010. The Beatles - Revolver // Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Capitol SW-2576 // MAS 2653
I’ve been struggling with how to begin things this week. This is our first and only entry on The Beatles - an English group from the 1960s who you may have heard of before.
Writing a short history or appraisal of the Beatles is either pointless or impossible; as what was arguably the major celebrity phenomenon of the 20th century, everything these guys ever did has been exhaustively studied, dissected and subjected to wave after wave of reassessment and historical revision. The basic outline of their story is as familiar to the general public as, say, the tales from Genesis - and for over sixty years they have been some of the most recognizable people to ever exist on this planet.
The Beatles were at the height of their powers in the mid- and late-1960s, when the entire planet was experiencing the convulsions of war, space technologies, and new ways of cultural thinking at the same time that mass media and worldwide communications were sowing the seeds of our current global society. They were some of the most famous and successful people ever, working and performing at exactly the right place and the right time. At the first moment that it was possible to share their music with every corner of the world, they were talented and beguiling enough to capture its attention. They were fashionable and savvy enough to recognize major trends as they were happening, and repurpose them into music that was (mostly) fit for mass audiences. And then, near the middle-to-end of their run, they had the critical, financial, and artistic cache to experiment wildly, blowing the lid off of whatever was left of the culture of Old World.
Whether or not you like their music is irrelevant. It is everywhere. Besides being the most-covered band ever (with Dr. Google quoting over 11,000 entries), their records have been instructional to countless artists. All of this is has been, necessarily, a huge generalization - but from about Rubber Soul forward, every single Beatles track has either spawned, popularized, or epitomized a movement of 20th century rock music.
But, of course, you already know all this. This is exactly what I was afraid I’d be writing tonight: another quick-and-dirty epitaph for the fucking Beatles, as if I could change your mind about them. I can’t, because changing your opinion of the Beatles is like trying to change your opinion of the ocean. So instead, I’m just going to talk about how these records came into my possession, and in the meantime I hope you don’t unsubscribe from this blog.
Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s are the first and last Beatles records I ever took home with me, and they were some of the earliest ones in my collection. It must have been - because I remember pulling them out of my locker in middle school, feeling self-conscious that I should even have such a thing in public.
My friend had slipped them in there at some point that day. He was the kind of mythical kid who is so unlikely a person that he is hard to explain; all I can say is that at the age of 12 or 13 he had thousands of albums. When most of us were still in short pants this kid had an entire room in his house that was solely dedicated to music, with LPs stacked feet high and instruments strewn about. This was not his parents’ collection - his single mom didn’t really enjoy that kind of leisure. Nor was it a collection of dollar-bin toss-offs; we bonded at that age over our love of the 13th Floor Elevators and I was startled to find a copy of Easter Everywhere at the bottom of one of his stacks on my-first ever visit to his house. We were, at the time, in the 8th grade.
You learn a lot of things in middle school. The things most kids learn are usually anchored around arithmetic, teamwork, reading comprehension, and personal hygiene. I could have used a crash course in all of those things; instead, I was learning about records, the loser sitting alone at the back of the bus looking at the cover of Revolver. I had carried these albumbs from my locker to the bus, wrapped in a plastic bag - the first LPs I was ever gifted. I sat alone, with the bag on my lap, my body turned so no one would ask me what I was bringing home. I was a young kid and I thought the Beatles were so uncool. Still, gazing at the Beardsley-style Klaus Voormann artwork, the mystifying collage, I could feel segments of my brain rearranging. The revelation began to creep in before I had even heard the music.
And then I heard that music. I listened to these records back to back, and I vividly remember hearing the “Taxman/Eleanor Rigby” changeover on the shitty speakers of my Panasonic SG-J500. It was afternoon, I sat at my bedroom desk. I heard “I’m Only Sleeping” for the first time. It was autumn, I was thirteen years old. “She Said She Said,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” in an empty house, in the fading northern light, in November. “Tomorrow Never Knows,” especially, was like an ice pick to my brain; a little light in, a little light out.
Then onto Sgt. Pepper’s. This record’s breathless, unbelievable adventurousness had a similar effect on my soft child’s brain as it probably did on the entirety of pop culture forty years before. While listening to Revolver I pretty much instantly recognized my preference for the John songs over the rather soapy Paul ones - but who can deny “Fixing A Hole,” or the anguished “She’s Leaving Home?” And while thousands and thousands of words have been wasted trying to explain “A Day In The Life,” I can make my own attempt to describe the effect it had on me: with no other alternative, I recorded that song with a microphone so I could listen to it on my iPod. What else can you say about these songs, but that they exist?
I won’t stand up for everything the Beatles ever did, and wouldn’t even consider them one of my favorite bands - as the years pass by, my feelings about what they did and did not do well have begun to separate like oil and water. A lot of what they created, especially at the very beginning and near the end of their run, was not meant to be taken seriously or consumed academically. They were complicated people whose lives were warped by celebrity, living under unbelievable amounts of pressure to create art that was groundbreaking and illuminating but also safe for the public. They were not untouchable, they were not perfect, they hurt people, and they did not exist independent of history or time. But this memory of these two records is untouchable - as a formative moment, and as an early gift of music. One of the few moments of my life that I wish I could play over again.
Author’s note: I promised I wouldn’t do these types of cheesy, saccharine posts anymore. I lied. But we’ll pick things up again next week - when we talk about The Beau Brummels’ freak-folk classic Triangle.