The Complete Beatles Chronicle

"The Beatles: Recording Sessions is simply the most comprehensive study of the Fab Four's recording dates ever compiled."

Rolling Stone

"With this wealth of detail, Mr. Lewisohn vividly conveys a sense of the atmosphere at the sessions, and shows how the band evolved during its brief, productive recording career."

New York Times

"It's the next best thing to a new Beatles album."

Boston Globe

"A definitive account of the Fab Four at work from 1962 to 1970."

Musician

Its accuracy and loving attention to every detail made The Beatles: Recording Sessions a resounding success. Now its author, Mark Lewisohn, the world's leading authority on the subject, brings the Beatles' entire career to life in one lavishly illustrated volume, The Complete Beatles Chronicle.
        Easily the single most authoritative document about the world-famous group ever published, The Complete Beatles Chronicle is the culmination of years of painstaking research in film, TV, radio, newspaper, record-company and recording-studio archives, and the product of hundreds of interviews with those who knew and worked with the Beatles. This book reconstructs each day of their career, encompassing every stage and radio appearance, all their film, video, TV, and radio work, and, of course, every recording session. It details how the Beatles matured, shedding the mop-top image of the Fab Four. They experimented with Eastern philosophy and drugs, and as their own lives changed, so did their music, from somewhat simplistic songs like "Love Me Do" to the LSD-influenced "Strawberry Fields Forever." By 1969 the Beatles could no longer contain its four members' ideas and compositions, so it came as no surprise when John and Yoko formed the Plastic Ono Band. And on April 10, 1970, when Paul openly stated his desire to split from John, George, and Ringo, the Beatles was a band no more.
        The Complete Beatles Chronicle is the first book to tell the whole story of the Beatles' working lives, from their very first tentative performances in Liverpool social clubs in the 1950s through psychedelia and the band's irrevocable split in 1970. Each working day's events are described in the sort of fascinating detail that made The Beatles: Recording Sessions such a runaway international best-seller. More than five hundred photographs (many previously unpublished), posters, handbills, tickets, letters, and rare documentation combine with Lewisohn's expert text to create a body of work that will never be rivaled.
            For every Beatle fan, past, present, or future, this is the ultimate record of those remarkable Beatles years.

Long recognized as the world's leading authority on the subject of the Beatles, MARK LEWISOHN is the author of the best-selling The Beatles: Recording Sessions, The Beatles Live!, The Beatles Day By Day, and other critically acclaimed books on the band. Widely employed as a writer and consultant, he researched and cowrote the BBC's award-winning radio series The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes. Mark Lewisohn has a long association with EMI, for when he compiles and prepares albums and boxed sets and writes sleeve notes such as those for the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band CD, the two-volume Past Masters, and the four-volume Lennon compilations.
He lives in Hertfordshire, England, with his wife and two sons.

Normally I do not wallow in nostalgia; life is too short to keep looking back. But a recent reappraisal of old Beatles masters at Abbey Road has enabled me to delve into the past without too much of a guilt complex. I have listened again to the original tapes that we made all those years ago. Can it really be 30 years since I introduced the Fab Four to the strange and wonderful world of recording at EMI Studios in London? Even in 1962 they were experienced performers, although their genius for creating brilliant music and songs had yet to emerge. Certainly they were no strangers to hard work, and the years that followed saw them plunge into a whirlwind of concerts, broadcasts, feature-films, TV appearances, press conferences and photo calls that would have broken lesser men. Make no mistake about their lives then; there was little glamour in their goldfish bowl, and far too many demands were made on them.

As one of those behind the scenes urging them on, I had to stake my claim on their time for recording, which they fortunately enjoyed. In the studio their inventiveness and quest for new sounds is well known. They were quick learners, and in no time the master found himself becoming the student. Once the studio became their priority - from 1966 on - their horizons were limitless. Always curious, they insisted on finding new sounds and newer ways of achieving them.

Of course, there were moments when I could cheerfully have strangled one or other of them, and no doubt the feeling sometimes was reciprocated, but my enduring memory of those times is the enormous fun it all was. We really did not think about material success and the fortunes that they were earning. Our only consideration was to achieve the very best that we could, and we were completely united in that aim. If I inwardly believed we were developing an art form that would last for decades I kept it to myself. The value of what we were doing was never discussed. But we all knew that something really worthwhile was emerging.

Of all the chroniclers who have studied the lives of John, Paul, George and Ringo, Mark Lewisohn stands supreme. His dedication in getting all the true facts and cataloguing them, coupled with a style of writing that is most readable, leaves him with no rival. Time and again he has proven that he knows far more about what we did and when we did it than any of us. His book on the Beatles' recording sessions is an authoritative journal that I find invaluable. So many other books have been written about the lives of the Beatles that are less than truthful and a great deal of misinformed rubbish has been avidly devoured. We are fortunate to have Mark's scholarship. We need have no fears about his latest work, The Complete Beatles Chronicle; it will be as accurate as it is detailed.

During a recent visit to the United States I was struck by just how much the Beatles have become a part of everyday popular culture. Barely a few hours went by without their name coming up in the news, in a film or television script, in advertisements, in conversation or, more obliquely, via some quote or headline (so and so "has got his ticket to ride"; will this or that country "give peace a chance"?). Although perhaps less so, the same can also be said for Britain, my home country. As a group they split up more than 20 years ago but interest in the Beatles remains remarkably high and their image and music continue to illustrate not only the 1960s but the latter half of the 20th century.
        Of course, no one could possibly have predicted this - least of all the Beatles themselves who, as this book shows, began humbly and never aspired to be the world leaders and mighty voice they became. Their talent and personalities took them right to the top, though, and now their place in history is not only assured but already a face: pick up any modern encyclopedia or reference book and you'll find a potted history of the Beatles.
        Strangely for such a recent event, however, the story of the Beatles' career is frequently mis-reported, with errors of all kinds creeping in and distorting the truth. In 1979, with a vague plan of sifting through fact from fiction, I set about establishing a complete list of the group's live appearances, from the Quarry Men skiffle era of the late 1950s through to 1966, when the Beatles stopped giving concerts. To my surprise there was no existing catalogue and no short cut: the research took seven long years and the result was published in 1986 as the book The Beatles Live!
        Soon afterwards I received the invitation of a lifetime from EMI Records: to be the only person outside of the Beatles, George Martin and a handful of studio staff to go into Abbey Road and listen to the company's entire collection of Beatles recording session tapes, then to interview virtually everyone involved in their making and write a book about it all, published in 1988 as The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. No one was more astonished than me to see it enter the best-seller lists and shift something over 150,000 copies. I should have remembered the power of the Beatles.
        Shortly before publication of Recording Sessions the Live! book went out-of-print and no copies were around to meet renewed demand. While I was considering a reprint edition it was suggested that I combine the live performance material with a condensed version of Recording Sessions with all-new research and text converting the Beatles' work in radio, television, film and video.
        This is that book. It's called The Complete Beatles Chronicle because that's what it is: a complete, chronological summary of the group's entire oeuvre - their live performances from 1957, their sessions and other recording studio activities, their appearances on the small and large screen and radio. I'm happy to report that the Live! and Recording Sessions aspects of the story incorporate all of the relevant new information that came to light following those previous publications, helping me to make the account as accurate as possible.
        So watch those videos, play those discs, read the book and savour the experience, once again, of a 20th century phenomenon that we now know will run and run and run.

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