Riding So High: The Beatles and Drugs | Page 5 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Thanks everyone! I’m just catching up on this thread, and it’s lovely to see all the nice things people are saying.

I even sold two paperbacks to parents in my son’s playground while dropping him off this week! They’d heard about it and asked for copies. That’s pretty cool.

@sir walter raleigh I hope you do keep going with it. I think the later chapters are better!

@ewe2 Which Facebook page was that? I did get a sales spike for a few days last week and wasn’t sure why.

vonbontee said
One thing I’m looking forward to is Joe’s, uh, “authorial voice”, I guess you’d call it. So many of the articles on the BB are necessarily written with a neutral, journalistic/encyclopedic tone, with only the occasional opinion unobtrusively sneaking in. By contrast, his too-infrequent extended Forum opinion-posts (like his hilarious takedown of Philip Norman, one of my favourite posts here ever) are full of personality. That isn’t strictly necessary in a scholarly work, but it’d be nice added bonus if some of that crept into “Riding”.  

Ah, don’t get your hopes up too much @vonbontee. One thing that bugs me is when non-fiction writers put too much of themselves in the text. Unless you’re Christopher Hitchens or Will Self or [insert your favourite polemicist] it’s quite hard to do it convincingly, and harder still to sustain for the course of a book. There are some jokes or wry asides here and there but it’s certainly not full of them.

One thing Erin T Weber told me was that, after reading it, she had no idea who my favourite Beatle was, or even if I had one (I don’t). She saw that as a positive, in that too many biographers let their love of a particular person cloud their storytelling (eg Norman, Coleman). I thought The Beatles were far more interesting than I am, so it was my duty to get the hell out of the way.

Furthermore, I didn’t want to cast judgement too much on The Beatles’ drug-taking. Some people take drugs on a daily basis; others would never think to touch anything stronger than tea or coffee. I decided it wasn’t really for me to say that anything was intrinsically good or bad, but rather to let people make up their minds based on their own points of view. When I quoted Yoko saying heroin was “a celebration of ourselves as artists”, or that she and Lennon weren’t really addicted because they didn’t inject, I didn’t say “…which is a steaming pile of self-serving bullshit”, even though it (hopefully quite clearly) is.

That said, there are judgements there – one of my favourite characters in the book is Lady Isabella Frankau, a Wimpole Street doctor who practically gave away heroin and cocaine in order to manage addictions and to keep junkies away from the black market, but who inadvertently helped accelerate a huge drugs problem in Britain. It’s hard to discuss someone like that without making some judgements on their behaviour. Do let me know what you think once you’ve read the book.

Yeah, it was hard to avoid pointing out that McCartney was a bit daft with all the drug problems. He and/or Linda were busted on six occasions in six different countries (Sweden, Scotland, USA, Japan, Barbados, England). He admits that he was incredibly cavalier in the 70s and 80s.

Here’s another snippet from the McCartney solo chapter. I didn’t really want to post many extracts here because they sometimes don’t read very well out of context, but I thought it might amuse you @vonbontee:

IN 1986 MCCARTNEY and Ringo Starr were among the performers on a charity album, It’s A Live-In World, in aid of the drug and alcohol rehabilitation organisation Phoenix House.

McCartney’s contribution was the light reggae Simple As That, a poor song even by McCartney’s wildly variable Eighties standards. ‘I know it isn’t easy to refuse,’ goes the opening verse. ‘A lot of thoughts are flying through your head. Tell me this before you have to choose: Would you rather be alive or dead?’ In the chorus he appears incredulous than anyone could ever succumb to drug addiction: ‘It’s as simple as that. Would you rather be alive or dead? It’s as simple as that, it’s so simple. It makes you wanna cry.’ Indeed.