Beatles biographies?

agree that Epstein is a wonderfully drawn character (and Martin, too)--am about halfway through the first volume of the enormo version. You can see the seeds of how he'd present the Beatles in his first days at his family's department store, where he makes the window displays chic but not ostentatious

and in re Martin, it's so refreshing to see him as a human being. Usually he's just cast the patrician straight man figure in most Beatles bios, with no inner life.

otm

Tweets from Lewisohn:

"The extended edition of Tune In has sold out and is now unavailable. Another print may or may not be scheduled at some future time. The e-book (issued in two halves) IS still available, but it’s UK only. My US publisher, Crown, wouldn’t issue the extended book and couldn’t agree terms for the e-book. I’m sorry about that, for me and for everyone in US who wants to buy it, but I can do nothing about it."

Man, that's a shame. Glad I got it in time.

I picked up a used copy of 'You Never Give Me Your Money' -- interesting to come at them from the money/snark angle, makes for v interesting reading!

Yeah, and it's such a sad story. But the most fascinating aspects about that era for me were how they were able to compartmentalize. It was, almost literally, "Hey, asshole, sign this Allen Klein agreement!" "Fuck no! Go fuck yourself! Anyway, OK then, it's 'Something' take 2, innit? One, two, three, four..."

It's like Ringo said in the Anthology: there were always great songs, and when they were playing/recording, the business bullshit may as well have never existed.

yeah, I find that really interesting. I wonder if it ties back into all that time in Hamburg...like when there's music to play they just can't help but hone right in no matter what.

think i was most surprised to find how close they did come to reuniting, how it was this thing out there that was always a real possibility and also kinda a thing they could eventually cash in on (which is effectively what happened w/ george and the 'reunion' in the 90s). the paul-john relationship is still kinda an enigma to me tbh. obv there's a love there and they both were aware just how much the other mattered to them being who they were but at the same time there always been this element to that relationship that reminds me of 'work friend' or 'workplace spouse' or whatever. it reminds me of gilbert and sullivan where the one is nearly impossible w/o the other but they're not nearly as close as you might imagine.

i think it's the opposite imo

my theory is they *are* that close, but songwriting is the only place where it translates, where they can use it unconsciously & not have to think about what the other means/thinks/wants - their inherent closeness drives them apart in the rest of their life bcz they never knew how to talk about it imo

I was going to post something about how the Who were close because they constantly talked shit/were vocal about how much they didn't like one another, but VG, you nailed it. Lewisohn talks about how neither John nor Paul even mentioned Julia's death, as if to do so would reveal a certain vulnerability. I think that carried through the rest of their lives. It's why Paul kept showing up with a guitar on John's doorstep into the late 70s, knowing that songwriting (or at least the potential opportunities for collaboration) was the only way they could remain close, or at least communicate what they couldn't otherwise communicate to one another.

exactly.

like all of Daltrey & Townsend's fist-throwing translates to RAGH FEELINGS I HAVE THEM FUCK OFF RAGH

my theory is they *are* that close, but songwriting is the only place where it translates, where they can use it unconsciously & not have to think about what the other means/thinks/wants - their inherent closeness drives them apart in the rest of their life bcz they never knew how to talk about it imo

i think this is pretty much dead-on. it's telling that even when they truly seemed to hate eachother's guts in the "Let it Be" sessions, they can still do a gorgeous duet on "Two of Us" and subconsciously acknowledge how much they mean to each other (Macca's assertions that "ToU" is about him & Linda aside)

It's hard to imagine Jagger and Richards holding conversations about babies and feelings either, but unlike the John-Paul dynamic Richards has bellyached for more than 20 years about Jagger's reticence.

I haven't read Mark Lewisohn's book (honestly, I don't know that I'm up to a long book on the Beatles at this point in my life), but I'll see this, in part because of all the enthusiasm for the book here.

http://revuecinema.ca/movies/articles/2014/beatlemania-at-the-revue-july-31,-7-pm

awesome

um so I bought the hardcover...even though I have the kindle version

a) is there a 12-step program and b) do I really need it or am really v sane

u mad

;_;

It was cheap, wasn't it?

$35, purchased w a gift card so practically free :D

I won't tell you how much it was in Fopp then.

Didn't get one: too heavy.

is the hardcover the complete version that didn't get released in the US?

torn between my desire to read this and my gut feeling that i already know too much about the beatles

If you know what "Japage 3" is, you know enough about the Beatles.

torn between my desire to read this and my gut feeling that i already know too much about the beatles

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, December 19, 2014 4:31 PM (3 minutes ago)

A friend of mine who is the biggest Beatles obsessive in the world was actually going to pass on this, because he figured, what more is there to know? Then I started telling him about the stuff in the book, and since he knows Lewisohn a bit, he started hearing first hand, and he eventually went screw it and bought the UK version, which is like 2000 pages. He's excited like a little girl in the Ed Sullivan auditorium.

Me, I'm a casual Beatles fan, but it was one of the best books I've read in months. Just amazing to read this mind-blowing day to day detail about all the chance encounters and serendipity that changed the world forever, tiny little things that, had any of the many moving pieces did not fallen into place just right, would have meant no Beatles. Just fascinating.

that's it, yes.

totally otm

does this pretty much render every other beatles book irrelevant? i did read every beatles book i could get my hands on between the ages of like 13 and 16, but in retrospect i suspect a lot of them were pretty unreliable. the only one i've felt the need to dig out and reread since then is the ian macdonald book, which is great but of course isn't a biography.

I've read several that kind of suck for various reasons - All You Need is Love, the Bob Spitz one - would love to read a great one but find this a bit daunting

Spitz one made me actively angry at several points. All You Need is Love I read as a teenager and I remember it being very tabloid-y.

it doesnt render anything else irrelevant per se

but this is the def one of the most engaging biographies out there imo

the philip norman one has a weirdly high reputation but even as a teen i could tell it was overwritten crap with a stupid bias against paul.

otm. Seem to recall that he is the one who came up with the crazy theory that Paul was right-handed but only played left-handed, or something like that.

I believe that is true. Sure Paul has said it just felt more natural that way.

Our Alice used to mess around with guitars when little and would play them either way round, but she's settled on right-handed now.

Anyway, most of the Beatle books lock down the facts and put a little narrative between them. And most of them rattle through the early years to get to "Love me do" and beyond, where the facts are easier to lock down.

The Lewisohn book is great for people who already know everything about the Beatles because more than any work it places them in the context of the times and places where it happened. (Revolution in the Head tried to do this and completely failed imho). As mentioned by everyone the detail is tremendous and lots of it is about Liverpool/England/The World at the time, not specifically the Beatles. So ultimately it enriches and contextualizes all the information we already have consumed about the Beatles.

http://www.beatlesagain.com/breflib/lefthand.html

I didn't grow up in Liverpool in the late fifties, more South Shields in the early sixties, but I definitely felt the time and place for real. And playing pubs and clubs with three guitarists and one amp with 2 guitars through it, yes.

i got the lewisohn out of the library earlier this year, but only got about 1/3 of the way through it before i had to return it.
might have to buy it. or i might just wait for the next volumes when things start getting serious.
tbh i kind of want someone to re-do revolution in the head -- which i like a lot, but i disagree w/ the author so much that it's sometimes frustrating to pick up.

I really like the song summaries and the recording info in Revolution In The Head, though I don't agree with a lot of it, but I think the timeline stuff at the back is just pointless.

revolution in the head is a great book imo but you have to sort of take a lot of what he says with a grain of salt. there's a lot of misplaced anger and general misanthropy in there, but a lot of his insights are brilliant and it's very well written. it was one of the last beatles books i got around to during my teenage-fan days and it was kind of bracing to read after a lot of indifferently written and gossipy books that tended to ignore the music.

Tried to read that book but
1) It was at least twenty years after my youthful Beatles fandom and
2) I had already been reading Alan W. Pollack's Notes On...: http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/awp-notes_on.shtml

Love his relatively light touch so far - he knows that he can just say "known as Penny Lane" and it's ka-BOOM.

Paul is left handed, but it's actually Ringo who was born left handed but taught to be right handed, which may be one reason his playing has this nice awkward quality to it.

The Lewisohn book talks a lot about how John originally played guitar with banjo chords, so Paul would have to teach him the correct guitar chords, playing left handed in front of him while John mirrored the finger positions. There are lots of stories of John and Paul (or maybe Paul and George?) taking the bus for hours to some part of England just to see a guy who supposedly knows some chord they can't figure out.

Book also notes - which is obvious once you think about it - that the standard John, Paul, George and Ringo (which sounds weird any other way you say it) is the order they joined the band.

Another neat epiphany in the book is that Paul more or less ended up playing the bass by default. He grew up playing piano, then took up guitar, even played drums on the occasions that Pete didn't show, and would sometimes switch back to piano in the early days when one of the piano players wouldn't show, but took up bass only as a last resort when Stu dropped out. He used Stu's bass, which is only a Hofner because it was the cheapest domestic bass he could find while they were playing in Germany.

The book also tallies up the total number of hours the Beatles logged in Germany, some ungodly number that was the equivalent to a year and a half of steady gigging in Liverpool or some such wild total. All squeezed into just a few months. Maybe the equivalent of 1200 gigs at home? Something like that. It explains how the Beatles got so good, and certainly so much better than any other band in Liverpool. Though curiously fails to explain how Pete Best didn't manage to improve nearly as much as his bandmates.

Paul was on the Nerdist podcast today, just casually telling stories from the long ago...having picked up the book yesterday it was just such lovely timing, universe saying YES rereread the book bc here's lovely old macca chatting away about their early years, all the little things I love, the "mach shau!" and john & paul sitting down together "to write a swimming pool", or how they wrote in thd toilet because the acoustics were better, contextualizing the sadness & fear of his parents generation vs the joy & freedom of his teenage generation, being born during bombs & coming of age with rock n roll...i love all that stuff! and hearing it from him is just nice. it makes me so teary!!! he even talked abt him & john at the Dakota watching SNL momentarily toying with going down to 30 rock :)

idk

i think if you have any love or curiosity for the chain of events & cultural forces that brought the lads together, you really really should read Lewisohn

just for the fact that it helps you to re-love them all over again :)

hmm i realize even that overstates it though

for me, it just really is the book i always *wanted* to read sbout the beatles, but i didnt know what i wanted exactly til i read this

I think my favorite part of this book was when poor George got stuck in a car with a wasted and armed Gene Vincent who was trying hunt down an ex-lover or something.

Also, how John and Paul are constantly "pulling birds" and desperately searching for places to furtively hook up while poor George keeps getting drawn into these platonic relationships.