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selenakIf you're only a casual Beatles fan - or no fan at all, for that matter -, then all the attention paid to the first volume of a planned biographical trilogy about the band is probably bemusing for you. Another biography? Why? Etc. If, otoh, you're somewhat familiar with at least part of the biographical literature already in existence, then the name Mark Lewisohn makes you sit up. He has a - deserved - reputation as the expert of experts, whose research was invaluable to many a preceding biographer, whose 1988 The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, which used just about every note EMI ever archived on the Beatles recording, revolutionized and partially turned upside down the until then accepted ideas about who contributed what. So when a couple of years ago it was announced he was working on his own biography, which, this being Mark Lewisohn, would not be contained in one volume but in three, the expectations were high. (Also a bit of nervousness. A brilliant fact finder does not necessarily a good prose stylist make.)
Now that the eagerly awaited first volume (covering basically births till New Year's Eve 1962/1963, i.e. stopping at the dawn of the Philip Larkin immortalized Annus Mirabilis) is out there, we can judge for ourselves. Naturally, I pounced as soon as I could and have now emerged bleary eyed and rivetted. General judgment: worth the wait, and the expectations. How a reader who has no idea who the hell any of these people were beyond being able to name the four Beatles themselves would approach it, I have no idea, of course, but I think Lewisohn does a good job of writing for fans and casual readers alike, not taking for granted you know your Neil Aspinall from your Mal Evans, or for that matter have any idea what the hell a Getsch is. Also, which is great for me since I'd rather know where Quote X and avowed circumstance Y are coming from, he's excellent with the footnotes. Of which there are actually two categories; some are given at the end of each chapter (pronounciation guides for the names once the Beatles have arrived in Germany, for example), while the quote annotations (i.e. which quote is from which interview/memoir/other primary source) are in the appendix. While Mark Lewisohn is no Terry Pratchett, his footnotes are always worth reading, not least because there some hidden gems of additional information in them and because he sometimes includes some evaluation of source trustworthiness there.
As for the story: it has the advantage of being an origin story, which tends to be most people's favourite part of anyone's dramatic tale anyway, and there is a reason why so many people have told it before. Format-wise, Lewisohn makes one choice from the get go that sets his work apart from the previous volumes. Your other Beatles group biographies are basically structured thusly:
A) John Lennon's birth, childhood and adolescence up to the point where he meets Paul
B) Paul McCartney's childhood, a bit shorter than the Lennon one, until the encounter; then a chapter or so on John and Paul befriending before Paul brings in George.
C) George Harrison's childhood, even briefer. Group biography procedes until 1962, at which point:
D) Mini Ringo biography up to his replacing Pete Best as the drummer of the Beatles.
Not Tune In, which can't resist starting with John (though in order of birth Ringo is older), either, but immediately after setting up the Lennon family background pre John's birth switches over to the McCartneys, then the Harrisons, then the Starkeys, and then procedes to write a genuine life story for all four from the get go, with all four getting detailed narrative attention, which means, among other things, that by the time Ringo joins the group you know as much about his previous life as you do about theirs. Since the groups Ringo played in, most importantly, but not exclusively the Hurricanes, were successful before the Beatles were, this also enriches the picture of the Liverpool musical scene. Nor is he the only one introduced into the narrative before his path crosses with his future bandmates. Brian Epstein and George Martin both enter the tale in 1960, so that again, by the time they encounter the Beatles the reader is far more familiar with Brian and George M. than if they'd gotten just a brief summary of their pre-Beatles lives.( In Brian Epstein's case, this narrative approach also serves to underline who much he and the Beatles were made for each other, because by late 1961 they were as restless and dissatisfied with their then status quo as he was.) Singling out these two for particular narrative attention (in addition to the future Fab Four) also feels right in terms of the importance they were going to have on each other's lives, though Lewisohn doesn't do obvious foreshadowing. It's there if you want to spot it, but not hammered down. (For example, the drinking situation in the Starkey household, and Ringo's observance that his parents - meaning his mother and stepfather, his biological father having walked out very early in his life - were alcoholics without him or them realising or calling it thus - is foreshadowing if you know that by the 1980, Ringo himself was well beyond even what's taken for granted with rock stars and ended up going Alcoholics Anonymous for a reason, but if you don't, it's simply part of the story told.)
In terms of agenda and partiality, my own impression is that Lewisohn is fair to all four, describing their virtues and flaws alike. Mind you, that won't stop the more hardcore partisans of each to feel their guy didn't get enough understanding/got more than his fair share of criticism, because such is the nature of fandom. (Peter Doggett, whose You Never Give Me Your Money about the breakup of the Beatles and the aftermath is also a book which in my opinion manages to be fair to all four, wrote an entertaining blog entry about this phenomenon: "Equally valuable for me was the chance to read other people's interpretations of which Beatle(s) I favoured in the narrative. My intention was to be as even-handed as possible, but during the course of writing the book, I felt saddest and sorriest for Paul McCartney - even while I was highlighting things that he might have done and said differently. One Amazon reviewer reckoned that I showed a definite bias towards George Harrison; another, in an unrestrained attack on the book, decided that I was nothing more than another author adopting the "brown nose" position towards John Lennon, without a good word to say for Paul. ("PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't buy this book!", his review ends.) And another felt that Ringo came out best, whereas I was concerned that, because he maintained the lowest profile for most of my narrative, Ringo tended only to appear in the story in negative terms. Nobody, however, thought that I showed any special sympathy for Paul - which just goes to prove that the book you're writing, and the book you THINK you're writing, can be two very different things. " ) He's also really good in including fandom itself into the tale; from the earliest fans of the band (very few pre-Hamburg, but they did exist, and the earnest correspondance excerpts are rather endearing, because the boys - who really were boys at that point, teenagers, were thrilled about the fanmail and wrote back) to the first mass reactions when the Beatles started get on the radio in 1962, it's all brought to life, and there are priceless gems among these stories. Since most of them are told by female fans, they also illuminate what it was like to be a rock music interested girl in the late 50s/early 60s, which forms an interesting counter point to the main narrative since of course Our Heroes started out as passionate male fans of rock music themselves.
New information: some, going from the minor (say, an origin story of I Saw Her Standing There I hadn't been familiar with) to the major (one of Lewisohn's big coups is to debunk no less a story than the John Lennon Ur-Trauma Tale of having to choose between his parents, or at the very least call it heavily into question, more about that below the cut). Also, he's simply able to provide details about things that previous biographers had to only briefly mention because they were covering far more time in only volume (say, Paul's and George's teenage hitchhiking trips). And one of his great strengths is the firmness of dates, which allows him to illuminate contexts that were previously unlooked at. (For example: Julia being pregnant with her third child when returning John to Mimi for good.) And he managed to interview Neil Aspinall (Liverpool Institute schoolmate, roadie, confidant and later Apple boss; one of the two people most constantly around the Beatles throughout their lives) before the later's death, which since Neil Aspinall spent a life time NOT giving interviews is fantastic from a historian's pov.
What about the competition? Without mentioning him by name, he's unable to resist taking a potshot at Philip Norman (in the section discussing how much or little Brian's homosexuality and supposed attraction to John in particular informed his choice of the Beatles), but other than that, I didn't get the impression he's settling scores, and in the footnotes there is often praise for this book or that which first unearthed this and that information.
Style: earnest and readable. He goes for matter of factly but can't resist being swept away by the drama a couple of times. There is the occasional pun, but only one comparison/metaphor that made me groan. Most importantly, though, the narrative voice gives you the impression that the author somehow managed to never lose his passion for what made the Beatles compelling to him to begin with. (Important, that; I remember choosing the subject of my doctoral thesis with the question "whose novels will I still be able to enjoy reading for the hell of it even after combing them through academically?" in mind, because wading through details and looking at downsides really can sometimes take the joy away.)
With all this in minds: here are some choice quotes for your own judgment:
From Lewisohn's introduction (i.e. his "what I tried to do with this book" tale:
"I've tried to thread together the lives and relationships of John, Paul, George, Richy, Stuart, Pete, Brian Epstein, George Martin and other crucial players. Everyone is in their context and worlds run on parallel and occasionally interweaving tracks before properly connecting - characters creating the circumstances dictating an outcome. The Lennon and McCartney partnership is one of many deep explorations, told thoroughly in their words and deeds. George and Ringo were essential to the Beatles, but John and Paul drove the bus and wrote the catalogue, and theirs is an especially fascinating tale - two needle sharp grammar school boys, then young men steeped in postwar British culture, but with a passion for America and its great music, close friends with a deep admiration for each other's talents and understanding of each other's moods and personalities. Their determination, their egos and their creative rivaly made them the greatest songwriters of the age, and I've tried to show how it began."
Accordingly, the very first chapter of the book, the opening prologue actually gets us right into 1957 and teenage John and Paul practicing guitar and starting to write songs together before going back to the 1930s and everyone's parents. Speaking parents, and parent figures, on the "Aunt Mimi - tough yet loving or abrasive bordering on narcissistic" question, Lewisohn is firmly on the "tough but loving" side of the fence, while also showing Mimi must have been the mother-in-law from hell, though not as bad as Millie "The only good German is a dead German" Sutcliffe. Still, such incidents like Mimi going through Cynthia's letters when Cyn was staying with her for the first time, discovering John's love letters from Hamburg which contained some sexually explicit stuff and promptly blaming Cynthia (not John) for corrupting her boy with her sexual wiles and kicking her out, made me sigh. (Sidenote: mind you, my maternal grandmother went through my mother's mail too, but was confounded by the fact my dad has errible handwriting, so his love letters remained undecyphered, which became a family joke. Reading the Mimi and Cynthia incident made me realise how not-funny it could have turned out. Privacy and personal space for late 1950s/early 1960s lovers: non-existant.) Mimi fact I was unaware of: John wrote a poem for her after the death of his Uncle George which praises her and chides her sisters - including his own mother - for not appreciating and supporting her enough. (Lewisohn quotes the poem in full.) Mimi fact I was aware of, but was curious to see Lewisohn's evoluation of, because that really depends on the biographer in question: how John came to live with her. There were two key instances here: one was Mimi alerting social services after Julia moved in with Bobby Dykins; Lewisohn solidly sides with Mimi here:
At the end of March 1946, Julia moved in with Bobby Dykins and took John with her. It wasn't only a one bedroom flat in Gateacre Village (close to Woolton), it was a one-bed-flat - one double bed in which Julia and her man were sleeping with her five years old son. Considering with what fervour and frequency newly cohabiting couples usually enjoy sex, John's intimate exposure to a such a situation was truly shocking, no matter how discreetly adults may have been behaving. Mimi went straight over to express her view, Dykins ordered her out, and she returned with a senior official from the Public Assistance Committee. This department of the Liverpoool City Council - the Social Services of its day - played everything straight. It wasn't in the business of separating a mother from her child unless there was a good reason, but an unmarried couple sharing a bed with a young infant was one such. As a consequence, for a time at last, Mimi found herself John's primary carer.
The other happens shortly after, when John's father, Alfred Lennon, at this point a sailor whose marriage to Julia in effect though not on the paper ended some years earlier, comes back. Now what follows as mentioned is one key Lewisohn-discovered new factoid. As a reminder: every single biography both of the Beatles as a group and of John Lennon as an individual has treated the "John gets taken by his father to Blackpool for a holiday and with his father intending to keep him, Julia follows, John is made to choose between his mother and father, ends up deeply traumatized for the rest of his life" story that was first told by John's father, Alfred Lennon - called "Freddie" in early Beatles literature and "Alf" in later one -, to Hunter Davies in 1967 when Davies researched for his Beatles biography as one of THE key events in John's life. There is hardly a fictional depiction of John that resists including the incident, either, whether directly happening on screen or later narrated by adult John to someone else. In light of this, it's worth mentioning that in real life, John himself never commented on the event - as far as I remember, though I could be wrong since it's been a while, in Davies' biography Davies quotes him as saying he doesn't remember it, which later biographers have taken to mean he either didn't want to comment or ras repressing. Anyway, since the source for the story is one of the key players, i.e. Alfred Lennon, there was never any reason for biographers - or fans - to doubt it. Until now. Quoth Lewisohn:
Alf went to Blackpool (with John) because that was where his merchant navy friend Billy Hall lived, with his parents (the house is still there, 37 Ivy Avenue). Born in 1923, ten years younger than the man he knew as "Lennie", Hall has for a long time been the only living witness to what transpired here, and the only person to relate the events impartially. (He calls John "Johnny" because this was how Alf introduced him.) Every account of Alf and John's time in Blackpool has turned on the vital fact that Alf brought his boy here prior to emigrating with him to New Zealand - the plan being that Billy's parents would emigrate and take John with them, to be joined later by Alf who'd work a passage there. This, insists Billy Hall, is fantasy.
"There is no truth in that. I said I would go to New Zealand, and Lennie said he might too, and another mate of ours, and at some point it was mentioned it was a great place to raise Johnny - but no plans were ever made. Not only were my parents not planning to go, they didn't even know I was. The only actual plan that involved Johnny was that maybe he'd stay with my parents for two or three months until Lennie got something sorted out. But my mother was born in 1894 - she was already fifty-two. Though she looked after Johnny for the short time we were there, she didn't want to be responsible for a young kid at her age, and Lennie had to go back to sea. He had to go back. We were only on leave. (...)
Lennie's wife came up with her boyfriend. I'll always remember him. He looked l ike a spiv, a wide boy, with a Trilby hat at a forty-five degree angle, and a very thin moustache, like a smaller version of Terry-Thomas. He was probably there in case of trouble.
They needed privacy, so we let them go into the front room - which normally no one went to, and which my mother kept spotless. They talked maybe half an hour and then Lennie came out and said, "I'm letting Johnny go back with his mother - she's going to look after him properly." I remember him saying 'properly' because Lennie was pleased he'd fixed it. There were no raised voices - had there been, I'd have rushed in because I didn't know this Terry-Thomas character and my pal Lennie was only small. I really can't remember whether Johnny was in there, too, maybe he only went in after, but there was definitely no tug-of-love scene. Lennie's wife didn't leave the house until Lennie came out and told us what they'd decided."
John's "choice" was not between his mother and his father, it was between his mostly absent dad's friends' parents - in whose lives he had no place - and home and school back in Liverpool. There was no choice at all.
As to why Julia then brought him back to Mimi: not only had her living situation not changed but she was pregnant again (with younger Julia, as it turns out, her daughter Julia Baird). I think what sells me on the authenticity of this version of the story are two things: the accurate physical description of Bobby Dykins (Beatles biographies aren't exactly brimming with photos of the man - it was a long time till even his name was mentioned , as opposed to John's nickname for him, Twitchy), and the fact that Alfred Lennon in 1967 actually had a good reason to tell a version in which he wanted to live with his son (as opposed to letting his son be cared for by other people): he was just re-entering John's life, and in fact his contact with Davies and this story contributed to convincing John to give him another shot, after an earlier encounter during Beatlemania years, arranged by newspapers ("John Lennon's Father Washes Dishes!") had gone disastrously. Mind you, Hall mentions he wasn't in the room during the Julia-and-Alfred conversation, so it's still possible there was some moment of choice involved, but given Alfred really couldn't take John with him (being a working seaman only on leave) and Hall's parents weren't keen on taking him, it really is likely he was relieved when Julia showed up to take John back to Liverpool.
Not bringing in new facts but to my knowledge newly examining something previous biographers took for granted: Lewisohn points out that while Mimi disapproved of Paul and Jim McCartney disapproved of John, Jim had no such problem with George.
Jim liked George. Though there appeared to be no reason why he should favor him over John, both being dressed as Teddy Boys, history played its part: Paul and George had been friends for some time, and a friendly rapport had been established between child and adult - George called him 'Uncle Jim', and the older man found George's impudence attractive. George wasn't going to influence Paul the same way John did, which was the prime reason why Jim maintained his stance against the older lad.
Speaking of George's impudence: it has always amused me that no sooner has Paul joined the Quarry Men that John's ramshackle band of school mates first gets a visual overhaul (from everyone wearing their own clothes to everyone dressing as bands looked at the time), and then teenage Quarry Man after teenage Quarry Man (only in the band because John said so and because it was a lark) starts to drop out while Paul's pal George H, teenage music obsessive, gets moved in, and of course Paul not holding back with his opinions on everyone's musical abilities turns out to be a life long thing. What I hadn't been consciously aware of was that Young George, once John had caved and allowed him to join the band despite his youth, immediately started to do the very same thing:
George had walked into the Quarry Men and coolly wondered, what are all these people doing here? 'It was daft: they had no proper drummer but about eighteen guitarists, and people coming along for one night and not again...who didn't seem to be be doing anything, so I said, 'Let's get rid of them', and conspired to get rid of Griff.'
(Presumably this is what John was thinking of when calling teenage George "conniving" after George's early 1969 temporary walkout in this conversation.) Teenage George in general comes across as very confident and secure in his own musical opinions, which was necessary because anyone hanging out with John had to give as good as he got verbally or got bulldozered over. (Or, as another teenage friend put, "if John thought you were a pushover, he pushed you over".) What struck me, not just in this biography and by no means for the first time, is how much all those teenage relationships informed the rest of their lives, and how the whole boys/young men in a group dynamic resembles Renaissance courts, with the monarchs thriving on playing out their favourites against each other, so that any unpopular measure gets blamed on the favourite, never on the monarch, whose affection everyone tries to secure. John was an expert in this. Writes Lewisohn, re: the Paul and Stuart Sutcliffe situation once Stu joined the band (before, when he was simply John's friend from art college, there don't appear to have been problems):
Stu's position in the group didn't sit well with Paul, however, whose objection ran on two fronts. First, (...) he couldn't really see the point of taking on a bass player who couldn't play bass. It wasn't the only time John had brought an unmusical close mate into his group, but Pete Shotton's inability had been no particular disadvantage in the skiffle days. Now, at a time when other rock groups existed on a higher plane and the Quarrymen patently had to improve, it was nonsensical to shackle themselves to someone who didn't know his instrument. Paul's second objection was more visceral, and sometimes asked by the first. He quickly became jealous of Stu's relationship with John. He felt edged out, rejected, hurt. A fourth player might normally expected to join a group in a fourth position, but Stu came in nearer the top, perhaps even second, and Paul was pushed down. He had staked the primary claim to John since the end of 1957, and now slipped down the chart. Before, he would sit next to John on the bus, with George alone in the seat behind. Now, John and Stu sat together, and Paul was in the back with the boy nine (or so) months younger. John had engineered this situation; it was by his actions that dissent was in the air, but Paul couldn't be angry with him, only with Stu - so it was Stu who get Paul's snippy remarks and general behavior that in one way or another cut the ground from under him. John, as usual, observed it and did nothing. It was for Stu to defend himself, if he wanted to. It seems Stu mostly ignored it. Sometimes, John even even joined in, and Stu ignored that, too.
As I said, Lewisohn doesn't do obvious foreshadowing, but the parallels to, ahem, a later situation are patently obvious. Incidentally, Stu's status as favourite at any given point was fluid, too; while George liked him well enough and John did intensely so, both of them were self admittedly as eagerly picking on him as Paul ever did during the Scottish tour, directly after he'd joined the band, and in Hamburg it really depended on which mood John was in, so it's not surprising that when a couple of German students turned up who befriended him, Stu turned to those new friendships with a vengeance.
Speaking of Hamburg, this is where many a Beatles biographer gets gleaming eyes, not just because the band goes from shambolic-with-potential to really really good there by virtue of the swim-or-drown approach their marathon hours in the clubs brought them there, but because of the sex. Our Mr. Lewisohn urges caution:
Sex was everywhere, and figured high on the Beatles' menu. There was no chance they'd match the fidelity demanded of girlfriends back home. And yet, because so much happened to the Beatles in Hamburg - and because, supposedly, every excess was availalbe here so easily - detaching fact from fiction just isn't possible. (...) To give just one example, Pete Best - an honest man, prone to understatement rather than exaggeration - has talked about all the Beatles having sex simultanously at the Bambi Kino, but George, speaking of the unforgettable occasion he lost his virginity, clearly describes John, Paul and Pete being in the room at the same time, in bunk beds, which is a 1961 situation. Accordingly, as unlikely as this is, it appears George managed to go through the entire extraordinary Hamburg experience of 1960 without having sex, despite the mass of opportunities, a healthy sexual appetite and Stu describing him in print as a Casanova.
Another good example of Lewisohn's narrative caution is part of the how-Pete-got-fired-and-Ringo-got-hired tale from 1962:
It was at this same time, around the end of July, that - probably - a strange incident took place, when John and Paul made a 332-mile return road trip to talk to Ringo at Butlin's. Paul had just passed his driving test, but had yet to buy a car, so they went in the van - Neil would remember them taking it, and reliable witnesses saw them at the camp, including Johnny Guitar and Rory Storm's mother Vi Caldwell, who was on holiday there at the time. But it all lacks clarification. Paul could have phoned Ringo from home, but the suggestion is that he and John made a mystery trip along England's winding A-roads, west coast to east coast, like The Nerk Twins Go To Lincolnshire. There is also no explanation why George, who'd instigated getting Ringo into the Beatles, didn't drive them in his car. And while witnesses have insisted that it all happened, the story is short on verification by the key parties: Ringo has never mentioned it, John never did, and Paul, when asked about it in 2011, has just a 'vague recollection'.
Then there's Lewisohn going for various popular legends with gusto, including the one that Brian Epstein got the Beatles' first single (not counting My Bonnie, which they recorded as Tony Sheridan's backing group), Love Me Do, into the charts and to number 17 via buying so many copies for his own store in Liverpool:
As the Beatles began to go national, so Brian began to find he'd fewer friends that he thought. Gossip about 'the ten thousand' was traded maliciously and without proof by people jealous of his success or keen to claim 'insider' status. No one considered Brian's membership of a comittee (within the Grammophone Record Retailers Association) that challenged suspicions of chart malpractice, or his resistance of faking 'My Bonnie' into even his own shop's published Top Twenty, or - most striking of all - the fact that in 1962, it made no difference of how many copies a shop sold of any records because the charts weren't computed that way. Nems had been a 'chart return' operation for years - it stil provided data to Melody Maker and now also to Record Retailer - but those papers' weekly phone calls and questionaires didn't ask for sales figures, only for a shop's bestselling records ranked from 1 to 30; the papers awared 30 points for the number 1 record down to one point for the number 30, and calculated an overall national total. All the charts were produced this way, as they still were in America. Brian Epstein had no need to buy ten thousand 'Love Me Do's' to fake it into the charts; he didn't even need to buy one.
Lewisohn's attention to detail includes pointing out the unromantically obvious yet usually ignored: until the Beatles befriended the Exis (which led to Astrid Kirchherr offering her parents' house as an opportunity for everyone to take a hot shower, and also to her mother volunteering for the laundry), the group who lived in two rooms behind a cinema with a restroom (no shower) as their only opportunity to wash both themselves and their clothes and who smoked up to 40 cigarettes per day each must have stunk pestiantally. During their second Hamburg gig, they'd also become friendly enough with Horst Fascher the bouncer and in Paul's case with Rosa the toilet caretaker at the Top Ten Club for both Fascher's mother and Rosa to help out with the laundry and with washing facilities as well, but during the first time in Hamburg, there really was nothing until Astrid.
The three Exis - Astrid Kircherr, Klaus Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer - were all interviewed over a period of years for Lewisohn for this book (as were the survivors among the other Hamburg friends, like the Fascher brothers), and along with the early Liverpool fans of the Beatles, it comes across that Lewisohn developed the most affection for these particular witnesses. Since I happen to be fond of the Hamburg crowd as well, I'm not surprised. (One of the most likeable aspects for me is the Astrid and Klaus relationships, because I don't know many male/female relationships in real life that start out as romance, quickly come to realise this doesn't work and then settle into a life long strong friendship instead. This in a world where people rarely manage to be even civil to their exes pushes buttons for me. There is a great documentary German tv did on Klaus Voormann, who went on to have a rich vand varied career even aside from his Beatles-related projects (among others, he played bass for Carly Simon - on "You're so vain", no less, B.B. King, Lou Reed, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dr. John and of course for the group Manfred Mann, whose regular bassist he was; when he tried his hand at producing, he ended up producing one of the biggest hits of the Neue Deutsche Welle in the 1980s, trio), and where you have Astrid chatting about Klaus and teasing him re: his ears that is one of my favourite "old people with a life time of friendship behind them" real life situations.) This means we get detailed analysis and circumstances for the photographs both Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer took of the Beatles, which became iconic afterwards, and where exactly in Hamburg each photo was taken. At which point Lewisohn the sober historian becomes Lewisohn both the Beatles fan and the fan of the photographers.
re: Astrid's photos, starting with the group shot:
The Beatles had maybe four hours of sleep after stepping off the Kaiserkeller stage, and under notice from Koschmider their Hamburg experience was unravelling. All this and more is in their faces. This one photograph singlehandedly defined the rock band image: young punks who think, dress and act differently to everyone else; who have ego and ambition to burn, but no future plans. Astrid's other photos from the Dom are its equal. There is John alone with his Rickenbacker, sitting on the front of a heavy lorry, and John joined there by George and Stu with their guitars. There are fine photos of George; and, best of all, some extraordinary photos of Paul and John, individually, with Stu out of focus in the background. These are high calibre intimate portraits, free of artifice, photos that probe inside. 'I didn't have to tell them not to smile, they just knew. They only had to look straight into the camera. They were absolutely professionals, even if it took a long time to get everything just right. No one got angry or said they didn't want to carry on."
Astrid photographed George side-on, aware he was sensitive about his splayed ears, what the friends lovingly called his Segelohren. ("I tried to capture George's childlike and naive aspects.") Paul is natural, not mugging this time; he shows no trace of his awkward relationship with the photographer, but one eyebrow hovers as if slightly, fascinatingly questioning. ("I tried to bring out Paul's wit and his airiness.") John doesn't pull a crip but lets Astrid come close, full into his face and deep into his eyes, behind defenses to sorrow and vulnerability. ("I tried to capture John's wit and sensitivity.") Pete slipped away after the group shots and features in no other image, and Astrid never took his picture again. He wasn't with the Beatles when, after the session, she drove them to her house for something to eat - and another world opened up. Stu had already been to 45a Heimsbüttler Straße, but this was the first visit for John, Paul and George, their first blessed release out of St. Pauli, into the trees and quieter streets of residential Hamburg and Astrid's arty world. They instantly loved it.
Leaving completely different financial circumstances aside - and for the first three years of the Beatles/Exis relationships, from 1960 to 1963, it was the Beatles who profited from knowing the Exis, who offered generous hospitality and devoted fannishness, coming to the respective clubs the Beatles played in nearly every night after Klaus Voormann had found his way there - , I was also struck by the different family reactions. Astrid's mother, Nielsa, had no problem with her daughter taking up with a penniless British musician (or living with him in every sense of the word), while John faced endless opposition to Cynthia from Mimi, and Stu had to face considerable opposition from his mother. (While Millie Sutcliffe probably would have objected to Stu speaking of marriage as early as November 1960, - Lewisohn quotes the relevant letter - even with an English girl, Astrid's nationality really was an obstacle, and it never got that much better, culminating in Millie accusing Astrid of murdering Stu after his death.) (His sister Pauline would of course years later accuse John of the same thing.) Lewisohn manages to write this with understanding for everyone involved:
Millie Sutcliffe said that John averted his eyes when she entered the arrivals hall, but there was rarely much affection between the two of them and none by the time she made the remark (1970), so the truth is hard to establish. It was of course simply a horrible time for everyone. Millie and Astrid, the two principal mourners, had the worst relationship of all, but here they were, thrown together in grief and a thousand angry questions. Millie had to formally identify her son's corpse. a gruelling scene was played out in private at the morgue, enough to establish further polarization between Millie on one side and Astrid and Klaus on the other. Millie also had to arrange transportation of the body back to England, for the funeral. She wasn't going to lot him be buried in Germany. Her anti-German feelings had blanketed everything within these past twenty months. As Allan Williams had noted, she held the opinion shared by many in Britain for whom the two world wars were within living memory: "The only good German is a dead German." First Germany had bombed Millie's Britain into bankruptcy, now her son had died there, with no doctor preventing it. She thought the worst of everything and everyone."
(Millie eventually calmed down enough to enter into intermittent correspondance with Astrid, which is why we have a letter from Astrid (in broken English), written at the time, about the Beatles being supportive of her post funeral - testimony to that effect years later after the group became famous would have been one thing, but the letter from the days when it happened when they were still just another British group who happened to be old friends is another - which also includes praise of Cynthia, via letters, being supportive as well; since interconnectness between the supporting characters of the Beatles saga always fascinates me I glomped on this bit of news. (When John finally got around to his belated honeymoon with Cynthia, in Paris, they met Astrid there.)
For the conclusion, two quotes from Lewisohn's interviews with new sources. One re: the Paul and George hitchhiking trip to Wales in 1958 which ended up in Harlech where they camped outside of a farm:
John Brierly, the then-16-years old son of the farm owners, remembers Paul and George 'wandering around':
"They didn't know us. It was just "'Can we stop in your field?' We had quite a bit of land on the back. Mum said that was fine, so they put up this crappy little tent and started camping. It poured with rain during the night, and because their tent was useless they were wet thorough. So Mum said, 'You can't stop out there, come in'. They stayed in the bungalow, both of them sharing a double bed, and Mum fed and watered them for the duration of their stay. My abiding memory is Paul playing my crummy acoustic guitar upside down for the left-hander. George also played it, and we had a piano in what we called 'the bottom room'. Buddy Holly's 'Think it over' had just come out, and I remember Paul working on it and working on it until he'd completely figured out the piano solo in the middle. My younger brother Bernard loved the way Paul pounded away at the Little Richard songs, and and kept bothering him to play them again, and Paul was always happy to oblige."
And the other illustrates what I mean about Mark Lewisohn using the early fans, especially the female ones, and their experiences. Here it's Pat Moran, who became a fan pre-Hamburg (rare) and with whom they corresponded later on (the letters also provide later quotes). So, here's a look on how you fared as a female rock 'n roll afficiniado:
Pat Moran was an intelligent 16 years old Catholic girl from Wallasey who went to the Grosvenor most Saturdays. Her mother died when she was nine, and she was raised solely by her Irish disciplinarian father. 'He wouldn't let me wear any make up and never trousers, only a skirt, and he'd knock hell out of me if I misbehaved. One time, I came home late seeing the Beatles and he'd locked me out. He stood in the bathroom above the front door and shouted 'You're late' and wouldn't le me in.' Such was Pat's passion for the Beatles, it was all worthwile.
'I loved their music and the way they played it. My favourites were 'Tutti Frutti', 'Long Tall Sally', 'Cathy's Clown' and 'A Whole Lot of Shakin Going On' - oh, and 'Red Sails In The Sunset' was beautfiul. I can't say they were great musically because I don't know - my idea of music at that age was inexperienced - but they were certainly entertaining. They played music we knew, that we'd heard on the radio, but to hear them doing it was different: when John and Paul sang a rock-n-roll song together we'd all be dancing. John was the leader. He used to talk to Paul and then they'd play something, but Paul was also the leader in a way because he was very much part of it. Certainly it was between Paul and John as to who took the lead. Paul was my favourite. I can still picture him at the front with his guitar, left-handed. He was on the left side of the stage, then George along side him, then John, and Stuart on the right.'
Something in the Beatles touched Pat Moran deeply, in a way she hadn't experienced or expected. Chatting to Paul at the Grosvenor, she gathered they had hardly any money and spent weekends at John's flat at Gambier Terrace, not always with much to eat. She had a job and wanted to give something back to them for all the pleasure they gave her, so every Sunday morning after church she took the ferry across the Mersey and the bus up the Pier Head with a wicker basket of food for them.
'Friends went with me, I wouldn't have dreamed of going on m y own, and we'd arrive about midday. They were always up - we never arrived to find them unclothed - but the flat was horrible. There weren't even chairs to sit on, so we'd either sit on a bed or stand leaning at a window. We'd just talk for a while, and then I'd pick up the empty basket and go home to Wallasey. This happened maybe half a dozen times. (...) Stuart was lovely: very quiet, gentle, a really nice guy, small with dark glasses, and fairer hair than Paul. John was nice but very different. I got the feeling he wouldn't have bothered having us there if Paul hadn't be friendly with me. So John accepted that - he opened the door and let us through. Cynthia was there once but I can't say she spoke to us. George didn't really say anything. He wasn't unpleasant, he used to say "Hello" and "What did you think of us last night?", but that was about it. I mostly spoke to Paul. He was friendly and there wasn't any unplesantness about him at all - he didn't stand off or anything, he was just a nice boy. There was no sexual relationship between us, we were simply mates (...) . He was very chatty - he told me he was really McCartney, not Ramon, he talked about his song writing and we laughed because it seemed such a teenage thing. He talked a lot about the Beatles; how hard they needed to work to earn money and how they hoped to become famous. I always felt the Beatles were determined."
Paul called Pat Moran "our number one fan" , accepting her both as their first and their keenest, but her enthusiasm led to some sorry consequences for her. Her father demanded to know what the devil a good Catholic girl was doing chasing boys who played filfthy rock'n roll. And when these same boys began to affect her vocabulary - she began to say 'fab' and 'gear' because they did - he almost hit the ceiling (but hit her instead). In the end, she drove him so mad with her chattering - Beatles for breakfast, dinner and tea - that he proncounced it a sin and ordered the first Beatles fan to seek almighty God's forgiveness at confession. 'I had to tell the priest "I spend too much of my time worshipping the Beatles". He just ignored me and said, as he always said, 'Remember your prayers. Say three Hail Marys and Four Our Fathers and you'll be forgiven."
Pat was so dermined a fan that she decided to draft petitions so more people would hire them (this being pre-Hamburg, clubs and ballrooms weren't exactly competing for the honour), and tried to fix them up with her uncle so they could go on holiday.
"Two of Paul's letters back to Pat reveal what was going on for the Beatles at this moment (summer of 1960). The first was written on Sunday, August 7, and posted late on the 8th:
'It's OK, George (Carl) and I might be able to come - we fancy the idea of an holiday. Oh yes! I hope your uncle can fix us up with something, anyway if he can't it'll make us get around and look for some good bookings ourselves - it works both ways. I hope. Have you got your embroidered sweater yet, No.1 fan?"
The second letter chased the first into the mailbox late on the Monday:
'This note is to let you know that I think everything you're doing for us is great. I've seen John since I wrote and he says he can come too if you don't mind. This is nearly definite. See - we were promised some tours of Scotland, road shows, trips to Hamburg & a couple of promises have been broken already, so we'll probably be able to come; we can hitchhike down there. It's not far - is it?
I think it's a great idea about the petition.
You ask me whether I'm offended by you giving me all these gear things; well, I'm not - I'm flattered and I don't know what to say! I don't know how you can do all this for us, you must think we're not bad, or else you're just a kind hearted type."
The trip to Hamburg did work out (and thus the booking via Pat's uncle and the holidays in Rhyl did not), the rest is history, but with this correspondance of the very first passionate Beatles fan (literally; they hadn't been called the Beatles for long, going through various names sine The Quarry Men) with (barely; his birthday had been in June) 18th years old Paul, I'll conclude my review of the defnite Beatles biography: first volume.
Now that the eagerly awaited first volume (covering basically births till New Year's Eve 1962/1963, i.e. stopping at the dawn of the Philip Larkin immortalized Annus Mirabilis) is out there, we can judge for ourselves. Naturally, I pounced as soon as I could and have now emerged bleary eyed and rivetted. General judgment: worth the wait, and the expectations. How a reader who has no idea who the hell any of these people were beyond being able to name the four Beatles themselves would approach it, I have no idea, of course, but I think Lewisohn does a good job of writing for fans and casual readers alike, not taking for granted you know your Neil Aspinall from your Mal Evans, or for that matter have any idea what the hell a Getsch is. Also, which is great for me since I'd rather know where Quote X and avowed circumstance Y are coming from, he's excellent with the footnotes. Of which there are actually two categories; some are given at the end of each chapter (pronounciation guides for the names once the Beatles have arrived in Germany, for example), while the quote annotations (i.e. which quote is from which interview/memoir/other primary source) are in the appendix. While Mark Lewisohn is no Terry Pratchett, his footnotes are always worth reading, not least because there some hidden gems of additional information in them and because he sometimes includes some evaluation of source trustworthiness there.
As for the story: it has the advantage of being an origin story, which tends to be most people's favourite part of anyone's dramatic tale anyway, and there is a reason why so many people have told it before. Format-wise, Lewisohn makes one choice from the get go that sets his work apart from the previous volumes. Your other Beatles group biographies are basically structured thusly:
A) John Lennon's birth, childhood and adolescence up to the point where he meets Paul
B) Paul McCartney's childhood, a bit shorter than the Lennon one, until the encounter; then a chapter or so on John and Paul befriending before Paul brings in George.
C) George Harrison's childhood, even briefer. Group biography procedes until 1962, at which point:
D) Mini Ringo biography up to his replacing Pete Best as the drummer of the Beatles.
Not Tune In, which can't resist starting with John (though in order of birth Ringo is older), either, but immediately after setting up the Lennon family background pre John's birth switches over to the McCartneys, then the Harrisons, then the Starkeys, and then procedes to write a genuine life story for all four from the get go, with all four getting detailed narrative attention, which means, among other things, that by the time Ringo joins the group you know as much about his previous life as you do about theirs. Since the groups Ringo played in, most importantly, but not exclusively the Hurricanes, were successful before the Beatles were, this also enriches the picture of the Liverpool musical scene. Nor is he the only one introduced into the narrative before his path crosses with his future bandmates. Brian Epstein and George Martin both enter the tale in 1960, so that again, by the time they encounter the Beatles the reader is far more familiar with Brian and George M. than if they'd gotten just a brief summary of their pre-Beatles lives.( In Brian Epstein's case, this narrative approach also serves to underline who much he and the Beatles were made for each other, because by late 1961 they were as restless and dissatisfied with their then status quo as he was.) Singling out these two for particular narrative attention (in addition to the future Fab Four) also feels right in terms of the importance they were going to have on each other's lives, though Lewisohn doesn't do obvious foreshadowing. It's there if you want to spot it, but not hammered down. (For example, the drinking situation in the Starkey household, and Ringo's observance that his parents - meaning his mother and stepfather, his biological father having walked out very early in his life - were alcoholics without him or them realising or calling it thus - is foreshadowing if you know that by the 1980, Ringo himself was well beyond even what's taken for granted with rock stars and ended up going Alcoholics Anonymous for a reason, but if you don't, it's simply part of the story told.)
In terms of agenda and partiality, my own impression is that Lewisohn is fair to all four, describing their virtues and flaws alike. Mind you, that won't stop the more hardcore partisans of each to feel their guy didn't get enough understanding/got more than his fair share of criticism, because such is the nature of fandom. (Peter Doggett, whose You Never Give Me Your Money about the breakup of the Beatles and the aftermath is also a book which in my opinion manages to be fair to all four, wrote an entertaining blog entry about this phenomenon: "Equally valuable for me was the chance to read other people's interpretations of which Beatle(s) I favoured in the narrative. My intention was to be as even-handed as possible, but during the course of writing the book, I felt saddest and sorriest for Paul McCartney - even while I was highlighting things that he might have done and said differently. One Amazon reviewer reckoned that I showed a definite bias towards George Harrison; another, in an unrestrained attack on the book, decided that I was nothing more than another author adopting the "brown nose" position towards John Lennon, without a good word to say for Paul. ("PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't buy this book!", his review ends.) And another felt that Ringo came out best, whereas I was concerned that, because he maintained the lowest profile for most of my narrative, Ringo tended only to appear in the story in negative terms. Nobody, however, thought that I showed any special sympathy for Paul - which just goes to prove that the book you're writing, and the book you THINK you're writing, can be two very different things. " ) He's also really good in including fandom itself into the tale; from the earliest fans of the band (very few pre-Hamburg, but they did exist, and the earnest correspondance excerpts are rather endearing, because the boys - who really were boys at that point, teenagers, were thrilled about the fanmail and wrote back) to the first mass reactions when the Beatles started get on the radio in 1962, it's all brought to life, and there are priceless gems among these stories. Since most of them are told by female fans, they also illuminate what it was like to be a rock music interested girl in the late 50s/early 60s, which forms an interesting counter point to the main narrative since of course Our Heroes started out as passionate male fans of rock music themselves.
New information: some, going from the minor (say, an origin story of I Saw Her Standing There I hadn't been familiar with) to the major (one of Lewisohn's big coups is to debunk no less a story than the John Lennon Ur-Trauma Tale of having to choose between his parents, or at the very least call it heavily into question, more about that below the cut). Also, he's simply able to provide details about things that previous biographers had to only briefly mention because they were covering far more time in only volume (say, Paul's and George's teenage hitchhiking trips). And one of his great strengths is the firmness of dates, which allows him to illuminate contexts that were previously unlooked at. (For example: Julia being pregnant with her third child when returning John to Mimi for good.) And he managed to interview Neil Aspinall (Liverpool Institute schoolmate, roadie, confidant and later Apple boss; one of the two people most constantly around the Beatles throughout their lives) before the later's death, which since Neil Aspinall spent a life time NOT giving interviews is fantastic from a historian's pov.
What about the competition? Without mentioning him by name, he's unable to resist taking a potshot at Philip Norman (in the section discussing how much or little Brian's homosexuality and supposed attraction to John in particular informed his choice of the Beatles), but other than that, I didn't get the impression he's settling scores, and in the footnotes there is often praise for this book or that which first unearthed this and that information.
Style: earnest and readable. He goes for matter of factly but can't resist being swept away by the drama a couple of times. There is the occasional pun, but only one comparison/metaphor that made me groan. Most importantly, though, the narrative voice gives you the impression that the author somehow managed to never lose his passion for what made the Beatles compelling to him to begin with. (Important, that; I remember choosing the subject of my doctoral thesis with the question "whose novels will I still be able to enjoy reading for the hell of it even after combing them through academically?" in mind, because wading through details and looking at downsides really can sometimes take the joy away.)
With all this in minds: here are some choice quotes for your own judgment:
From Lewisohn's introduction (i.e. his "what I tried to do with this book" tale:
"I've tried to thread together the lives and relationships of John, Paul, George, Richy, Stuart, Pete, Brian Epstein, George Martin and other crucial players. Everyone is in their context and worlds run on parallel and occasionally interweaving tracks before properly connecting - characters creating the circumstances dictating an outcome. The Lennon and McCartney partnership is one of many deep explorations, told thoroughly in their words and deeds. George and Ringo were essential to the Beatles, but John and Paul drove the bus and wrote the catalogue, and theirs is an especially fascinating tale - two needle sharp grammar school boys, then young men steeped in postwar British culture, but with a passion for America and its great music, close friends with a deep admiration for each other's talents and understanding of each other's moods and personalities. Their determination, their egos and their creative rivaly made them the greatest songwriters of the age, and I've tried to show how it began."
Accordingly, the very first chapter of the book, the opening prologue actually gets us right into 1957 and teenage John and Paul practicing guitar and starting to write songs together before going back to the 1930s and everyone's parents. Speaking parents, and parent figures, on the "Aunt Mimi - tough yet loving or abrasive bordering on narcissistic" question, Lewisohn is firmly on the "tough but loving" side of the fence, while also showing Mimi must have been the mother-in-law from hell, though not as bad as Millie "The only good German is a dead German" Sutcliffe. Still, such incidents like Mimi going through Cynthia's letters when Cyn was staying with her for the first time, discovering John's love letters from Hamburg which contained some sexually explicit stuff and promptly blaming Cynthia (not John) for corrupting her boy with her sexual wiles and kicking her out, made me sigh. (Sidenote: mind you, my maternal grandmother went through my mother's mail too, but was confounded by the fact my dad has errible handwriting, so his love letters remained undecyphered, which became a family joke. Reading the Mimi and Cynthia incident made me realise how not-funny it could have turned out. Privacy and personal space for late 1950s/early 1960s lovers: non-existant.) Mimi fact I was unaware of: John wrote a poem for her after the death of his Uncle George which praises her and chides her sisters - including his own mother - for not appreciating and supporting her enough. (Lewisohn quotes the poem in full.) Mimi fact I was aware of, but was curious to see Lewisohn's evoluation of, because that really depends on the biographer in question: how John came to live with her. There were two key instances here: one was Mimi alerting social services after Julia moved in with Bobby Dykins; Lewisohn solidly sides with Mimi here:
At the end of March 1946, Julia moved in with Bobby Dykins and took John with her. It wasn't only a one bedroom flat in Gateacre Village (close to Woolton), it was a one-bed-flat - one double bed in which Julia and her man were sleeping with her five years old son. Considering with what fervour and frequency newly cohabiting couples usually enjoy sex, John's intimate exposure to a such a situation was truly shocking, no matter how discreetly adults may have been behaving. Mimi went straight over to express her view, Dykins ordered her out, and she returned with a senior official from the Public Assistance Committee. This department of the Liverpoool City Council - the Social Services of its day - played everything straight. It wasn't in the business of separating a mother from her child unless there was a good reason, but an unmarried couple sharing a bed with a young infant was one such. As a consequence, for a time at last, Mimi found herself John's primary carer.
The other happens shortly after, when John's father, Alfred Lennon, at this point a sailor whose marriage to Julia in effect though not on the paper ended some years earlier, comes back. Now what follows as mentioned is one key Lewisohn-discovered new factoid. As a reminder: every single biography both of the Beatles as a group and of John Lennon as an individual has treated the "John gets taken by his father to Blackpool for a holiday and with his father intending to keep him, Julia follows, John is made to choose between his mother and father, ends up deeply traumatized for the rest of his life" story that was first told by John's father, Alfred Lennon - called "Freddie" in early Beatles literature and "Alf" in later one -, to Hunter Davies in 1967 when Davies researched for his Beatles biography as one of THE key events in John's life. There is hardly a fictional depiction of John that resists including the incident, either, whether directly happening on screen or later narrated by adult John to someone else. In light of this, it's worth mentioning that in real life, John himself never commented on the event - as far as I remember, though I could be wrong since it's been a while, in Davies' biography Davies quotes him as saying he doesn't remember it, which later biographers have taken to mean he either didn't want to comment or ras repressing. Anyway, since the source for the story is one of the key players, i.e. Alfred Lennon, there was never any reason for biographers - or fans - to doubt it. Until now. Quoth Lewisohn:
Alf went to Blackpool (with John) because that was where his merchant navy friend Billy Hall lived, with his parents (the house is still there, 37 Ivy Avenue). Born in 1923, ten years younger than the man he knew as "Lennie", Hall has for a long time been the only living witness to what transpired here, and the only person to relate the events impartially. (He calls John "Johnny" because this was how Alf introduced him.) Every account of Alf and John's time in Blackpool has turned on the vital fact that Alf brought his boy here prior to emigrating with him to New Zealand - the plan being that Billy's parents would emigrate and take John with them, to be joined later by Alf who'd work a passage there. This, insists Billy Hall, is fantasy.
"There is no truth in that. I said I would go to New Zealand, and Lennie said he might too, and another mate of ours, and at some point it was mentioned it was a great place to raise Johnny - but no plans were ever made. Not only were my parents not planning to go, they didn't even know I was. The only actual plan that involved Johnny was that maybe he'd stay with my parents for two or three months until Lennie got something sorted out. But my mother was born in 1894 - she was already fifty-two. Though she looked after Johnny for the short time we were there, she didn't want to be responsible for a young kid at her age, and Lennie had to go back to sea. He had to go back. We were only on leave. (...)
Lennie's wife came up with her boyfriend. I'll always remember him. He looked l ike a spiv, a wide boy, with a Trilby hat at a forty-five degree angle, and a very thin moustache, like a smaller version of Terry-Thomas. He was probably there in case of trouble.
They needed privacy, so we let them go into the front room - which normally no one went to, and which my mother kept spotless. They talked maybe half an hour and then Lennie came out and said, "I'm letting Johnny go back with his mother - she's going to look after him properly." I remember him saying 'properly' because Lennie was pleased he'd fixed it. There were no raised voices - had there been, I'd have rushed in because I didn't know this Terry-Thomas character and my pal Lennie was only small. I really can't remember whether Johnny was in there, too, maybe he only went in after, but there was definitely no tug-of-love scene. Lennie's wife didn't leave the house until Lennie came out and told us what they'd decided."
John's "choice" was not between his mother and his father, it was between his mostly absent dad's friends' parents - in whose lives he had no place - and home and school back in Liverpool. There was no choice at all.
As to why Julia then brought him back to Mimi: not only had her living situation not changed but she was pregnant again (with younger Julia, as it turns out, her daughter Julia Baird). I think what sells me on the authenticity of this version of the story are two things: the accurate physical description of Bobby Dykins (Beatles biographies aren't exactly brimming with photos of the man - it was a long time till even his name was mentioned , as opposed to John's nickname for him, Twitchy), and the fact that Alfred Lennon in 1967 actually had a good reason to tell a version in which he wanted to live with his son (as opposed to letting his son be cared for by other people): he was just re-entering John's life, and in fact his contact with Davies and this story contributed to convincing John to give him another shot, after an earlier encounter during Beatlemania years, arranged by newspapers ("John Lennon's Father Washes Dishes!") had gone disastrously. Mind you, Hall mentions he wasn't in the room during the Julia-and-Alfred conversation, so it's still possible there was some moment of choice involved, but given Alfred really couldn't take John with him (being a working seaman only on leave) and Hall's parents weren't keen on taking him, it really is likely he was relieved when Julia showed up to take John back to Liverpool.
Not bringing in new facts but to my knowledge newly examining something previous biographers took for granted: Lewisohn points out that while Mimi disapproved of Paul and Jim McCartney disapproved of John, Jim had no such problem with George.
Jim liked George. Though there appeared to be no reason why he should favor him over John, both being dressed as Teddy Boys, history played its part: Paul and George had been friends for some time, and a friendly rapport had been established between child and adult - George called him 'Uncle Jim', and the older man found George's impudence attractive. George wasn't going to influence Paul the same way John did, which was the prime reason why Jim maintained his stance against the older lad.
Speaking of George's impudence: it has always amused me that no sooner has Paul joined the Quarry Men that John's ramshackle band of school mates first gets a visual overhaul (from everyone wearing their own clothes to everyone dressing as bands looked at the time), and then teenage Quarry Man after teenage Quarry Man (only in the band because John said so and because it was a lark) starts to drop out while Paul's pal George H, teenage music obsessive, gets moved in, and of course Paul not holding back with his opinions on everyone's musical abilities turns out to be a life long thing. What I hadn't been consciously aware of was that Young George, once John had caved and allowed him to join the band despite his youth, immediately started to do the very same thing:
George had walked into the Quarry Men and coolly wondered, what are all these people doing here? 'It was daft: they had no proper drummer but about eighteen guitarists, and people coming along for one night and not again...who didn't seem to be be doing anything, so I said, 'Let's get rid of them', and conspired to get rid of Griff.'
(Presumably this is what John was thinking of when calling teenage George "conniving" after George's early 1969 temporary walkout in this conversation.) Teenage George in general comes across as very confident and secure in his own musical opinions, which was necessary because anyone hanging out with John had to give as good as he got verbally or got bulldozered over. (Or, as another teenage friend put, "if John thought you were a pushover, he pushed you over".) What struck me, not just in this biography and by no means for the first time, is how much all those teenage relationships informed the rest of their lives, and how the whole boys/young men in a group dynamic resembles Renaissance courts, with the monarchs thriving on playing out their favourites against each other, so that any unpopular measure gets blamed on the favourite, never on the monarch, whose affection everyone tries to secure. John was an expert in this. Writes Lewisohn, re: the Paul and Stuart Sutcliffe situation once Stu joined the band (before, when he was simply John's friend from art college, there don't appear to have been problems):
Stu's position in the group didn't sit well with Paul, however, whose objection ran on two fronts. First, (...) he couldn't really see the point of taking on a bass player who couldn't play bass. It wasn't the only time John had brought an unmusical close mate into his group, but Pete Shotton's inability had been no particular disadvantage in the skiffle days. Now, at a time when other rock groups existed on a higher plane and the Quarrymen patently had to improve, it was nonsensical to shackle themselves to someone who didn't know his instrument. Paul's second objection was more visceral, and sometimes asked by the first. He quickly became jealous of Stu's relationship with John. He felt edged out, rejected, hurt. A fourth player might normally expected to join a group in a fourth position, but Stu came in nearer the top, perhaps even second, and Paul was pushed down. He had staked the primary claim to John since the end of 1957, and now slipped down the chart. Before, he would sit next to John on the bus, with George alone in the seat behind. Now, John and Stu sat together, and Paul was in the back with the boy nine (or so) months younger. John had engineered this situation; it was by his actions that dissent was in the air, but Paul couldn't be angry with him, only with Stu - so it was Stu who get Paul's snippy remarks and general behavior that in one way or another cut the ground from under him. John, as usual, observed it and did nothing. It was for Stu to defend himself, if he wanted to. It seems Stu mostly ignored it. Sometimes, John even even joined in, and Stu ignored that, too.
As I said, Lewisohn doesn't do obvious foreshadowing, but the parallels to, ahem, a later situation are patently obvious. Incidentally, Stu's status as favourite at any given point was fluid, too; while George liked him well enough and John did intensely so, both of them were self admittedly as eagerly picking on him as Paul ever did during the Scottish tour, directly after he'd joined the band, and in Hamburg it really depended on which mood John was in, so it's not surprising that when a couple of German students turned up who befriended him, Stu turned to those new friendships with a vengeance.
Speaking of Hamburg, this is where many a Beatles biographer gets gleaming eyes, not just because the band goes from shambolic-with-potential to really really good there by virtue of the swim-or-drown approach their marathon hours in the clubs brought them there, but because of the sex. Our Mr. Lewisohn urges caution:
Sex was everywhere, and figured high on the Beatles' menu. There was no chance they'd match the fidelity demanded of girlfriends back home. And yet, because so much happened to the Beatles in Hamburg - and because, supposedly, every excess was availalbe here so easily - detaching fact from fiction just isn't possible. (...) To give just one example, Pete Best - an honest man, prone to understatement rather than exaggeration - has talked about all the Beatles having sex simultanously at the Bambi Kino, but George, speaking of the unforgettable occasion he lost his virginity, clearly describes John, Paul and Pete being in the room at the same time, in bunk beds, which is a 1961 situation. Accordingly, as unlikely as this is, it appears George managed to go through the entire extraordinary Hamburg experience of 1960 without having sex, despite the mass of opportunities, a healthy sexual appetite and Stu describing him in print as a Casanova.
Another good example of Lewisohn's narrative caution is part of the how-Pete-got-fired-and-Ringo-got-hired tale from 1962:
It was at this same time, around the end of July, that - probably - a strange incident took place, when John and Paul made a 332-mile return road trip to talk to Ringo at Butlin's. Paul had just passed his driving test, but had yet to buy a car, so they went in the van - Neil would remember them taking it, and reliable witnesses saw them at the camp, including Johnny Guitar and Rory Storm's mother Vi Caldwell, who was on holiday there at the time. But it all lacks clarification. Paul could have phoned Ringo from home, but the suggestion is that he and John made a mystery trip along England's winding A-roads, west coast to east coast, like The Nerk Twins Go To Lincolnshire. There is also no explanation why George, who'd instigated getting Ringo into the Beatles, didn't drive them in his car. And while witnesses have insisted that it all happened, the story is short on verification by the key parties: Ringo has never mentioned it, John never did, and Paul, when asked about it in 2011, has just a 'vague recollection'.
Then there's Lewisohn going for various popular legends with gusto, including the one that Brian Epstein got the Beatles' first single (not counting My Bonnie, which they recorded as Tony Sheridan's backing group), Love Me Do, into the charts and to number 17 via buying so many copies for his own store in Liverpool:
As the Beatles began to go national, so Brian began to find he'd fewer friends that he thought. Gossip about 'the ten thousand' was traded maliciously and without proof by people jealous of his success or keen to claim 'insider' status. No one considered Brian's membership of a comittee (within the Grammophone Record Retailers Association) that challenged suspicions of chart malpractice, or his resistance of faking 'My Bonnie' into even his own shop's published Top Twenty, or - most striking of all - the fact that in 1962, it made no difference of how many copies a shop sold of any records because the charts weren't computed that way. Nems had been a 'chart return' operation for years - it stil provided data to Melody Maker and now also to Record Retailer - but those papers' weekly phone calls and questionaires didn't ask for sales figures, only for a shop's bestselling records ranked from 1 to 30; the papers awared 30 points for the number 1 record down to one point for the number 30, and calculated an overall national total. All the charts were produced this way, as they still were in America. Brian Epstein had no need to buy ten thousand 'Love Me Do's' to fake it into the charts; he didn't even need to buy one.
Lewisohn's attention to detail includes pointing out the unromantically obvious yet usually ignored: until the Beatles befriended the Exis (which led to Astrid Kirchherr offering her parents' house as an opportunity for everyone to take a hot shower, and also to her mother volunteering for the laundry), the group who lived in two rooms behind a cinema with a restroom (no shower) as their only opportunity to wash both themselves and their clothes and who smoked up to 40 cigarettes per day each must have stunk pestiantally. During their second Hamburg gig, they'd also become friendly enough with Horst Fascher the bouncer and in Paul's case with Rosa the toilet caretaker at the Top Ten Club for both Fascher's mother and Rosa to help out with the laundry and with washing facilities as well, but during the first time in Hamburg, there really was nothing until Astrid.
The three Exis - Astrid Kircherr, Klaus Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer - were all interviewed over a period of years for Lewisohn for this book (as were the survivors among the other Hamburg friends, like the Fascher brothers), and along with the early Liverpool fans of the Beatles, it comes across that Lewisohn developed the most affection for these particular witnesses. Since I happen to be fond of the Hamburg crowd as well, I'm not surprised. (One of the most likeable aspects for me is the Astrid and Klaus relationships, because I don't know many male/female relationships in real life that start out as romance, quickly come to realise this doesn't work and then settle into a life long strong friendship instead. This in a world where people rarely manage to be even civil to their exes pushes buttons for me. There is a great documentary German tv did on Klaus Voormann, who went on to have a rich vand varied career even aside from his Beatles-related projects (among others, he played bass for Carly Simon - on "You're so vain", no less, B.B. King, Lou Reed, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dr. John and of course for the group Manfred Mann, whose regular bassist he was; when he tried his hand at producing, he ended up producing one of the biggest hits of the Neue Deutsche Welle in the 1980s, trio), and where you have Astrid chatting about Klaus and teasing him re: his ears that is one of my favourite "old people with a life time of friendship behind them" real life situations.) This means we get detailed analysis and circumstances for the photographs both Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer took of the Beatles, which became iconic afterwards, and where exactly in Hamburg each photo was taken. At which point Lewisohn the sober historian becomes Lewisohn both the Beatles fan and the fan of the photographers.
re: Astrid's photos, starting with the group shot:
The Beatles had maybe four hours of sleep after stepping off the Kaiserkeller stage, and under notice from Koschmider their Hamburg experience was unravelling. All this and more is in their faces. This one photograph singlehandedly defined the rock band image: young punks who think, dress and act differently to everyone else; who have ego and ambition to burn, but no future plans. Astrid's other photos from the Dom are its equal. There is John alone with his Rickenbacker, sitting on the front of a heavy lorry, and John joined there by George and Stu with their guitars. There are fine photos of George; and, best of all, some extraordinary photos of Paul and John, individually, with Stu out of focus in the background. These are high calibre intimate portraits, free of artifice, photos that probe inside. 'I didn't have to tell them not to smile, they just knew. They only had to look straight into the camera. They were absolutely professionals, even if it took a long time to get everything just right. No one got angry or said they didn't want to carry on."
Astrid photographed George side-on, aware he was sensitive about his splayed ears, what the friends lovingly called his Segelohren. ("I tried to capture George's childlike and naive aspects.") Paul is natural, not mugging this time; he shows no trace of his awkward relationship with the photographer, but one eyebrow hovers as if slightly, fascinatingly questioning. ("I tried to bring out Paul's wit and his airiness.") John doesn't pull a crip but lets Astrid come close, full into his face and deep into his eyes, behind defenses to sorrow and vulnerability. ("I tried to capture John's wit and sensitivity.") Pete slipped away after the group shots and features in no other image, and Astrid never took his picture again. He wasn't with the Beatles when, after the session, she drove them to her house for something to eat - and another world opened up. Stu had already been to 45a Heimsbüttler Straße, but this was the first visit for John, Paul and George, their first blessed release out of St. Pauli, into the trees and quieter streets of residential Hamburg and Astrid's arty world. They instantly loved it.
Leaving completely different financial circumstances aside - and for the first three years of the Beatles/Exis relationships, from 1960 to 1963, it was the Beatles who profited from knowing the Exis, who offered generous hospitality and devoted fannishness, coming to the respective clubs the Beatles played in nearly every night after Klaus Voormann had found his way there - , I was also struck by the different family reactions. Astrid's mother, Nielsa, had no problem with her daughter taking up with a penniless British musician (or living with him in every sense of the word), while John faced endless opposition to Cynthia from Mimi, and Stu had to face considerable opposition from his mother. (While Millie Sutcliffe probably would have objected to Stu speaking of marriage as early as November 1960, - Lewisohn quotes the relevant letter - even with an English girl, Astrid's nationality really was an obstacle, and it never got that much better, culminating in Millie accusing Astrid of murdering Stu after his death.) (His sister Pauline would of course years later accuse John of the same thing.) Lewisohn manages to write this with understanding for everyone involved:
Millie Sutcliffe said that John averted his eyes when she entered the arrivals hall, but there was rarely much affection between the two of them and none by the time she made the remark (1970), so the truth is hard to establish. It was of course simply a horrible time for everyone. Millie and Astrid, the two principal mourners, had the worst relationship of all, but here they were, thrown together in grief and a thousand angry questions. Millie had to formally identify her son's corpse. a gruelling scene was played out in private at the morgue, enough to establish further polarization between Millie on one side and Astrid and Klaus on the other. Millie also had to arrange transportation of the body back to England, for the funeral. She wasn't going to lot him be buried in Germany. Her anti-German feelings had blanketed everything within these past twenty months. As Allan Williams had noted, she held the opinion shared by many in Britain for whom the two world wars were within living memory: "The only good German is a dead German." First Germany had bombed Millie's Britain into bankruptcy, now her son had died there, with no doctor preventing it. She thought the worst of everything and everyone."
(Millie eventually calmed down enough to enter into intermittent correspondance with Astrid, which is why we have a letter from Astrid (in broken English), written at the time, about the Beatles being supportive of her post funeral - testimony to that effect years later after the group became famous would have been one thing, but the letter from the days when it happened when they were still just another British group who happened to be old friends is another - which also includes praise of Cynthia, via letters, being supportive as well; since interconnectness between the supporting characters of the Beatles saga always fascinates me I glomped on this bit of news. (When John finally got around to his belated honeymoon with Cynthia, in Paris, they met Astrid there.)
For the conclusion, two quotes from Lewisohn's interviews with new sources. One re: the Paul and George hitchhiking trip to Wales in 1958 which ended up in Harlech where they camped outside of a farm:
John Brierly, the then-16-years old son of the farm owners, remembers Paul and George 'wandering around':
"They didn't know us. It was just "'Can we stop in your field?' We had quite a bit of land on the back. Mum said that was fine, so they put up this crappy little tent and started camping. It poured with rain during the night, and because their tent was useless they were wet thorough. So Mum said, 'You can't stop out there, come in'. They stayed in the bungalow, both of them sharing a double bed, and Mum fed and watered them for the duration of their stay. My abiding memory is Paul playing my crummy acoustic guitar upside down for the left-hander. George also played it, and we had a piano in what we called 'the bottom room'. Buddy Holly's 'Think it over' had just come out, and I remember Paul working on it and working on it until he'd completely figured out the piano solo in the middle. My younger brother Bernard loved the way Paul pounded away at the Little Richard songs, and and kept bothering him to play them again, and Paul was always happy to oblige."
And the other illustrates what I mean about Mark Lewisohn using the early fans, especially the female ones, and their experiences. Here it's Pat Moran, who became a fan pre-Hamburg (rare) and with whom they corresponded later on (the letters also provide later quotes). So, here's a look on how you fared as a female rock 'n roll afficiniado:
Pat Moran was an intelligent 16 years old Catholic girl from Wallasey who went to the Grosvenor most Saturdays. Her mother died when she was nine, and she was raised solely by her Irish disciplinarian father. 'He wouldn't let me wear any make up and never trousers, only a skirt, and he'd knock hell out of me if I misbehaved. One time, I came home late seeing the Beatles and he'd locked me out. He stood in the bathroom above the front door and shouted 'You're late' and wouldn't le me in.' Such was Pat's passion for the Beatles, it was all worthwile.
'I loved their music and the way they played it. My favourites were 'Tutti Frutti', 'Long Tall Sally', 'Cathy's Clown' and 'A Whole Lot of Shakin Going On' - oh, and 'Red Sails In The Sunset' was beautfiul. I can't say they were great musically because I don't know - my idea of music at that age was inexperienced - but they were certainly entertaining. They played music we knew, that we'd heard on the radio, but to hear them doing it was different: when John and Paul sang a rock-n-roll song together we'd all be dancing. John was the leader. He used to talk to Paul and then they'd play something, but Paul was also the leader in a way because he was very much part of it. Certainly it was between Paul and John as to who took the lead. Paul was my favourite. I can still picture him at the front with his guitar, left-handed. He was on the left side of the stage, then George along side him, then John, and Stuart on the right.'
Something in the Beatles touched Pat Moran deeply, in a way she hadn't experienced or expected. Chatting to Paul at the Grosvenor, she gathered they had hardly any money and spent weekends at John's flat at Gambier Terrace, not always with much to eat. She had a job and wanted to give something back to them for all the pleasure they gave her, so every Sunday morning after church she took the ferry across the Mersey and the bus up the Pier Head with a wicker basket of food for them.
'Friends went with me, I wouldn't have dreamed of going on m y own, and we'd arrive about midday. They were always up - we never arrived to find them unclothed - but the flat was horrible. There weren't even chairs to sit on, so we'd either sit on a bed or stand leaning at a window. We'd just talk for a while, and then I'd pick up the empty basket and go home to Wallasey. This happened maybe half a dozen times. (...) Stuart was lovely: very quiet, gentle, a really nice guy, small with dark glasses, and fairer hair than Paul. John was nice but very different. I got the feeling he wouldn't have bothered having us there if Paul hadn't be friendly with me. So John accepted that - he opened the door and let us through. Cynthia was there once but I can't say she spoke to us. George didn't really say anything. He wasn't unpleasant, he used to say "Hello" and "What did you think of us last night?", but that was about it. I mostly spoke to Paul. He was friendly and there wasn't any unplesantness about him at all - he didn't stand off or anything, he was just a nice boy. There was no sexual relationship between us, we were simply mates (...) . He was very chatty - he told me he was really McCartney, not Ramon, he talked about his song writing and we laughed because it seemed such a teenage thing. He talked a lot about the Beatles; how hard they needed to work to earn money and how they hoped to become famous. I always felt the Beatles were determined."
Paul called Pat Moran "our number one fan" , accepting her both as their first and their keenest, but her enthusiasm led to some sorry consequences for her. Her father demanded to know what the devil a good Catholic girl was doing chasing boys who played filfthy rock'n roll. And when these same boys began to affect her vocabulary - she began to say 'fab' and 'gear' because they did - he almost hit the ceiling (but hit her instead). In the end, she drove him so mad with her chattering - Beatles for breakfast, dinner and tea - that he proncounced it a sin and ordered the first Beatles fan to seek almighty God's forgiveness at confession. 'I had to tell the priest "I spend too much of my time worshipping the Beatles". He just ignored me and said, as he always said, 'Remember your prayers. Say three Hail Marys and Four Our Fathers and you'll be forgiven."
Pat was so dermined a fan that she decided to draft petitions so more people would hire them (this being pre-Hamburg, clubs and ballrooms weren't exactly competing for the honour), and tried to fix them up with her uncle so they could go on holiday.
"Two of Paul's letters back to Pat reveal what was going on for the Beatles at this moment (summer of 1960). The first was written on Sunday, August 7, and posted late on the 8th:
'It's OK, George (Carl) and I might be able to come - we fancy the idea of an holiday. Oh yes! I hope your uncle can fix us up with something, anyway if he can't it'll make us get around and look for some good bookings ourselves - it works both ways. I hope. Have you got your embroidered sweater yet, No.1 fan?"
The second letter chased the first into the mailbox late on the Monday:
'This note is to let you know that I think everything you're doing for us is great. I've seen John since I wrote and he says he can come too if you don't mind. This is nearly definite. See - we were promised some tours of Scotland, road shows, trips to Hamburg & a couple of promises have been broken already, so we'll probably be able to come; we can hitchhike down there. It's not far - is it?
I think it's a great idea about the petition.
You ask me whether I'm offended by you giving me all these gear things; well, I'm not - I'm flattered and I don't know what to say! I don't know how you can do all this for us, you must think we're not bad, or else you're just a kind hearted type."
The trip to Hamburg did work out (and thus the booking via Pat's uncle and the holidays in Rhyl did not), the rest is history, but with this correspondance of the very first passionate Beatles fan (literally; they hadn't been called the Beatles for long, going through various names sine The Quarry Men) with (barely; his birthday had been in June) 18th years old Paul, I'll conclude my review of the defnite Beatles biography: first volume.
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Date: 2013-11-02 07:36 am (UTC)