Originally published in Uncut Take 292 (September 2021 issue)…
As they approached the making of Revolver, The Beatles couldn’t have known that they’d just enjoyed their last carefree year. In 1965, they had made Help!, played Shea Stadium and visited Elvis and the Queen. Just before Christmas, as was now their habit, their second album of the year had been released. Rubber Soul still sounds like the perfectly balanced expression of a pop band with artistic ambitions, expanding their creative range without jeopardising the relationship with their vast and adoring public. The following year would be different.
They started 1966 still shining still like a four-headed Sun King, dispensing rays of unsullied happiness. But in February, during an interview with the Evening Standard, John Lennon compared their popularity with the statistical decline in Christian worship. He was trying to say how ludicrous it seemed, but the subtlety of his point was ignored in America’s Bible Belt, where Beatles records were promptly piled up into bonfires. In July, the group released an album in America titled Yesterday And Today, its cover showing the four of them smiling as widely as usual while holding the bloodied body parts of dolls. Another uproar forced its withdrawal. They were starting to tread on dangerous ground.
Revolver arrived in August, on schedule, but it was the result of a very different creative process. Their debut album, Please Please Me, had been recorded in a single day. Rubber Soul had taken 8o hours of studio time. Revolver took 220 hours, the result of a band suddenly liberated from constant live performances and from an aborted third feature-film project. Now so successful that they were free from the imposition of studio budgets, they were able to use Abbey Road as a laboratory.
But the album might not have been recorded in England at all. Following the example of the Stones, who had already recorded successfully at Chess in Chicago and RCA in Hollywood, they had made overtures to Stax in Memphis, thinking that the label’s boss, Jim Stewart, might produce them.
Somehow, though, they ended up in the same old place with the same old George Martin, although this time the chief engineer would be the 19-year-old Geoff Emerick, who had just completed his EMI apprenticeship.
Before the sessions began on April 6, Lennon and McCartney were played an advance copy of Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson’s response to the possibilities suggested by Rubber Soul. McCartney in particular recognised the need to accelerate the sort of development glimpsed in the introspective lyric of “Help!” and the use of sitar on “Norwegian Wood”.
The others needed no encouragement to experiment with sound, to tackle new subjects, to turn pop into art.
In the world outside, it was a time of celebration and discontent. A week before the sessions started, Harold Wilson’s Labour party won a general election with a majority of 96. Six weeks into recording, someone in the audience at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall shouted “Judas!” at Bob Dylan; a few days later they took a break and went to the Albert Hall to judge him for themselves. As they wrapped up the final mixes on June 21, race riots were erupting in American cities. On July 3, 31 people were arrested in the anti-Vietnam War demo in Grosvenor Square.
The first copies of Revolver were being manufactured at EMI’s plant in Hayes when England won the World Cup at Wembley, a few minutes’ drive away. On August 5, the very day of the album’s UK release, Mao Ise Tung publicly endorsed the protests by China’s students against the country’s bourgeois elite, triggering the Cultural Revolution.
The Beatles responded by opening the album with their first real protest song. But it was not a civil rights anthem or a hymn to the Chinese proletariat. George Harrison’s target was Britain’s tax system, which was now taking 95 per cent of the investment income of top earners, including the four Beatles. “There’s one for you, 19 for me”, Harrison sang, ” cos I’m the taxman”. His sardonic whine was counterpointed by the snap and snarl of the backing track, which might as well have been recorded in Memphis.
No-one really criticised these young millionaires for moaning about their tax burden – and anyway what came next was the irreproachable “Eleanor Rigby”, a small string ensemble performing the arrangement with which Martin immediately justified his continued involvement, devising the perfect setting for McCartney’s dreamlike evocation of an England haunted by its past. Dreams were also the theme of “I’m Only Sleeping”, introducing a seemingly blissed-out Lennon, a tape-reversed lead guitar suggesting the psychotropic source of his reverie.
A sitar cascade announced the return of Harrison in full Hindustani drag, intoning the erotic blackmail note of “Love You To” over a droning tamboura and syncopated tablas. McCartney’s “Here, There And Everywhere”, the loveliest of his ballads, was a direct response to Wilson’s “God Only Knows”, giving way to the genial foolery of Ringo and “Yellow Submarine”, a song for children destined to be repurposed as a football chant from Anfield to Belper Town.
And so it went on, one facet of collective genius succeeding another in a glorious kaleidoscope of newly discovered feelings: “She Said, She Said”, “Good Day Sunshine”, “And Your Bird Can Sing”, “For No One”, “Doctor Robert”, “I Want To Tell You”, “Got To Get You Into My Life” and the final climactic “Tomorrow Never Knows”, incorporating The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, tape loops, the use of a Leslie speaker on Lennon’s lead vocal (Emerick’s idea) and the levitating effect of Ringo’s astonishing drumming. A three-minute vision of eternity, it confirmed the impression that they were now in a kind of collective trance, freed from the clock-time of the “real” world, running on Beatle-time.
The album’s black-and-white cover, by their Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann, mixed Beardsleyesque ink portraits with collaged photos in a pre-echo of the look of International Times, the McCartney-supported underground paper whose first edition would be published a few weeks later. As the world changed, once again they were in the lead….
RICHARD WILLIAMS
Side 1
1. “TAXMAN”
“One… two… three… four…” And we’re off – The Beatles’ seventh studio album begins with George Harrison’s tight, 12-bar riposte to the government’s punitive tax regime. Thirteen tracks later, it will end in another dimension…
JOHNNY MARR: “I’ve been thinking about George Harrison a lot recently. He’s a good advert for how incredibly famous people might want to conduct themselves. He seemed to be above needy celebrity. He was, I like to think, a very singular personality in rock music. When I was a little kid in the early ’70s, his support for the Krishna movement was a big deal – he had the eyes of the world on him, but he single-mindedly followed his own path. If that’s not integrity, I don’t know what is! Similarly, with “Taxman’, I hear a young man at the peak of his powers, unafraid to stick his neck out and have a good old gripe – and on side one, track one! Considering how scrutinised The Beatles were, that took a lot of balance, perspective and self-assurance.
“Overall, the scope of ambition on Revolver for all of them is immense. The high moments on Revolver for each individual Beatle were the highest moments that they’d reached thus far. In a whole career of many, many innovations, Paul McCartney’s guitar solo on “Taxman’ is exceptional – his bass riff on Taxman’ invented a genre in itself!” Revolver was a benchmark. A lot of that was to do with not just the songs but the sonics. “Taxman’ captures the energy of an R&B track. When Revolver came out, I imagine “Taxman’ sounded very hip. It’s lean, punchy and very well edited. But then, Revolver is all about attack and compression. The vocals are very present and vital, the guitar sounds are all super in your face. It’s a wide-awake album.
“By the time they made Revolver, they had been through A Hard Day’s Night, Please Please Me, Help! and everything – and they’re still their own entity. Of course Revolver is influenced by all the things you hear on those records – particularly the soul records that are hip in the UK and London at the time – but it’s The Beatles. They didn’t need to look outwardly at other scenes to find a concept. In a way Revolver is the culmination of an extremely mod phenomena.
“I got influenced by The Beatles in a big way – way, way after the event – through the advent of the VCR. You could walk into HMV and buy things like The Compleat Beatles, Ready Steady Go! and all these retrospective documentaries on VHS. Being able to watch those was one of the reasons why I dressed like George Harrison for a bit in The Smiths! For many years, I believed Revolver was everybody’s favourite Beatles record. I mean – it is, isn’t it?”
2. “ELEANOR RIGBY”
Revolver’s only single – a double A-side with “Yellow Submarine” – and McCartney’s finest story song: a tragic Play For Today sketched in three scenes….
NORMAN BLAKE, TEENAGE FANCLUB: “Revolver has a real edge – it’s The Beatles’ punk-rock album. ‘Taxman’ is very punk, the way it comes in with that little open-mic ‘One, two…’, and sets you up for the album.
“Then ‘Taxman’ finishes and it’s amazing the way ‘Eleanor Rigby’ comes in – there’s no preamble, just that ‘Aah!” then into George Martin’s string arrangement. It’s really aggressive. George Martin’s strings remind me of Vivaldi. He’s really edgy and makes you sit up and listen, and the arrangement is very much in that spirit. It’s a marriage of Vivaldi and Psycho!
“John Lennon later said he wrote 80 per cent of it, but there’s absolutely no way. It’s so McCartney in where it goes melodically. It’s got the McCartney scan – the way the lyric scans across is 4/4, but the melody scans across five bars, so it’s slightly 5/4 in the verse. McCartney’s melody gift was innate; John had to work at it more. It’s quite a complex melody. He was 23 when he was doing this stuff, really sophisticated. He had just moved in with Jane Asher’s folks. He was being educated culturally and he was eager to advance his skill set. It’s like he’s moving on from Hamburg quicker than the other guys, in arrangements and themes.
“Are the ballads on this album the climax of a particular sort of McCartney writing? Well, ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ is one of the most beautiful romantic songs ever. In fact, when I got married, my wife Krista and me walked down the aisle to it.
“‘Eleanor Rigby’ is a really sad song. Even the way it tails off at the end, with that last little bar with the strings: da-da-da-da-der. It’s brutal. Like the last bit of dirt on the grave? That’s it, you can almost see him wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks away. It’s a really strong image. This song about loneliness and death is the most played Revolver song on Spotify. It’s up to 144,903,115 at the moment! So it still resonates with people.”
“george was enlightened and grounded, eager to learn and grow” – margo price
3. “I’M ONLY SLEEPING”
How to follow “Eleanor Rigby”? With John’s evocative ode to introspective reveries, rich with studio innovation: slowed-down cymbals, varispeed vocals and a backwards guitar solo…
SEAN ONO LENNON: “There’s a lot of good Beatles records, but Revolver is hard to beat. They were moving at an unbelievable speed, they’d hit their stride as individuals and were claiming their power as artists – but they haven’t got to Pepper yet.
Revolver is like bursting through a door. In a way, this transitional period is the most exciting. My dad and Paul are still writing together but they’re also individuated. It’s the best of both worlds. George has started writing incredible songs on his own. Their production is getting experimental. The technology is changing. They’re starting to listen to the mixes, they’re starting to have production input.
“The tape loops on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and the backwards guitar sound on ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ are the birth of psychedelic music.
George spent hours trying to get the backwards guitar to sound right. You read about him trying to figure out guitar licks forwards and learning them backwards – you can tell he’s figuring it out. My dad’s voice is sped up but the drums are slowed down, so they sound really sloshy, almost like they’re underwater. I think it had to do with the recording having been done a bit faster, then when you play it back at the regular speed it sounds slower – which is why the song sounds like it should be in E minor but it’s in E flat.
“I loved the song as a kid because everyone can relate to not wanting to be woken up! Please, just let me sleep another five minutes… I remember hearing this song and my mum saying to me, ‘Your dad really liked to sleep, he was a good sleeper!’ So I used to take it literally – as a song that championed people who liked to lie in a bit. I didn’t know about the implications of consciousness, drugs or whatever.
“I never really thought about it before, but I don’t think any other song could follow ‘Eleanor Rigby’.I mean, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is so heavy and sophisticated, to follow it with another complex, classically influenced song would have been too much – but this is perfect. It feels easy and loose, it’s incredibly cool. The perfect vibe after a song as highbrow as ‘Eleanor Rigby’. It shows how powerful my dad was, that he could achieve all this with just a couple of chords, a cool lyric and a great melody. It’s one of my favourite songs. I think it was one of my dad’s, too.”
4. “LOVE TO YOU”
Following “Norwegian Wood”, George continues to explore his love for Indian classical music, abetted by tabla player Anil Bhagwat and various members of London’s Asian Music Circle….
MARGO PRICE: “When I first listened to Love You To’, I was transcended to another dimension. I heard it at a pivotal time in my life when I was experimenting with psychedelics, questioning cultural norms and rejecting societal pressures that had been drilled into my head since the day
I was born. ‘Love You To’ was a love song to George’s then-wife, Pattie Boyd, but it was also a philosophical catalyst in terms of how he was interpreting the world around him after his first LSD trip. The flowing rhythm of the tabla hand drums and the twangy hum of the sitar provided the perfect backdrop for the sly message of the counterculture that George was illicitly slipping into The Beatles’ sound. It was the first time Eastern music reached the mainstream consciousness, thanks to the most popular band of all time.
“‘Love You To’ has few words and its chords are simple, but it says so much in its brief three minutes and nine seconds. It broke ground by introducing a new hybrid of philosophical love song. It’s sardonic and cynical – but somehow totally zen. The song encouraged what I already knew deep inside myself – that material possessions don’t matter, that life is brief and love is what’s truly important. George was tapping into a higher knowledge; he exuded something real despite being rich and famous. He was enlightened and grounded and eager to learn and grow, both as a musician and a person.
“The lyrics almost seemed like a riddle to me, and long ago I tried to figure out how to decode them. I thought if I could break the code, I could find the true meaning to life and happiness. It inspired me to meditate for the first time ever in my life and became my mantra at times. I still return to this album, this song especially, when I feel I’m losing my centre. And I run these words through my mind: ‘A lifetime is so short/A new one can’t be bought/But what you’ve got means suchalotto me’.”
5. “HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE
Supposedly inspired by The Beach Boys “God Only Knows”, Paul’s faultless hymn (written while waiting for John to get out of bed) glows with layered harmonies…
GRAHAM NASH: “I first met The Beatles at a talent show in November 1959 – on the final round of TV Star Search, at the New Manchester Hippodrome theatre. On this particular night it was me and Allan Clarke, who later became The Hollies, Freddie Garrity, who went on to lead Freddie And The Dreamers, a guy called Ron Wycherley, who became Billy Fury, and these four kids from Liverpool, who were then called Johnny And The Moondogs. Me and Clarkey actually won. The Beatles did Buddy Holly’s ‘Think It Over’. They weren’t there at the very end because they had to catch the last bus home to Liverpool at nine o’clock.
“A few years later, I was working at a coffee bar in Manchester – the 2]’s, which had just changed its name to The Oasis – where The Beatles were due to play (February 2, 1962, their first gig outside Liverpool]. The Hollies were playing at the Twisted Wheel that night, about half a mile away.
“The Beatles came in around four in the afternoon to do a soundcheck, wearing these black leather overcoats. It was obvious there was something magical about these four people. That’s before they’d even played any music. So I followed them over the years and watched them develop from an R&B covers group to Revolver and Sgt Pepper. To see that transition was both fascinating and inspiring.
“Revolver was so forward- looking. I homed in on the brilliance of Paul McCartney. ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s incredibly simple, which, quite frankly, isn’t easy to do. You have to absolutely make sure that, when you simplify a melody and backing track, they marry together and make one complete statement. ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ does exactly that.
“More than anything, The Beatles allowed you to experiment. Before Revolver I’d been writing moon-June type songs with The Hollies. That’s when I began to realise – especially later, after coming to America – that if I could take my ability to write a simple melody and put meaningful words to it, my songs would be so much better. That’s one of the things that The Beatles taught me. They freed you.”
6. “YELLOW SUBMARINE”
Let us dive into a sea of green, as McCartney’s jolly singalong dovetails neatly into the birth of English psychedelia, while randomly sequenced fragments of nautical sound continue the album’s technical experiments…
BUDDY MILLER: “When Revolver came out, I was 12. I’d already been playing guitar for four or five years. The Beatles are the reason I got my first good guitar, and they made my world bigger and better. I was a horrible student, a horrible son to my parents. I’d just look at whatever pictures would show up in Beatle magazines or on Beatles bubblegum cards, to figure, what are they playing? That was my school. When they played The Ed Sullivan Show, I’d set my camera up on a tripod and photograph the TV, trying to figure it out.
“I stayed home from school after Revolver came out to listen. Everything just dug in a little more. The guitar parts are astounding. The whole thing was more difficult to digest, but it was the harder stuff that pulled me in. ‘Yellow Submarine’ was the only song I could play, when my little band would come round my garage. It wasn’t quite as complicated as the rest, although it’s more complicated than it sounds. Much later on, I played it with Kinky Friedman’s band. ‘Yellow Submarine’ makes a real good country song! It isn’t overly goofy. It tells a story, it’s a very catchy, singable, lovable chorus. I love Ringo’s singing. If anybody else did it, it would have made it more serious. It was a weird little song that drew you in, that I dug and could play. Whereas I couldn’t play ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’!
“I remember talking to all my friends at the lunch table about ‘Rain’ that year. Back then, we didn’t know they were backwards guitars. It was just taking in the feeling. The way I felt listening to Revolver wasn’t an emotional thing, although there are beautiful songs on there. I just felt awe. I still hear Revolver as one thing, I don’t pick it apart. Because it’s a singular vision.
“Sgt Pepper didn’t ever resonate with me as much as Revolver. My parents played it the day it came out at a party, so how hip is it? Were The Beatles behind the game by then? I wouldn’t say that. The Beatles were the game.”
7. “SHE SAID SHE SAID”
Tacked onto Revolver at the last minute and taped “in the middle of the night, under pressure”, according to Geoff Emerick, the first of Revolver’s side-ending psychedelic masterpieces was based on Lennon’s acid trip with The Byrds in LA…
ROGER McGUINN: “It was John, George, David [Crosby], Peter Fonda and me the night we took acid. Peter was enigmatic that night. He spoke in riddles a lot. It wasn’t like you could ask him a question and he’d give you an answer. It was hard to understand where he was coming from. Peter said the acid was from the Sandoz labs, so it was good stuff. But at one point George felt like he was dying. Peter wanted to help out, and said, “Well, I know what it’s like to be dead…” – because he’d shot himself in the stomach once. In ‘She Said She Said’ John said Peter’s comments ‘made him feel like he’d never been born’. So he had Peter thrown out. It had been quite a surreal night, like a Fellini film. ‘She Said She Said’ captures that.
“I loved Revolver. The vocals and guitars slide around and have almost a Doppler effect, which created a sense of euphoria. ‘She Said She Said’ had that, changing into 3/4 time at When I was a boy…’, and back to 4/4. I love the guitars on that track – the tone, and the way it mimics the melody. It’s really beautiful music. It gave you the impression of an acid trip.
“You’d have moments of sheer panic on LSD, then moments of ecstasy, where the colours were great and everything smelt good, almost like when you’re on a motorbike and you’d go through pockets of warm and cold air. You could feel things changing back and forth in ‘She Said She Said’ too, going into other areas and coming back to the original. Then when John sings, ‘When I was a boy, everything was right’, he’s longing for the normal life experience, for the comfort and security of youth. It’s possible to go to different levels of memories like that on acid. It’s a very flexible experience.
“Revolver made The Byrds want to experiment more, with backward-tape and sound effects. We had a lot of interplay and cross-pollination. But The Beatles were like our older brothers, and we followed them right through the 60s.”
“IT’S REALLY BEAUTIFUL…IT GAVE YOU THE IMPRESSION OF AN ACID TRIP” – ROGER MCGUINN
SIDE 2
1. “GOOD DAY SUNSHINE”
Written by Paul on John’s piano at Kenwood and partly influenced by The Lovin Spoonful’s recent hit “Daydream”. George Martin heightens its old-school feel with a great barrelhouse solo…
BRIAN WILSON: “I first heard Revolver at my house in Beverly Hills and got very excited about it. I thought it was very revolutionary for the time. I loved the singing and all the instruments used in the production. I loved ‘Good Day Sunshine’. I like Paul’s voice, I think he’s a great singer.
“In the ‘6os, Paul was somebody I admired very much, but a competitor at the same time. It was a thrill to have him around. When The Beach Boys first heard Rubber Soul we were so flipped out that we cut Pet Sounds. There’s absolutely no way that Pet Sounds would have happened without it. I knew then that I needed to create an album that everybody would like. Then Lennon and McCartney were so flipped out with Pet Sounds that they made Sgt Pepper. So it was like a friendly rivalry.
“Paul’s best quality is his singing voice. And of course, his songwriting ability runs very high. He has such a versatile way of writing. He’s probably the most prolific songwriter in the history of the business. There were similarities between us in that we were both bass players and our birthdays were two days apart. He was June 18th and I was June 20th (both 1942].
“The first time I ever heard The Beatles was when ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ came on the radio. I flipped – I really loved it. Later on, The Beach Boys took on Derek Taylor as our publicity agent. He’d been The Beatles’ agent too. Because of the Beatles connection, we decided he’d be appropriate for us as well.
“I first met Paul in a recording studio in Los Angeles in 1967. He came by with Derek Taylor and was dressed in a white suit with red leather shoes. He looked really spiffy and good. Then he sat down at the piano and played ‘She’s Leaving Home’ for me and my wife. We both just cried tears. It was such a beautiful song. Then of course, he ate a carrot and some celery on my song ‘Vegetables’. We got along pretty good. We didn’t really stay in touch over the years, but when we met in 2004, he had come to watch the Smile concert in England. I was told that he was crying. I knew he’d said that ‘God Only Knows’ is the best song ever written.”
2. “AND YOUR BIRD CAN SING”
Continuing side two’s upbeat start, this brisk slice of psychedelic R&B rides in on McCartney and Harrison’s twin lead guitars while Lennon works through his romantic disenchantments…
FRAZEY FORD: “I was deeply into The Beatles as a small child and stayed that way for a while. Bob Dylan was a religion for my dad. The Beatles were more like the foundation to everywhere pop music went. Listening to Revolver now, I don’t lean towards that fuller production on my own records. But hearing something like ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, they’re doing that thing where they’re fusing Stax with something else to create a new sound. The Beatles had that drive and belief to constantly move forward and the way they did it is part of why people have that spirit of innovation now.
”’And Your Bird Can Sing’ really hits me, it’s so quick. Like ‘I Want To Tell You’, it has this manic quality. It’s so short, like soul records, like Otis Redding songs that are so fucking fast that all you can do is play them again. It’s the combination of Paul’s sweet harmonies and George’s cool, scratchy guitar – there’s such visceral immediacy to it, and then there’s a Beach Boys vibe too, where suddenly it’s very lush. It unfolds really quickly, like origami, then it goes away. It’s a very fast feeling that you’re not expecting.
“There are a few songs on Revolver that whip through you like that, overwhelming and sort of uncomfortable. The Beatles have got so much craft that they make it sound easy, but it must have been challenging to make, and what Lennon’s working through in ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ is quite hard. He’s sorting through a very uncomfortable feeling, from different perspectives, of envy and insecurity: You don’t get me… you can’t hear me’. What I get from that song is that for people who are very famous it’s very hard to keep your humanity. You can be surrounded by all of these riches, but you’re still missing something. The song feels like a storm, and a reminder: ‘When your prize possessions start to weigh you down… ‘ll be around. ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ is also funny. John’s not taking it too seriously, and making it seem ridiculous puts it all in perspective.”
3. “FOR NO ONE”
Paul’s sombre ballad, about the end of an affair, is a baroque masterclass, largely played out on a clavichord (borrowed from George Martin) and featuring doleful French horn….
RICKIE LEE JONES: “It was a rough year in the Jones house the year Revolver came out. We’d moved to a new school district, for which I was grateful, but my brother had been maimed on his motorcycle, my dad was drinking and mother just sat in the kitchen like a character from a John Prine song, smoking cigarettes and thinking of ways to torment everyone.
“My room was my only refuge. It was not the geography of the bed or the closet that kept me safe and sound – it was the record player. I played Beatles records all night long. I was still a little girl in many ways. I would play with my doll while listening to this record, for acting out my life was the only way I could find any release from the stress, make any sense of my longing and the prison of so much prohibition that is life for a 12-year-old girl. So The Beatles’ voices were as close to God as I would ever come.
”For No One’ is a greater song than its function on Revolver gave it credit for, a bridge to connect the big, scary, psychedelic finish of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ to the rest of the record. It’s a brief gasp of a song, a loss of air in someone’s life. A silent inhale, the kind of sound you try not to make when something terrible has been revealed.
While I was sure this was the territory of grown-up strife, it never occurred to me that I was listening to the sound of my own life, gasping for air as every single thing I held close loosened and fell away from me in the aftermath of my brother’s accident. I already knew there would be times when life seemed like a receding dream. ‘For No One’ offered some kind of reality the rest of the songs didn’t bring, a diamond of a song, simple and melancholy.
“I had the great fortune to record a version with the legendary Joe Jackson. He pounded out the notes like he was hammering a new house for
me to look out of. Something safer than that room from 1966. But it wasn’t possible. I would always be in that room, then and forever, any time I sing of the hours when love is dying and there is nowhere to run, and love inexplicably ceases to exist, ‘a love that should have lasted years.”
“THE BEATLES’ VOICES WERE AS CLOSE TO GOD AS I’D EVER COME” – RICKIE LEE JONES”
4. “DOCTOR ROBERT”
The first specific drugs reference in a Beatles song – “It was about myself,” said John – with maracas, harmonium and double-tracked vocals alongside George’s peppy, psychedelic guitar…
STEVE CROPPER: “A DJ friend of mine in Memphis, George Klein, got to interview The Beatles when they first came over to the States. Ringo said that they wanted to cut an album at Stax, where I was the A&R director at the time. It was a real compliment.
“A couple of years later (1966), Brian Epstein came over to discuss it. He said, ‘We’re going to need security. We’ll need a safe place for The Beatles to stay.’ So I found them a house owned by the manager of the Hilton Hotel, surrounded by an iron fence, very secure. But Brian didn’t think that it was going to be good enough. I kept telling him that The Beatles wouldn’t go through the same experience in front of the Stax studio as they would elsewhere. Then he called me again: “They’re still working on it. Would you mind coming to New York to do the album?’ I said I’d go wherever they wanted me to do it. The next time he called from England and said, ‘They’re almost through with this album. We’ll catch you on the next one. But I never heard from him again.
“I don’t know how Revolver would’ve sounded if they’d cut it at Stax, but I remember hearing it for the first time. The Beatles were getting into more psychedelic stuff with some of the chords they used and I was more influenced by the music than the lyrics. ‘Doctor Robert’ wasn’t on the album in the States, so I heard that later [on Yesterday And Today. It had such a great sound – I don’t know if George is getting that from a 12-string Rickenbacker or not – and I loved the chord changes. Some of the harmonies on that song are amazing.
“Later on, in the 70s, I got to play with them individually. Ringo and I used to hang out sometimes, as well as doing music in the studio, and I was with George when he played with Ravi Shankar. And I played on the sessions for John’s Rock’n’Roll. The only one I never worked with was Paul. Now, every time I see him, he says to me, ‘Cropper, you and I need to do something together one of these days!’”
5. “I WANT TO TELL YOU”
“My head is filled with things to say…” George shares his philosophical musings on this, his unprecedented third contribution to a Fabs LP…
DHANI HARRISON: “I Want To Tell You’ reminds me of touring with my dad in Japan in 1991, with Eric Clapton’s 24 Nights band. We opened the show with ‘I Want To Tell You’ every night. My dad was kind of nervous, because it was the first song of the set – but the lights would go down, the guitar riff would start and everyone would go mad! It would blast off so fast that, before you knew it, the song was over and everyone was cheering. I felt like that gave him such a good boost – opening with a track from Revolver on your solo tour is not something many people can do!
“We also opened with it in the western part of the Concert For George, too. We learnt every single one of his songs during almost three months of rehearsal – at the end of it, I felt like I’d done my 10,000 hours! I’d known the band from when I was a kid, so everything felt very familiar. But all the same, I don’t really remember the show itself – that was too much information, it was like a final university exam or something. We walked on stage exactly a year after the moment my dad passed away, given the time difference. I remember trying to have a little quiet moment for myself before we went on, then it was like, ‘Right, here’s your guitar – on stage!’
“That opening chord! It definitely makes your head tilt for a second: ‘What?’ The three-part harmonies are some of the greatest ever. They’re completely different – the tone in John’s voice, Paul’s voice and my dad’s voice. That makes for a really great Shirelles-y, radio-sounding harmony. At the end, you’ve got Paul singing an Indian gypsy-style vocal -I’ve heard people singing like that in the desert in Rajasthan. Hearing Paul McCartney doing Rajasthani vocals is very cool!
“I go through periods where Revolver is my favourite album. I guess if something creates that kind of strong reaction in you, then it’s evidently the most incredible recording. It might be my favourite thing of all time…”
6. “GOT TO GET YOU INTO MY LIFE”
Paul’s brassy fanfare to the joys of pot was heavily indebted to Stax and Motown, with members of Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames brought in to steer the horn section….
GREEN GARTSIDE, SCRITTI POLITTI: “I got my copy of Revolver when it was released in 1966 – I was 11 years old. I don’t think any other cultural artefact, any book, film or work of art, has had a greater impact on making me the man I am. I would play the LP over and over on a suitcase record player in the tiny front room of our house in Cwmbran New Town. In a rhapsodic state I’d begin a kind of interpretive dance which lasted the length of the record. The only part of the routine that I remember clearly is my expressive response to Lennon’s She Said She Said’, which involved me surfing on an imaginary board. I’ve no idea where the surfing connection came from, nor the indefinable sense of Scottish-ness that came over me when Lennon sang ‘And you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born’. Maybe it’s the Mixolydian mode of the melody.
“I’m a McCartney man by inclination. It’s his wide-ranging melodies and harmonic inventiveness. Lennon’s tunes, by contrast, tended to be more conjunct. But on Revolver it seems like an unfettering force drives all the Beatles’ melodies into exquisite shapes and trajectories. The same emancipatory power that set their fingers free to explore the fretboards. In those 1966 recording sessions, The Beatles turned Abbey Road studios into a laboratory for fissions and fusions of countercultural energies – collected, absorbed, intensified and exploded. There’s almost a celebration of unease and dissatisfaction at the heart of this record. A joyous sense of liberation in being able to sing the confusion alongside the absolution. ‘She Said She Said’ revels in doubt, soars with the struggle to communicate the ineffable and hymns the retrieval of uncorrupted childhood. It also rocks like a motherfucker.
“But maybe my desert island track from the album would have to be McCartney’s gently stonking stomper ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’. There’s a tiny guitar break at around the 1:50 mark that always occasioned a moment in my improvised gyrations between the settee and the fireplace when I almost passed out in sheer ecstasy. It has that power still. It’s classic Paul with the heartstring-tugging verse and the almost menacing monotone flattened third in the hook, straight out of his Little Richard register. It goes sublimely from yearning to vehemence in a shift that’s typical of the album’s exaltation of uncertainty. Revolver is the hypocentre of a nuclear reaction. I’m still surfing its shockwaves and basking in the fallout.”
“IT’S JUST SUCH A STRANGE, HEAVENLY RUMBLE” – WAYNE COYNE
7. “TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS”
So Revolver ends, after 35 minutes and 1 second, with The Void. Lennon’s incantatory reading from The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, via Timothy Leary, prepares The Beatles for liberation and rebirth. Pepper awaits…
WAYNE COYNE: “The Flaming Lips have always used The Beatles as a comparison because their music was so diverse. They would do ‘Yesterday’ and then Revolution 9′, so we’d take the equation any way it worked for us. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ falls somewhere in between. It’s such an insanely great-sounding song. It all meshes together in such a hypnotic way that you can’t quite picture yourself playing it. It’s just such a strange, heavenly rumble. There are no drums that you could actually play in real life that would sound like that. If you listen to the isolated tracks from ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ you’d think it’d be a bit like a magic trick being explained to you. But it’s even more magic once you pick it apart. You can’t quite believe what you’re hearing.
“I realise now that I just can’t figure out most Beatles songs, because I’m not a musician like that. But I could play bass along with “Tomorrow Never Knows’. It’s one of the simplest ones, and that’s part of its strange beauty too. So many of their songs have these insane, sophisticated chord changes, then this one comes along and it’s just grinding away on a C major chord. It’s really unbelievable. That’s the mind-blowing thing about The Beatles – they were the most popular group in the world, but also fucking weird. And it’s not a throwaway. It’s like The Beatles couldn’t ever really break free of doing a great song.
“If The Beatles hadn’t have made that break from touring in 1966, I don’t think they would’ve been considered so far ahead of the curve. So Revolver seemed to come along a couple of years before everyone else was doing it. When you think about the way their music went afterwards, what a great gift to the world that was.
“They’re forever in the realm of the gods for me. They’re mythological. Mount Rushmore has the presidents’ faces carved into the rock, but for me it should be The Beatles. I think about it more and more, how I was influenced by them and not by the actual music that was going on in Oklahoma at the time. And I’m so glad. Wanting to be like The Beatles was different to wanting to just be a musician. It was like wanting to be a superhero.”
Interviews by Michael Bonner, Nick Hasted, Rob Hughes and Tom Pinnock