Published: Sunday, July 18, 2010
Nuances of Beatles’ breakup focus of book
“You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup” by Peter Doggett, $24.99
When exactly did the Beatles break up? For many years, conventional wisdom has offered two options: September 1969, when, on the way to his solo set at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival festival, John Lennon told fellow performers Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann that he was planning to leave the Beatles, and April 1970, when, shortly before the release of what would become their final album, “Let It Be,” Paul McCartney went public with his decision to leave the band.
Whichever date you accept, both have an air of the definitive about them. Yet the truth, suggests Peter Doggett in his elegant and deeply researched “You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup,” is more difficult to pin down.
The book posits a nuanced afterlife for the Beatles, if “afterlife” is the right word. For Doggett, their breakup was a process, beginning in late 1967, after the death of longtime manager Brian Epstein, and dragging on in some form or another to the present day.
His book is remarkable for many reasons, not least that 48 years after the release of “Love Me Do,” he has found a new lens (and much new information) through which to consider the band.
Yet even more striking is his sense of the textures, the delicate interplay of individual and collective history, that continued to define the members of the Beatles long after they had ceased to function as a cohesive entity.
Of course, for all he has to tell us about the music, Doggett’s main focus is on the money, and he deftly explicates the complexities of the Beatles’ finances, which both bound them inextricably together and drove them irrevocably apart.
The first part of the book deals with the rise and fall of Apple, the band’s anti-corporate media corporation, which foundered on its own idealism.
It was precisely this partnership that trapped the Beatles in a series of claustrophobic legal battles, as Doggett documents.
When exactly did the Beatles break up? For many years, conventional wisdom has offered two options: September 1969, when, on the way to his solo set at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival festival, John Lennon told fellow performers Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann that he was planning to leave the Beatles, and April 1970, when, shortly before the release of what would become their final album, “Let It Be,” Paul McCartney went public with his decision to leave the band.
Whichever date you accept, both have an air of the definitive about them. Yet the truth, suggests Peter Doggett in his elegant and deeply researched “You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup,” is more difficult to pin down.
The book posits a nuanced afterlife for the Beatles, if “afterlife” is the right word. For Doggett, their breakup was a process, beginning in late 1967, after the death of longtime manager Brian Epstein, and dragging on in some form or another to the present day.
His book is remarkable for many reasons, not least that 48 years after the release of “Love Me Do,” he has found a new lens (and much new information) through which to consider the band.
Yet even more striking is his sense of the textures, the delicate interplay of individual and collective history, that continued to define the members of the Beatles long after they had ceased to function as a cohesive entity.
Of course, for all he has to tell us about the music, Doggett’s main focus is on the money, and he deftly explicates the complexities of the Beatles’ finances, which both bound them inextricably together and drove them irrevocably apart.
The first part of the book deals with the rise and fall of Apple, the band’s anti-corporate media corporation, which foundered on its own idealism.
It was precisely this partnership that trapped the Beatles in a series of claustrophobic legal battles, as Doggett documents.
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