Just when you think you know everything about the Beatles — along comes Kenneth Womack’s “Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans.” The book is a meticulous accounting of the life of the Fab Four’s friend, roadie and personal assistant, who died in 1976 amid tragic circumstances.
Written with the support of Evans’ family, the book features original interviews and information culled from Evans’ diaries, manuscripts and memorabilia. (Fortuitously, Evans kept meticulous diaries as he worked with the Beatles, meaning “Living the Beatles Legend” offers a new and intriguing perspective on a band that’s been thoroughly documented.) These archives are also due to be published in a second book.
“The other half — I'm hoping it'll be sort of a DIY experience for folks, in the sense that they'll have access to all of the diaries for themselves, all of the manuscripts annotated,” Womack says. “And I look forward to seeing, with all of this raft of material and photographs, what they can come up with — what sort of Mal Evans stories they'll find when they go down the rabbit hole.”
Womack spoke with Salon via Zoom on a recent afternoon to delve into how “Living the Beatles Legend” came together.
How much did you know about Mal going into “Living the Beatles Legend” — and how did your perspective change upon writing the book?
I knew a lot about him simply because I've studied the band for so long. I knew the bare bones outline, certainly. But I didn't know as much as I came to know by working with the materials.
"He's the reason they could stay up all night working on another great song."
When [Mal’s son] Gary Evans asked me to do the project, I knew he wanted a biography of his father. And within minutes of talking to him, I knew I would write it, because Gary Evans is very Mal Evans-like. You just love him. He's cuddly. He's grown into a great friend, and I would do anything for him.
But we made a pact that we’d tell the story straight, which he was fine with, because he's had 50-plus years to understand his father and his complicated legacy.
I wondered that, because sometimes working with relatives of people who are deceased can be challenging because they have a specific view of what it should be. It’s nice to hear that he was like, “We have to write about what's there. We have to do the truth.” That’s good.
It is. And it helped that at one point, his dad was speaking to Ringo [Starr], and Ringo said, “Well, if you're gonna write anything, tell the truth.” And Mal adhered to that dictum. And so we kind of had Mal’s words in a cloud above us the whole time.
Even during even my first Zoom conversation with [Gary], which would have been at the beginning of our shared COVID lockdown, Gary said, “You know, you're gonna find out that a lot of the things in Wikipedia aren't accurate. And you've just got to tell the story like it is.”
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That is such a common thing. There's the narrative that's out there — and then the narrative that's actually true. And it is often completely two different things. What was the biggest challenge for you in terms of putting this together?
Well, it was an unusual challenge. Usually, when we're working on subjects related to the Beatles, or any musical fusion that has a few decades on it, finding information is tough. And I knew that I would need to create a Rolodex of folks who were still living.
When I spoke to Gary during that first call, I said, “So is it true that there is all this stuff?” And Gary said, “Yeah, you want to see it?” [Laughs.] I said, “Well, yeah, I want to see everything. No matter how minor you think it is, I want to see it.”
Consequently, he regularly does surveys of his late mother's house and his attic, looking to make sure that I have everything. His sister, Julie, does the same thing. Within a few weeks of talking to him that first time, this giant box arrives.
The reason why this has been a challenge is there was so much stuff, where I'm used to not having very much material with which to work. Organizing that material — which Mal did not organize in his day, and certainly it had not been organized in the interim — was a challenge. There were 2,000 photographs, his diaries, notebook entries. He kept voluminous notebooks and his three manuscripts. Even some cassette tapes to play and transcribe. So [there was] lots of lots of material.
Fortunately, I’m a college professor, so I have four or five grad students and one undergrad working on this project. They've been working on it for a couple of years under the veil of secrecy—and, of course, that made them like the project even more. [Laughs.]
And that's when I basically hit the turf interview-wise. I've interviewed a few 100 people [for] several 100 hours, including weekly conversations with Gary since late 2020. It's been a strange research challenge in that I have lots of Mal in his voice, but it required corroboration from surviving witnesses.
Mal Evans dismantles Ringo Starr's drum kit after the concert in Washington DC. 11th February 1964. (Mirrorpix via Getty Images)
Everyone remembers something a little bit differently. And when you talk about the truth—the truth is somewhere in the middle of all the different stories and deciding how to address and convey that, especially something as important as this story and taking into account Beatles fans who have everything documented. That’s also a challenge, I imagine.
Absolutely. I even made a joke about this to Gary — I said, you know, when I start calling all these folks, they're all gonna start the same way. “Mal was affable. He was lovable.” And after a while, that's not helpful. I know he's lovable and affable. All of those things are true. I just needed more candid observations. It was a matter of trying to get folks who were willing to really share the real story that Mal wasn't perfect — that they did love him, he was cuddly, but he had this side and that side.
And you don't want a book that's just all 100% glowing. When you talk about telling the truth — none of us are perfect. All of us have a different side, depending on who you talk to.
And in different periods in our lives. Mal has several where they're dark. Part of my job was to explain why.
Love the Beatles? Listen to Ken's podcast "Everything Fab Four."
Obviously, there's his chronological life story, but trying to find the stories and threads beyond that—what was the most surprising thing that you discovered upon doing all this research?
You know, I wasn't surprised—and this may have been simply because before I even made some phone calls, I knew the bare bones from Gary, right?
"He was this de facto maternal figure because he would be there when they were angry, when they were sad and disillusioned."
The first thing I did when I received the materials was I went right to my May 9, 1969, when Allen Klein and the other three Beatles came and accosted Paul [McCartney]. I wanted to know, “How did Mal deal with this kind of situation? And there it was: He just drew a picture of Paul losing his mind.
So that helped me because it gave me a way of reading Mal as a historian, because I think he is the Beatles’ first historian. He's the one who, packrat-like, kept all of this stuff, because he thought it would be important.
Working on it chronologically allowed me to start to see where Mal could really tell that he was on a mission. There comes a point in ’67 or ’68 where it's very clear Mal is writing for posterity. He’s even hiding things in the diary entries, inside drawings and other sort of material.
[He was also] even admitting things that, if you looked at his diary a certain way, would seem meaningless — and instead, when you start to think about the names, and who's there, you start going down a new rabbit hole, and learning more and more about him and how he lived.
Did the Beatles realize at the time he was doing that and leaving all those breadcrumbs?
Oh, I think so. You know, John Lennon made a joke when he was asked to endorse the book — “I've been waiting to read your diary.” I think he'd been reading them regularly. There are times when you can find handwriting from all four of the Beatles or [road manager] Neil Aspinall in there, where they clearly have grabbed the diary and added something of their own.
I look forward to book two because folks are going to have a lot of fun with that kind of stuff. They were very well aware of what he was up to. I think they also had so much confidence in Mal that they must have known that whatever story he tells — and I think the biography proves this — is really going to expose him and not them. His love’s too deep; his fanship is too much.
There are so many stories of musicians that when they become huge stars, they don't know who they can trust. They don't know who has their best interests at heart. And Mal did — and they found him so early. There's something very sweet about that. Reading this book, that really comes through.
Yeah, they were very lucky. And we are, actually, that that Mal was on the case. He made so many things possible that otherwise wouldn't. He's the reason they could stay up all night working on another great song. He could make a meal. He could wake up the owner of an instrument store in the middle of the night and they would bring new equipment or replacement equipment. He just made so much possible.
His oldest surviving sister, Barbara — who, unfortunately, did just die — said to me that she really felt like what Mal did was mother them. He was this de facto maternal figure because he would be there when they were angry, when they were sad and disillusioned. And Mal could take the blows. He knew how to deal with the tremors of their personalities. Everybody needs a Mal in any social production like music or art.
Were there people that you wanted to talk to that you weren't able to catch up with — and/or were there things you couldn't figure out? Either rabbit holes or things that you wanted to find the answer to, but you just couldn't do it?
There are a couple of little mysteries that exist that I couldn't get to the bottom of. So what I would do is provide sometimes a different point of view — you know, “In somebody's view this, while in another's this,” because I couldn't solve them.
There are a couple of little things I'd love to know more about during the touring years and the dismantling of Apple [Corps] in the early '70s that still elude me. At this point, I can approximate better what the outcomes of some of those little rabbit holes are. But when I didn't know, when I felt like it was important, I would simply show how people have different views of a particular incident.
First off, that gives people more fodder to chew on forever and debate. [Laughs.] But it does show that it's more complicated than you think.
That’s just a fact when it comes to this kind of story. I didn't speak to Mr. McCartney or Mr. Starr. But while I did reach out to their folks, the issue there is I'm not sure they have anything new to say. I know they loved him. Plenty of contemporaneous evidence is on the record from their heyday with Mal. So I really don't have any regrets of folks I couldn't talk to.
There were a number of folks I spoke to in the nick of time, Ken Mansfield, who died last year. Alan White, Plastic Ono Band drummer and Yes drummer, I got him the week before he died.
And there were folks from that time whose story was bound not to put them in the best light, but they spoke anyway. I was really proud of the number of folks who, when I called, were willing to put their two cents in and say, “Here's how I saw it.” Even though the ’70s were a wild and wooly time, and folks didn't always look so wonderfully in the silver backcast of four or five decades.
English drummer Ringo Starr of The Beatles talks with Beatles assistant and roadie Mal Evans (1935-1976) during a rehearsal at the Royal Albert Hall in London in February 1971. (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)When the time came to actually write the story and put pen to paper — or fingers to keyboards — did you end up writing it in pieces and sharing it with Mal’s family? Or did you send it all at once?
I wrote it completely chronologically over a matter of several months, and every time I would finish a chapter, it would go to Gary. Not for any approval, just to make sure I got it right as far as his memory goes.
It's remarkable how much he allowed in. He really never asked me to remove a single thing, frankly. Not once. He might have said, “Let's give this more context,” or what have you. But it went right to Gary so he could be proofing along the way. I prefer to fix things while I'm working on the book as opposed to six months later. [Laughs.] When it's harder to find your way into revising a text. I worked with Gary in that way, and my editor.
I'm so happy that the story is finally out there. Beatles fans know who Mal is. But I think a lot of people don't know who he is and don't realize the role he played. You could tell just from reading the foreword how much it means to Gary to that his dad's story is out there.
That's right. And, like I said, Gary has learned to love him over the long distance of time in his own way. And that is meaningful. Mal’s life ends in such a sad way. [Editor’s note: He was shot and killed by Los Angeles police at his home.] And folks have predilections about it, right? It was the cop’s fault. It was this; it was that. I mean, it really was mental health, and Mal was undiagnosed. That’s basically the era of the dinosaurs compared to today in terms of the kind of help you can get when you're in crisis. And Mal certainly was.
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What else do you want people to know about this book? Are there any preconceived notions they might have that you want them to leave at the door before really digging in?
I hope that they're openminded. You can still love Mal and know the truth about him and the mistakes he made and his flaws. I don't want to paint this with too broad a brush, but it’s kind of the story of all of us who really love something, right? A cultural artifact like The Beatles, you know. Mal had every fan’s ultimate dream: He had perfect access all the time whenever he wanted it.
I mean, in that sense, it's a cautionary tale. In another sense, it’s the story of how artists produced. Everybody needs a Mal, right? Our favorite writers, whether it's Didion or Bronte, it doesn't matter. Nobody does it alone. Everybody has folks who are on their team, who were sometimes giving more of themselves than they should to make something possible. And Mal certainly did that.
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