Category: Beatles

The Best Beatles Books

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Stephen Thomas Erlewine at Pitchfork chooses the ten best books about the Beatles, from Philip Norman’s Shout! to Rob Sheffield’s wonderful Dreaming the Beatles.

M.I.A. (fully cognizant of the fact that there are probably 25-30 “best” books on the Beatles):

  • Mark Shipper’s Paperback Writer (cf. the back and forth email chat between Richard Riegel and myself on this)
  • Tim Riley’s Tell Me Why (listen to my 2008 discussion with Riley in which he counts down his favourite Beatle books)
  • Devin McKinney’s masterful Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History
  • Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock (only as much of a stretch as your own imagination; in his foreword to the ’86 reprint, Greil Marcus calls it “both the best and most obsessive book about the Beatles ever written”)

cf. “Top 10 Beatles books” lists in: Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Barnes & Noble.

On deck: Top 10 books about Sham 69.

Meet the Critics

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What the critics wrote about the Beatles in 1964 (compiled by Cary Schneider, L.A. Times)

I did a similar roundup here a few months back – Beatles Invade American Newspapers, Feb 1964 – but my interest was less in what people were saying about the Beatles at the time (not that that’s at all uninteresting) than in what else was going on (headline- and ad-wise, I mean) around the swirl of Beatlemania: Oswald, Castro, marijuana, Cambodia, Gitmo, Guantanamo, colour TV, etc. How and where did the Beatles fit into the collage of American life ca. Feb ’64?

Beatles Invade American Newspapers, Feb 1964

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Beatles Welcomed to US by 2,000 Screaming Fans (The Milwaukee Journal – Feb 7, 1964)
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‘Yeah, Yeah,’ Fans Screech as Beatles Hit the Beach (St. Petersburg Times – Feb 17, 1964)
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Home Lauds Beatles Aid: Calls It New Kind of Diplomacy (Toledo Blade – Feb 16, 1964)
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Rockin’ Beatles Roll In Today (The Miami News – Feb 13, 1964)
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Beatle Hater Fighting for Past (The Pittsburgh Press – Feb 29, 1964)
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Squealing Teenagers Pelt Beatles With Jelly Beans (The Fort Scott Tribune – Feb 12, 1964)
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Beatles Upped Ed’s Ratings (Kentucky New Era – Feb 22, 1964)
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Charge of the Blue Jeans (Park City Daily News – Feb 27, 1964)
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Beatlemaniacs Kick Cane From Under Aging Critic (The Milwaukee Journal – Feb 1, 1964)
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Silly Wars Cool Down

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…it may well be true that Sgt. Pepper is more bound to a moment than in a lot of the Beatles’ earlier music. The postadolescent philosophizing and premusicianly jamming of some of this music sounds silly now. But if the energy of early rock and roll is bound up in the realization of personal autonomy, this music is about beginning to discover that autonomy carries with it identifiable powers and — these sometimes take a while to come to the surface — responsibilities. Often it’s quite delighted with its incipient maturity. And that doesn’t sound silly at all.

Robert Christgau, Dec. 1967

Critical Collage: Sgt. Pepper

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Seven months ago it was 45 years ago today.

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“Like an overattended child, this album is spoiled. It reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises, and a 41-piece orchestra.”
– Richard Goldstein, review of Sgt. Pepper in the New York Times, 1967

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“So, as expected, it had to be the Beatles themselves to do the job of (one-more-time) summing up the recent by summing up the whole thing in a soft cataclysmic combination of death, sleep and multiplicity/variety, as if they hadn’t done it before… so this time it would have to be a really real end-of-culture/end-of-the-world thing. And that’s precisely what Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was/is. Bringing with it the consequent death of art forever (until someone forgets) and subsequent everybody-influenced-by-everybody-but-particularly-by-the-Beatles-and-Sgt.-Pepper, eventually dispersing it everywhere and thus inevitably devaluing the specific Sgt. Pepper focal point.”
– Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock, 1970

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“The comparison with Gershwin, in fact, is not unjustified. Just as ‘Embraceable You’ and ‘I Can’t Get Started’ were flawless popular songs but ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was disastrous pretention, so with the Beatles. At the level of ‘Baby Let Me Drive Your Car’ or ‘Hard Days Night,’ they’d been inventive, funny, acute and that’d been enough; in Sgt. Pepper, they retained the same qualities but their new ambitions demanded something more. Ingenuity and quickness weren’t remotely enough, and the loss in power proved fatal. They went flat: after all, what does third-rate Art have on Superpop?”
– Nik Cohn, Pop From the Beginning, 1969

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“…a Day-Glo tombstone for its time.”
– Greil Marcus on Sgt. Pepper in the Stranded discography, 1979

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The Two Sides of Sgt. Pepper: An Honest Appraisal of The Beatles’ Classic – A nearly two-hour audio excursion into Sgt. Pepper, featuring (amongst others) Greg Kot, Ann Powers, Anthony DeCurtis, and Jim DeRogatis.

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“Rock musicians were creating new music, so writers had to create new criticism. Writing had to be an appropriate response to the music; in writing about, say, Sgt. Pepper, you had to try to write something as good as Sgt. Pepper. Because, of course, what made that record beautiful was the beautiful response it created in you; if your written response was true to your listening response, the writing would stand on its own as a creation on par with the record.”
– Michael Lydon, review of Paul Williams’s Outlaw Blues, Rolling Stone, April 19, 1969

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Billboard Top LPs of 1967

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“Usually, people point to [Goldstein’s] Sgt. Pepper review as the moment he got his scarlet T, for turkey. He panned the record, dig, at precisely the instant when everybody was getting rather off on it. In recent times, certain revisionists and cynics have not only forgiven him, but consider him to have been right–what a joke.”
– Richard Meltzer, preface to “Redd Foxx Gets off the Pot” in A Whore Just Like the Rest, 2000

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– Ellen Willis, “The Star, the Sound, and the Scene,” New Yorker, 1968

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“Goldstein was disappointed with Sgt. Pepper. After an initial moment of panic, I wasn’t. In fact, I was exalted by it, although a little of that has worn off. Which is just the point. Goldstein may have been wrong, but he wasn’t that wrong. Sgt. Pepper is not the world’s most perfect work of art. But that is what the Beatles’ fans have come to assume their idols must produce.”
– Robert Christgau, Esquire, 1967

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“Any of these songs is more genuinely creative than anything currently to be heard on pop radio stations, but in relationship to what other groups have been doing lately Sergeant Pepper is chiefly significant as constructive criticism, a sort of pop music master class examining trends and correcting or tidying up inconsistencies and undisciplined work, here and there suggesting a line worth following… Sooner or later some group will take the next logical step and produce an LP which is a popsong-cycle, a Tin Pan Alley Dichterliebe. Whether or not the remains of Schumann or Heine turn in their graves at this description depends on the artistry of the compiler.”
– William Mann, The Sunday Times, May 29, 1967

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Billboard, July 29, 1967

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“That a song [‘A Day in the Life’] of such intellectual sophistication and artistic resourcefulness should arise out of the same tradition that only a dozen years ago was spawning ditties like ‘Rock Around the Clock’ seems almost unbelievable. But the very swiftness of the development indicates its real nature. Unlike other popular arts, rock has not been forced to spin its substance out of itself. Instead, it has acted like a magnet, drawing into its field a host of heterogeneous materials that has fallen quickly into patterns. No other cultural force in modern times has possessed its power of synthesis.”
– Albert Goldman, “The Emergence of Rock,” New American Review, 1968

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– Langdon Winner, 1968

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“If being a critic were the same as being a listener, I could enjoy Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Other than one song which I detest (‘Good Morning, Good Morning’), I find the album better than 80 percent of the music around today. But it is the other 20 percent–including the best of the Beatles’ past performances–which worries me as a critic.”
– Richard Goldstein, “I Blew My Cool Through the New York Times,” 1967 (from Goldstein’s Greatest Hits)

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“So, if Sgt. Pepper passes, what am I grousing for? Well, it did work in itself, it was cool and clever and controlled. Only, it wasn’t much like pop. It wasn’t fast, flash, sexual, loud, vulgar, monstrous or violent. It made no myths.”
– Nik Cohn, Pop From the Beginning, 1969

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“Almost immediately, Sgt. Pepper was certified as proof that the Beatles’ music — or at least this album — was Art. But what mattered was the conscious creation of event — the way in which the summing-up-the-spirit-of-the-times style of the music (which for the most part has not survived its time) was perfectly congruent with the organizing-the-spirit-of-the-times manner in which the album was released and received. Which is to say that Sgt. Pepper, as the most brilliantly orchestrated manipulation of a cultural audience in pop history, was nothing less than a small pop explosion in and of itself. The music was not great art; the event, in its intensification of the ability to respond, was.”
– Greil Marcus, “The Beatles” chapter in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 1979

And in the End

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The Beatles: For 15 Minutes, Tremendous

Nice–Nik Cohn reviews Abbey Road in The New York Times, Oct. 1969. After praising the medley on side two (“there are maybe 15 tunes in as many minutes — all of them instantly hummable, all of them potential hits”), Cohn laces into the rest of the disc: “…the words are limp-wristed [er, ouch–Ed.], pompous and fake. Clearly, the Beatles have now heard so many tales of their own genius that they’ve come to believe them, and everything here is swamped in Instant Art.” Elsewhere: “The badness ranges from mere gentle tedium to cringing embarrassment. The blues, for instance, is horribly out of tune, and Ringo’s ditty is purest Mickey Mouse.”

cf. (if you can find it–I had no luck online) Richard Goldstein’s takedown of Sgt. Pepper, also published in the NYT just two years earlier. From what I recall, Goldstein’s response to SPLHCB was much more hedged, but then, Goldstein himself was a much more hedged critic than Cohn (who wasn’t?). Goldstein’s piece sparked a wave of controversy (apparently), but this is the first I’ve even heard of Cohn’s review. What a difference two years makes?

Andrew Sarris R.I.P.

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“I must say I enjoyed even the music enormously, possibly because I have not yet been traumatized by transistors into open rebellion against the ‘top 40′ and such. (I just heard ‘Hello, Dolly’ for the first time the other day, and the lyrics had been changed to ‘Hello, Lyndon.’) Nevertheless I think there is a tendency to underrate rock ‘n’ roll because the lyrics look so silly in cold print… I like the songs the Beatles sing despite the banality of the lyrics, but the words in R&R only mask the poundingly ritualistic meaning of the beat. It is in the beat that the passion and togetherness is most movingly expressed.”

Andrew Sarris, from his review of A Hard Day’s Night, Village Voice, Aug ’64. I love Sarris’s review of this, and it puts him in an exclusive club of pre-war critics who got — or anyway, who at least attempted to get — rock and roll. (We’re talking about an extremely exclusive club here: McLuhan’s in it, for sure, Kael… and who else?). Not suggesting that Sarris became any kind of major fan of rock and roll — I strongly doubt it, in fact — but that’s beside the point, what matters is that, before such a thing as rock criticism even existed, he evaluated the music on its own terms, heard something special in the beat, took for granted its “importance” from the get-go (well, from the second get-go — not sure he has any words on Elvis, Chuck Berry, et al.).

Of course Sarris will be recalled by many for a hell of a lot more than that, and rightly so, but it’s a small moment in a giant career which, to me, seems at least worth a mention. More about Sarris here.

McLuhan @100: Bless the Beatles

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– Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Counterblast

(2011 marks the centenary of my all-time favourite Canadian, Marshall McLuhan. I’m going to mark the occasion here over the next few weeks by posting various McLuhan-related items, including though not necessarily limited to some of the intersections between McLuhan and pop music. I once half-jokingly suggested somewhere that McLuhan was “the world’s first rock critic.” This is indeed funny until you wake up one day and realize that it might just be true. As no less an authority than Tom Wolfe once asked, “What if he is the world’s first rock critic?”)

Writers Wanted for Beatles Book

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Sean Egen writes:
Hello,


I may soon be editing an anthology of writing about the Beatles.


Have you had published any articles on the Beatles or related subjects (e.g., post-Beatle activities of former Beatles)? If so, I would be interested in seeing them with a view to publishing them. The subject can be anything to do with the Fab Four: their music, their films, their cultural importance, their image, their history, etc. though I’m not too interested in their private lives except where it impacts on their art. I’m particularly interested in ‘first-hand anecdote’: articles with input from people who dealt directly with The Beatles. I’m also perfectly happy to consider Beatles-debunking articles and articles skeptical of their achievements.


As well as published journalism, extracts from books — whether in print or out of print — are welcome. So are verbatim interview transcriptions with Beatles or Beatle-associates/relatives/friends/lovers (interviews can be published or unpublished).


Articles can be of any vintage and any length, although extremely short pieces wouldn’t be too useful for my purposes.


Please e-mail them to me as a Word file or a text file, stating where and when the article was originally published. Obviously, I can’t promise to print it, but everything will be given serious consideration. If you don’t hear back from me, it’s because I have decided not to use it. If I do want to use it, I will get back to you to discuss terms.


Please also at the same time let me know what the copyright situation is with regard to the article(s). Will I need to obtain permission from the magazine that first printed it or did you retain re-use rights? No problem if the former, but I need to know for legal and practical reasons. It would also be helpful if you could let me know if in the case of you not retaining re-use rights whether you had an arrangement with the relevant magazine whereby you would receive a cut of the proceeds from any resale they managed to engineer.