Who torted?

The Beatles, Revolver

This isn�t necessarily my favorite Beatles album, but it is the most important one, the most formative. My earliest memories of listening to music are from my third year, when my family was visiting my aunt and uncle in Paris during Christmas 1979. My uncle was working at CBS Records (I called it The Record Factory) and was an ardent music collector. This is where I first heard the soundtrack to the original Muppet Movie, hot off the press, along with most of the Beatles� ouevre, on the expensive-looking hi-fi setup in his den. I don�t really remember anything about that Christmas except a couple of the presents I got and the room where I listened to those records. And that I had a "radio" I'd made by drawing dials on a cardboard box and getting my aunt to write "John Paul's Radio" on it. Also, in French Sesame Street, Oscar the Grouch is blue and plays a trumpet. No lie.

Back in the US, I discovered my parents� considerably smaller vinyl collection, the bulk of which consisted of Beatles LPs. My parents pretty much stopped listening to contemporary music when I was born, so to them, pop music more or less began and ended with the Beatles. (My father used to call Rubber Soul their �wedding album�.) I pulled those LPs off the shelf in the dining room, and must have figured out how to work the turntable on my own because I listened to those records constantly, whether my mom was around or not. It seemed she was always taking on home improvement projects back then, and my earliest memory of being even remotely percussively inclined was banging along with �Tomorrow Never Knows� on paint cans, using stirring sticks as drumsticks while my mother massaged her temples on the couch in the living room, pregnant with my brother and watching �Guiding Light�.

Let me be clear about one thing: the Beatles terrified me. In some ways, they still do. Anytime someone is that talented, it�s a little scary. But back then, it was a different kind of fear: there were so many things about their music to simultaneously spook and fascinate me. It�s the morbid curiosity that causes people to crane their necks at auto accidents, coupled with the awe inspired by the infinite that causes astronomers to explore the cold depths of space. I found this dichotomy at play throughout the Beatles� music: for every truly beautiful musical moment, there was the deafening astral wind-up at the end of �A Day In The Life�, the epic suite that closes �Abbey Road�, the demonic screeching tape loops in �Tomorrow Never Knows� or �I Am The Walrus�, the chopped-up calliope in the middle of �Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite�, the droning organs and cellos in �Blue Jay Way�, and the invocation of mortality in dozens of the songs, a concept I didn�t even really know existed with until it appeared in �Maxwell�s Silver Hammer� (which scared me because my mother�s name is Joan), or �Day In The Life�, or �Eleanor Rigby�.

Then there were the album covers, perhaps rendered more vivid because they were LP-sized and not shrunk down to CD-size: the insane casts of characters on the cover of Sgt Pepper�s or Magical Mystery Tour, the psychadelic pastiche of Revolver, and even the inner sleeve of Let It Be, whose documentation of the group�s studio milieu left me speechless and planted in me an early seed of tech-geek fascination with instruments: all those knobs! Those big drums and cymbals! The sheer size of those speaker cabinets! Even the band members themselves seemed exotic, almost alien, whether gussied up in their Sgt Pepper�s garb or crossing the street in their tailored suits, huge beards, and extremely long hair.

What is it about �Revolver�, then? Well, to be honest, there isn�t much that sets this apart from the others in terms of importance or influence. Maybe it�s that it seems the most song-oriented, though I�m not sure what evidence I have to support that. Surely there are few pop songs as perfectly self-contained and committed to tape as �She Said She Said� or �Good Day Sunshine�. There�s a reason this album usually sits at the top of the mostly-arbitrary Greatest Rock Albums Of All Time lists that Rolling Stone or VH1 does every once in a while. Maybe it�s the way these songs are, by this band�s standards, relatively basic in terms of production and arrangements--there isn�t as much of the manipulated mellotron and sitar that became ubiquitous on later albums. Also, there�s the historical context, though I certainly wasn�t around in 1966 to see this album drop on an unsuspecting public.

Maybe it�s because this album sounds the freshest when I revisit it. �Got To Get You Into My Life� was as apt when I was courting girls in college as it was when I was four years old. I never get sick of "Good Day Sunshine", despite its ubiquity. One song that may have suffered from ubiquity is "Eleanor Rigby", though I still enjoy it in the right moments. �Tomorrow Never Knows�, despite becoming a hippie cliche, is still pretty intense, especially when you realize it�s only one chord. Songs with genius rhythmic parts like �I�m Only Sleeping� or �She Said She Said� gained resonance when I grew up and started playing drums on something besides paint cans. And of course, any song on this album can either suffer or benefit from its countless imitators, but if you find a good one, say, Elliot Smith�and listen to �I Want To Tell You� and �Baby Britain� back to back, it�s hard to tell who nails that seemingly basic but eternally elusive pop formula more perfectly.

One winter afternoon when I was four years old, I was at the sitter�s when the phone rang and she said something in a loud voice and the television came on. John Lennon was dead, then, and that certainly didn�t help the Beatles get any less scary. I subsquently put the Beatles to rest in junior high and most of high school, certain that I had discovered more sophisticated, more relevant, more exciting artists who were actually around and creating new, �modern� music. Somewhere near the tail end of my senior year of high school, Wes and I pulled out those albums again, this time on CD, and went over them with a fine-toothed comb. We heard about the ridiculous things that mad scientist George Martin did to the tapes, the strange places he put microphones, the thousands of takes necessary to get it just right. We covered �She Said She Said� at a show weeks before my high school graduation and it almost seemed as though things had come full circle. But it's not really that simple.

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