Rating My CD's: Relax, and Float Downstream...

 5. The Beatles -- Revolver

Imagine, if you will, a universe in which the Ramones actually had serious commercial viability, and did not require an endless touring schedule to make a living. Imagine a hip young manager took over the Ramones and made them into pop stars, and that the band went along with this, and basically turned themselves into the Jonas Brothers, perhaps dumping the drummer and replacing him with an amiable, technicolor-named journeyman  in the process.


Then imagine that they became the biggest band in the world, provoking media insanity on two sides of the Atlantic, and every band wanted to be them, and everything they recorded turned to gold. Then imagine that they tired of this, and worked over a few records to transform themselves into Bends-era Radiohead, without sacrificing a jot of their sales. After this, they shifted again, to become Pink Floyd, and when the run was over, an odd halfway split between the Kinks and Fugazi. So that's Ramones to Jonas Brothers to Radiohead to Pink Floyd to Kinks/Fugazi. Improbable. Impossible. But it happened. That's basically what the Beatles did.



And in the midst of one of these transformations, they did Revolver. I like it. You like it. Your mom likes it. My grandfather once told me that if there was a lovelier song than "Eleanor Rigby," he hadn't heard it. Amazon dubbed it an Essential Recording years ago. It routinely wins All Time Best Album polls. It blossomed forth from the so-called Golden Year of 1966. Is there anything else to say about it?

About Revolver, no. About myself, yes. The thing to understand about me and music is that if I say that I hate something, you can practically guaruntee that in five years I'll decided that I like it. I did it with R.E.M.; I did it with Blur; I'm in the process of doing it with country music. I've even got an early Death Cab album just to make sure I really didn't like emo (I don't). I've just about finished doing it with the Beatles. I started with Revolver.

I think I remember why. I think an girlfriend convinced me that I should give the Beats a try. I think she specifically suggested Let It Be, because some of my earliest mix tapes cull from that, and not loathing Let It Be and not getting Abbey Road made me comfortable with devising my aforementioned "mid-period" theory. I knew I liked "Taxman" (don't ask me where I first heard it), so I went with the iconic post-modern collage cover.

Welcome to Contradiction Recollection Theater. I said I started with Revolver, but the first Beatles album I owned was Let it Be. But that doesn't count, for two reasons: 1) I traded the latter to the wife for Rubber Soul, and 2) I liked Let It Be; I dug Revolver.

My favorite song is "I'm Only Sleeping," a pleasantly trippy little number that slides gently into the sonic & emotional void left by "Taxman" and "Eleanor Rigby." Psychedelic sonics swirl, brought down not with the bang of Maxwell's Silver Hammer but with the droop of leaf falling on stream. The lyrics are about nothing but what they're about, without irony or come-on. Nor is this fact hidden behind an otherwise up-jumpy pop song, as on the previous album. A subtly transitional song on a subtly transitional album from the band that made such transitions not only an art form, but a career. In this, as in everything else, they were way ahead of everyone around them.

Grade: LL