‘Revolver’: The Beatles album that changed the world
No one goes out of their way to try to change music every time they walk into the studio. Even when The Beatles painted masterpieces, it was all in service to the kind of music that turned them on rather than trying to make bold new innovations of what an album could be. But while Abbey Road is acknowledged as their final masterpiece and Sgt Peppers is responsible for altering the course of rock, the true game-changer for music as a whole involves us scrolling back a few years before.
Because when the band first started experimenting in the studio, it was always for small features here and there. A song like ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ couldn’t be recreated with the same flute part every time they played live, but that’s what album cuts are made for. If Rubber Soul saw them dipping out of their comfort zone, Revolver was the first time that people started hearing approaches to rock and roll that had never been conceived of.
The singles ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’ already promised something a bit more off-kilter, but across 14 tracks, the band gave us looks into different sides of their psyche. Some of the tunes may have still been based around typical love songs, but Paul McCartney’s ‘Here There and Everywhere’ feels like it’s miles away from tunes like ‘And I Love He’, despite it only being a year and a half before.
In fact, none of The Beatles seemed concerned with love song structures any longer. Across the entire record, we get strange songs about everything from taxes to insomnia to weed to the inevitable mortal fate that will come for us all. Not necessarily something that you’d hear on the top 40, but the fact that tunes like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ managed to make a dent on the hit parade would have been enough to place their heads above anything The Rolling Stones or The Kinks had in the pipeline.
While it’s easy to consider this their “acid album” when things started getting psychedelic, there was always a healthy amount of genius going on behind everything. Even if John Lennon got the idea to make backwards music or pull from Timothy Leary when he was under the influence, the end result of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ or ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ only comes from someone who is chasing after their muse rather than looking for the next high.
And it’s hard to imagine any of that creativity working were it not for George Harrison’s experimentation with Eastern textures. ‘Love You To’ was his first foray into writing raga rock, and despite Macca taking over for the solo in ‘Taxman,’ you can still hear the strange modal textures that probably came from listening to Indian ragas in their spare time.
Outside of the maturity of the album, there were pieces of this album that were never destined for the stage. The band would at least try to play tunes like ‘Nowhere Man’ before, even with that complex harmony, but ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was the first time everyone collectively decided that there was no way they could ever go onstage and play them.
The idea of writing songs that couldn’t be played live was still unheard of back then, but as time would soon show, The Beatles seemed to outgrow the concept of touring. They still loved playing together, but since the rest of the world was more inclined to scream whenever they came onstage, it was better for them to spend time in the studio coming up with music they wanted rather than play ‘Long Tall Sally’ to a crowd that couldn’t hear a thing.
So, while Revolver is still celebrated as one of the best albums that the Fab Four ever made, it holds a greater place as being the most important project they worked on together. Most people usually get into The Beatles’ music by hearing something off of Sgt Pepper or even A Hard Day’s Night, but considering how many creative boundaries were pushed for every song on Revolver, it stands as the band’s greatest artistic statement. They were moptops before, but this was them slowly mutating into the most accomplished rock musicians of their generation.
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