from the LP Revolver, Capitol Records, 1966LSD affects different people in different ways, giving some a taste of the immaculate and divine while leaving others scratching their heads, wiping their eyes, or worse; in the case of John Lennon, who admitted that, “…I must have had a thousand trips, literally a thousand…I used to just eat it all the time…”, LSD radically altered his sense of identity and, by his own admission, crushed his ego. The effect that change in personality wound up having on the Beatles as a whole is a very long conversation best kept for another day, but the effects it had upon Lennon’s songs, in the midst of his experimentation, provides an interesting glimpse into an unwinding mind. This is not to say that Lennon looked back with regret upon his lysergic adventures---indeed, although he stopped taking acid for a while after having had too many bad trips, he recounted in the above-quoted interview with Rolling Stone that he returned to it right as he was hooking up with Yoko and had great experiences, a period where he felt the acid helped him to rebuild & re-sharpen his focus. By the release of Revolver, the whole band had experimented with LSD to varying degrees (Lennon & Harrison doing it a lot, Ringo & Paul only indulging in a handful of trips), and the LP cover-art alone let their fans know that something was up. Indeed, something was “up”, and no other song on the LP did a better job of intimating that to us than did this one; riding in on a swarm of strange tape effects and the drone of a sitar, this closing track on Revolver gives me everything I could possibly ask for in a song: reverse guitar, compressed drums, a panoply of processed vocals & weird tape loop effects, Indian instrumentation, a tambourine, and some exceedingly acidy lyrics, “…turn off your mind, relax and float down stream, it is not dying, it is not dying; lay down all thought, surrender to the void, is it shining, is it shining? That you may see the meaning of within, it is being, it is being; and love is all, and love is everyone, is it knowing, is it knowing?...” Lennon took direct inspiration for the trippy lyrics from Leary’s redux of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, both of which he later summed up as being, “full of shit”. This song has a way of consuming the listener, particularly if you are stoned on something while listening to it, carrying you “downstream” in a torrent of mental images that are largely precipitated by the speeding up and slowing down of the oddball effects matched with Ringo’s stop-start drumming: I see hippies dancing in circles, people fucking in fields, trippers having religious experiences and throwing their arms skyward, cars on a highway with weird scenes going on inside, with all of these images varying in speed and converging into a kaleidoscopic whole. Capping off what was their most psychedelic album yet, this song was the best possible compass for showing fans where the Beatles were headed next, capturing a moment in time when experimentation was neither seen as elitist or tortured, but rather, fun & exciting.
