McCartney Times

Mal Evans’ Lost Beatles Memoir Finally Emerges After 50 Years

The long-unpublished memoir of Beatles road manager and confidant Mal Evans is finally being published, half a century after his death. Beatles historian Kenneth Womack reconstructed the approximately 95,000-word manuscript from Evans’ surviving material, including recordings Evans dictated into a portable cassette recorder in 1975. The archive encompasses six large boxes and thousands of photographs, notebooks, discarded lyric sheets, receipts and other material Evans collected while living and working alongside the Beatles. The Guardian

The book, With the Beatles, follows the group from the Help! period through Magical Mystery Tour, the Get Back sessions and their final studio years. Womack calls Evans essentially the Beatles’ “first archivist” and says the manuscript contains a treasure trove of previously unavailable material. The Guardian

Most tantalizing is Evans’ extensive eyewitness account of the Beatles meeting Elvis Presley at his Bel Air home in August 1965. Evans regarded it as the greatest day of his years with the group and describes Elvis playing Beatles records before guitars appeared and the musicians began informally playing together. His account matters because Beatles historians have debated what actually happened during that legendary private encounter for decades.