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Lot Essay
Revolver is considered by many Beatles aficiandos to be their finest album, author John Robertson describes it as having.....its feet in The Beatles' past, but its head in the clouds of the future; and today it has a freshness, clarity and enthusiasm that little of The Beatles' other work can match....there was an electric thrill to 'Revolver', a richness of sound and production, that is still the peak against which all subsequent pop music has to be judged.... It went to no.1 in the both the U.K. and U.S. charts. In a recently published article in Record Collector, Peter Doggett explains the importance of the recording included in this lot:
..Very brief fragments were aired in the US more than a decade ago on 'The Lost Lennon Tapes' radio series. But the 25-minute sequence of recordings, assembled by Lennon himself for Yoko Ono's previous husband, Tony Cox, has never surfaced before.
-- She Said, She Said was famously inspired by a remark made to Lennon by actor Peter Fonda during a shared LSD trip in 1965. But the composer quickly moved beyond Fonda's claim, I know what it's like to be dead, to examine his own bittersweet childhood in song for the first time. The Cox tape shows him experimenting with additional sections of the song which weren't included in the finished version, and weighing up unused lyrical ideas: When I was a little boy, I never had no toy....and I might be green, I might be green.
Particularly fascinating is the way in which Lennon gradually strips away the weakest elements of the lyric and melody, briefly taking the process so far that he loses the entire "when I was a boy" section. A song which sounds like a maudlin dirge on its early run-throughs is transformed by a change to a higher key, after which She Said, She Said takes on a much more recognisable form. The tape ends with Lennon listening to a playback of his work to date, while a voice suspiciously like Paul McCartney's chats in the background, and Lennon complains: God, I just don't know what I'm doing, I'll have to give up. I'm just going crazy with it!."
This lot marks the first occasion on which a composing tape by either Lennon or McCartney has been offered at auction.
..Very brief fragments were aired in the US more than a decade ago on 'The Lost Lennon Tapes' radio series. But the 25-minute sequence of recordings, assembled by Lennon himself for Yoko Ono's previous husband, Tony Cox, has never surfaced before.
-- She Said, She Said was famously inspired by a remark made to Lennon by actor Peter Fonda during a shared LSD trip in 1965. But the composer quickly moved beyond Fonda's claim, I know what it's like to be dead, to examine his own bittersweet childhood in song for the first time. The Cox tape shows him experimenting with additional sections of the song which weren't included in the finished version, and weighing up unused lyrical ideas: When I was a little boy, I never had no toy....and I might be green, I might be green.
Particularly fascinating is the way in which Lennon gradually strips away the weakest elements of the lyric and melody, briefly taking the process so far that he loses the entire "when I was a boy" section. A song which sounds like a maudlin dirge on its early run-throughs is transformed by a change to a higher key, after which She Said, She Said takes on a much more recognisable form. The tape ends with Lennon listening to a playback of his work to date, while a voice suspiciously like Paul McCartney's chats in the background, and Lennon complains: God, I just don't know what I'm doing, I'll have to give up. I'm just going crazy with it!."
This lot marks the first occasion on which a composing tape by either Lennon or McCartney has been offered at auction.