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Indian Express
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
The Beatles and their disruptive trip to India: The ‘Transcendental Meditation' that changed the Abbey Road musicians forever
By any standard, The Beatles will remain one of the biggest, most prolific, controversial, and iconic bands of all time. Remember the pretentious guy from 10th grade who always carried around a small leather diary with him, the old widower uncle on your block growing up, or the inspiring English professor from your American Literature class in college who made you feel like opening up a dead poet's society of your own. They all listened to the Beatles because the band, like a few other phenomena in the world, wasn't just famous or sought after because of their product; it was because of what they represented and how they made you feel when you associated with their identity, for better or for worse. For example, the Cali Cartel exported and controlled just as much cocaine in their heyday, if not more, as the Medellin Cartel did. But you ask a layman who Rodriguez Orejuela was. It's likely they won't be able to give you the right answer. But ask them about Pablo Escobar, and they will recite for you their favourite dialogues from the Narcos series on Netflix (by the way, they made a season about the Cali guys too; no one cared). Yes, a drug lord who killed thousands of people during his reign is somewhat of an unsuitable person to be compared with the Abbey Road quartet, but Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and John Lennon, together, had a drug-like hold on their listeners. A drug that would make them keep coming back, a drug that made you cool just by association, and let's be honest, The Beatles weren't pumping out album after album, surviving on Earl Grey tea and English muffins. The boys got together in 1962, after the trio of McCartney, Harrison and Lennon finally found the right drummer in Starr. Soon after their first hit, 'Love Me Do', manager Brian Epstein played all the right moves, and through his grooming and moulding process, out came the biggest rock group in the world. They would go on to make 12 studio albums in the short span of 8 years, due to the power of Earl Grey tea and Scouse, of course. ALSO READ: 'P Diddy would rather die than let go of rights to Biggie Smalls' music': How Diddy was at the epicentre of both Tupac and Biggie's death The amount of music they were putting out was almost too much, and say what you will, the guys knew their stuff. Apart from being amazing musicians, Lennon and McCartney were incredible writers, artists who were more susceptible to inspiration and ideas for a bridge than Joseph B. Strauss (he wasn't a musician, just the guy who built the Golden Gate Bridge). Harrison and Starr were expert executioners of their writers' vision, and together they worked hard day and night to earn their place in the Mount Rushmore of music, if not at the peak of Everest. But that kind of schedule, along with the 'calm and sober' lifestyle of a rock star, can be taxing on the body, and soon the street outside Abbey Road Studios became too long a course to chart, and they were exhausted. It was getting difficult keeping up appearances while trying to manage your career, wives, extramarital affairs and dentists serving you coffee laced with LSD, which, considering the 60s, was probably part of the dental plan for musicians. The Beatles needed a break, and Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd, the woman who was described as the modern-day Helen of Troy by LA magazine, suggested 'Transcendental Meditation' to the group. This was a revelation, and without any delay, the Beatles travelled to Rishikesh to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Liverpool to Rishikesh The Beatles had previously met the Maharishi during a lecture in London and a 10-day workshop in Wales (with Mick Jagger by the way), a trip they had to cut short because Epstein suddenly passed away. They were then invited to join him at his main ashram, where the Beatles would end up writing close to 50 songs, with many of them ending up on their next project, 'The White Album'. Even though the Beatles had sold millions of records all over the world and had probably witnessed every comfort known to man, they were taken aback when they reached the Ashram. 14 acres of land consisting of six long bungalows, each containing five or six double rooms, and the rooms were equipped with four-poster beds and an electric fire system. Along with all that, there was a post office, a lecture theatre and a swimming pool. All four of them were now determined to make the most of this trip, and Harrison and Lennon were the most affected by the teachings. After the band met the Maharishi in Wales, they had decided to give up drugs, just like Jimi Hendrix switched to the tambourine after playing the 'Star-Spangled Banner'. Even after this supposed break from drugs, Lennon admitted that he was hallucinating during his time at the Ashram, and his claims were backed by his wife, Cynthia Lennon, who said in Bob Spitz's book The Beatles that Harrison and Lennon had completely accepted the teachings of the Maharishi. However, Starr and McCartney weren't having that much of a jolly time and left soon after a couple of weeks. The band tripped for days, just on meditation apparently, and wrote an entire album while denying a Lord of The Rings movie (story for another time). But as half of the group departed, the other two maybe went too deep. ALSO READ: Frank Sinatra 'facilitated' John F Kennedy's other life, but couldn't outrun his mafia connections: The rise and ruin of their unlikely friendship Boyd, who introduced Harrison to the entire scheme, admitted later on that the teachings had gotten a hold of him, and so had alcohol and drugs. Lennon who was apparently already thinking about bringing his then muse Yoko Ono on the trip along with his wife, asked for separate rooms for him and his wife after just a few days in Rishikesh. Their relationship would never get back to normal, ultimately leading to a divorce. Through the Ashram and his muse, Lennon had shed the skin of the young and innocent Scouser, and the man that emerged wanted to change the world, and his own life with it. He had already been drifting towards politics and activism before Rishikesh, many fans and members of the band accused his relationship with Ono to be one of the reason, they broke up. Lennon admitted later on that the moment he saw Ono was the moment he knew his days with the old gang were over. Soon Lennon and Harrison also left upon discovering the Maharishi's involvement in sexual assault cases, even though it was never proved. But even though the boys were all back in good old England, the distance had already been created. During this very week in 1968, the Beatles started recording 'The White Album' at the Abbey Road Studios, and to the average Joe, it was just another great project. Songs filled to the brim with mystique of the East, songs that brought out a different side of the Beatles, a broken side of the Beatles. The strum of the guitar still blended perfectly with the thrum of the drums, the tempo still intact, and the different voices and harmonies still so seamlessly brought together that they sounded one. But the trip, like perceived by many, wasn't a breather; it was a moment of realisation for all four men that they didn't need to be the greatest band in the world anymore. It was enough, all that they had done, and if the sun had set on the Beatles on the day they released the White Album, it would be alright. They did end up working on another album, but personal turmoils, failing relationships and four broken minds were enough to stop this madness. Seeds of discontent had been sown long before the trip and maybe whatever they experienced in India, just exacerbated the whole situation. All four of the Beatles left their wives following that trip, with McCartney's marriage lasting the longest. The group went their separate ways, and the band was legally disbanded in 1974. Even though they were gone in such a short time, everyone listened to the Beatles. They were probably the first band to be famous enough to be recognised by all, even if many never listened to a single thing they put out. It wasn't about what they sang; it was always about who they were and what they represented, and maybe the pretentious guy from your school whom we talked about earlier isn't all too bad, because no matter who they were and what they did, the Beatles were cool; it's that simple.
New York Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What Ron Chernow Loves About Mark Twain
The biographer Ron Chernow has written about the Rockefellers and the Morgans. His book about George Washington won a Pulitzer Prize. His book about Alexander Hamilton was adapted into a hit Broadway musical. Now, in 'Mark Twain,' Chernow turns to the life of the author and humorist who became one of the 19th century's biggest celebrities and, along the way, did much to reshape American literature in his own image. On this week's episode of the podcast, Chernow tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he came to write about Twain and what interested him most about his subject. 'The thing that triggered this Mark Twain mania in me was more Mark Twain the platform artist, Mark Twain the political pundit, Mark Twain the original celebrity, even more than Mark Twain the novelist or short story writer,' Chernow says. But at the same time, 'I felt that he was very seminal in terms of bringing, to American literature, really bringing the heartland alive — writing about ordinary people in the vernacular and taking this wild throbbing kind of madcap culture, of America's small towns in rural areas, and really introducing that into fiction.' We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A New Biography of Mark Twain Doesn't Have Much of What Made Him Great
Ron Chernow's new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain's career like a McMansion. Chernow, who has previously written lives of financial titans, war heroes and founding fathers, misses the man William Faulkner called 'the father of American literature' almost entirely. He demonstrates little feeling for the deeper and least domesticated regions of Twain's art, or for the literary context of his era. His book is an endurance test, one that skimps on the things that formed Twain and made him the most lucid, profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty American of his time. Hardy will be the souls who tour this air-conditioned edifice all the way through and glimpse the exit sign. Chernow is the author, most famously, of 'Alexander Hamilton' (2004), which Lin-Manuel Miranda devoured while on a vacation and metamorphosed into the rap musical 'Hamilton,' which became a cultural and commercial juggernaut. Chernow got his start writing books about the Morgans, the Warburgs and other financial dynasties, including a life of John D. Rockefeller, before moving on to even more conspicuous figures such as Hamilton, George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. Many of his books have been best sellers, and his biography of Washington won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. He is probably, alongside Walter Isaacson, the best-known biographer of his time. The crucial moments in most biographies tend to arrive early, when a life begins to deviate from those around it — those moments when the future forks, when there's a sheep-versus-goat separation. The biggest mistake Chernow makes is to blow through the vital first third of Twain's life in a fleet 150 or so pages. This period includes the footloose, incident-packed childhood in slave-owning Hannibal, Mo., that informed both 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and his masterpiece, 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' It includes the feverish years when Twain was soaking up America's vicissitudes as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, time he funneled into the spooky and incandescent 'Life on the Mississippi.' It includes his journey out West, sometimes prospecting in Nevada, which became 'Roughing It,' and the around-the-world, seat-of-the-pants travels that he reworked into 'The Innocents Abroad.' This is an imposing cargo of experience that Chernow never fully inhabits — it's all over in what seems like a series of postcards. Twain is married to Olivia Langdon and has settled down by Page 166 of Chernow's book. He is 34 and will live to be 74. Here is when the alert reader, weighing the left and right sides of the elephantine volume in his lap, notices there are still 850 pages to go. How will the author fill them? There is writing to be done and lecture tours to be taken; we seem to go boat by boat and hotel by hotel. There is squabbling with editors and publishers, and the decision to go into publishing himself. There are more lecture tours, and ruinous business adventures — the financial writer in Chernow is more at ease with this material. His Twain is fundamentally a dupe, not a genius. There are cigars to be smoked, a headline-making bankruptcy and more tours. There are the interviews he tended to give while in bed. There is a complicated relationship (apparently not sexual) with the woman who became his aide-de-camp after Olivia's death, health problems and a troubling late-life fixation on tween girls. There is a great deal about the ailments and other woes of his four children, Langdon, Susy, Clara and Jean — the last two especially. The stories of Twain's children, who either died young or suffered innumerable medical and professional setbacks, are heart-rending and hardly uninteresting. But Chernow goes so deeply into the weeds of their lives, a series of parallel hells, that this book is like a biography of Ronald Reagan that goes all in on Patti and Ron Jr., or a biography of Frank Zappa that gets lost in the life and times of Dweezil and Moon Unit. This is just one of the ways that Chernow's gift for condensation, unmistakable in earlier books like 'The Death of the Banker' and even the hefty 'Washington,' fails him after the first third of this 1,100-page book. By comparison, Justin Kaplan's penetrating 1966 biography, 'Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain,' which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, came in at a brisk 424 pages. Ron Powers's more recent biography, 'Mark Twain: A Life' (2005), a book that has more ragtime in its soul than Chernow's, wrapped up the life in 722 pages. At the rate we are heading, Twain's next overkill biographer will deliver a page for every day he was on the planet. Twain — born Samuel Langhorne Clemens — entered this world in Florida, Mo., on Nov. 30, 1835. His family moved to Hannibal, a port town, when he was 4. His father was a mostly unsuccessful lawyer, a downbeat man who also worked as a shopkeeper, postmaster and judge. Twain got his sense of humor from his mother, as well as his poker-faced delivery. He dropped out of school, where he'd learned to hate apple-polishers and phonies, to become a printer's apprentice before drifting into journalism, where he discovered he had a knack for embellishment and hyperbole. Clemens published his first piece under the byline 'Mark Twain' — a call used on riverboats to indicate a safe depth of water — in 1863, when he was 27. He'd experimented with other pseudonyms, including Rambler, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass and Josh. It's painful to imagine American literature without the ideal name Mark Twain, 'short and melodious — a perfect spondee,' as Chernow points out. Twain had a striking look from the time he was young. In early photographs, he can resemble Billy the Kid, then Joe Walsh, then early Jimmy Buffett, then Kurt Vonnegut before emerging as the crinkly, shambolic, mustachioed, bushy-browed, white-linen-suit-wearing sage of his later years. There was something about his eyes — an intensity, a shrewdness. One observer commented that they were 'so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me.' Women found Twain appealing — he seemed to stride out of a billiards-room fantasy — but he lacked confidence with them. 'He was a wild man in every respect except sex,' Chernow writes. His wife, known as Livy, was the sheltered daughter of a coal baron. She didn't have a well-developed sense of humor, but she steadied Twain. She was a strong post to lean against, and theirs was a great love. She worked to civilize him, not always effectively. They evolved a system of codes, so that she could inform him in real time when he was being a bore at a dinner party. She became her husband's first reader and, controversially, bowdlerized a good deal of his prose, excising jokes and what she saw as vulgarities ('breech-clout,' 'stench' and 'retching' included). The Twain's family's most idyllic years were spent in Hartford, Conn., where they lived in a mansion of their own design that some thought resembled a gingerbread house, a folly. The Twains traveled like plutocrats, in private railroad cars, before financial miscues — notably Twain's deep investments in a novel typesetting machine that flopped — drove them to Europe, where they could live more cheaply, for nearly a decade. Chernow's book traces what William Dean Howells called Twain's desouthernization. He shed many of the prejudices of his youth and became a stalwart northern liberal — one of the most enlightened men of his time on matters of race, religion, colonialism, suffrage, antisemitism and monarchy. Still, Chernow misjudges and overplays some of this material, arguing, for example, that Twain's impassioned stance (he took a lot of impassioned stances) against America's imperialist adventures in the Philippines is 'no less a part of his legacy than his creation of Tom and Becky, Jim and Huck.' It's a sentence that draws a line under some of this book's problems. This is the first major biography of Twain to appear after Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Though Twain was progressive for his time — he wrote America's great antislavery novel, befriended Frederick Douglass and put a Black student though Yale, among other things — he could be crude sometimes in his letters, and elsewhere, about Black and Native Americans and Jews. Chernow, to his credit, closely attends to these missteps. He goes far deeper than previous biographers have into Twain's affection-starved interest in what he called his 'Angelfish' — the young girls who, late in his life, formed a kind of harem around him. He had no grandchildren during his lifetime. Was he simply trying to find an outlet for his grandfatherly feelings? If so, why only girls? 'Young girls innocent & natural — I love 'em same as others love infants,' he wrote. At the time, no one found Twain's behavior creepy, not even, apparently, the girls' mothers. (A pin he gave to one of the girls turned up not long ago on an episode of 'Antiques Roadshow.') There is no indication that Twain groped or took advantage of any of these girls, but the information, which Chernow lays out like a detective, is disturbing and sobering. Twain was no special fan of biographies. He said that they are 'but the clothes and buttons of a man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.' Chernow's biography has clothes and buttons galore but misplaces the man. The whip of Twain's wit is here, but it's laid out like slides in a biology class. 'Any time you mention a river in America you are thinking about the Mississippi,' Bob Dylan writes in his most recent book, 'The Philosophy of Modern Song.' It's largely because of Twain that this is so — he planted a pirate's flag on our literature — but you don't sense that river's, or Twain's, primal currents here. This trip, rather than providing the rush of experience, makes you feel lashed to the mast.
Associated Press
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Book Review: Ron Chernow's 'Mark Twain' gives readers an honest assessment of beloved author's life
Pulitzer Prize winning author Ron Chernow is known for writing massive biographies of the country's most enduring figures, including Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Hamilton. So it comes as no surprise that his biography of author and humorist Mark Twain clocks in at more than 1,000 pages. It's also forgivable, considering that Twain was such a colossal figure in American literature and history that his authorized biography was more than 1,500 pages long. Chernow's 'Mark Twain' is well worth that length to learn more about the author best known for introducing readers to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Chernow's aptly portrays Twain as someone who 'fairly invented our celebrity culture,' the precursor to the influencers that dominate our lives today. Twain had no qualms about cashing in on his fame, with his name being used to promote cigars, pipes and other products. But Twain was known just as much for the attitude linked to the humorist and his works. Twain, as Chernow describes him, was 'someone willing to tangle with anyone, make enemies and say aloud what other people only dared to think.' Chernow's biography avoids the trap of idolizing Twain and gives and honest assessment of the author's life, including his flaws and contradictions. Revered for addressing the evils of slavery in 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' Twain was also someone who avoided lending his voice to condemning the practice of lynching. That silence, Chernow writes, was a major missed opportunity to help foster a national debate. Chernow also delves into the uncomfortable subject of Twain's obsession in his later years with teenage girls, developing close friendships with teens that he dubbed his 'angelfish.' Chernow's willingness to give readers the unvarnished truth about Twain makes the biography stand out, as does his ability to simultaneously explore the historical and literary context of Twain's writing. Even Twain's lesser-known works are addressed. Twain comes alive in the pages of Chernow's biography, which shows much he was influenced by his wife and her 'delicate restraining hand.' It also portrays the complex and fraught relationship Twain had with his daughters. The book drags at some points, which is inevitable in a tome of this size, and is strongest when it tells the relationship Twain had with the written word. Chernow writes that 'words were his catharsis, his therapy, his preferred form of revenge.' The recurring theme of Chernow's biography is Twain's love affair with the written word, and it ably demonstrates the impact that relationship had on a nation. ___ AP book reviews:
Wall Street Journal
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Mark Twain' Review: The Most American Writer
More than a century after his death, Mark Twain remains one of the most recognizable voices in American literature—the author of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876), 'Life on the Mississippi' (1883) and 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' (1884), the latter among the most consequential novels ever written in English and possibly (if you believe Ernest Hemingway) the source of American literature itself. That may be an exaggeration, but almost everything about Twain seems exaggerated as well as true. In his disapproval of Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, he called the president 'the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War,' a man 'always hunting for a chance to show off.' Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in 1835 in Florida, Mo., before moving, at the age of 4, to nearby Hannibal—his beloved 'white town drowsing' on the banks of the Mississippi. A roistering, high-spirited boy, he was described by his 'very pretty' neighbor, Laura Hawkins (the model for Becky Thatcher in 'Tom Sawyer'), as a barefoot lad who 'came out of his home, opposite mine, and started showing off, turning handsprings and cutting capers.' The showing off continued until his death in 1910. In his biography of the famed satirist, Ron Chernow tracks, with patience and care, Twain's journey over nearly eight tumultuous decades. Mr. Chernow's tale is enlivened by blazing quotes from Twain's prodigious interviews, diaries and letters. This literary bounty, of course, poses a problem for all Twain biographers, from his rambling but indispensable first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine (1912), through Van Wyck Brooks (1920), Justin Kaplan (1966) and Ron Powers (2005), among many others. The quotes tend to burn a hole in the page, and it's difficult for a biographer to recover. Mr. Chernow, whose lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Ulysses S. Grant are revered for their sound scholarship, clear writing and strong narrative drive, weaves Twain's sizzling remarks almost seamlessly into his own narrative.
