LAst week while walking through the airport, I saw a headline which called out for a pitting. I think it was on TV Guide, though I may be wrong. It said: “The Beatles: the Untold Story”.
Let us begin by supposing that all stories must be either be told or untold, which seems quite reasonable. How we decide to categorize a story as “told” or “untold” is a matter open for debate. We might, for instance, choose to classify all stories as “untold”. In that case, it would make sense to declare that the story of the Beatles is untold. But such a classification is meaningless.
So we therefore conclude that there is at least one story is the world that has been told. I would then venture the following assertion: if there is any story that has been told, then it’s the story of the Beatles. The story of the Beatles has been told ad nauseam. In books. In magazines. In newspapers. In TV specials. In countless other places.
In other words, there is no fucking way that you could justify referring to the story of the Beatles as “the untold story”! There is nothing you could possibly tell about the Beatles that has not been told a thousand million billion trillion times already!
Ah, but maybe the story we’ve heard the last decades was false, and this magazine had the true untold story, only recently revealed by George Harrison on his deathbed?
“We were faker than The Monkees”, he whispered, moment from death. “I can’t play the guitar to save my life, and neither can the other lads. Paul is really two midgets in an overcoat. And Ringo was actually a puppet. <urk>”
I imagine there are probably a few stories involving The Beatles which currently remain untold. Not unreasonable at all considering how pervasive Beatlemania was for a few years.
I tell ya one story which I’d like to hear is how they managed to have a group think tank after the debacle which was the Let It Be sessions in January 1969. They decided to go out with a last hurrah and they went back into the Abbey Road studios for 3 months during April thru June to make the wondrous album “Abbey Road”. To the best of my knowledge, no photos were taken during those sessions and very little was written about them. And yet, according to George Martin, the boys were at their most professional and cordial to each other in years. That’s one untold story I’d love to hear about. f only to learn how Paul settled on his wicked bass riff for “Come Together”. Let alone the “all bets are off” final musicianship show off bit before “The End”.
Considering how acrimonious things had become after The White Album, Abbey Road really was quite a miracle I reckon. Or maybe not - the were The Beatles after all.
It’s simple advertising. The phrase was designed to catch your attention (which it obviously succeeded in doing) and hopefully get you to buy the magazine on impulse. Oh well.
Linda McCartney photographed the band during the Abbey Road sessions. Check out the lovely full-page black & white shot of Paul & George harmonizing on page 336 of The Beatles Anthology–there’s the feeling you’re looking for.
Mild irritation over a cliched headline is not quite Pit material. There’s not much here for MPSIMS or Cafe Society either, so I’m just going to close this. If you want to discuss the TV Guide article or the Beatles or the airport or whatever, feel free to start a new thread in Cafe Society or MPSIMS.