Revolver (Beatles album)

• 1. Introduction

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  Revolver, the Beatles’ seventh studio album, arrived on the 5th of August 1966 with a record cover unlike anything pop music had seen: a tangle of hair connecting four hand-drawn faces, photographs tumbling out of their heads, all in deliberate black-and-white. The artist was Klaus Voormann, an old Hamburg friend, and when Brian Epstein first saw the artwork he reportedly wept. What had Voormann captured that moved the band’s manager so completely? The answer lies inside the grooves.

  By the time recording began at EMI Studio 3 on the 6th of April, the Beatles had spent an unprecedented three months free of professional engagements, the longest stretch outside the group collective since 1962. That freedom produced something strange and concentrated. The album they made in those sessions spent seven weeks at the top of the UK chart and six weeks atop the US Billboard Top LPs list, and it did so while containing songs built on tape loops running down a studio corridor, a vocal sung through a Leslie organ cabinet, and a string octet recorded at unnervingly close range. How did four musicians from Liverpool arrive at a record that critics would later call the best album ever made? And what did it cost them to get there?

• 2. Three Months and a Half-Revolution

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  Brian Epstein had planned 1966 the way he planned every year: a feature film, an accompanying album, then summer concert tours. The Beatles vetoed the film. The time allocated for filming became three extra months of freedom, and the group used it to remake themselves.

  Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard interviewed each Beatle separately throughout March 1966, publishing her findings in weekly instalments. She found John Lennon to be intuitive, lazy, and dissatisfied with his life in the Surrey countryside. Paul McCartney, by contrast, projected confidence and an appetite for new ideas. With Barry Miles as his guide, McCartney had been moving through London’s avant-garde community, immersing himself in what would soon be called the underground. George Harrison had been deepening his study of Indian sitar and the philosophy it was bound up with. Ringo Starr had tried LSD; McCartney, despite his bandmates’ urging, refused.

  Beatles biographer Nicholas Schaffner, along with musicologists Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc, marks 1966 as the start of the band’s psychedelic period. Music journalist Carol Clerk describes Revolver as having been “decisively informed by acid”, following Lennon and Harrison’s continued use of LSD since the spring of 1965. Through those experiences the two musicians had developed a fascination with Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly the notion that human existence is illusory. Meanwhile McCartney drew inspiration from the intellectual world he was inhabiting: from concerts by Stevie Wonder, Roy Orbison, the Mamas and the Papas, Bob Dylan, Luciano Berio, and Ravi Shankar, all of whom he and the band encountered between February and June. According to Robert Rodriguez, whereas Lennon had been the dominant creative force before this album, McCartney now reached roughly equal standing. Harrison, for his part, was ready to compose; Ian Inglis calls Revolver “the album on which Harrison came of age as a songwriter”.

• 3. The Studio as Instrument

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  On the 6th of April 1966, EMI technical engineer Ken Townsend invented automatic double tracking, or ADT. That same day, it was used on Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the first song the Beatles attempted for the new album. ADT linked two tape recorders to create a doubled vocal automatically, sparing Lennon the task he particularly disliked of singing the same part twice. The technique became a standard pop production tool almost immediately, and led directly to the artificial chorus effect.

  Twenty-year-old Geoff Emerick was the Beatles’ new recording engineer on the project, and Ian MacDonald describes him as an “English audio experimentalist” in the tradition of Joe Meek. Emerick recalled that no preproduction or rehearsal took place; the band arrived with outlines and built songs from scratch in the studio. He said they told the staff that “every instrument should sound unlike itself: a piano shouldn’t sound like a piano, a guitar shouldn’t sound like a guitar.” This was a deliberate policy, not an accident.

  To achieve it, the band reached for instruments outside their standard live set, including Indian tambura, tabla, clavichord, vibraphone, and tack piano. Harrison switched to a Gibson SG as his primary guitar. Fairchild 660 limiters were used for recording. Emerick recorded McCartney’s bass through a loudspeaker reconfigured as a microphone, and inserted a piece of clothing inside Starr’s bass drum to dampen the sound before moving the microphone to within three inches of the drumhead. MacDonald writes that Starr’s drum sound on Revolver soon had studios in the United States “being torn apart and put back together again” by engineers trying to replicate it.

  For the strings on “Eleanor Rigby”, Emerick close-miked the eight players rather than recording from a distance, alarming musicians trained in classical technique. The same close approach was applied to the horns on “Got to Get You into My Life”. Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew documented nine techniques introduced to the recording world during these sessions, including ADT, backwards recording, and close-miked drums. The Beatles spent over 220 hours recording Revolver, a figure that excludes mixing, and compares with fewer than 80 hours for Rubber Soul.

• 4. Songs in Orbit

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  Harrison wrote “Taxman” as a protest against the marginal tax rates faced by high earners under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, which amounted to 95 per cent of unearned income above the top threshold. The song names Wilson, who had just been re-elected prime minister, and Edward Heath, the Conservative Leader of the Opposition. Rodriguez calls it the first Beatles song written about topical concerns, and identifies its abrasive quality as a precursor to 1970s punk rock.

  “Eleanor Rigby” had its lyrics assembled by a group effort, with Harrison, Starr, Lennon, and Lennon’s friend Pete Shotton all contributing. Martin arranged the track for a string octet, taking inspiration from Bernard Herrmann’s 1960 score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. No Beatle played an instrument on the recording.

  Harrison’s “Love You To” marked his first foray into Hindustani classical music as a composer, following his earlier introduction of the sitar on “Norwegian Wood” in 1965. Indian musicians from the Asian Music Circle provided tabla, tambura, and sitar. Peter Lavezzoli recognises it as “the first conscious attempt in pop to emulate a non-Western form of music in structure and instrumentation”.

  McCartney wrote “Here, There and Everywhere” after hearing the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds track “God Only Knows”, which Brian Wilson had himself been moved to write after repeatedly listening to Rubber Soul. The chain of influence looped back on itself.

  The lyric for “Yellow Submarine” was written with assistance from Scottish singer Donovan. On the 1st of June, the Beatles and friends sourced chains, bells, whistles, tubs of water, and clinking glasses from Studio 2’s trap room to fill the recording with nautical sounds. Lennon shouted part of the mid-song ship’s orders from inside an echo chamber.

  Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” adapted its lyrics from Timothy Leary’s book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The song’s harmonic structure rests on a high-volume C drone played by Harrison on tambura. The five tape loops layered over it include two sitar passages played backwards and sped up, an orchestra sounding a B chord, McCartney’s laughter sped up to resemble a seagull’s cry, and a Mellotron. Lennon told Martin he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from the top of a high mountain, and Martin threaded the vocal through a Leslie speaker to get there. The title came from one of Starr’s malapropisms.

• 5. Release, Reception, and a Tour Going Wrong

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  Before the album appeared, Tony Hall of Record Mirror previewed the new recordings in mid-May 1966, calling some of them “the most revolutionary ever made by a pop group”. He highlighted Lennon’s track then known as “The Void” for its electronic effects, a “McCartney song about lonely people” set to string orchestration, and a “Harrison number on which he plays a long exotic solo on sitar”.

  In Britain, EMI distributed the songs gradually to radio stations throughout July, a strategy Ian MacDonald describes as building anticipation. Critical reaction there was strongly favourable. Melody Maker, having once found Rubber Soul “almost monotonous” in places, praised Revolver as a work that would “change the direction of pop music”. A Guardian review titled “Thinking Pop” recognised the three songwriters’ movement beyond the standard love song as evidence that popular taste could align with artistic merit. The writer for Gramophone, a jazz critic named Peter Clayton, called it “an astonishing collection” and warned that “such a diet of newness might give the ordinary pop-picker indigestion”.

  In the United States the album landed in a different atmosphere. The controversy over Lennon’s remark that the Beatles had become “more popular than Jesus”, published in Cleave’s Evening Standard interview, had taken on new intensity when the piece was reprinted in America. Questions at press conferences during the summer tour focused on religion rather than music. Capitol Records, wary of the religious references in “Eleanor Rigby”, instead promoted “Yellow Submarine”, which peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Critical response was muted by comparison with Britain, though Ralph J. Gleason, then the jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, called it “the most outstanding pop album in years, possibly the best of all time”.

  Capitol had already reduced the album to eleven songs for the North American market, omitting three Lennon-written tracks for inclusion on the June 1966 release Yesterday and Today. That left only two songs on the Capitol version where Lennon was the principal writer, compared with three by Harrison and six by McCartney. Tim Riley notes that this imbalance distorted the album’s intended mood across both sides.

  The Beatles’ final concert tour ended on the 29th of August 1966. They did not attempt to perform a single song from Revolver during it. When the band re-signed with EMI in January 1967, their contract stipulated that Capitol could no longer alter the track listings of their albums.

• 6. The Cover and the Title

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  Klaus Voormann had known the Beatles since their early days in Hamburg. For the cover, he combined line drawings inspired by the nineteenth-century illustrator Aubrey Beardsley with photographs mostly taken between 1964 and 1965 by Robert Freeman. Beardsley was then the subject of a long-running exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and highly influential on the era’s fashion and design.

  Voormann drew each of the four Beatles with photographs of the group tucked into the tangle of hair connecting their faces, so that older images appeared to tumble out from them. His choice of black-and-white was deliberate defiance of the preference for vivid colour, intended to reflect the radical departure in sound that “Tomorrow Never Knows” represented. The cover won the 1967 Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts.

  Voormann also designed four additional images, titled “Wood Face”, “Wool Face”, “Triangle Face”, and “Sun Face”, which appeared on Northern Songs sheet music for the album’s songs.

  The album’s title, like that of Rubber Soul, operates as a pun: it refers to a kind of handgun and to the revolving motion of a record on a turntable. Jonathan Gould reads it as a “McLuhanesque pun” because the album appears to rotate its creative focus from one Beatle to another with each track. The group had originally wanted to call it Abracadabra, before discovering another band had already used the name. Lennon proposed Four Sides to the Circle in response to McCartney’s Magic Circle; Starr offered After Geography, a play on the Rolling Stones’ recently released Aftermath LP. Other candidates included Bubble and Squeak, Beatles on Safari, Freewheelin’ Beatles, and Pendulum. The band confirmed the final choice by telegram from the Tokyo Hilton, sent on the 2nd of July.

• 7. Legacy

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  Barry Miles, one of the architects of the British underground, describes Revolver as “an advertisement for the underground”, and recalls that it resonated on the level of experimental jazz among movement members, including those who would soon found the UFO Club. He credits it with establishing rock and roll as an art form, and identifies it as the impetus for Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and for Brian Wilson to complete the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”.

  Mark Brend writes that the Beatles formalised Joe Meek’s strategy of using the recording studio as a musical instrument and turned it into “an accepted option for pop music making”. Critic Ian MacDonald says that with Revolver the Beatles “initiated a second pop revolution” that, while inspiring their contemporaries and many new acts, “left all of them far behind”.

  The album has been credited with anticipating electronica, punk rock, baroque rock, and world music, and with opening the path for the psychedelic pop style that would emerge in the following years. Walter Everett views its experimental timbres, rhythms, and tonal structures as the inspiration for the progressive rock bands that formed in the early 1970s. Steve Turner identifies the pioneering sampling and tape manipulation on “Tomorrow Never Knows” as having had “a profound effect on everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Jay-Z”.

  For decades, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band held the reputation as the Beatles’ greatest achievement. The April 1987 CD release of Revolver standardised its track listing to the original UK version, restoring the three Lennon compositions that Capitol had omitted. From that point, the album climbed steadily. It was ranked first in the 1998 and 2000 editions of Colin Larkin’s All Time Top 1000 Albums, and third in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in both 2003 and 2012. It has been certified double platinum by the British Phonographic Industry and 5x platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. A remixed and expanded edition followed in 2022, keeping the conversation alive more than half a century after the band confirmed their title choice by telegram from Tokyo.