Love Me Do! | Michael Braun

This episode of Books for Men features Love Me Do!: The Beatles Progress by Michael Braun. A biography about a historic moment in cultural history—Beatlemania. It's a behind-the-scenes look at the Beatles during their first British tour, right before they set the world on fire. Listen for more!

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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So today I have a great, great book, such a cool book, a unique book, and I will get more into that shortly. But as always, I just wanted to thank everybody who has supported the podcast thus far, because supporting the podcast means you are supporting the initiative, which is the most important thing and something that I truly believe will help society. We need men to read and continue reading throughout their lives because of the impact that reading has on one's life. But if you're a listener or a consistent listener of this show, I should say, then you already know this and you're probably already a reader. So now all you have to do is be an advocate or an evangelist for reading. So now let's move right into today's episode, which is Love Me Do! by Michael Braun.

(01:07)

So this is a super cool book. So it's a non-fiction book. It's a short book. It's only 208 pages. It's a biography slash journalism. It's been in and out of print for the last 50 years or so. So it was first printed in 1964, more on that shortly, and then again in 1995. And then the most recent edition came out in 2019, I believe. Yeah, 2019. That's the one that you could currently buy on Amazon, or I think Amazon actually is the only place you might be able to get it, or maybe other places, I'm not sure. But anyway, you should get it, and I don't get paid for saying that, but I will explain more why I think you should get it. And I think a good place to start with that is the genre, right? So it's a biography, and in case you don't know what a biography is, it's basically somebody's take on somebody else's life.

(02:00)

A lot of it is fact-driven, resourced, and put together through various sources to create a factual account of somebody's life. This is, of course, different than an autobiography, which is self-written. So it's somebody who is telling you about their entire life. And then there's of course memoir, which is different than an autobiography, and that is really just a recounting by an individual about a specific time period or a specific moment inside of their life, not as long or as detailed as say an autobiography would be. And so interestingly, the reason why I had said earlier that this is a biography slash journalism is that this is a recounting of a very specific time period inside The Beatles—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Star, and George Harrison. And it recounts a very specific time period in their life. And so it's not really a full biography, but at the time period, it was all that this author had to draw off of really.

(03:03)

So it was biographical in that sense, but it was really just a piece of journalism. And the reason why I say that is because Michael Braun was an American journalist who moved to London in the sixties and wrote for The Observer in the Sunday Times, and he found himself in a very unique situation, historic in many ways, in that HEC was a journalist covering the Beatles prior to Beatlemania. So, in 1962, 63, and 64, before they became the Beatles, and this book is aptly titled Love Me Do! because that was The Beatles first hit single Michael Braun had really an inside look at this seminal moment in music history, in cultural history really, which is when the Beatles arrived on the scene, the cultural scene. It's hard to sort of put into words the sheer pandemonium that took place when this occurred, but if you've ever listened to pretty much any rock star, rock and roll star who you love or you appreciate, they pretty much all say their life changed.

(04:10)

When The Beatles went on Ed Sullivan, they realized that they wanted to be a rock and roll star, and guitar sales spiked in America when this happened. Prior to that, The Beatles made this tour run in England, and Michael Braun was the person who was covering them. And so he wrote this book. And what makes it really, really interesting is that at the time, the Beatles didn't want the book to come out. I don't know if it was the actual artists like it was John or Paul or any of them that didn't want the book to come out, but it was The Beatles management, Brian Epstein, who didn't want this book to be released. That's why it's been in and out of print. And it was never authorized as an official Beatles biography. Nonetheless, it's probably the closest thing that we have to an actual account of what it was like during that time period as any resource there is.

(05:12)

So there are over 250 books on The Beatles, and none of them occupy the space that this book occupies because nobody else was there in the moment. And one of the unique things about that is that most accounts of The Beatles attempt to look back at them or are attempted to address their lives through interviews and cobbling together resources. And there are many really, really good ones. But the advantage that this book has over pretty much any other is that it's not looking back. So it was originally published in 1964. This means that Michael Braun, the author, the journalist, doesn't have the luxury or the hindrance, I should say, of hearing everybody else's opinions about The Beatles, meaning he was there, he saw what he saw, he documented what he documented, and then he published the book almost immediately. Whereas everything else that's come out about the Beatles has been through a layer of what everybody else thinks about The Beatles, right?

(06:16)

And so it's tinted in this Beatles lore that may or may not exist. And I think that a lot of times this book didn't get the press or the support that it needed merely because it didn't acquiesce to the image that The Beatles wanted to present, or I should say Brian Epstein wanted to present. And by the way, I'm not taking any shots at The Beatles at all. I am just adequately trying to address why this book is very, very special because of the perspective that it comes at this subject matter, which is both highly unique and un-tinted from other accounts of who The Beatles actually were. Because again, this book was originally printed in 1964 and then taken out of print and put back into print, and now we have the pleasure of reading it. So I think this is a good point to say that this is also part of what made The Beatles so successful and so brilliant.

(07:17)

So it wasn't just their amazing musicality and their originality and all of the above. It was also the image that was crafted around them. And for the first time ever, there was a star, or stars in this case that were having an image crafted around them, and they wrote and performed their own music. So let's look at the other two big stars. At the time, you had the more underground, more introspective Bob Dylan who was writing and performing his own music, obviously, but he didn't have that same image built around him. Or you have, let's say Elvis who had the image built around him, but he wasn't writing and performing his own music. So for the first time ever, what you had were heart throbs essentially, but also amazing artists. In a sense. They were the total package. And this is kind of that flagship moment in culture where this became sheer pandemonium, almost too much for the world to handle at once, were these guys who were amazing artists, but also amazingly curated to be this very specific thing for you.

(08:33)

And this scales back to this book because part of that image building in that brand building is not allowing books like this to be in existence. And it's interesting because, in the 1995 release of this book or re-release of this book, Michael Braun wrote a preface. And in that preface, he writes, it wasn't so much their music, which in any case was hard to hear because of the screaming fans. It wasn't even the audience's delirious reaction. After all, I came from the culture that had produced Elvis. It was afterward talking with and observing those then known as the Four Mop Tops or the Fab four that I began suspecting. I was in the presence of a new kind of person. And this is really why The Beatles ended up being a brand new kind of person. It was a new kind of artist, a new kind of star, and they had the chops and the talent and the songwriting ability and just the greatness to be able to sustain that and be a springboard for what we knew as rock and roll music, well them and The Rolling Stones.

(09:40)

But that's a whole other thing. And maybe I'll get into that in another episode because I've read some pretty good books on The Rolling Stones. But this episode is about The Beatles and the Love Me Do! book. And this has all just been to say why I think you should read this book because of how cool and how unique of a space it actually occupies. And it's not some outlandish account either. I think that you'll be surprised when you read some of the things that the guys said, and they think, and they do. But really it was just Brian Epstein who wanted a very clean image of what The Beatles were in this book paints them not in a totally dirty manner, but marijuana and stuff like that, and just things that they didn't want out into the public eye. And Lennon has been quoted as saying, “This is a true book. He wrote how we were.”

(10:28)

And there's going to be people who say, well, yeah, of course, John Lennon said that because he was bitter about the fact that whatever, because it, it's been a long-running thing about him and Paul being at odds with each other as the later years of The Beatles ran on and why they ended up breaking up and all of that stuff. And it's interesting, especially now looking at some of the historical documentation of this, or more recent documentation of this and documentaries and whatnot that come out or books that come out, is it's really called together by what would be fans if you're a fan of The Beatles. And so you want to document their history. And so that account of who they were is going to be clouded in my eyes. And how you put the narrative together is more susceptible to protecting the vision that you have of who they are in your mind.

(11:24)

But anything that you read from the time period, especially around the time period of the later stage of The Beatles, at the end of their 10-year run in subsequent after, would indicate that there was definitely feuding. There was definitely a riff, and there were definitely opinions that were much different and diverged both life opinions and artistic and creative opinions. And no matter what you do now to protect that, it’s just what it is. And I think that this book is a good place to start if you really want to broaden your perspective on what The Beatles actually were. And that was great in music and great as artists and seminal and pivotal and critical to everything that came after it. But they were also a lesson in brand building and a lesson in image creating. And this book in many ways is tied to that.

(12:25)

So yeah, if you're a Beatles fan, I think that you have to read this book hands down no matter what. If you're not a Beatles fan, you probably should still read it because it is that cool of a piece of journalism and literature, and it should be on your bookshelf, or it should be in your canon of knowledge. It will definitely, definitely entertain you. There are a lot of conversations with the Beatles quotes and all that stuff. Michael Braun was not just a person writing from the outside. He was right there next to them behind the curtain in conversation with them during this historic moment in cultural history. All right, so that's a wrap. This is been a fun episode for me to do because I am a Beatles fan and I am a rock and roll fan, and I actually read a lot of rock biographies and memoirs.

(13:16)

So if you like this episode, then you're probably going to like some of the future episodes because I have a couple that I plan to share in the near future. But next week's episode is back to Fiction, and I have a great book planned for that. So stay tuned. I just wanted to remind you that if you do like to show, please remember to share it with friends, family, other people that you think would enjoy it, maybe music fans, maybe Beatle fans, maybe rock and roll fans, people that you think would like this book specifically. That would be cool. That would be great. It would also reflect well on you as the person who showed him this book. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you supporting the initiative and inspiring more men to read and bringing together men who do. And you could double down on that support by rating or subscribing or following the show on whatever podcast provider that you listen to this on. And lastly, you could visit BooksforMen.org for more information where you can also sign up for the newsletter, a monthly roundup of all the books and authors that you hear on the podcast.