It’s that time of year again, with The Fest for Beatles Fans rolling into the Chicago area, Aug. 15-17 in Rosemont, Ill. Every year – well, almost every year – I preview for the Chicago Sun-Times.
This year I spoke with Searchers singer-guitarist Mike Pender and author Mark Lewisohn, whose “Tune In: The Beatles After All These Years” might be the most amazing Beatle book I’ve ever read. So much has been said and written about the Fab Four that you wouldn’t think there was much we didn’t already know. Yet Lewisohn, through meticulous research and hundreds of new interviews, has come up with a book that’s packed with surprises and revelations – and it takes us only through 1962. Volumes 2 and 3 are coming, but will be years in the making. Lewisohn takes no shortcuts.
I’d actually met Lewisohn in Liverpool in 1983. I was with a tour group that was spending a day on a mystery tour. We had two buses, I was with the group that rushed straight for the Magical Mystery Tour bus – just had to have that experience. The other bus was bigger, more comfortable and had Lewisohn for a tour guide. After a while, the guides changed places, and he came to our bus. Everyone was just amazed with his knowledge and passion --- and believe me, if you’re impressing a group of knowledgeable, passionate Beatlemaniacs who spent their vacation money on 10 days in the footsteps of the Fabs, you’ve done more than a good day’s work.
I was able to use only one quote from our interview due to space restraints in the Sun-Times, but in this blog I can stretch out. Here is the full transcript of my 15-minute talk with Mark Lewisohn:
John Grochowski: Mark, it’s going to be great to have you in Chicago, and I love your book. Have you done many Fests?
Mark Lewisohn: The one I’ve done the most is the New York Metro one, but I have been to Chicago before, 1990 I was there. Possibly one other time right after, 1992 or 3, but I haven’t been for 20 years or more to the Chicago one.
JG: You would have been talking about “Recording Sessions” then, right? (Reference is to an earlier Lewisohn book that detailed who played, did what and was in what place and when for the recording fo their music.)
ML: Recording Sessions in 1990 I would have been, absolutely, it was in 1988, Possibly I might have come after the Chronicle was published in 1993, but I don’t recall. That’s all a long time ago
JG: “Tune In” is an amazing piece of research, and when it ends, we haven’t even reached Beatlemania. I’ve read that you’re looking at 14 more years to finish the project …
ML: It really is hard to say. People keep asking me if I can come up with an approximation of how long it might take, but until I start writing them, it’s going to be very hard to know. I’m researching volumes 2 and 3 at the moment, but then I’ll write Volume 2, publish it, do some more research for 3 and write that one. But they can’t be done quickly by the nature of what they are.
JG: I’m reading about Stu Sutcliffe and the aftermath of his death, and you mention that on one ever asked John Lennon about Stu. To be able to say that, you have to hav gone through everything written and broadcast about them.
ML: I have. As far as I know I have. That’s my job, to make sure that I do so. I can do these books any way I like, but I choose to be as thorough as possible, and I would be remiss in my professional duties if I didn’t endeavor to look for and see and hear everything and I am aware of no interviews when John was explicitly asked about Stuart, which is why there are no quotes. The absence of quotes may indicate he was callous about it, but simply he wasn’t asked. He answered questions candidly, and I’m sure he would have spoken about Stuart, of course he would have done if he asked, but he wasn’t
JG: Besides the review of earlier material, how much original interviewing did you do?
ML: I’m not actually sure of the number but several hundred, maybe 300 new interviews done for Tune In, with a great many people who have not been interviewed before. It’s like anything in life, you know, there are witnesses to events and there are some people who witness events who put their hand up immediately when anybody asks if they were there. And they get themselves interviewed many times over as time goes by. But then there are others who are more reluctant to stick their hand up, and you have to go and find them and persuade them that now is the time. Quite often I was tracking people who had never been interviewed before and who told stories much more convincing and more colorful and more authentic than the stories that have been told too many times by the same people.
JG: Can you name a few who haven’t been interviewed before?
ML: Quite a few of the people who went to art school with John, including this guy called Derek Hodkin, who actually managed John, Paul and George when they were a trio, the Japage 3. He was a good one. Many of the girls who used to go and hang around the Beatles in the Cavern and at their houses and so on. Like the two girls Lou Steen and Lindy Ness, who had a particularly good relationshop with John and Paul in ’62. John and Paul took care of them, and made sure they got to gigs and let them hang around them, so they were there when John and Paul were working on “Please Please Me” on the piano in Paul’s house in Liverpool, and they kept diaries.
Knowing when it was and how they described it, and because they haven’t told it before, it was fresh. It wasn’t something they told too often which they’d embroidered, which happens a lot. And it enabled me to tale the reader right into that private moment with John and Paul in Paul’s house,.writing a song, which would become their first No. 1.
And then there was the girl Bobby Brown, who was their first fan club secretary before Freda Kelly, who went to the “Please Please Me” session, and John asked her to play on it. No one has ever mentioned that there was a girl at that session alone, the fact that John wanted this girl to play piano on the track. These people had a lot of close proximity to the Beatles at a time when they were not yet famous but were clearly going to become so because of the talent that they had. It was great to find these people.
Two girls who actually really started the fan club in ’61 who for a brief while actually managed them before Brian Epstein. It never really got off the ground, but there was this brief period when these two girls were actually managing the Beatles. I tracked down people knowing they quite likely could have something to tell me, but very often I wouldn’t know exactly what. So I’d be sitting here floored by what I was hearing
JG: What’s the one biggest surprise, something that really shocked you as someone who has lived with the Beatles story for decades?
ML: The book is actually full of them, it’s hard to pin down, because it’s a combination of new material that no one has ever discovered before, and information that if you’d read all the books that were written before AND you retained all the information you read, maybe you might know bits of this, but you won’t know it in context, you won’t see how it all weaves together to form this complete picture.
As far as I’m concerned, as people who’ve read the book all tell me unanimously it’s just like reading like you’ve never read about them before. It’s hard to pick out these particular bits. I wrote an entire chapter, short chapter, about John and Paul’s trip to Paris in 1961 which was a real turning point in all their lives. To actually look at what happened there, and to make it real, to actually put the reader on the streets of Paris, so they can almost smell it is strong.
The fact that John and Paul went to Paris is know to some people, but they won’t really have known what happened there. The fact that John and Paul tried to play there, for example, and were rebuffed by this club owner, and that they got their hair cut on the little hotel by the Left Banke in Paris, which I went to visit because I always go and look at places I write about.
One of the things that has surprised many people is the true story of how the Beatles got their recording contract and how incredibly lucky they were they way that it happened. And the way that it happened is thanks to the efforts of a many whose name is not written in any books. A man who called himself Kim Bennett, without whom we wouldn’t be talking about the Beatles. They had the talent, but he had the tenacity to push for something on their behalf that actually got them their recording contract with George Martin in a roundabout way,
JG: The music publisher? (Bennett pushed for EMI to sign the Beatles because he thought he could do something with the publishing for “Like Dreamers Do,” and later pushed for “Love Me Do” to be the Beatles’ first A-side rather than “How Do You Do It?” because he wanted to maximize publishing value of a Lennon-McCartney song.)
ML: That’s right.
What it’s mostly about is putting flesh on the bones of who these people are. Not so much a Beatles biography, but a complete biography of John Lennon, of Paul McCartney, of George Harrison, of Ringo Starr, of Pete Best, of Brian Epstein, of George Martin, of all of these people, all woven together so you get a much, much greater sense of the characters and the drive particularly of the four Beatles. How tenacious they were, how they would say no to things very readily, as well as yes. The tough job that Brian Epstein had managring them but the brilliant job he had getting them out of Liverpool and before the nation and before the world. That much is known, but how he did it and what it says about him as a person is what’s new. So you end up feeling like you know these people and that you were there while it was happening. And that is possible through the research
JG: One thing that really hit me, which maybe as Americans we knew but never internalized, was what a tough environment Liverpool was, that Ringo couldn’t always carry a full drum kit because it made him too much of a target.
ML: It was tough, no doubt about it. Liverpool wasn’t the only tough place in Britain and Britain wasn’t the only tough place in the world. But nevertheless on a day to day basis, this is what they had to deal with. But in a sense, such experiences weeded out who really wanted to do it from those who quite wanted to do it. Because the Beatles -- all four of them – were very, very determined young men.
All four of them, ambitious, determined and intent on disregarding all the advice they were getting from parents and other adults about this stupid thing they’re doing, this playing the guitar, this rock and roll and all of that, and why did they stick at it? Because of the personalities of who they were, rather like because the kind of music they liked was not everywhere around them like it is these days. You can’t move from hearing rock and roll music, you hear it everywhere, on television, on the radio, while you’re out shopping, wherever you might be, it’s around. But this was greatly frowned upon in the later 1950s. If you wanted it, you really had to go looking for it. And that eliminated the casually interested and kept only the passionate involved, and that is a very good process for making sure the people who are in it are in it for the right reasons.
JG: One of the other Fest guests is Mike Pender of the Searchers. At different points in the book, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes are the top band in Liverpool, and later the Beatles look at Gerry and the Pacemakers as their main competition. Where do the Searchers fit in all this?
ML: I always preface this kind of answer with I wasn’t there, but having done the deep level research, and particularly reading contemporaneous news items, letters, contracts, and all of that,. It’s clear that the Searchers were always a good band, or group, to use the correct word. Always a good group, but they somehow … in those days they were the backing group for a lead singer. Johnny Sandon and the Searchers is what they were through most of the period in “Tune In.” Johnny Sandon by all accounts was a good singer, and I’ve heard recordings that were made, but somehow or other they gelled better without him.
So really the Searchers story will rise in my trilogy in book 2 rather than in book 1, They’re around the scene in book 1, but not tearing up any trees. It’s in book 2 I will write about the Searchers becoming a No. 1 group on the charts. Never the biggest group from Liverpool, of course, but they were very well liked and respected. The Beatles liked and respected them, Brian Epstein would express the wish that he was their manager but it was too late, they had signed with somebody else. Brian clearly reckoned they were good and indeed they were.
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