Rabbit Hole: Notes on Research Methodology

HANG ON A SEC: This is the backup site for Beautiful Possibility in case of technical failure or shenanigans. For the official episode please go here – https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/rabbit-hole-notes-on-research-methodology

All the episodes of Beautiful Possibility in sequence are here.

Now that I have your attention, 😎 I’m guessing for some of you, research methodology has become a Topic of Interest in a way that it wasn’t up til now. So in this Rabbit Hole, I want to take a few minutes to share with those of you who are now interested a little about how I research this series.

My guiding research principles are simple — all the research cited in this series is from publicly available material and from primary sources, verified by tracing the research back to the original source of publication.

The reason I avoid relying on second and third-hand research about this story is obvious, of course. With each link in the chain, the story potentially becomes less and less accurate. And to compound the problem, following a chain of a source quoting another source quoting another source back far enough often runs right back into the distorted breakup narrative that got us into this mess in the first place.

There are a few exceptions to the “publicly available” part. Occasionally I’ll cite a conversation I had with someone directly, if it wasn’t off the record. That’s obviously previously not publicly available, since it originated with me. And some of this research did require special access and occasional heroic efforts, but that material is still publicly available in that it’s been published and is in the world for anyone motivated enough to go find it.

For example, there’s a quote in the next episode from Fifty Years Adrift, a book co-authored by Derek Taylor and George Harrison. That book is publicly available in that it’s a published book. But it’s out of print and used copies of it cost upwards of $2000, and that’s not in my research budget. But if you’re willing to, as I did, get on a plane and travel to London and apply for a Reader’s Pass at the British Library and request the book from their rare book collection and put on a pair of white gloves and sit at a table in the Rare Book Room while stern British librarians frown at you to make sure you’re not getting peanut butter all over the pages, and take handwritten notes because each photo of each page requires individual permission from those stern librarians, then you, too, can access that book.

Also in the course of my research, I’ve had people share information with me off the record. While that information has sometimes informed the direction of my research, none of it has been used in this series unless I was able to verify it independently through publicly available sources, and those publicly available sources are what I cite. I’ve also found and been told plenty of gossip, hearsay and rumour about the lovers possibility, some of it dating back to the 50s and ‘60s. None of that appears in this series because gossip and rumour is not what we’re doing here.

Primary versus secondary sources are trickier to define. People write whole scholarly articles attempting to make the distinction. I’ll keep it simple even though it will be somewhat imprecise.

Basically what I mean by a primary source is that if someone said something, it has to be sourced at the original place where they said it — whether that’s an interview, a conversation, or a piece of their own writing. If something happened, the account of that event has to be sourced to someone who was there when it happened.

When I say verified at the original source, I mean pretty much this: if I can’t trace the quote or the information back to where it first came from — the first person who said it in the first place it was said, or to an account from someone who lived through the events firsthand, it doesn’t make the cut for Beautiful Possibility.

The one semi-exception here that’s not really an exception is that because this is a story about a story and we’re talking about bias and distortion, it’s sometimes relevant how someone presents a piece of research.

So for example, in next week’s Rabbit Hole, I’m going to show you an example of how the distorted breakup narrative has resulted in stripping the lovers possibility out of the story. To do that, I’ll show you how different writers have described the same event. In this case, it’s the bias of the writer that’s relevant, not whether or not their information is accurate. So in this case — to get just a little bit complicated — it’s still primary research because the research in question is the author’s way of presenting the information.

Before using any piece of research from anybody, including John and Paul, I put it through a series of questions — Is the source in a position to know this piece of information? When was the information shared and in what context? Is there an incentive to tell the truth or bend the truth or withhold the truth altogether? What’s the agenda of the person who’s offering the information and what do they have to gain or lose by telling the story the way they’ve told it?

These questions are important because virtually everyone in this story has motivation to bend the truth in one direction or the other and sometimes back again, and I’m including the Fabs themselves. That doesn’t mean we can’t believe anything anyone says about anything (although come to think of it, that’s not an unreasonable research standard when it comes to this story). But what it means, practically speaking, is that bias, human error, and human motivations always need to be factored in when deciding what to believe and what not to believe.

This back-to-basics research is insanely time-consuming, even with the help of my fab research assistant, Robyn. It’s a big reason this series has taken so long to write. But it’s necessary because even beyond the bigger biases and distortions in the story, I’ve discovered that there is a lot of monkey business happening with the research even in those “definitive” books — and especially when it comes to direct quotes by John and Paul, which are, of course, going to be crucial to this series.

This monkey business results from a problem I’ve come to know all too well. Both John and Paul tend to talk in long, seemingly disjointed trains of thought. I say “seemingly” because those thoughts usually aren’t actually disjointed, it’s just that geniuses tend to make connections between things that most people can’t perceive as being related.

But because most journalists and biographers aren’t geniuses — and I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s just that by definition most people aren’t geniuses — journalists and biographers don’t see those connections between apparently disconnected ideas. So there’s a lot of temptation to edit out the parts of a quote that seem unrelated to the main line of thought. That editing happens a lot. Like, a lot a lot. And that revised quote then gets quoted by someone else who thinks it’s the original and sometimes revises it even more. And so it is that, with each successive iteration, more of the original is lost.

Unfortunately, there’s no getting completely away from this quote editing situation when it comes to print interviews, because magazine editors are the worst at doing this to make the piece fit the length restriction and to match the style of the magazine — and as we saw with Lennon Remembers, to conform to the bias of the writer or the editor.

Sometimes there’s audio to check those interviews against, most times there’s not. When there’s not, there’s no way to know for sure if the quote is accurate. And ultimately, that means making a subjective judgement about whether to trust the source or not — which is far from ideal, but it’s the best we can do unless we’re willing to throw out every single print source that’s not a memoir or an autobiography or a verified complete interview transcript, and that’s not realistic.

The most obvious example of this problem of presenting edited quotes as accurate to what was actually said is, as many of you probably know, the work of Mark Lewisohn, who for a long time was considered, even by The Beatles themselves, to be the world’s foremost authority on The Beatles.

I don’t want to say too much about the Lewisohn situation here, because it’s not my work. But in January of 2024, two of the top countercultural Beatles scholars, Serene Tami Sargent and Sharon Dubosky, shared extensive, well-documented research findings that showed that Lewisohn has a long history of not just editing existing quotes, but manufacturing entirely new ones by gluing together pieces of multiple quotes over different time periods into a single quote, thus creating a “franken-quote” that was never actually spoken by the person in question, doesn’t mean what Lewisohn claims it means, and is completely out of context.

This, unfortunately, calls into question the accuracy of all of Lewisohn’s work, and it’s for this reason that I don’t consult or cite Lewisohn as a primary source for anything other than his studio logs, even if he conducted the interview in person. And it’s also why I’m attempting to be doubly careful about where I source research from

Again, the Lewisohn research isn’t my work, or my area of expertise, so I’m not going to say much more about it. But it is astoundingly careful and meticulous work, and I’m so grateful to Serene and Sharon for breaking anonymity to share it with the world. And it’s also an example of how the research being done in the Beatles studies counterculture is light years better of what’s being done in the mainstream.

I’ll put the link in a footnote and you can read the research directly and draw your own conclusions. It includes the original article presenting the findings, and the spreadsheet that details each manufactured quote and what the original source is.1

This is, again, all I’m going to say about this, because I have no desire to be the Quote Police — that’s not what this series is about. But before we leave this topic, it wouldn’t be fair not to add that Lewisohn is not the only one doing this.

I have not researched it in depth, but in my research I did come across one of those manufactured “franken-quotes” in The McCartney Legacy Vol 1 — two quotes from two separate occasions, forty years apart, glued together to make one quote.2 The good news is that at least the writers of McCartney Legacy footnoted the two quotes they glued together so it was easy to notice the problem— but that doesn’t make it okay, and most people who quote will not check the footnotes first. And it suggests that we may need to read McCartney Legacy with the same skepticism with which we now need to read Lewisohn.

Speaking of footnotes, I hope you’ve already figured out that there’s a lot more information, beyond just source cites and full quotes, in the footnotes for each episode. In fact, as we continue on in this series, you may find that the deeper story is being told in the footnotes even more than in the body of the main episode.

I’m attempting to find a balance between footnoting too much and not enough. I’m footnoting only things that are unusual and not widely known and accepted, or points that are especially important or potentially controversial, or sometimes when the quote is just an especially good one that didn’t work well in the actual body of the episode. But again, the footnotes contain a lot more than just source citations, so I recommend that even if you’re listening to the audio version, you stop by The Abbey and scroll through the footnotes to get all the goodies.

There are a few quotes that I would love to include in all of this, but that I haven’t been able to verify all the way back to their original source. And that sometimes gives me no end of heartache , because there are some really beautiful quotes that are within a hair’s breadth of being verified.

For example, there’s a quote from John in which he names Paul as the first love of his life (and Yoko as the second). That quote has long been thought to be an internet fabrication, like the fake photos of John and Paul kissing — because unfortunately fabricated internet quotes do happen. But I found a reference to John’s “Paul is the first love of my life” quote in a 1986 biography of Paul, which is well before the internet — and this suggests to me that the quote exists somewhere. And as you might imagine, I’d very much like to verify it.3

I’ll mention these pending quotes in the footnotes as we go, and eventually maybe create an “In Search Of” page on The Abbey. If you know the sources of any of them, please let me know. I’m happy to include you in the thank yous in exchange, if the information turns out to be useful.

Also about quotes.

Having now bitched about other people doing it, I, too, will often shorten a quote to make it easier to follow. As I mentioned already, John and Paul both tend to give lengthy, seemingly disjointed answers to interview questions, especially when it comes to questions relevant to the lovers possibility (which is in and of itself something to consider). I’m often, though not always, able to see the connections they’re making, and those connections yield a wealth of insights relative to the lovers possibility and to the story in general.

But sometimes the full quote, even with all its insights, is hard to follow if you’re reading or listening. So in that case, just to make those quotes easier to follow, I’ll condense them a bit and remove more tangential information before including them in the actual body of the episode. But when I do that, I will tell you I’m doing that, and the full quote along with its context and original source will be in the footnote. No monkey business.

But it does mean that if you’re going to quote my use of the quote (and you really shouldn’t be quoting me for that kind of thing, please go to the original source), but if you insist on doing it anyway, please go to the footnotes and use that quote instead.

A meta-note.

There’s more written about The Beatles than any single person could possibly read in a lifetime. I’ve mostly limited my research to primary sources — people who were directly a part of the story — but even so, I’ve been working through that primary source material for years and I still have a daunting amount of material I haven’t been through yet.

Obviously, if we waited til we’ve read and seen and listened to everything before writing about The Beatles, no one would ever be able to write about The Beatles. So at a certain point, a decision has to be made that enough research has been done to justify doing the actual writing.

Given the subject matter of Beautiful Possibility, determining when that point of sufficient research has been anxiety-inducing, to say the least. For a long time, I lost sleep wondering if there would be something in one of those sources I haven’t yet looked at that would invalidate my research and bring this whole series crashing down.

That could still theoretically happen, but it’s unlikely enough at this point that I no longer lose sleep over it. (I still lose sleep over lots of other things related to all of this, just not that.)

The way I dealt with this situation is that I decided I wouldn’t start writing this series until I’d gathered a cumulative body of research substantial enough both in quantity and quality that it’s extremely unlikely that a single piece of new information would invalidate that research.

To put it another way, I researched until I felt I had enough confidence in the credibility of the lovers possibility based on the overall body of research that a single piece of new information was extremely unlikely to affect the overall credibility.

A lot of people have helped with Beautiful Possibility — mainstream and countercultural Beatles writers and scholars and researchers, museum curators and archivists, librarians, university professors, biographers, journalists, and lots of other smart people with good ideas and useful perspectives.

Some of those people knew when they helped that this series would deal with the lovers possibility. Most of them did not know this. This withholding of information on my part wasn’t something I was at all comfortable with, but there was no practical way around it, at least as far as I could see.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, the answer to the actual ethics questions involved here — as opposed to the ethics questions people assume are involved here — are complicated, and it will take us all nine episodes of the first part of this series to answer them. If I’d brought up the lovers possibility in advance with a potential source, I’d have had to, quite reasonably, justify the ethics of what I’m doing here. I couldn’t just say “trust me, it’ll all be fine.” And there was no practical way to ask a busy professional writer or librarian or archivist to listen to nine episodes of material that wasn’t even written yet just to be able to ask them to verify a quote.

Sometimes, it comes down to me needing to believe in the importance of the work and trusting that the greater good will sort things out in the end. So that’s what I did.

All of which is to say that when I reference a source as having helped with this series, do not take that as any kind of indication one way or the other as to their position on the lovers possibility, or on whether or not they believe it’s okay to include it in the mainstream story.

Before we wrap up this Rabbit Hole, I want to mention that much of this verifying of sources is being done by my fab research assistant Robyn, who is patient and kind and diligent and much appreciated and deserves an MBE from the Queen for her efforts to track down all the odd and obscure things I send her way.

I suppose the larger point in all of this is that the story of The Beatles is important — I hope you’re starting to see just how important. And if we’re going to fix this story — this foundational myth of our modern world — going back to this kind of back-to-basics research is going to be important. The only way to purge the distortion of the breakup narrative from the story and stop the monkey business with the quotes is to go back to the original sources and trust (but verify) only information from the people who were actually there.

Especially given the subject matter of Beautiful Possibility, I’m doing everything I reasonably can and a few things that are probably unreasonable to get it right, so that you can be confident that what I’m sharing here is verified and accurate.

I have confidence in what I’m sharing with you or I wouldn’t be sharing it. But that said, nothing is perfect except maybe a Beatles song. I do my best and then some, but mistakes are inevitable and they’re solely 100% my responsibility when they happen.

Okay, that concludes this Rabbit Hole. Next week, we’re going to put all this to work and look at the credibility of the lovers possibility, and whether there’s anything to it or whether my pretty little head is just filled with romantic fantasies.

Till then, peace, love and strawberry fields,

Faith

1 The website presenting the findings is here:

The Beatles and MARK LEWISOHN

And the spreadsheet containing the details is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YQV_SlTPiRd1HDRL2if5bTEK1ziQ9ahl5xmotyjylQQ/edit#gid=0

2 Here is the franken-quote in McCartney Legacy Vol 1:

“I would help him finish off a lot of stuff,” Denny said of collaborating with Paul. “You get together and say, ‘I haven’t got this bit yet, I haven’t got that bit’ and you kind of finish the thing off. He comes in with the initial idea and then says to me ‘have you got anything you want to add?’ And I’d have some ideas as well, and we’d join ’em together. ‘No Words,’ for example, was two songs that became one song. I wrote the first few verses and couldn’t get any further. I took them to Paul, and he added his little bit of magic.” (The McCartney Legacy, Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, Dey/William Morrow, 2022, p. 602.)

Kozinn and Sinclair do, to their credit, at least footnote their franken-quote, and I was able to verify the accuracy of both halves of the quote.

The first part of the quote comes from an interview with Denny Laine during the Fest for Beatle Fans, Chicago, May 14, 2016: “I would help him finish off stuff, you know, like, you get together and you say, oh well I haven’t got this bit yet I haven’t got that bit or you’ll kind of finish the thing off. But [Paul] comes in with the initial idea, say, and then he’ll say to me, have you got anything you want to do, I have some bits as well, and we join them together. “No Words,” for example, was two songs that became one song.”

The second part of the quote comes from a June 1974 interview with Denny Laine for the Wings Official Fan Club: “What usually happens is that I get so far, then get stuck. I wrote the first few verses to “No Words” and couldn’t get any further. I took them to Paul and he added his little bit of magic. I sometimes help Paul with his songs too.”

But that both quotes are in and of themselves accurate does not mean it’s okay to do this in writing and research. It’s categorically not.

These two quotes were spoken over forty years apart, in different circumstances and contexts. They are not a single quote and should not be presented as such. I haven’t researched the rest of the book as it’s not my focus or area of speciality, but the obvious deliberate manufacturing of a single quote out of two quotes separated by over four decades apart. It’s not clear if this is a one-time occurrence, but at the least, it calls into question the credibility of the entire McCartney Legacy project.

3 “In later years John would admit that Paul had been the first love of his life, and Yoko the second.”

Chris Salewicz, McCartney, Queen Anne Press, 1986, p. 212.

Again, this is NOT a verified quote. If you have any leads on the original source, I’d be grateful if you’d let Robyn know

Beautiful Possibility

the story… of the story of The Beatles

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