Can't Buy Me Love - Jonathan Gould

That the Beatles were an unprecedented
phenomenon is a given. In Can't Buy Me Love, Jonathan Gould explains 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. Nearly twenty years in the making, Can't Buy Me Love is a masterful work of group
biography, cultural history, and musical criticism.

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.

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.