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The Beatles

The Biography

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The Beatles

Written by: Bob Spitz
Narrated by: Alfred Molina
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About this listen

Even before the Beatles hit the big time, a myth was created. This version of the Beatles legend smoothed the rough edges and filled in the fault lines, and for more than forty years this manicured version of the Beatles story has sustained as truth, until now.

The product of almost a decade of research, hundreds of unprecedented interviews, and the discovery of scores of never-before-revealed documents, Bob Spitz's The Beatles is the biography fans have been waiting for.

Never before has a biography of musicians been so immersive and textured. We are there in the McCartney living room when Paul and John learn to write songs together; backstage the night Ringo takes over on drums; in seedy German strip clubs where George lies about his age so the band can perform; and at the Ed Sullivan Show as America discovers the joy and the madness. From Shea to San Francisco, through the London night, on to India, through marmalade skies, across the universe, all the way to a rooftop concert and one last moment of laughter and music.

It is all here, the highs and the lows, the love and the rivalry, the drugs, the tears, the thrill, the magic never again to be repeated. Bob Spitz's masterpiece is, at long last, the biography the Beatles deserve.

©2005 Bob Spitz (P)2005 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
Entertainment & Celebrities Music Celebrity Young Adult

What the critics say

  • Winner of Audio Publishers Association 2007 Audie Award, Non-Fiction, Abridged

"As with all great history writing, Spitz both captures a moment in time and humanizes his subjects. While some will blanch at the unsettling dark sides of the Beatles, most will come to appreciate the band even more for knowing the incredible personal odysseys they endured." (Publishers Weekly)

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There are worse biographies, but not many.

My first mistake was buying this book after having read Hunter Davies' 1968 biography of The Beatles. My second mistake was listening to this book through the end.

I have no idea who Bob Spitz was writing for, but it certainly wasn't people who remember The Beatles, and it certainly wasn't for people who speak British English, even with Alfred Molina reading it (who did a fine job with the dreadful material). The story was littered with a very odd mix of American terms and British quotations. I thought perhaps the author had been a beatnik poet in sixties San Francisco given the number of times he used the word "scene" to describe what was happening. Not that Spitz was short on vocabulary, because anyone who can describe Ringo's head movements as "demonic pendulation" is never going to be short on appalling words.

In the early chapters I thought the Spitz' research was fine, but I think he missed out a lot (perhaps that was the abridgement), and he tinkered with the time lines as well. I understand that some of The Beatles recollection of events was sketchy, which could account for some of what I saw as errors, but I'm fairly sure that he didn't spend a lot of time with Paul or Ringo to bring this book together.

Later chapters started to sound like a very long album review, something you might read in the NME, but with those it's done within minutes; here we had ten hours of it. Then it started to sound like a badly written gossip column, with tales who did what to who, and Spitz did not hide his likes and his loathes. Paul McCartney can do no wrong, Linda Eastman was a world renowned beauty (apparently), yet Yoko Ono was an ugly, evil, scheming, troll intent on breaking up the Beatles, and poor old Ringo just seemed to be an innocent bystander caught up in a hail of what Spitz assumes are "hip and happening" words.

Spitz also seemed to have a thing about anything homosexual, going into great detail about events that may or may not have happened, but frankly were not relevant to this story. If I want to read about how Brian Epstein lived his life, I'll get a book about Brian Epstein. Ultimately, Spitz could have written anything, really, and we'd be none the wiser because those he was writing about are long dead.

Since the book's publication, Peter Jackson has edited and released the footage from the Let It Be sessions as a feature film cum documentary. Spitz' work does not correspond with Jackson's work on a number of key events, and while I accept Jackson had his own agenda, I tend to believe the footage as shown rather than Spitz' interpretation of events.

I was not sorry to get to the end of this book. I wouldn't recommend this book to any Beatles fans, frankly. If you want an honest biography of The Beatles, get Hunter Davies' book, it's superior in every way.

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