When Lennon's Anxiety About Having Lost Contact With Reality Became Alarming, He Would Bring Himself

When Lennon's anxiety about having lost contact with reality became alarming, he would bring himself back to earth by a simple expedient: "When it gets too bad," he told his biographer, "I have to see the others." The value of the Beatles to him at such moments was that they were "someone else like me." In other words, the Beatles embodied the identity that John Lennon was always losing. But their own identity was by no means simple. Consider how various were the ways in which the public perceived the Beatles. Initially everyone saw the Fab Four as one man repeated four times. Soon, however, this perception was superseded by the vision of the Beatles as four different men wearing the same costume, which is how they were seen by the typical fan, who then identified with his favorite Beatle. The more sophisticated Beatle watchers, however, had yet another take on the group: they saw the Beatles as one man with four different faces. This was an idea that appealed to the Beatles themselves, but it raises a basic question: who was that man? The best clue is provided by the finest description ever written of the Beatles as a collective identity. According to British Pop critic Nik Cohn, the most remarkable thing about them was their self-sufficiency, which was the product of their perfect complementation, each Beatle interlocking with and counterbalancing the other like the works in a Swiss watch. "Lennon was the brutal one," Cohn observed, "McCartney was the pretty one, Ringo Starr was the lovable one, Harrison was the balancer. And if Lennon was tactless, McCartney was a natural diplomat. And if Harrison seemed dim, Lennon was very clever. And if Starr was clownish, Harrison was almost sombre. And if McCartney was arty, Starr was basic. Round and round in circles... and it all made for a comforting sense of completeness." Exactly.

The Lives of John Lennon, Albert Goldman (1988)