The Love You Make

And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love
You make.

 

 

—The last lyric in the last song
on the last Beatles’ album

foreword

Once There Was a Way to Get Back Homeward

“I believe in Beatles,” David Bowie sings at one point on his current album,
Heathen.
The line occurs in a song called “Afraid,” and it is the statement of a man who is struggling with nebulous fears that he cannot name. “But I put my faith in tomorrow,” the lyric runs, as the singer encourages himself, “I believe we’re not alone/I believe in Beatles/I believe my little soul has grown/And I’m still so afraid … on my own.”

“Afraid” could almost be a rewrite, more than thirty years later, of John Lennon’s “God”; the sentiment is the same, but it’s intentionally delivered by Bowie from a more cowardly perspective. “God” is the summary statement of Lennon’s first post-Beatles solo album,
Plastic Ono Band.
“God” begins with the lines, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” and as the song goes on, Lennon systematically sheds all the faiths that, in his view, only serve to provide people with an illusory protection against the dread isolation they feel in an uncaring universe. Jesus, Buddha, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan all take the fall before Lennon dramatically declares: “I don’t believe in Beatles/I just believe in me/Yoko and me/That’s reality.”

Lennon, of course, was nearly driven mad by his time in the Beatles, and until the day of his death he could not speak of the band without a chill running down his spine about people’s expectations of him as a member of the group. In the first major interview he granted after the Beatles publicly broke up, Lennon blew the lid off what the Beatles’ lives were like—or at least what his own harrowing experience was like. “I couldn’t take it,” Lennon told Jann S. Wenner, the editor of
Rolling Stone,
in 1970. “It was awful. All that business was completely awful. It was a fuckin’ humiliation. One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and
that’s
what I resent. I
did
it, but I didn’t know—I didn’t foresee that—it just happened bit by bit till this complete craziness is surrounding you. And you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t
stand
—the people you
hated
when you were ten.”

Ten years later, in one of the last interviews he ever did, Lennon had this to say about the desire on the part of fans for a Beatles reunion. “And for the ones who want to relive it, ‘Resurrect the Beatles’ and all,” he told David Sheff, who was on assignment for
Playboy,
“for those who didn’t understand the Beatles and the sixties in the first place, what the fuck are we going to do for them now? Do we have to divide the fish and the loaves for the multitudes again? Do we have to get crucified
again?
Do we have to do the walking on water
again
because a whole pile of dummies didn’t see it the first time or didn’t believe it when they saw it? That’s what they’re asking: ‘Get off the cross. I didn’t understand it the first time. Can you do it again?’
No way!”

You certainly can attribute some of passion of those remarks to Lennon’s vitriolic nature and his fondness for hyperbole—not to mention his megalomania. (He was given to Christ comparisons as early as his claim in 1966 that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” and his comic worry in the Beatles’ 1969 single “The Ballad of John and Yoko” that “The way things are going/They’re gonna crucify me.”) But even the far less volatile George Harrison claimed near the end of
The Beatles Anthology
that the relationship between the band and their fans “was a very one-sided love affair. The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give.”

For Harrison the stress of being in the Beatles manifested itself as a fear of the external upheavals that often surrounded the band—and a fear of being assassinated. “I wanted to stop touring after about ’65, actually, because I was getting nervous,” he told me when I interviewed him in 1987. “I didn’t like the idea of being too popular. There was that movie
The Manchurian Candidate….
I think in history you can see that when people get too big, something like that can very easily happen. Although at the time it was prior to all this terrorism. I mean, we used to fly in and out of Beirut and all them places. I mean, you would never
dream
of going on tour now in some of the places we went….

“We were flying into race riots in Chicago,” he continued. “We flew into this situation where the French and the English in Montreal were having a big fight, and Ringo was threatened…. It was nerve-racking. Everywhere we went, it was something like that. We’d go to Japan, where the students were rioting, and there’d be Beatlemania all mixed up with the politics. It just seemed to be like that all the time.” Harrison’s fears for his personal safety might seem paranoid—except, of course, that John Lennon was eventually murdered, and years later, Harrison was nearly stabbed to death in his own home.

For a variety of reasons, relatively little of the chaos afflicting the Beades’ lives was evident to anyone outside the band’s small, tightly knit circle. While the Beatles were one of the phenomena that launched the age of worldwide mass communication, the media were not nearly as aggressive, intrusive, or powerful as they would become in the decades after the band’s breakup in 1970. Even Lennon, Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr—who were easily among the most famous people on the planet—were accorded a degree of privacy that would make them seem absolutely reclusive by contemporary standards. Or, should I say, lack of standards.

In addition, the Beatles often kept their own counsel, even in the worst of times. In the early days, the cohesion among the band members constituted a kind of us-against-the-world toughness. It was the self-protective stance of four Liverpool lads contending with forces outside themselves whose strength and strangeness they could not have imagined only a short time before. Harrison once summarized the Beatles’ touring entourage to me as “only two road managers, that’s what we had. One guy to look after our equipment—which was three little amplifiers, three guitars, and a set of drums—and one guy who looked after us and our suits.”

In 1987, Paul McCartney also told me this about the Beades’ staunch sense of unity: “When we actually got in that limo, big blacked-out windows, there were really only ever four of us in the back of that car. And what went on then, that was the real thing. That was where we drew our strength from. We were able to withdraw into this private world of our own. And it was rather a good thing, really” But even in the band’s final stages, when Lennon announced at a group meeting that he wanted to quit, the Beatles and everyone around them managed to keep that secret in order not to damage the band’s position in the record contract renegotiations that were going on at the time. They may have grown sick of each other, but if anyone was going to break up the Beatles, it was going to be the band members themselves, acting whenever they saw fit.

The meeting at which John Lennon demanded his divorce from the Beatles took place in Peter Brown’s office at Apple, the Beatles’ highly conceptual, loosely defined company, where Brown served as chief operating officer. Brown had worked closely with Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, since the days when Epstein ran the record section in his affluent family’s department store in Liverpool and he had not yet even heard of the Beatles. Brown was one of a very select, propitiously placed group of people who worked closely with the Beatles through their entire public—and private—life as a band.

That nearness to the Beatles’ internal flame, both when it burned its brightest with possibility and when it was flickering its last, is part of what makes
The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles
such a riveting read nearly twenty years after its original publication in 1983. In the book’s introduction, Brown’s collaborator, Steven Gaines, recalls meeting Brown in 1974 and asking him if he’d like to share some anecdotes about the Beatles for a story Gaines was working on. “He explained,” Gaines writes, “that no one who was closely associated with the Beatles ever gave interviews about them.” When the two men parted, Gaines suggested that Brown give him a call if he ever considered writing a book about his experiences with the band.

Brown’s reticence seems almost quaint now that virtually everyone who has ever been in a room with one of the Beatles has written a book about them. But what sets
The Love You Make
apart is not so much the nature of its intimate revelations about the Beatles’ lives (we’ll get to some of those later) but the plainspoken, insightful representations of the band’s origins and their relationships both with each other and to the people closest to them. The access that Brown had—not only to the Beatles themselves, but to their wives, girlfriends, friends, and fellow musicians—did not distort the clarity and even-handedness of his portraits.

Epstein, for example, emerges as charming, feckless, utterly devoted to the Beatles, self-serving, dangerously self-destructive, and sad. It is a three-dimensional rendering, and quite unforgettable. Without ever lapsing into the sort of psychological reductionism that afflicts so much biographical writing, particularly over the past twenty years, Brown sensitively untangles the nuances of Epstein’s life as an upper-middle-class, Jewish, closeted gay man in England at a time when any single one of those identity issues raised far more complex problems than they do even today. And whether or not you accept the notion—one that gained this book considerable notoriety when it was first published—that Epstein and Lennon became lovers on their trip to Spain in 1963 (a charge that Lennon repeatedly denied), the texture of the strange, deep, and conflicted affection between the two men communicates forcefully in these pages.

All four of the Beatles, in fact, come across as real, recognizable people at the same time that none of the achievements or personal qualities that made them undeniably larger than life are belittled or compromised. Probably because he was such a close witness to the people and events he is writing about, Brown assumes that greatness can coexist with pettiness, that enormous talent and mean-spiritedness can rest side by side in a person’s soul. Even more significantly, he assumes that any intelligent reader will understand that a person can be kind and loving one day, and manipulative and insidious the next. So if the Beatles are depicted as being far from saints in
The Love You Make,
neither are they shown to be the mere sum of their flaws. In short, the book is not a “pathography,” to borrow Joyce Carol Oates’s priceless term, and we can be very thankful for that.

In this regard, the obvious affection the author feels toward John Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia, does not detract from the painful-to-read recountings of Lennon’s stultifying life with her in the suburban limbo of London’s stockbroker belt. And Brown gave Paul McCartney his well-deserved due long before McCartney, irritated to the point of obsession by the view of him as a mere pop craftsman, insistently claimed his own aesthetic sophistication in his friend Barry Miles’s book,
Paul McCartney
:
Many Years from Now.
The book displays the quiet confidence of a man who was in a position to know, and who therefore does not need to embellish or diminish his subject, but only render it in full.

 

 

The Love You Make
ends with the tragic event that in all likelihood also made Brown feel that he was free to write this book: the murder of John Lennon on December 8, 1980. Indeed, Lennon’s death felt like an ending in many ways. Most broadly, coming as it did so soon after the election of Ronald Reagan as president, it seemed to provide a dark conclusion to whatever the utopian hopes of the sixties might ultimately have represented. After 1980, American consciousness would decisively shift—not to say, constrict—and it was sometimes difficult to imagine what possible role Lennon could have played in so pragmatic, unforgiving, and business-minded a world as took shape after he died.

Far beyond its profound symbolic resonance, however, Lennon’s death also put a stop to all the endless talk about a Beatles reunion. It’s hard to recall (and if you’re too young to have lived through it, perhaps impossible to imagine) how persistent such speculation was, from concert promoter Sid Bernstein’s deranged plea to the band to unite for one benefit concert to end world hunger, to producer Lorne Michaels’ hilarious on-air offer to have the Fab Four perform three songs on
Saturday Night Live
for $3,000, which he upped to $3,200 when they didn’t accept right away.

But the yearning for the Beatles to get together again could not completely be quelled, even by Lennon’s death. McCartney, of course, was always the member of the band who grieved its loss the most, and it was particularly difficult for him to relinquish the hope that the Beatles, in whatever form, would get back together.