It Had to Be Stu

The Beatles seem to having what must be their 300th re-emergence into our collective culture, and now someone at the New Yorker's dug in to sing the praises of Stu Sutcliffe, the famous 5th Beatle whose quitting (and head getting kicked in) led to Paul being relegated to bass THANK GOD!!!

The art was flowing out of him: life studies, collages, canvases as tall as he was. “If he’d lived, he could easily have been the Beatle,” Paolozzi later said. “He was imaginative, ultra-intelligent, and he was open to everything.” In at least one edition of “Tune In,” Lewisohn includes a photograph from February 3, 1962, full of that sense of possibility. Voormann wears a Baroque ruff, as if impersonating a Rembrandt portrait; Kirchherr and Sutcliffe wear matching leather pants.

Throughout the desolation of the pandemic, it helped to play the Beatles, especially with a deeper understanding of just how close we came to never hearing them at all. If Harrison had immigrated to Australia, as he wished; if McCartney had kept his job as a coil-winder, as he nearly did; or, if Lennon and Sutcliffe had not recognized something profound in one another, this would have been a different story.

Sutcliffe had his own life, and was an aspiring painter when his best friend John Lennon bugged him into buying a bass with art prize money. He couldn't play, which drove Paul bananas, but it didn't seem to matter to the rest of the band at the time.

As I wondered a while back, just how momentous was this handing over of the bass to McCartney?

A better version of the movie Yesterday (which I reviewed here) would be revisiting the fateful moment when Paul picked up the bass after Stuart Sutcliffe left the band. Normally, John being the inferior guitar player would mean he'd be relegated to being the bass player, but him being the leader of the band allowing him to refuse, leaving it to Paul, forever changed the future of the band and rock and roll itself, as Paul went on to become the most inventive bass player of all time. With John on bass, how different would The Beatles have turned out?

Stuart's small part in the birth of The Beatles is undeniable. But it is a point of human existentialism to wonder was Stuart Sutcliffe's entire reason for existing, his raison d'etre, was that he would one day hand over the bass guitar to one James Paul McCartney, therein changing music forever?