Revolver

Revolver is the seventh British album by the Beatles, released by Parlophone on August 5, 1966. It was recorded at EMI’s studios on Abbey Road between April and June of that year, produced by George Martin with Geoff Emerick as engineer. It is pop rock and psychedelic pop, with arrangements that go beyond the group’s guitars and drums: a string octet plays “Eleanor Rigby” with no Beatle on the track; George Harrison’s “Love You To” uses sitar and tabla, “Got to Get You into My Life” a soul horn section, and “Tomorrow Never Knows” tape loops and a treated voice. Its songs are about loneliness, sleep, drugs, tax and love. It was the first Beatles album with three of Harrison’s songs.

British reviewers mostly praised it, though Record Mirror expected parts of it to divide listeners. It was number one in Britain for seven weeks and, in an eleven-track American edition, for six in the United States. George Martin later called it the beginning of the work that led to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Rolling Stone wrote in 2011 that the West Coast pop of the following years sprang from it. Rolling Stone placed it third in its list of the 500 greatest albums in 2003 and 2012, behind Sgt. Pepper, and eleventh in 2020, when Sgt. Pepper was twenty-fourth. In 2016 Rob Sheffield called it the greatest rock album ever and Greg Kot the Beatles’ greatest.

Background

Rubber Soul came out on December 3, 1965, the day the Beatles began their last British tour, nine concerts in early December.¹ The NME gave it five stars; Melody Maker headed its review “Mixed Beatles,” finding the group’s sound “matured” but “a little subdued.”² George Martin later said that with it “we began to think of albums as art on their own, as complete entities.”³ After the tour the Beatles took about three months without engagements, their longest break since 1962.⁴ In the week the sessions began, Rubber Soul was still second on the NME’s list of best-selling albums.⁵

Paul McCartney had been going to concerts of avant-garde music, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s and Luciano Berio’s among them, and making tape loops at home on his Brenell tape recorders. A tape loop is a strip of tape spliced into a ring, so that a short sound repeats for as long as it plays.⁶ He was one of the backers of Indica, the bookshop Barry Miles set up in Mason’s Yard, whose gallery Miles’s partner John Dunbar ran.⁷ In April 1965 the Weekend Telegraph had run John Crosby’s essay on London as “The Most Exciting City,” an early statement of the idea of Swinging London.⁸ McCartney told Disc and Music Echo on January 1, 1966, that the Who were his favorite group, for their fresh sound and new ideas, and in the week the sessions began their single “Substitute” was climbing the British chart.⁹

John Lennon had taken LSD, and by the first session he had read The Psychedelic Experience (1964), Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert’s adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.¹⁰ Ian MacDonald wrote that Britain had no acid subculture in 1966 to guide him, so he turned to this American manual; the drug was not added to the Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act 1964 until an order that took effect in September 1966.¹¹ George Harrison had first picked up a sitar on the set of Help! in 1965 and played one on “Norwegian Wood” later that year.¹² He said that David Crosby of the Byrds had mentioned Ravi Shankar’s name to him, after which he went and bought a Shankar record, and Roger McGuinn recalled showing him Shankar’s sounds on guitar when Harrison and Lennon spent an afternoon with the Byrds in Los Angeles in August 1965.¹³ In an interview at Lennon’s home in Weybridge, printed in the London Evening Standard on March 4, Maureen Cleave found Lennon reading widely about religion and listening to the Indian music Harrison had shown him.¹⁴ A week later, in the NME of March 11, Lennon said the next LP was “going to be very different” and that he and McCartney were “very keen on this electronic music.”¹⁵

The group considered recording in America, at Stax in Memphis with its producer, Jim Stewart. In a letter postmarked a month into the sessions, Harrison wrote that the plan fell through because “too many people get insane with money ideas at the mention of the word ‘Beatles.‘”¹⁶ Billboard reported on April 2 that American radio had begun to call white acts, the Beatles among them, soul, a word it said had become “quite loosely used.”¹⁷ At EMI the group’s engineer, Norman Smith, had been promoted to producer, and Geoff Emerick, aged twenty, took his place at the mixing console from the first session. Martin had left EMI’s staff in August 1965 to form his own company, AIR, and went on producing the Beatles.¹⁸ Harold Wilson’s Labour government was re-elected on March 31, its majority in the House of Commons rising from 4 seats to 96.¹⁹ The next day the NME reported that the group planned to start recording the following week, for a single and an LP.²⁰

Recording

The sessions ran from April 6 to June 21, 1966, mostly in EMI’s Studio Two and sometimes in Studio Three, and the final mono and stereo mixes were made on June 22. Phil McDonald was second engineer on most dates.²¹ Between April 13 and 16 the group also cut “Paperback Writer” and “Rain,” issued as a single in America on May 30 and in Britain on June 10 and left off the album.²²

The first song taped was “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the album’s closing track, logged at the session as “Mark I.” Martin remembered Lennon asking to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop while his words stayed clear. The answer was to feed Lennon’s voice through the Leslie speaker of a Hammond organ, whose rotating horn makes a sound waver and swirl. It meant breaking into the speaker’s circuitry. The effect is heard on the second half of the song.²³

On April 7 the group added the tape loops. Most were McCartney’s, made at home. They were played from tape machines around the building, held taut with pencils, and faded in and out live by Emerick at the console, with five machines running at once.²⁴ Walter Everett counts five loops, and McCartney spoke of six in 1966. Emerick said the seagull-like cry among them is a distorted guitar; McCartney and the announcement of the 2022 reissue say it is his voice, sped up.²⁵ For the drums on “Tomorrow Never Knows” Emerick moved a microphone close to Ringo Starr’s bass drum, stuffed a sweater inside it and put the signal through Fairchild limiters, devices that hold a sound’s level down. “Drums had never been heard like that before,” he said.²⁶

Ken Townsend, an EMI engineer, devised artificial double tracking for these sessions after the Beatles, Lennon above all, tired of singing every vocal twice. A copy of the voice plays back a fraction of a second late, so that one performance sounds like two, and almost every song on the album was treated with it.²⁷ Martin and the group also changed the tape speed on purpose. Lennon’s vocal on “I’m Only Sleeping” was recorded with the tape running at 45 cycles a second against the usual 50, so it plays back slightly faster and higher.²⁸ On May 5 Harrison recorded two guitar parts for the song to be heard backward, working the lines out so they would make sense reversed.²⁹

“Love You To,” first called “Granny Smith,” was recorded on April 11 and 13. Anil Bhagwat, found through the Asian Music Circle in north London, played tabla and was credited on the sleeve, which names no sitar player. Mark Lewisohn in 1988 and the announcement of the 2022 reissue give the sitar to Harrison; in 1992 Lewisohn wrote that a player from the Circle may have taken the part.³⁰ On April 28 Martin conducted an octet of four violins, two violas and two cellos on “Eleanor Rigby,” with Lennon and McCartney in the control room; no Beatle plays on the track. Martin had the players try their part with and without vibrato, the slight wavering of pitch that string players use to warm a note, and it was recorded without. Emerick set the microphones almost touching the strings, which, he said, horrified the players.³¹

McCartney wanted brass on “Got to Get You into My Life.” On May 18 three trumpeters and two tenor saxophonists played parts McCartney showed them at the piano, with nothing written down, and the microphones went inside the flared bells of the horns.³² On “For No One” McCartney played piano and a clavichord, a small keyboard whose strings are struck by metal blades, hired from AIR for the session. On May 19 Alan Civil, principal horn of the Philharmonia, played a French horn solo; Lennon and Harrison are not on the track.³³ “Yellow Submarine” was finished on June 1 in a session of sound effects, with chains swirled in a bath of water, Lennon blowing bubbles and a chorus of friends including Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull and Pattie Harrison. A brass band hired for the session played in the studio, as Martin told the NME that summer.³⁴

“I Want to Tell You” was taped on June 2 and 3, and McCartney added his bass separately afterward.³⁵ Martin played the honky-tonk piano solo on “Good Day Sunshine” with the tape speed changed, though sources disagree on the direction: Lewisohn’s figure of 56 cycles a second would play it back slower.³⁶

“She Said She Said,” the last new recording, was begun and finished on June 21; McCartney said he left the session after an argument.³⁷ During the sessions the Beatles began to sit in on the mixing. No stereo mixes were made until May 20, and those, Lewisohn writes, got little attention.³⁸

Music

Beyond the pop rock and psychedelic pop of most of the album,³⁹ four tracks reach into other genres: “Love You To” draws on Indian classical music, “Got to Get You into My Life” is soul, “Yellow Submarine” is a children’s song and “Tomorrow Never Knows” is avant-garde electronic music.⁴⁰ Harrison wrote three of the songs. The rest are credited to Lennon and McCartney, five of them mainly Lennon’s and six mainly McCartney’s, and each sings lead on his own songs, except “Yellow Submarine,” which McCartney wrote for Starr to sing.⁴¹

Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” stays on a C drone, one note held under everything, and moves only to a B-flat chord, two piano keys below the home chord, the chord the song rests on. A tamboura sounds the drone, and around it are Starr’s close-miked drums, the tape loops, a guitar solo played backward and a tack piano, its hammers fitted with tacks for a metallic tone.⁴² Its words are instructions for letting go of the self, drawn from Leary’s manual.⁴³ “She Said She Said” comes from an afternoon on LSD in Los Angeles in August 1965 spent with Peter Fonda. Its lyric argues with Fonda’s talk of death and retreats into childhood. Its bridge changes the number of beats in a bar.⁴⁴ “I’m Only Sleeping,” in praise of lying in bed, puts the sped-up vocal over Harrison’s reversed guitars, each note swelling in and cutting off. “And Your Bird Can Sing,” a put-down aimed at someone Lennon never named, is built on a riff, a short repeated figure, that Harrison and McCartney play in harmony on two guitars.⁴⁵ “Doctor Robert,” about a fashionable doctor who handed out drugs, holds an A chord for eight bars, though the song’s home key is B, and its middle section, with harmonium, a small pump organ, sounds like a hymn.⁴⁶

McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” is about two lonely people, an old woman and a priest, who meet only at her funeral. The octet plays short, hard strokes in E minor with a Dorian coloring, the sixth note of the scale raised so that the minor key lightens.⁴⁷ “For No One,” on the end of an affair told from both sides, pairs the thin, tinkling tone of the clavichord with Civil’s horn.⁴⁸ “Here, There and Everywhere” is a love song that McCartney said he sang in imitation of Marianne Faithfull, with backing voices singing wordless chords behind him. It is in G major and keeps borrowing chords from G minor, so that the harmony clouds and clears.⁴⁹ “Good Day Sunshine” groups the refrain’s beats three, three and two inside a bar of four, so it seems to change meter without doing so. Its last refrain rises a half step, the distance between neighboring piano keys.⁵⁰ “Yellow Submarine” is a singalong about a voyage in a submarine with friends aboard, and Starr sings it over the session’s sound effects and crowd chorus.⁵¹ In “Got to Get You into My Life” McCartney sings over the brass, with shouted asides as it fades, and the refrain is built on the three basic chords of the blues. McCartney has said the song is about marijuana; Lennon called it an acid song.⁵²

Harrison’s “Taxman,” which opens the album, is a sarcastic complaint about the tax taken from the highest earners, naming the prime minister, Harold Wilson, and the opposition leader, Edward Heath. It is in D with a lowered seventh note, the Mixolydian mode, common in blues and rock and roll. McCartney plays the guitar solo, which ends on an Indian-sounding run.⁵³ “Love You To” begins without a regular beat before the tabla comes in over a tamboura, a long-necked lute whose open strings sound a continuous drone. Its scale matches the Dorian mode, and a few bars of three beats break the run of fours. Its lyric mixes love for Harrison’s new wife, Pattie, with a growing interest in philosophy.⁵⁴ “I Want to Tell You,” about the difficulty of saying what one feels, is built on a guitar figure and a clashing piano chord, and McCartney stretches single syllables over several notes in an Indian manner.⁵⁵

Title and artwork

The title is a pun on a record turning.⁵⁶ One candidate, Abracadabra, had already been used; others included Magic Circles and Beatles on Safari. The Beatles discussed titles in their Munich hotel suite on June 23 without settling on one, by The Beatles Book’s account, and cabled their choice to EMI from Japan on July 2.⁵⁷

Klaus Voormann, a friend from the group’s Hamburg days, drew the cover in pen and black ink and set among the drawing cut-out photographs by Robert Freeman and Robert Whitaker. Working in the kitchen of an attic apartment in Hampstead, Voormann made it black and white, he said, “to shock” and to stand out “in a muddle of colour,” and he remembered the fee as “£50, or £40.”⁵⁸ The back cover, a photograph credited to Whitaker, shows the group in dark glasses, and there are no sleeve notes.⁵⁹

What it inherits and what it introduces

“Love You To” took its tabla player from the Asian Music Circle; Harrison met Shankar only afterward, in June 1966.⁶⁰ The loops of “Tomorrow Never Knows” came from McCartney’s home tape experiments and its words from Leary’s manual. McCartney modeled “Good Day Sunshine” on the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream” (1966).⁶¹ For the strings of “Eleanor Rigby” Martin named Bernard Herrmann’s score for Fahrenheit 451, which Herrmann recorded that summer, after the session; McCartney has named Herrmann’s music for Psycho.⁶² Lennon said the strings were McCartney’s idea, after Jane Asher had introduced him to Vivaldi.⁶³

The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds reached Lennon and McCartney in the middle of May, when, by Bruce Johnston’s recollection, he played it to them in London. Five of Revolver’s songs were still to be recorded. Johnston recalled them saying its vocals had helped them write “Here, There and Everywhere”; McCartney said in 1990 that its influence on that song was “just the introduction.”⁶⁴

Cash Box counted Revolver the first Beatles album with as many as three Harrison songs, and Lewisohn counts “Got to Get You into My Life” as the group’s first song with a strong brass section and “I Want to Tell You” as the first on which a Beatles bass part was added on its own.⁶⁵ Richard Goldstein, writing in The Village Voice in August 1966, put the change in terms of the album before it: Rubber Soul had opened up “areas of baroque progression and Oriental instrumentation to commercialization,” and Revolver “does the same for electronic music.”⁶⁶

Release

Parlophone released Revolver, the group’s seventh British album, on Friday, August 5, 1966, in mono and stereo, as PMC 7009 and PCS 7009. “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yellow Submarine” came out the same day on Parlophone R 5493, a double A-side, a single with two lead songs and no B-side. Melody Maker reported that it was issued to keep cover versions of the songs off the charts.⁶⁷ Capitol’s American edition followed on August 8, as T 2576 and ST 2576, with eleven tracks. “I’m Only Sleeping,” “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Doctor Robert” had already gone out on Yesterday and Today, released on June 20, so the American Revolver ran a little over 28 minutes against 35. The American single, Capitol 5715, paired the same two songs.⁶⁸

Between the end of the sessions and the release the Beatles played in West Germany, Japan and the Philippines, from June 24 to July 4.⁶⁹ The album came out during the controversy over Lennon’s remark, in Cleave’s interview of March 4, that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. The American teen magazine Datebook reprinted it on July 29, and radio stations began banning Beatles records, starting with WAQY in Birmingham, Alabama.⁷⁰ The American tour ran from August 12 to August 29 and ended at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the group’s last concert for a paying audience. They played none of Revolver’s songs.⁷¹

The album came out on CD on April 30, 1987, with all fourteen tracks in America for the first time.⁷² Its mono mix was first issued on CD in the remastered catalog of September 9, 2009. A special edition on October 28, 2022, added new stereo mixes and mixes in Dolby Atmos, a surround-sound format, by Giles Martin and Sam Okell. They were made with software from Peter Jackson’s Get Back team that separates instruments recorded together on one track.⁷³

Reception

The British reviews were mostly favorable and the American trade papers wholly so. Melody Maker opened by agreeing with McCartney’s prediction that no one would be able to copy the record, and wrote that the Beatles had “broken the bounds of what we used to call pop,” though it called “Tomorrow Never Knows” “smothered.”⁷⁴ Edward Greenfield, in The Guardian, called that song “musically most original” and found in “Eleanor Rigby” “a quality rare in pop music, compassion.”⁷⁵ In Record Mirror Peter Jones and Richard Green predicted that parts of it would “split the pop fraternity neatly down the middle.”⁷⁶ Ray Davies of the Kinks, reviewing it for Disc and Music Echo, called “Yellow Submarine” “a load of rubbish” and “I’m Only Sleeping” “definitely the best track on the album.”⁷⁷ Billboard called it “another sure-fire sales winner,” Cash Box “another fantastic sales item.”⁷⁸

In Britain Revolver entered the album chart at number one on August 13 and held it for seven weeks, and the single was number one for four.⁷⁹ In America the album entered Billboard’s chart at 45 on September 3 and reached number one the next week, for six weeks; it was eighth on the magazine’s list of the year’s albums, which counted sales to October 8.⁸⁰ There the single’s two sides charted separately, “Yellow Submarine” reaching number two and “Eleanor Rigby” number eleven.⁸¹ The group was presented with a gold record, then a measure of a million dollars in sales, in late August.⁸² At the Grammy Awards of March 2, 1967, McCartney won best contemporary rock and roll solo vocal performance for “Eleanor Rigby,” Voormann’s cover won best album cover, graphic arts, and the album was nominated for album of the year, which went to Frank Sinatra’s A Man and His Music.⁸³

Legacy

Robert Christgau, writing in Esquire in December 1967 about the American edition, found Revolver “twice as good and four times as startling as Rubber Soul” and Sgt. Pepper “more intricate than Revolver but not more substantial.”⁸⁴ George Martin, in comments for the 1997 Pet Sounds Sessions booklet, said that Revolver “was the beginning of the whole thing” that led to Sgt. Pepper.⁸⁵ Harrison, in the Beatles’ Anthology, said Rubber Soul and Revolver “could be Volume One and Volume Two.”⁸⁶

Until 1987 most Americans knew the eleven-track Capitol edition, and Rob Sheffield argued in Rolling Stone in 2016 that the album was recognized late as a result; he called it “the greatest rock album ever.”⁸⁷ David Medsker had written in PopMatters in 2004 that Sgt. Pepper had long “carried the title of best album of all time” but that “revisionist history has actually changed things.”⁸⁸ Rolling Stone placed Revolver third, behind Sgt. Pepper, in its lists of the 500 greatest albums in 2003 and 2012, and eleventh, ahead of it, in 2020; the NME placed it second in 2013, with Sgt. Pepper eighty-seventh.⁸⁹ Greg Kot wrote for BBC Culture in 2016 that Revolver “now stands as The Beatles’ greatest album.”⁹⁰ It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.⁹¹ The RIAA certified it five times platinum, for five million copies shipped, in 2000, and in Britain it was certified platinum in 2013 on its sales since 1994.⁹²

In 2011 Rolling Stone wrote that the West Coast pop of the next several years “sprang directly from Revolver.”⁹³ The producer Tony Visconti said it showed “how the studio could be used as an instrument” and helped him decide to move to Britain.⁹⁴ The Jam’s single “Start!” (1980) has a riff and bass line close to those of “Taxman”; Bruce Foxton said the song “subconsciously went in.”⁹⁵ The Chemical Brothers, by The Guardian’s account, took “Tomorrow Never Knows” as a template for their music; they covered it, and opened their sets with Junior Parker’s 1970 version.⁹⁶

Further reading

• Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1999) — a musicologist’s reading of every song, from this album on
• Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (Chicago Review Press, 2007) — every recording in order, with its sessions and players
• Alan W. Pollack, “Notes on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’” — one of a song-by-song series of harmonic analyses

See also

• Rubber Soul (1965) — the album before, which Martin said set the group thinking of albums as art
• Pet Sounds (1966) — the Beach Boys album that reached Lennon and McCartney during the sessions
• “Tomorrow Never Knows” (1966) — the first song taped for the album and the last on it
• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) — the next album, which Martin said Revolver began
• The transatlantic feedback loop — the exchange between British and American records, here through Pet Sounds and the Stax plan
• Swinging Sixties — the London of the mid-1960s, in which the album was made
• British Invasion — the British groups’ run in America, which took in the 1966 tour
• Pop as craft — the idea of the record as something made in the studio