The Beatles' Second Album (Rock of Ages) [Hardcover]

Dave Marsh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 2007 | Series: Rock of Ages

The Beatles' Second Album runs only 22 minutes, with just 11 songs - many of which the group didn't write. Despite all that, the album personifies the Beatles: the world's greatest rock'n'roll band, according to well-known rock'n'roll critic and author Dave Marsh. With its overload of rock'n'roll, R&B, and early soul influence, including "Roll Over Beethoven," and "Long Tall Sally", The Beatles' Second Album - the book and the album - offers a great vantage point from which to see the group's enormous impact on pop music and culture.

Marsh breaks new ground by focusing on the Beatles' US recordings and how they evolved from British releases at a time when the two nations' approaches to rock'n'roll production were vastly different.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

DAVE MARSH is America's most widely read rock and roll critic and music historian. He cofounded Creem magazine in Detroit and wrote for Newsday, the Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. He edited two editions of the Rolling Stone Record Guide and also edited the newsletter Rock and Roll Confidential, which morphed into Rock and Rap Confidential. He is the author of more than two dozen music books, including three books on Bruce Springsteen, for whom he is the semiofficial biographer. Marsh lives in New Jersey.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Rodale Books; 1st edition (October 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594864268
• ISBN-13: 978-1594864261
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,131,526 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, but flawed, November 28, 2007

By 

Archiver (The Heartland) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Beatles' Second Album (Rock of Ages) (Hardcover)

How does someone, even the always loquacious Dave Marsh, write an entire book (albeit 180 small pages) about an album containing 11 songs? He doesn't. While perhaps a third of the book is about or relates to the Capitol concoction released in the US as "The Beatles' Second Album," the rest is a scathing attack on Capitol exec Dave Dexter, Jr., who oversaw the release of Capitol's Beatles' records from late 1963 to 1966. This puts Marsh in an odd position, too, for as much as he adores the subject LP which Dexter assembled (there is no UK "counterpart" album), he cannot stop raking Dexter over the coals for everything Marsh sees that Dexter did wrong.

There is way too much about Dexter in this book. And, of course, "Trashing Dave Dexter While Listening to the Beatles' Second Album" would not have been a marketable title, albeit a more accurate one.

Marsh offers some interesting descriptions of the LP's songs and how they affected him, though he retains his long-standing tendency to throw in totally unnecessary ten-dollar words here and there. But he does not offer any new revelations or, for that matter, insight. His primary sources are Bruce Spizer's excellent books and Dexter's own "Playback." Even so, he completely fails to explain why the LP includes both sides of the Beatles' sole Swan single (Swan did not have the rights to issue the songs on an LP), no doubt because Spizer's superb "The Beatles' Swan Song" had not yet been published when Marsh was writing his book.

Most of the factual material is condensed well, though quite a bit of it, such as the Vee Jay/Capitol debacle (all gleaned from Spizer's excellent book on the subject) has little or nothing to do with the book's subject. There are only a few obvious errors (e.g., reference to a Canadian radio station in "London" and one reference to Capitol's constructing "Meet the Beatles" from the UK "Please Please Me" instead of the UK "With the Beatles," though Marsh gets it right in the acknowledgments section).

The book suffers somewhat, though, from being written in spurts, as some sentences appear verbatim or nearly so in different chapters. This is likely due not to Dickensonian writing but rather to sloppy editing.

A casual Beatles fan may find this thinly-disguised hatchet job interesting in spots, but the more serious fan will appreciate the book more for Marsh's opinions. They make it an entertaning read, while the overbearing bludgeoning of Dexter and endless recitations of Dexter's life history, most of which are utterly superfluous to the book, render it flawed.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting look at the American Beatles albums, January 1, 2008

By 

psychsound "psychsound" (Upstate New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Beatles' Second Album (Rock of Ages) (Hardcover)

I have always liked Dave Marsh's take on rock history, but I believe this is his first book on the Beatles. This short volume is useful for detailing exactly why Capitol Records issued the butchered albums in the 1960's, essentially turning 7 official British albums into 11 American albums which were much shorter and appeared to be exploiting the American market by selling the same music over the course of additional albums. There were economic reasons for this, including greed (on the part of Capitol records) and practical reasons (the American market wanted the stand-alone Beatles singles on the albums, not the case in Britian). The Beatles Second Album is the high point of this otherwise sorry history, and I recall regarding this album as an interesting mix of Beatles songs. Nothing beats the official British albums, but the Second Album is not bad. In all, an interesting chapter in Beatles history, but one of great interest to fans who appreciate the official British albums but wonder why, exactly, the record company screwed up the American catalogue.

Docked a star for Marsh's constant attack on Dave Dexter, who edited and reworked the Beatles' American catalogue. Dexter appears to have been the wrong person for the job and his blunders affected how American fans viewed the music, but there is too much in the way of attacking Dexter. We get the point that Dexter was a bad-guy here, but there are better ways to express contempt for someone like this.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A really good book; reader criticism simply not justified, July 7, 2008

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J. D. Syme (St. Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Beatles' Second Album (Rock of Ages) (Hardcover)

Dave Marsh is a well-known and well-respected author in the world of rock criticism, so it makes sense that he would someday turn his sights on the greatest rock band of all time. Add to that his quirky choice of The Beatles' Second Album as the subject for a full book and what do you expect? This is not a feel-good biography of the album, folks, or a rose-tinted history of it, though it includes some of those elements as well. This mini-tome represents Marsh at his best: opinionated, knowledgable, experienced, outspoken and absolutely fearless. While Marsh's scathing words about Dave Dexter are pointed, Marsh grounds his criticism in both history and fact. Do I believe every idiosyncratic jibe was necessary? Maybe not. A case can easily be made that Dexter's big, fat reverb-laden sound was, in fact, justified and served The Fabs very well on the AM radio of the day. And at the time, of course, who knew? Even now, it's probably my favorite early Beatles' album for all the reasons Marsh delineates in this book. Wow! What a collection of songs! So agree with it or not, this book is valid food for thought and made me appreciate the fabulous Second Album all over again, for better and worse. I can highly recommend this book for all fans. Thank you, Mr. Marsh. I'd love to read more.