October 8, 2000

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Meet the Beatles: John, Paul, George and Ringo in their own words.

By MIM UDOVITCH

THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY

By the Beatles.

Illustrated. 367 pp. San Francisco:

Chronicle Books. $60.



ow does it feel to be one of the beautiful people? According to the beautiful, brilliant Beatles, in their lavishly illustrated oral autobiography, ''The Beatles Anthology,'' the answer is, more or less, that in their particular case if we weren't there, we couldn't possibly understand. Being charming as well as beautiful, they mean this in the nicest possible way, although for George Harrison, who never really enjoyed being fab -- he used to send the Beatles' press officer, Derek Taylor, out to the balcony in his place to wave at the thousands of shrieking fans -- the answer might even be that it's really none of our business. (It's no coincidence that the first song on a Beatles album written by Harrison was ''Don't Bother Me.'')

In fact, it is one of the many -- you could almost say the infinitely many -- unique things about the Beatles that of all entities who were the objects of extreme mass-cultural emotion in the 1960's, they are curiously, transcendently legacy-free. Their closest equivalents in the music business, the Rolling Stones, have become, in effect, their own legacy. Their closest equivalents outside the music business, the Kennedys, as long as they continue to have children who bear the name, have a built-in system of legacy whether they like it or not. The divisions and paradigms created by the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, even Woodstock, have survived and evolved to the present day.

But for all their genius, their charm and their charisma; for all their exceptionally, even innovatively, forthright dealings with the press; for all the approximately 400 books that have already been written about them -- at least another 15 Beatles-related books are due this fall -- the Beatles remain, to a great extent, as much of a mystery and a miracle as they were when they first appeared to us (if we were resident in the United States in 1964) on ''The Ed Sullivan Show.'' They were preceded by a tsunami of hype, and they lived up to it -- ubiquitous, accessible, obliquely but overwhelmingly sexy in a way that defied all standards of sex appeal. In the polite suits that somehow did not efface the (true) impression that these boys would be wearing leather if they could, they were simultaneously every teenage girl's dream and beyond homoerotic: watch any video clip in which John and Paul are on the same mike; as they sing, close together, facing each other, mouths open as if about to kiss, the shrieks always escalate. The music was great. And they were, quite simply, the happiest people we had ever seen, beyond explanation or resistance. Until technological and security concerns made touring an impossibility after 1966, people used to bring their disabled near-and-dear backstage, as if just the touch or the glance of a Beatle might have restorative powers. It is in this way, quite apart from the historical conditions that enabled Beatlemania as a phenomenon, that they remain forever preserved as an exquisite exception, and one that died without issue. Simply to see them shake their heads and go ''Woo!'' was to feel a jolt of vicarious joy to which there was no adequate response other than succumbing immediately and forever.

Which is not to say that they were not the start of practically everything in popular music for a long, long time. They were the first pop group, or among the first, to write their own material; to make extensive creative use of multitracking; to intentionally use feedback as part of the guitar riff (''I Feel Fine''); to include backward vocals and guitar on a record (''Rain''); to play huge open-air arenas; to conceive of albums as holistic works of art rather than simply compilations of songs; and, outside of jazz, the first musicians to intentionally pursue their careers as a progressive creative process. Any band that uses certain chords or chord sequences, certain vocal harmonies or even a string quartet arrangement also automatically recalls the Beatles. The fact that their enormous commercial success opened the door for the musically diverse groups who are collectively known as the British Invasion notwithstanding, there are very few groups who sound the way the Beatles sounded. The exceptions tend to be either in some way directly produced by a connection to the band (Peter and Gordon, Badfinger) or engaged in outright riff-thievery (Oasis).

The ''Beatles Anthology'' project began in 1995 with the ''Beatles Anthology'' television series, which, like the book, combines archival material with contemporary interviews to tell the story of the Beatles from their point of view; it was broadcast in hundreds of countries and is now available as eight 75-minute videotapes. The same year, the first of three double CD's came out, with previously unreleased studio outtakes, early, little-known recordings and two new ''Beatles'' songs, ''Free as a Bird'' and ''Real Love,'' composed from homemade demos recorded by John Lennon before his death in 1980 in combination with later contributions from the surviving three members of the band. In fact, the book contains much of the same interview material as the video series, as well as some new or expanded comments from the Beatles and from people who worked with them (the producer George Martin, the manager Brian Epstein and others), along with previously unpublished photographs and documents.

Coffee-table-book-sized, and at more than 350 pages, it is not an easy book to read straight through, and despite its extremely pretty graphic design, it is not that easy to browse through. Selected captions appear in an index in the back, but they are not comprehensive. For example, a highly entertaining and understandably erratically spelled memo from the Apple Corps period of the group's career appears on Page 326: ''I found some lost marijuana and mixed it with neppalese hashish, I then rolled a joint and smoked it and went into the garden and put up 50 yards of fencing and aquired a headache which took over the entire front half of my head. I took two codein and rolled another joint and smoked it. At that point Joan reminded me that you had called to find out what was happening. After giving the matter some thought I decided I didn't know what was happening, so I didn't call you. I know you will understand. Your friend.'' The author and the recipient remain anonymous (although close readers might think they recognize the dry wit of Derek Taylor, as well as the first name of his wife). In short, the book, like all installments of the ''Anthology'' project, is entertaining and, to a degree that depends on your previous grasp of the information, informative, but there is little here of major import that has not been told elsewhere. Either Philip Norman's 1981 ''Shout!'' or Hunter Davies's authorized biography, ''The Beatles,'' published in a third edition in 1996, remains the Beatles book to read if you're reading just one. Among those being published this fall are the reissue of John Lennon's 1964 ''In His Own Write''; Debbie Geller's poignant oral biography, ''In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story''; and ''Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews,'' the complete transcript of a 1970 interview, by Jann S. Wenner.

As with each manifestation of the ''Anthology'' series, ''The Beatles Anthology'' highlights some of the ways in which the Beatles are not, in the present, the best creators or keepers of their own flame, the wish to be which, aside from money, is presumably one of the primary motivations for the book's existence. This may be because of some inherent discomfort with being Beatles, signs of which were evident early in the prelapsarian themes of songs like ''Help!'' or ''Strawberry Fields Forever''; in attempts to be something other than Beatles (''Sgt. Pepper''); and, most disturbingly, in the opening shot of each ''Anthology'' video, where the camera pans back until the boys, as they were always called, are crushed by their own logo. In the case of the CD's, there are more interesting and more comprehensive bootlegs of studio outtakes floating around, and have been for years. In the case of the videos and the book, the surviving members of the band are simply too cautious, for any number of very understandable reasons, to reveal very much. The quotations show them, as personalities, to be much as they have always appeared -- Ringo, bonhomous and very funny; George, grave and grumpy; John, acerbic and radical; and Paul, diplomatic and defensive in a way that makes you want to sit down and write him a letter saying, ''Dear Sir Paul: Anybody who really knows recognizes that without your superb musicianship, the Beatles could not have been. You are fully a co-genius with the late John Lennon. Now please relax.''

BUT the ''Anthology'' also highlights, as no work by an outsider could, how close the members of the group really were to one another, if only because it demonstrates how insular their existence was for much of their time as a band. They were together virtually from childhood: John was 16 when he met Paul, who had just turned 15; George, who joined the ensemble a year or two later, was about 15 when he first played with the not-yet-Beatles; even Ringo, who did not join the band until after they were signed to a recording contract, had been a running buddy of the other three since his late teens or early 20's. They were isolated first by being the only ones obsessed with the music that obsessed them; second, by being Liverpudlian lads in Hamburg, where their most formative early gigs took place in engagements at various Reeperbahn nightclubs; and, almost immediately afterward, by being impossibly, even dangerously, successful.

The extent to which they saw, knew, trusted and loved one another above all others for more than a decade is made clear both explicitly and implicitly throughout the book. ''We were all in love with John,'' Paul says at one point; ''In the old days we'd have the hugest hotel suites, the whole floor of a hotel, and the four of us would end up in the bathroom, just to be with each other,'' Ringo says at another; on the subject of mistreating women, John says, ''The way I started understanding it was thinking, 'What would happen if I said to Ringo or Paul or George: ''Go fetch that. Put the kettle on.'' '. . . He'd give you a punch in the face''; even the undemonstrative George says, ''The good thing about being four together: we were able to share the experience.''

It has become de rigueur to conclude all assessments of the Beatles by quoting the closing lyrics of ''The End'': ''And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.'' I've always preferred that song's opening lyric: ''Oh yeah -- all right -- are you gonna be in my dreams tonight?'' It doesn't really bring you to any nice or neat conclusion, and neither does, nor should, this book. Although the ''Anthology'' doesn't mention these examples, at the time of ''Abbey Road,'' their last recording, on which ''The End'' appears, the Beatles were on such poor terms with one another that before starting it, John was insisting that all his songs appear on one side, and all Paul's on the other. (John and George also had a screaming row during the ''Abbey Road'' sessions when Yoko Ono ate George's digestive biscuit.) But in the part of the song that lies between the lyrics just quoted, Ringo plays a drum solo and the three guitar-playing members of the band trade licks to form one long, seamless, tripartite line. You only have to listen to that to know what their value was to one another, and, 30 years after they broke up, what it is to the world.

