If any rock album can be labeled “groundbreaking,” it’s the Beatles’ Revolver. A sweepingly innovative masterpiece, it divides the ’60s in half, evades categorization, anticipated Sgt. Pepper and the “white album,” and launched myriad offshoots.
In early 1966, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were at their creative zenith. For Revolver, they allotted more studio time than with any previous album; still, from just April 6 until June 22, 16 songs were recorded, mixed, and edited.
Revolver opened sonic floodgates by introducing tape loops, backward and vari-speed recording along with filtering and processing, string and horn orchestration, unusual instruments, sound effects, and world sounds. The studio, coupled with the imaginative input of engineer Geoff Emerick, became the “Sixth Beatle” in addition to the band and producer George Martin. Previously forbidden close-miking of instruments resulted in improved sonics. Starr’s 22″ kick drum, muffled with a sweater, was run through Fairchild 660 tube limiters/compressors for a heavier, more-present sound. Brass and strings were close-miked in “Got to Get You Into My Life” and “Eleanor Rigby.” A speaker rewired as a microphone boosted McCartney’s bass sound, unmistakable on “Paperback Writer,” “Rain” and “And Your Bird Can Sing.” Automatic Double Tracking (ADT), employing a second machine, was used to double vocal and instrumental parts with a slight delay (24-30 ms).
The Beatles’ individuality, reflected in Harrison’s three pieces and increasingly complex music like “Eleanor Rigby,” “Got to Get You Into My Life,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” – none of which could be effectively rendered by a rock quartet – implied a coming breakup, though the Beatles’ camaraderie was at its peak. The album’s unorthodox music accompanied story lines of humanity, death, loneliness, philosophy, and altered consciousness; the latter informed the psychedelic bent of the counterculture and acid-rock movement, and supplanted the love-song themes of earlier Beatles pop. Moreover, American country/western and folk influences, prominent on Rubber Soul and Help!, were minimized giving way to experimentation, art-rock/prog-rock precursors, and outré sounds manipulated with studio technology.
The Beatles instrument arsenal grew in ’66; Strats and Casinos (’64-’65), a Rickenbacker 4001S (’65), and Gibson J-160 were joined by new instruments including Harrison’s SG Standard, Indian tamboura, and Burns Nu-Sonic bass, Lennon’s ’62 Gretsch Nashville, Fender Showman amps with 1×15 cabs, and a cream-tolex Bassman. Sonically conspicuous were Vox 7120 guitar amps with Dick Denney’s modified Thomas Organ Super-Beatle 120-watt circuit with fuzz, Mid Range Boost (MRB) and tremolo/vibrato with hybrid solid-state preamp and tube power section, and a 4120 bass amp.
The guitar-dominated opener, “Taxman,” expressed the Beatles’ dissatisfaction with Britain’s onerous taxation, and asserted Harrison’s stature as composer, augmented by a ferocious solo accentuating McCartney’s lead-guitar abilities. He previously played lead on “Drive My Car,” “Another Girl,” and “Good Morning.” Taped noises (Harrison’s secretive count over slurred guitar notes, various sounds, and coughing) set the album’s tone and a precedent fulfilled in Sgt. Pepper as crowd sounds. The R&B groove and emphatic D7#9 chord (“Purple Haze,” anyone?) heightened its urgency. The final mix removed gimmicky vocal responses (heard on the 2022 Revolver Special Edition box set, “Take 11”), revealing how much was re-evaluated in the studio.
By 1966, it was customary to see Paul McCartney using his Epiphone Casino in the studio to demonstrate songs and parts and to play occasional lead and rhythm overdubs. On “Taxman,” though, he played a solo that ranks as one of the best in Beatledom. His aggressive phrases through a distorted Vox split the difference between hard blues-rock improvisation and raga references. His first three bars are driving and rhythmic, with droning triplet figures, pentatonic melody, string bends, and incisive phrasing while measure 4 presents a descending/ornamented scalar sequence reminiscent of a sitar.
“Eleanor Rigby” was the first song without any member playing, only McCartney’s lead vocal, Lennon and Harrison’s harmonies, and Martin’s aggressive arrangement for string octet, presaging future orchestrations. McCartney insisted the strings be given a “biting” quality, explicit in the marcato attack and minimal vibrato (“Take 2” on the box set). “Rigby” became one of the most-covered Beatles tunes, with versions by Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Wes Montgomery.
“I’m Only Sleeping,” Lennon’s nod to everyday life, was made preternatural by Harrison’s two-part backward guitar solos that depicted dreaming, sleepiness, and yawning.
The song began as an acoustic track with vibraphone (“Rehearsal”) and simple harmonies added in “Take 2.” A faster version was recorded as “Take 5” in preparation for the slower final. “Mono Mix RM1” unveils George’s entire backward-guitars track.
“Love You To” embodied the Beatles’ world-music proclivities, heralded Harrison’s Indian influence and increasing sitar skills, included a guest tabla player, and contains their first deliberate meter change (4/4 to 3/4) (:55). It represents a middle ground between the simple hook of “Norwegian Wood” and more-complex arrangement of “Within You, Without You,” and conveys rock intention with power chords and volume-swelled triads.
After Revolver, raga-rock trends flourished. The Stones (“Paint it Black”) and Donovan (“Sunshine Superman”) used sitar, and Indian gestures became part of rock’s language, epitomized by Yardbirds’ Jeff Beck (“Over, Under, Sideways, Down,” “Shapes of Things”).
“Here There and Everywhere,” McCartney’s debonair love ballad, was a last-minute composition that upped the ante of Pet Sounds with cluster-voiced background vocals, enriched chords, and thirds-related modulation of G to Bb. Textures and overdubs were spare and simple; in the bridge, Harrison complemented McCartney’s clean chording by adding a melodic counterline on Rickenbacker 12-string (going to two amps).
In ’66, harmony guitars were a rarity, so the tour de force double-lead in “And You Bird Can Sing” must have been a revelation. The song marked an auspicious moment in rock history, leading to twin-guitar tactics of Scorpions, Thin Lizzy, Wishbone Ash, Allman Brothers, and even Metallica. After several attempts to portray the Lennon tune with jangling/capoed 12-string parts, the track was re-made two weeks later with a harder edge and laden with intricate harmony-guitar parts played by Harrison and McCartney on matching Casinos through distorted Vox amps.
Starr’s song, “Yellow Submarine,” was a whimsical, nautical-themed acoustic sing-along with childlike trappings, employing Lennon’s processed vocal responses – at one point blowing bubbles in water, overdubs of effects from EMI’s sound library, including chains, bells, whistles, sloshing water, clinking glass, and a brass-band passage replacing a guitar solo.
Needing one more song, “She Said, She Said” was recorded hurriedly at the end of sessions, Lennon’s acid-rock narrative flaunted meter shifts – 4/4 to 3/4 – the second in their repertoire. McCartney didn’t participate, but Harrison added bass lines on his Burns Nu-Sonic, overdubbing lead melodies to Lennon’s guitar and harmonium parts, and drums. Though the arrangement was straightforward, the track introduced several tenets of prog rock.
McCartney’s upbeat piano-driven piece, “Good Day Sunshine,” alluded to Vaudeville and English cabaret, and rocked despite having no guitar. Saved by Martin’s atmospheric ragtime/boogie tack-piano, it fell short of the campiness paraded later.
“And Your Bird Can Sing,” Lennon’s enigmatic rocker, established modern guitar practices and harmonic twists, with the band’s craftsmanship evidenced in several takes. The first version was dominated by electric 12-string with distorted harmony-lead (Harrison/McCartney) only in the solo and outro (“Take 2”). A second version emphasized twin-guitar textures. In “Take 5,” the duet is conspicuous and finally heard in the bridges, solo and outro (over vocal pads). On the original final, those vocal pads are removed and guitars overpower the arrangement. Ostentatious guitar harmony was uncommon in rock and foreshadowed trends in bands like Allman Brothers and Wishbone Ash.
“For No One,” McCartney’s melancholy piano song of unrequited love, was backed by drums, dubbed bass, percussion, and clavichord; it was guitar-less and featured a largely improvised French horn solo by Alan Civil.
The bold Lennon rocker “Doctor Robert” overtly addressed drug use in pop culture, getting an appropriate rock-combo treatment with Lennon and Harrison’s intertwined distorted rhythm/lead guitars laced with MRB, feel changes, and the juxtaposition of A and B tonal areas contrasting normalcy with a blissful state.
“Got to Get You Into My Life” was the second song recorded on Revolver. Started as an exploratory acoustic piece with drums, vocals and harmonium, it was re-recorded the following day with Harrison’s electric guitars colored with fuzz, distortion, and MRB. These foreshadowed horn riffs overdubbed later. This excerpt presents the coda break where guitars (with distortion, MRB and tremolo) were brought back in. Note the layering of two simple-but-elegant parts that contain motives and melodies interpreted later by saxes and trumpets.
“I Want to Tell You,” Harrison’s third tune, continued the human interaction dynamic of “Think for Yourself” and underscored tension through altered-chord dissonance; the piano’s prolonged emphasis on a half step in E7b9. The track is further distinguished by Harrison’s processed clean-Strat sound in the main riff, faded in at the intro.
McCartney’s R&B number, “Got to Get You Into My Life,” offered a template for horn bands like Chicago and Blood Sweat & Tears, but began as a guitar/drums/harmonium/vocal rendition (“First version, Take 5”). Familiar riffs appeared as guitar parts in the second version and by “Take 8” morphed into a horn section (three trumpets and two tenor saxes) with layered guitar exploiting MRB and tremolo. Guitar parts are buried in the final mix until the coda (1:49). They used horns again in “Good Morning” and “Savoy Truffle.”
“Tomorrow Never Knows,” the title a Ringo malapropism, conveys Lennon’s stream-of-consciousness and musical travelogue of a dream world begun with “In My Life” and taken to greater heights with “Lucy in the Sky” and “Across the Universe.” Anchored to one sonority layered with tape loops, backward guitar, and tamboura drone, it was the first song recorded, the most experimental, and ultimately the closer. Originally titled “Mark I,” it adapted imagery from Buddhist text, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, something the Beatles were experiencing at the time. The basic track (“Take 1”) was a slowed percussive tape loop and guitar ostinato with overdubs of Starr’s muffled, compressed drums and Lennon’s vocal through a Leslie speaker, heard only in the last verse of the final mix. To this were added Lennon’s two-note bass riff, the tamboura drone, sustaining organ tone, Martin’s honky-tonk piano (highlighted in the ending) and tape loops (“Mono Mix RM 11”). The song was played over a C pedal, simultaneously modal and atonal with no semblance of Western harmony – only brief superimposition of Bb/C, suggesting the collision of an Indian raga and Mixolydian mode. McCartney’s avant-garde pursuits fueled his quest for novel sounds in rock. He recorded numerous tape loops at various speeds and directions (distorted guitar, laughter, rubbed wine glass, etc). Five were selected, fed back on tape machines in several Abbey Road rooms, and Emerick “…played the faders like a modern synthesizer,” synchronizing loops in real time and flying them into the track. Harrison’s backward-guitar solo, a pentatonic blues-guitar improvisation treated with fuzz, MRB, and Leslie, strengthened the otherworldly impression with its reversed envelopes. The landmark solo inspired Hendrix’s approach on “Are You Experienced.”
“Paperback Writer”/“Rain,” recorded April 13-16, are part of the Revolver canon by virtue of boosted bass, vari-speed/backward tape effects, heavy MRB guitar tones, and innovative qualities. As composer, McCartney handled distorted lead/rhythm on the former with Harrison’s chiming backbeat strums (“Take 1” and “Take 2”). The droning modal mood of “Rain” is maintained by Lennon’s distorted chording (Drop G) and McCartney’s emphatic pedal-point bass riff. A fast version (“Take 5”) was recorded and slowed down for the master version, over which backwards vocals were added to the coda.
Most Revolver songs would have been impossible to perform in ’66 without additional musicians, shuffling of roles, modern synth/sample techniques and effects processing, and elaborate stagecraft including miking sitar, tamboura, and piano. “Dr. Robert,” “She Said,” “Taxman” and “I Want to Tell You” could be played as quartet, but would be unconvincing. The Beatles never bothered trying; none were played in concert; Revolver is their first record to have that distinction.
Rubber Soul had similar limitations, but “Nowhere Man” and “If I Needed Someone” were performed onstage. And while Soul prompted the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Revolver was first Beatles album to throw down multiple gauntlets that no one band saw fit to pick up.
Wolf Marshall is the founder and original Editor-In-Chief of GuitarOne magazine. A respected author and columnist, he has been influential in contemporary music education since the early 1980s. His latest book is Jazz Guitar Course: Mastering the Jazz Language. Others include 101 Must-Know Rock Licks, B.B. King: the Definitive Collection, and Best of Jazz Guitar. A list credits can be found at wolfmarshall.com.
This article originally appeared in VG’s May 2024 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
