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Richmond Reads by John DennistonBiography of a Juggernaut Looking at The Beatles in Historical Context Hundreds of books have been written about The Beatles, more than 500 since the first in 1964, according to Jonathan Gould in his new Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (Harmony, 672 pages, $27.50). Think a moment about that: If you were to start today and read one Beatles book a week, it would be late into 2017 before you finished them all. And that’s not even counting the books that will undoubtedly be published during the next decade as authors try to find new ways to capitalize on the Fab Four’s relationship with, and effect on, the baby boomer generation, their parents and their offspring. So what makes Gould’s book stand out? First of all, he has avoided the standard form of a Beatles’ biography: looking at the individual lives of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr and fitting them into how each played a part in the creation of the whole. The Beatles and the Big Picture Instead, Gould has created a “group biography” that is primarily concerned with the events that defined the birth, life and death of the Beatles as a cultural, historical and musical juggernaut that shaped times, generations and nations. Secondly, Gould has carefully inserted the Beatles and their work into the historical context of their times, showing how they, as teens, were the product of post-World War II England and its attraction to anything American. It’s no coincidence, for example, that the group was formed in Liverpool. The formerly great cosmopolitan port city, once home to the Cunard line and the eastern terminus of the Atlantic crossing, had perhaps the strongest cultural ties to the United States than any other English city, due at least in part to the more than 1.2 million American servicemen who had passed through and lived there during the war. Anyone who knows the Beatles knows that their music was, at the beginning at least, an English interpretation of American rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues. This is not new ground. What makes Gould’s interpretation fascinating is his understanding of the social, economic and cultural currents that led to this once-proud, now depressed and war-scarred, Americanized city on the Mersey becoming the perfect incubation spot for the birth of John’s Quarry Men in 1956. There could be no other place for the upper-working-class, but bright and musically talented Paul and the lower-middle-class, but artistic and rebellious John to come together in 1957 to create a hybrid musical form that would storm across the Atlantic and eventually cover the world. Full of Impressive Detail Gould tells the Beatles’ historical story in a straight-forward, scholarly way with little bias and lots of details that will impress even the most knowledgeable fan. But his emphasis on the music really makes “Can’t Buy Me Love” stand above other Beatles books. Along with telling about events that led to certain songs (for example, Peter Fonda’s casual remark about an LSD trip to John at a party, leading to “She Said” and the famous “I know what it’s like to be dead” lyrics), Gould analyzes virtually every album and song in the Beatles’ body of work. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Gould writes, is “an act of exquisite artifice: a recording posing as a live concert, performed by a world-famous group of musicians posing as a once-famous group of musicians. It is the concert that the real-life Beatles could never have given live.” “On the basis of its stunning initial impact and its subsequent influence, the debut of the album bears comparison with such earlier celebrated landmarks of twentieth-century popular music as the 1943 opening of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical ‘Oklahoma!’ and the 1927 premier of George Gershwin’s Jazz Age icon, ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ In the sense that all three of these works reflected the ambition of their authors to create a popular masterpiece and were recognized as such by audiences who felt thrilled to be hearing music that seemed to express some essential spirit of what it meant, at that moment, to be alive, the comparisons are apt.” Falling for a Small Eternity “A Day in the Life,” the five-minute, 33-second final track of “Sgt. Pepper,” is “arguably not only the single greatest performance in the Beatles’ canon, but in the history of recorded rock,” Gould writes. It represents the loneliness of the musician as he stands on stage after performing the album’s 12 dazzling numbers before this “encore.” The highly personal meditation by John ends with the onrushing sound of an orchestra, “the sound in the ears of the high-wire artist as the ground rushes up from below,” silence, and a piano chord that “hangs in the empty air for a small eternity . . . that leaves each member of the audience listening with a new kind of attention and awareness to the sound of nothing at all.” With Gould’s interpretation, one is reminded of the ending of the final episode of HBO’s “The Sopranos” and the high-art effect of nothingness. One may not agree with all of Gould’s critiques and interpretations. But his attention to historical detail and his definite love of the music make “Can’t Buy Me Love” a must-read for anyone ever touched by the Beatles.
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