Living the Beatles Legend
The Untold Story of Mal Evans
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- 27,99 €
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- 27,99 €
Publisher Description
The first full-length biography of Mal Evans, the Beatles’ beloved friend, confidant, and roadie.
Malcolm Evans, the Beatles’ long-time roadie, personal assistant, and devoted friend, was an invaluable member of the band’s inner circle. A towering figure in horn-rimmed glasses, Evans loomed large in the Beatles’ story, contributing at times as a performer and sometime lyricist, while struggling mightily to protect his beloved “boys.” He was there for the whole of the group’s remarkable, unparalleled story: from the Shea Stadium triumph through the creation of the timeless cover art for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the famous Let It Be rooftop concert.
Leaving a stable job as telecommunications engineer to serve as road manager for this fledgling band, Mal was the odd man out from the start—older, married with children, and without any music business experience. And yet he threw himself headlong into their world, traveling across the globe and making himself indispensable.
In the years after the Beatles’ disbandment, Big Mal continued in their employ as each embarked upon solo careers. By 1974, he was determined to make his name as a songwriter and record producer, setting off for a new life in Los Angeles, where he penned his memoirs. But in January 1976, on the verge of sharing his book with the world, Evans’s story came to a tragic end during a domestic standoff with the LAPD.
For Beatles devotes, Mal’s life and untimely death have always been shrouded in mystery. For decades, his diaries, manuscripts, and vast collection of memorabilia was missing, seemingly lost forever…until now.
Working with full access to Mal’s unpublished archives and having conducted hundreds of new interviews, Beatles’ scholar and author Kenneth Womack affords readers with a full telling of Mal’s unknown story at the heart of the Beatles’ legend. Lavishly illustrated with unseen photos and ephemera from Mal’s archives, Living the Beatles’ Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans is the missing puzzle piece in the Fab Four’s incredible story.
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Biographer Womack (John Lennon 1980) provides an exhaustive chronicle of Beatles' road manager Malcolm Evans, from his days as a patron of Liverpool's Cavern Club, where the band got their start, to globe-crossing tours with the Fab Four between 1963 and 1966. Evans became the group's road manager in 1963 and adopted a jack-of-all-trades role: cameoing in promotional videos; singing harmonies on recordings; briefly serving as managing director at Apple Records, the label the Beatles formed in 1968; and even co-writing such songs as 1967's "Fixing a Hole" with Paul McCartney, though he didn't receive credit or royalties. After the band's 1974 breakup, Evans managed John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr and nursed dreams of becoming "a star in his own right," though his life came to a tragic end at age 40 when he was shot by the police during a domestic disturbance. Womack's account is full of thrilling moments—the 1973 theft of Harrison's prized guitar "Lucy" and Mal's efforts to get it back being a highlight—even if it's sometimes bogged down by minutiae (every broken guitar string seems recorded) and the author's fawning hyperbole ("For the Beatles themselves, the highlight of the European sojourn was the Italians' wide-eyed wonder at the image of colossal Mal lugging their equipment"). Still, devoted fans of the band will find much to cheer about.
