Book of the week: You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup by Peter Doggett

(Harper, 390 pages, $24.99)

Maybe the Beatles never really did break up, said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. That’s one of the “striking” implications of author Peter Doggett’s “elegant and deeply researched” new portrait of the long, complicated afterlife of history’s most beloved rock band. In popular memory, April 1970 was the moment when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr went their separate ways. But Doggett has “found a new lens through which to consider the band” after all these years. By focusing on the business entanglements that “both bound them inextricably together and drove them irrevocably apart,” he makes the famous split feel like a footnote to a larger tale. Though the Fab Four would not record or perform together again before John Lennon’s 1980 murder, “it’s tantalizing” to learn now “how close that prospect often was.”

The Beatles aren’t heroes in this book, said Aaron Leitko in The Washington Post. They come across as consistently “self-absorbed, bratty, and—more than anything else—confused” about how to move forward without one another. But Doggett sympathizes with them: Their 1967 decision to incorporate as Apple Music Ltd. helped the Beatles avoid the Draconian British income taxes that pushed the Rolling Stones into exile, but it locked them into intramural money disputes when they most needed breathing room as artists. The business feud still weighed on Lennon and McCartney when they took tentative steps toward reuniting. In early 1975, they even briefly made plans to hole up in New Orleans to start writing songs together again.

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Doggett’s emphasis on money helps clarify what the real tragedy was, said Hugo Lindgren in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. By the late ’60s, former pals McCartney and Lennon were “fighting over nothing and everything, like hurt lovers,” yet none of the band’s handlers did what any “enlightened” business manager should have done—hired a shrink to end the psychological warfare. After all, they were already a money-making machine—just “imagine what the Fab Four could have raked in” over the next decade if they’d stayed together. The suits who watched passively as the band unraveled were guilty of “one of the worst managerial blunders in the history of the entertainment industry.”