University of Virginia Library

Beatle Biography Attempts Impossible, Fails

By Charles K. Ribakoff II

In The Beatles: The Authorized
Biography, author Hunter Davies has
attempted the impossible, and failed.

He attempts to tell the whole story of the
Beatles, and those connected with them, from
the beginning to the present. He even
attempts some clumsy song analyses, and
includes some curious, unimportant,
unexplained lists of things, like the names of
all their records, their financial worth ("Total
Worth: Anybody's Guess."), the number of
times their songs have been recorded by other
artists, and other trivial drivel. It's just too
much for one book to do, although Davies
tries valiantly.

Grandmothers Convention

The first five chapters are impossibly dull,
describing the early lives of the Beatles before
they knew each other. These chapters are
written largely from interviews with their
relatives and early friends. Unfortunately,
they too greatly resemble the fond
reminiscences of a convention of
grandmothers'. Davies tends to gloss over the
less pleasant aspects of their early life (John,
for example, was a compulsive shop lifter, and
was thrown out of school for drawing obscene
pictures; this is not compatible with some
one's calling him a "sweet boy"). Everything
seems hyper glorified; for four tough kids from
the toughest part of Liverpool, they come out
sounding too much like some one's adorable,
mischievous child from Long Island.

But the book gets steadily more
interesting, as it goes over the early career of
the Beatles, covering their intellectual and
musical evolution from four unpolished,
untrained, unpleasant "Teddy Boys" with
greasy Elvis Presley-style hair and leather
jackets to the "Adorable Fab Four" to the
resident spokesmen for the avant-garde.

In Hamburg, where they used to play eight
hour sets every day for 10 pounds a week and
all the beer they could drink, they met Astrid
Kircherr and Klaus Voorman (who later did
the cover for Revolver.) They were the
Beatles' first intellectual fans, the first to
realize their power and potential. Astrid, a
beautiful young German photographer, first
saw their magnetic visual potential, and took
many fascinating sensitive pictures of them
(the cover of Meet the Beatles is based on one
of her early photographs). In addition, she
convinced Stu Sutcliffe, (the original fifth
Beatle, who played bass guitar and was often
called the most talented of all of them, and
who died of a brain hemorrhage in 1963) to
change his hair style from the greasy, combed
back Presley duck tails they all wore to what
the world now knows as the Beatle Haircut. It
was also in Hamburg that the Beatles first
came upon drugs. They took pep pills to keep
them up for their long shows. Davies is frank
in his discussion of the Beatles and drugs,
although he tries to rationalize the pep pills as
their artistic prerogative, or something.
Elsewhere in the book, Ringo says that the
only fun they ever had on tours was smoking
pot in their hotel rooms at night. Again,
Davies tried to rationalize something that
doesn't have to be and, from the Beatles'
point of view, obviously shouldn't be.

His general frankness in discussing drugs is
unfortunately not kept up throughout the
book in other areas. Incidents like the firing
of drummer Pete Best (replaced by Ringo just
before their first record) are quickly and
perfunctorily glossed over. Also, the whole
story of Brian Epstein, their strange, quiet,
manager is told in such glowing terms that his
death, perhaps by suicide, is totally
incongruous. And, absurdly, Davies devotes
only a paragraph to the whole Sergeant
Pepper experience.

Faulty Concepts

These, however, are faults not so much
with the author as with his concept. It is
simply impossible to tell everything about the
Beatles in one book. There is too much.
Unfortunately, the incidents that Davies
chooses to include are too often either totally
trivial or anecdotes that are so generally
known that anyone willing to spend $6.95 for
a book on the Beatles probably already knows
them. Do you really care what John used to
wear to grammar school, or how much Ringo
paid for his stepfather's new house? And
Davies almost totally ignores the sociological
significance of the Beatles, which is perhaps
the most important issue here.

What saves the book are the Beatles
themselves. Their incredible power as people
and as a social phenomena burst through both
the trivia and too familiar material. Their
humor, and their comments on their fame
reveal them as people as never before. Ringo
especially comes across as a very kind, warm
person, not the giggling stupid oaf he is
generally assumed to be. Even their sense of
duty is somewhat touching. John says wearily,
"I've got these bloody songs to write."

Further, Davies, a young writer (he wrote
the screen plays for Georgy Girl and Here We
Go Round The Mulberry Bush) is able to
write about the Beatles at their own level. He
doesn't talk down to them, like too many
reviewers from mass media (who, for some
unexplainable reason, can rave about any
obscure Italian opera, written in a language
they don't understand, one minute, and
complain the next that the Beatles are
probable good, but their lyrics are
incomprehensible.) He doesn't idolize them
like the obnoxious Public Relations Corps. I
think that Davies has a much better grasp of
what the Beatles are than any other major
writer who has ever written about them. He
paints a sympathetic portrait of the Beatles,
four people who, because of the world's
adoration have been cut off from it. With
their lives in the public domain, they can't
even go to a movie.

Changing Faces

The high point of the book is a section
called "the changing faces of the Beatles,"
32 pages of photographs, featuring some by
Astrid Kircherr and some excellent photos by
Ringo. It is a pleasant deja vu review of our
youth, and a pleasing contrast to the dull deja
vu of the too familiar stories.

Davies has written a good and apparently
honest book. His only failure is his inability to
accomplish all he set out to, and unfortunate
choices of what to include and what to leave
out.

For the Screaming Beatlemaniacs, The
Authorized Biography will be required
reading. But for the Beatleologists, those of us
who never screamed but always listened,
Davies has provided only lumpy oatmeal
where a good steak would be far more
satisfying.