Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles

Even before the Beatles hit the big time, a myth was created. This version of the Beatles begins in Liverpool, a hard city knocked on its heels. In the housing projects and school playgrounds, four boys would discover themselves — and via late-night radio broadcasts, a new form of music called rock 'n roll. Author Bob Spitz was invited on the “Today” show to discuss his book, “The Beatles.” Here's an excerpt:

Chapter 1: A Proper Upbringing
Water. Those who were drawn to it — the seafarers to whom the infinitesimal lap against a bow and the white blown spray prefigured a window on the world, the merchants and craftsmen who plied goods from the North and Midlands into commercial dynasties, and the dockhands and laborers bred to keep the machinery moving — allowed the mystery of the Mersey to lay hold of their imagination. The river, with its dark, brooding magnetism, drove the city as if throughout its existence it had been waiting for a subject as pliant and as pure as these shores, those spiny timber docks, that rim of sea. This wasn’t a typical Lancashire shoreline, fashioned for pleasure boats and sunbathers, but a remarkable seven-and-a-half-mile natural harbor studded with chocolate-dark rock that clung to Liverpool’s lofty townscape like a dressmaker’s hem. The nucleus of the dock system, with its imposing mass of antique structures — warehouses, embankments, swing bridges, overhead railways, and gates—fed a humped dense center of red brick and church spires, itself a sort of iron splash that provided a nicely supporting symmetry all around.

The people living within these confines saw the seaport as a threshold on the horizon. Beyond it, an invisible world beckoned. Not a day passed when detachments of tall-masted ships weren’t diligently on the move, bound for one of the globe’s imagined corners.

Liverpool considered itself “the Gateway to the British Empire” for its mastery of imperial trade. And yet to the rest of the country, especially those living in tweedy London, Liverpool was an anglicized Siberia: desolate, insular, meaningless — out of sight, out of mind. Hardworking, dressed darkly, and forgotten. The prejudice was no secret, and it made those men and women of the North fierce and intimate. People from Liverpool called themselves “Scousers,” giving their common kinship an exalted magic, in much the way that Ozark Mountain dwellers are called hillbillies. The term was derived from the nautical lobscouse, a sailor’s dish consisting of meat stewed with vegetables and a ship biscuit but revised over the years by the Irish custom of keeping a pan of scouse stew simmering on the stove all week, to which table scraps and leftovers were added as they became available. “Scousers have a fierce local patriotism,” says Mersey Beat founder Bill Harry, who grew up in the center of town at the same time as the Beatles. “It’s like belonging to your own country. A real Scouser believes he is fighting everybody else in the world, and that everyone is against him, especially Londoners. He defends this position eloquently — with his fists.”

Like many seaside boys, the four young men who would form the Beatles were absurdly modest, considering the outlet water provided: “to be the best band in Liverpool” was all they ever wanted. The Mersey was their only river.

Two hundred years before the Beatles crossed the water to “take America by storm,” the ships of Liverpool rode the seas in service to the upstart colonies, whose landowners coveted burly African slaves. Merseyside magnates, loathing the practice of slavery but drunk on its profits, sent “stout little ships” laden with blue and green Manchester cottons and striped loincloths called “anabasses” down the Atlantic to West Africa, where, on the swampy, malaria-ridden island of Gorée, they bartered textiles with Arab and African flesh peddlers for human cargo. This, according to ships’ logs and harbor records, was the first leg of a triangular route for the so-called African trade, a twelve-month journey that required an arduous “middle passage,” docking next in either Virginia or the West Indies, where cotton or sugar, respectively, was then dispatched to Liverpool.

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