I've thought a bit about writing something on how @wingsoverlagos and I killed Mark Lewisohn... because we did, but this is tumblr so of course I'll just randomly post something from my phone.
It was hell, but we did bury him. The hate I got in the month after my last two posts was unbelievable. I shut everything out.
But of course I was getting Mark Lewisohn Google alerts. I was investigating him, so of course I did. Every week. And they all looked the same. Six or so big papers quoting him for whatever Beatles' crap they had going on that week, then some combo of appearances and old book stuff would shuffle towards the top.
But after the posts on his accuracy that all changed.
Now the Google alerts are the alerts of a dead man. Whatever the lag time within the fandom, his credibility was wiped out almost instantaneously on the broader scale. No one is seeking quotes from him any more. Every week it's just a regurgitation of his books. Get a free PDF here. An old message board post. If you Google âMark Lewisohn+accuracyâ or anything like it you'll get us. Me and Sharon.
It's kind of sad. When I was trying to finish my last two pieces my biggest issue was that I felt like I would be killing him. Destroying him. His whole life and image was completely wrapped up in the Beatles, and destroying a human was difficult. I had to keep myself angry at him because otherwise I would begin to think about what it meant for us to succeed. I didn't want him to be able to continue his mythology-as-biography, but also it was scary to think about what the truth would do to him.
I thoughtâwe both thoughtâthat the biggest problem would be getting people to see what we had uncovered, but in the end Phoebe @anotherkindofmindpod saw it before I'd even recovered from writing it and within 24 hours it had blown up and I was getting hate mail. There was no time to process anything. We went from a tumblr oddity to a nuclear bomb overnight.
And for a few months we both felt like it had all been for nothing. Like everyone hated us but to no purpose. The feedback we saw was all negative, and from the most vehement Lennon/Lewisohn freaks imaginable. It colored everything. And it was a while before I even managed to look at the Google alerts again.
But once I did it started to sink in.
Sharon, I think we won. I think we actually did it.
It's too bad that âwinningâ meant hurting a human. I wish it didn't. But this last month I've gone back and read my last two big posts and I realize that we were right. We were righteous. It had to be done, whatever the costs. I wish it had been less painful, but it's not our fault that he misrepresented things. We just told the truth. That's all.
That can't be a sin.
I've missed my tumblr peeps, though. Sincerely. đ
The only way to preserve Beatles historyâbut more importantly, the only way to uncover that history in the first placeâis to make it accessi
Excuse me do you know why peeps on tumblr dislike M. Lewisohn so much?
The TLDR is that he's biased in certain ways, most of which spring from a clear John preference (which is kind of funny when you remember John is the only Beatle he never met).
You can glean from certain passages of Tune In (he employs suggestive "foreshadowing" when describing Paul's interactions with Brian) and some interview comments he's made that he's kind of pro-Klein and blames Paul for the breakup. He also sometimes buries the lede with regards to Paul's early influence on the band's artistic direction as opposed to John's. Another Kind Of Mind did a multi-episode series going into some of this (I never finished it and don't agree with every single point they made that I heard, but it gives a good overview of people's general feelings on the matter).
Lewisohn is notably staunchly anti-McLennon and has downplayed John and Yoko's heroin use, stating John didn't "seem" like he was on heroin all the time.
He also made some verifiably messy mistakes in Tune In, frankensteining certain quotes and often avoiding serious source analysis. (IMO he partially does this because he likes writing his biography like it's a work of fiction â if he tells you this John quote about the early days is from Lennon Remembers, which should absolutely be kept in mind when considering what John is saying, then that's 'spoiling the breakup' and messing with the flow of the story.)
With all that in mind, I find a fair amount of the critique he's been getting as of late over the top and reactionary.* The fact of the matter is that Lewisohn has seriously raised the standard of Beatles scholarship, and if McCartney Legacy Vol 1 & 2 are better books, its authors have Lewisohn's influence to thank for it in part. The only reason we're able to scrutinize his citations is because he actually bothered to cite shit, which can't be said for 95% of the Beatle books before his â this field of historical study is essentially still in its infancy, which means it's very error-prone and still driven by people with strong emotional investment in the band, leading to various biases. Really, the biggest problem with Lewisohn is his "this will be the definite Beatles story!" attitude.
I also think it should be noted that there isn't all that much money to be made in writing Beatles books (maybe Ian Leslie made a fair amount of bank). Sure, you get clout in the form of invitations to Beatle Fest & niche podcasts, but it's mostly a labour of love, and I think some online fans need to recognize that more.
Personally, I don't place a ton of value in his analysis, but I happily defer to him on matters of chronology.
*Beatles tumblr kind of sees itself as the Beatles scholarship counter-culture, disrupting the orthodoxy with their subversive takes. So, to some extent, Lewisohn is just one of many targets of these subversions, but probably especially so because he's 1) specifically spoken out against Fandom Fave Theory McLennon and 2) because he's held up by normies as the be-all, end-all authority on the Beatles.
Last year, like it or not, we proved beyond all doubt that Mark Lewisohn was an unreliable relator of facts.
It was, in the end, Sharon's spreadsheet that forced me to write A Tendency to Fabricate History and We Find Ourselves at a Crossroads.
Mark Lewisohn knows a ton of Beatles' facts, butâmost unfortunatelyâhe chose to remove himself from the appendix of reliable Beatles' scholars by fabricating history.
Let me be clear, whether you hate me or love me, this is what Mark Lewisohn did. I had nothing to do with that decision. Neither mine, nor Sharon's researchâwhich uncovered uncontroverted truthsâhad anything to do with the personal decisions that led to this outcome.
Before âA Tendency to Fabricate Historyâ was released âbased explicitly on the careful and meticulously documented research of Sharon Duboskyâbetween six and ten major newspapers a week quoted Mark Lewisohn.
After those articles citing our findings, that immediately dropped to zero.
It is not celebrating the destruction of a person to note that. it isn't.
It simply is not.
But it is importantâVERY IMPORTANTâcorroboration that we were right on the facts.
We were always up front and transparent on our evidence. We followed Cicero's rules:
NEVER DARE SAY ANYTHING FALSE. NEVER DARE WITHHOLD ANYTHING TRUE.
We begged journalists to check us.Â
AND THEY DID.
At some point this year "We Find Ourselves at a Crossroads: the Mark Lewisohn Disaster" passed the 750,000 views mark, and despite personal pain to individuals that I regret, I know we did the right thing.
A lot of hard work and sweat went into righting some wrongs of history, and I am proud of that.
A BEATLE DIDNâT SAY THAT! Lewisohnâs lab-created quotes
A BEATLE DIDNâT SAY THAT! Lewisohnâs lab-created quotes
âOne of the things about this book that is a strength is itâs not me saying anything, itâs them or other people. I shape the text, I plot where it goes, I weave it, but the quotes are theirs. And so when Iâve got Paul McCartney behaving in a way some readers might think, âWhatever, oh dear,â itâs actually him saying it. So you end up thinking that to his own credit he said that. Itâs not me saying it.â (Mark Lewisohn, âNoted,â (October 7, 2013) Somerset, Guy.)
This is hella long, and that's because it's actually a full blog post. (In case you want it in a less monstrous form.)
My personal standard is that If someone represents, âA Beatle said this,â it better damn well be something a Beatle said.
A lot of people for a long time have put a lot of trust in Mark Lewisohnâs footnotes. Or at least in the fact of those footnotes. Because once you dig through them for any length of time you quickly discover that Mark Lewisohnâs footnotes hold secrets that would get him expelled from any undergraduate program. They reveal a âhistoryâ often contrived through a mass of Frankenquotes, ala carte creations, Lewisohn rephrased âparaphrases,â and worse. For some parts of the narrative things arenât too bad, yet in others monsters lurk around every corner. But this is not the sort of thing thatâs graded on a curve, and it is past time to have a conversation about what standards should be accepted in Beatlesâ scholarship.
Lewisohn lists his sources unlike most others. And his footnotes alone are more insightful than some other writersâ books. (Reddit, r/beatles)
I do not judge footnotes based on their insightfulness, nor do I want to single out a redditor, but I grabbed the comment because itâs an opinion that is widely shared and even accepted as canon. At least by people who have not combed those freakish footnotes. And while the pages of piled up sources do look fearsome en masse, a closer inspection reveals an offense to the truth, a threat to the record, and a blight on Beatlesâ historiography.
âThe rules for writing history are obvious. Who does not perceive that its chief law is never to dare say anything false, and never dare withhold anything true? The slightest suspicion of hatred or favor must be avoided. That such should be the foundations is known to all; the materials with which the building will be raised consist of facts and words.â âCicero
A Look at Lewisohnâs Lab-created Frankenquotes
FIRST, WHAT ARE QUOTES? AND WHY ARE QUOTES?
Quotes are the soul and center of recordedâand recordingâ history.
And the rules around quotes and quotation marks are pretty simple. Most people, even if theyâve never written anything beyond a term paper, understand what quotation marks represent.
A set of quotation marks means, âThis person said or wrote âthese exact wordsâ at some given time.â You can smash a quote from two hours before or two years before right up against a separate quote to make your pointâalthough it might get your grade loweredâbut what you cannot do is take two different statements from two different times and make them seem like they are one statement.
When you put words inside one set of quotation marks you are stating, in black and white, that the identified person made this statement. That they said all those words togetherâor if you want to excise a reasonable part and use ellipses to represent thatâ as part of the same statement.
Look, combining two separate quotes that are not part of the same thought or topic is not a subjective issue. It is not an issue of controversy. Quotes are the bone marrow of written history. Quotes are the alpha and omega. In academic work or journalism they have to be, which makes sense as soon as you think about it. If it was cool for me to take a transcript and grab half a sentence from page 2 and half a sentence from page 17, push them together as if those words were spoken one after the other in a single thought, I bet I can manage to get those words to say almost anything I want.
Separate thoughts must be in two separate quotation marks. Separate. Somewhere between four sentences and a paragraph is widely accepted as the âtwo separate quotesâ line, and there can be some ethical and technical wiggle room in a long rant by a person, but what makes all that subjective nonsense go out the window is if the quotes come from two separate questions. Or two separate days. Thatâs two quotes. Not hard.
Which again, makes sense if the point is conveying information to the reader and lessening the chance of a writer manipulating someone elseâs words to express something that the person didnât mean.
This is the contract inherent in a quote. These are the rules we all agree to and understand, and these are the reasons why. And thereâs no reason to break them.
Why do you want me to believe that John said these two things at one time? What was wrong with what he did say?
THE FOUR MOST COMMON WAYS MARK LEWISOHN MAULS THE MEANING OF THE QUOTE:
The Basic Lewisohn Frankenquote đ§ââïž
(âCONCLUDING FIVE WORDS FROMââ â I cannot even see the point of this THREE PART monster. Full footnote reads: 9) Author interview with Tony Meehan, September 6, 1995. (âI met George again in 1968 and for some reason he was harboring a grudge against me. He was very, very uptight about itââYou blocked us getting a recording contract âŠâ â) First part of George quote from interview by Terry David Mulligan, The Great Canadian Gold Rush, CBC radio, May 30 and June 6, 1977; concluding five words from interview for The Beatles Anthology)
This three-headed monster attributed to George Harrison is a very dull little guy. Not particularly venomous. Just convenient, I guess. For whatever reason, Mark Lewisohn decided it was worth rummaging through the quote buffet until he collected enough pieces for George Harrison to say this thing. ââŠconcluding five words fromâŠââWhat are we even doing here? No, really. Please tell me.
And like a lot of the footnotes for these bespoke quotations, there are further problems. â[F]rom interview for Beatles Anthologyâ? An interview that aired? In one of the episodes? Can you narrow it down? I guess Iâll just have to listen very closely to them all and hope I donât miss the five words.
But if we got bogged down in the sorts of trivial details that would immediately lose a college student a letter grade off a History 101 paper we would never get anywhere. We have to stick to the violent felonies.
*Love the "George would sayââ" Uh, would he? Well, I guess after all that trouble you went to, he would now. It's really incredible how cavalier Lewisohn is about a Beatle's words.
These sorts of reconstituted, lab-engineered, made up âquotesâ are shot throughout Tune In. âQuotesâ made up of words from two, three, and even four sources, spoken months or often years apart.
Ala Carte Creations đ±
It really is a buffet, and these ala carte creations come in all shapes and sizes. They might just be words that have been plucked up and glued back together to make something more useful to a particular narrative. (Ellipses or dash optional.)
TUNE IN: âJohn saw a bigger picture, and it would be surprising if it wasnât equally obvious, or made obvious, to Brian and George. He likened Paulâs enduring snag with Brian to his other long-standing difficulty: â[Brian] and Paul didnât get alongâit was a bit like [Stuart and Paul] between the two of them.ââ (Footnote 37: Interview by Peter McCabe and Robert D. Schonfeld, September 1971)
Bonus đ Phoebe's dramatic reading of John's original quote:
Then there are a seemingly uncountable number of âquotesâ with a sentence or three ripped out from the middle, but with zero representation that more words were ever there. (And in most of these particular deceptions, the simple representation of something excised (. . .) would make the quote fine. There are a lot of these, but they are also the easiest to fix.)
Chapter 10: âI was in a sort of blind rage for two years. [I was e]ither drunk or fighting. **It had been the same with other girlfriends Iâd had.** There was something the matter with me.â
And then there are the true buffet bonanzas, words lifted and twisted beyond recognition until they say something brand spanking new.Â
However, John remembered Paulâs attitude to Brian being very different. John was always emphatic that Paul didnât want Brian as the Beatlesâ manager and presented obstacles to destabilize him, to make his job difficult âŠÂ like turning up late for meetings. âThree of us chose Epstein. Paul used to sulk and God knows what âŠÂ [Paul] wasnât that keen [on Brian]âheâs more conservative, the way he approaches things. He even says that: itâs nothing he denies.â
The Lewisohn Remixes đž
And then there are the âparaphrases.â I couldnât even begin to guess how many of these there are, and often they arenât even paraphrases, but whole new Mark Lewisohn re-interpretations with quotation marks slapped around them. But if you donât check, you probably wonât know, because like this Lewisohn rewrite of a well-known Mrs. Harrison quote, thereâs a good chance youâll recognize the bulk of it, making it less likely that youâll catch the scalpel work excising Paul. And while I donât want to get caught in the nooks and crannies of intent in an example like this one I have to say, just this once, that what has to be a purposeful excising of Paul to create a slightly new quote on one side, combined with a badly acted, bad faithâ(or bad scholar)ââWhere was Paul when Johnâs mom died?â on the other, is par for the course.Â
George Harrisonâs momâs made up Lewisohn rephrase which coincidentally removes Paul from the imagery.]  âŠÂ  LEWISOHN:â Asked some years later to describe how heâd been able to help John cope with the loss of Julia, Paul could remember nothing of the period at all. It could be they didnât see much of each other in the summer of 1958. John was working at the airport, and Paul and George went on holiday togetherâadventurous for boys of 16 and 15. But Louise Harrison would recall how she encouraged George to visit John at Mendips, âso he wouldnât be alone with his thoughts.ââ âŠÂ  DAVIES: âThey were still practicing a lot at Georgeâs house, the only house where they got endless hospitality and encouragement. . . . I forced George to go round and see him, to make sure he still went off playing in their group and just didnât sit and brood. They all went through a lot together, even in those early days, and they always helped each other.â
Why do you have to slice and dice and reconstitute peopleâs words? No writer, and certainly no historian, should ever feel empowered to take words from a historical figure from two or three different places and topics and times, splice them together, and tell us, âWinston Churchill said this.â No he didnât! Why are you so intent on changing the words of the people youâre writing about? Whatâs wrong with just using two different quotes?Â
You cannot take two or three quotes from two or three or even four separate statements, stick them between one set of quotation marks and say John or Paul or George or Joe Smith said this.Â
No they didnât. They never said that. Why do you want me to think they did??Â
All these words are Abraham Lincolnâs, but this is not a Lincoln quote:
âEvery man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of â making a most discreditable exhibition of myself.âÂ
(I kept it ridiculous, although I didnât have to.)
But I want you, the reader, to be saying to yourself, âOkay, enough already. I get it!â Because in the last few days I have wandered too far into the weeds too many times and written far too many words detailing the multiplicity of ways Mr. Lewisohn does violence to each and every law of reporting historical facts, and could write many more. And I will post a more detailed list of the crimes against the quote that I am charging Mark Lewisohn with as we go forward, but I donât think we need that now. The fact is that every fair-minded person knows what quotation marks represent, and there is no more fair-minded group of people than serious Beatles fans and scholars. And it is those fair-minded scholars who I want most to hear me. Whether youâve written books or host a podcast or just know that you know a whole lot of stuff and take seriously your part of the trust in preserving the truth about The Beatles for us and future generations, it is you I am really talking to. My Cicero quoting-freaks. The ones who care about getting it right.
âThe chief, the only, aim of style is to put facts in a clear light, with no concealment.â
- Lucian of Samosata
â What footnotes can do, and what footnotes canât.
You can list multiple sources in a single footnote. Thatâs not only fine, itâs correct. If I want to tell part of a story based on several sources, that often means several sources in a footnote. But not for one, single quote.Â
The problem isnât the footnote, itâs the bioengineered quote on the page that you swept under a footnote hoping I wouldnât notice.Â
Which leads us to what a footnote is not. A footnote is not a post-hoc fixative for your textual sins. You cannot do whatever you want as long as you confess it in a footnote. A footnote is not a magic spell. A footnote is not the universally understood symbol for âI have my fingers crossed behind my back.â You cannot fix lies and misrepresentations in the footnotes. Footnotes arenât for trying to chase down three different sources to match up which part of a manufactured âquoteâ someone said on which date. Footnotes are not the picture on the front of a puzzle box. I should not need to find corner pieces to figure out which of these George Harrison words were actually spoken together.Â
Footnotes are a truthful and independently verifiable record of primary sources. Itâs that simple.
And taking Mark Lewisohn completely out of the picture for a moment, I feel sure we can all agree that neither John Lennon nor Paul McCartney nor George Harrison nor Ritchie Starkey would want anyone rearranging their words as if they were guitar chords. You wouldnât take three-quarters of Penny Lane and one-quarter of Across the Universe, put them together and call it a Beatlesâ song. So donât take three quarters of John to Jann Wenner and one-quarter of John to Lisa Robinson, put them together and call it a Beatleâs quote.
MY PERSONAL STANDARD IS THAT IF SOMEONE REPRESENTS, âA BEATLE SAID THIS,â IT BETTER DAMN WELL BE SOMETHING A BEATLE SAID.
None of the Beatles, dead or alive, would be cool with their words being taken out of context at all, let alone two or three different statements on god knows what being combined into one. This isnât hard, though. Use two or three separate quotation marks, and donât take statements out of context. Donât mix and match their words, but donât twist them, either. If a person said something, it is the historianâs duty to represent those words to the best of your ability, and then use them to tell a factual story focused on what you feel is important. Staying true to the original words and true to their meaning. If you canât use those words without twisting them, then change your story to fit their words, not the other way around. If their statement helps tell the story your way, use it! For goodness sake, John Lennon said at least two opposing things about almost every topic on earth, so there should be enough to choose from without being deceptive. I actually want the truth. Donât you?
Biography is story based around accurately represented, trustworthy and verifiable facts. And look, Beatles fans, whoever your favorite is: we are not going to get the truth about his history if we donât learn to take these things seriously. Letâs haveâif not high standardsâat least the lowest generally accepted standards. In the mid-term we need a lot more Beatles scholars with a lot more points of view, and nowâright nowâwe need experienced Beatles scholars to prioritize searching out and finding smart, interested people to mentor. And we simply must ensure that we arenât allowing to solidify into stone âfactsâ that are not facts and statements no one ever made. I donât think any honest Beatles fanâ(which rounds up to all of them)âwants any question around that issue.
The record is the most important thing. Now, and always. This is not about John versus Paul. John versus Paul may live on always in our hearts, but for Beatles history, itâs the wrong question. Iâd rather someone be up front about their loves, but in the end the focus should be on representing the primary facts in their most pristine form. Love who you love most, but place truth above all. Pristine facts. Pristine quotes. Nothing hidden. Nothing misrepresented.Â
Let the historical actors speak for themselves. That is their right.
And the historianâs duty.
NEXT, WE DISSECT A MONSTER.
Final note: I became frustrated and (maybe strangely) offended by Lewisohn's obscene pretenses in 2020, but my frustrations were nebulous and unfocused until this incredible AKOM series. I feel much better now. Angrier. But better. They worked their asses off. đ„
Lewisohn has definitely gotten weirder over the years.
Some Ivan Vaughn weirdness from Lewisohn's latest, very weird, interview that made me think about Phoebe and Daphne and all the weirdness they caught in Fine Tuning.
Lewisohn says John and Ivan's parental figures introduced them in the hope that they might play together, but also Ivan went to Liverpool Instituteâthe superior school to Quarry Bankâbecause Ivan's mum didn't want him to play with John. And Paul and Ivan might not have met (despite both being at the Inny) had they not had the same birthday? I must be missing some bit of trivia because what does that mean??
(transcription below)
John and Paul âmet because they had a mutual friend.â
That mutual friend was the friend of John because he lived in the house behind John. And in those days parents, or parent figuresâJohn was raised by his auntâbut if there were other little boys in the neighborhood, you would be introduced in the hope that you might play together. I don't know that that happens any more, but it did happen in those days. And in Paul's case, because Paul had gone to a particular school, um, this friend-- this mutual friend-- this friend of John's, Ivan, he was at the school, the same as Paul. And they had the same birthday, so they'd been introduced to one another. If they hadn't have had the same birthday they may not have even been-- ever been met. So, and it's-- and also, the reason that Ivan was at that school and not the more local one was his mother had said âyou're not going to the same school as John Lennonâ 'cause he was the kind of boy that other parents always kept their children away from if possible.
Daphne and Phoebe definitely caught that Lewisohn invented the idea that Ivan would have gone to Quarry Bank but for John being such a bad boy. (They didn't say âinvented,â but they knew it, and after four months of being a Lewisohn Sherlock Holmes I'll say it. He made it up. There is no support for it outside Lewisohn's delusional mind.)
HAMBURG I: It's not just that the narrative becomes so ridiculous, it's that as usual all the other evidence we have contradicts it. George talking about punching Stuart. Stuart's letters. The sourcing voids. âThe logbook recordedâ nonsense, but a few pages before that the âlogbookâ is long lost, âunfortunately.â It's like Lewisohn forgot his continuity notebook.
But mostly it's the pictures that put the lie to âStuart was all and Paul was off moping in a corner.â (And incidentally, very jealous of Pete getting all the best birds.)
"The Paul of Tune In isn't real, and so he isn't relatable."
Today's AKOM was outstanding. I have so much to write and probably no time to write it until Thursday, but I had to make the time to say that it blew me away. The aspect I expected to influence me least, influenced me most: the death of Paul's mom. The writing about it. All of it. It humanized him and that loss in a way that hit me hard, and made me realize how much I'd been influenced by Tune In, even though I'd done my own critiquing of that section before.
(I want to write about the money part so badly, because I think that was very real for Paul, and I believe all the evidence shows that Jim was â or at least would have felt â much less stable than we really think about. He bet on the horses. He was the fun parent. But no, that's what I don't have time for.)
This was an excellent, excellent episode. The most powerful overall, by far. The most holistic in its picture, the most undeniable, and the one that brings me back to where I started, and with a bullet: "What story is Mark Lewisohn trying to tell? And why?" And why aren't we talking about the fact that he seems to hate Paul McCartney and Apple definitely doesn't like him?"
There are longstanding grievances, and the fact that he makes Paul McCartney into a manipulative ice cube on the page is likely not an accident.
I mean, right??
Lewisohn seems downright deceptiveâmay I even say manipulative?âafter listening to today's episode. And although I have big problems with Lewisohn because studying the text you just have to, I have played Devil's advocate in my head through every episode, but at some point today I lost my ability to find any excuses. It is just impossible to construct any defense of this.
Fucking incredible episode. Brava, ladies.
Reminder clip: Mark Lewisohn on Fans on the Run pod â "the bastards took my name off it"
A. Linda died and he stopped a lot of things, like the Wings fan mag. But also he was getting old and it was hard to find pictures he was happy with. (Literally his wife and keyboardist died! That's why there's no fan mag, not because he was old, you insensitive reptilian jerk.)
