Entertainment For Lively Minds
Revolution 9.5
After listening to the recent Beatles podcast I rummaged about in the shelves and found a copy of Revolution in the Head, by Ian MacDonald, that I'd been given for Christmas a couple of years ago. A few days later the book is read and I'm pretty underwhelmed. This has always been held up as the 'must-read' Beatles text, and seemed to be custom made for me: I always prefer music tomes that use the actual music as the entry point, rather than biography, and I have adored the Beatles for exactly 78% of my life. What could go wrong?
Well, for starters I don't think it's particularly well written. It reads like an undergraduate cultural-studies essay, full of over-confidence in his opinions, over-interpretation of his subject and deliberate contrariness.
So the face that Ms Rigby keeps in a jar by the door is "the single most memorable image in the Beatles output"? Pigs arse. Nowhere Man is a dirge-like tune memorable only by "the luxury of its production"? It's pure pop perfection to me and most others (unlike the "brilliantly fluent" Martha My Dear). I understand that some of this is difference of opinion, but he bludgeons the reader with his views so absolutely and gracelessly that he leaves no room for dissent.
He is also bizarrely dismissive of pretty much all rock music (as opposed to pop), and scolds the Beatles heartily any time they dabble. Post Beatles, music descended into a "barrage of distortion" that eliminated the need for "anything more than a generalised strum technique". Can this have been included for any reason other than to be deliberately superior and provocative?
The other interesting thing, and I may be completely wrong here, is his slightly awkward inclusion of music theory, as if he doesn't really know what he's talking about. He'll often mention a specific note to illustrate a point (or impress), but the information is meaningless without the harmonic context of the song (i.e. the key signature). So he's either being deliberately exclusive to most of his readership, or he's tugging.
I don't enjoy reading toady hagiographies, but the book has a quite sour tone to it that I don't think the music deserves. I maintain that anyone interested in the Beatles should start with The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn and The Beatles Gear by Andy Babiuk, and move to The Unreleased Beatles by Richie Unterberger if they want more. While these books concentrate on the tangible relics of the group, they give the same cultural context as Revolution in the Head, albeit with far more subtlety and grace.
btw, I've just started Peter Doggett's book, and it seems excellent.
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I've got it
£3 it was in HMV. I didn't finish it. I just don't need that much detail. It represents a sort of trainspotter mentality. Similar books have been made about The Smiths and Morrissey, and although I finished them, I was similarly underwhelmed.
Just give me the music and maybe a rip-roaring biog packed with anecdote and insight.
I really enjoyed it
I thought the extended essay at the front had some interesting points to make. Particularly the point about the disappearing generation gap.
Probably I am anal, but I love all that, "at 2.53 notice McCartney's embarrassed cough when he fluffs his fuzz base line" tosh.
I also love
that studio detail, but it is far better covered in the recording sessions book and on sites such as Beatles Anomalies.
I think though
that he was the first.
Complete Beatles Recording Sessions
came out in 88.
stand corrected
In retrospect
you may have a fair old point.
I read it when it first came out when I was much more impressionable and took his word as THE word.
I do remember disagreeing many times with what he was writing but I bowed to a superior knowledge, I think.
If I reread books I would pick it up tonight and start again with this older and wiser head upon my shoulders.
But I don't, so I won't.
Coincidentally, I just
Coincidentally, I just returned from London, where I picked up a few books I had in storage, this being one of them and was flicking through it last night, for the first time in ages.
I remember when this came out, think it was just around the time of the Anthology, maybe a year or two ahead, and I was pretty bowled over. Beatle-lit through the 80s and into the 90s had been mired in endless hagiographies or at the other extreme, sensationalism (Albert Goldman). The band's critical stock was pretty low and I don't *think* there had been such an in-depth assessment of the canon, track-by-track and in such detail, other than Mark Lewisohn's exhaustive studio book.
I actually like his cussedness and contrary opinions, I personally would disagree with many of them, but at that time, just before the HJH 'revival' of the mid-90s, they really did need a hefty critical reappraisal and RITH served that purpose well. For me, the book was utterly absorbing and I very much liked his style and slightly bleak attitude! And despite his apparent dismissal of most rock post-1970 (I think his reductive analysis seemed to reference typical early 90s indie more than anything else) if you check out his essays in 'The People's Music', you'll find him to be a chap of wide-ranging tastes with an unquestionable passion and love of rock in myriad forms.
I've always thought 'RITH' was over-rated...
...(and yes, I did buy and read it when it came out): it manages to make a fascinating subject dull (compare with Lewisohn's work) and, perhaps unforgivably, considering the rare and privileged access MacDonald was given to the EMI tape archive, it contains more than one error (which is important in a book appealing primarily to Beatlegeeks).
Yet the reviews were almost universally gushing. I suspect there may have been a touch of hero-worshipping there and the reviews were of the author rather than their work...
Errors?
Give me some examples please. I took everything at face value!
The only musical howler I noticed (and it's very picky and muso-ish) is that he goes on about Blackbird being in some alternate tuning with a dropped E string. Any nitpicking fool with a pedantic bent knows fine well it's in standard tuning... Duuuh!...
From memory...
...(it's a LONG time since I read the book), he made a major howler about provenance of the Anthology version of Please Please Me, which Beatlefans immediately leapt on, and for some reason he attributes the none-more-George guitar solo in She's a Woman to Paul.
Well I really liked it...
...although I take jimmyshoes' point about being more impressionable when I read it.
However, I could NEVER have read it cover to cover. It was a perfect kitchen table/bathroom book to pick up and read bits at a time for me.
Many Years From Now
The McCartney book Many Years From Now by Barry Miles (a book length set of interviews with McCartney only talking about the writing of every Beatles song) is derided as far as I know. I read it years before Revolution In Head and I much, much prefer it. That is my Beatles tome.
Barry Miles
We may be in the minority but I agree with you. I think Many Years From Now is under-rated. It's really well written and is valuable as much for how Barry Miles sets the scene of the period as for the McCartney quotes. I think the book captures well what was happening in London at the time, and shows the Beatles' (and especially McCartney's) place in that "happening" scene. It's a good read.
I know Many Years From Now gets dismissed because people perceived it as Paul being defensive and trying to prove something. But for me, it's just Paul giving his side of the story. Of course his version has occasional distortions. We all do that in talking about our lives. People accuse McCartney of "rewriting" history but they never seem to realize that Lennon did the same thing. Lennon gave his version of events endlessly in interviews and while his interviews were always entertaining, the fact is he often exaggerated and occasionally even lied. Yet people seem to forgive him for all his distortions. Bit of a double standard.
That said, I do like Revolution in the Head a lot, too. MacDonald is opinionated and caustic but that made the book entertaining for me. And his praise carries more weight because you can tell he's not just a fanboy. I like that the latest edition combines both his opinions with Lewisohn's research and quotes from Many Years From Now and from other books. It pulls many strains together into one text. One thing I've noticed is that MacDonald's footnotes are often juicier than the text. And I agree with the other poster here who said the best way to read the book is in bits and pieces because he's not the smoothest writer. He can be very dull in spots.
Many Years from Now
Oddly enough, I have had this for years and never got around to reading it. Maybe I should bump it up the queue. Agree with the comment below about Lewisohn's 'Complete Beatles Chronicle'.
I quite like Shout
however the Lennon worship is a bit heavy. At the time I probably endorsed it - wouldn't now though.
I think you can't beat...
...Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle (which incorporates the main part of his Beatles Live!, Recording Sessions and Beatles at the BBC books) as the most readable and accessible one-stop Beatles tome.
I always detected a touch of
I always detected a touch of the schoolmaster in MacDonald ("beta minus, Lennon, now go away and try harder next time").
And while RITH is a great book for mulling on a bit by bit basis, there's really not much, er, joy there. It doesn't strike me as odd that MacDonald thinks that the acme of the Beatles' achievement was the over-blown and over-rated "A Day In The Life".
"there's really not much joy there"
...I don't mean this as a fatuous comment at all, but as Ian took his own life there may well have been an absence of joy in his life which would, of course, have impacted on his writing.
I suspect you're right.
I suspect you're right.
Not much
joy, to be fair, yes. He obviously was seriously ill, as his tragic suicide a few years later sadly proved.
However, he did occasionally sparkle with effervescent enthusiasm. I haven't the book to hand right now, but I remember especially evocative and joyful entries for 'Penny Lane', 'Eight Days A Week' amongst others.
Jeez
I did not know that. I knew he had died, but I didn't know anything about the circumstances. That's tragic.
I love "Revolution In The Head" and "The Peoples' Music", and I particularly love his contrarian viewpoints and dogged self-belief. His offhand mentions of some bands are enough to send me seeking out their catalogue to find out what I'm missing (The Incredible String Band, for example).
I hear he wrote a book about Shostakovich as well. Not quite had the courage to attempt that, but one day maybe.
my immediate thought...
...on anyone writing a serious work on Shostakovich is that they must have had to immerse themselves in a great deal of intense and dark material in order to know their subject. But then, on the other hand, experiencing troubles - be they internal or external (and Shostakovich was pressured from the Soviet authorities all his life) - can help to give real insight into the creative products of the troubles of others. But I should say that I never knew Ian or his particular circumstances and that any thoughts I might have are based only on speculation.
Well
I don't know a single note of Shostakovich's music (unless I just don't realise it) but even his name sounds heavy.
Agree
It's great in it's way but I don't find it particularly enjoyable to dive into.
My top 3 :
Authorised - Hunter Davies
Beatles Forever - Nicholas Schaffner
An Illustrated Record - Roy Carr and Tony Tyler
Coincidentally (probably) the first 3 books I read on them ...
Beatles Forever
Wow. I forgot this one. When I was a 9-year-old Beatle freak it was the only book on them I had. Every picture has become so internalised it's part of my DNA.
Ok I think, for me, the real point of RITH
is that it opened up my ears to re-listening to much of The Beatles output with fresh ears..I think prior to that book, I was conditioned to "going through the motions" of listening to the Beatles because of over exposure and listening fatigue really..I think that I-Mac can be rather pretentious in his musings. However his essay on Nick Drake in "The People's Music" is remarkable and works on so many levels that I have been compelled to read it many times..Also let's not forget that it was McDonald who revisited Neil Young's "On The Beach", after it was more or less slammed by most of the music press on it's release, to hail it as the masterpiece that it truly is.
The Nick Drake essay
is one of the few pieces of his writing I don't like. He is much too enamoured with his subject, and strays far too far into flights of fancy about angels or heavenly noises (or whatever his point was).
It doesn't help that I think Nick Drake is vastly over-rated.
Re. Good Beatles Books...
Prior to RITH, many people raved about "The Love You Make" by Peter Brown. I read it a long time ago and thought it was excellent. It hardly seems to get a mention these days.
Linda McCartney on Peter Brown...
"He was a friend. He was the one who introduced Paul and me… A man I trusted. When I was going to the hospital to have Stella, I handed him my baby, Mary, to hold. I wouldn't trust my baby to anyone but a friend. Now it's like he doesn't exist. And his book… well, it doesn't matter what he wrote, because he betrayed a trust. We decided not to read it, but we heard things. We put the copy he sent us in the fire and I photographed it as it burned, page by page. As to what he wrote about Paul or about John's experiences, ask Paul himself. He's coming back."
Peter Brown
I don't think the book has held up well. It came out in 1983, at the height of the "Lennon WAS the Beatles" period. Partly you can tell that Peter Brown, like the publicist that he was, held a finger up to the air to test the prevailing wind and realized that his book should paint John as a saint and Paul as evil.
More problematic is that the book is fictionalized. Brown recreates entire conversations when he wasn't even in the room. He pretends to be present at all sorts of moments when he wasn't there.
And now, all these years later, with new research and new books that have come out, and with a more balanced portrait of both Lennon and McCartney, Brown's book is just inaccurate.
I haven't read it in absolute ages but...
...the 12" record sized 'Illustrated Beatles Record' (or something like that) by Tony Tyler & Roy Carr (again, that's from memory - I may be wrong) I recall as being both amusing and incisive for its time (the early 80s). Not sure how it would stand up now as a whole, but I suspect there's still raised smiles to be had at the pithiness of many of the writers' observations.
It stil stands up -
though my copy is falling apart, but I have had it since it was first published an alarming number of years ago. The last Lennon album out at the time was Walls and Bridges! OMG. (Published as long ago as 1975 - yikes).
Interesting
It seemed almost heretical to criticise RITH before this - it seemed like a "given" that as a fan of the HJHs you had to like this book. Me, I must have around 30-40 books on the subject (including most - if not all - of those mentioned above) and I never really got on with RITH. Nice to know I'm not the only one...
I like it.
He's a bit unnecessarily dismissive of rock music, but it really opened my ears to the Beatles, having never really been a fan previously. It helped me believe, so I'll always love it for that.
I like that it gives Lennon pretty short shrift for all the same reasons I've always disliked him. Talented bloke, but eminently unlikeable, IMO.
And
he rightly rates Lennon well below McCartney in terms of technical musical ability and craftsmanship. It's something I had never really considered until I read the book.
And as George Martin said...
"[Paul]'s an excellent musical all-rounder, probably the best bass-guitarist there is, a first-class drummer, brilliant guitarist and competent piano player." He's just such a great musician, such a gifted composer.
I think of Lennon as being the lemon juice to McCartney's complex, rich dessert. It'd cloy without Lennon, but the vast majority of the craft resides in McCartney.
What RITH did for me was make me realise Macca's melodic gift - soaring around all over the place, while Lennon's melodies are more "horizontal". That's not to do Lennon down - many of my favourite individual Beatles songs are Lennon's, but they needed each other big time. But I do think Lennon needed McCartney, musically, more than McCartney needed him.
Paragraph two
is a brilliant summation of the alchemy that was Lennon & McCartney.
Their first solo albums define the gulf between them perfectly; McCartney is all twee pretty melodies but ultimately (despite the occasional flash of melodic genius) cloying and Plastic Ono Band is stark, uncompromising truth but melodically flat and sparsely arranged. That's why they needed each other.
The dismissal
of Nowhere Man was the moment that severed my trust in the book and MacDonald's opinions.
Whereas...
...I was a bit surprised by that, but pleased, because I don't like Nowhere Man very much either. I actually don't like very much of Rubber Soul at all: far too many of its songs get right on my tits.
Rubber Soul
is one of my least favourite Beatles albums, and shrinks in comparison to Help on one side and Revolver on the other. The Recording Sessions book makes it clear how quickly it was thrown together in the studio, and how desperate they were for material at the time. Somehow it manages to capture the archetypal Beatles sound while being slightly hollow in the songwriting (much like Sergeant Pepper).
Oooh
this could be the start of the Rubber Soul backlash. I too think it is a bit of a weak entry in the canon.
You hear Revolver and you just think, "Ah THAT'S what they were trying to do."
It's Brian Wilson's favorite
Interestingly, just this year, Brian Wilson was quoted as saying Rubber Soul was the best pop album ever made. He said it was better than his own band's Pet Sounds. Not sure I agree but he clearly hears something in it.
Remember he was
probably referring to the US version which has a couple of Help tracks.