Revolutions. What a laugh.

The first psychedelic song, the birth of the genre, was the last song on the Beatles album Revolver, Tomorrow Never Knows. Now, THAT was a revolution.

One chord. ONE chord! And yet the permutations of that chord, of that sound, seemed infinite. Loop the track and you might not notice the segue for days.

That was 1967, so now it’s, what, 58 years later and nothing, NOTHING, has matched that one song. What happened? Where, and wither, went the revolution? It was all on the flip side of Revolver, the back of the black and white album cover with the band a chiaroscuro silhouette, as black as the vinyl. The fab four posing by a grand piano, serious artists now, in black silhouette. Ringo’s hilarious and gear horizontally-striped sunglasses. All the possiblity in the world, right there in black and white.

The vinyl spiral runs counterclockwise, but the turntable spins clockwise. And the sound swells up from the black spinning disk. It’s all black and morbid and final now, the Beatles all dead, all except Pete Best, a TV star now, but the first pyschedelic song is still alive, rising from the black depths, still calling: turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.

Downstream.