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Three Memoirs, Three Reviews
Jul. 14th, 2011 07:03 pmMore leftover from my Brückenau days: book reviews. One of the books in question I’d browsed through before but hadn’t read it properly, the other two were new to me. What the three have in common is, aren’t you surprised, a Beatles connection; otherwise they’re widely different, though each struggling with the opening sentence ofDavid Copperfield in their way: Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
( Pattie Boyd: Wonderful Tonight )
The other two books are in German and were written by two Beatles’ friends from the Hamburg days, Horst Fascher and Klaus Voormann. They make for a fascinating compare and contrast, not least because these two come from completely different corners of German society, take a completely different approach in telling their stories, and come to widely different conclusions (and some similar ones.) Horst Fascher starts out the son of a cleaning woman and a POW (his father was one of the long term POW in Russia who didn’t return to Germany until many years after the war), started a career as a boxer, which rapidly ended when he killed someone in a (non-professional, private) fight with a punch, became a bouncer in various clubs in Hamburg’s red light district, the Reeperbahn, at which point he meets not just the young Beatles but practically every rock musician of the era other than Elvis and the Stones, after some delayed stints in prison goes to the very place most people of the era couldn’t wait to get away from, Vietnam, as Tony Sheridan’s manager via Tony entertaining the troops, and spends the next decades promoting and managing anything from musicians to football stars; he’s what is often referred to as “a colourful character”.
Meanwhile, Klaus Voormann, son of a rich dentist and a banker’s daughter from Berlin, hails from what we call in German Großbürgertum (I think the English equivalent is upper class), studies art in Hamburg, discovers certain musicians in a night club after a quarrel with his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr, becomes a musician himself in addition to being a graphic artist (as a bassist, he played most famously with Manfred Mann and the Plastic Ono Band, among many others, and the cover he drew for Revolver won him a Grammy, the first to go to a German artist) and after twenty years abroad returns to Germany at some point during the 80s. Not to kill the suspense, but his book is my favourite of the lot, not least because the combination of self-drawn illustrations (and he’s really, really good at that) and the ability to narrate his and other stories very well makes for a compelling whole. Something he and Horst Fascher do have in common, though? Don’t look to either of them for accurate chronology, date or record wise. Horst puts Billy Preston into the White Album when Billy actually plays on Let it Be, while Klaus thinks Magic Alex didn’t become a hanger-on with the Beatles until after India, instead of half a year before). But that’s okay; neither of them claims to be a biographer. They tell their own memories.
( Horst Fascher: Let the good times roll )
( Klaus Voormann: Warum spielst du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John? )
( Pattie Boyd: Wonderful Tonight )
The other two books are in German and were written by two Beatles’ friends from the Hamburg days, Horst Fascher and Klaus Voormann. They make for a fascinating compare and contrast, not least because these two come from completely different corners of German society, take a completely different approach in telling their stories, and come to widely different conclusions (and some similar ones.) Horst Fascher starts out the son of a cleaning woman and a POW (his father was one of the long term POW in Russia who didn’t return to Germany until many years after the war), started a career as a boxer, which rapidly ended when he killed someone in a (non-professional, private) fight with a punch, became a bouncer in various clubs in Hamburg’s red light district, the Reeperbahn, at which point he meets not just the young Beatles but practically every rock musician of the era other than Elvis and the Stones, after some delayed stints in prison goes to the very place most people of the era couldn’t wait to get away from, Vietnam, as Tony Sheridan’s manager via Tony entertaining the troops, and spends the next decades promoting and managing anything from musicians to football stars; he’s what is often referred to as “a colourful character”.
Meanwhile, Klaus Voormann, son of a rich dentist and a banker’s daughter from Berlin, hails from what we call in German Großbürgertum (I think the English equivalent is upper class), studies art in Hamburg, discovers certain musicians in a night club after a quarrel with his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr, becomes a musician himself in addition to being a graphic artist (as a bassist, he played most famously with Manfred Mann and the Plastic Ono Band, among many others, and the cover he drew for Revolver won him a Grammy, the first to go to a German artist) and after twenty years abroad returns to Germany at some point during the 80s. Not to kill the suspense, but his book is my favourite of the lot, not least because the combination of self-drawn illustrations (and he’s really, really good at that) and the ability to narrate his and other stories very well makes for a compelling whole. Something he and Horst Fascher do have in common, though? Don’t look to either of them for accurate chronology, date or record wise. Horst puts Billy Preston into the White Album when Billy actually plays on Let it Be, while Klaus thinks Magic Alex didn’t become a hanger-on with the Beatles until after India, instead of half a year before). But that’s okay; neither of them claims to be a biographer. They tell their own memories.
( Horst Fascher: Let the good times roll )
( Klaus Voormann: Warum spielst du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John? )
