Revolver (album)

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Timeline More from year 1966

UK release date:: Aug 05, 1966

Articles

“Revolver” reissue announced

Sep 07, 2022

“REVOLVER 50: Birth of an Icon” book published

January 2017

The Beatles win two Ivor Novello awards

Mar 23, 1967

The Beatles win Grammy Awards for “Michelle” and the Revolver cover

Mar 02, 1967

The Beatles’ brief stay in Beverly Hills – Rest, guests, and gold records

Aug 24, 1966

The name and tracklist of the new Beatles LP are announced

Jul 08, 1966

The Beatles create an abstract collaborating painting during their stay in Tokyo

June 30 - July 2, 1966

The Beatles travel from Essen to Hamburg

Jun 26, 1966

The Beatles travel from London to Munich

Jun 23, 1966

Designing the “Revolver” cover

June 1966 ?

The Beatles consider recording their new album at Stax Records, Memphis

Spring 1966

About

From The Beatles:

The Beatles’ seventh album was released in early August 1966. Following the release of Rubber Soul the group had embarked on what was to be their final UK concert tour and following a lengthy break, they returned to Abbey Road to record continually for three months. The first recordings released from these sessions, engineered by Geoff Emerick, was the single “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” and those tracks gave an indication of what was to come.

Having longer in the studio had paid off with greater creativity and experimentation and with John and Paul in fine form as writers. George also made his mark with three of his compositions appearing on a Beatles album for the first time.

Prior to the album’s release, the band had set off on a short tour of Western Germany, prior to flying to Japan then the Philippines and finally to the USA for what turned out to be their final gigs, the last of which took place on 29thAugust 1966 at Candlestick Park, San Francisco

The distinctive album sleeve design was the work of Klaus Voormann, an old friend from their Hamburg Days.

The album entered the UK chart at no. 1 where it enjoyed seven weeks in that spot out of an impressive overall run of 34 weeks.

The album released in the US was almost identical – The sleeve looked the same but the album only included 11 tracks. The reason for this was that Capitol had already released three of the songs on a collection issued in June titled “Yesterday…And Today”. Following a five week stay at # 1, this album was knocked off the top spot by “Revolver” which then spent six of its 77 week chart life in that position.

We suddenly thought, ‘Hey, what does a record do? It revolves. Great!’. You know – and so it was a Revolver.
Paul McCartney – From The Beatles

It will be the best we’ve done. We’ll lose some fans with it, but we’ll also gain some. The fans we’ll probably lose will be the ones who don’t like the things about us that we never liked anyway, and those we’ll gain are the ones who want to hear us breaking into new things. Every track on the LP has something special. I’m not saying they’re all good, but this rest period of the last few months gave us all a chance to think. George wanted to get his Indian stuff on the record, I wanted to do some new electronic things, and John even had a song in which his inspiration was The Tibetan Book Of The Dead.
Paul McCartney – Early June 1966 – From “The Beatles: Off The Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

The group encouraged us to break the rules. […] It was implanted when we started ‘Revolver’ that every instrument should sound unlike itself: a piano shouldn’t sound like a piano, a guitar shouldn’t sound like a guitar. There were lots of things I wanted to try, we were listening to American records and they sounded so different, the engineers [at Abbey Road] had been using the same [methods] for years and years.
Geoff Emerick, The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook The World, Mojo , 2004

It was four guys who were red hot at exactly the right point in their lives, feeding off each other, and coming up with something that we insisted on being something that we’d never done before.
Paul McCartney – From interview with MOJO, 2006