03 Oct 2013 05:03:21
Where did these four incredibly talented people actually come from, and how did they find each other? There are so many of us, forever fascinated by the story, who still cannot quite fathom how the band managed to make music so endlessly full of interest, while also embodying the idea that as the world was changing at an unprecedented rate, they were always ahead of everyone else.
The Beatles themselves, in order to stay halfway sane, always denied that anything out-of-the-ordinary had gone on. Paul McCartney still talks of them as "a good little band". When they went their separate ways at the end of the 1960s, John Lennon had stern words for anyone who thought their demise was tragic, or even significant. "People talk about it as if it was the end of the world," he said. "It's just a rock group that split up. It's nothing important."
But it was, and still is – so much so that they are now surely the most analysed musicians in history. The books written about the Beatles cover every aspect of their story – and they keep coming, from unwieldy works of culture studies, to the drab memoirs of fans, aides and hangers-on. The story as told by the group themselves is collected in a misnamed, door-stopping oral history called Anthology; in terms of prose style, the best all-purpose biography has long been Philip Norman's Shout!, first published in 1981. In an age as nostalgia-soaked as ours, and in the case of a group so dissected and deconstructed, the one really pertinent question remains: is there anything left to add?
Mark Lewisohn's new book Tune in is the best part of 1000 pages long. The product of at least eight years' writing and research, and full of information sourced even before that, it runs from the band members' family prehistories to the release of their first proper single in 1962. Two further volumes will appear, all under the umbrella title "All These Years". Should you have £120 to spare, each book will also be published in an extended special edition which includes "hundreds of thousands of words of extra material, as well as many extra photographs". This is the story told in Proustian detail: we will presumably at last know what Lennon actually shouts at the start of "It's All Too Much", the history of a company owned by Ringo Starr called Bricky Builders and the full life-story of McCartney's sheepdog Martha. I have been a Beatles obsessive since the age of seven, but even for people like me, this all sounds as if it might be a little unnecessary.
The first edited-down volume, though, is largely a delight, and the story is told so definitively that, after this, that really should be it. Secondary sources are comprehensively mined; letters, public records and business documents have been found in places no one else ever thought to look; friends, associates and acquaintances have been interviewed over what seems to be a quarter-century. All that is lacking is substantial new testimony from the Beatles themselves, a point to which there are two responses: first, that the two most candid and iconoclastic Beatles have been dead for a number of years; and second, that the last people you should ask about the detailed history of the Beatles are the Beatles themselves.
McCartney, for example, remains of the immovable opinion that they refused to entertain the idea of visiting the US until they had a number one record on the Billboard charts: a nice story, but he should try booking Carnegie Hall at 10 days' notice. His own accounts of his life have long been blurred and rose-tinted: a good biographer, by contrast, has to avoid the pull of legend, and be prepared to coldly debunk as much as they lionise and celebrate. But it is a token of how astonishing the story of the Beatles remains that even a telling as particular as this one dispels none of the magic.
Any account of the band members' lives before fame and success will be as much social history as musical biography. The roots of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison are tangled up with migration to Liverpool from Ireland. All four Beatles were war babies, and blessed by two strokes of luck: their fathers were either in reserved occupations or, in the case of Jim McCartney, excused the call-up owing to impaired hearing. And they escaped the dreaded national service, which was phased out from 1957. All, apart from Starr, were grammar school boys, educated in institutions holding fast to tradition, but from 1956 on, at least some of that tradition was undermined by a seditious noise pressed into black vinyl.
The excitement of early rock'n'roll records – not least in a city still smattered with bombsites – can only begin to be imagined. When Lennon heard Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel", "it just broke me up. I mean, that was the end. My whole life changed from then on, I was just completely shaken by it." Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally", he said, was "so great I couldn't speak". McCartney's first record was Gene Vincent's "Be Bop A-Lula", all nonsense-words and space‑age echo. "The whole song is purple in my mind because of the purple Capitol label," he said.
Their world was quickly moving out of monochrome: mere records were enough to revolutionise their lives. Mid-50s Britain was hit by two pop-cultural waves: the boom in skiffle, which drew on country, blues and folk music, and emphasised home-made instruments and enthusiasm rather than technique; and rock'n'roll, which was much more transcendent. Aged 16 when he formed the Quarrymen – or Quarry Men: he and his fellow band members never seemed sure – in late 1956, Lennon started using skiffle's modus operandi to deliver an approximation of rock, and he was off. McCartney joined him six months later, after their famous meeting at a church fete, and Harrison was recruited in early 1958 – he was just short of his 15th birthday. "It took me years to come round to him, to start considering him as an equal," Lennon later admitted, but the chemistry was obviously right: after a spell in 1960 as the Silver Beatles (regularly spelled "Beetles"), by the summer of that year, they were the Beatles, for keeps.
Ordinary tragedies are magnified into unrivalled dramas by the knowledge of how they feed into the Beatles' myth – most notably in the case of John Lennon's mother, Julia. She was an untamed spirit whose maternal role in his life was soon taken by her sister Mimi; Julia's relationship with her son was rekindled in his adolescence, and given extra spark by a sense of oedipal attraction. She was, Lewisohn says, "very much the girl of John's dreams … the kicker of convention and bucker of trends … an older version of himself … irreverent, iconoclastic, uninhibited, witty, with a huge personality". By the time Lennon was five, Julia's partner was a waiter called John Dykins, an alcoholic. For the first time, a Beatles book goes deep into her death in the summer of 1958: a year-long driving ban for Dykins that led her to walk to a bus-stop near Mimi's house, where she was run over by an off-duty policeman. "To my mind, she'd been killed instantly," said Lennon associate Nigel Walley. "I can still see her gingery hair fluttering in the breeze, blowing across her face."
Nine years later, Lennon wrote the beautiful song "Julia": "Her hair of floating sky is shimmering/Glimmering, in the sun." As Lewisohn says, he had always been silent about her death, but when he finally voiced his feelings via music, it was obvious that, for his entire adult life, the bereavement had been at the core of who he was.
There are other tragedies, more than would perhaps usually afflict four young lives. The death of McCartney's mother, Mary – from breast cancer, when he was 14 – doesn't get nearly the same level of attention here as Julia Lennon's, which is surprising given its likely profound effect on him, hinted at but not explored. He remains someone with a carefully cultivated exterior, who tends to talk about his personal history in soundbites, and rarely gives the sense of someone who is troubled. But "Paul was far more affected by Mum's death than any of us imagined," said his younger brother, Mike. "His very character seemed to change, and for a while he seemed like a hermit." McCartney said he quickly "learned to put a shell around me", which is telling. "Paul was so 'nice' you couldn't get close. He was like a diplomat," one of their early associates tells Lewisohn.
The sadnesses go on. The talented painter Stuart Sutcliffe, who became the band's less-than-brilliant bass player, died of a brain haemorrhage at 21, leaving McCartney feeling guilty about his habitual digs at Sutcliffe's musical abilities (in the wake of his death, Lewisohn reveals, Lennon and Harrison made a point of visiting his photographer fiancee, Astrid Kirchherr; McCartney stayed away). By this point, one gets the sense that losing people close to him had become for Lennon a kind of inexplicable curse (his Uncle George, Mimi's husband and his de facto father, had also died). Richy Starkey, later Ringo Starr, faced his own challenges – a 10-week coma and a year in hospital after he contracted peritonitis (when he was six); and, just to test him, a further long spell in hospital after pleurisy turned into tuberculosis, when he first resolved to play the drums. The idea of talent flowering as if to avenge past suffering is a cliche, but here feels undeniable.
As the story goes on, there are further revelations, both minor and major. Starr's later problems with drink are implicitly traced to his family: "My parents were alcoholics and I didn't realise it," he says. George Harrison's lifelong distrust of anyone prying into his business might have originated in the behaviour of his maternal grandparents, who had seven children but were secretly unmarried.
During an early phase of their band's progress, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were billed as "Japage 3" – a reference to their first names, and pronounced "Jay-page". When they first played in Hamburg, Lennon, Harrison and Sutcliffe slept in one squalid backroom, while McCartney was billeted with their drummer, Pete Best, and thereby relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy. A letter home written by Sutcliffe acknowledged this with brutal simplicity: "Paul has turned out the real black sheep of the trip. Everyone hates him and I only feel sorry for him." Two years later, they were signed by George Martin's Parlophone label, not because – as previous accounts have suggested – he fell hopelessly in love with their irreverent northern wit, but thanks to a convoluted set of agreements that climaxed with Martin being handed them merely as a sort of punishment for having an affair with his secretary (soon to be his second wife). There is a great deal of such happenstance.
Best, the drummer sacked just as the Beatles began to break big, was always at one remove from the rest of them. He apparently shared little of their humour, was kept away from some of their closest friends – and, just to seal his fate, the other three combed their hair forward, while he stubbornly retained his Tony Curtis quiff. During 1961, Lewisohn says, he had settled "into a role he hardly ever varied … night after night – playing with his head down, avoiding eye contact, not smiling, projecting the study in moody shyness he knew would win girls' hearts. Fine, but it was bound to wear thin for the other Beatles. Sometimes they wanted to see a spark when they turned around, some vibrancy, emotion, an engagement of eyes or mind."
By far the most compelling sections of the book detail the time the Beatles spent in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962 – Starr was there, too, as the drummer with a Liverpool troupe called Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Tales of shared intimacy (as Harrison lost his virginity in a backstage bunk, they all applauded), petty crime, and drinking and drugging are explored, and either confirmed, or debunked: contrary to legend, Lennon never peed on a party of churchgoing nuns. The picture section includes an image of them gurning as they hold up silver tubes of Preludin, the German diet drug that allowed them to play punishingly long sets at the Indra, Kaiserkeller, Top Ten and other clubs, and which the ever-marginal Best always refused to touch. After their second trip to Hamburg, Lewisohn says, they were "bursting with the experience that only another 503 extraordinary hours on the Hamburg stage could have given them"; in a footnote, he calculates that the total time spent onstage on their first two German visits was 918 hours: "the equivalent of 612 90-minute shows… in just 27 weeks." As he points out, this probably made them the most seasoned rock'n'roll group in the world, even before most people had heard of them.
Lewisohn is a Beatles oracle: he is the author of such exhaustive reference books as The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions and The Complete Beatles Chronicle, as well as reams of sleeve notes. He had a cameo in Shout!, not only as the self-styled Beatle Brain of Britain, but as a seven-year-old in his native Middlesex, so taken with Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band that he "stood in the garden as it played, shaking his head wildly while trying not to dislodge the cardboard moustache lodged under his nose". Some of his prose betrays a slightly Pooterish sensibility: two non-white characters in the story are described as "swarthy" and "dusky-skinned"; and their manager and mentor Brian Epstein, whose closeted life provides the story with another fascinating strand of social history, is constantly described as "homosexual". Here and elsewhere, perhaps you miss the flights of critical fancy of a pop-cultural theorist such as Greil Marcus, the sturm und drang of Elvis's definitive biographer Peter Guralnick, or the grasp of rock music's romance possessed by the Rolling Stones's greatest biographer, Stanley Booth. Yet it takes a certain kind of person to write a history as thorough as this – and Tune in is only the start.
It ends as Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and, at last, Starr play their final club performances in Hamburg, recorded by another Liverpudlian musician and eventually put out as a double album – before the Beatles' legal representatives thrust it into the realm of bootleggers. It is a shame this music has never been given an official release: despite its low-fi quality, it showcases exactly what you'd hope to hear: four people evidently delighted to have found each other, playing supercharged versions of Chan Romero's "Hippy Hippy Shake", Chuck Berry's "I'm Talkin' About You" and "Twist and Shout", as the nightly German bacchanal swirls around them. On occasion, the recordings sound like an early variety of punk rock – vivid, muscular music, made by a quartet who are simply on fire: four laughing freemen, as Leary would have it, on their way to something incredible.
