Book Excerpts: Applying Sources Analysis to Beatles Interviews

The Credibility of Interviews and The Historical Method:

Beatles historiography is saturated in both primary and secondary sources, mass media sources, and interviews. What Beatles historiography significantly lacks are the most valuable and credible of primary sources: private records that were never intended for public consumption. (Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 31). Beatles history is awash in primary sources, but because of their very public nature, even the primary sources meet few of the established standards that determine the most credible material.

(For those readers hoping to see the video of my Lennon Vs. McCartney History Speaker Series talk, I apologize: while I expected that would be my next post, my University’s Advancement Office has yet to send me the video, rather throwing a wrench in my plans.)

In compensation, I’m offering an excerpt from Chapter One: The Fab Four Narrative, which was cut from the final manuscript. The primary reason for its deletion is simple: it came across, ultimately, as a rather dry academic laundry list lecture on historical methods and source analysis. (So I’m inflicting it on you — nice compensation, right?)

My initial approach for Chapter One was to provide the basic rules of source analysis and historiography, and then, throughout the book, evaluate sources while referring back to the rules as laid out in this excerpt. Ultimately, after 15-20 pages of this approach, I scrapped it, and decided to discuss specific standards and methods as they were applied to certain primary and secondary sources within Beatles Historiography. Many of the standards which I discuss in the excerpt are eventually mentioned in the published version of The Beatles and the Historians, but applied in text to specific sources, individually. Simply put; rather than bombarding the reader with an excessive amount of rules and standards at the book’s beginning, I decided to drop them like breadcrumbs along the historiographical trail, one piece at a time.

(Below is the rest of the excerpt: Buyer Beware; this can be regarded as academia at its most impenetrable and insufferable 🙂 ).

There has been a tendency on the part of some Beatles writers to regard all primary sources and interviews as equally credible, a significant flaw that ignores some of the essential questions that are used to evaluate primary source material: First, how close in proximity was the source to the event? Second, what was the purpose behind the production of the source? Was it more to provide a record of an event, or to sell something? Third, was the source originally intended in a confidential, private nature, which grants it more credibility? Fourth, what about the level of expertise of the author concerning the source? Were they capable of understanding the situation, or did they lack important knowledge or training that would have affected their understanding of the event? (James Starrt, Historical Methods in Mass Communication, 179) Was the interview contemporaneous or retrospective? These questions, as well as the issue of authorial agenda, must be used to ensure that any version of a story is more history than myth. Any historian who attempts to write an accurate account of the band or the individuals in it must do so while acknowledging the fact that, from 1962 on, the interest of the Beatles was not to record events as they occurred, or depict facts in interviews in the most accurate terms. Instead, the Beatles agenda was to ‘sell’ something: their personalities, their singles, their albums, their movies and their mythology.

This element of agenda influences the credibility of every interview the Beatles ever gave, from the group’s functioning years to its breakup and beyond. That is not to say that it negates all the public statements made by the group or the individual Beatles. However, according to standard historical methods, the varying agendas behind each particular interview need to be acknowledged when analyzing the validity of the testimony they provide. The overreliance on interviews as the most commonly used source in Beatles historiography has resulted in a more journalistic than historical methodology. Relying too heavily on these interviews, or eyewitness testimony, has resulted in two major weaknesses in Beatles historical writing.

First, by concentrating on interviews, some writers who have told the Beatles story have neglected other forms of evidence, such as personal letters, legal or business documents, or other primary sources that provide documentation as well as testimony.  In many cases, these neglected sources provide a more impartial analysis than personal testimony.

Second, very few Beatles’ writers have applied legitimate source analysis to the interviews they rely on as evidence. Interviews, more than any other type of source, have served as the primary structures underpinning the four major narratives in Beatles historiography. Few of these interviews, however, have been analyzed for their credibility as legitimate or accurate accounts of events.   Because so much of Beatles history is shaped by interviews, such critical analysis is essential for any accurate understanding of the group’s history.  “Good historians ask themselves: ‘Should I trust what this person is telling me?’” James Starrt, Historical Methods in Mass Communication, (New Jersey: Vision Press, 2003, 174). For too long, this question went unasked by many Beatles writers.

Ideally, in history, “a witness’s competence must be established for every particular fact.” In order to gain a more accurate understanding of Beatles history, every interview should have its credibility and accuracy analyzed. (Garraghan, 282) This analysis includes a critical assessment that goes beyond authorial agenda and examines the veracity of the interviews themselves.

In his book A Guide to Historical Method, Historian Gilbert Garraghan outlines some of the essential questions researchers must ask when encountering direct eyewitness testimony. Does the witness have a reputation for honesty, or exaggeration? Has other testimony provided by the witness been verified by independent sources? Does lying bring the witness any sort of advantage? Does telling the truth disadvantage them? Are they “constrained by the public character of their testimony,” which might be publicly challenged by others? Are they only “trustworthy in matters in which their own private interests … are not involved?” (Garraghan, 290). According to Garraghan, witnesses displaying “an air of sincerity” (Ibid) and accounts containing an excess of detail do not automatically grant testimony a greater amount of credibility.  Twentieth historian and philosopher Marc Bloch offered similar requirements including “fatigue and emotion,” as well as the “degree of attention,” (Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 101) to the list of factors to take into account when analyzing the credibility of eyewitness testimony.

Few Beatles writers have applied this analysis to the interviews that make up the majority of their evidence.  In addition, many books on the Beatles, particularly those published in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, failed to document their sources or provide bibliographies. The impact of this lack of documentation on Beatles historiography is immense. Information provided in these books and articles in the 1960s and 1970s was later repeated in individual and group biographies, but could not be traced to its original source. ‘Facts’ were passed from book to book and narrative to narrative and became an accepted part of the historical understanding without being separately verified.  Beatles biographer Bob Spitz commented on the “the stunning lack of reliable source material” (Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography, (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 861. in the afterword of his 2005 group biography, The Beatles. Fellow Beatles writer Mark Hertsgaard also condemned the lack of verified facts when researching the Fab Four:

One simply cannot trust that the ‘facts’ in most books about the Beatles are anything more than speculation, hearsay or opinion. The daily media reporting about the Beatles over the years was often careless or simpleminded. Book authors then compounded the confusion by making vast deductive leaps that then presented as truth, or by using technically factual evidence in selective ways, or by surmising what a given person, usually one of the Beatles, must have thought in a situation and then putting those words in his mouth. Authors rarely bothered to document their conclusions: very few books on the Beatles contain a list of citations in support of their claims.

Mark Hertsgaard, A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles, (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995), xi

Other issues affect the credibility of the claims in some interviews given by the Beatles. The group members themselves admitted to lying in their interviews at times to simply disrupt the tedium of enduring endless rounds of questions. There is evidence to suggest that in some phone interviews, Beatles’ assistants Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans impersonated various Beatles, casting the legitimacy of those interviews into doubt.  The sheer amount of sources available also poses a problem.  With hundreds of interviews spread out over decades and across widely varying narratives, there is no shortage of contradictory testimony. Some aspects of Beatles history are reliant solely on memory, but there are multiple instances where one band member’s memory contradicts that of another. There are numerous times in Beatles history in which Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr all provide noticeably differing accounts of the same event.  At times, these contradictions in testimony can be attributed to the agendas of their respective authors. In other instances, they can be traced back to the faultiness of human memory, lack of attention at the time of the event or, particularly in the case of the Beatles, drug use. These conflicting versions, which concern a number of both inconsequential and extremely significant events in Beatles history, have forced many writers to cope with contradictory testimony.

How Beatles writers have dealt with conflicting eyewitness accounts varies wildly across the spectrum. Some authors either lacked access to or neglected to acknowledge the existence of contradictory accounts, choosing to relay only the testimony that reinforced their chosen thesis or burnished the reputation of their personal favorite Beatle.  This omission of evidence produced flawed work that, while packaged as history, does not qualify as such. “The writer of a historical narrative must deal with the contradiction. You cannot pretend the contradiction doesn’t exist.” Richard Marius, A Short Guide to Writing About History, Second Edition, (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 59 Others relayed the contradictory testimony that clashed with their version of events but only did so in order to critically analyze and attempt to discredit the contradictory account, while failing to apply any such standards to their other pieces of evidence.  Few authors used critical source analysis equally on both original and contradictory testimony, or relayed differing accounts with impartiality.

 

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For those readers who have read the book; do you prefer the stylistic approach taken in this excerpt, or the ultimate method used in The Beatles and the Historians? For all blog readers: what do you make of these standards? Are there any that surprise you, or that you disagree with, or would like further clarification on? And should I have kept this excerpt permanently in my deletions folder, rather than inflicting on you? All comments and questions are welcomed. (Hopefully, the video will be here soon).