The Music and Magic of John and Paul (with Ian Leslie)

At the heart of the success of the Beatles was the creative chemistry and volatile friendship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Listen as author Ian Leslie discusses his book, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. It's a deep dive into music and friendship as well as a revisionist history about how John and Paul created musical magic.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is March 11, 2025. My guest is author Ian Leslie. His sub stack is The Ruffian.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  This is Ian's fourth appearance on Econ Talk. He was last here in January of 2023, talking about being human in the age of AI. His latest book, and the subject of today's conversation, is John and Paul, A Love Story and Songs. Ian, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Hi, Russ. It is great to be back.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Now, this is an extraordinary book. I want listeners and you, Ian, to know a little bit about what I bring when I read this book, what I brought to the book. I have to say, I don't read books like this. I'm not a fan of the Beatles, of John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the usual sense of the word, a fan. I've never read a book on the Beatles. I never expected to. And I invited you to Econ Talk because you wrote an extraordinary essay, which we will link to, 64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney. After all these years, he's still underrated. It's an incredible essay. It's 10,000 words. That's about 40 pages. I gobbled it up. And because of that essay, you got a contract to write this book, John

• 1:47Speaker 00

  and Paul, and because of that essay, I wanted to interview you about John and Paul. So I started to read the book to prepare for our conversation, and I couldn't put it down. I'm not going to praise it any more explicitly. I'm just telling listeners, if you like the Beatles or music, or you're interested in friendship, or the cost of fame, or popular culture... Read this book. My wife is sick of hearing me tell people that they have to read it. So that's the end of my ad, which is rare. I don't generally like books as much as this. So I'm done with the praise. Congratulations.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  That's amazing to hear. I love to hear it. Thank you so much. It means a lot.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  So let's get started. This is not the first book on the Beatles. I suspect there've been, I said I've never read one, but I think there've probably been a few. So talk about your own relationship to the band and their music, how you did the research behind the book. The narrative you produced is relentlessly paced. I couldn't put it down, as I said, and it's told very beautifully. How did you stay on track with that narrative, given the incredible amount of material there is to review, read, listen, watch, and decide on what you're going to keep and reject?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Ooh, yes. Well, these are big questions. I think your first question was my relationship to the band. Yeah, I mean, I have been a Beatles fan for most of my life. I think I got into them when I was seven or eight. You know, my parents had, I was a sort of Gen X Beatles fan. My parents had Beatles LPs lying around the house, like most households in Britain at the time, and probably America too. And so I've always loved them. And then in the, I think really in the 1980s, I started reading about them too, and became absolutely fascinated by the story as well as the music. And although I've always been into them and

• 3:51Speaker 01

  always fascinated by them, I never thought I would write a book about them until I wrote that essay on my Substack about McCartney, and it went sort of unexpectedly viral. You know, I honestly didn't think anyone was going to read, not many people were going to read a 10,000-word essay about why Paul McCartney is good at music. But apparently they did. And there was a very kind of emotional response to it, a very big response in every way. And that made me think, oh, gosh, well, maybe I could do a book about this group that I've loved since I was very young. And the thing that I immediately knew I wanted to do, I didn't want to just write a book or the blog post. And I knew pretty much, in fact, I think I knew while I was writing it that if I ever

• 4:36Speaker 01

  do a book, it'll be about John and Paul. I left out quite a lot of stuff about the relationship out of that essay, otherwise it would have been even more ridiculously long. So I, yeah, so I had this idea, I'm fascinated by their relationship, by the chemistry between these two intense, brilliant, incredibly gifted young men. It's so complex and so interesting. And it struck me that nobody has written a book about it, which is sort of extraordinary when you think about it. There's well over a thousand books about The Beatles. There are group biographies, there are biographies of each individual

• 5:18Speaker 01

  member, and there are lots of different ways to slice the story. You know, there were books about Hamburg, there were books about the drugs that they took, and so on and so forth. But nobody's just said, look, you know, the nucleus of this band and this creative explosion is the chemistry between these two men. So what's going on there? I hadn't really seen the relationship analyzed with any really real depth or emotional intelligence at length. And so it was kind of a big, wide open goal. It happened to coincide with something that I'm, you know, inexhaustibly interested in. And then your question, you know, how

• 6:03Speaker 01

  did I focus the narrative? Well, I pretty much immediately realized that if I was going to tell this story, I had to tell it through the music and through the songs, right? It's called, the subtitle is A Love Story in Songs. And each, we tell the story chronologically from when they meet in 1957 to when John dies in 1980. So we tell the story of The Beatles and beyond. And we do it through the songs. So each chapter starts with, it's sort of anchored in a song that was meaningful to both of them.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  And the reason that was essential is that you can't really understand John and Paul without understanding the music, because they thought and they felt and they communicated and expressed themselves through music, you know. And equally, you can't understand the music without understanding of the relationship. So much that is vital and innovative and radical and moving about the music is rooted in the relationship between these two guys.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  And, you know, when you start the book and you see that the songs, that each chapter has a title that's a song, you sort of assume incorrectly that, oh, this will be the most famous, you'll be analyzing the most famous songs that the Beatles wrote or the best songs in your view. And what's beautiful about the book is that many of the songs you use are fairly obscure. Not all of them, of course, many of them are famous, but they're not the most famous. And the reason is that the interaction between these two people, that given how many songs they wrote together, allows you to understand what's going on in their friendship and in their relationship. So I thought that was, it's really quite extraordinary.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and if you think about the, just the songwriting relationship, they get together and they start writing songs when they're teenagers. This was not a common thing to do at the time. The Beatles, biographer and scholar, probably the foremost sort of scholar of the Beatles, if you like, Mark Lewison, has said that, according to his research, very few other teenagers were doing this anywhere in Britain. Even if they were into rock and roll in the 1950s, actually writing your songs, there was just not a done thing, there wasn't something that people... But somehow, these guys decided that's what they wanted to do.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  And if you, and you can see how the emotional lives of these two then becomes intertwined with their creativity. Because, you know, showing other people your ideas is a very kind of exposing thing to do, right? No matter what field you work in, say, here's this thing, here's this poem I've written, or here's this tune that I've written. And of course, pop songs are full of emotion, right? They're full of yearning and desire and jealousy and all sorts of things. And so they're kind of communicating on an emotional level, face to face, over guitars, from the teenage years, from this emotionally formative stage onwards.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  And they form this really incredibly strong bond, which is then enhanced and strengthened and transformed in all sorts of ways by the fact that they both suffer bereavements. They both lose their mother during these years, which brings them even closer together. They don't necessarily talk about it very much, but they absolutely know the other guy understands something of the pain that they've been going through. And it also reinforces their sense of themselves as special. It's different from their peers, right? They're just not like the other people around them.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  And I think the third thing it does for them gives them this tremendous sense of agency, of determination to make the most of the time that they have available to them, and a conviction that the world that we're living in could just change at any minute. And we can create the world as well as just passively experience it.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  There's a standard view of the Beatles and of John and Paul's relative talent and importance to the band. The standard view is basically that Lennon was the more creative one, the more talented one, the real force behind the band. Talk about how that came to be the standard story in the aftermath, especially of the breakup, and then in the aftermath of John's murder. And why it's wrong, what's missing there, because this book really is a revisionist history of the most important band of the 20th century and talk about what you were trying to achieve there without, with using fewer than 10,000 words, if that's okay.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think you characterize the book very well there. And it's not revisionist for the sake of it. I just think that we have kind of got it wrong. Because we had this theory, which is formed really, as you say, in the wake of the breakup, when, by a generation of music critics, kind of the Rolling Stone generation, who really revered John Lennon. And Lennon really conformed to their idea of what a genius is, you know, difficult, conflicted, terrible in some ways, you know, messed up. And Lennon was also

• 11:54Speaker 01

  this incredibly brilliant, compelling spokesperson for himself, right? Loads of interviews around this time. And he was just rude about everyone. And he was no less than incredibly compelling. So he kind of spins this narrative and they buy it. And the narrative is essentially, I was the creative genius and motivating force behind this band. I had a fairly talented sidekick in Paul McCartney. I respect him as a songwriter, but Paul was always trying to, you know, he was the commercial one. He was the one with the pretty tunes and the pretty face. But I was the true artist. And I had to break free of the Beatles in

• 12:36Speaker 01

  order to really express my inner kind of artistic urges. Now, this is just all wrong. I mean, it's not all wrong. I mean, he was, you know, Lennon really was a genius and, but was at least one half of the creative. But McCartney was a genius too. He was just as innovative, in some ways more so. He was always pushing at the boundaries of what was possible, musically speaking. And he was also kind of the engine of the band, particularly towards the latter years, he was the one kind of like driving it forward. But this narrative got set because Lennon fitted that idea and because McCartney didn't fit the idea of what a genius should be like.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  McCartney liked being a family man. He liked being a dad, you know, around this time. And after the breakup, he was having photos of himself taken with his baby and with the children, with Linda, living on a farm. That's not what a countercultural, you know, drug-taking genius is supposed to do. This guy's just, you know, shallow and superficial. Now, I think our ideas about masculinity and genius have changed a lot over the last, whatever it's 40, 50 years. But the story of the Beatles is only just catching up with it. And so I think it's time for a new story.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  So the other way to think about it, I think, is that, you know, Lennon was the iconoclast. Paul was the conformist. He was square.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Lennon was hip. He had vetted hip, actually. He was hip before there was hip alongside the other extraordinary performers of the 60s, you know, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and so on. And McCartney doesn't fit that image visually. He does have a, he has a cute baby face. He does like some bourgeois things. But here's the thing that blew me away, one of the things, or a lot of things blew me away about this, the story and the book. So I have to tell you, I'm born in 1954. So in 1964, the Beatles are on Ed Sullivan. I'm 10 years old. So I remember them pretty well.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Their first album is 1963, Please Please Me. Their last time in a recording studio together, correct me if I'm wrong, is 1969 with Abbey Road. Or at least Abbey Road is released in 1969. Let It Be comes out after that, but they'd recorded that before. That was sort of a leftovers thing. So this is stunning. There's two things that just blew me away. The entire time of the Beatles as public phenomenon is six-plus years, seven-ish, maybe eight, if you count all the way through Let It Be. But their time together in the recording studio is, it's roughly six and a half, seven years, correct?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  So during that time, they released 13 studio albums, good a double album, the White Album. They've lived together, they've had things happen to them that's never happened to human beings before, in terms of their celebrity, popularity and so on. They stopped touring in 1966. So for the last four plus years of the band, they're only in studio. They have lived 10 lifetimes of music, in terms of how their music changed, sex, drugs, fame, in seven years. Paul McCartney, I just, I didn't realize this, Paul McCartney, when Abbey Road comes

• 16:21Speaker 00

  out, is 27 years old. He's a kid. I mean, relatively, from his, he becomes famous when he's 20, and for seven years, he, and one who's a little bit older, go through this unbelievable journey. How did they, how did they survive that? How did they go on? You know, people, there's a lot of gossip and conspiracy theories about Yoko Ono and breaking up the Beatles. I can't conceive of how they stayed together through this journey for as long as they did, and how short it was, and what they accomplished is mind blowing.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  I'm so glad you, you said all that, you said it brilliantly, and because part of the aim of the book is to just re-capture our sense of astonishment about the Beatles, you know? Because they've been part of the cultural furniture for so long now, we just think, yeah, that's, that's the Beatles, that's what, they're just sort of, it's like water for fish, you know, they're just part of, they just surround us, they're part of the atmosphere. And I just wanted to kind of, in the book, kind of take a step back at several points and go, what the hell happened here? There is nothing like this, I could, you know, in the history of pop and rock, there's nothing like this in the history of culture. It's, it's an incredible story. You're absolutely right, you know, it's seven years of recording music, and seven

• 17:50Speaker 01

  years of fame, and, and then they're out. And they're out at the kind of peak of their powers, by the way, right? So they're making some of the best music they ever made. They're selling more records than than ever. I can't think of any other examples of bands that do that. And then it's like, right, you know. So, you know, there's so much that is extraordinary about it. And I think your question is the right one. Sometimes the question of their breakup is approached from the angle of, you know, so why did they split up? You know, they could have gone along. And actually, the question should be asked the other way around. How did they stay together for so long? And the question is particularly pertinent because these guys were all very willful

• 18:34Speaker 01

  and volatile people. And the chemistry between Lennon and McCartney was very close, but very volatile. And was always, it was an unstable kind of compound, right? So they're always kind of jiggling against each other. And I kind of tried to show that from before the pre-fame days. You can see them kind of coming apart at various times and then coming back together. But Lennon, of course, you know, in particular is very, he's unstable himself as an individual. Psychologically unstable. You start to understand why when you look at what happened during his childhood.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  This kind of incredibly, incredibly tough, confusing, baffling childhood that he had. And then when he's an older guy, you know, as an adult, he gets into drugs and starts taking too much LSD. He was violent, you know, he could get very drunk and be violent. He was a real. A mess. He was a mess. He was a mess in some ways. And yet somehow, the group, and particularly Paul, I think, you know, keep him in the fold, keep him, you know, keep just about channeling his immense talent into the group. But finally, you know, as they get into just the second half of their twenties, as you

• 19:56Speaker 01

  say, they're still young, the strains that are put on them by all the legal and the business things, that. Relationship finally starts to kind of stress and crack and and and and break up. But yeah, um, that that that the closeness of the relationship um is is is kind of what keeps them together. But but at some point, because it was so close, it had to explode in quite a spectacular way. This was never going to be a kind of um an amicable partner parting where they go, so yeah, you go your way. I'll go mine handshake, you know, great friends and all that. I'm sorry, that was never going to happen. This was way too intense.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  You know, and as music fans, we all for the groups we love, we all want them to stay together and keep producing music. We wish we could go see him at Six Flags. Yes, one of them would be gone, but we'd find their substitute. And we'd hear the old songs over and over. They never went through that phase. They never. And and certainly when they went solo, they rarely performed. They never leaned on their fame. Their desire for innovation is, I think, unparalleled. They reinvent themselves in that seven years numerous times musically. And that that is, well, let me say it this way, and I'll let you react. In 1964, when they're on the Ed Sullivan Show, I remember watching it with my parents.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  And my dad very confidently said, they'll never last. And it's hard to remember how intense the passion for this foursome spiked around the world. It was, we had some of it with with Frank Sinatra. We had some of it with Elvis Presley. This was different. Um, women screaming through an entire concert convulsed with intense longing. I don't even know how to describe it. You can watch, you know, there's video all over of it.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  And my dad said, oh, this is just some goofy goofy thing. My dad was half right in the following way. If that had been the end, if the Beatles had been a group that honed the kind of music they were producing then, I Want to Hold Your Hand, I Saw Her Standing There, they're very catchy songs, they're great pop songs. They'd be like, I think people would look back on them and say, yeah, they were influenced by the Everly Brothers, they were kind of like them, but a little bit better. But what made them so extraordinary, and the reason my dad's prediction is ludicrous, is that they didn't stand and stay there. For people who took as many drugs as they did, their productivity and devotion to their craft is just hard to believe, hard to understand.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  The creative dynamism and the reinvention, the constant reinvention, which must have been exhausting, and you chronicle the toll it took on them as friends and as human beings. It was just extraordinary.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and when you think about it, you know, they effectively had to invent the idea of reinvention, if you see what I mean. There's a point in my book where I say it was a lot harder for the Beatles at every stage of their career to do what they did because they didn't have the Beatles example to follow, right? So every other band, every other artist that comes after them, they're working in the wake of the Beatles, and they go, okay, yeah, well, this is how to think about it, you know, and you might think, well, I'm an artist, I want to do things my way, I have integrity, I don't want to repeat myself, all that kind of stuff, which we take for granted as the standard kind of problem of musical artists. The Beatles had to kind of invent that for themselves.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  It was them that determined they were going to take themselves seriously as musicians and as artists who wanted to do something new every time. And, yeah, the productivity is just incredible. Partly that was, obviously, just these incredible commercial constraints, or that's not the word, but imperatives that they had to follow in the early years. But it actually becomes apparent towards the end of the 60s, they're just going into the studio and recording because they love to do it and they want to do it. And actually, they, in the last year, 1969, when they are effectively splitting up, they actually record more songs than ever. Incredible number of songs they record, they recorded two albums in 1969.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  And the more kind of stressed or more kind of emotionally stressed they got, the more music they made, right? Because they put everything, they processed everything through the music. So, yeah, I think you're right. That just that sense of we've got to move on is maybe their kind of greatest legacy. Apart from the songs and the music itself, this is that sense of how to be a popular artist.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  When you go back and look at those old video clips of them performing either on The Ed Sullivan Show or Chase Stadium, the other thing that's crazy is they stopped touring, which is giving concerts in, I think, 1966, which is also unheard of. The idea that they would just become a studio band is crazy. But when you go back and watch those early performances, it's a little hard to understand this, the hysteria. Again, part of it's because we've already lived through it as part of our wallpaper. But if you say, what was so different about the Beatles in 1963 and 64, you say, well,

• 25:31Speaker 00

  they had good harmony, they had good hair, they had a certain rebelliousness that appealed to the zeitgeist of the time. They wrote very nice pop songs. The lyrics are very mundane. They're not magical in those early years in any way. What struck me going back and listening, and what's wonderful about your book is you do rediscover their music. And it's been playing in my head all week. It's been interesting. Literally, over and over again, different songs. There's something about the sound of their voices together, what you call the grain. It's part of what makes Simon and Garfunkel special, obviously,

• 26:13Speaker 00

  and many other, the Beach Boys had, every harmonizing group has a particular sound. There's something, I think, about especially Paul and John singing together that is magical. Do you agree?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And, you know, we're talking about being re astonished by them again. Just think about it like, okay, we recognize the fact that these two guys are amazing songwriters and they come together and make each other better. But that that is that's an independent fact from the fact that they're both amazing singers. But that those two things needn't have gone together, right? Bob Dylan's proof of that. Well, I like Bob Dylan singing, but no one would say he has a great voice in the standard dimension. And they both turn out to be incredible singers. Just individually, you put them

• 27:12Speaker 01

  both in the kind of top 20, you know, greatest rock rock singers, I think. And and not only that, their voices blend, the ranges kind of overlap and then exceed each other in just the right way. And they're similar to each other, but but different at the same time. So yeah, that the sound of their voices is really and the sound of their harmonies is so central, is maybe the kind of central thread of the Beatles' sound. And that is the, you know, a through line from the early days right to the end. I would just say about the early songs, I have a slightly different view on those early songs. I think they are

• 27:56Speaker 01

  more innovative and stranger than we can recognize now. The chords they were using, in fact, talking to Dylan, Dylan recognized that earlier on, he said something about, you know, the chords are outrageous, but the harmonizing makes it all make sense. You know, he saw that quite quite early on. He's like, these are actually musically very adventurous. She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, they're actually musically very kind of innovative and sophisticated songs, but they're they're so kind of condensed into these incredible little bombs, sort of nail bombs full of hooks, that we don't recognize it. And then the other thing about those early songs, what made them sound different, what part of what generated this incredible response from

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Teenagers is that they are soulful, they are emotional, they're not just going through the motions and writing a pretty pop song. You know, they disdain that kind of Cliff Richard's in the shadows thing of, you know, you have a neat little pop song, you do a nice little dance routine, you go on TV, oh, isn't that nice? And they wanted to get back to what they saw as the kind of spirit of early rock and roll, which is Little Richard and Elvis Presley, which is kind of grabbing you by the shoulders and say, listen to this. You can hear it particularly in both of their singing, but Lennon's voice in particular, just that kind of raw emotion and lust and desire that you can hear in his voice. And actually, the lyrics are not all kind of simple and nice. You know, look at Please Please Me, like I please you.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  It's kind of sexual and it's also like jealousy and anger and there's all sorts of like quite intense emotions in there. And I think teenagers, who are obviously like cauldrons of emotion, got that better than the adults at the time.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  And that's very well said. And I think you could also, in a way, maybe, as you point out, first of all, they're writing their own songs. You know, Elvis Presley's not writing his own songs. Frank Sinatra's not writing his songs. Frank Sinatra, the other, you know, those are the three biggest phenomena of the 20th century, I would say, in terms of musical obsession. Frank Sinatra made it sound like he was singing a song he had written, but he hadn't, right? He came across as if he was pouring out your heart to you, which is why he was so effective. But in a way, and tell me if I'm wrong, and you may have written it, they're writing their

• 30:22Speaker 00

  own songs, as you said, that was unusual, but they're singing them in a way which is not performative, but in the standard sense of like, here's a perfect composition, I'm going to share it with you, you can listen, but rather, listen to my heart. And I think, obviously, that's the essence of rock and roll, but it has an immediacy, as you point out, that was deeply effective to teenagers, but I also would say is very appropriate for the time. I think that with the 60s, the thirst for authenticity, the rebellion against authority, it was kind of a perfect match.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  In a way, that's their kind of great hidden innovation, hidden in plain sight, which is the vertical integration of songwriting and performance, of songwriting and singing. You know, as far as they were concerned, and so far as they had models, and part of the theme, one of the themes of the book is they always had to invent their own models because they didn't have them. They were thinking about Rodgers and Hammerstein, maybe Lieber and Stoller, right, when they start writing songs. Nobody wanted to see Rodgers and Hammerstein perform their own songs. Nobody knows what Lieber and Stoller sound

• 31:38Speaker 01

  like when they sing. So this is a new thing where, not completely new, but they saw something that wasn't conventional or standard. And so like, we can actually write our own songs and sing them, and we'll sing them better because we're putting our emotions into it and that'll be evident, right? So they intuitively landed on this idea of the pop song as not just a catchy tune, but a vehicle for the transmission of emotions. And in fact, they make that explicit early in the mid 60s, there's some interviews with them where they say, people don't understand what pop music is. For us, it's about communicating an emotion, a feeling. That's what we tried to capture first, and then we build everything around

• 32:21Speaker 01

  that. And that was a real, you know, that was a massive kind of innovation in the way that they saw pop music.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  And we're not going to go into the details of the friendship, how it's revealed in the music. You have to read the book to really appreciate it, and it's magnificent. And I'm just going to say, in passing, I cried a couple of times reading this book because the emotion that is released and unleashed in their friendship, that's expressed through their music, and it's imperfection, the imperfection of their friendship and the challenges of ego and money that over that seven-year period become ultimately insurmountable is... And that end, you know, shortly thereafter in in human years with the death of John is is a truly heartbreaking story. So we're not gonna talk about it. You can say something

• 33:12Speaker 00

  about it for a minute, but I want to move on to a different thing. So but say something about that if you'd like.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I would just say, it sounds a bit odd to say I'm glad you cried, but I am glad that you had a emotional response to it because that was an absolutely big part of the aim of the book is is to show people what a moving and emotional story this is. And that's one of the things I think that previous Beatles books and scholarship had not really got to.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  And in the course of reading the book, I remembered a 1963 pop song my dad loved that is a counterpoint to the examples we're talking about. It was called Sailor Blue. And it went, this was the refrain was, blue sailor, blue, I'm as blue as I can be, because my sailor boy said, ship ahoy, and join the navy. So that's the end of that's that era that I want to hold your hand is in. And I want to hold your hand has a urgency and power to it that is new.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's and it's so radically different from that kind of soul that you just sang, that dominated the charts, along with lots of sort of novelty acts, right? And actually did way into the 60s, you know, quite a long time before other groups and other artists caught up with with what the Beatles were doing. They were making this direct bid to the heart and to the body in a way that was just sort of knocked you off your feet and was much more powerful than than most of what was going on, with the exception of, I would say, Motown and some of the black acts in America that they were deeply influenced by. But but other than that, it just sounded incredibly different

• 35:08Speaker 01

  coming out of the radio.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  We recently had Dana Joy on the program talking about opera and songwriting. And in most of music history, a lyricist collaborates with a composer. There's a handful of successful people who can do both. They're very rare in history of certainly of opera and musicals. And in most of successful, what are called American standards, it's Lieber and Stoller, it's Rodgers and Hart, it's the Gershwin Brothers. Paul and John wrote lyrics and music together, which is, I think, extremely unusual. I think you note that. Is there any parallel to that? I guess many bands write music together, but they usually credit Robbie Robertson when the band would produce a great song or leave on a helm.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  All of Lennon McCartney, almost all, all, or Lennon McCartney. And they collaborated in an extraordinary way that we have video of and writing about. Talk about that collaboration. The process.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, well, there's a couple of things to say here. One is that they, as you say, they both wrote words and they both wrote music. Now, doesn't mean that all songs were equally written and, you know, some of their songs, particularly as their career goes on, are independently conceived and maybe mostly written by one or the other, although actually the collaboration goes on pretty much until the end, even if it's in subtler ways than it was happening at the beginning. But the point is that, as you say, there was not this division of labor that was the form.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Again, there was no model for this. And it took them a while. And Brian Epstein says at some point, you know, I keep having to say, no, they both do both, actually, because he kept being asked, who does the words? Who does the music?

• 37:03Speaker 00

  He's the manager.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  They both do both. Sorry, yeah, Epstein, their manager. And so, yeah, it was very unusual at the time, and actually is still unusual. As you say, I actually can't think of any, I'm sure there are some, but like, you know, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, mainly Jagger writes the words, mainly Richards writes the music, sometimes one or the other will dive in and do the other, but there's a fairly kind of clear division of labour there. And there just wasn't with Lennon and McCartney, and they're both incredibly good at lyrics as well, certainly when they wanted to be. You know, McCartney could write Eleanor Rigby and John could write I'm the Walrus.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's just another way in which they were even more unusual than we necessarily recognise.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Talk about George Martin that many people listening will not have heard of. I don't know if you're going to agree with me, but when I went back to the songs and re-listened to many of them that I had known but not paid much attention to and listened to the ones that I loved, one thing I was struck by was how, to my ear, they're overproduced. I had a longing for The Beatles' Unplugged, a sparser version, but when you go back and listen to a song like Strawberry Fields or Penny Lane or almost every song on Abbey Road, there's so much going on all the time of different kinds, and there's strings and

• 38:35Speaker 00

  there's an orchestra, then there's noises that aren't musical, and all kinds of stuff. And you call it the wash of sound, I don't know if that's a standard term, but I thought that captured, I wanted a little bit of a more placid, like, from time to time.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't really agree, but, you know, we will have a different opinions. And there is an argument that around the kind of psychedelic era, Sergeant Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, there was little too much going on. I can kind of see around that time, maybe, and they kind of agreed, you know, so that when they do the White Album, which is still has some big productions, but the White Album is more- About the group again, it's more about the four of them playing guitars and drums. And then, and they sort of go back and forth. So Abbey Road is a bit of a fusion between the two. It's kind of group centered, but there were some big productions as well.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  So George, but George Martin is sort of important to the story in so many ways. So Brian Epstein is their manager and he meets them in Liverpool. And he's the one that kind of finally gets them a break in London because it's very hard to get a break in London. Because in London, they were like, well, I barely know where Liverpool is. You know, the idea that there is going to be a pop act coming out of Liverpool is just ridiculous, you know. And what this group, they don't even have a lead singer. It's not John and the Beatles, it's The Beatles. And also, what is this name, The Beatles? It's so weird. You know, so every time Epstein tried to sell them into a record label, they just, he just met with this wall of kind of like,

• 40:14Speaker 01

  what are you talking about? I don't understand what you're, and they write this, I mean, it's just weird. And finally, he meets George Martin, who's running this small label, which is part of a big company, EMI. And George Martin is a comedy producer, mate. He's had some hits with comedy performers. And he's very creative, very innovative. You know, comedy records, you get lots of sound effects and odd things going on. So he was used to kind of using the studio as almost because of another musical instrument. And he's a bit dissatisfied with his job. He doesn't feel like he's getting enough credit from his bosses. And he hears something in this kind of weird bunch of guys from, God knows where, as far as people in London are concerned, you know.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  And he goes, well, maybe I could do something here. And it's his, and he's very musically educated, right? He's got a classical music education.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  And he gets it pretty quickly. He gets that these guys are actually operating on a high musical level, right? Even if they're uneducated, relatively speaking, in musical terms. And it's his kind of generosity of spirit and his imagination and his kind of vision which really opens up the door for them. Because he pretty quickly recognizes, we're not just going to do recordings which are the live performance transferred onto a record, which is basically how most people saw the point of a record, right? We can actually make new kinds of recording, and we can use the studio as an instrument too. And the Beatles were into that, and he kind of got it very quickly in a way that probably

• 41:53Speaker 01

  nobody else would have done. And so it was his kind of, his ability to rate them, to see that these, you know, working class, or at least kind of not educate, not, you know, highly educated kind of London guys, were into something really sophisticated and clever here. And also, his ability to think outside the boundaries of pop music, and his willingness to do something different, it was crucial to their evolution.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Let's talk about the song "Yesterday." I looked it up. You can't really look it up, it's kind of silly, but I found one website that said it's been covered approximately, approximately, I like that, 2,200 times since it was released in 1966. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it's the most covered song of all time. Regardless of what the exact number is, it's really, people really like the song, and it's been recorded by a lot of different people. Paul wrote it initially, and it's a source of jealousy that you recount in the book. But how did Paul come to write it? It's kind of extraordinary.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  He just woke up one morning in his flat in London with this tune running around his head. And he gets out of bed and he's got a piano in his room and starts and kind of plays the melody that he can hear in his head. And it's so lovely and so it feels like a kind of a classic, you know, to him, that he thinks, well, I must, it must be another tune. I must have heard it before. It can't be from me. And so he starts humming it or playing it on the guitar or on piano to pretty much everyone he encounters for

• 43:48Speaker 01

  quite a long time. You know, he plays it to George Martin. Do you recognize this, George? He plays it to John, of course, you know, do you recognize this? Plays it to several other people and goes, do you know this? Because it's in my head and I can't. And everyone said, oh, I have this, you know, maybe it sounds a little bit like this, a little bit like this, but it doesn't really sound like, like anything else. And eventually he comes to accept that, okay, I've written this tune. He's been using the place held the world's scrambled eggs. Oh, my darling, how I love your legs. And he starts taking the song seriously and starts going, okay, well, this song feels like it's about yesterday.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  And, and then painstakingly kind of puts together the, the rest of the song. And it's really kind of important song in so many ways because first of all, it becomes this massive hit in America first, unexpectedly. And, and secondly, because it is performed and written by Paul. There's a string quartet, obviously, which he and George Martin put together. But other than that, none of the other Beatles are involved. And this becomes a source of uneasiness and tension between him and John. Because from John's point of view, well, first of all, this isn't really rock and roll at all, is it? It's something different.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  And secondly, if Paul can do this and just stand in the spotlight and sing a song by himself and it's this massive hit and lots of people are covering it, maybe Paul doesn't need The Beatles, maybe Paul doesn't need me. John was somebody who right from childhood was terrified of being abandoned, it had happened to him, you know, and it really hurt him when he was young. And I think those insecurities started to play into the relationship around this time with Real Force, because it suddenly looked like Paul might be able to step aside from the band and have a solo career. And so the tensions between them really kind of ramp up around this time. They're actually very productive tensions, but but yesterday becomes this kind of real source of tension between them, particularly for John.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  But there's another piece to this, which you write about a lot, and this small little look at one song is, in many ways, encapsulates the challenge of this friendship. I think, at least based on the way you wrote it, you may have said this literally, John recognized that this was the best Beatles song ever written, or at least one of the greatest, and he didn't have much to do with it. And it hurts.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  It hurts and it's it's kind of terrifying. And equally, from Paul's perspective, it's a moment where he realizes the full extent of his talent, you know. So this was John's group originally, Paul joins, right? Now, they quickly become co-equals in the group, but that residual sense of John being the kind of leader of the band remains. And certainly in the early years, he is the most prominent voice. Those early albums, it's his voice you hear the most.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Paul had some huge hits, you know, Can't Buy Me Love, and I Saw Her Standing There, and some of the kind of best songs, but John dominated to some extent those early years. And but and it's really only when kind of sixty four, sixty five, sixty six that Paul's talent, the the full kind of scale of it starts to unfurl. And yesterday, when he realizes what a great song it is and that he wrote it and and that, you know, he actually performed it as well, he starts to think, wow, okay, this is it. And and and really kind of rises up and and and becomes this, you know, a least equal kind of creative force to to Lennon

• 47:55Speaker 01

  from the mid to to late sixties. So, yes, it's a pivotal song in the relationship and it's a pivotal song in the the story of the group's musical development, too.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  And John is older, right? He's two years older?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Is it two years?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, a year, year and a half, I think. Yeah, year and a half, two years.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  So that's irrelevant through most of your life. But when you're when they first meet in nineteen fifty seven, Paul is either fifteen or sixteen and John is seventeen or eighteen. And that's an enormous gulf, right?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So so Paul is the junior partner. As you say, when you're teenagers, these gaps of, you know, year and a half, two years, they matter a lot. Now, Paul, unlike the other members of the Quarrymen, which was the the group that existed before the Beatles, pretty much became John's kind of musical equal quickly because he was obviously so so gifted. But I think it took a long time for that sense of being the younger partner, the junior partner in the relationship, to to fade away. And it took a while for Paul to really expand his musical and emotional range. And partly, he

• 49:05Speaker 01

  was influenced by John. You know, he he got better because a a a big part of that was seeing what John was doing with with songwriting. You know, John was introducing this whole range of emotions, you know, negative emotions, anger, jealousy, reproachfulness. And Paul starts to put those Paul had been pretty much been, you know, either a big kind of joyful explosion of of emotion, or a beautiful romantic side, you know, like things we said today. And from the kind of early to, you know, late, early to middle sixties, he starts to, to put these more complex, difficult emotions into, into his songs.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yesterday, you could say is part of that, but also songs like, you know, I, I, I'm looking through you. And then a bit later, for no one, which, you know, really sad, difficult songs. And I think he's learning from, from John, he's learning from others too, like Dylan, but, but he's, he's learning from, from John.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  It's, it's worth noting, and we don't think, when people think about this, when they think about the Beatles singing, it's a lot of screaming in various parts of their, um, their oeuvre, right? It's, um, they sing very sweetly on many, many songs, but on a lot of songs, they're yelling and then literally emitting screams, not just singing in a screaming style, but screaming.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, this kind of like atavistic, animalistic, wild screaming, famously on Twisted Shout, you know, I actually think it's Paul's scream that really cuts through on, on that one. And John's kind of incredible singing, of course. Um, but yeah, and I sort of like trace that through the career, through the career of the Beatles. And, and going back to what we were saying about them wanting to somehow break through the veneer of, um, niceness and neatness, um, kind of superficiality of the pop world as they saw it, right? They, they always thought that the acts they saw on TV before they were on TV

• 51:12Speaker 01

  just seemed kind of phony to them, like they didn't really mean it. And they wanted to kind of, you know, like just sort of grab you bodily almost with their music and with their singing and make you feel something very, very intense and very strong. And then the screaming is part of that.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  You quote something I've mentioned on the program recently, Tolstoy's definition of, of art. You quote, to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling. And that's really, they did that par excellence, if that's the right way to use par excellence.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  I don't know if listeners remember, but a long time ago, I interviewed Chuck Klosterman on his book, But What If We're Wrong? And in that book, he speculates that when people look back on the era of rock and roll, um, which is a very short window.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  There will only be maybe one group that gets remembered, one voice. He gives the analogy of marching bands music. Like, we've heard of John Philip Sousa, but John Philip Sousa was not the only person writing marching band, music for marching bands, but he's the only one that got remembered, and that's it. That's all you get. And he speculates 150, 300, I don't know what the years are, but hundreds of years from now, people look back on the, this bizarre, glorious, wondrous moment in the 60s, and there'll be one name associated with rock and roll. And he looks at, I think he considers The Beatles, he considers Dylan, he ends, he says, you know, it's gotta be somebody who, it might even be somebody so obscure, we haven't heard of him, that academics will unearth with some cool hip theory.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  And I think he settles on Chuck Berry as his, as his guess. But it could be The Beatles. But here's the irony for me, and I'd love your reaction. John definitely saw his identity as a central member, if not the dominant member, of a rock and roll band. But if you look at The Beatles' immortal songs, the songs that will be sung in 20, 50, and 100 years, I'm gonna make, this is my list, it's colored by my personal taste, obviously, so yours will be different, but it's striking how un-rock and roll-y they are. This is my short list. "Let It Be," "In My Life," "Yesterday," "Hey Jude," "Long and Winding Road," "Here,

• 53:32Speaker 00

  There and Everywhere," "Michelle," and "Eleanor Rigby." I wouldn't, there's a little rock in some of them, but they're mostly not what you would call rock and roll songs, they're mostly what we would call ballads. All of them have an incredible elegiac yearning power to them. And what do you make of that? Do you agree or disagree?

• 53:58Speaker 01

  I don't necessarily agree with your list, although I do think those are all wonderful songs that will last a long time. I know that they're almost all Paul songs.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Is that true? Not on purpose?

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I know. That was just funny. Yeah, there might be a reason for that, but we can come back to that. But first of all, I think they are more likely to be remembered than anyone else. I mean, I think more than any of those other artists that you mentioned. Maybe Dylan, but because Dylan is not quite as musically, certainly lyrically, poetically, right, he's probably kind of peerless in the work, but musically, perhaps not quite on that level, right? And music is a very powerful, you know, memetic kind of, you

• 54:53Speaker 01

  know, cultural property. So I do think that the Beatles are kind of the ones that will be remembered. I see them as Shakespeare versus Ben Johnson and Philip Marlowe, right? Johnson and Marlowe plays still get performed, still get studied, but Shakespeare isn't just another Elizabethan Jacobean playwright, is he? Right? He's on another level from those guys. And I think, I suspect the same is going to be true of the Beatles and the way they're seen in a couple of hundred years' time. And then, yeah, so your question about, you know, how many of their songs, which was so many of their songs are not rock and roll centric is really interesting. And I do kind of make the effort in the book

• 55:38Speaker 01

  to show that they're actually part of the great river of 20th century popular music, and that many of the tributaries that feed into the Beatles' sound come from before rock and roll. They didn't actually renounce everything that had gone before when Elvis and Chuck Berry arrived in their lives. They were, that's what turned them on, that's what they got incredibly excited by, that's what kind of got them up there, playing guitars. But they still loved the music of their childhoods, and the music of their childhoods was from the great American songbook. It was English.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Music Hall, it was kind of big band, a kind of jazz band, trad jazz stuff, you know, like Paul's dad used to play. And they never, Paul in particular, but actually John too, although he was less likely to admit it, they never stopped loving that, those older forms of music. And they, they took them with them into the new era of rock and roll and then rock and pop as they kind of expanded its horizons. So even as they were pushing forward the boundaries of pop with Tomorrow Never Knows and doing these kind of incredibly futuristic avant garde psychedelic experiences,

• 56:58Speaker 01

  they were also throwing in Music Hall and Disney and Rodgers and Hammerstein's and all sorts of things. So they're, they're really kind of bringing together all these different streams of 20th century music. And that's why, you know, I, I think you're right. I think a lot of the songs that they're really well known for, you can trace back to, to older traditions.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  Now, I made my list based on Lennon McCartney songs. I think Here Comes the Sun will be performed for a long time, but that song is credited in some dimension, if not in terms of copyright.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  That's Georges.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  To George Harrison.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  So in what sense are those Paul songs, given that they're all Lennon McCartney? Why do you call them Paul songs? You said many of those are, not all of them, but many of them that I listed.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so when I talk about a John, Paul or a song, a, a John song or a Paul song.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  So, so there were a few songs, particularly early on, and then one or two examples later, where they were, they're really co-written. And they're written face to face, kind of throwing out lines to each other, saying, how about this quarter? How about we, we do this for the middle eight? What do you think? Well, no, no, we should go here. Right? So, I Want to Hold Your Hand is written like that. You can't, you can't tell where one person's contribution begins and the other one ends, right?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  But for the most part, they would independently propose ideas to each other. So they would kind of come up with their own songs, say, how about this? And then the other one would kind of modify it, make suggestions, sometimes explicit ones, sometimes, I think, just very subtle ones that perhaps wouldn't have been recorded. You know, there'll just be a look on the face, you know, or a kind of shrug or a kind of, you know, how about this? So I think nearly all their songs, they were kind of influenced by the other. But for most of them, you can kind of, you could see that one of them proposed it and conceived of it and was kind of the creative director of the song, if you like.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  So the group would help them kind of put the song together, but it was ultimately up to Paul to make the decisions on Paul's songs and up to John to make the decisions on John's songs. Does that make sense?

• 59:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, of course, listened to Eleanor Rigby, I don't know how many dozens of times through my life, some intentionally, some unintentionally. It's, it gets played a lot. For me, it's in a class by itself lyrically and in terms of its composition and its literary nature. Why is there so few, why are there so few songs in their work that, at least maybe you don't agree, but for me, that have that, that could be poetry, pure poetry, not enhanced by the music? The music is extraordinary and the arrangement is extraordinary, of course.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  What do we know about that song? Why does it sound at least so different to my ear?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's, you know, one of the kind of mysteries, one of the many mysteries of the Beatles is where a song like that comes from. It's very difficult to see what the models were, again.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Nothing like it.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Nothing like it. Maybe like the

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  Leonard Cohen later.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, bit later. So I think there was a kind of King song where he kind of tells a story about, but it's not really the same. And to write this kind of character, it's kind of two intersecting narratives in a song about these strange kind of lonely characters that are, again, very far from hip rock and roll people. And to write a song essentially about death, you know, and the afterlife, whether or not there's anything that comes after it. It's, and you know, he was 23.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  So, and he's like king of

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Who's he?

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  The world.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  Who's he?

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Paul McCartney, sorry.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is, this is a Paul song that John contributed to, but kind of was, this song was led by, by Paul.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  So it's just utterly incredible. And, and yeah, the lyrics are literate without being pretentious. I don't think, you know, they don't come across as tryhard. They're just kind of clever. And the, the, the patterns of the sounds and the words, when you say it's like poetry, it really is quite poetically structured.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  And then, of course, they find this, you know, with George Martin does this incredible string arrangement, which is very biting, again, quite dark.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  And then sort of musically, you get these kind of counterpoint melodies happening at the same time. There's a lot going on, right? But it, but it feels completely kind of immediate, right? You don't feel like you're having to struggle to understand this incredibly complex song. It just kind of hits you. So yeah, I do think it's one of their greatest achievements.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  And it's what, two minutes long?

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  And it goes

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  So many of the Beatles songs are like that. They're just so short. They're just kind of, like their career, you know, it's just kind of, they come in, they change you and they, they get it out.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  And unlike what we were talking about before, Eleanor Rigby is an attempt to move us about, not about them, at least explicitly. It's maybe implicitly about them. They would be thinking about their own loneliness and their own death. But they're telling a story about us, about someone else in a, in a very literary way.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they were interested in other people. I mean, this was a particularly kind of McCartney attribute. And he kind of told quite a few stories in his songs about women. And not just their sexual, you know, objects of desire. Again, very strange thing for a young pop star, a young man, to do. But when he writes Lady Madonna, or Another Day is a kind of another example. He's finding these stories about people who are sort of disconnected from society

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  in some way, and he's kind of really curious about them. Again, it's just something that I don't know where it came from, because nobody else was incorporating those kinds of thoughts and emotions and stories into pop music. But it's one of the many things that make them very distinctive.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  I recently saw the movie Maria with Angelina Jolie. It's got some fine things in it. And a friend of mine was saying that, you know, here's this woman who has inhabited characters on stage with such emotion, and it eventually bleeds into her daily life. You know, her ability to separate. The movie's in many ways about the challenge of separating reality from one's own imagination. In the movie, it's hard to tell what she's seeing versus imagining. Are the people that she's talking to real? Or are they figments of her imagination? And I was struck by, having just read your book, that the Beatles have to deal with

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  this incessantly. Their identity as a Beatle is at the center of their existence. At the same time, to have to wear that mask, that costume that the world has created along with your own efforts, is so destructive. And a lot of the book is capturing the dysfunctionality of their existence in this time. And of course, it has lasting damage in certain dimensions, I'm sure. But talk about that issue of their identity, how it was hard for them to have that level of fame and expectations from the people around them.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, there's no real models for this, for being pop stars aren't quite on this scale. And equally, after they split up, there weren't really any models for being an ex-member of a group, you know, an ex-Beetle or an ex-anything. It's, you know, it's again, it's a kind of, they're always kind of at the forefront of what's going on, whether they wanted to be or not. I think they dealt with it as well as any four young men could have dealt with it. I think it absolutely helped that there was, it wasn't, they weren't a solo act. And it wasn't, there wasn't a front man, it wasn't just one front man.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  You know, this was a group of four and they were able to create their own protective bubble by sort of turning inwards. There's a nice little observation that Ringo made later on where he said, you know, there will be a big party at some sort of, say, at the American Embassy or somebody's house and all the stars were there, everybody wanted to meet us and we would just meet up in the bathroom and light up a joint. Just the four of us, right? And sort of like shutting ourselves away. And they managed to maintain that. You know, they weren't always together as a foursome, but when they were together, they

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  were inside that bubble again and they kind of protected each other and kept each other sane, you know, because they were kind of teasing each other, they had that kind of relationship. But yeah, the personas that they were kind of created in, say, A Hard Day's Night and where, you know, John was the scathing cynical one and Paul's the cute one and Ringo's the slightly kind of lost boy, this sort of, and George is a bit sort of sulky and sad. They all had a grain of truth in them, but they didn't really reflect the full range and complexity of these characters. And they started to really chafe at that. And it's part of the reason they stopped touring.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  They didn't want to be exposed always on show to the world, you know, always having to do press conferences, always being screamed at as they ran into a hotel. It really felt like they were in a trap, in a kind of weird prison by the end of the touring days.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  Help, I need somebody.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, John's song is literally a cry of help. You know, he wasn't just writing a pretty pop song. We've been talking about the way that they put their emotions into their songs. And he was doing it very directly there. And he was effectively having a psychological crisis, if not a nervous breakdown, caused by the disjunction between the public persona that he had as this happy, cheery Beatle, and what he was feeling inside, which was a kind of confusion, disorientation, not really sure what he wanted to do.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  And he writes this song, "Help", and it's really kind of expressing that confusion and disorientation to the rest of the world. One of the beautiful things about that song is that the backing vocals sound like a group of friends who are literally backing him up. And, you know, they start to sing the words before he sings them. "And now, and now these days are gone, these days are gone." And I just think it's kind of typical of the Beatles' sound, the way they harmonized, the way their voices interacted, that they really convey that ethos of friendship and mutual support in the music.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  So, you know, it wasn't just that they were friends and that they made music. You can hear the friendship and the love for each other and the support in their songs.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  We focused on, as I said, we're not going to go as deeply into the, what I think is the central part of the book. I want to encourage listeners to read it and I don't, and viewers to read it. I don't think it's easy to talk about it. You did such a good job writing about it. But if you could say something briefly about friendship. You've written one of the few rock biographies that I think mention Plato. I think you mentioned the Symposium. And the Symposium is partly about friendship. And certainly Aristotle wrote eloquently on friendship. When you think about the...

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Attempts to write about what is special about same-sex friends who are not lovers, just friends. Your book is, one of the reasons it's such a powerful read is that you capture that. And I can't think of any other things that are like that. You know, movies capture it occasionally, but that's really what this book's about. And in a way, we haven't done justice to it, and I'm suggesting it's, I don't particularly want to, and I'm not sure we can, in a brief conversation. But really, in many ways, your book is about something that is a tremendous gift that was, that these two people had of caring deeply for each other, being able to express

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  it through music, experiencing many of the same things together that no one else could understand, other than those four, and maybe just those two, especially Paul and John. And that it lasts for such a short time, roughly 10 years, a little over 10 years as friends, and then falls apart, and then leads, ends in the early tragic death of one of them is, it's one of the saddest things that's ever been captured in a book, and you did it amazingly well. I have nothing else to say, but you can react to that.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it is a sad story. It's a joyful story as well, I think.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  And, you know, you can't kind of separate the two. But I would just say, on the friendship thing, I do think it's absolutely fascinating, because I do think their relationship was very unusual, this very intense, platonic, you know, I don't think they were having sex, but in every other sense, romance, that's also incredibly creative. And the creativity is part of the excitement and the sort of intoxication of the relationship. You do get these friendships now and again, and you could see them in cultural history. They are rare, and I don't think there's any kind of exact analogy to Lennon and McCartney,

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  but there are a few that I've been thinking about that are close or have similarities. And so I was thinking about Coleridge and Wordsworth, you know, these two poets who meet, one's older, one's younger, kind of wake of the French Revolution. They're very kind of politically engaged. They love the countryside, they go for hikes. And they just start saying, you know, maybe there's a new way to do poetry. And they write poetry together as a very kind of intense relationship. And it really kind of give birth to a whole, the Romantic movement in English poetry. Just one example, you know, the closest 20th century example is not actually for poetry or music. It's from the social sciences.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  So I, a few years ago, I read Michael Lewis's book, The Undoing Project, where he basically tells the story of the relationship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the psychologist, Israeli psychologist. You know, they meet in 1969, Tel Aviv, and their relationship is as intense as Leonard and McCartney, I would say. And they really kind of shut themselves away and together invent a new model of human rationality. And the way that Lewis writes about it and the way that Kahneman talked about it to Lewis, because Michael Lewis interviewed Kahneman, is very much as a love affair.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Kahneman's wife says to Lewis, you know, was it like a marriage? No, no, no, it was much more intense than a marriage.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  And similarly with Leonard and McCartney, they then, after they become effectively famous and well acclaimed, they then find it hard to get along. There's kind of questions of relative status and competition and conflict kind of comes between them. And they drift apart and they both feel awful about it. And but they can't kind of work out a way to get back together. And indeed, Tversky, you know, dies relatively early, leaving Kahneman to wonder about what happened there.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  So that's another example of this kind of, yeah, very close, very intimate, very tempestuous and incredibly creative male friendship. But there aren't many of them.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  And I was thinking about Rogers and Hart. You mentioned Rogers and Hammerstein earlier. Rogers and Hart.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  Heart was, Loren's heart was damaged emotionally in a way that reminds me of Lennon, not to the same extent. Lennon was much healthier, I'm sure, but you know Rogers was fairly stable. Hart was this very mercurial troubled soul and they end up breaking up and Hart, I think I've got this right, Hart dies shortly after that breakup. But what it is like to create something as extraordinary, forget the money, forget the fame, forget the rest of the package, to create something at all is glorious. To create it with another person

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  and appreciate that they're not just tagging along, you may resent it at times, but that they are entwined with your gift in a way that makes it sweeter is, there's nothing quite like that, other than maybe making a child, which is a similar, in certain dimensions, kind of creative act with someone you love. So, you know, it's complicated, but there's something, that bond is very powerful.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think you've seen, we've seen McCartney come to terms with it over the years since John's death. At first, I think very difficult, it was very difficult for him. You know, to lose someone you're very close to is always difficult. To lose someone when your relationship is not on the level that it was, and there's sort of some conflict there, but you know, suddenly they're gone and you can't fix it. I think it's incredibly hard. But I think as the years have gone by, you can see him kind of processing it. And now, when he looks back on it, it seems to be with just an enormous

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  sense of gratitude and love and a feeling of fortune, you know, how lucky he was to have met John, how lucky they were to have found each other and to have created this magical, magical thing. And, you know, I feel the same way. I think we're all very lucky that they met each other.

• 1:17:07Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Ian Leslie. The book is John and Paul's A Love Story in Songs. Ian, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  Thank you very much, Russ.

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.