Dec 14

Revolver

Highly Appreciated

REVOLVER
 
 
Revolver  is the seventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles.  It was released on 5 August 1966 in the United Kingdom and three days later in the United States.  The album was produced by George Martin and features many tracks with an electric guitar-rock sound that contrasts with their previous LP, the folk rock-inspired Rubber Soul (1965).  In the UK, Revolver’s 14 tracks were released to radio stations throughout July 1966, with the music signifying what author Ian MacDonald later described as “a radical new phase in the group’s recording career”.  Revolver was ranked first in the book All-Time Top 1000 Albums and third in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
I have a confession to make though.  When I first heard the “Stars on 45 Medley” (Beatles medley), there were several songs that I was actually not familiar with.  I don’t think that I have ever told anyone this before now; I wonder how many other Beatles fans were similarly chagrined.  My own experience with the band is being caught up in the excitement in late 1963 and early 1964, but I quit buying Beatles albums sometime in 1965, though I still bought a lot of their 45’s.  Naturally, I bought Sgt. Pepper right away, and it wasn’t long before I figured out how good the preceding album Revolver was.  However, I didn’t buy Rubber Soul until I got the box set, The Beatles / The Collection.  Basically, between “Yesterday” and Sgt. Pepper, if it wasn’t on the radio, I hadn’t heard it.  Thus, for this music fan at least, Stars on 45 reawakened my interest in the Beatles, and I definitely took to heart their exhortation:  “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t forget!” 
 
(September 2012)
 
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Since Year One came out, Jacco Gardner has been busy.  He has released several more singles and has a lot of YouTube videos in a somewhat different direction than his work with the Skywalkers.  The online Quip magazine has this description:  “His echo-washed sound recalls the psychedelic and lushly orchestral vibe of the Beatles’ Revolver or Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, interspersed with the peppy, sardonic jabs of more modern fare like the Shins.” 
 
(January 2013)
 
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Following the break-up of the Beatles, George Harrison released a mammoth two-record album in 1970 called All Things Must Pass that also included a third disk called Apple Jam.  Clearly Harrison was creating a lot of music that wasn’t winding up on the Beatles albums.  By the time “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” showed up on Abbey Road, nearly all rock critics were acknowledging that George Harrison was a songwriter equal to John Lennon and Paul McCartney; but I had noticed that at least as far back as Revolver, where his songs were “Taxman”, “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You”. 
 
(September 2014)
 
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Lennon/McCartney appears by most of the Beatles’ songs, but starting at least with Revolver, I began to notice that George Harrison was writing many of my favorite Beatles songs.  His contribution to Sgt. Pepper was “Within You Without You”; that song and “A Day in the Life” quickly became my favorite songs on that mammoth album. 
 
On Revolver, which I bought after Sgt. Pepper actually, George Harrison wrote the lead-off song, “Taxman” plus “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You”.  George wrote the first song on Side 2 of Abbey Road, “Here Comes the Sun” – whose title is reflected in a later song on the album, “Sun King” in the lyric, “Here comes the sun king” – as well as “Something”, perhaps George Harrison’s finest composition for the Beatles.  As a double-A–sided single with “Come Together”, “Something” is the only song Harrison wrote that the Beatles took to the top of the charts.  Also, “Something” has been recorded by about 150 other artists, making it the second most covered Beatles song (after “Yesterday”). 
 
(June 2015)
 
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One of my favorite Beatles songs, “Tomorrow Never Knows” is the first of their songs to use flanging; though by the time of its release in August 1966, Wikipedia reports that almost every song on their album Revolver had been subjected to flanging. 

 

Anthology 2 includes the first take of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and the liner notes give the history of this groundbreaking recording (although it is the final track on Revolver, it is actually the first song that the band worked on after taking off the first three months of 1966):  “Clearly refreshed, and full of yet more innovative ideas, they conveyed at EMI Studios on 6 April [1966] and began work on their seventh album, Revolver, with what turned out to be the closing and most progressive number, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.  Here was Beatles music the like of which had never before been heard . . . or made.  Here was a dramatic new direction for a musical form that was ceasing to be ‘pop’ and developing into ‘rock’.  Here was a thrilling orgy of sound, all the more inventive for being made within the confines of 1966 four-track technology, less reliant on melody but focusing more on the conveyance of mind-pictures on to tape.  ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is all of this in a single piece of music, the released version (Take 3) being as stunning now as it was 30 years ago.  Recording under its working title, ‘Mark I’, Take 1, issued here for the first time, is notably different but, in its own way, just as compelling.  The Beatles’ music had indeed come a long way in the four years since ‘Love Me Do’.”  

 

(July 2015)

 

Last edited: April 8, 2021