Hunter Davies, the only ever authorised biographer of the group, has produced the essential Beatles guide. Divided into four sections – People, Songs, Places and Broadcast and Cinema – it covers all elements of the band’s history and vividly brings to live every influence that shaped them. Illustrated with material from Hunter's remarkable private collection of artefacts and memorabilia, this is the definitive Beatles treasure.
Despite the enormous amount of writing devoted to the Beatles during the last few decades, the band's abiding intellectual and cultural significance has received scant attention. Using various modes of literary, musicological, and cultural criticism, the essays in Reading the Beatles firmly establish the Beatles as a locus of serious academic and cultural study. Exploring the group's resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music, the contributors trace not only the literary and musicological qualities of selected Beatles songs but also the development of the Beatles' artistry in their films and the ways in which the band has functioned as a cultural, historical, and economic product. In a poignant afterword, Jane Tompkins offers an autobiographical account of the ways in which the Beatles afforded her with the self-actualizing means to become less alienated from popular culture, gender expectations, and even herself during the early 1960s.
“At last, I finally understand the alphabet! I also love this book: secret Beatles knowledge from one of the closest insiders.” —Steve Martin Peter Asher met the Beatles in the spring of 1963, the start of a lifelong association with the band and its members. He had a front-row seat as they elevated pop music into an art form, and he was present at the creation of some of the most iconic music of our times. Asher is also a talented musician in his own right, with a great ear for what was new and fresh. He was asked by Paul McCartney to help start Apple Records; the first artist Asher discovered and signed up was a young American singer-songwriter named James Taylor. Before long he would be not only managing and producing Taylor but also working with Linda Ronstadt, Neil Diamond, Robin Williams, Joni Mitchell, and Cher, among others. The Beatles from A to Zed grows out of his popular radio program “From Me to You” on SiriusXM’s The Beatles Channel, where he shares memories and insights about the Fab Four and their music. Here he weaves his reflections into a whimsical alphabetical journey that focuses not only on songs whose titles start with each letter, but also on recurrent themes in the Beatles’ music, the instruments they played, the innovations they pioneered, the artists who influenced them, the key people in their lives, and the cultural events of the time. Few can match Peter Asher for his fresh and personal perspective on the Beatles. And no one is a more congenial and entertaining guide to their music.
The cottage industry of Beatles publications is more prolific now than it ever was. As the band recedes into the mystic fog of 20th century history we get more and more documentation about their music, their love lives, their personalities, and their finances. I wanted to try to make sense of it by reviewing the best and the worst of the Beatles tomes as they stand side by side in bookstores everywhere. I spent 40 years reading about them knowing that one day I would share my accumulated knowledge with the fans in Pepperland. Having read the book, I'd love to turn you on.
Over 30 landmark interviews, accounts, and memoirs of The Beatles and their entourage, recording how they inadvertently became counter-culture's figureheads and changed society.
Almost everyone can sing along with the Beatles, but how many young readers know their whole story? Geoff Edgers, a Boston Globe reporter and hard-core Beatles fan, brings the Fab Four to life in this Who Was...? book. Readers will learn about their childhoods in Liverpool, their first forays into rock music, what Beatlemania was like, and why they broke up. It's all here in an easy-to-read narrative with plenty of black-and-white illustrations!
Thirty years after The Beatles split up, the music of Lennon, McCartney, Harrrison and Starkey lives on. What exactly were the magical ingredients of those legendary songs? Why are they still so influential for today's bands? This ground-breaking book sets out to explore The Beatles' songwriting techniques in a clear and readable style. It is aimed not only at musicians but anyone who has ever enjoyed the work of one of the most productive and successful songwriting parterships of the 20th Century. Author Dominic Pedler explores the chord sequences, melodies, harmonies, rhythms and structures of The Beatles' self-penned songs, while challenging readers to enhance their appreciation of the lyrics themselves with reference to the musical context. Throughout the book the printed music and lyrics of The Beatles' songs appear alongside the text, illustrating the author's explanations. The Songwriting Secrets Of The Beatles is an essential addition to Beatles literature - a new and perceptive analysis of both the music and the lyrics written and performed by what Paul McCartney still calls 'a really good, tight little band'.
Help! Can you find the Fab Four? This quirky, vibrant, and comically-illustrated book features scenes inspired by The Beatles' rock star lives and their rapid rise to fame. Find Yoko Ono, George Martin, David Bowie, and many others, too. Between us, we can work it out (with a little help from our friends)!
A riveting look at the transformative year in the lives and careers of the legendary group whose groundbreaking legacy would forever change music and popular culture. They started off as hysteria-inducing pop stars playing to audiences of screaming teenage fans and ended up as musical sages considered responsible for ushering in a new era. The year that changed everything for the Beatles was 1966—the year of their last concert and their first album, Revolver, that was created to be listened to rather than performed. This was the year the Beatles risked their popularity by retiring from live performances, recording songs that explored alternative states of consciousness, experimenting with avant-garde ideas, and speaking their minds on issues of politics, war, and religion. It was the year their records were burned in America after John’s explosive claim that the group was "more popular than Jesus," the year they were hounded out of the Philippines for "snubbing" its First Lady, the year John met Yoko Ono, and the year Paul conceived the idea for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. On the fiftieth anniversary of this seminal year, music journalist and Beatles expert Steve Turner slows down the action to investigate in detail the enormous changes that took place in the Beatles’ lives and work during 1966. He looks at the historical events that had an impact on the group, the music they made that in turn profoundly affected the culture around them, and the vision that allowed four young men from Liverpool to transform popular music and serve as pioneers for artists from Coldplay to David Bowie, Jay-Z to U2. By talking to those close to the group and by drawing on his past interviews with key figures such as George Martin, Timothy Leary, and Ravi Shankar—and the Beatles themselves—Turner gives us the compelling, definitive account of the twelve months that contained everything the Beatles had been and anticipated everything they would still become.
