BEATLES MYTHS A SEA OF HOLES
Beyond being mere characters floating in a Yellow Submarine, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr produced some of the most enduring music of all time and rose to near-universal adoration. But The Beatles’ evolution from a Liverpoo
MYTH NO. 1: The Beatles objected to trading leather outfits for suits and ties.
“In the beginning,” John Lennon told Melody Maker, the British music magazine, in 1970, Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager “... put us in neat suits and shirts, and Paul was right behind him. I didn’t dig that, and I used totrytogetGeorgetorebelwith me.” Lennon later complained to Rolling Stone that by giving up leather for suits, “we sold out.” Soon, the story of The Beatles chafing against Epstein’s directives was part of the lore.
The other Beatles — and sometimes Lennon himself — recalled things differently. “It was later put around that I betrayed our leather image,” Paul McCartney says in The Beatles Anthology, “but, as I recall, I didn’t actually have to drag anyone to the tailors.” George Harrison said that “with black T-shirts, black leather gear and sweaty, we did look like hooligans. … We gladly switched into suits to get some more money and some more gigs.” Lennon put it this way to Hit Parader in 1975: “Outside of Liverpool, when we went down south in our leather outfits, the dance hall promoters didn’t really like us. … We liked the leather and the jeans but we wanted a good suit, even to wear offstage.” To which he added, “I’ll wear a … balloon if somebody’s going to pay me.”
MYTH NO. 2: Ringo Starr was not a good drummer.
Perhaps because he joined The Beatles just before they rocketed to stardom and was never a showy virtuoso like Cream’s Ginger Baker or Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, Starr has often been portrayed as a so-so drummer who became “a living symbol of good luck,” as Craig Brown called him in a 2005 column in The Telegraph. Discussions of Starr’s drumming often include a quotation attributed to Lennon, who supposedly said: “Ringo was not the best drummer in the world. He wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles.”
Mark Lewisohn, author of Tune In, discovered this quote originated not with Lennon but in a 1983 TV appearance by the British comedian Jasper Carrott. What Lennon did say, in one of his final interviews, was that “Ringo is a damn good drummer,” and he noted Starr had already been a professional, playing in one of Liverpool’s best bands, when The Beatles were taking their musical baby steps. McCartney told Rolling Stone in 2016 that Starr “has a feel that nobody else has.”
MYTH NO. 3: George Martin recognized their talent right away.
Martin’s perspicacity in signing the band, after the rest of London’s record producers turned them down, is a pillar of Beatles legend, based on Martin’s and Epstein’s telling: When Epstein turned up at his office with recordings of the group, Martin writes in Playback, his 2002 memoir, he was not initially impressed but heard “something different about them, an unusual sound that intrigued me.” Epstein, in his autobiography, A Cellarful of Noise, quoted Martin as saying, “I know very little about groups, Brian, but I believe you have something very good here.”
But Kim Bennett, a song-plugger for EMI’s in-house publisher, said Martin had turned Epstein down, according to Lewisohn’s research. Epstein had also played his recordings for Sid Colman, Bennett’s boss. Colman wanted to publish some of the LennonMcCartney songs, but without a record on the market, it would be difficult to sell the sheet music. So Colman tried to sway EMI’s producers to record the group, with no more success than Epstein. Eventually he persuaded Len Wood, EMI’s managing director, to take them on. Wood was upset with Martin — thanks to a difficult contract negotiation and the discovery that Martin was having a romance with his own secretary, Judy (who later became the producer’s second wife). Wood assigned The Beatles to Martin’s Parlophone label as comeuppance.
MYTH NO. 4: Yoko Ono broke up The Beatles.
“Yoko Ono knows what you’re probably thinking,” a report on Ono’s 2014 art exhibition in Florida began. “She knows people still blame her for breaking up The Beatles.” Last year, when the National Music Publishers Association gave Ono a co-composer’s credit for Imagine — in keeping with Lennon’s claims that the idea for the song was hers — news reports around the country referred to this persistent belief. One commenter on a report in Variety went so far as to suggest McCartney and Starr collaborate on a new song, to be called Imagine John Hadn’t Married a Tone-Deaf Person Who Broke Up the Group.
Lennon’s inseparability from Ono during The Beatles’ final 16 months — particularly his insistence on bringing her to every recording session (and when she was ill, a bed was brought in) — unquestionably contributed to the tensions in the already fractious group. But given everything else that had been going on — Harrison’s growing resentment about his songs being ignored, fights about how (and whether) to stage a live concert for the finale of the Let It Be film and, most of all, business squabbles — the breakup cannot be pinned on her. “She certainly didn’t break the group up,” McCartney said in an interview with David Frost in 2012, later adding in a 2016 interview on BBC radio that “the business thing split us apart.”
MYTH NO. 5: Abbey Road was named for The Beatles’ recording studio.
“We take it as a great compliment that The Beatles should choose to name what turned out to be their last album after our studio,” Ken Townsend, former general manager of EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, says in Abbey Road: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Recording Studios, by Brain Southall, Peter Vince and Allan Rouse. Alistair Lawrence made a similar assertion in Abbey Road: The Best Studio in the World.
Originally, the LP was to have been called Everest, engineer Geoff Emerick has said, in honour of the brand of cigarettes he smoked. John Kurlander, another engineer who worked on the album, said “The Beatles knew this album was going to be their swan song, and by calling it Everest, they were telling the world that they were going out at their peak.” The band had agreed to fly to Mount Everest to take the cover photo, but as the album neared completion, they decided the trip was not worth the trouble.
As Emerick recalled, Starr suggested the group just go outside EMI Recording Studios for the cover shoot. McCartney quickly made a sketch of how the cover might look, and photographer Iain Macmillan was commissioned to shoot it, which he did on Aug. 8, 1969, as the Beatles filed across the Abbey Road crosswalk. EMI changed the studio name to Abbey Road in 1970, to capitalize on the interest created by the album.