Today is the fortieth anniversary of the senseless, stupid murder of former Beatle John Lennon. I was a sophomore in college when it happened, and I remember it well because December 8 was the birthday of the woman I was dating at the time. I was sitting in Heidi’s dorm room just a few minutes before midnight when her mother called to wish her a happy birthday — and dropped the bombshell, “Did you hear one of the Beatles was killed?”
The Beatles had been part of my life for as long as I could remember.
I was a 3-year-old kid watching entranced when the Beatles performed on Ed Sullivan in early 1964. I was in the third grade when I learned the devastating news that they had broken up. My teen years were spent getting to know their music better and always feeling like their solo careers could never measure up to the magic that the Fab Four created as a group. Like Bill Graham and so many others, I dreamed that some day John, Paul, George and Ringo would bury their collective hatchets and make new music, or at least launch the tour to end all tours. Can you imagine all four Beatles performing the Abbey Road medley live? It’s magic when Paul plays just the last bits of it in his solo shows. It’s magic when tribute bands or artists play it. One can only wonder how it might have been had they all reunited, even just for one glorious tour.
On December 8, 1980, all those dreams were shot dead with five point-blank bullets in John Lennon’s back.
Like so many people of my generation whose childhood and/or adolescence had the Beatles for a soundtrack, I’ve never stopped loving — or listening to — their music. I grieved nineteen years ago, when George Harrison succumbed to cancer (he was younger than I am now), and preened with pride when “my” childhood band had the best-selling album not only of the year 2001, but of the decade 2001-2010! (I’m speaking of their compilation album of number one hits, simply called “1” — if you’re one of the three people on the planet who don’t own a copy, you can get it by clicking here).
But today, on this rather unhappy anniversary, I’d like to highlight an interesting story, that I stumbled upon a few months ago.
This story involves Paul and Linda McCartney and famed rockabilly musician Carl Perkins. It’s a story with a bit of a supernatural edge to it. Coincidence? Or a hint of how love can get expressed from even beyond the grave? I’ll let you decide.
To set the stage, let’s pause again to reflect on both the tragedy and the irony of the Beatles breaking up. The most commercially and critically successful music group of the rock and roll era ended their ten-year association with a bitter court battle and incredible vitriol between various members of the band, who wrote songs and used interviews to bash one another. How could musicians who sang songs like “All You Need Is Love” and “All Together Now” end up being so mean to one another? Well, it happened — but it also wasn’t the end of the story.
In a video interview, the legendary rockabilly musician Carl Perkins told the story of helping Paul McCartney record his first album after the shocking murder of John Lennon in 1980. Perkins spent a week with the former Beatle on the Island of Montserrat, where producer George Martin had a studio. It was literally just weeks after Lennon’s murder, and both George Harrison and Ringo Starr came to spend time with their former bandmate. Apparently Carl Perkins had a wonderful time there, for the night before he was scheduled to return to America a song came to him, about the beauty of friendship. The next morning he told Paul and his wife Linda he wanted to play it for them, as a kind of “Thank you” for their time together. The song, “My Old Friend,” started off as a sweet ode to friendship but then took a melancholy turn; Perkins sang about what might happen if two friends never saw one another again on this side of life. The verse ended with a plaintive request to the old friend, to “think about me every now and then.” As he sang those words, tears streamed down Paul’s face and he abruptly left the room. Not sure what had just happened, Carl stopped playing, and Linda hugged him. She thanked him for helping Paul grieve — and said that John Lennon had spoken the same words to Paul the last time the two spoke before he was killed.
Was this a coincidence?
Or was John Lennon sending his “old friend” a message from beyond the grave?
Perhaps this is just as clear an example as any, of how love — and related virtues such as forgiveness, reconciliation, and remembrance — can extend, even into eternity.
I’m not going to pass judgment here. For all we know, this is just a big coincidence. Or maybe it’s just a testament to how sensitive a man Carl Perkins was, that he could intuitively pick up the one phrase that would not only express his affection for Paul McCartney, but also remind McCartney that, beneath the tragedy and brokenness of the Beatles’ breakup, there was genuine love there between John and Paul — a love that could not be destroyed even by a coward’s bullets.
John Lennon was only a few weeks past his 40th birthday when he died, and now four decades have passed since his tragic, untimely death. It’s mind-boggling that he’s been as gone for as long as he was here. It doesn’t seem so but that’s a testament to how timelessly classic Lennon’s music continues to be.
Today, let’s celebrate the beauty of music, and the enduring magic of love and friendship. I still grieve Lennon’s senseless passing, but I sure do celebrate the gifts he gave, literally, to the world. Like millions of people around the world, I continue to think of him every now and then.
Carl Perkin’s song about friendship can be found on his album Go Cat Go, where he’s accompanied by McCartney. Several videos on Youtube explore the spiritual meaning of the song. Here’s one.
I have a guilty pleasure that I don’t think I’ve ever written about, here on my blog. Well, here goes: I’m a fan of Neil Gaiman.
Years ago somebody told me I simply had to read the Sandman comics. At the time I just filed that recommendation away for future reference (I’m slowly making my way through them now). On a trip to England about fifteen years ago now, when a friend learned that I had never read Good Omens he immediately went to a bookstore and bought a copy, which he gave to me to read on my flight home. Which I did, and I laughed all the way across the Atlantic (my apologies to whomever was sitting next to me).
Then movies like Stardust and (especially) Coraline made me pay closer attention to Gaiman and his unique blend of myth, fantasy and just a touch of horror. Normally I don’t have much taste for horror at all, but Gaiman is such a skillful storyteller that even the icky stuff in his work I find insightful and thought-provoking.
Gaiman’s writing appeals to the same part of me that loves Narnia and Hogwarts: my appreciation for stories that deal in archetypes and the imagination, that recognize there’s more to life than meets the eye even if sometimes what’s lurking in the dark is actually kinda scary.
While no one would ever mistake Gaiman for a “Christian author,” religion does crop up, but usually in a manner that many people of faith might find discomfiting. Good Omens — which you may know from the 2019 BBC/Amazon TV adaptation — is a playfully flippant, but ultimately warm-hearted, reimagining of the Christian apocalypse, replete with evil nuns, the Antichrist as a boy, and the four horseman of the apocalypse keeping up with modern times by riding motorcycles. Literal-minded Christians might look askance at the story’s central premise: that an angel and a demon might join forces to thwart the apocalypse — but beneath the story’s seeming impiety, it in fact offers some meaningful insights into religion and spirituality for those who watch with an open mind.
Perhaps more objectionable to some would be Gaiman’s short story, “The Problem of Susan” (found in his book Fragile Things), which reflects on the fate of the character from the Narnia books who is “left behind” because she preferred lipstick and nylons to the stories of Aslan. Whether Lewis was profiling the sin of vanity or displaying a subconscious misogyny is open for debate, but Gaiman caps this story with a violent/erotic dream sequence that might be too offensive — and bereft of redemption — for many Christians.
Mythology and Meaning
I read Neil Gaiman neither because of nor in spite of his irreligiosity (or irreverence), but rather because of his ability to weave imaginative dream-worlds that are neither beholden to, nor constrained by, the ordinary neoplatonic cosmology which shapes the mystical and contemplative writing I spend most of my time reading (whether such writing originated in the twelfth century or the twenty-first). As Christians we may not like to admit it, but our world-view is as “mythical” as anything found in the fantasy aisles of your neighborhood used bookstore.
In one of his letters, C. S. Lewis once said of Christianity, “Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.” This was the conclusion he reached after struggling with the fact that the myth of a dying-and-rising god is found in many mythologies around the world. He wrote that letter in 1931, and many critics today might want to argue about what “really happened” means — or doesn’t mean. As I have noted elsewhere, myth has a power to influence and even transform its listeners, even when the stories of myth clearly have no foundation in history.
Good modernist that he was, for Lewis it was necessary for something to have “really happened” before he could accept its authority in his life. A postmodernist, trying to balance the authority of faith with the reality of historical criticism, might say “Can we ever truly know what ‘really’ happened? Of course not. But we can measure how whatever did happen — and certainly something did, for the followers of Christ were motivated enough to launch a worldwide spiritual movement — and, perhaps most important of all, we can enter into the story for ourselves and see what really happens to us, when we open our hearts to that story.”
J. R. R. Tolkien once noted about The Lord of Rings that “the tale grew in the telling.” Isn’t that the way of all myth? Think about how the story of Christ is more complex, more nuanced, today than it was even two hundred years ago. The foundational text (i.e., the New Testament) is the same, but we have surrounded that text with liturgy, folk customs, music, art, drama, film — just consider the story of the Nativity. Can we imagine telling that story without all the trappings of Advent and Christmas? Yet much of what we think of as “traditional” customs associated with the celebration of the nativity only go back to the Victorian age.
Or consider the concept of hell — Jon Sweeney’s insightful book Inventing Hellexplores how so much of our cultural understanding of the punishment that God will mete out to the damned comes not from the Biblical, but from later sources — like Dante’s Divine Comedy.
A good story helps us to make sense of the world we live in. But our stories also shape how we relate to things, whether for good or ill. There’s a buzz among Beatles fans right now, because Peter Jackson (who directed the film version of The Lord of the Rings — man, Tolkien is all over this blog post!) has been commissioned to create a new documentary called Get Back which will be, in essence, a new version of the last Beatles film, Let it Be. Let it Be is a somber film because it zeroes in on the conflicts within the band, conflicts that would contribute to their split just a few months later. But Jackson reviewed over 50 hours of unreleased footage, and has decided to tell a different story — emphasizing that even with the tensions between the band members, there was still plenty of joy and camaraderie between them as they made music together.
Same event, same basic story, but told in two different ways. Which version is the most “true”? The answer, of course, is yes.
Imagination and Insight
All this is to say: the reason why writers like Neil Gaiman, or Tolkien, or Lewis, or J.K. Rowling, sell millions of books is the same reason why movies based on Marvel Comics continue to be blockbusters: stories that ignite the human imagination, that invite us into the mythic space where anything seems possible, help us to know who we are and how we fit in to a mysterious and sometimes challenging universe.
And while I write spiritual nonfiction and am inspired primarily by contemplatives who lived centuries ago, I like to read books by the likes of Gaiman because his stories give my imagination a workout — even when I might forcefully disagree with the spiritual implications of what he has to say.
In the contemplative world, perhaps the best guide to encountering the Mystery of God through the stories of our imagination is St. Ignatius of Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises is based on the idea of using your imagination to encounter Christ — here and now, in your own heart, your own mind’s eye. If our imagination can create a sense of meaning and a framework for interpreting the world as we encounter it, doesn’t it only stand to reason that the Spirit (who, after all, is in our hearts) can use our imagination to inspire us or surprise us?
In Ignatian prayer, we imagine ourselves encountering Christ during one of the stories from the Gospels. Ignatius encourages his directees to use their imagination as vividly as possible. Imagine being in Christ’s presence — and then imagine having a conversation with Jesus. What would you say to him? What questions would you ask? For that matter, what would he say to you and what questions would he pose to you?
Our imaginations are not infallible, so anything we experience in this type of prayer needs to be subject to discernment. But don’t let that caveat dissuade you from exploring the mystery of Christ through he storylines of your imagination. You might be amazed at the unexpected insights awaiting you.
Fifty years ago today — on April 10, 1970 — the Beatles announced that they were breaking up. We now know that this had been brewing for at least two years, as the members of the band grew apart both creatively and personally. But just like there is a difference between a troubled marriage and a marriage where the couple has decided to get a divorce, so too it seemed that everything changed on that spring day half a century ago.
I remember well when I discovered that the Beatles were splitting up. It may not have been that exact day, but it was certainly not long after. It was the spring of my 3rd grade year — also the year of the first Earth Day, which would take place just twelve days later. One of my classmates broke the news to me. “Did you hear the Beatles are breaking up?” he asked, with a seriousness as if he were announcing the death of Santa Claus. Having loved the Beatles ever since as a 3-year-old I watched them on Ed Sullivan, this news really did feel like learning of a loved one’s passing.
If you were born after about 1980, you will have no recollection of this — but until John Lennon was murdered, there was always some speculation in the air about “would the Beatles get back together?” Impresarios like Bill Graham offered them millions of dollars to agree to just one tour — or even just one concert. It certainly didn’t seem likely — Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison all used both interviews and lyrics of some of their solo songs to implicitly (or explicitly) attack one another. Only Ringo seemed to be above the fray, managing on at least one album to get all three of his former bandmates to appear as guest stars (although not on the same track).
It would eventually come out that Paul and John had managed to some extent to salvage their friendship by the mid-70s, but only in the privacy of their homes. But then a deranged, cowardly fan shot Lennon five times in the back, and a Beatles reunion became an impossibility. Even when the three survivors would work together in the mid 1990s to produce their “Anthology” series, the story goes that they talked about re-recording “Let it Be” together, as a trio — but the absence of John was just too much to bear, and all they could manage to do was play a few oldies together.
All four ex-Beatles had respectable solo careers, but all four also released some pretty mediocre-to-awful material as solo artists (or in McCartney’s case, as a member of Wings). Considering how creative and visionary the Beatles were even on their last group effort (Abbey Road, even though it was released prior to the less magnificent but still eminently listenable Let it Be), we could argue that the Beatles were brilliant in their timing: they broke up at an optimal moment, where each could find a way to shine as a solo artist, and yet their body of work as a group was protected from the kind of decline that mars the later work of so many other bands.
To commemorate this sad, if inevitable, day, I’d like to reflect on four songs, one from each of the individual Beatles. Ringo’s song comes from Abbey Road, but the other three are all songs from their solo careers (or in McCartney’s case, from Wings). Each of these songs is instantly recognizable as a signature song of each individual Beatle — indeed, two of these were #1 hits when first released — but I also think they are songs that, taken together, speak to the kind of fragmented spiritual life that characterizes our culture over the last 50 years. When the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan’s Show in 1964, it was a moment of cultural unity, at least for white Americans. But a decade later, we were already beginning to see the fissures in our cultural identity that separated liberals from conservatives, hippies from capitalists, true believers from hardcore atheists, and activists from ostrich-in-the-sand-ists — basically, the kinds of splits that have gone on to ignite what we now call the culture wars.
Maybe I’m overstating the case a bit, but I’d like to suggest that one of the reasons why the Beatles continue to fascinate us, half a century after they went their separate ways, is precisely because the psychological differences that contributed to their split are similar to the problems that we face as an entire society. Maybe we can learn something from how each of the Beatles sees the world in their own particular way.
I should also point out that, as popular and influential as they were, the solo Beatles certainly do not offer a comprehensive commentary on our culture: they were all men, all white, to the best of my knowledge all straight, and by the time of their solo careers all quite wealthy. So there are limitations to how they represent the fragmentation of our culture. But even so, I think it’s interesting to consider how these four signature songs really do represent four radically different points of view. Check them out — and consider which of these songs do (or don’t) speak to your values and your way of relating to the world.
God love the Beatles. “And in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make.”
John Lennon — Imagine
John Lennon’s signature song is still very much part of our cultural zeitgeist — consider the controversy when Gal Gadot gathered a group of her celebrity buddies to sing this song as a kind of pep talk for the teeming masses as we have encountered the challenge of COVID-19. The fact of the matter is, the song combines a wistful “let’s all live as one” idealism with Lennon’s notorious disdain for religion — the man who announced in 1966 that the Beatles where “more popular than Jesus” and doubled down after the predictable firestorm by insisting that Christians were “thick and ordinary” would naturally combine his political idealism with a kind of aggressive agnosticism that ultimately seems narcissistic. On his much lesser known but more revealing song “God,” he offers a litany of what he doesn’t believe in — not only does he reject the Bible and Jesus, but he has no use for Hitler, the Buddha or yoga, either. He ends by announcing “I don’t believe in Beatles” (as if the Beatles were something to be believed in!) and then reveals what anyone could have suspected: “I just believe in me, Yoko and me.”
As a young adult, John Lennon was my favorite solo Beatle, and his anger at religion (and the politics of war) was helpful for me as I had to sort out my own sense of having been betrayed by the shadow side of our culture’s institutions. But a friend recently asked me who my favorite Beatle was, and I had to say — without even thinking about it — “It used to be John, but these days it’s George.” My friend remarked, “John’s anger doesn’t really age well.” It’s sad that Lennon’s life was so absurdly, meaninglessly cut short — had he lived into his 70s, how might he have revisited his own angry youth? We’ll never know, but just spend a few minutes on Twitter and you can see what that kind of unfiltered anger has morphed into in our time. And it’s not pretty.
Paul McCartney — Silly Love Songs
I saw an interview recorded fairly recently, where a septuagenarian Paul McCartney, asked for what must have been the bejillionth time what he thought was the secret of the Beatles’ success, replied rather humbly that he thought they were just a really good, really tight little band. And that’s true enough. But there have been a lot of really good, really tight little bands over the years, but they didn’t have what the Beatles had: three genius songwriters (some people might say only John and Paul were geniuses, but I think George deserves equal billing: his output may have been much smaller, but with songs like “Something” or “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” he reached the same heights as his more renowned bandmates).
Still, the heart of the Beatles-as-songwriting-juggernaut was the partnership between Lennon and McCartney. Even though by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bandthey were clearly mostly writing songs as individuals — a divide that continued to sharpen until their bitter split — at their best, they continued to rely on each other if for nothing else than brilliant cross-fertilization. You see hints of what was to come in 1967, when McCartney’s unabashedly sentimental “Penny Lane” was paired with Lennon’s dreamy and nihilistic “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Later that year, Paul would chirp “It’s getting better all the time” while John would offer his dour counterpoint: “It can’t get no worse!” By 1968’s The Beatles (aka TheWhite Album), the lines were drawn: Lennon was singing about heroin and revolution and teenaged girls lost in meditation; McCartney opted for ditties about his pet sheepdog, reggae singers, and English music halls. In other words, Lennon’s music was gritty, cynical, political, and angry; McCartney’s was sentimental, playful, upbeat and sometimes saccharine.
Each one of them could bust out of this stereotype: McCartney’s “Helter Skelter” was a gritty enough rocker to inspire the dark fantasies of Charles Manson, while Lennon’s “Goodnight” (sung by Ringo) sounds like McCartney at his sugary worst. “Blackbird” on the surface was more McCartney sweetness, but the lyrics had a political edge — his reflection on the trauma of American racism. But stereotypes often exist because they point to something that’s really happening, and anyone who listens to the 1970s albums by Lennon and McCartney can see that, for the most part, they both embodied this kind of dark/light division in their creative personas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh15LOppcWQ
McCartney wasn’t technically a solo artist — for much of the 70s he and his wife Linda were members of a band called Wings — but nobody was fooled: Wings consisted of one ex-Beatle and a bunch of other musicians. In 1976 Wings had the top selling single of the year (something McCartney had done twice before, with the Beatles) with “Silly Love Songs” — a mellow confection of a funky pop song that was McCartney’s way of saying “So what?” to all his critics (including Lennon) who derided him for just writing, well, silly love songs. “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs — and what’s wrong with that?”
The man has got a point. The Beatles built their success on silly love songs (listen to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” and tell me I’m wrong). So did Michael Jackson, Hall & Oates, Taylor Swift, and a host of other top-selling musicians. So while John Lennon’s motto might have been “If you aren’t enraged, you aren’t paying attention!” Paul McCartney’s rejoinder is simply “Love makes the world go ’round.” John’s intensity, expressed in righteous anger at how politics and religion fail us, is matched by Paul’s sunny optimism, where falling in love and staying in love is really all we need to get happy and be happy.
John and George represent a yin and yang in their relationship to spirituality — George was the mystic, John the skeptic — whereas Paul (and Ringo) are content to simply be secular. “All You Need is Love” may have been John’s song, but Paul seems to have more truly embodied its message. The last survivor of the three songwriting Beatles, Macca is now a billionaire who sells out his concerts by happily delivering setlists filled to the brim with familiar hits — from both his bands. At least for him, love really has been enough.
George Harrison — My Sweet Lord
All the Beatles released solo albums in 1970; John’s bitterly angry Plastic Ono Band, Ringo’s countrified Beaucoups of Blues, and Paul’s uneven McCartney. And then there was George: the so-called “quiet Beatle” released the triple-LP All Things Must Pass which, for my money, is hands down the best solo album by any ex-Beatle. By turns psychedelic, folky, rootsy, dreamy, and straight-ahead rock and roll, the album featured some great guest musicians (Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Ringo), and proof positive that, once liberated from having to function in the shadow of Lennon-McCartney, that Harrison could more than easily stand on his own as a writer, lead singer, and “star.”
The lead single from the album, “My Sweet Lord” became a huge hit, topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and cementing Harrison’s reputation as the “mystical” Beatle. Alas, the song’s melody was so similar to a 1963 hit single by the Chiffons, “He’s So Fine,” that Harrison became embroiled in a plagiarism suit that would forever tarnish the song’s reputation. The judge eventually decided that Harrison had “subconsciously” copied the earlier song.
But whatever we might think of the history of “My Sweet Lord’s” musical composition, what makes the song truly unique is its lyrics. Not only is it an unabashed hymn of spiritual devotion; it is no doubt the first (and, to date, only) international hit song that is explicitly interspiritual in nature: Harrison’s backing vocalists exchange a chant of “Alleluia” with “Hare Krishna” and various other lines of Sanskrit devotion that make the song almost a kind of pop-kirtan. It so clearly represents its moment in history: 1970 was probably about the only year in which a song that so beautifully wove together devotional language from both eastern and western spirituality could literally make it to the top of the pop charts. So while John Lennon was telling the world he didn’t believe in yoga, George Harrison offered a joyful song of ecstatic spirituality that brought different cultures together — in a mystical way.
For Lennon, “the world will live as one” only when we get rid of religion; For McCartney, unity comes not through political action but through a private experience of romantic love, whereas Harrison found oneness by uniting the great spiritual traditions of the world. Unfortunately, in the half century that has followed the release of “My Sweet Lord,” fundamentalist religion has made it increasingly difficult for members of different spiritual traditions to come together in a shared experience of devotion; although we have a thriving interspiritual movement thanks to organizations like the Parliament of World Religions and the work of visionary individuals like Wayne Teasdale, Mirabai Starr and Anthony deMello, it seems that among “average folks” far more people are comfortable adopting the skepticism of John Lennon, the secularism of Paul McCartney, or the fundamentalism that has characterized the religious right over the last forty years.
Still, for those of us who embrace the contemplative path — even if we anchor ourselves in the context of a single religious tradition — the joyful exuberance of “My Sweet Lord” is a reminder that a kind of unitive spirituality that transcends our religious differences really is possible, even if it’s hardly a mainstream reality in our day.
Ringo Starr — Octopus’s Garden
Finally we come to dear Ringo. No one accuses Ringo Starr of being a great songwriter. His greatness had to do with performance — McCartney’s praise of Ringo when inducting him in the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame centered on his virtuosity as a drummer: not flashy like many later rock drummers, but steady and reliable. Songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Here Comes the Sun,” and “Rain” show his capacity for mastering intricate rhythms and rapid changes in time signature.
But Ringo has written or co-written a handful of songs over the years, with perhaps his most renowned composition being “Octopus’s Garden” from Abbey Road. On the surface it’s a playful counterpoint to Lennon-McCartney’s 1966 gem “Yellow Submarine;” both songs are whimsical fantasias on what might be possible deep under the sea. But where “Yellow Submarine” is just a playful children’s song, “Octopus’s Garden” has a darker tone. “I’d like to be, under the sea, in an octopus’ garden, in the shade,” begins the song, but eventually Ringo reveals what he’s really feeling:
We would be so happy you and me
No one there to tell us what to do
The story goes that Ringo began writing the song while on vacation during a break from recording the White Album; he was unhappy with the conflicts brewing in the band and so he escaped, both physically (by going on vacation) and psychologically (by writing this song about his “little hideaway beneath the waves”).
Ringo’s song, then, is ultimately a song about escapism. And it parallels with a dark chapter in the drummer’s life: from the time of the Beatles’ breakup until the late 1980s, Starr struggled with alcoholism. Eventually he went into rehab, and like Paul McCartney he has survived — and now thrives as an elder statesman of the rock and roll world: he may not attract as big crowds as his former bandmate, but his shows have a reputation for fun, and as Ringo closes in on his 80th birthday, he can take some satisfaction not only in having been a member of the greatest rock band in history, but also in being the wealthiest drummer on the planet.
But we all know that alcoholism — and other forms of escape — don’t always have such happy endings. Nicotine shortened George Harrison’s life, and other musicians who were the Beatles’ peers were destroyed by heroin — or booze. The reality is, many of us do choose the path of escape. For some, it’s a bad detour through life, whereas for others, it leads to more ominous consequences.
Four Ways of Living
In writing this post, my purpose is not to decide which ex-Beatle is “best” or which one offers us the most helpful approach to life. I’ve already said that as a young man I appreciated Lennon’s iconoclasm, whereas in getting older I find more comfort in Harrison’s heartfelt devotion. But even McCartney’s romanticism has its place; and while I hope we can all avoid the dark side of escapism, at his best even Ringo Starr’s playful spirit is something to enjoy and celebrate.
The world needs true believers like George Harrison, dedicated skeptics like John Lennon, unabashed lovers like Paul McCartney, and lovable goofs like Ringo Starr. The Beatles were brilliant because these four immensely talented — and very different — blokes from Liverpool managed to make magic out of their very different approaches to life. Maybe they represent archetypes, and each of us need a little bit of each in our lives. We need to be careful: Lennon’s anger can lead to bitterness and nihilism; McCartney’s romanticism can be soppy and saccharine; Harrison’s devotionalism blinded him from the creative mistakes he made; and Starr’s childlike escapism opened up into the dangers of substance abuse. So if you find you favor one Beatle or another, try to cultivate the energies of the other three. I think they can be correctives to each other. The true believer needs a dash of skepticism. The iconoclast needs some optimistic love. The escapist needs both hope and the gumption to fight for what he believes in.
It’s sad that the Beatles broke up so bitterly, and it’s a shame we never found out what magic they might have co-created in their mature years. But let’s keep listening to the joyful music of their youth, and perhaps we can “reunite” the Beatles in our own hearts: by weaving together the best dimensions of each of their archetypes in our own spiritual lives.
I suppose most writers don’t like to talk about writers’ block. It’s not a pretty sight — to have a deadline looming, and every time you sit down at the blank screen, you just get lost in the void of it all.
And instead of writing… nothing.
It’s such an ominous part of the writer’s life that you can find lists online of movies devoted to the topic. I can think of two off the top of my head: Shakespeare in Love and Ruby Sparks. Both are humorous stories, and in each film, the writer — who is male — finds his creative spark restored through the influence of a beautiful female muse (what critics have called “the manic pixie dream girl”).
Okay, not all writers are men, and certainly not every artist (writer or otherwise) is going to get their own personal muse to help magically jump-start their creative flow. Sorry about that. For most of us, we need to find a more realistic, down-to-earth solution to our lack of inspiration.
The other day I was chatting with a friend about the challenges of writer’s block. He pointed out to me that it often seems to be related to perfectionism. I nodded my head in agreement. It’s not merely not having an idea (although sometimes that’s the case), but it’s also the fear that, whatever words I do manage to put down to my file (or paper) will simply not be very good. People who read it will find out the terrible truth: that I’m just a “lousy writer!”
Such catastrophizing is a giveaway that what is really at work here is perfectionism: that nasty thought, lodged deep in our skulls, that our work must be perfect to have any value at all.
Yecch. It looks really irrational, in plain black and white. So why is it such a hard notion to liberate ourselves from?
Perfectionism is really lazy way of looking at the world: it’s an insistence that everything is black or white, good or bad, perfect or lousy, with nothing in between. It ignores the radiant beauty of a world filled with literally millions of colors.
(A lot of people like to say that the antidote to seeing things in black and white is to learn to know the “shades of grey.” But I think even that is too limiting. What makes life sparkle is not 32 layers of greyscale, but an almost infinite array of eye-nurturing color.)
I think one of perfectionism’s nasty little tricks is to always compare ourselves (unfavorably, of course) with the writers or other artists whom we admire. How can I ever amount to anything as a writer, when my work is so lackluster compared to the shimmering genius of ________? (fill in the blank with your favorite writer).
But I think we can beat the inner-perfectionist at his or her own game. And I realized this by thinking about one of my favorite bands, the Beatles.
It’s been nearly fifty years since the Beatles disbanded in an acrimonious split — but they are still the top-selling pop music group of all time. None of them were yet 30 years old, and their entire recorded output consisted of just under ten hours of music. Some of their songs have become truly iconic: “Yesterday,” “In My Life,” “Hey Jude,” “All You Need is Love” “Let it Be,” “Come Together,” “Something,” — just to name a few. The Beatles featured not one, not two, but three brilliant songwriters; when they split up, every member of the band went on to enjoy a successful solo career. The two surviving Beatles, both in their late seventies, are still going strong as we approach the 60th anniversary of the band’s founding.
It’s reasonable to say the Beatles were geniuses.
I’m not a songwriter, but the perfectionist in me has no scruples about comparing my lack-of-genius to the geniuses of another art form. But that road goes both ways. And by thinking about the creative work of brilliant songwriters like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, ironically I can find a way to talk back to my inner perfectionist.
Here’s what occurred to me the other day. I was listening to The White Album — a brilliant recording, to be sure, but notoriously uneven. There are plenty of tracks on this album, released in 1968, that were experimental, or avant-garde, or just plain weird. Don’t take my word for it — cue up Spotify and listen to tracks like “Wild Honey Pie,” “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” or “Revolution #9.”
In other words, geniuses aren’t perfect. And if they don’t have to be perfect, why should you and I be?
Pushing this line of thought a bit further, I thought about the Beatles’ all-time most celebrated song, “A Day in the Life” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s an artsy song, featuring a symphony orchestra and impressionistic lyrics in which John Lennon’s almost cynical commentary on the daily news is punctuated by Paul McCartney’s playful narrative of a worker’s mundane morning routine. It wasn’t a hit song like “Hey Jude” or “She Loves You,” but it still sounds fresh and relevant after more than fifty years; and the song seems to epitomize the critical consensus about Beatles music: that Lennon and McCartney were each great songwriters on their own, but when they composed a song together, they truly were far, far more than the sum of their parts.
Genius, right?
But before your inner perfectionist gets all worked up… compare that to the Beatles’ first-ever hit single, a surprisingly modest number recorded in 1962: “Love Me Do.” It’s a mid-tempo rock and roll love song, with lyrics that could easily be dismissed as banal; aside from a sassy harmonica line played by Lennon, it’s actually a fairly ordinary song.
But it was a hit song for the Beatles, and nearly sixty years later, Paul McCartney still regularly performs it live. It’s charming to watch a video recording of McCartney at Dodger Stadium in 2019, introducing the song and admitting that he was so nervous when recording it (at barely 20 years old), that you can clearly hear the quavering in his voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12WZ46RH0bA
It’s not the song he’ll be remembered for: it’s not “Yesterday” or “Let it Be” or “Penny Lane.” But it was good enough.
And that’s the key: good enough.
“Love Me Do” was good enough for the Beatles to have a hit record in 1962, and it’s good enough for Paul McCartney to keep it in his setlist in 2019. But nobody would accuse it of being a perfect song.
It’s not — because it doesn’t have to be. It’s good enough, and that’s good enough.
The next time I experience writer’s block, I’m going to listen to “Love Me Do” — and maybe even see if I can manage to get all the way through “Revolution #9.” Since I can forgive the Beatles for releasing a song as bad as “Wild Honey Pie,” and appreciate them for a run-of-the-mill song like “Love Me Do,” then I can certainly give myself permission to engage in my own writing in a less-than-perfect way.
Now, in 1962, the Beatles probably were not even capable of writing masterpieces like “Come Together” or “Hey Jude.” At least, not yet. Those songs were the result of years of practice and performance and hard work in the studio. But what if, in 1962, the “perfectionist” inside Lennon’s and McCartney’s heads wouldn’t give them any peace because all they could manage was something like “Love Me Do”?
They might have given up. And the world would be so much the poorer for it.
So the next time you have a little conversation with your inner perfectionist, listen to the Beatles. And tell your perfectionist that maybe all you’re capable of doing is writing something about as good as “Love Me Do.” But that’s good enough. By doing your “good enough” best today, maybe tomorrow — or next year, or 10 years from now — you really could create a work of genius. If the Beatles could grow into it, why not you? But that’s for the future. No pressure to be a genius today. For today, just do the best you can.
I love the Beatles, and like many Beatles fans, I think The White Album is one of their great masterpieces. And one of the best songs on The White Album is, without question, “Dear Prudence.”
But did you know that the song was influenced by the music of the Gypsies, Transcendental Meditation, and the daughter (and sister) of Hollywood celebrities?
“Dear Prudence” was written in early 1968, when the Beatles were in India, while John and George were studying Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yoga. It was written for a woman named Prudence Farrow (Mia Farrow’s sister) who was there meditating as well, and became so immersed in her meditation practice that she rarely left her room. Hence John Lennon wrote a playful song for her, where he sings, “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?” The music was inspired, at least in part, by a Gypsy style of guitar picking that John learned from the folk-rock musician Donovan, also studying with the Maharishi.
While on the surface the song could be seen as a playful rebuke to excessive spirituality — Prudence, don’t waste your time meditating, come out to play! — at its heart “Dear Prudence” makes a powerful statement for an integral contemplative perspective: where Prudence (and by extension, anyone who listens to the song) is “part of everything” and is invited to “look around, round, round” and see the beauty in all things. The song is a reminder that there is really no line separating “spirituality” from the rest of life: it’s all connected. The point behind a contemplative practice, after all, is not merely to lose ourselves in meditation; but rather to find, through the disciplined attention of silent awareness, that we really are “part of everything” and it’s all beautiful — and so are we. In other words, contemplative practice fosters a contemplative way of life, in which we learn to see with, and through, the eyes of love at all times — not just when we are “sitting.”
The Beatles eventually became disillusioned with the Maharishi and left India. Prudence went on to become a T. M. teacher, eschewing the limelight and devoting her life to the study and practice of spirituality. Fast forward to 2015, Prudence now is a Yoga and T.M. teacher based on the Florida Gulf Coast, and has written a memoir called Dear Prudence: The Story Behind the Song. I haven’t read the book yet, but the other day I stumbled across a wonderful recording of a recent interview with Prudence. It’s quite enjoyable — not only as a bit of Beatles trivia, but surprisingly rich in its spiritual insight as well. Clearly, Prudence is more than just a member of a Hollywood family with a Beatles song written about her — she is an articulate and insightful woman with a clear understanding of the value of meditation and spiritual discipline.
In the interview, not only does Prudence talk about her childhood in Hollywood, but also recounts the Irish Celtic heritage — full of myth and folklore — that informed the life and spirituality of her mother, actress Maureen O’Sullivan. The interview also explores how Prudence’s childhood formation as a Catholic both inspired and challenged her when she began to explore eastern spirituality. It’s a delightful interview, a nice mix of Hollywood and Beatles lore, spirituality, and even some reflection on interspirituality. The book is now on my to-read list, but the interview itself is well worth the 45 minutes it takes to listen.
