No lame tabloid/frat house regurgitations of who kissed and told, and was then threatened with legal action harder, faster and, more salaciously than the previous jaundiced raconteur. No backroom, backwoods, backbreaking or brokeback revelations of business and personal wranglings. In spite of, or perhaps more accurately, BECAUSE of Jonathan Gould's decision to bypass the traditional celebrity bio's barely veiled innuendo and recycled gutter-gabbing, "Can't Buy Me Love" is a standout among its literary genre.

Then again, it's hard NOT to stand out in a category that you may well have re-invented, a literary genre based on—wait for it—facts. Gould delivers these facts via that hard-to-come-by, harder still to recognize, writing style that stitches together history, personality, analysis and well-founded supposition with threads of humor, insight and experience. The end result? A quilt of prose that comforts, excites, amazes and most of all reminds of the true power of words: to enlighten, entertain, even elevate the spirit (yes, that sounds hokey, but only if the writer lacks something Gould is refreshingly dripping in: sincerity).

Bonus? In a telephone interview of almost an hour, Gould, with disarming candor and believable self-deprecation, more than lives up to a reader's (and interviewer's) hope that this guy is the real deal: a writer who obviously enjoys his craft and not only cares about his book's subjects, but also about his portrayal of those subjects. Nowhere in this detail-lush 600+page account, does this New York-state social activist resort to the lazy and mostly myopic writing "technique" of trumpeting his chosen celebs as deranged, spoiled, one dimensional artists who happen to hit the music world's Big Time.

Rather, Gould, through 25 years of painstaking, bordering on obsessive-compulsive (but in a good way) research, provides his readers with an unflinching yet respectful portrait of regular blokes who became friends and just happened to live in one of the most exciting periods. Oh, and these guys revolutionized the music scene for musicians, the people who listen to them, the people who make their living off of them, those who fear them, and those who embrace them.

Gould sidesteps the real and imagined hoopla of celebrity and gives us one of the most thoughtful, most intricate, most historically, socially, politically layered accounts of the Beatles' individual and collective influences on theirs as well as future generations.

Naïve, Rainy Sunday Afternoon Wistful Thinking Prediction: If Can't Buy Me Love were made mandatory reading for this generation's high school set, our fears of churning out an army of historically-bereft young people with Teflon reactions to societal milestones would be allayed before you could name each of the mop-topped young lads.

antiMUSIC: Have to say right off the top that I always read the entirety of any book I review. But that isn't the case with Can't Buy Me Love. I literally did not want it to end...so I've been savoring each and every page and I'm rationing out the last few pages of the final chapter…

Gould: I'm thrilled to hear you say that…

antiMUSIC: Just wanted to put that out there but I won't gush on and on here.

Gould: (laughs) That's alright. I got a good review somewhere and I was telling my daughter about it, and I was sharing it with her. I was telling her that when I was reading that review, I could literally feel my head beginning to swell. I've never had that experience. (laughs)

antiMUSIC: That kind of experience doesn't happen often enough in this business…

Gould: (laughs) So let's tone it down.

antiMUSIC: Got it. How about we start at the beginning, about what the genesis of the book was…was it you harboring a lifelong need to write the definitive book on The Beatles? Or was it a publisher who approached you?

Gould: No. Oh my goodness. Well that part of the book goes something like this: I'm a musician; I spent years in the music business. I'm a drummer. And I came up really as a jazz drummer (who studied with jazz drumming great Alan Dawson) and I played a great deal of jazz and rhythm and blues and rock and roll. I played in bands and played in studios. So that was what I was doing for much of my adult life. But I had harbored kind of … actually two things. One was a certain desire to write that I had never really acted upon all that strongly...

antiMUSIC: Are you kidding me? You'd never written before this book?

Gould: No, (laughs), no, I'm not kidding. And also I had sustained really a "reading interest"--- is how I'd describe it--- in popular culture but also in social history. In college I studied cultural anthropology, and kept reading about that. I was a little bit self-educated in those areas, is the best way to describe it. Then, I decided with some encouragement, to go back to college at one point in the mid '80s. I took a year off from the music business and went back to Cornell and basically finished. I had dropped out of Cornell many years before.

When I did go back there, I received a great deal of encouragement from a number of teachers who sort of didn't know what to do with me because I was older and treated me like a graduate student. And I became friendly with these people who were wonderful, extraordinary people. Some of them were anthropologists; some of them were historians, one of them was James McConkey, a wonderful prose writer, memoirist and fiction writer.

I got a lot of encouragement from the "anthropologically-oriented" people to write about my ideas about pop culture and I got a lot of encouragement from James (McConkey) and a guy named Larry Moore, simply to write. They said, "You know, you could do this."

So I started off with a lot of grandiose ideas, wanting to write some far-flung thing about popular music in the 20th century or something like that…

antiMUSIC: So, something really ambitious…?

Gould: Really. In a short period of time I realized I needed something, I needed a story, and I needed a narrative to get at some of that. So it came into my head to write about The Beatles. And originally what I really wanted to write about most was their music, because there had been a number of good biographies that had come out. Philip Norman's book Shout came out in the early '80s and you know, it's a very well done biography, is how I'd describe it. He's not so interested in the stuff I'm interested in but nonetheless… But what I noticed about all the biographies that had been written then, and to some extent it's still true, is that they all tended to take the music for granted. They all tended to think, "Well, we all know those songs, and we all know those records. Let me tell you the story of these people."

Which was kind of the thrust of those books. I wanted to write about their music, and I wanted to write about their music, I think, in a sort of new, or what I thought of as a new way, which is: I wanted to really write about what was going on in it---without a great deal of musical jargon and things like that, although I use a little bit of that in certain places.

And so I started off thinking about that. And as I began to think about that, almost immediately, or rather TRYING to do that, the question of WHY this music had this extraordinary impact on so many people---including me---seemed to get larger and larger and larger. And that led kind of inevitably into the realm of social history and even to some extent social psychology.

So I began to take that into account. And then I really sat down. I'd decided, "Okay: I'm going to write a book about this. I don't know anything about writing books." And I really didn't at that time.

But I did know one thing, which is that people always say that if you're going to write a book, don't start at the beginning. Start somewhere in the middle and find your orientation and find your voice and things like that. So I picked what struck me as a very pivotal time, which was sort of 1962, the period where The Beatles met (manager) Brian Epstein. They met (producer) George Martin. Ringo joined the band. They made their first record, then they made—in my view-- their first GOOD record, "Please Please Me". That seemed to be a really rich period to focus on.

So I sat down for a long time and wrote a chapter. A really long chapter. Originally this book was written in these completely ungainly 60, 70 page chapters. I really didn't know what I was doing. But I wrote a chapter. And it took a long time to find a voice…a writerly voice that would, in one way or another, enable me to speak about the music, to speak about the social background, to speak about all these things I wanted to speak about. It was very hard to do that.

But eventually I was reasonably satisfied with what I'd done. And then it was time for something extraordinarily lucky to happen. I must say that one of the things that I realized writing about The Beatles is that, and we all know this, is that people go about their work, they try to get good at things, and they try to do the best they can. And then, often, they need some luck too. It's not just as simple as working hard and playing by the rules, you know?

So I was at a party and there was a songwriter named Jake (Jacob) Brackman, who was actually a lyricist for Carly Simon, and wrote many of those songs with Carly. And Jake, in a previous life had worked at the New Yorker, in the late 1960s, had written a couple of very good pieces for them about cultural criticism. And I had told Jake, the way you might at a dinner party, what I was doing and so on. And he said, "Well, if this thing is as good as you seem to think it is…"---because, I guess I sounded pretty pretentious at the time---

antiMUSIC: Well, it WAS a dinner party after all…

Gould: (laughs) Exactly. It WAS a dinner party after all. He said "If this is as good as you think it is, you ought to send it to William Shawn. Now William Shawn, I knew him as the longtime editor of the New Yorker magazine. This is in the early 90s now. Shawn had been sort of deposed as the editor of the New Yorker a few years before by the new management, and in some New York publishing circles this had been a major event, because Shawn had been a legendary figure, I think it's fair to say that was the way he was seen. And I said, "Well where he is now, he's not at the New Yorker."

And Jake said, "No, he's now an editor at Farrar, Straus (& Giroux). And so I did just that. I took this chapter and put it in an envelope and I wrote a cover letter. And one thing. When I said I'd never written before, one thing everyone always told me was that I wrote great letters, okay? (laughs.) I think I wrote a pretty good cover letter saying, this is who I am and this is what I want to do. And then I sent it off to him attention Farrar, Straus.

And about a week later Shawn called me up. And the details of this are interesting because they were so bizarre. He called me up at about 10:30 on a Sunday night. At that time, my then wife and I had small children. No one EVER called us at 10:30 at night. But it was him. And finally I realized it was him, and not some friend playing some horrible joke on me. And then he talked to me about the work. And he was enormously admiring of it in what he said, and he asked if I'd like to have lunch with him...

antiMUSIC: And THAT was on the strength of that next chapter and a cover letter?

Gould: Yes, (laughs) on the basis of that one chapter and cover letter…which is all that I'd written. That was it. I was working on another chapter at the time. And he said, "Well, is there more?" And I said, "Well, yes, there's a little bit more."

And so we wound up getting together in the city, about 10 days later. And in that time I kind of pulled together that second chapter, which was in pretty good shape. So I gave him that and we had, for me, this amazing lunch. He took me to the Algonquin, to sort of complete the total effect of shock and awe and I found out a lot of things about him that were very interesting, which I had not known. I had known nothing about him other than he was this famous editor and he was supposed to be very eccentric. It turned out that he was a self-taught jazz pianist who played Duke Ellington, Fats Domino at the piano, improvised them and was enormously interested in almost every form of popular culture, belying the usual notion of the New Yorker (mag) as being this sort of high brow publication and so on.

And he was just enormously interested in almost anything that you could think of to talk to him about, it seemed. So anyway I gave him the second chapter. He called back the next day and said that he'd read it and that he'd liked it as much as the first one and that he was going to talk to Roger Straus about getting me a publishing contract, which he proceeded to do.

So suddenly I had gone from sort of toying around, as I thought of it, with this book, to now having a publishing contract and one of the more famous editors of the 20th century (chuckles)

antiMUSIC: You DID realize at that time how totally bizarre that was, how unusual it was for an editor…

Gould: Oh, completely. I didn't even tell my friends who were writers about it; because I knew they'd just hate me. (laughs)

antiMUSIC: (laughing) And rightfully so…

Gould: Really, yeah, absolutely rightfully so. It was this incredibly serendipity that happened. And so Shawn and I worked together on the book for about two years, until, as an elderly man in his '80s at that time, he died. And when he died…and he was my only connection with Farrar, Straus, he was my…it was a very strange-- when I look back on it--and somewhat fragile kind of arrangement because so much of my sense of myself as a writer and so much of my sense of ….., and I should say this, the QUALITY of the writing elevated pretty dramatically with his help. I learned an incredible amount about how to write from working with him. But there was a dimension to it, as I say that was pretty fragile. After he (Shawn) died, Roger Straus called me right up and said; "We've got to get together. We're still devoted to the book and so on and so forth. And maybe this is too much of a saga that I'm telling you, but I'm going to carry it through…

antiMUSIC: Oh, absolutely,…

Gould: Ok. (laughs) So I went down in the city---I live in upstate New York, near Woodstock, and I went down to the city again, and went for lunch with Roger who could not have been a more different personality---even though they had been great friends. Roger was the absolute antithesis of Shawn.

Shawn was this enormously genteel, and quiet and shy and mouse-like in his manners. Strauss was like a lion, or a pirate or something like that. He was incredibly flamboyant, kind of wonderful, embracing sort of figure, all this profanity coming out of him like this all the time, a great….

antiMUSIC: Character?

Gould: …A great character. Exactly. So we went out to lunch and he invited a then much younger editor named John Glusman to go out with us and that was Roger's way of assigning John to my book. Initially, I don't think, the concept of being assigned a quote Beatles book thrilled him at all. But he sat there at lunch very politely and listened to what I had to say, and then I suggested to him that maybe we should start off by having him read some of what I had done and so I gave him a gave him a couple of chapters. Because it turned out that Shawn had not been doing what an editor would normally do, where you send him a chapter, he puts it in the file and that becomes part of your file there. So I sent John a chapter---probably the most recent one I had written. It was incredibly gratifying because he had a very strong, very positive and completely surprised reaction to what it turned out I was doing. He called me up and said, "I had no idea what we were talking about, what you were trying to do." And the truth of the matter is, that was kind of a missed opportunity for me because I could have, if I had been more experienced, if my relationship had less of this psychological dimension to it than it had, I probably could have just continued right on. But as it turned out I really went through a couple of years where I kind of felt orphaned after Shawn had died.

antiMUSIC: Which is understandable…

Gould: Yeah, but again, if I had been a more professional writer I wouldn't have let it (Shawn's death) affect me quite as much, but there it was. That's not to say I didn't work on the book. All this time I'm doing other things, I'm playing music, and so on and so forth. So, in that sense, the fact that the book has taken so long, isn't something of which…I'm not all that proud of the fact although they sort of play it up as though it's, you know, it IS an indication that I have been thinking about these things and writing about them for a long time. Anyway, along I went. Amazingly enough the thing slowly started to get really done. And then about two years ago, when it was really close to being done, I was working on the last chapter. I had filled in all of the blanks that needed to be filled in and other sections of the book and so on and so forth. It was December…or whatever it would have been…20 months or so ago. John calls me up and he says, "I have some news." Whenever somebody in the publishing industry says this, I've learned that it means that they're moving someplace. (laughs) THAT'S what it means.

antiMUSIC: Good to know.

Gould: Right. That's their word, the understated word that they use. At any rate, Roger had died and Jonathan Galaksi had become publisher at FSG (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and John Glusman had become editor and chief for Strauss, during all the time I was working on this book, and John announces to me that he's leaving Strauss. This time I didn't have the reaction of feeling "Oh, my god! I'm an orphan again." I mean, I was in control of the book and it didn't affect my writing. But I was very concerned, first of all because he had served as this enormously devoted editor, he had championed my interests through god- knows how many editorial meetings, in which people smucked themselves and asked, "What the hell's going on with the Gould book?" sort of thing. And John would just say, "Don't worry, it's great it's going to be a great book." (laughs.)

antiMUSIC: It's all under control…

Gould: Right! It's all under control. (laughs.) And suddenly he's (John) leaving, and says "Don't worry! I've assigned your book to another editor here who's very good." And at any rate, after about a month, it took some time, I did get together with my new editor there. And his reaction was a little bit like John's reaction when I first met him. It was like this thing had just been dumped on his lap. It's not a book that he's acquired. He didn't seem ALL that enthusiastic about the project. I think he had read some of it. And he didn't seem all that enthusiastic about what he'd read, from MY needy point of view.

So I came away from that a little bit concerned. And the next day John called me up and said he'd accepted a position at Random house, actually Crown, or Harmony Books which is part of that whole empire, or that EVIL Empire as Roger Straus used to characterize it…(laughs).

And in fact, when John called, my caller ID said "Random House", and I thought, who do I know at Random House? And I realized it was probably going to be John. And just on that chance I picked up and said: "What would Roger have said?" (Laughs.) And his voice at the other end of the line said, "He would have said that I'd gone over to the Evil Empire."

antiMUSIC: …crossed over to the DARK side…

Gould: (laughs.) Yeah, exactly. So John calls me up and he says he's taken a position with them, and would I like to have lunch? And I go out for lunch with him and he basically said to me, "You know, I've been working on this book for a long, long time---not as long as YOU---but almost as long as you, and I simply can't bare the idea that it's going to get published and I'm not going to do it. So I want to buy your book." And so that's what ended up happening. Random House bought out my contract at Farrar Straus and they are now publishing my book. And the only thing I'm going to add to this long, long saga is I did say to John, "Okay, the personal connection here is everything to me. Just tell me, if I wasn't taking that attitude, why should I do this?"

So he said to me, "Well, for one thing, we're going to give you a lot more money." And I said, "Okay, that's good." And then he said, " We've got a very aggressive sales staff that is very, very good and this is a book that deserves to be promoted out there." And I said, "Okay, that's good."

And finally he said, "I'm going to give you the kind of editorial attention that nobody gets anymore." And it was really that …that…

antiMUSIC: Clinched it?

Gould: Exactly. That clinched it for me. And I really have to say that he was so true to his word in that regard. The manuscript I delivered was probably 100 pages, maybe even a little bit more, too long. I don't mean, too long contractually, I mean too long in the sense of longer than it NEEDED to be, longer than it SHOULD have been. And we spent really about six months, on the phone every weekday afternoon for an hour or two or sometimes three hours, editing this book together. In one sense it was very GENTLE editing. It was not some kind of drastic, sort of slashing and burning type of editing or anything like that. It was kind of Stage 2 of what I had learned working with Shawn all those years before. And it improved me so much as a writer, and it improved the book so much as a book. And again, when I tell people in the publishing industry this part of the story, they just look at me with their mouths open, because most people don't get that kind of editing these days.

antiMUSIC: No, it sounds like it's becoming more and more rare for that type of---and I don't mean this in a derogatory sense--- but that type of hand-holding. It's quite rare.

Gould: No, exactly. There's this great intimacy that came from it. When the book was published, and we actually had a copy of it, John took me out to lunch at the Union Square Café, I think for old time's sake—which is where the Farrar, Straus hangout was. And he brought the book with him, and he had already sent me one copy of it, so I'd seen it. But he said, "I just brought it so we could put it on the table here and just look at it for a few minutes."

And we did that, and then I said to him; "God, you really get a kick out of this, don't you?"

And he (John) just looked at me, and he said: "This is the biggest thrill in the world to me. When you can just look at it and say, "There's the book" sort of thing." I say that because, the Shawn thing (relationship) was an incredible piece of good luck. But that feeling of good luck in terms of the people I've dealt with going forward, that I've had the opportunity to deal with, and in some ways even going back to those people at Cornell, there have been extraordinary people who were involved in this whole thing. And THAT'S been wonderful.

The interesting connection of course, there's a kind of parallel there to The Beatles story too. In the sense that they too, at critical instances, met up with people who were very different from what they had every reason to expect, who really facilitated what they were doing in very, very important ways. I like that kind of thing. Again, I'm not comparing myself to them, but I like that sort of parallel. I like the fact that whatever this project has been, it's been affected by that same sort of goodwill that some people are capable of bringing to their work on behalf of other people.

antiMUSIC: Absolutely. But at the same time, credit is due also to you. Obviously you had the goods. None of this would have come into being, none of these relationships …if you hadn't had the stuff…

Gould: (laughs) I'm slowly, slowly allowing myself to accept that. (laughs)

antiMUSIC: I'm sure this book publishing "thing" is still new…you've been working on it for a couple of decades, but in many ways, it seems that it's still new for you. Is that fair to say…

Gould: Absolutely.

antiMUSIC: One of the first things to hit me, very early on in the book, and I'm sure you've heard it before, is this thought : "If my high school teachers had used your book as a textbook, I very well could have gone on to become a teacher, or historian or social analyst…" What type of reaction do you have when you hear that type of comment?

Gould: Nobody has said that. But that's lovely. (laughs) I grew up in an era, and that is to say, much of my sensibility was formed in the era which was the 1960s. And there were certain things about it that I was certainly in tune with. One of the things that I wasn't in tune with and that I've struggled with ever since I think is a kind of current of anti-intellectualism that was very strong then, and has continued in that generation and in subsequent generations. I may regard myself as someone with a hip intellect but I feel like, you know, I have an intellect. And it's a perfectly valid organ of my personality in that way. (laughs) To me the challenge, and this is not surprising, I mean a lot of the people I know, particularly in the jazz world, and some of them have an almost comically affected intellectuality about them. Of course, we all know that –I didn't know Dizzy, but we all know people who model themselves on Dizzy Gillespie and so on and so forth. These guys all acted as if they were all members of the faculty of the University Jazz or Be-bop. But I think to me, if this stuff is presented with some humor and some passion, it's really interesting. The past is really interesting. The way things come about is tremendously interesting. And what's new about that? I mean narrative has been, in one way or the other, at the core of most forms of art for longer than anybody can trace. So that's the compelling dynamic of it all. But that's a lovely thing to say about the textbook…

antiMUSIC: The amount of research here is obviously exhaustive and impressive. Is there something in this research that struck you as counter to what you had always believed or turned you on your ear enough to say: "Wow, even I didn't know that!"

Gould: Well, a lot of small things…too many small things to count, particularly as it relates to the music itself. I still listen to The Beatles. I still listen carefully and I still hear things in the music that strikes me as new.

antiMUSIC: Even now?

Gould: Yes, even now. And maybe to some people they'd seem like enormous subtleties but still, there is that continuing sense of discovery which I think, with any art that has any depth to it, that's a fairly common experience. You can't really exhaust it that way.

In terms of the research though, probably the most surprising thing was, I won't call it a revelation, but sort of a change of perspective, which had to do with John Lennon's famous, "We're more popular than Jesus" remark. I was in Junior High then, and I remember it pretty well, when the controversy broke out. I remember my reaction to it and I remember the reaction to it of most of the people around me. I grew up in New York, in a kind of upper middle class, cosmopolitan New York milieu. Lennon's comment prompted a big a reaction from a group of people—the Christian right-- that everybody seemed a little surprised to learn even existed. The reason it prompted such a reaction was that these people, whoever they were, didn't like hearing this type of unvarnished truth from a longhaired British pop musician. When I went back to look at it (the comment and its resulting controversy), and when I had to write about it, I had a very very different reaction. That's even allowing for the fact that Lennon may have been even mainly speaking metaphorically, that is to say, using Jesus the way that he might have said, "as popular as sliced bread" or something like that. Although that's NOT the way that he said it because he was talking to a British journalist---Maureen Cleave--- that he had a flirtatious relationship with, and he was trying to impress her with his deep thoughts, which John Lennon was capable of doing from time to time. And he went on about how Christianity would vanish and shrink and all of this. He was sounding off on this thing. The first thing that occurred to me in researching this, is that it was demonstrably NOT true. At that point, there were hundreds of millions of devout Christians all over the world and let's face it, when The Beatles put out one of their incredibly successful records, it sold a few million copies, and that doesn't compare to hundreds of millions of people. And that's even if popularity may not be the way that those people, or many of them would have described their attitude about Jesus. But the more interesting thing to me, was again, in seeing the reaction of main stream media, and realizing that the group of people, for better or worse, that we all become very aware of now, that is to say the Christian Right, the Conservative Fundamentalist Right, those people were virtually not even on the radar screen of the mainstream media in 1966, and I found that fascinating. I found that fascinating to think that this was, as I sort of describe it in the book I think, kind of an opening skirmish. That was really illuminating for me to see how my own perspective had changed, and the way of looking back on it now with an understanding that there are all these devout Christians out there. I say "out there" because they're still not all that present in my personal life as far as that goes. They're there. They're in the world. They were almost invisible at that time and I think that, again, I'm not saying that that was the smartest reaction to that comment, to start throwing Beatles records on bonfires and stuff like that, but at least I can have some understanding of what they were feeling, and the way that they felt unacknowledged, ignored in some way or another.

antiMUSIC: After producing this type of book, what can you possibly do for an encore…is there such an animal in the making?

Gould: Oh, sure. In fact I started working on it the last couple of weeks, oddly enough because if I don't work on that, then all I do is sort of , if I don't work on something new, then all I do is worry about, you know," Is the book going to get reviewed? Is it going to get noticed?" and that sort of thing…and that's maddening. Do you know Professor Longhair by any chance?

antiMUSIC: The name sounds vaguely familiar…

Gould: Okay. That's perfect. That's one of the things I love about this subject. Because I've spent a long time writing about four of the most famous people in the world. And I'm so sick writing about celebrity. I am so sick of writing about everything that's involved in that, as interesting as it can be. And I'm also tired of writing about, in this case four people, about whom almost everybody already has some fairly-well developed set of opinions, whether they agree with me or not, or whether I changed you, or whether they're different from what I have to say…So, Longhair, whose real name was Henry Rollin Bird, or Roy Bird as he was called, was a New Orleans piano player who made some records in the late '40s and in the '50s, really sort of dropped out of the music business in the '60s and then was quote unquote sort of rediscovered which a very loaded word, and it's important how really loaded that word is. In the early '70s, he had a much more successful career as a musician for a while, and then died in 1980.

He played under the name Professor Longhair and the important thing…and I should say he was a black New Orleans born in Bogalusa, Alabama in the 30s and grew up in a poor black family in New Orleans and so on. The thing about Longhair that intrigues me tremendously is that he was hugely influential on the whole New Orleans music world, meaning Fats Domino, Little Richard who recorded in New Orleans even though he didn't come from there, Ray Charles who recorded in New Orleans, even though he didn't come from there, and then on a group of people who surfaced much later on like Dr. John, and Alan Toussaint. All of whom play homage to Longhair, all of whom regard themselves…the New Orleans guys regard themselves as disciples of Longhair. And so what he was, was an example of a musician who was enormously influential and not particularly successful, in his lifetime.

And I think that there's something about the whole subject that intrigues me tremendously. Now me being me, what I'm adding on to it is a couple of big things. One of which is, one of the things I sort of feel I learned to do a little bit in this book, is to write about music and place, how music comes from sensibilities of particular places. So in some ways, this will also be a book about New Orleans as a music centre. It will also be about the way, after WW2, the popular music of America changed from being jazz based which is what it had been during the whole Tin Pan alley sort of period, to blues-based which is what it became in the rock and roll era so to speak.

And ultimately, my biggest ambition for the book, the way I describe it is, to get at what I regard is the huge cultural questions that sort of hangs over the modern era. That question is: what is it that all of us white people have about black music? What is that fascination that goes back 150 years? What is that about, you know?

Obviously it's not a question that I can begin to answer definitely but it's something that I want to try to get at. And that's why I say it involves terms like "rediscover". Well Longhair wasn't rediscovered. What he was, was rediscovered by white people--- he'd been living in his house in New Orleans, all that time. (laughs)

This book will have to do with repaying another set of debts I feel I've acquired in my life, which first of all, is a debt to black music and black culture which has had an enormous influence on me. And also the sense ---The Beatles is a sad story in the end--- but the story of their success is this incredible story of these people who were very talented and who saw their talent carry them to the attention of the entire world. There are a lot of other people out there who are also very talented and never achieve any success. And to find some way to write a book about someone like that is an interesting project to me. That's the next thing I'm going to do.

antiMUSIC: I expect it's going to be a real treat to be able to read this account through your perspective. Truly looking forward to it…confident it will be as interesting as Can't Buy Me Love, and as interesting as this interview. Really enjoyed this. Thanks for taking the time. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Gould: No, I don't think so. I love to talk about my work, but I also was raised to have certain inhibitions about doing it, and I've been doing it now for about 45 minutes and I think it's time to stop. If that makes sense… (laughs).

antiMUSIC: Again thank you and the best of luck with the book.

Gould: Thank you for all of the kind things that you said about it. I mean it's a pleasure talking to people. Here I am going to say one more thing: one of the great pleasures of having this thing out there is it becomes an opportunity to speak to a lot of people that I would never meet and really enjoy sort of communing with on some level or another, and that's sort of the subsidiary pleasure that's really becoming more and more precious to me in that way.

antiMUSIC: Glad I had the chance to be one of those people.

Gould: Absolutely!

antiMUSIC: Thank you so much Jonathan.

Gould: Be well