At the End of the Line

Years ago on a long-defunct website, I argued (like many others) that part of what's made the Beatles endure is the malleability of their myth. The band members were so easy to identify with, and their music worked so well, that you could read almost anything you wanted into them. In biographical fact, when Abbey Road was being mastered in 1969, "Her Majesty" was included at the end accidentally, when it was placed at the end of the reel and forgotten about after it couldn't be satisfactorily worked into the closing medley. It was discovered before release, and it was consciously kept in place as a joke. It wasn't placed there to invent the hidden album track, and it wasn't included as a knowingly self-deflating wink to the pristine career-ender Abbey Road would otherwise have been. But such was the mystique of the Beatles that if you wanted to believe either alternate history, you could -- Babe Ruth called his shot, George Washington felled the cherry tree, and the Beatles quietly informed a generation that it was OK to move on.

The Beatles reuniting for the Anthology project in 1994 owed much to timing. Some of the contributing factors were clear publicly. Animosity had faded (but not resolved) in the decades since the divorce and John Lennon's death; the teenagers who'd grown up with the band were now adults with nostalgia for their youth and dispensable income; George Harrison's work with Jeff Lynne had reinvigorated his career and provided the project with a suitable producer; and technology's advancement meant that a posthumous project was technically realistic for the first time. Also important, if less overtly clear, was a commercial need to revive the Beatles' brand in public consciousness, and the Anthology kicked off a second career for the band which has, in general, continued apace since. Like most Beatle projects from Sgt. Pepper on, the musicians might have enjoyed it more had it been more contained in scope. Instead, Anthology ultimately included an 11 hour TV series, a coffee table retrospective book, 3 archival double albums, and plans for 3 posthumous singles to open them. By most metrics, the first two singles were successes, charting well and receiving largely positive reviews. Work on the songs was complicated by the audio quality of the Lennon home demos they were based around, but "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" were completed uneventfully, and are held in favorable (if somewhat middling) estimation by most contemporary Beatle fans.

Two other Lennon demos, "Now and Then" and "Grow Old with Me," were provided by Yoko Ono to the band as contenders for a third and final posthumous single. With the latter having already been released as-is a decade prior, focus turned to "Now and Then," though this ultimately proved brief. Identified issues included more severe versions of the technical problems already encountered on "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love," as well as a song sketch less realized in its demo form than the others had been. Cursory attempts at a backing track were made, including McCartney bass, Harrison guitar, and an automated drum track. Ultimately, the song was abandoned after likely an afternoon. In retrospect, this decision was pinned to dissatisfaction from George Harrison, certainly with the hissy, wobbly tape recording, but possibly also with the song itself. Perhaps McCartney was tired of pushing his bandmates to do things they'd just as gladly give up on, or was wary of pushing them away again; maybe he himself had reservations this time about the project, too, or was just ready to go home. Regardless of the rationale, Anthology 3 arrived to stores in October 1996 conspicuously missing a leadoff single, which in spite of multiple revisitations over the ensuing decades, threatened never to arrive.

The Peter Jackson Get Back project is being credited for jumpstarting the technical leaps necessary to bring "Now and Then" to fruition nearly 50 years later. However, the roots likely stretch back as far as 2006, with the LOVE remix album, and especially to the Live at the Hollywood Bowl rerelease in 2016. The latter represented a major sonic facelift, diminishing the intensity of that album's infamous crowd screams and refocusing the recording on the music in a manner which would previously have seemed impossible.  It can be tempting, then, to view 2023's "Now and Then" as an inevitability, a project which was bound to materialize as soon as it was possible to cinch the final remaining loop. Why wouldn't they?

On the other hand, though, these are the same Ringo and Paul who for the more than 20 years that they've been the surviving Beatles have, with few exceptions, consciously avoided collaboration. Even as the Beatles have gone all-in on revitalizations of their back catalog, Ringo and Paul have steered clear of even a Page and Plant-style tour, let alone second-iteration albums along the lines of Queen or the Who. With that in mind, then, why would they?

Listening to "Now and Then" as released this year makes it more or less impossible to appreciate the technical concerns that (at face value) held it up for so long. John Lennon's vocals sound at least as clear as they did on "Real Love," if not more so, with no hiss or whine to announce the performance's archival origins. Paul and Ringo's instrumental work sounds just about as good as more complete attempts they might have made in 1994 likely would have. There is little to distinguish George's 1994 guitarwork from the supplemental parts Paul recorded with an attempt to emulate his playing. This includes the solo, which has received criticism in some circles for its understatement, but plays as well as George's own (also unfairly maligned) brief solo on "All You Need Is Love." The string arrangement is perhaps somewhat less understated, but still tasteful, with Giles Martin continuing to prove a capable steward of the band's legacy.

None of that is to say that this is a conventional Beatles recording, though, not even to the extent that the other Anthology singles were. The limitations of the song structure are clear. "Real Love" was essentially finished as it was; "Free as a Bird" required "We Can Work It Out"-style buttressing to complete, but likewise, was otherwise more or less able to stand alone. "Now and Then" is essentially a refrain, a chorus, and two functionally identical verses with a wordless bridge inserted in between. This isn't inherently a problem, but limitations in text do entail more emphasis placed on subtext. What sets "Now and Then" apart from its colleagues most are the vocals, which place the audibly aged Paul (and to a lesser extent, Ringo) up alongside John, frozen as he sounded in 1977. In 1994, the surviving Beatles' vocal timbres had changed, but it was nowhere near so glaring then as it is now that the singers are no longer contemporaries. Once again, in biographical fact, the Beatles did not intentionally hold back "Now and Then," their most bittersweet and nostalgic posthumous single, to complete only once the voices of a 37-year-old John and an 80-year-old Paul were disparate-sounding enough to instantly amplify existing themes of longing and loss. Once again, though, it's hard to escape the notion that if you wanted to believe it, you could.

"Now and Then" is currently tracking in the direction of topping the charts in both the US and UK, propelled among other things by a marketing campaign emphasizing that this is, will be, has to be, the "last Beatles song." While it's difficult to conceive that the executors of the band will never again put out previously commercially unreleased music -- "Carnival of Light" is still in the ether, after all, and Peter Jackson was just talking about the hundreds of hours of Get Back recordings that never made it past bootlegs -- it does seem unlikely that archival Beatle material and contemporary recordings of surviving band members will ever be merged again in quite this way. And with that in mind, it's hard to imagine that this project, through roadblocks, time, and all, could have turned out any better than it did. Those who want to should be able to consider this the "final word" from the Beatles, and if you so choose, it's a touching and fitting note to go out on. Those who don't can stop looking either at the end of the core catalog, or at the (presumably many) reissues yet to come, or anywhere else in between. And once again, if you're inclined to read something into the Beatles, whatever evidence you may need is likely already waiting for you.