Meet The Beatles… Again
The Beatles Anthology” (Chronicle Books, $60) is hard to put down, and that’s saying something, because this book is hard to pick up in the first place.
This coffee-table monster, released last week, is the size of a paving stone — 6 pounds and 368 pages of dense text and layered photos. But this is not a case of quantity over quality. My guess is that most readers, if they are any kind of Beatle fans at all, will spend three, four or five solid days glued to this remarkable book, only to reach the end and find it all too short.
A bit like the Beatles phenomenon itself.
For most American fans, the Beatles era lasted only six years, from 1964 to 1970. Yet for John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the story lasted 13 years, because they met and began to play together in 1957. George Harrison, another school chum, came along a year later, and then Ringo Starr joined in 1962.
As Lennon says in the text, “So it’s a long time we spent together, in the most extraordinary circumstances, from lousy rooms to great rooms. … We called each other every name under the sun. We’d got to blows. We’d been through the whole damn show.”
The valuable thing about this book is that it details everything — the whole damn show. It is not just a chronicle of the most influential rock band in history, it is also a chronicle of four uncommonly articulate and sensitive people growing from boys to men in the most thrilling (and trying) of circumstances.
The text consists of intertwined interviews. Ringo will have several paragraphs about, for instance, their first visit to America, and then George will have his say, followed by John and then Paul, and then back to Ringo or George. The editing is astonishingly good; these separate narratives are stitched together seamlessly, for the most part.
All of the narratives except Lennon’s come from new interviews conducted for the “Beatles Anthology” series, which has already spawned a TV miniseries and three sets of CDs. Lennon’s excerpts come from many different interviews before his death, and in an unobtrusive yet valuable device, each passage is labeled with the year it was uttered. Because he spoke about every aspect of his life on so many different occasions, Lennon gets nothing like short shrift here.
The beginning of the book alone is worth the steep price. All four have separate mini-autobiographies, in which they discuss their childhoods, their families and their earliest influences.
Lennon, especially, is remarkably sensitive about the way his character (and his admitted neuroses) was shaped by his childhood. He never knew his father. His mother, Julia, handed him over to his aunt Mimi at a young age.
Here’s a typical penetrating passage: “The worst pain is not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way that you need them… . This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind… . With the fact that I wasn’t tied to parents I would infiltrate the other boys’ minds. That was the gift I got, of not having parents. I cried a lot about not having them, but I also had the gift of awareness of not being something.”
After these opening chapters, the narrative continues chronologically. In a fascinating twist of perspective, we see the Beatles phenomenon not as fans, but as the Beatles did. This means, among other things, that the peak is no longer, say, 1967 with “Sgt. Pepper” or 1969 with “Abbey Road.” No, 1964 was the peak, and it was all downhill from there. The journey to the top was far more fun than the top itself.
In fact, the best times came before we had even heard of the band. The photos and descriptions of their early years playing seedy clubs in Hamburg are priceless.
“We had great happenings on stage,” said Lennon. “We used to eat on stage, we’d smoke, we swore. Some shows I just went on in my underpants… . I’d go on in underpants and with a toilet seat around my neck.”
“I’d have to say that Hamburg bordered on the best of the Beatle times,” said Harrison. “We didn’t have any luxury, we didn’t have any bathrooms or any clothes, we were pretty grubby, we couldn’t afford anything; but on the other hand, we weren’t yet famous, so we didn’t have to contend with the (nonsense) that comes with fame. We could be ourselves and do whatever we wanted without people writing about it in the newspapers.”
The story of their rise to stardom is compelling, and not nearly as “overnight” as most Americans believe. And just as the rest of the world became aware of the Beatles, life suddenly became complicated for these four sensitive individuals. On one hand, they wanted to be stars. On the other hand, they were stars on a scale that had never been seen this side of Elvis.
Suddenly, they were adored by half the world and vilified by the other half. This would be difficult for anybody to handle, but especially difficult for young men of an artistic temperament (and the Beatles, from the beginning, truly thought of themselves as the art-school type).
The insanity of Beatlemania is captured at its surreal height when they talk about the fact that, everywhere they went, disabled children were wheeled in for an audience.
“I can’t stand looking at them,” said Lennon, with characteristic brutal honesty. “I have to turn away. I have to laugh or I’d just collapse from hate. They’d line them up and I got the impression The Beatles were being treated as bloody faith healers. It was sickening.”
The rest of their lives consisted of running from one limo to another, from one hall to another, and living in hotels. They couldn’t go out, they couldn’t be on their own, they couldn’t even spend the money they were making.
They were imprisoned in an artificial world of celebrity. If you think, “It should happen to me,” then you should read this book and find out how heavy the toll.
“The people gave their money and gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems,” said Harrison, summing it up with a lyricist’s brevity.
As they matured as artists, they had the tremendous solace of knowing that they were producing music at a higher level than anyone else in pop. They still evince plenty of pride in such groundbreaking albums as “Rubber Soul” (Harrison’s favorite), “Revolver” “Sgt. Pepper,” and even, as the band was breaking apart, “Abbey Road.”
Yet even as they became the most successful band in history, they could never truly enjoy the fruits of their success.
“We used to ask, `Am I a millionaire yet?’ and they used to say cryptic things like, `On paper you are,’ ” said McCartney. “… It was actually very difficult to get anything out of these people and the accountants never made you feel successful.”
No wonder they looked back with fondness on Hamburg, where they would make only 50 pounds a week, yet feel enormously rich on payday.
No wonder, also, that they turned enthusiastically to drugs (“Rubber Soul” was the pot album and “Revolver” was the acid album) and other means of escape, such as the Marahishi.
It also helps explain the long and often dispiriting breakup of the band, which takes up the book’s most depressing (yet undeniably insightful) section. Their huge success brought them even closer together — no one else could relate — yet in the end, so close as to be stifling.
The book had to be big in order to fully flesh out all four of these complex characters. That it succeeds is one of book’s biggest achievements.
Ringo comes off as similar to his public image as the amiable, comic Liverpool lad, yet deeper. He’s the one who first left The Beatles, temporarily during the “White Album,” in a torrent of self-doubt. His contributions to the book are often touching and gentle, as when he looks back on their heyday: “A really amazing closeness. Just four guys who really loved each other. It was pretty sensational.”
McCartney is probably the most unscarred Beatle and his comments are usually the most sensible, diplomatic and conciliatory, to the point where he doesn’t particularly reveal much. He’s the one you might prefer to have as a dad, but not as an honest memoirist. Even now, his emotions are too guarded.
Lennon, on the other hand, is a seething mass of unguarded emotions. Few professional writers, not to mention professional musicians, have so nakedly revealed themselves to the world (both figuratively and literally, as in the nude “Two Virgins” photo on page 300). Lennon’s comments are outrageous, humorous, vicious, vulnerable, unsentimental and unfailingly candid.
Yet the book’s biggest surprise is George Harrison. He was never my favorite, and never got credit for being as clever with words. Yet here, he’s the one who emerges as the wisest for the four, the one who sees this insane phenomenon with the clearest eyes, and with the clearest pen.
As I go through my favorite passages, many of them are from Harrison, including:
On their Maharishi interlude: “There were a lot of flakes there, the whole place was full of flaky people. Some of them were us.”
On humor: “I think that was an important part of The Beatles — people associate humor with us… . Everybody in Liverpool thinks they’re a comedian. Just drive through the Mersey Tunnel and the guy on the toll booth will be a comedian.”
And finally, at the end of the book, it is Harrison who has one final, touching request for those millions of Beatlemaniacs: “I’d like to think that the old Beatle fans have grown up and they’ve got married and they’ve all got kids and they’re all more responsible, but they still have a space in their hearts for us.”
Wish granted, George.