I'll begin this deserved eulogy with an anecdote about an encounter in New York with a certain Arnie, who said he'd pinged vibraphone in a cocktail lounge combo restaurant in the Manhattan hotel where The Beatles had stayed when playing Shea Stadium in 1965. After the show, Lennon and McCartney were in the bar where they listened to Arnie, and waved him over to their table. During the ensuing conversation, they asked him to join The Beatles. However, it was not to be John, Paul, George, Arnie, and Ringo, because Arnie mislaid the beer mat on which Paul had scribbled a contact number.
Que sera sera Arnie was planning to write a life story centered on this episode. As well as self-aggrandizement, he was motivated too by the plain fact that any publications to do with The Beatles remain such sound fiscal exercises that you wonder if there's ever going to be a cutting off point.
Apparently, someone's at work on Mal Evans, one of the road managers. Will there also be a book each from every act on the same label? Everyone who ever covered or revived a Lennon-McCartney song? The foresters who felled the trees to make the paper on which they were written?
I'll stop being facetious for long enough to state that Robert Bartel is infinitely better qualified to write such a tome than Arnie or anyone like him, having gone so far beyond the call of duty in rooting out biographical nooks and crannies of his chosen saga to both over-satisfy the soul of the most fixated Beatle trivia freak and provide the last word on the matter for everyone else.
Over a quarter of a century ago, Rob introduced himself to me at a Beatlefest in Chicago. 'They kept me alive in the 1960s when things were not always good,' he says of the pop combo that launched a thousand fanzines. Through one of these, Rob had met future wife Janice in 1991. They wed on John Lennon's birthday two years later. Their house in Springfield, Illinois is a shrine to The Beatles with rooms full of neatly-displayed memorabilia, whether 1964 bubble-gum card, an autographed limited-edition George Harrison songbook or a signed photo of Sean and Yoko Lennon with Santa Claus.
The Bartels' devotion epitomizes the precise difference between the North American and the British attitudes towards John, Paul, George, and Ringo. This is a silly analogy, but if Beatlemania lasts a lifetime for British fans, it's for all eternity for US opposite numbers like Rob - who, if a business consultant and private investigator by occupation, functions outside the firm's time as a poet and Beatles historian. In the latter capacity, he campaigned tirelessly to save from demolition the house in Benton, Illinois where the late George Harrison spent a holiday a few months before The Beatles' messianic descent on Kennedy Airport in February 1964 to spearhead what has passed into myth as the 'British Invasion' of North America.
This episode lies at the heart of this absorbing book - which, tempering imagination with sound sense and a subtle sense of humor, goes beyond mere literary competence to lighting-bright inspiration, within the scope and the idiosyncratic nature of a project that is as entertaining in its way as the musician from half-a-world away that triggered it.
Alan Clayson, London, March 2019