The BeatlesThe Biography

More than a biography — it's the living word of the world's most famous band
How did four kids from Liverpool become the objects of three generations of adulation and nostalgia so obsessive that it spawned its own terminology? Bob Spitz's The Beatles offers an answer that's both satisfying and — still — not quite enough. As an exhaustive group biography, The Beatles will ensure that fans finally have every single fact straight in their obsession arsenals — and Alfred Molina's elegant narration only emphasizes the frequent over-the-top absurdities that became the group's reality. For example: Jayne Mansfield badgered the boys for a photo on their first trip to LA; John and George were dosed for their virgin LSD trip — the drug was slipped into their coffee via loaded sugar cubes; Sergeant Pepper was the first album to have lyrics printed on the inside cover; John, Paul and Brian Epstein didn't think George Harrison's songs were particularly riveting until Abbey Road's "Something," his paean to then-wife Patti Boyd.

For listeners looking for new insight into the music of the world's most famous band, Spitz's tome provides relatively little new information. However, as the document of record on the personalities, incidents and anecdotes that made the Beatles into the Beatles, it's unparalleled. For fans who are looking for the flavor of a now vanished time and place (I'm thinking particularly now of the 16-year-old kid who just walked into my Brooklyn coffee shop wearing a Revolver t-shirt) The Beatles is more than a biography — it's the living word. And after all, isn't God (who Lennon himself famously declared dead) in the details?