Your Mother Should Know

The Beatles have been one of my three all-time favorite bands, along with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (more or less back to their 1970s lineup, Deo gratias) and Moxy Fruvous (four guys from Toronto who broke up a few years ago). Anyway...



Forty years ago today, the "Revolver" album came out in the UK. (It would be released in the USA by US Capitol on the 8th of the month.) It was this album -- or "Rubber Soul" depending on how you look at it -- that signaled the sea-change in the Fab Four from the mop-tops at the top-of-the-pop in a more innocent time, to the late-60s cerebral peace-love-dope advocates of the latter days.

Personally, I knew something was up the minute I heard "Eleanor Rigby" for the first time.

And now, Alan Pollack and Ger Tillekens have collaborated to give us the results of ten years of painstaking analysis with "The Official Beatles' Canon" which covers every Beatles single, album track, and variation thereof, complete with musical and lyrical analysis. (Note: songs are in order of their UK release.) According to Ian the Inoperable Terran, to whom we are grateful for this referral: "The emphasis is firmly in music theory land, but most of the songs have a lot of general comments that the untrained will get a lot out of too."

Maybe I'll find out who The Walrus is after all these years. Stay tuned...