"a conversation that I've never really stopped having"

A very cool Pitchfork interview with Jonathan Lethem.  On The Beatles:

"It’s a conversation that I’ve never really stopped having with my mother. After she died, I just kept having it in my head. For her, living through those transformations, it was like night and day, like when Dorothy goes from black-and-white to color in The Wizard of Oz. She was like, 'Once you’ve heard Sgt. Pepper and everything that came after, how could you ever care about those early Beatles records?' It was part of her coming of age—discovering sex and drugs was concurrent with the Beatles going from being square, short haired, black-and-white pop stars to being these revelatory counterculture geniuses.

She kept trying to nudge me into the paisley world. But I felt and still feel that the songs on the brink are better—Revolver and Rubber Soul—which, of course, are the records being pillaged for Yesterday and Today. To me, 'Day Tripper' was the greatest song that anyone had ever created. I loved the convulsive energy and slang. It’s got this great double reverse where John Lennon is trying to catch up with her, but he doesn’t know the lingo. If only he’d known, if only he’d got the memo—she was a Day Tripper, but it took him so long to find out."