Beatles' Second Album (Rock of Ages Series) Book

Dave Marsh can be a tiresome bully; listen to him on satellite radio sometime, and you'll hear someone who sounds like a left-wing version of Sean Hannity. He can also be a misguided scold'I'll never forgive him for his "debunkings" of Tom Verlaine or Steely Dan. But he's always written lovingly about early rock'n'roll, that is, before it became "rock." In addition to critiquing the eleven world-changing songs assembled here (27 minutes!), the two main threads of this brief study are the Beatles as cover artists and the strange history of their American discography. The former is a terribly under-examined aspect of the group, and I tend to agree with Marsh's assessment that the Beatles took some already pretty great songs and, in most cases, made them even better. As for the way the U.S. label Capitol mangled the Parlophone (UK) albums, Marsh reveals how Capitol exec Dave Dexter, a jazz guy who didn't even like the Beatles, oversaw a program that reconfigured those masterpieces into obtusely sequenced, shorter, often redundant packages. Marsh goes after Dexter as if he's back in the Detroit of his childhood and arguing with his dad at the dinner table. Unfortunately, Marsh relays the story no less than three times, and at great length. Which points to a big problem with this little book: for all its qualities, it is horribly repetitive.