The ascertainable facts were all reported in the British press late last year, but until last week few people seemed to care. McCartney, Harrison and Starr have told the band’s story on camera for a 10- to 12-hour documentary “The Long and Winding Road”; it should air in late 1994 or 1995. At the same time, the ex-Beatles plan to release several CDs of alternate takes and live performances. And McCartney had revealed that he, Harrison and Starr discussed recording some new music for the documentary. In the current Rolling Stone, McCartney, 51, elaborates. “We’re looking for a completely unpressured situation to get together because nobody wants to revive the Beatles,” he tells writer David Wild. “So we’re all thinking of very quietly going into a studio somewhere. If we hate it the first day, then we’ll just can it–nothing lost.”
McCartney, of course, had reason to minimize the occasion. The media stakeout on the quiet Connecticut town where the Rolling Stones rehearsed before their 1989 tour was tame compared with the attention a Beatles reunion would draw. And while McCartney’s, Harrison’s and Starr’s expectations are probably lower than those of diehard fans, the prospect must be both enticing and daunting. As the ex-Beatles surely wished, the tentative rapprochement remained a nonstory; McCartney’s comments to Rolling Stone, for instance, were merely part of an article on his just-completed tour and his busy schedule. But when The New Yorker “broke” the story, and McCartney embraced Ono at the Hall of Fame induction, a belated Beatlemania set in. “Because it’s The New Yorker, everyone goes berserk,” says David Hughes, a spokesman for EMI Records, who’s now had dozens of press inquiries.
One industry source (seconding McCartney’s skepticism about his ability to work with his old mates) says they could end up recording only incidental music, or nothing at all. The chance they’d ever tour together is still more remote. They don’t need the money, and McCartney and Harrison get on each other’s nerves. Harrison once said of Lennon and McCartney that “we’d do 14 of their tunes and then they’d condescend to listen to one of mine.” (On the recorded evidence, these proportions seem about right.) McCartney, in turn, told Rolling Stone that Harrison came backstage at one of his recent shows and, in his “professorial” mode, pronounced it too long.
Who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall when these three come together? Yet who wouldn’t be weirded out? The Beatles re-entering the music scene in the 1990s would be (here’s an inappropriately American simile) like Mount Rushmore’s granite giants lumbering down to Bill Clinton’s Washington–and without Abe Lincoln. What that band accomplished between 1962 and 1970 seems, in retrospect, impossible. Millions of ordinary folks hung on their every note and cheered them on as they underwent an artistic mutation as radical as that of a Joyce or a Picasso. They wrote songs as baffling (sometimes as terrifying) as any avant-garde art work–“A Day in the Life,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Strawberry Fields Forever”–and everyday people hummed along and have passed them on to their children. It will never happen again. Not even for guys who used to be the Beatles.
