ISOLATION AND WEARINESS : ‘WHITE ALBUM’ CD: BEATLES’ TRUE COLORS?

This has been a year of Beatles celebration.

Ever since February, when Capitol Records began releasing the Beatles’ albums in compact disc, we’ve been able to enjoy once more the innocence, warmth and imagination of rock’s greatest band--a band that offered its audience in the ‘60s a comfort and stimulation unprecedented in pop.

But the release this week in CD of the “White Album” (as the 1968 LP officially titled “The Beatles” is commonly known) reminds us of a very different band and very different times. This two-record set doesn’t offer the Beatles’ best music. To call it one of the 10 best albums of the last 20 years--as Rolling Stone magazine critics did this month--is a severe misjudgment.

If you ranked the 200-plus individual Beatles songs in order, only a couple of tracks from the “White Album” would likely be among the first 50. Most of the double LP’s tunes would probably end up in the second hundred, with a few falling perilously close to the bottom.

So why does the “White Album” seem so surprisingly affecting after all these years?

The answer is in the way the LP showcases the vulnerability of the Beatles--a vulnerability that is much easier to see and understand now than when the LP first hit the stores 19 years ago. The rock community was so in love with the Beatles and the counterculture mythology that fans didn’t even notice the isolation and weariness in much of the album’s music.

At the time, the Beatles were such enormous cultural heroes--the symbols of both ultimate hipness and strong-willed independence--that it was inconceivable that they didn’t have everything under control.

In retrospect, all you have to do to sense the disillusionment and separation of the 1968 Beatles is look at the photos of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr included with the album. The message isn’t just in the sober, disconsolate expressions of the four Beatles, but in the fact that these are literally separate photos--no longer the smiling group shots that beamed out at us from albums like 1965’s “Beatles VI.”

The Beatles would struggle on for two more years, trying gallantly to fill the role of cultural heroes and hang on to their own superstardom. But the dream already was over--as Lennon would finally declare in his 1970 solo album.

There are still bright, engaging moments in the “White Album,” but the overall tone is sadness: a sadness that forces us to relate to the individuals in the group, not just the superstar images. By doing so, the album inadvertently becomes the Beatles’ most personal and revealing work. The group certainly made better albums than this, but nothing quite so emotionally naked.

There is so little unity and focus to the “White Album” that it is easy to picture John, Paul, George and Ringo getting together after the acclaim generated by the formal, disciplined 1967 LP, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” to ask each other, “What do we do now?” Unfortunately, no one came up with an answer.

Perhaps there was no way to successfully follow up “Sgt. Pepper,” an album whose importance was as much tied to its role as a symbol of the emergence of a new culture as to actual musical accomplishment. The Beatles’ challenge was compounded by the fact that the group was very much in disarray in the months leading up to the recording of the “White Album.”

Manager Brian Epstein had died the previous summer and there was no one left to balance the conflicting instincts and egos of McCartney, who wanted the group to continue (under his leadership), and Lennon, who was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the group’s music and the compromises required in the partnership. Besides, he had found what he felt was a more stimulating musical ally: Yoko Ono.

Still, the Beatles weren’t something you walk away from easily. So the four of them spent the months between “Sgt. Pepper” and the “White Album” trying to sort out their lives (the much publicized Maharishi experience was during this time) as well as figuring out where to go musically.

Despite the strains, Lennon and McCartney, writing independently, were able to come up with some classic recordings in the summer of 1968 (“Hey Jude” and “Revolution,” neither of which is on the LP--though an alternative version of the latter does appear), but they couldn’t sustain that energy or vision over a full album. They ended up reworking familiar themes or experimenting with styles that would later characterize their solo recordings.

There are attempts by McCartney in songs like “Rocky Raccoon” and “Honey Pie” to revive the good-natured, vaudeville spirit of “Sgt. Pepper,” and in tunes like “Birthday” and “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” to salute the band’s raucous rock roots.

Lennon, meanwhile, began concentrating on the raw emotion and stark instrumentation that he would employ on his first solo album--though on the “White Album” only “Julia” perhaps quite offered the persuasiveness of the material on that solo LP, “Plastic Ono Band.”

This isn’t to say that Lennon’s contributions always outshone McCartney’s on the album. The delicate “Blackbird” and the zesty “Back in the U.S.S.R.” underscore McCartney’s range and appeal, but it is Lennon’s music that generally carries the most bite.

The differences in approach between these catalysts is most vivid in the coupling of McCartney’s cheery, good-natured “Martha, My Dear” (Martha, reportedly, was the name of a sheep dog) and the weary disenchantment of Lennon’s “I’m So Tired,” which can easily be interpreted as a reflection on still being in the Beatles. Sample lyrics: “You know I’d give everything I’ve got / For a little peace of mind.”

Because the four musicians no longer worked as a team, the album emerges as a fascinating look at artists in confusion and conflict. The music itself--after all these years--seems secondary to the drama in the studio. The brightness of the CD sound telescopes that drama in a way that makes it seem as if you’re sitting in on a prizefight. And Lennon and McCartney weren’t the only ones with troubles. Harrison’s chief contribution to the album is the slow, plaintive “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

At a time when much of the nation has been caught up in recalling the tragedy of Elvis Presley’s death, it’s sobering to recall that the real dream of Lennon and McCartney as youngsters in Liverpool was to be another Elvis. By the time of the “Sgt. Pepper” album, they had pretty much reached--if not surpassed--their goal. How disorienting it must have been for the Beatles, so soon after that victory, to see the whole thing torn apart.

Unlike Elvis, however, they found the courage and understanding to escape being prisoners of their fame. Their fame was still intact in the “White Album,” but the dream wasn’t. In one of the most terrifying lines in contemporary pop, Lennon laments at one point in the “White Album”:

Black cloud crossed my mind

Blue mist round my soul

Feel so suicidal

Even hate my rock and roll

Wanna die yeah wanna die

If I ain’t dead already.

When Lennon eventually declared the dream to be over in 1970, there was a sense of liberation about it. In this album, however, the same realization carries only the shadows of sorrow and regret.

(Capitol Records also released Tuesday a CD version of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” but buyers should beware. The LP does not contain all the songs from the film. Instead, it supplements a few Beatles songs--notably the title track, “All You Need Is Love” and “All Together Now”--with music composed for the film by producer George Martin.)