Revolver
1. Taxman (Harrison)
2. Eleanor Rigby (Lennon/McCartney)
3. I’m Only Sleeping (Lennon/McCartney)
4. Love You To (Lennon/McCartney)
5. Here, There And Everywhere (Lennon/McCartney)
6. Yellow Submarine (Lennon/McCartney)
7. She Said, She Said (Lennon/McCartney)
8. Good Day Sunshine (Lennon/McCartney)
9. And Your Bird Can Sing (Lennon/McCartney)
10. For No One (Lennon/McCartney)
11. Doctor Robert (Lennon/McCartney)
12. I Want To Tell You (Harrison)
13. Got To Get You Into My Life (Lennon/McCartney)
14. Tomorrow Never Knows (Lennon/McCartney)
Revolver is the seventh album by The Beatles, released on 5 August 1966. Many of the tracks on Revolver are marked by an electric guitar-rock sound, in contrast with their previous, folk rock inspired Rubber Soul. It reached #1 on the UK chart for seven weeks and #1 on the U.S. chart for six weeks.
It was released before the Beatles’ last tour in August 1966, but they did not perform songs from the album live. Their reasoning for this was that many of the tracks on the album, for example "Tomorrow Never Knows", were too complex to perform with live instruments.
Melodic diversity and innovation in the studio
A key production technique used for the first time on this album was automatic double tracking (ADT), invented by EMI engineer Ken Townsend on 6 April 1966. This technique used two linked tape recorders to automatically create a doubled vocal track. The standard method was to double the vocal by singing the same piece twice onto a multitrack tape, a task Lennon particularly disliked. The Beatles were reportedly delighted with the invention, and used it extensively on Revolver. ADT quickly became a standard pop production technique, and led to related developments, including the artificial chorus effect.
Contributions and inspirations
Lennon’s other contributions included "And Your Bird Can Sing", "She Said She Said", and "Dr. Robert" each of which are guitar-laden tracks with swirling melodies. According to Lennon, some of the lyrics of "She Said She Said" were taken almost verbatim from a conversation he had with actor Peter Fonda in August 1965, while he (Lennon), Harrison and Starr were under the influence of LSD at their rented house in Benedict Canyon (in Beverly Hills, California). During a conversation, Fonda said "I know what it’s like to be dead," because as a boy he had almost died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
McCartney’s "Got to Get You into My Life" was influenced by the Motown Sound and used brass instrumentation extensively. Although cast in the form of a love song, McCartney described the song as an "ode to pot." It was released as a single in the US in 1976, ten years after Revolver, to promote the compilation album Rock ‘n’ Roll Music on which it appeared.
McCartney also contributed "For No One" a melancholy song featuring him playing clavichord and a horn solo played by Alan Civil, "Here, There, and Everywhere" written in the style of The Beach Boys, and "Good Day Sunshine".
Revolver was also a breakthrough album for Harrison as a songwriter, and he contributed three songs on Revolver, including the opening track, "Taxman". The guitar solo is actually played by McCartney. The "Mr. Wilson" and "Mr. Heath" referred to in the lyrics (right after the word "taxman") are Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, who were, respectively, the British Labour Prime Minister, and Conservative Leader of the Opposition at the time. In the Anthology 2 version, "Mr. Wilson and Mr Heath" were replaced with "Anybody got a little money." The song was a protest against the high marginal rates of income tax paid by high earners like the Beatles, which were sometimes as much as 95 percent of their income (hence the lyric, "There’s one for you, nineteen for me"). This would lead to many top musicians becoming tax exiles in later years.
Harrison also wrote "I Want to Tell You", about his difficulty expressing himself in words. "Love You To" marked a significant expansion of his burgeoning interest in Indian music and the sitar, which started with "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" on Rubber Soul. It was the intro to "Love You To" that was playing in the background when the Harrison character first appears in Yellow Submarine, the animated Beatles movie released in 1968.
Heralding the psychedelic era
In many respects, Revolver is one of the very first psychedelic LPs — not only in its numerous shifts in mood and production texture, but in its innovative manipulation of amplification and electronics to produce new sounds on guitars and other instruments. Specific, widely heralded examples would include the backwards riffs of "I’m Only Sleeping," the sound effects of "Yellow Submarine," the sitar of "Love You To," the blurry guitars of "She Said, She Said," and above all the seagull chanting, buzzing drones, megaphone vocals, free-assocation philosophizing, and varispeed tape effects of "Tomorrow Never Knows." The most light-hearted track on Revolver is the childlike "Yellow Submarine." McCartney said that he wrote "Yellow Submarine" as a children’s song for Starr to sing. With the help of their EMI production team, the Beatles overdubbed stock sound effects they found in the Abbey Road studio tape library.
In 1972, Lennon offered some context for the influence of drugs on the Beatles’ creativity (quoted in The Beatles Anthology): "It’s like saying, ‘Did Dylan Thomas write Under Milk Wood on beer?’ What does that have to do with it? The beer is to prevent the rest of the world from crowding in on you. The drugs are to prevent the rest of the world from crowding in on you. They don’t make you write any better. I never wrote any better stuff because I was on acid or not on acid."
[From Wikipedia - Original page is here]
