The Beatles – The Beatles

My copy is stamped: No. 2508467
I have 5 original Beatles Records

As far back as the very first Beatle release, their albums had a contextual feel. With the release of the singles “Penny Lane,” and “Strawberry Fields,” followed by the albums ‘Revolver,’ ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ and ‘Magical Mystery Tour,’ the Fab Four seemed to be uniting the world through a charismatic set of themed albums revolving around the Flower Power movement, psychedelic drugs, and the ability to be able to draw us all together, united in a stance not only against the war in Vietnam, but in the power this new generation had in their hands, to change the course of social and political events. While there were signals of disillusion, and troubles within the band, as found on the George Harrison song “Blue Jay Way,” I think we all saw this as typical issues any group or family are destined to have, especially when they have worked so closely for so many years.

And the ‘White Album’ was just as prophetic in its on way. I hearing it not only for the first time, but the second, and third time ... and thinking that though the songs were well crafted, there was something lacking. The music seemed disted, like light refracted through a prism, with most of the songs more than notably written by single of the band. Some songs seemed to be pulled or left over from other adventures, leaving me with a shattered, schizophrenic feeling ... there was nothing inter laced, nothing tying the songs together. This feeling was not lost on most fans, yet these were The Beatles, a group who had taken us on a serious journey, collimating in a series of climatic musical ecstasies, the peak of the trip, a feeling I never wanted to leave my body.

But here on the ‘White Album,’ there was nothing I could warm up to. The 'White Album' felt like the ‘crash,’ the day after the ‘trip,’ when the excesses of speed that the LSD had been cut with showed their head, leaving me with an uncomfortable feeling ... one of uncertainty, pending doom, and a disconnection to say the least ... a feeling I just wanted to sleep through, wake up and find that all of the music on this double release made sense.

I had to set this record aside for a very long time, going to places like Vietnam, where the world actually was schizophrenic. And now, nearly forty years later, while I have come to appreciated the songs as a very good grouping of music, I still see the ‘White Album’ as the light at the end of the tunnel, a tunnel that had once bathed and warmed me in strobing colours, psychedelic sensuality, pleasantly distorted shapes that would bend and ebb, as musical notes, like breezes changed my total perception ... I thought the light at the end of the tunnel would be more this, but then as The Beatles had grown up, so had I, and I was left with the reality that most things are not what they seemed.

Review by Jenell Kesler