All You Need Is 'Love'
Jonathan Gould's adept Beatles book is a multifaceted delight
By Chris Morris
A long train ride is a good excuse to pick up a weighty book that’s been sitting atop the stack for a while. So I took advantage of 11-hour treks to and from Northern California over the holidays to plow through Jonathan Gould’s 600-page opus Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (Harmony).
What’s that, you say? Another Beatles exegesis? As the Fabs themselves put it: I told you before, you can’t do that. In his own prologue, Gould points out that the band is a publishing cottage industry; an estimated 500 titles, examining every conceivable aspect of the group, have hit the market since Michael Braun’s Love Me Do, cited by Gould as the first serious Beatles book, was issued in 1964.
Gould’s tome is essentially a narrative history of the Beatles, from their Liverpool origins through the recording of Abbey Road in 1969 (with a brief epilogue to pick up the post-breakup pieces). There have been others, to be sure – most notably, Hunter Davies’s authorized book (issued at the height of the band’s renown), Philip Norman’s Shout!, and, most recently, Bob Spitz’s leaden 900-page attempt at a definitive portrait, 2005’s The Beatles: The Biography.
Gould notes that these heavily sourced tomes reflect “the ethos of feature journalism”; I will note that all of them have the flavor and the depth of compiled Associated Press dispatches. It has been left to Gould, a first-time author using secondary sources exclusively, to pen the most brainy and insightful Beatles history to date. The author, a trained drummer, has made the book his life’s work: Its first editor, The New Yorker’s William Shawn, died 15 years ago. His labor and sheer chutzpah have paid off in monumental fashion.
Can’t Buy Me Love joins the late Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head (released last year in a third edition by Chicago’s A Cappella Books) on the very short shelf of essential Beatles reads. MacDonald used track-by-track analysis of the Beatles’ recordings as a doorway into the band’s meaning. Gould employs the skeleton of the quartet’s story as a means to show how they defined their time, and how their arrival in the ’60s served as a summary point in world culture. It’s a masterful work of interpretive biography.
Gould manages his ambitious task through a capacious and seemingly bottomless knowledge; he skillfully brings an eclectic well of information to bear in explication of the Beatles’ import here, at home, and internationally. He excels equally in history, sociology, politics, journalism, art, fashion, film, theater, psychology, pharmacology, and economics, to name just a few of his strong suits. He displays an abiding understanding of the record industry, and compellingly discusses the billion-dollar changes the Beatles wrought in the business. As a musicologist, MacDonald is his only peer; his close readings of individual songs lead one to pause and exclaim, “Oh, so that’s how they did that!”
In the end, Can’t Buy Me Love succeeds so splendidly by focusing on the achievements of JohnPaulGeorgeandRingo – a gestalt grouping without precedent in musical-social phenomenology. Their tart, individuated yet gang-like collective personality, which mocked and exploded the niceties of traditional “entertainment,” was what endeared the Beatles to us in the 1963-64 explosion of Beatlemania. Gould’s delineation of the band’s slow, hubris-filled demise, following manager/mentor Brian Epstein’s death in the wake of the 1967 release of the sensational Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is a tragic acknowledgement that the Beatles’ brilliant whole was far greater than the humble, all-too-human sum of its parts.
Prickly, smart, loving without being blind to its protagonists’ follies, and comprehensive without resorting to mounds of pointless minutiae, Can’t Buy Me Love is an involving, wildly intelligent book that allows us to experience anew the band’s great moment in all its glorious, world-shaking velocity. A better title may have been Re-Meet the Beatles.
Chris Morris hosts Watusi Rodeo on Indie 103.1 FM, every Sunday at 9 a.m.
Published: 01/09/2008
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