Revolution 9

• 1. Introduction

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  "Revolution 9" begins with a voice repeating the words "number nine" as it pans slowly across the stereo field. That voice belonged to an EMI engineer who had been recording a routine test series. John Lennon found the tape, cut it up, and turned those two words into one of the strangest motifs ever placed on a major pop record. At eight minutes and twenty-two seconds, it remains the longest track the Beatles officially released while they were still a band. What drove one of the world's most successful musical acts to fill nearly nine minutes of their album with tape loops, backwards orchestral fragments, gunfire, breaking glass, and the sounds of playing schoolchildren? And why did millions of people hear in those same sounds something terrifying, prophetic, or even murderous? The answers reach back to avant-garde concert halls in Europe, to a first encounter with Yoko Ono, and to a chaotic all-night session at EMI Studios in the summer of 1968.

• 2. Influences and Origins

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  Stockhausen's name appears on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper album, which tells you something about how seriously the Beatles had come to regard the European avant-garde by the mid-1960s. Karlheinz Stockhausen was a favourite of Lennon, and music critic Ian MacDonald specifically suggested that Stockhausen's work Hymnen may have been one of the direct influences on "Revolution 9". McCartney had pointed to both Stockhausen and John Cage as inspirations for an earlier unreleased experimental piece the band recorded in January 1967, called "Carnival of Light". The group had also introduced avant-garde styling in their 1966 song "Tomorrow Never Knows". But Lennon's most personal influence was closer at hand.

  Lennon and Yoko Ono had recently recorded their own avant-garde album together, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. Lennon later described his introduction to Ono's work in direct terms: "Once I heard her stuff - not just the screeching and howling but her sort of word pieces and talking and breathing and all this strange stuff... I got intrigued, so I wanted to do one." Ono attended the recording sessions and, according to Lennon, helped select which tape loops to use. A 1992 interview in Musician magazine offered a somewhat different account, with George Harrison saying that he and Ringo Starr were the ones who chose the sounds, sourcing them from EMI's tape library, including the "Number nine, number nine" dialogue. In the 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Ono went further, saying that Harrison "sort of instigated" the piece and pushed them to create it. Authors Chip Madinger and Mark Easter note that Harrison's lesser-known experimental work "Dream Scene", recorded between November 1967 and February 1968 for his Wonderwall Music album, suggests he had a greater influence on "Revolution 9" than formal credit acknowledges.

• 3. Building the Collage

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  On the 30th of May 1968, the first recording session for Lennon's song "Revolution" produced a take that ran more than ten minutes. That extended recording received additional overdubs over the next two sessions, and Mark Lewisohn described the final six minutes as "pure chaos... with discordant instrumental jamming, feedback, John repeatedly screaming 'RIGHT' and then, simply, repeatedly screaming... with Yoko talking and saying such off-the-wall phrases as 'you become naked'". Lennon decided to shape the opening portion into a conventional Beatles song, "Revolution 1", and use those last six minutes as the foundation for something entirely different.

  The work culminated on the 20th of June, with Lennon performing a live mix from tape loops running simultaneously on machines spread across all three studios at EMI. During that live mix, the STEED system ran out, and the sound of the tape machine rewinding is audible at the 5:11 mark. More overdubs followed on the 21st of June, and the stereo master was completed on the 25th of June, at which point it was shortened by 53 seconds. Lennon later described the method plainly: "All the thing was made with loops. I had about 30 loops going, fed them onto one basic track. I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that." The "number nine" phrase, he explained, came from a tape of an engineer saying "This is EMI test series number nine." He simply cut it up. Nine happened to be his birthday and his lucky number, but he said that realisation came later. At the time, he described it as "just so funny".

  McCartney had been out of the country when the track was assembled and mixed. When he heard the finished result, he was unimpressed, and later tried to persuade Lennon to drop it from the album. Lennon refused. The final editing, Lennon said, was done by himself and Ono alone.

• 4. What Is Actually Heard

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  Researchers have identified specific classical works within the tape loops. The Vaughan Williams motet O Clap Your Hands appears in the piece, as does the final chord from Sibelius' Symphony No. 7, and the reversed finale of Schumann's Symphonic Studies. Violins looped from "A Day in the Life" recur throughout, alongside sped-up loops from "Tomorrow Never Knows". Shortly after the seven-minute mark, part of the Arabic song "Awal Hamsa" by Farid al-Atrash appears. Some of the stock sound effects - women's laughter, a cooing baby, crowd noise, playing schoolchildren, breaking glass, car horns, crackling fire, and gunfire - were taken from the Elektra Records "Authentic Sound Effects" series.

  One loop that begins appearing around the two-and-a-half-minute mark is rumoured to originate from the unreleased "Carnival of Light" recording. It opens with what is barely discernible as George Martin shouting "Geoff, could you put the red light on?", followed by distorted amplifier feedback, then a short clarinet rendition of The Streets of Cairo, ending with Martin shushing loudly before the loop repeats. The piece closes with a recording of American football chants: "Hold that line! Block that kick!" In total, the final mix draws on at least 45 different sound sources. The complexity of the track meant that, unlike other songs on the album, the mono version could not be independently remixed; it was made as a direct reduction of the stereo master.

• 5. Critical Fallout

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  When the White Album reached listeners in 1968, Lewisohn summarised the public reaction to "Revolution 9" as "most listeners loathing it outright, the dedicated fans trying to understand it". Alan Walsh of Melody Maker called it "noisy, boring and meaningless". The NME's Alan Smith went further, describing it as "a pretentious piece of old codswallop... a piece of idiot immaturity and a blotch on their own unquestioned talent as well as the album". The track was voted the worst Beatles song in one of the first such polls, conducted in 1971 by WPLJ and The Village Voice.

  Not every critic dismissed it. Jann Wenner, writing in Rolling Stone, called "Revolution 9" "beautifully organized" and argued it carried more political impact than "Revolution 1". Ian MacDonald went the furthest, describing it as culturally "one of the most significant acts the Beatles ever perpetrated" and as "the world's most widely distributed avant-garde artifact". Writing in 2002, David Quantick described it as, after nearly a quarter of a century, still "the most radical and innovative track ever to bring a rock record to its climax". He added that no one in the history of recorded music had ever been so successful in introducing such extreme music to so many people. More recently, Mark Richardson of Pitchfork noted that "the biggest pop band in the world exposed millions of fans to a really great and certainly frightening piece of avant-garde art". Writing for Mojo in 2003, Mark Paytress called it both "the most unpopular piece of music the Beatles ever made" and their "most extraordinary recording".

• 6. Meaning and Misreading

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  Lennon said he was "painting in sound a picture of revolution", but later admitted he had mistakenly made it "anti-revolution". In an interview at his home on the 2nd of December 1968, he was asked directly whether "Revolution 9" was about death. His answer was characteristic: "Well then it is, then, when you heard it... listen to it another day. In the sun. Outside. And see if it's about death then." He added that it was "not specifically about anything" and described it as "a set of sounds, like walking down the street is a set of sounds."

  Ian MacDonald offered a more structured reading, suggesting Lennon had not meant revolution in the political sense but rather as "a sensory attack on the citadel of the intellect: a revolution in the head" aimed at each individual listener. MacDonald also noted the structure evoked a "half-awake, channel-hopping" mental state with underlying themes of consciousness.

  The "number nine" loop fed the most famous misreading of all: the legend of Paul McCartney's death. Listeners who played the loop backwards reported hearing the words "turn me on, dead man". A far darker interpretation came from Charles Manson. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi established, based on interviews and testimony, that Manson believed many songs on the White Album confirmed his prediction of an apocalyptic race war he called "Helter Skelter". According to Gregg Jakobson, Manson mentioned "Revolution 9" more often than any other track, interpreting it as a sonic parallel of Chapter 9 of the Book of Revelation. Manson also misheard Lennon's distorted screams of "Right!" as the command "Rise!". Before his trial, speaking to music journalist David Dalton, Manson drew a connection between the animal noises in Harrison's White Album track "Piggies" and a similar sound followed by machine-gun fire that appears in "Revolution 9".

• 7. Afterlife in Cover Versions

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  Little Fyodor recorded a cover of "Revolution 9" in 1987, though it was not released as a CD single until 2000. The jam band Phish performed the piece at their Halloween 1994 concert, covering nearly the entire White Album; band member Jon Fishman streaked across the stage after the line "if you become naked". That concert was eventually released in 2002 as Live Phish Volume 13. Kurt Hoffman's Band of Weeds put their version on the 1992 album Live at the Knitting Factory: Downtown Does the Beatles on Knitting Factory Records. Australian dance rock band Def FX recorded a version for their 1996 album Majick, and The Shazam released their cover as the closing track of a mini-album called Rev9 in 2000.

  The piece also prompted more oblique responses. Punk group United Nations wrote a song called "Resolution 9". Rock band Marilyn Manson titled a track "Revelation #9". White Zombie's "Real Solution #9" samples a Prime Time Live interview that Diane Sawyer conducted with Manson Family member Patricia Krenwinkel, in which Krenwinkel is heard saying: "Yeah, I remember her saying, 'I'm already dead.'" Skinny Puppy referenced a reversed melodic fragment from "Revolution #9" on their song "Love in Vein" from the album Last Rights. Brazilian musician Rogério Skylab recorded a cover in 2008 for a collaborative tribute album marking the 40th anniversary of the White Album's release. That same year, the contemporary classical ensemble Alarm Will Sound completed an orchestral transcription they later recorded for their 2016 album Alarm Will Sound Presents Modernists. Mexican rock band Botellita de Jerez created their own variant, replacing the "Number nine" voice with one saying "No'mbre, no hay", meaning "No, man, there isn't".