Dreaming the Beatles

Author: Rob Sheffield
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062207679
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
An NPR Best Book of the Year • Winner of the Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism “This is the best book about the Beatles ever written” —Mashable Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape offers an entertaining, unconventional look at the most popular band in history, the Beatles, exploring what they mean today and why they still matter so intensely to a generation that has never known a world without them. Dreaming the Beatles is not another biography of the Beatles, or a song-by-song analysis of the best of John and Paul. It isn’t another exposé about how they broke up. It isn’t a history of their gigs or their gear. It is a collection of essays telling the story of what this ubiquitous band means to a generation who grew up with the Beatles music on their parents’ stereos and their faces on T-shirts. What do the Beatles mean today? Why are they more famous and beloved now than ever? And why do they still matter so much to us, nearly fifty years after they broke up? As he did in his previous books, Love is a Mix Tape, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, and Turn Around Bright Eyes, Sheffield focuses on the emotional connections we make to music. This time, he focuses on the biggest pop culture phenomenon of all time—The Beatles. In his singular voice, he explores what the Beatles mean today, to fans who have learned to love them on their own terms and not just for the sake of nostalgia. Dreaming the Beatles tells the story of how four lads from Liverpool became the world’s biggest pop group, then broke up—but then somehow just kept getting bigger. At this point, their music doesn’t belong to the past—it belongs to right now. This book is a celebration of that music, showing why the Beatles remain the world’s favorite thing—and how they invented the future we’re all living in today.

Magic Circles

Author: Devin McKinney
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674012028
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
No one expressed the heart and soul of the Sixties as powerfully as the Beatles did through the words, images, and rhythms of their music. In Magic Circles Devin McKinney uncovers the secret history of a generation and a pivotal moment in twentieth-century culture. He reveals how the Beatles enacted the dream life of their time and shows how they embodied a kaleidoscope of desire and anguish for all who listened--hippies or reactionaries, teenage fans or harried parents, Bob Dylan or Charles Manson. The reader who dares to re-enter the vortex that was the Sixties will appreciate, perhaps for the first time, much of what lay beneath the social trauma of the day. Delving into concerts and interviews, films and music, outtakes and bootlegs, Devin McKinney brings to bear the insights of history, aesthetics, sociology, psychology, and mythology to account for the depth and resonance of the Beatles' impact. His book is also a uniquely multifaceted appreciation of the group's artistic achievement, exploring their music as both timeless expression and visceral response to their historical moment. Starting in the cellars of Liverpool and Hamburg, and continuing through the triumph of Beatlemania, the groundbreaking studio albums, and the last brutal, sorrowful thrust of the White Album, Magic Circles captures both the dream and the reality of four extraordinary musicians and their substance as artists. At once an entrancing narrative and an analytical montage, the book follows the drama, comedy, mystery, irony, and curious off-ramps of investigation and inquiry that contributed to one of the most amazing odysseys in pop culture.

Like Some Forgotten Dream

Author: Daniel Rachel
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1788403231
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
*** This is the story of the great lost Beatles album. The end of the Beatles wasn't inevitable. It came through miscommunication, misunderstandings and missed opportunities to reconcile. But what if it didn't end? What if just one of those chances was taken, and the Beatles carried on? What if they made one last, great album? In Like Some Forgotten Dream, Daniel Rachel - winner of the prestigious Penderyn Music Book Prize - looks at what could have been. Drawing on impeccable research, Rachel examines the the Fab Four's untimely demise - and from the ashes compiles a track list for an imagined final album, pulling together unfinished demos, forgotten B-sides, hit solo songs, and arguing that together they form the basis of a lost Beatles masterpiece. Compelling and convincing, Like Some Forgotten Dream is a daring re-write of Beatles history, and a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. Praise for Daniel Rachel: Walls Come Tumbling Down: 'Superlative...brilliant' - Q Magazine 'Triumphant' - The Guardian 'Brilliant' - Mojo Isle of Noises: 'In depth, scholarly' - Q Magazine 'Fascinating' - The Guardian / NME 'Fantastic, insightful interviews' - Noel Gallagher Don't Look Back in Anger: 'A-grade, A-list' - The Sunday Times 'A rollicking read' - Mail on Sunday 'Remarkable' - Art Review 'Book of the Week' - The Guardian

Artificial Paradise

Author: Kevin Courrier
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313345872
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
There is an epigram in this book from the Phil Ochs song, "Crucifixion", about the Kennedy assassination, that states: I fear to contemplate that beneath the greatest love, lies a hurricane of hate. On February 11th 1963, the Beatles recorded "There's a Place", a dazzling, unheralded tune which was included on their electrifying debut album, Please Please Me. This song firmly laid the foundation on which a huge utopian dream of the sixties would be built. Within that dream, however, also lay the seeds of a darker vision that would emerge out of the very counterculture that the Beatles and their music helped create. Thus, even as their music attracted adoring fans, it also enticed the murderous ambitions of Charles Manson; and though the Beatles may have inspired others to form bands, their own failed hopes ultimately led to their breakup. The disillusionment with the sixties, and the hopes associated with the group, would many years later culminate in the assassination of John Lennon and the attempted slaying of George Harrison by deranged and obsessive fans. In this incisive examination, author Kevin Courrier (Dangerous Kitchen: the Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams) examines how the Fab Four, through their astonishing music and comically rebellious personalities, created the promise of an inclusive culture built on the principles of pleasure and fulfillment. By taking us through their richly inventive catalogue, Courrier illustrates how the Beatles' startling impact on popular culture built a bond with audiences that was so strong, people today continue to either cling nostalgically to it, or struggle - and often struggle violently - to escape its influence.

The Beatles: Off the Record

Author: Keith Badman
Publisher: Omnibus Press
ISBN: 085712045X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
The Beatles Off The Record is the most comprehensive oral history of The Beatles ever published - an 'as it happened' story of the greatest pop group of them all. Featuring a wealth of quotes from the Sixties by John, Paul, George and Ringo themselves and a host of others who were close to the group during the heady days of Beatlemania and beyond, including their families, fellow musicians, Brian Epstein, George Martin and dozens more. As Hunter Davis, The Beatles official biographer, states in his foreword; ...compared with some of The Beatles' later selective and polished or faulty and fading memories, this is much nearer the truth. Well, as it appeared to be, at the time...

Can't Buy Me Love

Author: Jonathan Gould
Publisher: Crown Archetype
ISBN: 0307405494
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 674

Book Description
That the Beatles were an unprecedented phenomenon is a given. In Can’t Buy Me Love, Jonathan Gould explains why, placing the Fab Four in the broad and tumultuous panorama of their time and place, rooting their story in the social context that girded both their rise and their demise. Nearly twenty years in the making, Can’t Buy Me Love is a masterful work of group biography, cultural history, and musical criticism. Beginning with their adolescence in Liverpool, Gould describes the seminal influences––from Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry to The Goon Show and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland––that shaped the Beatles both as individuals and as a group. In addition to chronicling their growth as singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists, he highlights the advances in recording technology that made their sound both possible and unique, as well as the developments in television and radio that lent an explosive force to their popular success. With a musician’s ear, Gould sensitively evokes the timeless appeal of the Lennon-McCartney collaboration and their emergence as one of the most creative and significant songwriting teams in history. Behind the scenes Gould explores the pivotal roles played by manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin, credits the influence on the Beatles’ music of contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Ravi Shankar, and traces the gradual escalation of the fractious internal rivalries that led to the group’s breakup after their final masterpiece, Abbey Road. Most significantly, by chronicling their revolutionary impact on popular culture during the 1960s, Can’t Buy Me Love illuminates the Beatles as a charismatic phenomenon of international proportions, whose anarchic energy and unexpected import was derived from the historic shifts in fortune that transformed the relationship between Britain and America in the decades after World War II. From the Beats in America and the Angry Young Men in England to the shadow of the Profumo Affair and JFK’s assassination, Gould captures the pulse of a time that made the Beatles possible—and even necessary. As seen through the prism of the Beatles and their music, an entire generation’s experience comes astonishingly to life. Beautifully written, consistently insightful, and utterly original, Can’ t Buy Me Love is a landmark work about the Beatles, Britain, and America.

One Dream Ago

Author: Michael Xenephon Savvas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780957777798
Category : Adelaide (S. Aust.)
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
"Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, made history as the place that gave the Beatles their biggest ever reception."--Book cover.

The Beatles

Author: Keith Badman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781847721013
Category : Rock musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In the '60s, before the legend was fully formed, The Beatles were sometimes unguarded and often indiscreet in their comments. These original raw remarks have been unearthed and re-assembled in a vivid new verbal documentary.

The Beatles

Author: Roy Carr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782859220013
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description

And in the End

Author: Ken McNab
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 125080373X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Ken McNab's in-depth look at The Beatles' acrimonious final year is a detailed account of the breakup featuring the perspectives of all four band members and their roles. A must to add to the collection of Beatles fans, And In the End is full of fascinating information available for the first time. McNab reconstructs for the first time the seismic events of 1969, when The Beatles reached new highs of creativity and new lows of the internal strife that would destroy them. Between the pressure of being filmed during rehearsals and writing sessions for the documentary Get Back, their company Apple Corps facing bankruptcy, Lennon's heroin use, and musical disagreements, the group was arguing more than ever before and their formerly close friendship began to disintegrate. In the midst of this rancour, however, emerged the disharmony of Let It Be and the ragged genius of Abbey Road, their incredible farewell love letter to the world"--