#my regular rant about the state of beatle literature

[no-reply95]

Dogget forgot that the other three actually tried to persuade Paul to return to them too after break up. Paul however, was angry and declined. And this might sound strange but i would actually say both John and George are actually hella possessive of Paul. The entitlement those two got for Paul...astounding. All the Beatles are possessive of each other, if Dogget try to say that in front of them...not sure it will be good.

I mean I haven’t read YNGMYM so I can’t speak to everything Doggett has said on the Beatles but from the excerpts I’ve read he does appear to fall into the camp of people who believe Paul was constantly pining for the Beatles to get back together in the 70s and would have dropped everything if John had said he was interested.

My issue with people like Doggett (if that is the camp he does fall into) is they are credible authors and do make an effort to write an unbiased book on the Beatles but then they clearly bring in their interpretations and select the evidence they find to fit their pre-determined interpretations rather than looking at the actual evidence in front of them and letting that shape their interpretations. I think Doggett, like a lot of other authors, falls into the trap where they see Paul’s post break-up announcement depression as demonstrative of his permanent attitude towards John, George and the Beatles reforming but that just isn’t based on reality. I’ll outline a few reasons why I disagree:

If Paul was so desperate for the band to reform why would he take them to court to legally break them up? Why wouldn’t he just acquiesce and accept Klein?

Why wouldn’t Paul play at Bangladesh? That would have been a great opportunity to mend fences with George and get him onside, in an alternative universe where Paul plays at Bangladesh can you see George playing on HDYS? I can’t.

Paul says that John specifically called him up to get the band back together after they failed to renew Klein’s contract, again if Paul was so desperate to reform the band how did he not bite on that offer from John?

Similarly to Bangladesh, John and Yoko invited Paul to play at the One to One concert and again he turned them down so clearly it wasn’t a case of John saying jump and Paul saying how high.

The above list is by no means exhaustive, there are so many instances in the 70s, heck even in the late 60s of John and George reaching out to Paul so this narrative that Paul would have dropped everything if John would have given the word is an invention of a narrative that seeks to show that John was the centre of Paul’s universe while Paul was just some guy that John could pick up and drop as he pleased. We don’t know everything that happened between the members of the band but from what we do know the facts just do not support this narrative so it would be great to get some non-boomers into the Beatles literature space because I for one am tired of these weird fanboy takes that are based solely on confirmation bias rather than (the closest approximation of) reality.

It’s a shame that Doggett’s Prisoner of Love book was cancelled because I think it’s likely that if he really did get to read John’s diaries that a lot of what was in there would have been pretty eye-opening and may have been cause for him to revise some of his interpretations from YNGMYM… Let’s see what happens in the future on this, hopefully this book can come out eventually.