Love, love them do

From the very beginning of their career, the Beatles have proved an irresistible temptation for biographers. The first substantial book about them, Michael Braun’s “Love Me Do,” appeared in 1964 -- just a year after the group’s initial conquest of the United Kingdom with “Please Please Me.”

Since then there has been an onslaught of biographical material, with distinguished contributions from Hunter Davies (best access to the inner circle), Philip Norman (wittiest style) and Bob Spitz (biggest tonnage). Add to that the sanitized self-portrait of “The Beatles Anthology” (2000), and you begin to wonder whether there are any Fab-related stones left unturned.

On the basis of Jonathan Gould’s “Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America,” the answer would have to be yes. The author, a journalist and former musician, hasn’t dredged up much in the way of smoking guns or scurrilous revisionism. Indeed, he has relied almost exclusively on secondary sources, with a bibliography running to 12 pages of tiny, eyeball-punishing print. But his accomplishment here is twofold.

First, he has put the Beatles, and the mass mania that surrounded them, into a deeper cultural context than most of his predecessors. It would be hard to blame a biographer for latching onto the group itself, with its droll and delightful concatenation of personalities.

Gould, however, is equally interested in how “the great upsurge of adolescent fervor that the press called Beatlemania would coalesce into one of the main tributaries of a broad confluence of pop enthusiasm, student activism, and mass bohemianism that would flood the political, social, and cultural landscape of much of the industrial world during the second half of the 1960s.”

Determining that sounds like a tall order. Yet Gould’s panoramic approach does pay major dividends. The small things, like the group’s early attraction to Teutonic pep pills, are enlivened by just the right detail: It was the expatriate rocker Tony Sheridan who introduced them to Preludin, “whose popularity with West Germans in all walks of life had given a stiff pharmacological boost to the country’s postwar economic miracle.”

Gould also shines when it comes to the bigger phenomena, such as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Most previous biographers have dismissed this figure as a giggling huckster in a starched dhoti: Philip Norman devoted all of a single paragraph to him, and even the more expansive Bob Spitz sprinted through the particulars.

Gould turns up extra details, including that this avatar of pure mind studied physics at India’s University of Allahabad. More to the point, he makes us understand why the Beatles, who had pretty much drained the material world to its dregs by 1967, were drawn to the “impish, articulate swami” -- no mean accomplishment. (Caveat: I could have lived without the six leaden pages on Max Weber’s conception of charisma, one of the few truly egregious digressions in the book.)

Gould’s other strength is his deep grasp of the music. In his preface, he argues that his predecessors have often shortchanged the Beatles’ musical output, preferring to dwell on the glamorous narrative and its quarrelsome Gotterdammerung. This is less true of Spitz. And there are, of course, some brilliant books on this subject, including Tim Riley’s “Tell Me Why” (1988) and Ian MacDonald’s “Revolution in the Head” (1994). That said, Gould certainly integrates the group’s snarky, sumptuous art more thoroughly than any previous biographer.

He has the two gifts essential to a critic -- passionate expertise plus a bulletproof sense of humor -- and his descriptions of the music are hilariously on target. He compares Paul McCartney’s sizzling fuzz bass on “Think for Yourself” to “the snarls of an enraged schnauzer.” He’s amusingly wry about Ringo’s shaky vocal turn on “Act Naturally,” noting that when the effervescent Paul “adds a high harmony in the last verse, he sounds like the good singer who lives inside the head of every bad singer.”

Yet Gould also possesses that third essential gift: the capacity for awe. I’ve never read a better sentence on the massive E-major chord at the end of “A Day in the Life,” which “hangs in the empty air for a small eternity, slowly fading away, a forty-second meditation on finality that leaves each member of the audience listening with a new kind of attention and awareness to the sound of nothing at all.”

Gould’s excellent and engrossing volume means that we won’t need another biography until, say, 2017 -- the 50th anniversary of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

In the meantime, there is no end of things to say about the music. And Dave Marsh says quite a few of them in “The Beatles’ Second Album,” a study of the LP that Capitol Records unleashed on Americans in April 1964. As the author points out, this is an unlikely starting point for a meditation on the band’s musical greatness. The album was a slapdash product, grafted from several prior British releases -- and even worse, it was a victim of sonic tampering by Capitol’s engineering staff.

Marsh fingers one man in particular for these crimes: an executive named Dave Dexter Jr., who declined to release the group’s first four singles in the United States and then led the charge in disfiguring its subsequent output. (As Marsh puts it, Dexter “left a deep personal signature like a schoolboy with a jackknife on a desktop.”)

Yet these shenanigans open a fascinating window onto two very different musical cultures -- British and American -- and illustrate how deeply the Beatles were indebted to both.

And Marsh, like Gould, never forgets the point of it all: the music. Writing about John Lennon’s vocal transformation of a Motown throwaway, “Money,” Marsh characterizes the singer as “sarcastic, ironic, obsessed, driven, self-reflective, taking it out on the world of mammon, embarrassed by his own riches, greedy for more, lustful in every sense, or repulsed in a whole bunch of ways.”

Readers may choose to accept some of these adjectives and reject others. But Marsh’s song of praise goes to the heart of the Beatles’ collective genius, which, over the course of a single miraculous decade, allowed four guys from Liverpool to contain multitudes -- more like multitudes of multitudes.

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James Marcus is the author of “Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut,” a translator of several books from Italian and proprietor of the blog, House of Mirth.