Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

 

Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World by Rob Sheffield

There’s a scene in Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard and his motley crew finally reach their destination deep in the Cambodian Jungle.  They’re greeted by a drugged out rambling hippie photographer played by Dennis Hopper.  This brainwashed individual is so doped up that his limbs fly when he talks. He’s spews out a bunch of nonsense to these new arrivals at breathtaking speed yet with limited clarity.  Out of every 10 or 15 sentences that fly out of his mouth, maybe one actually makes sense.

I use this analogy because the behaviors of this particular individual seem to mirror the personality of the author of this book.  I never felt like I was reading a steady, linear narrative.  Instead, I felt as though the author typed this book up while loaded up on speed and hacking whatever words were in his spaced brain onto the paper.    I felt as though the author really enjoyed writing this book, I just wished I would have enjoyed reading it as much as he enjoyed writing it.

When the Beatles released their “Anthology” compilations on book, cd, and video back in 1995, I figured that since this was the ultimate retrospective, we would never see any more books, cds or videos on the Beatles ever again. How wrong I was.  So anytime one of these “new” releases comes out, I tend to roll my eyes.  Do we really need more?  Is there really anything else that hasn’t been seen or heard from The Beatles?  Well, sadly, this book doesn’t do anything that would make you think so.   That’s not really the goal of the book, however.  This book is simply written by a fan as he yarks up all of his old memories and arbitrary observations. He wasn’t alive when the Beatles were around, but these days that doesn’t matter.  Had this book had been more carefully written with a tad more linear flow, it wouldn’t have been so bad.  The author is a journalist who covers music, so he does know how to write.  The problem here is that even though this book is supposed to be about the Beatles, it’s really about himself.  The focus is on his likes and dislikes, his recollections, and his opinions.  The fact that he rambles with no consistency just makes this narrative even more difficult to stomach.

Example: There’s an entire chapter where he compares the Beatles song “Something” to a post-Beatles McCartney song “My Love”.  (An entire chapter. I swear I’m not making that up.)  He then makes such gut-churning observations that McCartney’s “My Love” is the worst solo song ever to be released by a Beatle.  Well, due to the fact that it performed quite high on the charts, I would respectfully suggest to the author that there are probably 200 or so songs that would fit such a moniker somewhat better.  Now, if you’re having a drink or two at the bar and talking about this band with your buddy, such a discussion is probably likely and maybe even welcome. But this sort of nonsense really doesn’t belong in a book that people have to pay money for in order to read.

If you think that sounded bad, we also get an entire chapter about the COVER of the Sergeant Pepper album.  True, it’s quite the album cover, but an entire chapter?  Then there’s a chapter somewhat devoted to the Charles Manson family of lunatics that used the Beatle song “Helter Skelter” as their mantra for worldwide chaos.  If that isn’t bad enough, the author gets lost within this chapter and somehow ends up talking about the Rolling Stones tragic Altamont concert.  He even drifts further talking about how it’s possible that the chaos at that event was planned as some sort of conspiracy involving the fed discreetly distributing bad acid.   There are so many examples in this book when you ask yourself “why exactly am I reading all of this”?

Did I mention the author is a music journalist?  Sadly, this is apparent since he feels obligated to litter these pages with reflections of other music artists ad-nauseum – regardless of whether or not these musicians have anything remotely to do with the Beatles.  I seriously doubt that 90-95% of Beatles fans really give a rip about what the author thinks of acts such as Joy Division or Husker Du.  Again, he devotes an entire chapter to some of these other artists that somehow relate to the Beatles somehow.  It’s an incredible waste.

So there really aren’t that many saving graces here.  I will give the author credit in that he does keep his chapters somewhat in sequential order.  So we read about “Rubber Soul” before we read about “Abbey Road” which I guess is good.  The only statement that he made in this entire book that I thought was worth the time was when talking about the history of the band, he states “The Beatles broke up while they were still young, so they did not share a decline phase together.”   That’s actually profound and is probably a reason why the band is regarded in such holy fashion.   The consensus is that all four did put out some pretty crappy solo material during the subsequent decades.   There’s also another chapter about the mystique of Paul McCartney, and why so many manage to love and hate him at the same time.  So this author can write well, he just didn’t demonstrate this capacity for the majority of this book.

There are a lot of great books out there on the Beatles.  This one, sadly, is not one of them.