Throughout their career, and right up until the release of The Beatles [aka ‘The White Album’] the Fab Four had been a finely-honed machine designed to produce musical perfection. Their reputation was built upon an endless wave of beautifully crafted pop confections, exquisitely performed; perfectly articulated masterpieces.

The White Album was the first and only record I ever remember seeing my dad actually buy. I remember picking it up with him in the music department at FEDCO, the now defunct federal employees’ department store in San Bernardino, California where my dad ran the pharmacy. There were stacks of them on the shelves: pristine, glossy, creamy white – with the embossed numbers on the front. I think my dad thought that HEY JUDE was on it because he never played it after we got home and he opened it. You had to open the gatefold cover to see the song list…

But I was fascinated and I listened to it over and over again. In a way, it shaped my childhood. The music it contained was such a challenge to hear: a confusing, mysterious, and at times terrifying puzzle to be analyzed and dissected.

So many questions! I spent my childhood trying to figure them all out. Like, why the between-song muttering or the weird sound effects or odd fade ins and outs; and what the hell was Revolution 9, anyway? Frankly, to this day that thing still gives me creeps.

The brilliance of The 30 songs included on The Beatles is that they prove that the four brothers-in-arms had the guts – and the creative freedom – to prove to the world that true artists don’t always need to produce total perfection. A flawed masterpiece is still a masterpiece. The Beatles had reached a point artistically where they didn’t really care what anyone said, not even their producer. Nor did they particularly need to care. They were global taste-makers and they knew it.

It’s The Beatles, for God’s sake: whatever it is, the public will buy it. And they’ll like it.

And Lo and Behold, they did.

The Beatles were a unique historical phenomenon. They set the musical and cultural standards for the entire 60s generation. Artistically, they moved the goalposts and changed and adapted with the times, and in the case of The White Album they were well ahead of their time.

Yet, no Beatles album has polarized fans in quite the same way as The White Album. The eclectic collection of songs has created the most controversy of any in The Beatles cannon. Should it have been a single or a double album? Should they have excluded this song or included that out-take? The debate continues to this day.

For instance: some fans hate Happiness is a Warm Gun – even though it was a personal favorite of George and Paul’s. Plenty of folks don’t like Rocky Raccoon or Honey Pie or even Yer Blues; and of course there are plenty of avant-gardists who write entire theses on Revolution 9. But I think in many cases people simply don’t get the joke. Some folks are unable to understand parody or grasp the satire or underlying context beneath some of the music.

Helter Skelter scared the hell out of me because I will always associate that song with the Manson family. I grew up in Southern California in the late 60s – early 70s and the trial saturated the local news every day. It didn’t help that I had no idea what a ‘Helter Skelter’ was until many years later…but in my mind I cannot separate Manson murders from the song. Same with Piggies. The White Album and Manson will always be connected.

But the problem with cherry picking songs is that that is not the way to listen to the White Album. That approach is too Millennial: the tendency to edit and discard the stuff you think you don’t like. That is one way to avoid challenging your preconceptions, but it is not the way to listen to this record. The White Album was first Beatles music that allowed us to peer into their collective creative process. The joy of discovering the diamonds is enhanced by having to dig through the (relative) dirt.

For all the times that the Beatles were sometimes acting as each other’s session men by this point, there are many times when the four of them in the same room were able recreate the old magic. Unfortunately, the only people in the audience were George Martin and his team of engineers at Abbey Road including Geoff Emerick (briefly), Ken Scott and Chris Thomas.

As a song cycle, The White Album forms an extraordinarily cohesive whole. It’s a great record for a road trip because of its length and the amazing variety and progression of songs – some of variable initial appeal – which eventually become a part of the musical tapestry. I cannot conceive of listening to it without including all of “those” songs.

It is fascinating to compare the current situation with the zeitgeist of the late 60s. It was so different in many ways, yet similar in others. In comparing the eras: 1968 was quite singular in that it came after a long period of hope and celebration; at a time when it was beginning to dawn on some people that all was not well in “the garden.”

In today’s dystopian world, though, we have well and truly lost our innocence. The environment has already been polluted; the animals have vanished; and the birds are falling silent. Fascism is on the rise again. America is more divided than ever. We are just now seeing the consequences of what was set in place in 1968.

So perhaps it is much harder now for anyone to react to The White Album in any creative way. The widespread anxiety that is felt across the political spectrum today is about a world slipping out of control. In ’68 the driver of social unrest was the realization that the world wasn’t changing fast enough.

The key difference between 1968 and 2018 is how much more awful everything is.

At the start of 1968 the atmosphere was very different than it was on 11 November, when The Beatles released The White Album. People were hopeful and optimistic because they were moving forward from less enlightened times. It was difficult, but at least we knew we were moving in the right direction; away from darker days.

By the end of the year, however, that optimism seemed like a quaint notion. 1968 was when the dream began to unravel.

The trajectory we are on fifty years later is effectively going backwards – with neither hope nor optimism.

The centre cannot hold!