http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/article/855344--what-if-the-beatles-had-just-let-it-be
What if The Beatles had just let it be?
40 years ago this summer, The Beatles officially called it quits. Geoff Pevere wonders what would have happened if they’d stayed together
What if The Beatles had just let it be?
40 years ago this summer, The Beatles officially called it quits. Geoff Pevere wonders what would have happened if they’d stayed together
By Geoff Pevere Entertainment Columnist
Published On Wed Sep 01 2010
“In order to put out of its misery the limping dog of a news story which has been dragging itself across your pages for the past year, my answer to the question: ‘Will The Beatles get together again?’ is no.” ? Paul McCartney, in an August 1970 letter to Melody Maker magazine.
With these words, published 40 years ago this summer, Paul McCartney rather bluntly killed the rumours that the breakup of The Beatles was just another Paul-is-dead hoax. The world’s most popular rock band was, definitively, dead.
As distressing as the news might have been for countless fans who felt robbed of a future, it also meant the world was spared any number of ugly scenarios: the Beatles becoming a pathetic oldies band; The Beatles embracing country-rock, glam, prog rock, disco, punk or rock opera; The Beatles becoming a pale, sorry shadow of their former selves. A band we wished had broken up.
Nevertheless, McCartney’s words started something else, a game of “imagine” that still thrives, perhaps the most persistent instance of what-if wondering in popular music history.
What if The Beatles hadn’t called it quits?
The question is posed despite the fact that, even then, we knew it was over. Ever since McCartney announced his plans to go solo the previous spring, he and John Lennon had engaged in public spitballing on Melody Maker’s pages. (“Paul hasn’t quit. I sacked him.”) Rumours were rife that the reason for the delay of the swan-song album Let it Be — originally titled Get Back — was that The Beatles had grown to hate each other, and the album reflected that fact. That’s why Abbey Road, which was actually recorded after Let it Be but was strained by the cracks of the rift between Lennon and McCartney, was released first.
McCartney had wanted Abbey Road to be one long, unfolding suite. Lennon thought the idea was not feasible. The compromise was an album that had discrete songs on one side and a suite on the other.
McCartney wanted the next album to be recorded before a live audience, something The Beatles hadn’t done in three years. Lennon nixed this idea, as well as any plans the band might get back on the road. He hated the thought of touring, while McCartney thought it vital to the band’s future.
Then, with that letter, there was no future.
But what if there was?
“One can imagine they would have continued to evolve,” says York University ethnomusicology professor Rob Bowman of the band’s “stunning” rate of development in the brief, brilliant decade it was together. “And one can imagine that they would have got back on the road if they’d stayed together. Who knows what that would have meant?”
At McGill University, Will Straw is another teacher of popular music and culture, arenas of study that might not exist were it not for The Beatles’ storming of the barriers between the popular and the intellectual. Looking back, he thinks the timing of the breakup was perfect.
“It allows them to stand as the perfect example of this historical moment,” Straw observes, “which is when rock becomes both amazingly popular and changes everything around the world, but also becomes sort of arty and introspective and creative. They embodied that more than anybody else. So it’s sort of perfect that they broke up when they did.”
For Keir Keightley, an associate professor in the department of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario, the question itself reveals the enormous nature of the band and its influence. He believes The Beatles might not be The Beatles—at least not as omnipresently so — if they hadn’t split 40 years ago.
“Had they not broken up,” Keightley says, “it’s possible the respect that’s given them might have been more eroded. Perhaps they would have been a target of punk music and things might have been slightly different because they would not have been deified as quickly or as massively in the ’70s and ’80s.”
It’s like this. To become The Beatles — the formidable cultural entity — they needed to stop being The Beatles — the flawed human aggregate of four guys succumbing to the pressures of fame, fatigue and paralyzing expectations. They are what they are because they quit when they did.
But the wondering isn’t entirely unwarranted. Bowman, for one, hears a number of portents of what might have been in The Beatles’ final studio sessions.
“I’m sure they would have toured,” he speculates. “That would have transformed their legacy substantially. They would have had to get their chops back together as live players, which they had let slip because nobody could hear them and nobody cared anyway, which was one reason they stopped touring.
“It might have led to simpler, back-to-rock-’n’-roll material, it might have led to ever-evolving, complicated stuff. I’m not saying they would have made records like Close to the Edge by Yes, but I think the Abbey Road suite, that’s pointing in a similar kind of direction. And look at the solo material, Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, the first two McCartney albums. Great records.”
“One might even argue,” Bowman says, “that the deterioration one saw in Paul and John and George’s solo songwriting might not have happened if they had been editing each other. Who can tell Paul McCartney it’s not good enough except for John or George or Ringo? No one’s going to tell him that. Likewise for any of them.”
Back to rock ’n’ roll? Beatlesque prog rock? Fab Four disco? These possibilities point to yet another path: the one where The Beatles persist to the point of parody.
“The real horrible scenario would have been the Spinal Tap one,” winces Straw. “You watch Spinal Tap and they do the history of the group, and they started out as a skiffle group and then they were a beat group and then they went psychedelic. Well, in fact the band that’s closest to that is The Beatles. But they didn’t go beyond that into all the sort of horrible stuff that Spinal Tap stands for. So it’s hard to imagine. The beauty of The Beatles was the tensions between Lennon and McCartney and the others, but at a point when those tensions were still creative.”
Looking back on the 1970s, Keightley wonders if The Beatles would have survived the assault on rock orthodoxy wrought by punk and the post-boomer backlash.
“Take the Stones,” Keightley points out. “The fact that they had a ‘Steel Wheelchairs’ tour and people call it that, that tells us a lot,” he adds, referring to the band’s Steel Wheels tour. “So it’s very likely that The Beatles would have gone through that period where they would have been seen as an enemy of innovation, as dinosaurs. If they kept touring into the ’80s and ’90s, it could have been seen as laughable. ‘When I’m 64’ might not have been treated as gently I think as it was when McCartney, Sir Paul, turned 64.”
In any case, it’s not like John, Paul, George and Ringo owed the world anything when the band called it quits.
“What else might they have given us?” Bowman asks disbelievingly. “They transformed the whole notion of what rock music could be. Along with Dylan, they made the album the dominant mode of expression, rather than the 45. Not only the dominant mode of expression but the dominant mode of commerce. Which leads to FM radio and a serious rock press, which leads to things such as Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, which leads to a seriousness of an audience which changes the whole notion of what live performance is.”
“Then the shift from pop entertainer to rock artist,” Bowman adds, “a shift in the way musicians thought of themselves and a shift in the way audiences thought about themselves. Some people would argue that that was a bad thing, but other people would argue it’s an amazing thing because it leads to great music that follows long past The Beatles’ breakup. None of which would have happened if rock wasn’t considered an art form rather than simply entertainment for kids.”
“That’s a huge shift,” says Bowman. “A massive transformation in both the creative process and political economy which, given the role rock played in the culture at large, makes it pretty hard to imagine what more any group could have given the planet.”
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