bodhbdearg

The McLennon Files digital archive

My posts about interesting finds while archiving:

John's demos

John's collage for Paul

Whose minutes are crumbling away?

Who's sleeping and where?

My fics.

Novel-length fic: Pentimento

My essays/meta.

Beatles (and solo) albums through the McLennonlens.

Beatles book reviews.

I avoided reading memoirs by ex-Dakota employees for a long time as they seemed so depressing, and had a reputation for being distorted. But I finally decided to because it's so difficult to get anything that seems like accurate information about those years. "Official" accounts like Elliot Mintz's book are so obviously whitewashed, while Goldman's biography seems the opposite extreme - ridiculously negative. So I read Dakota Days (1983) by John Green aka Charlie Swan, one of the many tarot readers that Yoko employed in the late 1970s, and The Last Days of John Lennon (1991) by Fred Seaman, who worked as John's assistant in 1979-80 and was embroiled in an insane saga involving purloining John's diaries after his death and endless lawsuits. Both slightly disreputable characters, so obviously their accounts should be approached with healthy scepticism. The following is a review of Dakota Days; Seaman's book review will be in a later post.

With all that in mind, does Dakota Days ring true? To a certain extent, yes. Dakota Days is based on many hours of conversation between John Green and Yoko and John (separately). The book is largely made up of dialogue, the accuracy of which Green ascribes to his "excellent memory". That already sounds pretty sus - no one could remember conversations that precisely. It seems more likely that Green either (a) took notes during his conversations, which would be facilitated by many of them taking place over the phone; (b) invented the conversations wholesale based on his recollections; or (c) secretly recorded his phone calls and transcribed them. Options (a) and (c) would lend credence to claims of their accuracy, while (b) would be closer to fanfic. I can't tell which option is more likely. He does say in his introduction that he altered some things and modified timelines for readability, so he gets ahead of accusations of making it all up. I will say that his John and Yoko do largely sound like the real people. His John uses wordplay and grandstands a lot, and his Yoko is scattershot and indiscreet.

Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America by Jonathan Gould is another Beatles biography, but with an advantage many others don't have - it's written by a musician and looks at the music in detail. Gould is a jazz musician and academic, and the book is well-researched and well-written. He follows the same rise-and-fall story as most of the other books, and the details are mostly right (with a few errors). He's less caught up in personal dynamics (although he does write about them) and while he's probably a Paul girl at heart, he doesn't stint on praise for John and George's artistry - George in particular gets a lot of honour and respect for his music in this book.

Each album is walked through and the musical styles analysed. When non-musicians write about songs (myself included) the results can be confusing and very subjective. Gould describes the specific chords, rhythms and melody structures using musical language which may be a little inaccessible at first, but when you match it to the song in your mind, makes a lot of sense. It's very useful to have explained to you why something works musically, why something is unusual and ground-breaking, how it refers to other contemporary songs and so on. He praises George Martin very highly, and quotes contemporary reviewers who did the same, almost to the extent of wholly crediting GM with the Beatles sound. Gould doesn't believe that, but he is clear that they would not have managed to achieve what they did without him. He's also not afraid to point out that the band improved a lot simply by being a band, and that their proficiency on their instruments was relatively limited when they started out.

Gould has clear ideas about Beatles songs, and like most (male) Beatles authors he presents these opinions as irrefutable fact, which can be annoying, especially when he's writing off a song as a failure simply because he doesn't like it. He has very specific theories about the inspiration behind some songs that he presents as fact - for example, he says that "And Your Bird Can Sing" was inspired by an interview with Frank Sinatra who was using "bird" as a slang term to possibly refer to his penis? (It's not clear). I've never seen that theory anywhere else, and hey, it could be true, but it seems more likely that it's Gould's opinion that he's presenting as fact. That annoyed me and it speaks to the weird resistance of male Beatles authors to admit to any uncertainty. I would take his theories more seriously if he qualified them even a little, with words like "maybe" or "possibly". But apparently male Beatles writers think not being Absolutely Certain that your opinion is fact makes them weak or something? Smh.

He's good on referring to other contemporary songs that may (see, I'll use the qualifier!) have influenced Beatles music, and I reckon he's probably right about most of them. He leans into the idea that Beatles songs are often "spoofs" or "parodies" of other songs and genres, which is probably true to an extent, but can serve to dismiss the deeper meaning of what are likely, in essence, sincere songs. He does the classic "Yer Blues wasn't serious, it was just a parody" line, which you'd think would be debunked by John literally saying it was a song he wrote about being depressed, but hey. Gould's opinions about how well the various "parodies" work is pretty subjective, too. For example, his case that "When I'm Sixty-Four" works as a parody and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" doesn't really just comes down to personal preference rather than objective fact.

I loved reading the musical breakdowns because it's so interesting to find out exactly why a melody like "Yesterday" is unusual and compelling, and how changes in time signatures give the listener a certain feeling even if they can't say why. For that kind of insight alone I'd recommend the book.

Gould gets more into the personal psyches of the Beatles from 1967 onwards. He's quite insightful about John's struggles and insecurities (though perhaps leans a little too much into the "John was stagnating in the suburbs and doing absolutely nothing outside of music and drugs between 1965 and 1967" narrative for me) and how they affected the band dynamic. He's quite shady about Yoko, seeing her as a fraud and a bad influence, though he doesn't claim anything we haven't already heard about her. His is actually the most coherent description I've read of the sequence of business events that happened in 1968-69 with Klein, NEMS, Northern Songs etc - but I'd hesitate to recommend it as a definitive guide, because I noticed a couple of details and dates he got wrong, and things he left out, so there could well be more issues. Still, it would be a good introduction to this period.

One part of Gould's book that is often quoted is his description of "If I Fell", comparing John and Paul's singing to an "exchange of vows". That's not the only McLennon-y thing he kind of hints at, but very obliquely and not conclusively. He does see the relationship as important and comes down on the side of "they were never as good apart as they were together". When writing about the breakup, he posits that songs like "Oh! Darling" and "Two of Us" are appeals from Paul to John, and doesn't make "no homo" caveats, which is interesting.