Revolutionaries, eight days a week

IN the late summer of 1963, with Beatlemania sweeping into every corner of the British Isles, a reporter approached Paul McCartney for his thoughts on, of all things, athletics. “I’m not really interested in sport ... except for swimming,” the Beatles’ spaniel-eyed bass player said, the old Empire hanging on his every word. “But that’s the thing for these hot days, isn’t it? It really cools you off.”

Forty-plus years later, every banal Beatle utterance or doing continues to exert a hold on the imagination -- at least for those of a certain age or inclination. The above quote turns up in “The Beatles: The Biography,” by journalist Bob Spitz, (Little, Brown: 984 pp., $29.95) a hefty tome timed to capitalize on this year’s spate of Fab Four milestones: It was 35 years ago that the band dissolved amid a miasma of lawsuits. In July, Ringo Starr hit retirement age, and John Lennon would have turned 65 this year too. And this week marks 25 years since the grimmest day in the annals of rock, Dec. 8, 1980, when Lennon was gunned down by an unstable fan in the entrance to the Dakota. It’s no surprise, then, that the Beatles ephemera machine is up again, pumping out, along with the Spitz bio, an impressive inventory of new Beatles books -- just in time, like the Beatles albums of yore, for the holiday-buying binge.

And why not? You’ve probably heard “Paperback Writer” more than you ever wanted (Oh, to hear the Beatles again for the first time!), but even if you’ve had your fill, it’s hard to get enough of the Beatles saga, a condensed epic of glory unmatched in all of pop culture. At its heart is the dynamic engine of Lennon and McCartney, a partnership that was no mere variation on Gilbert and Sullivan or Rodgers and Hart but a torrid affair along the mythic lines of, say, Heloise and Abelard. “Their talent,” Spitz writes, “was so natural, so unforced and kinetic, that it developed like infant speech.”

As everyone on the planet knows, their story begins in Liverpool, where they met on July 6, 1957, when Lennon’s skiffle band, the Quarry Men, played at a local church fair. (In the rock firmament, the date is second only to the day, almost exactly three years earlier, when Elvis walked into Sun Records to cut “That’s All Right.”) Spitz calls the meeting -- in which McCartney came backstage and wowed the Quarry Men with a jaw-dropping rendition of “Be-Bop-A-Lula” -- “love at first sight.”

What ensued over the next decade or so has all the cozy familiarity of a folk tale, as Lennon, an art school screw-up with a loud mouth and a wicked imagination, and McCartney, a “wildly confident” kid who could shriek like Little Richard and “charm the skin off a snake,” shook the world loose from its moorings. As the durable (and Spitz-endorsed) cliche goes, the two balanced each other: Paul taught John the finer points of musicianship; John taught Paul how to shoplift. John had the attitude; Paul had the chops. Paul was, as John put it, “a good P.R. man,” able to handle the public as deftly as he handled his partner’s meltdowns. John, for his part, was an intuitive (and sometimes lazy) creator who fed off Paul’s tireless momentum. McCartney was the gallery hound, urbane sophisticate, dabbling experimenter and sometimes overbearing motivator who let Lennon run interference for him. In brute terms, McCartney was the musical genius and Lennon the pure artist.

Along with McCartney’s buddy George Harrison, a cheeky rascal with a Carl Perkins fixation, the nascent Beatles kicked around in various guises, propelled by a shared obsession with Elvis, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. They enlisted Lennon’s art school chum Stuart Sutcliffe, a Kierkegaard-reading James Dean look-alike with no discernible facility for bass guitar, and Pete Best, a ham-fisted drummer with a demeanor generously construed as “mean, moody, and magnificent” by the emcee at the Cavern Club, where the Beatles became mainstays of the burgeoning Merseybeat scene. There was Hamburg, Germany, of course, where, clad in leather, they played marathon sets fueled by lager and amphetamines. In April 1962, Sutcliffe died from a probable brain aneurysm, perhaps brought on by a couple of violent run-ins.

The sad circumstances are a staple of Beatles lore but, oddly, Spitz neglects to mention them. In “Lennon Revealed” (Running Press: 296 pp., $29.95), Larry Kane, the veteran Philadelphia broadcaster who traveled with the Beatles on their U.S. tours and maintained a long-distance acquaintance with Lennon, suggests that Lennon himself, having pummeled Sutcliffe some months before, might have contributed to his friend’s death.

Best was dismissed after a so-so audition for Parlophone Records and replaced by Ringo Starr. Starr, who had survived a Dickensian childhood complete with tuberculosis and home tutoring, created a drumming style as nimble as it was Neanderthal, paving the way for future practitioners Keith Moon and Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham. Meanwhile, teddy-boy pompadours changed into “Beatle haircuts” and, thanks to manager Brian Epstein, the leather outfits gave way to sleek suits and boots.

McCartney -- ever the showman -- loved the spiffing up; Lennon, naturally, hated it. Spitz cites this moment as the beginning of friction between the two. But no band ever rocked three-buttons and drainpipes so hard, before or since. If you look at photos of the Liverpudlian competition (say, Ringo’s old band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes), you’ll see 1950s sock hoppers. Photos of the Beatles going back to the Hamburg days show something weirder, wilder, darker, louder, funnier, more tuneful. It was all so wrong it was right.

The early singles -- “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me” -- toned down what Spitz calls the “smoldering rock ‘n’ roll rave-up power extravaganzas” of Hamburg. But they were unvarnished and in-your-face. The maritime salt of Liverpool clung to them. When the Beatles hit America, in February 1964, they were a full-blown four-headed monster -- “kings of the jungle,” as Lennon put it. No less a sage than poet Allen Ginsberg -- quoted in Simon Wells’ absorbing photographic chronicle “The Beatles: 365 Days”(Harry N. Abrams: unpaged, $29.95) -- tuned in: “I started dancing. It seemed that the years of wartime repression were really over, or something was over, and the new era had begun.”

IN her landmark essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag wrote of “works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be

Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages, Spitz’s opus projects diligence rather than mastery. There are details galore: We learn, for instance, that Epstein’s hat size was 7 1/8 . But has Spitz anything new to say, any fresh insights? Maybe there just aren’t any left.

The book is hamstrung by errors: “Rubber Soul” wasn’t the first Beatles album with 14 songs, for instance, nor were the boys all younger than 22 in 1963. Spitz even flubs the lyrics to “I Am the Walrus.” Nevertheless, it’s still possible to gorge happily here, the way one luxuriates in listening over and over to “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver.”

Eventually, the saga turns grim: It’s a quarrelsome, drawn-out winding down, no joy to read, as the self-indulgent, splintering and cranky Beatles embark on harebrained business ventures (Apple), endure the onslaught of Yoko (a “malevolent” presence, Spitz writes, who shared a heroin habit with Lennon) and traipse to Rishikesh, India, to inhale the rarefied oms of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Harrison, long in the shadow of Lennon-McCartney, makes the ultimate end-run, straight toward the Godhead.

In February 1968, Harper’s Editor Lewis Lapham was a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, dispatched to poke around Rishikesh as the hirsute, post-psychedelic Fab Four and their posse booked “a session in the recording studio of the world soul.” Lapham got only occasional glimpses of the Beatles’ entourage, but his book “With the Beatles” (Melville House: 148 pp., $12.95 paper), might be the most insightful of the lot. Cynthia struck him (accurately, it turns out) as “sad, like a lost princess waiting to be rescued from a medieval castle.” Soon enough, the Beatles tired of their laughing fakir and returned to London for another round of squabbling and music (the White Album) that managed to be by turns mind-blowing, meandering and fatally unfun. “What had happened to John’s sense of humor?” Cynthia asked. “Abbey Road,” the 1969 swan song that McCartney rallied the band to complete, was, as Lennon put it, “something slick to preserve the myth.” Already into globetrotting agitprop, Lennon probably didn’t notice that Harrison’s contributions on that album outshone his and McCartney’s.

These days, Lennon-McCartney continues, despite the years and the passing of Lennon (who, though dead, earned $22 million last year). McCartney is a top-grossing touring act and has just put out his best album since 1980’s “McCartney II.” He’s even published a storybook for children, “High in the Clouds,” written with Geoff Dunbar and Philip Ardagh (Dutton: 96 pp., $19.99) and starring one Wirral the Squirrel (named after a Liverpool suburb). Lennon, meanwhile, recently played Broadway in the form of a garish, ill-advised revue, and a new hits collection was released in October.

In the end, the journey Spitz takes us on is all too much and yet not quite enough. But his book is just an opener for the main event, due in 2007: a three-part mammoth biography from dogged Beatles archivist Mark Lewisohn. Elvis had his Peter Guralnick, his Greil Marcus, his Stanley Booth. The Beatles, meanwhile, are still looking for their Boswell or Gibbon. Lewisohn’s version will take him years to write; will you take a look? *