Scene one
A video call seizes my attention. I am busy, doin’ nuthing, wasting time.
That’s Ken… oh, okay, I’ll take it
Looking for the best Wi-Fi connection spot—I end up in the same place, on the couch.
“What I am going to tell you, is under embargo, Rob. Watch and listen.”
Before too long I get to see a video, with images, and text. A strange and epic tale messes with my head space. It is about a suitcase that wasn’t.
Get to see a little drawing of Paul McCartney. Powerful and with an expression I still remember vividly, having seen it only once, two or three years ago. Without any hesitation, I say something like ‘This is the moment the Liberty bell broke. The ultimate Beatles betrayal. May 9th, right? Who did it? Do you mean he was there?’ That moment in the Olympic Studios, when John, George, and Ringo fucked Paul, and blackmailed him. The extortion failed…
“The very first thing I did, was to open up the 1969 diary and I shot right to May 9th 1969, because I wanted to see how Mal dealt with what must have been a primal, awful, moment for him. The day that the other Beatles brought Allen Klein to the studio to convince Paul to sign.
And I wanted to see how Mal reacts to that. It must have been like watching his parents die in front of him. Right?
The only thing that exists there (...) is (a drawing). This is what happens when words won’t suffice, you draw.
And (Mal Evans) draws this picture of poor Paul, just losing his mind, at this thought. And, of course, he is absolutely right, this is going to be the thing that destroys them. This is the piece, that as he said after that night we could not put it back together again. And we all can understand why, because in hindsight we know that Allen Klein, was much, much worse than any of them imagined that night at Olympic studios.
Mal’s drawing of that little, almost childlike drawing of Paul losing his mind, is like a Beatle going apeshit, right. He’s just losing it, because it is so ridiculous. And it jives so well with what we know Paul said in the Anthology, right? ‘The Beatles, we’re a big act, we don’t have to sign for 25%. We don’t have to sign tonight, it is the weekend, we can do this next week, you know.
You know (...) that little drawing, I mean at that point I realized, and this is five minutes after opening the box, I realized wait a minute, this is big, this is going to change how I will look at some of these events.”1
Even though the extortion failed, and no matter what, “officially only three directors were required to form a quorum” in the Apple board, J&G&R broke the bond, their brotherhood with Paul. Their attitude left “McCartney to face the reality of his separation”. Hence the expression on Macca’s face in the Mal Evans cartoon.
After the meeting in the Olympic Studios McCartney stormed out seething, straight into the next room for a jam session with Steve Miller and Glyn Johns as engineer.2
I will never participate in a cafe trivia contest, on the history of The Beatles, on my bookshelves you won’t see any ‘The Beatles Trivia Book’3. My brain is not wired like Mark Lewisohn’s grey mass, who as a young man won Beatles Trivia contests, or my friend Daan Meijer, who cannot resist participating in Amsterdam trivia cafe competitions, and, alone or with others, almost always wins a top three place. It is not my cup of tea, yet, it seems, that up to that moment in the zoom-call with Ken Womack, I was the first one who immediately recognized the situation that supposedly made this cartoon Paul look so angry, sad, and disappointed: The May 9th 1969 betrayal and violation of trust by his buddies.
This is the kind of material that potentially supports, if not solidifies, moments in The Beatles’ story in surprising and tantalizing ways. It may not be entirely new, but I expect these publications to add color, emotion, and human emotions to the story. Something too often left out by narrators of The Beatles story.
On the phone, Ken continues to tell an amazing story about the gentle giant, ‘teddy bear’, road manager, assistant, confidant, surely a big fan, perhaps even friend, and about his son Gary, Lilly from Allerton, about ashes, boxes, diaries, and three(!) manuscripts. Thousands of photos, and something special about Yoko getting to be the hero for once. Regrettably, the story is also about a father creating havoc (as so many parents do), and a man in the 1970s
being sad and lonely
as the eagle picks his eye
The worm licks his bones
He feels so suicidal
Just like Dylan's Mr. Jones
Black cloud crossed his mind
Blue mist round his soul
He wants to die
nobody knows the reason why.
There is no angel to save the situation.
.
Yet many years later angels, Leena and Yoko, in New York rescue a cherished archive, containing documents telling The Beatles legend from an insider’s perspective, based on diaries, stenographed notes, manuscripts, and numerous images, and with written permission from all individual Beatles.
As Ken Womack4 talks, it dawns on me this is a project with the potential of new details emerging to enrich if not change the history of The Beatles. Timeline adjustments, new names, new loyalties. All in the name of ‘looking for something new’. Proving wrong those who believe Lewisohn has the ultimate truth. You know what I like to read is ‘big news’ or ‘old stuff’ confirmed from a different perspective.
But most of all I like to experience ‘all these moments, he gave the four lads his heart’, his life; how he “made beans, toast, and tea” so they could keep doing what they were doing best “to all of our benefit”.5 Unintentional his meditation song ‘You and Me, Babe’, the final song of Ringo’s classic pop music album ‘Ringo’ (1973), told us he loved all of it, as a fixer and as a fan:
“… it's the end of our date / Me and the band, babe, all thought it was great / And between you, babe, I gave you my heart.
For these few moments / I wish we could start at the top again / I want to tell you the pleasure really was mine. / Yes, I had a good time, singing and drinking some wine.”6
Mal Evans was not a slough, he learned and developed to become a songwriter, played on numerous Beatles songs, produced a Top Five hit, and developed the band Badfinger into a legendary and successful rock group. He lived a life of compartments. He was an obsessive Beatles fan. In the fall of 1975, he said in an interview:
“It was certainly exciting. I could live on it. The Beatles are better than food or a drink”
Quite a statement, indeed, most likely neither gauche nor flimsy. “He loved food. He clearly (…) was a connoisseur of eating and drinking, and yet The Beatles were better.“7
I hope the influence of this story will equal or surpass the storytelling power of Peter Jackson’s ‘Get Back’, and its’ impact on The Beatles’ historiography. Even if it doesn’t, Ken Womack is going to tell a story of love, dedication, and tragedy.
Excitement and anticipation sparkle our conversation.
.
.
Scene two
Historians, including Erin Torkelson Weber, propose Mark Lewisohn’s ‘All These Years’8 is the final version of The Beatles’ history. Erin introduces concepts like “The Lewinsohn orthodoxy”9, a word and concept that in the Western world emerged in the context of good ôl Christian religion. One of the most prominent experts on historiography John Lewis Gaddis wrote in 2002 in his seminal work 'The Landscape of History : How Historians Map the Past'.
The fact that
“orthodoxies (…) dominate the realms of religion and culture suggests the 'absence of agreement from below, and hence the need to impose it from above. People adapt to technology and environment in so many different ways as to defy generalization. Traditions manifest themselves so variously across such diverse institutions and cultures that they provide hardly any consistency on what the past should signify. The historical method, in this sense, beats all the others.
Historians so often and so visibly disagree with one another. We relish revisionism and distrust orthodoxy, not least because were we to do otherwise, we might put ourselves out of business. We have, in recent years, embraced postmodernist insights about the relative character of all historical judgments—the inseparability of the observer from that which is being observed—although some of us feel that we’ve known this all along. Historians appear, in short, to have only squishy ground upon which to stand, and hence little basis for claiming any consensus at all on what the past might tell us with respect to the present and future.
It’s part of growing up to learn that there are competing versions of truth, and that you yourself must choose which to embrace. It’s part of historical consciousness to learn the same thing: that there is no “correct” interpretation of the past, but that the act of interpreting is itself a vicarious enlargement of experience from which you can benefit.”10
For decades the dominance of rockism journalism amplified the desire to believe one’s truth, is the one truth for everyone. Mix this conservative, intentional, top-down approach with the highly infectious virus of ‘authenticity’ and a hot chili pepper mix appears that fed group polarization among Beatles fans. Group polarization is one of the social phenomena Cass R. Sunstein recently described in the Journal of Beatles Studies.11
Words like ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘definitive’ are part of this polarization. In Erin’s instructive book words like these are proof of the price she pays when fandom waters the historian’s obligation to academic rigor, as Gaddis argues.
In 2015 Erin predicts nobody will be interested in challenging Lewisohn’s version of The Beatles’ story. They will follow the story as laid out in ‘All These Years’. A large crowd of too many people believe that fairy tales exist, they hope, nope, they know somewhere out there over the rainbow a truth exists. Their minds are overcharged or underperforming, unable to imagine how ten people working in the Twickenham Studios, in early January 1969, will have ten diverging, and most likely, conflicting, views of what happened or never happened. Luckily there are enough historians with the stamina to keep on digging, with the expertise and data to rewrite The Beatles’ history and publish new editions through various channels.
There is no definitive version.
Stories, history, or fairy tales change over time and transform in exchange with the social environment in which they emerge. It is the people who determine the historiography. It can be a top-down information cascade12, and even then the story changes in the relay, as so many factors play in how we tell each other stories from the past. Even more factors play in how we hear or read tales, how we understand them and perceive them, and how the stories we are told evolve in our memories. Historiography is at least partially oral history. Stories gain substance or disappear completely, myths are dispelled, new tall tales are added, and rumors are confirmed. Humanistic qualities will appear, and perhaps a vivid distinction between The Beatles as men and as rock stars will gain leverage in how we tell The Beatles’ story.
‘In the meanwhile’, Womack does the research biographers should do, talk to anyone alive, make calls, get out and visit, get into archives, gather new data, and then become the creator of a story as he selects what will be used to tell the story, and what will be left out. Ken Womack is the storyteller here.
As a historian, I call out to you Ken, please make sure you keep your notes, and the recordings of all the phone- and video calls. Store all the working documents in vaults, where no fire may turn them, accidentally or not, to ashes. Keep the materials safe from the rising sea level, a phenomenon that tends to drown out history. There are diamonds you have chosen to leave out, and after a while, these voices and little facts deserve to see the light of day. You and me, Ken, know the real stories don’t come easy from those who were there while they were alive: as you said on the ‘Nothing is Real’ Beatles podcast in October 202313:
“Some of the best (historical) work will be done (…) maybe twenty, thirty years after everyone (them and their circle) is deceased. So we really need to hang on. It is only just getting started.”
And in the meanwhile, The Beatles’ historiography is alive and kicking, and continues to evolve.
© 2023 The Beatles Review of History. The work of the original interviewers and publishers is gratefully acknowledged and excerpts are reproduced on this site under allowances for fair use in copyright law. If anything on this blog constitutes an infringement of your copyright, please let us know, and we will consider removing the materials.
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Womack, Ken (2023). The Mal Evans Story: AKOM Talks w/ Ken Womack. On ‘Another Kind of Mind: A Different Kind of Beatles Podcast’, 2023-11-10. Assessed November 2023: https://anotherkindofmind.podbean.com/e/the-mal-evans-story-akom-talks-w-ken-womack/.
Doing vocals, and playing drums, guitar, and bass guitar on ‘My Dark Hour’, later released on the Steve Miller album ‘Brave New World’.
- Castleman, Harry, and Podrazik, Walter J. (1977). 1969 – But If Paul's Alive, How Did He Die? in: All Together Now – The First Complete Beatles Discography 1961–1975 (Second ed.). New York City: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-25680-8. Print. p. 78.
Raynes, Dale (2021). The Beatles Trivia Book: Uncover The History Of One Of The Greatest Bands To Ever Walk This Earth! Bridge Press. ISBN: 978-1955149112. Print.
Everything Fab Four is the website presenting Kenneth Womack’s work. To get to know the man a little better, read the conversation I had with Kenneth Womack five years ago, published as: “Kenneth Womack's dinner party with Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath and John Lennon.”
Womack, Ken (2023). Talking Mal Evans with Ken Womack. On Nothing is Real - A Beatles Podcast, 20 October 2023. On all platforms, Spotify, Apple Podcast, etc. Assessed October 2023:
Evans, Mal and George Harrison (1967-1973). You and Me, babe. Published by UMLAUT CORPORATION and DUTCHSCHULTZ BV. Assessed October 2023: https://secondhandsongs.com/work/149454/all#nav-entity. Online.
Womack, Ken (2023). Talking Mal Evans with Ken Womack. On ‘Nothing is Real - A Beatles Podcast’, 20 October 2023. See endnote 5.
Lewisohn, Mark (2013). The Beatles - All These Years: Volume 1: Tune In, Extended Special Edition. Little, Brown Book Group. ISBN: 978-1-4055-2730-9. Kindle Edition. eBook.
Torkelson Weber, Erin (2016). The Beatles and the Historians - An Analysis of Writings About the Fab Four. McFarland & Company, ISBN 978-1-4078-0478-3. Print.
Gaddis, John Lewis (2002). The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Oxford University Press, Inc. ISBN 0-19-506652-9. eBook
Sunstein, Cass R. (2022). Beatlemania: On informational cascades and spectacular success. The Journal of Beatles Studies, Vol. 2022, Number Autumn, 2 November 2022. Assessed October 2023: https://doi.org/10.3828/jbs.2022.6. Online.
ibid.
Womack, Ken (2023). Talking Mal Evans with Ken Womack. On ‘Nothing is Real - A Beatles Podcast’, 20 October 2023. See endnote 5.