Revolver was the first Beatles album i bought. Wait, let me correct that. Actually, it was the first full Beatles album I bought. Before that, i had a lot of their compilations on cassettes (which mostly kicked off with "Love Me Do" and ended with either "Let It Be" or "Hey Jude"). So i was aware of their more... accessible material, I guess. But then i saw a documentary called "The Beatles Compleat", which valiantly tried to distill the whole story into two hours, and mostly succeeded (a few years later i discovered the narrator was none other than Malcolm McDowell. Cool). It was then that i noticed that this Revolver album is kind of interesting... there are a lot of songs there that i hadn't discovered.
Well, it was, and still is, a fascinating, diverse and often beautiful piece of work. My favorite Beatles LP will always be Rubber Soul, but this came very close to being its equal. Now, you may ask, why do i prefer its predecessor? Well, i never did understand George Harrison's statement that he considered Rubber Soul and Revolver as the two sides of the same record, because in my opinion, they could not be any more different. Whereas Rubber Soul is seamless, Revolver is more akin to a car crash, where all kinds of musical genres run into each other without any sense of cohesion. I myself prefer records that have a certain common thread on its songs But that doesn’t make it inferior, though. Song-quality wise, it remains every bit as good as Rubber Soul. And what it lacked in flow, it gained in both diversity and fearlessness. Think about it for a minute. This is a record by the most popular band of their time, and instead of sitting back, popping the cork and be pleased with themselves, the Beatles took considerable risks. And their bravery and confidence paid off handsomely, not just in a commercial way, but also in that all the material has inspired and influenced countless other bands. Because, let's be honest. most excursions that happened to rock'n'roll took its idea from Revolver and ran with it, whether it's chamber-pop (Eleanor Rigby, For No one), Raga-rock (Love You To), and jangle-pop (And Your Bird Can Sing, I Want To Tell You).
It also has the distinction of being the first Beatle record where you can tell who contributed what. Paul McCartney's songs are melancholic and meticulously melodic, while John Lennon was more fascinated with atmosphere and "feel". If Rubber Soul presented Lennon and McCartney as separate individuals but equal, then Revolver, as Albert Goldman memorably put it in his John Lennon bio "The Lives of John Lennon", now they're also opposites. There was clear optimism even in the saddest of McCartney tunes, and Lennon's work here all have an undercurrent of resignation and (drug-induced?) confusion. I still have that old, beat-up cassette of Revolver, bought in a small music shop in Ratu Plaza (which gives you a picture of how long ago this was), and though i don’t use it anymore (all the tracks have found permanent residence in my trusty MP3 player), i still find it hard to throw it away, because it meant so much to me, introduced me to music that is far-out, weird, yet somehow accessible.
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