REVOLVER

Had the Beatles broken up after Rubber Soul, they'd be recognized as an all-time great band; just replace the last two songs on the "Red Album" (1962-1966) with "Twist and Shout" and "Rock and Roll Music," or with "The Word" and "You Won't See Me," or with "Do You Want to Know a Secret" and "You're Going to Lose That Girl" and you'll get the idea; in the US alone, the band had already accumulated 41 Billboard Hot 100 hits, including eleven number-one songs. And yet not one George Harrison composition had even "bubbled under" the Hot 100, and they had yet to release their all-time classic single "Penny Lane" / "Strawberry Fields Forever." Their five highest-rated albums were still in the future.

Pardon the hyperbole, but Revolver launches the Beatles into the stratosphere. Among its number are four Beatles classics?Harrison's "Taxman," Paul McCartney's "Good Day Sunshine" and "Eleanor Rigby," and John Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows"?and a number of songs ("Yellow Submarine," "Here, There and Everywhere," "Got to Get You into My Life," "And Your Bird Can Sing") whose quality is the equal of the classics of most other groups. But beyond the songs themselves is the fact that Revolver is a cohesive artistic work, a superbly sequenced pop album.

Amazingly, the stratospheric Revolver doesn't even represent the Beatles' zenith. Nonetheless it's not only a five-star pop album; it's also an important proto-progressive work. While producer George Martin's genre-defying (or perhaps genre-defining) arrangements on songs like "Eleanor Rigby," "I'm Only Sleeping," and "Yellow Submarine" are historically significant, it's "Tomorrow Never Knows" that solidifies the Beatles' importance as progenitors of progressive rock. A track without rhymes or key changes, "Tomorrow Never Knows" relies heavily on studio trickery. Nonetheless, it's easily recognizable as rock music; the fact that it's been covered by Phil Collins and 801 (among many others) attests to this. And yet its merger of the melodic and the avant-garde is the song's real legacy. Along the same lines but more broadly, Revolver's claim to greatness is both its excellent composition and its groundbreaking approach to studio recording.