Toru Mitseui (ed.), Peter Ingham :"The Complete, Illustrated Discography of the Beatles' Records in Japan 1962-1986" Published by: Shinko Music Publishing Kanji Hirota (ed.):
"Beatleworld nowhere" Published by: Produce Centre
"TOKYO BEATLES FAN CLUB MAGAZINE" Published by : Tokyo Beatles Fan Club
David Schwartz:"Listening To The Beatles Vol.1" Published by: Popular Culture, Ink. Jun Asano (ed.), Yuuji Terao :
"Record Collectors extra number-The Beatles Complete Works1, 2" Published by: Music Magazine.
Admired by Sir George Martin, Sir Paul McCartney, and the late Derek Taylor, REVOLUTION IN THE HEAD has become the must-have book on The Beatles.
'Arguably the most indispensable Beatles book ever published has just become even more indispensable. MacDonald's track-by-track analysis of the Fabs' entire recorded output, originally published in 1994, was a breathtaking overview not just of the world's greatest group but of the politics and culture of the Western world over the last 35 years. This new edition is updated to include the extra material from Apple's exhaustive Live At The BBC double and the three Anthology sets.
Revolver Review
"I was in Germany on tour. just before Revolver came out. I started listening to the album and I got really down because I thought the whole thing was out of tune. Everyone had to reassure me it was OK."
That's how Paul McCartney remembers this album. It's to be doubted that he needs any further reassurance by now. The Beatles' seventh LP. Revolver was released on August 5. 1966: it took its place, as Beatle records inevitably did in those days. at the top of the charts, and it has never stopped selling since. Like the group's other albums it was reincarnated on compact disc in 1987: the re-issue programme was supervised by original producer George Martin and it was clear the appearance of this legendary back catalogue would endorse the compact disc as rock's supreme medium from here on.
McCartney nowadays looks back at 1966 as being the most creatively exciting period of his life - an era when The Beatles and their peers were daily overturning their approach to life and music through the discoveries of avant-garde ideas, new drugs, new religions. There are other Beatle records that are every bit as enjoyable as Revolver,- but none that marks a turning point - for the group themselves and pop in general so dramatically as this one. Revolver , (the title was just a pun about a spinning disc:- they nearly called it Abracadabra-or the Beatles On Safari - or even cartoon sex) was longer in the making than any previous Beatles collection. Recording had begun at EMl's Abbey Road studios on April 6 of that year, continued intermittently for the next 10 weeks, and was interrupted on May 1 while the group made their last UK stage appearance,- at the NME Pollwinners' Concert in Wembley. When the record was released, they were touring overseas: and at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on August 29. they played their last public show together. From now on the studio would be their natural habitat. For the first time, they`d produced a set of songs that could not conceivably be reproduced live. The Revolver sessions even gave birth to that gem of studio jargon, "flanging". for a form of double-tracking. The Beatles' previous LP.- 1965's Rubber Soul.- had confirmed their status as pop music's most sophisticated and pioneering writers. For some people. Revolver was the point at which The Beatles stopped being a pop group at all. Many sensed it was an entirely novel departure - but was it for the better? Jonathan King. as ever. was in no doubt: "Pseudo-intellectuaI rubbish." he declared. A few fans were dismayed by their heroes' weird innovations. One distraught Beatlemaniac wrote to Beatles Monthly lamenting the passing of "the Beatles we used to know before thev went stark, raving mad." And years later, in 1983. the poet Philip Larkin recalled the Fab Four's transition from mop-tops to something stranger, and more remote: "Their fans stayed with them, and the nuttier intelligentsia, but they lost the typists at the Cavern." There were moments on Revolver that bore no relation to anything heard before. But for The Beatles in 1966, competition was hotting up: two of rock's most astonishing albums were reaching the record shops at the same time as Revolver, namely Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde and The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.These were rivals to inspire and excite. The avant-garde, too, began paying court to pop music, and found The Beatles eager to learn from them - so did a whole raft of gurus. Eastern and Western. mystic and, sometimes, plain daft. Meanwhile. pot was supplanting booze, and LSD was beginning to work its certain spell. Genius and gibberish walked hand in hand. Of John's songs on the record. I'm Only Sleeping and She Said, She Said go the furthest in abolishing the sunny mop-top image: the former has him in retreat, crawling to the safety of a psychological hole: the latter is savagely bleak (its Iyric drawn from a stoned exchange with Peter Fonda) 'Dr Robert' and 'And Your Bird Can Sing' bear witness to his infatuation with the cryptic new writing of Dylan, while the the closing track Tomorrow Never Knows (its title, like A Hard Day's Night, came from a casual remark by Ringo) was the most startling of all. John had been talked out of his first plan, namely using 1,000 Tibetan monks to chant the backing, but still the cosmic scramble of the track seems to land upon the album like an alien spacecraft. In Love You To, George essayed the first full-blown fusion of pop and Indian styles, although the opening track, Taxman, suggested his concerns had not abandoned the material world entirely. And Yellow Submarine, for all its romping, upbeat jollity, had a distinctly surrealistic cast to it - one more fully developed in the cartoon feature film that followed - as well as a range of sophisticated studio effects that anticipates later sound-collages such as I Am The Walrus and Revolution 9. In later years John Lennon never felt obliged to be polite about the songs of his old partner Paul McCartney, but he always acknowledged the brilliance of For No One and Here, There And Everywhere - alongside Eleanor Rigby they supply Revolver's quota of classic ballads, and a reminder that The Beatles' taste for innovation would never displace their dedication to melody. Even so, Revolver was baffling for some. Within a year, teenyboppers were looking to The Monkees and the new bubblegum pop for a chirpier, more uncomplicated kind of fun than The Beatles were willing to supply. The mums and dads were perplexed as well: beat music they could cope with, but this? They would drift away from The Beatles and all they represented; by 1968 the singles charts were stuffed with crooners in dinner suits - Vince Hill, Englebert, even Ken Dodd - singing songs of romance and moonlight. Highbrows of the day would acclaim complexity as being the salvation of popular music, rescuing it from all that was banal and adolescent. Others wondered if this new cleverness wouldn't prove to be pop's undoing. But Revolver liberated rock music. It created a space in which genuine creativity could flourish. Without this album, far less wondrous music would have been made afterwards. For a few heady years - as The Beatles followed Revolver with Sgt. Pepper, and Strawberry Fields and IAm The Walrus - it really seemed as if anything might be possible. And who's ever proved that it's not?