Product Details:

• Paginas: 498
  
• Editora: Pan 
  
• Idioma: Inglês

This is a fairly interesting and comprehensive book on the Beatles. Other than a single chapter on childhood and a chapter on each ‘ex-Beatles’ the focus is firmly on the rise and fall of the fab four. It’s a passable overview for the general fan, but if you’re looking for insight into the music you need to look elsewhere.

Norman rarely touches on the music, and when he does he often gets it wrong. In fact he not only reveals little insight into the Beatles songs, but little grasp of music generally.
So we have Stu Sutcliffe struggling to play chords shapes on his bass (57) and a Les Paul guitar is apparently a “state of the art” guitar (458).
Mistakes about the Beatles songs are even worse, leaving you wondering how closely he’s listened to the songs. The 8 second guitar coda on A Hard Day’s Night is described as being “gloriously long and irrelevant” (239) (it was added to underscore the fade into the opening scene). The lyrics to Polythene Pamare wrong (397). And this is in a ‘Completely revised and updated edition’.
Musical history doesn’t fare much better. Norman claims Only a Northern Song was written for Yellow Submarine (334) – it was a Sgt Pepper outtake, and that the Ballad of John & Yoko was recorded single-handedly by John with later drum overdubs by Paul (389) – they recorded it together, famously calling each other ‘Ringo and George’ on the master tape.
Paul comes in for a good kicking whenever the chance arises for secretly coveting the position of bass player in Hamburg days! for having a ghosted autobiography (even though this ‘autobiography’ was written solely by Barry Miles) or merely for being ‘desperately anxious to be liked”.
The book has some good insights into how the publishing deals were struck and how the Beatles finally broke though in the states. But in a world swamped with books on the Beatles I can’t help feeling that there are better ones out there.