Read The Beatles

So, I’ve been reading Bob Spitz’s Beatles biography, The Beatles, which just came out in paper. I’ve basically been continuously reading books about the Beatles since I was about eleven years old; I well remember being not far from that age and waiting for months and months for my turn with the local branch library’s copy of Hunter Davies’s authorized biography. Nerddom is hot these days, as you’ll notice if you ever check out a “hip” internet dating site like nerve.com, but all you hipster nerds are poseurs as far as I’m concerned: how many of you have your first experience of *recalling a library book* etched permanently into your brain? I didn't think so. At the same time, there are plenty of Beatles books I haven’t read, especially more “serious” ones like Mark Hertsgaard’s, which from the reviews and publicity (I should try to be fair to the author when I’ve not read the book) sound like tired and facile accounts of sixties cultural history, and “America’s loss of innocence” for which the Beatles compensated, two months after JFK’s assassination, etc, blah, blah, we can all write this book in our sleep, and now it’s time to say good night.

Spitz’s biography came out last year with a lot of hoopla, and I can say it is good. Its goodness stems directly from its heft—almost 1000 pages. To produce such a tome Spitz emphasizes detail over either half-assed cultural critique or fan-oriented mythologization. As I was sitting in the bathtub this morning, when, incidentally, I conceived this blog (wasn't wearing a condom--let that be a lesson), I was thinking, the reason this book is good is because it’s more like a literary biography. After that moment of delusional thinking passed I realized that in fact it’s better, i.e. less single-mindedly hagiographical, than 95% of literary biographies. For even many of those literary biographies that deal with the nitty-gritty of their subject’s life do so in a way that treats his or her faults and pecadillos as important on an epic scale—which to me is not only dully repetitive, but signals the biographer’s anxiety about convincing us his or her book was worth writing. But Spitz, buried in detail, makes, for instance, John Lennon’s hideous treatment of his first wife Cynthia seem just as banal and routine as it no doubt was—not the “dark side” of his burning fires of genius, for instance. My only major complaint about the book is that it doesn’t seem to treat the recording process with any particular care or focus; for instance, it mentions when they first started overdubbing vocal tracks (recording the songs for With the Beatles) and leaves it there. But for that topic I’m looking forward to one day having the time to read Geoff Emerick’s Here, There, and Everywhere, which also came out last year.

I also went to Itunes a couple of days ago to listen to samples of the Smithereens new full-length cover of Meet the Beatles, which was written up in the Sunday Times last weekend. I always seem to be a sucker for those Arts and Leisure features—another recent one was responsible for my purchase of the Cirque de Soleil Beatles show CD, which is another topic altogether. Anyway, listening to the samples was enough to counter the effect of the paper of record. For as much as I’m interested in copies, revisions, and reconceptualizations of the idea of originality (as well as karaoke and cover versions more specifically), it was just not pleasing to hear what’s really a pretty run-of-the-mill male rock vocalist singing in the “place” where the voice of the best white male pop-rock singer ever—John Lennon—had once been. All I could hear was the absent grain of John’s voice.

Other:
-The new Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin is gorgeous; I just saw it in “the flesh” for the first time yesterday. Funnily, they made it look like a McSweeney's book! Then I realized, oh yeah, this (i.e. mid-late 19th-century publishing aesthetics) is where McSweeney’s got all its tricks.

-The semester starts on Monday. I’m resisting the temptation to analyze my decision to start a blog three days before the semester starts.

-I have not sufficiently marked the death of Alice Coltrane (to myself, or to others). But in the past ten years I’ve listened to her records more than John’s, largely because of the title cut on Journey to Satchidananda, with that superbly groovy bass riff, and the beautiful textures of the middle eastern instruments, etc. I haven't read any obituaries, so I can't comment on how she's being memorialized, and to what degree it's simply as "John Coltrane's wife." But there's a way that her work speaks more directly to the present--to styles like electronica's repetitious grooves and various forms of ambient music.