Essential Beatles Reference Books

Sam, I was kind of fudging by specifying “reference” books, and saving biography/narrative books for another list. Says a lot about how many books I have, I know.

I’ve got to look up “The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away.” I’d heard of it before, but have never read it.

“Recording the Beatles” by Kevin Ryan & Brian Kehew. Exhaustive chronicle of the equipment and process for making the recordings. $100 book, but if you like details it’s a lot of fun

Good list. The only book I really don’t like on your list is Tim Riley’s Tell Me Why. There are some sloppy mistakes in that book. For example, Riley says John’s mom was run over by a bus (it was a car), he credits the guitar solo on Taxman to George (everyone knows it was Paul), etc. Those are just embarrassing errors that anyone writing on the Beatles should know.

Plus Riley is clearly a Lennon fan and it’s irritating to see him repeatedly invest John’s songs with more intellectual meaning and weight than Paul’s songs. Of course John-oriented critics (and too many male music critics are John-oriented; critics tend to be a very insular bunch marching in lockstep) do that ALL the time: They take a nonsense song written by John and pore over it for meaning and clues, but they take a nonsense song written by Paul and just call it a nonsense song. Or they take the detailed imagery of Strawberry Fields Forever and call it “psychedelic” and they take the detailed imagery of Penny Lane and see only “nostalgia.” Very annoying.

But I agree with you on many of your choices. Besides The Beatles Anthology (the band’s story as they wanted it told), I also constantly turn to Revolution in the Head, Lewisohn’s books, and to Barry Miles’ various books (not just Beatles Diary but his McCartney biography and his most recent book on The British Invasion.)

It’s too bad the book that was published about George Harrison to coincide with the Scorsese documentary is so thinly researched with so little new information and very little information at all. It’s mostly just a nice photo book. That seemed like a missed opportunity for the Harrison family since that book could have been a good reference about George and his music.

— Drew

Feel fortunate having to lug all those books around: I recently lost my voluminous Beatles book collection in a house fire. Sure, many were old and dog-eared (Recording Sessions, Beatles Forever), but I miss not being able to reach for one of them when I want to.

Ironically, the one book that did survive was “The Unreleased Beatles” by Unterberger. Ironic since I also lost my huge Beatles bootleg collection!!

Just a reminder to cherish what you have!

I sent in a couple of posts with my favorite Beatles reference books (and my thoughts on some of the books on your list here and it ever got posted.

(insert sad face here.)

Did the posts not go through? Or did I say something inappropriate for publication?

— Drew

the complete scores book is the only one of its kind; once you step off that ledge, you start hitting the fake books and the hal leonard simplified arrangements books (“for piano and vocal”) on your way down. so, in that sense, it’s invaluable for scholarship. I own a copy.

however, it’s worth pointing out that there are numerous errors in the book. some of them don’t affect the music (“steal guitar”), but others have the potential to lead beginning/intermediate musicians down the wrong path. drive my car is a good example of this: the transcriber misinterpreted the pickup at the beginning as a downbeat and so turned the intro into 9/8 to make it fit in. good luck playing it as written and making it sound like the record–in reality, it’s just 4/4 with a pickup. these kind of careless issues ultimately suggest an unfortunate lack of revision. it’s also possible that the errors were introduced deliberately in order to expose potential copyright violation, an old cartographic trick that sometimes makes its way into the world of music publishing.

I usually advocate for would-be beatles players to listen and figure out the parts on their own. there really isn’t anything in their music that a transcriptionist could figure out more readily than another musician listening at home, and there aren’t any passages so complex that a transcription would save a great deal of time (as would be the case with, say, a Bird solo). plus, it’s a great way to learn a thing or two from the brilliance of their songwriting and the gestalt effect of their work.

@Nancy

Many thanks for the recommendation of The Beatles: Ten Years That Shook the World.

I had never heard of this and found it for a reasonable price on Amazon. Quite dense and it took more than a few very enjoyable evenings to work through. The reward, however, was a trove of photos that I had not seen elsewhere and that put a face to many of the names in the Beatles saga.

I found some of the photos to be quite poignant. The shot of John on page 379 reflects, perhaps more than any other in my memory, the incredible transformation from the Help/Revolver era John to the 1969 version. While the one of Paul on page 387 provides the visual image that it was all coming to a close.

Again, many thanks for the vector to this one. It is indeed a keeper.

This has nothing to do with this work per se, but when I look at those early days I wonder what would have happened had the four somehow encountered Joe Meek. Not saying it would have been good, but I do think John and Joe might have had a good chat at the least as Joe was, like John, seemingly in search of sounds that were not yet in the musical vocabulary.