Craig Brown
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020)
The Last Days of John Lennon
James Patterson with Casey Sherman & Dave Wedge
(Little, Brown & Company, 2020)
The Search for John Lennon: The Life, Loves and Death of a Rock Star
Lesley-Ann Jones
(Pegasus, 2020)
Three recent Beatles books that, while not scintillating, move at a quick pace via short chapters (Brown and Patterson) and have their moments. It's perfectly fine to jump around the pages in Brown's case, and with Patterson alternating between '60s Beatles items and the days leading up to the assassination of John Lennon, there's a bit of a breather before the gruesome finale we know all too well.
The Last Days of John Lennon details the sequence of plans by Lennon's killer, a name so filthy to me that I won't mention it to this day. Because I know little about the murder trial, I'm unable to tell if Patterson deduces the assassin's thoughts (he's not as good at it as Peter Guralnick, who uses less sinister recreations of thought in his masterful Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke) or takes actual testimony from court documents, yet he passably depicts that startling state of mind that led up to the horrific deed of December 8, 1980. Four decades after that heart-stopping day, it pains me to go there.
Perhaps there's no need to consume the Patterson book at all, as it has far too many errors and/or typos, which shouldn't happen with a well-known author like Patterson, who happens to have a large staff. The book says that "Can't Buy Me Love" was recorded on the Beatles' first trip to Miami, and that's flat out wrong, or that Paul McCartney's mother died in 1957 (it was 1956, when Paul was 14). Just two examples.
Another annoying feature of The Last Days of John Lennon is its use of lyrics at the start of chapters. The listing omits the song's artist and worse, rarely displays the best line in the song. The nadir of this hapless approach is this:
Let's stay together.
--"Let's Stay Together"
Craig Brown's 150 Glimpses of the Beatles compiles Fab Four fables from a large variety of sources, some of them by the author and others based on familiar and not-so-familiar accounts. I learned plenty of new things, like the day in 1963 when they met actress-personality Jane Asher, together at one event; she ended up in Paul's company (and in his life), discussing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with him after a drunken John insulted her. It was the start of Paul and Jane. Another fun one: "leg man" Ringo Starr, meeting Marlene Dietrich with the band and offering, "look at those pins!"
A most revealing chapter concerns Ringo's brief replacement on the 1964 tour, Jimmie Nicol (not "Jimmy," evidently), who had a series of misfortunes after disregarding Beatles manager Brian Epstein's instructions not to leave the hotel when the boys were in Australia. It's suggested that Epstein then sabotaged Jimmie's chance of later success. Not long after that, George Harrison went to see Nicol's band and ordered a drink to go to Jimmie backstage. The drummer sent it back.
Brown skillfully puts together several different interpretations of the night when a raging Lennon broke Cavern Club DJ-presenter Bob Wooler's ribs--somewhat confusingly, every personal account of that incident only partially matches another's. And in one of his most creative chapters, the author pens an entertaining fantasy piece on what it would have been like if the Liverpool band Gerry & the Pacemakers (Gerry Marsden died in 2021) were revered today instead of the Fabs.
That said, the failure of Brown and staff to factcheck or utilize Mark Lewisohn's authoritative Beatles documentation is boneheaded and puzzling. Lewisohn has established that Ringo's first nickname was spelled Richy, not "Ritchie," so Brown is inaccurate there. But the big deal is that Brown duplicates the erroneous info about Ringo's "Starr Time" segment when playing in Rory Storm & the Hurricanes up until August, 1962. Supposedly, this short set gave Ringo the chance to play drum solos. Wrong! "Starr Time" was when Richy received the vocal spotlight to sing songs like "Alley Oop" and "Boys"; he didn't care for drum solos, never taking one until the Abbey Road sessions late in the Beatles' recording career.
Another awful typo or outright goof happens when Brown discusses the "Paul Is Dead" rumors that circulated in 1969 on "WLNR" radio in Detroit. Wrong! It's WKNR-FM, as anyone who grew up in Southeast Michigan--or was a fan of DJ Russ Gibb--can tell you.
If you're looking for the best value in a Beatles-related tome, Lesley-Ann Jones' The Search for John Lennon might satisfy you. After all, the margins of the book are framed by the tiniest amount of blank space I've ever seen, and it's got a Beatles/Lennon chronology of events section, and it's got the author's comments on her favorite Fab Four records. For me that's pure overkill, as her ambitious work becomes overwrought with those features. But wait--there's more: Jones put out another opus last autumn, Who Killed John Lennon? (John Blake Publishing). I kid you not.
The best parts of Jones' book concerns a saga I hadn't followed before: the sad story of Yoko Ono's daughter Kyoko, whom Lennon adored but barely got to see. As for Yoko herself, Ms. Ono receives a careful assessment that balances her odd nature and accomplishments--her artistic flair, her business acumen--with the advantage of hindsight. Jones perceptively notes that there's a tendency to underplay what has been written about the Beatles by women; from what I can tell, Maureen Cleave's groundbreaking interviews and pieces about the Fab Four don't seem to have been anthologized. Now there's a subject overdue for research.
Perhaps the most outrageous chapter in The Search for John Lennon concerns Mona Best, mother of drummer Pete and for a time one of the few guiding lights the Beatles had. Mona's remarkable management and success with the Casbah Coffee Club in Liverpool--where kids went in droves to see the band long before that kind of mania took place at the Cavern--finally gets its due. This overrides many Beatles scholars who seem to focus on Mrs. Best's "pushy" personality rather than the trails she blazed. At the same time, author Jones can't help but take it a step further, opining that, "(Mona) may have even moulded (my note: use of the English spelling there) a group better-equipped to deal with the vagaries and madness of fame, that might not have disbanded at the zenith of their global popularity, that might have carried on performing and recording towards the 21st Century." It's an absurd assumption, overlooking how the Beatles would each find marital partners in the 1960s and naturally drift apart from the unit. And it conveniently downplays the missing catalyst the Beatles long needed: Ringo.
Another point that makes little sense is the author's assessment of the chain of superstardom in popular music that she says runs from Franz Liszt to Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to the Beatles to...Marc Bolan? (If you're British or wrote a biography of Freddie Mercury, that might explain the lack of critical perspective there.) Likewise, Jones' constant use of the band's song lyrics in her journalism is an often hackneyed, amateur touch that mars a diligent work. When John marries Cynthia Powell in 1963 because baby Julian is on the way, Jones offers, "he loves her, yeah, yeah, yeah."
Overall, fact-checking seems to ring true despite the exhaustive amount of details in The Search for John Lennon, so Jones deserves much credit there. One inaccuracy jumps out: Irving Berlin's standard "Cheek to Cheek" is referred to as "Heaven, I'm In Heaven" (which is the song's opening line).
I can scarcely believe that after so many years, the Beatles remain the toppermost of the poppermost for me; the band still finds a way to jolt my senior senses. Overall, there is simply not enough magic captured in these three chronicles, so I'll take something from 150 Glimpses, the best of the lot. It's where Chrissie Hynde perfectly describes the joy of their US blitz in 1964: "The Beatles were like sex--but without the sex."