THE LIBRARY - BOOK REVIEWS - CAN'T BUY ME LOVE - DONNE TEMPO
Can't Buy Me Love
Reviewed by Christian Toto
Q & A with Jonathan Gould
The amount of research that made this book
possible must have been staggering. Can you
break down the process for us? Any unusual
sources you were able to draw
upon?
There
was a great deal of research involved, and in
the early going I was not very organized in the
way I went about it. From the beginning,
however, I was committed to taking a
historical, as opposed to a journalistic,
approach, which mainly involved weighting the
relevance and credibility of contemporary
sources over the recollections, reminiscences,
and opinions of people speaking twenty or
thirty or forty years after the fact.
The goal was to try to see things the way people living at the time saw things, in all of their newness and strangeness and unpredictability. So I began by reading most anything I could find relating to popular music and popular culture that was published during the period I was writing about, immersing myself in newspaper and magazine articles from the 1950s and 1960s.
The coverage of the Beatles in the British music papers Melody Maker and New Musical Express was an especially rich source of context and quotations, because the members of the group tended to speak more candidly to the music press. (I spent years finding these articles and reading them on microfilm machines; now I see that they've all been collected and published as a book in Britain!) Mark Lewisohn's two books chronicling the Beatles' live performances and their recording history at Abbey Road were indispensable in establishing an accurate chronology. But I tended not to rely all that much on other published biographies of the Beatles, with the notable exception of Hunter Davies's authorized biography, which I treated as a primary source on account of his direct (and unprecedented) access to the group. And Michael Braun's 1964 book “Love Me Do” (which for some reason has never been reprinted) was an extraordinarily helpful source on the Beatlemania period.
Few topics have been covered as extensively as the Beatles. Discuss why you decided to write the book in the fashion in which you did.
My intention when I started out was to write mainly about the Beatles' music and their lives as musicians and songwriters. Strangely enough, this was a dimension that had not been dealt with comprehensively in the existing biographies of the group, which tended to take their music and its impact more or less for granted. Very quickly, however, I became aware that to write about the impact of the music - the effect it had on people - it was necessary to understand and evoke the social and cultural context of the times. At that point, the scope of the project expanded from a kind of annotated discography into a social and cultural history.
Almost everyone has a personal connection to the band, from those who were alive during their incredible run to today's children who simply dig the melodies. Tell us about your Beatles connection - what made their music so personal, so important, to you?
I was twelve years old in the fall of 1963, growing up in New York, and listening to the city's big AM radio stations. So from an American perspective, I can claim to have been present at the creation, and the chapters of the book that deal with the Beatles' arrival in New York and their initial effect on American teenagers have a tinge of autobiography. I first heard their music in the week between Christmas and New Years, and I first saw them perform on”The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964 – just me and 70 million other Americans. As young man, I think they represented a new version of masculinity to me - a much more appealing and attainable version, I might add, than the prevailing Hollywood stereotypes. As I grew older, they had a profound influence on my desire to become a musician and on my ideas of how to go about pursuing that goal. In that sense, they embodied a new and exciting model of creativity for me. As for what made their music so important to me, the answer to that is a book: this book, to be precise.
Everything about the Beatles ascent seemed like a perfect storm, an arrangement of cultural, economic and aesthetic forces all coming together. Talk about what forces impacted the Beatles music the most and why?
As the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein once said, there was no one reason for the group's success; there were many, many reasons. My book tries to do justice to the complexity of the whole phenomenon, so I'm reluctant to offer any simple explanations.
As far as the influences that shaped the Beatles' music, however, it is important to recognize that during the 1960s, the symbiosis between black music and white music reached an unprecedented level of intensity. Black R&B musicians were consciously reaching out to a white audience in a way that they never had before, and white rock musicians were returning the compliment by drawing on black music forms more widely and directly than ever before. That cultural exchange program has wound down during the last few decades, to the detriment of popular music across the board.
Social critic Daniel J. Boorstin described how the media, circa 1962, was starting to manufacture "pseudo events" and that he envisioned a "rising tide of banality" as a result. He certainly was prescient, but the Beatles escaped that fate. Why?
I think the Beatles had their own intuitive grasp of the banality and contrivance of the modern cult of celebrity, and they were embarrassed by the phoniness of "show biz." (In an important sense, the whole Sgt. Pepper album is a critique of the pandering mentality of show business.) I agree that Daniel Boorstin was prescient – that's why I cite him in the book. But I also think that he was unaware of a growing backlash to the pseudo-reality of the mass media that was already well underway at the time he was writing. One need only think of Mad Magazine and satirists like Lenny Bruce and Sid Caesar in the United States and “The Goon Show” and “Beyond The Fringe” in Britain to see that a great many people were not entirely taken in by the world of pseudo-events.
So many rock stars succumb to the excesses of fame. The Beatles were different. Was it their respective upbringings that prevented them from losing control of their lives? Their unique bond? Or might they have crumbled under the type of pressure modern rock stars face?
It's hard to know how they would have borne up under the pressures of modern celebrity, but I think the essential qualities that kept them more or less "honest" and kept them together, both as individuals and as group, was the defensive sense of solidarity and the reflexive fear of appearing "big-headed" that derived, in large part, from their upbringing in the working-class milieu of postwar Liverpool. The deflationary humor of Liverpool has always served to puncture pretension, and for as long as the Beatles remained together, they policed one another in this regard. As I mention in the book, at an early stage of their success, when Paul McCartney started speaking with reporters about the experience of being famous, the other Beatles reacted by answering the standard interview question about whether the group rehearsed by saying, "Paul does. The rest of us don't."
How important was the Beatles' role in our relations, both then and now, to England?
The Beatles, as the figureheads of the pop explosion that occurred in Britain during the 1960s, transformed the prevailing American view of Britain and its people. They were not alone in their influence; the gritty British films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, many of which featured working-class protagonists, paved the way. But beginning with their youthfulness, their sexiness, and their insouciance, the Beatles embodied a broad range of qualities that Americans had never associated with the British before. On the most basic level, the Beatles humanized Britain in the eyes of many Americans.
Has the Beatles legacy changed in recent years? Do people still appreciate what they accomplished in under a decade?
I think you touch on the one thing that many people still fail to grasp, which is the compressed nature of their recording career. The Beatles made their first real record in the summer of 1962. They made their last real record in the summer of 1969. Their entire body of work, consisting of their eleven Parlophone albums (twelve if we count Magical Mystery Tour) and twenty-one Parlophone singles, was recorded in the span of seven years. That's an astonishing output for a group that was writing its own material.
Are there any modern bands that can be compared on any level to the Beatles, musically or culturally?
I'm asked this a lot, and I feel it invites a somewhat unfair comparison. The Beatles made their mark on the world at a time when popular music was assuming an outsized influence on the lives of a great many people. There were historical reasons for this, involving the postwar resurgence of the recording industry, the reorientation of radio as a localized, music-oriented medium (following the advent of television), and the capacity of popular music to bridge certain social, cultural, and, in the United States especially, racial distinctions.
In fact, I think we have to consider the possibility that popular music has entered a stage of its development that is analogous in some ways to the stage that classical music entered toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the principal forms of expression – the symphony, the concerto, etc. - began to sound exhausted. Art forms don't sustain their creative energy and innovative quality forever. The age-old media of music, painting, theater, and so on have all gone through periods of intense development and periods of relative stasis. Popular music strikes me right now as existing in a period of stasis. It's not that the current crop of pop stars doesn't exert a strong influence on the lives of the current crop of adolescents. But what happened in the 1960s and sustained for some time after was the concept of pop as something more than music for adolescents. Nowadays, it's very hard to imagine a recording by, say, Radiohead or U2 as having anything like the impact on a broad audience – on the culture itself - that the Beatles had in 1967.
The Beatles never reunited once they split, even though they could have earned untold riches if they had. How crucial is that toward their enduring legacy?
I think it has unquestionably helped to preserve their reputation and their artistic integrity. They broke up at the absolute height of their musical influence and cultural power, leaving behind the definitive recorded performances of nearly two hundred original songs. As you note, they also broke up at the absolute height of their commercial power, mainly because they had reached the point where playing together wasn't fun for them any more. Though all four of them went on, with varying degrees of artistic and commercial success, to have solo careers, those careers never seemed to compromise the reputation of the work they did together. The contrast with other 1960s groups like the Rolling Stones and the Who, which have kept on reforming and reuniting for decades, earning vast sums of money for reprising their greatest hits, is striking.
Have you had any interesting reactions to the book yet? From the surviving Beatles? Others who lived through that era?
I'm very interested and very gratified by many of the reactions I've received from readers, including those who experienced the 1960s firsthand and those who did not. For people who lived through that period, I think the level of detail and association in the writing can make the narrative seem very evocative. For younger readers, I'd like to think that the book provides a new sense of context concerning how certain aspects of the world they know – a world they may take for granted – came to be.
To date, I've heard nothing from the two surviving Beatles, and I don't really expect to, though I would obviously be very interested in their reactions to some of the things I have to say about their music.
The goal was to try to see things the way people living at the time saw things, in all of their newness and strangeness and unpredictability. So I began by reading most anything I could find relating to popular music and popular culture that was published during the period I was writing about, immersing myself in newspaper and magazine articles from the 1950s and 1960s.
The coverage of the Beatles in the British music papers Melody Maker and New Musical Express was an especially rich source of context and quotations, because the members of the group tended to speak more candidly to the music press. (I spent years finding these articles and reading them on microfilm machines; now I see that they've all been collected and published as a book in Britain!) Mark Lewisohn's two books chronicling the Beatles' live performances and their recording history at Abbey Road were indispensable in establishing an accurate chronology. But I tended not to rely all that much on other published biographies of the Beatles, with the notable exception of Hunter Davies's authorized biography, which I treated as a primary source on account of his direct (and unprecedented) access to the group. And Michael Braun's 1964 book “Love Me Do” (which for some reason has never been reprinted) was an extraordinarily helpful source on the Beatlemania period.
Few topics have been covered as extensively as the Beatles. Discuss why you decided to write the book in the fashion in which you did.
My intention when I started out was to write mainly about the Beatles' music and their lives as musicians and songwriters. Strangely enough, this was a dimension that had not been dealt with comprehensively in the existing biographies of the group, which tended to take their music and its impact more or less for granted. Very quickly, however, I became aware that to write about the impact of the music - the effect it had on people - it was necessary to understand and evoke the social and cultural context of the times. At that point, the scope of the project expanded from a kind of annotated discography into a social and cultural history.
Almost everyone has a personal connection to the band, from those who were alive during their incredible run to today's children who simply dig the melodies. Tell us about your Beatles connection - what made their music so personal, so important, to you?
I was twelve years old in the fall of 1963, growing up in New York, and listening to the city's big AM radio stations. So from an American perspective, I can claim to have been present at the creation, and the chapters of the book that deal with the Beatles' arrival in New York and their initial effect on American teenagers have a tinge of autobiography. I first heard their music in the week between Christmas and New Years, and I first saw them perform on”The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964 – just me and 70 million other Americans. As young man, I think they represented a new version of masculinity to me - a much more appealing and attainable version, I might add, than the prevailing Hollywood stereotypes. As I grew older, they had a profound influence on my desire to become a musician and on my ideas of how to go about pursuing that goal. In that sense, they embodied a new and exciting model of creativity for me. As for what made their music so important to me, the answer to that is a book: this book, to be precise.
Everything about the Beatles ascent seemed like a perfect storm, an arrangement of cultural, economic and aesthetic forces all coming together. Talk about what forces impacted the Beatles music the most and why?
As the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein once said, there was no one reason for the group's success; there were many, many reasons. My book tries to do justice to the complexity of the whole phenomenon, so I'm reluctant to offer any simple explanations.
As far as the influences that shaped the Beatles' music, however, it is important to recognize that during the 1960s, the symbiosis between black music and white music reached an unprecedented level of intensity. Black R&B musicians were consciously reaching out to a white audience in a way that they never had before, and white rock musicians were returning the compliment by drawing on black music forms more widely and directly than ever before. That cultural exchange program has wound down during the last few decades, to the detriment of popular music across the board.
Social critic Daniel J. Boorstin described how the media, circa 1962, was starting to manufacture "pseudo events" and that he envisioned a "rising tide of banality" as a result. He certainly was prescient, but the Beatles escaped that fate. Why?
I think the Beatles had their own intuitive grasp of the banality and contrivance of the modern cult of celebrity, and they were embarrassed by the phoniness of "show biz." (In an important sense, the whole Sgt. Pepper album is a critique of the pandering mentality of show business.) I agree that Daniel Boorstin was prescient – that's why I cite him in the book. But I also think that he was unaware of a growing backlash to the pseudo-reality of the mass media that was already well underway at the time he was writing. One need only think of Mad Magazine and satirists like Lenny Bruce and Sid Caesar in the United States and “The Goon Show” and “Beyond The Fringe” in Britain to see that a great many people were not entirely taken in by the world of pseudo-events.
So many rock stars succumb to the excesses of fame. The Beatles were different. Was it their respective upbringings that prevented them from losing control of their lives? Their unique bond? Or might they have crumbled under the type of pressure modern rock stars face?
It's hard to know how they would have borne up under the pressures of modern celebrity, but I think the essential qualities that kept them more or less "honest" and kept them together, both as individuals and as group, was the defensive sense of solidarity and the reflexive fear of appearing "big-headed" that derived, in large part, from their upbringing in the working-class milieu of postwar Liverpool. The deflationary humor of Liverpool has always served to puncture pretension, and for as long as the Beatles remained together, they policed one another in this regard. As I mention in the book, at an early stage of their success, when Paul McCartney started speaking with reporters about the experience of being famous, the other Beatles reacted by answering the standard interview question about whether the group rehearsed by saying, "Paul does. The rest of us don't."
How important was the Beatles' role in our relations, both then and now, to England?
The Beatles, as the figureheads of the pop explosion that occurred in Britain during the 1960s, transformed the prevailing American view of Britain and its people. They were not alone in their influence; the gritty British films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, many of which featured working-class protagonists, paved the way. But beginning with their youthfulness, their sexiness, and their insouciance, the Beatles embodied a broad range of qualities that Americans had never associated with the British before. On the most basic level, the Beatles humanized Britain in the eyes of many Americans.
Has the Beatles legacy changed in recent years? Do people still appreciate what they accomplished in under a decade?
I think you touch on the one thing that many people still fail to grasp, which is the compressed nature of their recording career. The Beatles made their first real record in the summer of 1962. They made their last real record in the summer of 1969. Their entire body of work, consisting of their eleven Parlophone albums (twelve if we count Magical Mystery Tour) and twenty-one Parlophone singles, was recorded in the span of seven years. That's an astonishing output for a group that was writing its own material.
Are there any modern bands that can be compared on any level to the Beatles, musically or culturally?
I'm asked this a lot, and I feel it invites a somewhat unfair comparison. The Beatles made their mark on the world at a time when popular music was assuming an outsized influence on the lives of a great many people. There were historical reasons for this, involving the postwar resurgence of the recording industry, the reorientation of radio as a localized, music-oriented medium (following the advent of television), and the capacity of popular music to bridge certain social, cultural, and, in the United States especially, racial distinctions.
In fact, I think we have to consider the possibility that popular music has entered a stage of its development that is analogous in some ways to the stage that classical music entered toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the principal forms of expression – the symphony, the concerto, etc. - began to sound exhausted. Art forms don't sustain their creative energy and innovative quality forever. The age-old media of music, painting, theater, and so on have all gone through periods of intense development and periods of relative stasis. Popular music strikes me right now as existing in a period of stasis. It's not that the current crop of pop stars doesn't exert a strong influence on the lives of the current crop of adolescents. But what happened in the 1960s and sustained for some time after was the concept of pop as something more than music for adolescents. Nowadays, it's very hard to imagine a recording by, say, Radiohead or U2 as having anything like the impact on a broad audience – on the culture itself - that the Beatles had in 1967.
The Beatles never reunited once they split, even though they could have earned untold riches if they had. How crucial is that toward their enduring legacy?
I think it has unquestionably helped to preserve their reputation and their artistic integrity. They broke up at the absolute height of their musical influence and cultural power, leaving behind the definitive recorded performances of nearly two hundred original songs. As you note, they also broke up at the absolute height of their commercial power, mainly because they had reached the point where playing together wasn't fun for them any more. Though all four of them went on, with varying degrees of artistic and commercial success, to have solo careers, those careers never seemed to compromise the reputation of the work they did together. The contrast with other 1960s groups like the Rolling Stones and the Who, which have kept on reforming and reuniting for decades, earning vast sums of money for reprising their greatest hits, is striking.
Have you had any interesting reactions to the book yet? From the surviving Beatles? Others who lived through that era?
I'm very interested and very gratified by many of the reactions I've received from readers, including those who experienced the 1960s firsthand and those who did not. For people who lived through that period, I think the level of detail and association in the writing can make the narrative seem very evocative. For younger readers, I'd like to think that the book provides a new sense of context concerning how certain aspects of the world they know – a world they may take for granted – came to be.
To date, I've heard nothing from the two surviving Beatles, and I don't really expect to, though I would obviously be very interested in their reactions to some of the things I have to say about their music.