The Beatles
Revolver

THE REVIEW

Reviewing a Beatles album today is like writing a report on the '82 World Cup for the Gazzetta dello Sport. If you write more than 10 words, you are mathematically bound to commit plagiarism, or state the obvious. But I'll try anyway.

Is there anything that hasn't been said about the Beatles?
They are the most talked about, the most plundered, the most hated, the most loved. The covers of their songs are countless, in the thousands, both the punk and irreverent ones and the tributes, performed by the most diverse musicians.
It's hard to "give to the Beatles what is the Beatles'." Turned into a cultural phenomenon, they have found themselves in the midst of something much bigger than them that would have happened anyway. They certainly didn't fuel rebellion, long hair, etcetera, but for many young people of the time, they were an excuse to transgress the precepts of mom and dad and play revolutionaries...

Musically speaking, they are the immense melting pot where all the genres and trends of their era fuse, sometimes successfully, sometimes a bit awkwardly and falling, I'm sorry to say, into the ridiculous: see "Helter Skelter," a pathetic imitation of the Who's "hard" sound and the like... It almost endears you.
They are the most underrated and simultaneously the most overrated band: there are those who say "the Beatles didn't invent a damn thing" and those who say "don't touch them, they made music history".
The fact is, both parties are right: no musician can say they invented something from scratch, not even -or least of all- Mozart. It would be like saying Chuck Berry had an epiphany and invented rock 'n' roll, Jelly Roll Morton invented Jazz, and the Maiden created Metal.
There's simply those who influenced or innovated more (Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground, and the Beatles obviously) and those who less (Mino Reitano...), but music is about influencing each other, emulating and synthesizing, finally reaching one's personal style, an "artistic maturity."
With Rubber Soul, it became clear that the Beatles didn't make music just to pick up girls. With Revolver, they start to get really serious.

More than the overrated Sgt. Pepper, Revolver is the emblem of this work of synthesis that the Beatles accomplished.
It has almost everything: the blues rock riffs ("Taxman"), chamber music ("Eleanor Rigby"), the children's rhyme (guess...), the "sophisticated" pop (the excellent, little-known McCartney piece "For No One"), the psychedelia that exploits the studio effects that were coming into vogue in those years ("Tomorrow Never Knows": it sounds modern even today, a
cross between the Chemical Brothers and the minimalist electronics of Radiohead). There's Harrison's sitar and social satire; McCartney's pop tricks and the song of lost love; the sarcasm and Eastern philosophy of the troubled Lennon. And of course, the inevitable reference to drugs (Got to get you into my life is supposedly a sincere declaration of love from Macca to cocaine).
"Maybe there's too much stuff... There's the risk of just making a big mess," you might think. I don't know, you be the judge...
There is no doubt, however, that in '66 Revolver was a current album at the edge of pioneering, the result of curious and receptive minds exploring the clubs and emerging groups - as well as their own minds - searching for the new and the unexplored.
Not everyone knows, for example, that McCartney, even before the other Beatles, was one of the first fans of Pink Floyd when no one else paid attention to them except the college hippies.

In short, the euphoric atmosphere of swinging London, a human and musical growth, the frenetic changes of the '60s, all of this ended up inside Revolver. And you can feel it. Man, can you feel it...

I close beautifully by listing some particularly successful Beatles covers:

Hey Jude - Wilson Pickett:
it's monumental. the absolute best version, with a 21-year-old Duane Allman on guitar, in top form. it was the recording of this song that earned him the nickname Skyman, coined by Pickett.

"With a Little Help From My Friends" - Joe Cocker:
the one from Woodstock. According to McCartney, the best version ever.

"Help" - Deep Purple:
what can I say.

some others:

"Daytripper" - Jimi Hendrix
"Come Together" - Aerosmith
"Yesterday" - Ray Charles
"Hey Bulldog" - Afterhours
"Blackbird" - Crosby Stills Nash & Young
"Strawberry Fields Forever" - Peter Gabriel
"I Am The Walrus" - Frank Zappa
"She Came In Thru The Bathroom Window" - Joe Cocker
"And I Love Her" - Bob Marley