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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