Beatle Pete, Time Traveller


Book Description

An offbeat book about original Beatles drummer Pete Best, early Beatles history, and Pete's life after the Beatles, including the intriguing story of the Pete Best Combo's 1965 North American tour, as well as a Best family history, detailing the lives of Pete's famous father and grandfather, Johnny Best, Jr. and Sr., and the boxing, wrestling, and concert arena that they founded and ran, Liverpool Stadium. A mix of plot and scholarship, with voluminous footnotes, well-illustrated, with many photographs never before published.




Drummed Out!


Book Description

Leigh tells us what really happened during that extraordinary week in August 1962 when the Beatles sacked their drummer Pete Best. Unanswered questions such as why this happened and what role each Beatle played in the decision are examined.'




Best of the Beatles


Book Description

Why was Pete Best sacked from the Beatles? In this unique book, based on extensive research and interviews with those close to the events, Spencer Leigh has gathered the clues together to try and solve the greatest Beatles mystery of all. On 16 August 1962, the Beatles drummer, Pete Best, went to see their manager, Brian Epstein, in his Liverpool office. He thought that Epstein wanted to discuss future bookings with him but instead, Epstein sacked him. Pete had not seen it coming. Why did Brian Epstein do it and not the Beatles themselves? Why did they want to be rid of him? Why did they do it so callously? Pete never spoke to any of them again. Best of the Beatles: The sacking of Pete Best tells you what really happened and is essential reading for Beatles fans.




Paul McCartney


Book Description

From the acclaimed biographer who brought you the rock biography of Bruce Springsteen comes the life of musician Paul McCartney—from his groundbreaking years with the Beatles to Wings to his work as a solo artist and activist. More than a rock star, more than a celebrity, Paul McCartney is a cultural touchstone who helped transform popular music as one half of the legendary Lennon-McCartney songwriting duo. In this definitive biography, Peter Ames Carlin examines McCartney’s entire life, casting new light not just on the Beatles era but also on his years with Wings and his thirty-year relationship with his first wife, Linda McCartney. He takes us on a journey through a tumultuous couple of decades in which Paul struck out on his own as a solo artist, reached the top of the charts with a new band, and once again drew hundreds of thousands of screaming fans to his concerts. Carlin presents McCartney as a musical visionary but also as a layered and conflicted figure as haunted by his own legacy—and particularly his relationship with John Lennon—as he was inspired by it. Built on years of research and fresh, revealing interviews with friends, bandmates, and collaborators spanning McCartney’s entire life, Carlin’s lively biography captures the many faces of the living legend.




The Beatles from A to Zed


Book Description

“At last, I finally understand the alphabet! I also love this book: secret Beatles knowledge from one of the closest insiders.” —Steve Martin Peter Asher met the Beatles in the spring of 1963, the start of a lifelong association with the band and its members. He had a front-row seat as they elevated pop music into an art form, and he was present at the creation of some of the most iconic music of our times. Asher is also a talented musician in his own right, with a great ear for what was new and fresh. He was asked by Paul McCartney to help start Apple Records; the first artist Asher discovered and signed up was a young American singer-songwriter named James Taylor. Before long he would be not only managing and producing Taylor but also working with Linda Ronstadt, Neil Diamond, Robin Williams, Joni Mitchell, and Cher, among others. The Beatles from A to Zed grows out of his popular radio program “From Me to You” on SiriusXM’s The Beatles Channel, where he shares memories and insights about the Fab Four and their music. Here he weaves his reflections into a whimsical alphabetical journey that focuses not only on songs whose titles start with each letter, but also on recurrent themes in the Beatles’ music, the instruments they played, the innovations they pioneered, the artists who influenced them, the key people in their lives, and the cultural events of the time. Few can match Peter Asher for his fresh and personal perspective on the Beatles. And no one is a more congenial and entertaining guide to their music.




Beatles Gear


Book Description

Chronicles the Beatles' use of instruments from 1956 through 1970, including photographs and discussion about Paul's 1963 Hofner 500/1 violin bass, John's Rickenbacker 325 12-string, and George's Gibson Les Paul.




The Beatles


Book Description

The Casbah Coffee Club, which opened in Liverpool on 29 August 1959, was the brainchild of Mrs. Mona Best, the mother of Pete Best. It is well known that Pete Best was the drummer for The Beatles in their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg. Less well known is that The Beatles' origins were in fact at Pete's mother's club - it was at the Casbah and with Mona Best's blessing that the greatest popular music phenomenon of the twentieth century began. This book tells the story of how Mona Best created the Casbah, and in the process played a major part in creating The Beatles. The band played the Casbah over ninety times, first as The Quarrymen, then as The Silver Beatles and finally as The Beatles. The Casbah's significance cannot be overestimated - it brought together some of the greatest names in rock music and became the catalyst for the Mersey Beat phenomenon which swept Liverpool in the early sixties. Seen here for the first time in forty years is the club's interior as it was at the very beginning, juxtaposed with the rooms as they are today, and still showing the ceilings that were painted by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best. A wealth of rare material from the Casbah and the Bests' own archives, together with newly commissioned images by photographer Sandro Sodano, documents the club's and The Beatles' intertwined story. Accompanied by a personal memoir of this extraordinary time, written by Roag Best with his brothers Pete and Rory, this is both a moving family tribute from the Bests to their mother, and a unique insight into a remarkable period of Beatles history.




The Time Travel Handbook


Book Description

Not many of us can claim to have dipped our handkerchiefs in Charles I's blood after his execution, or to have watched Vesuvius erupt, but that's about to change... Wyllie, Acton & Goldblatt's Time Travel Handbook offers eighteen exceptional trips to the past, transporting you back to the greatest spectacles in history. We offer the chance to join Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and to march on Versailles with the revolutionary women of Paris. You can sail with Captain Cook to Tahiti and Australia, and spend time at Xanadu with Marco Polo and Kubla Khan. Or, closer to the present, you might accompany Charlie Parker at the birth of bebop or The Beatles in Hamburg, and take part in the VE Day celebrations in London or the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The notable authors and time travel agents, Wyllie, Acton & Goldblatt are your guide to these and other unmissable events, charting the action as it will unfold, and advising on local customs, and what to wear, eat and drink, for the most authentic of experiences. Forget museums, forget history books - the only way to do history is to live it.




TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism


Book Description

Since the magazine’s first issue in 1964, TeenSet’s role in popular music journalism has been overlooked and underappreciated. Teen fan magazines, often written by women and assumed to be read only by young girls, have been misconstrued by scholars and journalists to lack “seriousness” in their coverage of popular music. TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism: Don’t Let the Name Fool You disputes the prevailing conception that teen fan magazines are insignificant and elevates the publications to their proper place in popular music history. Analyzing TeenSet across its five-year publication span, Allison Bumsted shows that the magazine is an important artifact of 1960s American popular culture. Through its critical commentary and iconic rock photography, TeenSet engaged not only with musical genres and scenes, but also broader social issues such as politics, race, and gender. These countercultural discourses have been widely overlooked due to a generalization of teen fan magazines, which have wrongly presumed the magazine to be antithetical to rock music and as unimportant to broader American culture at the time. Bumsted also examines the leadership of editor Judith Sims and female TeenSet staff writers such as Carol Gold. By offering a counternarrative to leading male-oriented narratives in music journalism, she challenges current discourses that have marginalized women in popular music history. Ultimately, the book illustrates that TeenSet and teen fan magazines were meaningful not only to readers, but also to the broader development of the popular music press and 1960s cultural commentary.




Tune In


Book Description

Now in paperback, Tune In is the New York Times bestseller by the world’s leading Beatles authority – the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy about the band that revolutionized music. The Beatles have been in our lives for half a century and surely always will be. Still, somehow, their music excites, their influence resonates, their fame sustains. New generations find and love them, and while many other great artists come and go, the Beatles are beyond eclipse. So . . . who really were these people, and just how did it all happen? 'The Beatles story' is everywhere. Told wrong from early on, rehashed in every possible way and routinely robbed of its context, this is a phenomenon in urgent need of a bright new approach. In his series All These Years, Mark Lewisohn – the world-recognized Beatles historian – presses the Refresh button to relate the entire story as it’s never been told or known before. Here is a full and accurate biography at last. It is certain to become the lasting word. Tune In is book one of three, exploring and explaining a period that is by very definition lesser-known: the formative pre-fame years, the teenage years, the Liverpool and Hamburg years – in many ways the most absorbing and incredible period of them all. The Beatles come together here in all their originality, attitude, style, speed, charisma, appeal, daring and honesty, the tools with which they’re about to reshape the world. It’s the Beatles in their own time, an amazing story of the ultimate rock band, a focused and colorful telling that builds and builds to leave four sharp lads from Liverpool on the very brink of a whole new kind of fame. Using impeccable research and resources, Tune In is a magisterial work, an independent biography that combines energy, clarity, objectivity, authority and insight. The text is anti-myth, tight and commanding – just like the Beatles themselves. Here is the Beatles story as it really was. Throw away what you think you know and start afresh.