“my dear Lady Jane” —Rolling Stones lyric 1966
Jane broke up the Beatles. I think Paul needed and loved her more than he could admit, and post-Jane he was lost and angry. Think about it. Linda was Paul’s mommy and made him happy but I think it also made Paul regress into selfish infantilism and let’s live in the country with sheep and kids. And he became absolutely insufferable to the other three Beatles, a bossy little kid, and that was the rift which essentially ended the Beatles. Paul went from an adult intellectual to privileged bully who put the other three off because unconsciously he felt defeated and small by his relationship with Jane (the pinnacle of English classiness) not working out. Jane and Paul split in July of 1968. Just as John became a fake New Yorker, bossed around by Yoko, Paul, too, decided he was going to give up his British edginess for American goofiness and excess. John and Paul were so clever, so funny, so edgy, and yet they decided to go soft and be worshiped for their American fuzziness, which they both wanted to happen to compensate for something deeper they were losing unconsciously.
And while I’m on the subject, here’s another reason the Beatles broke up.
The Beatles were comparing themselves to new powerful acts with guitar gods and spectacular drummers and sexy lead singers. It must have made them seem a bit old-fashioned and twee as the 60s progressed. A weird insight: Plato, in speaking about elementary building blocks of the universe, compared the triangle to fire, the rectangle to earth. The dionysian fire: the Doors in 1967, a group with a prominent front man backed by a band (the base of the triangle). The Stones, another ‘triangle’ band, would take notice of the Doors (Jagger traveled to California to learn what he could from the Doors’ live act at the Hollywood Bowl in mid-1968). The Stones have gone on to gross the highest earnings as a musical act of all time. The Beatles were a foursome (rectangle) who lacked the dionysian triangle identity. The pressure to be sexy rock gods when their strengths were song craft and a sense of humor must have been enormous. They must have realized that they could never compete with the Stones and Led Zeppelin and other guitar god bands in giant stadium tours. It wasn’t that the Beatles didn’t want to stay together as a band—they were terrified of falling short in the new, “dumb-downed,” stadium touring rock climate. The rectangle fractured. The Beatles could not compete with Morrison, Plant, Jagger. Paul was not big enough to drag John and George with him so he went solo, Paul’s touring, to date, earning roughly half the take of the Stones. Not bad, Sir Paul! I’m sure Jane (married in 1981, 5 children) is proud.