The Beatles are in the pantheon of the musical greats

Nov 27 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

But that was his home of choice, not his birth place. The Beatles were very canny about such matters. Jonathan, whose book is the result of endless reading as well as a research, and visited Liverpool 10 years ago, is fascinated by it all. He catches the English mood of the ’50s – the grey austerity, the basic diet, the houses without modern amenities.

You have to remember that every morning then, Americans stepped from gleaming kitchens with freezers, electrical ovens, dish-washers and cavernous utensil-cupboards, into chrome chariots. Britons crept out of two-up-two-down terraces, many with the lavatories in the yard, to catch the bus to work or to hoist a leg over the bike saddle – if they were coming up in the world, they might squeeze into a motorbike’s sidecar, a three-wheeled Bond mini, or a squat black Austin.

We had been allies in the war, but they were a thriving, capitalist economy. Still, we had the Welfare State to prevent people falling into destitution. In 1957, Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister, was able to tell the people, a little prematurely, that they had never had it so good.

However, by 1962, when The Beatles scored their first hit with Love Me Do, the economy was improving, egged on by pictures of American life seen on our chummy TV sets.

More significantly, working-class life, or a version of it, had been promoted in the novels of the Angry Young Men, many of whom were grammar school boys, and on stage in the plays of John Osbourne, Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse. These rustled the curtains of traditional, middle-class drawing-room drama.

Jonathan, a 56-year-old father- of-four, who now lives in Willow, near Woodstock, in upstate New York, understands most of this well, despite spelling Childwall as “Childwell” and Fazakerley as “Fazakarley”, but such errors are forgivable.

His dismissal of Lonnie Donegan, though, is a hanging offence, at the very least.

“Enter Anthony ‘Lonnie’ Donegan, a frantic, nasal Scot, who burst upon the scene in 1956 singing perhaps the world’s worst version of Rock Island Line,” he writes.

And then adds, “Donegan’s mediocrity was a living inspiration, and over the second-half of 1956, as skiffle groups formed by the dozen in every British town, merchandisers flooded the market with genuine washboards, tea-chest bass conversion kits and flimsy mail-order guitars.”

OK, you can talk about the special relationship between Britain and America, but he is not getting away with that treatment of Lonnie, father of the British music, which would for a while gain much favour in the USA.

And the man begins to retreat. “Everybody in Britain has gotten on my case about that,” he says. “It is fair that people are criticising me for it. He’s a beloved character over there, OK. The way I see it, Elvis was the dream, the Adonis figure. Lonnie Donegan, and I tried to indicate this – though I was a little snide about him, and I admit that – was the guy who said, ‘you can do this, too’ to a generation of English kids. I should know more about him, I really should.”

Jonathan was brought up in Long Island and then Manhattan. His father, Milton, was a lawyer and his mother, Eleanor, was a psychotherapist. “The joke in the family was that she did that in order to be able to deal with my dad,” he says. “I had what we call a New York upper middle-class upbringing.”

He broke his studies at Cornell, to become a professional drummer in jazz bands, finally majoring in the 1980s. In addition to the Beatles book, he has written extensively on popular music. His ability to read music and play other instruments is evident in his appreciation of Beatles songs.

“This pattern is then extended and elaborated further in the song’s release, where cascading lines of “Sun! Sun! Sun! here it comes!” are sung in triplet rhythm over arpeggiated triads while the meter of the music shifts seamlessly between bars 2/4, 3/8, 5/8 and 4/4 time,” he writes of George’s composition.

But we are talking about musicians whose work is offered to the world, like that of the grand composers.

Anyway, whatever comparison you make, Here Comes the Sun is a beautiful song, expressing a sentiment with perfect simplicity.

* CAN’T Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America, by Jonathan Gould, is published by Portrait, at £25.

A beacon of Liverpool’s homegrown culture >>>