It is a truth universally unrecognised that all the greats must, at some point, be bad. Muhammad Ali hit the canvas, David Bowie had a wayward jungle phase, Bob Dylan turned out the utter tatt of Empire Burlesque, and Breaking Bad had a few boring episodes. But, much like The Beatles‘ own wobbles from grace, these slip-ups were inevitabilities, borne from the very same ambitious strides that made these folks great in the first place.
At the core of the Fab Four’s triumph was a group of old friends trying to do something remarkable. The pressures of this set the standards, and it was inevitable that one day, these standards would prove too precious to uphold, and they would part. As John Lennon mused, “That old gang of mine. That’s all over. When I met Yoko is when you meet your first woman and you leave the guys at the bar and you don’t go play football anymore and you don’t go play snooker and billiards.”
He continued to tell David Sheff, “Maybe some guys like to do it every Friday night or something and continue that relationship with the boys, but once I found the woman, the boys became of no interest whatsoever, other than they were like old friends.” In essence, all he is talking about there is maturity and how the currency of security inflates once the rigmarole of the flipside begins to wane. You simply couldn’t be 45, and in The Beatles, it just wouldn’t work.
Their greatest strength, above all else, was that they were the very definition of a band. That ‘old friends’ spirit magically galvanises their work with a wistful transcendence. Honesty, communion and fun abound in their work, imbuing it with a sincerity that only friendship can afford. That was always set to mutate somewhat in maturity; that’s life. But even in the halcyon days when it was brimming with passion of a much more visceral sort, it wasn’t easy to maintain.
Squabbles were part of the lore of The Beatles. Anyone who has been on a long holiday with friends can testify that at one point, without too much rhyme or reason, you will look across at a random pal whom you love unconditionally and think, ‘I have never hated anyone more’. That was the comic undertone that underscored The Beatles, and it was that frisson of love and hate that helped to imbue their music with magic.
At the impasse at one of these friendly scraps lies a Beatles song that was batted away by a bruised Paul McCartney. As the band began to delve deeper into psychedelia in the mid-1960s, Macca was fearing that they were experimenting a little too extremely and losing their identity in the process. He still wanted to retain a smattering of football and billiards down the bar about their disposition. As sound engineer Geoff Emerick recalled, ”John was deliberately distorting the Beatles music, trying to turn the group into an avant-garde ensemble instead of a pop band”.
This caused increasing skirmishes, and one track beset by such bad blood was ‘She Said, She Said’. “John brought it in pretty much finished,” recalled McCartney in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now. “I’m not sure, but I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on. I think we’d had a barney or something, and I said, ‘Oh, fuck you!’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ll do it.’ I think George played bass.”
In a weird way, this blot on the copybook showcases the brilliance of the band. Many groups at the height of their success are more than happy just to turn up and play any old safe rubbish that will keep their commercial wheel in spin. However, these revolutionary young lads from Liverpool wanted more than that—and they were happy to disagree with each other to get there, and bound by enough friendship to put those disagreements aside.
