At nearly 1,000 pages long, including more than 100 pages of footnotes, bibliography, discography and other end matter, "The Beatles," by Bob Spitz, is as big as a Bible. But as we hefted this literary cinder block and contemplated reading it, we had to wonder what could possibly be left to say about the musical foursome whom John Lennon once declared more popular than Jesus.
Ten pages in, we were hooked. Bob Spitz's beautifully written chronicle breathes new life into the familiar story of the Liverpool boys who conquered the world and became, according to a recent Variety poll, the most influential entertainers of the past century. The author's passion for his subject, and for every nuance of every scene, electrifies even the most familiar moments in the legend. Spitz cast his net wide, gathering little-known information from contemporary radio interviews, fanzines, Brian Epstein's personal diaries, and such arcana as the architectural renderings for John and Cynthia Lennon's home and a pamphlet called "A Short History of the Liverpool Cotton Market." The scene-by-scene particulars are fascinating; for example, the description of Ringo meticulously rolling up towels to seal the threshold under the door of a room at the Delmonico Hotel in New York the night in 1964 when they met Bob Dylan and Dylan introduced them to marijuana. "An unusually gregarious Dylan was delighted by the Beatles' curiosity and readiness to experiment," Spitz writes. "They got right in the groove, which relaxed the recalcitrant bard, who lit joint after joint, fanning the fateful flame." The chapter ends: "Nothing would ever be the same again."
Spitz - author of a biography of Bob Dylan and a onetime manager to Bruce Springsteen - comes to his subject with the verve of someone who knows he has a fantastic story to tell. While "The Beatles" is a biography of the group, he begins by following each member from birth to the day he met the others. In the bleakness of Liverpool in the 1950's, these boys fell hard for American rock 'n' roll. While parents were humming music-hall ditties in the next room, Little Richard and Bo Diddley sang of sex and longing through the static of a transistor radio. These early scenes throb with the powerful, insolent allure of Eddie Cochran and Elvis, whose 45-r.p.m. records were passed among John, Paul and other followers like contraband.
It is poignant to read about John, Paul and George and their erstwhile band, the Quarry Men, going into Percy Phillips's shabby "professional tape and disc recording service" in Liverpool in 1958 to make a demo of "That'll Be the Day." Here, too, the details breathe life into the scene: "Phillips, a formal but snarly gentleman who'd just turned 60, spent endless hours tucked away in the hot, airless cell, engineering sessions for the popular country-and-western singers he loved." He told the boys that for the money they were paying, they could not record on tape. And they got one take, straight to vinyl. John improvised draping a scarf over the snare drum to muffle its thunder; George transposed the opening guitar riff to the B-string, "unaware that Buddy Holly capoed his guitar on the seventh fret and began lower." They then threw themselves into the song "with the energy of a man chasing a train," Spitz writes. "John seemed to know intuitively how to grab a listener's attention from the start, refusing to loosen his grip; the tension he invests in the lyric never falters." They walked out of the session with a record that they agreed each member of the band could keep for one week. That historic disc is now owned by Paul McCartney.
For those of us who were teenagers at the time, it is especially exciting to read about the Beatles coming to America. Although "Please Please Me" was No. 1 in England, recording executives considered the band unsuitable for the American market. Their first two singles flopped in Canada, which seemed to support the notion that Beatle appeal didn't travel. "In the world of rock 'n' roll . . . merely being British doomed an artist to provincialism," Spitz notes - an amazing historical irony, considering the "British invasion" that the Beatles were about to spearhead.
The band was finally signed by Vee-Jay, a small independent label; but before their tapes could be put on record, the company's president gambled away most of its operating expenses in Las Vegas. When Vee-Jay released "From Me to You," the band's third American single, in May 1963, disc jockeys ignored it and a record executive proclaimed the Beatles "stone-cold dead in the U.S. marketplace." It was only after "She Loves You" became the catalyst for what the British press dubbed "Beatles fever" and they performed before the queen that Capitol Records agreed to release "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
They were invincible heroes even before they arrived in America, so much so that producer Phil Spector booked himself on the same flight from Heathrow to New York. His reason, Spitz reports, was that Spector was afraid of flying and was betting that a plane carrying the Beatles would not crash. When "I Want to Hold Your Hand" came out on Dec. 26, 1963, the No. 1 song in America was "Dominique," a ditty by Soeur Sourire, the Singing Nun. But any notion that the mop tops were yet another musical fad or novelty act was derailed by the wit and charisma they exuded at their airport press conference. By April 1964, they had 14 singles on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. Spitz leads readers on a dizzying ride through the 1960's, taking in the band's musical and financial high points, way-out mystical adventuring, struggles over the Yoko Ono issue and what he calls their "course of reckless hedonism." That course included John's making a deal with LSD-maker Stanley Owsley to pay for a lifetime supply of the hallucinogen. On one occasion, under its influence, they all went to the Aegean Sea to purchase a cluster of islands where they planned to build four houses connected by tunnels, with the land between the homes filled with meditation posts, painting and recording studios, a go-cart track, and a landing strip. When the acid wore off, they got bored and abandoned the idea . . . but bought the islands anyway.
As we marveled at such stories and at the Beatles' awesome trajectory, we came to appreciate just how things have changed since young John Lennon first heard Elvis sing "That's All Right (Mama)" on Radio Luxembourg in 1955. Rock 'n' roll was considered marginal and disposable; the way to learn about its practitioners was to scour fan magazines or pore over sparse album liner notes. When the Beatles began, it would have been unthinkable to read a well-written biography about rock 'n' roll performers that was as serious and thoroughly researched as an important book about Faulkner or Picasso or Mao. For better and for worse, the Beatles changed all that. Their evolution sent shock waves radiating into culture and commerce as they took rock 'n' roll from the periphery into the mainstream and gave pop music a gravity heretofore unknown.