Quotes from “John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs”
PROLOGUE
“Great Britain seemed stuck in some long-gone era of top hats and dirty chimneys, all vitality spent. But from its damp soil sprouted a life force so vigorous that it jump-started a new epoch. It didn’t come from the country’s capital, either, but from the suburbs of a provincial city in industrial decline, streets forlorn with war damage. Here two teenage boys invented their own future, and, in doing so, our present. Neither John Lennon nor Paul McCartney studied music; they couldn’t even read the notes. They schooled each other, and then they schooled the world.”
“The micro-culture of the Beatles, which had such a decisive impact on our culture, germinated in the many hours that John and Paul spent in Paul’s front parlor or in John’s bedroom, guitars on laps, making songs, poetry, and laughter.
This is a book about how two young men merged and multiplied their talents to create one of the greatest and most influential bodies of work in history. The partnership of Lennon and McCartney was responsible for 159 of the Beatles’ 184 recorded songs, and they were the dominant creative decision-makers within the group. [...] This is also a love story. John and Paul were more than just friends or collaborators in the sense we normally understand those terms. Their friendship was a romance: passionate, tender, and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy. This volatile, conflicted, madly creative quasi-marriage escapes our neatly drawn categories, and so has been deeply misunderstood.”
“We think we know John and Paul; we really don’t. A popular narrative about the group and its central partnership emerged in the wake of the Beatles’ demise in 1970. [...] After Lennon’s untimely end in 1980, this narrative became canonical. Somehow it survives, albeit in a moth-eaten form, even though it says more about the cultural and political preoccupations of a bygone era than about what actually happened. ‘John versus Paul’ is still the polarizing shorthand by which fans and writers discuss the Beatles. But as the protagonists themselves often acknowledged, there was no ‘John’ without ‘Paul’, and vice-versa. Their collaboration, even at its most competitive, was a duet, not a duel.”
“The standard narrative has distorted the true personalities of Lennon and McCartney, and impoverished our understanding of the Beatles’ music. We need a new story, not least because recent years have seen the emergence of important sources of evidence that definitively undermine the old one.”
“From the moment they began writing, Lennon and McCartney conceived of the pop song not just as a tune with words but as a way of processing overwhelming pain or joy, or both, and as a means of communication. They saw the song this way because they needed to. They were both deeply emotional men who had the fabric of their world ruptured at a young age, and they longed to connect — with each other, with audiences, with the universe. When they couldn’t speak what they felt, they sang it.”
“As millions reel at the sudden, violent death of one of the most famous and loved men in the world, that mean and paltry phrase hits the headlines: ‘It’s a drag.’ McCartney’s apparently emotionless demeanor seems to confirm what many already suspect: that Lennon and McCartney fell out years ago and no longer had any affection for each other. Amid the sadness, this news arrives like another little death. The infectious joy the two of them took in each other’s company had been so plain, on stage, on screen, and, above all, in music. Now one is gone while the other chews gum and makes glib remarks.
Whatever happened to John and Paul?”
