The Beatles: The Biography
by Bob Spitz

Reviewed by Chris Kemp

The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz is a great read, one of the few books in recent memory I couldn't put down (S. T. Joshi’s The Evolution of Weird Fiction is another one, but that’s a tale for another time). The book seemed to get its fair share of hype in the media, and my impression is most of it was deserved. I don’t think I've ever brought up a book for discussion with my family over Thanksgiving dinner, but that streak ended with the The Beatles (although admittedly it helped that my cousin Roxanne has been a Beatles fanatic, like, forever).

The line on The Beatles was that it uncovered new facts about the group. I’m not a great judge of that; unlike Roxanne I never dove headfirst into all things Beatles, although I do enjoy their middle period, especially the English versions of Rubber Soul and Revolver, and a number of singles that originally weren’t released on albums, “Rain,” “Paperback Writer,” “Penny Lane,” “Strawberry Fields Forever.” But just because I wasn’t a fanatic doesn’t make this subject matter any less compelling to me. If you grew up when I did, the influence of the Beatles on popular music was without peer and spurred welcomed innovation among contemporary artists.

I was a little too young for the heart of Beatlemania; for me it’s mostly black-and-white TV images including an Ed Sullivan appearance that was much-to-do about nothing for a fourth grader. But by sixth grade my perceptions had changed considerably and I was ready to grasp what the Beatles had to offer. I remember, as if it were yesterday (no pun intended), the day the older sister of my friend David Meniketti (who would later become guitarist for the metal band Y&T) brought home Revolver. I had begun to nurture an awareness of popular music, so when Dave put it on and said, “You gotta listen to this!” we did, over and over again with our mouths open. We’d never heard anything like it before, from the album’s beginning (the sound of the boys tuning up before “Taxman” --was it some kind of screw up?) to its end (the absolutely, positively, otherworldly sounds of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which I might propose as Ground Zero for psychedelic rock and all things Progressive).

Undoubtedly these kinds of experiences flavored my positive response to the book, as the Beatles did provide, to use a variation on a hoary and withered cliché, the soundtrack to my formative years. But I also think from a general perspective, the book has much to offer.

For one, The Beatles is exhaustive, a hefty tome checking in at just under 1,000 pages, about 150 of them dedicated to acknowledgments, research notes and footnotes, speaking to the meticulous investigation that creates its foundation. It begins with an adolescent John Lennon following his musical instincts into his first skiffle band (a mild musical mania running through England in the late 1950s--Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” is an updated take on the style), and ends with the breakup of the group. Along the way it makes a concerted effort to cover every phase of the band’s career and every character--major and minor--that had an influence on its development.

Spitz’s choice to begin with Lennon makes sense. The oldest Beatle emerges clearly as the driving force behind the group in its earliest days. Though the most middle class of the four (George’s family was downright poverty-stricken; Ringo’s not much better off), Lennon was the most desperate to succeed, which leads to  the main reason his presence dominates throughout--for better or worse he is the most complex, interesting character in the book, full of contradictions and tortured by any number of demons. From that perspective, he’s the most literary character, the one you’d most expect to see in a novel. And he’s by far the least likable of the four, with a nastiness that was exacerbated by his alcoholism and drug use, and a weakness of character that led him to become completely enthralled with the execrable Yoko Ono, a relationship that led as directly to the demise of the Beatles as anything. That John has been somewhat canonized in the decades after his murder is puzzling to me, given the revelations about his personality and motivations in The Beatles. Even his trademark line, “All you need is love,” is presented as a kind of coincidental one-off creation, not the result of any altruistic conviction of Lennon’s. It simply was a line that sounded cool.

The book gives plenty of ink to Paul, George and Ringo, too. Though far mellower than his writing partner (pot being his drug of choice), Paul surfaces as the most musically inspired, a fact that--when combined with his natural charisma--drove John literally to drink. Spitz also gives the creative benefit of the doubt to the oft-maligned George Harrison, a refreshing perspective (“Taxman” has always been one of my favorites,  though some might be surprised to find that it is Paul who plays the searing guitar solo during the break).

A generous portion of time is spent on the story of the band before they come together in “The Smoke”--vernacular for their Liverpool hometown--and their subsequent struggle to gain popularity with the help of Brian Epstein (an even more tortured soul than Lennon, who meets a mysterious and depressing end). For me, the most revelatory parts of the book come early, covering the years leading up to their success. Call the Beatles anything you like, but they clearly were not an overnight success. They worked in squalor for months on end in hellholes, particularly in Hamburg, where they were often forced to do half-a-dozen shows a night and sleep in unheated closet-sized “quarters.” In those pre-pot days, it was mostly booze and uppers that kept them going.

After they break first in London and then in the U.S., through a combination of talent, hard work and luck, the story becomes a little less compelling, at least for me, because having lived through the period with a keen interest in popular culture, I had already picked up some of the bits and pieces that are woven into the story.

Not to say there isn’t plenty to find out about this later period. Like how Bob Dylan, probably the only person equal to the Beatles in terms of impact on the popular culture and music of that generation, turned them on to their first joint. Or the absolute insanity surrounding the LSD-induced failure of Apple, the company, and how it bled the Beatles dry financially. Perhaps most fascinating is how mercurial and ethereal creative talent can be. All John and Paul did, in the beginning at least, was try to write songs that were a little different, and progress each time they wrote. It’s something literally millions have set out to do, but something innate set Lennon and McCartney apart. The greatness of their writing wasn’t part of some grand scheme. They didn’t read music, and they certainly didn’t buy books like, How to Write a Hit Song in a Day or Great Opening Lines for Lyrics. I find that reassuring. Hell, the book portrays John as being more or less lazy and unmotivated most of the time, but it certainly didn’t get in the way of his muse. Yes, hard work broke the Beatles as a popular phenomenon, and later on they (especially Paul and George) made the effort to seek out and soak up diverse musical influences, but the quality of their music comes from a place that is much harder to pin down.

There’s more to The Beatles than great content, however. The writing of Bob Spitz stands on its own merit. He’s an excellent stylist with a descriptive knack not often found in today’s “crank-‘em-out-to-make-a-buck” biographies. It took literally years for him to complete this book, and while his research was undoubtedly time-consuming, the effort also shows up on the page; the prose is absolute gold with impressive turns of phrase on almost every page. He paints a clear picture of Liverpool, a bleak industrial town on the skids; the Red Light District of Hamburg, where the Beatles willed themselves into visibility; and to a lesser extent, mid-sixties Swinging London. He does an admirable job of painting a complete word picture of the four Beatles and the complex characters that surrounded them--Brian Epstein, Pete Best, Stu Sutcliffe, Yoko Ono and more--no mean feat given the main part of the book is “only” 800 pages.

Something else I appreciate is that, while it is apparent that Spitz interviewed dozens, if not hundreds of people for this book, we don’t get bogged down in an endless series of direct quotes. Rather, he weaves the information he’s gotten from his sources into a seamless flow, only occasionally using someone’s exact words. I've read music biographies that pile on the direct quotes one after another and it leads to a sameness of tone and dullness of style. What Spitz does takes significantly more skill, and the reader wins, the prize being more elegant storytelling.

If I have a complaint about the book, it’s that it ends too soon, but that can’t be helped because it is the story of the Beatles, and once that story is over you’re on the acknowledgments page. Problem is, the end of the Beatles wasn’t the end of individuals within it. So you’re left hanging. We don’t witness John and Yoko’s climb out of heroin addiction and are left guessing to how their reputation grew in the meantime. We never get to see George, so long under the creative thumb of Lennon and McCartney, triumph with his three-disk set, All Things Must Pass. The relationship between Paul and Linda Eastman eventually develops into something deep and lasting, but we miss that, too.

In the end, though, it matters little, because so much good stuff has gone before. I devoured this thing in record time. Chances are, you will, too.