Poignant and fab
The latest Beatles portrait makes a wonderful mosaic of musical history
“They ARE awful. But I also think they're fabulous. Let's just go and say hello.”
What if young record store manager Brian Epstein had not, in 1961, after a scrappy gig in a “sweaty basement,” popped over to say hello to the band? What if, as Craig Brown wonders in 150 Glimpses of The Beatles, Paul had done better in his exams, moved up a school year and never got to know George? Or Ringo had more patience with U.S. immigration forms and succeeded in moving to Houston?
Or the engine fire on a 1965 flight from Minneapolis to Portland had ended in catastrophe, cutting the bandmates off in their prime? We are haunted by the shadows of what didn't happen.
“Think what we would have missed if we had never heard the Beatles,” the Queen once mused. As the world marks 40 years since the murder of John Lennon — gone, now, for as long as we had him — shimmering alternative histories are especially poignant. A feeling of loss is palpable.
Time-play and what-ifs are part of Brown's formidable bag of tricks, deployed to add emotional range and a poignant twist to his comic vignettes. His biographical method — combining fragments, lists, excerpts, quotes and flights of whimsy — is executed as brilliantly here as in 2017's glittering Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Interestingly, the two stories intersect. At the 1964 première of A Hard Day's Night, in an incident that appears in both books, George approaches Her Royal Highness to point out an unfortunate hitch in the social order: “Ma'am,” he says, “we're starved, and Walter (the film's producer) says we can't eat until you leave.” The princess duly departs, and thus, “for the first time, but not the last, royalty deferred to celebrity.”
The contrast between old and new worlds is amplified when Brown takes a further step back in time. At the recording of All You Need Is Love for television, we're told that brass section leader David Mason once played Vaughan Williams for Vaughan Williams. In turn, the elderly composer had known, for the first 10 years of his life, his great-uncle, Charles Darwin. “From Charles Darwin to John Lennon in just three handshakes,” Brown writes: “the Beatles concertina time in the most extraordinary way.”
Within this historical sweep, Brown tells his story mosaically: The Beatles are assembled from shards of memory, no claims made of empirical authority. Brown revels in the instabilities of the past, gleefully dissecting contradictory accounts of an incident in which an interloper at the British Embassy in Washington snipped a lock of Ringo's hair from his head, and John's attack on a Cavern Club MC at Paul's 21st birthday party.
If the events sound familiar, you may not learn much from these 150 Glimpses. But Brown is less interested in finding fresh material than in finding novel ways to approach it.