Hunter Davies wrote an authorized take in the late ’60s Philip Norman published the essential “Shout!” in 1981. Lewisohn is far from the first to try to get underneath the shell. The Beatles, too, have become encrusted by an aura of nostalgia and wonder, as if subjects of an ancient legend. American media is currently drowning in biographies and retrospectives linked to the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, and for all the attempts at hard-nosed history, it’s still challenging to watch videos of the youthful president and not be swept away by the yearning, emotional pull of what-might-have-been.
“The book is anti-myth.”Īh, but it’s a season for myths. “It’s not about legends, it’s not about icons, it’s not about myths,” he says. He’s emphatic that “Tune In” isn’t a hagiography, the literary version of a Beatles concert’s high-pitched screams. The Beatles' popularity, energy and cleverness made them favorites on the BBC. “And it needs to be done, and it needs to be done now, while the witnesses are still with us – most of them – and while access to archives is still possible.” “This is a proper work of history,” he says. He compares the work to Robert Caro’s equally monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, which is now four volumes long and has just started the story of LBJ’s presidency. Lewisohn, 54, has immersed himself in original documents, listened to and read contemporary accounts and interviewed those who were there, all those years ago. (For those who really can’t get enough detail, there’s an “Extended Special Edition” available in Britain that runs 1,728 pages and retails for £120 – about $190.) The book ends in 1962, with the band on the cusp of stardom. The result is “Tune In,” a mammoth (800 pages, not including notes) biography of the Fab Four that’s just the first of a projected three-volume work. “It’s a story that’s lost all its excitement, because it’s been trodden down through too many bad tellings through the years,” says Lewisohn, the Beatles historian and author of such detailed works as “The Beatles Recording Sessions” and “The Beatles Chronicle.” “I just felt I would disregard everything that’s been done. A group of scruffy musicians from Liverpool, a depressed port in northern England, become the biggest band in the world, known on a first-name basis? They put out album after groundbreaking album, their influence as great as their popularity? They dominate the pop culture of the 1960s and break up while still at the top of their game?īut there’s been enough mythmaking, says Mark Lewisohn. Today, five decades after Beatlemania erupted, it seems almost inevitable, a magical confluence of talent and timing. The story of the Beatles has taken on the power of myth.
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