Ian MacDonald Gets Down on the Beatles

Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in My Head hit the mid-’90s pop-cultural scene like a bolt from the blue. A quarter of a century since they were Fab, it might have seemed that everything worth saying about the Beatles had already been said, several times.

Browsing the shelves of your local chain bookstore’s music section, you could be forgiven for thinking that there is no shortage of Beatles books; in fact, you might easily get the impression that there are far too many. But where most of these repeat the same tired old stories without kindling any new spark of interest, Ian MacDonald’s words leap off the page with a freshness and sense of excitement reminiscent of, say, the opening seconds of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.

Amid a slew of biographies, memoirs, chronologies, and cut-and-paste hack jobs, this book stands out as a lamentably rare study of the Beatles’ music, or — as MacDonald invariably puts it — the records the group made, their “buoyant, poignant, hopeful, love-advocating songs”.

A chronological song-by-song analysis of the Beatles’ output, Revolution in the Head manages to achieve that rarest of feats: to transcend merely being an excellent study of its subject, and instead emerge as a worthwhile cultural artifact in its own right. Scholarly yet irreverent, highly serious but always richly entertaining, the book not only sends the reader back to the music it describes but also repays repeated readings.

Every official Beatles recording is covered, some songs’ entries rolling on for a number of pages, some dismissed with just one desultory paragraph. MacDonald pulls off a number of simultaneous balancing acts, each of which, on their own, would be deserving of acclaim. He achieves a remarkable blend of concision and comprehensiveness, many entries managing to cram an immensity of insight and information into a very short space, yet this density of content is delivered with a lightness of touch which makes for a seductively easy read.

He focuses foremost on the Beatles’ music, but also offers up a range of thematic perspectives: from musical theory to socio-cultural analysis, from the groups and records which influenced the Beatles to fleeting biographical vignettes which, by combining penetrating insight with elegantly vivacious language, add up to far more than the sum of their parts.

MacDonald’s style is difficult to satisfactorily describe. If you insisted on trying to unpick it, you could say it encompasses elements of academic, musicological, and — pace Frank Zappa — what might best be described as ‘classic rock critical’ modes. It’s simultaneously refined and gritty, frequently poetic, occasionally flamboyant, more often elegantly understated.

A classic example, of MacDonald’s literary style and his critical pugnacity, is the entry on “A Day in the Life”. MacDonald’s assessment of the song’s importance within the Beatles’ canon, and his intriguingly incisive dissection of (some of) its layers of meaning, is preceded by a warning that “more nonsense has been written about this recording than anything else The Beatles produced.” MacDonald refutes a number of myths surrounding the song, including the idea that it represents “a sober return to the real world after the drunken fantasy of ‘Pepperland'”, or “an evocation of a bad trip”, or even “a morbid celebration of death”.

Rather, this sometimes somber but always ethereally beautiful track– which Macdonald hails as the group’s “finest single achievement” — is, essentially, a “song about perception”:

A song not of disillusionment with life itself but of disenchantment with the limits of mundane perception, A DAY IN THE LIFE depicts the ‘real’ world as an unenlightened construct that reduces, depresses, and ultimately destroys. In the first verse – based, like the last, on a report in the Daily Mail for 17th January 1967 – Lennon refers to the death of Tara Browne, a young millionaire friend of The Beatles and other leading English groups. On 18th December 1966, Browne, an enthusiast of the London counterculture and, like all its members, a user of mind-expanding drugs, drove his light blue Lotus Elan at high speed through red lights in South Kensington, smashing into a parked mini-van and killing himself. Whether or not he was tripping at the time is unknown, though Lennon clearly thought so. Reading the report of the coroner’s verdict, he recorded it in the opening verses of A DAY IN THE LIFE, taking the detached view of the onlookers whose only interest was in the dead man’s celebrity. Thus travestied as a spectacle, Browne’s tragedy became meaningless – and the weary sadness of the music which Lennon found for his lyric displays a distance that veers from the dispassionate to the unfeeling.

At one level, A DAY IN THE LIFE concerns the alienating effects of ‘the media’. On another, it looks beyond what the Situationists called ‘the society of the Spectacle’ to the poetic consciousness invoked by the anarchic wall-slogans of May 1968 in Paris (e.g., ‘Beneath the pavement, the beach’). Hence the sighing tragedy of the verses is redeemed by the line ‘I’d love to turn you on’, which becomes the focus of the song. The message is that life is a dream and we have the power, as dreamers, to make it beautiful. In this perspective, the two rising orchestral glissandi may be seen as symbolising simultaneously the moment of awakening from sleep and a spiritual ascent from fragmentation to wholeness, achieved in the resolving E major chord. How the group themselves pictured these passages is unclear, though Lennon seems to have had something cosmic in mind, requesting from Martin ‘a sound like the end of the world’ and later describing it as ‘a bit of a 2001‘. All that is certain is that the final chord was not, as many have since claimed, meant as an ironic gesture of banality or defeat. (It was originally conceived and recorded — Beach Boys style — as a hummed vocal chord.) In early 1967, deflation was the last thing on The Beatles’ minds — or anyone else’s, with the exception of Frank Zappa or Lou Reed. Though clouded with sorrow and sarcasm, A DAY IN THE LIFE is as much an expression of mystic-psychedelic optimism as the rest of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The fact that it achieves its transcendent goal via a potentially disillusioning confrontation with the ‘real’ world is precisely what makes it so moving.

It should be made clear, also, that the paragraphs quoted above have been excerpted from the several pages MacDonald devotes to “A Day in the Life”. The entry for that song alone is so rich and varied, so liberally studded with telling details, strident opinions, and points for potential discussion, that it probably contains as much wisdom and contention as the average critic could pack into an entire book. It’s not so much food for thought as an intellectual banquet, to be returned to and picked over for weeks, if not years, to come.

The keyword is ‘opinion’. MacDonald’s opinions are frequently contentious and always delivered with conviction. This is a book written by someone who is a Beatles fan, but one who is also, above all, writing as a critic. MacDonald’s passion for the music of the Beatles resonates throughout, but he brings plentiful amounts of objective appraisal to bear upon what he considers to be their lesser achievements. If, when assessing the recorded output of the Beatles, ‘lesser achievement’ must always be considered a highly qualified term, MacDonald doesn’t waste any time dwelling on such relativistic niceties: he routinely states his opinions as though they were incontrovertible facts. Which is just as it should be; who wants to read a book full of caveats and IMHO’s?

MacDonald has a lot to say about this music, most sensible readers will probably agree with a good deal of it, and in any case, half the fun is in having your own opinions contested. The better the critic, the more the reader is likely to find himself equally enjoying agreeing or disagreeing with him. This is one of the keys to the book’s success. As UK newspaper The Guardian wrote, “What could have been a dry task instead produced a volume so engagingly readable, so fresh in its perceptions and so enjoyable to argue with that, in an already overcrowded field, it became an immediate hit.”

This can lead to long-term fans potentially having some of their preconceptions challenged. Rare is the Beatles fan who wouldn’t rank “A Day in the Life” very highly; even so, lodging the straight-faced claim that it’s “their finest single achievement”, is still a bold statement. And using unqualified terms such as “the message is…” runs the risk of seeming arrogant, didactic, or just plain wrong. It’s a testament to the quality of MacDonald’s work that such robust opinions never stick in the reader’s throat.

On the other hand, consider MacDonald’s critique of “Across the Universe”:

After the aggressive sarcasm of I AM THE WALRUS, it is sad to find Lennon, some months and several hundred acid trips later, chanting this plaintively babyish incantation. […] Lennon was impressed with this lyric, trying on several later occasions to write in the same metre. Sadly, its amorphous pretensions and listless melody are rather too obviously the products of acid grandiosity rendered gentle by sheer exhaustion. […] While a Beatle, Lennon was rarely boring. He made an unwanted exception with this track.

It’s a characteristically trenchant dismissal of a song many readers might wish to defend. But, crucially, even the most indulgent tolerator of the Let It Be album’s many over-eggings, will at least grant MacDonald a fair hearing. It’s a sign of how persuasive a critic he is that the impulse is not to scoff at his harsh assessment but to feel impelled to at least think twice before moving on. A critic who simply sets out to be controversial for controversy’s sake quickly becomes wearisome; conversely, a really effective critic – and few can compete with MacDonald in this regard – can make you think more when you are disagreeing with him than when he is merely reinforcing your existing opinions.

An updated edition of Revolution in the Head was published in 1997, covering the Beatles material released since the book’s original publication in 1994, notably the Anthology series, “Free as a Bird”, “Real Love”, and The Beatles at the BBC. A second revised edition, published in 2003, included numerous minor amendments, taking account of newly available information, such as the detailed discussions of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting practices contained in Barry Miles’s McCartney biography, Many Years From Now, which had itself been published in 1997.

Fans of the ’90s Beatles records won’t find much comfort here. The opening sentence of the short section devoted to assessing them sets the tone: “The Beatles’ post-Beatles story is, on the whole, unedifying.” MacDonald acknowledges that “most Beatles fans will be restless until they own these discs”, but warns that “they are unlikely to take them off their shelves very often.”

Overall, MacDonald says, the “money-spinning additions to the Parlaphone/Apple discography during 1994-96 are hard to justify artistically”, with the Anthology series having been particularly ill-conceived:

Once the decision had been taken to attempt a ghost outline of the Beatles’ career — putting in tracks at regular intervals to give the impression of a continuous documentary, rather than selecting the twenty or so unreleased songs and takes which would have sufficed to complete the group’s story — padding became inevitable, and ever more blatantly resorted to as the Anthology series progressed.