For instance, crucial, confidence-building early work-a tour as a backing band in Scotland-comes about “not on merit but because no one else could fill the bill and they shifted everything to make it happen.” A recurring moment, the defining scene of this book, which happens about a dozen times: In doubt, and in the dumps, with ostensibly no prospects to ever get anywhere, one Beatle turns to the others and says, basically, “Something’ll happen.” And then, boom: It does. In this book, which focuses on 1957 to 1962, Lewisohn picks up on that supernal feel to the Beatles’ success, and at times his own wonder that all of this ever happened, with one amazing coincidence after another, feeds into our own. These are the hell-for-leather years, the period when a band from a grimy, bomb-scarred city-a city that didn’t exactly turn out world-beaters-defied long odds and commenced a quest that has something almost preordained about it. If you know the Beatles’ story arc, you are aware that despite the adulation, the chart-topping, the madcap tours, “We’re more popular than Jesus,” Yoko, the breakup-all of that which occurred between 19-the choicest parts of the band’s story are the early, pre-fame years, culminating with 1962.

A lot of this is simply cobbled together from the litany of Beatles books out there.

Well, a load of work from a certain point of view. Lewisohn reportedly got a load of money for the project, but it’s a load of work. Something Beatlesesque but more, serious and seriously funny, estimable, weighty, necessary, definitive, and, dare one say, canonical.Įven Beatles superfans are likely to wonder whether we really need another Beatles bio, and a three-volume one at that, with the newly released first part, Tune In, coming in at 932 knee-buckling pages. Even at 14, I understood that there was luridness there intended solely to shock and sell, but the book had so much in it that I’d return to it every few years, get caught up in the narrative all over again, snicker at the Satryicon-bits, and wonder who would eventually come along and write-insert posh Etonian voice-a proper, even scholarly bio, something to do for the Beatles what Gibbon did for Rome.

And while I would go on to read, if not every other, then damn close to it, that sense of an illicit reading encounter-with me wondering if I had done something wrong in so willingly being funneled into this mad, psychotropic world-captured a kind of Beatlesesque spirit, quite beyond the let’s-all-drink-liquid-acid trappings.

It was the first book on the band I ever read. The closest I ever came to a contact high from reading occurred the summer I was 14, curled up on my bed and pretending it was some submersible straight out of Yellow Submarine, staring gobsmacked at the pages of Peter Brown and Steven Gaines’ The Love You Make, a drugs- and sex-sotted ripsnorter of a Beatles bio.

Mark lewisohn beatles book