Everything changes. The more things change, they also usually end in reverse, and empty vessels keep making the most noise.
Probably the one certainty in life is that, for whatever reason, those of us who grew up with them, or are doing a crash course on the subject, get back to that place where they belong with the Beatles. And then, the magic returns.
Not just magic, but hope and dreams and love and truth and happiness and honesty.
*If only more world leaders and those sashaying around in the corporate world with their shoeshine people were turned on by the music of the Beatles...
* Those who don’t respect the power of music miss out on understanding the emotional attachment people- and “customers” are people which many forget- find in those handful of notes that work in bringing things together.
After everything that came flowing back during and after watching the “Get Back” documentary painstakingly turned into a new whole by Peter Jackson, we understood what was really going on during those “Let It Be” sessions.
We understood the inevitability in that the Beatles had done everything they could together and how it was time for each of the lads to grow up, get down to basics and restart their thinking for themselves and with all those new people in their lives.
Sure, these new people were other musicians, but, more than anything else, they were those incredible women who were playing such a huge role in their support system.
Now from the Beatles, and at a time when many of us need their music most as the world continues to shift and reshape itself with none of us having any idea of what lies ahead, comes a reissue of “Revolver”.
If “Rubber Soul” was the group’s farewell to the snap, crackle and pop of their songs, when released in 1966, “Revolver” was something new and revolutionary where everything we thought we knew what to expect from the Beatles changed course.
It was experimental but where there was an indefinite definition to this experimentation.
There was the brilliant album cover design by longtime friend and bass guitarist Klaus Voormann. This has new meaning today.
There were all those songs that we might not have been able to singalong with, but which made us turn off our minds and float downstream- but, this time around and in 2022, being able to lose ourselves in 63 tracks in all through demos, new mixes etc.
Interestingly- very interesting- is a demo of “Yellow Submarine”- not by Paul, who is said to have written the song for Ringo- but a slower and more wistful version by...John.
Every day there’s something new to learn and absorb from how the Beatles worked and why many things were never the way we thought they were or might have been.
Personally, I find myself turning off a great deal these days.
So much of what is out there is verbiage by the Nowhere Man and his followers- many words and lots of everything about nothing, and nothing of substance.
“Revolver” is a work full of substance and much needed at a time when someone said, “Send in the clowns” and we are suddenly bamboozled by jokers and corporate court jesters.
Here is a goofball world where many are stuck in the middle of the shallowness of it all, dumbed down by shtick and waiting to be saved from all this head up the arse nothingness.
* This is why every time we get back to the Beatles, it helps understand ourselves a little better- and cut those ties that strangle honesty and allow in those free lunches.
* We suddenly know where hypocrisy starts and reigns and why, despite those running around and playing hide and seek with words and, er, data, here is where there are answers that offer clarity and next steps.
Looking back these days, there are those empty vessels having tripped over themselves in their obscene hurry to succeed and have run outta puff.
As Dylan said, You’re invisible now, you have no secrets to conceal.