On New Year’s Eve 1970, Paul McCartney filed for divorce. The marriage he was suing to dissolve was not his recent one to photographer Linda Eastman, but a decade-long musical collaboration with three friends from his hometown. The next morning, the world found itself officially without the Beatles.
It’s difficult now to understand how cataclysmic the split seemed at the time. Pop culture, especially pop music, has been so fragmented for so long that the concept of a single galvanizing force like the Beatles seems far-fetched. But during the roughly seven (could it have been only seven?) years they were going full steam, the Beatles tallied twenty Number 1 singles and thirteen Number 1 albums. They played before the largest concert audiences of their day With producer George Martin, they expanded the creative scope of the recording studio, bringing to rock and roll artistic heft it had never had before. Their fans were legion, their influence pervasive. They became musical-political-spiritual gurus during a period of furious social upheaval. What John Lennon meant when he opined in 1966 that the group was “more popular than Jesus” was simply that, at the time, they were the four best-known blokes on the face of the earth.
Apologies to Michael Jackson, Madonna, and U2, but there will never be another Beatles.
In the aftermath of the unthinkable breakup, abandoned fans, journalists, and fellow artists searched for someone to blame. They found McCartney. All Paul had really done, though, was the paperwork: each of the Beatles had already issued solo albums by the end of 1970 (including McCartney’s McCartney, Lennon’s Live Peace in Toronto, Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, and Ringo Starr’s Sentimental Journey); Harrison and Starr had each quit temporarily at least once; and Lennon, now collaborating mainly with his new bride, conceptual artist Yoko Ono, had long since announced his intention to leave permanently. In point of fact, the breakup took seven years. It began with The Beatles (1968), essentially a bunch of solo albums in one (white) package, and wasn’t really over until Apple Corps., Ltd., was dissolved in 1975. Still, McCartney frequently found himself called upon to explain his actions.
He answered with music. “Another Day,” his tuneful slice-of-life debut single, would have been at home on any late-model Beatles album. It may not have ranked with grand statements like “Let It Be,” but it was long on melody and lyrical detail, strengths that continued to inform McCartney’s work for several more years. From astounding, multi sectioned singles like “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey,” “Live and Let Die,” “Band on the Run,” and “Venus and Mars/Rock Show” to straight-ahead rockers like “Hi, Hi, Hi,” “Jet,” “Junior’s Farm,” and “Helen Wheels” (named for Paul’s Land Rover), McCartney was the consummate pop melodist.
Oddly enough, friends and foes alike described him this way. In rock criticism, “melodic” is a pejorative term, implying a kind of weak-kneed, sing-along commerciality, and McCartney probably exacerbated the situation with 1976’s defensive “Silly Love Songs.” The single, his biggest of the seventies, marked the end of a fertile five-year period and was a mission statement for much of his later career.
Meanwhile, John Lennon was following his muse wherever it led him, sometimes down blind alleys. “How Do You Sleep?,” his vindictive attack on McCartney, indicated an unwillingness to give peace a chance, at least where band relations were concerned. Besides, after experiments with populism, minimalism, and rock revivalism, the eldest Beatle had a solo catalog that compared rather unfavorably to his old mate’s. Exceptions included the Spectorian “Mind Games,” a chamber-rock classic whose hypnotic flow made its big ideas digestible; “Whatever Gets You Through The Night,” a loping R&B duet with Elton John; and a few acknowledged classics like “Imagine” and “Jealous Guy.”
George Harrison was the Buzz Aldrin of the Beatles — always second to Lennon and McCartney — but after two acclaimed triple albums (All Things Must Pass and The Concert for Bangladesh), a blockbuster hit single (“My Sweet Lord” / “Isn’t It a Pity”) and several Grammy nominations, Harrison seemed ready to put an end to all that second-fiddle stuff. His early-seventies oeuvre presented a new set of questions, chief among them being: Why are love songs about God so often boring? When Harrison’s singles succeeded, it was in spite of their spiritual intentions: “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” had a quirky, rhythmically restless melody that made the Utopian lyrics a red herring. But go deeper into the albums at your peril.
One of Harrison’s best cracks at a pure pop song was a minor masterpiece he co-wrote for Ringo, the 1973 Richard Perry-produced blockbuster that made Ringo Starr a commercial force (if only briefly). “Photograph” went to Number 1 in eight weeks, and gold shortly thereafter. The song’s opening lines reflected the mood of many fans as they watched the solo Beatles lumber forward under the weight of recent history: “Every time I see your face / It reminds me of the places we used to go.” Starr’s other hits, mostly retreads and novelties, were more or less what people expected from the world’s drollest drummer.
In addition to a spate of Beatles covers by names big (Elton John’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” with Lennon on guitar, Stevie Wonder’s “We Can Work It Out,” Joan Baez’s “Let It Be,” Blood, Sweat & Tears’ “Got to Get You into My Life,” Richie Havens’s “Here Comes the Sun”) and small (Johnny Rodriguez’s “Something,” the Gary Toms Empire’s “Drive My Car,” Katfish’s “Dear Prudence”), the early seventies not surprisingly produced a number of Fab Four imitators. Of these, Badfinger was the only authorized one. The Liverpool quartet was signed to Apple in 1968, and songs like the McCartney-penned “Come and Get It” and the Harrison-produced “Day After Day” probably stayed truer to the Beatles’ legacy than the lads themselves did. To this day, many people mistakenly remember Badfinger’s hits as Beatles songs.
Beatles-style pop ran the gamut from the sublime (the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way”) to the ridiculous (the Hudson Brothers’ “So You Are a Star”), and was ultimately unnecessary; as of 1971, the solo Beatles had plenty of creative ammunition left. Compare the band’s twenty-one Top 10 hits from 1965 to 1970 to the individual members’ twenty-two during the following five years.
To the generation that had come of age with them, though, the Beatles would never be good enough again. Collectively they had raised expectations they could never live up to individually, and it fell to their original fans’ younger brothers and sisters to sort through four erratic solo careers. Too young to remember firsthand Beatlemania, these proto-X’ers listened to the Beatles as exactly what Lennon had insisted they were all along: four individuals. Or, as the joke goes, did you know Paul McCartney was in another band before Wings?
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