Mark Lewisohn - Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years

The Beatles Live! (1986)

The Beatles: 25 Years in the Life (1987) [USA: Day By Day, 1990]

The [Complete] Beatles Recording Sessions (1988)

The Complete Beatles Chronicle (1992)

Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy (1998)

Funny, Peculiar: The True Story of Benny Hill (2002)

Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy (2nd edition, 2003)

AS COAUTHOR

In My Life: John Lennon Remembered (1990)

The Beatles London (1994)

The Beatles London (2nd edition, 2008)

Copyright 2013 by Mark Lewisohn

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York

www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC

Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Little Brown UK.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewisohn, Mark.
The Beatles : all these years / Mark Lewisohn. First edition.
volumes cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Beatles. 2. Rock musiciansEnglandBiography. I. Title.
ML421.B4.L47 2013
782.421660922dc23
[B}
2013031654

ISBN 978-1-4000-8305-3
eBook 978-0-8041-3934-2

Jacket design by M-80 Design
Jacket photographs by: (left to right) Beatles at Liverpool Airport: The Epstein Family; Beatles at Indra: Courtesy Aarkive Features; Ringo with Ty, Johnny and Rory: Courtesy Iris Caldwell; John, Paul and George at Hulme Hall: Graham Smith

v3.1

For Richard, who gets it,
and Neil, who got it but went too soon,
and Liverpudlians everywhere, whose heritage this is

Every once in a while, life conjures up a genuine ultimate.

It can be said without fear of hyperbole: this is what the Beatles were and are, and fifty-plus years after they leapt into viewfiftytheres little hint its going to change. So many would-be successors have come and gone, theres now an acceptance that no one can be bigger or better. John Winston Lennon, James Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey hold on strong, universally acknowledged as a cultural force, still somehow current and woven into the fabric of modern lives. John, Paul, George and Ringo, the four Liverpool lads who pumped the heart of the decade that also wont shut up, the 1960s.

If it was necessary to sell the Beatles you could point to many achievements, but their music underpins everything: one game-changing album after another and one game-changing single after another, 214 tracks recorded in seven crowded years in a kaleidoscope of styles. This music is known, loved, respected, discussed, imitated, cherished and studied; it continues to inspire new artists and be reshaped impressively in every genre; its song titles and words are adapted for headlines in twenty-first-century media, quoted and folded into everyday vocabulary, chanted in football stadiums. Infused with the Beatles energy and personalities, this music still lifts the spirit and is passed joyfully from generation to generation.

Clearly, something special happened herebut what? How?

Consider too

how the Beatles repeatedly married cutting-edge originality with immense mainstream popularity, when for almost anyone else these are mutually exclusive, and how (and why) they ditched their winning ideas every time the world raced to copy them;

how they did everything with down-to-earth humor, honesty, optimism, style, charisma, irreverence, intelligence and a particularly spiky disdain for falseness; how they were articulate, bold, curious, direct, instinctive, challenging, blunt, sharp, polite, rude, prickers of pomposity, rule-breakers never cowed by convention;

how they created a profound and sustained connection to their public, and how they resisted branding, commercial sponsorship and corporate affiliation and hype: the Beatles were free of artifice and werent the product of market research or focus groups or TV talent shows, they were original and developed organically when everyone was looking the other way.

Ive been waiting for the book this sweeping story demands, one that stares unflinchingly at how it happened and what it was all abouta book to shoot adrenaline back into extraordinary events crushed under the weight of fifty years telling (and not always very good telling at that). Ive wanted a history of deep-level inquiry where the information is tested accurate, and free of airbrushing, embellishment and guesswork, written with an open mind and even hands, one that unfolds lives and events in context and without hindsight, the way they occurred, and sets the Beatles fully among their contemporariesthey never existed in isolation and were always part of musical scenes with friends and rivals, young turks together in clubs and nightclubs.

Ive also wanted a book that explains how the society that shaped the Beatles first received them and was then shaped by them, that looks at how John, Paul, George and Ringo dealt with each other as friends and bandmates, and how they so deftly handled the media and such phenomenal celebrity. Ive wanted it shown how they transformed the worldwide music industry, and shook global youth culture awake, and induced a revolution in how people listened to and played music. The Beatles didnt invent the electric guitar and werent the first guitar group, but every rock band since 1963 is fulfilling their legacy, especially if they write their own songs.

In 2003, I decided to have a go. As a professional historian-researcher who had worked around (and sometimes for) the Beatles for thirty years, I could draw on long periods of access to the right people and resources. Beyond that, I was aware that mountains of unfound knowledgevibrant color, vital detailswere out there if you knew where to look.

But, one book? Way too much of relevance and interest happened in and around the Beatles to fit into one book. This is a richly epic tale; cramming it into a single volume would mean cutting reams of material essential to the understanding. This book, Tune In, is the first in a trilogy titled All These Years that I hope will do the subject justice. (It is, at any rate, my best shot.) Its an objective and independent three-volume series that begins at the beginning and will go on until it reaches the end. Primary sources are central: an array of research discoveries, and every conceivable form of archive document found in private and public handsletters, contracts, but fictions fall quicker through the sieve.

Its been a continually surprising experience. Ive likened the challenge (which is ongoing) to assembling a multimillion-piece jigsaw puzzle of lives and moments: the more pieces you have and can place right where they belong, where they really fit, the clearer the picture becomes both in vivid close-up and broadly detailed context.

Tune In takes the Beatles from before their childhoods right up to the final night of 1962 when, after packing several years into the previous three, they know success is theirs to grasp but have no clue theyre on the cusp of a whole new kind of fame, a white-hot and ever-royal celebrity. These, then, are the formative years, the less visible years, the premadness yearsand in many respects the most absorbing and entertaining period of them all. (This can also be claimed for the others, of course.)