Michael McCartney, Paul McCartney's younger brother, had a backstage pass to one of the most significant events in music and social history: the emergence of the Beatles. Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Pete Best were a close group of Liverpool friends, each dreaming to transcend their working-class backgrounds and affect the world with their music and artistic message. They came together in the late fifties, blasting the world with a new sound and a new consciousness, fully realizing their dream faster than even they could have imagined.
With the family's Kodak Box Brownie, Michael photographed instinctively and captured precious Beatles' moments on film. Paul's consistent request to Michael was, "Make me look famous," and Michael obliged, knowing intuitively that someday he and his subject would not have to pretend.
Now, for the first time, these rare photographs, some of which have never been seen before, are gathered here with Michael's eyewitness accounts of the early history of this phenomenal group, their roots and their dreams. The book opens with family snapshots of the McCartneys and their home, with its patched carpet and wallpaper, as well as scenes depicting the boys' sadness at their mother's early death. Lucky for us, Paul's refuge from grief was his guitar and Michael's was his camera.
Join Michael, Paul, and the other Beatles during the Liverpool days at the Cavern Club and the Tower Ballroom. Michael captures the boys' transition from amateur musicians to potential superstars at the hand of Brian Epstein, who directed them to give up their leather jackets and slicked hair for tailored suits and moptops and, more significantly, decreed the final performance of drummer Pete Best, ushering in Ringo Starr on white drums.
Paul's twenty-first birthday party; Paul and George's first cars; old girlfriends; secret wives; and the growing crowd - all these and more were the subjects of Michael's all-seeing camera. Photographs taken on the set of Help!; the boys with their favorite musicians (at first requesting to have their pictures taken with the stars, then the stars asking to be in pictures with them); Paul in his first press interview; John and Paul writing songs in the McCartney living room; street scenes and significant places in Liverpool, the city that shaped so much of the Beatle repertoire.
Do you remember? Probably, but not like Michael McCartney and his camera do.