Behind the Beatlemania: just the facts, lots of them

Like Martin Scorsese's recent documentary about the young, meteoric Bob Dylan, this book powerfully evokes both the excitement and the price of such a sudden rise to fame. Janet Maslin reviews a new book on The Beatles

Bob Spitz says that his book about the Beatles is only one-third as long as the manuscript that he submitted to Little, Brown & Company. Even so, it spans nearly a thousand pages and is longer than major new biographies of Mao and Abraham Lincoln. Why?

Is it major news? A press release citing the book's big revelations includes "a full account of the day Ringo was stolen away from his previous band to join the Beatles." Keyhole-peeping? The gossip is kept at bay. A trove of musical minutiae? While the musical details will be new to some, many a Beatlemaniac already knows that it took three pianos and 10 hands to hit the walloping E chord at the end of "A Day in the Life."

Here's the new angle: Spitz means to outdo these conventional tactics by elevating the Beatles' story to the realm of serious history. Imagine John Adams with music and marijuana. The Beatles is written for the reader who seeks deep, time-consuming immersion in the past and can look beyond traditionally lofty subjects to find it. Like Mark Stevens's and Annalyn Swan's recent biography of Willem de Kooning, it means to meld the forces of personality, culture and art into a broad and emblematic story.

At first this is worrisome. Yeah, yeah, yeah: Spitz goes back centuries to link the slave trade with American and West Indian exports shipped back to Liverpool. He locates John O'Leannain and James McCartney II as Irish refugees from the potato famine of the 1840s. He embroiders the atmosphere of his subjects' early years, imagining how young John Lennon (as the family name evolved) was awakened by "a clatter of hoofbeats as an old dray horse made milk deliveries along the rutted road."

But the built-in momentum of the material quickly takes over. And this book – with its eerily gorgeous cover, unguarded photo illustrations and enchanting endpapers that reproduce a teenage Beatlemaniac's love-struck scrawl – begins to exert its pull. With sweep already built into its story and the cumulative effects of the author's levelheaded, anecdotal approach, the book emerges as a consolidating and newly illuminating work. For the right reader, that combination is irresistible.

Much of this information can be found in other accounts. There are nearly 500 Beatle books floating around. But Spitz means to be authoritative, to cut through the fictions and calumnies of earlier versions, and to put together a broad, incisive overview. Among the areas in which he succeeds startlingly well is the specifics of songwriting, performance and studio work that made the Beatles worth such scrutiny. (Spitz relied on the extensive archives of the New York Times music critic Allan Kozinn in some of his research.) The arc of their life together is revealed by the arc of their work.

The Beatles amplifies and corrects some of what is known about the band's formative years. It shapes a particularly vivid picture of the young, surly John Lennon, with a particularly revisionist and haunting portrait of his mother. It also captures the exhilarating freshness of young English musicians ready to try any crazy thing (another band of the time: the Morockans) with no clue about how far they might go. "It had never occurred to the Beatles that they might have fans," Spitz writes. And he transports the reader to the time when that could be true.

Like Martin Scorsese's recent documentary about the young, meteoric Bob Dylan, this book powerfully evokes both the excitement and the price of such a sudden rise. This book is with the Beatles as they hit upon a winning, hair-shaking performance style and as they watch the world go berserk over it. When the exhilaration begins to sour, it captures the frightening fishbowl sensation of their being imprisoned by fans' hysteria and critical acclaim. Among its quaint notes are stories about the naysayers who dismissed the Beatles' sound. ("Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody.")

Spitz contends that the Beatles' Sgt Pepper days were more remarkable for innovative recording tactics than for songwriting depth. He makes a fascinating case by describing the step-by-step construction of some of the best-known recordings in existence. George Martin, the Beatles' producer, is one of many figures who were close to them and wrote about his experience in detail. But Spitz is able to incorporate these and other memoirs into a bigger picture. By and large, it's a captivating picture that hasn't been seen before.

The Beatles also illuminates the way in which the collaboration came apart. Spitz replaces rumour-mongering and finger-pointing with a clear understanding of how the slights and misunderstandings accumulated. "He could charm the queen's profile off a shiny shilling," one associate snipes about Paul McCartney, whose quiet efforts to buy shares in the Beatles' publishing company infuriated John Lennon. The book also fathoms the union of Lennon with Yoko Ono and illustrates, with unusual acuity, how and why he angrily outgrew his Beatle role.

Length notwithstanding, The Beatles does not deign to describe certain things. It essentially ends with the group's breakup. It does not invade privacy by recounting the details of Lennon's death or George Harrison's. Time and again, it chooses perception over presumption in ways that set it off from the pack of Beatle stories. There is one exception: the author has had the effrontery to register www.thebeatles.bobspitz.com as a Web site, although it is not yet active. Here is one more bit of evidence that those fascinated by the Beatles have made the Beatles part of their lives. © New York Times