Most of the earliest books about rock bands are of the "rock-n-roll for dummies" or maybe "how a rock band works" kind, as if the authors earnestly tried to describe the phenomenon to somebody who never witnessed such an act, live or on TV. So I think anything like a detailed biography just wasn't in the plans of authors, and Hunter's words about newspaper archives confirm this - seems that literary workers saw no value in chronicling the phenomenon, if only because the pop musicians themselves had not much of an idea of the lasting value of their legacy, as pop was considered a sequence of disposable fads succeeding each other.Lord Reith wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 10:12 pm It's funny but recently I've been revisiting Hunter Davies book. Although he records The Beatles own disatisfaction with never being asked any questions about their music during Beatlemania, he then proceeds to document their career as a series of public events concentrating entirely on their fame, without a single mention of their musical development along the way. He also has an extraordinary attitude twoards facts, saying at one point that all the details of their tours are still in the newspaper archives "if anyone is mad enough to want to read it". It really is an incredibly shoddy and insubstantial book. The only redeeming thing about it is the interviews with the Beatles and the eyewitness accounts of their recording sessions, but in those instances all he had to do was transcribe what they were saying. As an actual biography, it is only slightly more detailed than something you'd expect to read in Beatles Monthly.
Among my acquisitions from the 60s are biographies of the Blues Project and Jefferson Airplane, the latter covering also the wider topic of "San Francisco Sound". Both are useless as biographies, pretty much in the same vein as Hunter's book. It seems the idea of proper chronicling entered the mind of writers around 1970, probably catalyzed by Lillian Roxon's rock encyclopedia from 1969, and I'd name Anthony Scaduto's "Dylan" and Jerry Hopkins' "Elvis" as the best examples of the changing trend.
I have to re-read Michael Braun's "Love Me Do and the Beatles' Progress" and a book written by somebody else on the Stones from the same early year, 1964, to evaluate the authors' angles on their subjects, but of course these early books (there's also one by the Hollies, in their own words, from 1965) happened too soon in the time frame.