Revolver

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

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 – From “The Beatles: Off The Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

Unlike our previous LPs, this one is intended to show our versatility rather than a haphazard collection of songs. We use trumpets, violins and cellos to achieve new effects. George has written three of the tracks. On past LPs he never did more than two and Ringo sings, or rather talks, a children’s song. This is all part of our idea of being up-to-date and including something for everybody. We don’t intend to go back and revive ideas of twenty years ago.

Paul McCartney – 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

If we did a whole album of way-out things we’d be doing what the people who do electronic music do, which is to go too far out, too suddenly, and no-one stays with them. Everyone gets left behind because they’re miles ahead, digging all this electronic stuff. What we try to do is—Rubber Soul was a bit more towards that, the next album will be a bit more, and the one after that should be a bit more. If people stay with us, it’s great.

Paul McCartney – From “Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year” by Steve Turner

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