#lewisohn

I've thought a bit about writing something on how @wingsoverlagos and I killed Mark Lewisohn... because we did, but this is tumblr so of course I'll just randomly post something from my phone.

It was hell, but we did bury him. The hate I got in the month after my last two posts was unbelievable. I shut everything out.

But of course I was getting Mark Lewisohn Google alerts. I was investigating him, so of course I did. Every week. And they all looked the same. Six or so big papers quoting him for whatever Beatles' crap they had going on that week, then some combo of appearances and old book stuff would shuffle towards the top.

But after the posts on his accuracy that all changed.

Now the Google alerts are the alerts of a dead man. Whatever the lag time within the fandom, his credibility was wiped out almost instantaneously on the broader scale. No one is seeking quotes from him any more. Every week it's just a regurgitation of his books. Get a free PDF here. An old message board post. If you Google “Mark Lewisohn+accuracy” or anything like it you'll get us. Me and Sharon.

It's kind of sad. When I was trying to finish my last two pieces my biggest issue was that I felt like I would be killing him. Destroying him. His whole life and image was completely wrapped up in the Beatles, and destroying a human was difficult. I had to keep myself angry at him because otherwise I would begin to think about what it meant for us to succeed. I didn't want him to be able to continue his mythology-as-biography, but also it was scary to think about what the truth would do to him.

I thought—we both thought—that the biggest problem would be getting people to see what we had uncovered, but in the end Phoebe @anotherkindofmindpod saw it before I'd even recovered from writing it and within 24 hours it had blown up and I was getting hate mail. There was no time to process anything. We went from a tumblr oddity to a nuclear bomb overnight.

And for a few months we both felt like it had all been for nothing. Like everyone hated us but to no purpose. The feedback we saw was all negative, and from the most vehement Lennon/Lewisohn freaks imaginable. It colored everything. And it was a while before I even managed to look at the Google alerts again.

But once I did it started to sink in.

Sharon, I think we won. I think we actually did it.

It's too bad that “winning” meant hurting a human. I wish it didn't. But this last month I've gone back and read my last two big posts and I realize that we were right. We were righteous. It had to be done, whatever the costs. I wish it had been less painful, but it's not our fault that he misrepresented things. We just told the truth. That's all.

That can't be a sin.

I've missed my tumblr peeps, though. Sincerely. 💜

The TLDR is that he's biased in certain ways, most of which spring from a clear John preference (which is kind of funny when you remember John is the only Beatle he never met).

You can glean from certain passages of Tune In (he employs suggestive "foreshadowing" when describing Paul's interactions with Brian) and some interview comments he's made that he's kind of pro-Klein and blames Paul for the breakup. He also sometimes buries the lede with regards to Paul's early influence on the band's artistic direction as opposed to John's. Another Kind Of Mind did a multi-episode series going into some of this (I never finished it and don't agree with every single point they made that I heard, but it gives a good overview of people's general feelings on the matter).

Lewisohn is notably staunchly anti-McLennon and has downplayed John and Yoko's heroin use, stating John didn't "seem" like he was on heroin all the time.

He also made some verifiably messy mistakes in Tune In, frankensteining certain quotes and often avoiding serious source analysis. (IMO he partially does this because he likes writing his biography like it's a work of fiction – if he tells you this John quote about the early days is from Lennon Remembers, which should absolutely be kept in mind when considering what John is saying, then that's 'spoiling the breakup' and messing with the flow of the story.)

With all that in mind, I find a fair amount of the critique he's been getting as of late over the top and reactionary.* The fact of the matter is that Lewisohn has seriously raised the standard of Beatles scholarship, and if McCartney Legacy Vol 1 & 2 are better books, its authors have Lewisohn's influence to thank for it in part. The only reason we're able to scrutinize his citations is because he actually bothered to cite shit, which can't be said for 95% of the Beatle books before his – this field of historical study is essentially still in its infancy, which means it's very error-prone and still driven by people with strong emotional investment in the band, leading to various biases. Really, the biggest problem with Lewisohn is his "this will be the definite Beatles story!" attitude.

I also think it should be noted that there isn't all that much money to be made in writing Beatles books (maybe Ian Leslie made a fair amount of bank). Sure, you get clout in the form of invitations to Beatle Fest & niche podcasts, but it's mostly a labour of love, and I think some online fans need to recognize that more.

Personally, I don't place a ton of value in his analysis, but I happily defer to him on matters of chronology.

Last year, like it or not, we proved beyond all doubt that Mark Lewisohn was an unreliable relator of facts.

It was, in the end, Sharon's spreadsheet that forced me to write A Tendency to Fabricate History and We Find Ourselves at a Crossroads.

Mark Lewisohn knows a ton of Beatles' facts, but—most unfortunately—he chose to remove himself from the appendix of reliable Beatles' scholars by fabricating history.

Let me be clear, whether you hate me or love me, this is what Mark Lewisohn did. I had nothing to do with that decision. Neither mine, nor Sharon's research—which uncovered uncontroverted truths—had anything to do with the personal decisions that led to this outcome.

Before ”A Tendency to Fabricate History“ was released —based explicitly on the careful and meticulously documented research of Sharon Dubosky—between six and ten major newspapers a week quoted Mark Lewisohn.

After those articles citing our findings, that immediately dropped to zero.

It is not celebrating the destruction of a person to note that. it isn't.

It simply is not.

But it is important—VERY IMPORTANT—corroboration that we were right on the facts.

We were always up front and transparent on our evidence. We followed Cicero's rules:

NEVER DARE SAY ANYTHING FALSE. NEVER DARE WITHHOLD ANYTHING TRUE.

We begged journalists to check us. 

AND THEY DID.

At some point this year "We Find Ourselves at a Crossroads: the Mark Lewisohn Disaster" passed the 750,000 views mark, and despite personal pain to individuals that I regret, I know we did the right thing.

A lot of hard work and sweat went into righting some wrongs of history, and I am proud of that.

A BEATLE DIDN’T SAY THAT! Lewisohn’s lab-created quotes

“One of the things about this book that is a strength is it’s not me saying anything, it’s them or other people. I shape the text, I plot where it goes, I weave it, but the quotes are theirs. And so when I’ve got Paul McCartney behaving in a way some readers might think, ‘Whatever, oh dear,’ it’s actually him saying it. So you end up thinking that to his own credit he said that. It’s not me saying it.” (Mark Lewisohn, ‘Noted,’ (October 7, 2013) Somerset, Guy.)

This is hella long, and that's because it's actually a full blog post. (In case you want it in a less monstrous form.)

A lot of people for a long time have put a lot of trust in Mark Lewisohn’s footnotes. Or at least in the fact of those footnotes. Because once you dig through them for any length of time you quickly discover that Mark Lewisohn’s footnotes hold secrets that would get him expelled from any undergraduate program. They reveal a “history” often contrived through a mass of Frankenquotes, ala carte creations, Lewisohn rephrased ‘paraphrases,’ and worse. For some parts of the narrative things aren’t too bad, yet in others monsters lurk around every corner. But this is not the sort of thing that’s graded on a curve, and it is past time to have a conversation about what standards should be accepted in Beatles’ scholarship.

Lewisohn lists his sources unlike most others. And his footnotes alone are more insightful than some other writers’ books. (Reddit, r/beatles)

I do not judge footnotes based on their insightfulness, nor do I want to single out a redditor, but I grabbed the comment because it’s an opinion that is widely shared and even accepted as canon. At least by people who have not combed those freakish footnotes. And while the pages of piled up sources do look fearsome en masse, a closer inspection reveals an offense to the truth, a threat to the record, and a blight on Beatles’ historiography.

“The rules for writing history are obvious. Who does not perceive that its chief law is never to dare say anything false, and never dare withhold anything true? The slightest suspicion of hatred or favor must be avoided. That such should be the foundations is known to all; the materials with which the building will be raised consist of facts and words.” –Cicero

A Look at Lewisohn’s Lab-created Frankenquotes

FIRST, WHAT ARE QUOTES? AND WHY ARE QUOTES?

Quotes are the soul and center of recorded—and recording— history.

And the rules around quotes and quotation marks are pretty simple. Most people, even if they’ve never written anything beyond a term paper, understand what quotation marks represent.

A set of quotation marks means, “This person said or wrote ‘these exact words’ at some given time.” You can smash a quote from two hours before or two years before right up against a separate quote to make your point—although it might get your grade lowered—but what you cannot do is take two different statements from two different times and make them seem like they are one statement.

When you put words inside one set of quotation marks you are stating, in black and white, that the identified person made this statement. That they said all those words together—or if you want to excise a reasonable part and use ellipses to represent that— as part of the same statement.

Look, combining two separate quotes that are not part of the same thought or topic is not a subjective issue. It is not an issue of controversy. Quotes are the bone marrow of written history. Quotes are the alpha and omega. In academic work or journalism they have to be, which makes sense as soon as you think about it. If it was cool for me to take a transcript and grab half a sentence from page 2 and half a sentence from page 17, push them together as if those words were spoken one after the other in a single thought, I bet I can manage to get those words to say almost anything I want.

Separate thoughts must be in two separate quotation marks. Separate. Somewhere between four sentences and a paragraph is widely accepted as the “two separate quotes” line, and there can be some ethical and technical wiggle room in a long rant by a person, but what makes all that subjective nonsense go out the window is if the quotes come from two separate questions. Or two separate days. That’s two quotes. Not hard.

Which again, makes sense if the point is conveying information to the reader and lessening the chance of a writer manipulating someone else’s words to express something that the person didn’t mean.

This is the contract inherent in a quote. These are the rules we all agree to and understand, and these are the reasons why. And there’s no reason to break them.

Why do you want me to believe that John said these two things at one time? What was wrong with what he did say?

THE FOUR MOST COMMON WAYS MARK LEWISOHN MAULS THE MEANING OF THE QUOTE:

The Basic Lewisohn Frankenquote 🧟‍♂️

(“CONCLUDING FIVE WORDS FROM—” – I cannot even see the point of this THREE PART monster. Full footnote reads: 9) Author interview with Tony Meehan, September 6, 1995. (“I met George again in 1968 and for some reason he was harboring a grudge against me. He was very, very uptight about it—’You blocked us getting a recording contract …’ ”) First part of George quote from interview by Terry David Mulligan, The Great Canadian Gold Rush, CBC radio, May 30 and June 6, 1977; concluding five words from interview for The Beatles Anthology)

This three-headed monster attributed to George Harrison is a very dull little guy. Not particularly venomous. Just convenient, I guess. For whatever reason, Mark Lewisohn decided it was worth rummaging through the quote buffet until he collected enough pieces for George Harrison to say this thing. “…concluding five words from…” What are we even doing here? No, really. Please tell me.

And like a lot of the footnotes for these bespoke quotations, there are further problems. “[F]rom interview for Beatles Anthology”? An interview that aired? In one of the episodes? Can you narrow it down? I guess I’ll just have to listen very closely to them all and hope I don’t miss the five words.

But if we got bogged down in the sorts of trivial details that would immediately lose a college student a letter grade off a History 101 paper we would never get anywhere. We have to stick to the violent felonies.

*Love the "George would say——" Uh, would he? Well, I guess after all that trouble you went to, he would now. It's really incredible how cavalier Lewisohn is about a Beatle's words.

These sorts of reconstituted, lab-engineered, made up “quotes” are shot throughout Tune In. “Quotes” made up of words from two, three, and even four sources, spoken months or often years apart.

Ala Carte Creations 🍱

It really is a buffet, and these ala carte creations come in all shapes and sizes. They might just be words that have been plucked up and glued back together to make something more useful to a particular narrative. (Ellipses or dash optional.)

TUNE IN: “John saw a bigger picture, and it would be surprising if it wasn’t equally obvious, or made obvious, to Brian and George. He likened Paul’s enduring snag with Brian to his other long-standing difficulty: ‘[Brian] and Paul didn’t get along—it was a bit like [Stuart and Paul] between the two of them.’” (Footnote 37: Interview by Peter McCabe and Robert D. Schonfeld, September 1971)

Bonus 🍒 Phoebe's dramatic reading of John's original quote:

The Donut 🍩

Then there are a seemingly uncountable number of “quotes” with a sentence or three ripped out from the middle, but with zero representation that more words were ever there. (And in most of these particular deceptions, the simple representation of something excised (. . .) would make the quote fine. There are a lot of these, but they are also the easiest to fix.)

Chapter 10: “I was in a sort of blind rage for two years. [I was e]ither drunk or fighting. **It had been the same with other girlfriends I’d had.** There was something the matter with me.”

And then there are the true buffet bonanzas, words lifted and twisted beyond recognition until they say something brand spanking new. 

However, John remembered Paul’s attitude to Brian being very different. John was always emphatic that Paul didn’t want Brian as the Beatles’ manager and presented obstacles to destabilize him, to make his job difficult … like turning up late for meetings. “Three of us chose Epstein. Paul used to sulk and God knows what … [Paul] wasn’t that keen [on Brian]—he’s more conservative, the way he approaches things. He even says that: it’s nothing he denies.”

The Lewisohn Remixes 🍸

And then there are the “paraphrases.” I couldn’t even begin to guess how many of these there are, and often they aren’t even paraphrases, but whole new Mark Lewisohn re-interpretations with quotation marks slapped around them. But if you don’t check, you probably won’t know, because like this Lewisohn rewrite of a well-known Mrs. Harrison quote, there’s a good chance you’ll recognize the bulk of it, making it less likely that you’ll catch the scalpel work excising Paul. And while I don’t want to get caught in the nooks and crannies of intent in an example like this one I have to say, just this once, that what has to be a purposeful excising of Paul to create a slightly new quote on one side, combined with a badly acted, bad faith—(or bad scholar)—“Where was Paul when John’s mom died?” on the other, is par for the course. 

George Harrison’s mom’s made up Lewisohn rephrase which coincidentally removes Paul from the imagery.]  ❦  LEWISOHN:“ Asked some years later to describe how he’d been able to help John cope with the loss of Julia, Paul could remember nothing of the period at all. It could be they didn’t see much of each other in the summer of 1958. John was working at the airport, and Paul and George went on holiday together—adventurous for boys of 16 and 15. But Louise Harrison would recall how she encouraged George to visit John at Mendips, “so he wouldn’t be alone with his thoughts.”  ❦  DAVIES: “They were still practicing a lot at George’s house, the only house where they got endless hospitality and encouragement. . . . I forced George to go round and see him, to make sure he still went off playing in their group and just didn’t sit and brood. They all went through a lot together, even in those early days, and they always helped each other.”

Why do you have to slice and dice and reconstitute people’s words? No writer, and certainly no historian, should ever feel empowered to take words from a historical figure from two or three different places and topics and times, splice them together, and tell us, “Winston Churchill said this.” No he didn’t! Why are you so intent on changing the words of the people you’re writing about? What’s wrong with just using two different quotes? 

You cannot take two or three quotes from two or three or even four separate statements, stick them between one set of quotation marks and say John or Paul or George or Joe Smith said this. 

No they didn’t. They never said that. Why do you want me to think they did?? 

All these words are Abraham Lincoln’s, but this is not a Lincoln quote:

“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of — making a most discreditable exhibition of myself.” 

(I kept it ridiculous, although I didn’t have to.)

But I want you, the reader, to be saying to yourself, “Okay, enough already. I get it!” Because in the last few days I have wandered too far into the weeds too many times and written far too many words detailing the multiplicity of ways Mr. Lewisohn does violence to each and every law of reporting historical facts, and could write many more. And I will post a more detailed list of the crimes against the quote that I am charging Mark Lewisohn with as we go forward, but I don’t think we need that now. The fact is that every fair-minded person knows what quotation marks represent, and there is no more fair-minded group of people than serious Beatles fans and scholars. And it is those fair-minded scholars who I want most to hear me. Whether you’ve written books or host a podcast or just know that you know a whole lot of stuff and take seriously your part of the trust in preserving the truth about The Beatles for us and future generations, it is you I am really talking to. My Cicero quoting-freaks. The ones who care about getting it right.

“The chief, the only, aim of style is to put facts in a clear light, with no concealment.” - Lucian of Samosata

⁠What footnotes can do, and what footnotes can’t.

You can list multiple sources in a single footnote. That’s not only fine, it’s correct. If I want to tell part of a story based on several sources, that often means several sources in a footnote. But not for one, single quote. 

The problem isn’t the footnote, it’s the bioengineered quote on the page that you swept under a footnote hoping I wouldn’t notice. 

Which leads us to what a footnote is not. A footnote is not a post-hoc fixative for your textual sins. You cannot do whatever you want as long as you confess it in a footnote. A footnote is not a magic spell. A footnote is not the universally understood symbol for “I have my fingers crossed behind my back.” You cannot fix lies and misrepresentations in the footnotes. Footnotes aren’t for trying to chase down three different sources to match up which part of a manufactured “quote” someone said on which date. Footnotes are not the picture on the front of a puzzle box. I should not need to find corner pieces to figure out which of these George Harrison words were actually spoken together. 

Footnotes are a truthful and independently verifiable record of primary sources. It’s that simple.

And taking Mark Lewisohn completely out of the picture for a moment, I feel sure we can all agree that neither John Lennon nor Paul McCartney nor George Harrison nor Ritchie Starkey would want anyone rearranging their words as if they were guitar chords. You wouldn’t take three-quarters of Penny Lane and one-quarter of Across the Universe, put them together and call it a Beatles‘ song. So don’t take three quarters of John to Jann Wenner and one-quarter of John to Lisa Robinson, put them together and call it a Beatle’s quote.

MY PERSONAL STANDARD IS THAT IF SOMEONE REPRESENTS, “A BEATLE SAID THIS,” IT BETTER DAMN WELL BE SOMETHING A BEATLE SAID.

None of the Beatles, dead or alive, would be cool with their words being taken out of context at all, let alone two or three different statements on god knows what being combined into one. This isn’t hard, though. Use two or three separate quotation marks, and don’t take statements out of context. Don’t mix and match their words, but don’t twist them, either. If a person said something, it is the historian’s duty to represent those words to the best of your ability, and then use them to tell a factual story focused on what you feel is important. Staying true to the original words and true to their meaning. If you can’t use those words without twisting them, then change your story to fit their words, not the other way around. If their statement helps tell the story your way, use it! For goodness sake, John Lennon said at least two opposing things about almost every topic on earth, so there should be enough to choose from without being deceptive. I actually want the truth. Don’t you?

Biography is story based around accurately represented, trustworthy and verifiable facts. And look, Beatles fans, whoever your favorite is: we are not going to get the truth about his history if we don’t learn to take these things seriously. Let’s have—if not high standards—at least the lowest generally accepted standards. In the mid-term we need a lot more Beatles scholars with a lot more points of view, and now—right now—we need experienced Beatles scholars to prioritize searching out and finding smart, interested people to mentor. And we simply must ensure that we aren’t allowing to solidify into stone “facts” that are not facts and statements no one ever made. I don’t think any honest Beatles fan—(which rounds up to all of them)—wants any question around that issue.

The record is the most important thing. Now, and always. This is not about John versus Paul. John versus Paul may live on always in our hearts, but for Beatles history, it’s the wrong question. I’d rather someone be up front about their loves, but in the end the focus should be on representing the primary facts in their most pristine form. Love who you love most, but place truth above all. Pristine facts. Pristine quotes. Nothing hidden. Nothing misrepresented. 

Let the historical actors speak for themselves. That is their right.

And the historian’s duty.

NEXT, WE DISSECT A MONSTER.

Final note: I became frustrated and (maybe strangely) offended by Lewisohn's obscene pretenses in 2020, but my frustrations were nebulous and unfocused until this incredible AKOM series. I feel much better now. Angrier. But better. They worked their asses off. 🥂

Some Ivan Vaughn weirdness from Lewisohn's latest, very weird, interview that made me think about Phoebe and Daphne and all the weirdness they caught in Fine Tuning.

Lewisohn says John and Ivan's parental figures introduced them in the hope that they might play together, but also Ivan went to Liverpool Institute—the superior school to Quarry Bank—because Ivan's mum didn't want him to play with John. And Paul and Ivan might not have met (despite both being at the Inny) had they not had the same birthday? I must be missing some bit of trivia because what does that mean??

(transcription below)

John and Paul “met because they had a mutual friend.”

That mutual friend was the friend of John because he lived in the house behind John. And in those days parents, or parent figures—John was raised by his aunt—but if there were other little boys in the neighborhood, you would be introduced in the hope that you might play together. I don't know that that happens any more, but it did happen in those days. And in Paul's case, because Paul had gone to a particular school, um, this friend-- this mutual friend-- this friend of John's, Ivan, he was at the school, the same as Paul. And they had the same birthday, so they'd been introduced to one another. If they hadn't have had the same birthday they may not have even been-- ever been met. So, and it's-- and also, the reason that Ivan was at that school and not the more local one was his mother had said “you're not going to the same school as John Lennon” 'cause he was the kind of boy that other parents always kept their children away from if possible.

Daphne and Phoebe definitely caught that Lewisohn invented the idea that Ivan would have gone to Quarry Bank but for John being such a bad boy. (They didn't say “invented,” but they knew it, and after four months of being a Lewisohn Sherlock Holmes I'll say it. He made it up. There is no support for it outside Lewisohn's delusional mind.)

AKOM 📍

But mostly it's the pictures that put the lie to “Stuart was all and Paul was off moping in a corner.” (And incidentally, very jealous of Pete getting all the best birds.)

I'm sorry but give me a fucking break.

One of my favorite AKOM Fine Tuning eps btw

Today's AKOM was outstanding. I have so much to write and probably no time to write it until Thursday, but I had to make the time to say that it blew me away. The aspect I expected to influence me least, influenced me most: the death of Paul's mom. The writing about it. All of it. It humanized him and that loss in a way that hit me hard, and made me realize how much I'd been influenced by Tune In, even though I'd done my own critiquing of that section before.

(I want to write about the money part so badly, because I think that was very real for Paul, and I believe all the evidence shows that Jim was — or at least would have felt — much less stable than we really think about. He bet on the horses. He was the fun parent. But no, that's what I don't have time for.)

This was an excellent, excellent episode. The most powerful overall, by far. The most holistic in its picture, the most undeniable, and the one that brings me back to where I started, and with a bullet: "What story is Mark Lewisohn trying to tell? And why?" And why aren't we talking about the fact that he seems to hate Paul McCartney and Apple definitely doesn't like him?"

There are longstanding grievances, and the fact that he makes Paul McCartney into a manipulative ice cube on the page is likely not an accident.

I mean, right??

Lewisohn seems downright deceptive—may I even say manipulative?—after listening to today's episode. And although I have big problems with Lewisohn because studying the text you just have to, I have played Devil's advocate in my head through every episode, but at some point today I lost my ability to find any excuses. It is just impossible to construct any defense of this.

Fucking incredible episode. Brava, ladies.

Reminder clip: Mark Lewisohn on Fans on the Run pod — "the bastards took my name off it"

Give and ye shall receive, @wingsoverlagos. A few clips of Lewisohn casually denigrating Paul from Fab4Cast.

First, and perhaps the strangest. Q. Did you ever talk to Paul McCartney on the phone?

A. He only says his first name to get people on the back foot. He likes to do that *to* people.

Q. How did the work end?

A. Linda died and he stopped a lot of things, like the Wings fan mag. But also he was getting old and it was hard to find pictures he was happy with. (Literally his wife and keyboardist died! That's why there's no fan mag, not because he was old, you insensitive reptilian jerk.)

Q.How was Paul to work for?

A. I didn't get shouted at.