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Living Without the Beatles
1. I.P.M.C.
Not one but two of George Harrison's friends got more applause thanthe best-selling ex-Beatle at the Bangla-Desh concert at MadisonSquare Garden. Dylan did, of course--New York is his turf--but unlessI am deceiving myself, so did Ringo. Admittedly, self-deception is areal possibility. I clapped and shouted enough to provide Ringo'smargin of victory all by myself, and that epiphany exhausted, sat andgazed upon my hero through opera glasses. I was only twenty rows back,among the industry freebies, but I craved detail, and wouldn't youknow?George kept getting in the way. His white suit hadobscured Ringo's grand ole black-on-black for most of "It Don't ComeEasy" as well, but both times Ringo seemed aware that he was beingupstaged. He looked calm and even complacent, brimming with quiethappiness, as if after eight years he still couldn't quite believe hisown good fortune--a seat right up on stage, the best industry freebieof all. That's why we love him, after all, and why unlike the othershe remains immune to the vagaries of our affection. Ringo is ourrepresentative on the Beatles.
Think about it. Ringo joined the group in the summer of 1962,replacing the corny good looks of Pete Best with a homely correctiveto all that genius. The Beatles were on the brink of their fame. Theyhad just signed with George Martin and EMI and dominated the thrivingLiverpool pop scene. In less than a year they would become a nationalcraze, with international Beatlemania already imminent. What a timethat must have been for Ringo, a continual up among three intimidatingnear-strangers. In retrospect it must seem the high point of his life,but if he's passed his peak, he's not complaining. Ringo may not beable to describe the dark chamber of his future, but he knows it'shis, and that suffices. He is a family man now, unalienated from hislifework and identity. Four or five years ago, when John was talkingabout expanding into films and George was learning sitar andtranscendental meditation and Paul was turning in on himself in aLondon town house, Ringo also had plans of his own--he wanted to starta Beatle museum. And now that the breakup is real, he has written asong, his fourth, called "Early 1970," the B side of the best singleany ex-Beatle has released. Perhaps you saw the lyrics in HowardSmith's column. After devoting a stanza each to Paul ("When he comesto town, I wonder if he'll play with me"), John ("When he comes totown, I know he's gonna play with me"), and George ("He's always intown, playing for you with me"), he goes on to himself: "I play guitar,A D E/ I don't play bass cos that's too hard for me/ I play the pianoif it's in C/ And when I go to town I want to see all three." Hereally is the ultimate Beatle fan.
Conversely, George is the ultimate ex-Beatle, exploiting hisBeatleness to assert his own identity. The old mediator and businesshead has turned into a superduperstar, and even as he talks of gettingthe group together again, he relishes his ascendancy as anindividual. It may be that John first wanted to break up the group andwas persuaded to stay by the insidious Paul, as John claims, or thatPaul was shut out by the others until he had to leave, as Paul claims,but it is silent George who has adapted best to being out on hisown. The catch is, he isn't out on his own, for unlike the otherthree, George feels totally at home in the new condominium thatdominates rock--I.P.M.C., the International Pop MusicCommunity. George fits in because he knows how--he always played leadguitar and second fiddle--but even more because the prevailing trendsuits his predilections. John is a media artist, Paul a composer, andRingo just a Beatle, but George, ahh, George is a musician, he likesto play his ax, he likes to jam.
The ascendancy of I.P.M.C. represents a fundamental changeover, fromPop to Music. Five years ago, rock was created by integral groups,each of which directed its own organic identity at the audience. It'strue that that identity was often filtered and distorted by friendsand outsiders, and that group members did create individually andinteract with each other. But the group was still an aesthetic unitthat communicated vertically, toward us, and thus related primarily tous. From the Beatles' earliest success, when their lively-but-harmlessmoptopness was manipulated by Brian Epstein, through all thespontaneous changes of their collective genius, what went on amongthem came right down to us as a self-contained but multifaceted andevolving whole. In contrast, the aesthetic unit of I.P.M.C. is theindividual musician, who communicated horizontally in continuingsemispontaneous improvisation with his coequals. We in the audienceare only incidental beneficiaries of his flirtations and affairs, atleast until we stop buying. George is an I.P.M.C. man as regards boththe public and his fellow superstars. InLet It Be, remember,it was George who rejected touring because he thought the Beatles,like Stravinsky, were responsible only to the art of music. Later,when Paul broke up Stravinsky, George reportedly made the perfectjoke: "Well, I guess we need a new bassist."
Although I.P.M.C. is vast enough to defy efficient generalization andis the locus of some of my favorite rock--Delaney & Bonnie,Layla, Mad Dogs & Englishmen--I strongly suspect the newmainstream of draining back toward an individualism that rock and rollonce seemed to challenge. That's a big argument, however. For now,allow me to note that there really is something aboutmusic-for-its-own-sake (read: I.P.M.C.) that transcends life's harsherdetails, and that this is not true of music-as-popular-communication(read: group-rock). George's religiosity is tellingly appropriate. DonHeckman referred to George as "the most introspective of the Beatles,"but that's just I.P.M.C. claptrap. Playing headsie with the UniversalMind is not introspection; more often, it constitutes an evasion ofhard inquiry by heirs of privilege with access to easier rewards, likeriding the hounds or playing the guitar. The Bangla-Desh benefitstarted a lot of money on its way to people who plainly need anddeserve it and established an awesome moral precedent, yet I find ithard to take seriously as politics because George has specificallydisclaimed political motivation. "The political side is not myconcern," he told the trades. "Any war is wrong." George'sknow-nothingism is admirably candid, but it is also embarrassing andinfuriating. Listen to the music. He can't feel the pain, has neverknown such distress, doesn't understand, but it sure looks like a messquote unquote, free the people of Bangla-Desh. The flip of the"Bangla-Desh" single, "Deep Blue," an unoverdubbed quickie that Iconsider George's most affecting piece since "Here Comes the Sun,"amplifies his almost comic intellectual gaucherie. Written for hisailing mother, but by implication applicable to all suffering,including Bangla-Desh, it ends up another piece of lordy-lordy-lordy,with all that suffering reduced to so much Eternal Recurrence. Itmakes sense. The man who seeks after transcendence wants to avoid theugly, immanent contingencies that taking sides involves. But maybeavoiding the contingencies is even uglier.
Despite the puffs of I.P.M.C. stalwarts like theNew YorkPost's Al Aronowitz andRolling Stone's nameless hydra, theBangla-Desh concert was far from an unqualified aestheticsuccess. Because rock and roll is happy blues, there is somethingintrinsically awkward about the idea of a rock benefit, unless thecause is revolution for the hell of it. The only way Leon Russellperforming "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Young Blood" (brilliantly, too)can be said to relate to a few million starving dark-skinned people onthe other side of the planet is by fiat, yet there he was; it's hardto blame the confused minority who clapped in time to "Bangla-Desh" asa film of the mutilation came on during intermission. With hisnever-failing critical acuteness, Dylan defeated this quandry byreverting to folk music, but Harrison's disinclination for hardinquiry told. The plethora of musicians may have been necessary--howelse render George's I.P.M.C./wall-of-sound synthesis on stage?--butwas still an excess wretchedly inappropriate in context. In fact, thewhole production was anachronistically showbiz.
Of course, the same overblown fatuity characterizesAll Things MustPass, which sounds more like Muzak to my ears thanRamdoes. I'm not even sure that the prodigious flatness of Harrison's newmusic--probably attributable to monomaniac Phil Spector, whoseproduction work continues to sound best on a car radio as itapproaches cosmic vagueness--can be adapted to the dynamic depth oflive performance at all. Maybe George don't need no wah-wahs, but heis a man of the recording studio more than ever--after all, how elsecan he make his voice do that? I.P.M.C. encourages a profitablemystique of concert jamming, but for every Mad Dogs & Englishmen,puts on half-a-dozen shoddy shows. Derek and the Dominoes are terrificwhen an extra guitarist hypes them up, uninspired otherwise. LeonRussell pumps away stage right like a coiffed locomotive, flanked bytwo women singers selected primarily for the mobility of their titswho function as a kind of tender, fueling Leon with attention, whilethe rest of the band cabooses desperately behind. And despite AlAronowitz's smug exultations about the "respectful and appreciative"crowd that responded to the "exercise in charisma" by performers whowould never "invite a crowd to bedlam and hysteria"--as do group-rockholdouts such as Sly and the Stones and Grand Funk, all of whom exciteAronowitz's disapproval--the music at Madison Square Garden, exceptingDylan and a few wonderful moments here and there, was competent atbest. Since I.P.M.C. is thought of as an antidote to pop image andhype, it would seem strange that the ultimate I.P.M.C. concert shouldsucceed as an event, which it certainly did, but not as music. Thefact is, however, that concerts in Madison Square Garden are rarelymore than events up in the cheap seats, and I've heard nothing from mysources in the cheap seats to indicate that this one was anexception. Here is fan Karin Klein: "The songs were very cut anddried, without particular flair or warmth. The basic result seemed tobe a put-down of the audience's mood, and the impression that Georgeand Friends would like to do their piece and go."
They did their piece, and they went.
2. Like a Horse and Carriage
In early 1970 Tom Paxton released a single called "Crazy John." Paxtonis one of those ex-purist folk singers whose major talent ispersistence: When Dylan went electric, Paxton commented, "Where it'sat is a synonym for rich," but a few years later he was riding theheretic's tail at the Isle of Wight. "Crazy John" was evidence ofPaxton's new vocation, offering that wonderful nut, the John Lennon ofbed-ins and peace billboards, some sage folk advice: "They never canhear you, John/ So how can you teach them?/ They never come near you,John/ So how can you reach them?" It's appropriate for a folk singerto offer such a sterling example of that contemporary usage, theparanoid "they," because the very idea of the folk connotes anintegral audience, us, separated by time and/or values from theshapeless mass, them. Paxton thinks John is crazy because he does notrecognize this dichotomy, and in an ass-backward way he is right, forif John were capable of such easy formulas, he might be almost asboring as Paxton himself. But John is a media artist, and like anymedia artist he continually confronts a maddening question: Where ismy audience? More than any other pop star (except perhaps Dylan) heenjoys a creative relationship with his own celebrity, plying it notmerely out of ambition or self-protection but because the processpiques him aesthetically. John Lennon in public is like a filmmaker atthe Movieola or Yoko Ono at a happening in 1963.
New York artists used to look at the six o'clock news or, perhaps,some wonderful new rock and roll group from England and think, "Huh,what a weird thing to reach so many people at once." They perceivedmass-cult outreach as a basically formal quality, irrespective ofcontent, and experimented with it by devising art events that if theywere very clever, might make Howard Smith'sVoice column, onceHoward Smith had devised a column to deal with such phenomena. In thiscontext the Lennon/Ono marriage was the most successful multimediamove of the decade. Yet the taint of the avant-garde has stayed withYoko, for after all, the cover ofRolling Stones orCrawdaddy just ain't the cover ofLife, and ifOno/Lennon appear on Cavett, you can expect McCartney/McCartney toshow up on Carson any time now. Ex-groupie or no, Linda EastmanMcCartney has class, and banker's daughter or no, Yoko Onodoesn't. John married genius, and Paul married power, and in the worldof public media it's hard to be sure which is more important.
None of this is to imply that Paul, or John, married forconvenience. Like all artists, great popular artists believe their ownmyths, and for popular songwriters of the pre-Beatle era--which isexactly how Lennon and McCartney began--there was only one of these:romantic love. Repeat: They werepopular songwriters. Eventhough the staple of rock and roll in the fifties was teen schmaltz ofwondrous innocence and vapidity, and even though the popularization ofblack music meant romanticizing the hard-assed realism ofrhythm-and-blues, the sheer physicality of rock and roll, its sexualunderpinnings, always implied a negation of such escapistrhapsodies. But the Beatles, unlike blues-influenced fellow geniusesJagger and Dylan, never showed much interest in this negation. Insteadof projecting sexuality, they evoked it and made fun of itsimultaneously, just one more example of the insistent popness thatalways tempted the cynical to suspect they were the finks. Afterturning out enchanting variations on the permissible themes of unionand parting for three or four years, their version of the mythgradually became more acerbic ("Girl," "If I Needed Someone," etc.),but their formal commitment to pop remained unchanged--those latersongs are reminiscent of the down Smokey Robinson, especially on theall-important pop surface.
It was only during their mature period--includingSgt. Pepper,their best album, andThe Beatles, their most consistent andprobably their worst--that they abandoned the subjectaltogether. Great popular artists believe their own myths, but likeall artists, they do so from a distance. As his relationship with JaneAsher became more problematic, Paul's romantic experiments became moreoutré. He never quite gave up on romance, but it is significant that"Hey Jude," one of his truest and most forthright love songs, wasomitted fromThe Beatles, whereas "I Will," a piece of fluffthat seemed designed to fit unobtrusively into that pastiche ofmusical exercises, was included. When Paul took up with Linda,however, he also took up the love theme with freshenthusiasm. Typically, John's withdrawal and return were moreextreme. He discovered Yoko well before the white album, but not until"I Want You," onAbbey Road, did he signal his renewed embraceof the myth. For both moderate Paul and manic John, romance was a lotof what getting back was about. After desperate years, each decidedloveis all you need, because each found his one-and-only,doo-wah doo-wah.
But the revitalization of the myth of romantic love almost inevitablycontributed to the disintegration of another myth, the myth of theBeatles. It is significant that it was the group's songwriters andresident movers who swung so precipitously from one myth to theother. In Hunter Davies's official biography Cynthia Lennon chides herhusband for preferring the group to his family. "They seem to need youless than you need them," the quote goes, and John admits it: "I didtry to go my own way after we stopped touring, but it didn't work. Ididn't meet anyone else I liked." At that time, according to John,Paul had just about taken over leadership of the group. Engaged toJane Asher, Paul regretted that he was still so much a bachelor, buthe wasn't--he was married to the Beatles: "We're really the sameperson. We're just four parts of the one." At that time PattieHarrison was thought of as the independent Beatle wife because shestill did some modeling. Now Ringo describes her as "a long-leggedlady in the garden pickin' daisies for his suit," and the marriageseems ornamental, the sort of show-business union that might just endsometime. The impression may not be factual, of course, but there's nodoubting the accuracy of Davies's description of Ringo as something ofan Andy Capp, albeit solider and more devoted--Ringo is a common manin ways that don't inspire our ready identification as well as in waysthat do. In any case, we realize in the context of more recent historythat George and Ringo did not separate themselves from the group bymarrying, although each gained a margin of autonomy. That marginproved necessary, because when John and Paul married, they marriedhard, replacing the Four Mates with "Man We Was Lonely" and "Love isyou/ You and me." It was as if their ambivalent relationship to thesexuality of rock and roll finally caught up with them. Men in groupsgave way to couples.
John started it, of course. His mates mated with suitably modtypes--an actress, a model, a hairdresser. Yoko, whatever else youmight think of her, was a rather unbirdlike original, from her maturebody to her obsessive creativity. She was strong--too strong. It ispossible, I suppose, that the other Beatles bore her some faint racialor (more likely) artistic prejudice, but her deepest offense was totheir male chauvinism. She aroused John's male chauvinism, too, butbecause he was in love with her he responded differently: He actuallythought she could become the fifth Beatle. And when he found hecouldn't work her into the Beatles, he began to rework the otheravailable myth instead. Like all artists, great popular artists notonly believe their own myths but carry them to new extremes: The dreamis over; long live the dream. The myth of romantic love is usually atrap for women, but a sufficiently potent woman can transform it (ithas been transformed before, after all) by compounding it with thatvague notion of the perfect equality of all free spirits that can alsobe descried lurking around our culture. Actually, the combinationisn't so much a compound as a colloid, mixing disparate elements insuspension. Nobody just screams away his entire oedipal heritage, andeven as John acts out the fierce symbiosis of his marriage, he remainsa jealous guy who interrupts his wife on Howard Smith's radio show.
Paul, the born romantic, came more readily to the new romanticism, butnaturally in a much more sentimental way. John has dedicated an albumto Yoko, but it is hard to imagine him doing something so cutesy asconcealing a Y.I.L.Y. on some secret border. Paul and Linda are alsomuch more moderate--in fact, it might be argued that they cop out onthe new dream altogether. Linda is a creative partner but in atraditionally subordinate way, not just in the view of her husband'sfans but in the view of her husband. Her work is the mod art-craft,photography, and she has looked to rock as an energy source for years;in contrast, Yoko is a conceptual artist who was completely outsidethe music when John came to her. John now calls himself John OnoLennon, but it's Paul and Linda McCartney, or even (on their firstcoauthored song, "Another Day") Mr. and Mrs. Paul McCartney.
In its radical or liberal version, however, romantic marriage hasdestroyed the group. The Beatles were an aesthetic unit, but what didthey transmit in common? Exuberance, yes. Cheek, although George'shead change changed that somewhat. Youth, and then youthfulness; rockand roll, and then rock. But above all, what the unit transmitted wasunity, the possibility that four very different individuals couldconstitute a harmonious and functioning whole. That image was veryimportant to the way we thought in the sixties, and Yoko and Lindahave made it impossible, not only by inspiring a countermyth but alsoby intensifying their husbands' divergences. John and Paulcomplemented each other: Paul was conservative, John mercurial; Paulwas fascinated with the silly history of pop music, John with itsgrand future; Paul was more comfortable with money, John withfame. But their women augmented rather than complemented. In classterms Paul married up to Linda and her show-business wealth, whereasYoko married down to John, who seems unlikely to abandon his scrappylower-middle-class heritage no matter how many possessions heaccrues. But psychologically, the spirit of the husband, focused bythe wife, dominates each marriage.
These personal changes are reflected in their musical work, exceptperhaps forMcCartney, which despite its melodic interludes Ifind difficult to take seriously as anything more than amillion-selling wedding announcement. In a way, though,McCartney can be said to have provided impetus for John'sPlastic Ono Band, from egocentric title to spareproduction. It's as if John is saying, "This is what personal minimalmusic ought to sound like."Plastic Ono Band is conceptual inthe Yoko Ono rather than theSgt. Pepper sense. It is one ofthe few albums I admire that does not permit casual enjoyment. Youhave to listen to it. Those who can do that--and there are many notin the category--customarily praise its lyrics, whereupon those whocan't, conclude that John has not only gone off the deep end but alsodragged his friends with him. It is distressing that anyone can take acollection of psychotherapeutic truisms as revelation, although "IFound Out" and "Well Well Well" are more than that on even the mostobvious level. It is even more distressing, however, that othersconsider John a simpleton (or perhaps a wonderful nut) who doesn'tknow what he's doing. Anyone who loves Rosie & the Originals theway John does understands the value of dumbness. Of course the lyricsare crude clichés. That's just the point, because they are also true,and John wants to make very clear that right now truth is far moreimportant than subtlety, taste, art, or anything else.
I am not encouraged by John's admission that he now writes melodiesfor lyrics rather than the opposite, because I believe music will getyou through times of no lyrics better than lyrics will get you throughtimes of no music. I also believe, however, that music overwhelmslyrics onPlastic Ono Band. Carman Moore, who is a composer aswell as a critic, thinks John has emerged as the most musical Beatlein terms of chords, melodic lines, and other such arcana, which onlyshows what I've said all along--that you can perceive that stuffwithout analyzing it. For me, the musicality ofPlastic OnoBand can be summed up in one word: strength. At first, of course,what came through was crudity. The music sounded stark and evenperfunctory compared to the free harmonies and double guitars of theBeatles' rock and roll. But the music of the album inheres not in itsinstrumentation but in the way John's greatest vocal performance, acomplete tour of rock timbre from scream to whine, is modulatedelectronically. Like so much great rock and roll, it depends on studiogimmickry, with the greatest of the gimmickers, Phil Spector,providing the expertise while stripped of his power to grind sixteentracks down to mush. John's voice unadorned appears only twice: on"Working Class Hero" and after the nonbelieving malediction of "God,"when John says, "I just believe in me/ Yoko and me/ And that'sreality." Elsewhere it is echoed, filtered, and double-tracked, withtwo voices sometimes emanating in a synthesis from between thespeakers and sometimes dialectically separated. In addition, theguitar and even the drumming is distorted.
This trickery slips by becausePlastic Ono Band just isn't atricky album. It does sound strong, even primal; there really issomething quintessentially raw about it. Yet it isn't. John is such amedia artist that even when he is fervidly shedding personas andeschewing metaphor, he knows, perhaps instinctively, that hecommunicates most effectively through technological masks andprisms. Separating himself from the homemade pretensions of, say,McCartney, he does not bullshit himself or his audience aboutwhere he is in the world--namely, on some private pinnacle ofsuperstardom. As always, he wants to reach us with a message that isalso a medium and really equals himself. Like any great artist, thegreat popular artist feels compelled to embody his myth in a form thatoffers its own pleasure.Plastic Ono Band had to be a one-shot,and in retrospect,Imagine follows it as inevitably asNewMorning followedSelf-Portrait. Its myth is twofold: Yokoplus the movement. The word "imagine" is a Yokoism crucial as well toMarcusian theory, which regards the ineluctable utopianism of theartistic imagination as essential to social transformation--we cannotchange unless we can envision change. If "Working Class Hero" isJohn's movement credo and "Power to the People" his movement marchingsong, then the title cut of the new album is his movement hymn.
Chances are the movement is just another of John's phases, though hehas always shown that mix of genius, indignation, and pugnacity thatcharacterizes the movement media heavy. In any case, it is certainlyan invigorating development for those of us who have been straining tolink rock and politics. Yet the movement's ability to get across tomasses of people has proved so sporadic that a part of me suspectsJohn's new stance portends his downfall. The thing is,Imaginedoesn't quite make it. At its best it is richer and more exciting thanPlastic Ono Band because its potential appeal is muchbroader. "Gimme Some Truth" is the union of Lennon unmasked with theLennon of Blunderland wordplay, the kind of venom Dylan never quitemanaged to spew. "It's So Hard" is the perfect blend of big blues andmetapolitical despair. "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don't WannaDie" is a proper Spectoral extravaganza. "Oh Yoko!" is purespontaneous joy and captures more of the spirit of fun than all ofRam. And other songs succeed, too. But the combination of nastylyric and good-timey ricky-tick on "Crippled Inside" has beenexploited by every ex-purist folk singer since Phil Ochs, and "How?"is so psychotherapeutically lugubrious that it might not even haveworked onPlastic Ono Band. Nor are these mistakes simply badtries. They are symptomatic of Lennon's limitations as an individualartist, limitations that, contrary to suggestion, are notmusical. John's music suits his vision perfectly. It's his vision thatis lacking.
As indicated, I thinkRam is a bad record, a classicform/content mismatch. If music is just gentle, fey, and occasionallyfunky, then why labor over it so assiduously? If you wanna have fun,then have it; don't just succumb to conspicuous consumption. I aminfuriated by the McCartneys' modern young-marrieds image--just normalfolks who happen to have a wee recording setup on their Scottishestate. Since Paul's political perspective seems limited to ZeroPopulation Growth, the production lavished on this album amounts to anecological obscenity. YetRam is far from Muzak and offersamenities that John could use. Paul's voice conveys a warmth andsophistication that might make John's manic-depressive extremism morepalatable at those times when we just feel like lying around andlistening to the stereo. Also, Paul uses Linda well. John seems unableto understand that although Yoko is a good artist, all thatdistinguishes her from a number of her fellows is access tomedia. This is indeed an important, and legitimate, distinction, butit ought to demonstrate once and for all that the function ofavant-garde art is to inspire other artists, not the public. Yoko hasentered John's music successfully twice (on "Cold Turkey" and on "Dothe Oz," by the Elastic Oz Band), and although her own records areinteresting, they will never reach a large public unless she makes themove. But Linda's participation on Paul's records works in a good way,another example of the trend to allow women as well as men to sing intheir everyday voices. It is not his commitment to yesterday oranother day but to everyday that might eventually render Paul's musicpleasant again. Let's hope so.
What John needs most, you see, is just that acceptance of the everydaythat in Paul-without-John appears to us as repellent complacency. Heneeds further rapprochement with the reality experienced by hisaudience. He needs continual reminder of his pop heritage, to balancehis oedipal heritage and his lower-middle-class heritage. That balanceis what the Beatles always reflected back to us, because we're alllike that and tend to forget it. It is missing from the New Yorkartistic/political avant-garde, which is why that avant-garde neverlives up to its genius. John really does need it. But it's obviousthat John doesn't want to get it from Paul ever again. "How Do YouSleep?" is the kind of public act committed by a lover who wants tomake sure he will never return in momentary weakness to the one whohas rejected him so cruelly, the best proof yet of how deep theBeatles' unity once was. Perhaps he'll find it in himself or inGeorge, who is capable of songs of rare beauty, or elsewhere, butalthough I'll always love him, I wouldn't be surprised if it were lostto him forever. It is strange to foresee the artistic death of anartist who is still so vital, but I often do.
What the breakup of the Beatles represents on the largest symbolicscale is a central problem of our time--the inability of couples tocoexist within cooperative groups. Perhaps they'll all survive to leadhappy, truly productive lives, or perhaps like so many of us, theywill be trapped by this dilemma. John will be a tragedy, George andPaul something not so affecting. But for Ringo it will be worst ofall, and since Ringo is all of us, we'd better figure out what thereis for us now that we can't be Beatle fans any longer. Find our ownlove, maybe--and form our own group.
Village Voice, Sept. 1971
Any Old Way You Choose It, 1973
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