Time is a perpetual motion machine. And consider, also, its alarming elasticity. With the Beatles’ release of “Now and Then,” we’re as far from “Free As A Bird” now as “Free As A Bird” was from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And an analogy suggests itself: “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love” are to Please Please Me as “Now and Then” is to Abbey Road. The gusts of Zeitgeists that have blown through all of those years and time- and date-stamped eras, the equivalent for humankind of the pencil marks on a kitchen wall charting the growth of a child. All of this is only math, of course, but then math itself is the science of change, among other confounding mysteries.
I vividly recall waiting for the countdown for the “Free As A Bird” video on television in 1995. Hearing John Lennon’s voice in our living room was startling and quite moving, though even then I recoiled at Paul McCartney’s contrived verse and scoffed at George Harrison only getting two lines in his verse to McCartney’s four—which felt like a classic “little brother” snub (though it may have been nothing of the sort). In any event, the sonic difference between Lennon’s thin, strangled vocal track, recorded on an inexpensive recorder in Lennon’s home in the late 1970s, and his mates’ polished studio vocals was jarring. As poignant and as technically marvelous as it was to be able to hear the song, the first “new” Beatles track in three and a half decades, to my ears (and heart) the tune never transcended its labored, created-in-the-lab feel. I barely remember the video.
But “Real Love” was, and remains, a different matter. A lovely song, it benefitted structurally from needing less democratic jerry-rigging than “Free As A Bird,” though why McCartney, Harrison, Ringo Starr, and producer Jeff Lynne didn’t avail themselves of the better sounding demos of the song that were within their grasp remains baffling. (And all the more problematic given the clarity of Lennon’s demoed vocal in “Now and Then.” More on that below.) Lennon’s track is unfortunately very noisy, and the clumsy fading in and out of the track in between his lines only emphasized the disparity between rough-and-ready and hi-gloss. Yet the melody is so pretty, and the accompaniment by the band is subtly supportive, the four minutes hanging together as an organic song, less a studio-enhanced production than the sound of of guys having satisfyingly banged out material.
Nearly three decades later, the most surprising and touching thing about “Real Love” is the unintended legacy to Harrison’s guitar playing. The spotlight of the song, as in “Free As A Bird,” was duly aimed at Lennon’s miraculous reappearance; the heart of the song is George’s characteristically-tasteful and emotionally-rich playing. His lovely phrases answering Lennon’s lines in the verses and the chorus both evoke his unobtrusive playing on mid-1960s Beatles records and respond beautifully to the sentiments Lennon was working though alone in his room at the Dakota a decade later, having secluded himself from his mates. Harrison’s playing on “Real Love” is among his most affecting on any Beatles track, I think. That was amazing and wholly surprising to me, but it shouldn’t have been. While in the Beatles, Harrison nearly always rose to a song’s emotional state, where it had taken the songwriter, where it was taking Harrison, and where it would take a listener sometime in the future. You’re hearing those songs right now, as am I.
As for “Now and Then,” after hearing it the first time I figured that I’d return to it infrequently, which is not the case with “Real Love.” The new song is polished, crisply recorded, the sound of Lennon’s demo vocal track remarkably strengthened via Peter Jackson’s MAL AI software, the machine learning duly depositing Lennon at the front of his track’s soundstage as if he’d demoed the tune last week. Harrison’s presence is meager—he strums accompanying guitars, and McCartney played a slide guitar line that, he promises, faithfully evoked the line that Harrison had come up with thirty years ago. (The band had done some work on “Now and Then” in the mid-1990s but scraped the efforts. Harrison died in 2001.) That Lennonian descending shiver in the phrase “That I-I-I-I-I love you” is sublime to hear again, and Ringo is Ringo, his backbeat sure, his fill’s unshowily propulsive. Giles Martin’s orchestral score perhaps over-dramatically evokes the song’s spirit, but is nonetheless affecting. Yet the song lingers briefly, approaching but lacking the emotional richness and depth of “Real Love.”
As it turns out, Lennon had written a pre-chorus for “Now and Then” that McCartney, et al, ignored. Their instinct was probably right, in that Lennon’s vocal at the end of the passage devolves into place-settling scatting, and anyway is a bit pitchy throughout, but the lyrics that were excised added real dimension, the lines—
I don’t wanna lose you, oh no, no
Abuse you or confuse you
Oh no, no, sweet darlin’
—moving the song to a darker place where Lennon admits to graphic weaknesses that dogged him for much of his life. In terms of sound quality, these particular lines were certainly usable, but what could the band have done with those last two lines of Lennon’s wordless vocal? I’m glad that McCartney didn’t write new lyrics and then sing them or, worse, wave Jackson’s magic wand and deployed a machine-learned Lennon vocal to sing them.
Ben Lindbergh considered all of this in a recent piece in The Ringer, observing smartly, “Setting aside the unanswerable question of whether Lennon would have wanted the song released without a section he may have considered essential, I can’t help but be a bit let down by the bridge’s omission.”
Without those surprising, distinctly Lennon-esque digressions, the song’s structure is simpler and more repetitive: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, verse. Plus, its sentiment is less poignant without some of the singer’s self-doubt. Even if there were no respectful, seamless way to preserve those fragments, I miss them sorely, having grown accustomed to them during my many spins of the demo.
As it is, those demoed lines—honest, complex, vulnerable, dark, written likelty with Yoko Ono down the hall with their small child—are lost to the dustbins of history, much as the way the cigarettes that the lads were holding in the photo used for the “Real Love” 45 sleeve were airbrushed into oblivion. Lost like some forgotten dreams, indeed. As the Beatles say, “If you don’t got ‘em, you can’t smoke ‘em!”
“Real Love” has secured a place in any Beatles playlist that I’ll make. I enjoy the shuffle-experience of the song, say, arriving after “You Really Got a Hold on Me” and before “Don’t Let Me Down.” But for the last three decades I’d been hearing a key passage of the lyrics in “Real Love” wrong.
A week or so ago I watched a YouTube video of a cover of the song. When the singer reached the pre-chorus, I was taken aback; why did she sing “No need to be alone” and, later, “No need to be afraid”? Why would she change up the lyrics; it changed the song fundamentally. Just as a mini-rant against reckless and indulgent interpretation began to voice itself inside me, I thought twice, and headed over to the Genius lyrics site. I was wrong, not the singer nor the hundreds of others who’ve covered the song. Nor, astonishingly enough, was Lennon himself wrong.
I heard—in 1996, and to this day—Lennon sing the words “Only to be alone” and “Only to be afraid.” I feel (OK, I felt, I’m trying) that that strange discovery, arriving as it does like a rueful insight before the warmly cheery chorus, really complicates things, reminding us that even within “real love” we’re going to feel alone and afraid at times. That chilly revelation is melancholy, to say the least. (And was echoed by Harrison’s dejected, descending lines.) Now, of course, I wonder why I didn’t wonder then why commentators never brought up that startling, very-Lennon pre-chorus, its admittance in song of defeat, or perhaps of hard-won wisdom. Well, because I heard the words wrong. Like anyone who’s innocently misheard a lyric, I make no apologies, and likely will I forever hear, and sing along with, the incorrect words. But facts are facts and, as a consequence, “Real Love” is a slightly lesser song to my ears now, de-fanged of the complex sentiment and analysis of adult love that I thought I’d heard for all of these decades. Just as well: my mistake will forever make up for the missing darkness in “Now and Then.”
What of the intentions behind these “new” Beatles songs? What of Lennon’s intentions for his private demos, for which he very likely had no conception of being used for a future song with his old bandmates? (For her part, Harrison’s widow Olivia Harrison is confident of George’s posthumous “OK” for the project.) “Would Lennon have wanted a reunion to take this form, with this demo of this song?”, Lindbergh asks. “Not even those who were closest to him can know with absolute certainty.”
Coincident to my musings on all of this, the novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison has written a terrific piece for The New Yorker in which she details the personal and artistic difficulties she faced after having been asked to complete a dead friend’s unfinished novel. She’d immediately agreed to, and then immediately faced the consequences of her decision. Could she complete the story, based on her friends sometimes-sparse notes as to its possible conclusion? How would she do that? And how might she keep put of the novel her own voice and aesthetic.
Ultimately, she decided upon a “set of rules, almost like Odysseus getting bound to the mast in preparation for hearing the sirens’ song. I wanted to guard against the creative impulses I feared would emerge and leave too much of my residue in the book.”
The first rule was, essentially, do no harm: leave everything alone unless there was an error, or a note from Rebecca [Godfrey] about something she needed to add or fix, or a scene that had been written several different ways. I slipped on her stylistic tics like a garment I was borrowing: Use more sentence fragments. Let the paragraphs stay long. Let the quotation marks stay off. Some of this felt intuitive, the text teaching me its rhythms. My abundant em dashes started to feel loud and clunky, like roadblocks dropped into her tight, sinuous sentences.
Surely, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr wrestled with a similar tangle of dilemmas in the studio. How to finish John’s songs? (According to lore, they imagined that Lennon had tossed his demos to them, asking them to finish it while he’s away.) How to follow his vision, update the sound, find a stake in it all somehow. “With each project, you eventually have to surrender the perfect version of the work to make room for what you actually create,” she discovered. “You are constantly, in that sense, displacing the sleek silhouette of perfection with its imperfect, bumbling cousin. With Rebecca’s novel, I had to give up on the fantasy in all the usual ways and also other ones.”
When it’s your own art, and you displace hypothetical perfection with actual imperfection, you are mainly just disappointing yourself; but with Rebecca’s novel I was also disappointing a ghost. Then again, the fact that I was doing this for her somehow made it easier to interrupt the spiral of self-recrimination. Was I going to finish or not? I got back to work.
As did the three remaining, and then the final two, Beatles. What will we make in the future of all these little plans and schemes?
The Beatles: Colors by lichtstadt (no alteration)
You've widen the question nicely Joe. Applies to all art I suppose. And the queststions you and Jamieson face can also apply to one's own work. Many times I've returned to a poem, sometimes after years of putting it away, and had to figure out what I had written and why and how I had originally intended to proceed. This is perplexing, often aggravating, but sometimes it producess a necessary and better revision. Hard enough to determine one's own intentions let alone John's. Thanks for the essay, Joe. I'll give the 3 songs a re-listen soon. Sibbie