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The BeatlesThe Biography

Bob Spitz

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Summary

The Beatles

By: Bob Spitz

Narrarated by: Alfred Molina

Even before the Beatles hit the big time, a myth was created. This version of the Beatles legend smoothed the rough edges and filled in the fault lines, and for more than forty years this manicured version of the Beatles story has sustained as truth — until now.

The product of almost a decade of research, hundreds of unprecedented interviews, and the discovery of scores of never-before-revealed documents, Bob Spitz's The Beatles is the biography fans have been waiting for.

Never before has a biography of musicians been so immersive and textured. We are there in the McCartney living room when Paul and John learn to write songs together; backstage the night Ringo takes over on drums; in seedy German strip clubs where George lies about his age so the band can perform; and at the Ed Sullivan Show as America discovers the joy and the madness. From Shea to San Francisco, through the London night, on to India, through marmalade skies, across the universe-all the way to a rooftop concert and one last moment of laughter and music.

It is all here, the highs and the lows, the love and the rivalry, the drugs, the tears, the thrill, the magic never again to be repeated. Bob Spitz's masterpiece is, at long last, the biography the Beatles deserve.

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Total File Size: 281 MB (9 files) Total Length: 10 Hours, 14 Minutes

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Elizabeth Isadora Gold

eMusic Contributor

04.28.09
Bob Spitz, The Beatles
2009 | Label: Audioworks

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?

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