Ostensibly a review of The Beatles by Hunter Davies

2017

I’ve had this copy of The Beatles by Hunter Davies sitting on my bookshelf for twenty years. When I was a teenager, my dad had a friend whose sister worked in publishing. She gave him a lot of pop music books, which he would then lend or give to my dad.¹ Since I loved the Beatles, I tried to hold on to those when I could. But I never actually read The Beatles. Maybe it seemed too big, or maybe I was at a place in my fandom where the music was enough.

What’s a little sad now about the Beatles’ music is that I often feel that I’ve used up much of my lifetime listening quota. I can play any of their albums in my head note for note, so it can be hard to recapture those feelings of joy and wonder when actually hearing the songs. But even now, I find that reading about the Beatles still holds great appeal. It’s a way to bring back some of the magic, to want hear the songs again and to hear them in a new light.

The Beatles, originally published in 1968, is the only ever authorized biography of the band. My edition was published in 1996, and there appear to have been one or two newer editions since then. The book itself is a bit like a ramshackle old house that someone has built too many additions onto. There’s the core text; an introduction and postscript, both from 1985; and a second 1996 introduction. I’d also argue that the personal experiences of any serious fan have a way of sneaking in as well. Reading from cover to cover, you’re jumping around the timeline in an almost postmodern way.

1996

The 1996 introduction, which starts the book, brought on a bit of an emotional rush. This particular reissue was released just after The Beatles Anthology television documentary, which I watched with my parents in 1995 at the age of 12. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this was a life changing experience for me. While I had been listening to the Beatles since the womb — my parents, both born in 1951, are prime boomers — watching The Beatles Anthology inaugurated a period of intense Beatle obsession that would last for the next several years. Reading about it brought back just how much the Beatles meant to me as young teenager.

It was more than just the music. Discovering the Beatles essentially drew a horizontal rule through my life at that point in time. Before the Beatles, to be honest, I was kind of a loser. I mean, I was just a kid and a painfully shy one at that, but I really had no identity or confidence. If people at school were talking about how much they loved “The Sign” or “Whoomp! There It Is,” I would blindly agree, despite never having heard these songs before.² Once a boy gave me a valentine in fourth grade, and I was so embarrassed I immediately threw it away and ignored him for the rest of elementary school. (I still feed bad about that.) My efforts at being invisible were sometimes successful, but more often than not marked me as one of the uncool.

After the Beatles, I became a different person. It may sound unlikely that the simple love of a 30-year-old band could transform me, but it did. I think it gave me the fire of the true believer. I knew that the Beatles were great, and suddenly I didn’t care if the other kids thought I was a weirdo. Luckily I had one friend who also loved them too. We would get our parents to take us to the lame mall head shop where we bought men’s sized Beatles t-shirts that fit us like dresses. We sewed Beatles patches onto our backpacks. In eighth grade, we even convinced our social studies teacher to let us hold a memorial for John Lennon on the anniversary of his death. I believe it consisted of a moment of silence and playing a song on a boombox.

While these antics attracted occasional teasing from other kids, for the most part they actually upped my social cache. It was an early lesson in the paradoxical way that not caring what other people think makes them respect you more. I loved the Beatles simply because I did, and they made me myself in a way I had never been before.

1985

Right, this is supposed to be a book review. Getting back on track, the next layer of The Beatles is the 1985 introduction and postscript. The ’80s strike me as lost years for the  Beatles, though I’m too young to remember them myself. Davies’s reflections during these years are mostly about demythologizing the band — not harshly or gleefully, but realistically.

The introduction is where he acknowledges that some of what he wrote in the 1968 text was cleaned up for the authorized biography. He had to pretend that the Beatles swore less and took fewer drugs, that their marriages were happier than they were. He couldn’t say outright that Brian Epstein was gay, despite Brian granting permission prior to this death. In the postscript, we see the fairytale come to an end. Solo careers are launched, marriages end, legal battles ensue, and John gets shot.

Having not experienced this time period personally, it’s hard for me to conceptualize a world where the Beatles are not the admired musical and cultural heroes they are today. Some of it may also be a result of being an American, which is interesting. Davies describes John Lennon’s image in England in the 1970s as “a harmless eccentric, an oddball who had gone off with that funny woman and was doing funny things and producing occasional funny music.” In America, by contrast, “there had emerged a different John Lennon during the last decade, someone who had become an active spiritual leader, a symbol of a new generations’ struggles and hopes, who could still communicate with millions of young people, even when, for those five years or so, he had hardly been seen or heard.” That’s the Lennon — and the Beatles — I grew up with.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a more recent edition of the book, but I can guess how a newer introduction might read. Between 1, a Cirque de Soleil show, the availability of cute girl-sized t-shirts, the Beatles’ catalog on Spotify, the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper, and countless other reintroductions of their music and image, the Beatles seem to have settled into a near-permanent place as pop culture heroes.

1968

The Beatles is still a great read, despite being frozen in 1968. Davies wrote the book after spending over a year observing and interviewing the band, as well as talking with their families and friends. He has a easy, unpretentious style, and it’s clear that his respect for the Beatles, as musicians and people, is genuine. And despite the obvious whitewashing of potentially scandalous material, there are moments of candor that do seem to cut nearer to the truth.

The first several chapters detail the Beatles’ boyhoods in Liverpool, and Davies paints a vivid picture of a time that now seems very far away. Liverpool in the 1950s was a world where people’s parents had jobs like cotton salesman or steward on an ocean liner. Boys rode buses, skipped school, and went largely unsupervised. The idea of a rock group, let alone a British rock group from Liverpool, was still very new. To dream of making a living at it was crazy.

One pattern that emerges during the early part of the book is just how risky it was to hang one’s hat on the Beatles’ future success. John, Paul, and George themselves we so set on music from an early age that they never really took school or jobs seriously. But many of the other players have similar stories of giving up secure, traditional roles to pursue a dream. Ringo was working as an apprentice fitter when he got the chance to join Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.³ Neil Aspinall had a career in accounting, and Mal Evans worked for the Post Office. Even Brian, who admittedly had a better cushion, gave up the life of a traditional businessman to manage an unknown beat group. All of these people quit what they were doing, at great personal risk, to join The Beatles enterprise.

The Beatles themselves were the reason for these leaps of faith. Their music was of course a part of it, but their personal magnetism seems to have been at least an equal factor. Davies’s narrative is drawn to that element as well, focusing more on personalities than music for most of the book. Again and again, we see portraits of fans and compatriots who are compelled by the whole Beatles package. A quote from Klaus Voorman, a fan and friend from the Hamburg years, sums it up well: “I couldn’t get over how they played, how they played together so well, so powerful and funny.” Davies makes the point throughout that the Beatles whole was greater than the sum of its members’ parts.

His portraits of each individual Beatle could hardly be called controversial, but neither are they fawning caricatures. He describes John moping around his house watching TV, and quotes Cynthia as saying that she probably would never have married him if she hadn’t gotten pregnant. He explores Paul’s dual nature as “the cute one,” adored by fans, but also driven and shrewd. George is too serious, deep into his Indian religion phase and not all that keen on Beatledom. And finally Ringo is sort of a regular guy, funny and self-depreciating, but traditional in his home and marriage.

On the whole, Davies doesn’t really try to draw a lot of conclusions about the Beatles. He observes and plainly writes down what he sees. What comes into focus is a a group of four people who, together, were able to create art that was full of beauty and humor. On their own, they are more like normal humans — four talented, lucky humans who nonetheless have their problems and hangups. Davies leaves us at a point in 1968 where the band’s future is an unknown. He resists the temptation to predict their future, and surely no one could have anyway. What The Beatles really does is capture the band at a pivotal moment, poised between past glories and a few more charmed years.

2017

Without really thinking about it, I’ve referred to the Beatles as “heroes” as couple times in this essay. I think that’s a particularly apt term, because as we get farther away from their active years, they become more mythological. Davies himself describes them as “folk heroes” at one point. I wonder if, in two hundred or two thousand years, people will talk about the Beatles they way we talk about Noah’s ark or King Arthur today. This way of looking at them would not be inconsistent with statements that have already been made about the band, from John’s infamous claim that they were more popular than Jesus to Bob Stanley’s recent framing of their success as a literal miracle.⁴

In that framework, the story of their lives becomes almost a holy text, a set of parables that not only describe literal events but that can be returned to time and again to show something new. Perhaps the lesson for me in letting this book sit untouched for 20 years is that there’s a time and place for everything, and that the Beatles, while they may grow old in some ways, can hopefully continue to offer new things as well — a window into another world, a meditation on success, or a prompt to revisit some of my own memories, forever entwined with my love for the band.

1. I spent god knows how many hours with a copy of Martin Strong’s Great Rock Discography, basically a printed version All Music Guide for the pre-internet age. It was a reference book, but I probably read it cover to cover after years of browsing. I credit my uncanny knowledge of pop — especially British groups — to information I absorbed from that book.
2. My parents were both teachers at my school, so I drove in with them. Not riding the bus was a major blow to my early knowledge of contemporary music. Funnily enough, I now enjoy “The Sign” quite a bit.
3. I had to Google what a fitter even is. It’s a person who puts together or installs machinery, engine parts, or other equipment.
4. From Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story Of Modern Pop