Beatlemania: A Penetrating New Book Celebrates Lennon and McCartney

JOHN & PAUL: A Love Story in Songs, by Ian Leslie

In our culture, music is most often written about in terms of sales, streams and chart positions. That is, of course, the least intelligent way to think about or talk about music.

Ian Leslie’s “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs”is unconcerned with all that, but rather it explores the way two extraordinarily gifted young men combined and exchanged their gifts while inspiring, challenging, teaching and learning from each other.

In the great teams of composers before John Lennon and Paul McCartney — Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe, Leiber and Stoller, Bacharach and David — one of the members wrote the music and the other wrote the lyrics. John and Paul both wrote music and both wrote lyrics, and they made a decision at the beginning of their collaboration to share the credit on all of their compositions, thereby creating a third being called Lennon and McCartney. That selfless, generous merger, as their egos shape-shifted into and out of each other, unleashed a power that took music to a height that has not since been surpassed, or I think it safe to say, even reached.

I fell in love with rock ’n’ roll music when I was 9 years old in 1957 and first heard “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,”by Jerry Lee Lewis. I clearly remember rolling around on the floor laughing at the explosion of freedom and joy in that recording, and in that moment I thought that that was how I wanted to spend my life. By 1960, however, the rock ’n’ roll explosion had faded away. Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash. Elvis Presley was in the Army. Chuck Berry was in jail. Eddie Cochran died in a car wreck. Little Richard was in the ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis had been canceled. Rock ’n’ roll seemed at a dead end.

Three years later, however, these two young musicians and their friends George Harrison and Ringo Starr, all from a seaport in the north of England, reinvented a style of music that had come from the backwaters of the Mississippi Delta, the highlands of the Appalachian Mountains and the mean streets of our cities. In the next five years, while absorbing and combining the art and music of the rest of the 20th century, they made music that took us all on an exquisite trip into other worlds of sound and meaning in a feat of invention that seems and is, I think, superhuman.

Though there has probably never been music that has permeated and elevated mass culture to a higher degree, this book is not interested in music as a mass commodity. This book is about soul, about grief and most of all about love — the love that two boys who lost their mothers far too soon have for each other, the courageous way they merge and the unfathomable power of that merger.