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Beatlemania curdled into hysteria outside the Tokyo Hilton. It was the first day of July 1966, andthe Beatleshad recently arrived for their first (and, as it turned out, only) set of Japanese shows. Hoards of overzealous fans andreactionary protestersthreatened the band with grievous bodily harm — each side for their own contradictory reasons. To combat this ever-present threat, a phalanx of police stood guard every few feet along the 10th-floor corridor of the hotel, monitoring all who came and went. Throughout the city, a security force 35,000 strong was poised to leap into action at the slightest provocation. An unfortunate side effect of this necessary protective measure was that the Beatles were effectively prisoners of the Presidential Suite, released only to perform.
“The next LP is going to be very different,” Lennon teased shortly before recording began on April 6, 1966. He wasn’t one for understatement, but this was putting it mildly. That spring the Beatles worked 300 hours, practically an eternity consideringtheir debut LP was (mostly) recorded in a single day. The tone was set at the first session with “Tomorrow Never Knows,” a stunning avant-garde soundscape that recreated a psychedelic experience through electronic tape-loops, Indian modalities and obtuse, impressionistic lyrics cribbed fromThe Tibetan Book of the Dead. Any one of these elements was unheard of in mainstream pop at the time. The blend made it one of the Beatles' boldest musical statements.
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“Because they’re the Beatles, I get all of the technical toys there are, much in the same way that they did in the ’60s,” he says. “And I also have that same mentality — which Peter Jackson does as well — of, ‘Well, why can’t we do it?’ But the key thing is, people don’t listen to technology. People listen tosongs. It’s about listening to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and having it take you somewhere. I do these [box sets] to humanize the Beatles. I include the outtakes to try and tell a story. This is the journey to the finished article. You’re trying to immerse people in the band’s humanity.”
Martin frequently describes his work as a kind of aural time travel. For this project, the journey took him from the testyGet Backsessions in January 1969to theRevolverdates in the spring of 1966, a time when collaboration and interest were at an all-time high. “I started listening to the [Revolver] tapes, and the difference between them and the band fromGet Backis really remarkable. It’s like they’re different human beings. It’s audible and it’s almost weird.”
Perhaps the biggest revelation on the Super Deluxe set is an early demo of “Yellow Submarine.” For decades, the received wisdom among Beatle fans was that this was a chipper sing-along that McCartney literally dreamed up for the avuncular Starr to sing. In other words, the kind of tuneful, happy-go-lucky track that Lennon would later dismiss as “Paul’s granny music s—.” But a newly unearthed work tape reveals that the seeds of the song actually came from Lennon, who strums an acoustic guitar while singing the mournful opening couplet: “In the place where I was born, no one cared, no one cared.” Considering Lennon’s own father was a man who sailed to sea and all but abandoned him, it’s tempting to read into this musical fragment as part of the processing of his difficult childhood, placing it on a continuum of songs ranging from his then-recent “In My Life,” to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” his White Album ode to his late mother Julia, and the harrowing confessional “My Mummy’s Dead” on 1970’sPlastic Ono Band.
Allowing McCartney to redress this intimate piece as a song for children is surprising, but indicative of their close working relationship in the period. Through trust and acceptance of each other’s creative direction, Lennon allowed McCartney to take a sad song and make it better. “Originally, the song is more like a Woody Guthrie thing,” Martin explains. “It’s this downbeat, sensitive song. But the interesting thing about it is how Paul takes it. You can see him go, ‘That’s a nice melody. Why don’t we try this with it?’ And John hadn’t gotten to that stage where he’d say, ‘I don’t want to go with your happy-clappy stuff on this.’ ByGet Back, that had changed. That’s the difference.”
A key factor in the creative energy ofRevolverwas the luxury of time. The early months of 1966 had been booked for the Beatles to shoot their third feature film, a western parody calledA Talent for Loving. But when a suitable script failed to materialize, the project evaporated. Suddenly the band found themselves with four months off, the longest break in their Beatle existence. After three years spent grinding out two albums and three singles annually — plus two movies, and multiple global tours — they appreciated the rest. For the first time in their adult lives, they were free to pursue their own creative interests. The result was an intellectual growth spurt. When they reconvened in the studio that April forRevolver, they had all the vitality of students returning from summer vacation. “It’s an album where you can hear the influence of every member,” says Martin, “often coming from very different musical places.”
While he’d utilized a sitar on theRubber Soultrack “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” a year earlier,Revolvercontained his first full-fledged foray into Indian music with “Love You To,” believed to be his inaugural composition on the instrument. Outtakes and rehearsal tapes featured on the box set reveal the band warmly embracing this new direction. McCartney can be heard working out an intricate alternate harmony that was left off the final cut, his work sacrificed for the good of the song. “You hear that in the evolution of the tracks,” says Martin, “You can see why they didn’t dothatthing and why they did thenextthing.”
The communal, collaborative nature of the times was apparent during sessions for “Yellow Submarine,” when the chorus chant — not unlike the chorus of Dylan’s own"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,“which was then in the charts — morphed into an in-studio party that included Rolling Stone Brian Jones clinking glasses and members of the Beatles entourage banging a bass drum and leading a Congo line throughout the building.
Starr has frequently said that his drumming on tracks from this era, specifically the “Paperback Writer” B-side “Rain,” are his favorite performances of his career. And for good reason. Those songs single-handedly invented a sound that’s sought after to this day. His versatility through the album continues to stagger Giles Martin. “Listen to ‘Dr. Robert’ compared to ‘Taxman.’ It’s like a different drummer. Same great Ringo feel, but very different sounds.” Though never flashy, Starr’s steady hand guides the sessions. On one outtake for “For No One,” he can be heard asking McCartney, “Shall I just keep it straight then? Not do anything else?” McCartney’s response is immediate and emphatic: “No, do!” Never sleep on Starr.
In pursuit of a beefier rhythm section, the Beatles very nearly recordedRevolverat Stax Studios in Memphis, home of the R&B greats like Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, the Bar-Kays, and Booker T. & the MGs. Though thrilling to imagine how the funk-adjacent “Taxman” or the horn-driven “Got to Get You Into My Life” would have turned out in a soulful Southern setting, the album as a whole would have suffered. At straight-laced EMI, where technicians were required to wear lab coats, the rulebook gave the Beatles something to rebel against. The jeans and shirt-sleeves gang at Stax were brilliant when it came to laid-back grooves, but unorthodox tracks like “Tomorrow Never Knows” would have surely been met with a blank stare. In addition to being technologically superior, EMI allowed the Beatles to enlist the greatest minds in the recording world as co-conspirators.
For all of his avant-garde extracurricular activities, the most drug-oriented song McCartney contributed toRevolveris arguably one of the most straight-sounding on the record. Heralding its arrival with a triumphant brass fanfare courtesy of Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, “Got to Get You Into My Life” is a blast of optimism that perfectly encapsulates the first euphoric brush with a potential romance. (McCartney’s vocal was so ecstatic that Lennon actually burst out of the studio control room to urge him on.) But the “you” referenced in the title is apparently not a new love but a psychotropic substance. “‘Got to Get You into My Life’ was one I wrote when I had first been introduced to pot,” McCartney would explain. “It’s actually an ode to pot. Like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret.”
It’s worth noting that McCartney’s first substantial exposure to marijuana came through Bob Dylan in August 1964, some 18 months, and three albums, beforeRevolver. (Also, the title seems like a reference to the Solomon Burke soul number"Got to Get You Off of My Mind,“which was a hit in mid-‘65.) Given this timeline, many —including John Lennon— have theorized that “Got to Get You Into My Life” is actually about McCartney’s first experience with LSD. He was the last Beatle to try it, doing so in December 1965 with Guinness brewery heir Tara Browne (laterimmortalized as the man who “blew his mind out in a car” on theSgt. Peppercloser “A Day in the Life”) and Pretty Things drummer Viv Prince. From a lyrical perspective, the lines about taking a ride to see another kind of mind seem more illustrative of an acid trip than getting stoned, but it’s silly to quibble about poetic license.
The real tell is its place in theRevolvertracklist alongside Lennon’s overt ode to the psychedelic experience, “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Heard back to back, the two tracks are similar to the 1967 double A-side “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane,” in which the two men revisit nostalgic childhood haunts in their own unique way — Lennon through the audio impressionism of the former and McCartney with hyper-realism of the latter. These indisputable companion pieces were the first tracks recorded for the sessions that yieldedSgt. Pepper. “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Got to Get You Into My Life,” incidentally, were the first two tracks tackled forRevolver. (They’re also compositionally similar, both based around a single drone note in the bass.) Regardless of the specific type of drug, circumstantial evidence suggests they’re in conversation with one another. On the final two tracks, Lennon and McCartney cover the same emotional terrain like two painters sketching the same landscape from differing perspectives, each in their preferred styles. McCartney sings of how the experience impacted him, while Lennon seeks to convey the experience itself. Both are immensely effective
Revolvercould only ever close with “Tomorrow Never Knows.” What else could possibly follow it? It’s the first song in the Beatles’ repertoire — and possibly the first in the pop-rock realm — that made no attempt at commercial accessibility. It also made no attempt to be replicated in front of a paying audience. It was purely a studio enterprise, paving the way for the rest of their career. If it were somehow possible to objectively measure and graph the Beatles' creative progress, the gap between the April 6, 1966 session for “Tomorrow Never Knows” and their previous recording date — Nov. 11, 1965, to finish offRubber Soulcuts “You Won’t See Me,” “Girl,” “Wait” and “I’m Looking Through You” — may very well be their single greatest creative leap.
Over the last half-century, “A Day in the Life” has earned a reputation as the song that crystallizes the Lennon-McCartney partnership. The division of labor is clear thanks to the shared vocal duties, making this a somewhat obvious choice. But “Tomorrow Never Knows” goes one better, utilizing the unique gifts of all four Beatles in almost equal measure, amalgamating their recent interests with invaluable help from George Martin and his production staff.
With the lyrics mostly in place, the music came largely from Harrison’s fascination with Indian compositions, which made use of long tamboura drones. “Indian music was all just on one chord,” Harrison explained. “It didn’t modulate. John wanted to try a tune like that.” At first, the band worried about bringing the idea to George Martin, still seen as the respectable, responsible adult in the room. He’d shepherded them through simple rock ‘n’ roll progressions, but this was, as McCartney would reflect, “a radical departure. We’d always had at least three chords, and maybe a change for the middle eight. Suddenly this was John just strumming on C rather earnestly - ‘Lay down your mind…’ And the words were all very deep. Certainly not ‘Thank You Girl’; a bit of a change from all that!” This was a song about transcendence and, as such, it transcended the typical pop format. There was no verse-chorus structure or end-line rhyme scheme. But Martin was unfazed. In fact, he was intrigued as he listened to his charges.When he had signed them four years earlier, the producer wasn’t totally convinced they had what it took to write a proper song. Now they were challenging his very understanding of what a song could be. “[George Martin] never freaked when we brought him even the most crazy ideas,” McCartney says in the Super Deluxe liner notes. “He was very supportive that way.”
Lennon had a habit of speaking in pictorial terms to evoke the sounds he wanted to hear. “He’d make whooshing noises and try to describe what he could only hear in his head, saying he wanted a song ‘to sound like an orange,'” Martin recalled in Mark Lewisohn’s 1988 bookThe Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. For this new song, tentatively titled “Mark I,” Lennon announced that he wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop. To achieve this wobbly effect, he helpfully suggested they suspend him from a rope attached to the studio ceiling and fling him around the microphone like a human tetherball. (By all accounts, he wasn’t kidding. Never the most technical of the group, the other Beatles used to joke that Lennon couldn’t even change a lightbulb.) Engineer Geoff Emerick had the slightly less treacherous idea of putting Lennon’s voice through a rotating Leslie speaker cabinet, previously reserved for Hammond organs. Lennon was delighted with the results.
A typical guitar break seemed inappropriate for what was shaping up to be their most unusual song to date. For a different kind of solo, they considered McCartney’s home experiments with tape loops. He brought in a few dozen in a plastic shopping bag, from whichfive were selected to form the track’s surreal sound bed. These included a B-flat major chord dubbed from an orchestral record, a scalar phrase on a sitar, flute and string notes recorded on an early sample-based synthesizer called a Mellotron, and McCartney himself laughing — all manipulated beyond recognition at various tape speeds, forward and backward.
Capturing the symphony of tape-loops required the ultimate act of cooperation. “Every tape machine in every studio was commandeered and every available EMI employee was given the task of holding a pencil or drinking glass to give the loops the proper tensioning,” Emerick wrote in his memoir. “In many instances, this meant they had to be standing out in the hallway, looking quite sheepish. Most of those people didn’t have a clue what we were doing; they probably thought we were daft…add in the fact that all of the technical staff were required to wear white lab coats, and the whole thing became totally surreal.”
But Lennon found himself stuck for a name. The working title “Mark I” had been discarded in favor of “The Void,” but that struck him as a tad ominous. His thoughts turned to Starr, whose sage words of humor and humility grounded the band in the same way that his inimitable stick-work anchored the track. “I was a bit self-conscious about the lyrics,” Lennon admitted in 1980. “So I took one of Ringo’s malapropisms to take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics.”
“Tomorrow Never Knows” is each Beatle at his best. Lennon’s fearless internal probing. McCartney’s boundless curiosity for the latest cutting-edge ideas. Harrison’s passion for India and his spiritual connection with its music. Starr’s rock-solid rhythm and home-spun homilies that offered a human element to the way-out concepts. That’s the blend. That’s the bond. That’s what made them the Beatles.
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“The reason why the Beatles were good is because the four of them made the most extraordinary sound,” says Giles Martin. “They did it consistently in different styles.Revolveris a great example. The efficiency ofRevolveris amazing. Everyone’s doing something, and it’s always the right thing. I think what’s happened with Paul over the last few years — and I don’t think he’d mind me saying this — is he’s realized that the Beatles were the best band he was in. It took a while to accept that. He really, really respects the other’s playing and what they did. He really enjoys it. He’ll go, ‘Ah, listen to George’s guitar, that’s a great part.’ Or, ‘Listen to Ringo’s drums.’ It’s like, ‘You know, we were a good band.'”
source: people.com
