Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Paperback)

by Devin McKinney (Author)
Key Phrases: est vivus, unintelligible truth, butcher cover, John Lennon, Hard Day's Night, Strawberry Fields (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
I believe Magic Circles quickly will be recognized as one of a handful of classic rock texts. This is simply a wonderful book, and I mean that quite literally - a book full of wonder. It filled me with the joy of intellectual discovery, challenged hard-set conventional notions I'd long harbored, and perhaps most surprising for a book of this kind, filled me with joy to read: it is a joyous book.
--Kevin Dettmar, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (20031015)

The Beatles occupy a unique moment in the history of popular entertainment, one in which the relationship between artist and audience undergoes a profound transformation. The Beatles mattered to people in ways that no previous (and few subsequent) popular entertainers have mattered. Sinatra may have inspired devotion, and Elvis mass hysteria, but only the Beatles inspired metaphysical debate.
--Ben Saunders, University of Oregon (20031210)

At its core, Magic Circles traces how the Beatles, as working-class musicians who came "out of the sticks" to transform the world by sheer force of will as well as talent, were able to enter the lives of millions of people and get under their skins as well as into their dreams. Thus McKinney argues their music both colonized and liberated their audience's imagination, laying the psychological foundation for the ecstasies and upheavals of the 1960s: the Beatles are presented as agents of desire combined with rebellion (a heady brew indeed), but who at the height of the '60s carnival-cum-revolution appeared at least in part as double agents, cover-up artists, traitors to the zeitgeist. These and other contradictions are rendered vividly here. The most original and valuable contribution that Magic Circles makes is as a map of collective sensibility: depicting the Beatles as a white hole in the fabric of official culture, disgorging meanings, fantasies, and mutations for all to share.
--Howard Hampton (20031210)

This is the book to read on the Beatles, whether or not you've read all the others. It is the critical look the Four have always deserved--clear-eyed, funny, daring, continually surprising, extraordinary in its reach and breadth. Devin McKinney, a generation younger than the Beatles and their core fans, is unburdened by received ideas, and he writes like a dream.
--Luc Sante, author of Low Life (20040104)

You'll find it hard to resist the urge to leap up and play whatever song [McKinney's] dissecting; though you may think you're sick of 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun,' Mr. McKinney will convince you otherwise. Any fan under 40 may be a phony Beatlemaniac, but new generations continue to wrap their heads around The White Album, and Magic Circles is a welcome reminder of why that record remains continually fresh.
--Brett Sokol (New York Observer 20040527)

McKinney, born in 1966, never experienced the [Beatles] phenomenon firsthand. His perspective grants him freedom to see new combinations, to consider and even dismantle the existing critical apparatus; in doing so, he jolts his subject back to bristling life...If this is a history, it's a poetic one, driven by smart, breathless connections rather than a need to gather all the facts.
--Ed Park (Village Voice 20040601)

With a white-hot prose style and a poet's instinct for metaphor, independent scholar McKinney exhumes, interrogates, and otherwise energizes the Fab Four in all their musical glory and mythic resonance. Born too late (1966) for phase one Beatlemania, he brings to the job a necessary detachment, a willingness to puncture pieties, and finally a script-flipping thesis: The Beatles were the '60s. If he gets surprising mileage out of the most lurid artifacts of that collective dream--the butcher cover, the Paul-is-dead rumor--he's also terrific at maximizing the excitement of a Reeperbahn stand or a mysterious bootleg, and always renders the music in three dimensions. (Voice Literary Supplement )

From the very first lines of Magic Circles, you know you're in for a different sort of ride...Devin McKinney's Magic Circles is as much pop culture comment as it is biography. In either role it's a fascinating study of a time--and a band--worth remembering. (January Magazine )

Using literary techniques of montage and free association not unlike those found in the Beatles' more psychedelic songs, McKinney spins a fabulous, fabulist psychic and social history of the band...A detailed, exhaustive and creative look at the Beatles that challenges readers to hear them with new ears.
--Seth Rogovoy (Newsday )

[An] intelligent study of the Beatles...McKinney crunches the facts and pulps the possibilities before tossing everything into a great metaphysical soup, and his book carries sentences not unlike those Norman Mailer used to write forty years ago in the Village Voice.
--Andrew O'Hagan (New York Review of Books )

[McKinney] is very good indeed on tracking the Beatles' collective footprints through the sands of the collective unconscious. He's a pleasure to read on the Marcos debacle and the 'butcher' photograph (in a chapter entitled 'Meat'): his deconstruction of Help! is little short of masterly...This is the work of a critic bold enough to cite 'Happiness is a Warm Gun' as 'the defining song of the Beatles' greatest album.'
--Charles Shaar Murray (Mojo )

Product Description
"

No one expressed the heart and soul of the Sixties as powerfully as the Beatles did through the words, images, and rhythms of their music. In Magic Circles Devin McKinney uncovers the secret history of a generation and a pivotal moment in twentieth-century culture. He reveals how the Beatles enacted the dream life of their time and shows how they embodied a kaleidoscope of desire and anguish for all who listened--hippies or reactionaries, teenage fans or harried parents, Bob Dylan or Charles Manson. The reader who dares to re-enter the vortex that was the Sixties will appreciate, perhaps for the first time, much of what lay beneath the social trauma of the day.

Delving into concerts and interviews, films and music, outtakes and bootlegs, Devin McKinney brings to bear the insights of history, aesthetics, sociology, psychology, and mythology to account for the depth and resonance of the Beatles' impact. His book is also a uniquely multifaceted appreciation of the group's artistic achievement, exploring their music as both timeless expression and visceral response to their historical moment. Starting in the cellars of Liverpool and Hamburg, and continuing through the triumph of Beatlemania, the groundbreaking studio albums, and the last brutal, sorrowful thrust of the White Album, Magic Circles captures both the dream and the reality of four extraordinary musicians and their substance as artists. At once an entrancing narrative and an analytical montage, the book follows the drama, comedy, mystery, irony, and curious off-ramps of investigation and inquiry that contributed to one of the most amazing odysseys in pop culture.

"

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (October 18, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067401636X
• ISBN-13: 978-0674016361
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #327,854 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I Am He As John Is Me, but I don't think we're all together, February 16, 2004

By	Robert Moslow (Albuquerque, New Mexico United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Hardcover)

The title, the front and back cover, the inner and outer dust jacket flaps, they grabbed me. References to sociology, psychology, sexuality, and even physics. This book will undoubtedly assist me to ascertain just why The Beatles seem to matter so much...Was it just the time that I grew up in, or are they a musical force which will transcend not only generations, but centuries, milleniums? Written by someone from a younger generation, I'll be able to get a more "objective" analysis! I had high hopes. They were dashed.

Mr. McKinney gets credit for adventuring into heady places. Places more interesting than, "Mr. Epstein liked the sound and looks of the boys and..." But these places full of potential were not realized, as Mr. McKinney's pretty words meandered like a restless wind inside a letter box. One stumbles onto nuggets and kernels. Provacative pieces of the puzzle. Mr. McKinney illustrates how The Beatles reflect society and influence it. (Yes, but how, why, and ultimately, why do we care?) Mr. McKinney draws upon Freud & portrays The Beatles as a manifestation of the audiences' wishes & desires, as well as pushing their audience to wish & desire. (So did Frank Capra & Lenny Bruce and, for some, John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.)

I continued to eagerly pour through each chapter's poetic imagery of toilet associations, on holes in the universe a la Einstein & Socrates, up to and including the comparing and contrasting of John Lennon & Charles Manson... I still continued to hold out hope in searching for The Meaning of The Beatles. But, as the pages chock full of swirling
thoughts/reveries/cultural lore went by, the more I came instead upon the The Meaning of Mr. McKinney. Revolution #9 as a masterpiece? McCartney as complex as Lennon? The Beatles creating The Sixties and being crushed by The Sixties because of the inability of its inhabitants to integrate demands for peace with feelings of rage?

Not everyone from the Sixties was either a member of The Silent Majority nor a flag burning, drug-crazed, free-love hippie.
I could march with my high school to demonstrate against the Vietnam War, until it was time for me to fulfill my obligations by reporting for my 2:00 PM shift as a 16 year-old stockboy in Alexander's Department Store in The Bronx, New York, 1968. That makes me a Day Tripper or just more reflective of the millions of teens & some adults who admired the Beatles?

Then came the final chapter, which I recommend be read first. An enjoyable autobiographical account of Mr. McKinney's interest in the Sixties! Much less pressured in delivery. More relaxed with his audience. Less need for a dictionary. Now it makes sense! That's what the book should have been about! It would have been both more interesting and possibly more significantly revealing. The title for which could have been: "The Beatles and Me: Search for Identity".

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this, brother; may it serve you well, December 29, 2003

By	Sebastian Thaler (New Milford, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Hardcover)

An astonishingly insightful, personal, and comprehensive interpretation of the Beatles mythos. McKinney successfully analyzes the special bond between the Beatles and their audience, in all of its kaleidoscopic complexity, from Quarry Men days to Apple rooftop and beyond. His organizing metaphors--including circles, holes, meat (!), and others--are strikingly original and on-target. The sections on the Paul-is-dead rumor and the dawn of the bootleg industry were especially fascinating to me. (It turns out that one bootleg song I'd always enjoyed may not even be by the Beatles at all!) Given its stance as a work of musical/historical/cultural criticism, the book is ideal for fans already somewhat familiar with the basic Beatles chronology. So glad the Village Voice Literary Supplement ran a review of this book, alerting me of its existence.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ignore "Absolute Garbage", March 27, 2004

By	S. Overfield (pacific palisades, ca United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Hardcover)

I've read dozens and dozens of books on the Beatles, and this one is certainly the best. While the second half of the book loses its way--the author does warn the reader of a new direction--and certainly the book suffers from some "cultural criticism run amok", The Beatles have never received such an intellectual love letter. Shawn H. accuses the author of writing the book only to make a name for himself, when in his own review he casually mentions that he'll be teaching a course on the Beatles, committing the very crime of which he accuses the author. Magic Circles is the most thoughtful and intelligent analysis of the Beatles and interpretation of their story I've yet to read. Hopefully this book is the first of many other similar analyses. This book correctly recognizes that the Beatles exist outside the scope of normal history and other legends; they are biblical in stature.