How The Beatles Reinvented Male Friendships in the '60s

John Lennon and Paul McCartney showed that men could be in touch with their feminine side, and be stronger for it

- Bibek Bhattacharya

Rock critic Lester Bangs once famously called The Beatles "the firstest with the mostest." A phrase that is patently true, even if Bangs used it ironically. The Beatles certainly were the first to a staggering number of new experiences within pop culture, not to mention re-writing or inventing new ways of composing, recording and delivering popular music.

They were also the first in other, less apparent, if equally important ways, like growing up together within an intense maelstrom of public scrutiny, falling apart in a fog of recrimination and sorrow just when divorce became a real cultural phenomenon, and charting very individualistic lives in the aftermath, while very much remaining a "Beatle."

All this is fairly well known by now. What writer Ian Leslie's new book does is get to the heart of The Beatles—the friendship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is one of the definitive portraits of the Lennon-McCartney partnership, and thus, one of the definitive portraits of the band. While previous biographies have focused on one or the other of John and Paul—clearly taking sides—Leslie goes in search of the duo's dynamic in the music that they wrote together, and then apart in their solo years.

Reading the book, the first thing that strikes me is just how much our understanding of The Beatles has changed over the past decade or so. The myth of the band started forming almost as soon as they broke up in 1970, and the attention shifted immediately on what Lennon and McCartney would do as solo artists.

In this respect, Lennon was out of the blocks in a flash, giving a series of unforgettable interviews to the likes of Rolling Stone magazine, where he proceeded to methodically deconstruct the band's aura, and especially that of the partnership that had defined the 1960s: between him and his friend Paul. "I don't believe in Beatles! Just believe in me," he sang in God.