Shout! Read Free Page B

supreme irony that the old truant, rebel, and blasphemer would have appreciated, he had become an instant twentieth-century saint.
    Millions of fans were now forced to accept, as they never quite had in the preceding nine years, that the Beatles’ career really was now over. The result was a refocus on an oeuvre that had for so long been taken for granted: a new, objective appreciation of its energy and variety, its poetry and humor, its astounding seven-league leaps from aural primitive painting to Michelangelo masterpiece.
    All this, of course, was an outcome I had never dreamed of when I began my book against such heavy discouragement two years earlier. Immediately after December 8, my concerns were the anesthetizing ones of journalism: I had to write a five-thousand-word tribute to John for the front of the Sunday Times Review section as well as advise on a rushed memorial issue of its magazine. I filed my five thousand words in the since outmoded Fleet Street manner, dictating it into the telephone as a copy taker at the office typed it. Not until the very end did full comprehension strike me: This was the boy whose life I had lived vicariously from Menlove Avenue and Quarry Bank High School to the London Palladium, Ed Sullivan, Shea Stadium, Savile Row, and Central Park West. My final half-dozen words of dictation were checked by an involuntary sob.
    Shout! was published in Britain in April 1981, and in the United States a couple of months later. It became a best seller in both countries and was translated into a variety of languages, including Estonian. While I was in New York doing promotion Yoko saw me talking about John on the Good Morning America program and invited me to visit her at the Dakota. So I did get there after all, albeit five months too late. My conversation with Yoko became an epilogue to the mass market paperback edition of Shout! It included many surprising sidelights on the Lennons’ relationship, and also her observation—made sadly rather than with any bitterness or malice—that “John used to say no one ever hurt him the way Paul hurt him.”
    When Paul read the quote in the British press he took the unusual step of bypassing his usual PR screen and telephoning me personally at my London flat (having presumably obtained my number from the PR man who, some months earlier, bade me “Fuck off”). Unfortunately, I was out when he phoned, and he left no number for me to call him back. I never did find out what he’d wanted, whether to argue with Yoko’s assertion or, more likely, to give me an earful for repeating it.
    So that was that, I thought: I’d “done” the Beatles and proved my point that for a biographer the most banally obvious ideas are generally the best ones. Again I put my notes into storage and made plans to move on to other things.
    Since 1981, I have written three other music biographies (of the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Buddy Holly), two works of fiction, an autobiography, and television and stage drama as well as journalism on subjects ranging from Tony Blair’s government to World War II. But, try as I might, there has been no moving on from the Beatles.
    More than thirty years after their breakup, they dominate the headlines almost as much as in their mid-sixties high noon. Every month or so brings some page-leading fresh twist in the story—a distant cousin of John’s now claiming to have been his closest childhood confidant, a Hamburg matron alleging long-forgotten amours with Paul or George, a Sotheby’s auction of freshly unearthed memorabilia; a lost letter, a doodled lyric, a fragment of reel-to-reel tape. Books on the Beatles, ranging from muck-raking “revelations” to scholarly analyses, now run into the hundreds, and go on multiplying all the time. Their old recording studios on Abbey Road, north London, is a shrine rivaling ElvisPresley’s Graceland, perennially setting some kind of record for how much mourning graffiti can be crammed onto a