Can't Buy Me Love

Starred review from August 20, 2007
Signature

Reviewed by
Mark Rotella
As a teenager, I collected every album the Beatles put out, starting with their first U.S. release, 1964's Meet the Beatles
, to their last, Let It Be
, in 1970. As Paul sang “Mother Mary comes to me/ speaking words of wisdom,” I heard the wisdom of an aged sage.
But as Jonathan Gould states in his brilliant biography of the Beatles, the band had “effectively ended before any of them had reached the age of thirty.”
There have been several biographies of the band (including two outstanding ones, Bob Spitz's The Beatles
and Devin McKinney's Magic Circles:
The Beatles In Dream and History
), but Gould leaves the gossip to others and instead relies on their music to tell the story, starting with the early days as a band in Liverpool (with Paul McCartney on guitar and Stuart Sutcliffe on bass) to the recordings at the Abbey Road studios in London (where Yoko became everpresent and George stormed out threatening to quit).
They got their start in Hamburg, Germany, and were soon managed by a young, eager former furniture salesman named Brian Epstein, and produced by George Martin, a recording executive known for novelty records.
Gould, a former musician, has written an engrossing book, both fluid and economical (aside from one overlong section on the concept of “charisma”). Page after page, you can hear the music; Gould's deft hand makes the book sing. This is music writing at its best.
“It begins with a musical wake-up call,” Gould writes of “A Hard Day's Night”—“the harsh clash of a solitary chord that hangs in the air for an elongated moment, its densely packed notes swimming into focus like eyes adjusting to the light.” On “Here Comes the Sun,” Gould describes George's music, written as he became more steeped in Indian philosophy amidst turmoil within the band, as “rays of sun cutting across the melting ice of winter... of coming through a long and arduous experience and emerging whole at the end.”
Focusing on the Beatles' influences, musical (Elvis, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys) and otherwise (marijuana, LSD, the Maharishi Mahesh yogi), Gould elucidates the mystery of the band that changed the course of Western popular music. (Oct.)

Mark Rotella, senior reviews editor at
Publishers Weekly, is the author of
The Saloon Singers, about the great Italian-American crooners, to be published by FSG in 2008.

September 15, 2007
Another holiday shopping season, another Beatles book. But what separates writer and musician Gould's first book from the multitudinous others is his threefold focus; Gould deftly mixes biography with social commentary and musical and lyrical analysis, illustrating how the band crafted its groundbreaking songs and how its achievements impacted, and were impacted by, the tumultuous 1960s. Gould writes of how the Beatles' artistic and commercial achievements revolutionized not only the music industry but all of British and American popular culture. He also expertly analyzes the lyrics and music of nearly every song the Beatles released, explaining how they consistently stretched the bounds of what popular music could achieve. Especially informative is his analysis of the Beatles' late-1960s albums, from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" onward. But this is also the chronicle of four ambitious, charming, Elvis-worshipping friends whose bond was slowly torn apart by a variety of forces, including manager Brian Epstein's death, legal and personal squabbling, botched spiritual and business ventures, and, of course, the fateful introduction of both psychedelic drugs and Yoko Ono into the Beatles' once-impenetrable circle. Highly recommended for all academic, public, and music libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 6/15/07.]Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2007
Goulds combination group biography, cultural history, and musical criticism artfully places the Beatles in their time and social context while examining with great skill how they became an international phenomenon comparable only to themselves. He examines cultural and historical moments on both sides of the Atlanticthe impact of John Osbornes epoch-making play Look Back in Anger, the arrival of Elvis Presley and the rise of rock and roll, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Summer of Love, Woodstockwhile limning Liverpool, the working-class port city in Englands industrial north from which the Beatles hailed, and the individual Beatles strong senses of regional solidarity and fierce local patriotism. To understand the Beatles, Gould implies, you must understand where they came from. He follows them through their roller-coaster career: Hamburg, early days at Liverpools Cavern Club, their conquest of America, the hysteria that came to be called Beatlemania, Sgt. Peppers, and the eventual breakup. All bases are covered, but setting Goulds book apart are his careful dissection of cultural history and his astute critical eye (his masterful critiques of Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever, and A Day in the Life, in particular, are miracles of economy). Long on history, short on gossip, he gives nuanced assessments of the worlds most admired rock band and of its era.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)