To the point, even beyond everything else which Norman portrays in the text, the theme that seems to emerge with the greatest relevance is this idea of the various members of the group as well as of such important figures in the group's extended family as manager Brian Epstein as plagued by personal uncertainty and tragic grief. So is this best captured in the details concerning John Lennon at the time of his mother's untimely passing by an automobile accident. Norman relates of Lennon that "he had never been short of girlfriends, though few were willing to put up for long with the treatment that was John Lennon's idea of romance. His drinking, sarcasm, his unpunctuality at trysts, his callous humor, and most of all, his erratic temper drove each of them to chuck him, not infrequently with the devastating rejoinder that is the specialty of Liverpool girls. 'Don't take it out on me,' one of them screamed back at him, 'just because your mother's dead.'" (50) The cruelty and tragedy of Lennon's scenario, for one, makes him a sympathetic figure here, easily identifiable to the countless young members of post-war Britain who struggled...
It is easy to see why the common ground shared by individuals like Lennon and his fans would resonate with a seemingly revolutionary power when compared to the aristocratic likes of a Frank Sinatra or a Perry Como.
Indeed, that is quite certainly the immediate appeal of the Beatles, who were empowered by a musical recklessness that was not produced from a vacuum of sheer ingenuity, but instead flowed from the cathartic implications of rock music, first demonstrated to them by Elvis Presley and his contemporaries. In the numerous passages where Norman lovingly, if not occasionally too honestly in its derisive affection, describes the early performances of the Silver Beatles in Hamburg and the Cavern Club, the clattering aggression and raw looseness of their performances comes through as a revolutionary trait, as driven by the everyday frustrations of both adolescence and working class obscurity as by their clearly unparalleled talent.
Works Cited:
Norman, P. (2005). Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation. Simon and Schuster.
