Quote of the Day (Mikal Gilmore, on the Significance of the Beatles’ ‘Revolver’)

“Sgt. Pepper captured a moment, but Revolver created the context and motion that became that moment. Partly because it was swallowed by the events of the summer of 1966, and partly because of the shadow cast by Sgt. Pepper, it would take years – decades, even – before critics and fans would widely regard Revolver as the Beatles' finest album. But the form-stretching possibilities it had unleashed would change popular music by giving it new and more blatant thematic range, matched by innovative and outrageous sounds. It introduced different angles in chords and melodies and gave other bands the courage to look at the risky moment as both internal and social unrest. The Beatles sneaked all of this into their music with flair and confidence, with beauty and dissonance.”— Mikal Gilmore, “The Beatles' Acid Test: LSD Opened the Door to Their Masterpiece 'Revolver'—But Also Opened Wounds That Never Healed,” Rolling Stone, Issue 1269 (Sept. 8, 2016)

This August marks the 50^th anniversary of perhaps the most unsettling month in The Beatles’ history as a group—begun with John Lennon’s controversial remark that the band had become “more popular than Jesus now,” and ended, in exhaustion, with the Candlestick Park appearance that served as the final stop of their last tour. In between came their transitional LP, Revolver. I discussed this masterpiece in a prior post, but it's worth another look in light of what Gilmore brings to light on its history.

Rubber Soul, as I discussed in this prior post, remains (for me, anyway) the most consistently satisfying Beatles studio album. But in his essay in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone, Mikal Gilmore makes a credible case for Revolver as the group’s first to spring from a self-conscious search for personal meaning.

That search was spurred mainly by the LSD taken—first unwittingly, then more enthusiastically—by John Lennon and George Harrison. While Rubber Soul was what Paul McCartney later called the band’s “pot album,” Revolver originated with the more intense, dangerous LSD.  “Tomorrow Never Knows,” sometimes called the first example of  “acid rock,” derived from Lennon’s attempt to make sense of his LSD trip through reading Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience.

I wish I could have heard more from Gilmore about the evolution of the album’s other sterling songs (notably, "Eleanor Rigby," “Got To Get You Into My Life,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”). But in view of the group’s subsequent history, it’s understandable why he delves into the LSD angle.

The drug opened up the band to new thinking and new sounds—and irrevocably altered its internal dynamics. From then on, Lennon and Harrison shared a bond that would endure until Lennon’s murder in 1980. Simultaneously, they treated McCartney as someone apart from their philosophical and creative journey, a Johnny-come-lately to their altered state.

Gilmore does point out a cost of the hallucinogen to Lennon: it worsened his drug habit, even leading to a 1968 incident in which he summoned astonished Apple employees to issue a press release announcing that he was Jesus Christ returned to Earth.

Gilmore might also have discussed how Lennon’s increased absences from the studio within a few years led to more tensions with bandmates, as well as to Lennon’s push back when McCartney sought to fill the inevitable leadership void. But altogether, he shines a strong light on a key album in rock 'n' roll history--one whose significance may only now be properly appreciated.

Song Lyric of the Day (George Harrison, on ‘The Taxman’)

“Let me tell you how it will be

There's one for you, nineteen for me

'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman.”—George Harrison, “Taxman,” from the Beatles’ Revolver LP (1966)

This post represents a holy grail for a blogger—a twofer! "Taxman" was not George Harrison’s best song, nor even his first recorded one (that would be “Don’t Bother Me,” which, come to think of it, might have served as an equally good title for this one). But it did serve notice that the “quiet one” of the Beatles had a sly sense of humor. 

The Beatles’ great lead guitarist—and, as fans (and even principal songsmiths John and Paul) learned, their secret songwriting talent—and the youngest of the Fab Four would have turned 70 today.

(One irony of this song: While George wrote the song, Paul played the lead-guitar solo. An interesting change of roles, no?)

Okay, here’s the second part of the twofer I just referred to: it’s also the centennial of the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—one of four passed during the Progressive Era, with this one instituting a federal tax on incomes. It was pushed originally as a matter of social equity by farmers and others who had suffered disproportionately from the federal government’s principal means of raising revenues to that time: the tariff. As Jay Starkman noted in a Wall Street Journal piece a few weeks ago, only one-third of the U.S. population earned enough to be subject to the income tax before WWII. Matters have changed utterly since then, of course, with seven out of 10 Americans now subject to the tax—and the long shadow of the IRS.

The situation was even worse in the U.K. when the Beatles shot to fame. As Harrison recalled it nearly three decades later for the Beatles’ Anthology retrospective: “In those days we paid 19 shillings and sixpence [96p] out of every pound, and with supertax and surtax and tax-tax it was ridiculous - a heavy penalty to pay for making money. That was a big turn-off for Britain. Anybody who ever made any money moved to America or somewhere else.”

Somebody should replay Harrison’s comments—and his song—for the benefit of The New York Times, which published James B. Stewart’s “The Myth of the Rich Who Flee From Taxes.” I’m as populist as the next guy, but the experience of Harrison, the Rolling Stones, Gerard Depardieu, and Phil Mickelson (and a whole swath of the PGA, who’ve moved en masse to tax-friendly Florida) constitutes far more than “anecdotal evidence” in support of the “myth.”

(The photo accompanying this post is a cropped version of a UPI image of Harrison, as the Beatles arrived in New York in 1964.)

This Day in Rock History (Beatles Release Hot “Revolver”)

August 8, 1966—Simultaneously with the Beatles’ release of their seventh album, Revolver, in the United States, the Fab Four’s single “Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine” appeared. The latter tunes from the LP offered fresh evidence that, even when recording a pop novelty song, the group was prepared to pull out all the stops in the studio—and that, when they became more ambitious, they could stretch the limits of the prototypical rock ‘n’ roll song like nobody except Bob Dylan.

It’s a measure of the Beatles’ greatness that you'll find partisans lining up behind different disks when asked about their favorite LP. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, of course, set standards as a concept album; Abbey Road featured the great Side 2 medley as well as the George Harrison works that marked him as an indelible songwriting force, “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something”; and The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album), as a double album, featured as much of their work released at one point that anyone could ever want.

I recognize all of these arguments,.and yet I still would claim that Revolver bests them all, surpassed in the Beatles’ entire opus only by its immediate predecessor, Rubber Soul. It exhibits much of the sense of experimentation that marked Sergeant Pepper’s, and, though not achieving the same sense of artistic unity as the 1967 LP, maintains a more consistently high level among its songs. (Even tunes that did not climb the charts as singles were superb examples of their songwriting skills, as I realized several years ago at a Marshall Crenshaw concert, when that talented singer-songwriter paid tribute to the recently deceased Harrison by playing John Lennon’s “I’m Only Sleeping.”)

While Harrison did not reach the songwriting heights he would later scale on Abbey Road, the creative straitjacket in which he had operated until 1966—no more than two songs for each LP—was loosened enough to allow him a third song on Revolver—and gave Lennon and Paul McCartney, already challenging and competing with each other, still another force to reckon with within the band. Moreover, Revolver represented a point when Lennon and McCartney were still functioning, to some extent, as collaborative songwriters. (By the time of Abbey Road and the near-disastrous Let It Be, they were simply bringing their contributions pretty much fully formed separately to the studio.)

Lennon’s influence on the tone of Revolver is the most evident of the four musicians. In particular, “Tomorrow Never Knows” seems felicitously placed as the concluding tune, heralding not only Sergeant Pepper’s but also the entire drug-influenced “psychedelic rock” movement to follow. Two years removed from “Can’t Buy Me Love,” Lennon was taking Beatlemania on a long, strange trip indeed.

Over the years, Lennon has gained something of an upper hand over Paul McCartney for his lyrics. At his best, however, with someone prodding him to produce something other than silly love songs, Paul could be far more than the so-called “cute Beatle,” and “Eleanor Rigby” shows why.

For fans who wanted a slow, meditative, thoughtful love song, McCartney supplied “Here, There and Everywhere.” For those who wanted one of his optimistic anthems, “Got to Get You Into My Life” provided an especially brassy jump-starter.

But “Eleanor Rigby” was something radically different from anything he had written before, and maybe different from anything anyone in the band, Lennon included, would do again. It’s a bifurcated narrative with two figures, Eleanor Rigby and Fr. MacKenzie, united only in their loneliness and sense of futility.

Most astonishingly for a McCartney song, there is no happy ending. But, unlike a frequent Lennon attitude, there was no irony or cynicism, either, only a cry of sympathy: “Ah, look at all the lonely people!”

Just as unusual, “Eleanor Rigby” did not contain a single instrument commonly associated with rock ‘n’ roll: no guitar, no piano, no drums, no bass. While the Beatles join in the vocals, none plays an instrument here. Instead, session musicians were employed for the four violins, two violas, and two cellos.

McCartney, who had been listening to quite a bit of classical music in the months leading up to the album, shared his idea of all-strings instrumentation with producer George Martin. The latter, in turn, found inspiration in the film scores of Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock’s longtime collaborator. The most notable impressions left by the song, then, are tension and lack of musical resolution—aural counterparts to life.

For his recent Yankee Stadium appearance, McCartney had five decades of songs from which to draw. But the fact that he included “Eleanor Rigby” on the set list for his 2 1/2-hour concert says much about his justifiable pride in the song—a pride reflected in its powerful influence on other, later rock ‘n’ rollers.

For instance, an account of the life of Elvis Costello, Graeme Thomson’s Complicated Shadows, has a short section on the making of The Juliet Letters, the string-oriented album that the musical polyglot made in 1993 with the Brodsky Quarter. Costello was trying to explain several years later why, despite success overseas, the album failed to catch on stateside, recounting his conversation with a clueless record company exec:

“This Juliet Letters would be all right if it just sounded more like ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but Paul McCartney already made that record. Why would we want to make that again? We’re trying to make a record that’s not like ‘Eleanor Rigby.’”

Ah, Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”—his idea that texts are inevitably a response to what preceded them--would get quite a workout in this case. A record “not like ‘Eleanor Rigby’”? It wasn’t there on the basis of the evidence. McCartney’s collaborator on “My Brave Face” and “Veronica” might have been better served by frankly acknowledging that he was trying to create something even greater than that single, hard as it was to imagine.