It is so stressful to listen to the December 28th Star Club tapes. And for anyone who has endured a relationship with an out-of-control person, who has tried to minimize the damage in public, terrified in every moment, it is borderline traumatic. You’re not terrified of anything in particular, but you still feel terrified. As moments stretch out, beat by beat, every hair on your body feels electrified. Your senses are on fire. Your blood seems hot and thick. You can hear and feel your pulse BOING-BOING-BOINGing in your head, and you are just trying to get through another second. You are blind to everything else and any future. All there is is now and you must, somehow, get through this because there is no escape.

I can remember the understanding that dawned on me when I first heard Paul trying so hard to keep it together. Heard Ringo trying to distract with little drum fills, and for the first time truly understood how much George’s guitar is his voice.

On the 31st of December John’s “Battina” might indeed be beguiling, but on the 28th nothing is fucking “edgy” and it’s certainly not “charming.” It’s a dysfunctional family at Cracker Barrel desperately trying to get dad to stop screaming at the waitress.

But that is not at all what Mark Lewisohn got from these tapes. (By the way, I’ve done a few threads on this night as it breaks down, and I don’t have it in me to parse through and post all that audio again now.)

I don’t think anyone could listen to this night, especially the spaces between the songs, and really believe that John is “edgy,” “beguiling,” or “charming.” He is just objectively not any of those things.

LEWISOHN: I mean, John— we need to talk about John Lennon on this recording. These recordings. Because he’s uh— he’s- he’s- he’s belligerent. Um, he’s under the influence of— I’m sure he’s under the influence of Prellies. Probably drink, as well. Um, he’s beguiling, he’s rude—

CS: —Yeah.

LEWISOHN: —He’s still charming. He’s— I mean he’s not horrible. He’s just —yeah— he’s just edgy!

I am the Eggpod with Chris Shaw; December 31, 2019, Episode 31 – https://spotify.link/mDCg0Yqg5Db

On the 31st of December John’s “Battina” might indeed be beguiling, but on the 28th nothing is fucking “edgy” and it’s certainly not “charming.” It’s a dysfunctional family at Cracker Barrel desperately trying to get dad to stop screaming at the waitress.

But what is clear from the first moment to the last is that Paul is the conductor. At first John is just shambolic and a little wild, and Paul seems fairly relaxed, but it changes. All the sounds of everyone change as John unravels. There are times when I can just see Ringo, George and Paul looking at each other, and although Paul is the one who is landing the plane, it feels so much like a team effort.

(John, playing out the cycle that would become so familiar, has shaped up and is on his best behavior on the 31st and the band sounds great.)

I think we need to realize that this was just the dynamic. This is by far not John at his worst. By all accounts this was one of John’s best behaved Hamburg trips. It was a short trip, they had real bedrooms and a real manager, and they had a future they didn’t want to screw up. All those “funny” stories about John wearing a toilet on his head and laying on the stage drunk just smudge out the three other people in the picture. How much fun was it for them?

Derek Taylor says that one of the things that helped bring George back after he walked out of the “Get Back” sessions was Taylor going to him and saying, “Come back, don’t make Paul shoulder the burden of John all alone.” The tape from December 28th makes that so explicit.

There is the whole separate issue of Lewisohn seeming to be a terrible listener. He listened to the NAGRAS like a tribute and has gotten so many things wrong about them in interviews that I hope someone else (wink, wink AKOM) will handle the mess, because I do not have a podcast and this ain’t the best format for lots of audio. But hearing Lewisohn gush about John being “edgy” in these recordings in that weird, fawning voice—and completely fail to see and hear what the band was going through—troubles me in a much deeper way than almost anything else regarding the man. How can anyone be that blind?

—

My biases

I want to say something about the John/Paul dynamic. I came into the Beatles story very late, didn’t understand all this John/Paul “leader” internecine struggle, and by the time I did understand it, it was too late and I loved them both too deeply to be too partisan. But to place myself somewhere on that well-known scale, I really feel for Paul in the breakup and instinctively like him and want to defend him. Yet I can be almost knee-jerk protective of John. He screws up a lot, but I am very quick to make excuses for him. (And I think I’m right because he’s hurt.) I think the evidence shows that Paul was probably pretty full of himself near the end. I don’t blame him for “bossy” but I think he held breaking up over their heads more than we acknowledge, and there’s a fair deal of evidence for that that we dismiss too easily. I am also more sympathetic with John than I think most of the Paul team is. I do think the loss of his mom was more impactful than Paul’s mom was because he was more alone. But just as a rational human with eyes and a brain I think the whole “John was the leader” position is the most untenable I’ve ever seen. There is simply no way to make it believable. It goes against all the evidence. And last, I think the biggest problem right now is cutting George out too entirely. He’s the third leg of the table and he wasn’t always the bitter dude that he was after the breakup. I agree that the main artery of The Beatles was John and Paul, but George is always the tiebreaker. (Yoko realized and utilized that power he held well in the Allen Klein fight.) He was a factor in the shifts of power every step of the way, and basically the most important voter. (Plus, I have a soft spot for him.) Since I want everyone else to state their biases up front, I will too.