http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/article/855344--what-if-the-beatles-had-just-let-it-be
40 years ago this summer, The Beatles officially called it quits.
Geoff Pevere wonders what would have happened if they'd stayed together
Sep 01 2010
By Geoff Pevere
"In order to put out of its misery the limping dog of a news story
which has been dragging itself across your pages for the past year,
my answer to the question: 'Will The Beatles get together again?' is
no." - Paul McCartney, in an August 1970 letter to Melody Maker magazine.
With these words, published 40 years ago this summer, Paul McCartney
rather bluntly killed the rumours that the breakup of The Beatles was
just another Paul-is-dead hoax. The world's most popular rock band
was, definitively, dead.
As distressing as the news might have been for countless fans who
felt robbed of a future, it also meant the world was spared any
number of ugly scenarios: the Beatles becoming a pathetic oldies
band; The Beatles embracing country-rock, glam, prog rock, disco,
punk or rock opera; The Beatles becoming a pale, sorry shadow of
their former selves. A band we wished had broken up.
Nevertheless, McCartney's words started something else, a game of
"imagine" that still thrives, perhaps the most persistent instance of
what-if wondering in popular music history.
What if The Beatles hadn't called it quits?
The question is posed despite the fact that, even then, we knew it
was over. Ever since McCartney announced his plans to go solo the
previous spring, he and John Lennon had engaged in public spitballing
on Melody Maker's pages. ("Paul hasn't quit. I sacked him.") Rumours
were rife that the reason for the delay of the swan-song album Let it
Be originally titled Get Back was that The Beatles had grown to
hate each other, and the album reflected that fact. That's why Abbey
Road, which was actually recorded after Let it Be but was strained by
the cracks of the rift between Lennon and McCartney, was released first.
McCartney had wanted Abbey Road to be one long, unfolding suite.
Lennon thought the idea was not feasible. The compromise was an album
that had discrete songs on one side and a suite on the other.
McCartney wanted the next album to be recorded before a live
audience, something The Beatles hadn't done in three years. Lennon
nixed this idea, as well as any plans the band might get back on the
road. He hated the thought of touring, while McCartney thought it
vital to the band's future.
Then, with that letter, there was no future.
But what if there was?
"One can imagine they would have continued to evolve," says York
University ethnomusicology professor Rob Bowman of the band's
"stunning" rate of development in the brief, brilliant decade it was
together. "And one can imagine that they would have got back on the
road if they'd stayed together. Who knows what that would have meant?"
At McGill University, Will Straw is another teacher of popular music
and culture, arenas of study that might not exist were it not for The
Beatles' storming of the barriers between the popular and the
intellectual. Looking back, he thinks the timing of the breakup was perfect.
"It allows them to stand as the perfect example of this historical
moment," Straw observes, "which is when rock becomes both amazingly
popular and changes everything around the world, but also becomes
sort of arty and introspective and creative. They embodied that more
than anybody else. So it's sort of perfect that they broke up when they did."
For Keir Keightley, an associate professor in the department of
information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario,
the question itself reveals the enormous nature of the band and its
influence. He believes The Beatles might not be The Beatlesat least
not as omnipresently so if they hadn't split 40 years ago.
"Had they not broken up," Keightley says, "it's possible the respect
that's given them might have been more eroded. Perhaps they would
have been a target of punk music and things might have been slightly
different because they would not have been deified as quickly or as
massively in the '70s and '80s."
It's like this. To become The Beatles the formidable cultural
entity they needed to stop being The Beatles the flawed human
aggregate of four guys succumbing to the pressures of fame, fatigue
and paralyzing expectations. They are what they are because they quit
when they did.
But the wondering isn't entirely unwarranted. Bowman, for one, hears
a number of portents of what might have been in The Beatles' final
studio sessions.
"I'm sure they would have toured," he speculates. "That would have
transformed their legacy substantially. They would have had to get
their chops back together as live players, which they had let slip
because nobody could hear them and nobody cared anyway, which was one
reason they stopped touring.
"It might have led to simpler, back-to-rock-'n'-roll material, it
might have led to ever-evolving, complicated stuff. I'm not saying
they would have made records like Close to the Edge by Yes, but I
think the Abbey Road suite, that's pointing in a similar kind of
direction. And look at the solo material, Harrison's All Things Must
Pass, Lennon's Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, the first two McCartney
albums. Great records."
"One might even argue," Bowman says, "that the deterioration one saw
in Paul and John and George's solo songwriting might not have
happened if they had been editing each other. Who can tell Paul
McCartney it's not good enough except for John or George or Ringo? No
one's going to tell him that. Likewise for any of them."
Back to rock 'n' roll? Beatlesque prog rock? Fab Four disco? These
possibilities point to yet another path: the one where The Beatles
persist to the point of parody.
"The real horrible scenario would have been the Spinal Tap one,"
winces Straw. "You watch Spinal Tap and they do the history of the
group, and they started out as a skiffle group and then they were a
beat group and then they went psychedelic. Well, in fact the band
that's closest to that is The Beatles. But they didn't go beyond that
into all the sort of horrible stuff that Spinal Tap stands for. So
it's hard to imagine. The beauty of The Beatles was the tensions
between Lennon and McCartney and the others, but at a point when
those tensions were still creative."
Looking back on the 1970s, Keightley wonders if The Beatles would
have survived the assault on rock orthodoxy wrought by punk and the
post-boomer backlash.
"Take the Stones," Keightley points out. "The fact that they had a
'Steel Wheelchairs' tour and people call it that, that tells us a
lot," he adds, referring to the band's Steel Wheels tour. "So it's
very likely that The Beatles would have gone through that period
where they would have been seen as an enemy of innovation, as
dinosaurs. If they kept touring into the '80s and '90s, it could have
been seen as laughable. 'When I'm 64' might not have been treated as
gently I think as it was when McCartney, Sir Paul, turned 64."
In any case, it's not like John, Paul, George and Ringo owed the
world anything when the band called it quits.
"What else might they have given us?" Bowman asks disbelievingly.
"They transformed the whole notion of what rock music could be. Along
with Dylan, they made the album the dominant mode of expression,
rather than the 45. Not only the dominant mode of expression but the
dominant mode of commerce. Which leads to FM radio and a serious rock
press, which leads to things such as Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy,
which leads to a seriousness of an audience which changes the whole
notion of what live performance is."
"Then the shift from pop entertainer to rock artist," Bowman adds, "a
shift in the way musicians thought of themselves and a shift in the
way audiences thought about themselves. Some people would argue that
that was a bad thing, but other people would argue it's an amazing
thing because it leads to great music that follows long past The
Beatles' breakup. None of which would have happened if rock wasn't
considered an art form rather than simply entertainment for kids."
"That's a huge shift," says Bowman. "A massive transformation in both
the creative process and political economy which, given the role rock
played in the culture at large, makes it pretty hard to imagine what
more any group could have given the planet."
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