Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America | Jonathan Gould

Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America | Jonathan Gould | An intelligent and engrossing biography

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Can't Buy Me Love:...

	Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America Jonathan Gould Harmony, 2007 - 672 pages average customer review:based on 32 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Best of the bunch, with faults....

This is the best book every written about the Beatles but I agree with Chris Federico's comments about the author's dismissal of some of the Beatles' music. For example, the author disses "What Goes On?" as not worthy of mention, while I think it contains the funkiest interplay, ancient-art-of-weaving between John and George on record. George's open-string solo is fantastic. But, I give the book five stars because, as I said, it's the best of the lot.

An intelligent and engrossing biography

Gould's magnum opus - all 606 pages of it, 20 years in the making - is a delight to read. He sets the Beatles in their social, artistic, and musical context, bringing into the narrative not only influences like Elvis, Chuck Berry, Dylan, Ravi Shankar, and The Goon Show, but also Teddy Boys and Mods, 'Look Back in Anger', the Profumo Affair, and the Kennedy assassination. The well-known episodes of the Fab Four's lives are well covered: the humble Liverpudlian beginnings, the Hamburg days, Beatlemania and the storming of America, transcendental meditation, the Apple Corps business fiasco, the disastrous advent of Yoko Ono, and the band's acrimonious collapse.

These stories are temperately told; Gould clearly likes his subjects and provides a balanced and non-prurient picture - though he struggles to contain his contempt for Yoko, and for their grubby last manager Allen Klein. But what sets the book apart, making it not just a compehensive and sympathetic pop-biography, is the musical criticism. Gould has a deep technical understanding of rock music and its idioms, and his song descriptions are not just musically and lyrically spot-on, but funny and even moving.

One quibble: while there are comprehensive notes, a bibliography, and index, I would have appreciated a discography. But for anyone with an interest in Swinging London, in Sixties music, or in rock 'n' roll generally, this book is essential reading.

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Wonderful book....

This is a great book for those of us lucky enough to have lived during the 60's and experienced The Beatles and for those who did not. I appreciate the amount of research that was done to write this book. By this time, Beatle fans have read all the gossip-type books and this book is more scholarly written. The history not only of the birth of the Beatles but of everything going on around them in England and America in the 1950's and 60's is worth the read. I don't think there is another book about The Beatles like this. It's unique and well written.

Excellent cultural bio of the Beatles

Phenomenal biography both of the Beatles and of their place in rock and roll history. I haven't read any of their other bios except for Geoff's, so I can't say how/if this is better than the others, but it does a lot well:
- Gives personal history without going into minutiae
- Discusses the Beatles' influences on a 'real-time' basis to their recordings (rather than just list them at the beginning, ignoring subsequent ones that emerge)
- Treats the Beatles as a singular entity for a large majority of their history; the closer you get to the end, the more individual each member becomes, so the biography starts to fray as the band did
- Goes into detail as to what made certain songs work (or not work)
- Keeps the music industry itself in the foreground, so you see the circular impacts as they occur
- With one small qualifier, easy to read (see flaws listed below)

There are two flaws in this book, though, that prevent me from giving it 5 stars:
The first flaw is that a lot of the songs are described in a manner that requires one to know music theory to appreciate (e.g. Yesterday is seven bars instead of the traditional eight, or the discussion of chord changes within a song). Fortunately, it's not overly cumbersome, and honestly does not constitute a large portion of the book, so you could probably get away with just nodding your head and pretending you understand what he's talking about, even if you don't.

The second flaw is one of interpretation; in the book he gives his interpretations as if they are what was intended by the Beatles. At the end of Day in the Life, there is a second orchestral bit followed by The Chord. The author equates it with For The Benefit of Mr. Kite (which ends the first side of the LP), stating that the orchestra represents the crowd listening to a performance from said Benefit, rising from glee to anxiety to terror to silence as the performer wows the crowd, but then falls. It sounds great, and when I read it I immediately listened to the track and thought, wow, he's right!

Except he's not. A Day in the Life was completed before For The Benefit of Mr Kite was even considered for Sgt. Pepper. Now, Mr. Gould does not specifically say that this interpretation is what was intended, however, it feels implied. And as a result it brings into question any of his other critical interpretations. Ultimately, this is a minor quibble ... but it diminishes the work a bit in my opinion.

That said, if you're looking for a Beatles bio that's ingrained with its cultural context, this is probably the one for you.

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Music and history

This book attempts to both analyze the Beatles' music and put it in historical context. Most of the history has been written before, although there are some interesting details. The attempts at sociological anyalysis are tough going, as are the details of the band's business arrangements. The most interesting part of this book is the song by song reviews of the music, which are very insightful.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7

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