Will the casual boomer fan, no matter how fondly he or she remembers the time between the band’s first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and its breakup six years later, wade through 800 pages before the Beatles even get to America? (Lewisohn has already pared back his original 1,700 pages - available as a deluxe two-volume special edition for superfans and unemployed cover-band guitarists.) Those who never dreamed of pursuing the story further may reconsider, though. Lewisohn’s ambition, of course, must be measured against the general audience’s appetite. In the first of a projected three-volume work - 803 pages of text that take the story up to the end of 1962 - he retells this epic tale in a manner that, while ambitious, and at times even indulgent, also manages to be expertly controlled and propelling.
The British scholar Mark Lewisohn nervily combines the two approaches with “Tune In,” providing the widest possible angle on an extensive and engrossing group biography built on a well-raked mountain of exacting new research. Others frame the narrative from more expansive angles, weaving in the era’s social texture, politics and cultural context (see Devin McKinney’s shrewd “Magic Circles” from 2003 or Jonathan Gould’s peerless “Can’t Buy Me Love” of 2007). Some authors choose a single figure and bore down deep, which has brought the count of Paul McCartney life stories to at least 10, with more in the pipeline. Approaches to retelling the Beatles’ story slice in two distinct directions: narrow or wide.
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