doi:10.1558/pomh.v9i1.27615

Marcus Collins1

Introduction to the special issue on The Beatles:

Nothing you can know that isn’t known?

Abstract

Writing on The Beatles has multiplied and diversified to an astonishing extent over the past half century. The contribution of academics to this literature has until recently been modest in volume and impact. However, multidisciplinary scholarship is now producing new insights into such subjects as The Beatles’ reception and their creative and commercial collaborations. Far from there being ‘Nothing you can know that isn’t known’ about The Beatles, scholars have much to explain regarding the band’s value and meaning in the 1960s and beyond.

For almost as long as people have been writing about The Beatles, they have wondered whether it was time to stop. Some commentators in the 1960s felt that devoting any attention to them served to inflate the subject out of all proportion. Oxford don John Gross remarked in 1963 that ‘there is surely almost nothing that an intelligent person really wants to say about them, one way or another’ (Gross 1963). Others considered that everything had been said already. In 1967, their authorized biographer Hunter Davies was informed by his publisher that ‘we know everything that we possibly want to know about The Beatles’ (quoted in Badman 2000: 260). In the late 1970s, colleagues advised Philip Norman against ‘wast[ing] your time’ by writing the first major unauthorized biography because ‘Everyone already knows all there is to know’ (Norman 2005: xxii). The publication in 2013 of the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s magisterial Beatles trilogy (Lewisohn 2013) brought a renewed sense that the subject had been exhausted. John Harris wrote that ‘the story is told so definitively that, after this, that really should be it’ (Harris 2013).

In the fifty years between Gross’s dismissive comments in 1963 and Harris’s call for a ceasefire in 2013, the number of books on The Beatles has increased exponentially. Relatively few books appeared during their recording career in the 1960s, so that Davies’s biography faced competition from only a couple of unauthorized titles when published in 1968. A cottage industry of Beatles publications appeared in the 1970s thanks to minor presses and self-publishing efforts by fans, but major publishers largely left them to it on the grounds that ‘The Beatles have broken up and no one is interested anymore’ (DiLello 2001: ix). The Beatles Collection, issued by Liverpool’s municipal authorities in 1975, accordingly managed to list all Beatles books of note on a bookmark (City of Liverpool Public Relations Department 1975), and the ‘Complete Beatles Bibliography’ produced by Nicholas Schaffner in 1977 included just over fifty titles (Schaffner 1978: 215–17).

A flurry of books was rush-released following the murder of John Lennon in 1980, and publishers thereafter found a ready market for such titles among fans from the baby-boomer generation onwards. Bill Harry’s annotated bibliography estimated that by 1983 the number of books about The Beatles had passed the ‘magic’ figure of two hundred on the strength of ‘an increasing thirst for information about The Beatles these days’ (Harry 1984: 9). Carol Terry’s more comprehensive international bibliography published in 1985 listed approximately 600 books. Recent bibliographers have put the number in the thousands: approximately 1,500 according to W. Fraser Sandercombe in 2009 and 1,700 according to Michael Brocken and Melissa Davis in 2012. These are just the books. ‘Millions of words have been written about them in the last few weeks’, marvelled music journalist Ray Coleman in November 1963 (Coleman 1963), and the additional journalistic output over the subsequent half-century is probably incalculable. Their presence on the internet is more easily quantifiable, if no more manageable. Apparent corroboration of John Lennon’s claim that the band was more popular than Jesus came in 2007, when New York Times journalist Bruce Handy found that The Beatles achieved 55 million hits on Google, seven times the number for Jesus Christ (Handy 2007).

The range of topics has expanded in tandem. The ‘photographic collections…discographies…biographies…“insider” books…tour books…books on a specific aspect of The Beatles’ career…collectors’ publications…almanacs…interview books…books about [Lennon]… [and] “kiss and tell” books’ listed by Bill Harry in 1984 (Harry 1984: 9) remain thriving subgenres to this day. Memoirs offering readers an ‘untold story’ or ‘inside account’ are a particularly flourishing field. The Beatles’ chauffeur, Lennon’s tarot reader, a fellow guest at the Rishikesh ashram, a fan who loitered outside the Apple building and a fifteen-year-old who interviewed Lennon and Ono at the 1969 Toronto bed-in are just some of the dozens of authors who have published book-length accounts of their encounters with The Beatles. In addition, many different kinds of fiction have refashioned the conventional Beatles’ story into new tales. These include short stories such as Robert Hemenway’s ‘The Girl Who Sang with The Beatles’ (1970), novels (Mark Shipper’s Paperback Writer), feature films (Backbeat, Nowhere Boy), TV programmes (The Rutles’ All You Need Is Cash), stage shows (John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert, Beatlemania, The Ballad of John and Yoko), comic books, fan fiction and romance fiction for girls.

There is non-fiction filling almost every conceivable niche. Books have been published about single days in The Beatles’ lives: famous days such as the first meeting of Lennon and McCartney (O’Donnell 1996) as well as routine days, such as a 1965 concert in Minneapolis (Carlson and Gardner 2007). Many books have appeared about individual albums and a few have focused on single songs (Coleman 1995; Kasser 2013). Specialist books detail The Beatles’ connection to places including Australia, Belgium, Blokker in the Netherlands, Bournemouth, Canada, Cleveland, Cuba, France, Germany, Hamburg, India, Ireland, Italy, Liverpool, Minneapolis, New York, New Zealand, Oldham and Middleton, Portugal, Rome, Scotland, Sweden, Tenerife, Tokyo, Uruguay and Wales. Other books target particular audiences, including audiophiles (Schwartz 1990) and Beatlephobes (Hall 2006), children (Edgers and Tugeau 2006) and ‘complete idiots’ (Buskin 1998). You can learn how to live well from The Beatles’ Way (Lange 2001), how to cook Beatles-inspired recipes from She Came in through the Kitchen Window (Spignesi 1999), how to speak English from Le dictionnaire des Beatles (Polard and Jouffa 1995) and how to make money from Come Together: The Business Wisdom of The Beatles (Courtney and Cassidy 2010).

Quantity is no guarantee of quality. In their indispensable The Beatles Bibliography, Brocken and Davis characterize most Beatles books from the late 1970s and early 1980s as ‘dross’, and consider that only a few recently published titles ‘actually reveal anything of substance (or indeed interest) at all’ (Brocken and Davis 2012: 147). Theirs is a familiar refrain. Spencer Leigh complains that many Beatles biographies ‘can’t separate the trivial from the important and are ridd[led] with errors’ (Leigh 2005) and Tom Schultheiss declares that ‘[a] trustworthy history or biography of the Beatles does not yet exist’ (Schultheiss 1980: vii). Lewisohn’s biography does much to remedy the situation, but is itself a product of the author’s concern that ‘The Beatles story has been told very often but, in my view, rarely very well’ (PFD 2007).

As I argue elsewhere in this special issue, academics have until recently made a limited contribution to our understanding of The Beatles. Over the past decade, however, the publication of a number of monographs (Frontani 2007; Womack 2007; Schneider 2008; Inglis 2012; Millard 2012; King 2013; McMillian 2013) and edited collections (Baur and Baur 2005; Womack and Davis 2006; Helbig and Warner 2008; Julien 2009; Womack 2009; Jarniewicz and Kwiatkowska 2010) has done much to legitimize and enrich the field of Beatles scholarship. The articles in this special issue (which originated in a 2012 conference held at Loughborough University entitled ‘Love Me Do: The Beatles at Fifty’) capture the field in all of its multifariousness. There are contributions from Britain and mainland Europe, from women and men and from the disciplines of cultural history, musicology, media studies and English literature. The articles cover a correspondingly broad range of topics, from The Beatles’ social origins to their commercial legacy, and range in time period from half a century of commentary to a single ‘Year of Peace’. The main sources examined in each article—lyrics (James McGrath), recordings (Yrjö Heinonen), products (Holly Tessler), magazines (Mike Kirkup) and books (myself)—testify to the diversity of materials generated by and about The Beatles during and after the 1960s.

Although the contributors study different topics using different sources over different periods from different disciplinary perspectives, some recurring themes nonetheless emerge. All of the articles except Heinonen’s explore questions of reception. All save my own consider the contribution made to The Beatles’ work by collaborators, whether producers and engineers, journalists and publicists, music industry executives or black Liverpudlian musicians. Heinonen discusses The Beatles’ claims to creative innovation, Kirkup considers their relationship to their fans, McGrath reviews their credentials as political radicals and Tessler and I look at the post-sixties ‘Beatles industry’. One theme underpins all of the others: that of The Beatles’ value and meaning in the 1960s and beyond. However many books have been and will be published on The Beatles, their significance will remain a subject of impassioned ongoing debate.

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