Īnd if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. Greg Kot is the music critic at the Chicago Tribune. It now stands as The Beatles’ greatest album. But time has affirmed the enduring worth of Revolver. In contrast, the release of Revolver was overshadowed by Lennon’s infamous and widely misinterpreted ‘more popular than Jesus’ comments. A few months after it was released, The Beatles began recording Sgt Pepper, an event that was chronicled with great fanfare as the band sequestered themselves in Abbey Road studios. Revolver wasn't always so highly regarded. It’s the album in The Beatles discography that comes closest to the majesty of Revolver. The first side of the album contains Harrison’s finest Beatles moment, Something, and Lennon’s metal precursor She’s So Heavy. Its closing line – “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make" – is a career capstone worthy of The Beatles’ legacy. It contains some brilliant music – including Lennon’s caustic Happiness is a Warm Gun and McCartney’s civil-rights hymn Blackbird – and at least a side’s worth of filler (sonic collage Revolution 9 juvenile Why Don’t We Do it in the Road? blues parody Yer Blues and the music hall pastiche of Honey Pie).Ībbey Road marks The Beatles’ final recording session, and it planted the seeds for progressive rock by stitching together 11 half-finished songs into a sublimely sequenced suite.
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Now, with the luxury of time to tinker, edit, re-edit and experiment, The Beatles were poised to record a masterpiece.īy the time of the 1968 White album, The Beatles were splintering and essentially turned the sessions into a series of solo recordings with the rest of the band members acting as session musicians. Lennon and McCartney were still closely collaborating and pushing each other to new levels of innovation, and Harrison was emerging as a formidable third songwriter and voice in the band. But in 1966, the quartet pulled off the road for good to devote themselves to songwriting and record-making. Lennon’s ‘Tibetan-monk’ vocals urged listeners to "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.”Īll The Beatles’ previous albums had been rush jobs – their debut was recorded in four hours. Ringo’s drums became the lead instrument, a thundering focal point amid the sonic chaos. Ringo Starr’s drums were pushed to the foreground in the mix, inverting the typical hierarchy of most rock instrumentation. George Harrison brought Eastern drones to the track by playing a long-necked lute called the tamboura as well as a sitar, and Paul McCartney cooked up backward and vari-speed tape loops, including one that evoked the sound of seagulls. Lennon’s voice was filtered through a Leslie speaker cabinet, which gave it a vibrato effect normally associated with a Hammond keyboard. "Well, I said, 'It's a bit expensive going to Tibet. “He wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop," Martin later recalled. The hype that preceded Sgt Pepper had a lot to do with the leaps in imagination, the studio-as-instrument adventurousness, that flourished on Revolver in half the time: the sessions for the 1966 album spanned two-and-a-half months whereas Sgt Pepper took an unprecedented five months to record. It just wasn’t as well-packaged and marketed.
It does everything Sgt Pepper did, except it did it first and often better. They all have merit, but none of them is as consistently brilliant and innovative as Revolver. In some quarters there’s a fondness for Abbey Road and its side-long suite of mini-songs, and lovers of the Bob Dylan-influenced folk-rock of the mid-‘60s cherish Rubber Soul above all. Many fans love the sprawl and variety of the self-titled 1968 double album, popularly known as The White Album. The best Beatles album? The rock historians often point to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as the moment, in 1967, when rock magically grew up and became a legitimate art form, at least as it was perceived by the mainstream media.
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