(All the audio is below the posts.)
Jump to Sharon’s @wingsoverlagos’ Lewisohn Tumblr post links, written as she checked
See Sharon’s Lewisohn error spreadsheet 💣
(and her spreadsheet readme)
It will never stop being the most popular Beatles’ content on my website. Nothing I ever do can compete with Martha, so love the huge-tangled-ball-of-wool and be happy
The Lewisohn mess:
The original. (Emojis and all.)
The thing that just came pouring out of me one night on Tumblr. It’s, you know, Tumblr, but it’s about something real and central to the soul of the Beatles, completely non-technical, and written with the freedom of social media. And, looking back, it’s where I realized how to put into words what I was seeing, and I knew I had. As I was writing it. (After some soap for my mouth and general cleaning up, of course.)
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AUDIO
WordPress updated everything into absolute $#*@ and I can’t fire them until next year, but now sometimes the players show “Error.” It’s usually an obnoxious lie and the audio works. Occasionally it takes refreshing the page, but in general ignore “Error” messages and please briefly shake your fist at WordPress in solidarity with me.
NAGRAS
Some day—when the Lewisohn business has calmed—I am going to post a lot of Nagra clips. For now, here’s a menu of @amoralto’s (pronounce: “a moral to”) amazing store of Get Back/Nagra audio and other January 1969 knowledge. 🫡
LEWISOHN AUDIO
“I need to do the book, the history” – “I just decided this has to be done really properly” – “It’s very important that I write this book now, because otherwise it will be wrong forever. And the primary reason for me doing it is to ensure that it’s right… if I don’t write these books it will be wrong forever. It will be misunderstood forever… it’s only really me who’s really out there trying to get it right.” – Arte da Biografia (April 26, 2024)
Pre-Get Back Mark Lewisohn vs. post-Get Back Mark Lewisohn:
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@wingsoverlagos on Tumblr: Citations & Accompanying Commentary
She is just plowing through sources. And it’s not looking good for Mark Lewisohn.
“
I already had a less-than-favorable view of Lewisohn’s work after @anotherkindofmindpod’s mammoth “Fine Tuning” series, a well-researched, often infuriating, always entertaining series that laid out the overarching bias in Tune In, but there can still be value in a biased work, particularly if you consume it with that bias in mind. Doctoring quotes, on the other hand–for a biography of supposed historical import, that’s a capital offense. So how could a big-name author, revered for his rigor and devotion to primary sources, put so many barely-concealed doctored quotes into his work? Why would he do it? And if @mythserene could turn up several as part of an initial investigation, just how many of the quotes in Tune In weren’t actually quotes?
Naturally, I’ve chosen to do the sane thing, and check each of his sources, one by one.
”
Arranged alphabetically by author/interviewer
Mark Lewisohn vs. Cynthia Lennon
A Twist of Lennon (1978) and John (2005) by Cynthia Lennon
Part 1
Cyn standing up to John is crucial enough that Lewisohn mentions it twice in short order, but that dynamic isn’t present in either of Cynthia’s accounts. … This isn’t the only time Lewisohn writes something contradicted by his cited source, and in some of those cases, I’ve found information supporting Lewisohn’s account in another, uncited source—we’ll get an example of that in the Twist citations. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here…
Part 2
Lewisohn makes up his own Dot/Paul breakup scene, but tells us that Cynthia said it. (She did not.)
In pink, we have Lewisohn’s misrepresentation of Cyn’s account of the breakup. Note the wildly different timbre. In green and yellow, we have Dot’s account from It’s Only Love. At the source, the green text comes after the yellow text, seemingly in response to a different question in the original interview.
@wingsoverlagos – tumblr: Lewisohn vs. Cynthia Lennon II
Part 3
There are three citations of A Twist of Lennon (1978, aka Twist) and two to John (2005) to dissect here, and all but one have a commonality: the cited source is either altered or directly contradicted in Tune In.
1980 BBC Radio Interview by Andy Peebles
1980 Playboy Interview by David Sheff
Part 1 // Part 1.5 // Part 2 // Part 3
1965 Playboy Interview by Jean Shepherd
Jann Wenner Interviews (May and December 1970)
Lewisohn vs. Wenner • Part 1 of 2
Mark Lewisohn quotes interviews conducted by Jann Wenner ten times in Tune In; nine of those quotes had issues. Nine of the ten quotes come from the infamous Lennon Remembers interview (conducted in Dec. 1970 and first published in Jan. 1971); the other one is from a different 1970 interview for Rolling Stone. A few of these have been covered by @mythserene; I’ve included links to her analysis.
About half of Lewisohn’s Wenner-sourced ‘quotes’ are Textbook Multi-Source Frankenquotes. Lewisohn does this quite brazenly–if you look at the text of the endnote, it will say something like “First and third parts of quote from Bip Bop Weekly, second part from interview with….” The multi-source quotes will appear in part two; this post will include the single-source ones.
Many Years From Now by Barry Miles (1997)/The Beatles Anthology (2005)
Tune In 13-23 (the “we” means “I” endnote, plus Paul’s French influences)
Today, I’d like to share one of Mark Lewisohn’s most entertaining fucked-up citations. This citation, Tune In 13-23, contains a rare example of Lewisohn almost saying something correct/insightful about Paul McCartney before hopelessly fumbling, as well as a far-less-rare example of Lewisohn correcting Paul on a bit of trivia while simultaneously mangling the source material. …
The Best of Fellas by Spencer Leigh aka Lewisohn’s Little Mysteries ft. Serene
Misc.
Kim Bennett
Lewisohn’s feelings on Olivia Harrison
Cynthia was very comforted by John’s domestic abuse-centric story in In His Own Write
Exact Words 