http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Cb9jP8PFxn4
Kitty Empire has high praise for Mark Lewisohn’s meticulous new bio, Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, the first of three volumes:
We probably all knew the acerbic John Lennon could be a bastard, as cruel as he was witty, but Lewisohn uncovers interesting levels of illegitimacy in many of these often part-Irish Catholic families. In fact, they’re not even called the Beatles until 300 pages in; Ringo doesn’t actually join until around page 700. This is the story of the Beatles as schoolboys, of Lennon and McCartney “sagging off” to write in secret at Aunt Mimi’s, of the latest rock’n’roll and R&B cuts, and of lost virginities, of Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best and Hamburg, of the “Piedels” – the German mispronunciation of Beatles, the Penises – on “prellies” (Preludin, the upper guzzled by many in the cellar clubs), ripping it up on the Reeperbahn. Sometimes, these famous men really seem like motherless children – both McCartney and Lennon lose their mothers in their teens and this huge, shared loss is given sensitive and apposite emphasis. Deaths, desertions and departures are key to the story.
Liz Thomson is also impressed with the author’s rigorous research:
Lewisohn spent six months living in Liverpool, and you can tell. Not just in the way he traces Beatle forebears but in the way he puts those forebears in their socio-historical context; in his understanding of the city’s psychogeography:
what it meant to grow up in rough-tough Dingle, as Ringo did, or in south-suburban Woolton, as John did, or to experience life like Paul and George, on the council estates created by Liverpool Corporation after the war as it moved people out of the city, leaving its bomb-damaged historic heart to rot until the 1980s renewal. The would-be Beatles criss-crossed its gap-toothed streets, guitars on their backs, in search of new musical experiences. Paul and George once crossed town to meet a stranger who they’d heard knew how to form a B7 chord. Today, you’d Google it.
Colin Fleming commends the book for bringing to life the sense of luck and good fortune that drove the group’s career:
If you know the Beatles’ story arc, you are aware that despite the adulation, the chart-topping, the madcap tours, “We’re more popular than Jesus,” Yoko, the breakup—all of that which occurred between 1963 and 1970—the choicest parts of the band’s story are the early, pre-fame years, culminating with 1962. … In this book, which focuses on 1957 to 1962, Lewisohn picks up on that supernal feel to the Beatles’ success, and at times his own wonder that all of this ever happened, with one amazing coincidence after another, feeds into our own.
For instance, crucial, confidence-building early work—a tour as a backing band in Scotland—comes about “not on merit but because no one else could fill the bill and they shifted everything to make it happen.” A recurring moment, the defining scene of this book, which happens about a dozen times: In doubt, and in the dumps, with ostensibly no prospects to ever get anywhere, one Beatle turns to the others and says, basically, “Something’ll happen.” And then, boom: It does.
He also flags the above recording – from a seven-song set in October, 1963 – as an example of the band’s raw energy in those early days:
They open with Paul McCartney’s “I Saw Her Standing There,” and they immediately make clear that this is going to be a full-speed affair. The sound isn’t just loud; it’s over-loud, possibly the loudest rock and roll anyone had ever cut to date. The guitars distort, adding abraded edges that make the song sound more lascivious than it is, the lines of “She was just 17 / If you know what I mean” now sufficiently scabrous to get the likes of Humbert Humbert up and dancing. The four guys sound thrilled, maybe over the fact that for once hardly anyone is screaming back at them.
The Dish 