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 And In The End, The Last Days of The Beatles (from the book by Ken McNab available on Thomas Dunne Books)
1969 was a tumultuous year. In the space of a few weeks, the moon landing, the Manson murders, and Woodstock all took place. Ken McNab sticks to a 1969-only model in his telling of the final moments of The Beatles as a band with And In The End, The Last Days of the Beatles. Twelve months and twelve chapters, Ken McNab details multiple days in the lives, at times split-screening the stories by showing what each member was doing, their reactions and subsequent actions seen as human rather than the legends history has made them. Given the in-depth rolling out of research, Ken McNab does a magnificent job of keeping the story interesting, less textbook, more page-turner. January 1969 sees The Beatles trying to re-capture what made them love what they did together musically, entering the studio to record Let It Be (then titled Get Back). The plan was to strip back the added touches that had become a hipster Pop covering on The Beatles recorded output for Sgt. Pepper’s and The White Album. By 1969, they were burned out on a grand scale. Adhering to a strict release schedule, The Beatles released 12 studio albums in the six years since their debut in 1963. Besides simply releasing, The Beatles music changed the world on a business and human level. Gone was George Martin behind the boards for the Get Back sessions, the band and Glynn Johns working on the recording, the plan to present an unvarnished version of The Beatles. Let It Be would be released after what would be their last studio effort, Abbey Road, in 1970. The album was handed over to Phil Spector, the stripped back sound of Get Back becoming the polished production of Let It Be. And that was January. As the months progress, the lives of The Beatles unravel, the seams that held the group together as they became the biggest band in the universe stretching to breaking. Over the course of And In The End, and in the calendar year 1969 for The Beatles, the group was bending from the pressure of financial losses from their company Apple, losing the copyrights to the Lennon/McCartney back catalog, renegotiating a better royalty deal from Capitol/EMI, and not being able to reach agreement on management with John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison voting for Demon King Allen Klein and Paul McCartney wanting to bring in his new in-laws, The Eastman law firm. On a personal side, John Lennon and Yoko were banned from the United States by the Nixon administration with Yoko increasingly becoming a challenge to band members in the studio with advice, John feeling she only wanted to be accepted. John and Yoko staged their infamous Peace Bed-In during the year, becoming husband and wife in 1969 as well as Paul marrying Linda Eastman with all the band moving more into family life. Looking back, the impact of The Beatles can be clearly seen as it was playing out, which And In The End details, The Beatles were under a 24/7 microscope, an Apple Scruff fanbase camped out both at the studio and the band member’s homes. Every word, action, hair length, clothing, and spiritual choice newsworthy. The break-up is detailed in the book as well as efforts to hold together not only a band but friendships. August 1969 was a particularly bumpy month, with lots of unknown endings, the band in a studio together for the last time and in photo shoots as a group. The haphazard decision for a simple cover on Abbey Road making the Paul is Dead myths that arose at the time ludicrous when credited to a thrown-off Ringo comment to ‘take the picture in the zebra crosswalk and be done with it’. And In The End fills in a lot of blanks. It humanizes four men who as a whole had achieved status well beyond human imagination. From Beatlemania to the Maharishi, from black and white albums to full color, And In The End brings the curtain down on the last year of four lads that shook the world. In a larger sense, it equally shuts the door on the 1960’s, a decade that cannot be separated from The Beatles. Purchase And In The End by Ken McNab from AMAZON Visit the Ken McNab website for more information
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