Mother Nature’s Son

10. You cannot win every battle. Within conflict, it is tempting to try to force others to agree with your perspective. However, most people are set in their ways, and find it difficult to change their views and behaviours. This is especially important when dealing with toxic family members. You may never get the apology and empathy that you seek, so it is important to accept that every battle cannot be won, and gain validation internally, rather than externally.

The Beatles return from America (August 31, 1966)

John Lennon at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, CA | 29 August 1966 © Koh Hasebe

I don’t know what’s more dangerous, those fans who launched jelly beans at the stage or paul with an umbrella

paul making john laugh paul making john laugh paul making john laugh

“MCCARTNEY NOW FELT SHATTERED; the band - the life he had been a part of since he was 15 - had been cut off from him. ‘John’s in love with Yoko,’ he told London’s Evening Standard, ‘and he’s no longer in love with the other three of us.’ Paul stayed at home with Linda, her daughter Heather, and their infant, Mary, and began drinking in evenings and mornings alike. He stopped writing music altogether, and his temper flared easily. He’d fallen into a paralyzing depression.” — Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone

WHAT THE BEATLES LACK HERE IS DISCIPLINE. They speak candidly of the loss of their manager Brian Epstein, who died in 1967. Though they resisted his authority, the suits he put them in, they needed it. Each Beatle has attempted to fill the void with a new life, a new love, a new diversion. We are watching the blossoming of individuals, parts becoming unmanageably more than the whole, beyond even Paul’s organizational capacity. The irony is that even as Paul enunciates this loss (“daddy has gone”) the father figure they need – George Martin, here sidelined by the trendier Johns – is reading the newspaper just behind him. But perhaps they knew all along: they returned to Martin for Abbey Road. — Wesley Stace

Linda Eastman (as she then was) at the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions “The sad thing is that John and Paul both had problems and they loved each other and, boy, could they have helped each other! If they had only communicated! It frustrates me no end, because I was just some chick from New York when I walked into all of that. God, if I’d known what I know now. All I could do was sit there watching them play these games.” - Linda McCartney

“I just said to Paul the other night when we got back to his house and we started playing this little harmonium of his. And I started trying to sing ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and I suddenly thought, This must have been really interesting if you were trying to write this song — it’s all this big stretch over one Seventh, a C Seventh or something — and I suddenly said to him, ‘Now who wrote that bit? Was that you or was that John?’ And he said, ‘I think what probably happened as I wrote the first bit, right, then John came in…’ Then I suddenly thought, This is stupid. I’m asking Paul who wrote which bit of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ twenty years later! [Laughs] Who cares anyway?” - George Harrison, Q, 1988 (x)

PAUL & (soon to be) LINDA MCCARTNEY “Paul has already decided Linda is the love of his life. He is correct. They’re inseparable for the next 38 years, until her dying day.”

“When you witness the joyful eye contact between Paul and John, as they harmonize, you can also see the rage smolder on George’s face. (No poker player, Harrison.) No wonder this is the song that pissed him off; it must have been agonizing to feel blocked out of that John/Paul duet. Everybody else on earth treats George like a world-class artist, including peers like Dylan and the Band. But the Beatles still treat him like a little kid.” — Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone Get Back review

— The Beatles Every Little Thing, Maxwell Mackenzie

"Hi John, Hi Cyn.' He would hurriedly catch us up and then it would be, 'Where are you two off to? Can I come?' Neither of us would have the heart to tell this thin gangly kid in school uniform to push off. Poor George! He hand't really got to the stage of serious girlfriends yet and was totally unaware of what it was all about, Alfie! So we would spend the lost afternoon as a jolly threesome, wondering what on earth we were going to do with ourselves." - Cynthia Powell

me, crying: i love them a normal amount

John smiling at Paul like this will sustain me for 100 years and I hope it sustains Paul too