When They Were Boys
The True Story of the Beatles' Rise to the Top
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Narrated by:
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Mel Foster
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By:
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Larry Kane
About this listen
This is the real story of the Beatles' harrowing rise to fame, focusing on that seven-year stretch from the time the boys met as teenagers in the 1950s to early 1964, when the Fab Four prepared to invade America. From the boys' humble beginnings in Liverpool, to the cellars of Hamburg, When They Were Boys includes stories never before told, including heartbreaks, lucky breaks, and dramatic twists of timing, fate, loyalty, and betrayal. Included are an eyewitness account of that first meeting between Lennon and McCartney, the inside story of how Ringo replaced Pete Best, an exploration of the brilliant but troubled soul of manager Brian Epstein, the real scoop on their disastrous first visit to Germany, and the death of Stu Sutcliffe. With an eye for life in Liverpool during the 50s and 60s, and with the help of his own conversations with the Beatles in the early years, Larry Kane brings to life the evolution of the group that changed music forever.
©2013 Larry Kane (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Overall
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In Catch a Wave, Peter Ames Carlin pulls back the curtain on Brian Wilson, one of popular music's most revered luminaries, as well as its biggest mystery. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and never-before heard studio recordings, Carlin follows the Beach Boys from their earliest days through Brian's deepening emotional problems to his triumphant re-emergence with the release of Smile, the legendarily unreleased album he had originally shelved.
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Not great
- By J. Barker on 08-08-16
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Bright lights dark shadows
- The real story of Abba
- By: Carl Palm
- Narrated by: Adrian Mulraney
- Length: 26 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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An exploration of all aspects of the Abba member’s lives and careers. Amazingly detailed, it examines the group member’s family backgrounds, the pre-Abba days, the legendary 70s, the marriages, the divorces, the business ups and downs, and the post-Abba solo careers.
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Awesome! -- All the Swedish words pronounced!
- By Howard_a on 06-18-12
By: Carl Palm
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Beatles '66
- The Revolutionary Year
- By: Steve Turner
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The year that changed everything for the Beatles was 1966 - the year of their last concert and of Revolver, their first album created to be listened to rather than performed. This was the year the Beatles risked their popularity by retiring from live performances, recording songs that explored alternative states of consciousness, experimenting with avant-garde ideas, and speaking their minds on issues of politics, war, and religion. Music journalist and Beatles expert Steve Turner investigates the enormous changes that took place in the Beatles' lives and work during 1966.
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Great listen
- By Tad Davis on 07-28-18
By: Steve Turner
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Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?
- Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock
- By: Gregory Alan Thornbury
- Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1969, in Capitol Records' Hollywood studio, a blonde-haired troubadour named Larry Norman laid track for an album that would launch a new genre of music and one of the strangest, most interesting careers in modern rock. Having spent the bulk of the 1960s playing on bills with acts like The Who, Janis Joplin, and The Doors, Norman decided that he wanted to sing about the most countercultural subject of all: Jesus.
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Hagiography not Biography
- By Keith Howard on 10-29-18
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Iggy Pop
- Open Up and Bleed
- By: Paul Trynka
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Iggy Pop's legendary career has been tumultuous, reaching great heights with mega-hits and then hitting rock-bottom lows in jail and mental institutions. Along the way, he's become a cult-rock hero, an inspiration for dozens of other famous rockers, and has had a pretty good time of it, too. But the image of Iggy Pop versus the man behind that image, James Newell Osterberg, Jr., is surprisingly contradictory.
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Banal and Boring
- By Michael on 12-03-08
By: Paul Trynka
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Thelonious Monk
- The Life and Times of an American Original
- By: Robin DG Kelley
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 25 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the 20th century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers.
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The definitive bio of Monk
- By ricardo on 12-27-17
By: Robin DG Kelley
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Kicking and Dreaming
- A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock and Roll
- By: Ann Wilson, Nancy Wilson
- Narrated by: Ann Wilson, Nancy Wilson
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Two sisters. Two voices. One Heart.
The mystery of "Magic Man." The wicked riff of "Barracuda." The sadness and beauty of "Alone." The raw energy of "Crazy On You." These songs, and so many more, are part of the fabric of American music. Heart, fronted by Ann and Nancy Wilson, has given fans everywhere classic, raw, and pure badass rock and roll for more than three decades. As the only sisters in rock who write their own music and play their own instruments, Ann and Nancy have always stood apart - certainly from their male counterparts but also from their female peers.
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Good Behind-The-Scenes Look At "Heart"
- By Kathy on 11-13-12
By: Ann Wilson, and others
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Unchained
- The Eddie Van Halen Story
- By: Paul Brannigan
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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From the moment their hugely influential 1978 debut landed, Van Halen set a high bar for the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, creating an entirely new style of post-'60s hard rock and becoming the quintessential rock band of the 1980s. But the high-flying success was fraught with difficulty, as Eddie struggled with alcohol and drug addiction while simultaneously battling David Lee Roth over the musical direction of the band, eventually taking the band in an entirely new direction with Sammy Hagar and scaling new heights, before that iteration of Van Halen disintegrated.
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Please don't read other audible books
- By Mike on 02-01-22
By: Paul Brannigan
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Never a Dull Moment
- 1971 - the Year That Rock Exploded
- By: David Hepworth
- Narrated by: David Hepworth
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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On New Year's Eve, 1970, Paul McCartney told his lawyers to issue the writ at the High Court in London, effectively ending The Beatles. You might say this was the last day of the pop era. The following day, which was a Friday, was 1971. You might say this was the first day of the rock era. And within the remaining 364 days of this monumental year, the world would hear Don McLean's "American Pie", The Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar", The Who's "Baba O'Riley", Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven", and more.
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A blast from the past
- By Amazon Customer on 07-30-16
By: David Hepworth
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Tearing Down the Wall of Sound
- The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector
- By: Mick Brown
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 17 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Phil Spector, born in the Bronx in 1940, grew up an outsider despised by his peers. But he formed a band, and had a number-one hit with "To Know Him Is to Love Him". He quickly became the top producer of early rock and roll and the originator of such girl groups as the Ronettes. Hit followed hit, and for all of them he used a new recording style called the "wall of sound". But the reign of the boy-man who owned pop music was doomed, and Spector spiraled into paranoid isolation and peculiar behavior.
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Descent Into Madness
- By Chris on 06-11-12
By: Mick Brown
What listeners say about When They Were Boys
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Laurzie
- 08-12-13
Some new stories, many inaccuracies, poor narrator
How could the performance have been better?
I found the narration quite irritating. The narrator's voice is cheesy, his pace is slow, and he constantly sounds amazed by everything, which gets old very quickly. The overall effect is that he almost sounds like he is speaking to an audience of young children. When reading quotations by interviewees, almost all of whom are British, he adopts a very gruff, folksy (American) style that seems totally out of place. If he couldn't do a Liverpudlian accent, he should have just read the quotes in his regular voice instead of using an exaggeratedly American accent that obviously sounds nothing like the original speakers. In contrast, German interviewees were portrayed with German accents, which was weird and inconsistent. The narrator's mispronunciation of names was also annoying; for example, he repeatedly pronounces the name of Liverpool's famous Liver Building as in the organ rather than as in the word "alive".
Any additional comments?
The most positive thing that I can say about this book is that it contains quite a bit of original research; Larry Kane clearly conducted new interviews with many players in the Beatles' early days, both in Liverpool and Hamburg. As someone who has read MANY books about the band, I appreciated hearing new stories and perspectives.
Unfortunately, the book is riddled with inaccuracies that are very obvious to the well-versed listener. For example, when Kane describes Yoko Ono's first visit to John's Aunt Mimi, he quotes her as saying something along the lines of "John's Uncle George was just sitting in the corner, like he was afraid to speak." It's not surprising that Uncle George didn't say much, given the fact that he had been dead for more than a decade. Since this is a book that only covers the band's early days, I felt that the treatment of their childhoods was generally quite superficial, and this is borne out by the fact that Kane fails to mention Uncle George's death at all (possibly not being aware of it himself?). The obvious misquoting of Yoko also makes me wonder who else he is misquoting throughout the book.
The book is not very well-written and its style can be very grating. When Kane quotes interviewees, the constant interposition of his own name is totally excessive, and suggests that he is trying to reinforce his own "insider" status. Even if everyone he interviewed really did preface all their statements with "you know, Larry," and "I'll tell you, Larry," these phrases should not have been included in the quotations. The style is generally very informal and at times it seems like it is aimed toward children rather than adults, due to digressions like "Can you imagine what it was like to use an outdoor toilet in 30 degree weather?" Also, I got the impression that Kane pretty much took the part of everyone he interviewed, so that if he had happened to interview a different set of people, the book's perspective would have been totally different. He is especially credulous when it came to the sacking of Pete Best, pretty much accepting the Best family's interpretation of events without looking very much to other sources or perspectives. Without any comment, he repeats a Best family claim that George Martin told Pete's mother that he had booked a session drummer because Pete's drum sound was "too big," which makes no sense (as well as coming from a very biased source). Kane never seems to evaluate the reliability of his interview subjects or to assess their possible motives, which I think makes his reporting much less credible.
Overall, the book is probably worth a listen if you are a serious fan, because it does contain some new information, but do not expect an excellent piece of journalism. Having access to many Beatles insiders, I think that Kane largely wasted his opportunity to produce a definitive document of Beatles' early days.
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