By Pete Shotton and Nicholas Schaffner
1983
By this point, I think I've read nearly every book on the Beatles that contains any worthwhile information (there are a zillion Beatles books out there, but only a small percentage really have anything of value to add to the conversation). This was one that I had neglected to get under my belt up until the start of the year.
For those who don't know, Pete Shotton was John Lennon's childhood best friend, and the two of them remained incredibly close up until the breakup of the Fab Four (or somewhere around there, I don't 100% remember. I read this in January). There is lots of fascinating insight Shotton's memoir offers, as he had a perspective very few did: he knew Lennon pre-fame, and got what mostly seemed to be an unguarded version of the famously-guarded musician. To wit, many of the stories here (especially concerning their teenage years) are pretty ribald and peppered with curse words and stories about bodily fluids that come from the nether-regions, which, again, is pretty rare for a tome concerning the Beatles. If you wish to know John Lennon's record for honking it in one day, you're in luck!
Two pretty infamous Beatle anecdotes originated from here, that you've probably heard by now if you care anything about the Mop Tops-- the groupwank sessions, of which Pete was a participant (I am weirdly proud to let you all know that despite not having read this book, I did know about that years before it made headlines recently-ish), and the allegation that John and the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein had some sort of sexual encounter on their oft-speculated-about trip to Barcelona together. The latter here spawned a well-regarded short film!
I would consider it essential Beatles reading, even if the information volunteered here doesn't have much to do with their creative process (although Shotton does claim he contributed a line to Eleanor Rigby) or artistry or history outside of what Shotton was privy to. If you want to see the most mythologized figures of 20th-century pop culture humanized, this is a good place to go.
By Andrew Matheson
2015
There are two books that I read this year that had the greatest impact on me; one is this one (and the other we won't be getting to in this instalment).
I had been meaning to listen to the Hollywood Brats' album for quite awhile, and finally did so at the start of this year. I was blown away. For my money, it's one of the best pure rock 'n roll albums ever recorded. The sound of that record is the sound I've always wanted to hear from rock music, Stones-influenced sleaze glammed out to the extreme. The New York Dolls, one of my favorite bands of all time, are the only other group who hit this sweet spot for me just as perfectly (the Dolls are often a point of comparison for the Brats, although in this book Matheson claimed they weren't influenced by them at all-- which I don't buy). Why did they just make one proper album? How did they presage the explosion of punk rock by a couple of years? Where did these guys come from, and where did they go?
The band's founder and frontman, Andrew Matheson, answers all these questions here with a vivid and hilarious narrative style. He walks us through the band's origins, when he arrived in the UK as a teenager armed with nothing but a wad of cash, some records and a guitar (which he was promptly semi-swindled out of). We follow the Hollywood Brats' struggle to exist in the first place, and after that, their struggle to not implode in on themselves. Young an' rowdy rock an' rollers who keep seeming to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, despite their talent. I won't spoil the many tales that comprise their journey, but I would be remiss not to mention the fact that Cliff Richard of all people lets the band stay in one of his mansions while he's not using it, and what ensues reads like a debauched episode of The Monkees on crack.
The Brat's album is phenomenal, but was released after their demise. Malcolm MacLaren tried to revive them but Matheson turned him down, causing him to focus his attention to his other going musical concern, the burgeoning Sex Pistols, whom the Brats influenced. The Clash and several other seminal punks took more than a few cues from the Brats, yet they remain relatively obscure unlike their peers in this sense such as the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and so forth-- a secret for those who want to seek it out. It's a shame.
A further shame is that Matheson passed in May of this year with little fanfare. The Brats' drummer Louis Sparks (maybe the heart of this book) also departed a few years back, and the sole piece of info I could find about that was his obituary on a crematorium website. The group sorta-reformed (and released a single) in 2019, but it looks like the story has come to an anti-climactic end. Do yourself a favor and listen to their album if you haven't. Keep Brat-dom alive, it deserves it.
By Mark A. Moore
2021
I mentioned this book in another post, so I will reiterate: it's the definitive tome on Jan Berry and Jan & Dean in general. Exhaustively comprehensive, sometimes to a fault, it covers everything one should know about the massively-underrated pop duo and then some.
Jan Berry is an unsung genius of 1960s music, so if you are unfamiliar of why I make such an assertion, I would point you in the direction of this book. You'll gain an appreciation for just how much the guy accomplished and pioneered in such a short window of time, starting with his professional-quality DIY recording studio he built in garage as a teenager.
By Colin Escott, with George Merritt and William MacEwen
1994
A captivating account of the life of one of country music's Mount Rushmore figure. Does a good job of separating fact from fiction, especially in regards to sanitized narratives pushed by Williams' ex-wife Audrey Sheppard since his death. Quite tragic overall, the man had some real demons and never seemed to be quite able to get it together long enough to reach stability (although this is well-known by now). I don't have too much to add here, really. If you're a fan of country this is an essential story, and if you're not I would wager you'll still find it a fascinating tale.
By Neal Gabler
2001
When we hear the name "Walt Disney" nowadays, we don't really think of a person. We think of an entertainment company that is practically omniscient by this point. If we try to envision the man who bore that name, what we see is still not so much a human being but a symbol. Someone who was effectively turned into a mascot for themselves.
If you ask ten different people for their opinion on Walter Elias Disney, you will likely receive ten different points of view. He was "Uncle Walt", the jovial storyteller who wanted us to know that it was okay to believe in magic, because he was going to bring it to us. He was "Disney", the cold and calculating media conglomerate that easily vanquishes anyone who stands in its path to world domination. He was an innovator; a forward-thinker who was completely obsessed with the idea of progress and wanted the world to be its best self. He was a close-minded crank who eventually developed some stubborn and backward notions, seeming threatened by anything that he couldn't understand. He created a studio that was a haven for artists, a mecca with a "one-for-all and all-for-one attitude" where he worked hand-in-hand with creative talent to realize a shared vision. He was an unreachable boss who handled the idea of his staff unionizing disastrously and made enemies of many of them when they were forced by his own stubbornness to go on strike. He was a friend to everyone who wanted the whole world to be included in his whimsical fantasies, regardless of race or creed. He was a symbol of American imperialism whose works include racist and regressive moments dotted throughout.
What's the truth? How did this walking contradiction, who simultaneously represented the best of us and the worst of us, exist?
Author Neal Gabler pulled off quite a remarkable feat: he was granted completely unrestricted access to the Disney archives in order to write this biography, and Disney the company had absolutely no say over the final product. As a result, we get what has to be the most well-rounded, three-dimensional portrait of a guy who seems so impossible to pin down. Gabler's overarching theory, which I agree with, is that Walt Disney was a man who was hurt by the real world many times and consequently aimed to create a world of his own where everything would be just to his liking.
This results in Walt's most admirable qualities: the constant drive to blaze forward, to pioneer new technologies and take the medium of animation further than anyone could have possibly conceived of it going before. The care and craftsmanship he personally poured into projects such as Snow White, Fantasia and Steamboat Willie as he took each and every frame under his microscope a dozen times, made the impossible a reality, opened new horizons for artists and brought joy to countless people. It also resulted in his worst qualities: whenever an issue presented itself that seemed incongruous with his fantasy world, he wanted no part of it. He sided with some nasty characters during the Disney studio strike of 1941, and viewed the animators trying to get what they were owed as a personal betrayal. He named names during the McCarthy hearings after becoming paranoid that the entity of communism was gunning to take his studio away from him and would possess certain employees in its effort to do so. The most apt demonstration of this is when he wanted to create a movie that would promote racial equality and he personally went above-and-beyond to get its star, James Baskett, an Academy Award in 1948, a time when racism was even more deeply-ingrained into American society than it is today. His desire for harmony amongst mankind was genuine, yet he still viewed the world through the simplistic lens of the pop culture he was familiar with, offering a foolish view of what those who weren't white were like-- the resulting movie was Song of The South, an Uncle Tom-ish picture that is frequently cited as a symbol of everything backwards and bigoted about the Disney studio's body of work, attempting to treat the black characters as dignified but coming across as condescending.
Gabler's biography is the definitive word on Disney as far as I'm concerned-- the research was clearly exhaustive and it comes across in the detailed final product. Yet it's not merely a mechanical reciting of the events that happened that happened throughout Disney's lifetime; it manages to be an engrossing, living and breathing portrayal of a man who poured his blood, sweat and tears into creating a kinder world for himself to live in, yet often failed to establish meaningful connections with the people around him in doing so, frequently shutting himself off in the bubble that world he had constructed allowed him to stay in.
This is it for part one! Part two will be up... I dunno. Soon I hope. I'm busy!
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