Authorship and the Beatles

If the artist could explain in words what he has made, he would not have had to create it. (Alfred Stieglitz)It's hard to describe, even with the clarity of memory, the moment the apple falls. The thing will start moving along at a speed of its own, then you wake up at the end of it and have this whole thing on paper, you know? (John Lennon)The ramifications of authorship, and the compensation and status that it derives, may be the most significant issue in the post-breakup lives of the Beatles-excepting, of course, John Lennon's murder in December 1980 and George Harrison's death in November 2001. In fact, it would not be until 1989, some two decades after their disbandment, that the surviving Beatles would absolve themselves of the considerable litigation that had served to disunite and yet bond them together at the same time. First, Paul McCartney agreed to an undisclosed, multimillion-dollar settlement with Lennon's estate, Harrison, and Ringo Starr in order to restore a sense of communal fairness to the band's royalty agreement from which he had disproportionately benefited since the late 1970s (he reportedly received a whopping $2.10 for every album sold compared to the relatively measly returns enjoyed by the other former Mop Tops). McCartney's financial gesture also effectively concluded the surviving Beatles' legal and interpersonal acrimony, paving the way for the highly acclaimed Anthology series during the mid-1990s. second, Apple Corps, Ltd.-the Beatles' holding company since 1968-won an $80 million settlement from EMI (Electrical Mechanical Industries), the parent company of Parlophone, the band's principal distributor. In both instances, the issue of authorship looms large. In addition to being in an advantageous business position to negotiate a better deal than his former mates, McCartney might understandably feel entitled to receive such a robust royalty rate. He was, after all, one of the band's two preeminent songwriters-and, if you consider his post-Beatles performance in the bargain, the most successful popular songwriter of all time. Perhaps even more significantly, the Beatles' settlement with EMI signaled a new era in terms of their collective sense of authorship. Simply put, they were being rewarded, quite belatedly in this case, for their musical cum writerly achievements as the cultural Zeitgeist that was-indeed, is-the Beatles.In November 1968, the Beatles released their most enigmatic work, The White Album, a variegated tapestry of musical forms and, for many of the band's critics, postmodern polyphony that found the group in the throes of disintegration even as they challenged the boundaries of popular music yet again.1 That same year, Roland Barthes famously proclaimed the "death of the author," concluding that prevailing Renaissance-era notions of authorship were no longer germane-and perhaps had never been so in the first place.The author "enters into his own death" when "writing begins," Barthes asserts, and textual creation equals writerly death, as well as the moment in which readerly reception commences (1977,142). For the Beatles, the concept of authorship clearly assumes a wide variety of competing authorial guises over their seven-year career as working songwriters and recording artists. Perhaps even more vexingly, the band members participated in countless interviews during and after their dissolution in which they occasionally propounded incongruous yet highly meaningful accounts of their textual practices. In so doing, they succeeded in establishing a conflicted historical record that, by virtue of its own contradictory-and, at times, antagonistic-nature reinforces popular, fan-friendly mythologies about the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team.In an effort to clarify the highly corporatized nature of the Beatles' creative activities, this paper will address the various levels of textual authority inherent in their songwriting and production processes. To accomplish this end, this paper will investigate Lennon and McCartney's songwriting practices, particularly in terms of each musician's starkly divergent memories about the composition and production of "In My Life" and "Eleanor Rigby," as well as in regard to the role of authorship as it relates to the group's cultural legacy and McCartney's ongoing struggle with Lennon's post-assassination hagiography. …