The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul. (Book Reviews: Popular Musics).(Book Review)

The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul. By Walter Everett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. [xix, 452 p. ISBN 0-19-514104-0. $65 (hbk.); ISBN 0-19-514104-9. $24.95 (pbk.).] Music examples, maps, bibliography, index.

Walter Everett's thoroughgoing treatment of the Beatles' musical production through 1966 will join his previously released companion volume on the group's later output (The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]) as a staple in the Beatles scholarly literature. Once again, Everett provides a broad overview of the Beatles' growth as composers. But now, as he covers the Beatles' rise from an unaccomplished skiffle band (the "Quarry Men" of the book's title) to the most highly sought-after pop act of their age, Everett adds much discussion of the Beatles as players as well. Although a plethora of literature already exists about the group's early years and its gradual rise to success, Everett's account goes beyond the many biographical narratives of these years to catalog meticulously what the Beatles were playing and how they were playing it. Readers will also find a wealth of information on the Beatles' early repertory of cover songs during their stint as a working club band in Liverpool and Hamburg during the late 195 Os and early 1960s.

Although some of the personal depth of other accounts is eschewed here, Everett's self-styled "Historical Narrative" provides a fairly thorough story of the group's early years. More significantly, Everett provides the first detailed analysis of how playing other people's songs helped Lennon, McCartney, and (to a lesser extent) Harrison hone their distinctive songwriting styles during these years preceeding their "Fab Four" reputations. In addition, he provides a stunningly detailed discussion of the various guitars used by those three members of the group from their youth through the recording of Rubber Soul (Capitol SW-2442 [1965], LP; Parlophone GDP 7 46440 2 [19871, CD). Although it is not always clear how Everett determines which guitars are heard in a recording session, such detailed coverage ensures that the book's method does not descend to a merely theoretical approach to the Beatles as musicians, but maintains a balance between compositional and performative aspects of their style.

Everett's clear and compelling writing style largely overcomes a considerable amount of technical jargon and a barrage of data in tabular form. Readers will not find a linear narrative between the covers, for this book functions as a desk reference rather than a thesis and will be most useful to the highly trained musician who is conversant with the Beatles' recorded repertory. Making the task still harder for the casual reader is the absence of substantial notated music examples. Everett relies instead on brief, partial examples of one or two voices or guitar lines from a song excerpt, or, more frequently, on reference to The Beatles: Complete Scores (London: Wise, 1993), a copyrighted edition of all of the Beatles' commercially released recordings up to 1970 in nearly full score. What appears to be an odd and cumbersome dependence on an outside source--"The reader will wish to consult the Wise edition in reading the analytical commentary in this volume" (p. xiii)--raises, in fact, a thorny issue in all seri ous Beatles analysis (and that of most popular music): Hal Leonard and Sony Music, who jointly administer permissions to reprint score examples of the Beatles' music, charge steep fees for the use of even the briefest excerpts. By referring to the already published Wise scores, Everett is able (legally) to allude to complete music examples without actually paying copyright fees that would force the cost of the book beyond the average reader's grasp. Unfortunately, however, the resulting nomenclature in the body of ...