Revolver-the Beatles

 

Revolver-The Beatles

A record store opened up in Bell across from Veteran’s Park on Gage sometime in the early 70s, and they had something that I’d never seen before-a used record section. I was probably about 10, and the idea that someone would sell their records was unheard of to me. Who would buy a record and then sell it? After saving up your allowance, or working some deal with your parents, much careful consideration, and then the act of picking up a record and taking it to the hip record counter person and facing their knowing look of either approval or disdain, who would then take the record home, play it and decide it wasn’t for them and take it back?

I didn’t know that person.

I looked through the bins with a bunch of records that I had never heard of and would never buy until I came across a copy of the Beatles’ Revolver. 10 year old me knew two of the songs, Yellow Submarine and Eleanor Rigby. I was still pretty early in my musical experience, and to that point, I thought Yellow Submarine was only on the Yellow Submarine movie soundtrack. I didn’t know the other songs, but for whatever reason, I paid the person, a young, bra-less vaguely dirty hippy looking woman at the counter, and went home to put the record on my parents’ Zenith console stereo (which I still have in the garage), and was amazed by George Harrison’s count off to Taxman. It’s a count that I still use in my head when I dive into a cold pool.

The transition from Taxman to Eleanor Rigby is jarring, a tribute to George Martin’s string arrangement and the stylistic variety of Beatles music. Other songs still pop into my subconscious when I don’t expect it, like the line from She Said She Said-“I know what it’s like to be dead/I know what it is to be sad/and it making me feel like I’ve never been born.”

“Turn off your mind relax and float down stream,” from Tomorrow Never Knows accompanies me when I’m suffering from bouts of insomnia. McCartney’s pop songs are good, but Lennon’s drug influenced songs are the ones that stick. A Jam Cover of And Your Bird Can Sing brought the original back into my consciousness in the 90’s, when I purchased the first CD version.

Fancy terms like “Bb Mixolydian” are thrown around in scholarly reviews, but the important thing is that this is still a pop record. The longest song on the album, I’m Only Sleeping, clocks in at 3:02, and all 14 songs take only 35 minutes. As a reference, the Ramones classic third album, Rocket to Russia also has 14 songs and takes 31:46, making Revolver a shade over three minutes longer. The Beatles brought a variety of influences to the record, but by keeping it short and the songs being built around familiar structures, the record remains accessible. The depth of the music has kept it close to the top of my record rotation for over 50 years, and as I play it this afternoon (2009 remaster, which sounds a zillion times better than my original, 90's version), it still surprises. 

For the very serious Beatles fans, here's where you can get the super deluxe 2022 version.