Paul's count-in on the first album was all lust pop, the four a scream of ignition for the clanging guitar engine that burst to life. George's close-mic mutter has a sinister feel to it and isn't the real count in anyway. It's 1966, three years of Beatlemania have pushed these twenty somethings into a very strange adulthood and now the Quiet One sounds like he's discretely spruiking a burlesque plus show. That gives way to a hard rock song about tax.
Some context is called for here. I didn't hear this album in 1966 but the late 70s. There was a tide of Beatles reissues in the mid 70s which made it as a trickle to Townsville in 76. Revolver wasn't among them. I knew it was an album that had appeared before Sgt Pepper (which had never gone out of print) but like Rubber Soul it was impossible to find. This made it mysterious and to my BBC thriller mind this made it irresistable. What was on it? Sight of a mail order record club ad in an old copy of Playboy or Esquire listed Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine. That, I knew had been a single and concluded that it would also have Paperback Writer and Rain, too. This was shaping up. The magazine thumbnail of the cover featured a negative image of what I would later learn was the cover. This meant that the faces of the Beatles looked like something from a sci-fi movie. Wow, more to this than teases the eye, I thought. Soon, it was the great forgotten masterpiece of dark energy that the colour and commerciality of Pepper had conveniently eclipsed. I took my favourite bands very seriously as a 13 year old.
While I did get a copy in 1977 as part of the 70s reissues the first time I heard the whole thing was when my sister borrowed a copy from one of her friends. It was an original pressing. It was mono. This almost put me off as all I knew of stereo or mono was that mono was old. Beggars and choosers. I ran down to the rumpus room, picked out a radio cassette of hits and future memories, set up the dub and let it happen.
As Taxman slashed to life I explored the cover. Four heads rendered in pen and ink, crammed together, looking in different directions. The eyes weren't drawn but cut and pasted from photographs. This gave off a strange air as though they'd let a fan design the cover. The same sister who accessed the record for me (thanks to Penny Johnson, btw) used to lead us in collage sessions with Clag, scissors and Mum's old She magazines. Under her guidance a kind of contained psychosis took form as we mixed 'n' matched anything we could cut neatly, and filled pages of scrapbooks with monsters made of lobsters and Prince Charles, pinstriped bankers and microwave meals etc.
This record cover was like that only more controlled the real eyes looking out of the pen and ink heads bore an odd hostility which I felt but couldn't name. Smaller photo Beatles were pasted around the heads, popping out of spaghettish hair or spewing out of the ink lines in lumpy photographic boluses. In the centre of all four heads small drawn figures of the four seemed to be walking through this strange scene looking variously lost, arch, aloof or ... well George's eyes were blacked out. While most of the 12 X 12 square was filled with this un-flower-powered black and white confrontation the left side between the heads of Paul and Ringo was almost entirely white. Had it not been finished? I would come to know the value of negative space in art but when I saw it there it looked like it was meant to puzzle or disturb. I returned to it repeatedly as the album played.
The Taxman backing vocals started sounding like the same 7th chord as in the Batman theme song and then the weird guitar solo snaked out of the speakers, sharp and wriggling and almost over before it began before the chorus came back in with bright harmonies sung through a frown. Paul's tight bass riff funked in exact step with the drumming and was joined an octave above by that Gibson playing the same figure. "And my advice for those who die. Declare the pennies on your eyes." "I'm the taxman and you're working for no one but me." What? Bloody hell.
I didn't hear the Beatles albums in sequence but a decade after their release in something like reverse order. We had a copy of Abbey Road in the record stack and I'd bought my own Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour and then the White Album. The same sister's boyfriend later that year would lend me his original copy of Rubber Soul. So, the notion of the Beatles singing about dark or nasty things wasn't new to me but, working out the timeline, what was new was how early it had started. I'd never owned the popular Red and Green compilations but I did have a couple of 60s era ones with the singles from 62 to 65. Taken as a whole, you could trace the development in those from Love me Do to Day Tripper but this stuff coming out of the stereo was almost absurdly advanced.
After Taxman slithered into its fade out with another guitar solo (later learned it was the same one just collaged on to the end, and that it was Paul not George who played it) the light rain sound of the groove between songs gave way to harsh staccato strings and urgent harmonies. "Aaaaaah look at all the lonely people!" Eleanor Rigby sounds like endlessly rainy streets and cold winter afternoons as the highly compact tales of loneliness are sung in a tone of a court reporter, unaffected, matter of fact. That's not often pointed out when this song comes up. Normally, there is mention of the strident Bernard Hermann string arrangement, no rock instruments and the theme of the song but no one ever seems to talk about how coldly McCartney sings the verses. Like the anti-vibrato stance he took with the strings in yesterday he strips the emotion out of this song and cools it down to a kind of horror tale. As a kid, only very barely aware of all the lyrics I was disturbed that Eleanor wore a face that she kept in a jar by the door. I also got one sequence wrong and mixed up the wedding with the phrase "no one was saved". That froze me if I thought about the song. This is before you get to the Psycho-soundtrack string section and the strident pace of a song that might easily have been a sentimental ballad. Hearing it afresh in 1977 felt like finding the grail on an archeological dig. I didn't wonder how the first listeners heard this back in '66 I was hearing it like that now.
I'm Only Sleeping begins with a six string strum and Lennon digs in with a monotone over changing chords played on slow acoustics. It's not a double bass but sounds like it. Then snaking through the ooh-ooh-ooh backing harmonies and John's softened snarl come coils of backwards guitar sounding eastern but also like nothing else. There's even a backwards solo that suggests the sensory warping of the dream state. The narrator of the song just wants to stay in bed and walk through the great open cosmos he finds behind his eyes. The song ends with a whole snake pit of slithering backwards guitar lines.
So, that's a sharp edged rock song about tax, a baroque severity about loneliness and a trippy song about dreaming. Not a She Loves You in earshot. This was already happening in previous albums but not to the same commitment as here. These are the opening tracks meant to grab the screaming hordes. They do grab but there's something eerie about each one. This does sit well enough in its times with things like The Kinks' Dead End Street, The Who's Substitute, The Stones' Paint it Black or 19th Nervous Breakdown all hits. But these were the Fabs, the moptops, the teenybopper's delight and here they were opening an album with subject matter that looked the other way as though trying to ignore the human jet engine behind them. Dylan reportedly looked up after hearing it and said: I get it, they don't want to be cute anymore. It was the music, as well. None of this sounded even like the steps forward on the previous album, it sounded like exploration. There was more.
Love You To begins with sitar glissandi far more authentic than the twanged echo of the vocal melody in Norwegian Wood. The rag is played through, the percussion (including tablas) roars into gear with a mix of tambura and distorted electric barre chords and a volume pedal. George's song is a series of couplets that don't always seem to belong. Sometimes it's about love and lust when you want it with whomever is nearby and sometimes it's about false hearted people. Whether it was George just throwing lines together or building up a picture I always hear this as a sinister memory. Maybe it's the force of the backing against his laconic vocal.
Five songs in and we finally get a love song. Paul's Here, There and Everywhere is a gorgeous jazz chord progression on shining electric guitars. Paul's vocal is the opposite of Eleanor Rigby, delicate and emotive, sung on the bridge between head voice and falsetto. Lush harmonies form a bed on the floor as sunlight floods in through the skylight. And then in the middle eight there's a strange chromatic figure Harrison plays on the electric. It fits but it's also quite sharp like a surf rock or spy movie riff. When it passes we return to that sunlit floor and finally to a circular repeat of the title and a couple of rich gleaming chords from the jazz ballad encyclopedia.
Yes, now it's Yellow Submarine with Ringo singing what became a kids' party song with more than a few flat notes with only a strummed acoustic to act as a safety net. It's naff and feels too long. But then I'll still take it over the kind of rock classique covers they were still playing live. And, really, there's a lot of fun happening in the studio that makes it through the speakers. This first hearing of it in context with all the heavier songs around it lent it a kind of in joke darkness. I don't hear that anymore but it was good to imagine at the time.
She Said She Said slides to life with a pair of electrics just at amp breakup for that extra jangle and sustain. A cool Lennon vocal relates a weird conversation the kind of which he would have had in the predawn world of swinging London club land. It was, in fact, derived from a conversation he's had with Peter Fonda about the latter's childhood near death experience. Lennon adapted it with a Lewis Carroll whimsy. The harmonies soar, a tiny organ note pierces the mix like tinnitus and the bass booms ahead (Harrison playing after McCartney had stormed out of the session) all of it twists together into colour and texture. It sounded like a perfect '60s rock song which is to say it sounded better than anything I was hearing on the radio at the time. I still love this song and will happily play it as the only track from the album.
Side 2 starts with a chunky piano plodding along like a cartoon bear. A snare roll and the bright harmonies of Good Day Sunshine burst in. Paul sings an easy mooded number of being in love on a sunny day with the heat of the road burning his feet while he and his girl head for the shade of the park. Little to see here but it's so nice and, like everything else so far, sounds like nothing they had done before.
And Your Bird Can Sing matches a complex guitar duet with dynamic harmonies on the lush side of Beach Boy and a song about being there for someone who's still in thrall to her riches and privileges.
For No One is McCartney again extending the kind of narrative song he was revelling in at the time (the single around the album but not on it was his Paperback Writer). In this case he sings about a couple whose relationship has dissolved, they are adrift, go about their routines, empty of all thought beyond a series of self delusions about the other, crying tears for no one. The instrumental descent is played on a clavichord. Slight electric bass and drumming and some chordal extensions on a piano fill this out but everything is kept minimal. And then one verse is only half as long as the others and into the space comes a figure on the French horn that is both light and because of that quite grave giving the whole song the feel of a film score. All in two minutes and two seconds!
Dr Robert starts with George's SG at amp breakup playing a sharp syncopated two chord rhythm. Lennon comes in low with the opening lines about ringing his friend. The harmonies come in after that and the song mixes imagery of public health and very private and privileged health as the Doctor of the title will pick up you if you're feeling down before a blissed-out middle eight where the guitars ring like bells over a shimmering organ chord and heavenly harmonies: Well, well, well, you're feeling fine. Well, well, well he'll make you..." The main song bashes in again and then another medicated section before the shuffle to the end. The song fades but you can hear the full end without listening too hard. Many fans of the band and this album dismiss this one as filler but I like the way it bridges the beat band sound that made them famous and the coming expansion of the sound and the exploration that was already taking place on the same album. It's two and a quarter minutes long, leave it on.
George's unprecedented third song, I Want to Tell You, begins with a fade in of an arpeggio chord on the Stratocaster he got during Rubber Soul. The timing of the riff is strange and only kind of fits the snare beat tha comes in under it. Once the band kicks in with a four on the floor shuffle centred around Paul on an out of tune piano we only hear it at the end of the chorus. George sings about the difficulties of communication in a state of confusion. Could be lysergic but just as easily could be social as the daily life of the swinging Londoners around them was getting tougher to unpack. A jolly rhythm belies this but the close harmonies accentuate it, finding their apex in the line at the end of the chorus: I've got time. At the end of the song the phrase is repeated until it unravels into the three vocalists trying out some Indian style scales as the strange arpeggio from the intro plays below it to the fade.
Got to Get You Into My Life blasts to life with a brass section straight out of the soul train, supplied by touring mates Sounds Incorporated. McCartney's tune climbs by thirds until the last words of the verse lines which go a full octave over that as the bass thumps on the ONE, a G which he keeps even though the brass ends on an F. The chorus waits until the end of the second verse and is entirely composed of the title phrase. Then it's back into it. but it's not just a three verse two veg. After the chorus there's a single chord break when the guitars finally appear. Instead of them reclaiming it as a standard rock song they are there to add texture and jangle on the lower strings, almost droning like a tambura. The last verse is all shouted in the upper octave as the brass section follows in the same range. Everything lifts as Paul screams some ad libs and the brass screams along with him to the fade. The band had long been associated with black artists from the US but if they covered them there was always a shortfall. Here they used the influence, the thing that got them about the soul records in the first place, and followed that. Is it echt funk? Doesn't need to be, it's the Fabs finding a new road and that's always good. McCartney, decades after he might have, confessed that it was not a song to a girl but to the cannabis that he'd come to use as others used wine, every single day of his life.
And then after that there is the track that everyone points to for being the raddest. They have just heard a whole album of innovative rock music from a band who didn't have to do anything more complicated than repeat their last successes until the well dried up. Nevertheless, Tomorrow Never Knows took pride of place as the closing track, forcing attention away from the rest. When I played the mono vinyl on that morning in early '77 this was the one that put every other backward tape or sitar or music concrete suggested in the rest of the album into context. They all seemed to head to this one.
The snarling drone of a tambura if lifted by Ringo's strange back to front rhythm and Paul's bass insisting on a C high on the fretboard. Then something like seagulls rise in the mix and then John comes in with the opener. If taxmen and lonely people seemed strange subjects for the world's greatest boy band then try this: "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. It is not dying. It is not dying." The tune plays the notes of a major chord like a bugle call, adding to the confusion. It doesn't sound remotely as Indian as the drone at the start. Then there's a break as something which still sounds unearthly happens. A kind of folk dance made out of scraps of orchestral music, woodwinds and brass uncoiling from under some almost screaming chords. It fits but it sticks out. But it fits. When John comes back in his voice is squeezed by a Leslie speaker and sounds like he's at the end of a long tunnel with more of the same in the lyrics. "Ignorance and hate may mourn the dead." And the seagulls screech overhead, again and again. A loud backwards guitar solo. More seagulls. "So play the game existence to the end of the beginning, of the beginning, of the beginning..." sings John at the other end of the void, fading into the chaos of sound, the orchestral stabs playing like fills. At the very end of the fade, ever more weirdly, a bar room piano plays some honky tonk chords into the silence at the end of the groove.
If there had been anything as boldly unapologetic yet also still recognisable and enjoyable pop music from the distance I first heard this I didn't know of it. Punk was already breaking through but this almost forgotten album by the biggest band in history was telling me that I shouldn't just be chasing the three chord distortion and slogan choruses from the desolate London of 1977. That felt the best but what if there could be more exploration after the reset finished? This was the record that told not only me that it was possible but necessary. It didn't mean that post punk bands needed to sound like the Beatles from a decade before but that they should race past the new standard before it blanded into a genre like any other (which it did and quickly).
Listening notes: This is mostly based on my first full hearing of the album as an original 1966 vinyl LP. That's a memory. The more immediate source was the 2009 remastered mono box set copy on cd in accordance with the original's mono mix. This, the closest you'll get to hearing what the band wanted has a lot of detail left off the stereo mix (which was considered a kind of luxury item as far as their fanbase went).
This was the album made as the band were acting on their instincts to stop touring and start exploring. That's important as, more than anything else until Let it Be it was a full band recording, the treasure at the end of months of intense idea sharing and playing. After it there were albums with more sophisticated arrangements and daring moves but they were also the work of a band that was less a creative unit than a series of recombined backings for individual members. Revolver is what a creative and collaborative peak sounds like. The single before it was Paperback Writer/Rain a powerful paring of daring with plain rock songs given unprecedented treatment (extra bass on one and backwards recording on the other) and the one after was Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever, the sound of a new era.
The album was eclipsed by its successor, Sgt. Pepper for decades and while that basked in the light until mention of it became a cliche it wasn't until the US market got the '80s CD release with the original track list intact (it had originally been released there minus some key tracks) that the relation of the two albums was reversed and Revolver began to top the lists. This is good and bad.
It's good because it means that the album takes it's well earned place at the top (at least of thinking about the Beatles) but it's bad because this makes it a target of every contrarian bore who thinks it signals the need to champion Please Please Me or Freddie and the Dreamers. For my part I heard something made in 1966 which made me go looking around for anything else I could find from the year. What I learned was that Revolver hadn't been made in a vacuum of unguided genius but was very much a part of the scene it seemed to lead. There was so much I found from the mid '60s that inspired with its daring and style and so much I longed for a smidgen of that to appear in my own time. If it didn't happen it would be up to me or anyone else who wanted their lives enhanced by culture as rich.
That week of holiday wasn't just that album. I was also going through the Queen back catalogue. One morning I was blissing out to Sheer Heart Attack, second last track, side two, She Makes Me with its giant drums and acoustic chords and celestial harmonies. My sister who had organised the loan of Revolver from her friend heard it and called down from the kitchen that the Beatles album had to go back to Penny soon. She'd mistaken Queen for the Fabs.
So, there it is, a pop music monolith like the one in Space Odyssey, come down among mortals to lead them to the next development. Well, it did a lot of inspiring and well beyond its time but, take that on board or not, care about it or not, it's still a good record, not just an important one, an engaging one, an intensely musical one, a fun one.
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