Paul McCartney: The Life -- biography by Philip Norman | Page 2 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I will be very interested to read your review, Dr. Beatle. This in particular interested me:

DrBeatle said 

I’ve read the foreword to the book so far and in it, Norman explains how Paul was his favorite of the Beatles when he interviewed them back in the 1960s but he felt so betrayed by their split and Paul’s (supposed) role in it that he spent the next few decades torching Paul (he almost seemed like a jilted lover, it was weird to read!) before realizing the error of his ways only in the last decade or so. Very strange…

I confess, I have a very hard time swallowing Norman’s justification of why he was so blatantly biased against Paul for decades. Now that he’s writing a biography of Paul — one whose main audience will presumably be Paul fans — Norman suddenly really liked Paul! He just felt betrayed by the breakup-era version of events and is now admitting the error of his ways. This smacks of authorial revisionism to me, as Norman desperately attempts to salvage his reputation as a Beatles authority by attempting to backtrack from his previously admittedly biased and “unfair” depiction of Paul in every edition of Shout!   

This isn’t what Norman was saying in 1981, when he was declaring on television that John was “75% of the Beatles,” or when he was writing facetious poems arguing that they “should bury (Paul) soon” … “in the middlemost middle of the road.” It wasn’t what he was saying in 2005 when he admitted, in the revised edition of Shout!, that he was an admitted “John” person, and that he didn’t like either Paul’s 70’s personae or music, or in later interviews with the NYT that he had been admittedly unfair to Paul in Shout! (To say nothing of how he depicted George, who might as well have been a scowling, useless lump in Norman’s eyes). So Norman’s mistaken feeling of betrayal over Paul’s perceived role in being solely to blame for the breakup is supposed to justify Norman’s decades-long bashing of Paul, and Linda, and even Stella — who according to Norman, the great fashion expert, has no talent whatsoever. What’s his justification for his rotten depiction of George, then? And his total lack of interest in Ringo? Even if this is Norman’s justification for why he was admittedly pro-John and anti/Paul/George for the last four decades, it’s a crummy one. It’s pretty obvious by 1973– when John, George, and Ringo refuse to renew their contracts with Klein and then sue him — that Paul wasn’t the mustache-twirling sole villain of the breakup, so how can Norman use that justification for a biography that was written in the late 1970s?

I think Norman is trying to save face. I’m still fascinated to see how he’s going to approach the Paul bio, but I’m going to have my salt-shaker ready.  

DrBeatle said
I’m halfway through the book and so far, so good. He’s fair to Paul in the main, critical when it’s deserved but very complimentary when it’s warranted, as well.

What do you think about his depiction of George? Norman’s work has been pretty uniformly negative regarding both George’s personality and musicianship, and that didn’t really change very much in the 2008 Lennon bio. Has George been granted a basic level of impartial analysis, or is he still a perpetually scowling grump and “average guitarist” who can only produce great work by imitating John?