Beatles Biography, and Slumming on Bob and Rachael (but no mention of the toothy swimmer - sorry)
From David Bauder/AP/Yahoo:
Eight years, 2,792 pages. That was the effort author Bob Spitz put into telling their story, although editors whittled his manuscript down to 856 pages (minus the end notes).
"The Beatles: The Biography," available Nov. 1, is a compulsively readable history that brings the same exhaustive level of scholarship to the Fab Four that Robert Caro brought to Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson....
Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr agreed on their version of the Beatles' story, a mix of truth and legend, and it formed the basis of what Spitz considers the band's only other serious biography, written by Hunter Davies four decades ago. Some of the stories were told so often that the lines between truth and fiction had even blurred for the surviving Beatles.
Spitz set out to make the record straight.
"I interviewed 650 people on this," he says. "I approached this book as if nobody had ever written a biography on the Beatles."
McCartney cooperated, and so did Harrison before his death in 2001. Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono did not, and neither did Starr or Neil Aspinall, who used to drive the Beatles to gigs in Liverpool and now runs their business empire.
Almost more important than his recollections was McCartney quietly putting the word out to dozens of former associates, many of whom had never spoken publicly about their roles, that it was OK to speak to Spitz. Spitz also tracked down new sources. In western Canada he found Dot Rohne, who nearly married McCartney and miscarried his baby before being dumped as the Beatles were on the cusp of making it big....
From Janet Maslin, quoted in The Cheese Sandwich:
Mr. Spitz means to...[elevate] the Beatles' story to the realm of serious history. Imagine "John Adams" with music and marijuana. "The Beatles" is written for the reader who seeks deep, time-consuming immersion in the past and can look beyond traditionally lofty subjects to find it. Like Mark Stevens's and Annalyn Swan's recent biography of Willem de Kooning, it means to meld the forces of personality, culture and art into a broad and emblematic story.
From ilya_son:
Ah, but the outtake! Dylan and Neuwirth decided to pick John Lennon up at his home in the pastoral countryside and take him on a 30-minute trip to London. Pennebaker filmed the resulting car ride conversation between the two rock superstars in the backseat. The scene was never used (only a three second clip made it into the official Eat The Document), and you can see from the edited transcript below why the complete "car ride" sits in a vault somewhere today, and not in the viewing room of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.
Dubs of the clip show that Lennon is more than willing to play along with the forced comedy and drug-addled psychobabble, but Dylan (zonked-out from lack-of-sleep and god knows what) proceeds to insult everyone from Mama Cass to (apologetically) Johnny Cash, make a total ass out of himself, and then, ultimately, throw up.
Ah, history. As Lennon, cameraman Pennebaker, and Bob Neuwirth watch their folk-rock pioneering host barf his brains out outside of camera range (we get John's reaction instead-- Pennebaker was a great filmmaker), you can just hear the Mystery Science Theatre Robots screaming, "How does it feeeeel?!!!"
Bob Spitz, a Dylan biographer, writes of the Infamous Car Ride outtake, "Furtively, Lennon inches away from Bob the way a passenger creeps off when a pervert squeezes next to him on the subway."
History can be ugly, folks....
And, to the disgust of the "rachael_ray_sux" community, Bob Spitz likes Rachael Ray:
[T]here's a disgustingly pro-Rachael article in the November issue of Reader's Digest. The author, Bob Spitz, (Take a bite of her food, what do you do? The irony of his surname is delicious) says her image is "less overtly glamorous than the girl-next-door. And yet her appearance dazzles. Ray is short, with plenty of soft curves and a wide, toothy smile."
Ick..it's not soft curves. Those are nice to look at and maybe touch. What he saw is pudge! No wonder the article in Reader's Digest after RR's has a headlining picture of a rat.
I wonder if the rachael_ray_sux people have another blog called hilary_duff_is_hott?
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