Some notes on Just Like Them: A Piece by Piece Guide to Becoming the Ultimate Thinking Person's Beatles Fan

Friday 7/12/24

I have two Beatles pieces in progress to finish. One of them goes all the way back to May. Other stuff came up. These pieces may be published on their own--I don't know--but I'd be writing them anyway for Just Like Them: A Piece by Piece Guide to Becoming the Ultimate Thinking Person's Beatles Fan.

There's no Beatles book like it. Stylistically, in terms of ideas, what is focused on, how it's ordered. The ordering is somewhat akin to the Ultra Rare Trax bootleg series. I loved--and still love--those bootlegs. They didn't proceed chronologically. You'd jump from an outtake in 1963 to one from 1969 as you listened, but it all worked really well, with this zesty, exciting spirit. That has always stuck with me.

A while ago this book went over 100K words, but I just kept writing. I wanted to be done. And it's going to be a slog going through the entire thing and making everything just so, because I'm more fastidious and demanding on that score than ever before. But you have a conscience in these matters, and mine was like, "You really need to make sure you hit everything. Can't not have something about..."

And it's certainly not me taking all of the Beatles things I've published and sticking them in a book. Many things wouldn't work. There was a feature, for instance, in The Atlantic on the 1963 BBC sessions--but no place for that in the book. Other things that were published have been changed and will be changed more. None of the Beatles-related op-eds would have been appropriate so none of them are included. There were things I pitched and did which I was pitching and doing because of this book. That got me to write the pieces. I would have written them anyway, but it helped. You gotta move, as they say.

One of these pieces I need to finish is on the band's BBC rendition of "Johnny B. Goode," as this kind of statement of aspirational intent that set a tone for 1964. None of this is the typical Beatles writing from the standard perspectives. I still have a bunch of these to get done. The thinking with the book is you can read it straight through, you can jump around, you can treat it as literature, or as a different kind of reference book. It's very revisitable, if you will. And readers become the very thing promised by the subtitle.

You can impress the hell out of people--and people like trying to do that--by taking what you learn from the book and bringing that stuff up wherever you might bring it up.