Revolver (album) Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
| Revolver | ||
|---|---|---|
| LP by The Beatles | ||
| Released | August 5 1966 | |
| Recorded | Abbey Road Studios 1966 | |
| Genre | Rock | |
| Length | 35 min 1 s | |
| Record label | Parlophone | |
| Producer | George Martin | |
| Professional reviews | ||
| Q | 5/5 | November 2000 |
| AMG | 5/5 | link |
| Beatles Chronology | ||
| Rubber Soul (1965) | Revolver (1966) | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) |
George Harrison contributes three songs including the lyrically incisive opening track "Taxman" (which contains some contributions by John Lennon). The "Mr. Wilson" and "Mr. Heath" in the lyrics refer to Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, who were respectively the British Labour Prime Minister and Conservative opposition leader of the time. The song refers to the savage rates of income tax paid by high earners like the Beatles, which were sometimes as high as 90% of their income. This would lead to many top musicians becoming tax exiles in later years.
Harrison also provides "I Want To Tell You", a standard rock song about the disarray of being unable to confess a longing for someone, and "Love You To", his first full dive into Indian music. On the latter he experiments with the Indian sitar, and includes some backwards guitar work on "I'm Only Sleeping" -- Harrison played the notes in reverse order, then reversed the tape and mixed it in. This song is Lennon's, and it is his comment on the futility of hastiness in the modern world.
"Yellow Submarine", by McCartney and "Doctor Robert" also reflect the growing drug culture of the 1960s. The character Doctor Robert' is thought to be a conflation of several people, including the Beatles' dentist (who first supplied them with LSD) and London art dealer Robert Fraser, who was a close friend of the group and who occasionally provided the group with drugs. The latter was Lennon's, along with "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "She Said, She Said", two amazing guitar-laden tracks with swirling melodies. Lennon later explained that "She Said, She Said" had been inspired by remarks he recalled from an LSD trip he had taken in Los Angeles with other musician friends and young film star Peter Fonda. According to Lennon, under the influence of the drug, Fonda had been repeating over and over "I know what it's like to be dead", to which Lennon acerbicly replied, "Who put all that shit in your head?". This exchange, with minor changes, formed the core of the song.
Compared to Lennon's hard rock influence, McCartney brings forth six diverse classics, all considered standards in the popular music canon. There is the most famous, the durable classic Eleanor Rigby which was released as a single (backed by "Yellow Submarine") concurrently with the album. This song contains McCartney's best lyrical imagery; its driving and sometimes frightening string arrangement (scored by George Martin under McCartney's direction) was inspired by the famous Bernard Herrmann score for Francois Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451.
"Got To Get You Into My Life" is a Motown experiment-cum-tribute that uses brass to its highest advantage; although cast in the form of a love song, McCartney has since revealed that the song was actually an ode to marijuana. It was released as a single in 1976, ten years after the release of the album.
McCartney also contributes "For No One" (written for his then girlfriend, Jane Asher), often overlooked but sometimes praised as one of the saddest songs ever written, and featuring a horn solo played by Alan Civil. There is "Good Day Sunshine", a Lovin' Spoonful mockery that is as cheery as any song in the Beatles' catalog. Finally there is the epic "Here, There, and Everywhere" which is perfect in lyric and harmony. A straight take on the Beach Boys.
Lennon, however, shows the greatest maturity on the album. Some call "Tomorrow Never Knows" the first song of psychedelia -- although that accolade arguably belongs to Donovan's 1965 single Sunshine Superman. Groundbreaking techniques including reverse guitar, processed vocals and looped tape effects are all premiered here and the production innovations on this song make it one of the key recordings of Sixties popular music.
Much of the backing track consists of a series of prepared tape loops, stemming from Lennon and McCartney's interest in and experiments with magnetic tape and music concrete techniques at that time. According to Beatles session chronicler Mark Lewisohn, Lennon and McCartney prepared a series of loops at home, and these then were added to the pre-recorded backing track. This was reportedly done live in a single 'take', with multiple tape recorders running simultaneously, and some of the longer loops extended out of the control room and down the corridor.
Lennon's processed lead vocal was another innovation. Always in search of ways of enhancing his voice, he gave the famously nebulous directive to EMI engineer Ken Townshend that he wanted to sound like he was singing from the top of a high mountain. Townshend solved the problem by splicing a line from the recording console into the studio's Leslie speaker, giving Lennon's vocal its ethereal filtered quality -- although he was subsequently reprimanded by the studio management for doing so!
Another key production technique used for the first time on this album was Automatic double tracking (ADT), invented by Townshend on 6 April 1966. This ingenious technique used two linked tape recorders to automatically create a doubled vocal track, replacing the standard method, which was to double the vocal by singing the same piece twice onto a multitrack tape, a task Lennon particularly disliked. The Beatles were reportedly delighted with the invention and used it extensively on Revolver. ADT quickly became a standard pop production technique and led to related developments including phasing, flanging and chorus.
The lightest track on the album is 'Yellow Submarine', which was deliberately written as a psychedelic children's song; it includes uncredited songwriting and vocal contributions by Donovan, who had become a close friend of the group. Faithful Beatles roadie Mal Evans also sang on the track, which made use of a number of stock sound effects the group found in the Abbey Road taped sound effects library, many of which had been collected by George Martin for his production of comedy recordings by The Goons.
As a sidenote, the original US LP release of Revolver marked the last time Capitol would alter an "established" UK Beatles album for the US market. As three of its tracks--"I'm Only Sleeping", "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "Doctor Robert"--had been used for the earlier Yesterday and Today compilation, they were simply deleted here, yielding an 11 track album instead of the UK's 14. The CD era standardizes this album to the original UK configuration.
The cover illustration was created by German-born bassist and artist Klaus Voorman, who was one of the Beatles' oldest friends from their days at the Star Club in Hamburg. Voorman's illustration, part line drawing and part collage, included photographs by Robert Whitaker, who also took the back cover photographs and many other famous images of the group between 1964 and 1966, including the infamous "Butcher Sleeve".
- "Taxman" (Harrison)
- "Eleanor Rigby" (Lennon-McCartney)
- "I'm Only Sleeping" (Lennon-McCartney)
- "Love You To" (Harrison)
- "Here, There, and Everywhere" (Lennon-McCartney)
- "Yellow Submarine" (Lennon-McCartney)
- "She Said She Said" (Lennon-McCartney)
- "Good Day Sunshine" (Lennon-McCartney)
- "And Your Bird Can Sing" (Lennon-McCartney)
- "For No One" (Lennon-McCartney)
- "Doctor Robert" (Lennon-McCartney)
- "I Want to Tell You" (Harrison)
- "Got to Get You Into My Life" (Lennon-McCartney)
- "Tomorrow Never Knows" (Lennon-McCartney)
In 2003 the TV channel VH1 named Revolver the number 1 greatest album of all time.