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Not just a pop group but a way of life

On January 1, 1962, the Beatles trooped down to London for an audition with Decca Records. Exhausted after a nine-hour drive, they impressed no one, least of all themselves. On January 3, 1970, the group — minus John Lennon — convened in Abbey Road to knock out the George Harrison song required for the “Let It Be” soundtrack album. A brutally brief critique of egomania, “I Me Mine” was the last track the Beatles ever recorded as a group.

Within those eight years, something so extraordinary occurred that it remains an object of intense fascination 40 years later. The Beatles — and the decade that they both reflected and shaped, the 1960s — embodied the unprecedented freedoms of a mass culture that was truly popular, that arose from the people and that, among youth at least, was open-minded and experimental in a way that barely seems conceivable today.

The Beatles were not so much a pop group as a way of life. Lennon recognised this with uncanny prescience in 1963, telling the American writer Michael Braun: “This isn’t show business, this is something else. This is different from anything that anybody imagines. You don’t go on from this. You do this and then you finish.” However many times it has been told, their story remains unique in its compression and its scope.

It is Jonathan Gould’s accomplishment to retell this mythic fable in a way that makes it seem new again. He focusses on three elements. The Beatles’ biography is over-familiar, but Mr. Gould wisely eschews stale factoids and emphasises the forgotten corners. The group do not get to America until a third of the way through the book, which means that 1963, the year that they broke through in the U.K., is deservedly discussed at length.

Like Wilfred Mellers and the late Ian MacDonald, Mr. Gould also subjects the group’s records to a musicological analysis: “Music was the passion that linked them to one another and brought them to the attention of the world.” This approach bears dividends, as in the discussion of McCartney’s melodic leaps in “Eleanor Rigby” — vocal hints of ambivalence that give the song its “unsettling emotional complexity.”

The third strand relates music and biography to “the real outside story”: time and place. “You Can’t Do That” tracks the Beatles’ intimate connection to “a period of rampant social and cultural change in Britain and America.” Citing Daniel Boorstein, Max Weber, Freud and Jung, Mr. Gould makes the case that they were a creative, charismatically collective response to these times. They not only spoke of the joy and the freedom, but also of the hidden cost.

Hence Lennon’s anguished admission of insecurity in the bright and breezy “Help,” the theme tune to their second film. Like the equally devastating “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” it marked a new period in the lead Beatle’s writing: not just an admission of vulnerability behind the macho mask, but a song about self that consciously drew “on the power of his own celebrity.”

“Walrus” was recorded right after the death of Brian Epstein, and it captures Lennon’s angry, fearful response. He knew that the group would be lost without their sensitive, troubled manager. Epstein earthed the Beatles while giving them the freedom to be themselves. His death “marked the moment when all the latent physical and psychic risk that had shadowed their lives during the previous five years seemed to compress into a single irreversible event.”

The rest was a long, bitter fade: exactly like watching a marriage break up in slow motion. As the Beatles fell out of love with each other, they lost the tension in their recordings as well as the privileged place that they had in the culture. Lennon’s equivocations in “Revolution” brought them derision from American radicals, while in Britain his partnership with Yoko Ono excited the negative attentions of the police and the popular press.

This is only to skim the surface. Can’t Buy Me Love is chock-full of details and fascinating discussions of the post-war English grammar school and its impact on Lennon, McCartney and Harrison; the language and discourse of Liverpool, and the way that the group amplified its harsh cadences; the trend towards Anglophilia in America during 1963 that paved the way for the Beatles’ explosive impact early the next year, and so on.

With only minor mistakes of emphasis and quirks of taste, Mr. Gould’s book is an essential addition to Beatle literature, ranking up there with MacDonald’s magisterial Revolution in the Head and Devin McKinney’s brilliant Magic Circles. The more time that passes since the Beatles’ high 1960s heyday, the stranger their story seems, embodying as it does the moment when pop culture was still new, generous of spirit and full of possibility. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

(Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America by Jonathan Gould [576pp, Portrait].)

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