The McLennon Thread: what were The Beatles really about? (evidence presented for consideration)

I don’t know why Beatle fans are so obsessed over whether the Beatles loved each other. To this day if someone posts a photo of John and Paul or modern day Paul and Ringo on Facebook, you can guarantee a high level of responses that “they really loved each other like brothers”.

I think Ringo has said recently that he’s not actually that close to Paul- and that they might meet for dinner if they’re in the same city, or join up to promote events, but they “don’t hang out”.

The greater mystery of the Beatles is why so many fans are obsessed and so vehement that they must have loved each other

I think there’s been a gradual realisation in the last few years from fans and so on that many musicians in many renowned acts past and present don’t really hang out as much as you would assume when not on band duty.

I think it’s also key that most examples probably aren’t from antipathy but that the band takes up enough time as A Job and it doesn’t really occur to those on the inside to socialise outside of it; said job - which they may love - takes enough of their time already.

well they were inseparable for long periods in the 60s including years after touring. they considered various forms of communal living (paul seems to have been the biggest holdout). the beatles were much closer than most bands, that's what attracted people to them and why people care about their feelings more than other bands, especially as their feelings are basically our feelings because of cultural saturation

Minor diversion for self-indulgence:

I think the public’s view is often at odds with the reality. During the Blair Labour Party years, Tony and Gordon had an infamously difficult or torturous working relation (the “TBGBs” as it was named by informed commentators )

It’s amused me when Labour pollsters reported that the public really didn’t like to see such obvious tensions and disagreements - and labour polled much better when it was thought they got on well.

To the horror of both, they were promptly despatched together on the campaign trail for visits and media interviews to show just how how well they were getting on. And I seem to recall some completely cringeworthy media footage of them buying ice cream at the seaside with fixed smiles and fake bonhomie as if in holiday mode.

the beatles were much closer than most bands, that's what attracted people to them and why people care about their feelings more than other bands, especially as their feelings are basically our feelings because of cultural saturation

Not convinced any of that is true btw. Mind you, Beatles fans are weird, especially in the US.

I don’t know if it’s meant to be funny, or it’s just funny to me, that so many of the arguments in this thread are raised against “ruling it out” [that LenMac fucked] or a NO HOMO stance. Neither of which I can see in the thread. Instead the counter view, over and over, is that it doesn’t actually matter or that people don’t care. Seems hard to accept that it’s genuine indifference rather than erasure.

― assert (matttkkkk), Friday, 10 February 2023 bookmarkflaglink

This is quite OTM. Though I am not indifferent otherwise I wouldn't post. I do think the material is not without interest but it would be one of many moving parts in their story. So my question is one of integration into the rest of the story.

And as talked about its something that is often happening with bands so where you end up is something very tabloid-y, or a possibly dark place. It might explain why no one has done as much with it (or it could end in a place where lawyering happens too, I don't know).

I wonder if it has something to do with the music as well. If you compare this to the similar questions surrounding the Stones and the Jagger/Richards partnership, I'm much more invested in Mick Jagger's feelings for Keith Richards than Lennon's feelings for McCartney, because those feelings - whatever they were - are everywhere in the songs. It feels like an essential part of who the Rolling Stones are as a band. Whereas, for all the pop love songs the Beatles wrote, there's something sort of chilly and intellectual and aromantic about their music in my mind, so that the question of who loved whom, and how, and how much, feels almost separate from the music to me, a question for biographers more than for listeners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb1BHc7aG10

*kkkk (!!!)

also great post as always Lily Dale

_the beatles were much closer than most bands, that's what attracted people to them and why people care about their feelings more than other bands, especially as their feelings are basically our feelings because of cultural saturation_

Not convinced any of that is true btw. Mind you, Beatles fans are weird, especially in the US.

i'm the most normal beatles fan in the US

just yesterday for me, what a track!

I have zero problems with the idea that perhaps the most famous and celebrated songwriting partnership in recorded history may have been more than a couple straight as an arrow lads "opening up to each other"

why anyone would care or if it matters at all is another question, but again, I do think that great music is very often hampered by interpersonal relationships that may or may not be sexual but are certainly very intimate in a way that is difficult to describe beyond swingers or a polygamist cult if it was also a public entertainment and a job and didn't necessarily involve genitalia...or something like that?

rock n roll is hard, sometimes VERY hard, wink wink also I am asexual so I hope this comes off more exasperated and tired than creepy

why anyone would care or if it matters at all is another question

You haven’t spent much time around Beatles fans nuts, have you? There’s a huge tendency to treat the music and the story as an intertwined whole (which they are ofc), especially when you get past the basic received narrative of like The Compleat Beatles or whatever. And for those people (of which I’m one, albeit not an obsessive partly due to the fact that I have a shit memory & so can’t keep all the nerdy details properly filed & partly because I know it doesn’t really matter & that nothing’s more of a drag than someone who bangs on & on about the goddamn Beatles) the knowledge that there’s a story behind the story — or multiple stories behind the story — that there’s more to discover about a band we thought we knew everything about — that matters & we care.

When the Let It Be doc came out, I tried texting a little about it with my uncle, who is a huge Beatles fan… I couldn’t really get him to engage with talking about the music, he was solely interested in all the little relationship details, the “flowerpot conversation,” etc.