Spinning Plates #7

Once a week, Spinning Plates examines an essential “long player,” an album worth listening through from the first note to the last.

The gap between Rubber Soul and Revolver was little more than half a year, but by 1966 The Beatles seemed preternaturally hell bent on blazing trails and redefining popular culture.

Revolver captures a band exercising its creative muscles and pushing its own compositional skills to the limit. That the album will always play second fiddle to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is both justified and unfortunate. That a band could release both albums within the span of one year is amazing.

Sgt. Pepper’s is a stronger work, as a whole, but what makes Revolver so great is the strength of the individual songs. The unabashed pop of “Taxman” and “Good Day Sunshine,” the melancholic chamber music of “Eleanor Rigby,” the psychedelic folk of “I’m Only Sleeping,” the acid rocker “She Said, She Said,” the Brit-pop template laid by “Got to Get You Into My Life” and the alien sonic landscape explored in “Tomorrow Never Knows” have, in and of themselves, inspired countless artists and recordings. This is Lennon and McCartney’s lyricism at its very best. The songs lack the pretension that crept into later works (particularly on The Beatles, otherwise referred to as “The White Album”). At this point in their career(s), The Beatles were as fascinated with the possibilities inherent within their music as their fans. Together, the songs of Revolver create one of the cultural touchstones of the mid-to-late twentieth century. The center would not hold for long, though, and in three brief years, the band would dissolve and popular music would never quite be the same again.

— Curt Whitacre