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Posts tagged ‘Mark Lewisohn’

Sep 7

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The Beatles in 1962

“The deeper you dig,” Mark Lewisohn said, “the higher you fly.” He was introducing a preview of his new stage show about the Beatles in 1962, and talking about the methodology behind the research into the group’s history that has been his life’s work. And then he spent two hours proving his point.

Among the many amusing moments of the show is his speculation on what might have happened if Decca had made a deal with Brian Epstein and his band instead of signing Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. Since Decca immediately put the Tremeloes to work as the studio backing group for some of their other artists, it might have meant the Beatles accompanying Jimmy Savile on his 45rpm single of “Ahab the Arab”. Which, 60 years later, would not have looked great on their collective CV.

Where memories fade, he points out, documents are the key. And he has documentary evidence for lots of things, including a letter demolishing the story that Decca turned down the Beatles, showing that an offer was made and rejected by Epstein.

His shows, of which this is the second, tend to have rather odd titles. This one is called Evolver:62. It follows the success in 2019 of Hornsey Road, in which he celebrated the 50th anniversary of Abbey Road, and which I wrote about in the Guardian. The new one takes us through the calendar year of 1962, including the death in Hamburg of Stuart Sutcliffe, the approaches to Decca and EMI, the signing with the latter and the first encounters with George Martin, the replacement of Pete Best by Ringo Starr, and a week in August when something extraordinary happened every day, including Ringo’s debut with the band, Liverpool FC’s first match on their return to the old First Division under Bill Shankly, and John Lennon’s marriage to Cynthia Powell.

Lewisohn narrates the show on stage, an engaging presenter who finds clever ways to illustrate the story. Talking about how the US rights to “Love Me Do” were turned down successively by Capitol, Liberty, Laurie and Atlantic, he shows us mock-ups of what the 45s on those labels would have looked like, while pointing out that Jerry Wexler, who did the deed on Atlantic’s behalf, never had to suffer the sort of scorn that, probably unjustly, followed Decca’s Dick Rowe to the grave.

I’m not going to give much more away, because the surprises are part of the fun. Suffice it say that Lewisohn knows more than McCartney remembers about the inspiration behind “I Saw Her Standing There”. And he delighted me by discovering the first newspaper or magazine in which the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones were mentioned in the same issue: a Melody Maker of late December 1962, when “Love Me Do” was in the charts, the American folk singer was in London to appear in Madhouse on Castle Street for the BBC, and a new R&B band were advertised as playing a gig at Sandover Hall in Richmond.

The preview I attended was full of that kind of stuff (including the postcard in the photograph above, the first known example of all four Beatles autographing a single object). Lewisohn is doing the show to finance his continuing work on the second volume of his epic trilogy, All These Years, which can legitimately be thought of as the definitive Beatles history. One of the things I like about him is that although he’s gone to enormous lengths to acquire all this information, he never seems proprietorial about it. He likes sharing his treasure, using it to enrich everyone else’s enjoyment of a story that will never be repeated. So while it’s for a worthy cause, it’s also a really entertaining couple of hours.

* Mark Lewisohn’s Evolver:62 is at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London for three shows on October 7 and 8, 2022. Tickets: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-theatre-studio. Tune In, the first volume of his trilogy, is published by Little, Brown.

Sep 19

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Mark Lewisohn’s ‘Hornsey Road’

Abbey Road

When the Guardian ran my interview with Mark Lewisohn about his Abbey Road stage show last week, the piece got 800,000 page views in 24 hours: more than that day’s Brexit coverage, they said. I don’t know what this means, except that the Beatles are still pretty popular. More popular than Brexit, anyway.

Mark had a lot of interesting things to say. What I didn’t have room to discuss in the piece was the use made in the show — which is actually titled Hornsey Road — of the original multitrack tapes, downloadable (astonishing as it may seem) from the video game called Beatles Rock Band, released in 2009. This allows anyone with the necessary equipment to make their own remixes: a dangerous opportunity, but one that Mark has used with care and sensitivity to form part of his two-hour show, which had its first night in Northampton this week and is touring around the country until early December.

I went to a run-through last week, and learnt a lot from his remixes of the original eight-tracks from Olympic, Trident and EMI’s Abbey Road studios between February and August 1969. He brought out a single bar of absolutely sublime McCartney bass-playing on “Because” that I’d never noticed before, ditto the cowbell on “Polythene Pam”. Thanks to him, I was paying closer attention and therefore better able to enjoy the sequence of guitar solos from McCartney, Harrison and Lennon on “The End”: two bars each, then repeat twice. Eighteen quite revealing bars — particularly Lennon’s — in a track that was the last thing they recorded together.

Revisiting Abbey Road was funny for me because it was 50 years ago to the week — on September 10, 1969, in fact — that I’d tipped up at the ICA in the Mall for a screening of several films by John & Yoko, including Two Virgins and Rape. It was a long and gruelling evening, during which an unidentified male and female in a white canvas bag led us all in a chant of “Hare Krishna” that lasted the entire 52 minutes of Yoko’s Film No 5. Was it the Lennons inside the bag? At first we assumed it was. Then we thought, almost certainly not. But it was Bag-ism in action, for sure.

The unexpected treat was a preview of Abbey Road, a couple of weeks ahead of its release. Side one was played in the interval, followed by side two as an accompaniment to John’s film Self Portrait, a 20-minute study of his penis rising and falling. By the time the evening ended, only a handful of the invited audience remained in the theatre.

It was a time when the Beatles — and the Lennons in particular — were in the headlines almost every day. Fleet Street was obsessed with their relationships, their business affairs, their eccentricities. It was also a time when Lennon was happy to sit and talk in the Beatles’ room at Apple HQ at 3 Savile Row, as he did a couple of days later. The following day he was in Toronto for the Live Peace Festival, with Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann and Alan White. On the Monday morning he called me up at the Melody Maker offices to give me the story, and specifically to deny the reports that he and Yoko had been booed off.

“That’s a load of rubbish,” he said. “It was a fantastic show — really unbelievable. It was magical. The band was so funky and we really blew some minds. We only had time to rehearse on the plane going over, and we did things like ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Money’, ‘Dizzy [Miss Lizzy]’, and a new song I’d never played before.” That would have been “Cold Turkey”, which the Beatles were about to turn down as their next single. “Then Yoko joined us,” he continued, “and sang one number [“Don’t Worry Kyoko”] before doing things like our Life with the Lions album. It was incredible because the crowd was howling along with us and they all joined in for ‘Give Peace a Chance’. Everyone was singing — it was like a great big mantra.”

My impression of Lewisohn’s show was that Hornsey Road tells the story in rewarding detail and with a nicely judged sense of how wonderfully absurd the events surrounding the Beatles sometimes were, half a century ago.

* The photograph of the Beatles was taken on the Thames at Twickenham on April 9, 1969 and is from the booklet accompanying the 2009 remastered version of Abbey Road. It is © Apple Corps Ltd.

Dec 15

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Christmas with Sgt Pepper, Lovely Rita etc

Sgt Pepper 1For some weeks now Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, the first part of his epic three-volume history of the Beatles, has been staring reproachfully at me from the top of the to-be-read pile. The time to absorb its 900-odd pages will come soon. Meanwhile on Saturday night I took the opportunity to listen to its author give an illustrated talk on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at the Centenary Theatre in Berkhamsted School, Hertfordshire, during an evening in aid of the Pepper Foundation, a locally based charity which provides specialised nursing care for children with life-limiting or terminal illnesses.

As it happens, Sgt Pepper is not in my top half-dozen Beatles albums, but the extent of Mark’s erudition and the depth of his engagement are such that I was fascinated by both the background detail and the close analysis he provided while showing related film clips and playing snatches of tapes from the sessions to show how the songs were built up.

It was an absorbing 45 minutes, and a perfect preparation to what happened after a short interval, when the charity’s founder, Robert Breakwell, took his place on a suddenly very crowded stage as the director of a troupe of dozens of musicians and singers, mostly amateurs, all primed to perform the album from beginning to end.

How bad an idea does that sound? How easy was it at that moment to exchange sardonic glances and make mental plans for an early exit and a quick drive back to London? All I can tell you is that the next hour passed in a whirl of surprise and enchantment as performers of all ages, abilities, shapes and sizes tackled the challenge not just with enthusiasm and energy but with a wonderful degree of imagination.

For the opening “Sgt Pepper” song itself, two cheerleaders held up cue cards — “LAUGH”, “CHEER” etc — to enable us to replicate the sounds borrowed by the Beatles and George Martin from Abbey Road’s library of sound effects. As it turned out, however, this wasn’t going to be an attempt to imitate the original. Each song was interpreted in a way appropriate to the material, the talents of the performers and the resources available on stage, and often given a creative twist.

So we heard “Getting Better” done by five young women in a Spice Girls sort of way, “When I’m 64” sung by a group of children and “Good Morning, Good Morning” subjected to a delightfully scatty acappella arrangement. “Within You, Without You” featured not just the sound of a sitar but a haunting snatch of “Tomorrow Never Knows”.  “Fixing a Hole” was sung by Mike Burnett in folk-music style to the accompaniment of his own acoustic guitar, a double bass and two backing singers. Claire Boulter’s trained voice was applied with exquisitely transfixing effect to “She’s Leaving Home”, accompanied by a string quartet, a pianist and a choir including many of the night’s performers (a clearly overjoyed Lewisohn among them).

And then came the moment when one or two of us were thinking, “Are they really going to have a go at ‘A Day in the Life’?” How on earth would they cope with the ambition of the album’s concluding track, a towering moment in the Beatles’ musical history? Blow me down if they didn’t succeed quite brilliantly, finding ways to emulate the orchestral glissandi and the final piano chord that fades away into an echoing silence.

It was an amazing thing to hear and feel, and it was one of several moments at which Breakwell and his troupe were able to remind us of the Beatles’ special magic, the quality that will surely persuade history that the benign spell they cast over us was the result not just of some sort of passing pop phenomenon, writ extra-large.