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

Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America | Jonathan Gould | A walk through an age

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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 28 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Nearly twenty years in the making, Can’t Buy Me Love is a masterful work of group biography, cultural history, and musical criticism. That the Beatles were an unprecedented phenomenon is a given. In Can’t Buy Me Love, Jonathan Gould seeks to explain why, placing the Fab Four in the broad and tumultuous panorama of their time and place, rooting their story in the social context that girded both their rise and their demise.

Beginning with their adolescence in Liverpool, Gould describes the seminal influences––from Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry to The Goon Show and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland––that shaped the Beatles both as individuals and as a group. In addition to chronicling their growth as singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists, he highlights the advances in recording technology that made their sound both possible and unique, as well as the developments in television and radio that lent an explosive force to their popular success. With a musician’s ear, Gould sensitively evokes the timeless appeal of the Lennon-McCartney collaboration and their emergence as one of the most creative and significant songwriting teams in history. And he sheds new light on the significance of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as rock’s first concept album, down to its memorable cover art.

Behind the scenes Gould explores the pivotal roles played by manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin, credits the influence on the Beatles’ music of contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Ravi Shankar, and traces the gradual escalation of the fractious internal rivalries that led to the group’s breakup after their final masterpiece, Abbey Road. Most significantly, by chronicling their revolutionary impact on popular culture during the 1960s, Can’t Buy Me Love illuminates the Beatles as a charismatic phenomenon of international proportions, whose anarchic energy and unexpected import was derived from the historic shifts in fortune that transformed the relationship between Britain and America in the decades after World War II.

From the Beats in America and the Angry Young Men in England to the shadow of the Profumo Affair and JFK’s assassination, Gould captures the pulse of a time that made the Beatles possible—and even necessary. As seen through the prism of the Beatles and their music, an entire generation’s experience comes astonishingly to life. Beautifully written, consistently insightful, and utterly original, Can’t Buy Me Love is a landmark work about the Beatles, Britain, and America.

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*****

This book was worth reading just for my finally FINALLY learning what "And Your Bird Can Sing" is about. FINALLY. And I never would have guessed. The article by Gay Talese published in ESQUIRE in 1966 that inspired Lennon to write the song is considered one of the great pieces of journalism ever, and I know journalism students who today are assigned to read it. When I tell them that article inspired a Beatles song, they're shocked!

A walk through an age

This book was not what I really expected for a Beatle biography. Mr. Gould integrates very well how the Beatles fit into the history of the 1960s but, as well, how history also molded itself around the Beatles. For those of us that lived during this time, we are re-immersed in all that went on and not only what The Beatles were doing at this time. For those who are Beatle fans but came to them after they disbanded, it helps to see everything in its context. The Beatles were not in a bubble but were a product of the '50s and '60s. Beatlemania had just as much to do with the time in which we grew up as it did with the Beatles themselves. "Can't Buy Me Love" does an excellent job in showing us that, no matter what other music was being created at the time, however raw or tame one would consider their music, The Beatles were a success because of their timing in history, how they borrowed from others and yet had their own unique and inimitable view of what music should be, where it should be headed. They were defined by their times but also defined their times. Other bands came from Liverpool and were relative flashes in the pan. Other bands disparaged their music, their showmanship, etc., and yet quickly became dated, footnotes in pop/rock history, by following a different muse.
"Can't Buy Me Love" is one of the most fascinating and engrossing books on The Beatles that I have read in quite a while and is a necessity for any serious Beatle Fan.

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The Crescendo!

Keen insight abounds in this brilliant Beatles book. The descriptions and analysis of the music and lyrics really does make the reader rehear The Beatles anew. A seeming impossibility all these years on.
Bravo on this stellar achievement Mr. Gould.
You have become a deserving part of The Beatles legacy and lore.

Great Book

Although I am not a huge Beatles fan, I found this book rather interesting in the detail that events are described. With notes on every Beatles album recorded, this book takes an enormous amount of data readable.

I found this book very enjoyable to read, although somewhat depressing when reading about how the Beatles eventually broke up.

BTW, without the addition of Yoko into Lennon's life, the Beatles would have been a much better band with a longer time together. Just my two cents...

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

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