Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America [Paperback]

Jonathan Gould (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 4, 2008

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.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. SignatureReviewed by Mark RotellaAs 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Gould's 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 Atlantic—the impact of John Osborne's 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, Woodstock—while limning Liverpool, the working-class port city in England's 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 Liverpool's Cavern Club, their "conquest" of America, the hysteria that came to be called Beatlemania, Sgt. Pepper's, and the eventual breakup. All bases are covered, but setting Gould's 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 world's most admired rock band and of its era. Sawyers, June --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press; Reprint edition (November 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307353389
• ISBN-13: 978-0307353382
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1.3 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #40,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #50 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > History & Criticism
  • #85 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Musical Genres > Rock

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 71 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars let's talk about their music October 8, 2007

By Richard Cumming

Format:Hardcover

Hundreds of books have been written about the Beatles. Jonathan Gould read a lot of them and he wasn't satisfied. They talked about almost every aspect of the Beatles except they seemed to flash right past one of the most important things, the thing we remember most, the music.

Gould, a musician, started this project 20 years ago. He looked at the Beatles from back at the very beginning-their roots. How did they become songwriters? How did Lennon and McCartney become such a wonderful songwriting team? Who were there major influences?

He doesn't rely on the memories of those who were there 50 years ago. Instead, he looks to the original sources, the music writers and fans of that time, in the words they wrote then.

He follows the Beatles course during their short but prolific time together. He looks at many of the songs and the stories behind them-the ideas that were formed in the studio and elsewhere, influences like India, drugs, women, philosophy, etc. Little tricks and accidents changed so many songs from what they might have been to something even better.

Throughout he plugs readers into what was happening in the world as the Beatles were making their indelible mark upon it.

'T is a thing of beauty. These things needed to be said.

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Intellectual, musicological, yet entertaining December 5, 2007

By John L Murphy TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Gould, a jazz player, spent two decades on this investigation. He combines the biographical range of an author like Bob Spitz with a deeper cultural insight that parallels if not intersects with Steven Stark, and he offers, as did Ian Mac Donald, a sophisticated analysis of many of their songs from a technically adept and closely observed musicologist's understanding.

Gould not only recites the familiar details, but explains their significance. For instance, Woolton is a suburb of Liverpool where Lennon was raised, but Gould places the locale in its suburban context vs. the supposedly working-class upbringing the maturing John was afforded. Instead of saying he dressed like a Teddy Boy, he goes on the place that movement within its psuedo-Edwardian origins in a war-straitened tailoring innovation that failed to catch on among the dandies so much as the sartorial rebels after the Second War. Such detail for many may be more than the reader may have bargained for, and as with the excursus upon Max Weber's theories, has surprised critics expecting another dutiful slog through accounts of Lennon wearing a toilet seat around his neck in Hamburg. Gould, to his credit, avoids the tiresome repetition.

When he discusses the Maharishi and his Transcendental Meditation, he opines how the guru proved a clever salesman who did not exactly tell the Beatles that the noun was much easier to attain than the adjective, so to speak! He handles the Eastman-Klein-NEMS negotiations in the same numbing detail that Spitz had, but adds to the discussion of these necessary facts an understanding of the reasons Lennon and McCartney may have desired such legal and managerial changes, why they picked who they did, and what blunders were made by all sides. He strives for fairness, but you also realize, as with the treatment of Pete Best earlier and Alistair Taylor later, how selfish the four musicians could be as they continued, despite their own bickering as the band began to disintegrate, to remain loyal only to each other.

His cultural range is vast. Isherwood, Huxley, Gertrude Stein, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear all gain attention, and the subtitle of the book while it appears too limited, does place the band's impact solidly within their studio innovation, their send-up of show biz conventions (a particular strength of Gould's project), and their British appeal to an American audience in the post-JFK slump. You learn much about the chords, the contributions of George Martin and his team, and how songs express the tensions and joys that the Beatles were experiencing as they made their music.

Compared to Spitz, as Gould tends to range over much of the same terrain inevitably, there is less about the band in their private life, and about the same attention to their public life. Less on the Apple's store and monetary problems, more on the influence of LSD on the band. Less on the goings on of the Maharishi, more about George Harrison's increasing fluency on the guitar in the band's final years. Less on their calculated witticisms (he notes well that estimations of their press conference wit tended to lean heavily on their first year of fame, as they tired quickly of such effort) and more on their reworkings of Dylan and their influences and competitors (he cites a liner note from Donovan's "A Gift From a Flower to a Garden" to devastating effect to show flower children at their most insipid).

A valuable combination of contextual situating of the band within their times and an argument how the band managed to transcend their origins and represent a liberating spirit that shaped not only the Sixties but every decade since, Gould's book may be more for the scholar than the casual fan. Yet, such ambition is appropriate as enough time has passed that the Beatles now can begin to be placed within their century as a crucial intellectual as well as entertainment force. Gould's study proves this.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Not just another Beatles book November 3, 2007

By R. Riis VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

After having read maybe a thousand books on the Beatles, what a treat to find a new one that is not only well-written and intelligent, but actually includes material I had not read or heard before. Everyone will have their favorite era and favorite part, but I especially enjoyed learning more about the very early days (1960-1961) when the band were acquiring their instrumental chops and soaking up lessons in songwriting and showmanship. A great book.