Revolver
Studio album by The Beatles
Released 5 August 1966
Recorded 6 April21 June 1966, Abbey Road Studios, London
Genre Rock, psychedelic rock
Length 34:58
Label Parlophone
Producer George Martin
Professional reviews
* Allmusic 5/5 stars
* BBC (Positive)
* Blender 5/5 stars
* Pitchfork Media 10/10 stars
* PopMatters 5/5 stars
* Rolling Stone 5/5 stars
* Sputnikmusic 5/5 stars
Revolver is the seventh album by English rock group The Beatles, released on 5 August 1966. Many of the tracks on Revolver are marked by an electric guitar-rock sound, in contrast with their previous, folk rock inspired Rubber Soul. It reached #1 on both the UK chart and US chart and stayed at the top spot for seven weeks and six weeks, respectively.
The album is often regarded as one of the greatest achievements in rock music history, and one of the Beatles' greatest studio achievements. It was released before their last tour in August 1966, but they did not perform songs from the album live. Their reasoning for this was that many of the tracks on the album, for example "Tomorrow Never Knows", were too complex to perform with live instruments.
Music
Melodic diversity and innovation in the studio
"Eleanor Rigby"
"Eleanor Rigby", one of Paul McCartney's songs on the album, was released as a single (in a double A-side with "Yellow Submarine") concurrently with the album. The song contains McCartney's lyrical imagery and a string arrangement (scored by George Martin under McCartney's direction). Martin once said his composition was inspired by the Bernard Herrmann score for Franois Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451; however, this is unlikely because the film had not yet been released. The writers of the book Recording The Beatles theorized that Martin was probably referring to the score from Psycho, which was also scored by Herrmann. Martin agrees he was probably thinking of the score to Psycho. The strings were recorded without reverberation, and compressed, giving a stark, urgent sound. The song is perhaps unique amongst Beatles' songs for having a lyric idea contributed by each Beatle. Ringo Starr contributed the line "Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no-one will hear." It was originally written as "Father McCartney" but was changed as it was thought that listeners would assume that it referred to Paul's father. So, after looking through a local phone book, he found the name McKenzie. Lennon laid claim to "40 percent" of the lyrics, including "Wearing a face that she keeps in the jar by the door" (though the other Beatles and those present at the writing of the song dispute this and argue Lennon's contributions were minor). Harrison contributed the line "Ah, look at all the lonely people" used in the opening and as a bridge. The song's quirky subject matter and instrumentation marks a departure from The Beatles' prior output.
"I'm Only Sleeping"
Lennon was the main writer of "I'm Only Sleeping". He and 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 guitar playing is a little different on the American version, which is not included on the American Revolver but on The Beatles Yesterday and Today.
"Tomorrow Never Knows"
The Beatles' unfolding innovation in the recording studio reaches 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. 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.
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 concrte techniques at that time. According to 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 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 (he 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 "And Your Bird Can Sing", "She Said She Said", and "Dr. Robert".
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 also contributed "For No One" a melancholy song featuring him playing clavichord and a horn solo played by Alan Civil, "Here, There, and Everywhere", and "Good Day Sunshine".
Revolver was also a breakthrough album for Harrison as a songwriter, and he contributed three songs on Revolver, including the opening track, "Taxman". The guitar solo is actually played by McCartney. The "Mr. Wilson" and "Mr. Heath" referred to in the lyrics (right after the word "taxman") 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, "Mr. Wilson and Mr. Heath" were replaced with "Anybody got a little money". 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").
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 the Harrison character first appears in Yellow Submarine, the animated Beatles movie released in 1968.
Heralding the psychedelic era
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.[citation needed] 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".
Ringo Starr's only song 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.
In 1972, Lennon offered some context for the influence of drugs on the Beatles' creativity (quoted in The Beatles Anthology): 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.
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 Magical 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 Japan in JuneJuly 1966. Due to security measures, they spent much of their time in their Tokyo Hilton hotel room; the name Revolver was selected as all four collaborated on a large psychedelic painting.
[edit] Critical reception
Revolver is often cited as one of the greatest albums in music history. In 1997, it was named the 3rd 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 2006, Q magazine readers placed it at number 4, while in 2000 the same magazine placed it at number 1 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. 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. A PopMatters review described the album as "the individual members of the greatest band in the history of pop music peaking at the exact same time", while Ink Blot magazine claims it "stands at the summit of western pop music." In 2002, the readers of Rolling Stone ranked the album the greatest of all time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 3 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.[18] It placed behind only the Beatles' own Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. It was ranked 10th on Guitar World's (Readers Choice) Greatest 100 Guitar Albums Of All Time. In 2006, the album was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best albums of all time.
Track listing
All songs written and composed by Lennon/McCartney, except where noted.
Side one
# Title Lead vocals Length
1. "Taxman" (George Harrison) Harrison 2:39
2. "Eleanor Rigby" McCartney 2:08
3. "I'm Only Sleeping" Lennon 3:02
4. "Love You To" (Harrison) Harrison 3:01
5. "Here, There and Everywhere" McCartney 2:26
6. "Yellow Submarine" Starr 2:40
7. "She Said She Said" Lennon 2:37
Side two
# Title Lead vocals Length
1. "Good Day Sunshine" McCartney 2:10
2. "And Your Bird Can Sing" Lennon 2:02
3. "For No One" McCartney 2:02
4. "Doctor Robert" Lennon 2:15
5. "I Want to Tell You" (Harrison) Harrison 2:30
6. "Got to Get You into My Life" McCartney 2:31
7. "Tomorrow Never Knows" Lennon 2:57
Capitol USA release
The original US LP release of Revolver, the band's tenth on Capitol Records and twelfth US album, marked the last time Capitol would alter an "established" UK Beatles album for the US market. As three of its tracks"I'm Only Sleeping", "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "Doctor Robert"had been used for the earlier Yesterday and Today Capitol compilation, they were simply deleted in the US version, yielding an 11 track album instead of the UK version's 14 and shortening the time to 28:20.
The album's 30 April 1987 release on CD standardized the track listing to the original UK version. Having been available only as an import in the US in the past, the 14 track UK version of the album was also issued domestically in the US on LP and cassette on 21 July 1987.
Personnel
The Beatles
* John Lennon vocals, rhythm and acoustic guitars
* Paul McCartney vocals, bass guitar, lead, rhythm guitar and acoustic guitars, piano, other instruments
* George Harrison vocals, lead, rhythm guitar and acoustic guitars, bass guitar ("She Said, She Said"), other instruments
* Ringo Starr vocals, drums, tambourine, and maracas
Additional musicians and production
* Anil Bhagwat tabla on "Love You To"
* Alan Civil French horn on "For No One"
* Brian Jones background noises on "Yellow Submarine" (uncredited)
* Donovan background vocals on "Yellow Submarine" (uncredited)
* Geoff Emerick recording and mixing engineer; samples of the marching band on "Yellow Submarine"
* George Martin producer; piano on "Good Day Sunshine" and "Tomorrow Never Knows"; Hammond organ on "Got to Get You into My Life"; samples of the marching band on "Yellow Submarine"
* Mal Evans bass drum and background vocals on "Yellow Submarine"
* Marianne Faithfull background vocals on "Yellow Submarine" (uncredited)
* Neil Aspinall background vocals on "Yellow Submarine" (uncredited)
* Pattie Boyd background vocals on "Yellow Submarine" (uncredited)
* Session musicians four violins, two violas and two cellos on "Eleanor Rigby"; brass section on "Got to Get You into My Life": orchestrated and conducted by George Martin
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