Alaska Employment Law

Can’t Buy Me Love, by Jonathan Gould 

Energized by the possibility that the Red Sox might successfully trade for Johan Santana, one of my partners recently asked me to “stop reading books about the Beatles and get back to baseball.”  I admit it, I have a Beatles addiction.  Luckily for my partner, though, the definitive Beatles biography has now been written, 38 years after the demise of the band.  A few words about that, and we – some of us – can get back to baseball.  And other stuff, of course.

The book is Can’t Buy Me Love, by Jonathan Gould; this is his first book.  It is not apparent that Mr. Gould did any fresh interviews or any original research; he does append a vast and useful bibliography.  While the text clocks in at just over 600 pages, it seems clear enough to me that the most important thing Mr. Gould did in the 20 years he worked on it was think about the group, the cultural milieu that influenced the group and its fans, and mostly, think about their music.  A musician himself, Mr. Gould’s signal contribution is his analysis of the music – not from just from a musicologist’s perspective, but from a thoughtful man’s perspective.  Since many of us who grew up with the Beatles know all the songs note-for-note in our heads, it’s both easy and entertaining to follow Mr. Gould’s analysis of a particular song.  Just play the music in your head while reading along.  He’s very smart.

Other writers have written “standard” biographies of the group.  I am thinking of Hunter Davies’ The Beatles: The Authorized Biography, Philip Norman’s Shout: The Beatles in Their Generation, and Bob Spitz’s recent The Beatles.  There are as well a variety of books about the music, the best one being Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head, which looks at every single song intelligently and in some depth.  A somewhat odder, but nevertheless fascinating, trip was taken by Devin McKinney in his Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History(Harvard University Press, no less, which says, on its web site, “In Magic Circles, McKinney uncovers the secret history of a generation and a pivotal moment in twentieth-century culture.  He reveals how the Beatles enacted the dream life of their time and shows how they embodied a kaleidoscope of desire and anguish for all who listened.”  Wow.  Harvard.  Cool.)  None of these books really tries to do straight biography in a meaningful social and cultural context and also write intelligently about the music.

So what you have in Can’t Buy Me Love is a book that unfolds the history of the group in its many social contexts – the Crown’s 1960 trial of Penguin Books over the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the emergence of the writers known as the Angry Young Men, e.g., John Osborne and his play Look Back in Anger, John Braine and his novel Room at the Top, the John Profumo/Christine Keeler prostitution/spy scandal, and then the Kennedy assassination, the rise of Mr. Dylan, Woodstock.   Mr. Gould sheds much welcome light on both the relevance and the effect of these and similar events, and how they figured in the cultural acceptance, or rejection, of the Beatles.  He’s persuasive.  And yet he doesn’t overdo it.  The book is never dull (well, maybe just once, when he carries on too long about Max Weber; you can skip that part).  The emergence and growth of the band, the standard biographical part, is told well, and the writing about their songs is engaging and really dead on.  Somehow Mr. Gould heard the songs in a way that is fresh and new.  His long chapters on the music in Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road are exceptionally insightful.  After 40 years, I think I finally understand what “A Day in the Life” is doing at the end of Pepper, why a song that apparently doesn’t fit the theme of the album, at all, works so well.

Gould puts it all together – the history, how the culture affected our heroes and was in turn affected by them, and the music – like no one else.  And he writes well.  If you only want to read one, read this one.