Sad Revolution in the Head

25 years ago while living in Oxford, Mississippi I practically memorized Ian MacDonald's instant classic, Revolution in the Head. I'd never seen such an exhaustive account of every Beatles recording: who played what, how the sessions went down, etc etc. I've mentioned it over the years on this blog, such as here.

Looking for something to buy/read while in quarantine like everybody else, last week I remembered I'd left my copy in Brooklyn when I left in 2012. So fuck it, I re-bought the much-updated edition from amazon.

I was enjoying dipping back into it when I noticed this:

I was totally bummed that I hadn't even realized he'd died, and all the way back in 2003. Someone whose book I read and re-read for hundred of hours, and he died 17 years ago without me knowing it until just now. It reminded me of Jennifer Risko, a girl I knew in college who had been dead for 13 years before I found out in 2010:

Thanks to the All-Google power of the internet, just now I found out that she died of leukemia in January 1997. What the fuck. Obviously, I haven't seen her in almost 20 years, so it's not like we were close. But she was the first girl I asked out in college. I can still see her in that "oh so 90's!" faux-suede brown jacket of the day, walking back to Wheeler Dorm, and I got up the guts to approach her, and I told her what I told her above. Now, everything after that sucked, she had no interest in me, but I can remember that moment clear as a bell. We were so young. Freshman year. And it turns out not only is she dead, but she's been dead for 13 years. Died at the age of 24. After I met her, she only lived another six years. Mind-boggling. It's not even as if she's just died, and the scars are fresh; people close to her have had almost a decade and a half to move on. She's the ghost in the yearbook, a goddam black and white photo. Yellowed pages. But I can still see her in that blue/yellow Heidelberg High sweatshirt, getting on the elevator. Goddam. 1997. It's amazing what can take the wind out of your sails on any given night. 

Anyways. Just sad, I guess. From a 2014 article in The Atlantic, celebrating the book's 20th anniversary:

But with no disrespect to other authors or their labors, if it’s a radical reexperiencing of the Beatles that you’re after, a refreshing of your Beatle-chemicals, there’s only one book you need.

His genius, his joy, was for the particular—the chord, the chemical, the warped time in a Ringo drum fill. Exemplary while being utterly idiosyncratic (this is the crowning paradox of Revolution in the Head), MacDonald turned critical prose into a sensorium, and his reactions linger and extend like the “jangling arpeggiated fade” at the end of “A Hard Day’s Night”: “a ticktocking swing between a fifthless Am7 and F major, each contained within the song’s opening chord.” Ticktocking outward, forever.