Spotlight: The Beatles

Celebrating The Beatles in a Year of Books

    I enjoyed last year’s experiment of writing one Star Trek related blog on the first Tuesday of each month so much,
that I’ve decided to pick something else to blog about in the same manner from now until September 2023. The choice was obvious for me since I watched Peter Jackson’s Emmy winning Get Back on Disney+.

    Books about and by The Beatles have been a mainstay for me for years. I grew up listening to them as The Beatles and in their solo years, so reading the books about them was as natural to me as breathing. There are a lot of books about them, of course, as Steven Cockroft of the Nothing is Real podcast—a podcast about The Beatles that you should search out and make part of your routine with Cockroft and his co-host Jason Party—anyway, as he says everyone who knew them wrote a book about them. 

I’ve been to Beatles conventions and seen most of the authors there talking about the books they wrote, the music they heard first, the famous foursome they were privileged to know, and though many of them will tell similar stories, they all usually have some unique twist, some different perspective that makes their book different from the ones that came before. 

The Beatles became part of the national consciousness in the United States after their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. They appeared on the show not once but three weeks in a row—February 9^th, 16^th, and 23^rd, May 24^th, and then in 1965 they appeared live once more. After that, in 1966 they appeared in taped performances in 1966 and 1967 and finally in 1970 they provided promotional videos of two of their songs. 

They’d appeared on a news program some time before this in more of a “look how silly they are in Britain” sort of story detailing how The Beatles had taken England by storm, but it was in February 1964 that, primed and readied by the release of the singles and the hype of the radio stations, as well as the PR machines attached to the Ed Sullivan Show, that the United States officially joined the masses of teenagers across Europe who’d embraced the Beatles into their lives.

My collection of Beatles books skews towards George Harrison books, but there are other gems, too. I’m excited to be rereading them, and hoping to find some new ones (or at least new-to-me) in the coming year. 

In recent months, I’ve been rediscovering my obsession. I’ve been listening almost exclusively to The Beatles and even listening to a fabulous Beatles Podcast called Nothing is Real and it was diving into my Beatles books collection just as I finished my last Star Trek post that really connected the dots for me on this idea.

For the record, my favorite Beatle is George Harrison, but in reality, I love them all—and Ringo in particular appeals of late. He’s got the absolute perfect attitude. Peace and Love!

I considered rescheduling this post and wondered at the odd timing—planning a year of writing so very British a topic as this and posting about it on the day the Queen Elizabeth II dies and one week after posting my review of The Windsor Knot, a novel with Queen Elizabeth as an amateur sleuth. It seemed wrong to do that, though. After all, Keep Calm and Carry On is a good motto.

I hope you’ll join me this year as I dive headfirst into the world of books about The Beatles.