The reasons Beatles fans in general prefer Revolver to Sgt. Pepper are the only ones that matter when you find yourself weighing what the most pleasurable would be to accompany your journey for forty minutes or so. The reasons should be self apparent in a world made perfect by my selfish dicta regarding taste, tact and civilized life, but alas, this isn’t my world. So here are the reasons: The songwriting on Revolver is consistently better, the production crisper, less reliant on special effects or musical quotes from ancient galleries of forgotten melodies and melodrama, and the lyrics are effectively ‘poetic’ without the florid excess that capsized about half of Sgt. Pepper’s songs. Perhaps most important, though, is that you could still listen to Revolver and regard the Beatles as a working band. It might be a better bet that musicologists would be a better choice to pick apart what made the musicianship on this record so alive and cogent, but a big attraction in my life is that these guys still sound like a band showing up for a gig, setting up their gear, and ready to play. It may be nostalgia, but something was lost when Sgt. Pepper became the standard by which most Beatles records after it would be judged — two sides of special effects, guest shots, and flailing ambition toward the ‘Art Gesture.’ Revolver was the band still in work shirts. There is a broad range of experimentation on Revolver that became the band’s hallmark, but because there still seemed to be an idea among them that they remained a creative unit, the expanding eclecticism didn’t capsize, overwhelm, or otherwise clutter and fuss up the quality material as would happen with increasing frequency on subsequent releases. Riffs, melodies, sarcasm, true love, psychedelic cave diving, Indian raga traces, rhythm and blues-influenced horn charts, children’s songs — the songs Lennon and McCartney brought to bear on this disc cover a wide terrain, and there is nary a weak link in this bright, shiny chain. ‘Taxman,’ ‘I Want to Tell You,’ ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ ‘Here, There and Everywhere’… There are songs here, to be sure, that I care less for than others, or rather like less, but Revolver over all the other studio albums in the Beatles’ oeuvre has more perfect three-minute masterpieces packed together, one after another — sublime constructions of chord voicing and melodic overlays, heartbreaking transitions to the chorus revealing a downturn of mood, precise and spare lyrics that range from cynicism, spiritual, erotic, to supremely lovesick, succeeding in being poetic and yet spare as songwriting requires.And, after years of listening, maybe even mere months, you notice the small, simple but unique things the Beatles did on the tracks instrumentally, such as the odd timekeeping Ringo managed, McCartney’s simple yet popping, looping bass work, or Harrison’s in-the-pocket guitar fills, both nasty and sweet. You realize that for all their limitations as musicians — none of them were virtuosos — they did indeed know their way around their respective instruments and worked brilliantly within their skill levels. That is what great bands do.
