The Fifth Beatle
By Austin Ratner
Illustration by Austin Hughes
To learn anything new about the Beatles, the most storied rock band of all time, most of us depend on newly released archival recordings or on new books or interviews by one of the surviving members of the band. But a little over ten years ago, I came into possession of some Beatles lore that was not publicly known. After acquiring it, I could find no trace of it on the internet, in print, or among Beatles connoisseurs. Through some curious magic, it was gifted to me by Paul McCartney himself. The reason I thought I would write about it in TAP is because it involves a dream and a wish—a wish that came true.
Dramatic art, according to Freud and Shakespeare, is a waking dream, and artists derive inspiration from nighttime dreams too. Supposedly Giuseppe Tartini dreamed the “Devil’s Trill Sonata.” The skeleton ship in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” came from his friend John Cruikshank’s dream. The title and refrain of one of Paul McCartney’s best-known songs, “Let It Be,” came to him in a dream. In The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, McCartney tells how he first encountered the phrase in his high school reading of Hamlet with his favorite teacher Alan Durband. Hamlet tells Horatio as he is dying, “O, I could tell you— / But let it be.” In 1969, the line surfaced in one of Paul’s dreams. “Mother Mary”—literally his own mother, Mary McCartney, who died before she could witness the Beatles—came to him, as the famous song narrates, “Speaking words of wisdom / Let it be.” The dream came at a time, he says, when both he and the Beatles were a mess:
I fell asleep exhausted one day and had a dream in which my mum (who had died just over 10 years previously) did, in fact, come to me. When you dream about seeing someone you’ve lost, even though it’s sometimes for just a few seconds, it really does feel like they’re right there with you, and it’s as if they’ve always been there. I think anyone who’s lost someone close to them understands that, especially in the period of time just after they’ve passed away. Still to this day I have dreams about John and George and talk to them. But in this dream seeing my mum’s beautiful, kind face and being with her in a peaceful place was very comforting. I immediately felt at ease, and loved and protected. My mum was very reassuring and, like so many women often are, she was also the one who kept our family going. She kept our spirits up. She seemed to realise I was worried about what was going on in my life and what would happen, and she said to me, “Everything will be alright. Let it be.”
It was in the winter of 2011 that I learned about another instance when actual nighttime dreams played a role in the history of the Beatles. I made notes at the time and have told some people about it, but until now I’ve never written about it.
This was in January, in an oceanside town on Long Island where I was staying, and it had snowed four or five inches the night before. I had dragged myself out to a small gym on the town’s main street. After I was done torturing myself on an elliptical machine, trying to make notes in my Signet Classics edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as I seized up and down, I shambled down to the locker room, the paperback clamped under my sweaty arm. I thought I was alone as I dug my wet boots out of my locker. And then a voice behind me said, “Hello.”
I turned around. There was only one other person in the locker room, and it was Paul McCartney. He was buttoning up his shirt, almost fully dressed, and his hair was still wet from a shower.
*
It was a strange coincidence because my brother and I had just had a long conversation about the famed collaboration between John and Paul. We’d just been talking about how John and Paul challenged and edited each other, how Lennon’s heartbrokenness led him into such an intense personal and musical dependence on Paul, how Paul was an elegant virtuoso and Lennon a raw Joycean poet, how they both lost their mothers as teenagers, within a year of each other—though Lennon’s mother had been partly lost to him much earlier. “I lost her twice,” he once said. Mother figures recur in their shared oeuvre.
The idea of a fifth Beatle seems less a matter of history and more a matter of metaphysics, akin to the idea of a “fifth element.”
The two Beatles front men had sometimes been a source of tension between me and my younger brother. He identified with the younger, sunnier, and more affable Paul, whom he viewed as more deserving of public affection than John. I identified with John, in part because he was dead, like our own father was dead, in part because he was angry at the world, as I sometimes felt. This time, however, the conversation with my brother was healing, because it was about Paul and John as coequals, about their love for each other.
My brother and I had even been listening to “Two of Us” and “Dig a Pony” off the last Beatles’ album ever released, Let It Be, and had been saying how poignant the two songs are as Phil Spector arranged them, back to back, with John saying in his characteristically free-associative way “I dig a pygmy” at the outset of the melodic McCartney song “Two of Us.” Paul sings of Linda McCartney, “You and I have memories / Longer than the road / That stretches out ahead,” but he could just as well be singing about the end of the great Lennon-McCartney collaboration and friendship. And then comes the very Lennon song “Dig a Pony,” introduced by a musical phrase of McCartney’s. Recorded live on the rooftop of 3 Savile Row, it begins with a false start: one guitar beat from Paul before Ringo stops him, crying out “Hold it!” so he can stab out his cigarette. Then a crash of cymbals and Paul launches into a wicked bass guitar lick on his Hofner 500/1 violin bass and Lennon wails, “All I want is you / Everything has got to be just like you want it to” with McCartney doing an angelic falsetto harmony, balm to his friend’s raw and weary lead vocals.
*
So it was just me and Paul there in the locker room on that wet, cold January day. I had known the icon of Paul McCartney since childhood. One of the first successful likenesses I ever sketched was of Paul’s face, copied from the famous Robert Freeman photograph on the cover of my parents’ LP Rubber Soul. When I was in sixth grade, I had performed “Yesterday” on my trombone for guests at a holiday party.
Normally, I do not engage with celebrities. It so often disappoints me and annoys them. But he had engaged me before I even realized he was there.
I said, “Whoa. My brother and I were just talking about Paul and John ... and here you are.”
And he said, “Yeah.... What were you saying about us?”
So I said, “Just that we’ve read about the friendship and the collaboration between you two and how it’s actually very moving.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I was lucky to know him. We had a rough patch there, but he was a great friend. And I think we did a bit of good work together there.”
He winked at me. He was tousling his hair with his hands to dry it off and looking in the mirror now.
I agreed, pretty good work: A Hard Day’s Night, Help, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album, Abbey Road, Let It Be. “Yeah, you did.”
He said, “The thing was that he could do things I couldn’t do, and I could do things he couldn’t. We really complemented each other.”
My mind started racing. I told myself: You have one chance to ask one question of Paul McCartney about the Beatles. Make it a good one. Of course, whether the question would be any good would depend mostly on the answer. I took my shot.
I asked him, “Did you know when you met him that he had something special, that you two were gonna do great things together?”
His answer could easily have been prosaic and, at first, it was. But the widely known general circumstances of their meeting were only a set-up for what he said next. He added something extraordinary, a bauble of musical memory attuned to the particular interests I’d expressed, a story I’d never heard before. Neither, to my knowledge, had any other Beatles fan or writer at that point. A missing piece of Beatles lore.
“Well,” he said, “he was a year and a half older than me. At that age that was a big deal. I looked up to him, I thought he was really cool. Later it evened out. But I’ll tell you, shortly after we met, he told me he had had a dream of digging in his backyard and finding a bunch of gold. And what was amazing is that I had had the same dream the previous night. Isn’t that weird? We were like, ‘Whoa, this is weird. This means something.’”
It was indeed a miraculous story—but hardly more miraculous to me than Paul McCartney materializing in a gym locker room like a genie and granting me wishes in the form of answers to my personal questions about the Beatles.
With a showman’s flair, he then produced a money clip and started sorting through the fattest stack of 100-dollar bills I’d ever seen. If our conversation had been a McCartney concert, this would be the part where the pyrotechnics go off during “Live and Let Die.” As he counted the bills, he said something more about his and John’s creative collaboration—my notes are unfortunately no more specific than that, as I was distracted by the money. But the meaning of the gesture with the money clip became clear to me years later: it was that his and John’s shared dream as boys in Liverpool of digging up a bunch of gold had come true. Here was the gold.
I turned around. There was only one other person in the locker room, and it was Paul McCartney.
Money of course figured prominently in the dreams of two motherless boys from hardworking postwar Liverpool. You can hear the pleading sincerity in John Lennon’s cover of “Money (That’s What I Want)” by Barry Gordy, Janie Bradford, and Barrett Strong (who died in 2023, 63 years after the song became Motown’s first hit). A reporter once asked John what he planned to do after the Beatles and Lennon said, “Count the money.” Beatles biographer Bob Spitz writes of Paul, “In later years, after he was fabulously wealthy and knighted before the Queen, Paul would often talk about success in terms of his mother’s encouragement ‘to do better’ than her and Jim, to improve his circumstances.” Turns out he didn’t mean it when he sang, “I don’t care too much for money / Money can’t buy me love.” McCartney told writer Barry Miles about his first time in America, “I remember meeting this rather nice girl and taking her out for dinner in this MG in the cool Florida night, palm trees swaying. You kidding? A Liverpool boy with this tanned beauty in my MG going out to dinner. It should have been ‘Can Buy Me Love,’ actually.”
About a year later, McCartney gifted the story of the twin dreams of gold to a greater cause. In 2012, he told it to The Big Issue, the UK free paper that raises money to combat homelessness.
“So both of us had this dream of finding this treasure,” he told the reporter. “And I suppose you could say it came true. I remember years later talking about it—‘Remember that dream we had?’; ‘Yeah, that was far out.’ So the message of that dream was: Keep digging, lads.”
*
That day in the locker room, Paul noticed I was confused about the money clip. He said, “I apologize for sorting my money. I just got back from England.”
Our conversation was long enough that there was time to change the subject. Yet the uncanny logic of the unconscious dictated that the subject remain the same—even as he or I tried to take it elsewhere. I mentioned, for instance, that I’d read John’s first book of nonsense stories, In His Own Write, and had enjoyed Paul’s witty introduction to it. I was digging at the secret of their free-associative creativity.
“John always wrote stuff like that from the time he was really young,” Paul said. He added that some of John’s teenage work, a satiric handwritten and hand-drawn newspaper called The Daily Howl, had recently been auctioned off at Christie’s. The buried treasure again. More to the point, I had forgotten, but must have known on some level, that Paul’s introduction to In His Own Write is a magical account of that magical day Lennon and McCartney first met, the basis for the twin dreams of digging for gold they would share soon after:
At Woolton village fete I met him. I was a fat schoolboy, and, as he leaned on my shoulder, I realised that he was drunk. We were twelve then, but, in spite of the sideboards, we went on to become teenage pals.
Aunt Mimi, who had looked after him since he was so high, used to tell me how he was cleverer than he pretended, and things like that. He had written a poem for the school magazine about a hermit who said:
“As breathing is my life, to stop I dare not dare.” This made me wonder right away—“Is he deep?” He wore glasses so it was possible, and even without them there was no holding him.
The “Woolton village fete” was in fact where the two future Beatles first met. On July 6, 1957, John’s skiffle band the Quarry Men played the Saturday garden fete and dance at St. Peter’s Church in the Woolton suburb of Liverpool. Bessie Shotton, the mother of John’s best friend Pete, had arranged the gig thinking it would attract the younger generation. It did. Young Paul McCartney showed up and was there to see Lennon perform a charismatic, raunchy version of Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” which he’d discovered in his mother’s hip record collection. Perplexed elders in attendance that day included Lennon’s mother Julia, Julia’s older sister Mimi, who raised Lennon from the age of five, and the church vicar. Between the Quarry Men’s afternoon and evening sets, a mutual friend introduced Paul and John. They were not the same age and neither of them were 12; Paul had just turned 15 and John was 16. Paul unofficially auditioned for John, playing guitar and singing some American hits he’d learned off the radio. By all accounts, Paul blew his peers away. He was not yet confident around girls, maybe, but he was confident in his musical ability. John quickly made space for a new guitarist in the Quarry Men. Elitist, Cambridge-bound Rod Davis was out, and Paul was in.
Paul and John were both “deep,” indeed. And what should a band called the Quarry Men do but dig deep? After much digging, they eventually struck gold in the Beatles.
Paul told me of his time in the Beatles, “Sometimes I can’t believe it was all real.”
He fixed his scarf before the locker room mirror. As he headed out the door, he said over his shoulder, “Say hello to your brother for me.”
*
Whether wholly accurate or partly revised in Paul’s memory, the essence of the story rings deeply true. The Beatles began with a matched set of dreams in the heads of Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Even before Paul and John met, they had each been dreaming independently of a place for themselves in the newly ascendant postwar culture of America, whose airwaves full of skiffle and rock’n’roll came to English shores via Radio Luxembourg.
“There was always a bad reception—you’d have your ear to the speaker, always fiddling with the dial, but it would give you plenty to dream about,” Colin Manley, a classmate of McCartney’s, told Bob Spitz.
More than a decade after my chance meeting with Paul, I feel I have an answer to the old question, who is “the fifth Beatle”? New York disc jockey Murray Kaufman nominated himself for the position when he coined the term in 1964 and Pete Best, Stu Sutcliffe, Brian Epstein, and George Martin have all been discussed, but the idea of a fifth Beatle seems less a matter of history and more a matter of metaphysics, akin to the idea of a “fifth element.” There is something more than meets the eye about this magical phoenix arisen from the death and broken brick of the Second World War, from the bombed-out holes and lost loves of Liverpool. There has to be some transcendental secret that explains the unique phenomenon of the Beatles, their music, their rocketry from Liverpool to immortality.
Well, I know the secret. The fifth Beatle was a dream. Paul told me.
Published August 2024