You're wrong about the Beatles.
Paul wasn't just the cute one. He was also the smartest one.
Welcome to The Experiment. Kids, do you like reading? Because you’re in luck. First, we’ve got an exclusive excerpt from David Pevsner’s Damn Shame: A Memoir of Desire, Defiance, and Show Tunes in which he shares a special story about my late uncle. Also, Rachel Megan Barker continues on her search for happiness. Frank Spring has another chapter of his Old West novel, Regulator. And I write about what The Beatles: Get Back reveals about how we perceive intelligence and optimism.
As always, we recommend things to do (get Girl Scout cookies delivered), read (Laura Meckler on the crisis facing public education), watch (Pam & Tommy on Hulu), and listen to (Mitski’s new album Laurel Hell).
And hey, can I ask you a favor? Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth is coming out in paperback this June. Pre-order the paperback now, and your Father’s Day present is taken care of.
But first, what do you see when you see this picture?
That’s the Beatles, of course. Their names are the first four books of the Baby Boomer New Testament — John, Paul, George, and Ringo. To a lay fan born later, the Beatles have always existed as a complete whole. We have never witnessed their evolution, the time when the Gospel of Matthew was complete but Mark and Luke were still in rewrites, and John was still shopping his book proposal to agents.
And that photograph is taken from Peter Jackson’s three-part documentary, The Beatles: Get Back. It was a thrill to see the Beatles become in Get Back and not exist as a leather-bound collectors edition. Paul, wearing a yellow sweater, noodling on his guitar in front of a yawning George and polite Ringo, teasing a song out of nothing. You can hear what they can’t. You know that Paul is creating “Get Back,” a song that has existed for my entire life, but Paul doesn’t. The thrill isn’t that we’re watching the Beatles, it’s that we’re watching the Beatles figure something out that we already know.
To a performing musician, of course, watching The Beatles: Get Back is initially an act of reverence, “like behind the scenes footage of the Bible,” says Walker Lukens. Walker’s had a couple hits — “Every Night” has 1.7 million streams, and “Lifted” spent eight weeks on the charts — and “Don’t Wanna Be Lonely (Don’t Wanna Leave You Alone” is on my all-time Top 5 list. And though the Austin Chronicle called him “a non-sexually intimidating version of Prince,” Walker would be the first to say that he’s slightly less of a big deal than the Beatles.
But when The Beatles: Get Back came out, Walker and his musician friends were all struck with the same thing: The Beatles - They’re Just Like Us!
“The cool thing about watching that documentary, particularly the first part, was that every band dynamic is similar to that,” said Walker. “And that would've been painfully boring to watch if they weren't working on stone, cold classics.”
Walker saw that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were just like any other band, each member having different motivations, different roles, resentments, pressures, hurt feelings, and an appalling lack of gratitude and appreciation that Walker says is common among artists who work together for awhile.
“And also the other thing that is such a feature of being in a band is to have it go from being incredibly goofy, to really tense, to transcendent, like in the same 10-minute period,” he said. “It just humanizes them in this way where you're like, oh my God, I've been in that band. Like I've been Ringo, I've been John.”
Whereas I saw George acting like a petulant adolescent, Walker saw Paul ordering Ringo and George around like they were replaceable session musicians. Walker marveled how Paul, the bassist, would tell George, whom he regards as one of the better rock guitarists of all time, how to play his guitar better, and he noted how many of George’s songs that were cut from Let It Be ended up on All Things Must Pass, a classic album. Suffice it to say that Walker isn’t a Paul McCartney partisan. “I think Paul's a dick,” he said.
“I've been Ringo, I've been John.”
So when I asked him who he thought was the smartest Beatle, I was a little surprised at his answer.
“I think definitely Paul,” he said. “I think Paul is the only person in that band who you could say is gifted, like the way that he is able to play every instrument very, very well. He's written so many types of great songs.”
Thinking Paul is the smartest Beatle contradicts the popular consensus and critical opinion that until recently I shared. “McCartney is seen as the sentimentalist, non-intellectual working-call craftsman, toiling to get every note just right,” wrote University of Michigan music professor Walter Everett in The Beatles As Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology. “In the popular press, John Lennon was generally portrayed as the creative intellectual and McCartney as the melodic, upbeat tunesmith,” wrote James W. Pennebaker, a University of Texas social psychologist, in The Secret Life of Pronouns.
Like Walker, Pennebaker also does not share the popular belief that John was the smart one, but instead of basing his assessment on Paul’s prodigious musical abilities — indeed, his direction to George about the guitar part was merely rude and not at all wrong — Pennebaker bases his on a psychological analysis of the Beatles lyrics that he and two other scientists completed in 2008 called “Things We Said Today: A Linguistic Study of the Beatles.”
“I think Paul's a dick.”
They divided the lyrics into four categories: Lennon-McCartney joints, Lennon’s songs, McCartney’s songs, and George’s songs. (They did not sully Ringo’s songs with mere pedantry, as “Octopus’s Garden,” “Act Naturally,” and “Yellow Submarine” achieved a perfection that as yet continues to elude mortals. We are but illiterate apes in the shadow of Ringo’s prodigious intellect. To quote Milli Vanilli, girl, you know it’s true.)
The jointly written songs tended to sound more like Lennon’s songs, negative, reflective, often in the present tense, frequently using big words and of a sexual nature. George’s tended to sound a lot like Lennon’s in reflecting a search for understanding and often being repetitive. (Ringo’s were just fucking great send tweet.)
Paul’s lyrics, on the other hand, indicated higher-level thinking, more lyrically complex, less repetitive. They were often about other people (“She’s leaving home,” “Lady Madonna,” “Get Back”), other things (“Back in the USSR,” “Paperback Writer,” When I’m Sixty-Four”), and groups and relationships (“We can work it out,” “Two of us,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”).
John? “The data reveal that he was more focused on his own personal distress,” wrote Pennebaker.
“The data reveal that he was more focused on his own personal distress.”
So why did John have the reputation for being the brains of the band even though he was moody and negative? Perhaps it’s because he was so moody and negative, and McCartney was the optimist who churned out catchy melodies.
The science is clear that we’re hard-wired to value the negative over the positive, the criticism over the compliment. A 2019 global study found that “the average human is more physiologically activated by negative than by positive news stories.” A decade earlier, another study proved humans have a “propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.” Not only does bad news really light up our pinball machines, but we keep putting quarters in, playing out the negative feedback in our heads long after we got bored with good news. Many suppose this negativity bias has evolutionary roots, but they’ve documented this behavior in infants. Our brains are horribly dumb, and like Lady Gaga, we’re born this way.
Our brains are horribly dumb.
But John, Paul, George, and Ringo had dumb brains, too, that were as addled by the negativity bias as much as fame and drugs. (I said Ringo’s songs were perfect. I’m sure he’s got a couple of flaws.) Pennebaker’s analysis showed that when Lennon and McCartney co-wrote songs, they came out sounding more like the former than the latter. Harrison’s songs, Pennebaker found, shared a lot of the same traits as Lennons: moody, negative, reflective. McCartney might have been the smartest, but Lennon was clearly the most influential.
Well, maybe not. Influencing the mood of the Beatles is one thing. Influencing them to do their damn jobs is another, and “I think if Paul hadn't been the task master that none of that would've gotten done,” said Walker, who marvels at the productivity. White Album came out in November 1968. Two months later, they filmed the footage for the companion movie to Let It Be, but because it took so long to edit and produce a movie back then, the Beatles took all their resentments, hurt feelings, and egos back into the studio, and nine months later they released Abbey Road. Let It Be came out the following May.
“It's cool to watch that documentary and see them really striving and really wanting to be on top and do great stuff. Because from my vantage point, they were the biggest, greatest band in the world. But you see them really trying to do something great,” said Walker. “And they're just trying to keep up with their peers. You see them hungry. You see them wanting to be the best.”
“You see them hungry. You see them wanting to be the best.”
For my entire life, the Beatles have been great, an inarguably durable cultural force that produced more than their share of our songbook. But once upon a time, they were becoming great. They could have stopped when Ringo almost quit the band during the recording of the White Album and retired as founding fathers of rock ‘n roll. But they wanted to become something greater, so they put aside their differences and put out three of the greatest albums ever.
Maybe the greatest takeaway from The Beatles: Get Back isn’t they have similar experiences and dynamics that regular people do, but that they were regular people who didn’t let their ordinary foibles stop them from becoming something greater.
Also, Ringo fucking rules.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Tipping more
Coup’ing more
Working hybridly
Re-evaluating pronouns
Rebranding blood oranges
Sneaking books into libraries
Getting excited about Spoon’s newest
Keeping cheaters out of the Hall of Fame
“Trying to do the next best thing, when so few good things are to be found.”
What I’m reading
Kellie Gormly: “An 8-year-old slid his handwritten book onto a library shelf. It now has a years-long waitlist.” - DED
Dillon is also writing a different book about a closet that eats up jackets.
Laura Meckler: “Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions” - Everybody has a good idea about the impacts of COVID on the healthcare system. It is as bad on the public school system.
Experts reach for comparisons. The best they can find is the earthquake following Brown v. Board of Education, when the Supreme Court ordered districts to desegregate and White parents fled from their cities’ schools. That was decades ago.
William Saletan: “What I Learned in 25 Years of Writing for Slate” - Some wisdom here, especially when it comes to recognizing one’s own patterns and motivated reasoning.
Recognizing these mistakes didn’t always stop me from repeating them. When Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, I was sure he’d lose the general election. That’s because the propensities that cause a person’s errors—in my case, a tendency to rationalize optimism—persist even when that person knows better. But by studying your failures, you can learn to manage your propensities. If you look back at your work and don’t see any failures, that doesn’t mean you’ve succeeded. It means you’ve failed to become wiser than you were.
What I’m watching
John Cena is surprisingly watchable in Peacemaker, but the opening credits are… Um… You should just see it yourself.
I’m enjoying Pam & Tommy, but I’m not sure I feel good about it.
What I’m listening to
Excited to see the Snotty Nose Rez Kids at SXSW. Here’s a bouncy track to get you started on them.
Thanks to P.S. for turning me onto David Bowie’s Aladdin Sue, which my friend described as “Ziggy Startdust comes to America.”
Mitski’s new album, Laurel Hell, is finally out with a pointed critique of capitalism. Girlfriend really doesn’t like having to work, but I’m glad she does, because this is good stuff.
Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds over 2020-21 and have kept it off since then. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works. No, this isn’t an ad. Yes, I really lost all that weight with Noom.
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We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some
Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. Out in paperback this June!
This barely readable opinion makes no sense except to confirm that Paul, indeed, was very much the taskmaster needed as malaise and emotional wounds set in. John was a brilliant guitarist, treble strums, some of the fastest finger work. Lyrics stand alone as poetry, George's in particular. In the end, I don't know what you're talking about or why you even tried.