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- The Complete Recording Sessions: the creation of a book
Part
2 (of 12): THE LEWISOHN AND ROGAN CONNECTION
Flash
forward to 1988 and the publication of what must be my all-time favourite Beatles
book: The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn. I can still remember
the sense of revelation as I turned page after page of this fantastic book and
learned the background stories of the songs I had loved all my life, finding out
how they were created - not to mention learning about the unreleased songs and
alternate takes that existed in the archives. The book was also beautifully designed,
conveying a great sense of atmosphere with the aid of archival documents and photographs
that were almost exclusively related to the subject of the book: the recording
sessions.
A few months later, I also snapped up an earlier title of Lewisohn's
which was just about to go out of print, entitled The Beatles Live! This was an
exhaustive documentation of each and every concert The Beatles had ever been known
to play. Like The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, this book was the result
of an amazing research effort. For instance, Lewisohn was the one who pinned down
the exact date when John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met each other (this
particular piece of information was originally published in Philip Norman's Beatles
biography, Shout!). Most notably, although both books were based on hard facts
and plenty of detailed information, Lewisohn had managed to make them readable
and entertaining.
About a year later, I bought another important book in
this story: the paperback version of Johnny Rogan's Starmakers And Svengalis,
which dealt with the history of British pop management. This book fascinated me
on two levels. Firstly, I thought it was such a refreshingly unusual subject for
a book. Instead of having to trawl through the all-too familiar career trajectory
of the typical rock band, this book tackled a very important subject for the music
business: the often very dramatic lives and careers of a number of British managers.
Secondly,
almost as fascinating as the book itself was Rogan's Acknowledgements and Introduction,
where the reader could learn exactly how much work and personal sacrifice had
gone into the writing of the book. In the Acknowledgements Rogan wrote about his
"obsession to complete this book without a prior commission", thanking
friends who had "provided fictitious addresses and telephone numbers when
I was homeless and intimidated". In his Introduction, Rogan described how
he had gone about creating the book. "Before even beginning the marathon
interviewing sessions," he wrote, "I had to read through every British
weekly music paper from 1954 to the present." He then went on to explain
how, after several years of hard work and countless interviews, a manuscript of
1084 pages had been restructured and edited down to a more manageable size. Now,
that's what I call dedication!
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Two
important books: The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn and
Starmakers And Svengalis by Johnny Rogan. They were the catalysts that inspired
me to start writing music books.
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