It's Real Life: An Alternate History Of The Beatles - A Short Story, Radio Play And Full Length Novel By Paul Levinson (2022 and 2024)

In a July 2023 blog post I discussed an alternate history of the most famous rock band of all time. It's Real Life: An Alternate History Of The Beatles was written in 2022 as a short story and radio play by Professor Paul Levinson of Fordham University. Since then, the author has expanded it into a full length novel that includes his original story as chapter one.

Below my original post you'll find a link to a fascinating podcast where Levinson discussed his book with NBC's Chuck Todd followed by an intriguing email question and answer session that Levinson graciously gave to Bloggerhythms.

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In 2005, novelist, playwright and rock musician, Larry Kirwan - best known as the leader of New York City's renowned Celtic-rock band, Black 47 - used his vivid imagination to write Liverpool Fantasy, a novel about what could have happened to each of the four Beatles if they hadn't hit the big time. As it turns out, it wasn't necessarily fab.

In 2010, I wrote a blog post about the night The Beatles played a reunion concert at Wembley Stadium to celebrate the 70th birthdays of John Lennon and Ringo Starr. Like Kirwan's excellent piece of fiction, my blog post flew in from another world because two very sad events of many years ago - the deaths of both Lennon and George Harrison - have prevented that wonderful evening from ever taking place.

There must be something in the atmosphere that makes people think about the four rock icons differently than how they actually lived their lives because alternate reality has visited another Beatles fanatic. Paul Levinson - a communication and media studies professor who is also a musician, novelist, and songwriter - has published It's Real Life, a truly inspired story involving the band; Fordham University's legendary New York radio station, WFUV; and the late DJ, Pete Fornatale.

Levinson published his short story on the web, and it has also been adapted into an online radio play that is reminiscent of the dramas people listened to on their AM radios before the days of television.

The tale begins on July 4, 1996 as Fornatale is nearing the end of his radio show on WFUV. He's playing a Beatles' song - George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass" - from their 1974 LP, Band On the Run. He has an ominous feeling that something isn't right about The Beatles other than the recent rumours circulating that they're going to break up in the near future.

After his show, Fornatale takes a long walk through the maze of tunnels Fordham built under their campus many years ago to protect students from the weather. He hopes the walk will remove the dark thoughts gnawing at his brain.

The tunnel has a lot of doors. Eventually, Fornatale exits through a different door than he has used in the past and winds up on the opposite end of campus. There, he boards a train to keep an important business appointment in midtown Manhattan with the local PBS station who wants him to host a retrospective on The Beach Boys. After he arrives at Grand Central Station he finds himself in another world where he talks to a trio of girl buskers singing Beatles songs.

Fornatale gives the singers "who look like the Bangles but sing like The Beatles" a ten dollar bill that has the face of Ronald Reagan on it, and one of them gives the radio man a look because she knows Alexander Hamilton is on that denomination. They ask him when the picture on the bill changed and question its legitimacy. However, because he also gave them a five dollar bill a few minutes earlier that they know is real, the young women continue conversing with him.

The protagonist quickly discovers the girls' knowledge of Beatles history is far different than the one he knows. Instead of the impending breakup he is told the Liverpool quartet actually disbanded in 1970 and that tragedy struck the band in December 1980. Of course, Fornatale is astonished and quite disturbed at this revelation, so he visits the reference section at a nearby Barnes and Noble to verify the stunning and upsetting news he just learned. In the process he also discovered Paul McCartney's post-Beatles group, Wings, and George Harrison's supergroup, The Traveling Wilburys.

Fornatale is confused. Did the Big Apple radio icon discover the truth after he disembarked from the train? Which reality is the correct one? Does he even get an answer to that question? Does it even matter? To find out, you'll have to read the complete short story here or listen to the radio adaption posted at Killerwatt.

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Here is the addendum to the original post that includes the interview.

First, listen to Levinson discuss his Beatles' alternative history and a couple of other "what ifs" on a podcast with with NBC's Chuck Todd.

CR: Briefly, what is the plot of your novel after the first chapter?

PL: As Pete Fornatale struggles to understand how to get in and out of alternate realities, and make sure John Lennon is not killed in any of them, Fornatale will actually dine with John Lennon and David Bowie, consult with Leonard Cohen, attend a Beatles concert with Diana Ross in Central Park in 1996, and work with a variety of real life characters you may or may not have heard of.          

CR: What was your inspiration for writing It’s Real Life?

PL: I thought and felt, from the moment I first heard about John Lennon’s assassination on that horrible night in December 1980, that this wasn’t the way the universe was meant to be -- that this act had deformed the cosmos. But it wasn’t until 2019 that I finally began to write the story, my way of righting the wrong, imagining what the world might have been like if Lennon had survived. Then I let it simmer, and put it aside for a while. And I saw Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back in December 2021, and I was so moved, I sat down and finished the short story. It was published the following month in January 2022. And it got such a good response, made into a radio play, winning The Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fiction, being a finalist for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, that I kept coming back to it, began writing some additional chapters, introducing new characters. And by the Fall of 2023, I had a novel.

CR: Why did you decide to make the setting for the novel and the original short story Fordham University and their radio station, WFUV?

PL: I grew up in the Bronx, within medium-long walking distance from Fordham University, so it’s been part of my life for a long time. I was a devoted listener to Pete Fornatale’s “Mixed Bag” show on WFUV in the 1960s. I used his book (which he co-wrote with Joshua E. Mills), Radio in the Television Age, in my first full-time teaching job, at Fairleigh Dickinson University in the 1980s. I got to know Pete personally when he came back to WFUV in 2001 -- I had started teaching at Fordham University just three years earlier in 1998 -- and he started playing one of my recordings, “Murray the K’s Back in Town,” in 2010. He died unexpectedly in 2012, and I knew then that I would put him in a story someday.

And then there are the tunnels. WFUV is located in Keating Hall, and there is some kind of tunnel system that runs beneath that building. I had already used the tunnels in a story I wrote before “It’s Real Life” -- “The Last Train to Margaretville” in 2013 -- and as soon as I began thinking about “It’s Real Life,” I knew those tunnels under Fordham University would literally be a crucial conduit in the story.

CR: Is there an intended message in the narrative or did you write the story solely for entertainment purposes?

PL: Both are in the novel. The message is don’t give up on your dreams, even if your dream is literally to change the world, or in this case, history. But I hope the reader is also entertained. There is always an element of fun in alternate history if it’s done right in tracking how so many little and big things are changed, if you change just one part of history. And this is especially fun when the changed element is music.

CR:  Are there any plans to expand the original, short radio play into something longer?

PL: Probably not a longer radio play, but see my answer to the next question.

CR: Are you interested in adapting the play/novel into a live stage version or possibly a film?

PL: Yes, I have interest in both of those happening, as well as a TV series, and I have projects in those areas percolating in various early stages. But I can’t say anything more specific about any of that until contracts are signed and/or projects are completed. I’ll also mention something that I have a little more control over: I have a sequel novel in mind.

CR: What is it about The Beatles that you love?

PL: A combination of songs that uniquely appeal to me, that I loved from the moment I first heard them, and I love even more today (see my answer to the next question). And as part of this, I love the way The Beatles evolved. Lennon’s “It’s Only Love” and “Dr. Robert” and “Jealous Guy” are very different songs, recorded at different times in the arc of his life, and they’re all very different and yet with the same soul shining through.

CR: What are a few of your favorite Fab Four songs and/or solo works by them?

PL: Impossible for me to list just a few, here’s the best I can do: "Real Love," "Yes It Is," "It’s Only Love," "Dr. Robert," "And Your Bird Can Sing," "I’m Only Sleeping," "Jealous Guy," "Whatever Gets You Through the Night," "I’m Looking Through You," "Penny Lane," "Helter Skelter," "Heart Like a Wheel," "Jet," "My Brave Face," "Hope of Deliverance," "I’ve Got a Feeling," "I Need You," "Taxman," "Here Comes the Sun," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "All Things Must Pass, Goodnight," "Octopus’s Garden"

CR: How can readers purchase a copy of your novel and what formats is the novel available in?

PL: The novel is available in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. All three are available on Amazon, and you can order the paperback and hardcover in most bookstores.

CR: What other books have you written and published?

PL: Science Fiction

• The Phil D’Amato series: The Chronology Protection Case, The Copyright Notice Case, The Silk Code, The Consciousness Plague, The Pixel Eye
• The Sierra Waters trilogy: The Plot to Save Socrates, Unburning Alexandria, Chronica
• Borrowed Tides
• The Loose Ends Saga
• Ian’s Ions and Eons
• Marylin and Monet
• Robinson Calculator

Media Theory

• The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution
• Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium
• Cellphone: The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium, and How It Changed Everything
• Realspace: The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age, On and Off Planet
• New New Media
• McLuhan in an Age of Social Media
• Fake News in Real Context

CR: Tell us about your ventures into recording and composing?

PL: My first album, Twice Upon A Rhyme, was released in 1972 and sold a negligible number of copies. It was rediscovered as a “lost cult classic” in Japan in the mid-1990s, and reissued in Japan and South Korea in 2008, and in the U.K. in 2010. My next album, Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time, was released by Old Bear Records and Light in the Attic Records in 2020 -- right, I waited almost 50 years to release my second album because I wanted to build up an audience. But I’m not waiting that long to do my third album -- I’ll be back up in Batavia, New York, at the Old Bear Records studio, to record my third LP this coming May.

I should also mention one single, recorded by my group The Other Voices (originally called The New Outlook) produced by Ellie Greenwich and Mike Rashkow for Atlantic Records in 1968. The B-side, "Hung Up On Love," was written by me (words) and Mikie Harris (music). It's been getting a lot of streaming in the past few years, especially in Japan. 

As for songwriting, I wrote (words and music) or co-wrote (words) all of the songs on those albums. Also, my song “Unbelievable (Inconceivable You)” (words and music by me) was recorded by The Vogues in the 1960s but never released, and my song “Sunshine Mind” (words and music by me) was recorded by Donna Marie of the Archies in the 1960s, and it was released, but didn’t sell enough copies to chart. Who knows, one or both of those songs may show up on my upcoming album.

CR: What do you prefer, writing books or composing and recording music, and why? 

 

PL: For me, the two - writing books or composing and recording music - are closer than you might think.  They both are different expressions that come from the same part of my brain.  Writing books, of course, takes much longer than writing a song, but recording an album can take almost as much time as writing a book.

 

I wrote my first short story when I was in first grade, but other than that, I wrote hundreds of songs before I wrote my first novel (and before I wrote my first nonfiction book).  But once I started writing lots of articles, stories, and books, in the late 1990s, I wrote ten times as many stories as songs. In the last few years, though, beginning with Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time in 2020, I write a few songs and a few stories each year. It's Real Life is the first novel I've written since Chronica in 2014.

 

And then there are the performances. Back in the mid-1960s, I was in two groups, a doo-wop group The Transits, and then a folk-rock group called The New Outlook (I came up with both names).  We performed in lots of venues in the New York City area, but that ended in the 1970s. Since the late 1990s, I’ve been doing lots of readings from my stories and novels, including via Zoom. I was about to do a few concerts of my songs from Twice Upon A Rhyme and Welcome Up in 2020, but the pandemic knocked those out. I’m hoping to do a few performances in 2024, and also expect to do lots of readings and signings of It’s Real Life.

 

Which do I prefer? My creations are like my children – I prefer them both.