Doggett’s portrait of the band — as businessmen, tied to each other by a partnership they’d entered in their 20s — is fascinating because it addresses them not as idols but as human beings. The tensions are summed up most succinctly by McCartney, who says of his decision to leave the group: “One night I’d been asleep and awoke and couldn’t lift my head off the pillow. My head was down in the pillow and I thought, Jesus, if I don’t do this, I’ll suffocate.”
What McCartney’s describing is, in every way that matters, the flip side of that heady arrival in New York, with its declaration of possibility. It’s also a vivid glimpse from the inside at the price of success, of celebrity.
This is the part of the story no one wants to hear, and yet it’s the part that, finally, resonates. Or, as Lennon observes, looking back to 1964 and its aftermath in “Lennon Remembers” (which gathers his 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner): “We were just a band that made it very, very big, that’s all.”
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