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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
At the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's death, a handful of writers attempt to tell us something we don't already know about the Fab Four.
Nov 8, 2005 | A 14-year-old boy sits in a suburban basement, smoking his first joint, when someone puts on the Beatles album that will, of course, alter his life forever. Maybe it's "Help!" maybe "Revolver," maybe it's "Abbey Road." It doesn't matter. Something about the sound: sweet without being saccharine, accessible but elusive -- it seems created for him, and him only. "Man," he mutters to himself, "who are these guys?"
In most cases our impressionable hero grows up, loses his acne, discovers the Rolling Stones, has sex, entertains more active passions than pop music obsession, and though he'll always dig the Beatles -- who doesn't? -- the band will never again be the deity it was in his youth. But there are the exceptions: the eternal 14-year-olds who grow up to write biographies of rock bands, devoting their adult lives to addressing those juvenile basement quandaries with scholarly gloss. Who are these guys? And, dude, how'd they do that?
Enter music writer Bob Spitz: onetime manager of Elton John and Bruce Springsteen, author of books on Bob Dylan and Woodstock, professional boomer sentimentalist. In his new "The Beatles: The Biography," Spitz devotes 856 pages of retina-impairing text to asking the question of how the Beatles did what they did. The more pressing question, however, may be whether this book is really necessary. As Spitz acknowledges, there have already been hundreds of books written about the band, ranging from fawning fandom drivel to self-serving pseudo-exposés to perfectly decent histories like Hunter Davies' authorized "The Beatles," published in 1967, which Spitz uses as a primary source. And there will, of course, be hundreds more penned over the years: new theories floated about John and Yoko, about the firing of original drummer Pete Best, about the "true" origin of those hairstyles, about what it's really like to be the pool cleaner of Paul McCartney's great-grandchildren.
In fact, alongside Spitz's book, recent weeks have brought the publication of "John," by Cynthia Lennon (John by John's first wife); "Lennon Revealed," by Larry Kane (John by dubious journalist); and "With the Beatles," by Lewis Lapham (John and band by the eruditely pugnacious Harper's editor, who reports on their infamous 1968 meditation vacation in India). Reading these books back-to-back provides a case study in the shortcomings -- if not the all-out impossibility -- of attempting to illuminate on paper what makes pop in general, and the Beatles in particular, so perennially seductive.
Spitz, of course, would shudder at the idea of being grouped as another featherweight alongside the gossips, the hacks, the cultural critics, the money-motivated ex-lovers. He aims to be not merely another barnacle suctioned to the belly of the beast, but the barnacle, who, in the process, has created a beast of his own. The press materials accompanying the book include an interview in which Spitz boasts of handing in a first draft at 2,700 pages, as if warning Robert A. Caro to watch his back next time he's strolling through Barnes & Noble. In Spitz's mind he has spent the past eight years writing what he sincerely believes to be "the" Beatles book, a biography-as-black-hole that consumes all that attempts to come near it.
Mission accomplished? If "definitive" means producing a work as clumsy as it is ambitious, as flat is it is evocative, as stultifying as it is entertaining, then without question Spitz has succeeded.
Spitz has said that for a model he looked to David McCullough, who takes a historical novelist's approach to writing historical nonfiction. McCullough is a master at fusing heroic bouts of research with a knack for storytelling, creating rollicking, Dickensian biographies that teem with eccentric personalities and lush descriptions of a pre-televised world. Inspired by this technique, Spitz sets out to deliver the Beatles as historical epic rather than pop cultural phenomenon. He prefaces John Lennon's birth, for instance, with an eye-glazing microhistory of Liverpool's shipping industry, as if the immaculate conception of the Beatle were somehow part of the city's industrial evolution. The result is often as cumbersome and hyperbolic as it is informative. But the real issue with applying the McCullough method to the Beatles is far simpler: 1966 isn't 1776, and John Lennon isn't John Adams.
This isn't to diminish the accomplishments of the Beatles just because they didn't, between songwriting and touring, create the framework for an entire nation. But unlike the Founding Fathers, the Beatles have been documented ad nauseam in movies, documentaries, interviews, concert footage, recorded recording sessions -- forces that conspire to render the biographer's florid incantations of the past superfluous. It says something that while Kane's "Lennon Revealed" is an unreadable, bottom-feeding study in journalistic desperation, the DVD it comes packaged with -- an uncut interview Kane conducted with John and Paul from 1968 -- is a fascinating glimpse into the tense chemistry between the two frontmen shortly before they went their separate ways. Maybe the image we have of the Beatles is mythologized spin -- they are, after all, a rock band -- but nonetheless it's anything but blurry. To be able to cut through the mediated glare and introduce the boys as something fresh requires a level of skill that appears to be just out of Spitz's reach.
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