'John & Paul'

A Note On My Forthcoming Book

One night in Austria in 1965, after a day shooting the ski scenes for Help!, John and Paul did an impromptu gig in the hotel bar, just for the hell of it. The hotel manager cut them short because he’d booked the house band, not Lennon and McCartney. Photo by Henry Grossman.

The Ruffian is deeply intertwined with John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs. The book sprang from a long piece that I wrote about McCartney on here, back in 2020, as kind of lockdown project. It went so insanely and unexpectedly viral that I started to think, huh, what if…? I’d already been thinking, vaguely, of a book about the two of them, but it was the response to that piece that suddenly made it seem viable.

What was striking about it is that people who didn’t know much about the Beatles found the piece fascinating, and people who knew an awful lot - more than me - judged it to be saying something new. I got a similar response to my piece on Peter Jackson’s Get Back, also published on here. All of which made me more confident that I could add something new and valuable to the already copious Beatles literature.

I’m now in the last stages of writing John & Paul and I’m pretty pleased with how it’s turning out. It’s been a massive undertaking. Without income from The Ruffian’s paid tier, I simply wouldn’t have had enough time to do this story justice. So thank you, in particular, paid subscribers. (This is not intended as passive-aggressive shade thrown at free subscribers, it just sounds that way).

All being well, John & Paul will be published around October next year March 2025.

Meanwhile, those of you with a New York Times subscription can read a preview of some of the book’s themes. I was delighted to be asked to write a guest essay on the new Beatles release, Now and Then, for Sunday’s paper. Of course, I looked at it from the perspective of J&P:

A funny thing about writing for the NYT (as I discovered - this is my debut!) is that the house style is to give everyone their honorific - hence “Mr Lennon and Mr McCartney”. I’m thinking about renaming my book now (joke).

The response to this article - on social media, via email, and in the comments - has been wonderful. The Beatles mean so much to so many. Here’s one of my favourite responses, from Mr Charles Kelley of New Hampshire:

Mr. Leslie,

I was nine years old and in 4th grade, recovering from the Kennedy assassination, when the Beatle’s took hold of my life in a way nothing else has ever done before of since.  Even now at 69 years old, I find myself no less in thrall, devouring Peter Jackson’s "Get Back”  as well as Paul McCartney’s 3-2-1 conversations as the latest supplement to my collection of Beatle’s recordings and memories.

This life long attachment has always been a mystery to me.  There are many artists whose music I love passionately, but who have never taken hold of the deepest parts of me in this way.  Why the Beatles?

To say that your essay was an “aha” moment would be an understatement and trite.  But thinking about their music as the expression of a love story, one formed in music and grounded in the kind of deep and vibrant friendship we all yearn for for in life, helped me understand why the Beatles were vital to my life in 1964, and continue to be vital in my life in 2023.  The love story you tell is the key that has unlocked the door for me.

Thank you so very much. 

In the NYT article I didn’t really get into what I think about the song itself. I’ve put my thoughts on it below the fold...

First of all, let’s cover the video, made by Peter Jackson. It’s goofy, trite, tacky and sentimental. I rather like it. I think if he’d tried for something ‘classy’ it might have got reverential - the Beatles never took themselves too seriously. And if you just kind of surrender to it, it has real emotional force. (Jackson also made a 12 minute documentary about the making of the song, definitely worth a watch if you’re interested).

As for Now and Then itself, well, I really like it. I mean of course I do. I don’t really have critical faculties available to me when it comes to this kind of thing. I’m in love with the whole story of the song, and the music is inseparable from that story and the story of the Beatles overall. I’m also just glad that Paul and Ringo are still with us, still doing what they love, and if they’re happy, I’m happy.

I would also say that my expectations were set fairly low. I think some Beatles fan are waiting for one last masterpiece. Of course that’s not realistic. The masterpieces happened when they were all together, all fiercely driven to do something amazing, and in the middle of a white hot moment in cultural history. What we’re listening to is the afterglow of that moment, and what a beautiful glow it makes. The final product actually exceeds what I expected.

I like hearing McCartney do “1-2-3-4”. From I Saw Her Standing There - at the opening of their first LP - to Taxman - the opening of Revolver - Paul’s count-ins are a signature Beatles sound. For some reason it didn’t strike me until now that you can also hear it as a count of the four Beatles.

The song itself, if we’re being brutally honest, is not top level. It verges on the maudlin (Lennon was always more of a sentimentalist than McCartney) and it doesn’t have much development. But for me it is saved by John’s vocal. He has this incredible ability to make you believe in the emotional truth of whatever’s he’s singing about.

McCartney did a lot more work on this song than I appreciated before reading an email from the rock historian/podcaster Andrew Hickey (I don’t have a link; someone forwarded it to me). He stripped out a third section from the original demo which was nice but didn’t really seem to go anywhere, musically or lyrically. He subtly adjusted the song in other ways, too, including its chords (more complex and surprising than might seem on first hearing). In other words, this really is a Lennon-McCartney collaboration. I should imagine McCartney had John’s voice in his ear at every step.

I love his supple, weaving bass-playing too. (It’s only on Beatles songs - especially John songs with Paul on bass - that I actually get emotionally moved by the sound of a bassline). Then of course, there’s hearing him harmonise with John again, his aged voice making it all the more poignant.

It took a hell of lot of musical and technical work from Giles Martin and his team to turn that old cassette tape into a modern track. The arrangement is tasteful and skilfully done. I kind of wish they hadn’t done the string glissandos, which edges it towards pastiche. If anything the production is, unlike Jackson’s video, too reverential and conservative but it would have been very risky to try something more adventurous, and perhaps inappropriate, given that two of the Beatles aren’t around to give input. Still, I think my favourite version might be this rather cheeky one:

In short, I’m delighted Now and Then is with us. It is a very nice way to end the sequence that began with Love Me Do, and it adds a lovely coda to the story I’ll tell in John & Paul.