Once In a lifetime comes an album with this much gravity attached, with so much social import, that its influence cannot be underestimated on so many levels. This is a record that defies everything.
Revolver is the seventh studio album by English rock band the Beatles, released on 5 August 1966 on the Parlophone label and produced by George Martin. Many of the tracks on Revolver feature an electric guitar-rock sound that contrasts with their previous LP, the folk rock inspired Rubber Soul (1965). In Britain, the fourteen tracks from Revolver were released to radio stations throughout July 1966, "building anticipation for what would clearly be a radical new phase in the group's recording career".
The album reached number one on the British chart on 13 August 1966 and charted for 34 weeks. It also reached number one on the American chart and stayed at the top spot for six weeks. The album was remastered 9 September 2009 for the first time since its 1987 digital compact disc release. It was ranked number 1 in the All-Time Top 1000 Albums and number 3 in the
Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In September 2013 after the British Phonographic Industry changed their sales award rules, the album was declared as having gone platinum.
"Eleanor Rigby"
"Eleanor Rigby" combines Paul McCartney's brand of lyrical imagery with a string octet (a conventional string quartet, doubled) arranged by George Martin under McCartney's direction. Both the lyrics and arrangement are a major departure from the Beatles' prior output.
Although Martin once pointed to Bernard Herrmann's score for
Fahrenheit 451 as inspiration for the string arrangement, the film was not released until several months after the recording; Martin later stated he was thinking of Herrmann's score for
Psycho. The compression and lack of reverberation given to the strings provides a stark, urgent sound that complements Martin's arrangement.
McCartney originated the song and the name, rejecting his initial choice, "Daisy Hawkins,"
in favour of a name derived from the Beatles'
Help! costar Eleanor Bron and Rigby & Evens, a wine shop McCartney noticed in Bristol. McCartney initially named the clergyman Father McCartney, but changed it out of concern that the character could be misinterpreted as being the writer's father.
"Eleanor Rigby" is one of the few songs with lyric contributions from all four Beatles. John Lennon laid claim to "40 percent" of the lyrics (which was later disputed), including the line "Wearing a face that she keeps in the jar by the door", though those present at the writing dispute Lennon's claim. Ringo Starr contributed the line "Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no-one will hear", and George Harrison provided the "Ah, look at all the lonely people" hook.
The fact that an actual person named Eleanor Rigby is buried at St. Peter Church Cemetery, in Liverpool's Woolton, yards from where John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time, is a bizarre co-incidence. Also bizarrely, the real Eleanor Rigby lived a lonely life similar to that of the person in the song.
"Eleanor Rigby" was released as a double A-side (with "Yellow Submarine") concurrently with the album.
"Tomorrow Never Knows"
The Beatles' unfolding innovation in the recording studio reached its apex with the album's final track. Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows" was one of the first songs in the emerging genre of psychedelic music, and included such groundbreaking techniques as reverse guitar, processed vocals and looped tape effects. Musically, it is drone-like, with a strongly syncopated, repetitive drum-beat played over a single chord. The lyrics were inspired by Timothy Leary's book, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, although the title itself was inspired by a Ringo Starr malapropism. The song's harmonic structure is derived from Indian music and is based upon a high volume C drone played by Harrison on a tamboura.
Much of the backing track consists of a series of prepared tape loops, stemming from Lennon's and McCartney's interest in and experiments with magnetic tape and musique concrète techniques at that time. According to The Beatles' session chronicler Mark Lewisohn, Lennon and McCartney prepared a series of loops at home, and these then were added to the pre-recorded backing track. This was reportedly done live in a single take, with multiple tape recorders running simultaneously, some of the longer loops extending out of the control room and down the corridor.
Lennon's processed lead vocal was another innovation. Always in search of ways to enhance or alter the sound of his voice, he gave a directive to EMI engineer Geoff Emerick that he wanted to sound like he was the Dalai Lama singing from the top of a high mountain. Emerick solved the problem by routing a signal from the recording console into the studio's Leslie speaker, giving Lennon's vocal its ethereal, filtered quality (Emerick was later reprimanded by the studio's management for doing this).
A key production technique used for the first time on this album was automatic double tracking (ADT), invented by EMI engineer Ken Townsend on 6 April 1966. This technique used two linked tape recorders to automatically create a doubled vocal track. The standard method was to double the vocal by singing the same piece twice onto a multitrack tape, a task Lennon particularly disliked. The Beatles were reportedly delighted with the invention, and used it extensively on Revolver. ADT quickly became a standard pop production technique, and led to related developments, including the artificial chorus effect.
Contributions and inspirations
Lennon's other contributions included "I'm Only Sleeping", "And Your Bird Can Sing", "She Said She Said" and "Doctor Robert".
On "I'm Only Sleeping", Harrison played the notes for the lead guitar (and for the second guitar in the solo) in reverse order, then reversed the tape and mixed it in. The backwards guitar sound has been said to "suspend the laws of time and motion to simulate the half-coherence of the state between wakefulness and sleep". The backwards guitar is mixed slightly differently on the American version, which is not included on the American Revolver but on Yesterday and Today.
According to Lennon, some of the lyrics of "She Said She Said" were taken almost verbatim from a conversation he had with actor Peter Fonda in August 1965, while he (Lennon), Harrison and Starr were under the influence of LSD at their rented house in Benedict Canyon (in Beverly Hills, California). During a conversation, Fonda said "I know what it's like to be dead," because as a boy he had almost died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
McCartney's "Got To Get You Into My Life" was influenced by the Motown Sound and used brass instrumentation extensively. Although cast in the form of a love song, McCartney described the song as an "ode to pot". It was released as a single in the US in 1976, ten years after
Revolver, to promote the compilation album
Rock 'n' Roll Music on which it appeared. (The vocal in the fade out at the end of the song is different on the mono version than on the stereo version. The last text line "What are you doing to my life?" can only be heard on the mono version).
McCartney mentioned in the 1989 radio series
McCartney on McCartney that "Here, There and Everywhere" was inspired by the Beach Boys. The song was worked on following a
Pet Sounds listening party in May 1966 where McCartney in particular was very affected by the album.
Rolling Stone noted, "The tune's chord sequence bears Brian Wilson's influence, ambling through three related keys without ever fully settling into one, and the modulations — particularly the one on the line "changing my life with a wave of her hand" — deftly underscore the lyrics, inspired by Paul's then-girlfriend, actress Jane Asher.
McCartney also contributed "Good Day Sunshine", "Yellow Submarine" and "For No One", a melancholy song featuring him playing clavichord and a horn solo played by Alan Civil. He also played lead guitar on two tracks, one being a guitar solo on "Taxman" and the other being a dual guitar part with George Harrison on "And Your Bird Can Sing". The song "And Your Bird Can Sing" is supposedly primarily by John Lennon, however Paul McCartney claims to have helped on the lyric, estimating the song as "80–20" to Lennon.
Revolver was also a breakthrough for Harrison as a songwriter, and he contributed three songs on the album, including the opening track, "Taxman". The song was a protest against the high marginal rates of income tax paid by high earners like the Beatles, which were sometimes as much as 95 percent of their income (hence the lyric, "There's one for you, nineteen for me"). The "Mr Wilson" and "Mr Heath" referred to in the lyrics are Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, who were, respectively, the British Labour Prime Minister and Conservative Leader of the Opposition at the time. In the
Anthology 2 version, the "Mr Wilson" and "Mr Heath" backing vocals were revealed to have originally been "Anybody got a bit of money" repeated rapidly.
Harrison also wrote "I Want to Tell You", about his difficulty expressing himself in words. "Love You To" marked a significant expansion of his burgeoning interest in Indian music and the sitar, which started with "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" on
Rubber Soul. It was the intro to "Love You To" that was playing in the background when Harrison's character first appears in
Yellow Submarine, the animated Beatles film released in 1968.
Ringo Starr's only lead vocal on
Revolver is the childlike "Yellow Submarine". McCartney said that he wrote "Yellow Submarine" as a children's song for Starr to sing. With the help of their EMI production team, The Beatles overdubbed stock sound effects they found in the Abbey Road Studios tape library.
Heralding the psychedelic era
According to music critic Richie Unterberger of Allmusic:
In many respects, Revolver is one of the very first psychedelic LPs – not only in its numerous shifts in mood and production texture, but in its innovative manipulation of amplification and electronics to produce new sounds on guitars and other instruments. Specific, widely-heralded examples include the backwards riffs of "I'm Only Sleeping", the sound effects of "Yellow Submarine", the sitar of "Love You To", the blurry guitars of "She Said, She Said", and above all the seagull chanting, buzzing drones, megaphone vocals, free-association philosophizing, and varispeed tape effects of "Tomorrow Never Knows".
In 1972, Lennon offered some context for the influence of drugs on The Beatles' creativity:
It's like saying, "Did Dylan Thomas write Under Milk Wood on beer?" What does that have to do with it? The beer is to prevent the rest of the world from crowding in on you. The drugs are to prevent the rest of the world from crowding in on you. They don't make you write any better. I never wrote any better stuff because I was on acid or not on acid.
—John Lennon, The Beatles Anthology
According to music critic Jim DeRogatis:
Revolver, Pet Sounds and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, relics of the first era of psychedelic rock and shining testaments to what can be accomplished in the recording studio when folks are fuelled on the potent drug of rampant imagination.
—J. DeRogatis, Milk it!: collected musings on the alternative music explosion of the 90s
Cover art and title
The cover illustration was created by German-born bassist and artist Klaus Voormann, one of the Beatles' oldest friends from their days at the Star Club in Hamburg. Voormann's illustration, part line drawing and part collage, included photographs by Robert Whitaker, who also took the back cover photographs and many other images of the group between 1964 and 1966, such as the infamous "butcher cover" for
Yesterday and Today. Voormann's own photo as well as his name (Klaus O. W. Voormann) is worked into Harrison's hair on the right-hand side of the cover. In the
Revolver cover appearing in his artwork for
Anthology 3, he replaced this image with a more recent photo. Harrison's
Revolver image was seen again on his single release of "When We Was Fab" along with an updated version of the same image.
The title "Revolver", like "Rubber Soul" before it, is a pun, referring both to a kind of handgun as well as the "revolving" motion of the record as it is played on a turntable. The Beatles had a difficult time coming up with this title. According to Barry Miles in his book
Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, the title that the four had originally wanted was
Abracadabra, until they discovered that another band had already used it. After that, opinion split: Lennon wanted to call it
Four Sides of the Eternal Triangle and Starr jokingly suggested
After Geography, playing on The Rolling Stones' recently released
Aftermath LP. Other suggestions included
Magic Circles,
Beatles on Safari,
Pendulum, and, finally,
Revolver, whose wordplay was the one that all four agreed upon. The title was chosen while the band were on tour in Germany late June 1966. They spent much of their time in their hotels in Munich, in a special train between Munich, Essen and Hamburg and in their Hotel Tremsbüttel outside Hamburg. The name
Revolver was selected finally while in the Hamburg hotel as drafts proof.
Critical reception
The Beatles had initiated a second pop revolution – one which while galvanising their existing rivals and inspiring many new ones, left all of them far behind.
—Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties
In a 1967 article for
Esquire, music journalist Robert Christgau called
Revolver "twice as good and four times as startling as
Rubber Soul, with sound effects, Oriental drones, jazz bands, transcendentalist lyrics, all kinds of rhythmic and harmonic surprises, and a filter that made John Lennon sound like God singing through a foghorn." Rob Sheffield, writing in
The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), said that the album found the Beatles "at the peak of their powers, competing with one another because nobody else could touch them", and concluded that, "these days,
Revolver has earned its reputation as the best album the Beatles ever made, which means the best album by anybody." PopMatters said in a 2007 review that the album had "the individual members of the greatest band in the history of pop music peaking at the exact same time".
Accolades
In 1997, it was named the third greatest album of all time in a
Music of the Millennium poll conducted in the United Kingdom by HMV Group, Channel 4,
The Guardian and Classic FM. In 2000,
Q magazine placed it at number 1 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. The same magazine's readers placed it at number 4 of greatest albums of all time in 2006.
In 2001, the TV network VH1 named it the number 1 greatest album of all time,
a position it also achieved in the Virgin All Time Top 1,000 Albums. In 2002, the readers of
Rolling Stone ranked the album the greatest of all time. In 2006, the album was chosen by
Time magazine as one of the 100 best albums of all time. In 2006,
Guitar World readers chose it as the 10th best guitar album of all time.
In 2010,
Revolver was named as the best pop album of all time by the official newspaper of the Holy See,
L'Osservatore Romano.
In 2012,
Revolver was voted 3rd on
Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2013,
Entertainment Weekly named
Revolver the greatest album of all time.
With all the accolades, with all the amazing music, and with the incalculable influence of the Fab Four at this pivotal time in their 7-year recorded history, it's easy to see why the Beatles are considered by critics and fans alike as THE one best band that ever dropped a note.
Unless Sinatra's your thing! (hehe).
Keep your mac cinched uptight and your hobnail books ashine! Sgt. Pepper's next in this series!
