Revolver at 60: Fourteen Songs That Changed the Future of Pop

On 5 August 1966, the Beatles released their seventh studio album. Sixty years later, Revolver is routinely described as a classic, but that hardly captures what happened across its fourteen songs.

It is better understood as a fuse.

Psychedelic rock, electronic experimentation, progressive rock, raga rock and chamber pop all intersect on Revolver. The Beatles didn't invent these forms, but Revolver brought an extraordinary range of experimental ideas into mainstream popular music and helped redefine what could be done inside a recording studio.

My old notes and scribbles.

Tomorrow Never Knows

The last song on Revolver was actually the first one recorded.

Work on “Tomorrow Never Knows” began on 6 April 1966, and almost everything about it challenged the conventions of a pop recording: a largely static harmonic structure, Ringo Starr's heavily compressed drums, George Harrison's tamboura drone, backwards sounds, tape loops and John Lennon's voice transformed through a rotating Leslie speaker.

The tape loops were particularly radical. Sounds recorded separately were manipulated, repeated and fed into the final mix, turning the studio itself into part of the composition.

The technique had precedents in experimental and electronic music, but hearing it on a Beatles record was something else entirely. Millions of listeners were suddenly being exposed to ideas associated with tape music and the avant-garde through one of the biggest pop groups in the world.

Lennon's lyrics were equally unusual, drawing inspiration from Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert's The Psychedelic Experience, itself based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The result became one of the defining recordings of early psychedelia, while its use of loops and manipulated sound anticipated techniques that would become central to electronic and sample-based music decades later.

Love You To

George Harrison had already introduced the sitar into the Beatles' music on “Norwegian Wood,” but “Love You To” went considerably further.

Rather than adding Indian instrumentation as decoration, the song was constructed around sitar, tamboura and tabla, drawing directly from North Indian classical music. Tabla player Anil Bhagwat joined Harrison for the recording, and Harrison would soon begin studying seriously with Ravi Shankar.

Revolver therefore arrived at an important moment in the development of what became known as raga rock, exposing an enormous Western pop audience to Indian instruments and musical structures.

It was more than psychedelic exoticism. Harrison's fascination with Indian music would become one of the defining threads of his work.

Eleanor Rigby

Then there was “Eleanor Rigby.”

No guitar. No bass. No drums.

Instead, Paul McCartney's song was accompanied by a string octet, four violins, two violas and two cellos, arranged by Sir George Martin.

Strings in pop music were nothing new, but here they weren't embellishment. They were the instrumental track.

On the same album, then, the Beatles could move from Indian classical music to a stark chamber arrangement and then to the tape collage of “Tomorrow Never Knows”.

There was no longer any requirement for a Beatles record to sound like four musicians playing together.

And that may be Revolver's most important innovation.

The studio becomes part of the music

Throughout the album, technology and composition became increasingly difficult to separate.

There is backwards guitar on “I'm Only Sleeping”, the abrasive twin guitars of “And Your Bird Can Sing”, the French horn on “For No One”, the brass of “Got to Get You into My Life” and the extraordinary sonic world of “Tomorrow Never Knows”.

The sessions also produced another important recording innovation. When Lennon complained about having to sing vocals twice to create double tracking, Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend developed ADT, a technique that automatically produced a second, slightly displaced version of the original recording.

The Beatles were increasingly making music that existed because of the studio, rather than simply being captured by it.

That approach would become fundamental to psychedelic and progressive rock and, eventually, to countless forms of electronic music.

Fourteen songs, multiple futures

None of this means the Beatles invented psychedelia, progressive rock or electronic music with Revolver. Music history rarely works like that.

Ideas move between musicians, engineers, composers, scenes and technologies. What makes Revolver remarkable is the number of those ideas that converged in one place at one moment, and the enormous audience that heard the results.

The album absorbed Indian classical music, soul, Motown, psychedelic culture, avant-garde experimentation and chamber music, while taking advantage of rapidly developing recording technology.

And somehow it still sounded like pop.

That is why Revolver remains more than a historical landmark sixty years later. It doesn't sound like four musicians consciously trying to invent the future.

It sounds like people finding things out in real time.

Fourteen songs opening doors that popular music has been walking through ever since.

Sources & Further Reading

Kevin Howlett & Mike Heatley — Historical Notes, Revolver, 2009 remastered edition
Allan Rouse & Kevin Howlett — Recording Notes, Revolver, 2009 remastered edition
Mark Lewisohn — The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years 1962–1970
Ian MacDonald — Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties
The Beatles — Official Revolver archive

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