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Long and Winding Road
Jonathan Gould Meets the Beatles
Imagine: A studio drummer who’s never written anything but letters decides to write the definitive book about the Beatles, subject of some 500 previous books. His first query letter lands him an immediate book deal. Three editors, two publishing houses, and 17 years later, Can’t Buy Me Love is complete. It gets rave reviews and goes into its fourth hardcover printing within two months.
Welcome to Jonathan Gould’s overnight success. The longtime Willow resident opened his recent reading at Woodstock’s Kleinert/James Arts Center by saying, “I’ve run out of jokes about how long I’ve been working on this book.” Then he posed “the eternal question: Why on earth would somebody publish another book about the Beatles?” As soon as he started to read, the answer was clear: Because no one has done it this well.
Despite the Beatles’ ubiquity, Can’t Buy Me Love avoids the familiar, eschewing gossip, spotlighting obscure songs, and selecting offbeat photos (not the classic Abbey Road cover shot, but the foursome lounging on the sidewalk, waiting to cross). Gould focuses on the Beatles’ musicianship, but also examines their cultural context. And he makes it swing.
An admirer of New Yorker prose stylists John McPhee and Whitney Balliett, Gould wanted to bring the same linguistic elegance to music writing. In a press release, he shrugs off the old saw that writing about music is like dancing about architecture: “What people really mean when they say ‘You can’t write about music’ is that it’s hard to write well about music. But it’s hard to write well about anything.”
Over coffee at Oriole 9 in Woodstock, he elaborates. “There are more words to describe how things look than how they sound, at least in our culture. Like Eskimos with snow, more sound-oriented cultures may have more words.” Nevertheless, Gould’s virtuoso descriptions of various Beatles songs are one of Can’t Buy Me Love’s many pleasures. Listen to him on “She Said She Said”:
“The track opens with the shrilly electrified, Bride of Frankenstein whine of George Harrison’s lead guitar, wringing the neck of a G-major chord as it caterwauls up the scale—smack into the leaden crash of a downbeat and a series of evasive maneuvers from the drums.”