Beatles Wiki - User contributions [en]

Shout!

2009-10-07T19:23:49Z

MrMustard: Added References section

{{Infobox book |
| name = Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation
| image = [[Image:Shout.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. Paperback Edition, December 4, 2003
| author = Philip Norman
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| genre = Biog
| publisher = Fireside (USA)
| release_date = 1981
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 608
| isbn = 0743235657 / 978-0743235655
}}

'''Synopsis'''

First published in 1981, Philip Norman's 'Shout!' is without question one of the best-known, best-regarded, best-selling Beatles biographies ever written. Although the Beatles had already been the subject of dozens of books by the time Norman began his research in 1978, he soon realised that much of the received wisdom surroundng the band consisted of muddled myths and overblown misconceptions. "Over time, the story had become like some ancient Norse myth, reduced to a string of worn-smooth legends and half-truths by endless fireside telling and retelling. Yet the whole truth had been out there for anyone who wanted to find it: more unbelievable than the myth; more exciting, more charming, more hilarious, more tragic."

In his introduction to the 2003 edition, Norman recalls having set out, in 1978, to write a book which would not only explode the many Beatles myths, but would also go some way towards bridging the gap between 'frivolous' pop and 'serious' literary sensibilities. "Pop fans were supposed incapable of reading 'real' books", says Norman, "I wanted to have a shot at changing that." There's no doubting the fact that Norman achieved his aim. Utilising his skills as both a novelist and a journalist, he produced a thoroughly engaging, consistently well-written, serious-minded study of a seemingly frivolous and worn-out subject. Having been in print now for well over a quarter of a Century, Norman's book has been around long enough, and garnered sufficient plaudits, to become enshrined as one of - if not ''the'' - definitive sources for anyone interested in the story of popular music's brightest burning stars.

In fact, it would not be pushing the point too far to say that 'Shout!' has itself become the subject of a certain degree of media mythologising. The idea that the Beatles might be 'overrated' may be absurd, but one of the factors which can contribute to such a view is the way in which the group are someties held in almost religious awe: nobody dare criticise or make distinctions between good or bad (or maybe that should be good or great) songs, albums, etc. Similarly, Norman's book has, over the years, begun to gather an unimpeachable aura, its (many) good points threatening to obscure its weaker aspects. In his introduction, Norman discusses his reasons for choosing the Beatles as the subject of his next book, offering the persuasive argument that the subject itself demanded to be written about, being one of the most compelling stories of the 20th Century: "which non-fiction story exetred the greatest fascination over the human race? It came down to Jesus, the Kennedy assassination, and them".

This is the problem. Ironically, Norman's greatest strength is also his fatal flaw: he approached the writing of his book as "an investgative journalist", and the result is, above all else, a work of journalism. As such, it's very successful, both in terms of unearthing facts and bringing Norman's considerable descriptive skills to bear on the phenomenon of Beatlemania. But the sense of journalistic detatchment hovers over the narrative, and becomes more and more of a distracton as the book unfolds. Norman calls himself a 'fan' of the Beatles, but supporting evidence for this claim is far from easy to find. Norman's focus is on getting the story, getting it into print, then moving on to his next job. Never once does he stop to offer any hint of effusiion or enjoyment of the Beatles' music, which he regards as merely a catalyst for the phenomenon he is studying.

If anything, Norman - a plummy-voiced Englishman, with an unmistakably Conservative sensibility - frequently appears rather sniffy about the Beatles, the Sixties, and much of the core subject matter of his book. We get the distinct feeling that, while we perhaps could not claim Norman has come to bury the Beatles, he certainly han't come to praise them either. Norman may have 'got the story', but some of his mistakes can be telling: what Beatles fan, for instance, would misquote key lyrics from Sgt. Pepper? Norman seems to think that Lennon sang, in 'Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite!', "Tonight Henry the Horse dances the waltz", rather than "And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz", and that the subject of 'She's Leaving Home' is meeting a man "in", rather than "from", the motor trade. A diligent journalist (or editor) could have checked these details, but that is irrelevant; anybody who likes the Beatles will have those words hard-wired into his psyche. Norman clearly doesn't.

----

'''Focus'''

Norman's focus is very much on the phenomenon of The Beatles, the story of their rise to unprecedented levels of fame and acclaim, and their descent from those dizzy heights at the end of the Sixties. The group's longevity, Norman believes, reflects "the residual power of the generation that grew up with them: the Chelsea-booted boys and Biba-frocked girls who would one day metamorphose into presidents, prime ministers, captains of industry, television bosses and newspaper editors." This view, like Norman's book, ignores the most important aspect of the phenomenon: the music. Very little is written here about the Beatles' records. 'Revolver', for example, is first mentioned when it arrives in the record shops, and each song on that pivotal album is accorded no more than a brief, often dismissive mention. 'Taxman', for instance, is described as "a bitter satire", sung by "the chronically bitter George Harrison".

Instead, Norman focuses on cultural contexts, which would be a perfectly valid line of enquiry, were it not for the fact that Norman's own political and social prejudices keep intruding. Norman never passes up an opportunity to sneer at (then Prime Minister) Harold Wilson, or his 'Socialist' Britain. Equally, he feels no nostalgia for the 'hallucination' of 'Swinging London': "brilliant at first, but in quickly fading, tawdry colours." Neither does Norman have much empathy for the Beatles' fans, lamenting George Harrison's song 'I Want to Tell You', "with its wonderful message to pampered, unharrassed and fully-employed 1966 teenagers that it was still OK to feel flat and unsatisfied (or 'hung up') the way George did". As a misreading of a Beatles song, it's hillarious; as an indication of the extent to which the author is out of sympathy with his subject, it's profoundly depressing.

----

'''Structure'''

The book is divided into 5 symbolically titled parts: WISHING, GETTING, HAVING, WASTING, and LASTING. These give a farily accurate impression of how Norman views his narrative of rise and fall, with the exception of 'Lasting', which might be better titled 'Unravelling'. The conventional wisdom holds that 'Shout!' is particularly strong on the opening and closing chapters of the Beatles's story. It would be closer to the truth to say that the book's early sections are by far the most compelling, whereas the book drags in the middle then peters out towards the end. Individual chapters within each part are headed up by a relevant quote, such as 'Elvis's manager calling Brian Epstein in Birkenhead', 'Even the jelly babies are symbolic', or 'We've got to spend two million or the taxman will get it'.

----

'''Style'''

Norman is a highly skilled writer, capable of consistently producing concise, elegant prose. His novelistic descriptive powers are well-honed, and he has a keen journalistic eye for detail and atmosphere. These skills are used to best effect in the early chapters of his book, which make for essential reading. A classic example is his description of the Beatles' early performacnes in the famous Cavern Club in Liverpool:

"Ray McFall paid the Beatles 25s (£1.25) each per day. For this they did two 45-minute spots at the end of teh central tunnel, on the tiny stage with dead rats under it, and positively no acoustics. The low-arched brick, and the wall of impacted faces and bodies, so squeezed out al empty air that Pete Bests drumbeats rebounded an inch in front of him, making teh sticks jump like pistols in his hand. A single Chuck Berry number. in that heat, caused even tidy Paul to look as if his head had been plunged into a water butt. The bricks sweated with the music glistening like the streams that coursed from their temples, and sending a steady drip of moisture over equipment in which there were many naked wires. Each breath they took filled their lungs with each other's hot scent, mingling uniquely with an aroma of cheese rinds, damp mould, disinfectant and teh scent of frantic girls."

----

'''Content'''

The book begins brilliantly, Norman's brisk yet literary style resulting in an exhilirating read. As the narrative progesses, however, Norman's opinions and prejudices begin to overwhelm any sense of objectivity. This, combined with his obvious distaste for the Beatles, their music, and their fans, sours the experience of reading what would otherwise be a hugely enjoyable book.

Norman comes across as bitter, curmudgeonly, and class-obsessed. On the subject of the Beatles' debut album, 'Please Please Me', he notes that "the front cover photograph showed four figures in Burgundy-coloured stage suits, grinning cheerfully down from a balcony in what seemed to be a block of council flats. No one seen in the Top Twenty since Tommy Steele had made so overt a declaration of being working class." That this photo in fact shows the Beatles looking down the stairwell inside EMI's London headquarters would at first seem to suggest that Norman has committed an absoute howler of a gaffe here. However, when considered in the light of the fact that Norman is surely too experienced a journalist to have made such a mistake, it seems more likely that this is merely a disingenuous attempt to massage the facts to fit Norman's preconceived notions.

As the Beatles' story unfolds, and the social and cultural changes they were so much a part of take effect, Norman's innate priggishness comes to the fore. Drugs, we are told, "occurred, like everything else, in almost wearisome profusion." The appeal of Sgt. Pepper "was total", crossing social and generational boundaries: "it equally entranced the most avant garde and most cautious", even reaching "the wildest acid freak, listening in his mental garret".

Norman is particularly unenchanted by the White Album. John Lennon's 'Yer Blues' is "one-dimensional and charmless, the playing turgid". Despite this damning appraisal, Lennon seems to be a relative favourite of Norman's, and gets off lightly compared to McCartney. Norman's anti-McCartney bias is unmistakable throughout. Lennon's music, says Norman, was "honest and powerful in a way that Paul's never dared to be." And Norman seems to have a virulent distaste for George Harrison. When Harrison, during an emotinonally fragile period, embarks on a brief, nervous and (apparently) unconsumated affair with a fan, Norman describes this as Harriosn "kerb-crawling for Apple Scruffs".

Brian Epstein, Norman claims, "fiddled and finessed" the Beatles "into the British charts with the weakest of all their A-sides, 'Love Me Do'". This old canard has been subject to decades of debate: to what extent did Epstein pad his record store's order for what was, in any case, bound to be a big-selling single on Mersyside? Norman's other claim in respect of Epstein's manoeuverings, however, is unequivocally wrong: Epstein, he says, "finessed and fiddled them into top billing on the Ed Sullivan Show." There may have been finesse in how Epstein handled Sullivan, but there was no fiddle.

Norman works himself up into his frothiest rage when he turns his attention to the phenomenon of 'the Sixties'. In the 20th Century, he writes, "moments of especially purblind human delusion had been symbolised by summers", none of which - not even "the hot summer of still trusting to Hitler's essential good intentions in 1939" - could compare, "or ever will, to 1967's so-called 'Summer of Love'." Looking back on that era, Norman places himself firmly on the right-wing side of 'the Culture Wars', looking on in dismay as "everything once valued about this country slides deeper into neglect and anarchy." Britain's streets are, he claims, "overrun by muggers and car-jackers, our public transport a homicidal mess, our hospitals uncaring Third World slums, our legal system a joke, our police force in retreat, our Royal Family in ruins."

His most egregious pontifications can be found in his prologue to the current edition, entitled 'September 2001: Across the Universe', where he compares September 11th to the assassinations of both John Lennon and JFK, as well as to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. All our modern woes, including terrorism, Norman lays squarely at the door of the Sixties, and the Beatles:

"If we are honest, we must accept the extent to which the heady new freedoms of youth in the Sixties paved the way to this frightening ungovernable world we see about us today. From the happy high of pot and pills and the cosy hallucinations of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band grew the drug menace that now saturates the most respectable, most rural British communities, turns once bright and happy children onto black-and-blue-punctured suicides, litters public thoroughfares and parks with the same foul stew of broken ampoules and needles."

The reader cannot help thinking that perhaps Norman should use some of his substantial publishing royalties to move to a better area.

Norman's fulminations reach a crescendo when he blames the Beatles for the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001:

"From the great discovery of Sixties youth through the example of the Beatles - that, with a bit of cheek, you could get away with anything - evolved the whole ghastly panolpy of modern contempt for convention and self-restraint that encompasses urban terrorism at one extreme and supermarket 'trolley-rage' at the other."

"Just as John Lennon realised he could get away with cheeking his blue-blooded audience at the 1963 Royal Command performance, so the IRA ralised they could get away with blowing up innocent women and children; [...] to the point where Bin Laden and his fanatics found they could get away with the vileness of Septembet 11 2001. If you seek to pinpoint the exact place in the twentieth century where civilisation ceased moving steadily forward and began taking quantum leaps backward, there can be no other culprit but the Sixties"

It's worth noting that, although these ravings were published in the introduction to the 2003 edition of 'Shout!', meaning the wounds of September 11th were still very fresh indeed, this cannot entirely explain their unhinged quality. In any case, when invited to contribute to a series of articles for the (London) Times, marking the release of the remastered Beatles catalogue on CD, in 2009, Norman regurgitated whole chunks of this hysterical bile pretty much word for word.

It would be hard to imagine anyone whose sensibilities and views could be more ill-suited to analysing The Beatles. It's puzzling that this aspect of Norman's book is not more widely discussed.

----

'''Criticism'''

'Shout!' is probably the most critically acclaimed Beatles book ever written. Philip Norman has become widely renowned as a Beatles expert. The unquestioning awe in which his work is held is puzzling, and perhaps reflects the fact that no biographer has as yet managed to achieve a satisfactory synthesis of factual reporting and musical analysis.

----

'''Editions'''

The original 1981 edition, subtitled 'The True Story of the Beatles', contained only 4 main sections, ending with 'WASTING', followed by a brief epilogue. The 'LASTING' section was added for later editions, the subtitle changed to 'The Beatles in Their Generation'.

The first edition begins, "John Lennon was born on 9 October 1940, during one of the fiercest raids by Hitler's Luftwaffe on Liverpool." Subsequent research revealed that this colourful account was not entirely accurate; the night Lennon was born actually coincided with a lull in the bombing of Liverpool. Accordingly, Norman updated the first sentence of the book to read, "John Lennon was born on 9 October 1940, during a brief respite in Nazi Germany's bombing of Liverpool."

Readers of a squeamish disposition would do well to seek out an early edition, as the prologue to the 2003 edition contains the bulk of Norman's most off-putting political rants.

----

'''References'''

[http://www.amazon.com/Shout-Beatles-Generation-Philip-Norman/dp/0684830671 Amazon listing for Shout!]

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

Shout!

2009-10-07T19:18:20Z

MrMustard: Added Criticism section

Shout!

2009-10-07T19:13:31Z

MrMustard: Added Editions section

{{Infobox book |
| name = Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation
| image = [[Image:Shout.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. Paperback Edition, December 4, 2003
| author = Philip Norman
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| genre = Biog
| publisher = Fireside (USA)
| release_date = 1981
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 608
| isbn = 0743235657 / 978-0743235655
}}

'''Synopsis'''

First published in 1981, Philip Norman's 'Shout!' is without question one of the best-known, best-regarded, best-selling Beatles biographies ever written. Although the Beatles had already been the subject of dozens of books by the time Norman began his research in 1978, he soon realised that much of the received wisdom surroundng the band consisted of muddled myths and overblown misconceptions. "Over time, the story had become like some ancient Norse myth, reduced to a string of worn-smooth legends and half-truths by endless fireside telling and retelling. Yet the whole truth had been out there for anyone who wanted to find it: more unbelievable than the myth; more exciting, more charming, more hilarious, more tragic."

In his introduction to the 2003 edition, Norman recalls having set out, in 1978, to write a book which would not only explode the many Beatles myths, but would also go some way towards bridging the gap between 'frivolous' pop and 'serious' literary sensibilities. "Pop fans were supposed incapable of reading 'real' books", says Norman, "I wanted to have a shot at changing that." There's no doubting the fact that Norman achieved his aim. Utilising his skills as both a novelist and a journalist, he produced a thoroughly engaging, consistently well-written, serious-minded study of a seemingly frivolous and worn-out subject. Having been in print now for well over a quarter of a Century, Norman's book has been around long enough, and garnered sufficient plaudits, to become enshrined as one of - if not ''the'' - definitive sources for anyone interested in the story of popular music's brightest burning stars.

In fact, it would not be pushing the point too far to say that 'Shout!' has itself become the subject of a certain degree of media mythologising. The idea that the Beatles might be 'overrated' may be absurd, but one of the factors which can contribute to such a view is the way in which the group are someties held in almost religious awe: nobody dare criticise or make distinctions between good or bad (or maybe that should be good or great) songs, albums, etc. Similarly, Norman's book has, over the years, begun to gather an unimpeachable aura, its (many) good points threatening to obscure its weaker aspects. In his introduction, Norman discusses his reasons for choosing the Beatles as the subject of his next book, offering the persuasive argument that the subject itself demanded to be written about, being one of the most compelling stories of the 20th Century: "which non-fiction story exetred the greatest fascination over the human race? It came down to Jesus, the Kennedy assassination, and them".

This is the problem. Ironically, Norman's greatest strength is also his fatal flaw: he approached the writing of his book as "an investgative journalist", and the result is, above all else, a work of journalism. As such, it's very successful, both in terms of unearthing facts and bringing Norman's considerable descriptive skills to bear on the phenomenon of Beatlemania. But the sense of journalistic detatchment hovers over the narrative, and becomes more and more of a distracton as the book unfolds. Norman calls himself a 'fan' of the Beatles, but supporting evidence for this claim is far from easy to find. Norman's focus is on getting the story, getting it into print, then moving on to his next job. Never once does he stop to offer any hint of effusiion or enjoyment of the Beatles' music, which he regards as merely a catalyst for the phenomenon he is studying.

If anything, Norman - a plummy-voiced Englishman, with an unmistakably Conservative sensibility - frequently appears rather sniffy about the Beatles, the Sixties, and much of the core subject matter of his book. We get the distinct feeling that, while we perhaps could not claim Norman has come to bury the Beatles, he certainly han't come to praise them either. Norman may have 'got the story', but some of his mistakes can be telling: what Beatles fan, for instance, would misquote key lyrics from Sgt. Pepper? Norman seems to think that Lennon sang, in 'Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite!', "Tonight Henry the Horse dances the waltz", rather than "And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz", and that the subject of 'She's Leaving Home' is meeting a man "in", rather than "from", the motor trade. A diligent journalist (or editor) could have checked these details, but that is irrelevant; anybody who likes the Beatles will have those words hard-wired into his psyche. Norman clearly doesn't.

----

'''Focus'''

Norman's focus is very much on the phenomenon of The Beatles, the story of their rise to unprecedented levels of fame and acclaim, and their descent from those dizzy heights at the end of the Sixties. The group's longevity, Norman believes, reflects "the residual power of the generation that grew up with them: the Chelsea-booted boys and Biba-frocked girls who would one day metamorphose into presidents, prime ministers, captains of industry, television bosses and newspaper editors." This view, like Norman's book, ignores the most important aspect of the phenomenon: the music. Very little is written here about the Beatles' records. 'Revolver', for example, is first mentioned when it arrives in the record shops, and each song on that pivotal album is accorded no more than a brief, often dismissive mention. 'Taxman', for instance, is described as "a bitter satire", sung by "the chronically bitter George Harrison".

Instead, Norman focuses on cultural contexts, which would be a perfectly valid line of enquiry, were it not for the fact that Norman's own political and social prejudices keep intruding. Norman never passes up an opportunity to sneer at (then Prime Minister) Harold Wilson, or his 'Socialist' Britain. Equally, he feels no nostalgia for the 'hallucination' of 'Swinging London': "brilliant at first, but in quickly fading, tawdry colours." Neither does Norman have much empathy for the Beatles' fans, lamenting George Harrison's song 'I Want to Tell You', "with its wonderful message to pampered, unharrassed and fully-employed 1966 teenagers that it was still OK to feel flat and unsatisfied (or 'hung up') the way George did". As a misreading of a Beatles song, it's hillarious; as an indication of the extent to which the author is out of sympathy with his subject, it's profoundly depressing.

----

'''Structure'''

The book is divided into 5 symbolically titled parts: WISHING, GETTING, HAVING, WASTING, and LASTING. These give a farily accurate impression of how Norman views his narrative of rise and fall, with the exception of 'Lasting', which might be better titled 'Unravelling'. The conventional wisdom holds that 'Shout!' is particularly strong on the opening and closing chapters of the Beatles's story. It would be closer to the truth to say that the book's early sections are by far the most compelling, whereas the book drags in the middle then peters out towards the end. Individual chapters within each part are headed up by a relevant quote, such as 'Elvis's manager calling Brian Epstein in Birkenhead', 'Even the jelly babies are symbolic', or 'We've got to spend two million or the taxman will get it'.

----

'''Style'''

Norman is a highly skilled writer, capable of consistently producing concise, elegant prose. His novelistic descriptive powers are well-honed, and he has a keen journalistic eye for detail and atmosphere. These skills are used to best effect in the early chapters of his book, which make for essential reading. A classic example is his description of the Beatles' early performacnes in the famous Cavern Club in Liverpool:

"Ray McFall paid the Beatles 25s (£1.25) each per day. For this they did two 45-minute spots at the end of teh central tunnel, on the tiny stage with dead rats under it, and positively no acoustics. The low-arched brick, and the wall of impacted faces and bodies, so squeezed out al empty air that Pete Bests drumbeats rebounded an inch in front of him, making teh sticks jump like pistols in his hand. A single Chuck Berry number. in that heat, caused even tidy Paul to look as if his head had been plunged into a water butt. The bricks sweated with the music glistening like the streams that coursed from their temples, and sending a steady drip of moisture over equipment in which there were many naked wires. Each breath they took filled their lungs with each other's hot scent, mingling uniquely with an aroma of cheese rinds, damp mould, disinfectant and teh scent of frantic girls."

----

'''Content'''

The book begins brilliantly, Norman's brisk yet literary style resulting in an exhilirating read. As the narrative progesses, however, Norman's opinions and prejudices begin to overwhelm any sense of objectivity. This, combined with his obvious distaste for the Beatles, their music, and their fans, sours the experience of reading what would otherwise be a hugely enjoyable book.

Norman comes across as bitter, curmudgeonly, and class-obsessed. On the subject of the Beatles' debut album, 'Please Please Me', he notes that "the front cover photograph showed four figures in Burgundy-coloured stage suits, grinning cheerfully down from a balcony in what seemed to be a block of council flats. No one seen in the Top Twenty since Tommy Steele had made so overt a declaration of being working class." That this photo in fact shows the Beatles looking down the stairwell inside EMI's London headquarters would at first seem to suggest that Norman has committed an absoute howler of a gaffe here. However, when considered in the light of the fact that Norman is surely too experienced a journalist to have made such a mistake, it seems more likely that this is merely a disingenuous attempt to massage the facts to fit Norman's preconceived notions.

As the Beatles' story unfolds, and the social and cultural changes they were so much a part of take effect, Norman's innate priggishness comes to the fore. Drugs, we are told, "occurred, like everything else, in almost wearisome profusion." The appeal of Sgt. Pepper "was total", crossing social and generational boundaries: "it equally entranced the most avant garde and most cautious", even reaching "the wildest acid freak, listening in his mental garret".

Norman is particularly unenchanted by the White Album. John Lennon's 'Yer Blues' is "one-dimensional and charmless, the playing turgid". Despite this damning appraisal, Lennon seems to be a relative favourite of Norman's, and gets off lightly compared to McCartney. Norman's anti-McCartney bias is unmistakable throughout. Lennon's music, says Norman, was "honest and powerful in a way that Paul's never dared to be." And Norman seems to have a virulent distaste for George Harrison. When Harrison, during an emotinonally fragile period, embarks on a brief, nervous and (apparently) unconsumated affair with a fan, Norman describes this as Harriosn "kerb-crawling for Apple Scruffs".

Brian Epstein, Norman claims, "fiddled and finessed" the Beatles "into the British charts with the weakest of all their A-sides, 'Love Me Do'". This old canard has been subject to decades of debate: to what extent did Epstein pad his record store's order for what was, in any case, bound to be a big-selling single on Mersyside? Norman's other claim in respect of Epstein's manoeuverings, however, is unequivocally wrong: Epstein, he says, "finessed and fiddled them into top billing on the Ed Sullivan Show." There may have been finesse in how Epstein handled Sullivan, but there was no fiddle.

Norman works himself up into his frothiest rage when he turns his attention to the phenomenon of 'the Sixties'. In the 20th Century, he writes, "moments of especially purblind human delusion had been symbolised by summers", none of which - not even "the hot summer of still trusting to Hitler's essential good intentions in 1939" - could compare, "or ever will, to 1967's so-called 'Summer of Love'." Looking back on that era, Norman places himself firmly on the right-wing side of 'the Culture Wars', looking on in dismay as "everything once valued about this country slides deeper into neglect and anarchy." Britain's streets are, he claims, "overrun by muggers and car-jackers, our public transport a homicidal mess, our hospitals uncaring Third World slums, our legal system a joke, our police force in retreat, our Royal Family in ruins."

His most egregious pontifications can be found in his prologue to the current edition, entitled 'September 2001: Across the Universe', where he compares September 11th to the assassinations of both John Lennon and JFK, as well as to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. All our modern woes, including terrorism, Norman lays squarely at the door of the Sixties, and the Beatles:

"If we are honest, we must accept the extent to which the heady new freedoms of youth in the Sixties paved the way to this frightening ungovernable world we see about us today. From the happy high of pot and pills and the cosy hallucinations of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band grew the drug menace that now saturates the most respectable, most rural British communities, turns once bright and happy children onto black-and-blue-punctured suicides, litters public thoroughfares and parks with the same foul stew of broken ampoules and needles."

The reader cannot help thinking that perhaps Norman should use some of his substantial publishing royalties to move to a better area.

Norman's fulminations reach a crescendo when he blames the Beatles for the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001:

"From the great discovery of Sixties youth through the example of the Beatles - that, with a bit of cheek, you could get away with anything - evolved the whole ghastly panolpy of modern contempt for convention and self-restraint that encompasses urban terrorism at one extreme and supermarket 'trolley-rage' at the other."

"Just as John Lennon realised he could get away with cheeking his blue-blooded audience at the 1963 Royal Command performance, so the IRA ralised they could get away with blowing up innocent women and children; [...] to the point where Bin Laden and his fanatics found they could get away with the vileness of Septembet 11 2001. If you seek to pinpoint the exact place in the twentieth century where civilisation ceased moving steadily forward and began taking quantum leaps backward, there can be no other culprit but the Sixties"

It's worth noting that, although these ravings were published in the introduction to the 2003 edition of 'Shout!', meaning the wounds of September 11th were still very fresh indeed, this cannot entirely explain their unhinged quality. In any case, when invited to contribute to a series of articles for the (London) Times, marking the release of the remastered Beatles catalogue on CD, in 2009, Norman regurgitated whole chunks of this hysterical bile pretty much word for word.

It would be hard to imagine anyone whose sensibilities and views could be more ill-suited to analysing The Beatles. It's puzzling that this aspect of Norman's book is not more widely discussed.

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

The original 1981 edition, subtitled 'The True Story of the Beatles', contained only 4 main sections, ending with 'WASTING', followed by a brief epilogue. The 'LASTING' section was added for later editions, the subtitle changed to 'The Beatles in Their Generation'.

The first edition begins, "John Lennon was born on 9 October 1940, during one of the fiercest raids by Hitler's Luftwaffe on Liverpool." Subsequent research revealed that this colourful account was not entirely accurate; the night Lennon was born actually coincided with a lull in the bombing of Liverpool. Accordingly, Norman updated the first sentence of the book to read, "John Lennon was born on 9 October 1940, during a brief respite in Nazi Germany's bombing of Liverpool."

Readers of a squeamish disposition would do well to seek out an early edition, as the prologue to the 2003 edition contains the bulk of Norman's most off-putting political rants.

----

'''References'''

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

Shout!

2009-10-07T15:45:01Z

MrMustard:

{{Infobox book |
| name = Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation
| image = [[Image:Shout.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. Paperback Edition, December 4, 2003
| author = Philip Norman
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| genre = Biog
| publisher = Fireside (USA)
| release_date = 1981
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 608
| isbn = 0743235657 / 978-0743235655
}}

'''Synopsis'''

First published in 1981, Philip Norman's 'Shout!' is without question one of the best-known, best-regarded, best-selling Beatles biographies ever written. Although the Beatles had already been the subject of dozens of books by the time Norman began his research in 1978, he soon realised that much of the received wisdom surroundng the band consisted of muddled myths and overblown misconceptions. "Over time, the story had become like some ancient Norse myth, reduced to a string of worn-smooth legends and half-truths by endless fireside telling and retelling. Yet the whole truth had been out there for anyone who wanted to find it: more unbelievable than the myth; more exciting, more charming, more hilarious, more tragic."

In his introduction to the 2003 edition, Norman recalls having set out, in 1978, to write a book which would not only explode the many Beatles myths, but would also go some way towards bridging the gap between 'frivolous' pop and 'serious' literary sensibilities. "Pop fans were supposed incapable of reading 'real' books", says Norman, "I wanted to have a shot at changing that." There's no doubting the fact that Norman achieved his aim. Utilising his skills as both a novelist and a journalist, he produced a thoroughly engaging, consistently well-written, serious-minded study of a seemingly frivolous and worn-out subject. Having been in print now for well over a quarter of a Century, Norman's book has been around long enough, and garnered sufficient plaudits, to become enshrined as one of - if not ''the'' - definitive sources for anyone interested in the story of popular music's brightest burning stars.

In fact, it would not be pushing the point too far to say that 'Shout!' has itself become the subject of a certain degree of media mythologising. The idea that the Beatles might be 'overrated' may be absurd, but one of the factors which can contribute to such a view is the way in which the group are someties held in almost religious awe: nobody dare criticise or make distinctions between good or bad (or maybe that should be good or great) songs, albums, etc. Similarly, Norman's book has, over the years, begun to gather an unimpeachable aura, its (many) good points threatening to obscure its weaker aspects. In his introduction, Norman discusses his reasons for choosing the Beatles as the subject of his next book, offering the persuasive argument that the subject itself demanded to be written about, being one of the most compelling stories of the 20th Century: "which non-fiction story exetred the greatest fascination over the human race? It came down to Jesus, the Kennedy assassination, and them".

This is the problem. Ironically, Norman's greatest strength is also his fatal flaw: he approached the writing of his book as "an investgative journalist", and the result is, above all else, a work of journalism. As such, it's very successful, both in terms of unearthing facts and bringing Norman's considerable descriptive skills to bear on the phenomenon of Beatlemania. But the sense of journalistic detatchment hovers over the narrative, and becomes more and more of a distracton as the book unfolds. Norman calls himself a 'fan' of the Beatles, but supporting evidence for this claim is far from easy to find. Norman's focus is on getting the story, getting it into print, then moving on to his next job. Never once does he stop to offer any hint of effusiion or enjoyment of the Beatles' music, which he regards as merely a catalyst for the phenomenon he is studying.

If anything, Norman - a plummy-voiced Englishman, with an unmistakably Conservative sensibility - frequently appears rather sniffy about the Beatles, the Sixties, and much of the core subject matter of his book. We get the distinct feeling that, while we perhaps could not claim Norman has come to bury the Beatles, he certainly han't come to praise them either. Norman may have 'got the story', but some of his mistakes can be telling: what Beatles fan, for instance, would misquote key lyrics from Sgt. Pepper? Norman seems to think that Lennon sang, in 'Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite!', "Tonight Henry the Horse dances the waltz", rather than "And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz", and that the subject of 'She's Leaving Home' is meeting a man "in", rather than "from", the motor trade. A diligent journalist (or editor) could have checked these details, but that is irrelevant; anybody who likes the Beatles will have those words hard-wired into his psyche. Norman clearly doesn't.

----

'''Focus'''

Norman's focus is very much on the phenomenon of The Beatles, the story of their rise to unprecedented levels of fame and acclaim, and their descent from those dizzy heights at the end of the Sixties. The group's longevity, Norman believes, reflects "the residual power of the generation that grew up with them: the Chelsea-booted boys and Biba-frocked girls who would one day metamorphose into presidents, prime ministers, captains of industry, television bosses and newspaper editors." This view, like Norman's book, ignores the most important aspect of the phenomenon: the music. Very little is written here about the Beatles' records. 'Revolver', for example, is first mentioned when it arrives in the record shops, and each song on that pivotal album is accorded no more than a brief, often dismissive mention. 'Taxman', for instance, is described as "a bitter satire", sung by "the chronically bitter George Harrison".

Instead, Norman focuses on cultural contexts, which would be a perfectly valid line of enquiry, were it not for the fact that Norman's own political and social prejudices keep intruding. Norman never passes up an opportunity to sneer at (then Prime Minister) Harold Wilson, or his 'Socialist' Britain. Equally, he feels no nostalgia for the 'hallucination' of 'Swinging London': "brilliant at first, but in quickly fading, tawdry colours." Neither does Norman have much empathy for the Beatles' fans, lamenting George Harrison's song 'I Want to Tell You', "with its wonderful message to pampered, unharrassed and fully-employed 1966 teenagers that it was still OK to feel flat and unsatisfied (or 'hung up') the way George did". As a misreading of a Beatles song, it's hillarious; as an indication of the extent to which the author is out of sympathy with his subject, it's profoundly depressing.

----

'''Structure'''

The book is divided into 5 symbolically titled parts: WISHING, GETTING, HAVING, WASTING, and LASTING. These give a farily accurate impression of how Norman views his narrative of rise and fall, with the exception of 'Lasting', which might be better titled 'Unravelling'. The conventional wisdom holds that 'Shout!' is particularly strong on the opening and closing chapters of the Beatles's story. It would be closer to the truth to say that the book's early sections are by far the most compelling, whereas the book drags in the middle then peters out towards the end. Individual chapters within each part are headed up by a relevant quote, such as 'Elvis's manager calling Brian Epstein in Birkenhead', 'Even the jelly babies are symbolic', or 'We've got to spend two million or the taxman will get it'.

----

'''Style'''

Norman is a highly skilled writer, capable of consistently producing concise, elegant prose. His novelistic descriptive powers are well-honed, and he has a keen journalistic eye for detail and atmosphere. These skills are used to best effect in the early chapters of his book, which make for essential reading. A classic example is his description of the Beatles' early performacnes in the famous Cavern Club in Liverpool:

"Ray McFall paid the Beatles 25s (£1.25) each per day. For this they did two 45-minute spots at the end of teh central tunnel, on the tiny stage with dead rats under it, and positively no acoustics. The low-arched brick, and the wall of impacted faces and bodies, so squeezed out al empty air that Pete Bests drumbeats rebounded an inch in front of him, making teh sticks jump like pistols in his hand. A single Chuck Berry number. in that heat, caused even tidy Paul to look as if his head had been plunged into a water butt. The bricks sweated with the music glistening like the streams that coursed from their temples, and sending a steady drip of moisture over equipment in which there were many naked wires. Each breath they took filled their lungs with each other's hot scent, mingling uniquely with an aroma of cheese rinds, damp mould, disinfectant and teh scent of frantic girls."

----

'''Content'''

The book begins brilliantly, Norman's brisk yet literary style resulting in an exhilirating read. As the narrative progesses, however, Norman's opinions and prejudices begin to overwhelm any sense of objectivity. This, combined with his obvious distaste for the Beatles, their music, and their fans, sours the experience of reading what would otherwise be a hugely enjoyable book.

Norman comes across as bitter, curmudgeonly, and class-obsessed. On the subject of the Beatles' debut album, 'Please Please Me', he notes that "the front cover photograph showed four figures in Burgundy-coloured stage suits, grinning cheerfully down from a balcony in what seemed to be a block of council flats. No one seen in the Top Twenty since Tommy Steele had made so overt a declaration of being working class." That this photo in fact shows the Beatles looking down the stairwell inside EMI's London headquarters would at first seem to suggest that Norman has committed an absoute howler of a gaffe here. However, when considered in the light of the fact that Norman is surely too experienced a journalist to have made such a mistake, it seems more likely that this is merely a disingenuous attempt to massage the facts to fit Norman's preconceived notions.

As the Beatles' story unfolds, and the social and cultural changes they were so much a part of take effect, Norman's innate priggishness comes to the fore. Drugs, we are told, "occurred, like everything else, in almost wearisome profusion." The appeal of Sgt. Pepper "was total", crossing social and generational boundaries: "it equally entranced the most avant garde and most cautious", even reaching "the wildest acid freak, listening in his mental garret".

Norman is particularly unenchanted by the White Album. John Lennon's 'Yer Blues' is "one-dimensional and charmless, the playing turgid". Despite this damning appraisal, Lennon seems to be a relative favourite of Norman's, and gets off lightly compared to McCartney. Norman's anti-McCartney bias is unmistakable throughout. Lennon's music, says Norman, was "honest and powerful in a way that Paul's never dared to be." And Norman seems to have a virulent distaste for George Harrison. When Harrison, during an emotinonally fragile period, embarks on a brief, nervous and (apparently) unconsumated affair with a fan, Norman describes this as Harriosn "kerb-crawling for Apple Scruffs".

Brian Epstein, Norman claims, "fiddled and finessed" the Beatles "into the British charts with the weakest of all their A-sides, 'Love Me Do'". This old canard has been subject to decades of debate: to what extent did Epstein pad his record store's order for what was, in any case, bound to be a big-selling single on Mersyside? Norman's other claim in respect of Epstein's manoeuverings, however, is unequivocally wrong: Epstein, he says, "finessed and fiddled them into top billing on the Ed Sullivan Show." There may have been finesse in how Epstein handled Sullivan, but there was no fiddle.

Norman works himself up into his frothiest rage when he turns his attention to the phenomenon of 'the Sixties'. In the 20th Century, he writes, "moments of especially purblind human delusion had been symbolised by summers", none of which - not even "the hot summer of still trusting to Hitler's essential good intentions in 1939" - could compare, "or ever will, to 1967's so-called 'Summer of Love'." Looking back on that era, Norman places himself firmly on the right-wing side of 'the Culture Wars', looking on in dismay as "everything once valued about this country slides deeper into neglect and anarchy." Britain's streets are, he claims, "overrun by muggers and car-jackers, our public transport a homicidal mess, our hospitals uncaring Third World slums, our legal system a joke, our police force in retreat, our Royal Family in ruins."

His most egregious pontifications can be found in his prologue to the current edition, entitled 'September 2001: Across the Universe', where he compares September 11th to the assassinations of both John Lennon and JFK, as well as to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. All our modern woes, including terrorism, Norman lays squarely at the door of the Sixties, and the Beatles:

"If we are honest, we must accept the extent to which the heady new freedoms of youth in the Sixties paved the way to this frightening ungovernable world we see about us today. From the happy high of pot and pills and the cosy hallucinations of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band grew the drug menace that now saturates the most respectable, most rural British communities, turns once bright and happy children onto black-and-blue-punctured suicides, litters public thoroughfares and parks with the same foul stew of broken ampoules and needles."

The reader cannot help thinking that perhaps Norman should use some of his substantial publishing royalties to move to a better area.

Norman's fulminations reach a crescendo when he blames the Beatles for the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001:

"From the great discovery of Sixties youth through the example of the Beatles - that, with a bit of cheek, you could get away with anything - evolved the whole ghastly panolpy of modern contempt for convention and self-restraint that encompasses urban terrorism at one extreme and supermarket 'trolley-rage' at the other."

"Just as John Lennon realised he could get away with cheeking his blue-blooded audience at the 1963 Royal Command performance, so the IRA ralised they could get away with blowing up innocent women and children; [...] to the point where Bin Laden and his fanatics found they could get away with the vileness of Septembet 11 2001. If you seek to pinpoint the exact place in the twentieth century where civilisation ceased moving steadily forward and began taking quantum leaps backward, there can be no other culprit but the Sixties"

It's worth noting that, although these ravings were published in the introduction to the 2003 edition of 'Shout!', meaning the wounds of September 11th were still very fresh indeed, this cannot entirely explain their unhinged quality. In any case, when invited to contribute to a series of articles for the (London) Times, marking the release of the remastered Beatles catalogue on CD, in 2009, Norman regurgitated whole chunks of this hysterical bile pretty much word for word.

It would be hard to imagine anyone whose sensibilities and views could be more ill-suited to analysing The Beatles. It's puzzling that this aspect of Norman's book is not more widely discussed.

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

----

'''References'''

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

Shout!

2009-10-07T15:03:02Z

MrMustard: Finished Content section.

{{Infobox book |
| name = Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation
| image = [[Image:Shout.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. Paperback Edition, December 4, 2003
| author = Philip Norman
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| genre = Biog
| publisher = Fireside (USA)
| release_date = 1981
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 608
| isbn = 0743235657 / 978-0743235655
}}

'''Synopsis'''

First published in 1981, Philip Norman's 'Shout!' is without question one of the best-known, best-regarded, best-selling Beatles biographies ever written. Although the Beatles had already been the subject of dozens of books by the time Norman began his research in 1978, he soon realised that much of the received wisdom surroundng the band consisted of muddled myths and overblown misconceptions. "Over time, the story had become like some ancient Norse myth, reduced to a string of worn-smooth legends and half-truths by endless fireside telling and retelling. Yet the whole truth had been out there for anyone who wanted to find it: more unbelievable than the myth; more exciting, more charming, more hilarious, more tragic."

In his introduction to the 2003 edition, Norman recalls having set out, in 1978, to write a book which would not only explode the many Beatles myths, but would also go some way towards bridging the gap between 'frivolous' pop and 'serious' literary sensibilities. "Pop fans were supposed incapable of reading 'real' books", says Norman, "I wanted to have a shot at changing that." There's no doubting the fact that Norman achieved his aim. Utilising his skills as both a novelist and a journalist, he produced a thoroughly engaging, consistently well-written, serious-minded study of a seemingly frivolous and worn-out subject. Having been in print now for well over a quarter of a Century, Norman's book has been around long enough, and garnered sufficient plaudits, to become enshrined as one of - if not ''the'' - definitive sources for anyone interested in the story of popular music's brightest burning stars.

In fact, it would not be pushing the point too far to say that 'Shout!' has itself become the subject of a certain degree of media mythologising. The idea that the Beatles might be 'overrated' may be absurd, but one of the factors which can contribute to such a view is the way in which the group are someties held in almost religious awe: nobody dare criticise or make distinctions between good or bad (or maybe that should be good or great) songs, albums, etc. Similarly, Norman's book has, over the years, begun to gather an unimpeachable aura, its (many) good points threatening to obscure its weaker aspects. In his introduction, Norman discusses his reasons for choosing the Beatles as the subject of his next book, offering the persuasive argument that the subject itself demanded to be written about, being one of the most compelling stories of the 20th Century: "which non-fiction story exetred the greatest fascination over the human race? It came down to Jesus, the Kennedy assassination, and them".

This is the problem. Ironically, Norman's greatest strength is also his fatal flaw: he approached the writing of his book as "an investgative journalist", and the result is, above all else, a work of journalism. As such, it's very successful, both in terms of unearthing facts and bringing Norman's considerable descriptive skills to bear on the phenomenon of Beatlemania. But the sense of journalistic detatchment hovers over the narrative, and becomes more and more of a distracton as the book unfolds. Norman calls himself a 'fan' of the Beatles, but supporting evidence for this claim is far from easy to find. Norman's focus is on getting the story, getting it into print, then moving on to his next job. Never once does he stop to offer any hint of effusiion or enjoyment of the Beatles' music, which he regards as merely a catalyst for the phenomenon he is studying.

If anything, Norman - a plummy-voiced Englishman, with an unmistakably Conservative sensibility - frequently appears rather sniffy about the Beatles, the Sixties, and much of the core subject matter of his book. We get the distinct feeling that, while we perhaps could not claim Norman has come to bury the Beatles, he certainly han't come to praise them either. Norman may have 'got the story', but some of his mistakes can be telling: what Beatles fan, for instance, would misquote key lyrics from Sgt. Pepper? Norman seems to think that Lennon sang, in 'Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite!', "Tonight Henry the Horse dances the waltz", rather than "And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz", and that the subject of 'She's Leaving Home' is meeting a man "in", rather than "from", the motor trade. A diligent journalist (or editor) could have checked these details, but that is irrelevant; anybody who likes the Beatles will have those words hard-wired into his psyche. Norman clearly doesn't.

----

'''Focus'''

Norman's focus is very much on the phenomenon of The Beatles, the story of their rise to unprecedented levels of fame and acclaim, and their descent from those dizzy heights at the end of the Sixties. The group's longevity, Norman believes, reflects "the residual power of the generation that grew up with them: the Chelsea-booted boys and Biba-frocked girls who would one day metamorphose into presidents, prime ministers, captains of industry, television bosses and newspaper editors." This view, like Norman's book, ignores the most important aspect of the phenomenon: the music. Very little is written here about the Beatles' records. 'Revolver', for example, is first mentioned when it arrives in the record shops, and each song on that pivotal album is accorded no more than a brief, often dismissive mention. 'Taxman', for instance, is described as "a bitter satire", sung by "the chronically bitter George Harrison".

Instead, Norman focuses on cultural contexts, which would be a perfectly valid line of enquiry, were it not for the fact that Norman's own political and social prejudices keep intruding. Norman never passes up an opportunity to sneer at (then Prime Minister) Harold Wilson, or his 'Socialist' Britain. Equally, he feels no nostalgia for the 'hallucination' of 'Swinging London': "brilliant at first, but in quickly fading, tawdry colours." Neither does Norman have much empathy for the Beatles' fans, lamenting George Harrison's song 'I Want to Tell You', "with its wonderful message to pampered, unharrassed and fully-employed 1966 teenagers that it was still OK to feel flat and unsatisfied (or 'hung up') the way George did". As a misreading of a Beatles song, it's hillarious; as an indication of the extent to which the author is out of sympathy with his subject, it's profoundly depressing.

----

'''Structure'''

The book is divided into 5 symbolically titled parts: WISHING, GETTING, HAVING, WASTING, and LASTING. These give a farily accurate impression of how Norman views his narrative of rise and fall, with the exception of 'Lasting', which might be better titled 'Unravelling'. The conventional wisdom holds that 'Shout!' is particularly strong on the opening and closing chapters of the Beatles's story. It would be closer to the truth to say that the book's early sections are by far the most compelling, whereas the book drags in the middle then peters out towards the end. Individual chapters within each part are headed up by a relevant quote, such as 'Elvis's manager calling Brian Epstein in Birkenhead', 'Even the jelly babies are symbolic', or 'We've got to spend two million or the taxman will get it'.

----

'''Style'''

Norman is a highly skilled writer, capable of consistently producing concise, elegant prose. His novelistic descriptive powers are well-honed, and he has a keen journalistic eye for detail and atmosphere. These skills are used to best effect in the early chapters of his book, which make for essential reading. A classic example is his description of the Beatles' early performacnes in the famous Cavern Club in Liverpool:

"Ray McFall paid the Beatles 25s (£1.25) each per day. For this they did two 45-minute spots at the end of teh central tunnel, on the tiny stage with dead rats under it, and positively no acoustics. The low-arched brick, and the wall of impacted faces and bodies, so squeezed out al empty air that Pete Bests drumbeats rebounded an inch in front of him, making teh sticks jump like pistols in his hand. A single Chuck Berry number. in that heat, caused even tidy Paul to look as if his head had been plunged into a water butt. The bricks sweated with the music glistening like the streams that coursed from their temples, and sending a steady drip of moisture over equipment in which there were many naked wires. Each breath they took filled their lungs with each other's hot scent, mingling uniquely with an aroma of cheese rinds, damp mould, disinfectant and teh scent of frantic girls."

----

'''Content'''

The book begins brilliantly, Norman's brisk yet literary style resulting in an exhilirating read. As the narrative progesses, however, Norman's opinions and prejudices begin to overwhelm any sense of objectivity. This, combined with his obvious distaste for the Beatles, their music, and their fans, sours the experience of reading what would otherwise be a hugely enjoyable book.

Norman comes across as bitter, curmudgeonly, and class-obsessed. On the subject of the Beatles' debut album, 'Please Please Me', he notes that "the front cover photograph showed four figures in Burgundy-coloured stage suits, grinning cheerfully down from a balcony in what seemed to be a block of council flats. No one seen in the Top Twenty since Tommy Steele had made so overt a declaration of being working class." That this photo in fact shows the Beatles looking down the stairwell inside EMI's London headquarters would at first seem to suggest that Norman has committed an absoute howler of a gaffe here. However, when considered in the light of the fact that Norman is surely too experienced a journalist to have made such a mistake, it seems more likely that this is merely a disingenuous attempt to massage the facts to fit Norman's preconceived notions.

As the Beatles' story unfolds, and the social and cultural changes they were so much a part of take effect, Norman's innate priggishness comes to the fore. Drugs, we are told, "occurred, like everything else, in almost wearisome profusion." The appeal of Sgt. Pepper "was total", crossing social and generational boundaries: "it equally entranced the most avant garde and most cautious", even reaching "the wildest acid freak, listening in his mental garret".

Norman is particularly unenchanted by the White Album. John Lennon's 'Yer Blues' is "one-dimensional and charmless, the playing turgid". Despite this damning appraisal, Lennon seems to be a relative favourite of Norman's, and gets off lightly compared to McCartney. Norman's anti-McCartney bias is unmistakable throughout. Lennon's music, says Norman, was "honest and powerful in a way that Paul's never dared to be." And Norman seems to have a virulent distaste for George Harrison. When Harrison, during an emotinonally fragile period, embarks on a brief, nervous and (apparently) unconsumated affair with a fan, Norman describes this as Harriosn "kerb-crawling for Apple Scruffs".

Brian Epstein, Norman claims, "fiddled and finessed" the Beatles "into the British charts with the weakest of all their A-sides, 'Love Me Do'". This old canard has been subject to decades of debate: to what extent did Epstein pad his record store's order for what was, in any case, bound to be a big-selling single on Mersyside? Norman's other claim in respect of Epstein's manoeuverings, however, is unequivocally wrong: Epstein, he says, "finessed and fiddled them into top billing on the Ed Sullivan Show." There may have been finesse in how Epstein handled Sullivan, but there was no fiddle.

Norman works himself up into his frothiest rage when he turns his attention to the phenomenon of 'the Sixties'. In the 20th Century, he writes, "moments of especially purblind human delusion had been symbolised by summers", none of which - not even "the hot summer of still trusting to Hitler's essential good intentions in 1939" - could compare, "or ever will, to 1967's so-called 'Summer of Love'." Looking back on that era, Norman places himself firmly on the right-wing side of 'the Culture Wars', looking on in dismay as "everything once valued about this country slides deeper into neglect and anarchy." Britain's streets are, he claims, "overrun by muggers and car-jackers, our public transport a homicidal mess, our hospitals uncaring Third World slums, our legal system a joke, our police force in retreat, our Royal Family in ruins."

His most egregious pontifications can be found in his prologue to the current edition, entitled 'September 2001: Across the Universe', where he compares September 11th to the assassinations of both John Lennon and JFK, as well as to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. All our modern woes, including terrorism, Norman lays squarely at the door of the Sixties, and the Beatles:

"If we are honest, we must accept the extent to which the heady new freedoms of youth in the Sixties paved the way to this frightening ungovernable world we see about us today. From the happy high of pot and pills and the cosy hallucinations of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band grew the drug menace that now saturates the most respectable, most rural British communities, turns once bright and happy children onto black-and-blue-punctured suicides, litters public thoroughfares and parks with the same foul stew of broken ampoules and needles."
"From the great discovery of Sixties youth through the example of the Beatles - that, with a bit of cheek, you could get away with anything - evolved the whole ghastly panolpy of modern contempt for convention and self-restraint that encompasses urban terrorism at one extreme and supermarket 'trolley-rage' at the other."

'Extreme' is right!

"Just as John Lennon realised he could get away with cheeking his blue-blooded audience at the 1963 Royal Command performance, so the IRA ralised they could get away with blowing up innocent women and children; [...] to the point where Bin Laden and his fanatics found they could get away with the vileness of Septembet 11 2001. If you seek to pinpoint the exact place in the twentieth century where civilisation ceased moving steadily forward and began taking quantum leaps backward, there can be no other culprit but the Sixties"

It's worth noting that, although these ravings were published in the introduction to the 2003 edition of 'Shout!', meaning the wounds of September 11th were still very fresh indeed, this cannot entirely explain their unhinged quality. In any case, when invited to contribute to a series of articles for the (London) Times, marking the release of the remastered Beatles catalogue on CD, in 2009, Norman regurgitated whole chunks of this hysterical bile pretty much word for word.

It would be hard to imagine anyone whose sensibilities and views could be more ill-suited to analysing The Beatles. It's puzzling that this aspect of Norman's book is not more widely discussed.

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

----

'''References'''

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

Shout!

2009-10-07T12:37:50Z

MrMustard: Added 'Style' section

Shout!

2009-10-07T12:25:42Z

MrMustard: added 'Structure' section

Shout!

2009-10-07T12:07:29Z

MrMustard: Added 'Focus' section

Shout!

2009-10-07T09:56:30Z

MrMustard: Finished Synopsis section

Shout!

2009-10-05T13:10:49Z

MrMustard: Begin Synopsis section

The Love You Make

2009-09-29T12:21:31Z

MrMustard: Fix error of chronology re John and Paul's weddings

{{Infobox book |
| name = The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of The Beatles
| image = [[Image:LoveYouMake.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. First Edition, February 1, 1983
| author = Peter Brown (with Steven Gaines)
| country = United States
| language = English
| genre = Novel
| publisher = McGraw-Hill (USA); Macmillan (UK)
| release_date = 1983
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 448
| isbn = 007008159X / 0-07-008159-X
}}

'''Synopsis'''

Both this book's title, and its author's name, represent powerful fragments of Beatles lore. Peter Brown was best man at John Lennon's wedding to Yoko Ono - in fact he had previously filled the same role for Paul McCartney - and was immortalised by Lennon, in 'The Ballad of John & Yoko', as the man wo "called to say, you can make it ok, you can get married in Gibraltar near Spain". The book's title is taken from the appropriately named Beatles song 'The End', quoted in the frontispiece:

:''And in the end'' 
:''The love you take'' 
:''Is equal to the love'' 
:''You make.''

:The last lyric from the last song on the last Beatles album.

However, nothing is ever simple in Beatles-land. A pedant could argue that 'Abbey Road' wasn't the Beatles' last album, since 'Let it Be', while recorded earlier, was released after it, and in any case 'The End' was not the last song on the finalised running order, being supplanted at the last minute by 'Her Majesty'. Still, great title for a Beatles book, and ‘love’ was always a subject close to the Beatles’ hearts.

Peter Brown, meanwhile, may not have been so much of an 'insider' as either his appearance in Lennon's self-mythologising ballad, or the subtitle of his book, suggest. He certainly can't claim to have been a member of the innermost circle of Beatles intimates - the so-called 'Liverpool Mafia' - such as, say, Neil Aspinall. This has led to some criticism, and it's true that Brown sometimes 'makes up' dialogue or thoughts for events and situations at which he was not a first-hand witness; but he was enough of an insider that he has an immensely interesting story to tell, and lucky for us he tells it in a brisk and entertaining way.

Similarly, this book can't be placed in the top rank of Beatles books, in terms of renown. While not obscure, it's nowhere near as well known as Philip Norman's 'Shout' or Albert Goldman's 'The Lives of John Lennon', for example. This is a pity, because while it may have its faults, this is a hugely enjoyable book, and an essential read for anyone interested in the Beatles.

----

'''Focus'''

This is not a conventional biography. Brown doesn't bother the reader with potted personal histories of the various Beatles' forbears, and in fact begins his narrative in May 1968, as Cynthia Lennon returns from holiday to find Yoko Ono sitting in the kitchen of the Lennons' Weybridge mansion, wearing Cynthia's dressing gown, and sporting an expression which is simultaneously inscrutable and unmistakably post-coital. This is a refreshingly grabby way to begin the book, and Brown keeps up this pacy style all the way through.

Brown's approach is anecdotal and episodic. While there are no longueurs, there are some significant lacunae, perhaps the most noticable being the absence of any real discussion, or even sometimes mention, of the music the Beatles made. When we read, towards the end of the book, of Paul McCartney's need to 'get away from it all' for a while on his Scottish farm, and are told that this has been caused by a renewed level of media attention, due to the recent release of 'Abbey Road', we realise with some surprise that this is the first time the album has been mentioned.

Even when Brown does skip back in time a bit, to cover the band's early days and their visits to Germany, he never goes any further back than their teenage years. At the other end of the scale, the narrative peters out a little towards the end, the period between the band's break-up and Lennon's murder taking only 50 pages or so.

Thematically, there's an unmissable imbalance between the large portion of pages given over to John Lennon and Brian Epstein, and the scant amount of space accorded to everyone else. It's natural, however, that Brown devotes so much time to Epstein, because it was through Epstein that Brown became involved with the Beatles and their multi-faceted, haphazardly run Apple organisation. Brown had worked for Epstein in Liverpool and after moving to London became probably his most loyal lieutenant, even cleaning up after Epstein's attempted suicide - and hiding the note he'd left next to the bottle of pills on his bedside table. This book is driven by personalities, with the Beatles being portrayed as owing their success, in large part, to the fact that Epstein fancied Lennon to the point of obsession. So it's apt that Brown takes such a personalised approach to both the structure and content of his narrative.

----

'''Structure'''

The book consists of 21 Chapters, each subdivided into several short, numbered sections. Most Chapters are preceded by an apposite quotation, mostly concerning the personalities involved. For instance: 

<blockquote>
"America is at our feet! Could anything be more important than this?"

 - - Brian Epstein in a phone call to Peter Brown
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
"What's a scruff like me doing with all this lot?"

 - - Ringo Starr
</blockquote>

Steven Gaines provides a short Introduction, describing how he came to be involved.

----

'''Style'''

One of Brown's main achievements is to maintain a dispassionate, objective tone. He clearly is a fan of Lennon, for instance, but that doesn't stop him detailing John and Yoko's heroin addiction, or poking fun at some of Lennon's less considered political stances. This fits well with his prose style, which is simple and to the point, seldom straining to turn elegant phrases or draw attention to itself. Significantly, both these aspects occassionally break down together, when Brown can't keep his emotions from rippling the otherwise nonchalantly calm surface of his narrative. More often than not, this involves Brian Epstein, who comes across as a thoroughly decent yet perpetually tormented man, and whose tragic early death from a drug overdose affects Brown deeply. Here Brown describes the moment when Allen Klein, who'd been angling after Epstein's role of Beatles manager, hears of Epstein's death:

<blockquote>
In New York City, Allen Klein was driving across the George Washington Bridge to his home in New Jersey. Behind him, Manhattan was glittering like a diamond diorama. Just then there was a news flash on the radio: Brian Epstein was dead.

Klein snapped his fingers. "I've got 'em!" he said.
</blockquote>

----

'''Content'''

Cynthia Lennon provides the opening quotation for Chapter One:

<blockquote>
"I managed to observe the whirlpool of events without drowning..."
</blockquote>

Well, like many who were close to the Beatles, if she didn't drown, Cynthia certainly got thrown up against a few rocks. And if Brown hasn't written a traditional biography, he hasn't produced a hagiography either. He isn't afraid to show some of the less attractive aspects of the Beatles, how their wealth and fame affected their behaviour, and their sometimes brutally disdainful treatment of those closest to them.

Lennon, of course, could be bitter and cruel, and there's plenty of evidence of that here. But nobody emerges from these pages with a clean charge sheet. George Harrison forbids his wife Pattie to continue her modelling career, and keeps her a virtual prisoner, "isolated almost continuously in the big gloomy house with all the friar's heads". He exhibits titanic levels of naivety in his dealings with the Maharishi, even insisting - on a flight back from a trip he and Brown took to visit the guru in Sweden, to prevail upon him to cease using the Beatles' names in his publicity - that the Maharishi just doesn't understand the issues involved because "he is not a modern man". Paul McCartney, often seen as the most level-headed Beatle, seems - in Brown's account - on the verge of a clinical case of satyriasis. In his first flush of fame, McCartney's "already healthy ego exploded". He dumps his childhood sweetheart, telling her frankly that he can't be expected to tie himself down to 'a steady', now that he has so many girls constantly available to him. Even affable drummer Ringo doesn't escape criticism, particularly of his lacklustre solo recordings, disastrous business ventures, and unsophisticated tastes. The "simple and uneducated" Ringo was "still eating egg and chips for his dinner" as late as 1965, and after the Beatles split became "a cameo-part player without a role", a man who "had little daily purpose in life".

Brown paints an enjoyably gritty portrait of the Beatles' escapades, which the press turned a blind eye to at the time, notably their enthusiastic bouts of "drinking and whoring", frequent encounters with venereal disease, and propensity for getting into decidedly un-moptoppish scrapes.

A lot of space is devoted to Brian Epstein, whose story is fascinating and unbearably sad. One of Britain's very rare Labour-voting millionaires, Epstein would perhaps have been the biggest and most deserving beneficiary, if the equation implied by that famous lyric which gives the book its title, were to become a reality. Epstein gave huge amounts of love - to lovers and friends, and to the Beatles - but received only a tiny proportion of affection in return. Gay, Jewish, posh, and with several chips on each shoulder, Epstein never found lasting happiness, and although his eventual death was deemed accidental, it wasn't really a surprise to those who knew him well.

Epstein was a mass of contradictions: he could be savvy and tenacious, as when he refused to accept anything but top billing for the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show; but his regal mien and aristocratic sensibility were ill-suited to the sort of tough business dealings his job required. In any case, Epstein considered himself too rarefied a figure to stoop to grubby negotiations and often accepted incredibly bad deals just to avoid the unseemly unpleasantness of haggling. Most famous was the Seltaeb debacle, where Epstein lost the Beatles (and himself) untold millions by signing away the rights to all Beatles merchandising just as that market was exploding. When Nicky Byrne, who Epstein's lawyer David Jacobs liked because Byrne threw great parties, "agreed to take on the job" of handling Beatles merchandising, Jacobs asked what percentage of the merchandising income Byrne wanted to keep for himself. "Byrne glibly suggested 90 per cent for himself, expecting Jacobs to start bargaining. Jacobs nodded. 'Well,' he said, '10 per cent is better than nothing,' and he signed the contracts."

In one of the book's saddest and most shameful passages, Brown describes the Beatles' reactions to Epstein's death. The Beatles were with the Maharishi in Bangor, Wales - "strolling around the grounds, enjoying the last weekend of summer and toying with their new mantras" - when they heard that Epstein had died. They were "shocked and saddened but strangely sedate", George telling reporters that "there is no such thing as death" and that they knew "Brian will return because he was striving for happiness and desired bliss so much." Brown adds:

<blockquote>
"That was the extent of the eulogy Brian was to receive from the Beatles. Within a few days, when the shock had worn off, they made foolish jokes about him. "
</blockquote>

Brown is very good on John and Yoko's hermetic relationship, their drug use, and their bizarre lifestyle arrangements. His description of the prolonged periods Lennon spends spaced out in the sunroom at Weybridge linger long in the mind:

<blockquote>
"At Kenwood, on a shelf in the sunroom, sat a white, pharmaceutical mortar and pestle with which he mixed any combination of speed, barbituates, and psychedelics. Whenever he felt himself coming down from his mind-bending heights, he would lick a finger, take a swipe at the ingredients in the mortar, and suck the bitter film into his mouth.”
</blockquote>

Here's Brown on the closing of the ill-fated Apple boutique, yet another money-losing enterprise. The night before the shop's remaining stock was due to be given awar free to the public on a 'one item per person' basis, John and Yoko visited the shop to help themselves:

<blockquote>
"The Monday night before the giveaway, Yoko Ono and John arrived at the shop. Before the amazed employees, Yoko spread large swatches of fabric out on the floor and began to pile merchandise onto it waist high. Then she knotted the corners of the fabric hobo-style and dragged it out of the store on her back, like an Oriental Santa Claus, into John's Rolls-Royce."
</blockquote>

Authors are often accused, sometimes accurately, of openly courting controversy in order to shift units. But in the case of a subject as hallowed as the Beatles, it would be difficult to produce a book which generated no controversy at all. Brown's book drew flak for two main sections, both - appropriately enough - concerning matters of the heart. Most famously, in tackling the age-old question of whether, or rather to what extent, Lennon was aware of and indeed encouraged Epstein's infatuation with him, Brown seems to imply that Lennon did in fact go so far as to allow Epstein at least one chance to live out his dream. Soon after Cynthia, having spent two days in painful labour, gave birth to Julian Lennon, John visited her in the hospital, 'ecstatic' at the sight of his baby son. This didn't prevent him from announcing that he not only wanted Brian Epstein to be the boy's Godfather but, furthermore, that he and Brian were heading off on holiday to Spain together, just the two of them. During their trip to Spain, Epstein opened up to John about his sexuality. The passage is worth quoting at length:

<blockquote>

"If you had a choice, Eppy," John said, "if you could press a button and be hetero, would you do it?"
Brian thought for a moment. "Strangely, no," he said. 

A little later a peculiar game developed. John would point out some passing man to Brian, and Brian would explain to him what it was about the fellow that he found attractive or unattractive. "I was rather enjoying the experience," John said, "thinking like a writer at the time: I am experiencing this." And still later, back in their hotel suite, drunk and sleepy from the sweet Spanish wine, Brian and John undressed in silence. "It's okay, Eppy," John said, and lay down on his bed. Brian would have liked to have hugged him, but he was afraid. Instead, John lay there, tentative and still, and Brian fulfilled the fantasies he was so sure would bring him contentment, only to awake the next morning as hollow as before. 
</blockquote>

So, not 100% clear-cut. And we have no way of knowing where Brown got the details of this episode from, although it's possible that Epstein himself was the source. Ambiguity also attends the second controversial claim in Brown's book, where he depicts the break-up of George Harrison's marriage to Pattie, a relationship which "bust up with such explosive force that it took Rigo and Maureen's marriage with it." Brown claims that, after the two couples had enjoyed dinner and plentiful wine together one night, George suddenly put down the guitar he'd been strumming and "blurted out that he was in love with Maureen." The controversial passage follows:

<blockquote>

Just a few weeks later, Pattie returned to her own home, Friar Park, from a shopping spree in London, reportedly to find George in the bedroom with Maureen, just as Cynthia and Jane Asher had found their men with other women. Neithe Maureen nor Pattie will confirm this often-reported incident actually took place, but they pointedly will not deny it either. Says Pattie on the subject: "I don't want to get anybody in trouble." 
When George was later asked why his buddy's wife, George shrugged his shoulders and said, "Incest." 
So much for the spiritual world.
</blockquote>

Again, no source is given. Again there is much ambiguity, particularly that key word "reportedly". But, whatever the truth of these ultimately not that scandalous passages, this is more of a memoir than a scholarly work and, at least in terms of reader enjoyment, all the better for it. Although supposedly written with the co-operation of the Beatles, and Yoko, it may well be that Brown burned a few bridges with this book; if he were to try writing another Beatles book, it's doubtful that he could repeat the enviable roll-call of interviewees that are listed in the introduction. You might want to take some of Brown's book with a pinch of salt. Conversely, you might ask yourself how likely it is that Brown left any number of skeletons safely closeted away.

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

Originally published in 1983, the book was out of print for some time, before being re-issued in a slightly revised form in 2002. The revised edition added a 'Contents' section, and an expanded index. There is also a very worthwhile foreward by Anthony DeCurtis, placing the book, and Beatles studies in general, in contemporary context.

Peter Brown gave a very brief 'Q & A' interview to 'New York' magazine in 2002, in which the following exchange took place:

<blockquote>

'''''Q.''' Any corrections or new material in this edition''?

'''A.''' No -- I thought we'd leave well enough alone. If there was any criticism, it was, Why did you have to be so frank? Paul once said to me, "Why did you have to put in that I had VD in Hamburg?"

</blockquote>

However, there certainly was some additional material added. For instance, a section inserted at the beginning of Chapter Seven, describing 'Swinging London' in the Sixties as a mixture of elements from other cities, and decades:

<blockquote>

"It had a touch of the naughty nineties of Paris, the decadence of pre-War Berlin. It had a sprinkling of the glamour of Hollywood in the forties and the sexual passions and peccadilloes of la dolce vita in the fifites. It was like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel rewritten by Ian Fleming."

</blockquote>

It would be interesting to learn who did write such passages, if not Brown, for their tone is ever so slightly out of synch with the rest of the book.

----

'''References'''

[http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/n_8019/ Q & A: Peter Brown, New York Magazine, November 2002]

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

Beatles Remastered

2009-08-18T20:52:29Z

MrMustard: /* August 7, 2009: Interview with Beatles Remastering Engineer Allan Rouse */

<seo metak="beatles remastered remasters remastering" metad="The Beatles remastered catalog will be released in September 2009. This page tracks the news about Beatles remasters." />

===August 7, 2009: Interview with Beatles Remastering Engineer Allan Rouse===

Here’s [http://www.examiner.com/x-2082-Beatles-Examiner~y2009m8d5-SPECIAL-Engineer-Allan-Rouse-discusses-the-Beatles-remasters an interview of Abbey Road engineer Allan Rouse] by Steve Marinucci. Rouse talks - fairly boringly and begrudgingly - about the process of remastering the Beatles albums.

===July 15, 2009: Box of Vision ===

If you plan on buying both the Stereo and Mono box sets, but still feel the need to blow even more cash, why not invest in the 'Box of Vision': a box to store the contents of your box sets it. Includes a 200 page, LP-sized book with reproductions of Beatles album covers and artwork.

[[Image:Box_of_Vision.jpg]]

[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/07/13/all-beatles-artwork-available-in-reissue-companion-set-box-of-vision Beatles artwork comes to Reissue Storage Set]

===June 10, 2009: US Apple Store 'Remasterded' Blunder ===

It's to be hoped that the wording blunder on the US Apple Store is not an indication of a general sloppiness we can expect to bedevil these releases.

[[Image:Beatles_Remasterded_sic.jpg]]

===June 10, 2009: Pictures of Remaster Box Sets at Beatles.com UK Store===

You can view images of the Mono and Stereo Remaster Box Sets at [http://www.digitalstores.co.uk/beatles/ the Beatles.com UK Store].

[[image:beatles_stereo_boxset.jpg|caption|Beatles Stereo Box Set|175px|thumb|right]]
[[image:beatles_mono_boxset.jpg|caption|Beatles Mono Box Set|175px|thumb|left]]

The first clear pictures of the remastered box sets are now up on the Beatles website UK store. The stereo set is listed at £199.99, which translates to $326.30 at current exchange rates.

The mono set is listed for £209.99, which is $342.97 roughly in U.S. dollars.

(N.B. It has been pointed out that the CD's spread out in front of these boxes do not look like the individual remastered CD's as advertised on Amazon etc. The CD's shown with the box sets do not have the distinctive sidebars with the Apple logo on them.)

===Apr 8, 2009: New York Times Article===

As has been [http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=beatles+remastered widely reported], EMI will be releasing remasters of [[#list|all 12 Beatles UK albums]] on 09.09.09. However, there is as yet no decision on their availability on iTunes or other etailers.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/arts/music/08beat.html?_r=2&hpw New York Times article...]

[http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2009/04/the_beatles_remastered.html Mojo Magazine article...]

===Apr 7, 2009: Beatles Remasters Announced for Sept 9, 2009 Release!===

[[image:Sgt-Pepper-Remastered.jpg|thumb|caption|Remastered CD - Cover Art|175px|right]]If you search [http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=Beatles%20Original%20recording%20remastered&tag=hyperartspynch07&index=music&linkCode=ur2&camp=1634&creative=6738 Beatles Original Recording Remastered] at Amazon.co.uk, you will be pleasantly surprised to see many of the Beatles releases '''available for pre-order'''! The release date is set for September 9, 2009. OK, that's 09.09.09 (get it?) They are also listed at the UK online retailer [http://hmv.com/hmvweb/simpleSearch.do?searchUID=-6921789425232557408&pGroupID=-1&adultFlag=false&primaryID=-1&simpleSearchString=beatles+remastered&btnSubmitSearch.x=0&btnSubmitSearch.y=0 HMV]. It will be released simultaneously with "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game.

You can check to see if they're available for [http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=beatles%20original%20recording%20remastered&tag=hyperartspynchon&index=music&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 pre-order at Amazon.com USA], but as of 7:30pm PST on April 7, 2009, they weren't.

====Beatles.com News Release====
TheBeatles.com (the "official" site) has [http://www.thebeatles.com/core/news/ a news release] with details. Here are highlights:

:Each of the CDs is packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album. On the same date, two new Beatles boxed CD collections will also be released.

:The collection comprises all 12 Beatles albums in stereo, with track listings and artwork as originally released in the UK, and 'Magical Mystery Tour,' which became part of The Beatles' core catalogue when the CDs were first released in 1987.

:A second boxed set has been created with the collector in mind. 'The Beatles in Mono' gathers together, in one place, all of the Beatles recordings that were mixed for a mono release.

There's no mention of alternate takes or unreleased tracks.

====RollingStone.com Article====

RollingStone.com has [http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/04/07/the-beatles-remastered-albums-due-september-9-2009/ an article on the Beatles remasters]. Highlights:

:The press release didn’t include news regarding a possible deal with iTunes or another digital-music vendor to distribute the catalog digitally: “Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalog will continue. There is no further information available at this time,” the press release reads. Both Apple Corps. and Paul McCartney have expressed reluctance to release the Beatles’ music digitally until all the albums had been remastered. The solo work of each of the four Beatles is available on iTunes.

<div id="list"></div>

:The Beatles Remasters:

::*''Please Please Me''
::*''With the Beatles''
::*''A Hard Day’s Night''
::*''Beatles for Sale''
::*''Help!''
::*''Rubber Soul''
::*''Revolver''
::*''Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band''
::*''Magical Mystery Tour''
::*''The Beatles (The White Album)''
::*''Abbey Road''
::*''Let It Be''
::*''Past Masters''
::*''Yellow Submarine''

====All the Online News, via Google News====

[http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=beatles+remastered Just click here!]

===Beatles Remasters - When???===

Currently, the only Beatles tunes available in remixed and/or remastered from the original master tapes are on two CDs:

* ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'' (1999)
* ''Love'' (2007)

Remixed at [[Abbey Road Studios]], the tracks of ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'' feature many alterations and adjustments from the original stereo recordings. All of The Beatles songs included in the film are on ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'', with the exception of "A Day in the Life", which was not put in because EMI did not want too many songs from [[Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]] to be included.

The ''Love'' album is a stunner and, as a teaser, shows what might be in store when the entire catalog is finally released. George Martin and his son managed to create an amazing "new" collection of Beatles material from the rich store of masters at EMI.

There are also two four-disc boxed sets that sound somewhat better than the late-1980s CDs:

* [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]] (2004)
* [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 2]] (2006)

However, the CDs in these two boxed sets do not contain the original George Martin mixes released in Britain in the 1960s. Instead, the CDs were mastered from mixes prepared by Capitol A&R executive Dave Dexter, Jr., who, in 1965 took the submaster tapes from Capitol Records' vaults and added reverb to several tracks and simulated stereo on mono tracks (the proof that these are Dexter's mixes being the false start on "I'm Looking Through You"). Initially, however, the CDs only used Dexter's stereo mixes, with the mono tracks consisting of the two stereo channels folded into a single channel. Dexter's mono mixes were made available on the second pressings of these albums. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capitol_Albums,_Volume_2]

==The latest news on the remastering==

===March 18, 2009===

From: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/mar/18/beatles-digital-music-store guardian.co.uk]

The long-awaited, remastered Beatles' catalogue may finally be making its way to your computer sometime this year. But don't bet on it being on iTunes.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with the estates of the late John Lennon and George Harrison, are said to be looking into the possibility of releasing the material on their own website.

Talks between Apple and The Beatles to resolve royalty disputes have been on-again and off-again for years, and according to Harrison's son Dhani, the situation has reached a tipping point.

Harrison, 30, told Blender magazine that The Beatles' camp still isn't satisfied with what they're being offered by Apple, and they may go elsewhere to release the remastered catalogue.

:"We're losing money every day," said Harrison. "So what do you do? You have to have your own delivery system, or you have to do a good deal with Steve Jobs.

:"But he says that a download is worth 99 cents, and we disagree."

It appears as though Dhani Harrison, who has his own band called thenewno2, is having increasing pull in how The Beatles' business is conducted. Just recently he revealed that he convinced the surviving Beatles and Yoko Ono to agree to the upcoming The Beatles: Rock Band project.

"The game blows my mind," said Harrison. "It's infinitely better than Rock Band 2."

===January 5, 2009===

'''The Beatles’ Catalog Finally Goes Digital Thanks To Norwegian Podcasts'''

[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/01/05/the-beatles-catalog-finally-goes-digital-thanks-to-norwegian-podcasts/ Rolling Stone magazine online reports] that the Beatles' entire catalog will become available via a Norwegian podcast series:

:The Beatles will reportedly make a bulk of their musical catalog available as a free, legal download thanks to a series of Norwegian podcasts. In 2001, the Fab Four were the subject of a documentary series entitled “Vår daglige Beatles,” or “Our Daily Beatles,” in which Norwegian journalists told the stories behind every track in the Beatles official catalog in chronological order, with the tracks themselves being played after the story was told. Now, for the first time ever, the series is available as a downloadable podcast, marking the first time the Beatles music in any form has been legally available via download. Despite efforts to finally bring the Beatles to iTunes, Paul McCartney said talks between Apple Corps. and EMI Records have “stalled.”

[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/01/05/the-beatles-catalog-finally-goes-digital-thanks-to-norwegian-podcasts/ Read the entire article...]

===December 2008===

On Murmurs.com, there's a reprint of a December 26, 2008 [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/arts/music/27beat.html?_r=1&ref=technology ''New York Times'' article] on what's going on with the remasters, by Allan Kozinn. It discusses what's going on (although no light is shed on the issues between the Beatles and EMI), the Purple Chick series, and the fans. [http://www.murmurs.com/forum/showthread.php?s=5bca8880b328b2099975c770330ec81e&p=2012636#post2012636 Check it out...]. It also references an addition to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles#2009_CD_remasters The Beatles entry on Wikipedia]:

:All albums by the Beatles (including Past Masters, Volume One and Past Masters, Volume Two) will be released newly remastered sometime in 2009 on CD. The 2009 remasters will replace the infamously poor quality 1987 remasters. Mojo Magazine's Mat Snow was invited to hear 10 remastered tracks from 1968's The White Album and stated that they were "Better even than we'd hoped."

The [http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49803 Audioholics Forum] has a good thread discussing the remasters, mentioning MOJO magazine's teaser about "sometime in 2009" and speculating on sound quality etc. Worth checking out.

===November 2008===

From [http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/11/26/sgt-pepper-stuck-in-nowhere-land.aspx The Motley Fool Financial Website] 
Nov 26, 2008

If Apple Corps is Sgt. Pepper, then EMI is the Nowhere Man.

On Monday, rocker Paul McCartney said that negotiations between the Beatles' record company and label EMI, which owns the rights to the group's recordings, have stalled. Each has a say in how and when The Beatles will publish to iTunes.

"The last word I got back was it's stalled at the whole moment, the whole process," McCartney told the Associated Press. "I really hope it will happen, because I think it should."

Us, too, Sir Paul. Apple Corps and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) became embroiled in a [http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2006/03/30/apple-cant-let-it-be.aspx trademark dispute] in 2006 that lasted [http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2007/02/05/apple-beatles-let-it-be.aspx about a year]. We've been waiting for the White Album on iTunes -- or maybe Help!, a personal favorite of mine -- ever since both sides decided to come together and work it out.

Do EMI and Apple Corps. know what they're missing? Certainly McCartney sees the value in digital sales, as do other labels. Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) recently reported a 28% year-over-year gain in digital sales. Universal Music, the largest label in the biz, said its digital take was up 33% for the first nine months of the year.

Perhaps EMI is the stumbling block. Apple Corps and Viacom's (NYSE: VIA) Harmonix, the makers of Rock Band, last week struck a deal to create a Beatles version of the game, VentureBeat reports.

===October 2008===
There's quite a bit of noise now about The Beatles remasters, and [http://s3.zetaboards.com/Strawberry_Fields/topic/7038111/1/ this website] has a good thread on developments. Apparently, The Beatles music will be finding a digital home on MTV Games' Rock Band, according to [http://www.pcworld.com/article/153053/beatles_to_make_digital_debut_on_rockband.html this news article]. "MTV Games, creator of the hit game Rock Band, and Apple Corps, which owns the rights to The Beatles' music catalogue, announced Thursday (Oct 30, 2008) that they plan to create a title that will feature only music from the Fab Four."

===June 2007===
Beatles fans will probably have to wait until next year before they can buy the [[Fab Four's]] tunes from online retailers such as Apple's iTunes store, [[George Harrison's]] widow has said.

A recent settlement to a lengthy trademark dispute between Apple and the Beatles' company, Apple Corps, has cleared the way for the band to distribute its catalogue in cyberspace.

But [[Olivia Harrison]] told Reuters, 'We just have a few things to work out elsewhere.'

Specifically, all the Beatles CDs have been remastered - good news for fans who have long complained about the poor sound quality - and the organisation wants to get the artwork ready for the physical packages.

Asked if the catalogue would be available online by the end of next year, she said, 'Oh God, yeah. Hope so ... I don't know if it would be the end of this year, but it would be nice. Imminent, let's put it that way.'

[[Paul McCartney]], who has adopted an aggressive digital marketing strategy for the release next week of his solo album, Memory Almost Full, said last month that an online deal for the Beatles catalogue was 'virtually settled' - perhaps over the cheesecake he delivered to Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. But he, too, shied away from saying that anything would happen in the short term.

The Beatles are the highest-profile omission from digital retailers. While the dispute with Apple did not help, the band's organisation has traditionally adopted a conservative approach to new technology, including CDs.

'I think we're a little bit behind,' Harrison said, noting that it was 'ridiculous' that properly remastered CDs of the band's catalogue were not yet available.

'We [the band's members and widows] all agree. It's been done. It's just trying to now get it out there.'

She said that [[Neil Aspinall]], the recently retired [now deceased] businessman who oversaw the group's complex business affairs, had been busy in recent years on the remastering project.

'That's a big job. That means you have to go back through all the archives and find great photographs and really give a nice package to the fans.'

Aspinall retired in April and was replaced by Jeff Jones, an American music industry executive who specialises in deluxe reissues of classic albums. Harrison said Aspinall's departure was voluntary, dispelling fan speculation to the contrary.

But she said Jones would 'pick up the pace' now that the most recent project, a Beatle-inspired [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirque_du_Soleil Cirque du Soleil] stage show in Las Vegas, was underway after years of preparation initiated by her husband before he died in 2001.

''Reuters and Simon'' Aughton[http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/114590/remastered-beatles-on-itunes-in-2008.html]

==The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1==

The Capitol Records LP's issued in 1964 were resurrected with the issue of this boxed set. Remastered from the original Capitol Records master tapes, these records were best known to American audiences before EMI's initial CD issue of the first four Parlophone LP's in 1987, causing their deletion. The initial effort to internationally unify the catalogue caused some state-side confusion, as the song programs and monaural sound deviated from the familiar product.

''[[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]]'' includes four CD's packaged in mini-album sleeves that mimic their vinyl counterparts. The titles are: [[Meet The Beatles!]], [[The Beatles' Second Album]], [[Something New]], and [[Beatles '65]].

[[Meet The Beatles!]], the group's iconic Capitol debut, was initially distinctive in its originality, featuring eleven Beatles compositions out of a program of twelve songs. [[The Beatles' Second Album]] relied somewhat more on covers and includes two of their best: John's landmark vocal on Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)", and Paul's one-take-to-glory shot of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally". [[Something New]] was culled from recording sessions for the Parlophone LP [[A Hard Day's Night]] and offers the cleverly constructed "Any Time at All", with its overlapping couplets, and "If I Fell", with one of John and Paul's best two-part harmonies.

The set is rounded out with [[Beatles '65]], perhaps the most notable inclusion for its underscoring of programming and artistic differences between EMI and Capitol. The corresponding Parlophone LP, Beatles For Sale features the most underrated cover photo in the history of rock with the Beatles staring in utter bewilderment. This is clearly intended to be a silent statement by the artists that the mania was taking its toll. Capitol replaced this display of candor for [[Beatles '65]] with a series of group photos that did nothing to alter their "happy moptop" image. The music, on the other hand, deceived no one who really listened: "No Reply", "I'm A Loser", and "Baby's In Black" left no question that the mood had darkened.

Although prepared from master tapes at least one generation removed from the original masters, [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]] offers some sonic improvements over the 1987 CD's. Each CD in the set includes both the early four-track stereo and mono mixes of the time for each song. The stereo versions in this set are audibly brighter with greater bass definition and vocal presence as compared to the previously available material, especially true on [[Something New]] and [[Beatles '65]], and are recommended at least until the remastered British catalogue becomes available.

==The Capitol Albums, Vol. 2==

The Capitol Albums Vol. 2 offers reissues of the group's four American LP's originally released in 1965: [[The Early Beatles]], [[Beatles VI]], [[Help! Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]] and [[Rubber Soul]]. As presented in the preceding box-set, all discs are packaged in sleeves that recall the original jacket designs and include stereo and mono mixes of each song. [[The Early Beatles]] is made up of eleven tracks from their British debut LP [[Please Please Me]] not previously released in album form. One of the disc's highlights is perhaps the Beatles' most popular cover of all time, "Twist and Shout". Capitol's choice to program "Twist and Shout" as the album's second track is somewhat curious in retrospect as this song was so often their concert finale, effectively taking down whatever was left up of the house. In comparison to the sound on the previously available Parlophone CD [[Please Please Me]] from 1987, it is worth hearing this remastered track (and several others on the disc) in stereo.

[[Beatles VI]] is derived from the greatest number of sources including two Parlophone LP's, [[Beatles For Sale]] and [[Help! (album)]], a B-side single, "[Yes It Is]", and a cover version of Larry Williams' "[Bad Boy]", which was intended only for American release. Although [[Beatles VI]] reached number one on the Billboard Charts and appeared for a total of 41 weeks, it is conceivable that by this point, Capitol's slicing and dicing of the Beatles' discography was becoming irritating to the artists themselves.

The incidental film background music on [[Help! Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]] is of interest only to hard-core completists and, unfortunately, makes up the majority of this set's third disc. Listeners who have purchased the [[Help! DVD]] from 2007 will have rendered this instrumental material completely inessential. From a standpoint of content, the Parlophone [[Help! (album)]] CD from 1987 is still far superior.

It is perhaps ironic that the last of the Beatles 1965 releases, [[Rubber Soul]], arguably benefitted from Capitol Record's programming changes. For it's American incarnation, [[Rubber Soul]] kicks off with Paul's "I've Just Seen a Face", raised in prominence from the B-side of the British [[Help! (album)]] LP. This, along with several other programming changes effectively set the tone for a subtley different, yet just as enjoyable listening experience compared with the Parlophone version of the album, as pointed out by [[Mark Lewisohn]] in the boxed-set's included liner-note book. It is notable that the version of [[Rubber Soul]] included here provided competitive inspiration for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wilson Brian Wilson] to create and produce The Beach Boys' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sounds ''Pet Sounds''], one of rock history's greatest achievements. In terms of sonics, listeners will note a clearer high end in the instrumentation, as well as improved bass definition as compared to the same tracks on the 1987 [[Rubber Soul]] CD.

==External Links==

* [http://www.thebeatles.com/core/news/ TheBeatles.com news release on 9.9.09 remasters]
* [http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/04/07/the-beatles-remastered-albums-due-september-9-2009/ RollingStone.com article on 9.9.09 remasters]
* [http://www.cnet.com/8301-13645_1-9869772-47.html Interview with Mastering Engineer Greg Calbi]
* [http://www.dmbeatles.com/forums/m-1196032146/ DM's Beatles Forums - Repackaging the Remasters Thread]
* [http://yourmothershouldknow03.blogspot.com Strawberry Lane - Awesome Beatles Sonics Resource]
* [http://www.bootlegzone.com/ BootlegZone - Documents most Beatle bootlegs]
* [http://threesrepeating.blogspot.com/2009/03/beatles-unauthorized-remasters.html Download Purple Chick Remasters].
* [http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/Where-Are-Beatles-Reissues-316/ Gibson.com Article on Remasters - Mar 16, 2009]

File:Box of Vision.jpg

2009-07-15T19:53:02Z

MrMustard:

Beatles Remastered

2009-07-15T19:52:03Z

MrMustard: Box of Vision

<seo metak="beatles remastered remasters remastering" metad="The Beatles remastered catalog will be released in September 2009. This page tracks the news about Beatles remasters." />

===July 15, 2009: Box of Vision ===

If you plan on buying both the Stereo and Mono box sets, but still feel the need to blow even more cash, why not invest in the 'Box of Vision': a box to store the contents of your box sets it. Includes a 200 page, LP-sized book with reproductions of Beatles album covers and artwork.

[[Image:Box_of_Vision.jpg]]

[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/07/13/all-beatles-artwork-available-in-reissue-companion-set-box-of-vision Beatles artwork comes to Reissue Storage Set]

===June 10, 2009: US Apple Store 'Remasterded' Blunder ===

It's to be hoped that the wording blunder on the US Apple Store is not an indication of a general sloppiness we can expect to bedevil these releases.

[[Image:Beatles_Remasterded_sic.jpg]]

===June 10, 2009: Pictures of Remaster Box Sets at Beatles.com UK Store===

You can view images of the Mono and Stereo Remaster Box Sets at [http://www.digitalstores.co.uk/beatles/ the Beatles.com UK Store].

[[image:beatles_stereo_boxset.jpg|caption|Beatles Stereo Box Set|175px|thumb|right]]
[[image:beatles_mono_boxset.jpg|caption|Beatles Mono Box Set|175px|thumb|left]]

The first clear pictures of the remastered box sets are now up on the Beatles website UK store. The stereo set is listed at £199.99, which translates to $326.30 at current exchange rates.

The mono set is listed for £209.99, which is $342.97 roughly in U.S. dollars.

(N.B. It has been pointed out that the CD's spread out in front of these boxes do not look like the individual remastered CD's as advertised on Amazon etc. The CD's shown with the box sets do not have the distinctive sidebars with the Apple logo on them.)

===Apr 8, 2009: New York Times Article===

As has been [http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=beatles+remastered widely reported], EMI will be releasing remasters of [[#list|all 12 Beatles UK albums]] on 09.09.09. However, there is as yet no decision on their availability on iTunes or other etailers.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/arts/music/08beat.html?_r=2&hpw New York Times article...]

[http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2009/04/the_beatles_remastered.html Mojo Magazine article...]

===Apr 7, 2009: Beatles Remasters Announced for Sept 9, 2009 Release!===

[[image:Sgt-Pepper-Remastered.jpg|thumb|caption|Remastered CD - Cover Art|175px|right]]If you search [http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=Beatles%20Original%20recording%20remastered&tag=hyperartspynch07&index=music&linkCode=ur2&camp=1634&creative=6738 Beatles Original Recording Remastered] at Amazon.co.uk, you will be pleasantly surprised to see many of the Beatles releases '''available for pre-order'''! The release date is set for September 9, 2009. OK, that's 09.09.09 (get it?) They are also listed at the UK online retailer [http://hmv.com/hmvweb/simpleSearch.do?searchUID=-6921789425232557408&pGroupID=-1&adultFlag=false&primaryID=-1&simpleSearchString=beatles+remastered&btnSubmitSearch.x=0&btnSubmitSearch.y=0 HMV]. It will be released simultaneously with "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game.

You can check to see if they're available for [http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=beatles%20original%20recording%20remastered&tag=hyperartspynchon&index=music&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 pre-order at Amazon.com USA], but as of 7:30pm PST on April 7, 2009, they weren't.

====Beatles.com News Release====
TheBeatles.com (the "official" site) has [http://www.thebeatles.com/core/news/ a news release] with details. Here are highlights:

:Each of the CDs is packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album. On the same date, two new Beatles boxed CD collections will also be released.

:The collection comprises all 12 Beatles albums in stereo, with track listings and artwork as originally released in the UK, and 'Magical Mystery Tour,' which became part of The Beatles' core catalogue when the CDs were first released in 1987.

:A second boxed set has been created with the collector in mind. 'The Beatles in Mono' gathers together, in one place, all of the Beatles recordings that were mixed for a mono release.

There's no mention of alternate takes or unreleased tracks.

====RollingStone.com Article====

RollingStone.com has [http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/04/07/the-beatles-remastered-albums-due-september-9-2009/ an article on the Beatles remasters]. Highlights:

:The press release didn’t include news regarding a possible deal with iTunes or another digital-music vendor to distribute the catalog digitally: “Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalog will continue. There is no further information available at this time,” the press release reads. Both Apple Corps. and Paul McCartney have expressed reluctance to release the Beatles’ music digitally until all the albums had been remastered. The solo work of each of the four Beatles is available on iTunes.

<div id="list"></div>

:The Beatles Remasters:

::*''Please Please Me''
::*''With the Beatles''
::*''A Hard Day’s Night''
::*''Beatles for Sale''
::*''Help!''
::*''Rubber Soul''
::*''Revolver''
::*''Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band''
::*''Magical Mystery Tour''
::*''The Beatles (The White Album)''
::*''Abbey Road''
::*''Let It Be''
::*''Past Masters''
::*''Yellow Submarine''

====All the Online News, via Google News====

[http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=beatles+remastered Just click here!]

===Beatles Remasters - When???===

Currently, the only Beatles tunes available in remixed and/or remastered from the original master tapes are on two CDs:

* ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'' (1999)
* ''Love'' (2007)

Remixed at [[Abbey Road Studios]], the tracks of ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'' feature many alterations and adjustments from the original stereo recordings. All of The Beatles songs included in the film are on ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'', with the exception of "A Day in the Life", which was not put in because EMI did not want too many songs from [[Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]] to be included.

The ''Love'' album is a stunner and, as a teaser, shows what might be in store when the entire catalog is finally released. George Martin and his son managed to create an amazing "new" collection of Beatles material from the rich store of masters at EMI.

There are also two four-disc boxed sets that sound somewhat better than the late-1980s CDs:

* [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]] (2004)
* [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 2]] (2006)

However, the CDs in these two boxed sets do not contain the original George Martin mixes released in Britain in the 1960s. Instead, the CDs were mastered from mixes prepared by Capitol A&R executive Dave Dexter, Jr., who, in 1965 took the submaster tapes from Capitol Records' vaults and added reverb to several tracks and simulated stereo on mono tracks (the proof that these are Dexter's mixes being the false start on "I'm Looking Through You"). Initially, however, the CDs only used Dexter's stereo mixes, with the mono tracks consisting of the two stereo channels folded into a single channel. Dexter's mono mixes were made available on the second pressings of these albums. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capitol_Albums,_Volume_2]

==The latest news on the remastering==

===March 18, 2009===

From: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/mar/18/beatles-digital-music-store guardian.co.uk]

The long-awaited, remastered Beatles' catalogue may finally be making its way to your computer sometime this year. But don't bet on it being on iTunes.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with the estates of the late John Lennon and George Harrison, are said to be looking into the possibility of releasing the material on their own website.

Talks between Apple and The Beatles to resolve royalty disputes have been on-again and off-again for years, and according to Harrison's son Dhani, the situation has reached a tipping point.

Harrison, 30, told Blender magazine that The Beatles' camp still isn't satisfied with what they're being offered by Apple, and they may go elsewhere to release the remastered catalogue.

:"We're losing money every day," said Harrison. "So what do you do? You have to have your own delivery system, or you have to do a good deal with Steve Jobs.

:"But he says that a download is worth 99 cents, and we disagree."

It appears as though Dhani Harrison, who has his own band called thenewno2, is having increasing pull in how The Beatles' business is conducted. Just recently he revealed that he convinced the surviving Beatles and Yoko Ono to agree to the upcoming The Beatles: Rock Band project.

"The game blows my mind," said Harrison. "It's infinitely better than Rock Band 2."

===January 5, 2009===

'''The Beatles’ Catalog Finally Goes Digital Thanks To Norwegian Podcasts'''

[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/01/05/the-beatles-catalog-finally-goes-digital-thanks-to-norwegian-podcasts/ Rolling Stone magazine online reports] that the Beatles' entire catalog will become available via a Norwegian podcast series:

:The Beatles will reportedly make a bulk of their musical catalog available as a free, legal download thanks to a series of Norwegian podcasts. In 2001, the Fab Four were the subject of a documentary series entitled “Vår daglige Beatles,” or “Our Daily Beatles,” in which Norwegian journalists told the stories behind every track in the Beatles official catalog in chronological order, with the tracks themselves being played after the story was told. Now, for the first time ever, the series is available as a downloadable podcast, marking the first time the Beatles music in any form has been legally available via download. Despite efforts to finally bring the Beatles to iTunes, Paul McCartney said talks between Apple Corps. and EMI Records have “stalled.”

[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/01/05/the-beatles-catalog-finally-goes-digital-thanks-to-norwegian-podcasts/ Read the entire article...]

===December 2008===

On Murmurs.com, there's a reprint of a December 26, 2008 [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/arts/music/27beat.html?_r=1&ref=technology ''New York Times'' article] on what's going on with the remasters, by Allan Kozinn. It discusses what's going on (although no light is shed on the issues between the Beatles and EMI), the Purple Chick series, and the fans. [http://www.murmurs.com/forum/showthread.php?s=5bca8880b328b2099975c770330ec81e&p=2012636#post2012636 Check it out...]. It also references an addition to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles#2009_CD_remasters The Beatles entry on Wikipedia]:

:All albums by the Beatles (including Past Masters, Volume One and Past Masters, Volume Two) will be released newly remastered sometime in 2009 on CD. The 2009 remasters will replace the infamously poor quality 1987 remasters. Mojo Magazine's Mat Snow was invited to hear 10 remastered tracks from 1968's The White Album and stated that they were "Better even than we'd hoped."

The [http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49803 Audioholics Forum] has a good thread discussing the remasters, mentioning MOJO magazine's teaser about "sometime in 2009" and speculating on sound quality etc. Worth checking out.

===November 2008===

From [http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/11/26/sgt-pepper-stuck-in-nowhere-land.aspx The Motley Fool Financial Website] 
Nov 26, 2008

If Apple Corps is Sgt. Pepper, then EMI is the Nowhere Man.

On Monday, rocker Paul McCartney said that negotiations between the Beatles' record company and label EMI, which owns the rights to the group's recordings, have stalled. Each has a say in how and when The Beatles will publish to iTunes.

"The last word I got back was it's stalled at the whole moment, the whole process," McCartney told the Associated Press. "I really hope it will happen, because I think it should."

Us, too, Sir Paul. Apple Corps and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) became embroiled in a [http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2006/03/30/apple-cant-let-it-be.aspx trademark dispute] in 2006 that lasted [http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2007/02/05/apple-beatles-let-it-be.aspx about a year]. We've been waiting for the White Album on iTunes -- or maybe Help!, a personal favorite of mine -- ever since both sides decided to come together and work it out.

Do EMI and Apple Corps. know what they're missing? Certainly McCartney sees the value in digital sales, as do other labels. Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) recently reported a 28% year-over-year gain in digital sales. Universal Music, the largest label in the biz, said its digital take was up 33% for the first nine months of the year.

Perhaps EMI is the stumbling block. Apple Corps and Viacom's (NYSE: VIA) Harmonix, the makers of Rock Band, last week struck a deal to create a Beatles version of the game, VentureBeat reports.

===October 2008===
There's quite a bit of noise now about The Beatles remasters, and [http://s3.zetaboards.com/Strawberry_Fields/topic/7038111/1/ this website] has a good thread on developments. Apparently, The Beatles music will be finding a digital home on MTV Games' Rock Band, according to [http://www.pcworld.com/article/153053/beatles_to_make_digital_debut_on_rockband.html this news article]. "MTV Games, creator of the hit game Rock Band, and Apple Corps, which owns the rights to The Beatles' music catalogue, announced Thursday (Oct 30, 2008) that they plan to create a title that will feature only music from the Fab Four."

===June 2007===
Beatles fans will probably have to wait until next year before they can buy the [[Fab Four's]] tunes from online retailers such as Apple's iTunes store, [[George Harrison's]] widow has said.

A recent settlement to a lengthy trademark dispute between Apple and the Beatles' company, Apple Corps, has cleared the way for the band to distribute its catalogue in cyberspace.

But [[Olivia Harrison]] told Reuters, 'We just have a few things to work out elsewhere.'

Specifically, all the Beatles CDs have been remastered - good news for fans who have long complained about the poor sound quality - and the organisation wants to get the artwork ready for the physical packages.

Asked if the catalogue would be available online by the end of next year, she said, 'Oh God, yeah. Hope so ... I don't know if it would be the end of this year, but it would be nice. Imminent, let's put it that way.'

[[Paul McCartney]], who has adopted an aggressive digital marketing strategy for the release next week of his solo album, Memory Almost Full, said last month that an online deal for the Beatles catalogue was 'virtually settled' - perhaps over the cheesecake he delivered to Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. But he, too, shied away from saying that anything would happen in the short term.

The Beatles are the highest-profile omission from digital retailers. While the dispute with Apple did not help, the band's organisation has traditionally adopted a conservative approach to new technology, including CDs.

'I think we're a little bit behind,' Harrison said, noting that it was 'ridiculous' that properly remastered CDs of the band's catalogue were not yet available.

'We [the band's members and widows] all agree. It's been done. It's just trying to now get it out there.'

She said that [[Neil Aspinall]], the recently retired [now deceased] businessman who oversaw the group's complex business affairs, had been busy in recent years on the remastering project.

'That's a big job. That means you have to go back through all the archives and find great photographs and really give a nice package to the fans.'

Aspinall retired in April and was replaced by Jeff Jones, an American music industry executive who specialises in deluxe reissues of classic albums. Harrison said Aspinall's departure was voluntary, dispelling fan speculation to the contrary.

But she said Jones would 'pick up the pace' now that the most recent project, a Beatle-inspired [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirque_du_Soleil Cirque du Soleil] stage show in Las Vegas, was underway after years of preparation initiated by her husband before he died in 2001.

''Reuters and Simon'' Aughton[http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/114590/remastered-beatles-on-itunes-in-2008.html]

==The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1==

The Capitol Records LP's issued in 1964 were resurrected with the issue of this boxed set. Remastered from the original Capitol Records master tapes, these records were best known to American audiences before EMI's initial CD issue of the first four Parlophone LP's in 1987, causing their deletion. The initial effort to internationally unify the catalogue caused some state-side confusion, as the song programs and monaural sound deviated from the familiar product.

''[[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]]'' includes four CD's packaged in mini-album sleeves that mimic their vinyl counterparts. The titles are: [[Meet The Beatles!]], [[The Beatles' Second Album]], [[Something New]], and [[Beatles '65]].

[[Meet The Beatles!]], the group's iconic Capitol debut, was initially distinctive in its originality, featuring eleven Beatles compositions out of a program of twelve songs. [[The Beatles' Second Album]] relied somewhat more on covers and includes two of their best: John's landmark vocal on Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)", and Paul's one-take-to-glory shot of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally". [[Something New]] was culled from recording sessions for the Parlophone LP [[A Hard Day's Night]] and offers the cleverly constructed "Any Time at All", with its overlapping couplets, and "If I Fell", with one of John and Paul's best two-part harmonies.

The set is rounded out with [[Beatles '65]], perhaps the most notable inclusion for its underscoring of programming and artistic differences between EMI and Capitol. The corresponding Parlophone LP, Beatles For Sale features the most underrated cover photo in the history of rock with the Beatles staring in utter bewilderment. This is clearly intended to be a silent statement by the artists that the mania was taking its toll. Capitol replaced this display of candor for [[Beatles '65]] with a series of group photos that did nothing to alter their "happy moptop" image. The music, on the other hand, deceived no one who really listened: "No Reply", "I'm A Loser", and "Baby's In Black" left no question that the mood had darkened.

Although prepared from master tapes at least one generation removed from the original masters, [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]] offers some sonic improvements over the 1987 CD's. Each CD in the set includes both the early four-track stereo and mono mixes of the time for each song. The stereo versions in this set are audibly brighter with greater bass definition and vocal presence as compared to the previously available material, especially true on [[Something New]] and [[Beatles '65]], and are recommended at least until the remastered British catalogue becomes available.

==The Capitol Albums, Vol. 2==

The Capitol Albums Vol. 2 offers reissues of the group's four American LP's originally released in 1965: [[The Early Beatles]], [[Beatles VI]], [[Help! Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]] and [[Rubber Soul]]. As presented in the preceding box-set, all discs are packaged in sleeves that recall the original jacket designs and include stereo and mono mixes of each song. [[The Early Beatles]] is made up of eleven tracks from their British debut LP [[Please Please Me]] not previously released in album form. One of the disc's highlights is perhaps the Beatles' most popular cover of all time, "Twist and Shout". Capitol's choice to program "Twist and Shout" as the album's second track is somewhat curious in retrospect as this song was so often their concert finale, effectively taking down whatever was left up of the house. In comparison to the sound on the previously available Parlophone CD [[Please Please Me]] from 1987, it is worth hearing this remastered track (and several others on the disc) in stereo.

[[Beatles VI]] is derived from the greatest number of sources including two Parlophone LP's, [[Beatles For Sale]] and [[Help! (album)]], a B-side single, "[Yes It Is]", and a cover version of Larry Williams' "[Bad Boy]", which was intended only for American release. Although [[Beatles VI]] reached number one on the Billboard Charts and appeared for a total of 41 weeks, it is conceivable that by this point, Capitol's slicing and dicing of the Beatles' discography was becoming irritating to the artists themselves.

The incidental film background music on [[Help! Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]] is of interest only to hard-core completists and, unfortunately, makes up the majority of this set's third disc. Listeners who have purchased the [[Help! DVD]] from 2007 will have rendered this instrumental material completely inessential. From a standpoint of content, the Parlophone [[Help! (album)]] CD from 1987 is still far superior.

It is perhaps ironic that the last of the Beatles 1965 releases, [[Rubber Soul]], arguably benefitted from Capitol Record's programming changes. For it's American incarnation, [[Rubber Soul]] kicks off with Paul's "I've Just Seen a Face", raised in prominence from the B-side of the British [[Help! (album)]] LP. This, along with several other programming changes effectively set the tone for a subtley different, yet just as enjoyable listening experience compared with the Parlophone version of the album, as pointed out by [[Mark Lewisohn]] in the boxed-set's included liner-note book. It is notable that the version of [[Rubber Soul]] included here provided competitive inspiration for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wilson Brian Wilson] to create and produce The Beach Boys' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sounds ''Pet Sounds''], one of rock history's greatest achievements. In terms of sonics, listeners will note a clearer high end in the instrumentation, as well as improved bass definition as compared to the same tracks on the 1987 [[Rubber Soul]] CD.

==External Links==

* [http://www.thebeatles.com/core/news/ TheBeatles.com news release on 9.9.09 remasters]
* [http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/04/07/the-beatles-remastered-albums-due-september-9-2009/ RollingStone.com article on 9.9.09 remasters]
* [http://www.cnet.com/8301-13645_1-9869772-47.html Interview with Mastering Engineer Greg Calbi]
* [http://www.dmbeatles.com/forums/m-1196032146/ DM's Beatles Forums - Repackaging the Remasters Thread]
* [http://yourmothershouldknow03.blogspot.com Strawberry Lane - Awesome Beatles Sonics Resource]
* [http://www.bootlegzone.com/ BootlegZone - Documents most Beatle bootlegs]
* [http://threesrepeating.blogspot.com/2009/03/beatles-unauthorized-remasters.html Download Purple Chick Remasters].
* [http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/Where-Are-Beatles-Reissues-316/ Gibson.com Article on Remasters - Mar 16, 2009]

User talk:Beatleboy

2009-06-10T20:58:58Z

MrMustard: New page: Hello Beatleboy! Looks like you and me are the only active contributors around here (apart from the admin)...

Hello Beatleboy! Looks like you and me are the only active contributors around here (apart from the admin)...

File:Beatles Remasterded sic.jpg

2009-06-10T20:57:02Z

MrMustard:

Beatles Remastered

2009-06-10T20:56:41Z

MrMustard: Remasterded blunder

<seo metak="beatles remastered remasters remastering" metad="The Beatles remastered catalog will be released in September 2009. This page tracks the news about Beatles remasters." />

===June 10, 2009: US Apple Store 'Remasterded' Blunder ===

It's to be hoped that the wording blunder on the US Apple Store is not an indication of a general sloppiness we can expect to bedevil these releases.

[[Image:Beatles_Remasterded_sic.jpg]]

===June 10, 2009: Pictures of Remaster Box Sets at Beatles.com UK Store===

You can view images of the Mono and Stereo Remaster Box Sets at [http://www.digitalstores.co.uk/beatles/ the Beatles.com UK Store].

[[image:beatles_stereo_boxset.jpg|caption|Beatles Stereo Box Set|175px|thumb|right]]
[[image:beatles_mono_boxset.jpg|caption|Beatles Mono Box Set|175px|thumb|left]]

The first clear pictures of the remastered box sets are now up on the Beatles website UK store. The stereo set is listed at £199.99, which translates to $326.30 at current exchange rates.

The mono set is listed for £209.99, which is $342.97 roughly in U.S. dollars.

(N.B. It has been pointed out that the CD's spread out in front of these boxes do not look like the individual remastered CD's as advertised on Amazon etc. The CD's shown with the box sets do not have the distinctive sidebars with the Apple logo on them.)

===Apr 8, 2009: New York Times Article===

As has been [http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=beatles+remastered widely reported], EMI will be releasing remasters of [[#list|all 12 Beatles UK albums]] on 09.09.09. However, there is as yet no decision on their availability on iTunes or other etailers.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/arts/music/08beat.html?_r=2&hpw New York Times article...]

[http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2009/04/the_beatles_remastered.html Mojo Magazine article...]

===Apr 7, 2009: Beatles Remasters Announced for Sept 9, 2009 Release!===

[[image:Sgt-Pepper-Remastered.jpg|thumb|caption|Remastered CD - Cover Art|175px|right]]If you search [http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=Beatles%20Original%20recording%20remastered&tag=hyperartspynch07&index=music&linkCode=ur2&camp=1634&creative=6738 Beatles Original Recording Remastered] at Amazon.co.uk, you will be pleasantly surprised to see many of the Beatles releases '''available for pre-order'''! The release date is set for September 9, 2009. OK, that's 09.09.09 (get it?) They are also listed at the UK online retailer [http://hmv.com/hmvweb/simpleSearch.do?searchUID=-6921789425232557408&pGroupID=-1&adultFlag=false&primaryID=-1&simpleSearchString=beatles+remastered&btnSubmitSearch.x=0&btnSubmitSearch.y=0 HMV]. It will be released simultaneously with "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game.

You can check to see if they're available for [http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=beatles%20original%20recording%20remastered&tag=hyperartspynchon&index=music&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 pre-order at Amazon.com USA], but as of 7:30pm PST on April 7, 2009, they weren't.

====Beatles.com News Release====
TheBeatles.com (the "official" site) has [http://www.thebeatles.com/core/news/ a news release] with details. Here are highlights:

:Each of the CDs is packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album. On the same date, two new Beatles boxed CD collections will also be released.

:The collection comprises all 12 Beatles albums in stereo, with track listings and artwork as originally released in the UK, and 'Magical Mystery Tour,' which became part of The Beatles' core catalogue when the CDs were first released in 1987.

:A second boxed set has been created with the collector in mind. 'The Beatles in Mono' gathers together, in one place, all of the Beatles recordings that were mixed for a mono release.

There's no mention of alternate takes or unreleased tracks.

====RollingStone.com Article====

RollingStone.com has [http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/04/07/the-beatles-remastered-albums-due-september-9-2009/ an article on the Beatles remasters]. Highlights:

:The press release didn’t include news regarding a possible deal with iTunes or another digital-music vendor to distribute the catalog digitally: “Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalog will continue. There is no further information available at this time,” the press release reads. Both Apple Corps. and Paul McCartney have expressed reluctance to release the Beatles’ music digitally until all the albums had been remastered. The solo work of each of the four Beatles is available on iTunes.

<div id="list"></div>

:The Beatles Remasters:

::*''Please Please Me''
::*''With the Beatles''
::*''A Hard Day’s Night''
::*''Beatles for Sale''
::*''Help!''
::*''Rubber Soul''
::*''Revolver''
::*''Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band''
::*''Magical Mystery Tour''
::*''The Beatles (The White Album)''
::*''Abbey Road''
::*''Let It Be''
::*''Past Masters''
::*''Yellow Submarine''

====All the Online News, via Google News====

[http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=beatles+remastered Just click here!]

===Beatles Remasters - When???===

Currently, the only Beatles tunes available in remixed and/or remastered from the original master tapes are on two CDs:

* ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'' (1999)
* ''Love'' (2007)

Remixed at [[Abbey Road Studios]], the tracks of ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'' feature many alterations and adjustments from the original stereo recordings. All of The Beatles songs included in the film are on ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'', with the exception of "A Day in the Life", which was not put in because EMI did not want too many songs from [[Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]] to be included.

The ''Love'' album is a stunner and, as a teaser, shows what might be in store when the entire catalog is finally released. George Martin and his son managed to create an amazing "new" collection of Beatles material from the rich store of masters at EMI.

There are also two four-disc boxed sets that sound somewhat better than the late-1980s CDs:

* [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]] (2004)
* [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 2]] (2006)

However, the CDs in these two boxed sets do not contain the original George Martin mixes released in Britain in the 1960s. Instead, the CDs were mastered from mixes prepared by Capitol A&R executive Dave Dexter, Jr., who, in 1965 took the submaster tapes from Capitol Records' vaults and added reverb to several tracks and simulated stereo on mono tracks (the proof that these are Dexter's mixes being the false start on "I'm Looking Through You"). Initially, however, the CDs only used Dexter's stereo mixes, with the mono tracks consisting of the two stereo channels folded into a single channel. Dexter's mono mixes were made available on the second pressings of these albums. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capitol_Albums,_Volume_2]

==The latest news on the remastering==

===March 18, 2009===

From: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/mar/18/beatles-digital-music-store guardian.co.uk]

The long-awaited, remastered Beatles' catalogue may finally be making its way to your computer sometime this year. But don't bet on it being on iTunes.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with the estates of the late John Lennon and George Harrison, are said to be looking into the possibility of releasing the material on their own website.

Talks between Apple and The Beatles to resolve royalty disputes have been on-again and off-again for years, and according to Harrison's son Dhani, the situation has reached a tipping point.

Harrison, 30, told Blender magazine that The Beatles' camp still isn't satisfied with what they're being offered by Apple, and they may go elsewhere to release the remastered catalogue.

:"We're losing money every day," said Harrison. "So what do you do? You have to have your own delivery system, or you have to do a good deal with Steve Jobs.

:"But he says that a download is worth 99 cents, and we disagree."

It appears as though Dhani Harrison, who has his own band called thenewno2, is having increasing pull in how The Beatles' business is conducted. Just recently he revealed that he convinced the surviving Beatles and Yoko Ono to agree to the upcoming The Beatles: Rock Band project.

"The game blows my mind," said Harrison. "It's infinitely better than Rock Band 2."

===January 5, 2009===

'''The Beatles’ Catalog Finally Goes Digital Thanks To Norwegian Podcasts'''

[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/01/05/the-beatles-catalog-finally-goes-digital-thanks-to-norwegian-podcasts/ Rolling Stone magazine online reports] that the Beatles' entire catalog will become available via a Norwegian podcast series:

:The Beatles will reportedly make a bulk of their musical catalog available as a free, legal download thanks to a series of Norwegian podcasts. In 2001, the Fab Four were the subject of a documentary series entitled “Vår daglige Beatles,” or “Our Daily Beatles,” in which Norwegian journalists told the stories behind every track in the Beatles official catalog in chronological order, with the tracks themselves being played after the story was told. Now, for the first time ever, the series is available as a downloadable podcast, marking the first time the Beatles music in any form has been legally available via download. Despite efforts to finally bring the Beatles to iTunes, Paul McCartney said talks between Apple Corps. and EMI Records have “stalled.”

[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/01/05/the-beatles-catalog-finally-goes-digital-thanks-to-norwegian-podcasts/ Read the entire article...]

===December 2008===

On Murmurs.com, there's a reprint of a December 26, 2008 [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/arts/music/27beat.html?_r=1&ref=technology ''New York Times'' article] on what's going on with the remasters, by Allan Kozinn. It discusses what's going on (although no light is shed on the issues between the Beatles and EMI), the Purple Chick series, and the fans. [http://www.murmurs.com/forum/showthread.php?s=5bca8880b328b2099975c770330ec81e&p=2012636#post2012636 Check it out...]. It also references an addition to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles#2009_CD_remasters The Beatles entry on Wikipedia]:

:All albums by the Beatles (including Past Masters, Volume One and Past Masters, Volume Two) will be released newly remastered sometime in 2009 on CD. The 2009 remasters will replace the infamously poor quality 1987 remasters. Mojo Magazine's Mat Snow was invited to hear 10 remastered tracks from 1968's The White Album and stated that they were "Better even than we'd hoped."

The [http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49803 Audioholics Forum] has a good thread discussing the remasters, mentioning MOJO magazine's teaser about "sometime in 2009" and speculating on sound quality etc. Worth checking out.

===November 2008===

From [http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/11/26/sgt-pepper-stuck-in-nowhere-land.aspx The Motley Fool Financial Website] 
Nov 26, 2008

If Apple Corps is Sgt. Pepper, then EMI is the Nowhere Man.

On Monday, rocker Paul McCartney said that negotiations between the Beatles' record company and label EMI, which owns the rights to the group's recordings, have stalled. Each has a say in how and when The Beatles will publish to iTunes.

"The last word I got back was it's stalled at the whole moment, the whole process," McCartney told the Associated Press. "I really hope it will happen, because I think it should."

Us, too, Sir Paul. Apple Corps and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) became embroiled in a [http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2006/03/30/apple-cant-let-it-be.aspx trademark dispute] in 2006 that lasted [http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2007/02/05/apple-beatles-let-it-be.aspx about a year]. We've been waiting for the White Album on iTunes -- or maybe Help!, a personal favorite of mine -- ever since both sides decided to come together and work it out.

Do EMI and Apple Corps. know what they're missing? Certainly McCartney sees the value in digital sales, as do other labels. Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) recently reported a 28% year-over-year gain in digital sales. Universal Music, the largest label in the biz, said its digital take was up 33% for the first nine months of the year.

Perhaps EMI is the stumbling block. Apple Corps and Viacom's (NYSE: VIA) Harmonix, the makers of Rock Band, last week struck a deal to create a Beatles version of the game, VentureBeat reports.

===October 2008===
There's quite a bit of noise now about The Beatles remasters, and [http://s3.zetaboards.com/Strawberry_Fields/topic/7038111/1/ this website] has a good thread on developments. Apparently, The Beatles music will be finding a digital home on MTV Games' Rock Band, according to [http://www.pcworld.com/article/153053/beatles_to_make_digital_debut_on_rockband.html this news article]. "MTV Games, creator of the hit game Rock Band, and Apple Corps, which owns the rights to The Beatles' music catalogue, announced Thursday (Oct 30, 2008) that they plan to create a title that will feature only music from the Fab Four."

===June 2007===
Beatles fans will probably have to wait until next year before they can buy the [[Fab Four's]] tunes from online retailers such as Apple's iTunes store, [[George Harrison's]] widow has said.

A recent settlement to a lengthy trademark dispute between Apple and the Beatles' company, Apple Corps, has cleared the way for the band to distribute its catalogue in cyberspace.

But [[Olivia Harrison]] told Reuters, 'We just have a few things to work out elsewhere.'

Specifically, all the Beatles CDs have been remastered - good news for fans who have long complained about the poor sound quality - and the organisation wants to get the artwork ready for the physical packages.

Asked if the catalogue would be available online by the end of next year, she said, 'Oh God, yeah. Hope so ... I don't know if it would be the end of this year, but it would be nice. Imminent, let's put it that way.'

[[Paul McCartney]], who has adopted an aggressive digital marketing strategy for the release next week of his solo album, Memory Almost Full, said last month that an online deal for the Beatles catalogue was 'virtually settled' - perhaps over the cheesecake he delivered to Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. But he, too, shied away from saying that anything would happen in the short term.

The Beatles are the highest-profile omission from digital retailers. While the dispute with Apple did not help, the band's organisation has traditionally adopted a conservative approach to new technology, including CDs.

'I think we're a little bit behind,' Harrison said, noting that it was 'ridiculous' that properly remastered CDs of the band's catalogue were not yet available.

'We [the band's members and widows] all agree. It's been done. It's just trying to now get it out there.'

She said that [[Neil Aspinall]], the recently retired [now deceased] businessman who oversaw the group's complex business affairs, had been busy in recent years on the remastering project.

'That's a big job. That means you have to go back through all the archives and find great photographs and really give a nice package to the fans.'

Aspinall retired in April and was replaced by Jeff Jones, an American music industry executive who specialises in deluxe reissues of classic albums. Harrison said Aspinall's departure was voluntary, dispelling fan speculation to the contrary.

But she said Jones would 'pick up the pace' now that the most recent project, a Beatle-inspired [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirque_du_Soleil Cirque du Soleil] stage show in Las Vegas, was underway after years of preparation initiated by her husband before he died in 2001.

''Reuters and Simon'' Aughton[http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/114590/remastered-beatles-on-itunes-in-2008.html]

==The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1==

The Capitol Records LP's issued in 1964 were resurrected with the issue of this boxed set. Remastered from the original Capitol Records master tapes, these records were best known to American audiences before EMI's initial CD issue of the first four Parlophone LP's in 1987, causing their deletion. The initial effort to internationally unify the catalogue caused some state-side confusion, as the song programs and monaural sound deviated from the familiar product.

''[[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]]'' includes four CD's packaged in mini-album sleeves that mimic their vinyl counterparts. The titles are: [[Meet The Beatles!]], [[The Beatles' Second Album]], [[Something New]], and [[Beatles '65]].

[[Meet The Beatles!]], the group's iconic Capitol debut, was initially distinctive in its originality, featuring eleven Beatles compositions out of a program of twelve songs. [[The Beatles' Second Album]] relied somewhat more on covers and includes two of their best: John's landmark vocal on Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)", and Paul's one-take-to-glory shot of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally". [[Something New]] was culled from recording sessions for the Parlophone LP [[A Hard Day's Night]] and offers the cleverly constructed "Any Time at All", with its overlapping couplets, and "If I Fell", with one of John and Paul's best two-part harmonies.

The set is rounded out with [[Beatles '65]], perhaps the most notable inclusion for its underscoring of programming and artistic differences between EMI and Capitol. The corresponding Parlophone LP, Beatles For Sale features the most underrated cover photo in the history of rock with the Beatles staring in utter bewilderment. This is clearly intended to be a silent statement by the artists that the mania was taking its toll. Capitol replaced this display of candor for [[Beatles '65]] with a series of group photos that did nothing to alter their "happy moptop" image. The music, on the other hand, deceived no one who really listened: "No Reply", "I'm A Loser", and "Baby's In Black" left no question that the mood had darkened.

Although prepared from master tapes at least one generation removed from the original masters, [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]] offers some sonic improvements over the 1987 CD's. Each CD in the set includes both the early four-track stereo and mono mixes of the time for each song. The stereo versions in this set are audibly brighter with greater bass definition and vocal presence as compared to the previously available material, especially true on [[Something New]] and [[Beatles '65]], and are recommended at least until the remastered British catalogue becomes available.

==The Capitol Albums, Vol. 2==

The Capitol Albums Vol. 2 offers reissues of the group's four American LP's originally released in 1965: [[The Early Beatles]], [[Beatles VI]], [[Help! Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]] and [[Rubber Soul]]. As presented in the preceding box-set, all discs are packaged in sleeves that recall the original jacket designs and include stereo and mono mixes of each song. [[The Early Beatles]] is made up of eleven tracks from their British debut LP [[Please Please Me]] not previously released in album form. One of the disc's highlights is perhaps the Beatles' most popular cover of all time, "Twist and Shout". Capitol's choice to program "Twist and Shout" as the album's second track is somewhat curious in retrospect as this song was so often their concert finale, effectively taking down whatever was left up of the house. In comparison to the sound on the previously available Parlophone CD [[Please Please Me]] from 1987, it is worth hearing this remastered track (and several others on the disc) in stereo.

[[Beatles VI]] is derived from the greatest number of sources including two Parlophone LP's, [[Beatles For Sale]] and [[Help! (album)]], a B-side single, "[Yes It Is]", and a cover version of Larry Williams' "[Bad Boy]", which was intended only for American release. Although [[Beatles VI]] reached number one on the Billboard Charts and appeared for a total of 41 weeks, it is conceivable that by this point, Capitol's slicing and dicing of the Beatles' discography was becoming irritating to the artists themselves.

The incidental film background music on [[Help! Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]] is of interest only to hard-core completists and, unfortunately, makes up the majority of this set's third disc. Listeners who have purchased the [[Help! DVD]] from 2007 will have rendered this instrumental material completely inessential. From a standpoint of content, the Parlophone [[Help! (album)]] CD from 1987 is still far superior.

It is perhaps ironic that the last of the Beatles 1965 releases, [[Rubber Soul]], arguably benefitted from Capitol Record's programming changes. For it's American incarnation, [[Rubber Soul]] kicks off with Paul's "I've Just Seen a Face", raised in prominence from the B-side of the British [[Help! (album)]] LP. This, along with several other programming changes effectively set the tone for a subtley different, yet just as enjoyable listening experience compared with the Parlophone version of the album, as pointed out by [[Mark Lewisohn]] in the boxed-set's included liner-note book. It is notable that the version of [[Rubber Soul]] included here provided competitive inspiration for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wilson Brian Wilson] to create and produce The Beach Boys' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sounds ''Pet Sounds''], one of rock history's greatest achievements. In terms of sonics, listeners will note a clearer high end in the instrumentation, as well as improved bass definition as compared to the same tracks on the 1987 [[Rubber Soul]] CD.

==External Links==

* [http://www.thebeatles.com/core/news/ TheBeatles.com news release on 9.9.09 remasters]
* [http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/04/07/the-beatles-remastered-albums-due-september-9-2009/ RollingStone.com article on 9.9.09 remasters]
* [http://www.cnet.com/8301-13645_1-9869772-47.html Interview with Mastering Engineer Greg Calbi]
* [http://www.dmbeatles.com/forums/m-1196032146/ DM's Beatles Forums - Repackaging the Remasters Thread]
* [http://yourmothershouldknow03.blogspot.com Strawberry Lane - Awesome Beatles Sonics Resource]
* [http://www.bootlegzone.com/ BootlegZone - Documents most Beatle bootlegs]
* [http://threesrepeating.blogspot.com/2009/03/beatles-unauthorized-remasters.html Download Purple Chick Remasters].
* [http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/Where-Are-Beatles-Reissues-316/ Gibson.com Article on Remasters - Mar 16, 2009]

Beatles Remastered

2009-06-10T20:46:37Z

MrMustard: /* June 10, 2009: Pictures of Remaster Box Sets at Beatles.com UK Store */

<seo metak="beatles remastered remasters remastering" metad="The Beatles remastered catalog will be released in September 2009. This page tracks the news about Beatles remasters." />

===June 10, 2009: Pictures of Remaster Box Sets at Beatles.com UK Store===

You can view images of the Mono and Stereo Remaster Box Sets at [http://www.digitalstores.co.uk/beatles/ the Beatles.com UK Store].

[[image:beatles_stereo_boxset.jpg|caption|Beatles Stereo Box Set|175px|thumb|right]]

The first clear pictures of the remastered box sets are now up on the Beatles website UK store. The stereo set is listed at £199.99, which translates to $326.30 at current exchange rates.

[[image:beatles_stereo_boxset.jpg|caption|Beatles Stereo Box Set|175px|thumb|left]]

The mono set is listed for £209.99, which is $342.97 roughly in U.S. dollars.

(N.B. It has been pointed out that the CD's spread out in front of these boxes do not look like the individual remastered CD's as advertised on Amazon etc. The CD's shown with the box sets do not have the distinctive sidebars with the Apple logo on them.)

===Apr 8, 2009: New York Times Article===

As has been [http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=beatles+remastered widely reported], EMI will be releasing remasters of [[#list|all 12 Beatles UK albums]] on 09.09.09. However, there is as yet no decision on their availability on iTunes or other etailers.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/arts/music/08beat.html?_r=2&hpw New York Times article...]

[http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2009/04/the_beatles_remastered.html Mojo Magazine article...]

===Apr 7, 2009: Beatles Remasters Announced for Sept 9, 2009 Release!===

[[image:Sgt-Pepper-Remastered.jpg|thumb|caption|Remastered CD - Cover Art|175px|right]]If you search [http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=Beatles%20Original%20recording%20remastered&tag=hyperartspynch07&index=music&linkCode=ur2&camp=1634&creative=6738 Beatles Original Recording Remastered] at Amazon.co.uk, you will be pleasantly surprised to see many of the Beatles releases '''available for pre-order'''! The release date is set for September 9, 2009. OK, that's 09.09.09 (get it?) They are also listed at the UK online retailer [http://hmv.com/hmvweb/simpleSearch.do?searchUID=-6921789425232557408&pGroupID=-1&adultFlag=false&primaryID=-1&simpleSearchString=beatles+remastered&btnSubmitSearch.x=0&btnSubmitSearch.y=0 HMV]. It will be released simultaneously with "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game.

You can check to see if they're available for [http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=beatles%20original%20recording%20remastered&tag=hyperartspynchon&index=music&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 pre-order at Amazon.com USA], but as of 7:30pm PST on April 7, 2009, they weren't.

====Beatles.com News Release====
TheBeatles.com (the "official" site) has [http://www.thebeatles.com/core/news/ a news release] with details. Here are highlights:

:Each of the CDs is packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album. On the same date, two new Beatles boxed CD collections will also be released.

:The collection comprises all 12 Beatles albums in stereo, with track listings and artwork as originally released in the UK, and 'Magical Mystery Tour,' which became part of The Beatles' core catalogue when the CDs were first released in 1987.

:A second boxed set has been created with the collector in mind. 'The Beatles in Mono' gathers together, in one place, all of the Beatles recordings that were mixed for a mono release.

There's no mention of alternate takes or unreleased tracks.

====RollingStone.com Article====

RollingStone.com has [http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/04/07/the-beatles-remastered-albums-due-september-9-2009/ an article on the Beatles remasters]. Highlights:

:The press release didn’t include news regarding a possible deal with iTunes or another digital-music vendor to distribute the catalog digitally: “Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalog will continue. There is no further information available at this time,” the press release reads. Both Apple Corps. and Paul McCartney have expressed reluctance to release the Beatles’ music digitally until all the albums had been remastered. The solo work of each of the four Beatles is available on iTunes.

<div id="list"></div>

:The Beatles Remasters:

::*''Please Please Me''
::*''With the Beatles''
::*''A Hard Day’s Night''
::*''Beatles for Sale''
::*''Help!''
::*''Rubber Soul''
::*''Revolver''
::*''Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band''
::*''Magical Mystery Tour''
::*''The Beatles (The White Album)''
::*''Abbey Road''
::*''Let It Be''
::*''Past Masters''
::*''Yellow Submarine''

====All the Online News, via Google News====

[http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=beatles+remastered Just click here!]

===Beatles Remasters - When???===

Currently, the only Beatles tunes available in remixed and/or remastered from the original master tapes are on two CDs:

* ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'' (1999)
* ''Love'' (2007)

Remixed at [[Abbey Road Studios]], the tracks of ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'' feature many alterations and adjustments from the original stereo recordings. All of The Beatles songs included in the film are on ''Yellow Submarine Songtrack'', with the exception of "A Day in the Life", which was not put in because EMI did not want too many songs from [[Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]] to be included.

The ''Love'' album is a stunner and, as a teaser, shows what might be in store when the entire catalog is finally released. George Martin and his son managed to create an amazing "new" collection of Beatles material from the rich store of masters at EMI.

There are also two four-disc boxed sets that sound somewhat better than the late-1980s CDs:

* [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]] (2004)
* [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 2]] (2006)

However, the CDs in these two boxed sets do not contain the original George Martin mixes released in Britain in the 1960s. Instead, the CDs were mastered from mixes prepared by Capitol A&R executive Dave Dexter, Jr., who, in 1965 took the submaster tapes from Capitol Records' vaults and added reverb to several tracks and simulated stereo on mono tracks (the proof that these are Dexter's mixes being the false start on "I'm Looking Through You"). Initially, however, the CDs only used Dexter's stereo mixes, with the mono tracks consisting of the two stereo channels folded into a single channel. Dexter's mono mixes were made available on the second pressings of these albums. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capitol_Albums,_Volume_2]

==The latest news on the remastering==

===March 18, 2009===

From: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/mar/18/beatles-digital-music-store guardian.co.uk]

The long-awaited, remastered Beatles' catalogue may finally be making its way to your computer sometime this year. But don't bet on it being on iTunes.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with the estates of the late John Lennon and George Harrison, are said to be looking into the possibility of releasing the material on their own website.

Talks between Apple and The Beatles to resolve royalty disputes have been on-again and off-again for years, and according to Harrison's son Dhani, the situation has reached a tipping point.

Harrison, 30, told Blender magazine that The Beatles' camp still isn't satisfied with what they're being offered by Apple, and they may go elsewhere to release the remastered catalogue.

:"We're losing money every day," said Harrison. "So what do you do? You have to have your own delivery system, or you have to do a good deal with Steve Jobs.

:"But he says that a download is worth 99 cents, and we disagree."

It appears as though Dhani Harrison, who has his own band called thenewno2, is having increasing pull in how The Beatles' business is conducted. Just recently he revealed that he convinced the surviving Beatles and Yoko Ono to agree to the upcoming The Beatles: Rock Band project.

"The game blows my mind," said Harrison. "It's infinitely better than Rock Band 2."

===January 5, 2009===

'''The Beatles’ Catalog Finally Goes Digital Thanks To Norwegian Podcasts'''

[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/01/05/the-beatles-catalog-finally-goes-digital-thanks-to-norwegian-podcasts/ Rolling Stone magazine online reports] that the Beatles' entire catalog will become available via a Norwegian podcast series:

:The Beatles will reportedly make a bulk of their musical catalog available as a free, legal download thanks to a series of Norwegian podcasts. In 2001, the Fab Four were the subject of a documentary series entitled “Vår daglige Beatles,” or “Our Daily Beatles,” in which Norwegian journalists told the stories behind every track in the Beatles official catalog in chronological order, with the tracks themselves being played after the story was told. Now, for the first time ever, the series is available as a downloadable podcast, marking the first time the Beatles music in any form has been legally available via download. Despite efforts to finally bring the Beatles to iTunes, Paul McCartney said talks between Apple Corps. and EMI Records have “stalled.”

[http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/01/05/the-beatles-catalog-finally-goes-digital-thanks-to-norwegian-podcasts/ Read the entire article...]

===December 2008===

On Murmurs.com, there's a reprint of a December 26, 2008 [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/arts/music/27beat.html?_r=1&ref=technology ''New York Times'' article] on what's going on with the remasters, by Allan Kozinn. It discusses what's going on (although no light is shed on the issues between the Beatles and EMI), the Purple Chick series, and the fans. [http://www.murmurs.com/forum/showthread.php?s=5bca8880b328b2099975c770330ec81e&p=2012636#post2012636 Check it out...]. It also references an addition to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles#2009_CD_remasters The Beatles entry on Wikipedia]:

:All albums by the Beatles (including Past Masters, Volume One and Past Masters, Volume Two) will be released newly remastered sometime in 2009 on CD. The 2009 remasters will replace the infamously poor quality 1987 remasters. Mojo Magazine's Mat Snow was invited to hear 10 remastered tracks from 1968's The White Album and stated that they were "Better even than we'd hoped."

The [http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49803 Audioholics Forum] has a good thread discussing the remasters, mentioning MOJO magazine's teaser about "sometime in 2009" and speculating on sound quality etc. Worth checking out.

===November 2008===

From [http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/11/26/sgt-pepper-stuck-in-nowhere-land.aspx The Motley Fool Financial Website] 
Nov 26, 2008

If Apple Corps is Sgt. Pepper, then EMI is the Nowhere Man.

On Monday, rocker Paul McCartney said that negotiations between the Beatles' record company and label EMI, which owns the rights to the group's recordings, have stalled. Each has a say in how and when The Beatles will publish to iTunes.

"The last word I got back was it's stalled at the whole moment, the whole process," McCartney told the Associated Press. "I really hope it will happen, because I think it should."

Us, too, Sir Paul. Apple Corps and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) became embroiled in a [http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2006/03/30/apple-cant-let-it-be.aspx trademark dispute] in 2006 that lasted [http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2007/02/05/apple-beatles-let-it-be.aspx about a year]. We've been waiting for the White Album on iTunes -- or maybe Help!, a personal favorite of mine -- ever since both sides decided to come together and work it out.

Do EMI and Apple Corps. know what they're missing? Certainly McCartney sees the value in digital sales, as do other labels. Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) recently reported a 28% year-over-year gain in digital sales. Universal Music, the largest label in the biz, said its digital take was up 33% for the first nine months of the year.

Perhaps EMI is the stumbling block. Apple Corps and Viacom's (NYSE: VIA) Harmonix, the makers of Rock Band, last week struck a deal to create a Beatles version of the game, VentureBeat reports.

===October 2008===
There's quite a bit of noise now about The Beatles remasters, and [http://s3.zetaboards.com/Strawberry_Fields/topic/7038111/1/ this website] has a good thread on developments. Apparently, The Beatles music will be finding a digital home on MTV Games' Rock Band, according to [http://www.pcworld.com/article/153053/beatles_to_make_digital_debut_on_rockband.html this news article]. "MTV Games, creator of the hit game Rock Band, and Apple Corps, which owns the rights to The Beatles' music catalogue, announced Thursday (Oct 30, 2008) that they plan to create a title that will feature only music from the Fab Four."

===June 2007===
Beatles fans will probably have to wait until next year before they can buy the [[Fab Four's]] tunes from online retailers such as Apple's iTunes store, [[George Harrison's]] widow has said.

A recent settlement to a lengthy trademark dispute between Apple and the Beatles' company, Apple Corps, has cleared the way for the band to distribute its catalogue in cyberspace.

But [[Olivia Harrison]] told Reuters, 'We just have a few things to work out elsewhere.'

Specifically, all the Beatles CDs have been remastered - good news for fans who have long complained about the poor sound quality - and the organisation wants to get the artwork ready for the physical packages.

Asked if the catalogue would be available online by the end of next year, she said, 'Oh God, yeah. Hope so ... I don't know if it would be the end of this year, but it would be nice. Imminent, let's put it that way.'

[[Paul McCartney]], who has adopted an aggressive digital marketing strategy for the release next week of his solo album, Memory Almost Full, said last month that an online deal for the Beatles catalogue was 'virtually settled' - perhaps over the cheesecake he delivered to Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. But he, too, shied away from saying that anything would happen in the short term.

The Beatles are the highest-profile omission from digital retailers. While the dispute with Apple did not help, the band's organisation has traditionally adopted a conservative approach to new technology, including CDs.

'I think we're a little bit behind,' Harrison said, noting that it was 'ridiculous' that properly remastered CDs of the band's catalogue were not yet available.

'We [the band's members and widows] all agree. It's been done. It's just trying to now get it out there.'

She said that [[Neil Aspinall]], the recently retired [now deceased] businessman who oversaw the group's complex business affairs, had been busy in recent years on the remastering project.

'That's a big job. That means you have to go back through all the archives and find great photographs and really give a nice package to the fans.'

Aspinall retired in April and was replaced by Jeff Jones, an American music industry executive who specialises in deluxe reissues of classic albums. Harrison said Aspinall's departure was voluntary, dispelling fan speculation to the contrary.

But she said Jones would 'pick up the pace' now that the most recent project, a Beatle-inspired [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirque_du_Soleil Cirque du Soleil] stage show in Las Vegas, was underway after years of preparation initiated by her husband before he died in 2001.

''Reuters and Simon'' Aughton[http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/114590/remastered-beatles-on-itunes-in-2008.html]

==The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1==

The Capitol Records LP's issued in 1964 were resurrected with the issue of this boxed set. Remastered from the original Capitol Records master tapes, these records were best known to American audiences before EMI's initial CD issue of the first four Parlophone LP's in 1987, causing their deletion. The initial effort to internationally unify the catalogue caused some state-side confusion, as the song programs and monaural sound deviated from the familiar product.

''[[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]]'' includes four CD's packaged in mini-album sleeves that mimic their vinyl counterparts. The titles are: [[Meet The Beatles!]], [[The Beatles' Second Album]], [[Something New]], and [[Beatles '65]].

[[Meet The Beatles!]], the group's iconic Capitol debut, was initially distinctive in its originality, featuring eleven Beatles compositions out of a program of twelve songs. [[The Beatles' Second Album]] relied somewhat more on covers and includes two of their best: John's landmark vocal on Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)", and Paul's one-take-to-glory shot of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally". [[Something New]] was culled from recording sessions for the Parlophone LP [[A Hard Day's Night]] and offers the cleverly constructed "Any Time at All", with its overlapping couplets, and "If I Fell", with one of John and Paul's best two-part harmonies.

The set is rounded out with [[Beatles '65]], perhaps the most notable inclusion for its underscoring of programming and artistic differences between EMI and Capitol. The corresponding Parlophone LP, Beatles For Sale features the most underrated cover photo in the history of rock with the Beatles staring in utter bewilderment. This is clearly intended to be a silent statement by the artists that the mania was taking its toll. Capitol replaced this display of candor for [[Beatles '65]] with a series of group photos that did nothing to alter their "happy moptop" image. The music, on the other hand, deceived no one who really listened: "No Reply", "I'm A Loser", and "Baby's In Black" left no question that the mood had darkened.

Although prepared from master tapes at least one generation removed from the original masters, [[The Capitol Albums Vol. 1]] offers some sonic improvements over the 1987 CD's. Each CD in the set includes both the early four-track stereo and mono mixes of the time for each song. The stereo versions in this set are audibly brighter with greater bass definition and vocal presence as compared to the previously available material, especially true on [[Something New]] and [[Beatles '65]], and are recommended at least until the remastered British catalogue becomes available.

==The Capitol Albums, Vol. 2==

The Capitol Albums Vol. 2 offers reissues of the group's four American LP's originally released in 1965: [[The Early Beatles]], [[Beatles VI]], [[Help! Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]] and [[Rubber Soul]]. As presented in the preceding box-set, all discs are packaged in sleeves that recall the original jacket designs and include stereo and mono mixes of each song. [[The Early Beatles]] is made up of eleven tracks from their British debut LP [[Please Please Me]] not previously released in album form. One of the disc's highlights is perhaps the Beatles' most popular cover of all time, "Twist and Shout". Capitol's choice to program "Twist and Shout" as the album's second track is somewhat curious in retrospect as this song was so often their concert finale, effectively taking down whatever was left up of the house. In comparison to the sound on the previously available Parlophone CD [[Please Please Me]] from 1987, it is worth hearing this remastered track (and several others on the disc) in stereo.

[[Beatles VI]] is derived from the greatest number of sources including two Parlophone LP's, [[Beatles For Sale]] and [[Help! (album)]], a B-side single, "[Yes It Is]", and a cover version of Larry Williams' "[Bad Boy]", which was intended only for American release. Although [[Beatles VI]] reached number one on the Billboard Charts and appeared for a total of 41 weeks, it is conceivable that by this point, Capitol's slicing and dicing of the Beatles' discography was becoming irritating to the artists themselves.

The incidental film background music on [[Help! Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]] is of interest only to hard-core completists and, unfortunately, makes up the majority of this set's third disc. Listeners who have purchased the [[Help! DVD]] from 2007 will have rendered this instrumental material completely inessential. From a standpoint of content, the Parlophone [[Help! (album)]] CD from 1987 is still far superior.

It is perhaps ironic that the last of the Beatles 1965 releases, [[Rubber Soul]], arguably benefitted from Capitol Record's programming changes. For it's American incarnation, [[Rubber Soul]] kicks off with Paul's "I've Just Seen a Face", raised in prominence from the B-side of the British [[Help! (album)]] LP. This, along with several other programming changes effectively set the tone for a subtley different, yet just as enjoyable listening experience compared with the Parlophone version of the album, as pointed out by [[Mark Lewisohn]] in the boxed-set's included liner-note book. It is notable that the version of [[Rubber Soul]] included here provided competitive inspiration for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wilson Brian Wilson] to create and produce The Beach Boys' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sounds ''Pet Sounds''], one of rock history's greatest achievements. In terms of sonics, listeners will note a clearer high end in the instrumentation, as well as improved bass definition as compared to the same tracks on the 1987 [[Rubber Soul]] CD.

==External Links==

* [http://www.thebeatles.com/core/news/ TheBeatles.com news release on 9.9.09 remasters]
* [http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/04/07/the-beatles-remastered-albums-due-september-9-2009/ RollingStone.com article on 9.9.09 remasters]
* [http://www.cnet.com/8301-13645_1-9869772-47.html Interview with Mastering Engineer Greg Calbi]
* [http://www.dmbeatles.com/forums/m-1196032146/ DM's Beatles Forums - Repackaging the Remasters Thread]
* [http://yourmothershouldknow03.blogspot.com Strawberry Lane - Awesome Beatles Sonics Resource]
* [http://www.bootlegzone.com/ BootlegZone - Documents most Beatle bootlegs]
* [http://threesrepeating.blogspot.com/2009/03/beatles-unauthorized-remasters.html Download Purple Chick Remasters].
* [http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/Where-Are-Beatles-Reissues-316/ Gibson.com Article on Remasters - Mar 16, 2009]

Revolution in the Head

2009-06-07T08:36:23Z

MrMustard: Added References

{{Infobox book |
| name = Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties
| image = [[Image:RevolutionHead.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. Paperback Edition, January 6, 2009
| author = Ian MacDonald
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| genre = Biog
| publisher = Vantage (USA)
| release_date = 1994
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 544
| isbn = 0099526794 / 978-0099526797
}}

'''Synopsis'''

This book hit the mid-1990s pop-cultural scene like a bolt from the blue. Well over a quarter of a century since they was Fab, it might have seemed that everything worth saying about the Beatles had already been said, several times. At that stage, the suggestion that someone could produce a genuinely fresh perspective on this most catergorised, analysed, and anthologised of pop groups seemed only marginally less unlikely than the idea that a new band might emerge from the pop field whose music could hold a candle to the imperviously incomparable legacy of the world's best-loved Liverpudlians.

But MacDonald's words leap off the page with a freshness and sense of excitment reminiscent of, say, the opening seconds of 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'. A chronological song-by-song analysis of the Beatles' output, 'Revolution in the Head' manages to make that rarest of leaps: to transcend merely being an excellent study of its subject, and instead emerge as a worthwhile cultural artefact 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.

The worth, and impact, of Macdonald's work was summarised by UK newspaper The Guardian:

<blockquote>
In his book Revolution In The Head, first published in 1994, MacDonald carefully anatomised every record the Beatles made, drawing attention to broad themes, particular examples of inspiration and moments of human frailty alike. 

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. Without a hint of sycophancy, MacDonald had managed to describe the magic created by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in such a way as to reacquaint those who were around at the time with their own original enthusiasm, while alerting listeners of later generations to the precise qualities that had made the Beatles so exceptional. Its introduction alone provides something close to a definitive evocation of the factors that turned the 1960s into 'the sixties'. 
</blockquote>

----

'''Focus'''

Oddly for a Beatles book, MacDonald focuses on the music, or - as he invariably puts it - the 'records' the group made. Every official Beatles recording is covered, some songs' entries rolling on for a number of pages, some dismissed with just one desultory paragraph. MacDonald achieves a remarkable blend of concision with comprehensiveness, offering up a range of thematic perspectives, from musical theory to socio-cultural analysis, to fleeting biographical vignettes which, by combining penetrating insight with elegantly vivacious language, add up to far more than the sum of their parts.

----

'''Structure'''

----

'''Style'''

MacDonald's style is, in a word, stylish. 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 actually quite a difficult writing style to satisfactorily describe, but any adequate attempt would surely include such words as 'elegant', 'laconic', 'intelligent', 'direct', and 'precise'. It's simultaneously refined and gritty, often poetic, occasionally flamboyant. MacDonald, basically, writes the way you wish you did, Jack, if only you'd been born with an abundance of talent and then honed your skills for a couple of decades.

----

'''Content'''

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. It's a book written by someone who is a Beatles fan but who is also, above all, 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 asessing 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 nicities: he routinely states his opinions as though they were incontravertable 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 preconceptions challenged. The better the critic, the more the reader is likely to find himself equally enjoying agreeing or disagreeing with him.

Some examples? Starting with an easy one, how might the average reader rate 'A Day in the Life'? Great? Just so-so? 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 nonesense 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 sombre but always ethereally beautiful work - which Macdonald hails as the Beatles' "finest single achievement" - is, essentially, a "song about perception":

<blockquote>
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 te report of the coroner's verdict, he recorded it in the opening verses of A DAY IN THE LIFE, taking the detatched 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 distacne that veers from the dispassionate to the unfeeling.


On the next page in the same newspaper, he found an item whose absurdity perfectly complemented the Tara Browne story: 'There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per peron, according to a council survey.' This - intensified by a surreal reference to the circular Victorian concert venue the Albert Hall (also in South Kensington) - became the last verse. In between, Lennon inserted a verse in which his jaded spectator looks on as the English army wins the war. Prompted by his part in the film How I Won The War three months earlier, this may have been a veiled allusion to Vietnam which, though a real issue to Lennon, would have overheated the song if stated directly.



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 dissillusioning confrontation with the 'real' world is precisely what meakes it so moving.


</blockquote>

Few in number are the Beatles fans who wouldn't rank that song 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...' always runs the risk of seeming arrogant, didactic, or just plain wrong. It's a testament to the strength of MacDonald's work that such robust opinions never stick in the reader's throat. It should be made clear, also, that the above passage is just a few paragraphs excerpted from several pages on 'A Day in the Life'. The entry for that song alone is so rich and varied, so liberally studded with telling details and points for potential discussion, that it probably contains more wisdom and contention than 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.

On the other hand, consider MacDonald's opinion on 'Across the Universe':

<blockquote>

After the agressive 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.

</blockquote>

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.

MacDonald's song-by-song analysis of the Beatles' records takes up the bulk of the book. But it is preceded by an introductory essay, 'Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade', which sets the Beatles in historical and cultural context, and represents an attempt at resolving a central paradox arising from the group's relationship to the decade they did so much to define: with the passing of time, The Beatles' reputation has only become more and more enshrined and unimpeachable, yet the decade which they were so much a part of, has become reviled, despised and so misunderstood that it has effectively become 'lost'.

At the time, MacDonald says, "the spirit of that era disseminated itself across generations, suffusing the Western world with a sense of rejuvenating freedom comparable to the joy of being let out of school early on a sunny afternoon." But the decade has since become a key battleground for what are sometimes known as the 'Culture Wars', right-wing politicians and commentators tending to blame all of modern society's ills on the 'permissive' 1960s. Conversely, many on the Left have long sought exmplanations for how (and why) the various 'revolutions' and 'movements' of the Sixties failed, and these questions have fuelled some of the most insightful political fiction written about the era, notably Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel 'Vineland', which shares many of MacDonald's themes.

It's obvious that MacDonald has very little sympathy for the Right's reductive and revisionist view of the Sixties, but readers looking for a robust defence of the idealistic impulses of the hippies and radicals whose sensibilities came to be seen as broadly representative of the generational spirit of the times, may also be disappointed. He certainly has plenty of positive things to say about them, especially when considered next to later social groups who looked on them with agressive disdain:

<blockquote>

The hippie outlook, if so hererogeneous a group can be said to have cleaved to one position, was by no measn flippant. Theirs was a kaleidoscopically inventive culture, actively devoted to the acquisition of self-knowledge and the promotion of fundamental social change. In rejecting the hippies, the punks of 1976-7 discarded only a caricature, coming nowhere near an adequate grasp of what they imagined they were rebelling against.

</blockquote>

As with his assessments of the Beatles' records, he doesn't hesitate to decry the more negative aspects of the young radicals of the era, noting that "the late Sixties' youth rebellion declined into an ugly farce of right-on rhetoric and aimless violence". But he also reminds us that "it would be a gross distortion to pretend that this was not substantially provoked by the stone-faced repressive arrogance of the establishment in those days."

MacDonald's thesis is a complex one, and can't be easily summarised. At its heart is his assertion that the "real movers and shakers" of the Sixties were not the student demonstrators, flower children, and 'beautiful people', but the greater mass of "ordinary people". The "true revolution" of the 1960s was "an inner one of feeling and assumption: a revolution in the head." The Sixties were, MacDonald points out, a transitional phase, rife with paradoxes and contradictions, not least that the social trends which seemed to sustain the more radical elements, were the very same forces which led to a fragmentation of consensus and rise of materilistic indiviualism, paving the way for "Margaret Thatcher's deregulated anti-society" in the 1980s.

<blockquote>

The truth is that the Sixties inaugurated a post-religious age in which neither Jesus nor Marx is of interest to a society now functionong mostly below the level of the rational mind in an emotional/physical dimension of personal appetite and private insecurity."

</blockquote>

A more bitter irony is that the Punks of the late 70s, and indeed the Thatcherites and Reaganites who dominated the zeitgest of the 1980s, had a lot more in common with the real spirit of the decade they so despised than they could ever bring themselves to realise:

<blockquote>

The irony of modern right-wing antipathy to the Sixties is that this much-misunderstood decade was, in all but the most superficial senses, the creation of the very people who voted for Thatcher and Reagan in the Eighties. It is, to put it mildly, curious to hear Thatcherites condemn a decade in which ordinary folk for the first time aspired to individual self-determination and a life of material security within an economy of high employment and low inflation. The social fragmentation of the Nineties which rightly alarms conservatives was created neither by the hippies (who wanted us to 'be together') nor by the New Left radicals (all of whom were socialists of some description).


So far as anything in the Sixties can be blamed for the demise of the compound entity of society it was the natural desire of the 'masses' to lead easier, pleasanter lives, own their own homes, follow their own fancies and, as far as possible, move out of the communal collective completely. The truth is that, once the obsolete Christian compact of the Fifties had broken down, there was nothing - apart from, in the last resort, money - holding Western civilisation together. Indeed, the very labour-saving domestic appliances launched onto the market by the Sixties' consumer boom speeded the melt-down of communality by allowing people to function in a private world, segregated from each other by TVs, telephones, hi-fi systems, washing-machines and home cookers. (The popularity in the Eighties of the answering machine - the phone-call you don't have to reply to - is another sign of ongoing desocialisation by gadgetry.)

</blockquote>

It's a persuasive view, though perhaps not one to win MacDonald any friends on either side of the ideological divide. One of the subtlest strands of his argument concerns the relationship between the way social and cultural changes were accellerated, and even brought about by, modern technologies of convenience, and the impact of musical and recording technology on the art of popular music, all of which are depicted as part of a steady cultural decline:

<blockquote>

"A malignant rot has spread through the Western mind since the mid-Seventies: the virus of meaninglessness. Yet this infection threatens all ideologies, Left or Right, being at root no more than a levelling crusade on behalf of the aesthetically deprived - a Bad Taste Liberation Front. The reason why cultural relativism has caught on is not because ordinary people read Derrida but because the trickle-down essence of Deconstruction suits both the trash aesthetic of media-hounds and the philistinism of Essex Man.


The destabilising social and psychological evolution witnessed since the Sixties stems chiefly from the success of affluence and technology in realising the desires of ordinary people. The countercultural elements usually blamed for this were in fact resisting an endemic process of disintegration with its roots in scientific materialism. Far from adding to this fragmentation, they aimed to replace it with a new social order based on either love-and-peace or a vague anarchistic European version of revolutionary Maoism. When contemporary right-wing pundits attack the Sixties, the identify a momentous overall development but ascribe it to the very forces which most strongly reacted against it. The counterculture was less an agent of chaos than a marginal commentary, a passing attempt to propose alternatives to a waning civilisation.


Ironically, the harshest critics of the Sixties are its most direct beneficiaries: the political voices of materialistic individualism. Their recent contribution to the accelerated social breakdown inaugurated around 1963 - economic Darwinism wrapped in self-contradictory socio-cultural prejudices - hasn't helped matters, yet even the New Right can't be held responsible for the multifocal and fragmented techno-decadence into which the First World is currently sinking as if into a babbling, twinkling, microelectronically pulsing quicksand. In the Nineties, the fashion is to reprove others for our own faults; yet even if we take the blame for ignoring our limitations and eroding our own norms over the last thirty years, it is hard to imagine much, short of fascism or a Second Coming, that will put Humpty back together again.

</blockquote>

It's not a cheerful outlook, but it would be hard to argue that it is not based on certain irrefutable truths.

That the twin phenomena of 'The Beatles' and 'The Sixties' were integral to one another is a theme which runs right through MacDonald's book. With subtle forcefulness, he uses the records the group made to illustrate how in tune with their times they were, and how they also played a role which was broadly similar to that played in America by Bob Dylan, in that they had a significant hand in shaping those times (although they had a much more globally pervasive effect). The Beatles changed the world; sometimes - indeed, maybe even mostly - when they weren't even trying to:

<blockquote>

Indeed, the American folk-protest movement had thrust plain speaking so obtrusively into the pop domain that every transient youth idol was then routinely interrogated concerning his or her 'message' to humanity. If it has any message at all, that of I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND is 'Let go - feel how good it is'. This though (as conservative commentators knew very well) implied a fundamental break with the Christian bourgeois status quo. Harbouring no conscious subversive intent, The Beatles, with this potent record, perpetrated a culturally revolutionary act. As the decade wore on and they began to realise the position they were in, they began to do the same thing more deliberately.

</blockquote>

It would be a mistake, though, to portray this as a 'political' book, or even one whose central concern was pop-cultural theorising. The vast majority of the text is made up of concise yet wide-ranging descriptions of the Beatles' music. The reader is compelled to come back and re-read any number of entries, not just to soak up more of the facts and insights, but to enjoy the elegance of the writing, to nod in heartfelt agreement (and, now and then, to reluctantly dissent), or just to indulge in the reveries this truly great book inspires.

It's a book that has to be read, and its many pleasures cannot be adequately summed up. A fairly representative sample might be this, the final paragraph in MacDonald's description of 'Happiness is a Warm Gun':

<blockquote>

In the end, the most purely Lennonian aspect of HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN is its extreme ambiguity. From an initial mood of depression, it ascends through irony, self-destructive despair, and obscurely renewed energy to a finale that wrests exhausted fulfilment from anguish. Grippingly uneasy listening, the track's tense blend of sarcasm and sincerity stays unresolved until its final detumescent downbeat.

</blockquote>

Elsewhere, in the entry for 'Help!', what MacDonald has to say about the finishing touches made to the song by The Beatles could, without too much adjustment, be taken as a pretty accurate metaphor for what MacDonald himself does:

<blockquote>

To finish, Starr overdubbed tambourine, and Harrison taped his guitar part, descending at the end of each chorus on a cross-rythm arpeggio run in the style of Nashville guitarist Chet Atkins. (This, and Starr's straight-quaver fills against the song's fast shuffle beat, are good examples of the group's care in painting characterful touches into every corner of their best work.)

</blockquote>

Every corner of this book is filled with characterful touches. You can look, but you will not find this level of writing in any other Beatles book.

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

----

'''References'''

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/sep/08/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries Guardian Obituary]

[http://blog.ctrlbreak.co.uk/?p=86 Our Word is Our Weapon: Tribute to Ian MacDonald]

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

Revolution in the Head

2009-06-07T08:30:20Z

MrMustard: Wording tweak

Revolution in the Head

2009-06-06T16:40:18Z

MrMustard: Finished Content section. Going for a beer.

{{Infobox book |
| name = Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties
| image = [[Image:RevolutionHead.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. Paperback Edition, January 6, 2009
| author = Ian MacDonald
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| genre = Biog
| publisher = Vantage (USA)
| release_date = 1994
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 544
| isbn = 0099526794 / 978-0099526797
}}

'''Synopsis'''

This book hit the mid-1990s pop-cultural scene like a bolt from the blue. Well over a quarter of a century since they was Fab, it might have seemed that everything worth saying about the Beatles had already been said, several times. At that stage, the suggestion that someone could produce a genuinely fresh perspective on this most catergorised, analysed, and anthologised of pop groups seemed only marginally less unlikely than the idea that a new band might emerge from the pop field whose music could hold a candle to the imperviously incomparable legacy of the world's best-loved Liverpudlians.

But MacDonald's words leap off the page with a freshness and sense of excitment reminiscent of, say, the opening seconds of 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'. A chronological song-by-song analysis of the Beatles' output, 'Revolution in the Head' manages to make that rarest of leaps: to transcend merely being an excellent study of its subject, and instead emerge as a worthwhile cultural artefact 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.

The worth, and impact, of Macdonald's work was summarised by UK newspaper The Guardian:

<blockquote>
In his book Revolution In The Head, first published in 1994, MacDonald carefully anatomised every record the Beatles made, drawing attention to broad themes, particular examples of inspiration and moments of human frailty alike. 

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. Without a hint of sycophancy, MacDonald had managed to describe the magic created by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in such a way as to reacquaint those who were around at the time with their own original enthusiasm, while alerting listeners of later generations to the precise qualities that had made the Beatles so exceptional. Its introduction alone provides something close to a definitive evocation of the factors that turned the 1960s into 'the sixties'. 
</blockquote>

----

'''Focus'''

Oddly for a Beatles book, MacDonald focuses on the music, or - as he invariably puts it - the 'records' the group made. Every official Beatles recording is covered, some songs' entries rolling on for a number of pages, some dismissed with just one desultory paragraph. MacDonald achieves a remarkable blend of concision with comprehensiveness, offering up a range of thematic perspectives, from musical theory to socio-cultural analysis, to fleeting biographical vignettes which, by combining penetrating insight with elegantly vivacious language, add up to far more than the sum of their parts.

----

'''Structure'''

----

'''Style'''

MacDonald's style is, in a word, stylish. 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 actually quite a difficult writing style to satisfactorily describe, but any adequate attempt would surely include such words as 'elegant', 'laconic', 'intelligent', 'direct', and 'precise'. It's simultaneously refined and gritty, often poetic, occasionally flamboyant. MacDonald, basically, writes the way you wish you did, Jack, if only you'd been born with an abundance of talent and then honed your skills for a couple of decades.

----

'''Content'''

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. It's a book written by someone who is a Beatles fan but who is also, above all, 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 asessing 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 nicities: he routinely states his opinions as though they were incontravertable 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 preconceptions challenged. The better the critic, the more the reader is likely to find himself equally enjoying agreeing or disagreeing with him.

Some examples? Starting with an easy one, how might the average reader rate 'A Day in the Life'? Great? Just so-so? 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 nonesense 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 sombre but always ethereally beautiful work - which Macdonald hails as the Beatles' "finest single achievement" - is, essentially, a "song about perception":

<blockquote>
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 te report of the coroner's verdict, he recorded it in the opening verses of A DAY IN THE LIFE, taking the detatched 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 distacne that veers from the dispassionate to the unfeeling.


On the next page in the same newspaper, he found an item whose absurdity perfectly complemented the Tara Browne story: 'There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per peron, according to a council survey.' This - intensified by a surreal reference to the circular Victorian concert venue the Albert Hall (also in South Kensington) - became the last verse. In between, Lennon inserted a verse in which his jaded spectator looks on as the English army wins the war. Prompted by his part in the film How I Won The War three months earlier, this may have been a veiled allusion to Vietnam which, though a real issue to Lennon, would have overheated the song if stated directly.



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 dissillusioning confrontation with the 'real' world is precisely what meakes it so moving.


</blockquote>

Few in number are the Beatles fans who wouldn't rank that song 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...' always runs the risk of seeming arrogant, didactic, or just plain wrong. It's a testament to the strength of MacDonald's work that such robust opinions never stick in the reader's throat. It should be made clear, also, that the above passage is just a few paragraphs excerpted from several pages on 'A Day in the Life'. The entry for that song alone is so rich and varied, so liberally studded with telling details and points for potential discussion, that it probably contains more wisdom and contention than 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.

On the other hand, consider MacDonald's opinion on 'Across the Universe':

<blockquote>

After the agressive 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.

</blockquote>

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.

MacDonald's song-by-song analysis of the Beatles' records takes up the bulk of the book. But it is preceded by an introductory essay, 'Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade', which sets the Beatles in historical and cultural context, and represents an attempt at resolving a central paradox arising from the group's relationship to the decade they did so much to define: with the passing of time, The Beatles' reputation has only become more and more enshrined and unimpeachable, yet the decade which they were so much a part of, has become reviled, despised and so misunderstood that it has effectively become 'lost'.

At the time, MacDonald says, "the spirit of that era disseminated itself across generations, suffusing the Western world with a sense of rejuvenating freedom comparable to the joy of being let out of school early on a sunny afternoon." But the decade has since become a key battleground for what are sometimes known as the 'Culture Wars', right-wing politicians and commentators tending to blame all of modern society's ills on the 'permissive' 1960s. Conversely, many on the Left have long sought exmplanations for how (and why) the various 'revolutions' and 'movements' of the Sixties failed, and these questions have fuelled some of the most insightful political fiction written about the era, notably Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel 'Vineland', which shares many of MacDonald's themes.

It's obvious that MacDonald has very little sympathy for the Right's reductive and revisionist view of the Sixties, but readers looking for a robust defence of the idealistic impulses of the hippies and radicals whose sensibilities came to be seen as broadly representative of the generational spirit of the times, may also be disappointed. He certainly has plenty of positive things to say about them, especially when considered next to later social groups who looked on them with agressive disdain:

<blockquote>

The hippie outlook, if so hererogeneous a group can be said to have cleaved to one position, was by no measn flippant. Theirs was a kaleidoscopically inventive culture, actively devoted to the acquisition of self-knowledge and the promotion of fundamental social change. In rejecting the hippies, the punks of 1976-7 discarded only a caricature, coming nowhere near an adequate grasp of what they imagined they were rebelling against.

</blockquote>

As with his assessments of the Beatles' records, he doesn't hesitate to decry the more negative aspects of the young radicals of the era, noting that "the late Sixties' youth rebellion declined into an ugly farce of right-on rhetoric and aimless violence". But he also reminds us that "it would be a gross distortion to pretend that this was not substantially provoked by the stone-faced repressive arrogance of the establishment in those days."

MacDonald's thesis is a complex one, and can't be easily summarised. At its heart is his assertion that the "real movers and shakers" of the Sixties were not the student demonstrators, flower children, and 'beautiful people', but the greater mass of "ordinary people". The "true revolution" of the 1960s was "an inner one of feeling and assumption: a revolution in the head." The Sixties were, MacDonald points out, a transitional phase, rife with paradoxes and contradictions, not least that the social trends which seemed to sustain the more radical elements, were the very same forces which led to a fragmentation of consensus and rise of materilistic indiviualism, paving the way for "Margaret Thatcher's deregulated anti-society" in the 1980s.

<blockquote>

The truth is that the Sixties inaugurated a post-religious age in which neither Jesus nor Marx is of interest to a society now functionong mostly below the level of the rational mind in an emotional/physical dimension of personal appetite and private insecurity."

</blockquote>

A more bitter irony is that the Punks of the late 70s, and indeed the Thatcherites and Reaganites who dominated the zeitgest of the 1980s, had a lot more in common with the real spirit of the decade they so despised than they could ever bring themselves to realise:

<blockquote>

The irony of modern right-wing antipathy to the Sixties is that this much-misunderstood decade was, in all but the most superficial senses, the creation of the very people who voted for Thatcher and Reagan in the Eighties. It is, to put it mildly, curious to hear Thatcherites condemn a decade in which ordinary folk for the first time aspired to individual self-determination and a life of material security within an economy of high employment and low inflation. The social fragmentation of the Nineties which rightly alarms conservatives was created neither by the hippies (who wanted us to 'be together') nor by the New Left radicals (all of whom were socialists of some description).


So far as anything in the Sixties can be blamed for the demise of the compound entity of society it was the natural desire of the 'masses' to lead easier, pleasanter lives, own their own homes, follow their own fancies and, as far as possible, move out of the communal collective completely. The truth is that, once the obsolete Christian compact of the Fifties had broken down, there was nothing - apart from, in the last resort, money - holding Western civilisation together. Indeed, the very labour-saving domestic appliances launched onto the market by the Sixties' consumer boom speeded the melt-down of communality by allowing people to function in a private world, segregated from each other by TVs, telephones, hi-fi systems, washing-machines and home cookers. (The popularity in the Eighties of the answering machine - the phone-call you don't have to reply to - is another sign of ongoing desocialisation by gadgetry.)

</blockquote>

It's a persuasive view, though perhaps not one to win MacDonald any friends on either side of the ideological divide. One of the subtlest strands of his argument concerns the relationship between the way social and cultural changes were accellerated, and even brought about by, modern technologies of convenience, and the impact of musical and recording technology on the art of popular music, all of which are depicted as part of a steady cultural decline:

<blockquote>

"A malignant rot has spread through the Western mind since the mid-Seventies: the virus of meaninglessness. Yet this infection threatens all ideologies, Left or Right, being at root no more than a levelling crusade on behalf of the aesthetically deprived - a Bad Taste Liberation Front. The reason why cultural relativism has caught on is not because ordinary people read Derrida but because the trickle-down essence of Deconstruction suits both the trash aesthetic of media-hounds and the philistinism of Essex Man.


The destabilising social and psychological evolution witnessed since the Sixties stems chiefly from the success of affluence and technology in realising the desires of ordinary people. The countercultural elements usually blamed for this were in fact resisting an endemic process of disintegration with its roots in scientific materialism. Far from adding to this fragmentation, they aimed to replace it with a new social order based on either love-and-peace or a vague anarchistic European version of revolutionary Maoism. When contemporary right-wing pundits attack the Sixties, the identify a momentous overall development but ascribe it to the very forces which most strongly reacted against it. The counterculture was less an agent of chaos than a marginal commentary, a passing attempt to propose alternatives to a waning civilisation.


Ironically, the harshest critics of the Sixties are its most direct beneficiaries: the political voices of materialistic individualism. Their recent contribution to the accelerated social breakdown inaugurated around 1963 - economic Darwinism wrapped in self-contradictory socio-cultural prejudices - hasn't helped matters, yet even the New Right can't be held responsible for the multifocal and fragmented techno-decadence into which the First World is currently sinking as if into a babbling, twinkling, microelectronically pulsing quicksand. In the Nineties, the fashion is to reprove others for our own faults; yet even if we take the blame for ignoring our limitations and eroding our own norms over the last thirty years, it is hard to imagine much, short of fascism or a Second Coming, that will put Humpty back together again.

</blockquote>

It's not a cheerful outlook, but it would be hard to argue that it is not based on certain irrefutable truths.

That the twin phenomena of 'The Beatles' and 'The Sixties' were integral to one another is a theme which runs right through MacDonald's book. Again and again, he uses the records the group made to illustrate how in tune with their times they were, and how they also played a role which was broadly similar to that played in America by Bob Dylan, in that they also played a significant role in shaping those times (although they had a much more globally pervasive effect). The Beatles changed the world; sometimes - indeed, maybe even mostly - when they weren't even trying to:

<blockquote>

Indeed, the American folk-protest movement had thrust plain speaking so obtrusively into the pop domain that every transient youth idol was then routinely interrogated concerning his or her 'message' to humanity. If it has any message at all, that of I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND is 'Let go - feel how good it is'. This though (as conservative commentators knew very well) implied a fundamental break with the Christian bourgeois status quo. Harbouring no conscious subversive intent, The Beatles, with this potent record, perpetrated a culturally revolutionary act. As the decade wore on and they began to realise the position they were in, they began to do the same thing more deliberately.

</blockquote>

It would be a mistake, though, to portray this as a 'political' book, or even one whose central concern was pop-cultural theorising. The vast majority of the text is made up of concise yet wide-ranging descriptions of the Beatles' music. The reader is compelled to come back and re-read any number of entries, not just to soak up more of the facts and insights, but to enjoy the elegance of the writing, to nod in heartfelt agreement (and, now and then, to reluctantly dissent), or just to indulge in the reveries this truly great book inspires.

It's a book that has to be read, and its many pleasures cannot be adequately summed up. A fairly representative sample might be this, the final paragraph in MacDonald's description of 'Happiness is a Warm Gun':

<blockquote>

In the end, the most purely Lennonian aspect of HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN is its extreme ambiguity. From an initial mood of depression, it ascends through irony, self-destructive despair, and obscurely renewed energy to a finale that wrests exhausted fulfilment from anguish. Grippingly uneasy listening, the track's tense blend of sarcasm and sincerity stays unresolved until its final detumescent downbeat.

</blockquote>

Elsewhere, in the entry for 'Help!', what MacDonald has to say about the finishing touches made to the song by The Beatles could, without too much adjustment, be taken as a pretty accurate metaphor for what MacDonald himself does:

<blockquote>

To finish, Starr overdubbed tambourine, and Harrison taped his guitar part, descending at the end of each chorus on a cross-rythm arpeggio run in the style of Nashville guitarist Chet Atkins. (This, and Starr's straight-quaver fills against the song's fast shuffle beat, are good examples of the group's care in painting characterful touches into every corner of their best work.)

</blockquote>

Every corner of this book is filled with characterful touches. You can look, but you will not find this level of writing in any other Beatles book.

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

----

'''References'''

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

Revolution in the Head

2009-06-06T16:17:29Z

MrMustard: Continuing Content section

{{Infobox book |
| name = Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties
| image = [[Image:RevolutionHead.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. Paperback Edition, January 6, 2009
| author = Ian MacDonald
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| genre = Biog
| publisher = Vantage (USA)
| release_date = 1994
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 544
| isbn = 0099526794 / 978-0099526797
}}

'''Synopsis'''

This book hit the mid-1990s pop-cultural scene like a bolt from the blue. Well over a quarter of a century since they was Fab, it might have seemed that everything worth saying about the Beatles had already been said, several times. At that stage, the suggestion that someone could produce a genuinely fresh perspective on this most catergorised, analysed, and anthologised of pop groups seemed only marginally less unlikely than the idea that a new band might emerge from the pop field whose music could hold a candle to the imperviously incomparable legacy of the world's best-loved Liverpudlians.

But MacDonald's words leap off the page with a freshness and sense of excitment reminiscent of, say, the opening seconds of 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'. A chronological song-by-song analysis of the Beatles' output, 'Revolution in the Head' manages to make that rarest of leaps: to transcend merely being an excellent study of its subject, and instead emerge as a worthwhile cultural artefact 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.

The worth, and impact, of Macdonald's work was summarised by UK newspaper The Guardian:

<blockquote>
In his book Revolution In The Head, first published in 1994, MacDonald carefully anatomised every record the Beatles made, drawing attention to broad themes, particular examples of inspiration and moments of human frailty alike. 

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. Without a hint of sycophancy, MacDonald had managed to describe the magic created by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in such a way as to reacquaint those who were around at the time with their own original enthusiasm, while alerting listeners of later generations to the precise qualities that had made the Beatles so exceptional. Its introduction alone provides something close to a definitive evocation of the factors that turned the 1960s into 'the sixties'. 
</blockquote>

----

'''Focus'''

Oddly for a Beatles book, MacDonald focuses on the music, or - as he invariably puts it - the 'records' the group made. Every official Beatles recording is covered, some songs' entries rolling on for a number of pages, some dismissed with just one desultory paragraph. MacDonald achieves a remarkable blend of concision with comprehensiveness, offering up a range of thematic perspectives, from musical theory to socio-cultural analysis, to fleeting biographical vignettes which, by combining penetrating insight with elegantly vivacious language, add up to far more than the sum of their parts.

----

'''Structure'''

----

'''Style'''

MacDonald's style is, in a word, stylish. 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 actually quite a difficult writing style to satisfactorily describe, but any adequate attempt would surely include such words as 'elegant', 'laconic', 'intelligent', 'direct', and 'precise'. It's simultaneously refined and gritty, often poetic, occasionally flamboyant. MacDonald, basically, writes the way you wish you did, Jack, if only you'd been born with an abundance of talent and then honed your skills for a couple of decades.

----

'''Content'''

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. It's a book written by someone who is a Beatles fan but who is also, above all, 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 asessing 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 nicities: he routinely states his opinions as though they were incontravertable 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 preconceptions challenged. The better the critic, the more the reader is likely to find himself equally enjoying agreeing or disagreeing with him.

Some examples? Starting with an easy one, how might the average reader rate 'A Day in the Life'? Great? Just so-so? 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 nonesense 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 sombre but always ethereally beautiful work - which Macdonald hails as the Beatles' "finest single achievement" - is, essentially, a "song about perception":

<blockquote>
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 te report of the coroner's verdict, he recorded it in the opening verses of A DAY IN THE LIFE, taking the detatched 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 distacne that veers from the dispassionate to the unfeeling.


On the next page in the same newspaper, he found an item whose absurdity perfectly complemented the Tara Browne story: 'There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per peron, according to a council survey.' This - intensified by a surreal reference to the circular Victorian concert venue the Albert Hall (also in South Kensington) - became the last verse. In between, Lennon inserted a verse in which his jaded spectator looks on as the English army wins the war. Prompted by his part in the film How I Won The War three months earlier, this may have been a veiled allusion to Vietnam which, though a real issue to Lennon, would have overheated the song if stated directly.



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 dissillusioning confrontation with the 'real' world is precisely what meakes it so moving.


</blockquote>

Few in number are the Beatles fans who wouldn't rank that song 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...' always runs the risk of seeming arrogant, didactic, or just plain wrong. It's a testament to the strength of MacDonald's work that such robust opinions never stick in the reader's throat. It should be made clear, also, that the above passage is just a few paragraphs excerpted from several pages on 'A Day in the Life'. The entry for that song alone is so rich and varied, so liberally studded with telling details and points for potential discussion, that it probably contains more wisdom and contention than 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.

On the other hand, consider MacDonald's opinion on 'Across the Universe':

<blockquote>

After the agressive 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.

</blockquote>

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.

MacDonald's song-by-song analysis of the Beatles' records takes up the bulk of the book. But it is preceded by an introductory essay, 'Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade', which sets the Beatles in historical and cultural context, and represents an attempt at resolving a central paradox arising from the group's relationship to the decade they did so much to define: with the passing of time, The Beatles' reputation has only become more and more enshrined and unimpeachable, yet the decade which they were so much a part of, has become reviled, despised and so misunderstood that it has effectively become 'lost'.

At the time, MacDonald says, "the spirit of that era disseminated itself across generations, suffusing the Western world with a sense of rejuvenating freedom comparable to the joy of being let out of school early on a sunny afternoon." But the decade has since become a key battleground for what are sometimes known as the 'Culture Wars', right-wing politicians and commentators tending to blame all of modern society's ills on the 'permissive' 1960s. Conversely, many on the Left have long sought exmplanations for how (and why) the various 'revolutions' and 'movements' of the Sixties failed, and these questions have fuelled some of the most insightful political fiction written about the era, notably Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel 'Vineland', which shares many of MacDonald's themes.

It's obvious that MacDonald has very little sympathy for the Right's reductive and revisionist view of the Sixties, but readers looking for a robust defence of the idealistic impulses of the hippies and radicals whose sensibilities came to be seen as broadly representative of the generational spirit of the times, may also be disappointed. He certainly has plenty of positive things to say about them, especially when considered next to later social groups who looked on them with agressive disdain:

<blockquote>

The hippie outlook, if so hererogeneous a group can be said to have cleaved to one position, was by no measn flippant. Theirs was a kaleidoscopically inventive culture, actively devoted to the acquisition of self-knowledge and the promotion of fundamental social change. In rejecting the hippies, the punks of 1976-7 discarded only a caricature, coming nowhere near an adequate grasp of what they imagined they were rebelling against.

</blockquote>

As with his assessments of the Beatles' records, he doesn't hesitate to decry the more negative aspects of the young radicals of the era, noting that "the late Sixties' youth rebellion declined into an ugly farce of right-on rhetoric and aimless violence". But he also reminds us that "it would be a gross distortion to pretend that this was not substantially provoked by the stone-faced repressive arrogance of the establishment in those days."

MacDonald's thesis is a complex one, and can't be easily summarised. At its heart is his assertion that the "real movers and shakers" of the Sixties were not the student demonstrators, flower children, and 'beautiful people', but the greater mass of "ordinary people". The "true revolution" of the 1960s was "an inner one of feeling and assumption: a revolution in the head." The Sixties were, MacDonald points out, a transitional phase, rife with paradoxes and contradictions, not least that the social trends which seemed to sustain the more radical elements, were the very same forces which led to a fragmentation of consensus and rise of materilistic indiviualism, paving the way for "Margaret Thatcher's deregulated anti-society" in the 1980s.

<blockquote>

The truth is that the Sixties inaugurated a post-religious age in which neither Jesus nor Marx is of interest to a society now functionong mostly below the level of the rational mind in an emotional/physical dimension of personal appetite and private insecurity."

</blockquote>

A more bitter irony is that the Punks of the late 70s, and indeed the Thatcherites and Reaganites who dominated the zeitgest of the 1980s, had a lot more in common with the real spirit of the decade they so despised than they could ever bring themselves to realise:

<blockquote>

The irony of modern right-wing antipathy to the Sixties is that this much-misunderstood decade was, in all but the most superficial senses, the creation of the very people who voted for Thatcher and Reagan in the Eighties. It is, to put it mildly, curious to hear Thatcherites condemn a decade in which ordinary folk for the first time aspired to individual self-determination and a life of material security within an economy of high employment and low inflation. The social fragmentation of the Nineties which rightly alarms conservatives was created neither by the hippies (who wanted us to 'be together') nor by the New Left radicals (all of whom were socialists of some description).


So far as anything in the Sixties can be blamed for the demise of the compound entity of society it was the natural desire of the 'masses' to lead easier, pleasanter lives, own their own homes, follow their own fancies and, as far as possible, move out of the communal collective completely. The truth is that, once the obsolete Christian compact of the Fifties had broken down, there was nothing - apart from, in the last resort, money - holding Western civilisation together. Indeed, the very labour-saving domestic appliances launched onto the market by the Sixties' consumer boom speeded the melt-down of communality by allowing people to function in a private world, segregated from each other by TVs, telephones, hi-fi systems, washing-machines and home cookers. (The popularity in the Eighties of the answering machine - the phone-call you don't have to reply to - is another sign of ongoing desocialisation by gadgetry.)

</blockquote>

It's a persuasive view, though perhaps not one to win MacDonald any friends on either side of the ideological divide. One of the subtlest strands of his argument concerns the relationship between the way social and cultural changes were accellerated, and even brought about by, modern technologies of convenience, and the impact of musical and recording technology on the art of popular music, all of which are depicted as part of a steady cultural decline:

<blockquote>

"A malignant rot has spread through the Western mind since the mid-Seventies: the virus of meaninglessness. Yet this infection threatens all ideologies, Left or Right, being at root no more than a levelling crusade on behalf of the aesthetically deprived - a Bad Taste Liberation Front. The reason why cultural relativism has caught on is not because ordinary people read Derrida but because the trickle-down essence of Deconstruction suits both the trash aesthetic of media-hounds and the philistinism of Essex Man.


The destabilising social and psychological evolution witnessed since the Sixties stems chiefly from the success of affluence and technology in realising the desires of ordinary people. The countercultural elements usually blamed for this were in fact resisting an endemic process of disintegration with its roots in scientific materialism. Far from adding to this fragmentation, they aimed to replace it with a new social order based on either love-and-peace or a vague anarchistic European version of revolutionary Maoism. When contemporary right-wing pundits attack the Sixties, the identify a momentous overall development but ascribe it to the very forces which most strongly reacted against it. The counterculture was less an agent of chaos than a marginal commentary, a passing attempt to propose alternatives to a waning civilisation.


Ironically, the harshest critics of the Sixties are its most direct beneficiaries: the political voices of materialistic individualism. Their recent contribution to the accelerated social breakdown inaugurated around 1963 - economic Darwinism wrapped in self-contradictory socio-cultural prejudices - hasn't helped matters, yet even the New Right can't be held responsible for the multifocal and fragmented techno-decadence into which the First World is currently sinking as if into a babbling, twinkling, microelectronically pulsing quicksand. In the Nineties, the fashion is to reprove others for our own faults; yet even if we take the blame for ignoring our limitations and eroding our own norms over the last thirty years, it is hard to imagine much, short of fascism or a Second Coming, that will put Humpty back together again.

</blockquote>

It's not a cheerful outlook, but it would be hard to argue that it is not based on certain irrefutable truths.

That the twin phenomena of 'The Beatles' and 'The Sixties' were integral to one another is a theme which runs right through MacDonald's book. Again and again, he uses the records the group made to illustrate how in tune with their times they were, and how they also played a role which was broadly similar to that played in America by Bob Dylan, in that they also played a significant role in shaping those times (although they had a much more globally pervasive effect). The Beatles changed the world; sometimes - indeed, maybe even mostly - when they weren't even trying to:

<blockquote>

Indeed, the American folk-protest movement had thrust plain speaking so obtrusively into the pop domain that every transient youth idol was then routinely interrogated concerning his or her 'message' to humanity. If it has any message at all, that of I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND is 'Let go - feel how good it is'. This though (as conservative commentators knew very well) implied a fundamental break with the Christian bourgeois status quo. Harbouring no conscious subversive intent, The Beatles, with this potent record, perpetrated a culturally revolutionary act. As the decade wore on and they began to realise the position they were in, they began to do the same thing more deliberately.

</blockquote>

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

----

'''References'''

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

Revolution in the Head

2009-05-21T13:18:22Z

MrMustard: Added synopsis of introductory essay to Content section

{{Infobox book |
| name = Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties
| image = [[Image:RevolutionHead.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. Paperback Edition, January 6, 2009
| author = Ian MacDonald
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| genre = Biog
| publisher = Vantage (USA)
| release_date = 1994
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 544
| isbn = 0099526794 / 978-0099526797
}}

'''Synopsis'''

This book hit the mid-1990s pop-cultural scene like a bolt from the blue. Well over a quarter of a century since they was Fab, it might have seemed that everything worth saying about the Beatles had already been said, several times. At that stage, the suggestion that someone could produce a genuinely fresh perspective on this most catergorised, analysed, and anthologised of pop groups seemed only marginally less unlikely than the idea that a new band might emerge from the pop field whose music could hold a candle to the imperviously incomparable legacy of the world's best-loved Liverpudlians.

But MacDonald's words leap off the page with a freshness and sense of excitment reminiscent of, say, the opening seconds of 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'. A chronological song-by-song analysis of the Beatles' output, 'Revolution in the Head' manages to make that rarest of leaps: to transcend merely being an excellent study of its subject, and instead emerge as a worthwhile cultural artefact 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.

The worth, and impact, of Macdonald's work was summarised by UK newspaper The Guardian:

<blockquote>
In his book Revolution In The Head, first published in 1994, MacDonald carefully anatomised every record the Beatles made, drawing attention to broad themes, particular examples of inspiration and moments of human frailty alike. 

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. Without a hint of sycophancy, MacDonald had managed to describe the magic created by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in such a way as to reacquaint those who were around at the time with their own original enthusiasm, while alerting listeners of later generations to the precise qualities that had made the Beatles so exceptional. Its introduction alone provides something close to a definitive evocation of the factors that turned the 1960s into 'the sixties'. 
</blockquote>

----

'''Focus'''

Oddly for a Beatles book, MacDonald focuses on the music, or - as he invariably puts it - the 'records' the group made. Every official Beatles recording is covered, some songs' entries rolling on for a number of pages, some dismissed with just one desultory paragraph. MacDonald achieves a remarkable blend of concision with comprehensiveness, offering up a range of thematic perspectives, from musical theory to socio-cultural analysis, to fleeting biographical vignettes which, by combining penetrating insight with elegantly vivacious language, add up to far more than the sum of their parts.

----

'''Structure'''

----

'''Style'''

MacDonald's style is, in a word, stylish. 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 actually quite a difficult writing style to satisfactorily describe, but any adequate attempt would surely include such words as 'elegant', 'laconic', 'intelligent', 'direct', and 'precise'. It's simultaneously refined and gritty, often poetic, occasionally flamboyant. MacDonald, basically, writes the way you wish you did, Jack, if only you'd been born with an abundance of talent and then honed your skills for a couple of decades.

----

'''Content'''

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. It's a book written by someone who is a Beatles fan but who is also, above all, 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 asessing 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 nicities: he routinely states his opinions as though they were incontravertable 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 preconceptions challenged. The better the critic, the more the reader is likely to find himself equally enjoying agreeing or disagreeing with him.

Some examples? Starting with an easy one, how might the average reader rate 'A Day in the Life'? Great? Just so-so? 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 nonesense 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 sombre but always ethereally beautiful work - which Macdonald hails as the Beatles' "finest single achievement" - is, essentially, a "song about perception":

<blockquote>
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 te report of the coroner's verdict, he recorded it in the opening verses of A DAY IN THE LIFE, taking the detatched 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 distacne that veers from the dispassionate to the unfeeling.


On the next page in the same newspaper, he found an item whose absurdity perfectly complemented the Tara Browne story: 'There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per peron, according to a council survey.' This - intensified by a surreal reference to the circular Victorian concert venue the Albert Hall (also in South Kensington) - became the last verse. In between, Lennon inserted a verse in which his jaded spectator looks on as the English army wins the war. Prompted by his part in the film How I Won The War three months earlier, this may have been a veiled allusion to Vietnam which, though a real issue to Lennon, would have overheated the song if stated directly.



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 dissillusioning confrontation with the 'real' world is precisely what meakes it so moving.


</blockquote>

Few in number are the Beatles fans who wouldn't rank that song 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...' always runs the risk of seeming arrogant, didactic, or just plain wrong. It's a testament to the strength of MacDonald's work that such robust opinions never stick in the reader's throat. It should be made clear, also, that the above passage is just a few paragraphs excerpted from several pages on 'A Day in the Life'. The entry for that song alone is so rich and varied, so liberally studded with telling details and points for potential discussion, that it probably contains more wisdom and contention than 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.

On the other hand, consider MacDonald's opinion on 'Across the Universe':

<blockquote>

After the agressive 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.

</blockquote>

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.

MacDonald's song-by-song analysis of the Beatles' records takes up the bulk of the book. But it is preceded by an introductory essay, 'Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade', which sets the Beatles in historical and cultural context, and represents an attempt at resolving a central paradox arising from the group's relationship to the decade they did so much to define: with the passing of time, The Beatles' reputation has only become more and more enshrined and unimpeachable, yet the decade which they were so much a part of, has become reviled, despised and so misunderstood that it has effectively become 'lost'.

At the time, MacDonald says, "the spirit of that era disseminated itself across generations, suffusing the Western world with a sense of rejuvenating freedom comparable to the joy of being let out of school early on a sunny afternoon." But the decade has since become a key battleground for what are sometimes known as the 'Culture Wars', right-wing politicians and commentators tending to blame all of modern society's ills on the 'permissive' 1960s. Conversely, many on the Left have long sought exmplanations for how (and why) the various 'revolutions' and 'movements' of the Sixties failed, and these questions have fuelled some of the most insightful political fiction written about the era, notably Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel 'Vineland', which shares many of MacDonald's themes.

It's obvious that MacDonald has very little sympathy for the Right's reductive and revisionist view of the Sixties, but readers looking for a robust defence of the idealistic impulses of the hippies and radicals whose sensibilities came to be seen as broadly representative of the generational spirit of the times, may also be disappointed. He certainly has plenty of positive things to say about them, especially when considered next to later social groups who looked on them with agressive disdain:

<blockquote>

The hippie outlook, if so hererogeneous a group can be said to have cleaved to one position, was by no measn flippant. Theirs was a kaleidoscopically inventive culture, actively devoted to the acquisition of self-knowledge and the promotion of fundamental social change. In rejecting the hippies, the punks of 1976-7 discarded only a caricature, coming nowhere near an adequate grasp of what they imagined they were rebelling against.

</blockquote>

As with his assessments of the Beatles' records, he doesn't hesitate to decry the more negative aspects of the young radicals of the era, noting that "the late Sixties' youth rebellion declined into an ugly farce of right-on rhetoric and aimless violence". But he also reminds us that "it would be a gross distortion to pretend that this was not substantially provoked by the stone-faced repressive arrogance of the establishment in those days."

MacDonald's thesis is a complex one, and can't be easily summarised. At its heart is his assertion that the "real movers and shakers" of the Sixties were not the student demonstrators, flower children, and 'beautiful people', but the greater mass of "ordinary people". The "true revolution" of the 1960s was "an inner one of feeling and assumption: a revolution in the head." The Sixties were, MacDonald points out, a transitional phase, rife with paradoxes and contradictions, not least that the social trends which seemed to sustain the more radical elements, were the very same forces which led to a fragmentation of consensus and rise of materilistic indiviualism, paving the way for "Margaret Thatcher's deregulated anti-society" in the 1980s.

<blockquote>

The truth is that the Sixties inaugurated a post-religious age in which neither Jesus nor Marx is of interest to a society now functionong mostly below the level of the rational mind in an emotional/physical dimension of personal appetite and private insecurity."

</blockquote>

A more bitter irony is that the Punks of the late 70s, and indeed the Thatcherites and Reaganites who dominated the zeitgest of the 1980s, had a lot more in common with the real spirit of the decade they so despised than they could ever bring themselves to realise:

<blockquote>

The irony of modern right-wing antipathy to the Sixties is that this much-misunderstood decade was, in all but the most superficial senses, the creation of the very people who voted for Thatcher and Reagan in the Eighties. It is, to put it mildly, curious to hear Thatcherites condemn a decade in which ordinary folk for the first time aspired to individual self-determination and a life of material security within an economy of high employment and low inflation. The social fragmentation of the Nineties which rightly alarms conservatives was created neither by the hippies (who wanted us to 'be together') nor by the New Left radicals (all of whom were socialists of some description).


So far as anything in the Sixties can be blamed for the demise of the compound entity of society it was the natural desire of the 'masses' to lead easier, pleasanter lives, own their own homes, follow their own fancies and, as far as possible, move out of the communal collective completely. The truth is that, once the obsolete Christian compact of the Fifties had broken down, there was nothing - apart from, in the last resort, money - holding Western civilisation together. Indeed, the very labour-saving domestic appliances launched onto the market by the Sixties' consumer boom speeded the melt-down of communality by allowing people to function in a private world, segregated from each other by TVs, telephones, hi-fi systems, washing-machines and home cookers. (The popularity in the Eighties of the answering machine - the phone-call you don't have to reply to - is another sign of ongoing desocialisation by gadgetry.)

</blockquote>

It's a persuasive view, though perhaps not one to win MacDonald any friends on either side of the ideological divide. One of the subtlest strands of his argument concerns the relationship between the way social and cultural changes were accellerated, and even brought about by, modern technologies of convenience, and the impact of musical and recording technology on the art of popular music, all of which are depicted as part of a steady cultural decline:

<blockquote>

"A malignant rot has spread through the Western mind since the mid-Seventies: the virus of meaninglessness. Yet this infection threatens all ideologies, Left or Right, being at root no more than a levelling crusade on behalf of the aesthetically deprived - a Bad Taste Liberation Front. The reason why cultural relativism has caught on is not because ordinary people read Derrida but because the trickle-down essence of Deconstruction suits both the trash aesthetic of media-hounds and the philistinism of Essex Man.


The destabilising social and psychological evolution witnessed since the Sixties stems chiefly from the success of affluence and technology in realising the desires of ordinary people. The countercultural elements usually blamed for this were in fact resisting an endemic process of disintegration with its roots in scientific materialism. Far from adding to this fragmentation, they aimed to replace it with a new social order based on either love-and-peace or a vague anarchistic European version of revolutionary Maoism. When contemporary right-wing pundits attack the Sixties, the identify a momentous overall development but ascribe it to the very forces which most strongly reacted against it. The counterculture was less an agent of chaos than a marginal commentary, a passing attempt to propose alternatives to a waning civilisation.


Ironically, the harshest critics of the Sixties are its most direct beneficiaries: the political voices of materialistic individualism. Their recent contribution to the accelerated social breakdown inaugurated around 1963 - economic Darwinism wrapped in self-contradictory socio-cultural prejudices - hasn't helped matters, yet even the New Right can't be held responsible for the multifocal and fragmented techno-decadence into which the First World is currently sinking as if into a babbling, twinkling, microelectronically pulsing quicksand. In the Nineties, the fashion is to reprove others for our own faults; yet even if we take the blame for ignoring our limitations and eroding our own norms over the last thirty years, it is hard to imagine much, short of fascism or a Second Coming, that will put Humpty back together again.

</blockquote>

It's not a cheerful outlook, but it would be hard to argue that it is not based on certain irrefutable truths.

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

----

'''References'''

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

Revolution in the Head

2009-05-20T20:33:50Z

MrMustard: Continue Content section - Across the Universe

Revolution in the Head

2009-05-20T20:21:05Z

MrMustard: Added Style section

Revolution in the Head

2009-05-20T19:59:43Z

MrMustard: Added Focus section

File:Twentyyearsago.jpg

2009-05-20T19:50:22Z

MrMustard:

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

2009-05-20T19:49:57Z

MrMustard: Created page for It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

{{Infobox book |
| name = It Was Twenty Years Ago Today
| image = [[Image:twentyyearsago.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. Paperback Edition, June 1987
| author = Derek Taylor
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| genre = Biog
| publisher = Fireside (USA)
| release_date = 1987
| media_type = Print (Paperback)
| pages = 256
| isbn = 0671642014 / 978-06716420135
}}

'''Synopsis'''

----

'''Focus'''

----

'''Structure'''

----

'''Style'''

----

'''Content'''

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

----

'''References'''

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

File:Shout.jpg

2009-05-20T19:44:56Z

MrMustard:

Shout!

2009-05-20T19:44:38Z

MrMustard: Created page for Shout!

Revolution in the Head

2009-05-20T15:34:22Z

MrMustard: Started Content section

File:RevolutionHead.jpg

2009-05-19T21:16:45Z

MrMustard:

Revolution in the Head

2009-05-19T21:12:13Z

MrMustard: Created page for Revolution in the Head

The Love You Make

2009-05-19T20:51:04Z

MrMustard: Added 2nd controversy to 'Content' section, plus conclusion.

{{Infobox book |
| name = The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of The Beatles
| image = [[Image:LoveYouMake.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. First Edition, February 1, 1983
| author = Peter Brown (with Steven Gaines)
| country = United States
| language = English
| genre = Novel
| publisher = McGraw-Hill (USA); Macmillan (UK)
| release_date = 1983
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 448
| isbn = 007008159X / 0-07-008159-X
}}

'''Synopsis'''

Both this book's title, and its author's name, represent powerful fragments of Beatles lore. Peter Brown was best man at John Lennon's wedding to Yoko Ono - in fact he also later filled the same role for Paul McCartney - and was immortalised by Lennon, in 'The Ballad of John & Yoko', as the man wo "called to say, you can make it ok, you can get married in Gibraltar near Spain". The book's title is taken from the appropriately named Beatles song 'The End', quoted in the frontispiece:

:''And in the end'' 
:''The love you take'' 
:''Is equal to the love'' 
:''You make.''

:The last lyric from the last song on the last Beatles album.

However, nothing is ever simple in Beatles-land. A pedant could argue that 'Abbey Road' wasn't the Beatles' last album, since 'Let it Be', while recorded earlier, was released after it, and in any case 'The End' was not the last song on the finalised running order, being supplanted at the last minute by 'Her Majesty'. Still, great title for a Beatles book, and ‘love’ was always a subject close to the Beatles’ hearts.

Peter Brown, meanwhile, may not have been so much of an 'insider' as either his appearance in Lennon's self-mythologising ballad, or the subtitle of his book, suggest. He certainly can't claim to have been a member of the innermost circle of Beatles intimates - the so-called 'Liverpool Mafia' - such as, say, Neil Aspinall. This has led to some criticism, and it's true that Brown sometimes 'makes up' dialogue or thoughts for events and situations at which he was not a first-hand witness; but he was enough of an insider that he has an immensely interesting story to tell, and lucky for us he tells it in a brisk and entertaining way.

Similarly, this book can't be placed in the top rank of Beatles books, in terms of renown. While not obscure, it's nowhere near as well known as Philip Norman's 'Shout' or Albert Goldman's 'The Lives of John Lennon', for example. This is a pity, because while it may have its faults, this is a hugely enjoyable book, and an essential read for anyone interested in the Beatles.

----

'''Focus'''

This is not a conventional biography. Brown doesn't bother the reader with potted personal histories of the various Beatles' forbears, and in fact begins his narrative in May 1968, as Cynthia Lennon returns from holiday to find Yoko Ono sitting in the kitchen of the Lennons' Weybridge mansion, wearing Cynthia's dressing gown, and sporting an expression which is simultaneously inscrutable and unmistakably post-coital. This is a refreshingly grabby way to begin the book, and Brown keeps up this pacy style all the way through.

Brown's approach is anecdotal and episodic. While there are no longueurs, there are some significant lacunae, perhaps the most noticable being the absence of any real discussion, or even sometimes mention, of the music the Beatles made. When we read, towards the end of the book, of Paul McCartney's need to 'get away from it all' for a while on his Scottish farm, and are told that this has been caused by a renewed level of media attention, due to the recent release of 'Abbey Road', we realise with some surprise that this is the first time the album has been mentioned.

Even when Brown does skip back in time a bit, to cover the band's early days and their visits to Germany, he never goes any further back than their teenage years. At the other end of the scale, the narrative peters out a little towards the end, the period between the band's break-up and Lennon's murder taking only 50 pages or so.

Thematically, there's an unmissable imbalance between the large portion of pages given over to John Lennon and Brian Epstein, and the scant amount of space accorded to everyone else. It's natural, however, that Brown devotes so much time to Epstein, because it was through Epstein that Brown became involved with the Beatles and their multi-faceted, haphazardly run Apple organisation. Brown had worked for Epstein in Liverpool and after moving to London became probably his most loyal lieutenant, even cleaning up after Epstein's attempted suicide - and hiding the note he'd left next to the bottle of pills on his bedside table. This book is driven by personalities, with the Beatles being portrayed as owing their success, in large part, to the fact that Epstein fancied Lennon to the point of obsession. So it's apt that Brown takes such a personalised approach to both the structure and content of his narrative.

----

'''Structure'''

The book consists of 21 Chapters, each subdivided into several short, numbered sections. Most Chapters are preceded by an apposite quotation, mostly concerning the personalities involved. For instance: 

<blockquote>
"America is at our feet! Could anything be more important than this?"

 - - Brian Epstein in a phone call to Peter Brown
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
"What's a scruff like me doing with all this lot?"

 - - Ringo Starr
</blockquote>

Steven Gaines provides a short Introduction, describing how he came to be involved.

----

'''Style'''

One of Brown's main achievements is to maintain a dispassionate, objective tone. He clearly is a fan of Lennon, for instance, but that doesn't stop him detailing John and Yoko's heroin addiction, or poking fun at some of Lennon's less considered political stances. This fits well with his prose style, which is simple and to the point, seldom straining to turn elegant phrases or draw attention to itself. Significantly, both these aspects occassionally break down together, when Brown can't keep his emotions from rippling the otherwise nonchalantly calm surface of his narrative. More often than not, this involves Brian Epstein, who comes across as a thoroughly decent yet perpetually tormented man, and whose tragic early death from a drug overdose affects Brown deeply. Here Brown describes the moment when Allen Klein, who'd been angling after Epstein's role of Beatles manager, hears of Epstein's death:

<blockquote>
In New York City, Allen Klein was driving across the George Washington Bridge to his home in New Jersey. Behind him, Manhattan was glittering like a diamond diorama. Just then there was a news flash on the radio: Brian Epstein was dead.

Klein snapped his fingers. "I've got 'em!" he said.
</blockquote>

----

'''Content'''

Cynthia Lennon provides the opening quotation for Chapter One:

<blockquote>
"I managed to observe the whirlpool of events without drowning..."
</blockquote>

Well, like many who were close to the Beatles, if she didn't drown, Cynthia certainly got thrown up against a few rocks. And if Brown hasn't written a traditional biography, he hasn't produced a hagiography either. He isn't afraid to show some of the less attractive aspects of the Beatles, how their wealth and fame affected their behaviour, and their sometimes brutally disdainful treatment of those closest to them.

Lennon, of course, could be bitter and cruel, and there's plenty of evidence of that here. But nobody emerges from these pages with a clean charge sheet. George Harrison forbids his wife Pattie to continue her modelling career, and keeps her a virtual prisoner, "isolated almost continuously in the big gloomy house with all the friar's heads". He exhibits titanic levels of naivety in his dealings with the Maharishi, even insisting - on a flight back from a trip he and Brown took to visit the guru in Sweden, to prevail upon him to cease using the Beatles' names in his publicity - that the Maharishi just doesn't understand the issues involved because "he is not a modern man". Paul McCartney, often seen as the most level-headed Beatle, seems - in Brown's account - on the verge of a clinical case of satyriasis. In his first flush of fame, McCartney's "already healthy ego exploded". He dumps his childhood sweetheart, telling her frankly that he can't be expected to tie himself down to 'a steady', now that he has so many girls constantly available to him. Even affable drummer Ringo doesn't escape criticism, particularly of his lacklustre solo recordings, disastrous business ventures, and unsophisticated tastes. The "simple and uneducated" Ringo was "still eating egg and chips for his dinner" as late as 1965, and after the Beatles split became "a cameo-part player without a role", a man who "had little daily purpose in life".

Brown paints an enjoyably gritty portrait of the Beatles' escapades, which the press turned a blind eye to at the time, notably their enthusiastic bouts of "drinking and whoring", frequent encounters with venereal disease, and propensity for getting into decidedly un-moptoppish scrapes.

A lot of space is devoted to Brian Epstein, whose story is fascinating and unbearably sad. One of Britain's very rare Labour-voting millionaires, Epstein would perhaps have been the biggest and most deserving beneficiary, if the equation implied by that famous lyric which gives the book its title, were to become a reality. Epstein gave huge amounts of love - to lovers and friends, and to the Beatles - but received only a tiny proportion of affection in return. Gay, Jewish, posh, and with several chips on each shoulder, Epstein never found lasting happiness, and although his eventual death was deemed accidental, it wasn't really a surprise to those who knew him well.

Epstein was a mass of contradictions: he could be savvy and tenacious, as when he refused to accept anything but top billing for the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show; but his regal mien and aristocratic sensibility were ill-suited to the sort of tough business dealings his job required. In any case, Epstein considered himself too rarefied a figure to stoop to grubby negotiations and often accepted incredibly bad deals just to avoid the unseemly unpleasantness of haggling. Most famous was the Seltaeb debacle, where Epstein lost the Beatles (and himself) untold millions by signing away the rights to all Beatles merchandising just as that market was exploding. When Nicky Byrne, who Epstein's lawyer David Jacobs liked because Byrne threw great parties, "agreed to take on the job" of handling Beatles merchandising, Jacobs asked what percentage of the merchandising income Byrne wanted to keep for himself. "Byrne glibly suggested 90 per cent for himself, expecting Jacobs to start bargaining. Jacobs nodded. 'Well,' he said, '10 per cent is better than nothing,' and he signed the contracts."

In one of the book's saddest and most shameful passages, Brown describes the Beatles' reactions to Epstein's death. The Beatles were with the Maharishi in Bangor, Wales - "strolling around the grounds, enjoying the last weekend of summer and toying with their new mantras" - when they heard that Epstein had died. They were "shocked and saddened but strangely sedate", George telling reporters that "there is no such thing as death" and that they knew "Brian will return because he was striving for happiness and desired bliss so much." Brown adds:

<blockquote>
"That was the extent of the eulogy Brian was to receive from the Beatles. Within a few days, when the shock had worn off, they made foolish jokes about him. "
</blockquote>

Brown is very good on John and Yoko's hermetic relationship, their drug use, and their bizarre lifestyle arrangements. His description of the prolonged periods Lennon spends spaced out in the sunroom at Weybridge linger long in the mind:

<blockquote>
"At Kenwood, on a shelf in the sunroom, sat a white, pharmaceutical mortar and pestle with which he mixed any combination of speed, barbituates, and psychedelics. Whenever he felt himself coming down from his mind-bending heights, he would lick a finger, take a swipe at the ingredients in the mortar, and suck the bitter film into his mouth.”
</blockquote>

Here's Brown on the closing of the ill-fated Apple boutique, yet another money-losing enterprise. The night before the shop's remaining stock was due to be given awar free to the public on a 'one item per person' basis, John and Yoko visited the shop to help themselves:

<blockquote>
"The Monday night before the giveaway, Yoko Ono and John arrived at the shop. Before the amazed employees, Yoko spread large swatches of fabric out on the floor and began to pile merchandise onto it waist high. Then she knotted the corners of the fabric hobo-style and dragged it out of the store on her back, like an Oriental Santa Claus, into John's Rolls-Royce."
</blockquote>

Authors are often accused, sometimes accurately, of openly courting controversy in order to shift units. But in the case of a subject as hallowed as the Beatles, it would be difficult to produce a book which generated no controversy at all. Brown's book drew flak for two main sections, both - appropriately enough - concerning matters of the heart. Most famously, in tackling the age-old question of whether, or rather to what extent, Lennon was aware of and indeed encouraged Epstein's infatuation with him, Brown seems to imply that Lennon did in fact go so far as to allow Epstein at least one chance to live out his dream. Soon after Cynthia, having spent two days in painful labour, gave birth to Julian Lennon, John visited her in the hospital, 'ecstatic' at the sight of his baby son. This didn't prevent him from announcing that he not only wanted Brian Epstein to be the boy's Godfather but, furthermore, that he and Brian were heading off on holiday to Spain together, just the two of them. During their trip to Spain, Epstein opened up to John about his sexuality. The passage is worth quoting at length:

<blockquote>

"If you had a choice, Eppy," John said, "if you could press a button and be hetero, would you do it?"
Brian thought for a moment. "Strangely, no," he said. 

A little later a peculiar game developed. John would point out some passing man to Brian, and Brian would explain to him what it was about the fellow that he found attractive or unattractive. "I was rather enjoying the experience," John said, "thinking like a writer at the time: I am experiencing this." And still later, back in their hotel suite, drunk and sleepy from the sweet Spanish wine, Brian and John undressed in silence. "It's okay, Eppy," John said, and lay down on his bed. Brian would have liked to have hugged him, but he was afraid. Instead, John lay there, tentative and still, and Brian fulfilled the fantasies he was so sure would bring him contentment, only to awake the next morning as hollow as before. 
</blockquote>

So, not 100% clear-cut. And we have no way of knowing where Brown got the details of this episode from, although it's possible that Epstein himself was the source. Ambiguity also attends the second controversial claim in Brown's book, where he depicts the break-up of George Harrison's marriage to Pattie, a relationship which "bust up with such explosive force that it took Rigo and Maureen's marriage with it." Brown claims that, after the two couples had enjoyed dinner and plentiful wine together one night, George suddenly put down the guitar he'd been strumming and "blurted out that he was in love with Maureen." The controversial passage follows:

<blockquote>

Just a few weeks later, Pattie returned to her own home, Friar Park, from a shopping spree in London, reportedly to find George in the bedroom with Maureen, just as Cynthia and Jane Asher had found their men with other women. Neithe Maureen nor Pattie will confirm this often-reported incident actually took place, but they pointedly will not deny it either. Says Pattie on the subject: "I don't want to get anybody in trouble." 
When George was later asked why his buddy's wife, George shrugged his shoulders and said, "Incest." 
So much for the spiritual world.
</blockquote>

Again, no source is given. Again there is much ambiguity, particularly that key word "reportedly". But, whatever the truth of these ultimately not that scandalous passages, this is more of a memoir than a scholarly work and, at least in terms of reader enjoyment, all the better for it. Although supposedly written with the co-operation of the Beatles, and Yoko, it may well be that Brown burned a few bridges with this book; if he were to try writing another Beatles book, it's doubtful that he could repeat the enviable roll-call of interviewees that are listed in the introduction. You might want to take some of Brown's book with a pinch of salt. Conversely, you might ask yourself how likely it is that Brown left any number of skeletons safely closeted away.

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

Originally published in 1983, the book was out of print for some time, before being re-issued in a slightly revised form in 2002. The revised edition added a 'Contents' section, and an expanded index. There is also a very worthwhile foreward by Anthony DeCurtis, placing the book, and Beatles studies in general, in contemporary context.

Peter Brown gave a very brief 'Q & A' interview to 'New York' magazine in 2002, in which the following exchange took place:

<blockquote>

'''''Q.''' Any corrections or new material in this edition''?

'''A.''' No -- I thought we'd leave well enough alone. If there was any criticism, it was, Why did you have to be so frank? Paul once said to me, "Why did you have to put in that I had VD in Hamburg?"

</blockquote>

However, there certainly was some additional material added. For instance, a section inserted at the beginning of Chapter Seven, describing 'Swinging London' in the Sixties as a mixture of elements from other cities, and decades:

<blockquote>

"It had a touch of the naughty nineties of Paris, the decadence of pre-War Berlin. It had a sprinkling of the glamour of Hollywood in the forties and the sexual passions and peccadilloes of la dolce vita in the fifites. It was like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel rewritten by Ian Fleming."

</blockquote>

It would be interesting to learn who did write such passages, if not Brown, for their tone is ever so slightly out of synch with the rest of the book.

----

'''References'''

[http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/n_8019/ Q & A: Peter Brown, New York Magazine, November 2002]

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

The Love You Make

2009-05-19T20:30:00Z

MrMustard: Added 1st controversy to 'Content' section

{{Infobox book |
| name = The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of The Beatles
| image = [[Image:LoveYouMake.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. First Edition, February 1, 1983
| author = Peter Brown (with Steven Gaines)
| country = United States
| language = English
| genre = Novel
| publisher = McGraw-Hill (USA); Macmillan (UK)
| release_date = 1983
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 448
| isbn = 007008159X / 0-07-008159-X
}}

'''Synopsis'''

Both this book's title, and its author's name, represent powerful fragments of Beatles lore. Peter Brown was best man at John Lennon's wedding to Yoko Ono - in fact he also later filled the same role for Paul McCartney - and was immortalised by Lennon, in 'The Ballad of John & Yoko', as the man wo "called to say, you can make it ok, you can get married in Gibraltar near Spain". The book's title is taken from the appropriately named Beatles song 'The End', quoted in the frontispiece:

:''And in the end'' 
:''The love you take'' 
:''Is equal to the love'' 
:''You make.''

:The last lyric from the last song on the last Beatles album.

However, nothing is ever simple in Beatles-land. A pedant could argue that 'Abbey Road' wasn't the Beatles' last album, since 'Let it Be', while recorded earlier, was released after it, and in any case 'The End' was not the last song on the finalised running order, being supplanted at the last minute by 'Her Majesty'. Still, great title for a Beatles book, and ‘love’ was always a subject close to the Beatles’ hearts.

Peter Brown, meanwhile, may not have been so much of an 'insider' as either his appearance in Lennon's self-mythologising ballad, or the subtitle of his book, suggest. He certainly can't claim to have been a member of the innermost circle of Beatles intimates - the so-called 'Liverpool Mafia' - such as, say, Neil Aspinall. This has led to some criticism, and it's true that Brown sometimes 'makes up' dialogue or thoughts for events and situations at which he was not a first-hand witness; but he was enough of an insider that he has an immensely interesting story to tell, and lucky for us he tells it in a brisk and entertaining way.

Similarly, this book can't be placed in the top rank of Beatles books, in terms of renown. While not obscure, it's nowhere near as well known as Philip Norman's 'Shout' or Albert Goldman's 'The Lives of John Lennon', for example. This is a pity, because while it may have its faults, this is a hugely enjoyable book, and an essential read for anyone interested in the Beatles.

----

'''Focus'''

This is not a conventional biography. Brown doesn't bother the reader with potted personal histories of the various Beatles' forbears, and in fact begins his narrative in May 1968, as Cynthia Lennon returns from holiday to find Yoko Ono sitting in the kitchen of the Lennons' Weybridge mansion, wearing Cynthia's dressing gown, and sporting an expression which is simultaneously inscrutable and unmistakably post-coital. This is a refreshingly grabby way to begin the book, and Brown keeps up this pacy style all the way through.

Brown's approach is anecdotal and episodic. While there are no longueurs, there are some significant lacunae, perhaps the most noticable being the absence of any real discussion, or even sometimes mention, of the music the Beatles made. When we read, towards the end of the book, of Paul McCartney's need to 'get away from it all' for a while on his Scottish farm, and are told that this has been caused by a renewed level of media attention, due to the recent release of 'Abbey Road', we realise with some surprise that this is the first time the album has been mentioned.

Even when Brown does skip back in time a bit, to cover the band's early days and their visits to Germany, he never goes any further back than their teenage years. At the other end of the scale, the narrative peters out a little towards the end, the period between the band's break-up and Lennon's murder taking only 50 pages or so.

Thematically, there's an unmissable imbalance between the large portion of pages given over to John Lennon and Brian Epstein, and the scant amount of space accorded to everyone else. It's natural, however, that Brown devotes so much time to Epstein, because it was through Epstein that Brown became involved with the Beatles and their multi-faceted, haphazardly run Apple organisation. Brown had worked for Epstein in Liverpool and after moving to London became probably his most loyal lieutenant, even cleaning up after Epstein's attempted suicide - and hiding the note he'd left next to the bottle of pills on his bedside table. This book is driven by personalities, with the Beatles being portrayed as owing their success, in large part, to the fact that Epstein fancied Lennon to the point of obsession. So it's apt that Brown takes such a personalised approach to both the structure and content of his narrative.

----

'''Structure'''

The book consists of 21 Chapters, each subdivided into several short, numbered sections. Most Chapters are preceded by an apposite quotation, mostly concerning the personalities involved. For instance: 

<blockquote>
"America is at our feet! Could anything be more important than this?"

 - - Brian Epstein in a phone call to Peter Brown
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
"What's a scruff like me doing with all this lot?"

 - - Ringo Starr
</blockquote>

Steven Gaines provides a short Introduction, describing how he came to be involved.

----

'''Style'''

One of Brown's main achievements is to maintain a dispassionate, objective tone. He clearly is a fan of Lennon, for instance, but that doesn't stop him detailing John and Yoko's heroin addiction, or poking fun at some of Lennon's less considered political stances. This fits well with his prose style, which is simple and to the point, seldom straining to turn elegant phrases or draw attention to itself. Significantly, both these aspects occassionally break down together, when Brown can't keep his emotions from rippling the otherwise nonchalantly calm surface of his narrative. More often than not, this involves Brian Epstein, who comes across as a thoroughly decent yet perpetually tormented man, and whose tragic early death from a drug overdose affects Brown deeply. Here Brown describes the moment when Allen Klein, who'd been angling after Epstein's role of Beatles manager, hears of Epstein's death:

<blockquote>
In New York City, Allen Klein was driving across the George Washington Bridge to his home in New Jersey. Behind him, Manhattan was glittering like a diamond diorama. Just then there was a news flash on the radio: Brian Epstein was dead.

Klein snapped his fingers. "I've got 'em!" he said.
</blockquote>

----

'''Content'''

Cynthia Lennon provides the opening quotation for Chapter One:

<blockquote>
"I managed to observe the whirlpool of events without drowning..."
</blockquote>

Well, like many who were close to the Beatles, if she didn't drown, Cynthia certainly got thrown up against a few rocks. And if Brown hasn't written a traditional biography, he hasn't produced a hagiography either. He isn't afraid to show some of the less attractive aspects of the Beatles, how their wealth and fame affected their behaviour, and their sometimes brutally disdainful treatment of those closest to them.

Lennon, of course, could be bitter and cruel, and there's plenty of evidence of that here. But nobody emerges from these pages with a clean charge sheet. George Harrison forbids his wife Pattie to continue her modelling career, and keeps her a virtual prisoner, "isolated almost continuously in the big gloomy house with all the friar's heads". He exhibits titanic levels of naivety in his dealings with the Maharishi, even insisting - on a flight back from a trip he and Brown took to visit the guru in Sweden, to prevail upon him to cease using the Beatles' names in his publicity - that the Maharishi just doesn't understand the issues involved because "he is not a modern man". Paul McCartney, often seen as the most level-headed Beatle, seems - in Brown's account - on the verge of a clinical case of satyriasis. In his first flush of fame, McCartney's "already healthy ego exploded". He dumps his childhood sweetheart, telling her frankly that he can't be expected to tie himself down to 'a steady', now that he has so many girls constantly available to him. Even affable drummer Ringo doesn't escape criticism, particularly of his lacklustre solo recordings, disastrous business ventures, and unsophisticated tastes. The "simple and uneducated" Ringo was "still eating egg and chips for his dinner" as late as 1965, and after the Beatles split became "a cameo-part player without a role", a man who "had little daily purpose in life".

Brown paints an enjoyably gritty portrait of the Beatles' escapades, which the press turned a blind eye to at the time, notably their enthusiastic bouts of "drinking and whoring", frequent encounters with venereal disease, and propensity for getting into decidedly un-moptoppish scrapes.

A lot of space is devoted to Brian Epstein, whose story is fascinating and unbearably sad. One of Britain's very rare Labour-voting millionaires, Epstein would perhaps have been the biggest and most deserving beneficiary, if the equation implied by that famous lyric which gives the book its title, were to become a reality. Epstein gave huge amounts of love - to lovers and friends, and to the Beatles - but received only a tiny proportion of affection in return. Gay, Jewish, posh, and with several chips on each shoulder, Epstein never found lasting happiness, and although his eventual death was deemed accidental, it wasn't really a surprise to those who knew him well.

Epstein was a mass of contradictions: he could be savvy and tenacious, as when he refused to accept anything but top billing for the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show; but his regal mien and aristocratic sensibility were ill-suited to the sort of tough business dealings his job required. In any case, Epstein considered himself too rarefied a figure to stoop to grubby negotiations and often accepted incredibly bad deals just to avoid the unseemly unpleasantness of haggling. Most famous was the Seltaeb debacle, where Epstein lost the Beatles (and himself) untold millions by signing away the rights to all Beatles merchandising just as that market was exploding. When Nicky Byrne, who Epstein's lawyer David Jacobs liked because Byrne threw great parties, "agreed to take on the job" of handling Beatles merchandising, Jacobs asked what percentage of the merchandising income Byrne wanted to keep for himself. "Byrne glibly suggested 90 per cent for himself, expecting Jacobs to start bargaining. Jacobs nodded. 'Well,' he said, '10 per cent is better than nothing,' and he signed the contracts."

In one of the book's saddest and most shameful passages, Brown describes the Beatles' reactions to Epstein's death. The Beatles were with the Maharishi in Bangor, Wales - "strolling around the grounds, enjoying the last weekend of summer and toying with their new mantras" - when they heard that Epstein had died. They were "shocked and saddened but strangely sedate", George telling reporters that "there is no such thing as death" and that they knew "Brian will return because he was striving for happiness and desired bliss so much." Brown adds:

<blockquote>
"That was the extent of the eulogy Brian was to receive from the Beatles. Within a few days, when the shock had worn off, they made foolish jokes about him. "
</blockquote>

Brown is very good on John and Yoko's hermetic relationship, their drug use, and their bizarre lifestyle arrangements. His description of the prolonged periods Lennon spends spaced out in the sunroom at Weybridge linger long in the mind:

<blockquote>
"At Kenwood, on a shelf in the sunroom, sat a white, pharmaceutical mortar and pestle with which he mixed any combination of speed, barbituates, and psychedelics. Whenever he felt himself coming down from his mind-bending heights, he would lick a finger, take a swipe at the ingredients in the mortar, and suck the bitter film into his mouth.”
</blockquote>

Here's Brown on the closing of the ill-fated Apple boutique, yet another money-losing enterprise. The night before the shop's remaining stock was due to be given awar free to the public on a 'one item per person' basis, John and Yoko visited the shop to help themselves:

<blockquote>
"The Monday night before the giveaway, Yoko Ono and John arrived at the shop. Before the amazed employees, Yoko spread large swatches of fabric out on the floor and began to pile merchandise onto it waist high. Then she knotted the corners of the fabric hobo-style and dragged it out of the store on her back, like an Oriental Santa Claus, into John's Rolls-Royce."
</blockquote>

Authors are often accused, sometimes accurately, of openly courting controversy in order to shift units. But in the case of a subject as hallowed as the Beatles, it would be difficult to produce a book which generated no controversy at all. Brown's book drew flak for two main sections, both - appropriately enough - concerning matters of the heart. Most famously, in tackling the age-old question of whether, or rather to what extent, Lennon was aware of and indeed encouraged Epstein's infatuation with him, Brown seems to imply that Lennon did in fact go so far as to allow Epstein at least one chance to live out his dream. Soon after Cynthia, having spent two days in painful labour, gave birth to Julian Lennon, John visited her in the hospital, 'ecstatic' at the sight of his baby son. This didn't prevent him from announcing that he not only wanted Brian Epstein to be the boy's Godfather but, furthermore, that he and Brian were heading off on holiday to Spain together, just the two of them. During their trip to Spain, Epstein opened up to John about his sexuality. The passage is worth quoting at length:

<blockquote>

"If you had a choice, Eppy," John said, "if you could press a button and be hetero, would you do it?"
Brian thought for a moment. "Strangely, no," he said. 

A little later a peculiar game developed. John would point out some passing man to Brian, and Brian would explain to him what it was about the fellow that he found attractive or unattractive. "I was rather enjoying the experience," John said, "thinking like a writer at the time: I am experiencing this." And still later, back in their hotel suite, drunk and sleepy from the sweet Spanish wine, Brian and John undressed in silence. "It's okay, Eppy," John said, and lay down on his bed. Brian would have liked to have hugged him, but he was afraid. Instead, John lay there, tentative and still, and Brian fulfilled the fantasies he was so sure would bring him contentment, only to awake the next morning as hollow as before. 
</blockquote>

So, not 100% clear-cut. And we have no way of knowing where Brown got the details of this episode from, although it's possible that Epstein himself was the source. Ambiguity also attends the second controversial passage in Brown's book, where he details a supposed affair between George Harrison and Ringo's wife Maureen:

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

Originally published in 1983, the book was out of print for some time, before being re-issued in a slightly revised form in 2002. The revised edition added a 'Contents' section, and an expanded index. There is also a very worthwhile foreward by Anthony DeCurtis, placing the book, and Beatles studies in general, in contemporary context.

Peter Brown gave a very brief 'Q & A' interview to 'New York' magazine in 2002, in which the following exchange took place:

<blockquote>

'''''Q.''' Any corrections or new material in this edition''?

'''A.''' No -- I thought we'd leave well enough alone. If there was any criticism, it was, Why did you have to be so frank? Paul once said to me, "Why did you have to put in that I had VD in Hamburg?"

</blockquote>

However, there certainly was some additional material added. For instance, a section inserted at the beginning of Chapter Seven, describing 'Swinging London' in the Sixties as a mixture of elements from other cities, and decades:

<blockquote>

"It had a touch of the naughty nineties of Paris, the decadence of pre-War Berlin. It had a sprinkling of the glamour of Hollywood in the forties and the sexual passions and peccadilloes of la dolce vita in the fifites. It was like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel rewritten by Ian Fleming."

</blockquote>

It would be interesting to learn who did write such passages, if not Brown, for their tone is ever so slightly out of synch with the rest of the book.

----

'''References'''

[http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/n_8019/ Q & A: Peter Brown, New York Magazine, November 2002]

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]

The Love You Make

2009-05-19T19:03:28Z

MrMustard: Editions section

{{Infobox book |
| name = The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of The Beatles
| image = [[Image:LoveYouMake.jpg|230px]]
| image_caption = U.S. First Edition, February 1, 1983
| author = Peter Brown (with Steven Gaines)
| country = United States
| language = English
| genre = Novel
| publisher = McGraw-Hill (USA); Macmillan (UK)
| release_date = 1983
| media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
| pages = 448
| isbn = 007008159X / 0-07-008159-X
}}

'''Synopsis'''

Both this book's title, and its author's name, represent powerful fragments of Beatles lore. Peter Brown was best man at John Lennon's wedding to Yoko Ono - in fact he also later filled the same role for Paul McCartney - and was immortalised by Lennon, in 'The Ballad of John & Yoko', as the man wo "called to say, you can make it ok, you can get married in Gibraltar near Spain". The book's title is taken from the appropriately named Beatles song 'The End', quoted in the frontispiece:

:''And in the end'' 
:''The love you take'' 
:''Is equal to the love'' 
:''You make.''

:The last lyric from the last song on the last Beatles album.

However, nothing is ever simple in Beatles-land. A pedant could argue that 'Abbey Road' wasn't the Beatles' last album, since 'Let it Be', while recorded earlier, was released after it, and in any case 'The End' was not the last song on the finalised running order, being supplanted at the last minute by 'Her Majesty'. Still, great title for a Beatles book, and ‘love’ was always a subject close to the Beatles’ hearts.

Peter Brown, meanwhile, may not have been so much of an 'insider' as either his appearance in Lennon's self-mythologising ballad, or the subtitle of his book, suggest. He certainly can't claim to have been a member of the innermost circle of Beatles intimates - the so-called 'Liverpool Mafia' - such as, say, Neil Aspinall. This has led to some criticism, and it's true that Brown sometimes 'makes up' dialogue or thoughts for events and situations at which he was not a first-hand witness; but he was enough of an insider that he has an immensely interesting story to tell, and lucky for us he tells it in a brisk and entertaining way.

Similarly, this book can't be placed in the top rank of Beatles books, in terms of renown. While not obscure, it's nowhere near as well known as Philip Norman's 'Shout' or Albert Goldman's 'The Lives of John Lennon', for example. This is a pity, because while it may have its faults, this is a hugely enjoyable book, and an essential read for anyone interested in the Beatles.

----

'''Focus'''

This is not a conventional biography. Brown doesn't bother the reader with potted personal histories of the various Beatles' forbears, and in fact begins his narrative in May 1968, as Cynthia Lennon returns from holiday to find Yoko Ono sitting in the kitchen of the Lennons' Weybridge mansion, wearing Cynthia's dressing gown, and sporting an expression which is simultaneously inscrutable and unmistakably post-coital. This is a refreshingly grabby way to begin the book, and Brown keeps up this pacy style all the way through.

Brown's approach is anecdotal and episodic. While there are no longueurs, there are some significant lacunae, perhaps the most noticable being the absence of any real discussion, or even sometimes mention, of the music the Beatles made. When we read, towards the end of the book, of Paul McCartney's need to 'get away from it all' for a while on his Scottish farm, and are told that this has been caused by a renewed level of media attention, due to the recent release of 'Abbey Road', we realise with some surprise that this is the first time the album has been mentioned.

Even when Brown does skip back in time a bit, to cover the band's early days and their visits to Germany, he never goes any further back than their teenage years. At the other end of the scale, the narrative peters out a little towards the end, the period between the band's break-up and Lennon's murder taking only 50 pages or so.

Thematically, there's an unmissable imbalance between the large portion of pages given over to John Lennon and Brian Epstein, and the scant amount of space accorded to everyone else. It's natural, however, that Brown devotes so much time to Epstein, because it was through Epstein that Brown became involved with the Beatles and their multi-faceted, haphazardly run Apple organisation. Brown had worked for Epstein in Liverpool and after moving to London became probably his most loyal lieutenant, even cleaning up after Epstein's attempted suicide - and hiding the note he'd left next to the bottle of pills on his bedside table. This book is driven by personalities, with the Beatles being portrayed as owing their success, in large part, to the fact that Epstein fancied Lennon to the point of obsession. So it's apt that Brown takes such a personalised approach to both the structure and content of his narrative.

----

'''Structure'''

The book consists of 21 Chapters, each subdivided into several short, numbered sections. Most Chapters are preceded by an apposite quotation, mostly concerning the personalities involved. For instance: 

<blockquote>
"America is at our feet! Could anything be more important than this?"

 - - Brian Epstein in a phone call to Peter Brown
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
"What's a scruff like me doing with all this lot?"

 - - Ringo Starr
</blockquote>

Steven Gaines provides a short Introduction, describing how he came to be involved.

----

'''Style'''

One of Brown's main achievements is to maintain a dispassionate, objective tone. He clearly is a fan of Lennon, for instance, but that doesn't stop him detailing John and Yoko's heroin addiction, or poking fun at some of Lennon's less considered political stances. This fits well with his prose style, which is simple and to the point, seldom straining to turn elegant phrases or draw attention to itself. Significantly, both these aspects occassionally break down together, when Brown can't keep his emotions from rippling the otherwise nonchalantly calm surface of his narrative. More often than not, this involves Brian Epstein, who comes across as a thoroughly decent yet perpetually tormented man, and whose tragic early death from a drug overdose affects Brown deeply. Here Brown describes the moment when Allen Klein, who'd been angling after Epstein's role of Beatles manager, hears of Epstein's death:

<blockquote>
In New York City, Allen Klein was driving across the George Washington Bridge to his home in New Jersey. Behind him, Manhattan was glittering like a diamond diorama. Just then there was a news flash on the radio: Brian Epstein was dead.

Klein snapped his fingers. "I've got 'em!" he said.
</blockquote>

----

'''Content'''

Cynthia Lennon provides the opening quotation for Chapter One:

<blockquote>
"I managed to observe the whirlpool of events without drowning..."
</blockquote>

Well, like many who were close to the Beatles, if she didn't drown, Cynthia certainly got thrown up against a few rocks. And if Brown hasn't written a traditional biography, he hasn't produced a hagiography either. He isn't afraid to show some of the less attractive aspects of the Beatles, how their wealth and fame affected their behaviour, and their sometimes brutally disdainful treatment of those closest to them.

Lennon, of course, could be bitter and cruel, and there's plenty of evidence of that here. But nobody emerges from these pages with a clean charge sheet. George Harrison forbids his wife Pattie to continue her modelling career, and keeps her a virtual prisoner, "isolated almost continuously in the big gloomy house with all the friar's heads". He exhibits titanic levels of naivety in his dealings with the Maharishi, even insisting - on a flight back from a trip he and Brown took to visit the guru in Sweden, to prevail upon him to cease using the Beatles' names in his publicity - that the Maharishi just doesn't understand the issues involved because "he is not a modern man". Paul McCartney, often seen as the most level-headed Beatle, seems - in Brown's account - on the verge of a clinical case of satyriasis. In his first flush of fame, McCartney's "already healthy ego exploded". He dumps his childhood sweetheart, telling her frankly that he can't be expected to tie himself down to 'a steady', now that he has so many girls constantly available to him. Even affable drummer Ringo doesn't escape criticism, particularly of his lacklustre solo recordings, disastrous business ventures, and unsophisticated tastes. The "simple and uneducated" Ringo was "still eating egg and chips for his dinner" as late as 1965, and after the Beatles split became "a cameo-part player without a role", a man who "had little daily purpose in life".

Brown paints an enjoyably gritty portrait of the Beatles' escapades, which the press turned a blind eye to at the time, notably their enthusiastic bouts of "drinking and whoring", frequent encounters with venereal disease, and propensity for getting into decidedly un-moptoppish scrapes.

A lot of space is devoted to Brian Epstein, whose story is fascinating and unbearably sad. One of Britain's very rare Labour-voting millionaires, Epstein would perhaps have been the biggest and most deserving beneficiary, if the equation implied by that famous lyric which gives the book its title, were to become a reality. Epstein gave huge amounts of love - to lovers and friends, and to the Beatles - but received only a tiny proportion of affection in return. Gay, Jewish, posh, and with several chips on each shoulder, Epstein never found lasting happiness, and although his eventual death was deemed accidental, it wasn't really a surprise to those who knew him well.

Epstein was a mass of contradictions: he could be savvy and tenacious, as when he refused to accept anything but top billing for the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show; but his regal mien and aristocratic sensibility were ill-suited to the sort of tough business dealings his job required. In any case, Epstein considered himself too rarefied a figure to stoop to grubby negotiations and often accepted incredibly bad deals just to avoid the unseemly unpleasantness of haggling. Most famous was the Seltaeb debacle, where Epstein lost the Beatles (and himself) untold millions by signing away the rights to all Beatles merchandising just as that market was exploding. When Nicky Byrne, who Epstein's lawyer David Jacobs liked because Byrne threw great parties, "agreed to take on the job" of handling Beatles merchandising, Jacobs asked what percentage of the merchandising income Byrne wanted to keep for himself. "Byrne glibly suggested 90 per cent for himself, expecting Jacobs to start bargaining. Jacobs nodded. 'Well,' he said, '10 per cent is better than nothing,' and he signed the contracts."

In one of the book's saddest and most shameful passages, Brown describes the Beatles' reactions to Epstein's death. The Beatles were with the Maharishi in Bangor, Wales - "strolling around the grounds, enjoying the last weekend of summer and toying with their new mantras" - when they heard that Epstein had died. They were "shocked and saddened but strangely sedate", George telling reporters that "there is no such thing as death" and that they knew "Brian will return because he was striving for happiness and desired bliss so much." Brown adds:

<blockquote>
"That was the extent of the eulogy Brian was to receive from the Beatles. Within a few days, when the shock had worn off, they made foolish jokes about him. "
</blockquote>

Brown is very good on John and Yoko's hermetic relationship, their drug use, and their bizarre lifestyle arrangements. His description of the prolonged periods Lennon spends spaced out in the sunroom at Weybridge linger long in the mind:

<blockquote>
"At Kenwood, on a shelf in the sunroom, sat a white, pharmaceutical mortar and pestle with which he mixed any combination of speed, barbituates, and psychedelics. Whenever he felt himself coming down from his mind-bending heights, he would lick a finger, take a swipe at the ingredients in the mortar, and suck the bitter film into his mouth.”
</blockquote>

Here's Brown on the closing of the ill-fated Apple boutique, yet another money-losing enterprise. The night before the shop's remaining stock was due to be given awar free to the public on a 'one item per person' basis, John and Yoko visited the shop to help themselves:

<blockquote>
"The Monday night before the giveaway, Yoko Ono and John arrived at the shop. Before the amazed employees, Yoko spread large swatches of fabric out on the floor and began to pile merchandise onto it waist high. Then she knotted the corners of the fabric hobo-style and dragged it out of the store on her back, like an Oriental Santa Claus, into John's Rolls-Royce."
</blockquote>

----

'''Criticism'''

----

'''Editions'''

Originally published in 1983, the book was out of print for some time, before being re-issued in a slightly revised form in 2002. The revised edition added a 'Contents' section, and an expanded index. There is also a very worthwhile foreward by Anthony DeCurtis, placing the book, and Beatles studies in general, in contemporary context.

Peter Brown gave a very brief 'Q & A' interview to 'New York' magazine in 2002, in which the following exchange took place:

<blockquote>

'''''Q.''' Any corrections or new material in this edition''?

'''A.''' No -- I thought we'd leave well enough alone. If there was any criticism, it was, Why did you have to be so frank? Paul once said to me, "Why did you have to put in that I had VD in Hamburg?"

</blockquote>

However, there certainly was some additional material added. For instance, a section inserted at the beginning of Chapter Seven, describing 'Swinging London' in the Sixties as a mixture of elements from other cities, and decades:

<blockquote>

"It had a touch of the naughty nineties of Paris, the decadence of pre-War Berlin. It had a sprinkling of the glamour of Hollywood in the forties and the sexual passions and peccadilloes of la dolce vita in the fifites. It was like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel rewritten by Ian Fleming."

</blockquote>

It would be interesting to learn who did write such passages, if not Brown, for their tone is ever so slightly out of synch with the rest of the book.

----

'''References'''

[http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/n_8019/ Q & A: Peter Brown, New York Magazine, November 2002]

[[Category:Books About The Beatles]]