Peter Doggett

Peter Doggett's new book about the end of the Beatles, "You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup," is out now, and while I haven't read it yet, let's just assume it's truly interesting and cool and extremely well done, if only because it's truly unfair to assume anything else.

But then I read this review in Businessweek, and bristled at the critics' analysis/deconstruction of the book/story, in which the entire gothic tale gets reduced to a series of personality flaws and corporate mismanagement, as if the artistic/personal/passionate bonds between Lennon, McCartney & friends were more or less akin to, say, the Time, Inc/AOL disaster.

"Imagine what the Fab Four could have raked in over the years if they had behaved more like their rivals, the Rolling Stones, and not let their personal indulgences and adolescent resentments drive them apart," critic Hugo Lindgren harumphs.

Well, sure. But there are so many things wrong with that sentence (e.g., the Stones as "rivals," e.g. Apple to the Fabs' Microsoft) you want to toss the whole thing against the wall, hard, and turn on the TV.

Again, I'm not going to offer a word on Doggett's actual book/thinking/argument, but Lindgren's boil-down version (proposing variations of the Evil Yoko theory; the evil Linda theory; the evil Klein theory; the crazy John theory; the power-hungry Paul theory) presents a corporate-friendly reductionism that offers basically no insight into the reality of the situation.