Revolution in the Head

Background

MacDonald first began working as a journalist with the New Musical Express in the 1970s. He had moved away from popular music writing by the early 1990s with The New Shostakovich, his re-evaluation of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich against earlier KGB written accounts, but revisited the subject when he started writing for the music magazine Mojo. He wrote a lengthy retrospective on Nick Drake, whom he personally knew when living in Cambridge in the early 1970s, and this led to writing a work about the Beatles.

Format

The book's main section comprises entries on every song recorded by the group, in order of first recording date, rather than date of release. Each entry includes a list of the musicians and instruments present on the track, the song's producers and engineers, and the dates of its recording sessions and its first UK and US releases. MacDonald provides musicological and sociological commentary on each song, ranging in length from a single sentence for "Wild Honey Pie" to several pages for tracks such as "I Want to Hold Your Hand", "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Revolution 1".

The book also contains the essay "Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade", MacDonald's analysis of the Beatles' relationship to the social and cultural changes of the 1960s. Later editions of the book added further commentary: the preface to the first revised edition discusses the British art school scene that spawned the Beatles and some of the differences between British and US culture that affect the two nations' respective views of the group; and the second covers subjects such as the Beatles' continued popularity into the 21st century, criticism of their lyrics, and the death of George Harrison. The book concludes with a month-by-month chronology of the 1960s (consisting of a table listing events in the Beatles' career alongside significant events in UK pop music, current affairs and culture), a bibliography, a glossary, a discography, and an index of songs and their keys.

The first edition of the book was published in 1994 and covered every song that had been officially released by the group during their active career between 1962 and 1970. The first revised edition, published in 1997, added tracks that had recently been officially released on Live at the BBC and the Anthology series. A second revised edition incorporated a number of factual updates taken from books including The Beatles Anthology and Barry Miles' Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now; this edition had been prepared by MacDonald, but was published posthumously in 2005.

Critical response

The book drew a favourable response from critics. The Guardian's Richard Williams wrote "no other critic ... contributed more to an enlightened enjoyment of the work of the Beatles." Music journalist John Bergstrom said the book surpassed Mark Lewisohn's earlier Sessions as the de facto factual reference for the group's recording career, adding that it "will leave you scrambling to your Beatles collection for a new listen rather than a familiar or nostalgic one, and that is quite an accomplishment". Charles Shaar Murray noted that the book clearly displayed MacDonald's favouritism towards mid-1960s pop, but nevertheless said anyone wanting to disagree "is going to have to argue as cogently and energetically as he does".

Paul McCartney has said he read the book, and has commented on it in interviews with Pitchfork in 2007 and with Rolling Stone in 2014. He disputes the accuracy of MacDonald's readings, and is irritated when inaccurate assertions from "a very highly respected tome" are propagated as facts.