Let Me Take You Down...

I am reading a copy of The Longest Cocktail Party, which I found on Amazon a while back. It seems to have found its way back into print after a number of years. It is written by Richard DiLello, sometime "House Hippie" and latterly (and briefly) Director of Public Relations at Apple, between July 1968 and August 1970. It is a remarkably readable eye witness account of the rise and fall of the Beatles' erratic business and music enterprise. First published in 1972, John Lennon called it the only decent book written about the Beatles; the Guardian review noted that it "...views the band's disintegration with the same excluded bafflement with which Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern follow the plots of the Danish court."

And so it does.

I first encountered the book nearly 25 years ago when I first came to London. I was holed up in a hostel in South Kensington and one of the other inmates was a chap with the colourful name of Joe Beadle-Ostrovsky (no, really). He had the most remarkable collection of books; not large, but certainly eclectic and this was one of them. I've wanted a copy ever since and now it's back in print.

If ever you wanted to know why a band, particularly a phenomenally successful and lovingly isolated band brimming with unparalleled egos and good intentions should never be allowed to run their own business affairs, then this is the book to read; an insider's view of pot-fuelled psychedelic mayhem and bewilderment.

Marvellous.

Let Me Take You Down...

I am reading a copy of The Longest Cocktail Party, which I found on Amazon a while back. It seems to have found its way back into print after a number of years. It is written by Richard DiLello, sometime "House Hippie" and latterly (and briefly) Director of Public Relations at Apple, between July 1968 and August 1970. It is a remarkably readable eye witness account of the rise and fall of the Beatles' erratic business and music enterprise. First published in 1972, John Lennon called it the only decent book written about the Beatles; the Guardian review noted that it "...views the band's disintegration with the same excluded bafflement with which Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern follow the plots of the Danish court."

And so it does.

I first encountered the book nearly 25 years ago when I first came to London. I was holed up in a hostel in South Kensington and one of the other inmates was a chap with the colourful name of Joe Beadle-Ostrovsky (no, really). He had the most remarkable collection of books; not large, but certainly eclectic and this was one of them. I've wanted a copy ever since and now it's back in print.

If ever you wanted to know why a band, particularly a phenomenally successful and lovingly isolated band brimming with unparalleled egos and good intentions should never be allowed to run their own business affairs, then this is the book to read; an insider's view of pot-fuelled psychedelic mayhem and bewilderment.

Marvellous.