Get Back
Twickenham—Liverpool—Providence—Morristown
I.
Twickenham is just over 10 miles southeast of London, where it sits among two bends in the Thames. The one true thing I really know about Twickenham is that it was there, on a gray and black soundstage, on January 2nd, 1969 that the Beatles began what would become known as the “Get Back” sessions.
For decades, Twickenham was, for me and many other people in varying states of obsession with the band, synonymous with the breakup of the Beatles. A quote from John Lennon in the book Lennon Remembers (1971) served as my mental image for what Twickenham was:
“It was a dreadful, dreadful feeling in Twickenham Studio, and being filmed all the time. I just wanted them to go away, and we’d be there, eight in the morning. You couldn’t make music at eight in the morning or ten or whatever it was, in a strange place with people filming you and colored lights.”
The experience at Twickenham was always put in juxtaposition with the band’s eventual move, later in the Get Back sessions, to Apple Studios at 3 Savile Row in London. In The Beatles Anthology (1995) Neil Aspinall, the Beatles one-time road manager and then head of Apple Corps., describes Apple Studios as “much nicer, much cozier” than Twickenham. At Apple Studios, George Harrison invited Billy Preston to join the sessions, The Beatles started behaving, the songs for the album started to cohere, and there was momentary peace in the band.
As has been well-covered at this point, the release of Peter Jackson’s 8-hour documentary Get Back in November has cast the established narrative in a new light. The Beatles don’t appear especially happy at the start in Twickenham, but they don’t seem miserable. And as few very well-researched Beatles podcasts have covered, there were a variety of other factors bleeding over from 1968 that led the members of the band to be in very different mental states and life stages.
What most people have found in watching Jackson’s documentary is that, even during the period that was historically known as perhaps their darkest hour, the Beatles still love each other and get along, still joke, still display a sense of camaraderie and connection that one feels that it had to be kismet that they were brought together in the first place. They loved each other in Twickenham and they loved each other in London as the sessions switched venues. They loved each other as they had in Liverpool, in Hamburg, in Manila, in Flushing, in Rishikesh, in San Francisco, and in Tokyo.
II.
When Get Back came out on the morning of November 26th, 2021, I was filled with relief.
To say I had been anticipating this documentary is an understatement. Get Back had originally been slated for release in September of 2020, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic it had been delayed to August of 2021. Then, because there was simply too much story to tell (and why not take advantage of a captive audience over the long Thanksgiving weekend to drive subs to Disney+?), the release was pushed to November and Get Back was going to be expanded from a two hour and change film released in theaters to an eight-hour plus streaming event. With each delay, I feared that I would die before it was released. Anything could happen to me: I could get COVID, a flight I was on could crash, an air conditioner could fall on my head. All of these things could prevent me from seeing the Beatles, as they were in front of those cameras for all of those hours, at the start of 1969.
Get Back’s release happened just as I was on the precipice of a big life change. On November 30th, I was leaving the company I had worked at for six and half years. I had given everything to the job I was leaving. During my first week at the company, I saw there was a chance to create something, to put into practice the beliefs I held about how a team should work—beliefs I had formed based on the bad management and bad work environments I had experienced before.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was entering my “peak earning years,” which is to say I was beginning my thirties, a decade generally known to be the time when work becomes more important, the time when a person has to prove themselves to get whatever they can from the working world. When I was hired, I was twenty-nine (about to be thirty) and barely making $40,000 per year. By the time I left the company, I had nearly quadrupled that salary. Your thirties, so it is said, is that decade when friends become less important than your career or your family. And, whether I knew it or not, my job did become the most important thing in my life.
It happened slowly but surely. I began to make concessions, I began to give things up. I stopped caring about going out on the weekends so that I could get a little bit more work done in the office while it was quiet and no one was around. I stopped making as many plans with friends, stopped maintaining relationships with people who I had spent countless days and nights with in my twenties. In my head, I kept hearing the voice of a musician I had interviewed for a dumb article I had written in my twenties who said to me, in a quote that didn’t make the article, that what’s strange about your thirties is that one day you realize that people who seemed so important to you in your twenties, that you spent so much time with, are suddenly gone.
This isn’t to say that I was some kind of heel. My friends were changing too. Life was changing. Some of my friends had left New York for Los Angeles or Seattle or Miami or Boston suburbs; a lot of my friends had babies; others got married and had babies and started spending a lot more time at second homes in Upstate New York. And I had my job, as well as a serious relationship with another person that required more of my time.
The opportunities of life, the decisions of our lives, had pushed us all in our own directions. And it’s impossible to take everything with you when you set off.
III.
The story of the Beatles, of their friendship, is entrenched in the history of pop culture. They were childhood friends from Liverpool who met when John was 16, Paul was 15, and George was 14. Ringo joined later, of course, but he was also from Liverpool and was known by the other three as being the best drummer in the city. Ringo was 22 when he joined the Beatles—John was 21, Paul was 20, and George was 19.
What has and will always fascinate me about the Beatles, perhaps more than their music (and I love their music), is the nature of their friendship. Or maybe it is because of their friendship that I love their music so much. I want to understand fully, be completely present, in those moments when their friendship, the bond and trust they shared, led directly to a decision in their work; to see the off-mic joke, the shared cigarette, that happened right before they asked George Martin or Geoff Emerick or Chris Thomas if it was possible to make the sound of the bass or the guitar on the piano on a new track sound different than what they had ever done before.
Their friendship was rooted in the place they all came from, the world they had known. And they carried it with them, deepening it in the singular journey they took across and through the world as the Beatles. John, Paul, George, and Ringo all remarked in interviews over the years that no one else knew what it was like to be a Beatle, and in being able to watch them interact for such an extended period of time in Get Back, you in some small way understand what that means. You glimpse the undefinable bond they shared specifically, but you also see that equally unexplainable quality their friendship had when it shone the brightest, which is inherent in all deep, lifelong friendships.
In Kenneth Womack’s book Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles (2019), Chris Thomas recalls a conversation he had with George Martin during the Abbey Road sessions.
“George Martin informed me that he wouldn’t be available [for the session]. I can’t remember word for word what he said, but it was something like, ‘There will be one Beatle there, fine. Two Beatles, great. Three Beatles, fantastic. But the minute the four of them are there, that is when the inexplicable charismatic thing happens, the special magic no one has been able to explain. It will be very friendly between you and them, but you’ll be aware of this inexplicable presence.”
For me, being able to see that magic play out on a screen over eight hours is what makes Get Back so fascinating to rewatch. They replay their entire history up to that point—and even in a sense into the future because as we watch we all know that they will break up and go on to fight, to grow apart, to reconcile privately, to play on each other’s solo albums, fight again, miss each other, love each other, and die—from songs John and Paul wrote as teenagers to Hamburg memories to stories from their touring days to allusions to the A Hard Day’s Night film to offhand references to lyrics from songs on Revolver and The White Album.
The original concept for the record that became Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was an album about childhood, about their childhood. Out of that concept came “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane.” They tried to bring Liverpool, their version of Liverpool, the place where their friendship was formed and where the mystery of fate brought them together, to the world through uncategorizable singles. It both worked and didn’t work: Those songs weren’t the past they remembered and those songs could not approximate what it was like to be a Beatle.
In Get Back you see every shade of their friendship. You see their shared sense of humor, the jokes that only they (and maybe a select few others) will get (see John at 33-35 minutes into Part II); you see them light up at an idea or a sudden harmony (see Paul and John at 2:04:50 in Part II); you see them hurt or ignore each other (see Paul and George at timestamp 40-41 minutes in Part I); you see them look at each other as if they were strangers or as if they can’t get far enough away from each other (see George at timestamp 2:19:00 in Part II and John at timestamp 1:04:56 in Part III); you hear them dissect the way they treat each other (see the “flower pot scene” at 11 minutes into Part II) and you see them look at each other with love (see Ringo and Paul at 22:12 in Part I).
And in watching one of the most famous friendships in history over eight hours, you begin to see your own friendships in each shade of theirs. You begin to see the jokes only you and your friends understand, the ones you made with each other to cope with the fact that the rest of the world was insane; you see how you’ve ignored a friend’s cry for help or a desire to be taken seriously; you see how you’ve grown apart from a friend, maybe from all of your friends because you’ve made a decision to go in your own direction in life; and you see yourself during a long weekend reuniting with your friends looking at them like they are strangers, like you can’t wait to return to a solo life of your own.
IV.
My new position didn’t start until January 3, 2022. So after I left my job, I decided to take a trip to visit two friends I hadn’t seen in a long time. Because of COVID-19, a lot of us haven’t seen old friends in a long time, but the issues with friendship I was experiencing had nothing to do with a global pandemic.
I have been blessed with great friendships throughout my life: from grade school through college through my twenties. Specifically, though, I have a group of friends I have known since I was ten years old, and they are people that I still text with almost every day. We grew up on the North Shore of Long Island together in a small town like many others along that bluffed and rocky shoreline. Like the Liverpool of “Penny Lane” or “Strawberry Fields,” in my mind I often see that town as it was then, as life was then, and it both seems impossibly alive but also incredibly dead. No song or story could bring it back, and even if it could, I wouldn’t want it back. That time only lives on in my friends, in the friendships we have carried with us as we have made our own, much more humble, journeys through the world.
But for some reason, over the last three to four years, I stopped wanting to talk to them or to see them. Whenever the phone would ring, I’d be afraid to pick it up. And I still don’t know why. But what I felt, and feel, is that it is because I was both ashamed to tell my friends about my life—how small it had gotten, how small I’d allowed it to get because of my focus on work, how I had not achieved all that I felt I should achieve—and incredibly frightened that in some way I was disappointed in them, in the people they had become or hadn’t become.
However, there was another, less depressing feeling that ran through me. When you have friends for over twenty years, you can reach a point when you feel them in you. You have taken on their mannerisms and speech patterns, absorbed part of who they are into you, so that in some way they live in your heart. And when your friends live in your heart, why do you need to call them? That love is always there and will always be there. You feel that they know it in some instinctive way, just as you know it. That’s what I believed and still believe, and several missed phone calls can’t change that.
But I had a month between jobs and felt that I should try to not be such an absentee friend. So I planned a trip to visit my friend Jeff and his wife and daughter outside of Providence, Rhode Island, and my friend Chris and his wife at their home and small farm outside of Morristown, Vermont. I would take an Amtrak to Providence and stay with Jeff for two nights, then take the commuter train to Boston for a night by myself, rent a car and drive from Boston to Morristown and stay with Chris for three nights. I would fly back to New York from Burlington on a midday JetBlue.
My Amtrak got into Providence on Friday evening at 5:30 and Jeff picked me up at the station. On the way back to his house we stopped to pick up dinner for his wife. In the car, we talked as we always had, veering from sports to small life updates to trying to remember the difference between an idiom, an adage, and a proverb.
After delivering dinner to his wife at home, catching her up on my new job and the other things happening in my life, and introducing me to their new family dog, Jeff took me to a restaurant in the town next to his. We sat at bar seats eating, hockey and basketball flashing on TV screens, and asked each other questions about our families, about our friends, and about each other. It was no different than any other time I’d visited him over the years. Our time without speaking hadn’t changed anything.
Back at his house, we watched the Friday night NBA games on ESPN, both of us admitting we weren’t following the season as closely as years passed. At about nine o’clock, his mother-in-law stopped by, delivering his daughter home after a “girl’s night out.” His daughter was six years old now—the last time I had seen her was when she was three. She was a different person entirely. She was clearly exhausted, but she greeted me politely and reminded me that I had given her a set of Winnie the Pooh books as a present when she was a baby. Then she ran upstairs to put on her pajamas. She returned a few minutes later, somehow revitalized, and wanted Jeff and I to entertain her. The only thing I could think to show her was how to draw the “cool S,” which, thankfully, she loved.
Soon, Jeff put her to bed and when he came back downstairs, we mutually agreed that we should call it a night. It was only 11 o’clock. For him, that was late; for me, it was early. Before we retired to our rooms, we had to set up the Elf on the Shelf for his daughter to find in the morning. “It’s stressful finding new hiding places,” Jeff said to me, his eyes half-lidded. But we found a suitable spot and then walked quietly up the stairs. As we parted, we said how good it was to see each other.
The next morning, I was greeted downstairs by Jeff’s daughter, full of energy before her tennis lesson, who wanted to show me where the Elf on the Shelf had hidden overnight. I had some coffee and then helped her put together a jigsaw puzzle. The whole time I was struck by her personality, her sense of humor, and her general maturity for a six year old girl. She didn’t seem to think twice about talking at length to an adult she most likely had no memory of.
When it was time for her tennis lesson, Jeff and I dropped her off at the house of a couple in his neighborhood. The couple were friends of Jeff and his wife and I’d met them several times before. Then, they didn’t have kids—now they had two, with a third on the way. The kids greeted Jeff’s daughter and they began to run around the house chaotically while we made small talk with the wife (the husband was away, alone, at a co-worker’s wedding) and Jeff thanked her for taking his daughter to tennis and for watching her in the afternoon while he and I went to a Providence College men’s basketball game. Suddenly, I understood what a large portion of my mother’s life had been like when Jeff and I were kids.
We left and made one more stop in the neighborhood at the home of another couple that Jeff and his wife were friends with. This couple didn’t have children, but the husband was coming to the basketball game with us. We drove into Providence and went to a new restaurant that was supposed to have good burgers. There, another friend of Jeff’s I’d met several times in the past joined us too. He remembered me and asked me about my work and my career. He was now involved in minting NFTs and we all proceeded to talk about that—because how could we not?
During lunch, I sat and listened to Jeff and his two friends talk about a country club they all wanted to join before moving onto other topics about their lives in and around Providence. Jeff and his friends lived a short drive from each other in the same, picturesque neighborhood; most of them had kids; they took tennis lessons and their kids took tennis lessons; they knew about country clubs. Most of my time was spent working, sitting in my apartment trying to write, and going to movies. I didn’t know when my girlfriend and I were going to get married, if I’d ever have enough money to buy a home, if I’d ever have kids, or if I’d ever have the courage to move from New York City. Jeff was thirty-six like me, but he lived a different version of thirty-six.
After lunch, we went to the basketball game and had some beer. I hazily watched, from good seats in the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, as Providence blew out Central Connecticut College. During the game, Jeff and I talked about our childhood friends some more. Before we knew it, the game was over and we were on our way back to pick up Jeff’s daughter.
After dinner that night, Jeff’s wife and his daughter went to bed while Jeff and I stayed up finishing two bottles of red wine. We started talking about our friends again. He told me that he felt bad that he wasn’t good about keeping up with people; that he was envious that I’d always been good about making the time to visit friends. I told him not to be so hard on himself, that he had his own business to run, a daughter to take care of, a family that required his attention.
I told him that I felt bad about not keeping up with our friends. Then I started to drunkenly talk about Get Back, about how astonishing it was to see the Beatles and their friendship so clearly on a screen for eight hours. I told him how it reminded me of us, of our friends. I explained how it would, of course, have been impossible for us to stay together just as it would have been impossible for the Beatles to remain a band. “I know it sounds stupid to compare us to the Beatles,” I told him, “but its true. We all had different interests, were all different people, all wanted to do different things with our lives. But we all know each other so well, and even if we don’t see each other, somehow that never goes away.” I could feel tears forming in my eyes.
“I know,” he said. “I have to watch it.”
I smiled, knowing that he never would. And suddenly I realized that I was very drunk and needed to go to bed. It was 11 o’clock again.
The next day, Jeff and I played with his daughter in the rec room he had made for her by finishing their basement. We had a fake snowball fight with a set of plush white balls, which we threw at each other from behind pillow forts. Then, Jeff, accompanied by his wife and daughter, took me to the train station. I got my bags and said goodbye to his wife and daughter through the window of the car. The way his daughter smiled at me made me feel as if I had made an impression, that she might now remember me as her father’s friend the next time I came to visit.
Jeff and I hugged goodbye and he told me he was glad I came, that I could make the trip. I told him I was too. Then I boarded the train and sat in a commuter line seat, watching the early winter darkness set in over the towns and woods between Providence and Boston, as people in homes who had to go to work the next day settled in for their Sunday dinners.
V.
I spent the night alone in Boston. After I checked into my hotel, I went to the gym, then went out to dinner in the South End at an Italian restaurant one of Jeff’s friends had recommended to me. I was hungry and ate a large meal while starting Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, which I only realized later was about the strain that time and life put on a friendship between two women. Walking through the cold Boston streets in search of a place to buy a beer to bring back to my hotel room, I felt a sense of pleasure. I was alone in a city that wasn’t New York for the first time in years.
The next day I checked out and got my rental car and started the three hour drive to Boston. As I drove, I listened to an interview with Peter Jackson about Get Back on a Beatles podcast. I passed through Massachusetts and New Hampshire on I-93 before getting on the peaceful and scenic I-89, which took me up and across Vermont.
I approached Morristown at around sunset. It was a mild day for December and the air had become gauzy, filled with gentle pinks and purples. All of the snowfall had melted from the recent spell of rain and warmer weather and so the surrounding fields were still a surprisingly healthy-looking green. When I made my way up the dirt road and long dirt driveway to Chris’s home, it was nearly dark and he was collecting mail from the mailbox.
We greeted each other and he showed me a pork butt he was slow cooking on his charcoal grill, fearing that he had maybe started it too late. I told him it was fine, that I wouldn’t be hungry for a while, and we went inside and started to drink non-alcoholic IPAs in nicely designed cans, waiting for his wife to come back from the gym with some actual beer. He and I sipped at the non-alcoholic IPAs and slipped easily into joking: taking on weird accents and voices, acting out characters in stories, real or made up, that we relayed to each other. It felt natural, the way it always was.
But a pause in our conversation struck me. Our laughter had subsided and suddenly his kitchen was quiet; he glanced at me while he drank from his can. And I was paranoid for a minute that maybe this would be harder than I thought, that maybe the gap I had created would be too difficult to bridge. That moment passed, however, and soon we were on to something else, talking seriously about work or our lives before making fun of each other for how serious we took things when we were left to our own devices, away from each other and away from the sanctuary that friendship can provide from the pressure and absurdity of the world.
He told me that he was glad I was there, and I said I was too. I told him about what Jeff and I had talked about and my fascination with Get Back and the way the Beatles, as friends, reminded me so much of our friendship. Nodding, he said that he hadn’t watched it yet because he wanted to wait to watch it with me.
Some amount of time passed and his wife returned home with beer. I greeted her and we started to drink. By nearly nine o’clock, the pork butt wasn’t as done as we would have liked but we ate it anyway with tortillas and beans and limes and fresh vegetables from their greenhouse. After dinner, we took beers with us down to the creek that ran at the border of their property and stood along the water’s edge looking up at the moon.
That night, I went to bed in a guest room on the first floor of their house. The room was drafty, but I was warm from the blankets and the heat coming from the wood burning stove in the main sitting room right outside my door. I turned out the light in my room and stared at the still-rolling fire, glowing orange in the small stove window, for a moment before closing the door, careful to leave it slightly ajar to allow the heat in.
The next day, Chis, his wife, and I set off for a nearby hike. In the shade, the air was frigid, but in the stretches of sun it was warm enough to take off a layer—or maybe two. There were patches of ice along rocks and flat, shady straightaways that made some parts of the hike slightly difficult, but that didn’t stop us from joking, retelling old stories, remembering things.
Several times I said something that made Chris laugh loudly. Each time, I felt a sense of pride swell in me that I hadn’t felt in some time. I remembered how much pleasure I took, how much of an achievement it felt to me, to make him laugh. And I thought about the moments throughout Get Back where Paul and John are constantly looking at each other after they make a joke or a reference, hoping for the other’s laughter or recognition.
We reached the summit of the hike and sat on a rock outcropping in the full sun, surveying the land. The rolling mountains were all gray and brown and in the distance a slate-colored lake sat dully under the sun. I took in deep breaths of the sharp cold air and tried to enjoy how clear everything looked in the early winter afternoon. We discussed what to do for the rest of the afternoon, for dinner, and for the evening. And soon we were heading back down the way we came, taking great care not to slip on the ice.
On the way home, we stopped to buy mezcal and a mixer. Outside of a small grocery store, Chris and his wife ran into a friend of theirs, an older man who had lived in the area for years. They greeted each other and talked about how it had been so long since they’d seen one another. Chris and his wife asked about his health and he told them about his recovery from bone marrow surgery and how he still couldn’t do all the things he wanted. All the while, he held a store-bought sandwich wrapped in cellophane in one hanging hand. After a few more minutes, we parted and drove home as the evening set in.
As we got dinner ready, the three of us drank mezcal mixed with raspberry lemonade and got pleasantly buzzed. Chris and his wife showed me pictures from their wedding, which had been a small affair, officiated on cross country skis in the middle of the woods, during the very onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I gazed at the pictures on their laptop: at the two of them exchanging rings on their skis, at the procession they and the other people gathered made through the snow, at them all sitting around a table at a sushi restaurant afterwards with big tropical drinks, at one attendee splayed out on the snow-covered hood of a car after dinner. Chris had told us about his wedding in our group chat, had explained it was only a small thing and that he’d celebrate with us all sometime in the summer. Then the pandemic hit and now, suddenly, almost two years of life had passed.
The next morning, Chris’s last good pair of jeans ripped, so I went with him to the store to buy two pairs of new ones. As he was checking out at the general store, he told the clerk that he knew her father—the store’s owner. We left and as we got in the car I made fun of his jeans or something else and it made Chris laugh. I drove my rental car along the rural roads with Chris in the passenger seat and it could have been us driving back to work at my father’s warehouse back on Long Island, where we used to spend our days for three summers in a row. Whenever I drove back then, we listened to the Beatles’s Anthology 3.
In the afternoon, I helped Chris clear out an old shed that adjoined his house. It was filled with a wide range of items from the fascinating to the useless: old teacups, commemorative Budweiser mugs with ceramic Clydesdales, old buckets used for storing sap, hockey equipment, a rusted chainsaw. Mainly, it was filled with pairs and pairs of skis—both alpine and cross country. We took them all out and laid them on the frozen mud and gravel at the end of his driveway. As I carried one pair, he said, “Be careful with those, those were Sam’s.”
I nodded and handled them with care. Sam had been his best friend in Vermont, but he had passed away several years ago. Whenever I saw Chris or spoke to him, I often forgot that he had experienced the death of a friend.
I handed the pairs of skis to Chris as he laid them across the rafters of a small wooden garage he had built to house his tractors. One by one, he methodically placed them on the raised wood planks. When he was finished, we stored the useful items from the shed in the stone basement and the useless items we threw onto a dump truck Chris now owned for his business. The sun was starting to set and we had cleared out the shed completely. Over the next year, he was hoping to tear it down and turn it into a proper mud room addition to their house.
That night, we went out to dinner at a restaurant in Stowe Village. Our waitress was friends with Chris and his wife, and each time she came over to the table they discussed people they knew. I sat with my margarita and tried to participate, but all I could do was watch. Chris, like Jeff, had made a life in the place that he lived. His world was dotted with new characters and friends, local signposts that made it a community. I thought about my life in New York and my apprehension of anything resembling a community; my strange attraction to anonymity. There was nothing similar in my life.
We went home after dinner and suddenly I realized that I was leaving the next day. After a beer or two, Chris said that he was tired and that he was going to go up to bed. I went over my timeline for getting out of the house and driving the hour it took to get to the Burlington airport. Chris nodded and yawned and then walked heavily up the creaking wood steps. I realized that we had never watched Get Back and I didn’t care. There was no reason to.
It rained overnight and into the morning. Chris made me coffee and breakfast as I got my things together to pack in my rental car. We sat and ate, talking idly, but the air was filled with that strange apprehension that rises between old friends when they know they are going to have to go separate ways. It’s a feeling of sadness—because the time together is ending—mixed with uncertainty—because each one is not sure if the other felt that the time together carried the same importance—mixed with relief—because each one is ready to get back to their own life.
I washed my dishes, got my bags, and took them to the car with Chris walking beside me. The rain had turned to a light mist, but the ground was still frozen solid and I could feel it crunch below my boots. Chris and I stood in the mist, looking at his house, at the dirt driveway, and the field that spread out alongside it. We glanced at each other and then looked away, mumbling about how good of a time it was and how we needed to see each other again soon. The love between us was there, each of us too embarrassed or ill-equipped to fully articulate it in the moment. So all we could do was give each other a damp hug.
I drove slowly down the driveway and saw Chris in my rearview mirror, idling for a second, before striding back into his house. As I drove through Morristown and Stowe, my windshield wipers batting away mist, I dreaded returning home. My trip to visit my friends was already over. And with each passing day, I would be closer and closer to working again, to being faced with my career, my professional responsibilities, and the ways that I let those things fill me up, distract me, drive me on, and give me a false sense of success and meaning.
By the time I got to Burlington, the rain had blown out and the sky had begun to clear. I made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare, so I sat near the small area by my gate, waiting for my JetBlue flight back to JFK. I was pleased with myself for carrying out the trip. All of my planning had worked, the logistics had all fit in place. I’d visited my friends the way I said I would and it hadn’t been so bad.
VI.
The breakup of the Beatles is often discussed or referred to in the same way that we talk about much of history: an event that happened on a specific day, after which, everything changed. But, of course, it wasn’t like that.
Paul stormed out of the recording sessions for the song “She Said She Said” in 1966; Ringo quit the band during the recording of The White Album in 1968; George left the group in January of 1969 when they were at Twickenham for the Get Back sessions; John told the Beatles he was quitting in September of 1969, but was convinced by Alan Klein, their manager at that point, to keep it quiet; Paul was the one who infamously announced to the world that he was leaving the Beatles as part of the promotion around the release of his first solo album, McCartney, in April 1970. But their creative partnership wasn’t legally dissolved until 1974—John placed his signature on the documents while he was on vacation at Disney World.
Throughout the early 1970s they played on each other’s solo albums; in some years, they would say to the press in various ways, perhaps unconvincingly, that they were all getting along; they also pissed each other off in completely petty and insulting ways (Rob Sheffield’s 2017 book Dreaming the Beatles tells the story of John not attending a concert George played at Madison Square Garden in 1974 because his astrologer told him “it wasn’t the right day”); in 1974, Paul offered to try and save John’s relationship with Yoko while John was on his “lost weekend” in Los Angeles and the two ended up playing together on the infamous Toot and a Snore recording; in 1975, John and Paul were, supposedly, together at The Dakota on the Upper West Side when Lorne Michaels offered the Beatles $3,000 to reunite on Saturday Night Live.
They couldn’t stop being Beatles, just as they couldn’t stop being friends, just as they couldn’t stop being John, Paul, George, and Ringo, the names they all called each other before the world did. George, perhaps the most forthright of the four, summed it up best in a 1970 interview when he was asked about the current state of the relationships between them:
“Well, I get on well with Ringo and John, and I try my best to get on well with Paul. And uhh, there's nothing much more we can... it’s just a matter of time, you know, just for everybody to work out their own problems and once they’ve done that I'm sure we'll get back ’round the cycle again. But if not, you know, it’s still alright. Whatever happens, you know, it’s gonna be okay.”
When John Lennon was killed on December 8, 1980, the idea of their friendship as something active, as something that could heal whatever the wounds were at that point and lead them to perform again for the world, began to fade. Instead, it hardened into legacy—into a “what if.” But they had been friends that whole time, both moving away from and back toward each other on their own tracks, their own cycles through life.
As Rob Sheffield writes in Dreaming the Beatles, when Ringo, George, and Paul reunited for The Beatles Anthology in the early ’90s, “George visibly found it difficult to tolerate being in the same room as Paul.” Whatever hurt remained was probably tied to a quip that George used to describe his relationship to Paul: “Paul was always 9 months older than I. Even now he’s still 9 months older than I.” And that is something you say about someone you’ve known your whole life—someone you’ve loved deeply and resented deeply as well.
As I’ve gotten older, the song “Free as a Bird,” which was recorded for The Beatles Anthology off a John Lennon piano and vocal demo, has grown on me. It’s an aching and beautiful song. What I love about it perhaps the most, is the music video for the song. The video takes what is supposed to be a “bird’s eye” view on the entire Beatles career and mythology. Scenes from their music videos, films, news reels, references to characters, people and places in their songs are spliced and interspersed as a bird seemingly flies around both London and Liverpool. For some reason, I find this video and the song extremely moving. Perhaps it is because the video does an astonishingly succinct job of unfurling the Beatles mythology through images, through the multiple lives they lived in just over a decade.
But the video only encapsulates the mythology of their lives up through 1970. They each lived on after that, carrying forward the friendship they had forged together and as individuals within the group. Peter Jackson’s Get Back shows, in stunning depth and detail, the beginning of the end of the Beatles as a musical partnership. But what it also shows is a specific moment in time between four (admittedly incredibly famous and important) friends who have known each other for years.
My friends and I will never be as famous as the Beatles. No one will ever write books about us or make a music video that brings together the mythology of our shared lives together. And yet, we are and will continue to be friends, proceeding on our own paths through life, the time when we were all together all the time firmly behind us. We will continue through life, like every person and every friend who lives and has ever lived, moving closer together and then further away from each other. We will work out our own problems and then once we’ve done that, we’ll go back round the cycle again. And whatever happens, you know, it’s going to be okay.