April 26, 2011

The Dreams That Filled Stadiums



From 1964, Brian Epstein appears as "Mr. X" on the popular television program What's My Line?

An immensely charming and intelligent man, Brian never had any sort of real happiness in his life, aside from his association with The Beatles as their manager. And even then, whatever happiness he managed to glean from that role was fleeting and unsatisfactory.

His interest in the group stemmed from his romantic interest in John Lennon, an interest that is said to have been reciprocated on several occasions. The two men took a vacation together to Barcelona, Spain in April 1963. Peter Brown reports in his excellent Beatle biopic The Love You Make that Lennon went along because he "...wanted to see what fucking a bloke was like."

John Lennon was often cruel to Brian Epstein about his homosexual proclivities. When Epstein wrote and published his autobiography in 1964, titled A Cellarful of Noise, Lennon's only reaction to the book was to snarl at Brian that the title should have been A Cellarful of Boys.

Brian Epstein died in his home on the 27th of August, 1967, from an accidental drug overdose. A notorious insomniac, one of the components in his sleeping tablets, carbitol, had built up to a lethal amount. Brian Epstein's heart simply stopped as a result.

In the end, I think Peter Brown put it best in The Love You Make:

"Here was a man whose passions had sparked an entertainment phenomenon, who had influenced the course of history, but the world would only remember his unhappiness and not the dreams that filled stadiums."


2 comments:

  1. i was lisening to 'and your bird can sing' from revolver when i read this. and it was wierd.

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  2. Please let us know if you ever get your writing published in a collection. I would be the first in line to buy it. Your blog and your writing are terrific. An inteligent oasis in so much stupidity on the Internet.

    ReplyDelete