In 2019 The Beatles’ Here Comes The Sun had been streamed 350 million times on Spotify. That’s no shabby number, given the streaming service has been going only since 2006.
It also raises the question: will we ever tire of those boys from Liverpool? Who doesn’t find themselves singing along to I Want to Hold Your Hand or doing their own impressive “na, na, na, nas” to Hey Jude?
Sixty-odd years since their first hits, and the British band continues to captivate new audiences and spark nostalgia across generations.
Later this year New Zealand uber director Peter Jackson (yes, he of The Lord of The Rings fame) will release Get Back — a new documentary about the Fab Four. It will feature cuts from 56 hours’ worth of footage of the musos never seen before, and is already being hyped. In that spirit, here’s the lowdown on two newly released books about John, Paul, George and Ringo and their music.
The Last Days of John Lennon: The Assassination That Changed a Generation, James Patterson (Penguin Random House)
On December 8 1980, the music died.
That was the day sociopathic, schizophrenic “fan” Mark Chapman murdered John Lennon on the sidewalk outside Lennon’s New York apartment block. After five years of self-imposed musical exile, Lennon had just recommenced song writing and recording. The album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with his second wife, Yoko Ono, was hot off the press. The album’s first single, (Just Like) Starting Over, had been climbing the US music charts, and was at number eight when he was killed. There were even faint whispers that, 11 years after their break-up, the Beatles were preparing to reunite for a concert or an album.
Chapman put paid to any such prospect, for which he remains unpardonable in the eyes of many. And the outpouring of grief still reverberates passionately today. “What he has stolen from the world is without measure,” posted a fan in response to an article published recently in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Lennon’s death.
One researcher calculates more than 500 books have been written about the Beatles, Lennon, or the assassination and the mind of the murderer. Patterson — the world’s ultimate best-selling author and book-writing record holder, with 425 million copy sales — has joined the crowd with this book, the most recent of his nearly 300 published works. “Yeah, there have been other Lennon books before, but so what?” says Patterson, who claims to have been living around the corner from Lennon at the time, and says he raced to the scene when he heard gunshots that fateful night.
To understand the importance of the Beatles and the ongoing fascination with their story, recall Lennon’s musing at the height of the band’s fame and success in 1966: “We’re more popular than Jesus now.” He was misconstrued — it wasn’t a boast, but an observation on the decline of Christianity in the tumultuous, counterculture, Swinging Sixties. But his words explain why, for many Baby Boomers, Lennon’s murder was a defining moment of their generation, and linked with the assassinations of president John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr in shaping the fallout for subsequent generations.
Patterson has blended many elements into a gripping narrative: journalistic research, rumours and anecdotes, memories from interviews with fellow Beatles and other musicians and celebrities, and the recollections of witnesses to the murder. The book is a form of nonfiction in the guise of a psychological suspense novel, similar to most of the fiction for which Patterson is famous, especially the Alex Cross detective thrillers.
The book doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive biography, but it nevertheless packs enough detail and intrigue to titillate even the most knowledgeable Beatles followers. Such as how the band inspired Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write their own music in the Lennon-McCartney formula. Backstage after watching one of the early Rolling Stones’ gigs, Lennon and McCartney decided to find a quiet corner and compose a song, which they casually gave to the Stones. Richards was amazed: “Jesus, look at that. They just went over there and wrote it,” he said to Jagger. I Wanna Be Your Man became the Stones’ first original hit in 1963.
Hindsight brings fresh perspectives and analyses. Was Lennon a true musical genius? (Debatably, McCartney was only marginally less inspirational, and was the force of graft and craft within the band.) How genuinely influential was Lennon as a voice of activism in support of the social causes of the era?
Patterson doesn’t attempt to answer the first question, and the closest he gets to exploring the second are brief, wide-angle chapters on the reactionary factions against Beatlemania: Christian conservatives in the US, powerful right-wing politicians determined to stifle Lennon’s anti-Vietnam War message, and their acolyte administrators intent on denying him permanent residence in America.
The book’s subtitle is also a ruse. That the assassination changed a generation is true, but trite. Missing are narrative threads which convey how the Beatles’ music revolutionised culture and how it galvanised a vision for how the youth wanted to change the world.
Perhaps the best reason to read The Last Days of John Lennon is that it prompts the urge to listen to the music. Unlike Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix — all under 30 when they died, leaving the unknown of partly unfulfilled potential — the musical legacy of the Beatles, and Lennon solo, is immense. Lennon’s tragic death robbed the world of a musical and cultural icon, but there is so much we can keep engaging with and enjoying.
For those who love the music of the Beatles or Lennon, the life-and-death chronicle of possibly the world’s most influential rock musician ever will be an engrossing reminder of heady days and grand, ground-breaking rock. For those of a younger generation, or who are not particularly in love with music from 50 years ago, the book shines a light on what all the fuss was about.
David Gorin
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, Craig Brown (Fourth Estate)
British satirist and author Brown’s biographies shake up the genre. They are unlike the often lumbering birth-to-death narratives we’ve got used to in the category, and rather go for punch, humour and fun, without losing any gravitas or accuracy. If you read Brown’s 2017 treatment of England’s Princess Margaret (the queen’s sister), Ma’am Darling, you’ll know the drill. One minute you’re reading a straightforward chapter describing the badly behaved royal, the next you’ve been plunged into a fictitious memoir that imagines she’d married artist Pablo Picasso. Then there’s a newspaper article or list. Brown loves a list.
Last year he turned his attention to the Beatles, and the result, this book, is an equally engaging, snappy and unexpectedly fascinating (albeit long) homage to the group. Loosely linear in its telling, what you’ve got is the sort of work trivia nuts love: here an off-the-wall fact about the lads’ early years playing in Hamburg, Germany, there a mad bit of data about their success on the charts; also a behind the scenes look at song lyrics, and so on.
It’s a zigzag of memories and commentary. When you read the endless list of interviews, other Beatles biographies and articles Brown cites as references, you’ll see just what an impressive feat this is. And he sure has cherry-picked some unexpected soupçons. Did you know, for example, that one of Lennon’s teeth was sold on auction to a Canadian dentist, Michael Zuk, for £19,000 (R394,000) in 2011? Turns out he’d really bought the molar for the DNA, and not because of his profession. After Ono’s legal team halted any ideas of him using it to clone the musical icon, Zuk figured he’d instead try to use its genetic evidence to make a buck out of establishing whether Lennon may have sired some illegitimate children.
From vignettes of Brown’s hysterical visits to the childhood homes of McCartney and Lennon (both buildings now National Trust museums) to a final, tender piece on the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, the book’s 150 chapters offer a kaleidoscope of stories about the four Beatles, their private lives and their personalities. The work also offers a glimpse of the decade in which the quartet ruled the music roost, and of the world they were, in part, responsible for shaping.
There’s a chapter on their “outlandish” haircuts, and much commentary about the over-the-top, shrieking fans and the Beatlemania that gripped the world in the early 1960s. There are accounts of them meeting Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley (it went badly) and Queen Elizabeth — who presented them with MBEs in 1965. Lennon later returned his in protest against the Vietnam War, and as he put it in an accompanying letter, “Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing ... ”
Which two elements enthralled me most in the book? First, the sections that deal with the band’s company, Apple Corps (core — geddit?). They reveal how a storm of disorganisation, anarchy, mismanagement and, frankly, the bunch of sycophantic, opportunistic chancers they surrounded themselves with almost spelt financial disaster for the fellas. They lost a fortune thanks to crazy ideas, negligence and bad people. Also, if you were in any doubt, this is the proof that making commercial decisions when high on LSD isn’t such a clever move.
Second, there are the moments Brown chooses to highlight the “normal humans” who had their lives changed by the band. The people who had chance meetings with them, the guy who got to be in their music video, the girl who snipped off a piece of Ringo’s hair during a party at the British embassy in Washington DC and, most charmingly, the scores and scores of young fans who worshipped the band and their music. Brown lists their letters of devotion, which include this:
Dear Beatles,
I told my mother that I can’t imagine a world without the Beatles, and she said she could easily.
Loyal forever,
Lillie K Fairbanks, Alaska
Lillie K — you were on the money.
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