Rating My CD's: They Won't See Me.

4. The Beatles -- Rubber Soul

I've made a long habit of not particularly liking the Beatles very much, mostly out of sheer obstinate contrariness. Something about the media force-feeding of this long-gone group with only two members still above ground down the collective throats of those too young to remember them has always made me gag.  It's easily the most galling manifestation of the Boomer Grief-Nostalgia Complex: every few years some corporate clown decides to repackage the same old songs we've heard a thousand times, cries "The Beatles!" and lets slip the dogs of Pavlov. Say what you will about the Rolling Stones, they at least have the decency to record some crappy new songs to summon us to hear the old ones.

So I used to make great show of denouncing the Fab Four with any one of the following epithets:

• The Original Boy Band
• Buddy Holly Wanna-Be's Who Wrote Show-Tunes
• Nancy-Boys Hiding In Their Studios
• Boring, Overproduced, Self-Indulgent Merchants of Dull Schlock Disguised as Creativity
• The Cause of Everything that Sucks in Music

Now, if a great deal of this was unfair, some of it contained a grain of truth. The Beatles were the Original Boy Band, on a level above and beyond any teen star before or since. Only Elvis can be said to have exceeded them as a sensation, and he had the distinction of being a solo act.

As for the rest, the group's music-hall inflections have always been precisely what I did not like about them. No one rocks out to the Beatles. People enjoy them, digest them, pour over them like the Rosetta Stone for clues to good songwriting, in short, people appreciate them, like they appreciate Van Gogh or opera.

If it sounds like I'm paying them a compliment, that's because I am. In the craft of writing pop songs, there may never again be a duo as universally recognized and valued as John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Their work is varied, complex, and endlessly hummable. And for a long time, I wanted nothing to do with that sort of thing. A suburban doughboy with a sheltered if not precisely silver-spooned upbringing, I spend most of my late teens to early thirties in rebellion against varied, complex pop music. I wanted loud, obnoxious Rauk n' Roll. If I didn't feel the music in my gut, it sucked. If it sounded pretty, I called it boring and pretentious.

The problem with such posturing becomes apparent when you actually take two seconds to listen to the Lads from Liverpool. They do defy easy categorization, don't they? How exactly was I supposed to claim that the band behind "Taxman," "Revolution," "Hard Day's Night," "I am the Walrus," "Helter Skelter," "Get Back," "Come Together," and all those great Chuck Berry covers did not know how to rock? It was not possible. So I made a face-saving bow to this reality and retreated to the niche position of only liking what I called "mid-period" Beatles, by which I meant Rubber Soul and Revolver.

In this way, I could dismiss everything up to and including Help! as a pile of sellout teenybopper balderdash and everything from Sgt. Pepper's forward (excluding Let It Be, because it was their last. Yes, I had a Beatles snuff album) as overrated drug-induced hippie crap. Also an unfair position, but an evolved one, that I clung to with great disinterest.

So here we are with Rubber Soul, the sound of a band in transition. By '65, they'd been cranking out two or three albums a year for three years, and riding the top of the charts in England and America with only the Stones feebly nipping at their heels. If their Shay Stadium Massacre was still a year away, the need for space and stillness seemed already reflected in the album's ambiguity. It's a disc full of lovely pop songs under which multitudes swim.

Take the leadoff track, an utterly silly song about that most adolescent of fantasies, driving a car. Automobiles promise escape, speed, and freedom, which is a strange thing for jet-setting superstars to have on their minds, and by "strange" I mean  "utterly unsurprising." Even odder is the songs conversational aspect, the putting of most of the lyrics into the mouth of the unnamed girl making demands on the narrator. This suggests a less-than-fully romantic depiction of the fairer sex.

The rest follows suit. "Norwegian Wood" is at best an ambiguous exploration of sweet young love, more sad than evocative. "You Won't See Me" barely masks its anger in its feel-good melody, and it doesn't take much to see the questions of identity bursting forth. Especially as it leads into "Nowhere Man," the Beatles' first soul-in-chains, Eleanor Rigby's husband if she had one. And "Think For Yourself" almost sounds like a command to the worldwide mob of Beatles fandom that had made them bigger than Jesus and seemed poised to crucify them had they not walled themselves off in the Apple.

I'd go on, but you get the idea. At the height of Beatlemania, the Fab Four were dealing with the same psycho-social drama that drove scores of later artists to addiction and other associated plagues, and they dealt with it by making a better album and a pile of more money. Since I started to rate this disc, I've only been able to get certain tracks out of my head by putting other ones in (replacing "Michelle" with "Nowhere Man" has been most effective). It's not going to make my Desert Island collection, but it's made an impression on me that I can't yet describe. That's worth a higher rating, which I do not hesitate to bestow.

Grade: L