#the beatles books

[crepesuzette2023]

I'm in love with "The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story" by Vivek Tiwary, Andrew C. Robinson & Kyle Baker

The 10th anniversary edition appeared in 2023. I got it for Christmas.

I love it because it's not an illustrated biography (nor is it a Beatles book)—it is a journey into Brian's mind. The illustrations are expressive and unusual. The writing tells truth as poetry. It's worthy of a man who saw what others could not—and made it his mission to share it with the world.

It shows the nights of Liverpool, where Brian learns that love is dangerous, and the stylish success of the family business, where he's Mr. Brian.

The magic moment when he meets the band that will be the life and death of him. The majestic bullfight of fame and love begins...

The book gives him an ally, an angel, a demon.

The rejections. The world saying no, go back to—

The Screams. Ed Sullivan. Nat Weiss. Boys. The Philippines. Sgt. Pepper.

Brian's loneliness and greed for success are not shown as a character weakness, but a reaction to not being allowed to love openly, due to the barbaric reality of "The Wilde Laws." There is always something missing, never a place to rest.

The book plays with metaphors and symbolism. It serves banter and stings, it seduces and cuts. And in the end...

The 10th Anniversary Edition has lots of additional material, such as an annotated playlist, early sketches, and various writings.

"... brian already had at least two social marks against him—he was Jewish and he was gay.

christ, you know it ain't easy, dusty springfield was catholic and gay but she was able to sing her way through it.

brian had to stand in the wings and watch his lads twist and shout

but those wings became the wings of the world" (andrew loog oldham) [all illustrations from THE FIFTH BEATLE: The Brian Epstein Story (10th Anniversary Edition, 2023), by Vivek Tiwary, Andrew C. Robinson & Kyle Baker. More materials on the book's website]

[loveinstreams]

"unauthorized biography" "unofficial biopic" that's a big budget rpf fanfiction if you ask me

[javelinbk]

“When we sang together,” Lennon told Mintz in one of their conversations, “Paul and I would share the same microphone. I’d be close enough to kiss him. Back then, I didn’t wear me specs onstage – Brian Epstein said they made me look old. So we’d be playing these concerts, in front of thousands of people, but the only thing I could see was Paul’s face. He was always there next to me – I could always feel his presence. It’s what I remember most about those concerts.”

Excerpt from 'We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me' by Elliot Mintz (link)

With thanks to @anotherkindofmindpod for originally posting the quote

[dovetailjoints]

obv I’m waiting impatiently for Ian Leslie’s mclennon book to come out, but I should have known that the French would get there first

If you press me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it cannot be expressed otherwise than by saying, “Because it was he; because it was I.”

[innitmarvellous]

I'm fucking crying

[georgeharrisonsmiling]

Nowhere man: The final days of John Lennon. Robert Rosen

Prisoner of Love: Inside the Dakota with John Lennon. Peter Doggett | Release cancelled in 2021

Lennon in America. Geoffrey Giuliano

[thebeatlemaniagirl]

Like excuse me-did you not hear what I just said 🙄😒

[beatlesmenrock]

it’s time for another beatles dump

[thestarsarecool]

“I was pretty lucky on the LSD front, in that it didn’t screw things up too badly. There was a scary element to it, of course. The really scary element was that when you wanted it to stop, it wouldn’t. You’d say, ‘Okay, that’s enough, party’s over,’ and it would say, ‘No it isn’t.’ So you would have to go to bed seeing things.

Around that time, when I closed my eyes, instead of there being blackness there was a little blue hole. It was as if something needed patching. I always had the feeling that if I could go up to it and look through, there would be an answer. Now, I could go on about how the wordplay in Bing Crosby’s song ‘Please’ – ‘Oh, Please / Lend your little ear to my pleas’ – might be informing the wordplay in ‘And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong I’m right / Where I belong’. The fact is that the most important influence here was not even the metaphysical idea of a hole, which I mentioned earlier, but this absolutely physical phenomenon – something that first appeared after I took acid. I still see it occasionally, and I know exactly what it is. I know exactly what size it is.”

— Paul McCartney on “Fixing a Hole”, The Lyrics

[webdiggerxxx]

꧁★꧂

[romcomisdead]

John and Paul book early release, they were giving it out for free at Central Park (strawberry fields) GOT MY HANDS ON IT!!

[myrockandrollking]

I want to start reading books about the boys as well but I don't know where to start! Please if any of you guys have any good suggestions I will gladly read them! I'm open to reading biographies about the whole band in any era, books about just one member, books by their wives or people in their lives, ect, basically anything Beatles related at all!

hi hello, Beatle people I'm wondering if there are any Beatle books (not specifically by them just about them and their history) people in the fandom can recommend as I want to start reading more of them!

[muzaktomyears]

I love that whenever Allan Williams talks about the Beatles he's like, ah yes, they were stinky little feral rat children begging for crumbs <3

from Liddypool: Birthplace of the Beatles, David Bedford (2017)

[javelinbk]

“It sounds a little sentimental, but as I approach forty I'm feeling just a bit sentimental about it all. A lot lower key. I do need the music. Not to prove I can or to compete with Paul because God knows he’s way out of my league now. But I need the music because I need it. It's what feeds me and I'm dying if it's not there. Just like I've been dying all the time you've known me.” “Until now.” “Yeah, until now. Now I've got it back again and I have no intention of losing it.”

John Lennon talking about recording Double Fantasy, as told by John Green in Dakota Days (1983)

[paulandjohn]

JOHN AND PAUL

‘I am delighted to say that Faber & Faber have commissioned me to write a book about John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Getting paid to write about The Beatles - well, that’s it, I can retire. After I’ve written this book.

The Ruffian played an integral part in the birth of this book. Towards the end of 2020 I wrote a piece called 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney and published it here. It was the quintessential lockdown project. I’d been making notes towards it for years but never found time to actually write it. I also had low confidence that anyone except superfans would read a 10k essay about Paul McCartney. It didn’t fit any obvious spaces in established media, at least not the way I wanted to do it. But I knew some of you would appreciate it, so once I’d completed it, I dropped it here. Unexpectedly and gloriously it went viral (in a good way).

When I was writing 64 Reasons I found I had to cut a lot of material to do with John and Paul’s relationship, a topic I am obsessed with, just to keep the thing down to its already overgrown length. (In fact I mentioned that in #63 - I was already thinking hey, what if…?). Given the scale and intensity of the response to that piece, I started developing an idea for a book about the two of them.

The conventional narrative about their relationship is deeply flawed. It was set in stone shortly after The Beatles’ breakup and hasn’t been much modified since. Constrained by the myopia and prejudices of the time, it misses out a lot and gets much wrong and consequently we have a very thin and limited view of both men and of what they did together.

Lennon and McCartney were more than just great mates, or fierce competitors, which is how they’ve generally been portrayed. They shared an essentially romantic friendship, a passionate love that ignited mutual creativity. The love (and the insecurity and jealousy that came with it) fed into the music, and vice versa.

I’ll track the relationship from the day they met in 1957 to the day John died in 1980: 23 years. Hence John and Paul: A Love Story in 23 Songs. I’m not just writing this for Beatles fans but for anyone who loves a love story; to me, it’s the greatest romance of the twentieth century.

OK I’ll say no more about it. I need to write the damn thing.’

*blog post from Ian Leslie’s blog The Ruffian (Nov. 13 2021).

It’s interesting that the title is no longer ‘John and Paul: A Love Story in 23 Songs’ and is instead ‘John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs’.

[abutterpie]

Excerpt from “The Beatles” by Bob Spitz