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The point isn’t just that Revolver was strange, but that it located its strangeness in places easily dismissed as familiar. And John, in particular, was a fan of the Scottish singer Ivor Cutler, whose novelty songs masked a sense of surrealism that pointed toward more cosmic realms. “Eleanor Rigby,” “Doctor Robert,” the “Taxman,” the lovebirds of “Here, There and Everywhere,” and the eccentric of “I’m Only Sleeping”: these are the people in your neighborhood, and if they’re stranger than you remember, it might be because you never really looked. Four people, one room.īefore: British Humor and the Surrealism of Daily Lifeįor however mystical Revolver can seem, squint and you hear an album mostly about ordinary life. Their growing conceptual interests didn’t get in the way of their roots as a bar-and-dance band, and their ability to bridge the two-or, more importantly, to dissolve the distinction between them-is part of what makes Revolver Revolver. And where the beat of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is rightly cited as a precursor to techno and drum ’n’ bass, it’s also a take on the syncopations of James Brown drummer Clyde Stubblefield, who said he got his style, in part, from listening to washing machines and trains-the funk of daily life. “Taxman” is obvious, as is “Got to Get You Into My Life,” which John called “our Tamla-Motown bit.” But you can also hear it in “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Love You To,” whose Indian influence is anchored by a beat heavy enough to drive a dance floor regardless of the continent it’s on. On the occasion of the album’s 2022 Super Deluxe reissue-which, in addition to a new mix in Spatial Audio by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, features some extraordinary rehearsals, outtakes, and demos-we’re taking a look back at what shaped Revolver and what Revolver shaped in turn.īefore: The R&B Backbeat Revolver is the last Beatles album where you can really hear the influence of American soul and R&B. Not only were The Beatles able to bridge their interest in the relatively uncommercial worlds of psychedelia, experimental, and Indian classical music with Motown (“Got to Get You Into My Life”) and what we now think of as classically Beatlesque pop (“Good Day Sunshine”), but they also gave us a template for the pop album as the kaleidoscopically varied studio construction we think of it as today. ![]() Part of what makes Revolver appealing is that it’s as much “Yellow Submarine” and the domestic sweetness of “Here, There and Everywhere” as it is “She Said She Said” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” But Dylan’s point was well-taken: For a band that put out “I Want to Hold Your Hand” less than three years earlier, the relative complexity of Revolver-in both sound and subject matter-not only challenged The Beatles’ image as the pop band the whole family could agree on (as opposed to, say, The Rolling Stones), but it also put pop on a course toward unfamiliar horizons. (In Dylan’s case, it was Blonde on Blonde.) On hearing the tape loops and death poetry of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Dylan allegedly said to McCartney, “Oh, I get it. ![]() One of the great, possibly true stories about 1966’s Revolver concerns an exchange between Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan at London’s Mayfair Hotel about what they were currently working on.
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