Off The Beatle Track

I recently came in possession of a quickie 1964 American paperback titled The Beatle Book (Lancer Books, Inc.). No author’s name appears on the cover or title page, but the many photographs are attributed to Dezo Hoffman. The photos seem to end roughly around their visit to Miami, the last stop of their February Ed Sullivan Show trip.

I don’t want to bury the lede: This book gets facts wrong and tells stories that appear to be made up, either by the unnamed authors or by The Beatles themselves (or perhaps someone in The Beatles’ camp). All of which make it wildly entertaining.

Remember their first drummer, Stu?

Let’s start with some of the facts that The Beatle Book whiffs on. I can’t provide citations, because the book’s pages aren’t numbered:

“John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool on October 9, 1940. He says that as a child he lived ‘a life of uninterrupted calm.’ He cannot recall either any unusual childhood or happiness. The even tenor of his youthful existence was shattered, however, when his mother died shortly before his fourteenth birthday. . . . After the death of his mother, John went to live with his Aunt Mimi. . . .”–Well, the good folks at Lancer got his birthday right. We probably can’t blame them for getting everything else in this passage wrong. John wasn’t speaking openly about his childhood trauma in 1964, but, for the record: being forced to choose between his mother and father at the age of 5 is “unusual”; Julia died when John was 17; and John lived with Mimi long before Julia died.

“The seeds for the plant that grew up to become The Beatles was [sic] sown in 1955 when John Lennon, then attending the Liverpool College of Art with indifferent success, got together with Paul McCartney to share a common interest in music. From that common interest came a joint determination to learn to play the guitar.”–John and Paul met in 1957; John was a student at the Quarry Bank School at the time; and both of them already knew how to play the guitar.

“The drummer who joined them was another young Liverpudlian with a background much like their own. His name was Stuart Sutcliffe.”–Pete Best’s name appears 0 times in The Beatle Book, which, in 1964, Pete probably considered a victory.

“When [John] married [Cynthia] in the Spring of 1962, he became the only Beatle to enter wedlock. They now have an infant son, born in the Summer of 1963.”–The writer seems to be sidestepping the fact that Cynthia was pregnant with Julian when she and John married in August (not a Spring month) 1962; Julian was born in April (not a Summer month) 1963.

“Paul McCartney. . . is the only one of the Beatles who is left-handed.”–The drummer who replaced Stu would like a word.

A JFK sighting and Paul’s bike

The writer or writers spend much of the book analyzing The Beatles’ astrological signs. They write sentences like, “Is it merely coincidence that astrologers claim that persons born under George Harrison’s sign, Pisces, find personal expression through the water element?” Yes. Whatever point you think you’re making in that terrible sentence is purely and entirely coincidental.

And “Ringo was born under the sign of Cancer. . . . Astrologers insist that virtually all persons born under this sign measure what is to come by their own past experience.” What on earth could have prompted someone to write this? “Oh, that Ringo. Unlike the rest of us, he tries to makes sense of what’s happening or could happen in light of other things that he’s experienced. What a weirdo!”

I’ll finish with two outlandish stories that make me think that someone associated with The Beatles planted outrageously false information with the media to see whether any gullible scribes would print it.

The writer starts a story about George by saying that when The Beatles had two weeks off in the Summer of 1963, John, Paul, and Ringo “arranged to spend the better part of the holiday with their families. George doesn’t love his kinfolk any less than they do, but he had a different idea”–he flew to America.

Where his sister Louise lived! He visited his sister Louise in Benton, Illinois! He did precisely the thing that you said he didn’t do!

Except in The Beatle Book version of George’s trip, he drove to Cape Cod, visited a supermarket in Brooklyn, and was standing on a corner in Washington, D.C., when president John F. Kennedy passed in motorcade and waved. George saw JFK! “I recognized him right away,” George said, in the fevered imagination of the person who wrote that sentence.

Then there’s the Paul bicycle story. “I couldn’t learn to ride a bike properly because I would insist on pedaling backwards,” Paul said. Well, maybe that happened. Once, possibly twice. Not so! “I fell on my head so many times it’s a wonder I can still grow hair on it. . . . I was thoroughly convinced that mine was the right way to do it, and that everybody else was doing it all wrong.”

I don’t mean to be impolite, but that would make you among the stupidest people who ever lived, Paul, insofar as you repeatedly injured yourself yet insisted that all other bike riders, many of whom didn’t continually fall on their heads, didn’t know what they were doing.

When Paul’s father, Jim, intervened and told Paul to pedal forward, “The answer sent Paul into a rage. ‘You’re just like everybody else!’ he cried. ‘That’s what they all tell me!’”

The writer ends the story by saying that “the more [Paul] thought about it, the more he began to think that just possibly the rest of the world was right and he was wrong about his unique theory on bicycle riding.”

BS. I’m calling BS on the Paul bicycle story. Not to mention the rest of The Beatle Story. It’s a terrible book. I highly recommend you read it.

Have you read The Beatle Book or any other books that you’d like me to review? Email me at beatletrack@gmail.com.