#mark lewisohn

Firstly, I have listened to Another Kind of Mind's Fine Tuning series, in fact I was listening to it as I was reading the book. I agree with some of their critiques, don't agree with others, and am agnostic on the rest. It's a very good series and I'd recommend listening to it - but you should read the book first or concurrently, just so you can get a full picture of what they're talking about.

Before I get into the AKOM critiques, I want to talk about the issue of composite quotes. Fine Tuning doesn't go into this as much as I thought they would, but I think it's quite significant.

Composite Quotes in Tune In

This has been explored pretty exhaustively on another blog on tumblr (I'm not a huge fan of that blog because the tenor of it is a bit...intense, lol, but kudos to it all the same for providing clear examples of the composite quotes issue) so I'm not going to go into detail, but just to summarise: Lewisohn frequently combines quotes from different interviews into one quote that appears as a single block of text on the page. Sometimes the different sections are separated by ellipses, sometimes not. In the footnotes, the different sources are cited (e.g. 'First line from NME interview, 1986; second line from Anthology' etc). The aim for doing this seems to be emphasising a certain point by finding multiple examples of the same person saying more or less the same thing and putting them together. I sort of see the logic but it's a little weird. I've never seen that in any other biographical or historical work. It wouldn't be fair to call it completely dishonest, because all the sources are outlined in the endnotes, but it can be a bit misleading. People tend to copy quotes directly from books when they're citing a time 'X said this and Y said that', and if they're doing that using Tune In, they're often going to be copying a quote that technically doesn't exist. I don't know if a professionally trained historian would do that, and maybe this shows some of the limits to being self-taught. Because I'm someone who always checks endnotes, the quote-mashing didn't bother me too much as I could always see where each part was coming from, but most readers aren't going to do that, so it could be argued that it's a misleading way to present information. I think AKOM argue successfully that the 'three of us chose Epstein' quote (see relevant episode of Fine Tuning) mash-quote is pretty misleading and the meaning is changed when it's removed from context. I can't say for sure that the practice is being used for bad intent, but it's certainly not great practice.

The Hot Button Issue of Bias

Is Lewisohn biased? Yeah, I think that's fair to say (not that he'd agree, haha). He's strongly biased in favour of John and sometimes biased against Paul. He's also fair and respectful to Paul plenty, I don't want to give the impression that the book is a total hit job or anything. The bias against Paul tends to be more covert and much of it wouldn't register with an average normie reader. But sometimes it's overt enough to be strikingly noticeable.

While I don't agree with all of AKOM's takes about that bias (I don't think it's quite as heinous as they make out), there are points where it's pretty undeniable to an informed reader. To an average reader, what's gonna stand out is his frankly weird way of writing about John. Lewisohn has talked a lot in interviews about how important it is to him to 'get the story right' and ensure that the 'truth' is told. He's not specific about what he means by the 'truth', and in what way that 'truth' hasn't been told before, but looking at Tune In it seems to me that he believes that any narrative that doesn't centre John as the most important Beatle around which the universe revolved is wrong and untruthful. I suspect he got upset at the 'Jawn beet wif' style of condemnation that's been popular among younger people for some years. And there seems to have been some kind of schism in his working relationship with Paul which may also be motivating him. As Paul is basically the official Beatles custodian now, guys like Lewisohn are very sensitive to any implication from Paul's camp that there was any kind of co-leader situation going on in the band. And I get it, to some extent - Paul can be disingenuous and self-serving and fond of simplified narratives, but that doesn't necessarily have to be a malevolent 'rewriting history' plot - it's just what people do, especially when faced with making sense of their own life story. This brings me to another issue, namely that the very things that initially qualified Lewisohn to be The Beatles Historian (I discussed these in Part 1 of this review) are also the things that partially disqualify him. He's too close to the people involved, too close to the story, unable to be really objective (whatever he may claim). I think about what Erin Torkelson Weber said about at least 50 years having to elapse before a historical event can really be assessed objectively, and I think that's true here, and the historian needs to be as far from the events too. And someone who worked for the people involved and stopped working for them under vaguely acrimonious circumstances is actually the least qualified to write an objective history all by himself. That's not to knock his research and archival work - it's tremendous - but he would have benefitted SO much if he had only collaborated with a disinterested outsider.

My biggest complaint with Lewisohn's pro-John bias is that it does a disservice to John most of all. I said in part 1 that he doesn't really analyse character and while I suppose he's not required to, it does prevent the personalities of each Beatle from coming to life the way they do in other books. Fine Tuning talked a lot about how Lewisohn doesn't pay much attention to how Paul's mother's death affected him, but the thing is, apart from giving more page space to describing it, he doesn't really look at how John's mother's death affected him either, not in any insightful way. The way he writes about John is kind of....flattening. Sometimes it feels like he went over the book's first draft and added in countless lines about how John was the leaderiest leader who ever leadered, even when he was five years old, and the cumulative effect is very cringey. He goes on and on about how amazing and intelligent and charismatic and countless other adjectives John is, but doesn't describe as many examples of these amazing qualities as you might think. (Related: he describes John as a great reader, reading 'a book a week' - but never tells you what books he's reading and what he got from then. We just get the usual suspects - Alice in Wonderland and Winston Churchill, yawn). Lewisohn interprets everything John does as leaderly, even when it's just neutral or plain un-leaderly. For example, when Paul is getting rid of the deadweight Quarrymen, Lewisohn says that it was a great testament to John's leadership style that he 'let' someone else do what was needed for the band. OK, that could be true, but it's just an interpretation. It could just as easily be argued that John was easily led and suggestible, and let someone rearrange 'his' band without complaint because he didn't have the leadership chops to do it himself. I'm not saying that the latter interpretation is any more accurate than the former, but it can be extrapolated from exactly the same data.

The book doesn't shy away from John's bad side, though it does kind of make excuses for it a lot. The overall picture ends up sort of (here's that word again) flat. In working so hard to redeem his hero, Lewisohn ends up painting a weirdly two-dimensional, empty portrait of a person who is simultaneously the greatest guy who ever lived and also deeply troubled - but with no curiosity or proper exploration as to why. Yeah, the broad themes (parents leaving, mother dying) are touched on, but there's no in depth look at his mental health as a child, Mimi's parenting, even his precocious sexuality is sort of laughed off as another sign of how cool he is rather than potentially a cause for concern? I get the feeling, when he writes about John, that Lewisohn just doesn't have the sophistication or depth to actually be able to understand him as a human being rather than a local god. The same applies to his approach to the other Beatles, too. It's a pity.

Fine Tuning talk a lot about Tune In's coverage of Paul vs John. I agree with some of their conclusions, in other cases I think they're reading too much into it. I agree that the discrepancy in how similar events in both Paul and John's lives are written about is often quite striking. The funniest example, to me, is coverage of their early creative efforts. Lewisohn praises Paul's early musical compositions: what became 'When I'm 64', and 'Suicide'; while saying that the lyrics of the latter weren't up to much (though he doesn't quote the lyrics). He then moves on (for implicit comparison) to a poem John wrote for Mimi after Uncle George's death and reproduces said poem in full. The hilarious thing is, the poem is the most Adrian Mole-ass thing imaginable and Lewisohn writing about it in these awed, hushed tones makes the whole thing even funnier. No shade on John for writing an Adrian Mole type poem when he was literally twelve, but Lewisohn's reverence is so silly, it makes it harder to take him seriously.

Generally, questions of 'who was the leader' are very boring to me, because they seem to boil down to 'who did other guys right out of adolescence think was the coolest guy in this bunch of near adolescents', which is not the same thing as actual leadership. Someone can have the loudest voice and get everyone to go along with their pranks and still not be able to lead their way out of a paper bag when it comes to grown-up issues. But at the end of the day, I'll let the Boomer Boys have their 'John was the ultimate forever super-leader' mantra, as what they think leading is is different to what I think it is, and ultimately it doesn't really matter. Where it does matter - and I agree with AKOM in this - is that it really does seem that all this blather about leadership is setting up Lewisohn's thesis as to why the band broke up (which in his mind is 'the truth' of course) - basically, it was Paul's fault for not knowing his place. Now, one can put a lot of blame on Paul for various actions and inactions over the years, but in general blaming one person for something as complex as the Beatles break up is a hiding to nowhere.

This is a complete side-track, but I have to talk about it: There's a section of the book where I think Lewisohn seems to have temporarily forgotten what the term 'to stand up to' someone means. He's describing John's relationships with Cynthia and Stu, and how John sometimes bullied and terrorised them both. Lewisohn says that Cynthia and Stu both 'stood up' to John but in the anecdotes he provides, both people are clearly not standing up to John, but passively accepting his bad treatment. It's all the more noticeable because it comes right after a clear example of someone definitely 'standing up' to John - Thelma Pickles tells the story of how she dumped him after he hit her, and clapped back when he insulted her in the pub. It's so weird and I can't figure out if he has a different definition of 'standing up to' than everyone else, or if he's trying to make some kind of point of how people 'should' behave around this most magnificent of men (withstand his shabby treatment?) I'd love to ask him what his thought process was here. It's so weird that even a normie reader would notice and be like "Eh, that's not what 'standing up to' means, mate."

Will We See Vols 2 and 3?

The billion dollar question in Beatles circles (and one-dollar question for everyone else lol) is: Will Lewisohn ever publish the next two volumes of his history? It's been 12 years since Tune In and he has stopped predicting publication dates for the next volumes. Tune In was published by Little, Brown but he doesn't seem to have a direct relationship with them or any publisher now, and makes his living with his Beatles roadshows. My speculation is that he's probably written a good part of at least Vol. 2 but has got stuck under the weight of research and/or has got distracted by recent critiques of Vol. 1 and by what he thinks is Paul nefariously rewriting history (Get Back, the Lyrics etc). He appears to insist on working alone (he says as much in the credits section of Tune In) and I would surmise that he doesn't collaborate or take critique well, so has got more and more locked-in and protective of his work, even to the extent of accidentally sabotaging his own efforts to get it out. And to an extent, I get it: this is literally his life's work, all he's ever been is a Beatles guy - this work is basically an extension of himself, so it being out in the world and receiving anything other than complete praise is gonna wound him and make him prickly and defensive. I suspect that's where his statements about being definitely one hundred per cent unbiased and the Only Guy who can write this book and get the story 'right' come from. They're ridiculous statements on the face of it, but they make more sense when you read them as the defensive lashing out of someone whose whole sense of self is wrapped up in this work. We've all been there.

So much time has gone by now that the weight of expectations on Vols 2 and 3 may just be too crushing, plus I'm certain he's read all the recent criticism of Vol. 1 and Not Taken It Well. I really wish, for his own sake, that he would get out of his own head and take on a collaborater, but I don't see that happening.

Conclusion + archives

In a podcast interview years ago, Lewisohn mentioned that he intended to donate his original interviews and other research material to a public institution like the British Library when he's done with the books. It was just one comment and it was a long time ago so there's no way of knowing if he still intends to do this. I really, really hope so, but he wouldn't be the first Beatles writer/collector to make such lofty promises and then end up selling the lot at auction to pay the bills, separating and scattering it into private hands :cries: Even if he does still intend to donate it, if that's precluded on Vols 2 and 3 being published, there's still no guarantee it'll happen. Every time I think of the fabulous material sitting in the personal archives of people like Bob Spitz and Hunter Davies and now Lewisohn, completely inaccessible with no plans for what'll happen to it after the writer dies, the archivist in me gets a wee bit anguished!

Ultimately, Lewisohn, and his critics, could do with relaxing a bit about all this. At the end of the day, these questions of bias are only of interest to a tiny subset of people, and while the arguments are fierce, they're also kind of peripheral. Whether Lewisohn is right about his book being The Only Truth, or AKOM and others are right about him being hopelessly biased, at the end of the day a book like this is only ever going to be a minority interest. Most people, hell, most Beatles fans, are not going to read it, and intricate questions of truth and bias and whatever else are ultimately arcana. If he could think about the books that way, rather than as the Revealed Truth on the Mountain, it might be easier to finish them and not fret so much about how they'll be received.