All you need is love, or at least a good lawyer

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/07/18/1565024/all-you-need-is-love-or-at-least.html

By David L. Ulin
Jul. 18, 2010

You Never Give Me Your Money:
The Beatles After the Breakup
By Peter Doggett
HarperStudio (390 pages, $24.99)

When exactly did the Beatles break up?

Could be 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, or April 1970, when, shortly before the release of what would become their final album, "Let It Be," Paul McCartney went public (after a fashion) with his decision to leave the band.

Both dates 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.

"Imagine an alternative script," he writes of McCartney's announcement, which, accompanying the release of his first solo album, was elliptical at best. Asked if his break with the Beatles was temporary or permanent, he replied: "Temporary or permanent? I don't know."

"You Never Give Me Your Money" posits a nuanced afterlife for the Beatles. For Doggett, their breakup was a process, beginning in 1967 after the death of manager Brian Epstein, and dragging on 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 new information) through which to consider the band.

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 ceased to function as a cohesive entity.

Doggett's 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.

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