Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
61 years after releasing their first single “Love Me Do,” The Beatles have released their latest single. “Now and Then” echoes its predecessor on the other side in the three words of its title. The single accompanies a new version of the group’s biggest hit albums, Red and Blue.
You could call it a cynical marketing strategy, but the long history of development suggests otherwise. The story from “Love Me Do” to “Now and Then” contains the love story of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, which is also ours.
More than half a century after the Beatles disbanded, their songs still shape our lives. We sing them in kindergartens and stadiums; We mourn them at weddings and funerals and in the privacy of our rooms.
The Beatles’ songs continue to speak to us so directly because they convey feelings too strong for normal language. Lennon and McCartney were intense young men who grew up in a time when men were not encouraged to talk about their feelings, either in therapy or with each other. He gained his emotional education through music, particularly the music of black artists such as Smokey Robinson, Arthur Alexander and The Shirelles. They poured almost everything they felt – and they felt a lot – into the music, including their feelings for each other.
“Now and Then” wasn’t conceived as a Beatles song. Long after the group’s dissolution, Lennon wrote it on the piano while withdrawing from the public scene in the late 1970s. He recorded it on a tape recorder and put it away. In 1994, his wife Yoko Ono discovered two cassettes of her husband’s demo songs and contributed them to the retrospective project “Beatles Anthology”.
On the label of one of them, Lennon had scrawled “Now + Then,” as if to highlight that particular song. But because the sound quality was very poor (George Harrison called it “garbage”), “Now and Then” didn’t get far.
But McCartney never forgot her. He sent the demo to Peter Jackson, director of the Beatles documentary Get Back, who used advanced audio technology to clean the tape so thoroughly that it sounded as if Lennon was back in the room.
“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” McCartney said. “It’s very emotional.” McCartney and Ringo Starr, now in his 80s – and George Harrison, posthumously – added roles.
Why did McCartney pursue this project for so long? He’s already pretty busy – in the last five years alone he’s worked on solo albums, a memoir, a musical and a world tour.
“Now and Then” is a sweetly melancholic song, but perhaps not on the level of The Beatles when they were together. Giles Martin, producer of this new song and son of legendary Beatles producer George Martin, has a theory: “I feel like ‘Now and Then’ is a love letter from John to Paul,” he says, believing that “that’s why Paul was so determined to finish it.”
Although it has been described as a friendship, a rivalry, or a partnership of convenience, the relationship between these two geniuses is best imagined as a love affair. As far as we know, it was not a sexual relationship, but a passionate one: intense, tender and stormy.
Lennon and McCartney met as teenagers in 1957. They were talented, charismatic and damaged. McCartney had recently lost his beloved mother to cancer; Lennon had gone from mother to father to aunt without ever feeling loved. His mother Julia, whom he adored, was killed a year later by a reckless driver.
Grief bound these motherless children together, as did laughter. But music was the strongest connection of all. They decided to write songs together, a promise they kept until the Beatles broke up, and dreamed of creating a completely private world.
In a few years the world became his dream. The microculture that emerged among them became the Beatles’ philosophy, leaving a lasting mark on all of us. We may not be as optimistic as we were back then, but we are filled with her relentless curiosity, her wild imagination, and her belief in the possibilities of love.
Throughout their relationship, Lennon and McCartney used songs to say things to each other that they perhaps couldn’t say to each other’s faces. Lennon said he wrote the song “Glass Onion” (one verse reads: “The Walrus was Paul”) in 1968 to let McCartney know they were still friends.
After the band broke up, they conducted a dialogue from a distance, in songs full of accusations, regrets and affection. Lennon, hurt by the insults McCartney had included in his album Ram (“You got lucky and broke it in two”), recorded “How Do You Sleep?”, a vicious and hurtful attack on his former composing partner (“The “The only thing you did was yesterday” or “The only thing you did was ‘yesterday’”).
McCartney responded with “Dear Friend,” a melancholy call for a cessation of hostilities (“Is this really the limit?”).
Afterwards there was a ceasefire. For the rest of the decade, until Lennon’s death in 1980, they made tentative efforts from different sides of the Atlantic to restore their friendship. McCartney and his wife Linda visited Lennon in the United States, but it is possible that their real trust was reserved for the songs.
In “Let Me Roll It,” McCartney makes a virtual replica of Lennon. On “I Know (I Know),” Lennon sings “Today I love you more than today” over a guitar solo based on their last direct songwriting collaboration, “I’ve Got a Feeling.”
“Speaking is the slowest way to communicate,” John Lennon said in 1968. “Music is much better.” In some ways, the Beatles’ music, which brings so much joy and comfort, is the glorious fruit of male oppression. We like to believe that we live in a more emotionally enlightened time. We learned to say things. However, I sometimes think that this is some kind of excuse or a failure of courage. We have awakened from sleep and yet we seem more confused than ever.
Carl Perkins, rockabilly guitarist and singer and Beatles hero, worked with McCartney after Lennon’s death. One day he played McCartney a song he had written for him with the line: “My old friend, won’t you think of me from time to time?”
McCartney cried and left the room while Linda calmed a shocked Perkins. “She said that [esas fueron] “The last words John Lennon said to Paul in the hallway of the Dakota Building,” Perkins told Goldmine magazine toward the end of his life. Lennon “patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘Think of me from time to time, old friend.'”
We can understand why a song called “Now and Then” might be so important to McCartney, and we can guess what he hears in Lennon’s lyrics:
If we have to start again
Then we’ll be safe
That I will love you…
I miss you from time to time
From time to time
I want you to be there for me.
In the last two lines we can hear McCartney’s aging voice combining with that of his old friend.
Last year I was in the audience at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey at a McCartney concert. The concert’s first encore was a virtual duet with Lennon of “I’ve Got a Feeling” using footage from the 1969 rooftop concert.
It may have been a cheap trick, but when McCartney turned to the giant image of his friend as a young man, I cried like thousands of others.
Technology can revive the dream state, even if just for a song.
(From The New York Times)