Harper Collins releases unpublished diaries of Beatles assistant Mal Evans

Journalist Ken Womack’s book, The Life of a Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans, has been published by Harper Collins. It is based on the diaries of The Beatles’ road manager, bodyguard and personal assistant Mal Evans. I read the sensational text Igor Gavrilov.

Many Beatles fans of recent calls first saw Mal Evans in Peter Jackson’s series “The Beatles: Get Back” (2021). There, Evans is most often seen on camera as an assistant, making tea for the musicians and marking something on a notepad. And it is he who holds back the police who are trying to interrupt the famous concert of The Beatles on the roof of their office on Savile Row. He looks like their nanny in the film, and even his height – 198 cm – is not very noticeable. But longtime Beatlemaniacs are aware of the important role that Big Mel played in the life of the group.

Mal Evans first just came to The Beatles concert. It happened in 1963 at the Cavern club in Liverpool. Evans was noticed by guitarist George Harrison and recommended him to the club owner as a bouncer. Evans, by that time already a completely family man and a happy father, stood on the threshold of the Cavern, but soon went to work for The Beatles themselves – as a bodyguard. A good-natured, bespectacled giant, he accompanied the quartet everywhere, even at the historic meeting with Elvis Presley. He was a driver, courier, secretary – in a word, a man who fulfilled the Beatles’ wishes around the clock. It’s no surprise that he eventually appeared on the recordings. In the song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” he hit the anvil with a hammer, and in “A Day In The Life” he was responsible for the alarm clock part. Evans was responsible for obtaining the rights to use the images featured on the cover of the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Even the idea for the album’s title, according to Ringo Starr, belongs to him.

Evans was the Beatles’ rear man. After all, someone has to fill the cars, roll the cigarettes and buy socks for the musicians while they write their imperishable works. Mal Evans and The Beatles’ road manager Neil Aspinall even learned how to forge the Beatles’ signatures, so, obviously, many of the autographs that collectors are proud of are their work.

After the breakup of The Beatles and a quarrel with his wife in 1973, Mal Evans lived in Los Angeles, where he suffered from depression and abused alcohol and tranquilizers. One day he was accidentally met on the Sunset Strip by The Who drummer Keith Moon: he asked Evans to become the producer of his solo album.

According to the widespread version, in 1976, Evans was shot by police in his home – his girlfriend mistook the air pistol in his hands for a real one and called the police. Mal Evans lost his life a week before a scheduled meeting with the publishers of his memoirs. Throughout his life alongside The Beatles, he kept diaries, which were to become the basis of the new book. After Evans’ death, the diaries disappeared from view and were only discovered in 1986 in the basement of the New York publishing house Grosset & Dunlap. They were given to Evans’ family.

Work on the book began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Evans’ son Gary connected via Zoom with the author of several works on The Beatles, Ken Womack. The writer received full access to Evans’ archive. The result is a book that includes Womack’s narration of Mal Evans’ life both with and without The Beatles, as well as his unique photographs of the Beatles’ time, drawings and notes from his diaries. “Before Ken started working on the book,” Gary Evans writes in the foreword, “my father’s life was monochrome in my memories, but Ken turned him into a real-life Wizard of Oz.”

The texts of the diaries are indeed not very valuable as literature. Here’s a description of Evans’ first day at his new job: “Started working with The Beatles in Blackpool. I picked up the guys from the airport at 1:30 am. They went home in a rented car. Neil and I are in a minibus. We went to bed at 3:30 in the morning.” However, Ken Womack believes that Evans’s recordings, which he put in order, change historians’ ideas about the chronology of events in the life of The Beatles. “The Life of a Beatles Legend” contains many mundane details related to people considered by the public to be like gods. For example, in a letter to his wife, Evans talks enthusiastically about visiting Burt Lancaster’s mansion: “George, Ringo and I went for a swim, and Burt lent me his personal swimming trunks. You can imagine how delighted I am.”

In a conversation with a Kommersant correspondent, Ken Womack said that Evans de facto produced only a Keith Moon single, although his production ambitions extended much wider. In the USA, he joined a pack of “Hollywood vampires” and spent time in the company of Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson and John Lennon. Despite all the alcohol and drug abuse that Evans experienced, Womack considers the main cause of his death to be his stalled relationship with his family in England. Womack calls Evans’ death a “suicide.” According to some evidence, Evans himself provoked the policeman’s shooting. Mal Evans never saw his memoirs published. But Womack plans to release a second volume next year.