IVIV (1) Can't Buy Me Love

[John Carvill]

(Dave, hope you don't mind me steppin' in here...)

Just been thinking some more about this bit.

"Doc whistled the title notes from 'Can't But Me Love.' ignoring the
look on her face. 'You're givin him IOUs for everything, o' course.'

"'You fucker, if I'd known you were still this bitter--'"

Ok, certainly Doc sounds quite bitter there. And it's a very funny exchange.

Any significance in the song choice? Notice Pynchon is careful to make
explicit the fact that Doc whistles "the title notes"?

A couple of possible relavancies spring to mind:

(1) The literal meaning of the song title, extolling the virtues of
emotion over materialism, that totemic word 'love' which Doc will
ponder on later, and which was always close to the heart of The
Beatles and The Sixties. Make love, not war. All you need is Love.
Love me Do. Can't Buy Me Love. The irony that the Sixties are, in the
book's 'present', dying all around Doc, and the era of (among other
things) 'free love' is coming to an end.

(2) The nature of the song itself. Although firmly apart of teh new
pop idiom the Beatles were carving out, and as such a relentlessly
modernist piece of work, there are more traditional forms stirred into
the mix: there are jazz and blues notes in there, and even 'big band'
and 'swing' elements. Consider the following, in the context of what
Pynchon is doing in Inherent Vice, from MacDonald's  'Revolution in
the Head':

"Among the simplest of the group's hits, CAN'T BUY ME LOVE consists of
a jazzy blues in minor chords with a straight-up eight-bar major
chorus. As such, it spoke a musical language teh parental generation
could relate to, and it was almost logical that Ella Fitzgerald
recorded a cover version as soon as she heard it."

MacDonald goes on to say that "The Beatles' ability to be two
contradictory things at once - comfortable safe and exhilaratingly
strange - has been displayed by no other pop act", and praises the
song's "effortless rightness".

Consider also, that, compared with the group's more complex and
artistically intense masterpieces, the song is musically and
(especially) lyrically simple, yet it is impeccably arranged and
produced.

Is this not similar to what Pynchon has done with Inherent Vice? Taken
an old, comfortable genre - noir fiction - and produced somethng
(seemingly) simple and straightforward, which is still infused with
that uniquely Pynchonian strangeness, these two facets combining to
create something exhilirating?

Of course, the song was written and recorded quickly, while the group
were playing a series of concerts in Paris. Which might fit with the
speed with which we assume Pynchon to have written Inherent Vice. On
the other hand, only the guide vocal was recorded in Paris.
McCartney's actual vocal for the track was added later, after the
group's first US tour, so the song came into existence during a
transitional period, as the Beatles were pulled even further into the
mania of a new existence, one where both love and money were flowing
so freely that the meanings of those words were changing rapidly. As
Paul McCartney told Barry Miles, in 'Many Years From Now':

"Miami was incredible. It was teh first time we ever saw police
motorbike outriders with guns. I've got photographs I took out of teh
car window. It was amazing. It was a big time for us, obviously, and
there were all these lovely, gorgeous tanned girls. We did a photo
session down by the beach and immediately asked them out. And MG
Motors were trying to sell their convertibles down there, which was a
perfect little Florida car, and lent us one each as a publicity thing.
I remember meeting this rather nice girl and taking her out for dinner
in this MG in the cool Florida night, palm trees swaying. You kidding?
A Liverpool boy with this tanned beauty in my MG going out to dinner,
It should have been 'Can Buy Me Love', actually."

Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Yeah!