It was Fifty Years ago...
Monday, October 7th, 2013 04:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanI have just ordered a copy of the soon-to-be published first volume of Mark Lewinsohn’s three-part, definitive biography of the Beatles, All Those Years: Volume One, Tune In. Once all three have been published, if Lewinsohn fulfils his remit, there should be nothing, literally nothing left to say about the Beatles in print.
This volume was supposed to have been published a couple of years ago, with the projected completion date for the whole project, sometime between 2018 and 2020. A meticulous researcher, Lewinsohn has admitted that it has taken far longer than he anticipated and he has stated (I hope, jokingly as he is only just over 12 months older than me) that he may be in his seventies before it’s finished.
The current volume starts in the 1940s and ends with the release of Love Me Do, the band’s ‘breakthrough’ single. At 900+ pages it is as much a social history of post war Liverpool and Hamburg as it is a biography of the group.
The reviews in the Guardian, The Times and the Telegraph were uniformly good and all point out that is a very even-handed treatment, showing the development of the Beatles warts and all, rather than being a simple hagiography. At the same time, it does not unnecessarily indulge in gutter reporting, or belittling the band members in the style of Goldman’s Lives of John Lennon. If it does what it is intended to do, it will present the whole story (in due course), and provide a properly human counterpart to previous books, which in some cases have left the mythology intact and unquestioned.
I can barely wait; I’ve read Lewinsohn’s stuff before, he has a solid track record and I doubt there is anyone on the planet who knows more about the subject than he. Even the surviving Beatles themselves.
This volume was supposed to have been published a couple of years ago, with the projected completion date for the whole project, sometime between 2018 and 2020. A meticulous researcher, Lewinsohn has admitted that it has taken far longer than he anticipated and he has stated (I hope, jokingly as he is only just over 12 months older than me) that he may be in his seventies before it’s finished.
The current volume starts in the 1940s and ends with the release of Love Me Do, the band’s ‘breakthrough’ single. At 900+ pages it is as much a social history of post war Liverpool and Hamburg as it is a biography of the group.
The reviews in the Guardian, The Times and the Telegraph were uniformly good and all point out that is a very even-handed treatment, showing the development of the Beatles warts and all, rather than being a simple hagiography. At the same time, it does not unnecessarily indulge in gutter reporting, or belittling the band members in the style of Goldman’s Lives of John Lennon. If it does what it is intended to do, it will present the whole story (in due course), and provide a properly human counterpart to previous books, which in some cases have left the mythology intact and unquestioned.
I can barely wait; I’ve read Lewinsohn’s stuff before, he has a solid track record and I doubt there is anyone on the planet who knows more about the subject than he. Even the surviving Beatles themselves.
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Date: 2013-10-07 05:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-07 06:18 pm (UTC)