- Memories of Nicholas Schaffner and The Beatles Forever - January 4, 2026
- Old Draft: Beatles Folk Memory 1970-1995 - December 8, 2025
- Lights are back on. - December 8, 2025
This edition is in a lot better condition than mine is.
Like many a second-generation fan, I thrilled to Nicholas Schaffner’s book The Beatles Forever. (Which can be viewed in its entirety here!) Some years ago, when my mom was cleaning out the family homestead on Forest Avenue in Oak Park, she handed me a box of Beatles stuff salvaged from my old room—LPs, posters, and books all still scented with my desperate teenaged dreams. Of my shelf-full of Beatle books, I kept only five—SHOUT!, John Lennon: One Day at a Time (since pitched), the Hunter Davies bio, Rolling Stone‘s The Beatles (with the Andy Warhol cover, seems to be rare?), and The Beatles Forever.
I’m looking at it now, thirty Christmasses after that, and nearly 50 since my grandma slipped it under our tree. The book is in pieces; I read The Beatles Forever over and over until it literally fell apart. But I loved it so, all the loose signatures are still present, pressed carefully between a dust-jacket that is only slightly torn.
“Pleasantly surprised by the surge of interest in his clients, Martin decided the world was ready for a Beatle album. But the record company was still taking no chances: all the songs had to be recorded and ready in a single day, February 11, 1963.
With Martin at the controls of the two-track tape machine, the Beatles—two of them suffering from mid-winter colds—were obliged to tear through an assortment of Lennon-McCartney originals and six recent American favorites, all of which they had been showcasing in concert…”
Yeah yeah yeah. We all know the story now, down to all its little details like John slugging milk to get his voice through “Twist and Shout,” but nobody knew the story then, In 1978, Beatles music was still everywhere, but it was difficult to piece together exactly what had happened. Imagine that! There was no Anthology; no Lewisohn or Spitz or Norman or even Albert Goldman. There were microfiche of Rolling Stone in your local library, which maybe had the Lennon Remembers paperback, but not much more. It was still an oral story, mostly—my Aunt could tell me what it was like to see the Fabs at Busch Stadium in 1966, but…what happened in India? She didn’t know. Who was Brian Epstein, really? That was all still in the vaults, and in the diaries and heads of the people who lived it. Back in 1978, George Martin still had dark hair.
The Beatles Forever, like The Compleat Beatles (which I’ve posted about here), was one of the first attempts to tell the story in all its sweep and glory. But unlike the McDowell documentary—a portentous, weirdly chilly movie released in the bleak eighteen months after Lennon’s murder, The Beatles Forever was hopeful. It embodied those expectant years between Wings’ triumphant 1976 tour and Lennon’s murder, a time when a Beatles reunion wasn’t only possible, but seemed likely. Being a fan back then wasn’t totally an historical exercise, but an investment in the future.
Schaffner’s book was exactly what my Beatle-crazed nine-year-old mind craved: what happened. The whole story lucidly told, from Sullivan to SNL, with pictures. A couple years later, walking giddily through the bowels of the O’Hare Hilton, I realized that The Beatles Forever was a Beatles convention on paper.
Looking at the book tonight, I’m struck by how purely it’s a core sample of late-Seventies Beatlefan opinion—something wonderful had happened, we knew that. But we didn’t know how singular it was yet. And we didn’t yet know the story was over.
Today, when lots of fans sniffily reject “the Standard Narrative” in favor of a Beatles story that works better for them, it’s impossible to explain how information-starved fans were back then. Impossible to describe how important this book was, not today where any unreleased track is two clicks away on YouTube. But if facts were hard to come by in 1978, they were also weirdly…free. Apple was more a hippie relic than a media behemoth; the idea that Disney would touch anything so countercultural was absurd. There weren’t yet billions of future streaming dollars riding on sanitizing what the Beatles really did in Hamburg. The Beatles Forever is pure fandom; one smart, knowledgable fan putting the story together. A pure core-sample of mid-Seventies Beatlefan opinion.
Okay, yeah, but why am I writing about The Beatles Forever tonight? Because I just stumbled on Wally Podrazik’s lovely little memory of Schaffner. He lived in my old neighborhood in the West Village, but died of AIDS four years before I got there. Loved your book, man—hope enough people told you how wonderful it was.
Do any of the rest of you know The Beatles Forever? Did anyone else meet Nick Schaffner? I hope you shook his hand for the both of us.
Related posts:
Ian Leslie: “Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back”
That was your first mistake
Lights are back on.
Various musings on Lennon and Addiction
Try it, you might like it
The Nagra Reels
Allen Klein Playboy Interview, 1971
“Poor old Buddy”
Mike’s Dream Bootleg: Beatles Complete Anthology Recording Sessions Box Set
Beatles singles that never were?
Sid Bernstein obituary
Getting (a bit) better — and a Minus 5 cover
Thank you for this post and for the link to Podrazik. I was happy he mentioned the Shotton book. That one had some unique stories but it’s been forgotten, hasn’t it?
I became a hardcore fan in 1981 at age 14. I still have my copies of: SHOUT, the RS/Warhol, the Hunter Davies bio, and The Beatles Forever.
I was shocked and upset when I opened the paper on Labor Day weekend 1991 and saw Schaffner’s obit. I pulled out “Beatles Forever,” opened my copy to the last page and wrote “we are losing our best and brightest to this f-ing disease.”
Never read Shotton; should I someday?
Re Schaffner’s death: The world of the arts — and the world in general — veered off in a totally different, demonstrably worse direction as a result of AIDS. It was a cultural and spiritual cataclysm which has never been properly calculated. A lot of the things that you can see in The Beatles — the attitudes that created the Sixties, the attitudes the Sixties helped create — were stopped cold by AIDS; “the West” of 1990 was vastly different from the one of 1980, and AIDS was a huge part of that story. Much of our current conundrum, politically and spiritually, comes from the people that filled in the gaps left by the better, more interesting, more humane people carried away by AIDS. For example: Keith Haring died, and Jeff Koons didn’t — two guys about the same age, both from PA. (Not that I’m rooting for Koons to die, but IMHO his art, and his vision of art, and the direction his success took the art world in, is bad.) A culture that worshipped artists (a lot of whom died) became one that worships money and power. Imagine if AIDS had been transmitted by junk bonds instead of sex…
“That seems harsh, Mike. Surely — ”
Hear me out: AIDS was a disease which devastated the particular subsets of our culture most responsible for arts and learning — the soul of our culture. And its manner of spread, through sexual contact, was particularly tragic. It was precisely the most open, most daring, most iconoclastic, who were most vulnerable to the disease.
So…not a fan. Glad they seem to be close to a cure.
Also, for me, two other touchstone books of the time were:
“The Beatles A to Z” (by Goldie Friede, Robin Titone and Sue Weiner) that was an encyclopediac breakdown of the career and singles. Besides being a good reference for b-sides, it was just a lot of fun to pore through. A kalideoscopic way to look over the 60s and 70s.
and
“The Beatles: An Illustrated Record” by Roy Carr and Tony Tyler (1981 edition) which is full of vicious hot-takes on the solo years that friends and I used to laugh at and disagree with.
Oh, I had — and loved — The Beatles A to Z! I lost my copy somehow, but it was an endless delight.