Revolution in the Head | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Those are important points, and probably most accurately the Capitol relationship and the setting up of Apple put paid to that idea. But they did make noises about it, possibly to keep EMI in line, and I can’t recall for the moment where I got that idea from, so I’ll have to edit that until I’m more certain of my sources.

Thanks for that, it looks very much like something I might have drawn from, probably someone quoting this as a source and of course it makes sense in terms of contract negotiations. I don’t know how much the boys knew about the issues George Martin was having with Capitol (I of course had no idea until the Lewisohn book), and it intrigues me to wonder if EMI played on that. In fact I’m wondering how aware were they of Martin’s power in the company at all; wasn’t it at this time he set up AIR?

Just continuing this tangent, I’ve googled that statement of Paul’s and found a couple of different sources, but this one adds something else:

When The Beatles were in Memphis that month during their final American tour, a reporter asked: “It was said that you would record ‘Revolver ’ in Memphis. What happened?” Paul’s answer was: “Little things kept getting in the way, like money. We wanted to come. A couple of tracks would have been much better if we had come. We wanted Steve Cropper, a guitarist for Booker T & The MG’s to A&R the session. He’s the best we’ve heard.”

It’s been documented that Steve Cropper was indeed earmarked to produce the album but that manager Brian Epstein had cancelled the Memphis sessions because of security problems. One can only imagine how “Got To Get You Into My Life ” would have sounded with this legendary guitarist/musician as producer. As it is, the innovative work of George Martin and Geoff Emerick back at EMI Studios in London did bring amazing results. As Paul himself stated in 1966: “When we finished ‘Revolver ,’ we realized that we had found a new British sound almost by accident.” A fortunate accident I’m sure most will agree!

Um, wow.

Going to boil down my rant for those who took one look and ran away screaming:

Revolution was an attempt to synthesise the new information from Lewisohn’s Beatles Recording Sessions with a critical assessment of each song and the cultural context it comes from. It’s been through three editions now, each time borrowing from new sources as they appeared, so my 2nd revised edition is probably very different from the first. It’s got some handy lists at the back (song keys, bibliography, discography), and each song entry lists the writers, who played what, when it was recorded and released and whatever MacDonald chose to say about it. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the information in the book, there are probably errors and they’re unlikely to ever be corrected since the author’s death. I think MacDonald does a good job of getting all this information together, the book is (so far) unique in this aspect.

My disagreement is with his critical analysis. He doesn’t think the lyrics have any consequence at all and thinks they may well be incoherent to someone a century from now, by which time it may be possible to objectively criticize their work (which is something I do agree with). He dislikes the Beatles later composition-by-multitrack methods and in particular an aspect he calls random, the use of collage either by tape loop or song fragment. MacDonald believes this is drug-induced laziness and describes their career in terms of an arc which begins to descend after Sgt. Peppers. Naturally I have all sorts of problems with this But it doesn’t stop there. He dismisses most of Harrison’s output, and begins to attack — starting musicologically but by the end of the book, personally — Lennon’s work too. You can’t escape the rising disappointment in everything MacDonald writes from Part 3 onwards, it’s distressing, and as a critical analysis it becomes too opinionated to be of any use. I think MacDonald mourns the 60’s and he’s bitter about it. I also think that his attempt to rewrite Paul’s contribution (based on the material in the Barry Miles book) may have critically unbalanced the book although I don’t have the first edition to properly make this comparison, but he certainly does a lot of Paul-defending between the lines.

I don’t agree with many of his cultural pronouncements, I suspect he couldn’t disentangle his attitude to his generation from the artistic products of it. I think it’s best to say he tried to be an objective critic but was bound to fail, as most of us are. It’s a great book if you treat it as the cultural artifact that it is, but be wary of imbibing its point of view. So that’s the short version of my rant, which is more wordy and literary and detailed. The short version , you say

@Ron Nasty I found where I had sourced that assertion, it is indeed in Revolution In The Head p189 but suggests that EMI’s contractual clauses made it too expensive to record in America, which is a little different from the verbatim quote. @vonbontee the suggestion that the solo is the same is indeed still there on p191. It’s nothing like it, and I don’t know how I missed that but it is in a footnote. Oops about “Buddy”, it’s fixed!

Another illustration of how MacDonald’s critical distance falters in the latter stages of the book: p362 where he discusses Paul’s demo [U181] Come And Get It . Now, its fine to like the song. It’s fine to speculate whether it should have been accepted as a Beatles song. Who knows why Lennon didn’t participate? It doesn’t sound like it needed any help. But the critical failing here is that he starts the discussion by contrasting this demo with [U138] Not Guilty as a means to yet again trash George and his composing method and surely this meant friction between Paul and George because Paul is quick and George is slow. An unfair comparison is made with a song that was shelved with a song mystifyingly left out of the Beatles canon. This is truly fanfiction and unnecessary, but it’s the kind of thing MacDonald does increasingly over the course of the book with no basis in fact.

Looking back on it, I am beginning to wonder just how final this final revision was and how much the publisher is to blame.