40. The Beatles – Rubber Soul / Revolver
*Something to keep in mind: Order-wise, my list is pretty bunk. I try to stick to general sets but the fact remains that often I sacrifice where I’d really keep a certain album for the sake of better readability. St Anger, for example (my #50 pick), would really be closer to the top 30-20—but it’s a good opener, so I started with it. And Rubber Soul/Revolver? Well, suffice to say that A) there’s another Beatles’ album closer to the top, and B) thematically, they make sense here. So as a general rule, take my ordering semi-lightly. All for the greater contextual good.
Building the Bridge
As obscenely popular as The Beatles were through their first 5 or so LPs, it’s pretty inarguable that they’d have never become THE Beatles if not for the way they grew, evolved stylistically, thematically and tonally with the times. Records like Rubber Soul and Revolver aren’t just incredible pieces of work; they’re freeze-frames of a metamorphosis, documents of a startling and rare brand of becoming. Where Rubber Soul works as a testament to growth, Revolver jolts alive as one of awakening.
Listen to Rubber Soul and you get to witness the best band in the world mature, test out some darker shades of sarcasm and retrospect in their songwriting. This isn’t “Can’t Buy Me Love” or “I Wanna Hold Your Hand;” it’s a different and deeper kind of pop.
And then we have Revolver, where it’s almost like John, Paul, George & Ringo accepted the mantle, grew confident in the fact that they were the best band in the world—not just the most popular—and decided to start acting like it.
As a segue out of the 40s portion of my list, where everything’s pretty straight-up rock and nostalgia, there’s really no better albums I could pick to mark a shift into new territory. I love each of these records not only for what they symbolize musically, but also for their accessibility—which I could say about the entire Beatles discography (and is maybe even the greatest accomplishment of their later, more ambitious releases).
Look anywhere and you can find a thousand Beatles reviews far better and more knowledgeable than anything I could come up with here, but just think: this is a band that went from Please, Please Me (their debut) to Sgt. Pepper’s in only 4 years. You don’t have to be a muiscphile to appreciate how crazy that is. And to think it all started with Rubber Soul and Revolver.
If you’re young and love music, it’s all too easy to romanticize the 60s and 70s. Radio stations were filled with bold and creative bands, all high off of the styles and forms they were making up as they went along. The charts were stacked with the likes of Crimson, Hendrix, Floyd, The Beatles. And there was an urgency and life to all of this—albums were produced faster and with less in mind about selling singles and more about contributing something new and worthy of airplay.
It’s just fascinating to me, the culture of change and discovery, that one minute everyone can be listening to an album like Rubber Soul and have absolutely no idea that the next they’d be assaulted by something like the White Album, or Are You Experienced?, or In the Court of Crimson King. Nobody could guess what a band’s next release would sound like because groups were taking risks it wouldn’t make sense to take if they were spending multiple years and countless dollars on every new piece and page of their catalog. Music was used for things back then that it’s hard to even imagine it could be used for now, because everything was exploding, breeding as much as being bred by everything else. The age of enlightenment had begun, and The Beatles were as much a product of it as they were the catalyst.
About a Revolution…
Don’t be fooled, the Beatles Revolution didn’t start with Lennon in a white suit and beard, singing about peace and universal love. It started as a group of kids with hair past their ears, getting so popular that they had room to literally do anything they wanted to.
Revolver has the band so much in their creative element, complete with horns, strings and a perfect dash of Eastern influence, that at the time, I’m sure, it was clear that this wasn’t at all the same foursome that everyone had fallen in love with just 3 years earlier when they hit the States. Which isn’t to say they weren’t still sweet: McCartney has some of his best ballad work in Revolver, with “Here, There and Everywhere,” “Got to Get You Into My Life” and the amazing “For No One.”
Where the album really shines, though, is in defying expectation, creating one of the most eclectic albums I’ve, to this day, ever heard*. A record with tracks like the textural and haunting “Eleanor Rigby” set next to one’s like Harrison’s sitar-driven “Love You To” really shouldn’t work—and it almost definitely wouldn’t in any less capable hands.
*Both albums have weak points, sure, but if you steer clear of the Ringo tracks—Revolver’s insufferable “Yellow Submarine” and the mediocre-at-best “What Goes On” in Rubber Soul—you’ll be hard-pressed to find any.
It’s a funny thing, deeming a 60’s timepiece as “modern.” These albums were recorded and released more than 30 years ago and, though I view Rubber Soul a little differently, I can’t help but see Revolver as an album that will always, always stay relevant. It’s a point to aspire to, and as long as any piece of work holds up a certain element of surprise or mystique, it will always be new.
But, this is The Beatles. You know this band, these albums and these tracks. The best I can do is outline a perspective and pretend that what I’m saying is novel. It’s not. And that’s exactly because these records are that good.
Listen:
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This entry was posted on Friday, August 13th, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under cd reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Mike August 14th, 2010 at 11:52 am
I actually didn’t know that about “Got to Get You…,” but I meant more tonally anyway. Obviously McCartney’s known as the heart guy and songs like “Got to” keep that light sing-along quality that lured so many people in at the beginning. And even if it is about drugs, why can’t it be drug ballad?
It was really hard putting Revolver so low on the list. But I want to keep it as themed and diverse as possible and realized early on that doing that wouldn’t be easy once I get down to the final 20. Had to improvise a little.
She’s Leaving Home… maybe my fav McCartney song.