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A review by saroz162
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown
3.0
It took me a long time to read this book - so long, in fact, I went back to the beginning and started it again, reading most of the first half twice. It has an interesting framework - 150 vignettes, many of which are very thinly connected, told in a roughly but not entirely chronological order - that contributes to it being both a little addictive and a little easy to forget once you put it down. It's a sort of attention-deficit writing; you can practically hear the "WHOOSH" from the TV series Lost as it veers backward, forward, and sideways in time.
It also takes some time to fully recognize what Brown's doing, or perhaps one might say the nature of his implicit thesis. This is a book about celebrity - about how it elevates normal, everyday people, changes how other people react to them, makes them into people they never would have been. Most of all, it's about the flame of celebrity and the peripheral figures who get their wings burnt by it. That's interesting - I'm not sure it's 650 pages of interesting, though.
Many of the vignettes revolve around specific people, and several of them will be familiar to stalwart fans, especially in the second half of the book: the Maharishi, "Magic" Alex, the policeman who broke up the rooftop concert, and of course, Yoko. The more surprising stories show up toward the beginning of the book, including anecdotes I've never read from Hamburg, encounters with Noel Coward and Malcolm Muggeridge, and some of the Beatles' earliest public appearances as chart-toppers. It's all very readable and often related in a cheerful, quirky tone that fits the cover design. The longer you go on, though, the more of a picture of destruction and chaos builds, including some openly seedy chapters that veer toward tabloid journalism (I'm thinking specifically of the second Ronnie Spector section). It's a strange book in that you often feel drawn to read it but feel just that little bit unclean afterward.
As others have also pointed out, Brown also gives the National Trust and their "preservation" of the Beatle homes a right kicking - not entirely unjustified, but the sarcasm in those chapters, and a couple others involving his tourist adventures, is laid on very thick.
At the end of the day I'm not totally sure what to make of One Two Three Four. It makes a worthwhile point, and I think it's good reading if you're a fan of the Beatles and you know a few (but not all) of these stories - you'll learn more about what happened to Jimmie Nicol, for instance. Some of the vignettes are really funny, like the letters received by Ringo from fangirls, and some of them are joyous, like the multiple perspectives that combine to tell the story of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The book ultimately trends toward melancholy, though - it's hard to get around the point he makes about Brian Epstein in the framing story, for instance - and while I'm in no way suggesting a book needs to stay cheerful and upbeat all the time, it feels like an awful lot of pages to reinforce a position that's pretty obvious by half the way through.
It also takes some time to fully recognize what Brown's doing, or perhaps one might say the nature of his implicit thesis. This is a book about celebrity - about how it elevates normal, everyday people, changes how other people react to them, makes them into people they never would have been. Most of all, it's about the flame of celebrity and the peripheral figures who get their wings burnt by it. That's interesting - I'm not sure it's 650 pages of interesting, though.
Many of the vignettes revolve around specific people, and several of them will be familiar to stalwart fans, especially in the second half of the book: the Maharishi, "Magic" Alex, the policeman who broke up the rooftop concert, and of course, Yoko. The more surprising stories show up toward the beginning of the book, including anecdotes I've never read from Hamburg, encounters with Noel Coward and Malcolm Muggeridge, and some of the Beatles' earliest public appearances as chart-toppers. It's all very readable and often related in a cheerful, quirky tone that fits the cover design. The longer you go on, though, the more of a picture of destruction and chaos builds, including some openly seedy chapters that veer toward tabloid journalism (I'm thinking specifically of the second Ronnie Spector section). It's a strange book in that you often feel drawn to read it but feel just that little bit unclean afterward.
As others have also pointed out, Brown also gives the National Trust and their "preservation" of the Beatle homes a right kicking - not entirely unjustified, but the sarcasm in those chapters, and a couple others involving his tourist adventures, is laid on very thick.
At the end of the day I'm not totally sure what to make of One Two Three Four. It makes a worthwhile point, and I think it's good reading if you're a fan of the Beatles and you know a few (but not all) of these stories - you'll learn more about what happened to Jimmie Nicol, for instance. Some of the vignettes are really funny, like the letters received by Ringo from fangirls, and some of them are joyous, like the multiple perspectives that combine to tell the story of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The book ultimately trends toward melancholy, though - it's hard to get around the point he makes about Brian Epstein in the framing story, for instance - and while I'm in no way suggesting a book needs to stay cheerful and upbeat all the time, it feels like an awful lot of pages to reinforce a position that's pretty obvious by half the way through.