His Real Love Is The Radio, We Can't Really Understand The Excitement Of Silent Generation

GEORGE HARRISON and social interaction difficulties.

Those boys who are wearing their hair long are saying no to the masculine mystique. They are saying no to that brutal, sadistic, tight-lipped, crew-cut, you know, Prussian… big-muscle, you know, Ernest Hemingway… kill bears when there are no bears to kill and napalm all the children in Vietnam and Cambodia to prove that I’m a man, you know and be dominant and superior to everyone concerned and never show any softness. Well, these boys that are wearing their hair long are saying, ‘No… I don’t have to be all that crew-cut and tight-lipped, I don’t have to be dominant and superior to anyone, I don’t have to have big muscles because there aren’t any bears to kill. I don’t have to, you know, kill anybody to prove anything. I can be tender, and I can be sensitive, and I can be compassionate… and I can admit sometimes that I’m afraid, and I can even cry, and I am a man… and I am my own man’. And that man, who is strong enough to be gentle… that is a new man.

Feminist pioneer Betty Friedan talking about The Beatles in 1964, a year after publishing her book The Feminine Mystique. Featured in Beatles ‘64

Paul McCartney in Beatles '64 (2024)

The Beatles dicking around in the studio durning the recording of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

basically the beatles being as cute as fuck

This is, by no means, original thought. However, after the release of Beatles ‘64, I just want someone to make a Beatles film that is for us. Forget the mainstream and do what Cynthia said had never happened - people getting the emotion right instead of just the facts. The Beatles story isn’t a success story, it isn’t a rags to riches story, it isn’t an even a story about genius, it’s a story that has the power to change the world and one that will be told for ever. We are living in an era where we get to witness a myth being made and so in tribute to the oral tradition, we need to be the myth-makers. Someone needs to tell the story. I hope it will be Paul. I fear it won’t. Perhaps he can’t or shouldn’t, perhaps he won’t be believed. He definitely won’t be if everyone, including him, keeps recycling the same tropes. We know there’s no new stuff to be created, but there is a new light to be shed on what we know is there. This is beginning to sound a bit like the discovery of the Book of Mormon. No one needs another religion, but we do need is for someone to actually attempt to approach this seismic cultural event with an honest and open perspective.

Yoko allowed John to believe he was the genius. John’s canonisation (his manufactured image does him no favours) means that we can forget that Paul was the revered one in the 60s. He was the chosen one - in every way. John clocked it at their very first meeting.

“I half thought to myself, He’s as good as me, I’d been kingpin up to then. Now, I thought, if I take him on, what will happen?”- John

He took a risk, he made his choice and then never again believed in his own ultimate superiority. The story he’d told himself growing up, was that nobody was capable of spotting his genius because they were all below him. Surely a trauma response to being abandoned by his parents. Never could stand to be ignored, forever desperate to be seen and yet incapable of taking off the armour of cruelty. Look at me! Paul was the same, not armour but a wall of charm. Underneath John was soft and Paul is that almost impenetrable wall. They let each other in, and each betrayed the other. Those instincts of self-preservation that John spoke about.

Anyway, he took the chance on Paul, because he wanted to be somebody and Paul and him together made that a real possibility. Also, Paul was fucking hot and clever and talented. He was also a non-conforming weirdo who made everything look effortless and wouldn’t join John’s gang and wouldn’t let him lead. I wonder if this was Paul knowing, from the first moment of seeing John as was then confirmed by subsequent sightings and (I suspect) recces, strategically carried out to observe John (oh that bus worship carries some significance beyond an appreciation for public transport), that he knew how to handle John. Handle and manage John, in order to make him his very own.

(Is it him? Does it matter, because Paul has told us he “noticed” John many times, even before the chocolate bar.)

But, all the Paul adulation, especially John’s own uncontrollable, unconditional veneration, got to be too much. He couldn’t keep his jealousy in check. No quantity of material objects, women, money, food, fame soothed the ache for long enough. He thought Yoko, and because I am sure this is what Yoko promised him, was the only person who would always be in awe of him. She wasn’t, and the really tragic part is that Paul was from the jump, he still is and his faith never waivered.

If only they’d been able to maintain the connection and never lose the ability to read each other’s minds.

They burned too brightly. They loved too hard.

In Beatles '64 the part with Cyntia was cut, all the parts with Cynthia were cut or not explained

John Lennon and Paul McCartney humorously hiding Cynthia Lennon from photographers, February, 1964. — From the documentary "What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A."

People questioning the whole re-release of Now and then 50+ years after the Beatles broke up is missing the point. The song is a gift to us who are lucky enough to enjoy the magic of the Beatles, of course, but it was never made for us. Alexis Peditris described this perfectly in the last paragraphs of his review for the Guardian:

This is McCartney letting go. This is him saying one last proper goodbye to the people he loved the most, the music that defined his life, his past mistakes, his wrong choices, his "what-ifs", his family, alongside Starr, the only person who knew exactly what it was like and who's been on this journey with him together.

This is the end of 40 years of grieving that began when that gun was fired in front of the Dakota in 1980 and continued when Harrison left them on a bed in his house in 2001.

This is him, at 81 years old, knowing this could be his last decade singing the songs that he wrote with John and George because there in the songs there will always be a part of them with him, and finally being at peace with it.

This is him saying,

Thank you for the good memories.

Goodbye.

Finally some photos where he is smiling to his son

John and Julian in the 70s