The Quarrymen, by Hunter Davies (Omnibus Press). The Quarrymen, as even some people who aren't Beatles fans know, were the Liverpool teenage skiffle band from the late 1950s that evolved, through numerous personnel changes, into the Beatles by the beginning of the 1960s. It might seem quite a task to make their history into a book-length project, particularly considering they never recorded (unless you count a privately pressed vanity disc with two songs, both of which eventually were used on Anthology 1). But Hunter Davies, who wrote the first decent biography of the Beatles in 1968, has the background and first-hand knowledge necessary to make this into a pretty enjoyable book, and not just for obsessed Beatles fans. For one thing, he interviewed, at length, all of the members of the Quarrymen who were in the band at the time founder John Lennon met Paul McCartney (excluding the late Lennon, though he had talked to John, Paul, and slightly later Quarryman George Harrison a lot back in 1967 for his authorized biography of the Beatles). Pete Shotton (Lennon's closest childhood friend), Rod Davis, Len Garry, Colin Hanton, and Eric Griffiths all contribute anecdotes that are not just interesting in filling out the Beatles' early history, but also give an entertaining sense of what it was like to grow up in Liverpool in the 1950s. Only the first third of the book deals with the band before they broke up and Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison moved on together, and though you might suspect that following the other ex-Quarrymen's post-1960 lives might be boring, that doesn't prove to be the case. It's interesting to see how wide the others diverged from the Beatles' paths, for the most part leading ordinary, at times tough and troubled lives, far from music, save Shotton, who remained friendly with Lennon and even worked for the Beatles' Apple organization in the late 1960s. Shotton, interestingly, had become a multi-millionaire businessman, with no help from the Beatles, by the time the Quarrymen reunited in the 1990s (minus any ex-Beatles, of course). The final sections, dealing with their mixed but generally happy experiences as they unexpectedly played to enthusiastic Beatles fans in England and other countries, are among the most affecting in the book. Davies never condescends to the subjects, resulting in a very interesting, enjoyable book not just on the roots of the Beatles, but on the unexpected ways friends can separate and at least partially reunite over the period of a lifetime.
Encounters with Bob Dylan: If You See Him, Say Hello, by Tracy Johnson (Humble Press). In the universe of Bob Dylan fandom, where there are already several hundred books about the singer available, there's always room for one that takes yet a stranger, more peripheral angle on the subject. And this is a strange one, as an oral history of sorts that gathers 50 first-person tales of personal meetings with the enigmatic superstar, dating all the way back to 1956, and stretching all the way to 1999. A few of these are musicians and journalists that are reasonably well known in their own right: Mimi Fariña, Nat Hentoff, sideman Rob Stoner, David Grisman, Kurtis Blow, super-groupie Pamela des Barres, and even star baseball pitcher Catfish Hunter (whose note is very brief). For the most part, however, these are ordinary fans, who managed to get past Dylan's tight-knit entourage for a second, a minute, or a few hours to actually speak to him, or at any rate be in his acknowledged presence. At times, these short accounts are pretty interesting, as when Grisman and Stoner detail their short and typically weird experiences as Dylan accompanists, or Rowland Scherman remembers taking pictures of the singer (one was used, famously, on the cover of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits). At other times they're quite amusing, as when one guy rescues a lost Dylan from a janitor's closet and directs him, a la that scene from Spinal Tap, to the stage at a 1963 show, or when a Manhattan taxi driver is shocked to find Dylan hailing him on the street, only to lose his chance to give him a ride when his previous passenger insists on fishing for a quarter tip. Too often, though, the meetings are brief and inconsequential: managing to edge up to him onstage for a moment, seeing him at a table in a club, and the like. More disturbingly, some of these fans are obviously taking their obsessions to unhealthy extremes, like the guy who runs a Dylan shrine in his home, and some seem to be overstepping the bounds from fanaticism to stalking, like the ones that poke around his Minnesota property. If you do think Dylan is a god with a capital G (as some of the contributors obviously do), you'll likely devour these tales. But even some big Dylan fans with more level heads might find it an unwitting testament to the more unseemly aspects of hero worship.
Dancing with Demons: The Authorized Biography of Dusty Springfield, by Penny Valentine & Vicki Wickham (St. Martin's Press). Although it provides a serviceable overview of Springfield's musical career and some insight into her troubled personal life, this biography is a little on the unsatisfying side. Springfield really did record a lot of interesting, varied music, particularly in the 1960s. The authors do describe and go behind the scenes of the production of some of these (particularly the most well-known hits). But whether because they don't have a lot more inside information to share, or they don't feel it important to go into great detail, one's left with the feeling that a lot more could be said, with some albums (both bad and fairly good) going virtually undiscussed. The book is stronger in its examinations of her mercurial personality and frequent disappointment in her private life, particularly as both authors knew Springfield personally (Valentine as a journalist, Wickham as a television producer and then her manager). Springfield was anguished by the suppression of her gay identity from the public; battles with substance abuse; erratic family upbringing that left her with self-esteem problems; and a professional nosedive that, at one point in the early 1980s, found her lip-syncing to her hits in Hollywood gay bars. She got on more solid footing after singing on a hit with the Pet Shop Boys, but then her final years were spent in a losing fight against cancer. The writers go over her ups-and-downs well and sympathetically, and do interview some of her close friends and associates, but not too many of them. The narrative sometimes jumps back and forth chronologically, and some of the basics of what happened when are fuzzy. Some additional information is filled in by Lucy O'Brien's previous Springfield bio Dusty, but even taken together, gaps remain in the life and music of Britain's finest woman pop-rock singer.
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