Stereo, Mono, and "Eleanor Rigby"

I've been teaching the History of Rock & Roll Era class at NCMC for over a decade, and as each year goes on, I'm more and more convinced that Revolver, the 1966 classic from The Beatles that's 50 years old this year, is the best start-to-finish album in history. It's pretty much perfect, for all the reasons that have been discussed by dozens of writers better than me, and -- when paired with Pet Sounds -- it's the point where rock & roll forever shifted from the dance floor to the studio, where the soundtrack to teenage groping was elevated to art, at least for the white artists who were allowed the keys to the sonic kingdom.

When we get to this point in class, I typically do two different things, but I wasn't able to do those two things this semester due to some technological snafus in my class room. (I was able to break down "A Day In The Life" along the three themes -- dreams, drugs, death -- so it wasn't a total loss.) The first thing was to emphasize the growing schism in the Lennon/McCartney partnership, and that's an easy thing to illustrate with Revolver. Typically, people focus on the "Penny Lane" / "Strawberry Fields Forever" single from '67 to show the clear stylistic split between the songwriters, but it's just as simple to point to the last two songs on Revolver -- the pure pop lovestruck joy of McCartney's "Got To Get You Into My Life" and the explosive studio mind-fuckery of Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows" -- to know that in the world of The Beatles, nothing would ever be the same.

And then there's "Eleanor Rigby." Of course, the clearest catalog antecedent is "Yesterday," a McCartney composition, melancholic and mature, with the strings providing a heretofore unexplored colour in the palate of The Beatles, just as "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" was punched up by Harrison's sitar. But while "Eleanor Rigby" is some next-level shit, both lyrically and musically, the thing I like to do most is to bypass the poetic storytelling and the Psycho-like string stabs, and instead contrast the mono and stereo versions to illustrate the studio as the tool by which perceptions can be shifted and shaped.

The original monaural mix did what mono does -- when everything is thrown into one channel, as with the best of Phil Spector's work, there's a downhill intensity that demands attention -- but it's the stereo mix of "Eleanor Rigby" that's the primary artifact of note. For in a song that details lonely people, the stereo mix isolates the verses in one channel while pushing the strings into the other, giving the listener a tangible distance between music and lyric that helps to flatten the emotions of sorrow and longing in a veddy British fashion, so that when the bridge ("All the lonely people / where do they all come from?") is thrown into both channels, it's almost like a Greek chorus commenting on what has come before, an extra layer of narrative created by a technological afterthought.

And it's not even my favorite track on Revolver, which would have to be "Yellow Submarine." The use of diegetic elements out Pet Sounds Pet Sounds, it was the only song by The Beatles ever spun into a movie, and RINGO RINGO RINGO!!! But that's another post.