These Are the Best Beatles Books
n the decades since the Beatles’ 1970 breakup, the group’s rise and fall has been told as a myth. It’s also been told via children’s story, salacious gossip, dry history, detailed diaries, technical manuals, cartoons, and graphic novels. There are volumesdedicated to their recording equipment, encyclopedias chronicling all of the music and film the group has yet to release, collections of the photos from before they were stars—basically, if you can think of an idea related to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, it’s been published. This constant trickle of books can overwhelm even steadfast Beatlemaniacs, but the greatness of the music has also drawn out greatness within authors. The best books about the Beatles rank among the best pop culture writing—and criticism—ever.
Along with the band’s massive, lasting influence on music, their narrative has a clean, dramatic arc, separated into three distinct acts, each of which is worthy of deep exploration. While there are certainly more than 10 worthy books about the group, the following volumes provide the foundation of any Beatles library. These titles offer richly reported history, incisive critical analysis, detailed accounts of the quartet at work, and insider accounts that humanize a band who are still often seen as larger-than-life caricatures. Reading any one of these books will provide insight into a phenomenon that’s often thought of only in the broadest terms. Reading all 10 will illustrate why their myth only grows stronger over the years: Their story is always the same, yet always different.
The Best Overall Introduction
Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation by Philip Norman (1981)
Shout! was first published 11 years after the Beatles split and, more importantly, a year after the assassination of John Lennon, during a period when conventional wisdom began to settle. Author Philip Norman received no direct input from any of the four Beatles for the book, so he relied on research and first-person interviews with people who operated in their orbit, all of whom were ready to settle scores while keeping the fires of the Beatles’ myth alight. This perspective distinguishes the swift, thorough, and entertaining Shout! over its only other single-volume bio competitor, Hunter Davies’ official 1968 account, The Beatles, and helps place the quartet’s mercurial ’60s output in the context of that tumultuous decade.
The Definitive Origin Story
Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, Volume 1 by Mark Lewisohn (2013)
Tune In—the first (and, to date, only) installment in a planned three-part biography from eminent Beatles scholar Mark Lewisohn—is the opposite of Shout!Where Norman’s book moves at a rapid clip, Lewisohn intentionally recreates the rise of the Beatles at a pace so unhurried, it gives the illusion that events are unfolding in real time. Perhaps such deliberateness is the inexorable result of a lifetime spent researching the Beatles, but the remarkable achievement of Tune In is how it makes the group’s first act, which runs from before the band’s formation until the end of 1962, seem like their most exciting era.All of this is due to to Lewisohn’s decision to start his research from scratch. In doing so, he finds that printing the legend has obscured the truth: Such worn stories like Decca Records refusing to sign the Beatles, how George Martin received his assignment to produce the group, and John choosing which parent to live with simply didn’t happen the way scores of books say they did. These revelations, combined with Lewisohn’s knack at illustrating how the Beatles’ rise was not inevitable—time and time again, they hit limits on their respective circuits, and Lennon and McCartney went years without writing originals—gives Tune In a corrective punch. If Lewisohn never completes the other two volumes, at least he set the record straight for what is perhaps the murkiest period of the Beatles.
