Revolution (Beatles song)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  "Revolution" arrived in the summer of 1968 as one of the most argued-over pop songs ever released. John Lennon wrote it while the Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation in Rishikesh, India, inspired by a wave of student uprisings, street battles, and assassinations that had made the world feel like it was coming apart at the seams. When it hit record shops in late August of that year, it landed two days before televised footage showed police clubbing Vietnam War protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The timing made the song impossible to ignore and impossible to agree on.

  What exactly was Lennon saying? Was he with the revolution or against it? Why did the same lyric appear in two different forms on the same album, one saying "count me out" and the other saying "count me out, in"? And why did Lennon, who in 1968 insisted things would be "all right", spend the next several years backtracking, embracing radical politics, and eventually recanting that backtrack too? Those questions run through every recording, every court filing, and every open letter that this one song produced.

• 2. The World That Made the Song

  ›

  On the 17th of March 1968, some 25,000 demonstrators marched to the American embassy in London's Grosvenor Square and clashed violently with police. That single afternoon was part of a global convulsion. March also brought mass protests in Poland against the communist government there. May brought campus uprisings across France. The Tet Offensive had already accelerated opposition to the Vietnam War, especially on university campuses in the United States.

  For the Beatles, this pressure was personal. Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist, and Maoist groups each expected the band, viewed as leaders of the counterculture, to publicly endorse the revolutionary cause. Until this point the group had largely kept politics out of their music; their only overtly political track had been "Taxman". Lennon recalled that he had been thinking about speaking up even earlier: "I thought it was about time we spoke about it, the same as I thought it was about time we stopped not answering about the Vietnamese war in 1966."

  Another force was closer at hand. Lennon credited his relationship with avant-garde artist Yoko Ono with waking him from what he called a passive mindset. Ono's interest in sexual politics offered an alternative to the Maoist model of cultural revolution that many on the left were adopting, and her influence shaped the moral rather than ideological framework the song would argue for. Author Mark Hertsgaard described the result as lyrics advocating that "political actions should be judged on moral rather than ideological grounds".

  One phrase in the song, the repeated line "it's gonna be alright", came directly from Lennon's Transcendental Meditation practice in India. It carried the idea that regardless of political outcomes, some larger order would hold. That conviction set Lennon apart from the student activists who demanded urgency, a plan, and a willingness to destroy the existing order.

• 3. Three Recordings, One Song

  ›

  The Beatles began recording "Revolution" on the 30th of May 1968, the opening day of sessions for what would become the White Album. That first session focused on a basic rhythm track. Take 18 ran to 10 minutes and 17 seconds, far longer than the earlier attempts, and it was this sprawling take that became the starting point for everything that followed.

  During overdubs that brought the recording to take 20, Lennon performed his lead vocal lying on the floor, and altered a key line into the ambiguous "you can count me out, in". He later said he included both options because he genuinely could not decide. An accidental bad edit during mixing produced two extra beats at the end of the last chorus, and Lennon chose to leave it in.

  A monitor mix labelled RM1 of take 20, running to 10 minutes and 46 seconds at correct speed, was created at the end of the 4th of June session. It captures the moment before Lennon decided to split the material. The first half resembles the eventual "Revolution 1". After the final chorus, the recording extends into a chaotic coda where George Harrison and Paul McCartney repeatedly sing "dada, mama" in a childlike register, Lennon's voice is distorted in speed, and radio tuning noises appear. Yoko Ono recites prose over a portion of the Egyptian song "Awal Hamsa" by Farid al-Atrash, her voice trailing off; McCartney jokingly replies, "It is 'that'!"

  Within days of take 20, Lennon decided to divide the ten-minute recording into two separate pieces. Work began on "Revolution 9" using the last six minutes of the take as a foundation, compiled over several sessions almost exclusively by Lennon and Ono, drawing on more than 40 sources.

  For the released "Revolution 1", overdubs on the 21st of June added a lead guitar line by Harrison and a brass section of two trumpets and four trombones; final stereo mixing was completed on the 25th of June. On the 9th of July, Lennon and Harrison began rehearsals for an entirely new, faster version intended as a single. The riff for this version was borrowed from Pee Wee Crayton's "Do Unto Others". Recording engineer Geoff Emerick routed the guitar signal through two microphone preamplifiers in series, pushing the level just below the point of overheating the console. He later said: "If I was the studio manager and saw this going on, I'd fire myself." Nicky Hopkins added an electric piano overdub on the 11th of July, with mono mixing completed on the 15th of July.

• 4. Politics on Wax

  ›

  The single version of "Hey Jude" backed by "Revolution" was issued in the United States on the 26th of August 1968, followed by the UK release on the 30th of August. Two days after the US release, the Democratic National Convention erupted in Chicago as police and National Guardsmen were filmed clubbing protesters. That footage arrived two months after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, who had pledged to end American involvement in Vietnam. Author Jonathan Gould wrote that this combination had rendered "Revolution" all too relevant by "the onrushing tide of events."

  The single was the band's first release on Apple Records, their EMI-distributed label run, as McCartney put it, on the principle of "Western communism". One of four records sent in gift-wrapped boxes marked "Our First Four" to Queen Elizabeth II, other members of the royal family, and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Music journalist Jim Irvin recalled that the distorted guitar sound led some buyers to return their copies, assuming defective pressings; record shop staff had to explain, for what he described as the umpteenth time, "It's supposed to sound like that."

  The counterculture's reaction was swift and largely hostile. Ramparts branded the song a "betrayal" of the cause. The Berkeley Barb compared it to "the hawk plank adopted this week in the Chicago convention of the Democratic Death Party". The New Left Review in Britain called it "a lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear", and Black Dwarf concluded the Beatles were "the consciousness of the enemies of the revolution". By contrast, Time magazine devoted a full article to the song, the first time in the publication's history it had done so for a pop song, calling it "exhilarating hard rock" directed at "radical activists the world over".

  When "Revolution 1" appeared on the White Album on the 22nd of November 1968, some radicals who were unaware of the recording chronology welcomed the "count me out, in" lyric as evidence that Lennon had partially changed his mind. Harrison described "Revolution 1" as "the Glenn Miller version" in a post-album interview, saying it had "less attack and not as much revolution" as the single.

• 5. Lennon's Argument with the Left

  ›

  John Hoyland, a student radical from Keele University, opened an exchange of open letters with Lennon in the pages of Black Dwarf in late October 1968. Hoyland argued that "Revolution" was "no more revolutionary" than the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary and criticised Lennon for insisting that the Beatles' formula from "All You Need Is Love" still applied in 1968. His view was that genuine change required destruction: "In order to change the world we've got to understand what's wrong with the world. And then - destroy it. Ruthlessly."

  Before responding in print, Lennon met two other Keele University students at his home in Surrey on the 3rd of December. He told them that a destructive approach to change simply makes way for a destructive ruling power, citing the Russian and French revolutions. He also warned that far-left radicals of that type would likely be the first to shoot people like him if they ever came to power.

  Lennon's published reply appeared in Black Dwarf on the 10th of January 1969. He closed it with a postscript: "You smash it - and I'll build around it." Oz editor Richard Neville later described the exchange as "a classic New Left/psychedelic Left dialogue", and it was syndicated internationally through the underground press.

  Film director Jean-Luc Godard also attacked the Beatles through the pages of International Times in September 1968, saying the band had been "corrupted by money". Lennon told Rolling Stone that this was "sour grapes" from a director who had failed to recruit the Beatles for his film One Plus One and had gone to the Rolling Stones instead. The contrast between "Revolution" and the Stones' concurrent single "Street Fighting Man", which Mick Jagger had written partly in response to the March rally at Grosvenor Square, followed the Beatles throughout the controversy.

  Nina Simone, arriving in London in December 1968, said she wanted to understand the song's message before deciding whether to perform it. Instead she wrote and recorded an answer song of her own, also called "Revolution", challenging Lennon's statements about destruction and "the constitution", and urging him to "clean" his brain.

• 6. Lennon's Own Reversal

  ›

  After undergoing primal therapy in 1970, Lennon shifted toward the radical politics he had previously questioned. In a conversation with British activist Tariq Ali in January 1971, he described "Revolution" as a mistake: "I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution." He wrote "Power to the People" as an act of atonement, singing: "You say you want a revolution / We better get it on right away."

  After moving to New York in 1971, Lennon and Ono aligned with Chicago Seven defendants Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. By 1972, he had also retracted his lyrical rebuke of Mao Zedong, saying: "I should have never said that about Chairman Mao."

  That recantation did not hold either. Following Richard Nixon's victory in the 1972 presidential election, Lennon stepped back from revolutionary politics entirely and began denouncing radicals and their causes as useless. In the final interview he gave before his murder in December 1980, Lennon returned to the position of "Revolution", saying he still wished to "see the plan" for any proposed revolution. Author Ian MacDonald, writing in 1994 with the benefit of hindsight, observed that the collapse of Soviet communism and the fate of many of Lennon's radical critics of 1968-70, who "now work in advertising", had "belatedly served to confirm his original instincts".

• 7. Nike, the Lawsuit, and What Followed

  ›

  In 1987, "Revolution" became the first Beatles recording to be licensed for use in a television commercial. Nike paid $500,000 for a one-year licence, split between recording owner Capitol-EMI and song publisher ATV Music Publishing, which was owned at the time by Michael Jackson. The commercials began airing in March 1987.

  The three surviving Beatles, acting through Apple Corps, filed a lawsuit in July objecting to the use. The suit named Nike, its advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, and Capitol-EMI. Capitol-EMI maintained the licence was legitimate, citing the "active support and encouragement of Yoko Ono Lennon, a shareholder and director of Apple". Ono had said at the time of the ad's release that it was "making John's music accessible to a new generation". Ono also claimed that McCartney had agreed to the deal; McCartney denied this. Harrison, speaking to Musician magazine, warned that without legal action, "every Beatles song ever recorded is going to be advertising women's underwear and sausages".

  The lawsuit and others involving the Beatles and EMI were settled out of court in November 1989, with terms kept confidential. The financial website TheStreet.com later included the Nike campaign in its list of the 100 key business events of the 20th century, citing how it helped "commodify dissent".

  The song's afterlife in cover versions ranges widely. At Live Aid on the 13th of July 1985, Thompson Twins performed "Revolution" alongside Nile Rodgers, Madonna, and guitarist Steve Stevens at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia before a television audience estimated at 1.5 billion people. The concert raised $80 million for African famine relief. Their studio recording of the song later reached number 56 on the UK Singles Chart. In October 2001, Stone Temple Pilots performed the song at Come Together: A Night for John Lennon's Words and Music, a television special raising funds for victims of the September 11 attacks. Singer Scott Weiland's explanation for the choice was simple: "Our real decision for picking 'Revolution' was simply because it rocks."