19 Crows

Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs (Celadon Books, 2025)

John Lennon and Paul McCartney, of course. The subtitle was almost enough to put me off this book entirely, but I'm glad I read it. It's actually really insightful, and does not gloss over their conflicts, as the subtitle might imply or some reviews have suggested. The emphasis is not on the love but the musical collaboration. (George, Ringo, and George Martin get an occasional look-in.) There's relatively little on the details of the early period when Lennon & McCartney were writing songs together "eyeball to eyeball," perhaps because little is known of exactly how they did it. But after the Beatles stopped touring constantly, so John & Paul were no longer constantly in each other's company, their partnership mutated into each writing his own songs in dialogue with the other's, and this continued even into the nastiness of their early solo years. (Paul zings "Too Many People" at John, John ripostes with the brutal "How Do You Sleep?", Paul writes "Dear Friend" to make peace.) In these sections, Leslie is at his best. I was particularly taken with his analysis of "Tomorrow Never Knows." Lennon wrote this in response to McCartney's "Yesterday" (yesterday ... tomorrow ... that's only part of it) and "Eleanor Rigby," but the most striking point for me was the mutation of an influence from somebody else. The first line of the song, "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream," is a direct quote from Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience, which John had been reading, except that he added the word "and." A trivial change? Not at all. As a cited musicologist points out, that turns the line into iambic pentameter, the standard English verse meter. John may not have realized that that's what he was doing, but he'd been reading a lot of poetry, and, Leslie says, "it was part of his verbal muscle memory." There's lots more like this.

Leslie is adamant about two things: first, that whatever the conflicts in the later years of the Beatles, John and Paul were always happy to make music together (and that they continued to collaborate in the creation of even their most distinctive individual songs for the Beatles), and that the stereotypes of John the caustic rebel and Paul the smooth charmer are quite inadequate. Paul had his harsh side. In an interview, John said, "Paul can be very cynical and much more biting than me when he's driven to it ... He can carve people up in no time at all, when he's pushed." As for John, the later part of the book has a lot of psychological analysis, including the repeated statement that what John really wanted in those years was to be loved, and he felt Paul was turning cold and distant; meanwhile Paul had no idea what John was going through emotionally.

The book dribbles to a close with McCartney's comments on Lennon since Lennon's death, and the suggestion that he's been whitewashing some of the conflict between them. It's a very long journey through this book, nearly 400 pages of text, and the opening chapters go into tremendous detail on the events of the Beatles' early, struggling years. You have to be a real fan to want this book, but you'll get a lot out of it if you are.

Nancy Shear, I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms: A Memoir (Regalo Press, 2025)

What a strange book. At age 14 in 1960, Shear attended a Philadelphia Orchestra concert and fell in love not just with the music, but with the guest conductor, Leopold Stokowski (then 78). Despite her age, she quickly turned her passion into a job as a librarian with the orchestra: duties, mostly copying conductors' notations from the score into the individual musicians' parts. Then she parlayed that into a position doing the same thing for Stokowski personally as he undertook various gigs. How did she manage this? Sheer gumption and dedication, I suppose. This book is mostly a hero-worshipper's gushing love letter to Stokowski's talent: Shear considers him a conductor of unmatched skill and insight, an opinion that will not earn universal agreement. There is a lot about technical musical points, however. How Stokowski would modify scores to fit modern instruments' capacities (a controversial practice); does the orchestra tune up as a whole or by sections? That sort of thing.

But what about ...? Though Stokowski had a reputation for numerous affairs, Shear insists he always acted as a gentleman towards her, though she admits one might not believe this, and she does print some pretty personal letters and she says he frequently touched her in what she insists was a non-sexual way.

The book is almost entirely just about Stokowski. Though Shear says she worked with many great musicians, only two others get more than a momentary glance. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, much more physically handsy than Stokowski, and Shear mentions only casually and incidentally that she did have a sexual affair with him. And Eugene Ormandy, Philadelphia's music director, whom she did not like either as a musician or a man. He did try once forcibly to kiss her, which in telling it she brushes off in a manner that was typical of older accounts but seems beyond quaint when so told in a post-#MeToo world.

And the man who knew Brahms? He makes just a cameo appearance on page 62. Shear gives his name - Raoul Hellmer - but nothing else about him. He's not a famous musician, just some guy who visited backstage for some reason and who, as a boy in Vienna, once delivered a pharmacy order to Brahms. He shakes hands with Shear and that's it. "I (briefly) met a man who (briefly) met Brahms" is more like it.