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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, ambling 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 in the Seventies and Eighties, impossible to describe how important this book and a few others like it were, not today where any unreleased track is two clicks away on YouTube. If first-generation Beatle fandom was a lived experience, the second was a mindspace, created by the official disc- and filmography, supported by ephemera (sleeves, pictures, posters, journalism/interviews, even toys and merch), all arranged into a coherent narrative by books like The Beatles Forever. The very idea of a book like 1980’s The Beatles A to Z (which I also owned) is silly today, not just because everything’s available on the internet, but that there’s so much more to discuss. Two clicks and I’m on this site, reading about Magic Alex’s familial roots in Bulgaria. No area of Beatle lore remains unexplored; sometimes it seems like there are hundreds of YouTubers raking up every aspect in exchange for clicks. The Beatles story is now as big as the entire world, and puts more money into more people’s pockets than all the things that seemed so much more consequential in 1978—there is one really substantial YouTube series on The Cold War, but many on The Beatles. Today, we are choking on Beatle facts, but in 1978, the story was still somewhat human-scaled—you could still get your hands around the whole thing, if you were persistent enough. Not for nothing is Mark Lewisohn a second-generation fan, and his massive project is the natural bridge between the book-based second-generation fandom and the internet-based one of today.
But if facts were much harder to come by in 1978, they were also weirdly…pure. Uncontested. Unowned. Not so surrounded and conditioned by other facts that none of them could be seen clearly. Apple was more a hippie relic than a media behemoth; in 1978, the idea that the Orange County Republicans of Disney would touch anything so countercultural as The Beatles seemed absurd. There weren’t yet billions of future streaming dollars riding on sanitizing what the Beatles really did in Hamburg, or on tour, or in Ringo’s apartment in Montague Square. The Beatles Forever is a very pure type of fandom, one smart, knowledgable fan putting the basic story together for himself, and the rest of us. (The Rutles “All You Need Is Cash” is the other side of this same coin.)
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”
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That was your first mistake
The Nagra Reels
Try it, you might like it
“Poor old Buddy”
Various musings on Lennon and Addiction
Beatles singles that never were?
Shepard Fairey George Harrison Poster
Allen Klein Playboy Interview, 1971
Mad King John
Mike’s Dream Bootleg: Beatles Complete Anthology Recording Sessions Box Set
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.
Re: Shotton book.
It’s the only place you’ll get stories like this: “We must have been about eleven the day John accosted me with the dramatic announcement: ‘I’ve had a wank, Pete, I actually came! It’s f-ing great, the most amazing feeling ever!’ We repaired at once to our abandoned Vale Road garage, where John did it all over again for my benefit — but try as I might,I wasn’t to achieve a climax myself until several months later.”
Re: AIDS
Thank you for the very thoughtful reply. Very well said. The empathetic ones passed away and the greedy ones lived. I was a young gay man just entering adulthood in 1990, frightened beyond belief. There aren’t words harsh enough to describe my feelings for the Reagan administration.
Joel,
Re: Shotton: I LOVE stories like that.
Re: AIDS: as a straight man I was plenty scared myself — I cannot imagine what that must have been like for you, or any other gay man. When I lived in the West Village from 1995-2001 (due to some early personal circumstances, I always like to live in “gayborhoods”), there was something of the necropolis about it. Pretty, empty, full of a few lucky “old-timers” freighted down with sad memories.
The only thing I can possibly equate it to is COVID; because I have a compromised immune system, it was imperative that I not catch the disease. When people complained about masking — such a little thing! — I realized how little my existence mattered next to their attitudes. Even my own family. I suspect LGBTQIA folks feel this feeling a lot.
Glad you survived. Enjoy life today.
Yes, you should definitely read the Peter Shotten book written with help by Nicholas Shaffner. It is great. He was a gifted writer who died way too young.
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.
I’m of the same generation as you. Beatles Forever was the third book I picked up about the fabs somewhere around 1979-1980 after The Beatles Illustrated Record and the Podrazik and Castleman discography. Along with the LP’s and singles, these books were the launching pad for my lifelong fascination with the Beatles.
I did meet Nicholas Schaffer along with Pete Shotton at the 1983 Beatlefest in New Jersey upon the release of their Lennon book, In My Life. I still have that original version I purchased that day to which they personally signed to my then 13 year old self. I believe I did shake his hand.
By the way, I’m glad you’re back!
“By the way, I’m glad you’re back!”
Thank you, @Mike N.! My writing and editing load for The Bystander are just crippling, but I’m hoping to post regularly to HD. I’ve come to realize that it’s fifteen years worth of informed discussion about a lot of things I love, and feel are so important. Not just The Beatles, but the Sixties and Seventies, the counterculture, the Cold War, history and historians, the creative process and collaboration, addiction and so forth…too much to leave permanently.
Thanks for resurfacing this book, Michael. Schaffer’s The Beatles Forever was a revelation to me as yet another second generation 1970s fan. Not only did it reveal an entire world around The Beatles that wasn’t otherwise accessible, but it exposed 12 year-old me to a careful and contemporary writing style that was foundational to my future communication skills (such as they are). I read it so many times that I ended up taping the binding and holding it together with a book cover made from a brown paper grocery bag.
As an aside, I found a used copy of DiLello’s “The Longest Cocktail Party” shortly after I read The Beatles Forever and it completely broke my impressionable mind. Despite the lack of actual Beatle content (or perhaps because of it), it’s still my favorite fab-related book. I can’t believe no one has made it into a film.
I have an old paperback copy of “The Longest Cocktail Party” and I’m afraid to read it because the binding WILL crack. Maybe I’ll search for a PDF on archive.org.
One really great thing about Schaffner’s book was how illustrated it is–as you say, it revealed an entire world around the music you heard, and the few photos you’d already seen. This allowed one’s knowledge to accrete slowly, and with effort; the glut of information available to modern fans seems to give some a different relationship to the actual historical phenomenon. Things like “Paul Is Dead” require being steeped in too much Beatle stuff for too long — the brain gets bored with the old story, so it makes up a new, more interesting one out of the millions of shards of data.
https://i.redd.it/2xvctbijthgg1.jpeg
We’ll be getting four more movies soon, in addition to all the reading material.
I have an old book on my shelf. It’s an annotated version of the “Let It Be” documentary. Still photos from the film with some of the dialog in print form.
It’s such a fragile old book I’m afraid to touch it. I imagine it disintegrating like those volumes in The Time Machine movie from 1960.
Do you remember anything in particular from that book, @Baboomska?
Happy you’re back Mike, I hope you can keep it going!
This blog got me through covid, and for that, I owe you a lifelong debt. As one who is also severely immune compromised, I can relate to your concerns, especially with family, of all people!
@Paul, I’m very sorry to hear that you also have some health issues. But I am VERY gratified to learn that this labor of love was helpful to you during COVID. As I’ve said, I came within a couple of clicks of nuking the site entirely, but my hand was stayed by a sense that perhaps someone somewhere who was ill and could not function as they wish to in life — a reasonable description of my adult life — would be given entertainment or comfort by the writing, images and thinking here.
May your health improve!