#18 The Beatles – Revolver
There was that great scene in Mad Men when Don Draper sat down and listened to the last track on Revolver, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and you realize in this epic TV show is this that you have to think about music up to this point, that psychadelic music is just at it’s infancy and the biggest band in the world is sitting and setting a bar over 2 minutes and 57 seconds that could only be considered mind blowing. The song could be considered the core of several psychadelic movements. The lyrics have been recycled in songs several times over.
Of course, if you capture the history of rock and roll and you are sitting in front of a speaker system listening to this album for the first time and realize that only a couple years prior it was Buddy Holly making the scenes. The dimension at which ‘Rock and Roll’ had changed had shifted to a quick and furious pace. For me, Revolver has always been about the efforts of George Harrison who never gets enough credit but offers the underappreciated ‘Love You To’, offering his sitar which becomes the crux of the psychedelic sounds on this album.
While ‘Rubber Soul’ might have gotten bands like the Beach Boys to notice, Revolver is their statement album.