![]() | The Cavalier daily. Monday, October 28, 1968 | ![]() |
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.
![]() | The Cavalier daily. Monday, October 28, 1968 | ![]() |