Baby You’re a Rich Man: Suing The Beatles for Fun and Profit
Another Beatles book? You’d be forgiven for thinking there couldn’t possibly be anything left to be written about the Fab Four. Every aspect of their career has been excavated and explored in print so many times. With the exception of Bob Dylan, surely no popular musicians have been subject to such extensive investigation.
However, this latest addition to the canon offers perspective on the band that is as interesting as it is infuriating. Interesting because it considers some of the major legal spats involving the band in their lifetime; infuriating because time after time in Stan Soocher’s obsessively detailed book, one is left with the feeling that as songwriters the Beatles may have had rare talent, but as businessmen they were naive to the point of stupidity.
The book’s strength lies in the ability of its author, an academic and entertainment business attorney, to apply his knowledge of the law to existing files and recently released documentation. Winnowing out irrelevances, he draws some of the remaining threads together into a clearly constructed narrative, which can be read as three simple sub-narratives: the business chaos during the Brian Epstein era; the rise in legal wrangling during Allen Klein’s time; and then the manifold problems arising during the Beatles’ entanglement with Morris Levy. Add to these three maverick businessmen the problems created by governments and law enforcement agencies, and you’re left with a tale that reveals a rarely seen aspect of the band.
By: Martin James
Source: Times Higher Education
