Steve Turner's Beatles '66: The Revolutionary Year is a solid addition to my Beatles bookshelf (who am I kidding, bookshelves, at this point). It's been a given that 1967, with the release of Sgt. Pepper and "Strawberry Fields Forever," was the year in which the Beatles truly solidified their legacy and weren't going to fade away. But in this mix of reportage (second-hand) and interpretation, Turner explains how, in the his mind, 1966 was truly the turning point year in the Beatles' career.
Among the reasons he presents: 1966 is the year of Revolver, the album they spent the most time working on (almost three months) and which featured music that would be difficult to reproduce onstage (most notably, the psychedelic masterpiece "Tomorrow Never Knows"); for the first time, the Beatles ran into controversy and protests, due mostly to John Lennon's out-of-context remark about being more popular than Jesus; drugs became a major influence in the creation of their music; and this was the year they quit touring, which opened them up to spend nearly unlimited amounts of time in the studio.
To his credit, Turner is pretty good about sticking just to 1966, ignoring what must have been a strong urge to write at least a bit about Sgt. Pepper, which they didn't start to record until the beginning of 1967, though he does get to cover the gestation of Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, which pointed the way to Pepper. Turner succumbs at times to that unfortunate trend of including everything he dug up, whether or not it's crucial to his argument; for example, a mention of Ray Davies's published review of Revolver leads to three unnecessary paragraphs about the relation of the Kinks to the Beatles. There is much that should have been trimmed away but I can't complain too much when the rest of the book is so interesting. I've another Beatles book on deck for next time.
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