There is a more or less automatic consensus that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the great Beatles album. The record that changed everything. The masterpiece. And it is not wrong to think so, because Sgt. Pepper’s did in fact change many things, from the idea of what an album could be to the way musical production was conceived. But the consensus has a problem: Sgt. Pepper’s is a conceptual record, deliberate, that wants to be important and succeeds. It is a record that asks permission to be taken seriously. Revolver, which came out a year earlier, in August 1966, asks for nothing. It simply is.
The difference matters. Sgt. Pepper’s arrives in full dress uniform, with its elaborate cover, its fictional-band concept, its explicit will to be Art with a capital A. Revolver turns up with a black-and-white cover drawn by Klaus Voormann, a friend from Hamburg, and inside it has fourteen songs that range from music hall to musique concrète, from soul to Indian raga, with not the slightest intention of explaining what holds them together. What holds them together, of course, are the Beatles. But the Beatles of Revolver are no longer a band in any conventional sense. They are something else, something for which no vocabulary existed in 1966, and for which, if we are honest, none fully exists yet.
The Impossible Song
“Tomorrow Never Knows” is the last song on the record and the first they recorded. That alone says something. It is as though the Beatles had started at the end, at the furthest point they could reach, and then built the rest of the album as a road leading to that cliff.
John Lennon was twenty-five when he wrote it. He had read The Psychedelic Experience, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and decided he could turn it into a pop song. Not a ten-minute experimental piece for a knowing audience, not an exercise in academic avant-garde. A pop song of under three minutes for the most massive audience on the planet.
The lyrics say “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.” They say “it is not dying.” They say “listen to the colour of your dreams.” And the music is a drone over a single chord, with reversed tape loops, with Lennon’s voice processed to sound like a monk chanting from the top of a mountain, with a Ringo Starr drum part that is the only thing keeping the song tethered to anything recognisable as rock. Geoff Emerick, the sound engineer who was twenty at the time, ran Lennon’s voice through a rotating Leslie speaker, the kind normally used for Hammond organs, because Lennon asked him to make his voice sound “like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop.” Emerick had no idea how to do that, but he tried, and it worked.
What is remarkable about “Tomorrow Never Knows” is not that it is experimental. In 1966 plenty of people were making experimental music, from Stockhausen to the Velvet Underground. What is remarkable is that it is experimental and popular at the same time, without concessions in either direction. It does not simplify the experimentation to make it accessible, nor does it complicate the accessibility to seem serious. It is both at once, seamlessly, as though there were no contradiction. And that, in the history of music, is extraordinarily rare.
Eleanor Rigby and the Problem of Beauty
On the same record that has “Tomorrow Never Knows” there is “Eleanor Rigby.” The coexistence of both songs on a single album is, if you think about it, one of the most extraordinary facts in twentieth-century music. Because they have absolutely nothing to do with each other, except that both are perfect.
“Eleanor Rigby” has no guitar. No bass. No drums. It has a string octet, four violins, two violas, two cellos, arranged by George Martin with a roughness that owes more to Bartók than to anything associated with pop music in 1966. And then, the lyrics. “Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been.” “Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear.” It is English social realism compressed to the density of a haiku. Each line is a complete image, an entire life suggested in a phrase.
Paul McCartney was twenty-three when he wrote it. Twenty-three. At that age most people are trying to finish university. McCartney was writing chamber music with lyrics by Cheever, or Larkin, and putting it on a pop record that would sell millions of copies.
What “Eleanor Rigby” does, and does with a naturalness that defies any analysis, is erase the distance between high art and popular music without anyone noticing. It is not a pop song that quotes classical music. It is not classical music disguised as pop. It is a new thing that should not work and that works so well we are no longer surprised by it, which is perhaps the clearest sign of its success.
There is something about the melody of “Eleanor Rigby” that deserves attention. It is a modal melody, built on scales that sound ancient, almost medieval, and that gives the song an air of lament that transcends its era. It could have been written in the seventeenth century or the twenty-third. Nothing anchors it to 1966 except the production, and the production is so austere it barely anchors it at all. It is a song outside of time, which is another way of saying it is a song for ever.
For No One
If I had to choose a single song from Revolver to prove the Beatles were geniuses, I would not choose “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which is spectacular, nor “Eleanor Rigby,” which is imposing. I would choose “For No One,” which is neither of those things. It is simply devastating.
“For No One” is a minute and fifty-odd seconds long. It has piano, a clavichord, a French horn solo played by Alan Civil, who was principal horn of the Philharmonia in London, and McCartney’s voice. Nothing else. The lyrics describe the end of a love affair with the precision of someone taking clinical notes on his own wound. “A love that should have lasted years.” “She no longer needs you.” No drama, no grand emotional gestures, not the slightest attempt to make the situation seem bigger than it is. It is small. It is domestic. It is one person realising the other person has stopped loving them, and describing this with the same attention they might give to the weather.
The genius of “For No One” lies in what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t raise its voice. It doesn’t speed up. It introduces no dramatic bridge, no cathartic chorus. It moves with the monotony of the days that follow after something has ended, when you are still in the same house, doing the same things, but everything has changed and you both know it. Civil’s French horn, which enters in the middle of the song, is the closest thing to an overflowing emotion the song allows itself, and even that sounds restrained, like someone about to cry in public who holds it together.
McCartney wrote many songs about love. Some are beautiful, others are saccharine, most fall somewhere in between. “For No One” is the only one where love appears as what it really is when it ends: not a great drama but a quiet subtraction, the discovery that where there was something there is now nothing, and that the world carries on exactly the same.
Taxman and the Rest
Revolver opens with “Taxman,” by George Harrison, which is a notable fact in itself. Lennon and McCartney, who wrote the songs and controlled the repertoire with a firmness that went beyond the professional, gave the album’s opening slot to the third Beatle. And Harrison used it to write what is basically a libertarian pamphlet against British taxation, which in 1966 reached 95% on the highest bracket. “Should five percent appear too small, be thankful I don’t take it all.”
The song is good, it has one of the best guitar riffs on the record, but what matters is what it represents in the internal economy of Revolver: the emergence of Harrison as a third creative force. Until Revolver, Harrison was the lead guitarist who contributed one or two songs per album, generally solid, generally forgettable. On Revolver he has three, and all three are good. “Love You To,” with its Indian instrumentation, is the first time the influence of sitar and raga is genuinely integrated into a pop song rather than stuck on as exotic colour. “I Want to Tell You” has a harmonic sophistication that would not be out of place on a jazz record.
Harrison on Revolver is the musical equivalent of a country discovering natural resources: suddenly there is more wealth than the system can process. Lennon and McCartney were already, individually, the two best popular-music songwriters in the world. Adding a third composer of that calibre to the same group created a creative density that is, in the literal sense, unrepeatable.
What Changed
There is a before and after Revolver in popular music, and the change is so deep we now take it for granted, which is always what happens with changes that truly matter.
Before Revolver, pop music was entertainment. It could be good entertainment, first-rate entertainment, but the category was clear. Pop over here, art over there. Dylan had begun complicating that border with his lyrics, but musically he was still operating within recognisable traditions: folk, blues, rock and roll. The Beatles with Revolver erased the border. They didn’t move it, didn’t blur it. They erased it.
After Revolver, it was no longer possible to say “it’s just a pop song” with the same confidence. If “Eleanor Rigby” was a pop song, then a pop song could be a string quartet with lyrics of social poetry. If “Tomorrow Never Knows” was a pop song, then a pop song could be a psychedelic mantra using the techniques of musique concrète. If “For No One” was a pop song, then a pop song could be a two-minute chamber miniature that emotionally gutted the listener with the efficiency of a scalpel.
That opened a door that has never closed. Everything that followed, from art rock to post-punk, from Radiohead to Björk, operates in the space Revolver opened up. Not necessarily through direct influence, though in many cases that too, but because Revolver proved that the category of “popular music” could contain anything. That the limits were not in the medium but in the imagination of whoever was using it.
Four Lads from Liverpool
There is something that gets lost sometimes in the technical analysis of Revolver and that is worth recovering: it was made by four lads from Liverpool who had not yet turned thirty, in a recording studio with four tracks, in a period of roughly three months, between April and June of 1966.
Four tracks. To put that in context: today any laptop has virtually unlimited recording capability. At Abbey Road in 1966 they had four channels to fit everything into, which meant every production decision was irreversible and every mix was an act of engineering as precise as a surgical procedure. The technical innovations on Revolver, the tape loops, the ADT, the extreme compression on Ringo’s drums, were not the choices of someone with infinite resources trying things out. They were ingenious solutions to concrete limitations. Restriction as the mother of invention, a truth that applies to music as much as to war and to politics.
And they were under thirty. Lennon twenty-five, McCartney twenty-three, Harrison twenty-three, Starr twenty-five. At that age, with that level of fame, with that pressure, with that substance use, the normal response would have been to repeat the formula that worked. More Help!, more A Hard Day’s Night. Love songs for teenagers, world tours, merchandise. Nobody was asking them to reinvent popular music. They did it because they could and because they wanted to, which is always the only reason anything worth doing gets done.
What you end up with is a record that contains multitudes, to use Whitman’s phrase, and contains them without apparent effort. That is the difference with Sgt. Pepper’s, which is a great record but one that sweats, that wants you to know it is ambitious. Revolver is the record of someone who doesn’t yet know he is changing history, and that is why he changes it with a naturalness no deliberate gesture can replicate. It is the exact moment when popular culture became art, and it happened the way truly important things always happen: without asking permission, without warning, and with no one able to stop it.