The Politics of Cool
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As Beatlemania threatens to sweep the West again with the launch of a new book by the three surviving Beatles, JAYADITYA GUPTA joins the debate over who was better: John or Paul

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book/ It took me years to write, will you take
a look?

It took them years to write, alright, but the three surviving Beatles didn’t have to plead with any publisher — leave alone reader — to take a look at what will probably become one of the biggest-selling books of all time (advance orders have crossed 1.5 million in the UK alone).

Much has been written about John, Paul, George and Ringo. Anyone, it seems, who has heard their songs (and quite a few who haven’t) has written the ‘definitive’ biography of the most successful artistic team ever. Even John’s chauffeur Anthony Fawcett wrote an account of Life with Lennon, cheekily titled — what else? — A Day in the Life.

So why are Beatles fans from Adelaide to Acapulco dusting off their Carnaby Street shirts and sequinned Sgt Pepper jackets? What’s the buzz about? Will the world stop turning on October 5, when The Beatles Anthology is released? It’s all been said before, hasn’t it? Well, not really; there’s never really been an official book about the Fabs yet, bar Hunter Davies’s chronicle in 1968 and George Harrison’s vapid I, Me, Mine. The thrill is this: For the first time, the survivors have told their tale in their own words.

That means that the vast compendium of Beatles lore can finally be put through an objective test, and maybe eternal rest. That compendium has, of course, grown over the years simply because the Beatles never saw the need to correct or counter any of them.

But for a large number of Beatles fans, and for gossip columnists the world over, what will be most fascinating is the manner in which McCartney reportedly tries to set the record straight on who was the gorup’s creative leader. Conventional wisdom has it that Lennon was the group’s avant-garde, well, avant-garde. He was, after all, the man who spent considerable time with his wife in a bag and then in an Amsterdam hotel bed and then posed nude with her for an album cover, who underwent Arthur Janov’s primal therapy and then recreated it on vinyl, who put together a group of Perspex speakers and called them the Plastic Ono Band, who wrote two acclaimed books of poetry and who made psychedelic music.

A pretty strong case, you might say. And any argument was dismissed by Lennon’s assassination in December 1980, which effectively canonised him. He could now do no wrong, and McCartney won few friends with his response when asked for his reaction to the killing: ‘‘It’s a drag’’.

That comment has come back to haunt McCartney several times since, though he tries to downplay its significance or explain what he meant. That has obviously rankled the Cherub-Faced One; he has taken (rather fatuously) great pains to explain how close he was to Lennon and why he should have been upset more than most.

Anyway, the bottom line is that McCartney’s hip credentials have long been held in question. To counter this, Macca engineered Many Years From Now, a biography of his life in the sixties by Barry Miles, friend, counter-culture freak and editor of the seminal underground paper International Times. The book bears out what Macca had been saying all along: That he was dabbling in art and artyness before Lennon, poetry excepted.

Once you read this book, it’s easy to see why McCartney feels the need to set the record straight: His case is pretty strong, too. When he started dating actress Jane Asher in 1964, he wasn’t just entering a relationship, he was setting foot in a totally different world to both his working-class Liverpool upbringing and his millionaire Beatle existence. It was a world of intellect, of laid-back indulgence of the finer senses. Asher’s parents were both brilliant scholars and savants; Asher herself was the darling of the London stage.

Staying with them (he had a room in the attic) McCartney came in constant contact with the finer things in life and learned to appreciate them. He went to plays and operas, listene to chamber music, read cutting-edge literature and patronised art galleries; best of all, he met those who were actually behind all these events, the writers, composers, musicians and dramatists. His horizons were infinitely broadened, and its effects have lasted till this day: Witness his Liverpool Oratario.

Significantly, and as he mentions in Anthology, Macca stayed on in London when the other Fabs took off to their country estates. Here, he drank deep of the heady brew that was the swinging capital of the world. ‘‘We knew a few actors, a few painters; we’d go to galleries because we were living in London now. A kind of cross-fertilisation was beginning to happen. While the others had got married and moved out to suburbia, I had stayed on in London and got into the arts scene through friends like Robert Fraser and Barry Miles... I always contend that I had quite a big period of this before John really got into it, because he was married to Cynthia at the time. It was only later, when he went out with Yoko, that he got back into London and visited all the galleries.’’

Evidence of this can also be found in the music. Lennon, at the time, was more influenced by the drugs he was taking. Sitting in his Surrey farmhouse, he was cut off from the world save his TV set and the forays into the recording studio. Check out the songs on Revolver: I’m Only Sleeping’, She Said, She Said, the watershed Tomorrow Never Knows. McCartney’s contribution? The string quartet on Eleanor Rigby and the horn solo on For No One, both obviously culled from classical influences. And the elegant structure of both songs. On Sgt Pepper, most of John’s songs are collages from real life (A Day in the Life, Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, Lovely Rita Meter Maid); the exception is the heady Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

By 1968, though, Lennon and Yoko got together and Macca split with Jane Asher. The avant-garde stakes were clearly tilted in Lennon’s favour, especially as Yoko herself was a veteran dabbler. Remember, they met at the Indica Gallery in London where Yoko was exhibiting her work. What first drew John to her was one ‘work’ in which you stood on a step-ladder and peered, through a magnifying-glass, at the ceiling on which was written ‘You are here’. From then on, there was no looking back. The White Album, recorded in 1968, offers proof of this. Macca’s chief contributions were straightforwrd pop and rock ’n’ roll (with the exception of Why Don’t We Do It In The Road). Lennon was elliptical, elusive, enigmatic — Glass Onion, Happiness Is A Warm Gun — and downright bizarre, as in Revolution Number 9.

So what’s the verdict? As in any form of art, there can never be any conclusive answer. Whether McCartney went arty before Lennon did, or whether John was more outre than Paul is pretty academic except, perhaps, to the Beatles’ bassist. Lennon could never have written Yesterday, just as McCartney had nothing to do with Lucy In The Sky. Macca was too conventional to be as left-field as his partner, Lennon too scared of losing his iconoclast label to do anything straight. They both used contemporary art and culture for their own ends, in their own ways.
What mattered was that together they made unforgettable music. Perhaps it would be best to think of them as two sides of the artistic coin, like the two sides of their double-A single, Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever, reckoned by many to be the greatest single of all time.

Interestingly, both songs dealt with childhood memories; how the two Beatles handled them tells this entire story. On one side we have Lennon’s vision of art, the stunning psychedelia of Strawberry Fields Forever. On the other, the realist McCartney served up his trademark story-in-a-song embellished with a trumpet solo score created from memory after listening to Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto.

Who was the genius? You decide.

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