#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]

[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

[loveinstreams]

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

[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

[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]

꧁★꧂

[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)

[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’.

[javelinbk]

This ‘quote’ from Yoko is certainly something

"It's a pity, really. I like Paul! I think of him as a friend. John is the one who doesn't like Paul. Paul was always the cute one and John was jealous of that. When I first met Paul I was attracted to him. I'm like that when I really like someone. I try to get close to the guy who's close to the guy I like. That's why I was getting close to John, so I would be near Paul if he wanted to make a move. And Paul was attracted to me, I could see that. But he couldn't handle the idea of being attracted to somebody John was with because that would be a violation of the fraternity rules. I was someone else's property; that's how men think, you know. So then Paul was very frustrated because he wanted me and felt that he couldn't have me. That's why he always acted so mean to me. Men always think like that, you know. If they can't have a woman they want to punish her. But I think that he was always a little interested because of the way he looked at me. Even when he used to come here with Linda, he was always looking at me funny when he knew Linda and John couldn't see him doing it. There were other things too, like he got married because John and I did."

"I thought that he got married to Linda before you married John."

"Well he did, but he knew that John and I were planning to, so right away he married Linda so he would get the headlines first. He's like John that way, very competitive. I think that if it wasn't for me, he never would have married Linda at all. She was just a groupie, you know. I don't think they ever would have married if it wasn't for the competitive pressure between John and Paul and Paul's frustration about me. He just married her to prove that I didn't mean anything to him. I think he does still feel something about me though. Do you want to read on that and see how he's feeling about me?"

I did and it didn't look like love. Disdain, maybe, contempt certainly, but definitely not love.

"He seems to have gotten over his infatuation with you."

"Are you sure? That's very funny. Well, he hasn't seen me in such a long time, so maybe that's it… I don't know why men think that I'm so attractive. But they all seem to. I can tell from the way they look at me—Do you think if Paul were to see me that he would be attracted again? I still like him, you know."

Excerpt from ‘Dakota Days’ by John Green

[abutterpie]

Excerpt from “The Beatles” by Bob Spitz

[m1ssunderstanding]

[cosmix-soup]

i went to a book shop today and they had a book of illustrated beatles lyrics and THIS was the picture they used for two of us.... the writers knew