The heart can be a horrible thing. Horrible in that it dissuades logic and reason and throws irrationality to the fore, and in 1970, the weaker strains of the heart were all The Beatles had left.
THE END OF LEGENDS
The narrative for the eventual Beatle break-up has two well-trodden beginnings: the death of Brian Epstein and the emergence of Yoko Ono — with neither one placing blame on The Beatles themselves. In the ashes of the break-up such thought was heresy. The Beatles were musical gods, the Lennon-McCartney partnership etched into musical history. They had saved a generation from the death of Camelot, and no one could believe that the members of the inner circle were capable of their own undoing. Such was the power of The Beatles that individualism could not be deemed the cause. The heart played tricks on The Beatle-loving public, and even as time wore on the blame kept landing on individuals outside of the fabulous foursome.
Even with the lavish attention that was fostered on the quartet, we, the public, only had glimpses of each band member’s desires. Let It Be showed the band under tremendous strain, but we insisted that the arm-twisting of McCartney only be seen as him trying to keep the band together, rather than driving it apart.
Yet The Beatles were four men, and only four men, replete with differing ideas, who had nonetheless worked together well enough to coalesce into a sound that defined an era. Men can only be human, their acts the only thing that becomes immortal. The Beatles had slipped the reins of being individual members; they were an entity that couldn’t possibly fall victim to human error. Such is the cruelty of the heart. They officially broke up in April of 1970, but their identity would forever linger, a ghost that would haunt their individual lives and careers as long as teach had a mortal coil.
Continue reading McCartney; In Which One Beatle Became One Man, Reviewed (1970)
The Art of the Mixtape 