The Perfect Order of Things (12 page)

She had a two o’clock showing, a triplex in a nearby town, and asked would I mind if she got on the road. Which was a nice way of saying that she didn’t have much more to say about George or any particular nostalgia about that time of her life. Dropping me off in front of my hotel, she unwound the window and said, “Ask him if he remembers my little blue car.” And then, glancing over her shoulder, she pulled into the light Liverpool traffic without, I bet, giving me or the Beatles another thought.

Two days later, I followed a polite, normal-looking young woman up a flight of stairs to the third floor of George Harrison’s pleasantly appointed office, Handmade Films, in London. The camera crew had already arrived and was setting up. From what I gathered, they’d just returned from shooting an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow. The Soviet Union was disintegrating, but this, meeting George Harrison, was apparently a bigger deal. Like the pharmaceutical supplier who had sat next to me in the plane on the way over, they knew more about the Beatles than an adult should know, than
anyone
should know: which verse of “Help” was forgotten during the Miami leg of
The Ed Sullivan Show
, that George got a black eye when a drunken Pete Best fan head-butted him outside the washroom in the Cavern Club. That Paul McCartney’s father, after hearing the just-written “She Loves You” (acoustic guitars in the living room), suggested a minor lyric change: “Yes, yes, yes would be better
,
” he offered.

Two cameramen, two soundmen, a producer, two assistant producers and a lighting “guy.” They were nervous or excited, I couldn’t tell which, but they wouldn’t shut up. I wasn’t doing any better. Like a man about to be shot, I stood by the window looking out at the empty trees, the thin sunlight, a woman walking a dog. February in London, everything so sad, so defeated. It was, of course, anxiety cloaking itself as melancholy. Some people get hungry when they’re frightened; I get sad, which I knew, but it didn’t help. Not a bit.

I heard a voice behind me, the up-and-down musicality of a Liverpool accent. “I didn’t realize it was television. Give me a sec to brush my hair.” A slim man in a rumpled shirt and worn blue jeans stood in the doorway, smiling pleasantly. His face was older, more deeply lined than I’d expected. He extended his hand to the barrel-chested cameraman who was staring at him as if he’d just seen a cobra standing on its tail.

“I’m George Harrison,” he said.

I was thirteen when I first heard “She Loves You” and found it, with its unusual chord progression, G to Bm (folk song chords), something of a disappointment. It
almost
went where you wanted it to—that great start!—but then didn’t. And that anticlimactic guitar riff just before the second verse made me wonder what all the fuss was about.

But a few months later I heard “I Saw Her Standing There.” No song, no piece of music before or since, has ever churned me like that. That busy bass line, a snare drum whack that seemed to hang just a split second behind the beat, and Paul’s inimitable shriek (try it sometime) just before the guitar solo made me want to throw something, swear, scream out the window, as if my young body simply could not contain the sensations it was experiencing. And the count-in, for me the most galvanic count-in in rock music.

Unhappy with the song’s original second line—it was a sugary McCartney flourish comparing the girl to a “beauty queen”—John Lennon smirked and suggested “You know what I mean” instead. I’ve always felt that that exchange was the key to the Beatles’ collaboration, why it worked and why, on their own, they never quite matched their former, alchemical
je ne sais quoi
.

My father, whose interests extended to golf, Scotch and sleeping with my mother’s friends, scolded me in the car one afternoon for wasting my allowance on Beatle magazines. It wasn’t the scolding that stung, it was the waft of contempt that came with it. I examined these glossy publications with a kind of forensic scrutiny. I was looking for something, an explanation that might diffuse the tension in my body. Nearly forty years later I came across a passage in a Chekhov short story, and I understood not what I was looking for in those pictures of four young men in black suits and white shirts but what I was
experiencing
while I was looking at them. In the 1888 Chekhov story “The Beauties,” a teenage boy catches sight of a peasant girl as she flits about inside a hut in the Russian countryside. Chekhov writes:

Whether it was envy of her beauty, or that I was regretting that the girl was not mine, and never would be, or that I was a stranger to her . . . or whether, perhaps, my sadness was that peculiar feeling which is excited by the contemplation of real beauty, God only knows.

Sadness, it has since occurred to me, is an inexplicable response to great art. I felt it when I flipped through those Beatle magazines the same way I would feel it later when I came across a description of a party in Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
:

There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

It is, this sadness, a reaction to something that you can never possess, that always moves away from you no matter how fast or how hard you try to grab it.

Because of Ringo Starr, because of the way he
looked
behind a pearl grey set of Ludwig drums, because of the almost unendurable happiness that I imagined he was feeling, I chose to be a drummer. When my parents left the house for the evening, I hurried to my mother’s bedroom on the second floor and put “It Won’t Be Long” on her stereo. Tap, tap, tap went my little knife blades, dancing along the top of her glass dressing table. Sometimes my brother, Dean, stuck his head in the door; he wasn’t yet so furious at life, but rather remote and admirable, and I adored his approval. He’d look in, watch for a moment and then, quietly closing the door, return to the baseball game on his maroon bedroom radio.

The snow melted outside my window; ice fell from the eavestroughs and the Beatles released “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Was there ever so irresistible a sight as the three of them stepping forward to the microphones to harmonize.

I played with real drumsticks now; on school books, on walls, on my thighs. I played after school, after dinner. I practised all the time. But I could never manage the drum roll that comes at the end of the song’s titular line in “I Want to Hold your Hand.” Was it a hand-over-hand thing or was it a succession of single, staccato beats on descending drums? Snare, tom-tom, floor tom. I must have listened to it two hundred times, picking up the needle, dropping it back down, picking it up, dropping it down, picking it up, dropping it down. (“Jesus H. Christ!” my mother shrieked down the stairs.)

But I couldn’t figure it out. Ever. In fact only the other day I saw a black-and-white tape of Ringo doing it on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. The camera went in for a close-up. I replayed it. Then replayed it again, until a kind of sickening sensation spread through my body.

I must have already been thwarted by other things in life—skating to the left, drawing a tree, juggling, tuning a guitar, slide rules, patching a bicycle tire—but this impasse was a pinching lesson on the exigencies of talent. Which is to say, in the parlance of my ex-wife, M., “Sometimes you’re fucked just by who you are.”

I wonder, though, if the unlucky drummer, Pete Best, could do it. If I ever met him, I’d have a million questions, but that would certainly be one. Can
you
do the drum roll in “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? I bet not. I bet if he could—

It was a shameful episode and I have, sadly, always associated it with the only time I saw the Beatles perform live. I was fourteen years old, and I was bewitched by a girl from, in my mother’s dreadful parlance, “the wrong side of the tracks.” Her name was Shauna. (“Only girls who have sex in automobiles are called Shauna,” my mother said.) Short, with teased hair and a sleeveless, fuzzy sweater, Shauna turned up at a Sunday morning church group; all the pretty girls in Forest Hill went there; but no one knew Shauna. She just appeared out of nowhere, this creature in a cloud of erotic pollen.

“What’s a girl like that even
doing
in this neighbourhood?” my mother asked. By which she meant that girls like Shauna invariably got themselves knocked up and then asked for a whole lot of money to go away. My mother, a curious mixture of authentic left-wing liberalism and cruel snobbery.

I ignored her admonitions, of course. And who wouldn’t? I came home late at night that fall with leaves all over my sweater and my eyes so bright they could peel the paint off walls.

Summer came; boys took off their ties and wrote exams in a holy silence; and then we left the city for our white house in the country. Like a Chinese water torture, my mother’s acidic disapproval chewed through my affection for Shauna until, in a moment of disgraceful compliance, I allowed her to dictate an ending-things letter which I left that same afternoon for the mailman in the box at the top of our lane. I did this in exchange for permission to go to Toronto to see the Beatles at Maple Leaf Gardens. Frozen with embarrassment and shame—a month had since lapsed—I sat next to Shauna in a crowd of twenty thousand hysterical teenagers. Even the man who unpacked Ringo’s snare drum got a scream that day. Staring straight ahead, I could feel Shauna looking at me. I could feel her waiting. Then she said, “You could at least
look
at me.” But there was a tone to her voice which I hadn’t expected, a kind of breezy disdain that said, “Don’t think you’re so important, bub.”

I know the Beatles played “Long Tall Sally” that day; I know Shauna asked me if she could borrow my binoculars, I know that when John Lennon clowned around onstage— he was pretending to be Frankenstein—the crowd blew the ceiling off the Gardens. I remember all that only fuzzily. But those words, or rather the
way
she said them, retain a peculiar freshness, like an audible report card of someone who has caught you at your most unattractive.

Five years go by. I’m in Paris with Justin Strawbridge. It’s my first time in Europe and I’m experiencing the unhappy fragility of waking up after dark in a foreign country with nothing having turned out the way you had hoped it would. It was five o’clock in the morning, I was in an overlit café drinking a glass of red wine—how awful it tasted, like a glass of blood—when “Don’t Let Me Down” came on the jukebox. By 1969, the Beatles didn’t much like each other, but even in the initial descending chords of that song, the announcement as it were, it’s as if all antagonisms have been momentarily forgotten and the four of them revert to a kind of mother tongue that not even the insistent and toxic presence of Yoko Ono could disrupt. “Don’t Let Me Down” is one of the great Beatles buried treasures, as effortless in its execution as the gait of a loose-limbed country boy.

That early morning in Paris, it seemed to me that I’d never heard the song properly before, that it was, in fact, a miniature symphony with complete, individual movements. Except that I liked it more, it moved me more, than Beethoven or Mozart. It had that thing which all great Beatles songs have, which
all
great art has, a sense of inevitability, that the progression of chords could only go in that order, and only with those lyrics; that if only you’d been given the first few bars you could have written it yourself.

And it occurred to me also (Justin talking to a prostitute in the doorway) that I was going to lose Raissa Shestatsky to another man, that I was losing her even while I was standing here. And those lyrics: Lennon leaning obscenely close to the microphone to emphasize the dirtiness of the words. That business about getting done by his girlfriend. The notion that I might never see Raissa naked again hit me like a kick in the stomach.

Why, I wondered, had I come to France, to this grey, grey city, when my life was so obviously elsewhere: an apartment on Major Street where I had left a young girl sleeping fitfully? What had I been thinking!

And then came the song’s final notes, that piano, wistful, fading, like a girl waving from a train.

I was in Casablanca in the seventies piddling about and waiting for my life to begin when I met a young Iranian, Arghavan Gholami, one afternoon. We were in a café in the French quarter, everyone uneasily stoned on hashish, Raissa long gone, when he began to talk about growing up listening to the Beatles in a small city on the Caspian Sea.

The Caspian Sea?

It was like talking to a Beatles scholar with an Arab accent (as momentarily displacing as a Chinese woman talking with a Jamaican accent). Did I know, Arghavan asked, that Ringo had played drums on the album version of “Love Me Do” but that a studio musician had sat in for the 45? That George Harrison had played bass on “She Said, She Said” because Lennon and McCartney had had a violent row which concluded with Paul storming out of the studio? That the lyric about butterflies in “It’s Only Love” seemed so corny to Lennon (even though he wrote it himself) that it wrecked the song for him? That Beatles producer George Martin lifted the cello strokes in “Eleanor Rigby” from the soundtrack to Hitchcock’s
Psycho
? (Another surprise.)

“If you want to know how Ringo got the job,” Arghavan said, “listen to the drumming on ‘Anna.’ It’s like a set of drums falling down the stairs.”

Until that day, I’d always assumed the Beatles were my possession, that other people liked them, sure, but I had a special rapport with them. But listening to this young Iranian, I began to suspect maybe that wasn’t the case. And the idea that it might
not
be gave me a confusing sense of comfort, that I was not, therefore, alone with this peculiar sensation of longing or sadness or incompleteness that I experienced whenever I heard their music or saw them in photographs.

All this ran through my head as I waited for the cameraman to stop fiddling and tinkering with the lighting, George Harrison already seated opposite me, patient, waiting to begin. For reasons too inane to elaborate on, I had decided to conduct the interview with no notes—I must have wanted Mr. Harrison to be impressed.