IT'S BEATLES EVE. . .
(Nov. 1, 2023)

          Okay, kids, it’s Beatles Eve. Tomorrow morning, Nov. 2, 2023, there will be a new Beatles song---a real Beatles song, with all the allure and grandeur of same. The last one. Souffle successfully reheated.
          Knock me down with a silver hammer.
          It’s really all due to Paul McCartney, who loved The Beatles more than anyone in the band, I’d wager, and probably more than anyone else in the world. He never took his eyes off the ball that was the third, unfinished, abandoned John Lennnon reunion song given to him, Harrison, and Starr by Yoko Ono in 1994.
          Never mind that Harrison vetoed “Now and Then,” justifiably, due to the terrible sound quality of the 1977 home recording by Lennon. (And, reportedly, because George was stung by the criticism of the two released reunion songs, “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love.”) Never mind that there were only tentative recordings of the three Beatles casually adding instruments and vocals to the last Lennon tape. Never mind Harrison’s terrible death from cancer at only 58. Never mind twenty-eight years. . .
          For McCartney, “Now and Then” lingered in the back of his mind, always. Lurking, teasing, like an unresolved chord. In 2007, he gave the working version to his then-producer, David Kahne, to see if anything could be done to enhance the fuzzy quality of the Lennon tape. Whatever the results, no song emerged. And yet, several times in the past twenty years or so, Paul remarked in interviews that he would like to finish the thing. Then there were rumors that he had, in fact, done so. Did he have a plan? Was he keeping it to be released on some future project? Or, gasp, after he passed away? It is, after all, a song about loss. . .We don't know. But we do know this:
          There would be no “Now and Then” without director Peter Jackson, who is the best thing to happen to The Beatles since producer/arranger George Martin.
          Jackson’s deep understanding and love of The Beatles and their music cannot be overstated. He brought incisive expertise and nuanced care to the 2021 “Get Back” documentary, revealing that the ill-fated 1969 sessions were not so ill-fated after all. In the eight hours that he managed to slip past the Disney-approved six, Jackson revealed the troubles and acrimony in the band in heartbreaking detail---far more troubling, by the way, than anything in the depressing 1970 Michael Lindsay-Hogg film of the sessions, “Let it Be.” Jackson understood that ultimately, The Beatles pulled together in triumph. It was a revelation.
          Along the way, the director and his crew just happened to, oh, yawn, oh, incidentally. . .just happened to invent the technology that made this Beatles Eve possible. They just happened to invent a magic trick unprecedented in the history of sound recording, that's all---a way to turn mono into stereo; to discretely isolate any particular sound in any mono recording. Why? Just so they could hear what Lennon and McCartney were discussing in “Get Back” session footage, where the two had been deliberately playing guitar and bass at high volume to keep their conversation secret. History, meet prying computer eyes. Or in this case, ears.
          It was about a year ago that Jackson excitedly announced that he and McCartney were working on a new project that he couldn’t speak about. Dollars to donuts, crème tangerines to montelimars, that they had a little confab, and one of them said that, oh, by the way, the new AI separation technology would enable the clean extraction of Lennon’s voice from that awful “Now and Then” tape.
          Light bulb. Or, more likely, sunburst. In McCartney’s head. You can imagine the 72-point bold mental headline: GOT IT!
          But. . .what to do about no George? No George Martin? Well, if Paul and Peter could effectively bring back John, a miracle of Biblical proportion, so to speak, Paul could bring back Martin and Harrison. He knew better than anyone alive what a Beatles song should sound like, and how it should be crafted. Audacity? Maybe. But more like. . .responsibility. George was already on the song with vocals, acoustic and electric guitar. His widow, Olivia, said The Crusty Beatle would have approved finishing the tune because of the new technology. Bingo. Paul created a tribute slide guitar solo in the style of his "little brother," George, of all things poetic. And then he wrote---with input from Giles “son of George” Martin---a George Martin-esque string arrangement. Zounds! He also kind of recut and rearranged John’s demo---which was an unfinished linking of three different song ideas---and added some words of his own.
          Voila. Lennon-McCartney. Voila. Beatles.
          One of the most compelling, almost alchemical aspects of the Beatles story, as biographer extraordinaire Mark Lewisohn has noted, is coincidence. How everything seemed to almost supernaturally line up; how stars and whims and circumstance allowed for that eight-year burst of inspired, unequalled music-making. A touch of this cosmic conspiracy seems to have returned with “Now and Then”---first with Jackson’s inadvertent enabling the completion of the song, and, symbolically, with the return of Mal Evans.
          Evans, of course, was The Beatles’ redoubtable “roadie,” but much more---a friend, confidant, genial jack-of-all-trades assistant who did everything from driving the van when they were poor and unknown to fetching an anvil for “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” to, as Harrison put it on his solo album, “All Things Must Pass,” tea and sympathy. Good old Mal was shot and killed by the LAPD in 1976, after he allegedly drunkenly pointed a rifle at cops summoned by his then-girlfriend.
          But Mal was back again, helping to facilitate the recording of “Now and Then”---in the form of that artificial intelligence program created by Jackson’s team, dubbed “MAL 9000” in tribute to Evans, and in winking nod to “HAL 9000,” the willful computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Is this point a stretch? Silly? Not when you consider that in a couple of weeks, the first-ever Evans biography---utilizing the man’s long-lost diaries and countless new interviews---debuts. Correct: “Living The Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans,” written by eminent author and Beatles historian Ken Womack, arrives just in the wake of “Now and Then.”
          Cue the theme from “The Twilight Zone.”
          Now, a long time ago---which is the way I introduce most anecdotes now---I grew up in a household where, to a great extent, I was more or less a boarder. No, I didn’t have to pay rent. I was cared for, had enough to eat, a nice roof over my head, my own room and TV, new school clothes each year (well, I was growing.) But I was a major inconvenience to my vicious, nutball stepmother, who came to despise me, chronically belittle me, and generally make me feel like ant dung, between the ages of eight and 16 (when she threw me out.) Gory details, yes, but omitted here. During those years, when my very being was forming, I turned to exactly one source for escape, comfort, inspiration, joy. Can you guess what that source was? I’ll just bet you can. Music. And the centerpiece of that music? The Beatles. Where I would be today without “Hey Jude” alone, I can’t imagine.
          The next new Beatles song or album came to mean practically everything to me. It was Christmas, every time (double Christmas in the cases of "Magical Mystery Tour" and the white album, under the tree in successive years.) What would the new George song be like? More India music? Ringo’s new song is hilarious! How can McCartney do something like “I Will” along with “Honey Pie” and “Helter Skelter?” Lennon looks like he’s freaked out! What’s a crabalocker fishwife?
          There I was, in Isla Vista, California, in the summer of ’67, hearing “Sgt. Pepper” coming from seemingly every hippie-choked house and apartment building. . .There I was, on a blacktop basketball court in Thousand Oaks, alone on a Saturday afternoon, practicing jump shots in the searing sun, when “Lady Madonna” came on my transistor radio for the first time. Was that Ringo or Paul singing? There I was, one hundred-degree August afternoon in my home with my older brother, when “Hey Jude” was world-premiered on KHJ radio. It was so loosey-goosey, so different. “Do you think it will be a hit?" asked my brother? “Yes,” I promptly replied. “Probably their biggest ever.” There I was, lazily browsing through records at the House of Sight and Sound in Marina del Rey one day after high school, when---what?---there was a new Beatles album with the four of them crossing a street? There hadn’t even been any announcement about it, that I’d heard. And why was the cover so thin and shiny? (I didn’t know that it was the English import, pre-dating the U.S. release.) I ran the couple miles home and back (I was a cross-country guy) to scrape together enough change to buy the album ($3.79) before 6 p.m. closing time. There I was, playing Beatles music in my room (or in my head), to deal with another attack by stepmommie, or the depression that came from changing high schools, etc.
          And on and on and on.
          The impact of the break-up is more than I can explain, as if the sun went down and an imposter came up the next morning, and every morning after. How could such machineries of joy (thank you, Ray Bradbury) have broken down? How could Lennon say all those rotten, idiotic things in the Rolling Stone interview? How could there be such sniping and ill will among these guys who often described one another as brothers? It was crushing---support system stained, trampled on. Oh, I bought all the solo albums in the ‘70’s, embraced them as well as I could, tried to excuse the lousy ones, hoped like hell Lennon had left Ono for good when he took up with May Pang and was re-connecting with McCartney, wished with Disney-esque naivete that they would reunite. . .
          And then, 1980. Lennon’s brutal, fiendish murder not only deprived a good human being of life, and forever shattered his family and friends, it killed The Beatles. This was impossible for me to come to terms with, emotionally, and to a great extent, remains so. Not only was that utterly transcendent, exuberant art---and the group's irreverence, subversion, intelligence---not regrouping, reconstituting. . .it never would. For me, and my life, there is pre-1980, and post-1980. The former colored by optimism, the latter by unforgiving reality.
          Which is why, in 1994, when Harrison announced he had gone to Ono in order to acquire tapes of Lennon songs for the other three to finish, I was gobsmacked, stupefied. This poignant gesture by the remaining Beatles was, for me, a miracle---the ghost-like return of the best stuff of life; certainly the best stuff of my life, which had guided and buttressed me through crises, knocks, abuse, and hard times. That the two songs the project yielded, “Free As A Bird,” and “Real Love,” didn’t really live up to their heritage, was forgivable. It was wonderful---make that wondrous---to have new Beatles songs again, however imperfect.
          I mean, look. The first article I ever wrote was a review of the “white album” for my high school newspaper in Thousand Oaks, at age 15. In addition to my journalism career writing news and features, I covered things Beatle for the Venice High Oarsman, the Valley News, L.A. Herald Examiner, L.A. Times, Washington Post, Musician, Guitar World, and pretty much every major paper in the country. In 1982 alone, I wrote a gigantic Her Ex series trying to quantify all the unreleased Beatles music left behind---the first time this had been done anywhere. In 1988, I did a long interview with Harrison himself (quaking in my sneakers in the presence of the guy who wrote "Within You Without You," a song that heavily influenced my outlook.) I’ve been a contributing editor to Beatlefan for decades. . .
          And here I am again, old and gray, a ridiculous fifty-five years later, on Beatles Eve, waiting for what---from everything I’ve read by people who have heard the song---promises to be something that, as a friend said, “lives up to The Beatles pedigree.” A final, unexpected gesture from those four great friends, those quibbling, loving brothers of heart and melody, a final bit of love injected into a catastrophic world, a final shot in the arm for this old kid. . .
          The mysterious, powerful, endearing thing that is a new Beatles song.

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