Shout! The Beatles In Their Generation – Philip Norman, 1981 ★★★

The Act You've Known for All These Years

The murder of John Lennon on December 8, 1980 was the biggest thing that could have happened to a book called Shout! Coming out just weeks later, Shout! was effectively marketed as the first serious journalistic account of the rise and dissolution of Lennon’s famous band, the Beatles.

People mourning Lennon’s death, or simply curious about the global outcry surrounding his passing, proved a ready audience for the book by first-time author Philip Norman.

Yet immediate success can be a bugbear down the road; just ask Debby Boone. Norman’s success made him enemies among many Beatles fans. Not a rock journalist but a traditional newspaperman, Norman wrote his Beatles biography with the tone of a bemused member of the older generation rather than a fan. [Norman in fact was born just two months after George Harrison, the youngest Beatle.] An air of mild contempt was perceptible in his treatment of the band and their music.

Making matters worse was the way Norman discoursed about the Beatles in interviews, explaining how the now-gone Lennon represented some 75-80 percent of what made the Beatles great. Paul McCartney certainly minded this; others did as well.

This impacted Shout!’s place in the library of Beatle lore. Anyone with a pulse couldn’t help but learn more about the Beatles since 1981, what with the release of compact discs, movies, interactive video games, and hundreds of books covering everything from the band’s concert tours to their equipment. The surviving band members even got into the act with the anvil-like The Beatles Anthology. The more people learned, the more Shout! came off as a work rife with factual errors and misstatements.

My goal today is not to bury Shout!, but rather assess it in light of what has become known about the Beatles since the time of its initial publication. Was Norman guilty of a slipshod, contemptuous work? Or was his guilt more in the form of being there early with a less-polished version of popularly accepted truth?

There are in fact several editions of Shout! But finding my 15^th birthday present copy of the first edition in Mom’s attic the other day was a call to arms. As someone interested not only in the history of the Beatles but the historiography of the band, a chance to re-experience this touchstone with fresh eyes was hard to resist.

Right away, in his Author’s Note, Norman establishes the tone that would nettle so many fans over the years: “I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help given to me during the preparation of this book by the four ex-Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Unfortunately I cannot do so. Though I have interviewed all four several times since 1965, and though I had a unique opportunity to observe them at their breaking point in 1969-70, none would agree to a formal interview during the two years I spent writing Shout!”

Given they scarcely finished cleaning the bloodstains off the Dakota walkway, he picked a strange time to carp over a lack of cooperation.

Norman writes like that throughout the book, with only the dimmest regard for the band as people. Nor is he particularly interested in their music. Mostly it’s the screams that interest him, both of the fans and of the singers themselves as they perform on stage in Hamburg for many wild hours at a stretch, hoarse and parched from ingesting too many “prellys.”

Yet Norman writes well, and this I find too often looked over by critics. He has a lean, descriptive style, which he combines with a jaded aristocratic mordancy reminiscent of one of my favorite authors, Ian Fleming. It’s not hard finding sample passages of this at work:

“Underneath the warehouse at 10 Mathew Street, in 1960, could be found the Cavern Jazz Club. Its entrance was a hatchway, under a single naked lightbulb. A flight of eighteen stone steps turned at the bottom into three arched, interconnecting brick tunnels…The best British jazz bands had performed down there, in an atmosphere pervaded by damp and mold and the aroma of beer slops and small, decaying mammals and the cheeses that were kept in the adjoining cellar...”

“From stadium or conference hall, whichever it chanced to be, they would run, in their sodden suits, directly to the aircraft, flying through the night to another sky, another airport, another screaming sea of faces, pressed against police backs or quilted by steel perimeter wire...”

“There now began seven weeks of business meetings, long and tortuous enough to surfeit even Allen Klein, in the winding course of which John and Yoko drifted, like rumpled white wraiths, through the grim purlieus of Threadneedle Street...”

To be sure, Norman does get things wrong in Shout! Some of this is understandable, such as how the Beatles wound up getting signed by record label EMI in the first place. What actually happened wouldn’t be unearthed for decades, when Mark Lewisohn revealed them in his 2013 book Tune In. Lewisohn went the extra mile to dig out the facts, while Norman settled for first-person accounts, like that of George Martin, who was the producer and the band’s point of contact at EMI. Wrong as he is here, I can’t really fault Norman for presenting the story Martin himself thought correct for many years.

There are factual errors, but they aren’t major and the few that stuck out to me seem too minute to dredge up here. I was more often impressed by Norman’s handling of the band’s mid-1950s origins, how a teenaged Lennon gathered a gang of like-minded skiffle-crazed youngsters in the middle-class Liverpool suburb of Woolton, all under the disapproving eye of John’s Aunt Mimi. They called themselves the Quarry Men.

“The group existed on the most casual basis, expanding and shrinking according to members available,” Norman writes. “Already there was some dissent between Rod Davis, who wished to play pure folk music, and John, with his passion for Elvis. Pete Shotton was only in it for laughs, as he strove to make clear on all occasions. Little Colin Hanton, drumming irregularly, with his birth certificate in his top pocket, was more interested in pubs and pints of Black Velvet.”

Brawls were common; at one point the band was left without a key instrument, Hanton’s tea chest, which provided makeshift percussion. After fleeing a couple of local toughs, the tea chest was left abandoned on the street: “Sometimes it would be standing on the pavement; sometimes it would have migrated to the middle of the road.”

Appointment with destiny: The Quarry Men, including leader John Lennon in plaid shirt, hitch a ride to St. Peter's Church on July 6, 1957, for a garden fête where Lennon would make the acquaintance of Paul McCartney, beginning an eventual partnership that would eventually change their lives and the world. Image from http://beatlesacrosstheuniverse.com/the-band-that-made-the-beatles/.

The big change in the band’s musical fortunes, and the eventual end of the road for all but one of their members, would come July 6, 1957. Between shows at a church fête, Quarry Men bassist Ivan Vaughan introduced Lennon to another musically-inclined friend of his, Paul McCartney. McCartney impressed Lennon by showing him how to tune his guitar. Strangely, there would be a long gap before Lennon offered McCartney a place in the Quarry Men. Norman suggests it was a matter of Lennon sensing a threat to his leadership.

Norman tracks the evolution of the Quarry Men from weekend skifflers to full-fledged rockers who soon became serious about their craft. McCartney made no secret of his dislike for lead guitarist Eric Griffiths; it turned out he had another kid in mind, a shrimpy tagalong with a bit of attitude named George Harrison. With Harrison in place as their first reliable instrumentalist, the band evolved into a passable rock act, albeit one without steady work of any kind, or even a regular drummer.

Throughout his account, which is never gripping but nearly always engaging, Norman makes clear the band’s ambitions were aided by a community of people who valued them more as entertaining company than tickets to the big time. The Beatles weren’t talking, but Norman makes good use of those who did, including Aunt Mimi, Ivan Vaughan, and other Quarry Men, not to mention the Beatles’ first manager, Allan Williams, and their first regular drummer, Pete Best. Both Williams and Best would have reason to regret their association with the Beatles, who proved short on gratitude in pursuing their dream.

Shout! is most impressive not as a story about the Beatles at all, but rather of their eventual manager, Brian Epstein, who married a vision of showmanship born of his love for the stage with an uncommon sense of decency that cost him more than a little money but would earn him much respect. Whatever Norman was saying in his post-publication interviews about Lennon’s dominant influence on the band’s fortunes, it’s clear from this narrative that he sees Epstein as the critical difference-maker.

Norman presents Epstein as a rather tragic figure. We meet him in the eyes of a childhood playmate who fancies one of Epstein’s toys. During one visit, Epstein takes the toy and smashes it from spite. This self-destructive meme, once established, becomes a recurring Eppy motif.

Epstein was homosexual, something not everyone knew when Shout! was published but which Norman makes central to his story. As he tells it, Epstein’s private life was not only illegal at the time but dangerous, his interests in sexual companionship gravitating toward “rough trade” types who could administer a beating, or worse. When the Beatles played their last commercial concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August, 1966, Epstein was not on hand. He was busy trying to buy back his stolen pill supply and compromising correspondence from a former lover turned blackmailer.

Norman does push his Epstein subplot into bizarre territory when it comes to the manager’s sudden death in 1967, his only major misstep. For some reason, at least in this first edition of Shout!, Norman posits the notion that someone might have murdered Epstein, perhaps in connection with a licensing deal gone wrong. The evidence Norman assembles is both vague and circumstantial, and it’s notable that no one has seriously picked up on the murder idea when one considers how myths accumulate around the Beatles like kudzu. After all, people still discuss Paul’s replacement by a doppelganger in 1966.

Whether by his hand or another’s, once Epstein exits the narrative, Shout! becomes a markedly lesser book. We are left with Norman’s open contempt for the band, regarding not only their excursions into drugs and psychedelia but everything else that challenged what was expected from pop bands at the time. When it comes to the band’s 1968 visit to India, Norman notes how Harrison especially was “dazzled by India’s mysticism, seeing none of its equally vast mundaneness.”

This can be taken as skeptical or parochial; it’s harder to shrug off the way Norman describes the Beatles’ music. Harrison impresses him neither as a musician nor a songwriter, except for the odd effort like “Here Comes The Sun.” Paul writes granny music; John is too often opaque. Poor Ringo Starr, the drummer, comes off as a bit of a dullard playing cards waiting for inspiration to visit his mates. Interestingly, Norman never advances his Lennon-centric idea of what made the Beatles great in the book, perhaps because he doesn’t make much of a claim here for any particular greatness beyond the phenomenal amount of sales and attention they garnered.

Ultimately, Norman’s book succeeds and fails as an accounting of success. The book is divided into four sections, the titles of which themselves tell a tale: “Wishing,” “Getting,” “Having,” and “Wasting.” Norman’s focus on the “boy Pharaohs” watching their kingdom crumble amid drugs, divorce, and chronic infighting becomes a burden in the last quarter especially, where Norman’s lack of investment in the band members’ personalities leaves him with little to say about their parting.

Yet Shout!’s thematic drive, and the fascinating portrait of Epstein as engineer of a cultural revolution he little understood, make for a worthwhile read. To my mind, it also deserves points for being an early serious treatment of the Beatles, a foundation stone that others would anneal and build upon. Shout! even introduces the best of those Beatle biographers in Lewisohn, whom Norman relied upon for research and who is briefly profiled in the 1981 edition as an expert of substance.

As a work of history on the lives of the Beatles and their impact on world culture, Shout! has been superseded by other books. But it remains a readable beginner-friendly guide for how the band came to be.