LJ Talks to Bob Spitz

Andrew Richard Albanese -- Library Journal, 11/15/2005

With the multitude of Beatles books already on the market, you may think the story of the Beatles has been told. In Bob Spitz’s massive The Beatles, published this month, the lads from Liverpool get a sobering historical perspective. The book took close to eight years to research and write, and is impeccably sourced. LJ’s Andrew Richard Albanese caught up with Bob Spitz to talk about writing pop culture history—and the Beatles’ making it.

How did you end up writing a 900+ page biography of the Beatles?

The material was so rich and the subjects so fascinating that it just took on a larger form. I began to believe almost from the beginning that this wasn’t just a story about these four guys and their music, it was a story about how culture changed. I saw this book from the very first page, from the minute I finished my research, which took about two years, as a book of history. I think popular culture subjects are given short shrift. Most of them don’t deserve a book of this length and a study this deep. But the Beatles do. The Beatles, 50 years later, are still around. Their music is earning as much money today as it did back then, and getting new audiences with every generation. They’re an indelible part of our history.

In writing the history about a pop culture subject, especially a subject as epic as the Beatles, was it a challenge to parse your sources?

One of the hardest tasks I had was chipping away at the myth and getting to the real story. The way I did that was to avoid the Beatles to begin with. If I had gone to the Beatles to start I would have gotten just the same story. So I began at the very beginning. I went to Liverpool. I began talking to everyone who had been involved with the Beatles, and I found that about 80 percent of them had never discussed their role in Beatles history in any great depth. So I looked for the people who were there when they played the Cavern, who made business deals with them when they played little gigs in the suburbs, their business partners, the people in [Beatles’ manager] Brian Epstein’s office. I even paged through Epstein’s diaries, which no one had ever looked at. Then I began to get a really good sense of what actually happened.

You were the first to see Brian Epstein’s diaries—they must have been fascinating, yes?

I was shocked by them. The man who worked as his driver took them from Brian’s house when he died. What he handed me was a wad of those little notebooks that had the fake leather covers, they were about two inches long and three inches wide with blue pages, each with three days on it. There was every one of them, from 1949 to 1966. I was able to page through them and get a good sense of where Brian was on specific days, what he did, who he saw and how the Beatles phenomenon rolled out. I kind of believe that if not for Brian Epstein the Beatles might still be in Liverpool. Brian was a man with a large vision. He always believed from the very start, and no one quite knows why, that the Beatles would be, as he put it himself, bigger than Elvis, and he was determined to see it that way. Brian’s belief in the boys, as he called them, was incredible, and they believed in him. Brian was a fascinating man, very troubled, and unfortunately his life was cut short.

In reading the book it almost seems as if John Lennon may have suffered from mental illness, as if he was bi-polar. Is that possible?

There’s no doubt in my mind that John was bi-polar. But I didn’t set myself up as a doctor and there weren’t that many people who were qualified to give me that kind of an examination of him. Remember, John was also doing LSD every day of his life at one point and he was addicted to heroin, so a lot of his issues were drug-induced. John was a troubled guy. His father disappeared when he was young. He was taken from his mother and given to his aunt. When he rediscovered his mother and fell in love with her she was run over and killed. So John always believed that everyone who was dear to him would be killed. He drank, he took drugs, he hated himself, he never dealt with this in any way until he met Yoko Ono, and that changed everything. I think that confused him as well.

Yoko Ono has been portrayed as everything from a con artist who killed the Beatles to a savior for John. Does the truth lie somewhere in between?

I think it does. Yoko was an avant-garde performer, and John bought the whole package. He loved the way she thumbed her nose at the establishment. Yoko brought him authenticity in a sense the she told him he didn’t have to be a lovable moptop. She allowed John to be what he really wanted to be. She had no respect for the Beatles, she didn’t care for their music, she cared for John. She taught him to look inside himself, which he was never able to do before.

In the end it seems like with all the fame and the bad business deals, the Beatles buckled under their own weight. Is that a fair assessment?

I don’t think much of the business mattered at all to them. What mattered to the Beatles was that they could make their music in the way they wanted to make it which at the time was really unorthodox. They could take their time in the studio, and be comfortable. That was all new. In the beginning, they did what every other group did, which was make one album in one day. As long as their bills got paid, they were fine, except when they discovered they were being taken advantage of.

And then?

When they discovered the awful licensing deals Brian had made for them, when they discovered their deal with EMI was usurious, when they discovered that Dick James, their publisher, had sold them down the river, then they wanted to take their matters under their hands. Of course, it was too much for them at that point. They were savvy guys, but not that savvy. It was just too late. They were already fighting at that point. What is remarkable to me is that the music never suffered. They started fighting around Revolver. After that you have Sgt. Peppers, Yellow Submarine, the White Album, Abbey Road, Get Back. They were always on the same wave length musically, but they’d just grown up and become different people.