Exclusive interview with author Randi Barrow and a review of her new novel, a story of chasing the Beatles in the summer of 1964
Rating: Three Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“Music has power like almost nothing else to connect us,” says Chasing the Beatles author Randi Barrow. “On some level I think that’s why I wrote this book…to time travel, and go back to 1964, and the swell of emotion and pleasure that came when the Beatles entered my life, and our culture.”
Annie Street’s cousin and best friend Bridget O’Malley is going through chemotherapy and has asked Annie to bring something, anything, to make her laugh. Annie digs out a manuscript she wrote in 1964 about their adventure chasing the Beatles. It has the crazy ideas, schemes, and adventures they had in their quest to get tickets for the sold-out concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The memories reading the manuscript may bring Bridget hope for the future.
Flashback to 1964: the Beatles are a global phenomenon. Girls from 13 to 25 are obsessed. Chasing the Beatles shows their love for music and the boys. The girls battle parents, rogue nuns, boys, institutions, and more, to be blessed in the end by surprising events,
This book touches heart and soul, reminds us of the power and magic of music, and the chance that impossible dreams may come true. However, the book doesn’t answer the question of what happens to Bridget in the present day. Do the memories of the magic summer of the Beatles help her to recovery or are they her last memory?
“When I began I thought, This will be a nice, lighthearted break from World War II, which is what I’d been writing about,” says Barrow. “But it turned out to be deep in its own way. What I realized as I wrote and talked to people about the subject, is what a yearning there is in people’s hearts for music that will move them again like the amazing music people of my generation grew up on. People become rapturous as they tell me about seeing the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, or Van Morrison at the Santa Monica Civic. Their voices change, they move differently, their eyes light up.”
“I lived in Santa Monica in 1964, and went to the Beatles concert at the Hollywood Bowl, so there was a lot I already knew and understood,” says Barrow. “It was a pleasure to try and remember which radio stations we listened to, where we hung out after school, and what other music influenced us. More difficult was remembering how different the culture was in 1964. The fifteen-year-old characters in the book probably seem hopelessly naïve when it comes to dating, but things were so much more innocent then. We entered into adult relationships later in our teens. The defiance of the establishment that came later in the Sixties hadn’t yet undermined the authority of the nuns, parents, and others who ruled over our lives.
“Several years ago I read Bob Spitz’s wonderful book, The Beatles: The Biography,” says Barrow. “It was refreshing to re-read it just to get a sense of who the Beatles were as individual people. The Compleat Beatles, Vol. I, 1962-1966, was invaluable in providing copyright dates, and lyrics. The Internet is invaluable in helping find dates, and other details like who the opening acts at the Hollywood Bowl were.”
Before becoming a full-time writer, Barrow was an adoption attorney. He first book, Somebody’s Child: Stories From the Private Files of an Adoption Attorney, waspublished by Penguin/Putnam in 2002. She also penned two award-winning books of historical fiction for nine to twelve-year-olds, Finding Zasha and Saving Zasha, which take place in Russia during World War II.
Barrow lives in Los angeles. She was born near Chicago and lives in Los Angeles. www.randibarrow.com.
Chasing the Beatles: For Grown-up Girls Who Remember by Randi Barrow. Paperback, 196 pages, Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (March 5, 2014) Language: English ISBN-10: 1494819597
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