Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: June 07 2013, 13:48 |
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Quote (ingresman @ June 07 2013, 11:47) | The two paqes contradict (as ever) much of what I've ever read. E.g I've read more than once that the bells were being taken away and our hero says "Can I keep them?", the new article seems to suggest he wanted to use the bells because he used them before. Maybe my interpretation but there you go. Second one is conventional wisdom about record companies wanting to put words on, new article seems to suggest Branson sugested it. |
This is the issue with history, really...there are a whole lot of stories that float around and there's not always a lot more behind them than one person's memory. There can be all sorts of reasons that might not be accurate, and of course it gets even more complex when two people have very different memories of an event!
I think from a historian's point of view, it's good to closely examine the commonly held interpretations of events to see if there's not a bit more too it than has been told before...but of course, to do that by just going with a different person's memories without attempting to even analyse the discrepancies isn't going to be helping a whole lot!
The story about the bells could perhaps be investigated further, I know the receipt for the hire of the instruments for the album was kept, so the thing to do would be to see whether there's a receipt for the session beforehand to see if the bells were hired for that or not. That, of course, wouldn't conclusively prove that Mike didn't just happen to ask for some without having seen them in The Manor, but it would at least go towards proving whether there would have been a set leaving the studio at the time he started recording, which he could have requested to keep.
I think there have been other things Mike's said which suggest he'd already tried some tubular bells in Abbey Road, so that would certainly support that part of the reason for wanting them was that he'd tried them before (which isn't incompatible with him seeing a set and asking to keep them...but I'll have to read the article to see whether the interpretation put forward there is incompatible).
I can say in general, from having talked to certain people who've been close to Mike...sometimes people's recollections are very different to the story that's been told through Mike's recollections (including Changeling) and the other published histories to date. I can only say that it goes to show that it can be a real minefield, and there are things which perhaps need some more careful analysis, ideally with the help of some archival sources (though how much is in existence is another question I don't know the answer to...). It's all very intriguing...
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