"Now and Then"

by Kirk Woodward 

[As veteran ROTters know by now, Kirk Woodward’s been a generous contributor to this blog since it began over 14½ years ago.  That’s probably largely because I started Rick On Theater at Kirk’s suggestion, so spiritually at least, he’s a part-owner. 

[Even if you’ve only read an occasional post on ROT, you probably know that one of Kirk’s most frequent topics is the Beatles—because he’s been an avid fan of that British rock foursome since they first appeared on the U.S. rock ’n’ roll scene almost 60 years ago. 

[(To be fair, I was, too, but I was in high school in Europe [see my post “Going to a Swiss International School,” 29 April-14 May 2021], so I started listening in mid-1963 on such radio stations as Radio Luxembourg and pirate stations aboard ships in the Atlantic.  Kirk, however, has a strong music background that I lacked, so I may have heard them earlier, but he understood what they were doing.)

[In any case, when I heard a report on WCBS-TV news on the evening of Thursday, 26 October, about the “new” Beatles song about to be released, I immediately e-mailed Kirk with the news (even though I was pretty sure he’d have picked up on it before I did) and urged him to try to hear the record ASAP and write about it for the blog.  Ultimately, that’s what he did—and the outcome is below. 

[(He actually sent his copy to me on 14 November, but after editing (minimal), I held it to space out Kirk’s contributions a bit—he’d sent me “Great Directors at Work” just before and I was posting it on 25 November—so they wouldn’t all come at once.)

[Kirk’s past Beatles posts on Rick On Theater include: “The Beatles and Me,” 7 October 2010; “The Beatles Box,” 30 September 2012; “The Beatles Diary” by Kirk Woodward & Pat Woodward, 8 January 2013; “The Beatles’ Influence,” 13 July 2015; “Now, Live, the Non-Beatles,” 27 September 2016; “Bob and Ringo,” 1 December 2017; “Help!,” 17 September 2020; and “Reviewing the Beatles,” 19 December 2021.]

The Beatles have been so central to my life that I don’t even think about how important they are to me anymore until something happens to remind me, like the recent release of “the last Beatles song,” a John Lennon song called “Now and Then.” [See Kirk’s earlier Rick On Theater posts “The Beatles and Me” (7 October 2010) and “The Beatles’ Influence” (13 July 2015), among his other Fab Four contributions to this blog.]

Lennon (1940-1980) recorded a “demo tape” on a cassette tape recorder in the late 1970’s. When the three remaining Beatles were working on the Anthology project in the 1990’s, Yoko Ono (b. 1933), Lennon’s widow, offered some of Lennon’s demo tapes to the remaining Beatles for the project.

[Sometimes referred to as the Anthology project, The Beatles Anthology is a multimedia retrospective consisting of a TV documentary, a three-volume set of double albums, and a book on the history of the group. Beatles members Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr participated in the making of the works, while Lennon appears in archival interviews.

[The television documentary was first broadcast in November 1995. The Anthology book was released in 2000; Anthology 1 of the album set was released the same week of the documentary’s broadcast and Anthology 2 and Anthology 3 were released in 1996.]

Two of the songs she provided, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” were completed and released (in 1995 and 1996 respectively) by the remaining Beatles, and they began work on a third, “Now and Then,” but abandoned it, with George Harrison (1943-2001) in particular losing interest, partly because of technical issues – Lennon’s voice was combined with his piano playing in a way that couldn’t be separated, and apparently there was an unfortunate hum on the tape as well.

Paul McCartney (b. 1942) occasionally mentioned in interviews that he’d like to finish working on the song, and he became more vocal on the subject in 2021.

While the film director Peter Jackson (b. 1961) was doing superlative work on the Beatles documentary Get Back (2021), he and his team developed software for separating and remixing monophonic sound (for example, on a cassette recording) that far exceeded the capability of previously existing software.

Apparently in 2022, McCartney and Ringo Starr (b. 1940) finished work on the song, adding additional instrumental and vocal parts, including an orchestral score. Producing the recording were Jeff Lynne (b. 1947); McCartney; and the brilliant Giles Martin (b. 1969), the son of the Beatles’ famous original producer George Martin (1926-2016). Giles Martin also co-wrote the orchestral scoring for the release with McCartney and composer Ben Foster (b. 1977). The result was publicly released on 2 November 2023.

For a band that made its last recordings in early 1970, the Beatles have been hot in recent years. Paul McCartney recently played on a track on the new album by the Rolling Stones, Hackney Diamonds (released on 20 October 2023). And “Now and Then” has done well on the US music sales charts and was #1 on its release in England.

[According to Wikipedia, “Now and Then” débuted at #42 in the U.K. on 3 November and reached #1 the following week. In the U.S., the song was #1 on the Billboard Digital Song Sales chart for the week ending 11 November and hit between #5 and #7 on other Billboard charts, making “Now and Then” the Beatles’ 35th top ten single on the magazine’s tallies. Wikipedia records, however, that two weeks later, it “fell off the chart.”]

Then there’s the Get Back documentary, in three parts and about eight hours long, an astonishing look at the creative process in action – we literally see the first moments of the composition of the song “Get Back” (originally released as a single on 11 April 1969) as McCartney improvises.

The Get Back documentary (footage originally shot in January 1969) also shattered a long-held belief about the Beatles, that their experiences making the Let It Be album (1970) that features “Get Back” were, not to mince words, a living hell. The documentary shows that there certainly are difficult moments, plenty of them, among the Beatles, but even more there are moments of cooperation, fun, and productivity, as well as a great deal of just messing around.

The Beatles did go on to break up over financial and management issues, but the Get Back film removed a huge cloud of gloom from over their last years, and I suspect that the film had much to do with the anticipation that greeted the announcement of the release of “Now and Then.”

We may ask, what is it about the Beatles, anyway? Why are they important to many of us (certainly to me) more than fifty years after they finished being a band? I have chewed over this question many times, and my answers never completely satisfy me.

Part of it is simply that they did their work so well. Song after song, recording after recording, the work is well thought out, clearly presented, full of energy, humor, and imagination. The Beatles are among the few rock bands capable of being funny; they are astonishingly poised; they almost never repeat themselves, even though many of their songs would make a career for most artists.

There’s got to be more to the story, though, and I think one can follow a thread that begins with the earliest songs they wrote and recorded. Typically those were “love songs,” and popular music is mostly made up of them.

The singer and songwriter Barry Manilow (b. 1943), who should know, said recently that in popular music, “You can either write, ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you.’ You go any further than that, you’re writing a Broadway song.” (Barry Manilow’s first Broadway musical, Harmony, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 13 November 2023.)

Actually Lennon and McCartney stated, in their earlier days, that they hoped one day to write a musical. Their songs have been presented on Broadway, notably in the musical Beatlemania in 1979. An early feature of their song list was “Till There Was You” from the 1957 musical The Music Man (released by the Beatles in 1963).

[Kirk has written about the distinctions between “popular songs” and “theater songs” in “Theatrical and Popular Songs,” posted on ROT on 2 October 2011.]

The Beatles did not write for Broadway, but they wrote popular songs of an extraordinarily broad range.  In general the earlier songs the Beatles – almost always Lennon and McCartney – wrote were about romantic relations, but from the start the angles from which they observed romance were unusual – but frequently presented so smoothly that one might not notice.

The famous “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1963), for example, is about the simplest possible “romantic” idea, expressed completely in its title, but even so, “holding hands” isn’t exactly a staple of rock music.

About the same time, though, “She Loves You” (also 1963), another enormous success, takes a different approach – the singer isn’t the person in love but is talking to another person about his relationship to still another, and offering advice on behavior:

So it’s up to you – I think it’s only fair;
Pride can hurt you too – apologize to her!

The song sounds so effortless that it’s easy to overlook how unusual the story within the song really is as an example of (extremely successful) popular music.

Then, still in the early period of their success, the Beatles met Bob Dylan (b. 1941) and listened to his songs, and learned that the focus of songs could range almost anywhere – toward society, toward people, toward one’s inmost thoughts and feelings.

With a little practice the Beatles mastered this insight and for the last several years of their career they wrote songs that didn’t convey meanings so much as they suggested the possibility of meanings, pointing to the existence of worlds of experience beyond the words of the songs themselves.

The master of this approach was John Lennon. A prime example is his song “I Am the Walrus” (1967), in which the lyrics don’t make literal sense. It’s a waste of time trying to parse them. But they point furiously at a swirl of meanings that the song only indicates. What does the song mean? It “means” that there is meaning somewhere.

Practically this meant that in their later years together the Beatles seldom wrote “love songs”; when they did, the songs were often complex and were full of implications beyond themselves. Frequently, their songs made one feel they were openings to a much wider world.

For a while it looked like the Beatles were leading the way in the march of popular songwriting. Today it’s clear that the Beatles basically were an end rather than a beginning. The following statement is a generalization by a fogey (which I am), but basically big selling recordings today are once again personal relationship songs, when they’re not simply music to exercise by.

On, then, to the song “Now and Then.” When I first heard it, I wasn’t thrilled. It’s a moody, sadly dreamy number. John’s voice definitely is clearer than in the first two posthumous Beatle songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” but I still felt it sounded a little unnatural. I was not impressed by Paul McCartney’s solo on electric guitar.

In general I was a bit let down. By contrast I had found “Free as a Bird” worthwhile, and I loved “Real Love.”

However, times have changed, and a feature of popular music for the last several decades has been the “music video.” Visual presentations of musicians playing songs go back to 1894, according to Wikipedia, and once “talking films” became prominent, they were often made.

The Beatles, however – who else? – pioneered the music video for our time, deciding in 1965-66, around the time they quit touring, that they could introduce their songs without having to do so in person. They used first-rate directors who brought imagination to their videos.

Following that hint, the music network MTV filled its programming with videos for years. Music videos turned into a competition of creative approaches. Today every song with a major release has one.

The video for “Now and Then” was directed by Peter Jackson. He had access to the “Get Back” footage, since he had spent years preparing that documentary. He was also able to use video of Beatles performances and recording sessions, including the ones for “Now and Then.” Pete Best (b. 1941), the drummer who famously was fired by the Beatles as they began to become famous, provided a very early film clip (although he is not seen in the video itself).

Jackson, whose Lord of the Rings films certainly tell a story, took his storytelling skills and fashioned a narrative for the video of “Now and Then.” It begins with quick cuts of guitars being tuned, a cassette tape being inserted in a console and then played, and two musicians playing guitar. We quickly see that they are George and Paul, and that they are working on “Now and Then.”

As they get going, the view shifts – John, identifiable by his “granny glasses,” is looking over the ocean, an appropriate choice since he wrote the song. The Beatles themselves, in old-fashioned bathing outfits, appear and disappear. Paul and Ringo, in the studio, continue to record the song, then Paul, Ringo, and George together, cross-cut with images of John and George, the two departed Beatles.

Then Ringo and Paul are standing next to each other, recording vocals for the song – except they’re not actually next to each other, it’s a trick of photography discernable because they’re using two different kinds of microphones. Still, in the image there they are . . . and at the line “I want you to be there with me,” there are the four Beatles, from left to right George, today’s Ringo and Paul, and John, mugging for the camera.

It’s a stunning moment, all four apparently together today over a span of half a century. It comes on unexpectedly, and for the rest of the video Jackson plays variations on the tune, so to speak, with different combinations of Beatles in different places – young and old, “now and then.” At the very end we see all four bow as they always did after a song (a moment taken from the wonderful 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night), and then their images dissolve, leaving only the word BEATLES.

Jackson does something else of great interest – the images he selects of John Lennon show not the John of the melancholy song, but John at his most relaxed, funniest, most giddy. John mugs, briefly imitates Elvis, does the Twist. He appears to stand in front of the orchestra that’s recording the score for the song, joyfully imitating the violins and mock-conducting them. The other Beatles, both younger and older versions, appear to be responding to his antics, bemused.

Art thrives on opposites. Jackson could have chosen melancholy images of John to match the melancholy tone of the song. Instead he does the opposite – he shows John at his most charming and amusing. The result, for me at least, is deeply satisfying. It gives me the John I want to think about – the best John – and the Beatles together, timelessly, working in harmony.

And now I love the song! That’s what music videos are supposed to achieve, but I can’t recall any that had that result for me before. I’m not surprised, however – the Beatles are nearly always a cut above everything else.

A question: did Lennon write “Now and Then” about Paul McCartney? It’s certainly a song about a difficult, perhaps ruptured relationship, filled with an unspecific hope that the break might in some way be repaired “if we start again.” Was it Paul that John was writing about?

Or Yoko Ono? Or someone else? Many writers will say that questions of inspiration are beside the point, that the finished work is an object of its own, not bound by its antecedents.

It’s hard not to speculate, though. McCartney has said that one of the last things Lennon said to him was to think of him “now and then, old friend.” Even more to the point, John’s song – to my ears at least – sounds like a “Paul song.” It could easily have been written by McCartney in his post-Beatle years. It wasn’t, but if it had been, it wouldn’t have sounded out of place in Paul’s work.

Most of all, both the song, the work of the surviving Beatles and their team, and the video, are filled with gratitude for the very existence of the Beatles. So, I probably don’t have to add, am I.

[I find it coincidental that both “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” come up together in Kirk’s article.  I happen to have a 45 of those two songs . . . in the German versions the Four recorded in ‘64 (“Sie liebt dich” and “Komm, gib mir deine Hand”; released in March 1964).  I bought Die Beatles in Koblenz, the town where my dad was stationed as a Foreign Service Officer (see “An American Teen in Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013), as a curiosity/souvenir, and I still have it.

[I observed in my introduction to this report that, though I never got to see the Beatles in person when they were appearing on the Continent before their American stardom exploded, I heard their recordings in mid-1963 or so, and I started buying their recordings pretty soon afterwards.  My copy of With the Beatles—t​heir second album in the U.K. but their first in Germany, where I lived then—i​s the German pressing which I bought in Koblenz.  Released in Germany on 12 November 1963, it has 14 songs, seven on each side, rather than the usual 12 for U.S. releases.  (The U.S. version was entitled Meet the Beatles, released on 20 January 1964, the Beatles’ début album in this country.)

[(It’s not really relevant, but my Rubber Soul is the British release [3 December 1965], purchased in France by my friend Marc Humilien as a gift when I was in Villefranche-de-Lauragais, the Humiliens’ tiny hometown in southwestern France, for a visit.  Like my German With the Beatles, it also has two songs that aren’t on the American release.) 

[Two other curiosities are in my record collection, too: a pair of 45 rpm extended-play disks from Odeon, something that was rare in the U.S.  The Beatles’ Hits has “From Me To You” and “Thank You Girl” on the A side with “Please Please Me” and “Love Me Do” on the B; The Beatles contains “She Loves You” and “Do You Want To Know a Secret” on one side and “Twist and Shout” and “A Taste of Honey” on the other.  

[All sung in English, of course, three of the songs on The Beatles were listed on the disk’s jacket with their French titles in parentheses: “J’ai un secret à te dire,” “Twiste et chante,” and “Un homme est venue” (literally, “I have a secret to tell you,” “Twist and sing,” and “A man has come”).  Oddly, that last is “A Taste of Honey,” but don’t ask me how come.

[I must have bought at least that last record in Geneva, where I was in school—I don’t know why else it’d have French titles and not German. Die Beatles was a souvenir, a keepsake; the other four I bought because I wanted the songs to play in the dorm. (Neither of these records is dated, but I’d guess I got all of the EP’s in 1964 and 1965, during my senior year in high school.)

[One last comment on these songs: Kirk asserts that “‘holding hands’ isn’t exactly a staple of rock music,” and I thought about that a bit.  The only other pop song of which I can think in which holding hands as used as a romantic gesture—I’m sure there are others, but I can’t think of any off hand (no pun intended!)—is Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (1961, from Blue Hawaii).  He sings “Take my hand / Take my whole life too / For I can’t help falling in love with you.”  Hand-holding’s not the main idea of the song, and it’s only one passing mention, of course.

[Now, for ROTters who are reading the serialization of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008,” which I’ve interrupted a second time to post Kirk’s discussion of “Now and Then”: I’ll be publishing the next installment, Chapter 10 & Epilogue, “Building a New Consensus” and “A Great Nation Deserves Great Art,” on Wednesday, 13 December.  I hope that you’ll all come back to ROT when I return to that serial post.]