Love me do beatles book
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Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004
I first heard of the Beatles when I was nine years old. I spent most of my holidays on Merseyside then, and a local girl gave me a bad publicity shot of them with their names scrawled on the back. This was 1962 or '63, before they came to America. The photo was badly lit, and they didn't quite have their look down; Ringo had his hair slightly swept back, as if he wasn't quite sold on the Beatles haircut yet. I didn't care about that; they were the band for me. The funny thing is that parents and all their friends from Liverpool were also curious and proud about this local group. Prior to that, the people in show business from the north of England had all been comedians. Come to think of it, the Beatles recorded for Parlophone, which was a comedy label.
I was exactly the right age to be hit by them full on. My experience — seizing on every picture, saving money for singles and EPs, catching them on a local news show — was repeated over and over again around the world. It was the first time anything like this had happened on this scale. But it was
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the Beatles
To say that the Beatles changed pop music would be an understatement. From the time they came together at the end of the Fifties until their breakup in 1970, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr repeatedly demonstrated what was possible in pop. Their journey from shaggy rock & roll through opulent and multi-textured albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band journeyed where few rock bands had gone before and set new standards in record making. The Beatles were also arguably the first major rock band to write its own material, and many of those songs—most by Lennon and McCartney, with some contributions from Harrison--have become standards: “Yesterday,” ‘Come Together,” “Get Back,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Something,” just a small sampling, have been covered by artists in nearly every genre over many decades.
Born in Liverpool, as were Harrison and Starr, the acerbic Lennon and the cheerier McCartney met at a church picnic in 1957. The two were magically complementary, and Harrison, original drumme
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Review: ‘The Beatles: The Authorized Biography’
The Beatles are the most outstanding phenomena of the McLuhan age: they are the first citizens of the global village, known in every remote part of the world. If you were wandering around in Tibet with long hair, and some hermit crawled out of his cave for the first time in twenty years, he’d look up at your hair and say one word: “Beatle?”
With that in mind, considering the “authorized biography” of the Beatles, in fact, considering the whole question of the Beatles, is a little difficult. One of the main concerns, one to which the book addresses itself but fails to deal with satisfactorily, is where the public life of the Beatles leaves off and where their private lives begin. Indeed, there is a prior question: does the Beatle ‘phenomenon’ entitles them to private lives at all?
This biography implies a dual answer: on the one hand, the answer is no, because here is a biography, promising revealing fact after fact and insight after penetrating insight and on the other, this bo
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