Despite his book's title, Goldsmith devotes more than half of it to the Beatles' early years. Once he reaches the pivotal year of 1964, he explains how, arriving in New York 11 weeks after President Kennedy's assassination, the Beatles filled, perhaps surprisingly, a cultural need of a mourning nation. He notes that, as the young fans grew older, they realized their elders had been wrong on the two most important calls of the 1960s, the Beatles and Vietnam. There is little new here. The Beatles' story has been recounted countlessly, and Goldsmith, former host of NPR's classical-music program,
Performance Today, offers surprisingly little musicological insight. His concise, useful account of the Beatles' career and impact should, however, find ready homes in libraries that somehow avoided acquiring many of the multitude of Beatles books published during the last few decades.
Gordon FlaggCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
"... fascinating ... quotations from those fusty Americans..." (New Statesman, 12th April 2004)
"...a breezily intelligent biography...perhaps the first serious Beatles history to have a truly happy ending." (Entertainment Weekly, February 6, 2004)
"...magic blows through the book, past delightfully obscure anecdotes and insightful reflection..." (Bookpage, February 2004)
"...the book does offer many fascinating details." (Publishers Weekly, January 19, 2004)
"... fascinating ... quotations from those fusty Americans..." (New Statesman, 12th April 2004)
"...a breezily intelligent biography...perhaps the first serious Beatles history to have a truly happy ending." (Entertainment Weekly, February 6, 2004)
Whether you're old enough to have lived through Beatlemania or young enough to know only that one of these guys went on to play in Wings, Martin Goldsmith offers new twists on a fascinating subject in The Beatles Come to America. In this reflective account of the Beatles' explosive arrival on the U.S. music scene in 1964, Goldsmith digs into the tale with such attention to detail that its freshness seems never to have faded. Discovering what went into designing the stage set for the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, for instance, makes clear how portentous that broadcast turned out to be.
The story is put into a personal context as the author inserts himself into the narrative, both as a teenager bearing witness and an adult now looking back with some perspective. The opening pages, for example, take us along on his pilgrimage to Liverpool on a recent summer day. Where the Britney generation might see an unremarkable urban panorama, Goldsmith finds evidence of miracles-a street called Penny Lane, a dank reliquary in the shadows of the Cavern Club-and, briefly but gloriously, bonds with a couple of Russians drawn on their own hadj to the center of Strawberry Fields.
This magic blows through the book, past delightfully obscure anecdotes and insightful reflections that present the Beatles as both a tonic for the malaise that followed the Kennedy assassination and a harbinger of the feminist revolution. When the Fab Four, a little bewildered at what they had just unleashed, wave goodbye to America and fly back home, Ringo wonders, "How in the world are we ever going to top this?" Even the four "mop-topped lads" themselves had no idea how lasting their appeal would be. In the last chapter, Goldsmith takes us back to where it all began, to an epiphany so unexpected and yet so appropriate that we are left wondering how it could have been any other way than it was-a world changed, forever and for better, by song. --Robert L. Doerschuk of Nashville is the former editor of Musician magazine.(Bookpage, February, 2004)
For this latest installment in Wiley's Turning Points series of personal perspectives on defining American issues, music writer Goldsmith (The Inextinguishable Symphony) looks at the 1964 arrival of the Beatles in America to show how the "unleashed, unbridled joy and unparalleled excitement" of Beatlemania "was an earthquake, and we continue to feel its aftershocks forty years later." Goldsmith clearly expresses his love of the Fab Four and is especially good at detailing their famous appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. However, while Goldsmith unassailably argues that the group that appeared on TV in 1964 was an act that had been honed during four previous years of hard work, he devotes the first half of the book to proving that point by giving a short history of their entire early career, including childhoods as well as the tough tours of Hamburg and England, where they forged their style. For someone who has never heard of the Beatles (if such a person exists), this may be necessary, but this material has been covered more thoroughly and with more detail in many other works. The book does offer many fascinating details related to their arrival (such as negative reviews of the band from mainstream newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post). Goldsmith never explores in-depth some of the "lasting changes" that he says the Beatles' arrival made in "music, broadcasting, journalism and fashion." A little less Beatles history and more material on their actual arrival would have made this a more effective narrative. (Feb.) (Publishers Weekly, January 19, 2004)
