150 GLIMPSES OF THE BEATLES
by Craig Brown
An overstuffed gathering of Beatlemania, an evergreen subject.
Who knew that Paul McCartney wrote “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” after watching “a couple of monkeys copulating en plein air” in Rishikesh? Or that John Lennon hesitated to let Paul join his band since Paul could play and might jeopardize his leadership? Brown, whose last book was an award-wining biography of Princess Margaret, serves up 150 episodes, most running just a few pages, concerning the lives and work of the Beatles, with poor Ringo, as ever, mostly an afterthought. (The author quotes American writer Carolyn See to deem the drummer “patron saint of fuckups the world over.”) Brown is not an uncritical worshipper, but when he does criticize, it’s seldom fresh. He observes, as have so many, that John and Paul needed each other as creative foils and competitors and that when they separated, their solo work suffered, “with John falling back on self-pity and Paul giving in to whimsy.” Still, there are some little-known moments here, as when Kingsley Amis railed, “Oh fuck the Beatles” in a bitter letter to Philip Larkin, attaching a nasty racist epithet to Yoko Ono in passing. Another example is when Brown describes the Maharishi’s retreat in India, which, thanks to the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, was “far from spartan,” though conducive enough to feelings of spiritual exaltation that John was reduced to writing “hippy-dippy lyrics” that later resolved into such self-doubting tunes as “Jealous Guy.” Collectors of all things Beatles will relish Brown’s description of their first time getting high, courtesy of Bob Dylan, who is “an enthusiast for visiting sites associated with rock stars,” touring John’s boyhood home after the National Trust acquired it. The author sometimes second-guesses, as when he decries the cover of Abbey Road, the quartet “generally looking as if they couldn’t be arsed,” but allows that it has since become iconic and often imitated, like the Beatles themselves.
Light on brand-new news but a pleasure for Fab Four completists.