The Beatles: A Celebration

R. Ficek was Branch Head, Palmerston Library, Toronto Public Library.

One of the first pictures in this book is a snapshot of the “fab four” on wallpaper. Unfortunately this expensive $35.00 book never gets beyond memorabilia of this sort. What we do get, however, is a few pictures of the Beatles in the studio, examples of rejected album-cover designs, and samples of artwork by members of the band. What text there is gives the standard history of the band growing up in Liverpool, performing as the Silver Beatles in Hamburg, and finally being transformed by their astute manager, Brian Epstein, into a worldwide rock phenomenon. Interspersed with this history are interviews with relatives, professional associates, and numerous hangers-on. The text ends with a quick look at the solo careers of George, Ringo, Paul, and the family of the late John Lennon Yoko Ono and Julian, both, as John would say, performers “in their own write.”

The text is uninspired and, with many books like this, fatuous, although the Beatles’ own sense of themselves and their place in history provides a corrective to the author’s gushing. Giuliano, who is described on the book jacket as a full-fledged hippie during the sixties, states, unashamedly, that with John’s death in 1980 “all at once an entire generation was forced to face the prospect of its own tenuous mortality.” George Harrison, on the other hand, when asked about the continuing interest in the Beatles states “I realize the Beatles did fill a big space in the sixties, but all the people they really meant something to are all grown up. It’s like anything that people grow up with — they get attached to it. I can understand that the Beatles, in many ways, did some nice things, and it’s very much appreciated that people still like them. But the problem comes when they want to live in the past.”

Ultimately the failing of this book resides in the fact that very little mention is made of the music, of the musical talent possessed by the band members, and above all of the influence that their music had on other pop musicians. Whatever legacy the Beatles do leave us with it surely resides in their music. It is the music after all that lies behind the phenomenal sales of the newly released CD renderings of the Beatles’ songs. It is not books like this that are the ultimate tribute to the sixties, as the book jacket would have us believe, but the music.