Orchestra of the Imperfect Man
Competence, though admirable, is not genius. The world loves to ask who was the best musician. It asks this with the grave, bovine sincerity of a magistrate inspecting a goose. Was he the best guitarist? Could he read? Did he know the changes? These are not foolish questions. They are simply insufficient questions.
To read at sight is a kind of literacy. To navigate changes is a kind of intelligence. To possess a reliable hand, an educated ear, an orderly mind, a strong embouchure, a clean attack, or the ability to enter a studio at ten in the morning without requiring three espressos, two apologies, and a minor moral intervention—these are serious gifts. They allow one to travel. They render a person employable in foreign harmonic territories. They permit the musician to be summoned, like a discreet military officer, into situations where the bridge has collapsed, the singer has changed keys, the arranger has left for Santa Barbara, and somebody must save the afternoon.
Yet there is another intelligence, more difficult to catalogue and much harder to invoice. It is the intelligence of the room. A musician may know every alteration available to a dominant seventh and still not know how to accompany a human being. He may possess a library of substitutions large enough to require municipal zoning permission, but fail to notice that the singer has just offered him a phrase trembling with such nakedness that the only honorable accompaniment is a single chord, played quietly, perhaps even late. He may be able to outmaneuver harmony itself, but he cannot outmaneuver taste.
This is the scandal of music, and perhaps of civilization: the thing that matters most cannot always be demonstrated alone. A chord chart is not a conversation. A scale is not a lover. A perfect take is not necessarily alive.
The Beatles are frequently brought before this tribunal of individual accomplishment, where they are examined by solemn gentlemen armed with metronomes, conservatory credentials, and the sort of fretboard knowledge that makes one fear for their marriages. The accusation is usually delivered with the air of someone revealing a financial irregularity: they were not, individually, virtuosos.
Of course they were not virtuosos in every sense that the word has since acquired. One would not summon John Lennon to rescue a collapsing Los Angeles studio date, hand him twelve pages of notation in a key he disliked, and ask him to negotiate an elegant harmonic detour through post-bop Manhattan before the tape ran out. This would be like employing Lord Byron as a tax assessor: possible, perhaps, but unnecessarily theatrical and likely to end in smoke.
But to conclude from this that Lennon was not a formidable guitarist, or that the Beatles were not formidable musicians, is to confuse the fencing master with the duelist.
A great session musician is trained to enter almost any room and speak its language correctly. A great band musician helps invent the room in which everyone else will spend the next fifty years trying to speak.
John Lennon’s guitar playing possessed something that can neither be purchased in a music school nor reliably obtained by marriage to a metronome: a sense of pressure. His rhythm guitar did not merely support the song; it leaned into it with its shoulder. It gave the music grain, impatience, adolescent hunger, a kind of erotic mechanical insistence. He could make a repeated chord feel like a sentence whose speaker had decided, abruptly, not to apologize.
Paul McCartney’s bass does what great bass playing so often does: it makes emotional intelligence appear athletic. His lines lift, prod, curve, and answer. He never permits the song to settle into mere weight. George Harrison, that most elegant inhabitant of musical negative space, offers guitar phrases with the discretion of a man placing rare flowers on the table after an argument. Ringo Starr, who understood better than many louder drummers that rhythm is not an announcement but a habitat, keeps the ground beneath the entire affair from dissolving.
A great ensemble is a constitutional arrangement among differences. One member is not necessarily the wisest, another not necessarily the most fluent, another perhaps incapable of reading a menu without a degree of suspicion. Yet each understands, through long acquaintance and some mixture of affection, irritation, rivalry, devotion, and practical necessity, what he is there to do.
The ability to read a page is admirable. The ability to read a room is rarer. The ability to read one’s friends—after years of triumph, envy, exhaustion, and shared weather—and still leave them enough air to become beautiful beside you: that is nearly miraculous.
And perhaps it is not only music that works this way. The legacy does not always belong to the man who could do everything. More often, it belongs to those rare companions who could do something together that no one, alone, would have been clever enough to imagine.
