Revolution in the Head | Page 2 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Much like The Beatles’ own music, I think it’s important to see RitH (and, indeed, Lewisohn’s earlier books) in the context in which it was written. In the early 90s there really weren’t all that many great Beatles books, which is why biogs like Shout! get mentioned so often. The early settlers are the ones who are remembered.

Lewisohn raised the bar immeasurably. Before his books we barely knew about half of the Anthology recordings. Just a few years later we’d heard the lot. And yet there are mistakes and omissions all through Lewisohn’s Sessions and Chronicle. Mistakes because the books were done quickly, because the information wasn’t out there, or because of simple misunderstandings. But for many years it was the best we had. Nowadays there are many more sources, people have gone back and added, corrected, improved upon, but the gold standard of reference books is always what Lewisohn achieved. That’s what all Beatles writers should aspire to.

Ian MacDonald’s book came in the wake of Sessions and Chronicle. It also raised the bar, though in a different way; before then there wasn’t really the same type of song-by-song analysis of a performer or group. His template was widely mimicked by a succession of other writers, and his scholarly approach bridged the gap between biography and musicology.

Obviously this here website is hugely indebted to both writers, both in the format they gave us, the style of reference writing, and also the information within the books. What I have that print authors don’t is a) the means to assimilate feedback from readers (and, indeed, in the mid-90s there was probably very little feedback), and b) the ability to make changes at the drop of a hat.

Yes, MacDonald’s publishers put out two revisions – the last of which added the Anthology recordings (I haven’t seen the second edition) – but there are still mistakes. Every publication has errors. Some of us are fortunate in that it can take literally seconds to fix something, but that’s not an option for print authors. Yes, he gets line-ups or facts wrong. Some of the articles on my site have gone through 100+ revisions, and probably still aren’t complete or entirely accurate. We (and I’m hesitant to include myself in such hallowed company) do the best we can with the tools at our disposal. RitH was written before Wikipedia, before Google, before the WWW went mainstream. IIRC from the introduction a lot of it was a result of nothing more than close listening.

I’ve seen MacDonald dismissed as a Marxist writer, written off as a curmudgeon who had lofty ideals for music, and who made the wrong call on a number of points (eg his dislike of Across The Universe ). That’s OK though – RitH was written to start a conversation, to make people think differently about the music, to help readers hear familiar songs in a new way. To take one example, nowadays we all know that Lennon wrote mainly horizontal melodies (eg Help !) and McCartney’s are more vertical (eg Penny Lane – NB there are exceptions from both authors). Who first put forward that idea? MacDonald did. McCartney himself has mentioned discovering that about their melodic styles. That’s the sort of weight MacDonald’s book had – he told a Beatle something new about his own songwriting!

You might disagree with any number of his assessments about the individual songs, but I defy any reader to finish the book and not come away with a new appreciation of The Beatles. And if you feel it’s spoilt by incorrectly claiming the Taxman solo was reused in Tomorrow Never Knows , well, pick a different song and learn something different!

I do, however, see an inherent flaw in his format. Song-by-song analyses are fine, but sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The White Album and Abbey Road are great examples of that. A lot of the songs on both albums are pretty dire, some of the worst recordings The Beatles made. But they collectively amounted to something intangibly magical. MacDonald’s discrete analysis doesn’t often allow for that sort of broader assessment, hence the rising negative tone during the third part.

I just wish he’d done the Bowie book he had been commissioned to write. Peter Doggett ended up writing it (The Man Who Sold the World: DB in the 70s) but, as much as I like PD, I think MacDonald would have done it so much better.

Thanks for the reminder, @The Void. I knew there were some mini-essays in the book, but it’s a while since I read it from cover to cover. I tend to only dip into it nowadays when I want to check something.