Beatles Bio

I am just finishing Bob Spitz’s new biography of the Beatles, entitled simply The Beatles. It’s 900+ pages plus notes, and is a real eye opener. Reviewers have labeled it as “dark.” I found it to be realistic and well informed. He goes well into the backgrounds of all the key players in their story, though the fulcrum of the book is John Lennon. Right now, with this book in mind, I want to go back and listen to every Beatles recording again, with “new eyes” and “new ears.” A dozen off the top observations…

1. John was one complex, dark, cynical, bohemian, sick dude, but in the context of his upbringing, his childhood, his father, mother, and aunt, he comes off sympathetically in his humanity.
2. These guys worked their butts off. They paid their dues. Spitz spends some 300 pages on their lives and their unceasing gig playing in Liverpool and Hamburg before their first record even comes out.
3. Once the roll started, he captures the Beatlemania, the frenzied pace, the almost superhuman creativity in light of the lack of sleep and excess of drugs. These guys hardly had a chance to breathe. I am amazed they lasted as long as they did.
4. The Beatles were truly ripped off by bad management, and then messed it up even worse trying to manage themselves.
5. The portraits of how individual songs were written is priceless. John and Paul face to face, guitar to guitar, just had a thing going musically that is rare in the anals of history.
6. The Beatles were absolute incredibly unspeakably decadent. I can’t really see what good they brought to the cultural table, much as I like their music.
7. And they did all this in their late teens and twenties! Unbelievable.
8. Ringo was and is the most normal of the lot.
9. Yoko Ono was really weird.
10. One can lose the impact of their wild in your face on-stage energy. They blew people away.
11. Despite the moral decadence, the drugs, the unfaithfulness to their wives, and all the rest, Spitz has me excited when their records start to sell, when they start to make it. I’m pulling for them. This is a true rags to riches story about four guys (and a few more) who were totally committed to their craft, who worked as hard as anyone could work playing live for years, who learned as well as wrote new songs and tried new things and created new recording techniques with abandon. No record company boys-band were these guys.
12. Thirty five years later I still haven’t gotten over that they broke up. Maybe this book will help me.