BEATLES BOOK SHEDS SOCIO-POLITICAL-MUSICAL LIGHT ON FAB FOUR

Can’t Buy Me Love the new book by Jonathan Gould puts forth the Beatlemania phenomena in a socio-political setting…but there’s more!

Beatles fans should be on the lookout for the new book, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” a take by author Jonathan Gould, which hit stores on October 2. With a proliferation of books on the fab four on shelves, Gould has focused on their music and the socio-political climate that not only influenced the band, but also influenced what was known as the hysterical reaction by little girls called Beatlemania.

Gould was asked why when the question of making the book was posed.

“The common denominator, the common feature of most of the biographical writing about The Beatles was that it tended to take the music for granted. It tended to approach the subject with the attitude of, ‘We all know this music.’ I sort of approached it in an opposite way. I began by wanting to write about The Beatles music. The next question that sort of became obvious was this was the music; why did this music have such an extraordinary effect on so many people. As a musician you do what you do and you hope that people are gonna like it. In the case of The Beatles, they did what they did and vast numbers of people not only liked it but responded to it in ways that are truly extraordinary — not just the numbers, but the intensity of the reaction to it.”

He was also asked about the 2007 view of the controversial statement by John Lennon that The Beatles were bigger than Jesus.

“The general thrust in the American media was that the general thrust of what Lennon said was true or more or less true. As a young, rebellious kid at that time in America I assumed that the reason why some people were reacting so angrily to it was that it was true and they didn’t like hearing it — and they especially didn’t like hearing it from some long haired English pop musician. And when what we thought of as the mainstream media was surprised and talked about reactions of people in the south, people in the Bible Belt and so on and so forth, I think what was coming on to the radar screen in America at that time was not just the counter culture, but also what we think of as the evangelical or fundamentalist Christian right.”

Gould was asked if there could be another Beatlemania situation in 2007, and examines how the band would hold up today.

“It’s very difficult to think about how The Beatles would fare now because the whole entertainment/celebrity/politics world of all of these things are so interwoven, are so combined now that it’s almost impossible to predict whether this sort of a group from that sort of a place could show up on anybody’s radar screen. Even something like the fact that they were able to come over to America and come on the Ed Sullivan show and basically become known by everybody at that time. There’s no real equivalent to The Ed Sullivan Show. There are so many different channels, there are so many different shows, there are so many different outlets. In those days it was very narrow. If you could get somebody in that position and they had something going for them, there’s a good chance they would come to everyone’s attention. It’s different now.”

It took Gould over 20 years of research to put the historical and musical points of the book together, and it is available via Crown Publishing for $27.50.