So ten years after it was published I am taking the deep dive (cliché, sorry) into Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, the (audiobook version of the) 1000 page history of the Beatles up to I guess they record 'Love Me Do' or something. TBH I was less interested in the story as I was in Lewisohn's famed comprehensiveness and claims to have uncovered unknown material, though actually I don't know enough to really know what this is (he doesn't flag it). (Similarly, and I appreciate this more, he doesn't constantly point out what the future held for them, which keeps the reader mindful of the extraordinary unlikeliness of them ever doing anything with their lives, let alone becoming megastars). One thing that strikes me about this narrative (I'm up to about mid-1960; the book goes to 1962) is that they are convinced they are extraordinary, but that there isn't a huge amount of evidence at this point that it's true - the only really interesting thing about them is that they write their own songs, although when they perform live they don't play a lot of their own songs, and their meagre triumphs/attractions/celebrated talents are the ability to mimic others. Other players come and go and are generally only barely tolerated.
Lewisohn is a good writer* and I like his bolshie pro-research, pro-history arrogance. Does this make me want to read his biography of Benny Hill? Yeah, actually it does.
Note: curiously I originally chose to illustrate this tiny thought with an image purloined off eBay of some child's drawing of the Beatles from eBay. I didn't credit it because there was no name attached, just captioned it as that - a child's drawing from eBay. Blogger refused to publish it, issuing me with a ban notice and instructing me to read all about what was prohibited from Blogger, suggesting I knew very well what I'd done. I suppose I'm still not entirely sure that it was the drawing or its caption which upset the bot - I guess I never will know (posting the drawing again below, sans caption). The above image by the way is AI, the prompt being 'The Beatles as schoolchildren cats'.
* A good mainstream writer able to write for broad appeal.
1 comment:
I bought the book (shorter version) about six years ago, but only got about a third of the way before the information detail kind of overwhelmed me....your audiobook choice might have been the better way to go. If you indulge in podcasts, there's one called Nothing Is Real that has a good two-part interview with ML.
Post a Comment