ABSTRACT

Revolver was the author's first Beatles album, given by a friend fascinated with the psychedelic cover. As a second-generation Beatles fan, introduced to the band with a disorderly mixture of badly recorded singles, Revolver was the author's first exposure to a coherently organized concept album. The author first encountered Revolver as an album in his freshman year of college in 1967. Of course, he had heard many of the songs on the radio, but down the hall in his dorm Michael Murphy would play the album over and over again, his door standing open so that the music became part of the life on their dormitory floor when they studied, talked about other things, and even just listened to its songs. It is as if the remarkable transformation of pop music accomplished in good part by Revolver patterned (or at least repeated) the transformation of life for those of them growing up in the 1960s.