Backstage Beatles

By JAY COCKS

THE LOVE YOU MAKE

by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines

McGraw-Hill; 448 pages; $14.95

It was never all you need, high sentimentality and ravishing melodies to the contrary, and what you take often exceeds what you make. Love, nevertheless, had never been advanced as a social curative with such blithe musical seriousness until the Beatles' stoned rhapsodies of good will. The songs, composed with manifest, even urgent sincerity, and lanced with fugitive wit, not only caught the fantasies of a generation but got them airborne. Now there is no telling for certain which ended first, the dreams or the band. In any case, more than love was needed to sustain them all. That was the hardest lesson learned.

A more generous portion of that precious commodity might also have spruced up The Love You Make, subtitled "An Insider's Story of the Beatles." Co-Author Peter Brown went to work for Brian Epstein when he was running the record department at one of the family music stores in Liverpool. Managing a scraggly rock quartet was a sideline. Epstein exalted the Beatles, of course, and was consumed by them. He was smitten with them all, and almost crazily in love with John Lennon. Brown attended at the beginning of all this and stayed past the end, when the Beatles set out on separate paths and their company, Apple, just went bad at the core. Brown was a Beatles businessman--executive director of their management company, NEMS Enterprises, and director of Apple--but he was also part of the Beatles family. He served as best man at the Lennon-Ono wedding and rated a mention in Lennon's rocking celebration of that event, The Ballad of John and Yoko. Throughout The Love You Make, Brown studiously keeps himself in the background, while the Beatles are pushed forward into the glare of revisionist celebrity. The book is like a police lineup lit by limelight.

John had a heavy heroin problem. Paul picked off girls like grapes. George, according to Harrison Brown, bedded Ringo's wife and later, when asked why, just shrugged and said, "Incest." Ringo was a dedicated jet-setter whose solid but unexceptional drumming talents were eventually unequal to the demands of the more complex Beatles music; Paul had to dub in Ringo's parts in the studio. Epstein agonized over a merchandising deal that lost the Beatles millions, but Lennon consoled himself with cash delivered by concert promoters in brown paper bags. Epstein took 25%, and the band got the rest. As young, hungry rockers playing in Hamburg, West Germany, the Beatles contracted, and were cured of, any number of venereal diseases. Later, rich and famous beyond anyone's wildest imaginings, they would become infected with incurable jealousy and suspicion, some of which was well founded. The final blow, Brown writes, came in one of those stultifying board meetings when the other Beatles discovered that McCartney had been secretly buying up shares in their publishing company behind then" collective back.

Brown knew about this because he helped McCartney do it. This fact, like all else in the book, is presented with a tone of slightly mocking worldliness that sometimes cracks into cynicism. Yet The Love You Make is the best backstage Beatles book so far, full of deep-dish gossip, much of it brought together for the first time and some of it new. A good deal of the information is inherently dramatic and painful. Brown's compassionate recollection of Brian Epstein as a deliriously romantic, masochistic homosexual and erratic businessman who died of a drug overdose in 1967 is like a rough character study for a Tennessee Williams play. Brown and Co-Author Steven Gaines have managed to scuff up Paul McCartney's Goody Two-Shoes and suggest that there is a lot more turmoil and contradiction lurking beneath the careful cherubic surface.

Shadowing and shading everything is John Lennon, who took the longest and most harrowing voyage of all the Beatles. He had finally reached a kind of peace and understanding after some sexual profligacy and a bit of doubt (he had, this book claims, a dalliance with Epstein). He had also been through the entire contemporary catechism of drugs and come out whole, and even a little certain. When he lay on the back seat of a squad car, bleeding from seven bullet wounds, and a policeman asked him the routine question, "Do you know who you are?," he could just manage to nod before he died.

--By Jay Cocks This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.