Beatles biographies?

WRITE LIKE THE WIND, MAN

the good thing about this bio is that Lewisohn is happy to make it clear that John and Paul were both almost complete & utter knobs, but in their own unique way

Yeah, and for a bit in Hamburg it looked like Paul might be kicked out of the band. Fortunately for Paul, Pete was hated even more.

I'm a bit concerned that he plans on finishing vol.3 when he's I'm 70

*sings* when we're 64

The postman just arrived with my extended edition. It's a very nice object. It hadn't occurred to me to be aggrieved that I got a 'first edition - reprint' rather than a 'first edition' 'til I saw some chump moaning about it in the amazon reviews. I still don't know how enraged I should be tbh.

That's my 2014 sorted anyway.

Fuck it, I'm reading this thing again. While I was listening to the new BBC dealie I realized I had a much deeper understanding of/appreciation for where they were, how they were, why they were, the insane journey to get there, etc. etc.

Love finding stuff like this: "Had Paul passed [his audition for the Liverpool Cathedral Choristers' Guild], all subsequent events could have turned out very differently, for being in the choir involved a busy calendar of commitments for at least three years and possibly longer."

"subsequent events"...like the transformation of Western popular culture.

Nearly done with the uber version, it's been great, I expected a little more detail on the recording sessions but I guess you can look elsewhere for that shit

2020, though FFS

Somehow, I never knew George Martin's oboe teacher was Jane Asher's mother. Crazy coincidence.

Loving this. Can tell it's going to drive me nuts to wait however long for the 2nd edition.

Also, in case anyone cares, I'm creating a Spotify playlist that contains most of the songs referenced in the book:

https://play.spotify.com/user/darinfabrick/playlist/290CKldsqShkpShOFFxsRk

What a great idea, I'm in.

I've crawled to about page 120, loving it and it's worth taking my time. They are about five years old now. What gets me is all the stories not told - meetings guessed at but not recorded, what Alf and Julia might have got up to, the lists of great aunts and uncles who never lived, and so on and so on. It's like the book could've taken a thousand courses, of which The Beatles is only one.

darin, you're a genius

xpost well put!

thanks! I'll keep adding to the playlist (I'm only at page 300 or so currently).

Ismael otm (and darin, great idea!). I found myself much more gripped by the pre-Beatles-births dramas the second time around.

yeah that family history added a lot more depth to john & ringo's childhoods in particular

that whole bit about him falling out of the hospital bed to see the other kid's toy was so heartbreaking

I may get this as an audiobook. It's 43+ hours long, lol.

I still can't get over the idea that it's going to be 6/7 years before I get to read the next volume.

one wonders, does he have a back up guy/girl to finish it off for him.. *just in case*? his wife maybe (as per the John Peel 'Margrave Of The Marshes' book which was only half-finished when he passed on).

Indeed, does the publisher have him insured? Maybe they sent him off to Bupa before he started.

rachel lichtman ‏@DJRotaryRachel

Not saying the new Beatles book is thorough but I'm 700 pages in and Ringo's great-grandfather just returned a hat.

Hah, that reminds me of a place I used to work where I was in the occasional orbit of the guys that were putting together the Beatles anthology doc, I asked one of them how it was going and he gave me a weary look and said 'yeah really good, we've gotten the rough cut down to 10 hours and Pete Best hasn't even left the band yet'

yeah Anthology is glacial. and *boring* too has to be said.

It gets going when the period reportage catches up, it was a mistake to get every single bit of regional Beatles footage EVER and then try and parse it, pre '65 it's all the same pretty much.

yeah it's clunky for sure. i think No Direction Home has permanently altered my concept of how a rock doc should look/feel/sound. nothing else really compares.

I would have thought a rock doc stands and falls on the amount of footage available, Anthology disproves that theory. But I love it when you see some killer bit of film in a doc and think 'how did they *find* that? why even was somebody there with a camera??'

But I love it when you see some killer bit of film in a doc and think 'how did they *find* that? why even was somebody there with a camera??'

yeah, it's kinda amazing that there's a photograph and a sound recording of the concert Lennon met Paul at.

It's interesting to compare Anthology v. Lewisohn: Lewisohn makes the Beatles' childhoods so involving, puts them in a rich world of interconnecting characters. Anthology feels like stock Time-Life "Forties" footage by comparison.

I've been racking my brains trying to think of what documentary I saw in the last couple of years that completely blew my mind with the wtf quality of the footage, it's driving me crazy.

Rush : Beyond The Lighted Stage?

YES!

Yeah, that was a great one, and I'm not much of a Rush fan. Pretty surprised that there was so much footage of their pre-label/pre-Peart days.

finally finished Lewisohn & now I'm sad ;_;

One thing I meant to say in all my rabbitting on about how much I love it, is what a beautiful job he has done in his portrayal of Brian. There is such genuine affection and admiration for him, so much more than I've ever seen put into words for him, it really does his memory so well.

And there's a really sad little footnote in the acknowledgements in the end, about how Neil Aspinall called him up after he'd retired from Apple in 07 and said 'okay I can do those interviews now, anything you want to know I'll talk' - they got together for a lovely chat which comprised most of Neil's comments in the first volume...and he promptly passed away soon thereafter. And he is another who certainly is served well by Lewisohn's portrayal of him.

anyway. what a cracking good read!! bloody hell.

OTM re: Lewisohn's portrayal of Epstein. Supposedly, most of the additional material in the expanded edition is about Brian (and George Martin). Since those were the most fascinating parts of the book to me, dammit, now I wanna read the expanded version.

I was reading about Brian's army days last night, where he was reposted to London and the gay underworld first opened up to him (to an innocent extent). I wondered where the quotes came from - 'I met homosexuals everywhere I went' - when it would have been either still illegal or only just legal when he died.

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)