Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Knowledgeable, intelligent and well-written, 12 Aug 2006
MacDonald understood music, society, and the occasionally disastrous effects of drugs, mysticism and fame. This is a gem of a book ; scholarly but never dull, written by a man who actually knew about harmony and music theory, unlike the vast majority of pop music critics, who are inclined to know lots about make-up and trousers and zilch about music. It is not 'pretentious', to quote an earlier reviewer on this site, to point out that it actually matters what chords, what guitars and what recording techniques they used. There is a good clear glossary of musical terms, an excellent bibliography, and useful indexes. The 58 pages of time-lines juxtaposing events in the Beatles' career with those in UK pop, current affairs and 'culture' are a fascinating and illuminating extra, also.
MacDonald is no starry-eyed fan ; he praises the Beatles when they deserve it most (A Day in the Life), yet criticises both Lennon and McCartney at appropriate moments.
He illustrates clearly when and why they lost 'their ability to discriminate between creativity and self-indulgence'. He makes it clear to what extent Lennon damaged the group by messing up his mind with LSD and heroin, and argues persuasively that during the latter stages of the Beatles' career McCartney was on the one hand 'the clear-minded sensitive caretaker' of the band, but also 'the immature egotist who frittered away the group's patience and solidarity on sniggering nonsense like 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer.'
MacDonald's tone here is of course more consistent here than in 'The People's Music', since the latter is collection of journalism on a wide range of topics, but the same intelligent, unsentimental and lucid mind is at work in both books. If you are to read only one book of his, make it this one.
There are unexpected delights ; when asked to provide sleeve-notes for John and Yoko's 'Two Virgins' album, McCartney apparently came up with 'When two great saints meet, it is a humbling experience.' So... read this and you will smile at least once, learn a huge amount about the sixties and their impact on popular culture, and regret deeply the death of such a fine writer. Need any more persuading ? Charles Shaar Murray, the author of a marvellous book on Hendrix, and Jonathan Coe, who writes so well about music and society in his novels, both praised this book to the skies. Nick Hornby thought it was 'quite brilliant', and even the vain and silly (but best-selling) Tony Parsons could see it was 'a brilliant piece of work.'
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb tome, 17 Jul 2007
This book is a wonderful book. The buyer who dismissed this book as "pretentious" must be one of those inverted snobs who is terrified by the prospect of approaching anything in a halfway intelligent manner. Indeed, perhaps the best thing about this book is its lack of pretentiousness - it rightly lambasts some of Lennon's later work (with The Beatles) for the self-absorbed nonsense it is. Author Ian Macdonald correctly sees Lennon and Ono's bag-wearing, acorn-planting antics in the name of peace, however well-intentioned, as inherently arrogant - promoting peace "as if they had personally invented it", as he puts it. On the other hand, he can see through the all-form-and-no-feeling tosh that McCartney was capable of churning out ("Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da", "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "All Together Now" and so on) too. Sure, a lot of his opinions might grate with a reader - he can come across awfully fuddy-duddy with his intense dislike of what he calls "rock" music as opposed to "pop" music. Sometimes his dismissals of well-loved songs such as "While my Guitar Gently Weeps" get one angry. At other times, his opinions seem downright bizarre - such as when he suggests Prince is the only artist whose output can be compared to The Beatles in terms of artistic worth - I mean, Prince? The little purple guy who plays nine-year guitar solos while preferring to be known by a symbol rather than a name? Surely some mistake... Then again, isn't a good work supposed to provoke reactions, rather than just massage a reader's ego by retelling them their own opinions? And for sheer well-researched, fact-based telling of The Beatles' story through what is surely the best medium - their songs and how they came together (NPI) - this book has not and, I believe, will not be bettered. Sad to learn that Macdonald took his own life. He leaves behind possibly the finest work of analysis written on rock music - sorry, Ian, "pop" music.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant and tragic, 13 Aug 2006
I bought 'Revolution In The Head' when it first came out in the mid 1990s, and was blown away. When 'Live At The BBC' and the 'Anthology' albums were released a couple of years later, MacDonald revised it to cover all the Beatle material that had suddenly become canonical. The great virtue of this book, IMO, is the extraordinary job MacDonald did in synthesising all the available knowledge about how the Beatles recorded their music and presenting it as part of his account of their rise and fall. He goes on a song-by-song basis, and his judgments about which Beatle songs are more inspired than others are hard to argue with. (Personally I like 'If You've Got Trouble', though.) This book's only rival in the how-they-did-it stakes is Walter Everett's monumental two-volume technical study, 'The Beatles as Musicians'.
MacDonald sees the Beatles' career as rising to a peak with 'Sgt. Pepper', from which it then gradually slopes downwards, reaching a nadir with 'Free As A Bird'. This is the best presentation of what might be called the English Version of the Beatles' creative arc. He is bracingly caustic about what he sees as the generally negative effect of the Beatles' heavy drug use and embrace of randomness, feeling that little was gained by them consciously abandoning their judgment of what worked and what didn't, and he's usefully respectful of what other writers criticise as Paul McCartney's bossiness. MacDonald rightly perceives that if McCartney hadn't been so nannyish and overbearing in the final years, they might not have lasted even as short a time as they did. He is not afraid to dismiss a song as 'sniggering nonsense' (Maxwell's Silver Hammer, in case you were wondering - fair comment, I'd have said.) Elsewhere, he can be oddly blinkered; he ridicules pianist Glenn Gould's dislike of the Fabs, saying that Gould, one of the greatest musicians of the century, was here displaying 'an embarrassingly tin ear'. But this fails to engage properly with Gould's case, which in fact was quite a coherent argument and which raised the question of how much one's 'ear' is a matter of cultural expectation rather than natural musicality.
However, I think he over-emphasises the long-term damage done by some of the more avant-garde elements in Sixties culture. His criticisms of postmodernism seem a bit dated now; does anyone still talk about 'postmodernism' anymore? The closer he stays to his subject, the better and more insightful he is, but when he turns to the present, he just gets cranky and nostalgic (e.g. his foolish dismissal, in another book, of the late Bill Hicks as an unfunny Lenny Bruce wannabe. Bruce at his worst was far less funny than Hicks at his.)
It's clear by the end that, for MacDonald, Western culture had been declining in quality since the Beatles' breakup. For someone like me who was born after the band split, an attitude like that is far from helpful, or even meaningful. However, those who find MacDonald's pessimism convincing might want to reflect that he was prone to depression, and indeed took his own life only a couple of years after the final edition of this book was published. A tragic footnote to one of the great rock books ever.
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