Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

787 Pages·2007·8.89 MB·English

by  Ian MacDonald

Revolution in the Head
Revolution in the Head
Third Edition
The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties
IAN MACDONALD
Cover design: Monica Baziuk
Photo by Terry O’Neill/Getty Images
Copyright © The Estate of Ian MacDonald 1994, 1997, 2005
Published by arrangement with the author’s estate.
This edition published in 2007 by
Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN-13: 978-1-55652-733-3
ISBN-10: 1-55652-733-0
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3
TO
SHE KNOWS WHO
CONTENTS
Preface to the Second Revised Edition
Preface to the First Revised Edition
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade
THE BEATLES’ RECORDS
Note on the cataloguing system
Part One Going Up
Part Two The Top
Part Three Coming Down
Part Four Looking Back
Note to Chronology
CHRONOLOGY: THE SIXTIES
Recommended Further Reading
Select Bibliography
Glossary
Compact Discography
Index of Songs and Keys
Index to Main Text
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Revolution in the Head was first published in 1994 by Fourth Estate in the
United Kingdom and Henry Holt in the United States. Fourth Estate published a
fully revised and updated edition in 1997, which appeared in the United States in
1998 from Owl Books.
Before his death in August 2003, Ian MacDonald had prepared this third
edition, which was published by Pimlico in the United Kingdom in 2005.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND REVISED EDITION
As the 21st century advances, no abatement of popular interest has yet occurred
in The Beatles, a product of the 1960s. They always figure uniquely high in polls
and voting lists, while books on every conceivable aspect of the group continue
to pour out annually. This is the more remarkable in that, so far from great
lyricists, they were reliant on a method of lyric-writing which, rather than aspire
to through-composed verse forms in the traditional style, worked more as chains
of phrases, some inspired, some hackneyed, others randomly surreal. If we were
to ask average listeners what The Beatles’ lyrics mean, they would likely say
very little. If, on the other hand, we asked the same listeners what The Beatles
mean to them, we would get a very different response. Attached to the most
original and imaginative popular music of the last fifty years, The Beatles’ lyrics
enjoy a charmed existence in which their relative inconsequentiality is as
nothing beside their association with joy, love, and freedom. An enormous
amount is forgiven The Beatles as wordsmiths because of the sheer benignity of
their idiom, its suffusion in loving feeling and (especially during the group’s
psychedelic years) its subversive carnivalism. Compared to the best of, say, the
American singer-songwriters of the late 1960s and 1970s, the lyrics of The
Beatles were wrought in a collage spirit, line by line. The group rarely thought of
them as overall structures, still less as of any real emotional consequence ([86]
ELEANOR RIGBY being an untypical example in The Beatles’ songbook of a
sustained line of thought and expression amounting to a poem). They were, in
short, instinctive, rather than rational, as artists - a trait which might be ascribed
to their youth and social origin, but which owes most to the fact that they were
working musicians rather than composers. All the great songwriting teams to
have preceded them were, in that sense, composers rather than performers.
In early 20th-century popular music, composing teams almost invariably
wrote for performers. Only a handful of performers ever wrote their own
material before The Beatles and Bob Dylan appeared, neither of whom set out on
their careers with the explicit intention of supplying themselves with their own
songs. Dylan had little idea when he started writing songs that this would
become his life; similarly, The Beatles started writing songs chiefly as a means
of preventing other groups from stealing their own purloined material. They
discovered that they had a powerful musical gift when Lennon and McCartney
began to work ‘one on one, eyeball to eyeball’ in 1963. Steered by their instant
harmonising, the duo’s way of composing produced unusual moves that released
a flood of catchy melody to which they sang dummy words or pure nonsense.
Only later, generally speaking, did they fill in their lyrics - and then mainly
phrasally, only bothering about overall concepts in formula terms (e.g., using the
second or third person, aiming towards a sort of punch-line, and so on). Rather
than tell a story in traditional Tin Pan Alley style, Lennon and McCartney wrote
their lyrics to create a mood or a tone, so as not to get in the way of the effect
created by the music and the sound. This bred a casual attitude to normal sense
which later turned explicitly free-associational. There was always just enough
sense in a Beatles lyric for the listener to get the general idea. The rest came
from the sum of the parts of the record as a whole. The Beatles rarely thought
long about their lyrics.
The Beatles’ casual lyrics look slipshod beside the careful verses and refrains
of the great composers of popular song before them. Those raised on more
traditional standards will listen to late-period Beatle songs and quite legitimately
ask ‘but what do they mean?’ To reply that they mean something more general
than traditional lyrics, that they were conceived as records not songs, may or
may not explain much. To those who grew up with The Beatles (and those who
came after them, whose popular music is fundamentally cast in The Beatles’
image), it makes sense to say that the group’s lyrics work as general signifiers,
the message blending into a newly charged medium rather than composing itself
into a coherent whole, detachable as verse. As verse, little of The Beatles word-
output coheres, except by way of mood and style. Is this a serious criticism of
their work? Yes. Nevertheless, it continues to be enormously popular - and, in
the general terms proposed, quite rightly so. All that can ultimately be said about
this aspect of The Beatles’ output is that it need not have been so; that they could
have written lyrics in a more traditional style but that this would have made their
songs and records very different from the way they are and, perhaps, far less
alive with overall spontaneity. After all, no traditional lyricist could compose
music like The Beatles. The comparative vagueness of their lyrics is the price we
pay for their main inspiration: their musical originality.
This is not to say that there won’t come a time when future listeners will look
back on The Beatles and find them lyrically wanting, if not incomprehensible. In
a century from now, the lingering aura of The Beatles will presumably have
dispersed enough for the group’s work to be looked at more objectively than we
are capable of doing less than fifty years after them. Perhaps then the haphazard
nature of many of The Beatles’ lyrics will be less easy to overlook and The
Beatles’ nonchalant stories of how these lyrics came to fall into place will have
lost their excusing charm. Or perhaps their music will continue to preserve them
in a sort of protective aspic. For the fact is that The Beatles’ way of doing things
changed the way things were done and, in so doing, changed the way we expect
things to be done. That the future is partly a consequence of the existence of The
Beatles is a measure of their importance.
Speaking of which, the most important thing to have happened in connection
with The Beatles since this book was last revised in 1997 is the death of George
Harrison on 29th November 2001. Of the songwriting Beatles, Harrison was the
one with the most coherent belief system and the one most likely to think his
lyrics through. This makes his lyrics perhaps more dogged than Lennon and
McCartney’s, but at least the listeners of the future have more chance of working
out what he was driving at. Arguably more responsible than any other individual
for popularising Oriental, and particularly Hindu, thought in the West, Harrison
was a countercultural figure in his own right, albeit that his natural modesty
would not have allowed him to relish the accolade. Most of his work from [105]
WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU on Sgt Pepper to Living In The Material World
(1973) is governed by assumptions taken from Indian religious philosophy, in
particular the concept of karma whereby the soul is said to be bound by its
egoistic attachments to a cycle of rebirth into existence. This makes his work
more impressive as a sustained effort of mind than much of The Beatles’ output.
On the other hand, it is not for their intellectual content that the average listener
loves and reveres The Beatles, but for their musical inspiration.
When Harrison died, a shiver must have passed through a generation which
thereby felt its mortality suddenly that bit more acutely. He was 58, not a great
age nowadays, but nonetheless significantly further into life than one’s twenties.
When the remaining two Beatles are gone, the afterglow of the group’s presence
in 20th-century popular culture may begin to wane. Or perhaps The Beatles
changed history enough to reorder the way we regard things, so that their aura
will never henceforth depart from the popular cultural scene. All we can be sure
of is that something extraordinary happened in pop music during the 1960s and
that the centre of it was the eight or so years of The Beatles’ public career. They
broke and rewrote the rules. We live partly in the consequences of the resulting
renewal (or, according to bias, collapse of traditional values). The Beatles are, in
a sense, us. No wonder we find it difficult to see them objectively.