The Beatles' Second Album (Rock of Ages) Review

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The Beatles' Second Album (Rock of Ages) ReviewHow does someone, even the always loquacious Dave Marsh, write an entire book (albeit 180 small pages) about an album containing 11 songs? He doesn't. While perhaps a third of the book is about or relates to the Capitol concoction released in the US as "The Beatles' Second Album," the rest is a scathing attack on Capitol exec Dave Dexter, Jr., who oversaw the release of Capitol's Beatles' records from late 1963 to 1966. This puts Marsh in an odd position, too, for as much as he adores the subject LP which Dexter assembled (there is no UK "counterpart" album), he cannot stop raking Dexter over the coals for everything Marsh sees that Dexter did wrong.
There is way too much about Dexter in this book. And, of course, "Trashing Dave Dexter While Listening to the Beatles' Second Album" would not have been a marketable title, albeit a more accurate one.
Marsh offers some interesting descriptions of the LP's songs and how they affected him, though he retains his long-standing tendency to throw in totally unnecessary ten-dollar words here and there. But he does not offer any new revelations or, for that matter, insight. His primary sources are Bruce Spizer's excellent books and Dexter's own "Playback." Even so, he completely fails to explain why the LP includes both sides of the Beatles' sole Swan single (Swan did not have the rights to issue the songs on an LP), no doubt because Spizer's superb "The Beatles' Swan Song" had not yet been published when Marsh was writing his book.
Most of the factual material is condensed well, though quite a bit of it, such as the Vee Jay/Capitol debacle (all gleaned from Spizer's excellent book on the subject) has little or nothing to do with the book's subject. There are only a few obvious errors (e.g., reference to a Canadian radio station in "London" and one reference to Capitol's constructing "Meet the Beatles" from the UK "Please Please Me" instead of the UK "With the Beatles," though Marsh gets it right in the acknowledgments section).
The book suffers somewhat, though, from being written in spurts, as some sentences appear verbatim or nearly so in different chapters. This is likely due not to Dickensonian writing but rather to sloppy editing.
A casual Beatles fan may find this thinly-disguised hatchet job interesting in spots, but the more serious fan will appreciate the book more for Marsh's opinions. They make it an entertaning read, while the overbearing bludgeoning of Dexter and endless recitations of Dexter's life history, most of which are utterly superfluous to the book, render it flawed.The Beatles' Second Album (Rock of Ages) Overview

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