Beatles biography lewisohn review 360

The closest I ever came to a contact high from reading occurred the summer I was 14, curled up on my bed and pretending it was some submersible straight out of Yellow Submarine, staring gobsmacked at the pages of Peter Brown and Steven Gaines’ The Love You Make, a drugs- and sex-sotted ripsnorter of a Beatles bio.

It was the first book on the band I ever read. And while I would go on to read, if not every other, then damn close to it, that sense of an illicit reading encounter—with me wondering if I had done something wrong in so willingly being funneled into this mad, psychotropic world—captured a kind of Beatlesesque spirit, quite beyond the let’s-all-drink-liquid-acid trappings.

Even at 14, I understood that there was luridness there intended solely to shock and sell, but the book had so much in it that I’d return to it every few years, get caught up in the narrative all over again, snicker at the Satryicon-bits, and wonder who would eventually come al