The Beatles Exposed: Fab Four Secrets From Biographer Mark Lewisohn (EXCLUSIVE)

“Ladies and gentlemen… the Japage 3!”

“There are so many little anecdotes from people who were witness to events who have never spoken before,” he says, “and of course the stuff the paperwork explains — documented research is a big part of this book. I was intrigued to find that John, Paul, and George went around as a trio called Japage 3, and not only that, but they had a manager at that time. I mean you never heard of that trio before, you never heard of that manager before. And how many books have there already been?”

Record producer George Martin was forced to sign The Beatles.

History has shown that producer George Martin, working for EMI’s Parlophone Records, initially had little interest in signing the group, but upon meeting them and hearing them play sensed that there was something there and got them aboard. According to Tune In, though, that signing had more to do with office politics than anything else. “The moment he met them, he saw how original and talented they were and that was the start of a beautiful working relationship,” Mark notes, “but to begin with, he was forced to sign them. It wasn’t because he thought they were going to be the biggest thing ever, though they ended up being so. But that only goes to show you how lucky we are to even be talking about them at all.”

The band nearly broke up numerous times along the way.

“You get the sense from other books that it was this relentless upward trend for The Beatles,” Mark points out. “That they start small and end up the biggest thing on the planet, but in reality they are four young kids who are determined to do this for a living, but along the way there are moments they could drop out and it nearly falls apart. Quite often the story is held together by sheer good fortune and coincidence that keeps things running. As such, it’s much more real now, as a story, than it's been in the past. As I said, it’s not the story of superstars. They will become that in the eyes of others, but even in volumes two and three, they’re still these same four guys working their way through it all.”

The tides of stardom were constantly changing.

Back in their early days in Liverpool, John, Paul, and George got to know Ringo when he was part of the group Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. As the book unfolds, Rory Storm is riding high — Ringo right along with them — while The Beatles are struggling to stay together as a group and make it. But then you see the rising of one and the diminishment of the other.

“It’s amazing that all of this was going on in Liverpool,” says Mark. “I mean, it’s the only place in the world that had a scene like this. There are rock bands everywhere today, and clubs to play in, and opportunities to put stuff up on the web or whatever, but back then there was nothing like that happening in the world except for this city in the Northwest of England, Liverpool — the most unlikely place for this to have occurred, and yet some extraordinary things were going on there.”

Liverpool or Hamburg — which had the greatest impact on The Beatles?

The Beatles got their start in Liverpool, but there's the belief that they truly became a band while performing in Hamburg, Germany, where they would oftentimes perform for eight hours a day. It quickly came the proverbial sink or swim situation.

“It’s actually both places,” Mark opines of the influence on them as performers. “When they went to Hamburg the first time, they really were on a steep learning curve and it made them. They went to Hamburg pretty inexperienced and came back dynamic. And that Hamburg experience did not affect any other group the same way, because they were not as receptive as The Beatles were, and not as capable of development as The Beatles were. All the ingredients you would need to make the hottest act on the planet were there, but it needed firing, I suppose, and Hamburg was where it occurred. But undoubtedly they took it back to Liverpool, and in Liverpool they were just dynamic; unlike anybody else. All of that is a tremendously exciting story. It's The Beatles' story.”

Exploring the "spark" that made them connect with the world.

In noting the fact that this discussion was taking place so many years after the group disbanded, there is something amazing that The Beatles remain as relevant as they do. Points out Mark, "It was just one of those moments when everything came together to create something extraordinary. There's been plenty of good work from them since their time as The Beatles, but The Beatles as a collective were stronger and greater than the sum of their parts. Their music has transcended time, but the period in which they created it was obviously a very fertile one anyway. In all kinds of ways. Just as we still talk about The Beatles, we still talk about the Sixties as being a very special decade, and so it was — with The Beatles as the heartbeat of it. But there was so much else going on around them, and I need to tell all of that in these books. I need to tell a contextual story, because they didn't exist in isolation. They were part of a bigger picture."

Success was owed to more than just John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

When you think of The Beatles, you automatically think of the four men who made up the band. But the truth is that particularly early on, they were fortunate in connecting with exactly the right people at exactly the right time to move things forward to them. Manager Brian Epstein came along and signed them up at a time when no one else would give them the time of day. George Martin, with a background largely in humor records, was nonetheless forced to sign them aboard, and what he ultimately brought to them in the studio was invaluable.

Mark states, “They were really lucky in attracting these people, but the reality is that it happened so consistently over the years that you end up thinking, 'It was them, it was them; there was just something about them that caused all of this to happen.' But at the end of the day, they were highly lucky to have Brian Epstein as their manager and George Martin as their producer, because these people didn’t want to take from them. They only wanted to give. They loved them and wanted to make things better and better.

“I actually number the years that pass in the book,” he adds, “because it’s important to understand that when, for example, The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show [in February 1964], you think they’ve just arrived; that they were ‘born’ on Ed Sullivan, but it’s actually year seven. That puts things into proper perspective, and explains why they were so well-developed, so confident, and so able to withstand the extraordinary pressure of global fame and that unbelievable new kind of celerity that they had. To actually maintain their sanity through all that was owed to many reasons, but partly because they had been doing this a long time.”

The band was always living in a constant state of evolution.

“It’s so very hard to get to the top, but it’s harder to stay there,” muses Mark, “If you didn’t evolve, you would eventually be knocked off the top, and The Beatles were aware of this and knew how to deal with it. This is what makes them so extraordinary because most people when they get to the top will just bask in the fact that they’ve made it. But to have the courage, the artistic courage, to dispense what has taken you to the top and to try something else that may not keep you there, is incredible. They took their audience with them, but we know that now from the proof of what happened. At the time they were moving on, always rapidly evolving, they couldn’t know for certain they would take their audience with them.”

This is particularly true following the insane Beatlemania years of 1964 to 1966, which saw them recording albums, making films, touring the world a few times, and then deciding to give most of that up and just becoming a studio band. They first emerged from that decision with the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Apparently, it was the right choice.

“People could have just said, ‘What the hell is this?’ and not bought it," says the author. "The challenge was to maintain cutting-edge originality and mainstream popularity. These things are usually mutually exclusive; you either do one or you do the other, but to do both simultaneously, so consistently, and so many times over so many years, is incredible. And that’s what I’ll be looking at in volumes two and three, but what you get in volume one is the clear sense that these guys are capable of it.”

From the start though, the band had a limited shelf life.

“The Beatles began to break up the day they got together.”

Those words are Mark’s, and as startling as they are to hear, he backs them up with genuine conviction: “It was in their personalities, particularly the personality of the leader of the group and the man who formed them, John Lennon. I don’t think he ever would have done any one thing forever. The Beatles were fine providing he could get his artistic satisfaction from them, and he could express himself through that vehicle, but when ultimately he found another means of expression, which was Yoko, he didn’t need The Beatles anymore. The fact that they were becoming this legendary thing, this myth where everyone was interpreting what they were saying, and imbuing all their work with greater meaning than they intended, I think he knew it was time to bring it to an end and do something different. Such was his personality that he would never do any one thing forever.

“Their breakup disappointed me at the time,” he continues, “and naturally I wished they could have gone on forever, but I’m now really happy that it finished in the way that it did, because the story has what you Americans call ‘closure’, right? It came to an end as opposed to just limping on forever.”

The enduring power of The Beatles.

So the natural question to ask is how it can even be possible that people are still so passionate about The Beatles nearly half a century after they disbanded. "It's very insane, isn't it?" asks Mark rhetorically. "It wasn't meant to be like this, but ultimately something of true originality will sustain. But for it to still be so engaging and fresh when you hear it… I'm not one for purple prose particularly, but you end up thinking this is all quite magical in a way. The fact that we're so enthused and so engaged with them, and the fact that they still sound so strong is baffling. But that's exactly what I need to be looking at.

"My goal for these books is to say, 'Okay, these are the facts: we are still talking about them over 50 years on. Therefore, who were these people and how did it all happen?' And, to go back to the beginning of this conversation, to kind of ignore to a large degree all the vast amounts of books that have been written about them and just say, "OK, this is all an industry now, but how? Who are these people and what did they have that made them so different from everybody else?' Hopefully by the end of the three volumes we'll have the answer."