125) 7 On their way home: the Beatles in 1969 and 1970 STEVE HAMELMAN Given the high amount of magnificent music the Beatles recorded in 1969, it ‘may surprise millions of casual listeners to learn that aside from a few num- bers, all of the official tracks from the band’s last full year ~ including classics such as “Let It Be,” “Get Back,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “Come “Together,” “Across the Universe,” “Something,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” and the medley on side two of Abbey Road— were created to the tune of four once inseparable friends going through an ugly divorce. Most of the tracks belie sessions where egos were so wounded by the slightest offense, whether real or imagined, that only in patches did the Fab Four function with a unified vision and in a collaborative spirit. Abbey Road and Let It Be, along with “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and three B sides, were made amid spats, sulks, shouting matches, temporary alliances, simmering jealousies, and many sessions with one or mote of the Beatles absent. “Given these cir- cumstances,” writes Walter Everett, “it is somewhat remarkable that Abbey Road is universally recognized as a coherent demonstration of inspired composition, impeccable vocal and instrumental ensemble, and dean and cleverly colorful engineering.”! And while Let Jt Be may not possess the polish of Abbey Road, many listeners prefer it for that very reason. Shining through the ramshackle and at times poorly performed and indifferently recorded pieces are melodies, harmonies, and grooves as addictive as any in the Beatles’ canon. So artful were the Beatles, and so blessed with good material, that evidence of internecine strife is concealed on Abbey Road, the band’s attempt in mid-1969 to end its career with one last masterpiece, and Let It Be, the band’s attempt in early 1969 (but released in 1970) to “get back” to its musical roots as the boys commenced the final phase of disintegration, Discontent had begun infecting their ranks as early as 1967 ~ the year that Brian Epstein died, that Paul's “Hello Goodbye” was chosen as the A side to John’s B side “I Am the Walrus” (a decision Everett calls “one more nail in the Beatles’ coffin”),? and that Paul saddled the others with Magical ‘Mystery Tour, a popular and critical disaster. Discord flared up in 1968 during work on The Beatles, and in 1969 conflict dogged them from first day to last. On January 2, 1969, they arrived at Twickenham Film Studios in London to film rehearsals for a documentary movie and a come-back televised concert (the location causing heated debate) at the end of the126 Steve Hamelman month-long rehearsals, and record an album named Get Back ~ all in all, a Paul-devised project that, after much argument and delay, became the album Let It Be, Almost exactly one year later, on January 4, 1970, at Abbey Road/EMI Studios, Paul, George, and Ringo convened the Beatles’ last recording session (John was on vacation in Denmark)? The intervening twelve months saw four musicians who had altered the history of popular culture vacillating between a pinnacle of creative collaboration and a nadir of disintegrative self-absorption. ‘The business of breaking up Like almost everything else in their career, the Beatles’ breakup was another unique chapter in rockand roll history. Evidence ofits singularity lies mainly in the music they made in 1969. Of equal note, however, is the excruciating indecisiveness they brought to the act of dissolution. "Theend cameand went several timesin 1969. On January 10, George quit the band fora few days followinga showdown with John during the Get Back rehearsals at Twickenham.‘ Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighhardt wonder how the band held together at all through these fractious sessions, noting among other impasses the dialog on January 13, when “the Beatles [were] nearer to breaking up than they had ever been before.”* Philip Norman states that “the Beatles ceased to exist”® on the afternoon of September 12, 1969, when John was invited to play at a festival in Toronto. He boarded a plane the next day with a makeshift Plastic Ono Band, which, as the ensuing live album testifies, gave a pedestrian performance. But it was in a business meeting within days of his return from the gig that Lennon declared he ‘was “divorcing” the other Beatles.” His decision was hushed up for half a year, when on April 10, 1970, Paul trumped his former partner’s card by feeding the breakup scoop to the media via the inclusion of an insert inside advance press copies of his first solo album, McCartney.* To secure bis artistic freedom from the Beatles’ management, Paul filed suit to dissolve the partnership on December 31, 1970, the band’s business affairs went into receivership on March 12, 1971, and the band formally “ceased to exist” on January 9, 1975. Clearly, the Beatles were incapable of ending it all in one fell swoop, spending most of 1969 either back-stabbing one another or courting new muses and pursuing new whims, ultimately enhancing their stature by recording music of a quality impressive even in relation to their previous peerless work. For a full appreciation of this peerless work, one must look briefly at modern and postmodern aesthetics. New Critics in the 1940s preached that it was a mistake to read authorial intention into works of literary art. Structuralists and poststructuralists of the 1960s through 1980s took thisin all, le the Abbey last ening ‘pular nadir this 127 On their way home: the Beatles in 1969 and 1970 dictum of “the intentional fallacy” ~ no one is fully aware of an author's intentions, the author included, which is why in the act of interpretation all intention must be discounted — to the next extreme. They argued that the existence of an autonomous author in absolute command of the signifiers (lines of verse, musical notations, swabs of paint) comprising a text was an axiom of humanistic ideology holding that transcendent meaning is encoded in literature and other means of artistic communication. Despite falling into disfavor with the rise of multicultural, political, and context- based theories in the 1990s, the legacy of formalism, structuralism, and poststructuralism lingers sufficiently to bedevil critics who seek to establish definite correspondences between a given text and the details of a given creators life at the time of composition. No matter how intriguing from a theoretical standpoint, the Beatles music of 1969 shatters the New Critics’ argument that private intentions ‘matter not atall in the analysis of texts made public, and it renders untenable all arguments that the Author (and the reader's burden of having to tease out the unmediated origins of a given text) died c 1968.? In fact, there can be little intelligent discussion of Abbey Road and Let It Be without awareness of their biographical background. The songs that ended up on these two disks, as well as “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and “Don’t Let Me Down,” illuminate the Beatles’ personal affairs in ways that “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “When I Get Home,” “Bight Days a Week,” “Getting Better,” “Day Tripper,” and dozens more do not. Many tracks from 1969 teem with melancholy and nostalgia, some Grip with sarcasm, and others sound the depths of insecurity, loneliness, and desire. In all cases, the composer's thoughts and feelings are transmuted into original and timeless music by the other three Beatles." Since few if any of the tunes from 1969 lack biographical overtones or reference points, the critic is obligated to throw the precepts of postmodern aesthetics to the wind, touching on both particular and universal aspects of the band’s music. ‘What, then, was on their minds in 1969? What caused such close com- panions to belittle and betray one another at almost every opportunity? ‘Why did they abandon the Get Back concert-film project, stew in their dis- content for a few months, pursue solo interests, pool their resources for the common good by regrouping for Abbey Road, and then, more decisively than before, go their separate ways at last? ‘Throughout 1969 the Beatles as single musical corpus was being drawn and quartered by internal and external forces too potent for each Beatle to resist, Yoko Ono, soon to be joined by Allen Klein, was pulling — had been pulling since mid-1968 ~ John out of one socket. Abetting Lennon's withdrawal from the Beatles were, in no particular order, his fury at the