It doesn’t sound like Vol 2 will be out before 2023 at the earliest. Better find something else to read in the meantime!
Tune In Vol 2
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Grr! Ah well, the longer we wait the better it will be! It’s a project that will reward a bit of time and care spent on it, and it’s a good sign that he is taking it so seriously.
His Abbey Road lecture show last year was amazing, by the way. I meant to write a review for this place but never got round to it. Good bloke, Lewisohn.
Agree about the Abbey Road show.
And I never got round to posting a review either – it deserved one (if it gets a DVD release, I’d happily watch it again).
Discussed at a Mingle Curry (the Thames Valley Chapter) – glowing reviews all round.
You think you know the album, and the story behind it – there’s still more to learn
Perhaps he is collaborating with George RR Martin
When was that updated? He may have more time on his hands now.
I was going to say that we need to ensure Lewisohn is holed up somewhere with a typewriter (a laptop will do, but it just doesn’t sound right) and no contact with the outside world, apart from somebody providing him with food, but I thought it in bad taste. I do wonder, however, if he has someone lined up to take over from him if anything should happen to him, and I’m not just talking about the virus, as I’ve wondered this for a while. It’s a lengthy undertaking and it will take him well into his 70s at this rate.
I have a feeling I will never get to read Vol.3…!
I have a feeling nobody else will, either!
Craig Brown has a book about the Beatles coming out next week, called One, Two, Three, Four. It looks like it might be along the lines of his book on Princess Margaret. By writing about her significance to other people, from their diaries, memoirs and so on, in short chapters he managed to paint a picture of both her and many different layers of society. I found it a very original way of writing biography, and very entertaining and I have no interest in the Royal Famaily
I bought Tune in when it was on offer on Kindle, and after hearing Mark Lewisohn being interviewed. He has clearly done a lot of valuable research, but I started reading it and found the level of detail and the length just too intimidating.
The Princess Margaret book was great, though I am no royalist. As I remember he wrote it because when he was reading diaries, as he does exhaustively for his Private Eye spoof diary column, he was struck by how often people mentioned Margaret; just as the Queen has famously never said anything interesting her sister, whatever, her many faults, could never be accused of being dull.
There were a couple of Beatles mentions in that book too. I remember Ringo, or possibly George, politely telling her to piss off from some record industry event because protocol was that they couldn’t eat until she had left and they were all starving hungry.
I do think you have to have a particularly obsessive Beatle mind to last the course with Tune In, especially the extended version. The level of detail is insane.
I bought the adbridged hardback when it came out and finished it in about two or three months. Then I got the two volumes of the extended version (part one is split into two volumes) on the kindle when they came down in price, and I just chipped away at it here and there in chunks for what seemed like years! I only just finished it last month!
What I love about it is just how gradually the story unfolds. You feel as if you are living through it with them, and the time spent making incremental improvements and waiting to become famous is just interminable. By the time they get to the Cavern and start building up a proper local following, it’s such a thrill because by that time you have had over 1000 pages of buildup and they are (comparatively) old seasoned pros on the live scene. Astonishing as well how many times it could all have just fallen apart, but last minute twists of fate gave them opportunities and kept them together.
I read somewhere once (or heard him say), that he was doing all the research for vols. 2 and 3 together, the research takes most of the time, he then writes relatively quickly. Don’t know if he has started writing vol 2 yet, but if it takes 3 years we could maybe get vol 3 within 4 years of vol 2, allowing him a year for promotion and time off between volumes.
He also moved house recently and apparently he has trouble organising all the material that he has.