10 Best Beatles Books

The standard Beatles history posits the star-crossed Stuart Sutcliffe as John Lennon’s best friend, until his tragic death in 1962, whereupon Paul McCartney became Lennon’s chief mate, but Pete Shotton better fit the bill. He was there first, romping with Lennon as schoolboy tearaways, and in on all the things that boys do with each other: lots of circle jerks, incidentally, in this candid, and very Northern memoir. Lennon later bought Shotton a supermarket, and the latter was awfully adept at telling Lennon when the rocker was full of shit, which was often enough. Bracing, ribald and infused with love.

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Williams is the titular figure, and you never have to sweat how good he is, how bright, how canny, etc., because he’s always there to tell you. He was the band’s first manager when, in his words, no one would go near them with a barge pole, Not a lot of people can boast like Williams does and still come off as a likable person, but that’s Williams: avuncular, shady as all hell, but earnest, like some comic-relief character from a Fielding novel who steals an early chapter or two. He loses out on future riches, naturally, but the dude keeps coming back, and even plays his role in the bartering of the wildly under-appreciated Star Club tapes.

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Beatles producer George Martin has a nice little remembrance called All You Need Is Ears, but it was his mid-1960s engineer Geoff Emerick who shot past him in the post-career Beatle book game. Emerick was integral to the sounds of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper – he is, in his way, as responsible for McCartney’s bass tone at the time as the bassist himself – and the band’s sonic palette was never richer. Here he tells you how many of those sounds came to be at Abbey Road, and what might have been a dry accounting for gearheads pulses with “damn, I didn’t know that!” narrative glee.

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The knock on this Philip Norman bio has always been that he looks down on his subjects, but the author’s honesty is admirable. In fact, the most compelling Beatles books tend to be the ones that you can have a mental punch-up over, disagreeing with a given taken, but enjoying it all the same because it makes you think, or sends you back to reevaluate something. Norman puts his readers through these enjoyable paces, and he also nails the Hamburg period better than anyone. If you want the spirit of the Beatles hustling and grinding on the Reeperbahn, trying like madmen – and pilled up, desperate, manic madmen – to get somewhere, get good, get better than everyone else so as to give the world that eventual fist pump of being the best, you come to this book.

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The volume many people think of – erroneously – as the first Beatles book set a high standard with its frankness. Released in 1968, The Beatles was the only place, for a long time, you could get examples of the correspondence between John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe. Consider these lines from a poem Lennon sent his friend: “I can’t remember anything/Without a sadness/So deep that it hardly/Becomes known to me.” That is Fitzgerald “dark night of the soul” territory, and it comes from a time when few people would have thought the Beatles anything but louts. Don’t be put off by the authorized-access element – clearly these were guys who needed to unburden themselves of some truths they’d been toting around for the bulk of a decade, and they pile up here.

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The Beatles have just ended, and Rolling Stone founder Wenner sits down with Lennon for a confessional that doubles as harsh attack, soul purging, study in how songs came to be, and, in the end, a kind of lament for something that was the defining journey of a life, which would never come close to being replicated. Lennon is more hurt than angry, one senses, as he lobs stones at the stained-glass windows of Beatledom.

Ironically, for all of the bashing, the book presents McCartney as the Beatles’ most talented member, reflecting a respect that Lennon clearly feels. He tells you – not always correctly — who wrote what, song-wise. But beyond the hurt feelings and foggy memories is a clarity of thought that emerges almost despite the man himself. As he says: “And the thing about rock and roll, good rock and roll, whatever good means, etc., ha-ha, and all that shit, is that it’s real. And realism gets through to you, despite yourself. You recognize something in it which is true, like all true art.” Hear, hear.

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