FEATURE:
Here, There and Everywhere
Revolver at Fifty-Five: The Legacy and Importance of The Beatles’ Masterpiece
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TOMORROW is a special day…
PHOTO CREDIT: David Mcenery/REX/Shutterstock
as The Beatles’ seventh studio album, Revolver, turns fifty-five. Released on 5th August, 1966, it is a hugely impressive and influential album. There has been debate through the years as to which album by the band rules. Maybe Abbey Road (the final album the band recorded) could claim some superiority and popularity over Revolver. For a long time, 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was seen as the king. Many were swept up by the fact it was so important when it was released - and it seemed to usher in something new and seismic. If one integrates the songs and judged the album as a whole, maybe the importance of the time and what Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band represents in a wider sense is more impressive than the album itself – even if there are some absolute classics to be enjoyed! Revolver sort of came into its own because people realised that it is a more collaborative effort than its successor. Maybe it was the last album where the band were on the same page and seemed very together. Also, in the 1990s, many Britpop bands used Revolver as a template. With Revolver turning thirty in 1996, small wonder many artists were picking it up again and finding inspiration. There is so much in the album that influences and blows the senses. If some bands were captivated by the psychedelic spin and epic atmosphere of Tomorrow Never Knows or the somnambulism of I’m Only Sleeping; the way a sad song like Eleanor Rigby could sound so beautiful and addictive; the pure perfection of And Your Bird Can Sing or the childlike wonder of Yellow Submarine, others found something else to admire. There are so many colours and styles mastered and experimented with. Even today, artists are finding something new in Revolver.
With one thing or the other, Paul McCartney was dominating and leading the group by 1967. Lennon was not as productive and together. Whilst Ringo Starr and George Harrison were more together and focused, one can feel more of McCartney in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Lennon rediscovered inspiration and almost surpassed McCartney in terms of his contributions on The Beatles (1968). By Abbey Road in 1969, again, McCartney was the group leader and most prolific songwriter – the same is also true of Let It Be (1970). Revolver seems to be The Beatles tight and balanced. George Harrison contributes great songs like Taxman (Revolver’s opener); Ringo Starr’s vocal on Yellow Submarine is infectious, strong and brilliant. I am going to bring in a couple of articles that look at the legacy of Revolver. Although John Lennon and Paul McCartney were largely writing separately by 1966, there isn’t this sense that they were drifting apart, or big cracks were forming – just that the two had their own ideas and ways of working. Lennon wrote the staggering And Your Bird Can Sing, Tomorrow Never Knows and I’m Only Sleeping (McCartney may have contributed a bit here and there; Lennon the same on McCartney’s tracks). Maybe McCartney was slightly ahead in terms of the classics: Eleanor Rigby, Here, There and Everywhere, Good Day Sunshine and Got to Get You Into My Life. Rather than Revolver being a competition, it is an album where the band are at their peak. Not only in terms of the range of songs and how advanced everything sounds. The songs make a huge impact without extending the three-minute mark! Eleanor Rigby is 2:06; Yellow Submarine 2:38; And Your Bird Can Sing 2:00. Even the immense closer, Tomorrow Never Knows, is 2:59. Only one song on the album – I’m Only Sleeping – exceeds three minutes. And to be fair, it is 3:00 dead!
For those like me who grew up in the 1990s, Revolver was handed down from our parents. We got a sense of what they must have felt when the album came out in 1966. With bands of the 1990s especially influenced by it, the album took on new meaning and life. Whilst no one song or artist could match the best moments of Revolver, it shows that it had this amazing legacy and real sense of significance. Before bringing in some articles, this Wikipedia entry reveals the extent of Revolver’s legacy:
“MacDonald deems Lennon's remark about the Beatles' "god-like status" in March 1966 to have been "fairly realistic", given the reaction to Revolver. He adds: "The album's aural invention was so masterful that it seemed to Western youth that The Beatles knew – that they had the key to current events and were somehow orchestrating them through their records." MacDonald highlights "the radically subversive" message of "Tomorrow Never Knows" – exhorting listeners to empty their minds of all ego- and material-related thought – as the inauguration of a "till-then élite-preserved concept of mind-expansion into pop, simultaneously drawing attention to consciousness-enhancing drugs and the ancient religious philosophies of the Orient". Author Shawn Levy writes that the album presented an alternative reality that contemporary listeners felt compelled to explore further; he describes it as "the first true drug album, not a pop record with some druggy insinuations, but an honest-to-heaven, steeped-in-the-out-there trip from the here and now into who knew where”.
According to Simon Philo, Revolver announced the arrival of the "underground London" sound, supplanting that of Swinging London. Barry Miles describes the album as an "advertisement for the underground", and recalls that it resounded on the level of experimental jazz among members of the movement, including those who soon founded the UFO Club. He says it established rock 'n' roll as an art form and identifies its "trailblazing" quality as the impetus for Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and for Brian Wilson to complete the Beach Boys' "mini-symphony", "Good Vibrations". Citing composer and producer Virgil Moorefield's book The Producer as Composer, author Jay Hodgson highlights Revolver as a "dramatic turning point" in recording history through its dedication to studio exploration over the "performability" of the songs, as this and subsequent Beatles albums reshaped listeners' preconceptions of a pop recording. In his review for Pitchfork, Plagenhoef says that the album not only "redefin[ed] what was expected from popular music", but recast the Beatles as "avatars for a transformative cultural movement". MacDonald cites Revolver as a musical statement that, further to the Rubber Soul track "The Word" and "Rain", helped guide the counterculture towards the 1967 Summer of Love due to the widespread popularity of the Beatles.
Revolver has been recognised as having inspired new subgenres of music, anticipating electronica, punk rock, baroque rock and world music, among other styles. According to Rolling Stone, the album "signaled that in popular music, anything – any theme, any musical idea – could now be realized". Through the Beatles' example, psychedelia moved from its underground roots into the mainstream, thereby originating the longer-lasting psychedelic pop style. Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc credit the songs on Revolver with "set[ting] the stage for an important subgenre of psychedelic music, that of the messianic pronouncement". As with Rubber Soul, Walter Everett views the album's "experimental timbres, rhythms, tonal structures, and poetic texts" as the inspiration for many of the bands that formed the progressive rock genre in the early 1970s. He also considers Revolver to be "an innovative example of electronic music" as much as it broke new ground in pop by being "fundamentally unlike any rock album that had preceded it". Rolling Stone attributes the development of the Los Angeles and San Francisco music scenes, including subsequent releases by the Beach Boys, Love and the Grateful Dead, to the influence of Revolver, particularly "She Said She Said".
Steve Turner likens the Beatles' creative approach in 1966 to that of modern jazz musicians, and recognises their channelling of Indian and Western classical, Southern soul, and electronic musical styles into their work as unprecedented in popular music. He says that, through the band's efforts to faithfully translate their LSD-inspired vision into music, "Revolver opened the doors to psychedelic rock (or acid rock)", while the primitive means by which it was recorded (on four-track equipment) inspired the work that artists such as Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes and the Electric Light Orchestra were able to achieve with advances in studio technology. Turner also highlights the pioneering sampling and tape manipulation employed on "Tomorrow Never Knows" as having "a profound effect on everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Jay-Z".
The fact many name Revolver as The Beatles’ best album means its influence and importance is huge! There are other facts and achievements that can be mentioned that goes to show just how special Revolver is. One only needs to consider how highly Revolver has been regarded by music critics and magazines through the years. This Beatles Daily article from 2016 shed more light:
“In 1997, it was named the third greatest album of all time in a Music of the Millennium poll conducted in the United Kingdom by HMV Group, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM.
In 2000, Q magazine placed it at number 1 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever.
In 2002, the readers of Rolling Stone ranked the album the greatest of all time.
In 2006, Guitar World readers chose it as the 10th best guitar album of all time.
In 2007, a PopMatters review described the album’s content – “the individual members of the
greatest band in the history of pop music peaking at the exact same time”.
One can listen to Revolver for the first time today and would be won over. The songs are short and punchy, yet there is a lot of experimentation and some lush moments. As opposed to the largely brief and anthemic Pop songs of their earliest albums, Revolver is more textured and layered. To me, it is the sheer breadth of the sounds on Revolver that means anyone can find something to love! For such a busy and important album, it only lasts a little over thirty-four minutes. It is amazing how The Beatles packed so much in and leave you wanting even more! It is testament to the band’s consistency and overflow of quality material that the single, Paperback Writer (with Rain as the B-side), was not put on Revolver! Take away its innovation and the fact The Beatles were starting to push the studio and experiment more – as they were touring less and starting to find that slog and routine exhausting and not work it anymore - and the album is still so important and ahead of anything else. The Beatles recorded Revolver after taking a three-month break at the start of 1966. Many people regard it as the start of The Beatles’ Psychedelic period. Pushing away from love songs and broadening their horizons, they addressed themes such as death and transcendence from material concerns. The boys knew they would not be touring these songs - so, as such, they could spend time in studio making the material a little denser and more sophisticated. The Beatles were doing things their own way and were pushing boundaries like never before. How exciting and inspiring it would have been for other artists at the time!
I am going to finish off with a feature from 2016 that the BBC published. To me, it is the absolute quality and power of the album that makes it so influential and inspiring:
“The best Beatles album? The rock historians often point to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as the moment, in 1967, when rock magically grew up and became a legitimate art form, at least as it was perceived by the mainstream media. Many fans love the sprawl and variety of the self-titled 1968 double album, popularly known as The White Album. In some quarters there’s a fondness for Abbey Road and its side-long suite of mini-songs, and lovers of the Bob Dylan-influenced folk-rock of the mid-‘60s cherish Rubber Soul above all. They all have merit, but none of them is as consistently brilliant and innovative as Revolver.
All The Beatles’ previous albums had been rush jobs – their debut was recorded in four hours. But in 1966, the quartet pulled off the road for good to devote themselves to songwriting and record-making. Lennon and McCartney were still closely collaborating and pushing each other to new levels of innovation, and Harrison was emerging as a formidable third songwriter and voice in the band. Now, with the luxury of time to tinker, edit, re-edit and experiment, The Beatles were poised to record a masterpiece.
Tomorrow Never Knows set a high standard for an album that moves from one peak to the next: Harrison’s corrosive guitar lick and McCartney’s commanding counterpoint bassline in Taxman made for one of The Beatles’ toughest-sounding tracks, the brisk strings on Eleanor Rigby presaged the chamber-pop feel and emotional tenor of She’s Leaving Home on Sgt Pepper, and Harrison’s plunge into Eastern mysticism and modalities on Love You To set the stage for the similarly inclined Within You Without You on the later album.
The melancholy beauty of Here, There and Everywhere answered the challenge of Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys masterpiece Pet Sounds, Doctor Robert and And Your Bird Can Sing achieved jingle-jangle guitar-pop perfection, and the horn-fueled Got to Get You Into My Life channeled Motown and Stax soul. Even a relatively lightweight track such as Yellow Submarine presaged the sometimes fanciful, almost child-like wonder of Sgt Pepper tracks such as Lovely Rita”.
On its fifty-fifth anniversary tomorrow, I am going to spin the album again. Although I do not love everything on Revolver – I can do without George Harrison’s Love You To -, one cannot deny the place it holds in The Beatles’ cannon and wider cultural relevance. Reaching fresh audiences in the 1990s through to its use in Britpop and other genres, a new generation are picking it up now. We will be hearing elements of Revolver in new music for decades to come. The fact Revolver is such a cohesive listen means it will always appear on lists of the best albums ever and be celebrated widely. On its fifty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to nod to and salute…
A faultless masterpiece.