Intro. [Recording date: March 11, 2025.]
Russ Roberts: Today is March 11th, 2025, and my guest is author Ian Leslie. His substack is The Ruffian. This is Ian’s fourth appearance on EconTalk. He was last here in January of 2023, talking about being human in the age of AI [artificial intelligence].
His latest book and the subject of today’s conversation is John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. Ian, welcome back to EconTalk.
Ian Leslie: Hi, Russ. It is great to be back.
Russ Roberts: Now, this is an extraordinary book. I want listeners and you, Ian, to know a little bit about what I bring when I read this book, what I brought to the book. I have to say, I don’t read books like this. I’m not a fan of the Beatles–of John Lennon and Paul McCartney–in the usual sense of the word, a ‘fan.’ I’ve never read a book on the Beatles; I never expected to. And, I invited you to EconTalk because you wrote an extraordinary essay, which we will link to, “64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney: After all these years, he’s still underrated.” It’s an incredible essay. It’s 10,000 words–that’s about 40 pages. I gobbled it up, and because of that essay, you got a contract to write this book, John & Paul, and because of that essay I wanted to interview you about John and Paul. So, I started to read the book to prepare for our conversation, and I couldn’t put it down.
I’m not going to praise it any more explicitly. I’m just telling listeners, if you like the Beatles or music or you’re interested in friendship or the cost of fame or popular culture, read this book. My wife is sick of hearing me tell people that they have to read it. So, that’s the end of my ad, which is rare. I don’t generally like books as much as this, so I’m done with the praise. Congratulations.
Ian Leslie: That’s amazing to hear. I love to hear it. Thank you so much. It means a lot.
Russ Roberts: So, let’s get started. This is not the first book on the Beatles. I said I’ve never read one, but I think there’ve probably been a few. So, talk about your own relationship to the band and their music, how you did the research behind the book. The narrative you produced is relentlessly paced. I couldn’t put it down, as I said; and it’s told very beautifully. How did you stay on track with that narrative, given the incredible amount of material there is to review, read, listen, watch, and decide on what you’re going to keep and reject?
Ian Leslie: Ooh, yes. Well, these are big questions. I think your first question was my relationship to the band. Yeah, I mean, I have been a Beatles fan for most of my life. I think I got into them when I was seven or eight. I was a sort of Gen X [Generation X] Beatles fan. My parents had Beatles LPs [Long Playing vinyl records] lying around the house–like most households in Britain at the time, and probably America, too. And so, I’ve always loved them.
And then, I think really in the 1980s, I started reading about them, too, and became absolutely fascinated by the story as well as the music. And, although I’ve always been into them and always fascinated by them, I never thought I would write a book about them until I wrote that essay on my substack about McCartney, and it went sort of unexpectedly viral. I honestly didn’t think anyone was going to read–not many people were going to read a 10,000 word essay about why Paul McCartney is good at music. But apparently they did. And, there was a very kind of emotional response to it, a very big response in every way.
And, that made me think, ‘Oh gosh, well, maybe I could do a book about this group that I’ve loved since I was very young.’ And the thing that I immediately knew I wanted to do–I didn’t want to just write a book of the blog post. I knew while I was writing it that if I ever do do a book, it’ll be about John and Paul. I left out quite a lot of stuff about the relationship, out of that essay. Otherwise, it would have been even more ridiculously long.
So, I had this idea: I’m fascinated by their relationship, by the chemistry between these two intense, brilliant, incredibly gifted young men. It’s so complex and so interesting, and it struck me that nobody has written a book about it, which is sort of extraordinary when you think about it. There’s well over a thousand books about the Beatles. There are group biographies, there are biographies of each individual member, and there are lots of different ways to slice the story. There are books about Hamburg. There are books about the drugs that they took; and so on and so forth. But, nobody’s just said, ‘Look, the nucleus of this band and this creative explosion is the chemistry between these two men. So, what’s going on there?’
And, I hadn’t really seen the relationship analyzed with any really real depth or emotional intelligence at length. And so, it was kind of a big wide open goal. It happened to coincide with something that I’m inexhaustibly interested in.
And then, your question: how did I focus the narrative? Well, I pretty much immediately realized that if I was going to tell this story, I had to tell it through the music and through the songs. The subtitle is A Love Story in Songs. We tell the story chronologically from when they meet in 1957 to when John dies in 1980. So, we tell the story of the Beatles and beyond, and we do it through the song. So, each chapter starts with–it is sort of anchored in a song that was meaningful to both of them. And, the reason that was essential is that you can’t really understand John and Paul without understanding the music, because they thought and they felt, and they communicated and expressed themselves through music. And equally, you can’t understand the music without understanding of the relationship. So much that is vital and innovative, and radical and moving about the music is rooted in the relationship between these two guys.
Russ Roberts: And, when you start the book and you see that each chapter has a title that’s a song you sort of assume–incorrectly–that, ‘Oh, this will be the most famous,’–you’ll be analyzing; the most famous songs that the Beatles wrote are the best songs in your view. And, what’s beautiful about the book is that many of the songs used are fairly obscure. Not all of them, of course: many of them are famous. But they’re not the most famous. And, the reason is that the interaction between these two people that, given how many songs they wrote together, allows you to understand what was going on in their friendship and in their relationship. So, I thought that was–it’s really quite extraordinary.
Ian Leslie: Yeah. And, if you think about just the songwriting relationship, they get together and they start writing songs when they’re teenagers. This was not a common thing to do at the time. The Beatles, by biography scholar–probably the kind of foremost sort of scholar the Beatles, if you like–Mark Lewisohn has said that according to his research, very few other teenagers were doing this anywhere in Britain. Even if they were into rock and roll in the 1950s, actually writing your songs, that was just not a done thing. That wasn’t something that people–but somehow these guys decided that’s what they wanted to do.
And, you can see how the emotional lives of these two then becomes intertwined with their creativity, because, you know, showing other people your ideas is a very exposing thing to do, right? No matter what field you work in, say, ‘Here’s this thing. Here’s this poem I’ve written,’ or ‘Here’s this tune that I’ve written.’
And, of course, pop songs are full of emotion. They’re full of yearning and desire, and jealousy, and all sorts of things. And so, they’re kind of communicating on an emotional level, face-to-face over guitars, from the teenage years, from this emotionally kind of formative stage onwards. And, they form this really incredibly strong bond, which is then enhanced and strengthened and sort of transformed in all sorts of ways by the fact that they both suffer bereavements.
They both lose their mother during these years, which brings them even closer together. They don’t necessarily talk about it very much, but they absolutely know the other guy understands something of the pain that they’ve been going through.
And, it also reinforces their sense of themselves as special. It’s different from their peers. They’re just not like the other people around them.
And, I think the third thing it does for them, it gives them this tremendous sense of agency of determination to make the most of the time that they have available to them, and a conviction that the world that we are living in could just change at any minute, and we can create the world as well as just passively experience it.
Russ Roberts: There’s a standard view of the Beatles and of John and Paul’s relative talent and importance to the band. The standard view is basically that Lennon was the more creative one, the more talented one, the real force behind the band. Talk about how that came to be the standard story in the aftermath, especially of the breakup, and then in the aftermath of John’s murder, and why it’s wrong. What’s missing there? Because, this book really is a revisionist history of the most important band of the 20th century. And, talk about what you were trying to achieve there without–with, using fewer than 10,000 words–if that’s okay?
Ian Leslie: So, I think you characterize the book very well there. And, it’s not revisionist for the sake of it. I just think that we have got it wrong because we had this story–which is formed really, as you say, in the wake of the breakup when, by a generation of music critics, kind of the Rolling Stone generation–who really revered John Lennon. And, Lennon really conformed to their idea of what a genius is, you know: difficult, conflicted, terrible in some ways, messed up. And, Lennon was also this incredibly brilliant, compelling spokesperson for himself–right?. Did loads of interviews around this time. And he was just rude about everyone, and he was nevertheless incredibly compelling. So, he kind of spins this narrative, and they buy it.
And, the narrative is, essentially, ‘I was the creative genius and motivating force behind this band. I had a fairly talented sidekick in Paul McCartney. I respect him as a songwriter. But, Paul was always trying to–he was the commercial one. He was the one with the pretty tunes and the pretty face. But, I was the two artists. And I had to break free of the Beatles in order to really express my inner kind of artistic urges.’
Now, this is just all wrong. I mean, it’s not all wrong. I mean, he was–Lennon really was a genius, but was at least one half of the creative genius. But, McCartney was a genius, too. He was just as innovative in some ways, more so. He was always pushing at the boundaries of what was possible musically speaking. And, he was also kind of the engine of the band: particularly towards the latter years, he was the one driving it forward.
But, this narrative got set because Lennon fitted that idea, and because McCartney didn’t fit the idea of what a genius should be like. McCartney liked being a family man. He liked being a dad. Around this time and after the breakup, he was having photos of himself taken with his baby and with the children, with Linda, living on a farm. That’s not what a countercultural drug-taking genius is supposed to do. This guy is just shallow and superficial.
And now, I think our idea is about masculinity and genius have changed a lot over the last, whatever, it’s 40, 50 years, but the story of the Beatles is only just catching up with it. And so, I think it’s time for a new story.
Russ Roberts: So, the other way to think about it, I think, is that Lennon was the iconoclast. Paul was the conformist. He was square. Lennon was hip. He had vetted hip, actually. He was hip before there was hip alongside the other extraordinary performers of the 1960s, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and so on. And, McCartney doesn’t fit that image visually. He has a cute baby face. He does like some bourgeois things.
Russ Roberts: But, here’s the thing that blew me away. There were a lot of things blew me away about this, the story and the book. So, I have to tell you, I’m born in 1954. So, in 1964, the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. I’m 10 years old, so I remember them pretty well.
Their first album is 1963, Please Please Me. Their last time in a recording studio together, correct me if I’m wrong, is 1969 with Abbey Road, or at least Abbey Road was released in 1969. Let It Be comes out after that. But, they’d recorded that before. That was sort of a leftovers thing. So, this is stunning. There’s two things that just blew me away. The entire time of the Beatles as public phenomena is six plus years, seven-ish, maybe eight if you count all the way through, Let It Be. But, their time together in the recording studio is–it’s roughly six and a half, seven years, correct?
Russ Roberts: So, during that time, they released 13 studio albums, including a double album, the White Album. They’ve lived together, they’ve had things happen to them that’s never happened to human beings before, in terms of their celebrity, popularity, and so on. They stopped touring in 1966. So, for the last four-plus-ish years of the band, they’re only in studio. They have lived 10 lifetimes of music in terms of how their music changed; sex, drugs, fame–in seven years. Paul McCartney–I didn’t realize this–Paul McCartney, when Abbey Road comes out is 27 years old. He’s a kid. I mean, relatively, from–he becomes famous when he’s 20 and for seven years, and Lennon, who is a little bit older, go through this unbelievable journey.
How did they survive that? How did they go on? There’s a lot of gossip and conspiracy theories about Yoko Ono and breaking up the Beatles. I can’t conceive of how they stayed together through this journey for as long as they did, and how short it was; and what they accomplished is mind-blowing.
Ian Leslie: I’m so glad you said all that. You said it brilliantly. And, because part of the aim of the book is to just recapture our sense of astonishment about the Beatles, because they’ve been part of the cultural furniture for so long now we just think, ‘Yeah, that’s the Beatles.’ It’s like water for fish. They surround us. They’re part of the atmosphere. And, I just wanted to kind of, in the book, take a step back at several points and go, ‘What the hell happened here?’ There is nothing like this in the history of pop and rock. There’s nothing like this in the history of culture. It is an incredible story. You’re absolutely right. It’s seven years of recording music, seven years of fame, and then they’re out.
And they’re out at the kind of peak of their powers, by the way. So, they’re making some of the best music they ever made. They’re selling more records than ever. I can’t think of any other examples of bands that do that and then decide–right?
So, there’s so much that is extraordinary about it, and I think your question is the right ones. Sometimes the question of their breakup is approached from the angle of: So, why did they split up? They could have gone along. And, actually the question should be asked the other way around: How do they stay together for so long?
And, the question is particularly pertinent because these guys were all very willful and volatile people. And, the chemistry between Lennon and McCartney was very close, but very volatile; and it was an unstable kind of compound. Right? So, they’re always kind of jiggling against each other. And, I tried to show that from before the pre-fame days: you can see them coming apart at various times and then coming back together.
And Lennon, of course, in particular, he’s unstable himself as an individual. He’s psychologically unstable. You start to understand why when you look at what happened during his childhood–this incredibly, incredibly tough, confusing, baffling childhood that he had. And then, when he’s an older guy as an adult, he gets into drugs and starts taking too much LSD. He was violent. He could get very drunk and be violent. He was a real–
Russ Roberts: A mess–
Ian Leslie: He was a mess. It was a mess in some ways. And yet, somehow, the group, and particularly Paul, I think keep him in the fold, keep–just about channeling his immense talent into the group. But, finally, as they get into just the second half of their 1920s–as you say, they’re still young–the strains that are put on them by all the legal and the business things, that relationship finally starts to kind of stress and crack and break up.
But yeah–the closeness of the relationship is kind of what keeps them together. But, at some point, because it was so close, it had to explode, and in quite a spectacular way. This was never going to be an amicable partner parting where they go say, ‘Yeah, you go your way. I’ll go mine.’ Handshake. Great friends and all that. I’m sorry. That was never going to happen. This was way too intense.
Russ Roberts: And, as music fans, for the groups we love, we all want them to stay together and keep producing music. We wish we could go see them at Six Flags. Yes, one of them would be gone, but we’d find there were substitute and we’d hear the old songs over and over. They never went through that phase. And certainly, when they went solo, they rarely performed. They never leaned on their fame. Their desire for innovation is, I think, unparalleled. They reinvent themselves in that seven years numerous times musically.
And, that is–well, let me say it this way, and I’ll let you just react. In 1964, when they’re on the Ed Sullivan Show–I remember watching it with my parents–and my dad very confidently said, ‘They’ll never last.’ And, it’s hard to remember how intense the passion for this foursome spiked around the world. We had some of it with Frank Sinatra, we had some of it with Elvis Presley. This was different. Women screaming through an entire concert, convulsed with intense longing. I don’t know even how to describe it. You can watch–there’s video all over of it. And, my dad said, ‘Oh, this is just some goofy, goofy thing.’
My dad was half right in the following way. If had been the end–if the Beatles had been a group that honed the kind of music they were producing then–“I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “I Saw Her Standing There”: they’re very catchy songs; they were great pop songs–I think people would look back on and say, ‘Yeah, they were influenced by the Everly Brothers. They were kind of like them, but a little bit better.’
But, what made them so extraordinary, and the reason my dad’s prediction is ludicrous, is that they didn’t stand and stay there. For people who took as many drugs as they did, their productivity and devotion to their craft is just hard to believe, hard to understand. The creative dynamism and the reinvention–the constant reinventionwhich must have been exhausting. And you chronicle the toll it took on them as friends and as human beings. It was just extraordinary.
Ian Leslie: Yeah. And when you think about it, they effectively had to invent the idea of reinvention, if you see what I mean. There’s a point in my book where I say it was a lot harder for the Beatles at every stage of their career to do what they did because they didn’t have the Beatles’ example to follow, right? So, every other brand, every other artist that comes after them, they’re working in the wake of the Beatles and they go, ‘Okay? Yeah, well, this is how to think about it.’ And, you might think, ‘Well, I’m an artist. I want to do things my way. I have integrity. I don’t want to repeat myself.’ All that kind of stuff, which we take for granted now, is the standard kind of pablum of musical artists. The Beatles had to kind of invent that for themselves. There is them that determined they were going to take themselves seriously as musicians and as artists who wanted to do something new every time.
And, yeah, the productivity is just incredible. Partly that was obviously just these incredible commercialist constraints–that’s not the word–but imperatives that they had to follow in the early years. But, actually, it becomes apparent towards the end of the 1960s: they’re just going into the studio and recording because they love to do it and they want to do it.
And actually, in the last year, 1969, when they are effectively splitting up, they actually record more songs than ever. The incredible number of songs they record–they record two albums in 1969.
And, the more stressed or more emotionally stressed they got, the more music they made. Because they put everything–they processed everything–through the music. So, yeah, I think you’re right. Just that sense of ‘we’ve got to move on’ is maybe their kind of greatest legacy apart from the songs and the music itself. This is that sense of how to be a popular artist.
Russ Roberts: When you go back and look at those old video clips of them performing either on the Ed Sullivan Show or at Shea Stadium, the other thing that’s crazy is they stopped touring and giving concerts in, I think, 1966. Which is also unheard of. The idea that they would just become a studio band is crazy.
But, when you go back and watch those early performances, it’s a little hard to understand the hysteria. Again, part of it is because we’ve already lived through it. It’s part of our wallpaper. But if you say what was so different about the Beatles in 1963 and 1964, you say: Well, good harmony. They had good hair. They had a certain rebelliousness that appealed to the zeitgeist of the time. They wrote very nice pop songs. The lyrics are very mundane. They’re not magical in those early years in any way.
What struck me, going back and listening–and what’s wonderful about your book is as you do rediscover their music, and it’s been playing in my head all week–it’s been interesting: literally over and over again, different songs–there’s something about the sound of their voices together, what you call the grain. It’s part of what makes Simon & Garfunkel special, obviously, and many other–the Beach Boys had. Every harmonizing group has a particular sound. There’s something I think about–especially Paul and John–singing together, that is magical. Do you agree?
Ian Leslie: Oh, absolutely. And, we are talking about being re-astonished by them again. Just think about it. Like, okay? We recognize the fact that these two guys are amazing songwriters and they come together and make each other better. But, that’s an independent fact from the fact that they’re both amazing singers. Those two things needn’t have gone together, right?
Russ Roberts: Bob Dylan is proof of that.
Ian Leslie: Well, that’s another question.
Russ Roberts: Well, I like Bob Dylan’s singing, but no one would say he has a great voice in the standard dimension.
Ian Leslie: They both turn out to be incredible singers–just individually. You’d put them both in the kind of top 20 greatest rock singers, I think. And, not only that, their voices blend. The ranges overlap and then exceed each other in just the right way. And, they’re similar to each other, but different at the same time. So, yeah, the sound of their voices is really, and the sound of their harmonies is so central. Maybe the kind of central thread of the Beatles sound. And, that is a throughline from the early days right to the end.
I would just say about the early songs, I have a slightly different view on those early songs. I think they are more innovative and stranger than we can recognize now. The chords they were using–in fact, talking to Dylan, Dylan recognized that earlier on. He said something about the chords are outrageous, but the harmonizing makes it all make sense.
He saw that quite early on. He is like, ‘These are actually musically very adventurous.’ “She Loves You”; “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” They’re actually musically very innovative and sophisticated songs, but they’re so condensed into these incredible little bombs–sort of nail bombs full of hooks–that we don’t recognize it.
And then, the other thing about those early songs, what made them sound different, and part of what generated this incredible response from teenagers is that they are soulful. They are emotional. They’re not just going through the motions and writing a pretty pop song. They disdain that kind of Cliff Richards and The Shadows thing: You have a neat little pop song, you do a nice little dance routine, you go on TV, oh, isn’t that nice?
And, they wanted to get back to what they saw as the kind of spirit of early rock and roll, which is Little Richard and Elvis Presley, which is grabbing you by the shoulders and say, ‘Listen to this.’ You can hear it particularly in both of their singing. Lennon’s voice in particular, just that kind of raw emotion and lust and desire that you can hear it in his voice. And actually, the lyrics are not all simple and nice. Look at “Please, please me, like I please you.” It’s kind of sexual and it’s also jealousy and anger, and there’s all sorts of, like, quite intense emotions in there. And, I think teenagers, who are obviously cauldrons of emotion, got that better than the adults at the time.
Russ Roberts: That’s very well said. And, I think you could also, in a way–maybe as you point out, first of all, they’re writing their own songs. Elvis Presley is not writing his own songs. Frank Sinatra is not writing his own songs. Frank Sinatra, the other–those are the three biggest phenomena of the 20th century, I would say, in terms of musical obsession. Frank Sinatra made it sound like he was singing a song he had written, but he hadn’t, right? He came across as if he was pouring out your heart to you, which is why he was so effective.
But, in a way–and tell me if I’m wrong, and you may have written it–they’re writing their own songs, as you said, that was unusual, but they’re singing them in a way which is not performative in the standard sense of: Here’s a perfect composition. I’m going to share it with you; you can listen. But rather: Listen to my heart. And, I think obviously that’s at the essence of rock and roll; but it has an immediacy as you point out that was deeply effective to teenagers, but also I would say it was very appropriate for the time. I think with the 1960s, the thirst for authenticity, the rebellion against authority–it was kind of a perfect match.
Ian Leslie: In a way that’s kind of their great hidden innovation–hidden in plain sight–which is the vertical integration of songwriting and performance of songwriting and singing. As far as they were concerned and sofar as they had models–and one of the themes of the book is they also had to invent their own models because they didn’t have them–they were thinking about Rodgers and Hammerstein, maybe Leiber and Stoller when they started writing songs. Nobody wanted to see Rodgers and Hammerstein perform their own songs. Nobody knows what Leiber and Stoller sound like when they sing. So, this is a new thing where–not completely new, but they saw something that wasn’t conventional or standard.
And so, ‘We can actually write our own songs and sing them, and we’ll sing them better because we are putting our emotions into it, and that’ll be evident.’ So, they intuitively landed on this idea of the pop song as not just a catchy tune, but a vehicle for the transmission of emotions. And, in fact, they make that explicit: early in the mid-1960s. There’s some interviews with them where they say, ‘People don’t understand what pop music is. For us, it’s about communicating an emotion, a feeling. That’s what we try to capture first, and then we build everything around that.’ And, that was a massive innovation and in the way that they saw pop music. [More to come, 32:29]
