Revolver
From BeatlesWiki
| Revolver | ||
| ||
| Studio album by The Beatles | ||
| Released | August 5 1966 | |
| Recorded | Abbey Road Studios April 6 – June 21, 1966 | |
| Length | 35:01 | |
| Label | Parlophone, EMI | |
| Producer(s) | George Martin | |
| Professional reviews | ||
|---|---|---|
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| The Beatles chronology | ||
| Rubber Soul (UK-1965) | Revolver (1966) | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
|
Contents |
[edit] Track List
[edit] Side one
- "Taxman" (Harrison) – 2:39
- "Eleanor Rigby" – 2:07
- "I'm Only Sleeping" – 3:01
- "Love You To" (Harrison) – 3:01
- "Here, There and Everywhere" – 2:25
- "Yellow Submarine" – 2:40
- "She Said She Said" – 2:37
[edit] Side two
- "Good Day Sunshine" – 2:09
- "And Your Bird Can Sing" – 2:01
- "For No One" – 2:01
- "Doctor Robert" – 2:15
- "I Want To Tell You" (Harrison) – 2:29
- "Got to Get You into My Life" – 2:30
- "Tomorrow Never Knows" – 2:57
[edit] Quotes
[edit] Writing
"John and Paul's standard of writing has bettered over the years, so it's very hard for me to come straight to the top, on par with them. They gave me an awful lot of encouragement. Their reaction has been very good. If it hadn't, I think I would have just crawled away."
-George Harrison, 1966.
"This album has taken longer than the others because, normally, we go into the studios with, say, eight numbers of our own and some old numbers, like Mr Moonlight or some numbers we used to know, which we just do up a bit. This time, we had all our own numbers, including three of George's, and so we had to work them all out. We haven't had a basis to work on, just one guitar melody and a few chords and so we've really had to work on them. I think it'll be our best album yet. They'll never be able to copy this!"
-Paul McCartney, 1966.
"[Got To Get You Into My Life is] not to a person, it's actually about pot. It's saying, I'm going to do this. This is not a bad idea."
-Paul McCartney, quoted in Many Years From Now
"I don't know whether poets think they have to experience things to write about them, but I can tell you our songs are nearly all imagination-- ninety percent imagination. I don't think Beethoven was in a really wicked mood all the time."
-John Lennon, 1966.
"It's too easy to put it off if we just meet without any plan and say, 'Shall we write something today?' If you do that then you feel as though you're losing a free day. What we're going to do is make dates beforehand and sort of say, 'Right, Wednesday and Friday of this week are for songwriting. And Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week.' Then we'll know it's something we've to keep to."
-John Lennon, 1966.
"One thing's for sure - the next LP is going to be very different. We wanted to have it so that there was no space between the tracks - just continuous. But they wouldn't wear it. Paul and I are very keen on this electronic music. You make it clinking a couple of glasses together or with bleeps from the radio, then you loop the tape to repeat the noises at intervals. Some people build up whole symphonies from it. It would have been better than the background music we had for the last film. All those silly bands. Never again!"
-John Lennon, 1966, New Musical Express, March 11, 1966
[edit] Recording
"We spend more time on recording now, because we prefer recording."
-George Harrison, 1966.
"And we've done half an LP in the time we'd take to do a whole LP and a couple of singles. So we can't do it all, you know, but we like recording."
-John Lennon, 1966.
"We were really starting to find ourselves in the studio. We were finding what we could do, just being the four of us and playing our instruments. The overdubbing got better, even though it was always pretty tricky because of the lack of tracks. The songs got more interesting, so with that the effects got more interesting. I think the drugs were kicking in a little more heavily on this album. I don't think we were on anything major yet; just the old usual - the grass and the acid. I feel to this day that though we did take certain substances, we never did it to a great extent at the session. We were really hard workers. That's another thing about The Beatles - we worked like dogs to get it right."
-Ringo Starr, quoted in The Beatles Anthology
"I knew [John Lennon would] never understand [Automatic Double Tracking], so I said 'Now listen, it's very simple. We take the original image and we split it through a double vibrocated sploshing flange with double negative feedback...' He said 'You're pulling my leg. Aren't you?' I replied 'Well, let's flange it again and see'. From that moment on, whenever he wanted ADT he would ask for his voice to be flanged, or call out for 'Ken's flanger.'"
-George Martin, Beatles producer, quoted in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions
"Revolver very rapidly became the album where the Beatles would say 'OK, that sounds great, now let's play it backwards or speeded up or slowed down'. They tried everything backwards, just to see what things sounded like."
-Geoff Emerick, Beatles engineer, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions
"For Tomorrow Never Knows [John Lennon] said to me he wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop, and I said, 'It's a bit expensive, going to Tibet. Can we make do with it here?' I knew perfectly well that ordinary echo or reverb wouldn't work, because it would just put a very distant voice on. We needed to have something a bit weird and metallic... A Leslie speaker is a rotating speaker, a Hammond console, and the speed at which it rotates can be varied according to a knob on the control. By putting his voice through that and then recoding it again, you got a kind of intermittent vibrato effect, which is what we hear on Tomorrow Never Knows. I don't think anyone had done that before. It was quite a revolutionary track for Revolver."
-George Martin, Beatles producer, The Beatles Anthology
"We were going to record Revolver in America, but they wanted a fantastic amount of money to use the facilities there. We thought we'd forget it because they were obviously trying to take us for a ride because we were The Beatles. We'd been thinking about going to record there for some time. When we finished Revolver, we realised that we had found a new British sound almost by accident. I think there were only two tracks on the LP that would have sounded better if we'd cut them in America. Taxman and Got To Get You Into My Life because they need that raw quality that you just can't get in this country for some reason. But Eleanor Rigby would have been worse, because the string players in America aren't so good. We may still record in America. What we might do though is write some numbers especially, take them over, do them and see how it works."
-Paul McCartney, 1966.
"I don't think we ever try to establish trends. We try to keep moving forward and do something different... and if in the meantime it starts a trend, that's ok. But we never try consciously to start them."
-Paul McCartney, 1966.
"We all put a lot of suggestions in after we've recorded a take. That's why we take so long to record a number. We've always cooperated with one another. Paul might come into the studio and say, 'Do this' if he has worked out the chords beforehand. But they always need changing."
-George Harrison, 1966.
"We'd had acid on Revolver. Everybody is under this illusion-- even George Martin was saying, 'Pepper was their first acid album.' But we'd had acid, including Paul, by the time Revolver was finished."
-John Lennon, 1972.
"George Martin would be saying, 'Can you turn the (guitar) amps down please? And John would look at George (Harrison) and say, 'How much are you going down? Let's go down to Five, alright?' John would go down to Six-- 'OK, I'm at Five!' 'You bugger! You're not. You're at Six!' There was always this terrible rivalry. You just wanted to be louder. But it's nice to listen to the Beatle records now. There's more guitar than you'll ever hear on a record these days."
-Paul McCartney, 1988.
"We were having more fun in the studio. It was getting more experimental, and the songs were getting better and more interesting."
-Ringo Starr, The Beatles Anthology
"Their ideas were beginning to become much more potent in the studio. They would start telling me what they wanted and pressing me for more ideas and for more ways of translating those ideas into reality. With Revolver you can hear that the boys were listening to lots of American records and saying, 'Can we get this effect?' and so on. So they would want us to do radical things, but this time they'd shove in high EQ on mixing, and for brass they'd want to have a really 'toppy' sound and cut out all the bass. The engineers would sometimes wonder whether there should be that much EQ. We would go through the complete range of EQ on a disc, and if that wasn't enough we'd put it through another range of EQ again, multiplied, and we'd get the most weird sound, which The Beatles liked and which obviously worked."
-George Martin, Beatles producer, The Beatles Anthology.
"EQ is equalization— when you want to add a bit to the top or roll a bit off the bottom. It’s bass, treble, and middle, but equalization is the posh way of saying it. I have a very high EQ— something like 3,000 hertz. If I think too hard, my brain hertz."
-George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology
"Originally, George Martin was the Supreme Producer In The Sky and we wouldn't even dare ask to go into the control room. But, as things loosened up, we got invited in and George gave us a bit of the control of the tools; he let us have a go."
-Paul McCartney, The Beatles Anthology
"George Martin had a strong role in our lives in the studio, but as we got more confidence he and the others in EMI became more relaxed with us. I suppose as time went on they believed more in our ability because it was obvious that we'd have success. They eased off on the schoolteacher approach. Also, George Martin had become more our friend as well; we socialised with him. We gained more control each time that we got a Number One, and then when we'd go back in the studio we'd claw our way up until we took over the store."
-George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology
"We got knowledge of the studio. [At first, I'd] go in there and think, 'It's just like a tape recorder. I'm going to sing and play to you, and you're the one that knows about the tape recorder - you just put it on and I'll sing.' But as soon as you tell me, 'Well, if we do that we can get a little reverb on it,' or if I stand over there it'll sound different than if I stand here, you start learning all that."
-John Lennon, 1973, The Beatles Anthology
"I used to play the first four albums one after the other to see the progression musically, and it was interesting. I got up to about Revolver and it got too many. It would be too much listening time, but you could hear the progression as we learnt about recording and the techniques got refined."
-John Lennon, 1972, The Beatles Anthology
[edit] Songs
[edit] Taxman
"It was in April 1966 that we started recording Revolver. 'Taxman' was on Revolver. I had discovered I was paying a huge amount of money to the taxman. You are so happy that you've finally started earning money - and then you find out about tax. In those days we paid 19 shillings and sixpence [96p] out of every pound, and with supertax and surtax and tax-tax it was ridiculous - a heavy penalty to pay for making money. That was a big turn-off for Britain. Anybody who ever made any money moved to America or somewhere else. We got twenty-five quid a week in the early Sixties when we were first with Brian Epstein, when we played the clubs. But twenty-five quid a week each was quite good. My dad earned ten pounds a week, so I was earning two and a half times more than my father. Then we started earning much more, but Brian would keep it and pay us wages. He once tried to get us to sign a deal saying he would guarantee us fifty pounds a week forever and he would keep the rest. We thought, 'No, we'll risk it, Brian. We'll risk earning a bit more than fifty pounds a week."
-George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology
"'Taxman' was very George. In business meetings, the solicitors and accountants would be explaining to us how things worked. We were very naive, as you can see by any of our business deals, and George would say, 'Well, I don't want to pay taz,' and they'd say, "You've got to, like everyone lese - and the more you make, the more they take.' And George would reply, 'Well, that's not very fair.' They said, 'Look, when you're dead you're going to pay taxes.' - 'What?' - 'Death duties.' So he came up with that great line: 'Declare the pennies on your eyes,' which was George's righteous indignation at the whole idea of having got here, made all this money and half of it was about to be removed by force."
-Paul McCartney, The Beatles Anthology
[edit] Cover
"Klaus [Voormann] had been a great friend since Hamburg days - he'd been one of the 'exis', the existentialists whom we'd got to know then. We knew he drew and he'd been involved in graphic design; I must admit we didn't really know what he did, but he'd been to college. We knew he must be all right and so we said, 'Why don't you come up with something for the album cover?' He did, and we were all very pleased with it. We liked the way there were little things coming out of people's ears, and how he'd collaged things on a small scale while the drawings were on a big scale. He also knew us well enough to capture us rather beautifully in the drawings. We were flattered."
-Paul McCartney, The Beatles Anthology
"John, Paul and I devoted an evening to sifting through an enormous pile of newspapers and magazines for pictures of The Beatles, after which we cut out the faces and glued them all together. Our handiwork was later superimposed onto a line drawing by Klaus Voormann, their old friend in Hamburg."
-Pete Shotton, Beatles friend and former member of The Quarrymen
[edit] Title
"It's just a name for an LP, and there's no meaning to it. Why does everyone want a reason every time you move? It means Revolver. It's all the things that Revolver means, because that's what it means to us. Revolver and all the things we could think of to go with it."
-John Lennon, 1966.
"Revolver did not mean a gun, but something that revolves, like a record. Johnny Dean, editor of Beatles Monthly, was with them on the night of 24 June 1966 in a Munich hotel room when they named the latter. At first they had all four wanted to call it Abracadabra, but someone had already used it. Pendulums and Fat Man and Bobby were other ideas. Ringo suggested having a joke with the Rolling Stones by calling it After Geography since the Stones had just done Aftermath! John proposed Beatles on Safari and Paul came up with Magic Circle. John changed this to Four Sides of the Circle and Four Sides of the Eternal Triangle, which somehow led them to Revolver."
-Barry Miles, author of Paul McCartney's authorized biography, Many Years From Now
[edit] Release
"Revolver was accepted well. I don't see too much different between Rubber Soul and Revolver. To me, they could be Volume One and Volume Two. They both were very pleasant and enjoyable records for me, and I was composing more and actually getting a couple of songs on the album, which felt nice. "
-George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology
[edit] Sources
- [1]
- [2]
- LENNON, J., MCCARTNEY P., HARRION G., STARKEY R., 2002, The Beatles Anthology, Chronicle Books -- Buy it on Amazon.com
