Acting Naturally: An Interview with Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr (Photo by Kevin Winter)

Does the world’s greatest drummer really need an introduction? Not really. Who hasn’t heard of Ringo Starr? The one-time Beatle? The charismatic actor of A Hard Day’s Night and The Magic Christian? The Fab who right out of the gate, following the break-up of The Beatles at the end of the 1960s, defied all expectations by having, at least for a while, the best solo career of his fellow band mates? Despite a dark period marked by drug abuse, alcoholism, and artistic shiftlessness (while simultaneously being a decadent globe-trotting European playboy in the late 1970s through to the end of the 1980s), The Ringed One’s glory days are many, continuing even now, with the 25th anniversary tour of his All-Starr Band which kicked off at Casino Rama in Ontario on June 5. 

This time around, his group of ace musicians and former hit-paraders includes Todd Rundgren, Greg Rolie of Journey and Santana, Electric Light Orchestra drummer Gregg Bissonnette, Toto’s Steve Lukather and Mr. Mister’s Richard Page. Ringo plays the skins, but he also sings, often standing solo in front of his band with a microphone in hand, his once awkward vocal performance (John Lennon and Paul McCartney used to write songs for him to suit his limited range) now polished through years of practice and professional coaching. An old dog who is more than capable of learning a new trick. Just how old is he? Well, next week, on July 7, Ringo turns (gulp!) 74. And yet as the millions who saw him on television this past February, performing as part of the Grammy’s 50th anniversary tribute show honouring the Beatles where he was accompanied by Sir Paul, the only other surviving Beatle, can attest, age has not withered Ringo Starr, neither his drive or appeal. Not only is he touring, performing in Dallas tonight, Vancouver on July 15, Los Angeles on July 19 and other dates in between, he is presently working on a new record which he is producing himself and planning to release in early 2015. 

He is also the subject of an exhibition of self-portraits which opened at New York’s Soho Contemporary Gallery on June 19, with additional exhibitions of his art work on display now at the Hard Rock Cafe in Chicago and the Ocean Gallery in Stone Harbor, N.J. There’s also an upcoming TV special, Ringo Starr: A Lifetime of Peace and Love, a tribute concert featuring performances by Joe Walsh, Ben Harper, Ben Folds, Brendan Benson, Bettye LaVette, Peter Frampton, Kenny Aronoff and others that will air July 13 on AXS TV. Taped in January in Los Angeles, according to a report in USA Today, the concert launched the Ringo Starr Peace & Love Fund , a division of the David Lynch Foundation, “which provides Transcendental Meditation instruction to tens of thousands of at-risk students in underservedschools, women who are survivors of domestic violence, and veterans with post-traumatic stress.” How does he do it? What is the secret of his success? A good attitude for one thing, he tells Deirdre Kelly in a rare one-on-one interview. A belief in the power of love, for another. Speaking of which, for his birthday on July 7, Ringo is asking fans to pause at noon, local time, to share in a “peace and love” moment. He’ll be participating in one of those himself, in front of the Capitol Records Building in Los Angeles. The reason? “I really do believe in all you need is love.” Here’s more of that conversation.

On Our Minds and Playlists: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr

The Beatles are a big part of why I listen to music at all. Twist & Shout (a compilation Capitol Records in Canada made out of their official UK releases) was the first album I ever owned. I was going to write, ‘the first album I ever bought,’ but of course my Mom and Dad bought it, and my brother Al and I shared it until the grooves were worn down. In fact, we didn’t even have a record player that would play 33 1/3 vinyl albums when it came along. We had to sit and stare at the sleeve for a week while my Dad took the old 78 rpm turntable into the local radio shop and had a new multi-speed turntable dropped in. The excitement was palpable as we came home from school that afternoon and counted the minutes ‘til Dad walked in with the new and improved record player! It was soon after hearing The Beatles that I asked for (and received) my first guitar. It was a Sunburst with a neck that was already warped, which made it very difficult to play. Lessons were frustrating, focusing on songs like “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along” instead of the really important tunes like “Anna” or “Boys,” “Please Please Me” or “Love Me Do.” Soon enough though I was able to strum along. That first Beatles’ album gave clues to the later development of the Four Mop Tops. Here we are nearly fifty years later … and in one week we’ve seen the release of new albums from Ringo and Paul.

John Lennon was gunned down in the street outside his apartment in New York over thirty years ago, but his son Julian just issued his fifth album. And George, who was claimed by cancer in 2001, was recently celebrated in a long-form documentary by Martin Scorsese. Paul and George featured on two Mojo magazine covers in 2011, and Rolling Stone issued two different special editions devoted to the band. The Beatles continue to be on our minds … and on our playlists. So let’s look at these two new releases.

Pseudo Swindler: Ray Wylie Hubbard's The Grifter’s Hymnal

Some songwriters improve with age and experience. In the case of veteran Austin musician Ray Wylie Hubbard, the evidence is heard on his new release, The Grifter’s Hymnal (Bordello Records 2012), one of the finest albums of the year. It’s a testament to his excellent ability, through song, at storytelling. All of which is shaped by a career and life that’s had some interesting turns, both artistically and personally.

Ray Wylie Hubbard is originally from Oklahoma born 65 years ago. His first album was released in 1971 joining a new mix of Alt-Country singers such as Guy Clark. He’s also been associated with the so-called, Outlaw Country performers like Waylon Jennings, Steve Young or Willie Nelson. But unlike those hugely successful artists, Hubbard has been more of a journeyman, quietly recording whenever he can and maintaining his craft playing local venues in Austin, Texas, where he lives. In the past ten years he’s released five albums, The Grifter’s Hymnal, being the most recent.

All Those Years Ago - Mark Lewisohn's Tune In The Beatles: All These Years (Vol. 1)

Reading Philip Norman’s Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation in 1982, I was slightly disoriented, yet nonetheless taken, by its references to a British youth and Beatles fan named Mark Lewisohn—disoriented because I, like most Americans, hadn’t heard of him. First glimpsed as an eight-year-old in the summer of 1967, dancing in the back yard to Sgt. Pepper “while trying not to dislodge the cardboard mustache clenched under his nose,” he was last seen as “a serious young man of twenty-two who holds the title ‘Beatle Brain of Britain,’ so labyrinthine is his knowledge of their music and history.”

But within a decade of Norman’s book, the “serious young man” had achieved broad renown as the acknowledged world authority on All Things Beatle. Today, the mustache beneath Mark Lewisohn’s nose is all his own. Among his works of Fab Four scholarship—all venerated for their precision, depth, and integrity—are The Beatles Live! (1986); The Beatles Recording Sessions (1988); The Complete Beatles Chronicle (1992); and, with Piet Schreuders and Adam Smith, The Beatles’ London (1994). He’s written liner notes for numerous Beatles reissues, and was intimately involved in the 1994-95 Anthology project. His work on the Recording Sessions book alone—for which he listened to every piece of Beatles tape in their record company’s vault—gives him a depth of archival insight undreamt of by other fans or historians.

And his magnum opus is finally upon us. Close to a decade in preparation, its publication twice delayed, Tune In (Crown Archetype; 932 pp.) is the first installment of a three-volume Beatles biography with the corporate title All These Years. The book both looks and weighs important, and the hefty mass-market version is dwarfed by the “Extended Special Edition”—two equally thick volumes in a box, with nearly twice the page count and many more photographs, incorporating quantities of ancillary research that must have been removed from the mass version with a shovel. Lewisohn tells us the project has not been authorized or in any way controlled by the surviving Beatles, the deceased Beatles’ estates, or the group’s joint company, Apple Corps. Unauthorized Tune In may be, but clearly Lewisohn earned the trust of at least three of his subjects (he never met John Lennon) over his decades of research into the Beatles’ daily lives and guarded archives; and it’s largely because Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr deign not to obstruct his work that we have this book, and the three-part whole it heralds.

Within You, Without You: George Harrison Living in the Material World

The late John Lennon probably characterized his friend and band mate George Harrison best in 1968 when he told a journalist that, while George himself was no mystery, the mystery inside George was immense. "It's watching him uncover it all little by little that's so damn interesting," Lennon remarked. You get some sense of that slow peeling away of paradoxical mystery while watching Martin Scorsese's two-part HBO documentary, George Harrison Living in the Material World, which examines Harrison's life both as one of The Beatles and his search for spiritual solace in the aftermath of Beatlemania. Scorsese has described his film, in fact, as an exploration into Harrison's endless quest for serenity. "We don't know," he said while making the picture. "We're just feeling our way through." That unfortunately is also a pretty accurate assessment of the movie. George Harrison Living in the Material World is filled with fleeting bits of revelation and insight but it seldom finds its focus. At times, the jagged storytelling and impressionistic glimpses seem arbitrary and puzzling rather than revealing. You may be inside the immense mystery that makes up George Harrison, but Scorsese can't seem to tell us why we're there.

Neglected Gem: Backbeat (1994)

From left: Scot Williams as Pete Best, Gary Bakewell as Paul McCartney, Ian Hart as John Lennon, and Chris O'Neill as George Harrison. (Photo: Channel Four Films.)

Backbeat covers a great period, 1960-62, when The Beatles, still teenagers and still unknown at home in England, played in cruddy Hamburg clubs (where the sailors used to ogle them) before the young avant-garde art crowd took them up. It’s about the friendship between John Lennon (Ian Hart) and Stu Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorff), an abstract expressionist painter he met at art school in Liverpool who dropped out to put together a band with John and travel to Germany; and about the uneasy, ambiguous triangle created when Sutcliffe fell in love with the German photographer Astrid Kirchherr (Sheryl Lee). The story is a fascinating one. But the film, directed by Iain Softley from a script he wrote with Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward, never caught on and has long been forgotten, though I love to teach it (my students always greet it enthusiastically) and, more than thirty years on, I think it deserves some attention.

New on Criterion: The Last Waltz (1978)

The Band on stage in The Last Waltz (1978)

In the forty-four years since Martin Scorsese released The Last Waltz, his film of The Band’s final concert, at San Francisco’s Winterland Arena on Thanksgiving Day in 1976, the movie hasn’t lost any of its visceral excitement, both as a piece of filmmaking and as a keepsake of one of the signal events in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s the greatest concert movie ever made. (The other contenders, in my view, would be Bert Stern’s 1959 Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a chronicle of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, which inspired Scorsese; Jonathan Demme’s 1984 Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense; and Scorsese’s one-of-a-kind 2019 Rolling Thunder Revue, which casts a backward glance at the all-star show, headed by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, that circled the continent in 1975 and 1976.) The new Criterion disc of The Last Waltz is as beautiful to look at as the film was in theatres in 1978. The veteran Hollywood production designer Boris Leven, borrowing the San Francisco Opera’s set for La Traviata and framing it with a trio of chandeliers, transformed Winterland into something that looks like a remnant of the Romantic era, and Michael Chapman, who had worked with Scorsese on Taxi Driver, lit it, while some of the most talented cinematographers in America (Vilmos Zsigmond, Laszlo Kovacs, David Myers, Bobby Byrne, Michael Watkins and Hiro Narita) manned the other six cameras covering the spectacle. It was the first concert film with a shooting script, which Scorsese had drawn up; the stories about the filming, where his meticulous planning met the inevitable challenges and accidents of a once-in-a-lifetime event that had to be captured spontaneously, are sometimes funny and always thrilling. (You won’t want to skip the extras on the Criterion disc, which include two audio commentaries, a 1978 Canadian television interview with Scorsese and The Band’s Robbie Robertson, a twenty-fifth-anniversary doc about the making of the movie, and a supremely articulate new interview with Scorsese conducted by film critic David Fear. There’s also a single outtake, a twelve-minute jam session that occurred at the end of the concert and is the only surviving piece of archival footage.)

Full Circle: Revisiting The Beatles' Revolver (1966)

In 1966 – before The Beatles abandoned the stage for good with a show at Candlestick Park, in San Francisco, and where Paul McCartney would recently play before the former baseball park itself passed into history – the new studio music they released that summer brought the group full circle to their first session at EMI in 1962. As if to commemorate the concept of completing a circle, the record was called Revolver. Recorded from April through June 1966, Revolver was a rich panorama of musical and philosophical styles, a masterpiece of eclecticism. George Harrison's interest in Indian music and religion came full bloom. The fruit of McCartney's venture into the world of avant-garde theatre, visual art and music fully emerged. John Lennon's fascination with Eastern thoughts about mortality, brought on through chemical enhancement, reached its apex. Ringo Starr even decided to redefine the sound of his drums to provide yet more personality to the music. 

Dystopian Dreams: Larry Kirwan's Liverpool Fantasy

In my book Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream, I was trying to answer a question: How did a group like The Beatles, who wrote songs about love and helped to build a popular culture based on pleasure and inclusion, also attract hate and murder. To do so, I realized that I'd have to answer another key question: Was The Beatles' utopian dream worth it?

Given that the state of the world, in the wake of the band's demise, is not the one they sung about - and hoped for - in "All You Need is Love," it was tempting to ask whether or not The Beatles truly mattered. I thought I was going to have to justify the group solely on the strength of their music until I came across, quite by chance, a book by Larry Kirwan called Liverpool Fantasy (2003). In his book, Kirwan (who was the lead singer of a New York-based Irish rock group called Black 47), imagines England without the emergence of The Beatles. Liverpool Fantasy is a dystopian, yet comical, look at the absence of The Beatles from history. It doesn't spare the reader, but it doesn't ridicule the dream the band created either.

In Liverpool Fantasy, Kirwan asks what might have happened had The Beatles broken up before their thunderbolt song "Please Please Me" had not hit the airwaves and broke them in England in 1962. Their manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin believe that their cover of the quiet ballad "Till There Was You" will do better. While Lennon balks at the suggestion, McCartney is happy to go along (after all, he sings on it). At which point, Lennon storms out of the studio taking George and Ringo with him. The Beatles are no more. Kirwan next cuts to 1987 where the picture of England isn't an artistic renaissance, but a fascist state where the National Front, bearing the slogans of the ultraright Enoch Powell, has struck a coalition with the Tory government. Unemployment is high. Racism is pervasive. And The Beatles never happened.

Nowhere Land: "Heartbreak Hotel" and "There's a Place"

On the 40th Anniversary of the release of The Beatles' Let it Be album, here is a lengthy excerpt from my book Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream (Greenwood-Praeger, 2008):

When rock 'n' roll first began its promise was pretty basic: good times lay ahead. With that primary assurance, a captivating pact was also struck with listeners. The world was going to be a different place than it was today. As early as 1954, Bill Haley's simple pledge told us we'd find our freedom by putting our glad rags on and rocking around the clock. But the song did more than just rock around the clock. Youth riots broke out in movie houses after it was featured in the opening credits of The Blackboard Jungle (1955), an otherwise cautionary story about juvenile delinquency. In the same year as Bill Haley, The Penguins, a quietly graceful doo-wop group with ultimately only one hit up their sleeve, promised us a world of feasible pleasures when they asked us in "Earth Angel": Will you be mine? In answer, people danced with their hips moving just a little bit closer to their partners'. When Elvis Presley first decided to shake his hips on national television, nations of eager teenagers were given permission to do likewise -- and shake them they did.

Magical Retreat: Sgt. Pepper After 45 Years

The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released in June 1967, is a lovely confection, a beautifully self-conscious neon sign that celebrated with ample imagination the romantic ideal, where the possibility of true love could transcend all of our problems. (If only.) And in that summer, which came to be termed 'The Summer of Love,' Sgt. Pepper's seamless and mellifluous tone made it appear as if that possibility was indeed well within our grasp. However, the idea for the record, following up on their concept single “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” (two radically different renderings of childhood and originally destined for the album) came out of the opposite sentiment, a 'Summer of Hate' that took place the previous year.

That particular summer, American cities (as they had almost every summer in the mid-Sixties) were burning in reaction to the continued racial unrest. The escalation of the war in Vietnam had also all but diminished President Johnson's War on Poverty. In short, the tenor of violence was becoming exactly as black activist H. Rap Brown had described it then – as American as apple pie. Amidst this chaos, with the mounting frustration over the dashed ideals of the New Frontier of the early Sixties, The Beatles became easy targets for the angry and the disillusioned. You could say they were even, to a large degree, at the apex of those very ideals being dashed. So their 1966 tour, filled with torpor and turmoil, reached its bottom end with record burnings in the Deep South after John Lennon had remarked that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. In that summer, The Beatles found themselves no longer in control of their meteoric success. When they first chose to engage their audience in 1962, with their first single “Love Me Do,” the goal wasn't simply to become entertainers, but to put new demands on the pop audience. They set out to take popular music and their fans to another place. And in the coming years they did just that – and more.

Shadow and Light: The Fiftieth Anniversary of With The Beatles (1963)

When The Beatles' second album, With The Beatles, was released almost fifty years ago in the UK, it stayed at the top of the pop charts for a startling 21 weeks. If you consider that it was released on November 22, 1963 (on the day President Kennedy was assassinated), and was ignored by their British label's subsidiary, Capitol Records, in the United States, the feat was extraordinary. Yet despite the circumstances, or perhaps, in part, because of them, the sounds within those grooves caught the times like few other albums ever did – and changed them. With The Beatles arrived on that cold late fall day amidst a national tragedy, and yet it became a tonic. The songs would mix joy seamlessly with sorrow, their brightness overshadowed darkness, as four white boys exuberantly celebrated their love of black music.

Where Dreams Don't Go to Die: John Lennon's "God" and The Beatles' Love

Eight months after The Beatles broke up in 1970, John Lennon released Plastic Ono Band, named after his new group. But rather than being a utopian vision from a collection of musicians shaping the future of a Seventies counter-culture, it was instead a solo autobiographical record which began as a stark recollection of Lennon's traumatic childhood. One listen to the album’s intensely austere songs made it clear that the world of possibility Lennon once heard in Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel," or the inclusive spirit he once proclaimed with The Beatles on "There’s a Place," he was now refuting. Lennon stripped the songs of their quixotic power for the purpose of discovering the naked truth about himself. "Mother" opened the album with the peeling of funeral bells, as Lennon ranted angrily at the father who abandoned him as a boy and at the mother who was killed soon after. "I Found Out" expressed his angry contempt for religion and the pop culture The Beatles helped inspire. "Working Class Hero," a mournful old-fashioned folk ballad, despaired of an authoritarian society that stripped its citizens of their souls. Critic Albert Goldman, in his controversial biography The Lives of John Lennon, compared the theme of Plastic Ono Band to The Who’s rock opera Tommy. "For what is the famous rock opera about?" Goldman asks. "A boy traumatized by his mother’s cheating loses all his senses but the most primitive, the sense of touch. He employs this mute yet passionate faculty to become a pinball hero—a symbol of rock ’n’ roll. Acclaimed by the world’s youth as a pop star, he continues to evolve, becoming first a guru and ultimately a saint. There is the legend of John Lennon to a T." On Plastic Ono Band, Lennon set out to reveal himself as a new man who was reborn.

Beatles Confidential: Mark Lewisohn In His Own Write

The Beatles arriving at New York's JFK Airport on Feb. 7, 1964. (Photo courtesy the U.S. Library of Congress)

Mark Lewisohn, the world’s only full-time Beatles historian, is a right scholar. In July, when the sun was shining and most Londoners were outdoors basking in the rarity of a cloudless English morning, the bespectacled Briton was ensconced inside the fortress-like British Library, quietly perusing a half century’s old clippings file having to do with the National Theatre’s 1967/68 stage version of In His Own Write, the 1964 book by John Lennon whose birthday it is today. Victor Spinetti, the Welsh actor who had appeared in such Beatles films as A Hard Day’s Night, Help! and Magical Mystery Tour, had directed the play for which Lennon had written additional material, and the reviews had been mixed. The comedian discussed the production in papers released to the public following his death in 2012. National Theatre stalwarts, Sirs Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier, also had referenced In His Own Write in correspondence of their own. Lewisohn, who makes it his business to know everything there is to know about the Beatles – “It’s my life’s work,” he proudly declares –  has read them all. But on this particular day he was on the lookout for additional details that would give him the full, unabridged picture –  the who, where, how and why –  of what actually had happened. “I go anywhere where I can find something new, new to me anyway,” he said during a coffee break in the library’s light-filled canteen. “I’ve been researching the Beatles since the late 1970s, and the fact that there are still things new to me is extraordinary. But that is very much the nature of this subject: there’s so much material to be found.”

Some of that new material, recently unearthed, will be exposed much later in future volumes of All These Years, the mammoth three-volume Beatles’ history Lewisohn was contracted to write in 2004 after first establishing himself as the world’s most foremost authority on the band. His previous books on the Beatles, each praised for their depth and breadth of knowledge and the brisk insightfulness of their prose, include The Beatles Live! (1986), The Beatles Recording Sessions (1988), The Complete Beatles Chronicle (1992), and the co-authored (with Piet Schreuders and Adam Smith ) The Beatles’ London (1994). As well, Lewisohn worked as a researcher and consultant on the 1994-95 Beatles Anthology project, collaborating closely with Beatles producer George Martin in producing the three double-CD audio release. He has written liner notes for the Beatles’ re-releases and for Paul McCartney’s solo albums. All his experience and understanding of the Beatles is brought to bear on his unauthorized Beatles’ biography whose first volume, Tune In, was published last year to critical acclaim. The highly anticipated second and third volumes are projected to follow sometime in the next decade. The precise publication dates are unknown. The release of the books depends very much on the pace of the research, which Lewisohn admits is slow. But, as he explained in a conversation touching on the enduring appeal of the Beatles, and why the remaining members of the world’s greatest band appear to want nothing to do with his definitive history, Lewisohn explained that scholarship of the sort he is committed to pursuing just can’t be rushed: “This project is about leaving no stone unturned, and that’s a time-consuming process. If I stop researching today because everyone’s saying, ‘Hey, I want to read it now’ I could miss some vital thing that must be written into this history. Content is paramount.”

Criss-crossing Abbey Road: Dreaming The Beatles by Rob Sheffield

When John Lennon released his solo album Plastic Ono Band in 1970, he concluded the record with a tune called “God.” The song laments everything he no longer believed in, including “Beatles,” which he stutters out at the end of a long list of disenchantments. “The dream is over,” sings Lennon, and while that may have been true for him at the time, months after the break-up of his band, it wasn’t the case for the millions of fans who adored The Beatles and believed in them. The current crop of believers can be easily found on YouTube as they compile so-called Beatles albums from the Lennon, McCartney-Harrison-Starr solo years in the early seventies. The notion isn’t without merit, as many of the songs on the early solo records were being written in the final months of the band’s career. One such compiler, in a nod to the red and blue Beatles compilations issued by Apple in 1975, has created his own “orange” and “green” albums. Another fan by the name of Marc Bridson has created The Beatles fantasy albums featuring the Fab Four’s solo tracks, collected in an effort to preserve the band in ways they never expected. Strangely, it works . . . but only for dreamers.

Fifty years after the release of Sgt. Pepper and another forty-plus years after the break-up of the world’s most popular rock band, Rob Sheffield’s timing couldn’t be better. In his recently released memoir, Dreaming The Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World (Dey St.), Sheffield turns the story of the Beatles on its cultural head. Rather than write another chronological history of the band, leaving that task to scholars such as Mark Lewisohn, Sheffield tells the story of the group from his unique perspective. He literally begins at the end when Paul McCartney says, “Thanks, Mo” at the conclusion of “Get Back” on Let It Be. For Sheffield it’s a great place to start because it captures a “quintessential Beatle moment” when the band calls it a day and the fans get to enjoy the meaning of their musical and cultural impact. Looking back as a fan, Sheffield says, “The Beatles’ second career has lasted several times longer than the first one . . . The world keeps dreaming the Beatles, long after the Beatles themselves figured the dream was over.” Clearly, timing is everything.

Setting the Record Straight: Interview with Beatles biographer Mark Lewisohn

Author Mark Lewisohn (Photo by Michael Priest)

Mark Lewisohn has been fascinated by The Beatles ever since he was a pre-schooler in his native England, hearing for the first time their string of number ones on British radio. Hooked from the start, Lewisohn went on to become, and it’s no exaggeration, their number one fan. In 1979, the year before the senseless killing of John Lennon in New York, he started researching them professionally, going on to publish several books on them before coming to collaborate directly with them when researching The Beatles’ Anthology and, later on, liner notes for Paul McCartney’s solo projects. But his major opus is Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years (Vol. 1), the first in a three part history which was published late last year, and to great critical acclaim. An unauthorized biography, and yet one written with the benefit of insider knowledge, Tune In revisits The Beatles’ story with an attention to detail that is staggering. Volume one starts with The Beatles’ ancestors in another century and ends on New Year’s Day 1963, just as The Beatles are on the cusp of world-wide fame. Ringo joins the band only on page 672, to give an idea of its scope. “It is my life’s work,” says Lewisohn, at 55 the world’s only full-time Beatles historian who expects to be well into his seventies when the whole of the project is finally completed, sometime in 2028. He is presently researching the second volume which will include 1964, the year The Beatles first came and conquered America, appearing in February of that seminal year on the Ed Sullivan Show before more than 73-million viewers, and in August, on screens around the world, with the release of their first film, A Hard Day’s Night. That was 50 years ago and 2014 is already awash with commemorative projects looking back on the impact The Beatles had – and continue to have – on popular culture. In February was the Grammy tribute which reunited the two remaining Beatles again in concert before a television audience. This summer, meanwhile, has been given over to re-screenings of Richard Lester’s now iconic black-and-white comedy, including the one taking in Toronto tomorrow night at the vintage Revue Cinema. Lewisohn, making his first Canadian appearance since the release of Tune In, will be in attendance, illuminating aspects of the film he knows so well, having already started researching it for his next book. Joining him for the pre and post Beatles’ talks will be Piers Hemmingsen, Canada’s foremost authority on all things relating to the Fabs. It happens that the two Beatles’ scholars are friends, and Lewisohn, after revisiting A Hard Day’s Night, will be off vacationing with Hemmingsen at a lakeside cottage. One can only imagine the campfire stories. But before heading off into the Canadian wilderness, Lewisohn kindly agreed to be interviewed for Critics at Large by Deirdre Kelly, a fellow Beatles fan. Here is some of their conversation:

To Have and to Hold: The Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 50th Anniversary Edition

Dreaming Pepper: The Beatles in costume.

                                                                          I.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in North America exactly 50 years ago today. Among the many things that were possible then and are impossible now is the unanimity that welcomed The Beatles’ eighth album as a culminating event in cultural history – if not History. “The closest that Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815,” critic Langdon Winner famously wrote at the time, “was the week that the Sgt. Pepper album was released.” An assertion so sweeping wouldn’t survive an hour in the social-media wind tunnel of today: experts both bona fide and instant would descend on it with annotated lists of other, far more unifying events. (Thus missing, as experts often do, the rhetorical value of overstatement: there’s a reason those words are still being quoted today.) But one unity Sgt. Pepper undoubtedly did effect was a new fusion of High and Low, of marketplace and ivory tower. It was embraced not only by pop fans, who kept it at #1 throughout the Summer of Love, but also highbrows previously dismissive of popular taste. Composer Ned Rorem believed the album announced “a new and glorious renaissance of song,” while literary scholar Richard Poirier called it “an eruption … for which no one could have been wholly prepared.” Wagner and Eliot, Monteverdi and Joyce were invoked for comparison.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXIV

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (photo by Mary Ellen Matthews)

I didn’t realize how much I had taken for granted my love of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. While I have collected and enjoyed Petty’s music for years, I’ve never taken the time to contemplate why his best songs (and there are many) have always brought me such happiness. But for the last 40 years, Petty and The Heartbreakers helped keep some of the idealistic dreams of the sixties alive. They didn’t, however, do it by showing a nostalgic reverence for the era and its music. Rather they captured the music’s urgency, its uncompromising demand for freedom which lies right at the heart of all rock & roll. Whether it’s in an anthem like “I Won’t Back Down,” a plaintive ballad like “Southern Accents,” or a scorching rocker like “You Wreck Me,” Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers created an immediacy that made each song sound both fresh and fully alive with possibility. For those who remember the joy they felt when a great song came through their tiny earphone on their transistor radio, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers brought that instant delight to the music they played. I think critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine nailed Petty’s appeal and longevity perfectly when he said that he and The Heartbreakers "didn’t break from tradition the way their punk contemporaries did. Instead, they celebrated it, culling the best parts of The British Invasion, American garage rock, and Dylanesque singer/songwriters to create a distinctly American hybrid that recalled the past without being indebted to it.”

Shining On Brightly: The Power of Sharing the Spotlight

(W.W. Norton Press)

“The Beatles, like Duke Ellington, are virtually unclassifiable musicians.” – Lillian Ross, writing in The New Yorker in 1967.

How can one possibly explain the majestic presence of music such as Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn’s  “Lush Life” and “Chelsea Bridge”? Or the shimmering beauty of Lennon/McCartney’s “She’s Leaving Home” and their entire “Abbey Road Medley”? What secret alchemical equation is behind the binary Odd Couple Code in the creative arts that makes such great collaborations so fruitful? A team of rivals, often incompatible and yet somehow incomparable, whose rivalry makes the team grow stronger and succeed far in excess of what either competitive team member could achieve alone, is an often mystifying but vastly entertaining cultural phenomenon. As long as they maintain the precarious balance required to equally channel their dramatically opposite energies in the same direction, that is.   

Help!: The Beatles, Duke Ellington and the Magic of Collaboration, the wonderful book by Thomas Brothers from W.W. Norton, is one of the most informative and inspiring places to begin examining this remarkable ability for two artists to meld into a unified field, a single creative force in tandem. The odd-couple metaphor of a relational golden mean suggests something hidden but potentially profound, something we could even call reciprocal maintenance. This arrangement of forces basically requires both partners to take turns, maybe even alternate, at being the dominant prevailing portion of the whole, pivoting frequently to allow the opposite partner to assume the same majority role as often as possible. 

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXI

Brian De Palma's Home Movies is a 1979 low-budget independent film made with the help of his film class at Sarah Lawrence as a hands-on training exercise. (They were given the primary responsibilities of raising money, arranging the shooting schedule, and editing the film, all under De Palma's supervision.) What they got was a spirited primal comedy laced with episodes from De Palma's early life that also came to make sense of his movie obsessions. Kirk Douglas (who had just starred in De Palma's last thriller, The Fury) plays a film instructor who uses the medium as a form of therapy. His prize student Dennis Byrd (Keith Gordon) decides to turn the camera on his family life, which is filled with enough neurotic issues to fuel numerous sessions. Besides competing with a favoured and pompous older brother (the hilarious Gerrit Graham, who played the glam rock star, Beef in De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise), Dennis also has to deal with a mother (Mary Davenport) who pops pills because of her philandering husband (Vincent Gardenia), a physician on whom his son ultimately turns his lens to catch him in the act. When his older sibling brings home his girlfriend, Kristina (Nancy Allen), Dennis is immediately drawn to this striking blonde while still torn by guilt over his parents' marital issues. Home Movies is a shaggy satire with Oedipal gags that pop like party balloons. While the picture has a relaxed charm compared to the fervently exciting thrillers, Carrie and The Fury, that preceded it, the themes of voyeurism and fear would carry over effectively into his next picture, Dressed to Kill, where the comedy and horror have a more lasting after-bite.