Daniel Rachel imagines what the next Beatles album might have been like, with painstaking detail and great stories
For a baby boomer like me, 12 years old when the Beatles broke through in 1962 and a mere 19 when they called it a day in 1969, it’s curious to watch the love objects of my teenage years still being pored over by grownups more than 50 years later. Writers such as Daniel Rachel may be adults today but they’re nonetheless too young to have experienced the Beatles in real time. They know more about their story than I do because they’ve read a lot of the books. Not all of them of course. Nobody could do that.
The first half of Rachel’s book is spent anatomising the discontents that set in once their manager Brian Epstein died in 1967, feelings that the four of them seemingly had to explain in every single interview they did for the rest of their lives. For 60s kids like me, it was neither a shock nor a mystery. In those days there were no bands with 40 years on the clock and therefore we had no expectation that this lot would continue. As McCartney points out, when a band are on the rise all the members’ energies are consumed by the climb. Once they plateau there’s fighting in the captain’s tower.
Nonetheless, as Rachel painstakingly shows in his account of how they worked in their post-touring years, they had an ability to operate under conditions of personal tension that would have buckled most bands. They bit their lips. When John Lennon said: “Yoko only wanted to be accepted as one of us,” nobody offered the obvious rejoinder. Sometimes they expressed themselves more forcibly. In one passage the author wonders whether John really could have thrown a brick the 75 metres (246ft) it would have taken to break the front window of Paul’s home in St John’s Wood. More often than not the Beatles wrapped their troubles in work. When John decided he wanted to record The Ballad of John and Yoko as the new Beatles single, Paul didn’t object. He played all the parts John couldn’t, which was most of them.
The counterfactual second half of the book looks at the album that could arguably have followed, had they acted upon their plan to divide up the songwriting chores equally. It proposes a double album made up of songs that appeared on their early solo records. That means it contains everything from John’s Jealous Guy and George’s My Sweet Lord to Paul’s Maybe I’m Amazed and even Ringo’s It Don’t Come Easy. It tells the story of every one of those songs and, this being the Beatles, and there being nothing about the group that is not interesting, every tale seems touched by serendipity. According to US musician Leon Russell, even George Harrison, the member most ambivalent about the Beatles’ specialness, had already made a tape of just such an album at the beginning of the 70s. Certainly there are lots of great records in this track listing. However, there isn’t one that wouldn’t have been better if it had been recorded by the Beatles.
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