Revolver

About

One of the great, possibly true stories about 1966’s <i>Revolver</i> concerns an exchange between Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan at London’s Mayfair Hotel about what they were currently working on. (In Dylan’s case, it was <i>Blonde on Blonde</i>.) On hearing the tape loops and death poetry of “Tomorrow Never Know,” Dylan allegedly said to McCartney, “Oh, I get it. You don’t want to be cute anymore.” It’s not entirely true. Part of what makes <i>Revolver</i> appealing is that it’s as much “Yellow Submarine” and the domestic sweetness of “Here, There and Everywhere” as it is “She Said She Said” and “Tomorrow Never Know.” But Dylan’s point was well-taken: For a band that put out “I Want to Hold Your Hand” less than three years earlier, the relative complexity of <i>Revolver</i>—in both sound and subject matter—not only challenged The Beatles’ image as the pop band the whole family could agree on (as opposed to, say, The Rolling Stones), but it also put pop on a course toward unfamiliar horizon. Not only were The Beatles able to bridge their interest in the relatively uncommercial worlds of psychedelia, experimental, and Indian classical music with Motown (“Got to Get You Into My Life”) and what we now think of as classically Beatlesque pop (“Good Day Sunshine”), but they also gave us a template for the pop album as the kaleidoscopically varied studio construction we think of it as today. Cute, but more. On the occasion of the album’s 2022 Super Deluxe reissue—which, in addition to a new mix in Spatial Audio by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, features some extraordinary rehearsal, outtake, and demos—we’re taking a look back at what shaped <i>Revolver</i> and what <i>Revolver</i> shaped in turn. <b>Before: The R&B Backbeat</b> <i>Revolver</i> is the last Beatles album where you can really hear the influence of American soul and R&B. “Taxman” is obviou, as is “Got to Get You Into My Life,” which John called “our Tamla-Motown bit.” But you can also hear it in “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Love You To,” whose Indian influence is anchored by a beat heavy enough to drive a dance floor regardless of the continent it’s on. And where the beat of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is rightly cited as a precursor to techno and drum ’n’ ba, it’s also a take on the syncopations of James Brown drummer Clyde Stubblefield, who said he got his style, in part, from listening to washing machines and trains—the funk of daily life. Their growing conceptual interests didn’t get in the way of their roots as a bar-and-dance band, and their ability to bridge the two—or, more importantly, to dissolve the distinction between them—is part of what makes <i>Revolver</i> <i>Revolver</i>. Four people, one room. <b>Before: British Humor and the Surrealism of Daily Life</b> For however mystical <i>Revolver</i> can seem, squint and you hear an album mostly about ordinary life. “Eleanor Rigby,” “Doctor Robert,” the “Taxman,” the lovebirds of “Here, There and Everywhere,” and the eccentric of “I’m Only Sleeping”: these are the people in your neighborhood, and if they’re stranger than you remember, it might be because you never really looked. The Kinks were experts in this field. And John, in particular, was a fan of the Scottish singer Ivor Cutler, whose novelty songs masked a sense of surrealism that pointed toward more cosmic realm. The point isn’t just that <i>Revolver</i> was strange, but that it located its strangeness in places easily dismissed as familiar. So, while John borrowed the first line of “Tomorrow Never Knows” from a book connecting LSD with <i>The Tibetan Book of the Dead</i>, its title came from a more historically modest source: Ringo Starr. <b>Before: Power of the Experiment</b> Given their cultural stature, it’s easy to forget that The Beatles didn’t really know what they were doing at the time. So, while <i>Revolver</i>’s experimental qualities—the tape loops of “Tomorrow Never Know,” the dislocated horn sections of “Got to Get You Into My Life”—could seem pretentious or alienating, they’re better understood as an embrace of the same unknowns that led to “Yesterday” or “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).” Namely, can this be done? Though the band’s interest in avant-garde composers like John Cage or Luciano Berio wasn’t always obvious in their sound, it spoke to a sense of experimentation and open-mindedness that spurred them on when they could’ve easily and comfortably stayed in the same place. <b>Before: Pop as Art</b> Part of The Beatles’ story is that of pop’s transformation into something like art. Not that <i>Revolver</i> was without precedent. Frank Sinatra’s serial-like string of albums in the ’50s (<i>In the Wee Small Hours</i>, <i>Only the Lonely</i>, <i>No One Cares</i>), Ray Charles’ <i>Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music</i>, the sound sculptures of producers like Phil Spector and Joe Meek, the arrangements of The Beach Boys’ <i>Pet Sounds</i>—all undoubtedly pop music. But they’re also examples of artists stretching pop to accommodate a sense of depth and conceptual ambition that hadn’t been there before. As George said around the time of <i>Revolver</i>’s release, selling a lot of records was nice. Now the point was to make them better. <b>After: Psychedelia for the Mainstream</b> The real psychedelic quality of <i>Revolver</i> wasn’t its sound but its subject. Time, memory, the inevitability of death: With the exception of Bob Dylan and The Byrd, no mid-’60s pop artists were wading as deeply into inner space as The Beatle. And because, in George’s word, they’d “had a few hit,” their ideas landed on audiences that probably wouldn’t have encountered them otherwise, or at least ones that might’ve been more hesitant to hear them out. The effect was to expand our sense of the terrain that pop music could cover and introduce a sense of headiness and ambiguity that gave way to everything from Jimi Hendrix and Prince to the inward-facing stance of alternative rock. <i>Revolver</i> tried to touch what can’t be touched. <b>After: The Studio as Instrument</b> Before <i>Revolver</i>, the studio wa, by and large, a place where bands went to record music they’d already worked out. After <i>Revolver</i>, it became a kind of instrument of its own. It wasn’t just the unprecedented amount of time The Beatles spent making it (220 hours to <i>Rubber Soul</i>’s 80) or their experiments with new technology; it was the way they opened their process to the concept of music being less a set of notes than a sequence of sounds—an attitude that evolved into everything from dub to shoegaze to hip-hop. Paul remembers meeting with producer George Martin before they went into the studio to play him what they’d been writing. When they got to “Tomorrow Never Know,” Martin was curious but puzzled: there were no chord change, no verse, no choru. In other word, it wasn’t a song. The blueprint was in the band’s collective head, but you couldn’t make sense of it until the work was done. <b>After: Pop as Playground</b> .

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