A$# 052 Beatles | Revolver

The Beatles had turned a corner with Rubber Soul. With Revolver, released in August of 1966, they ascended heights no other pop act has ever been able to match. Sgt. Pepper may have received more plaudits back in the 60s, but Revolver, the Fabs' seventh album, is equally deserving of the most effusive praise.

Just consider some of its laurels, as chronicled in Wikipedia:

In 1997 it was named the 3rd greatest album of all time in a 'Music of the Millennium' poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 2006 Q magazine readers placed it at number 4, while in 2000 the same magazine placed it at number 1 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2001 the TV network VH1 named it the number 1 greatest album of all time, a position it also achieved in the Virgin All Time Top 1,000 Albums. A PopMatters review described the album as "the individual members of the greatest band in the history of pop music peaking at the exact same time", while Ink Blot magazine claims it "stands at the summit of western pop music". In 2002, the readers of Rolling Stone ranked the album the greatest of all time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 3 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

So what is it that makes Revolver so great? Well, it should be obvious from a first listen, from the count-in of Taxman to the hypnotic psychedelia of Tomorrow Never Knows, that the shear talent in singing, songwriting, musicianship and recording innovation is probably the best you're ever going to hear ... from anyone.

George had really developed as a songwriter by 1966, and on Revolver, he contributes three excellent songs. Taxman is a resounding rocker that skewers the unfair British tax system; Love You To is a superlative melding together of Western and Eastern music; I Want To Tell You is another rollicking number, about the difficulty of expressing one's thoughts.

Paul's contributions to the album are particularly masterful. Good Day Sunshine and Got To Get You Into My Life are uplifting, soulful numbers. For No One and Here, There And Everywhere are among the best love songs Macca ever penned (and *that* is saying something), though the former is melancholic, whereas the latter is adoring.

Paul also wrote the song that Ringo sings on Revolver - Yellow Submarine. Is it merely a simple kids song? Is it a psychedelic anthem? Or perhaps a metaphor for the fishbowl environment that the Fabs were living in? Perhaps it's all of those, or not. That's part of the simple brilliance of YS; it can be whatever the listener wants it to be.

Paul's pièce de resistance track on the album is Eleanor Rigby, the sad and moving tale of a lonely lass. The song, as Wikipedia says, "is in modern Dorian mode, rather than the normal major/minor modes of popular music. It remains one of The Beatles' most recognizable and unique songs, with an eight-person string section working from a score by George Martin and its striking lyrics about the loneliness of old age, continuing the transformation of The Beatles started in Rubber Soul from a mainly pop-oriented act to a more serious and experimental studio band."

John's songs on Revolver are equally compelling. The trippy I'm Only Sleeping includes a backwards dual guitar solo by George. And Your Bird Can Sing and Doctor Robert are great psychedelic rockers. She Said, She Said chronicles John's (and Peter Fonda's) experiences with LSD.

But it's the album closer, Tomorrow Never Knows, that is the really creative piece of music on the LP. John's lyrics were based on the Timothy Leary's version of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead (and the title was one of Ringo's aphorisms), and he famously wanted the vocals to sound like a thousand monks chanting. Producer George Martin knew that was impractical, but through studio trickery was able to produce the quality John was seeking.

As Fab historian Mark Lewisohn wrote:

[TMK] was a heavy metal recording of enormous proportion, with thundering echo and booming, quivering, ocean-bed vibrations. And peeking out from under the squall was John Lennon's voice, supremely eerie, as if it were being broadcast from the cheapest transistor radio from your local market, and delivering the most bizarre Beatles lyric yet....

Ringo's drums carried a hypnotic and mournful thud. Paul's bass, hight up on the fretboard, matched Ringo note for mesmerising note. There was another eerily live Lennon vocal, a tambourine, one note of an organ playing continuously, two guitar solos, one fuzzed and played backwards, the other put through a Leslie organ speaker ... and a jolly honk-tonk piano. [And this was just after their first session for the song.] Coming less than three years after She Loves You, Tomorrow Never Knows reveals an unrivalled musical progression and the Beatles' willingness to first observe the boundaries and then smash right through them."

With tape loops and more effects added later, TMK would sound like nothing that any rock artist had ever released. Its recording also produced new innovations in recording techniques, such as artificial double tracking (ADT).

Revolver was such a departure that the Beatles did not even try to perform any of its songs on their final North American tour. The 14 songs in it, plus Paperback Writer and Rain, also recorded during those sessions, revealed that the Beatles had gone far beyond any regular three-chord rock 'n' roll band.

It's an understatement to call Revolver a masterpiece. It's way more than that.

Track listing:
1. Taxman
2. Eleanor Rigby
3. I'm Only Sleeping
4. Love You To
5. Here, There And Everywhere
6. Yellow Submarine
7. She Said, She Said
8. Good Day Sunshine
9. And Your Bird Can Sing
10. For No One
11. Doctor Robert
12. I Want To Tell You
13. Got To Get You Into My Life
14. Tomorrow Never Knows