What was the longest song The Beatles ever recorded?
When Bob Dylan was asked in 1966 what his songs were about, he quipped in response that “some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve”. While it was not long before bands like the Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd were regularly stretching songs out over half an hour or more, by 1966, it was not common for songs to go on for that long.
The maximum recommended amount of music to maintain the best possible audio quality on the A-side of a 45rpm single was four minutes and 30 seconds, but even that was too long to get the attention of a radio DJ. In the early 1960s, radio play was everything in ensuring that people heard your latest releases.
The Beatles understood this as well as anybody, and were better than everyone at crafting an immortal modern pop song complete with a catchy hook and chorus, intelligent verses and interesting and inventive chord progressions. Their first single, ‘Love Me Do’, is barely two-and-a-half minutes. None of the songs on their first full-length release, 1963’s Please Please Me, goes over three minutes.
On all of their first seven albums, the Fab Four only went over three minutes on three occasions, and even then, only barely, considering ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’ from With the Beatles is 3:01, ‘Ticket to Ride’ from Help! is 3:09 and ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ from Revolver is three dead on.
By the time the group made Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 they were not only stretching out the limits of what pop music sounded like, what an album was, and how to manipulate the studio to create new music, but they were also starting to stretch out the length of their songs. Most stuck to their standard two minutes and change, but ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘She’s Leaving Home’ were both around 3:30, while the eighth track ‘Within You Without You’ was their longest song to date by far, at 5:07.
It wouldn’t remain their longest song for long, though.
So, what was the longest song?
Released only a year later, towards the end of The Beatles / The White Album, ‘Revolution 9’ clocked in at a whopping (for The Beatles) 8:22.
‘Revolution 9’ not only stretched the limits of the run-time for a Beatles song, but it also stretched the limits of what you could really even describe as a song. Taking the experimental style that they had first toyed with on 1966’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ to the extreme, ‘Revolution 9’ is more a sonic collage than a piece of music. Made up of looping tape samples, drones, imposing brass, mellotron and percussion as well as sound and studio effects, the song contains vocal fragments, mumbles, laughter, speeches and screaming from John Lennon, Yoko Ono, George Harrison, George Martin and Alistair Taylor.
The song is an overwhelming assault of sound and is about as far away from ‘Love Me Do’ as you can get. Lennon said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution using sound, but Paul McCartney was unimpressed by the work and lobbied for the track to be left off the finished album.
It was released, though, and ‘Revolution 9’ would remain the longest song The Beatles ever released, but it wasn’t the longest they recorded. The avant-garde ‘Carnival of Light’ they recorded at the ‘Penny Lane’ session in 1967 clocked in at 13 minutes and 48 seconds, while at 27 minutes and 11 seconds, the demo for The White Album’s ‘Helter Skelter’ dwarfed the lot of them, and would have filled up a whole side of one of their albums by itself.
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