Yesterday I looked at how Bob Dylan shaped my musical tastes for decades. Today I’m paying tribute to the other important formative band of my adolescence — The Beatles.
I got into The Beatles a year or two after I discovered Dylan, when I was around 17. I spent a ridiculous amount of time that summer typing out the lyrics to all of the band’s songs on an electric typewriter (the sort of story I can tell my kids to explain how unplugged we were “back in the day”).
Today’s pick is very similar to yesterday’s in that both are early albums by artists who went on to create much more ambitious and ground-breaking work.
A Hard Day’s Night was the third Beatles album but the first to feature exclusively original material. Billed as the soundtrack to the film of the same name, the album featured all of the new songs in the movie plus additional material written for the film but unused in the final cut.
Revolver feels like the album where The Beatles really became The Beatles, which is odd because it was their seventh record and they released only four proper studio albums after this one.
But this album saw the band pivot from a pop band to psychedelic pioneers — tour guides on a head trip that would last for a decade.
Rubber Soul is the album on which The Beatles grew up. The lads who’d smiled through ‘Love Me Do’ and a dozen other simple ditties were now singing about Norwegian wood and nowhere men. Lyrically and musically, they were paving a new path, one from which every rock band for a generation would draw inspiration.
This album also marked the transition from touring band to studio band. The Beatles had performed their last live show — one in which their music could barely be heard over the screams, as usual. From this point on they would dedicate all of their time to recording.
Help! is kind of the forgotten Beatles album. It’s not their best soundtrack. It’s not even their best album of 1965. It’s a bridge between their more straight-forward early work and the ground-breaking music to come — the classic middle child.
But it’s also a terrific pop-rock album that would be the best thing ever recorded by just about any other band.
