburger Dom’s website in 2024. Case closed, right?

George at the Dom, from the Living in the Material World book

Sort of. The question is, would a Hugo Haase side-friction transportable figure-8 coaster from the 1920s or ‘30s still be making its way around Germany near the end of 1960? Though Haase died in 1933, his heirs operated his company until 1967. And the Beatles are sitting on the Hugo Haase railcar in November, strongly implying that the coaster had been brought in recently and constructed for the Winterdom, traditionally held from mid-November to mid-December. It is certainly not unusual for a transportable coaster to move around Germany for decades – the modern-day Schwarzkopf “Olympia Looping” coaster is proof of that. “Olympia Looping” has crisscrossed the European fair scene since 1989, and coaster nerds follow it annually. So my wife suspected the coaster behind the Beatles was a Haase Figur-8 Bahn.

Another of Astrid’s photos from that day – this one of George alone – features the same roller coaster and wagon in the background from a different angle. A partial contact sheet of the shot is featured in the 2011 Living in the Material World book. But there’s no new visible information, and it only seemed to reinforce our belief it was a Figur-8 Bahn.

Back home, our pursuit continued. We reached out to the Hamburg tourism bureau with no luck.

Aiming higher, we were able to get a hold of a former Hamburg resident named Klaus Voormann.

In good news, he was kind and replied in an instant.  Here’s the bad news, by email:

“sorry but I never took a ride on this roller coaster. nor do I know the name of it. best kv”

We tracked down a cultural anthropologist in Hamburg, Dr. Darijana Hahn, who wrote “the first and only monograph” on Haase, published in 2007. She replied with some incredible information, including several archival photographs of the coaster from different angles, and two German-language pieces which call out Astrid’s photo for its impact in cementing Haase’s legacy – the Beatles doing more to ensure the showman’s place in history than his transportable and ephemeral coasters could.

She thinks the coaster was called “Schlangenbahn” or “Die Schlange,” a ride built in 1934 by the Hugo Haase company that was very similar to the Figur-8 Bahn but resembled a snake (“schlange” translates to “snake” in English). So while Dr. Hahn ultimately held the answer, she had never asked the question of which specific coaster stood behind the lads. Given her status as the most prominent (only?) Haase researcher in the world, it was eye-opening to read her message that she is keenly interested in our work on this topic. And it did much to reinforce the coaster bonafides in this household to learn that my wife had nearly gotten it right by identifying the coaster as a Figur-8 Bahn.

At last, we had a name, and a new word we can tie to the Beatles: Schlangenbahn. A traveling coaster hiding behind a traveling band trying to make a name for themselves.

Behold: DIE SCHLANGE

But did the Beatles care enough to have a ticket to ride it?

We didn’t have to go to Liverpool or Hamburg for our last, and potentially best lead to find out.

As in Pete Best, who was slated to perform less than 10 miles away from our home on a four-date U.S. tour nearly two months after we returned from Liverpool.

Pete Best in Kent, Ohio, in July 2024.

Given the opportunity to talk to a Beatle before the show, we only had one question: Do you know anything about that roller coaster that was behind you?

“I have no idea. No idea at all. [The park] was closed, and we went. Astrid took us to a good location to shoot. And it became one of the most famous rock and roll shots in the world ever since then.”

He’s right! But did he or the other Beatles ever go in and blow off steam at the Dom?

“Pffft. No. We had better things to do than ride roller coasters.”

***

Dianne Ketler has lived most of her life in the shadow of Cedar Point. She has ridden 110 roller coasters, 21 of them in the UK. You can follow her @wouldride on Facebook, Instagram and X. 

 

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November 22, 2022 · 7:00 am

Jan. 13: The Lunchroom Tape (Pt. 2)

The lunchroom discussion on January 13, 1969, winds and turns, overlaps and often overwhelms. It’s sincerely impossible to give a linear rundown of this 30-minute discussion, as it isn’t a linear discussion. So here’s another disclaimer: You may have already read some of the bits below in previous posts, and if you haven’t, you may eventually read some of it again. This isn’t a straight recap — instead I’m trying to follow themes as they developed at different points in the conversation.

Also, please read Part 1 first, if you haven’t already. It’s there I lay out the background of the lunchroom conversation and the key differences between the Nagra tapes and the Get Back docuseries’ portrayal of events. It’s not insignificant.

***

John, Paul, George and Ringo.

From 1962 to this very moment, it’s how we break down the Beatles. It’s the quintessential ordinal.

Open up your eyes now, tell me what you see: From the closing credits to A Hard Day’s Night

At once, it’s a simple accounting of tenure in the Beatles dating back to the Quarrymen days, but also a power ranking, a long-term hierarchy openly affirmed during the January 13, 1969, lunchroom tape. Yet at its most elemental, it’s a listing of four ostensibly separate co-workers assigned to the same group project. They’re still individuals with their own names and agendas.

After all, “we have egos,” to quote John Lennon in the opening moments of this recorded conversation.

The full half-hour of audio from the lunchroom reveals periodic contention between John and Paul McCartney, but it’s based in candor not animosity. You can hear it in their spoken tones.

Still, John is constantly raising the subject of ego and individual and collective self to Paul. At this point early in the tapes, it’s in the specific context of wanting the departed George Harrison to return to the band. From around two minutes into the recording, following John’s “ego” declaration and in a sequence omitted from the Get Back docuseries:

Do I want him back, Paul? … [D]o I want it back, whatever it is, enough? Then if it is, you know, I’ve had to smother my ego for you, and I’ve had to smother me jealousy for you to carry on, for whatever reasons there is.

It’s a strong statement, but Paul likely knew as much all along — he didn’t reply. John said he couldn’t be his real self, or who he wanted to be, to partake in the Beatles experience. He didn’t bury Paul; he’s saying he buried himself for the sake of Paul. John’s jealousy could be rooted in a lot of things — later in the lunchroom we hear John and Paul seriously discussing John’s feelings of submission at Paul’s musical direction. We’ll get to that another time.

John continued to unload in a sequence that’s complicated to follow, speaking at times to Yoko Ono and at others directly to Paul. He may even be speaking just to get his thoughts gathered out loud. Part of John’s argument is that Paul only “this year” came to recognize his own shortcomings and took responsibility not just for Paul’s treatment of George but his relationship with John, too. But he also gets into Paul’s interpersonal approach, too.

There’s plenty to unravel. John’s liberal use of pronouns instead of given names and constant shifting from first to third person is dizzying. I want to get this right, but I’m not sure this can be gotten right entirely. (I covered some of this territory earlier, in the recap of the band meeting the day before.)

John: It’s only this year that you’ve suddenly realized, like, who I am, or who he is or anything like that. But the thing is … you realize that like you were saying like George was some other part. But up till then, you had your thing that carried you forward. … I know, I’d deduced it before you … that would make me hipper than you, but I know that I’d deduced it to you before that for selfish reasons and for good reasons, not knowing what I was to do, and for all these reasons I’d adjusted to all these, and allowed you to, if you wanted to let me be that guy, whatever it is.

But this year, you’ve seen what you’ve been doing and what everybody’s been doing, and not only felt guilty about it, the way we all feel guilty about our relationship to each other, is we could do more.

I’m not putting any blame on you for only suddenly realizing it, see. Because this was my game, you know. It might have been masochistic, but me goal was still the same — self-preservation, you know. And I knew what I liked. I know where, even though I didn’t know where I was at, you know, the table’s there, and just let him do what he wants, and George too, you know? …

But this year, see, it’s all happening to you. And you’re taking the blame suddenly as if he’ll say, “Oh yeah, you know I’m a mean guy” as if I’ve never known it. And then I thought, “Fucking hell, I know what he’s like. I know he used to kick people. I know how he connived with Len, Ivan, and I now know, you know? Fuck him.” And then, “Oh, but right, I’ve done such things.” All that.

So you’ve taken the five years … of trouble, this year. So half of me says, “All right, you know I’d do anything so save you, to help you.” And the other half of me goes, “Well, serves him fucking right. I chewed through fucking shit because of him for five years and he’d only just realized what he was doing to me.”

This is a lot, spoken rapidly and emotionally in a little under three minutes. Some takeaways, from John’s perspective, via my own perspective and listening of the discussion:

• Without visuals to help clarify who John is talking to or any body language we can decode, no amount of AI and crisp audio will get us to  understand this sequence satisfactorily, much as we’d like to. It’s in the ear of the beholder whether John was talking about George’s relationship with John and Paul or John is talking about his own dealings with Paul. Or maybe John was projecting! With every repeated listen, I try to convince myself John is complaining about Paul, but if he is, Paul’s reaction (none) is so stark and tame, it forces me to reconsider that it must instead be about George’s relationship with the others after all.

• Not guilty? On the contrary! Not only John, but all the Beatles feel guilty about their treatment of each other, and he believes they can improve. This certainly makes sense. George’s departure from the group, the second by a Beatle in 4 1/2 months over real or perceived treatment from the others, could represent a tipping point to John.

• It’s not just guilt, though. Saying it “might have been masochistic,” John admitted to probably finding pleasure in the treatment of George — and in Paul bearing the recent brunt of the conflict with George.

• John’s explicit goal is” self-preservation,” without any elaboration.

• While he said he didn’t want to put any blame on Paul, that’s exactly what he did throughout.

I’m open to the description of George as “some other part” having  a further meaning beyond him simply existing as a separate entity outside the Lennon-McCartney songwriting and social circle. George is literally another part of the Beatles, and wasn’t previously treated as earning that full share.

Connivin’ with Ivan: Paul and Ivan Vaughan at Cavendish in 1968 — the year Paul suddenly realized it.

And then there are the remarks about “this year,” when Paul finally started figuring things out. Not yet a fortnight into 1969, “this year” certainly must refer to part, if not all, of 1968. That’s the year of India, the launch of Apple and the recording of the White Album. And personally for Paul, the end of his relationship with Jane Asher and the start of his life with Linda Eastman. In other words, a transitional, emotional year for Paul.

This was, in large part, a few moments of John speaking openly and directly about Paul (which viewers of Get Back were led to believe were the discussion’s only two participants).

That was enough for Yoko to interrupt at one point and plead for John to shift the conversation, without a spoken explanation. Was she uncomfortable by the discussion? Did she just want John to focus? (Why not both?)

“Go back to … talking about George.”

Moments later, she interrupted again to ask, “What about George?”

I’ve written about this next sequence over several other posts. But it’s worth a revisit and recontextualization. (When I eventually ask you all to buy They May Be Parted: The Two-Ton Tome, this will be a more orderly read.)

Paul was an optimist. He didn’t view George’s absence as a problem quite yet. (This moment comes about 5 1/2 minutes into the full recorded conversation, but it in the closing seconds of the Get Back cut).

Paul: See, I’m just assuming he’s coming back, you know? I’ll tell you, I’m just assuming he’s coming back.

John: What if he isn’t?

Paul: If he isn’t, then it’s a new problem.

It’s at this point — when he suggests that “as a policy” they should retain George in the band — ostensible Beatle boss John pitched a corporate reorg that would essentially result in the Plastic Beatles Band (or is it the Plastic Ono Beatles?).

“The Beatles, to me, isn’t just the four of us,” John said with the implicit suggestion Yoko could be a Beatle if the others acquiesced.

“I think that I alone could be a Beatle. I think [Paul] could. I’m not sure whether [Ringo] could. … I’m just telling you what I think. I don’t think the Beatles revolve around the four people.

“It’s like [Ringo] joining instead of Pete [Best]. To me, it is like that.”

Of course, it’s not really like that. (As I wrote previously, going from Pete to Ringo was a crafty personnel decision and musical upgrade, not part of a disruptive strategy or to keep the band fresh by employing a rotating lineup.)

“You have always been boss,” Paul continued, about 6 1/2 minutes into the near 30-minute sequence on the Nagra tapes and about halfway through the four-minutes dedicated to the lunchroom sequence in the Get Back documentary. “Now I’ve been sort of secondary boss. George has been the third boss.” (Previously, I wrote that it sounded like “third rung” — I even found a picture of George on a ladder to highlight the point! — but on fresh listen prompted by the cleaned-up audio in Get Back, I do think it’s “boss.” Regardless of exact wording, the point is the same.)

In a grand comic concession, Ringo admitted, “I’ve been the rabbit.”

The documentary doesn’t include the reference of George’s ranking, much less Ringo’s joke. Instead it ends with Paul’s placement as “sort of, secondary boss.”

John, Paul, George and Ringo. That’s what the Beatles became when Pete was sacked, and that’s the order they had in place at the beginning of these sessions in January 1969. And that’s probably why Paul was pushing for John to step up.

(Interestingly in a 1971 interview that went unpublished until 1984, John explicitly said, “What I think about the Beatles is that even if there had been Paul and John and two other people, we’d never have been the Beatles. It had to take that combination of Paul, John, George and Ringo to make the Beatles.”)

Paul had been very conscious of this concept of band leadership. Just a week earlier, he gave a vague statement about this very point.

I’m scared of that, ‘You be the boss.’ I have been for a couple years. We all have, you know?

It’s unclear if in that January 6 quote Paul meant “for a couple years, he was scared” of taking on a leadership role or if he was acknowledging he had felt he “acted as boss, for a couple years.” If on the lunchroom tape he’s explicitly recognizing John at the alpha, then it sounds like the former.

Later during the lunchroom Nagras — about 18 minutes in and in a sequence ignored in Get Back — Paul evoked cinema’s rebellious, anti-hero “King of Cool,” Steve McQueen.  It didn’t sound like Paul was attempting to fill any power vacuum himself, but instead was giving John the space to fill it again in some fashion.

Here’s a separate mini-post snuck inside a caption. I can’t track down the exact source of this photo, although I’ve seen some say it’s one of Linda McCartney’s Polaroids. Anyway, if legit, it’s Paul and Steve McQueen, probably in the LA area around April 1974. Everybody’s hair in his era checks out. John, meanwhile, attended a benefit for actor James Stacy a few weeks earlier in 1974, and seems to to have at least met McQueen there. In 1973, when Paul was vacationing in Jamaica, McQueen and Dustin Hoffman were filming Papillon. That’s when Hoffman challenged Paul to write a song that resulted in “Picasso’s Last Words.”

Rattle the cage. Make a scene. And make a splash — on your own if that’s what it takes.

“You’re unsure because you’re not sure whether to go left or right on an issue,” Paul said to John. “You’ve noticed the two ways open to us. You know the way we all want to go. And you know the way you want to go. Which is positive! … So your positive thing might actually be to kick that telephone box in. It might occasionally be to do that.”

The metaphorical phone booth could be inspired by something in the room, outside the window or simply from thin air.

“Everybody would want to see that, actually,” said Yoko, the first to reply.

“But you don’t want to actually look like you’re kicking the telephone box in,” Paul accused John in this scenario. “So you have to sort of say to everyone, ‘Look at that over there, everyone!’ And while they’re looking, you’ll kick the telephone box in, and sort of [Paul whistles innocently like somebody who’s guilty].”

John laughed and said that wasn’t a fair representation of him.

“But I think the answer is that while you’ve got us all looking at nothing over there, and you’ve thrown us for a minute, we would actually all have dug to see you kick that telephone box in,” Paul said. “Because we wanna see you do it! … We would actually want to watch the Steve McQueen film where he kicks the telephone box in. We all want to see that.”

John: But it must be our own faults that we’ve built it up that I can’t kick the telephone box, apart from it being my fault.

Paul: You can. You could.

In preparing this post, I watched Steve McQueen’s filmography through the beginning of 1969 and asked around to more educated fans of his, and there doesn’t seem to be a scene where he explicitly kicks a phone booth. There are similar moments, like one in Bullitt (which was playing at the very hour of this discussion at the Warner West End theater, just a 10 minute walk from the Beatles’ Savile Row headquarters). McQueen doesn’t quite kick in a telephone box with no one watching, but he does get a little aggressive with a newspaper box.

McQueen was a metaphor. John’s directionless — or is it multi-directional? — impression was a reality. As Paul put it, John was “unsure if he wants to go left or right on an issue.” That included the issue of George, but really the group as a whole. But the solution — John showing some leadership, even if it’s not necessarily something directly leading the Beatles in a specific direction — was all they needed. It feels like Paul just wanted to believe in John and inspire John to believe in himself. An adjacent Plastic Ono Band, in this scenario, was a greater solution to Paul than some kind of expanded Plastic Beatles Band.

A solo career may have even been the better consequence than a compromised Beatles, and would solve the ego problem. Paul made his case by laying out an imaginary scenario in which at the end of the night, he was drunk and got on the piano just because he felt like it and he would be “singing because I don’t particularly want to show off.” In turn “everyone in that room will dig it, because it’s me really doing it.”

By contrast, when he “half-means” — a complaint that had been leveled already during these sessions, like Paul saying “sometimes [we] blow one of your songs cause we come in in the wrong mood”  — that’s when the problems emerge.

“What I’d like to do is for the four of us … I see it as you go one way, you go one way, George goes one way, and me another.”  Paul worked to continue his point but the conversation veered into a more specific discussion about musical arrangement on recent songs. We’ll get back to that digression in another post.

Sandwiching the invocation of McQueen, Paul and John sounded off on a potential solo project by Ringo, and took opposite points of view in using the LP as a representation for a larger ideal.

“Just you talking about the Stardust album … it isn’t as daft as you sort of find that it might sound,” Paul said.

Still more than a year out from being released, Ringo’s debut solo project was purely in the conceptual phase. (Eventually titled “Sentimental Journey,” the LP wouldn’t begin its recording sessions for nearly 11 months, and ultimately it came out at the end of March 1970, a few weeks before Let It Be.)

“But the great thing is that you singing like you really sing will be it. It will be!”

Ringo: Yes, but the only way is to do it on your own.

Paul:  …Until then … you’ll half-sing. … And it’s probably when we’re all very old, we’ll all sing together.  And we’ll all really sing, and we’ll all show each other … fucking die then, I don’t know.”

Singing how you really sing is a solitary endeavor. And the reunion of John, Paul, George and Ringo — once the solo careers are have concluded and in their twilight when they reassemble in the departure lounge — that is the epilogue.

Paul’s advice emerged in Get Back in condensed form, with another mis-transcription and served outside of this context as the final statement of the lunchroom sequence (emphasis is mine):

And probably when we’re all very old, we’ll all agree with each other, and we’ll all sing together.

Needless to say there’s a significant difference in saying an eventual reunion would come after “we’ll all show each other” and “we’ll all agree with each other.”  Paul very clearly predicated his concept on the Beatles requiring a controlled implosion before the individuals operated apart to some degree to reach their full potential, and then — for the sake of their egos, in part — they would prove their strength to each other. Reuniting wasn’t, as the Get Back transcription asserts, something they would simply do based on unanimous consent.

This is all consistent with Paul’s contemporary statements, like the one before the lunchroom gathering when he went as far as suggesting staging the group’s breakup. (And that’s not inconsistent with various statements the four Beatles made in the breakup period regarding solo projects and an eventual reunion).

Still John echoed Ringo’s insecurities, explaining on the heels of the Steve McQueen thread that it must be “our own faults” he couldn’t kick the metaphorical phone box.

“But the feeling that I …” John stammered, “like Ringo said about his album, that what was it, ‘I won’t do it, ’cause I’m gonna let us down or look a fool.'”

This wasn’t a self-centered approach. Letting the group down. Making them look a fool. This was about the Beatles.

Earlier John made his goal explicit: “Me goal was still the same — self-preservation”

That self wasn’t just John Winston Lennon alone. It was John, Paul, George and Ringo, too.

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October 5, 2021 · 6:54 am

Jan. 12: A family outing (Pt. 2)

FYI at the outset: I’m applying the same disclaimer from last time, when I started recounting the Beatles’ January 12, 1969, meeting at Ringo Starr’s house.  For this series of posts, I’m going to jump between various parts of the January 13 Nagra tapes that directly address January 12, for the sake of the overall narrative.  Specific quotes and certain discussion topics conspicuously absent here will soon be tied back into the story. I promise!

****

Twenty years after the breakup of the Beatles and in the midst of leading his own supergroup, George Harrison characterized the “Wilbury Attitude.”

From the March 1990 issue of Musician:

Somebody wrote in a paper things like, ‘Little Richard is a Wilbury. Madonna wouldn’t be a Wilbury but Cyndi Lauper would be.’ It was quite funny.

While there may have been “about 500” fifth Beatles, as George estimated in that same Musician profile, the four proper members of the Beatles were set in stone (Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe screw up this accounting, so let’s just stick with the figure of four), and the lineup had been stable for more than six and a half years by the time we reached January 1969.

John Lennon proposed expanding the group more than once over the course of that month. The Beatles’ board meeting on January 12 was one such occasion.

Most of what we know about that meeting we learned from recordings of John, Ringo and Paul McCartney — among several other key figures — captured a day later. And while some of those January 13 conversations were filmed openly at Twickenham Studios on the set, so to speak, of Let It Be, a clandestinely recorded lunchroom discussion fleshed out the story.  Remember Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s spy microphone? Documenting this lunch became the device’s greatest legacy.

It must be repeated to make it clear: This meeting was not merely between Paul and John, as suggested by the 2021 Get Back docuseries. There were at least half a dozen people present.

“The Beatles, to me, isn’t just limited to the four of us,” John said on the 13th, candidly recounting what became a contentious point discussed during the previous day’s meeting and in response to Ringo relaying that George wanted a meeting limited to the four Beatles. It’s worth noting there were multiple occasions during lunch that Ringo and Paul explicitly referred to the “four” Beatles.

“I think that I alone could be a Beatle. I think [Paul] could. I’m not sure whether [Ringo] could. … I’m just telling you what I think. I don’t think the Beatles revolve around the four people.”

Maybe it’s hindsight speaking, but of course the Beatles revolved around four people, and it had since Stu stepped out in 1961, even if their nominal leader suggested otherwise by calling a critical upgrade at drums merely a reorientation.

“It’s like [Ringo] joining instead of Pete,” John continued. “To me, it is like that.”

We don’t hear Yoko Ono’s name explicitly mentioned in the context of being a part of an expanded Beatles, a proto-Plastic Ono Band, but it’s the clear suggestion amid her omnipresence and in the wake of her taste of the fab experience 48 hours earlier.

For her part, Yoko didn’t see George’s departure as anything but temporary. His return was, in her eyes, completely in the hands of the others.

“You could get back George so easily, you know that,” Yoko said during the lunch.

****

Reputation’s changeable, situation intolerable: George stuck on the third rung

“The third boss.”

That’s how Paul plainly described George’s place in the Beatles hierarchy on the lunchroom tape. (Paul conceded John was at the front and himself secondary.)

It was only a few days prior when George openly bemoaned his status within the group and the dead-end destiny of so many of his contributions: “I’ve got about 20 songs from 1948, because I knew very well at the moment I’d bring them into the studio that [splat sound], there its gone.”

This complaint on January 7 came immediately before he called for “a divorce,” which he pursued when he walked out January 10. At the January 12 board meeting, it only got worse, according to John.

“It’s a festering wound … yesterday we allowed to go even deeper,” John said early in the recording of the lunchroom discussion. “But we didn’t give him any bandages.”

Not only a reluctant medic, John wasn’t sure he wanted George to even be a Beatle anymore. Maybe the Beatles could be a four-piece after all, just with Yoko and without George.

“Do I want him back, Paul?” John said. “I’m just asking, do I want it back, whatever it is — the myth?”

That remark echoed George himself from the divorce conversation, in his response to Paul, saying the band used to be “switched on,” George had replied, “If that’s what doing it is, that’s why I don’t want to do it.”

Like George, John was searching for motivation to maintain the group’s status quo, even when the Beatles’ status quo was really a constant state of invention and reinvention, at least to the point of view of us on the outside.

During lunch on January 13, Paul and John agreed the duo would “connive,” when it came to their marginalization of George within the band and their maintenance of creative control. This, while George “could afford to be more insensitive” himself, as “some other part,” an other acting separately from the other members of the band, perhaps musically, perhaps socially.

“I do think that as grim as it all is,” Paul said, “that [George] is right. And I do think that our sole approach is exactly what he’s been saying.”

John simply said that he knows he’s treated people this way since primary school and offered the customary breakup excuse, “It’s not him, it’s just me.”

Yet while the duo acknowledged the problem of their treatment of George as a tertiary Beatle — later Paul would admit they treated him “a bit like a mongrel” — they didn’t set forth a path to solve it directly. The board meeting on the 12th, which was supposed to be a general business meeting, went so far beyond just an attempt to reconcile George’s walkout. The band’s very existence was in question. Again.

“It’s like George said. It doesn’t give me much satisfaction anymore,” John said on the 13th. “Because of the compromise we’d have to make to be together. The end result of the records now aren’t enough. …  When something came out like Revolver or Pepper or whatever, there was still that element of surprise that we didn’t know where it came from. But now we know exactly where it comes from, and how we arrived at that particular noise and how it could have been much better.

“The only way to get it satisfactorily for yourself is to do it on your own. And then that’s fucking hard.”

Here John again mirrors another of George’s points from January 7, when the latter said he wanted no part of performing any of his own songs at the presumptive forthcoming concert “because they just turn out shitty. They come out like a compromise.”

A fab feast, July 1969

Linda Eastman, who like Yoko was at the lunch on the 13th, responded by throwing some of John’s words back in his face. “But you were saying yesterday … you write good songs and it can’t be any better way. You don’t want just studio musicians. I mean, that’s how I look at it. You make good music together, whether you like it or not.”

John admitted that he liked it. Still, he was dissatisfied with the White Album. Not his own contributions, which he remained happy with, but the sum of the parts. While Ringo said he dug it “far more than Sgt. Pepper,” John struggled to reconcile how good the White Album was and what he felt it should have been.

As difficult as the situation was, Paul was the optimist. He didn’t even see George’s absence as a problem — yet.

“See, I’m just assuming he’s coming back, you know? I’ll tell you, I’m just assuming he’s coming back.

“What if he isn’t?” John asked.

“If he isn’t, then it’s a new problem.”

****

A “new” problem implies previously existing problems, and on January 12, 1969, the Beatles definitely had other problems.

With the benefit of hindsight,  we know Yoko was right and Paul’s optimism was justified. It was easy to get George to return to the group. It took a couple painless concessions from the others, and he was back with the Beatles just a few days later — this wasn’t any protracted estrangement, just one with good retrospective drama and publicity. For context, Ringo’s resignation during the White Album sessions lasted almost twice as long.

While acknowledging the issue, why didn’t John and Paul go a step further and apply the bandages to salve George’s festering wounds? It’s unclear, as they had recognized, at least in the wake of the meeting — if not during it — their “conniving” problem.

“Our brains sort of … con him,” Paul said at lunch, calling those moments “so innocent” and “so simple.”

That kind of treatment came completely natural to John. “It might have been my game. It might have been masochistic,” he said describing his approach. “But the goal was still the same: self-preservation.”

Yet, John said he “had to fight it the last three years,” saying he overcompensated by feeling he was actually giving in to George for several years, going out of his way to work with and relinquish a territory on their records, while George was creatively on “a good ride.”

He didn’t use the word “connived,” but in later interviews George did consider the others’ actions selfish. None of this should surprise anyone who has followed the Beatles for the last half-century.

From George’s terrific 1977 interview with Crawdaddy:

There were too many limitations based upon our being together for so long. Everybody was sort of pigeonholed. It was frustrating. The problem was that John and Paul had written songs for so long it was difficult. First of all because they had such a lot of tunes and they automatically thought that theirs should be the priority, so for me I’d always have to wait through ten of their songs before they’d even listen to one of mine. … I had a little encouragement from time to time, but it was a very little. It was like they were doing me a favor. …

Paul would always help along when you’d done his ten songs, then when he got ‘round to doing one of my songs, he would help. It was silly. It was very selfish, actually.

Then there’s Yoko, who George didn’t want around the studio as a non-participant, much less as an artistic partner. He may have been insensitive to her when she entered John’s life (invoking her “bad vibes”), but he clearly felt that behavior was justified. This emerged as the red line for John. We know how the story ended, and Yoko didn’t leave John’s side while the Beatles were together. John won that part of the battle, even if she wasn’t elevated to a member of the group.  (Through tragedy she ultimately became a member of the Apple board.)

There was no punch-up on January 10, 1969, that pushed George to take a break from the Beatles, it was just, largely, the simple, sweeping con he endured for years. You could almost say George had been fobbed off and he’d been fooled, he’d been robbed and ridiculed. John and Paul recognized and acknowledged as much on the lunchroom tape.

Like it or not, in the words of Linda, the Beatles made good music together. After the meeting on January 12, 1969, it was an open question if the four of them had any mutual desire and consensus to resume doing so.

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