Streaming the Beatles

I'm listening to the newly-available Beatles catalog streaming on my Amazon Prime account this evening. The high quality headphones have the effect of making almost every song brand new, bringing out nuances that I never heard from either vinyl or CD versions.

I'm a little surprised at some of my impressions. Like most of the songs on the White Album are kinda lame. And I'm reminded of why I never really liked John Lennon because there was a kind of anger bubbling below the surface of his personality.

And I'd never really appreciated the way the Moog Synthesizer was used on some of the Abbey Road tracks. It's no big deal today, but in the late 1960s the first synthesizers were pretty primitive and required extensive programming to get the desired sound.

There are flashbacks, too. Revolver takes me back to the autumn of 1966 when I had my first newspaper job, working as a reporter and photographer at the Tipton (Ind.) Tribune and living in a drafty mobile home a couple of blocks south of the office. I was out in the world, making my way like a grown-up and it was a heady experience. It's a good thing I didn't know what I didn't know or I would have been paralyzed with embarrassment.