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      For Jann Wenner, the Music Never Stopped

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      In his memoir, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine is serenaded by Springsteen, nursed by Midler and breaks bread with Bono. There’s journalism, too.LIKE A ROLLING STONEA MemoirBy Jann S. Wenner592 pages. Little, Brown. $35.Jann Wenner’s new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” is the literary equivalent of a diss track: a retort to Joe Hagan’s biography, “Sticky Fingers,” which was published five years ago, after Wenner’s initial cooperation curdled into public repudiation. This it accomplishes with that ultimate diss, the silent treatment — acting like Hagan’s book never existed.Also, perhaps, by being a little longer, if not more searching. Hagan interviewed scores of intimates, plenty disgruntled; Wenner is fond of quoting laudatory letters and speeches, supplemented with color candids and a cover portrait by his longtime colleague Annie Leibovitz.Not counting Robert Draper’s 1990 “uncensored history” of Rolling Stone magazine, which Wenner co-founded and headed for five decades, the reading public now has over 1,100 heavily annotated pages on the guy, a print publisher who calls the internet “a vampire with several hundred million untethered tentacles” and curses the iPhone from his hospital bed. Generation Spotify might be baffled.One thing Wenner didn’t like about Hagan’s book was the title, a homage to the Rolling Stones album, of course, but perhaps too redolent of thievery and salaciousness for his taste. Choosing “Like a Rolling Stone” instead implies “I’m just as good friends with Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize-winning poet, as that naughty, bum-wiggling sensualist Mick Jagger.” One of the revelations in this overwhelmingly male tale is that each singer has a limp handshake, though Dylan wins this particular contest, his paw tending to “stay motionless in your palm as if you were holding a dead fish.”But the new title also strikes a note of melancholy. Wenner sold the majority stake in his flagship publication in 2017, a couple of months after the disdained biography came out. How does it feel, how does it feel, to be without a home (luxury real estate in Sun Valley, Montauk, etc. notwithstanding)?This devoted and daring sportsman — he also founded Outside magazine — had a triple coronary bypass, valve replacement and hip surgery that year. Candidly, he notes that fluid retained during the procedures made his scrotum swell “to the size of a head of cauliflower — not a grapefruit, not two papayas.” He “dramatically undraped” it for the amusement of Bette Midler.This isn’t the only time Wenner gets clinical. He describes his ex-wife Jane’s cesarean section for their second of three sons, Theo, and being “spellbound by how they pulled out various organs and laid them on her stomach.” (The third son, Gus, is currently C.E.O. of Rolling Stone.)Years later, as an unnamed gestational carrier is delivering twins to Wenner and his new partner, Matt Nye — the man who ushered him out of the closet in the ’90s — her organs are placed on cheesecloth. “It didn’t bother me,” the author writes coolly, as if playing the old battery-powered game Operation. Well, my buzzer went off.“Like a Rolling Stone” is about birth, the origin of a scrappy San Francisco music rag and its development into a slick, bicoastal boomer bible. But that story has always been intertwined with untimely death, starting with Otis Redding’s a month after its founding in 1967. The magazine’s coverage of the Altamont Free Concert in 1969, where an 18-year-old Black student, Meredith Hunter, was killed by one of the Hells Angels paid in beer to do security, helped put it on the map. Curiously for someone so associated with the epochal events of his generation, Wenner decided at the last minute not to attend; nor was he at Woodstock. When he did show up, the experience was often blurred or oversharpened by recreational drugs: pot, LSD, cocaine.Narcotics were what took Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison — all at the age of 27. When Elvis goes, it’s “our equivalent of a five-alarm fire,” Wenner writes, four days before deadline, after a move to New York offices in 1977. The murder of John Lennon, a Wenner favorite, is what finishes his ’60s idealism, and he continues to bathe the Beatle in white light here, glossing over the harm to their friendship caused by his publishing the acidic interview “Lennon Remembers” in book form, and the magazine’s partisan mistreatment of Paul McCartney’s brilliant early solo efforts.“Like a Rolling Stone” does gather moss, it turns out: celebrities in damp clumps — from when Jann, born Jan in January 1946 and a real handful, is treated by Dr. Benjamin Spock, to “the black-tie family picnic” of his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame he helped erect.His father was a baby formula magnate; his mother helped with the business but was also a novelist and free spirit whom he compares to Auntie Mame; and the newspaper young Wenner ran at boarding school had a gossip column. A career headline spinner who hired and fired with gusto, he writes here in crisp sentences more descriptive than introspective, giving résumés for even minor characters.“The apple cart was balanced,” he shrugs of the double life he long led — till Nye’s declaration of love, and the times a-changin’, tips it over.Though his journalists regularly championed the downtrodden, Wenner proudly recounts a life of unbridled hedonism, and seems disinclined to reconcile any contradiction. His staffers aggressively cover climate change while he revels in his Gulfstream (“My first flight was alone, sitting by myself above the clouds listening to ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’”). At the 60th-birthday party he throws at Le Bernardin, the fancy Manhattan fish restaurant, Bruce Springsteen gets up and sings of the honoree that “Champagne, pot cookies and a Percocet/Keep him humming like a Sabre jet.” A private chef makes pasta sauce for the Wenner entourage at Burning Man. Wenner and Bono wave to each other from their Central Park West terraces, and join McCartney for a midnight supper by the “silvery ocean.” (“Stars — they’re just like us!,” per another former Wenner property, Us Weekly.)Were there better ways for Johnny Depp to spend a million dollars than shooting the longtime Rolling Stone fixture Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon the height of the Statue of Liberty, as Wenner watched approvingly? Surely.“Like a Rolling Stone” is entertaining in spades but only sporadically revealing of the uneven ground beneath Wenner’s feet. Long sections of the book read like a private-flight manifest or gala concert set list. You, the common reader, are getting only a partial-access pass. More

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      Directing the Beatles Was Just One Part of His Long and Winding Career

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      HUDSON, N.Y. — Of course I wanted to talk with Michael Lindsay-Hogg about the Beatles. Everyone wants to talk with him about the Beatles, especially since his star turn in “Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s epic documentary, which debuted last fall on Disney+.In January 1969, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg was the brash young film director who tried to charm and cajole John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr through warring agendas as they hashed out new songs and gave their last concert on a London rooftop. Soon after that, he started shaping his nearly 60 hours of footage into the documentary “Let It Be,” a film largely unavailable since its initial theatrical run in 1970.Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s footage, as well as more than 100 hours of audio that he recorded with his crew, some of it with hidden microphones, got new life when Mr. Jackson cleaned it up and reassembled it for his nearly eight-hour series. Mr. McCartney and Mr. Starr, along with most critics, hailed “Get Back” as an upbeat corrective to Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s more somber take.So would he like to talk about his time with the Beatles?“That was a small part of a long career,” he said in the sitting room of his three-bedroom Civil War-era house in Hudson, N.Y.He had a point. In the so-called Swinging London of the 1960s, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg made a name for himself as a creator of the music video, directing promotional films, as they were then called, for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who a decade and a half before MTV. In the early 1980s, he was again a trailblazer, as the co-director of “Brideshead Revisited,” an 11-hour adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel that was a forerunner of prestige television dramas like “The Sopranos.” He is also a Tony-nominated stage director, painter and author. Oh, and Orson Welles may very well be his biological father.It’s almost too much to get through. No wonder he had a request, delivered in a deadpan voice: “Please make the entire article about my painting.” But eventually, over the course of three interviews, we got around to John, Paul, George and Ringo.The Third ManMr. Lindsay-Hogg, 82, lives with his wife, Lisa Ticknor Lindsay-Hogg, a former fashion model and casting agent, in a narrow cream-colored house in this river town nestled into lush green hills. The rooms have a lived-in feel, with book stacks rising from table tops and the walls blanketed with paintings, many of them scavenged from flea markets, and photos from his varied career.“I am the maximalist,” he said. “Lisa is the organizer.”A photo on display in Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s home of a dinner in London more than 50 years ago, after a screening of his film “Let It Be.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn addition to working with the Beatles, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg directed the Rolling Stones in the concert film “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesSprinkled among the decorations are posters from past projects, including “Agnes of God,” a 1982 Broadway play he directed, for which the actress Amanda Plummer won a Tony, and “The Object of Beauty,” a 1991 film written and directed by Mr. Lindsay-Hogg, with John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell in the lead roles. A sculpture of a rabbit head sits on a credenza. He got it in Harare, Zimbabwe, when he filmed Paul Simon’s “Graceland: The African Concert” in 1987.Three cats provide daily entertainment. “She’s a movie star waiting to happen,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said when a black cat named L’il Mew brushed against my leg.The couple has lived here less than two years. During lockdown, they rented a rock-star-style tour bus and fled Los Angeles, where they had lived since they were married in 2002. California’s wildfires were part of what drove them out.“The sky was yellow,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said. “You could taste the soot.”The move meant abandoning a city where he had deep ties. Although he was born in Manhattan and educated at Choate, the Connecticut prep school, he spent six years of his childhood in Hollywood, mingling with William Randolph Hearst, Olivia de Havilland and Humphrey Bogart.His mother was the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, who starred opposite Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s “Wuthering Heights” in 1939. His father — at least, according to his birth certificate — was Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, a baronet of Rotherfield Hall in East Sussex, England. The younger Mr. Lindsay-Hogg inherited the title upon the elder’s death in 1999.“Technically, I could be a ‘Sir,’ but unlike Mick and Elton, I didn’t earn it,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said, referring to his friends Mick Jagger and Elton John.A young man in Swinging London: Mr. Lindsay-Hogg in 1965, when he was a director of the British pop music show “Ready Steady Go!”Evening Standard, via Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesThe question of paternity has long hovered over him. His mother, born in Ireland, made her American stage debut opposite Orson Welles in a 1938 revival of George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House.” The production was directed by Mr. Welles at the Mercury Theater, the New York repertory house he had co-founded. When Mr. Lindsay-Hogg was a teenager, his mother told him of the rumors that Mr. Welles, best known for his 1941 film classic “Citizen Kane,” was his biological father.“It certainly played into my life growing up, partly because of the way I look,” he said. “I was heavy when I was young, and Orson was heavy. I have a round face; he had a round face. I didn’t look like Edward Lindsay-Hogg, who, if anything, looked more like, say, Jeremy Irons.”At 19, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg had a small role in Mr. Welles’s stage production of “Chimes at Midnight” in Dublin. “I knew him over the years, and he’d pop up every so often,” he said. Shortly after the run, Mr. Welles offered him a job in a London production of Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.” “He said, ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days and you can come over,’” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg recalled. “I then did not hear from him for five years.”Decades later, his mother, who had Alzheimer’s at the time, gave a cryptic confirmation that Mr. Welles was his father — then seemed to contradict it. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg got an answer when he spoke with Gloria Vanderbilt, a friend of his mother’s whom he had dated in the 1980s, while working on his 2011 memoir, “Luck and Circumstance.”“Gloria said, ‘I hesitate, because I promised your mother I wouldn’t say this, but she’s dead now. Geraldine told me Orson was your father,’” he recalled. He took a pause. “I’m kind of past that,” he said. “Whoever was in the bed that night was in the bed that night.”‘Seventh Career’He led me up a narrow staircase to a well-lit bedroom that he had converted into a painting studio. His latest work was on the easel: a portrait of a couple with haunted eyes that recalled the German Expressionists of the 1920s. Painting has become “a seventh career of sorts,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said.He said he recently sold four pieces at the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles, but art is more of a passion than a business. Painting also comes as a relief for someone who has endured the pressures of directing. “It’s all yours,” he said. “There’s no producer to say, ‘I don’t like that scene, why don’t you cut it out.’”Mr. Lindsay-Hogg calls painting his “seventh career.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHe hasn’t abandoned show business entirely. In recent years he directed several episodes of the web comedy series “Tinsel’s Town,” about a YouTube star in Hollywood, and he is writing a script for a film he hopes to direct, set in 1946 Nevada.On the wall next to the staircase were two black-and-white close-up portraits of Mr. Jagger in his early 20s, both stills from the 1960s British pop music show “Ready Steady Go!,” the program that gave Mr. Lindsay-Hogg his start in directing at 24, a few years after he dropped out of Oxford. On the third episode he directed, the Rolling Stones performed “Play With Fire,” and Mr. Jagger made an immediate impression.“He was absolutely beautiful, like a Botticelli cosh boy,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg recalled, using an old British slang term for stylish teenage hoodlum.He went on to direct more than a dozen Rolling Stones music videos, from early hits like “Paint It Black” to “Start Me Up” in 1982, and has remained close with Mr. Jagger. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said he called him for advice last year, shortly before he was scheduled to have valve-replacement heart surgery, a procedure Mr. Jagger had gone through.“Mick is creative,” he said, “but he’s also extremely practical.”In 1968, around the time of the release of the Rolling Stones album “Beggars Banquet,” Mr. Jagger asked him to direct a TV concert film. A few weeks later, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg called Mr. Jagger and said, as he recalled it: “‘I’m going to say seven words to you: “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.”’ And he got it. It just sounded right.”The production, filmed during a grueling one-day shoot on a London soundstage, included performances by the Who, Jethro Tull and a supergroup called the Dirty Mac featuring John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Yoko Ono. The Rolling Stones closed the show. Now considered a classic, the film was shelved until 1996, when it premiered at the New York Film Festival.“In late January ’69, while doing ‘Let It Be,’ I showed a rough cut to Mick, Keith and Allen Klein,” he said, referring to the guitarist Keith Richards and the group’s manager at the time. “When it was over, they thought the Who were great, but didn’t think the Stones were as good as they could be. Keith said, ‘If it were called “The Who’s Rock and Roll Circus,” I wouldn’t mind.’”Mr. Lennon’s appearance came as little surprise. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg had been working with the Beatles since 1966, when he directed promotional films for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.” Two years later, he was at the helm for the videos for “Revolution” and “Hey Jude.”Let It Be?In late 1968, Mr. McCartney asked him to direct a television special meant to accompany the album the band was about to record. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg was enthusiastic, but he knew from experience that “four Beatles would be four opinions.”“Giving an idea to them was like putting a lump of meat in an animal’s cage,” he said. “One of them would pick it up and sniff it and toss it to the next one to take a bite.”A poster in Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s home of a 1991 film he wrote and directed, “The Object of Beauty.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHis leather-bound diaries, which he started keeping in the mid-1960s, in his library in Hudson, N.Y.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesAfter 10 days of filming, it became clear that the production he had envisioned — a concert in a cinematic location, with Mr. Lindsay-Hogg pushing for an amphitheater in Libya, as well as a separate show documenting the rehearsals to run as a kind of teaser — was not going to happen. In the end, he did what he could to salvage something of the original idea by nudging the Beatles to the roof of the Savile Row building that housed Apple Corps, the group’s media company. There they played a glorious lunchtime set as passers-by peered up quizzically from the sidewalks below.Drawing from the dozens of hours that did not make it into “Let It Be,” Mr. Jackson turned Mr. Lindsay-Hogg into a major character in “Get Back”; his efforts to maintain some kind of momentum against long odds provided the three-part series with a narrative through-line. When “Get Back” started streaming, however, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg found himself in a vulnerable position: The man accustomed to a behind-the-camera role was now in the spotlight.And so he was seen chomping on a cigar and suggesting that he could film the Beatles playing a benefit show for orphans or sick children. “But I don’t mean for really sick kids,” he was quick to tell the group. “I mean for kids with broken legs. I mean, really, kind of, 1944 Hollywood musical Bing Crosby kids.” On social media, Disney+ viewers took swipes at his 28-year-old self, calling him “the upper class twit of the year,” among other insults.“I try to steer as clear from social media as possible,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said.He added that he is more concerned about the legacy of his own documentary. The Beatles skipped the premiere, and “Let It Be” has never appeared as a DVD or on streaming platforms. Most fans know it from washed-out videocassettes; and its reputation has suffered thanks to remarks made by Mr. Starr and Mr. McCartney. “There was no joy in it,” the Beatles drummer said last year on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”Mr. Lindsay-Hogg disagrees with that assessment.“There are moments of great sweetness,” he said. “No matter where you put the camera, no matter how you edited it, they loved each other. Anybody who sees ‘Let It Be’ again will find that.”He believes the tone he struck is not really so far from that of “Get Back,” which he said he found “terrific.” Mr. Jackson’s account, he added, had the advantage of being five times longer, its images and sound enhanced by 21st-century technology. “He had canvas to fit a Rubens painting,” he said, “and I had a canvas to fit a little David Hockney painting.”On July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the four Beatles and some family members attended a private screening of a rough cut of “Let It Be” in Hanover Square. They seemed pleased, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said. Afterward, he and his girlfriend at the time, the British actress Jean Marsh, went for a late dinner at Provans, a restaurant in the Fulham section of London, with Paul and Linda McCartney, Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono, and the Apple executive Peter Brown.“It was a friendly meal,” he recalled. “We had a couple of bottles of wine and mostly talked about our differing childhoods. They were happy with the way things were going, certainly, otherwise there would have been no dinner.”“They were grown men, not the Fab Four of the early 1960s,” he added. “And they were OK with being shown navigating relationships which were old, but changing.”Mr. Lindsay-Hogg in his studio.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe film was a victim of bad timing, in his view. By the time of its May 1970 premiere, the Beatles had broken up. Traumatized fans saw it as “a breakup movie: ‘Mom and Dad are getting divorced!’” he said.Apple has said in the past that it had plans to rerelease “Let It Be” at some point, and Mr. Lindsay-Hogg believes it deserves a fresh viewing; but he doesn’t dwell on his time with the Beatles, or the past in general, he said.“I have a very, very good memory,” he said. “It may be because I never took all the drugs. But I’m very not-nostalgic. Nostalgia is, for me, like the vermouth that I do not put in my martini.”He has preserved much of what he went through with the Beatles in diaries, which he has kept since the “Ready Steady Go!” years.He led me to a bookcase in the memento-filled library next to his art studio. It was filled with dusty leather-bound diaries, many overstuffed with letters and photos. At my suggestion, he dug out the volume from 1969. It was curiously slender.He thumbed through the pages and landed on January 30, the blustery day in London when the Beatles played in public for the last time. As captured by Mr. Lindsay-Hogg and his team, their swan-song performance was the climax of both “Let It Be” and “Get Back.”The diary page was blank, except for one word scribbled in black ballpoint pen.Roof.“The busier you are,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said, “the less you write down.” More

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      Alan White, Who Drummed With Yes and Ex-Beatles, Dies at 72

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      The invitation to perform with John Lennon, which he thought was a joke, led to almost 50 years with one of progressive rock’s foremost bands.Alan White, a seasoned rock drummer who had worked with two former Beatles by the time he turned 21, but who was best known for his long tenure with the pioneering British progressive-rock band Yes, died on Thursday at his home in the Seattle area. He was 72.His death was announced by his family. The announcement did not specify a cause, saying only that he died “after a brief illness.”News of Mr. White’s death came just days after Yes announced that he would not be taking part in the band’s upcoming tour of Britain, which begins on June 13. He had been a member of Yes since 1972, but, the band noted in a statement, “a number of health setbacks” had restricted his time onstage since 2016, with Jay Schellen doing most of the drumming and Mr. White joining the band late in each set.Alan White was born in Pelton, County Durham, England, on June 14, 1949, to Raymond and May (Thrower) White. He began playing the drums when he was 12. He first played professionally the next year, and went on to work with a number of British groups throughout the 1960s.In September 1969, John Lennon, who had heard him with one of those groups, called Mr. White and asked him to join the band he was putting together for a concert in Toronto.As Mr. White told interviewers over the years, he assumed the call was a prank and hung up. Lennon called back, Mr. White was convinced he was who he said he was and he was soon on his way to Canada as a member of the Plastic Ono Band, which also included Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann.The Toronto concert, one of only two that the band would play (the second was a charity concert in London that December), was a memorable one, marking Lennon’s return to the stage after a long absence and yielding the hit album “Live Peace in Toronto.” Mr. White subsequently recorded with Lennon on the single “Instant Karma” and on several tracks of the album “Imagine,” including the title cut, which, like “Instant Karma,” was a Top 10 hit.Mr. White also recorded with another former Beatle, George Harrison, on sessions for Harrison’s first solo album, “All Things Must Pass.”Following those recordings, as well as work backing Joe Cocker and others and a brief stint as one of several percussionists with his fellow drummer Ginger Baker’s band, he was invited in 1972 to join Yes after the band’s original drummer, Bill Bruford, left to join another leading progressive-rock band, King Crimson.Mr. White worked with two former Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, before he was 21.Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times, via Associated PressYes’s music, like that of other bands in the so-called prog-rock movement, was more complex and challenging than standard rock ’n’ roll. But Mr. White had only three days to learn the band’s repertoire before a concert in Dallas — and, he later recalled, when he met with the band’s singer, Jon Anderson, and its bassist, Chris Squire, they told him that if he didn’t agree to join the band “they were going to throw me out the third-story window.” He agreed, he learned the music and his long association with Yes began.Yes underwent numerous changes in both personnel and style over the years, notably adopting a more straightforward pop sound for the album “90125” and the single “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” which became a No. 1 hit in 1983. Mr. White and Mr. Squire were the band’s only constant presences until Mr. Squire’s death in 2015.Mr. White performing with Yes at Madison Square Garden in 1978. He was on every one of the band’s albums from 1973 until last year.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesMr. White, who also helped write a number of the band’s songs, was first heard with Yes on a few tracks of the live album “Yessongs” (1973) and, a year later, on the studio album “Tales From Topographic Oceans.” He was on every subsequent album through “The Quest,” released last year.Yes was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.Mr. White is survived by his wife of 40 years, Rogena (Walberg) White; a son, Jesse; a daughter, Cassi; and two grandchildren. More

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      The Sublime Spectacle of Yoko Ono Disrupting the Beatles

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      In Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back,” Ono is a performance artist at the height of her powers.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Early in “The Beatles: Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s nearly eight-hour documentary about the making of the album “Let It Be,” the band forms a tight circle in the corner of a movie soundstage. Inexplicably, Yoko Ono is there. She perches in reach of John Lennon, her bemused face oriented toward him like a plant growing to the light. When Paul McCartney starts to play “I’ve Got a Feeling,” Ono is there, stitching a furry object in her lap. When the band starts into “Don’t Let Me Down,” Ono is there, reading a newspaper. Lennon slips behind the piano and Ono is there, her head hovering above his shoulder. Later, when the group squeezes into a recording booth, Ono is there, wedged between Lennon and Ringo Starr, wordlessly unwrapping a piece of chewing gum and working it between Lennon’s fingers. When George Harrison walks off, briefly quitting the band, there is Ono, wailing inchoately into his microphone.At first I found Ono’s omnipresence in the documentary bizarre, even unnerving. The vast set only emphasizes the ludicrousness of her proximity. Why is she there? I pleaded with my television set. But as the hours passed, and Ono remained — painting at an easel, chewing a pastry, paging through a Lennon fan magazine — I found myself impressed by her stamina, then entranced by the provocation of her existence and ultimately dazzled by her performance. My attention kept drifting toward her corner of the frame. I was seeing intimate, long-lost footage of the world’s most famous band preparing for its final performance, and I couldn’t stop watching Yoko Ono sitting around, doing nothing.From left, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and John Lennon play as Yoko Ono arranges some papers.Apple Corps“The Beatles: Get Back” is being read by some as an exculpatory document — proof that Ono was not responsible for destroying the Beatles. “She never has opinions about the stuff they’re doing,” Jackson, who crafted the series out of more than 60 hours of footage, told “60 Minutes.” “She’s a very benign presence and she doesn’t interfere in the slightest.” Ono, also a producer on the series, tweeted an article without comment that claims she is merely performing “mundane tasks” as the band gets to work. In the series, McCartney himself — from the vantage of January 1969, more than a year before the band’s public dissolution — pokes fun at the idea that the Beatles would end “because Yoko sat on an amp.”Her presence has been described as gentle, quiet and unimposing. Indeed, she is not the set’s most meddlesome interloper: That is Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the hapless director of the original documentary “Let It Be,” who keeps urging the band to stage a concert in an ancient amphitheater in Libya or perhaps at a hospital for children suffering from reassuringly minor ailments.And yet there is something depressing about the recasting of Ono as a quiet, inconspicuous lump of a person. Of course her appearance in the studio is obtrusive. The fact that she is not there to directly influence the band’s recordings only makes her behavior more ridiculous. To deny this is to sap her of her power.What to Know About ‘The Beatles: Get Back’Peter Jackson’s seven-plus hour documentary series, which explores the most contested period in the band’s history, is available on Disney Plus.Re-examining How the Beatles Ended: Think you know what happened? Jackson may change your mind.Yoko Ono’s Omnipresence: The performance artist is everywhere in the film. At first it’s unnerving, then dazzling.6 Big Moments: Don’t have time to watch the full documentary? Here’s a guide to its eye-opening scenes.From the beginning, Ono’s presence feels intentional. Her gauzy black outfit and flowing, center-parted hair lend her a tent-like appearance; it is as if she is setting up camp, carving out space in the band’s environment. A “mundane” task becomes peculiar when you choose to perform it in front of Paul McCartney’s face as he tries to write “Let It Be.” When you repeat this for 21 days, it becomes astonishing. The documentary’s shaggy run-time reveals Ono’s provocation in all its intensity. It’s as if she is staging a marathon performance piece, and in a way, she is.The Beatles play their final public performance as Yoko Ono looks on.Apple Corps/Disney+Jackson has called his series “a documentary about a documentary,” and we are constantly reminded that we are watching the band produce its image for the camera. Ono was, of course, already an accomplished performance artist when she encountered Lennon, seven years her junior, at a gallery show in 1966. She was a pioneer of participatory artwork, a collaborator of experimental musicians like John Cage and a master at coyly appearing in spaces where she was not supposed to belong. In 1971, she would stage an imaginary exhibition of ephemeral works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the catalog, she is photographed in front of the museum holding a sign that says “F,” recasting it as the “Museum of Modern [F]art.”The idea that Ono doomed the band was always a canard that smacked of misogyny and racism. She was cast as the groupie from hell, a sexually domineering “dragon lady” and a witch who hypnotized Lennon into spurning the lads for some woman. (In 1970, Esquire published an article titled “John Rennon’s Excrusive Gloupie” that promised to reveal “the Yoko nobody Onos,” featuring an illustration of Ono looming over Lennon, who is rendered as a cockroach on her leash.) These slurs would spiral into an indefatigable pop-culture meme that has haunted generations of women accused of intruding on male genius.Ono did not “break up the Beatles.” (If Lennon’s distancing from the band was influenced by his desire to explore other pursuits, including his personal and creative relationship with Ono, that was his call.) But she did intrude. In the documentary, McCartney politely complains that his songwriting with Lennon is disrupted by Ono’s omnipresence. For her part, she was vigilant about escaping the typical role of the artist’s wife. In a 1997 interview, she commented on the status of women in rock in the 1960s: “My first impression was that they were all wives, kind of sitting in the next room while the guys were talking,” she said. “I was afraid of being something like that.” Later, she would dedicate her barbed 1973 song, “Potbelly Rocker,” to the “wives of rockers who are nameless.”The Beatles record the album that will become “Let It Be.” Yoko Ono is also there.Apple CorpsIn her 1964 text project “Grapefruit,” a kind of recipe book for staging art experiences, she instructs her audience “not to look at Rock Hudson but only Doris Day,” and in “The Beatles: Get Back,” she skillfully redirects the eye away from the band and toward herself. Her image stands in contrast to that of other Beatles partners — modelesque white women in chic outfits who occasionally swoop in with kisses, nod encouragingly and slip unobtrusively away. Linda Eastman, McCartney’s future wife, lingers a little longer, occasionally circulating and photographing the band. Eastman was a rock portraitist, and one of the film’s most fascinating moments shows her in deep conversation with Ono — as if to prove Ono’s point, it is a rare on-set interaction with no recovered audio.Ono simply never leaves. She refuses to decamp to the sidelines, but she also resists acting out stereotypes; she appears as neither a doting naïf nor a needling busybody. Instead she seems engaged in a kind of passive resistance, defying all expectations of women who enter the realm of rock genius.The Barenaked Ladies song “Be My Yoko Ono” compares Ono to a ball and chain (for the record, Ono said of the song, “I liked it”), but as the sessions go on, she assumes a weightless quality. She seems to orbit Lennon, eclipsing his bandmates and becoming a physical manifestation of his psychological distance from his old artistic center of gravity. Later, her performance would grow in intensity. The “Let It Be” sessions were followed by the recording of “Abbey Road,” and according to the studio’s engineer, when Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a bed to be delivered to the studio; Ono tucked herself in, commandeered a microphone and invited friends to visit her bedside. This is a lot of things: grotesquely codependent, terribly rude and iconic. The more Ono’s presence is challenged, the more her performance escalates.Ono wailing inchoately into Harrison’s microphone during his absence from the recording sessions.Apple CorpsAll of this was used to crudely fashion Ono into a cultural villain, but it would also later establish her as a kind of folk hero. “It all comes down to YOKO ONO,” the drummer Tobi Vail wrote in a zine connected to her riot grrrl band Bikini Kill in 1991. “Part of what your boyfriend teaches you is that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles,” she writes. That story “makes you into the opposite of his band.” It relegates women to the audience and ridicules them for attempting to make their own music. In Hole’s 1997 song “20 Years in the Dakota,” Courtney Love summons Ono’s powers against a new generation of whining fanboys, and says that riot grrrl is “forever in her debt.” Vail called Ono “the first punk rock girl singer ever.”In Jackson’s film, you can see the seeds of this generational shift. One day, Eastman’s young daughter, Heather, a bob-haired munchkin, whirls aimlessly about the studio. Then she spies Ono singing. Heather observes her with scrunch-faced intensity, steps up to the microphone and wails. More

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      6 Big Beatles Moments

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      6 Big Beatles MomentsDavid RenardWatching and listening ��Disney+What: Paul, on John and Yoko
      When: Part 2, 5 minutesPaul admits to band tension over the pair but also downplays it: “It’s going to be such an incredible, comical thing like in 50 years’ time, you know: ‘They broke up because Yoko sat on an amp.’” More

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      Maureen Cleave, Pop Journalist and Beatles Confidante, Dies at 87

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      Ms. Cleave’s interview with John Lennon, in which he said the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” drew worldwide attention.Maureen Cleave, a British journalist who was one of the first music writers to introduce readers to the Beatles, and who recorded John Lennon’s famous observation that the band was “more popular than Jesus,” died on Nov. 6 at her home in Aldeburgh, England. She was 87.Her daughter Dora Nichols confirmed her death. She did not give a cause but said Ms. Cleave had Alzheimer’s disease.When Ms. Cleave began writing the column “Disc Date” for The London Evening Standard in 1961, serious writing about pop music was in its infancy. She helped raise its profile, in columns that featured conversations with luminaries including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Rolling Stones. She became a marquee byline; in 1976, The Standard called her “the writer who gets people to talk about themselves in the way no other writer can match.”But she was best known for her regular reporting on the Beatles, with whom she had a warm relationship, and whom she described affectionately in the newspaper’s pages. Her piece headlined “The Year of the Beatles,” published in The Standard in 1963, was one of the first major newspaper articles about the band.“Their behavior ranges from the preposterous, farcical and impossible to the kindly, thoughtful and polite,” Ms. Cleave wrote. “You are outraged, diverted and charmed. You are never, ever bored.”Her biggest moment stemmed from an interview with Lennon published in March 1966, in which she delved into his thoughts on organized religion. “Christianity will go,” he said. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first — rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.”Readers, and the rest of the British press, paid little notice. But in July, a month before the Beatles began a tour of the United States, the American magazine Datebook reprinted the interview and provoked a frenzy.Lennon’s remark, which came to be widely known as a claim that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” prompted demonstrations and drew the ire of many American Christians. Lennon was accused of blasphemy — as, by extension, was Ms. Cleave.A Baptist pastor in Cleveland threatened excommunication for members of his parish who attended a Beatles concert. The Ku Klux Klan protested Lennon’s remarks. The Vatican issued a statement condemning the comparison.Lennon apologized — albeit reluctantly — at a news conference during the American tour, under pressure from the band’s manager, Brian Epstein.Paul McCartney said in the multimedia release “The Beatles Anthology” that Ms. Cleave was one of the band’s go-to journalists. “Maureen was interesting and easy to talk to,” he said. Lennon, he added, “made the unfortunate mistake of talking very freely because Maureen was someone we knew very well, to whom we would just talk straight from the shoulder.”Lennon’s line made it into The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.The 1966 American tour, fraught with protests and the lingering fear of violence, was the Beatles’ last.Maureen Diana Cleave was born on Oct. 20, 1934, in India, which was part of the British Empire at the time.Her father, Maj. John Cleave, was a British officer stationed in India. Her mother, Isabella Mary Fraser Browne, was a homemaker. She had two sisters.Ms. Cleave attended high school in her mother’s native Ireland after the family returned there.After graduating from St. Anne’s College at Oxford in 1957, Ms. Cleave found a job at The Evening Standard as a secretary.An avid fan of pop music, she pitched a column on the subject to the paper’s editors. That idea became “Disc Date.” She traveled to Liverpool in 1963 to see the Beatles in person.She married Francis Nichols, an Oxford classmate, in 1966, and they later moved to his ancestral home at Lawford Hall in Essex. He died in 2015. Her survivors include their daughters, Dora and Sadie Nichols; their son, Bertie Nichols; and three grandchildren.After the Beatles broke up in 1970, Ms. Cleave continued covering the music scene for The Evening Standard. In a series of articles in the 1970s under the rubric “Maureen Cleave’s Guide to the Young,” she explained the hippie movement to Standard readers and explored the Hells Angels, among other topics.Ms. Cleave was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, after collapsing on a London Underground platform in 1992. She documented her experience with the ailment in The Standard the next year. “The medical profession lagged behind in M.E. awareness,” she wrote; “because there is no test, ergo it doesn’t exist.”“Apart from having it, I knew little about it myself,” she added. She saw homeopathic doctors as well as traditional practitioners in an effort to manage her condition.Among the other topics she explored was women’s fitness. She also wrote profiles of painters, writers and philanthropists.But she also continued publishing reflections on her time with the Beatles. In 2005, she wrote a piece for The Daily Telegraph tied to what would have been John Lennon’s 65th birthday.“Charisma rarely survives the aging process,” she wrote, “but, killed in the prime of life, Lennon remains a very powerful absence.” More

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      Know How the Beatles Ended? Peter Jackson May Change Your Mind.

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      The director’s three-part documentary “Get Back” explores the most contested period in the band’s history and reveals there’s still plenty to debate.It is a cold January morning in 1969, and three of the four Beatles are assembled in a cavernous film studio in London, with cameras rolling and microphones everywhere. “Lennon’s late again,” Paul McCartney says matter of factly, as he plugs in his bass guitar.With Ringo Starr and George Harrison sitting groggily before him, a tray of toast and jam by their side, McCartney starts to strum and sing, searching for inspiration. Within minutes, a mid-tempo groove takes shape and a familiar vocal melody emerges. “Get back,” he sings in a faint howl. “Get back to where you once belonged.” Almost like magic, a Beatles classic begins to form out of nothing.Later that same day, after John Lennon arrives, the four rock deities gather in a circle and bicker. They have loose plans for a concert TV special featuring brand-new songs, but most of the men appear to be dreading it — and may be dreading each other, too. Lennon, who seems to space out for much of the meeting, declares vaguely that “communication” with an audience is his only aim, while an impatient McCartney challenges his bandmates to show some enthusiasm for the project or abandon it.Harrison blurts out what they may all be thinking: “Maybe we should have a divorce?”Those back-to-back scenes in Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” a seven-hour-plus project that will be shown in three parts on Disney Plus from Nov. 25 to 27, encapsulate the twin sides of the most contested period in Beatles history — the glory of artistic creation by the world’s most beloved and influential rock band, and the grueling conflicts that led to its breakup, announced a year later.For Beatles fans, or any student of 20th-century pop culture, these are astonishing glimpses into the band’s working life and the tensions that surrounded them.“It’s sort of that one impossible fan dream,” Jackson said in a video interview from Wellington, New Zealand, where he has spent much of the last four years in a darkened editing suite surrounded by Beatles memorabilia. “‘I wish I could go in a time machine and sit in the corner of the stage while they were working,’” he said, describing a lifelong dream like a child praying for the ultimate Christmas present. “‘Just for one day, just watch them, and I’ll be really quiet and sit there.’”“Well, guess what?” he continued. “The time machine’s here now.”Peter Jackson pored over nearly 60 hours of footage for his documentary “Get Back.”Nicola Dove/DisneyJackson’s film is also a volley in one of the longest-running debates in Beatles scholarship. The band’s journey in January 1969 began with intense pressure to put on a high-concept live show and ended with something wonderfully low-concept: an impromptu lunchtime performance on a London rooftop that reminded the world of the band’s majesty, spontaneity and wit. “I hope we passed the audition,” Lennon quips at the show’s end.That period was already the subject of “Let It Be,” a 1970 vérité film by Michael Lindsay-Hogg; its soundtrack was the Beatles’ final studio LP. In time, that film took on a reputation as a joyless document of the band’s collapse, and later testimony from members of the Beatles seemed to buttress that view. Lennon described the sessions as “hell,” and Harrison called them the group’s “winter of discontent.”Yet that narrative has long been challenged by some Beatles aficionados. Lindsay-Hogg’s film, they argue, was selectively edited for maximum dreariness, perhaps to retroactively explain the breakup — “Abbey Road,” the Beatles’ true swan song, was made after “Let It Be” but released first — while evidence from bootlegged tapes suggests a mixture of pleasure and frustration familiar to any musician struggling through Take 24 on a deadline.The mere existence of “Get Back” is a sign that, more than half a century after the Beatles disbanded, their history is still unsettled, and remains endlessly ripe for deep-dive research and partisan counternarratives.Jackson’s film, arriving with the authority of a lightning bolt hurled from a mountaintop in Middle-earth, may become the final word in the argument over this period, though the story it tells is far from simple. Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy — and an avowed Beatles nut — was given access to nearly 60 hours of previously unseen footage by Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company, with no brief, Jackson said, but to restore the film and tell the full story.From left: Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the studio.Apple CorpsThe Beatles, or at least their corporate surrogates, have embraced Jackson’s retelling, and a preview of the film highlighted moments of brotherly silliness, like the band dancing and clowning in the studio. At a music industry event last year, Jeff Jones, Apple Corps’ chief executive, promised that the new film would “bust the myth” that these sessions were “the final nail in the Beatles’ coffin.” Yet Jackson said the band has had no influence over his work.“Everyone sort of thinks it’s a whitewash” because the Beatles have authorized the film, Jackson said with a laugh. “But actually it’s almost the exact opposite. It shows everything that Michael Lindsay-Hogg could not show in 1970. It’s a very unflinching look at what goes on.”For fans who remember Lindsay-Hogg’s film, or have read dismal anecdotes in any of dozens of Beatles books, Jackson’s scenes of lighthearted antics and creative breakthroughs jump off the screen. We see the Beatles cracking each other up at the mic, mimicking posh accents and performing absurdist slapstick as if in a “Monty Python” skit.“You see these four great friends, great musicians, who just lock in and develop these songs, and you see it all onscreen,” Jackson said.Day after day, new material takes shape. Polishing the lyrics to the song “Get Back,” McCartney and Lennon test out names for a character who departs his Arizona home: Jojo Jackson, Jojo Carter, Jojo Daphne. Shaving off the last name gives McCartney enough syllables for some more specificity in the story: “Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona …”Lennon, chewing gum, glances up to ask: “Is Tucson in Arizona?”The original “Let It Be” was shot on 16 millimeter film and blown up to grainy 35 millimeter. Generations of fans, if they’ve seen it at all, have had access to the movie only in crummy bootlegs transferred from videotape. It has never been officially released on DVD or in online formats.I told Jackson that when I finally saw “Let It Be,” 20-odd years ago, my local video rental shop required a $100 cash deposit. Jackson grabbed a vintage VHS copy and said he had long regretted not buying it when visiting the United States in the early 1980s, but the format was unplayable on his machine in New Zealand. While making “Get Back,” he tracked down an original on eBay for $200.“I don’t have a VHS machine,” he said, “so I still can’t play it.”Jackson’s restored images in “Get Back” are strikingly clear, and help flesh out a story of creative anxiety and creature comforts inside Fortress Beatle. Attendants pour glasses of wine as the musicians rehearse; Yoko Ono paints Japanese calligraphy while Lennon and McCartney, a few feet away, yuk their way through “Two of Us” in goofy accents.But the misery is never far away, and as the arguments grind on, it starts to seem miraculous that the Beatles can still come together at all. At one point, Harrison briefly quits the band, apparently fed up with his second-fiddle status. In the studio cafeteria, Lennon tells McCartney that the band’s rift with their lead guitarist has been “a festering wound.”After Harrison walks out, the remaining Beatles jam loudly and angrily. Starr tears through the drums. Ono, dressed all in black, stands at a microphone and wails to a wild climax — perhaps the most violent sound the Beatles ever created.A recurring theme is the band’s discomfort over the role of Ono, who sits by Lennon’s side constantly during the sessions and will come to be vilified by fans for her supposed role in the Beatles’ breakup. A companion book to the film, with further transcripts from the tapes, quotes Lennon telling McCartney: “I would sacrifice you all for her.”Jackson’s restored images in “Get Back” help flesh out a story of creative anxiety and creature comforts inside the Beatles’ cloistered world.Apple CorpsYet it is never clear whether the Beatles’ conflicts are caused by the events of the day or by the accumulated stress of years in the spotlight. Peter Brown, who was a top executive at Apple during this time, said in an interview that the troubles began with the success of “Sgt. Pepper” in 1967.“They were doing things that they’d never done before, and they were very, very worried that it was going to take off,” Brown said. “And of course it took off like crazy. Then how do you follow that?”Some of the drama, of course, may be typical band stuff. Neil Finn, of the New Zealand group Crowded House, said that Jackson showed his band about four hours of footage earlier this year. “We all wept,” he wrote in an email.“So much of it struck a chord with me from my own rehearsals and recording experiences,” Finn added. “Paul asking John if he had any new songs, and John kind of blustering with his answer: Uh, maybe, not really. You can see the others staring in disbelief. I’ve seen that look before.”But the stakes were incredibly high for the Beatles, and the prospect of the band’s dissolution hangs like a cloud over almost the entire film. Early on, McCartney floats an idea for the still-undefined TV special. Their performance, he proposes, would be interspersed with news reports about earthquakes and other “red hot” events around the world. “And at the end,” McCartney says, “the final bulletin is: ‘The Beatles have broken up.’”To some extent, “Get Back” and the original “Let It Be” are exhibits in a study of truth. Does the footage actually show the endgame of the Beatles, or has history gotten it wrong all these years? Does the weight of the evidence point to the band being joyful and creatively fecund, or fed up with each other’s company? The answer may be: all of the above.In one of many moments of levity, Starr hoists a mug behind the drum kit.Apple CorpsIn a note included with a new reissue of the album “Let It Be,” McCartney writes that the original film “was pretty sad as it dealt with the breakup of our band, but the new film shows the camaraderie and love the four of us had between us.”Lindsay-Hogg believes that not only fans, but likely also members of the Beatles themselves, have been misreading “Let It Be” for years.“I think part of the rap that ‘Let It Be’ has had is no one has seen it for a very long time,” he said in an interview. “And it got very confused with the time it came out, which was just after they’d broken up.”Of course, the Beatles did not disband in January 1969. They went on to record “Abbey Road” later that year, with great care; most of the songs on that album, including “Octopus’s Garden,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Carry That Weight” and “Something,” are heard in early stages during “Get Back.”But Jackson’s film makes clear that the end was nigh. If there is a true culprit in the breakup, it was the business conflicts that ensued during 1969, when the group tussled over its management, and Lennon and McCartney tried but failed to take control of the company that held their songwriting rights.Those problems are foreshadowed in “Get Back” with the utterance of a single name: Allen Klein, the American business manager who arrives a few days before the rooftop show to pitch his services for the band. Shortly after the events shown in “Get Back,” Lennon, Harrison and Starr all signed on with Klein; McCartney declined, and the schism was never repaired. Klein died in 2009.“Our movie doesn’t show the breaking up of the Beatles,” Jackson said, “but it shows the one singular moment in history that you could possibly say was the beginning of the end.”If Beatles’ scholarship and fandom has proved anything, it is that even a contradictory summation of the band and its influence can still hold true. The Beatles were a pop boy band that ended up pushing the creative boundaries of rock music further than anyone else; nearly every day of their existence together has been documented exhaustively, though a full accounting of their motivations is impossible.“Get Back” seems to contain all those multitudes — the delight, the tension, the fighting and the wonder of the Beatles simply playing music on the roof.“There’s no goodies in it, there’s no baddies,” Jackson said. “There’s no villains, there’s no heroes. It’s just a human story.”Jackson’s scenes of lighthearted antics and creative breakthroughs jump off the screen. Apple Corps More

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      A Year in the Life: Who Gets a Master’s Degree in the Beatles?

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      In Liverpool, England, a postgraduate program aims to turn Beatles fans into serious students of the band’s legacy.LIVERPOOL, England — On Wednesday morning, as a new semester began, students eagerly headed into the University of Liverpool’s lecture theaters to begin courses in archaeology, languages and international relations.But in lecture room No. 5 of the university’s concrete Rendall Building, a less traditional program was getting underway: a master’s degree devoted entirely to the Beatles.“How does one start a Beatles M.A.?” asked Holly Tessler, the American academic who founded the course, looking out at 11 eager students. One wore a Yoko Ono T-shirt; another had a yellow submarine tattooed on his arm.“I thought the only way to do it, really, is with some music,” she said.The Penny Lane street sign. The street immortalized in a Beatles song was covered in the course.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesA 2015 statue of the band on Liverpool’s waterfront.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesTessler then played the class the music video for “Penny Lane,” the Beatles’ tribute to a real street in Liverpool, just a short drive from the classroom.The yearlong course — “The Beatles: Music Industry and Heritage” — would focus on shifting perceptions of the Beatles over the past 50 years, and on how the band’s changing stories affected commercial sectors like the record business and tourism, Tessler said in an interview before class.For Liverpool, the band’s hometown, the association with the Beatles was worth over $110 million a year, according to a 2014 study by Mike Jones, another lecturer on the course. Tourists make pilgrimages to city sites named in the band’s songs, visit venues where the group played — like the Cavern Club — and pose for photos with Beatles statues. The band’s impact was always economic and social, as much as a musical, Tessler said.Throughout the course, students would have to stop being simply Beatles fans and start thinking about the group from new perspectives, she added. “Nobody wants or needs a degree where people are sitting around listening to ‘Rubber Soul’ debating lyrics,” she said. “That’s what you do in the pub.”In Wednesday’s lecture, which focused almost entirely on “Penny Lane,” Tessler encouraged the students to think of the Beatles as a “cultural brand,” using the terms “narrative theory” and “transmediality.”A student’s pencil case. All 11 people taking the course said they were longtime Beatles fans.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesThen she applied those ideas to a recent Beatles-related event. Last year, Tessler said, street signs along the real Penny Lane were defaced as Black Lives Matter protests spread across Britain. There was a longstanding belief in Liverpool, she explained, that the street was named after an 18th-century slave trader called James Penny. (The city’s International Slavery Museum listed Penny Lane in an interactive display of street names linked to slavery in 2007, but it now says there is no evidence that the road was named after the merchant.)“What would happen if they did change the name to — I don’t know — Smith Lane?” Tessler asked. That would deprive Liverpool of a key tourist attraction, she said: “You can’t pose next to a sign that used to be Penny Lane.” The furor around the street name showed how stories about the Beatles can intersect with contemporary debates, and have an economic impact, she said.The course’s 11 students — three women and eight men, aged 21 to 67 — all said they were long-term Beatles obsessives. (Two had named their sons Jude, after one of the band’s most famous songs; another had a son called George, after George Harrison.)Dale Roberts, 31, and Damion Ewing, 51, both said they were professional tour guides, and hoped the qualification would help them attract customers. “The tour industry in Liverpool is fierce,” Roberts said.Alexandra Mason, 21, said she had recently completed a law degree but decided to change track when she heard about the Beatles course. “I never really wanted to be a lawyer,” she said. “I always wanted to do something more colorful and creative.”She added:“In my mind, I’ve gone from the ridiculous to the sublime” but said that some might think she’d done the opposite.Students would have to stop being simply Beatles fans and start thinking about the group from new perspectives, the course’s founder said.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesPaul McCartney’s signature among graffiti on another street sign on Penny Lane.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesA postgraduate qualification in the Beatles is a rarity, but the band has been studied in other contexts for decades. Stephen Bayley, an architecture critic who is now an honorary professor at the University of Liverpool, said that when he was a student in the 1960s at Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool — John Lennon’s alma mater — his English teacher taught Beatles lyrics alongside the poetry of John Keats.In 1967, Bayley wrote to Lennon asking for help analyzing songs on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Bayley said Lennon “wrote back basically saying, ‘You can’t analyze them.’”But these days a growing number of academics are doing just that: Tessler said researchers in several disciplines were writing about the Beatles, many exploring perspectives on the band informed by race or feminism. Next year, she plans to start a journal of Beatles studies, she said.Some people in Liverpool, however, were not convinced about the band’s academic value. In interviews around Penny Lane, two locals said they thought the course was an odd idea.“What are you going to do with that? You’re not going to cure cancer, are you?” said Adele Allan, the owner of the Penny Lane Barber Shop.“It’s an entirely silly course,” said Chris Anderson, 38, out walking his dog, before adding that he thought almost all college degrees were “entirely silly.”Others were more positive. “You can study anything,” said Aoife Corry, 19. “You don’t need to prove yourself by doing some serious subject,” she added.Students and academic staff members of the Beatles course, at the University of Liverpool on Wednesday.Duncan Elliott for The New York TimesTessler concluded Wednesday’s class by outlining the subjects for the semester’s remaining lectures. It was a program that any Beatles fan would savor, including field trips to St. Peter’s Church, where Lennon and McCartney first met in 1957 in the church hall, and Strawberry Field, the former children’s home the band immortalized in song. Classes would cover key moments in the band’s history including a famous live television appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and Lennon’s murder in 1980, Tessler said.She then gave the students a reading list, topped by a textbook called “The Beatles in Context.” Were there any questions, she asked?“What’s your favorite Beatles’ album?” called out Dom Abba, 27, the student with the yellow submarine tattoo.Tessler gamely answered (“The American version of ‘Rubber Soul’”), then clarified what she’d meant: “Does anybody have any questions about the module?” The students clearly still had a ways to go before they become Beatles academics, as much as fans. But there were still 11 months of lectures left. More