LF: Is the Beatles’ ‘Revolver’ the Best Rock Record Ever?

It is spring 1966, and the Beatles are ensconced in London’s EMI Studios, where they have embarked upon their latest manipulation of time. The Christmas season just passed had seen the release of the band’s sixth album, Rubber Soul, a game-changer of a disc that wedded American rhythm and blues to English folk music, as if the two genres were meant to go together all along. The Beatles, as the popsmiths-cum-pied pipers for teenyboppers, the lovable lads behind A Hard Day’s Night, were no more. Their middle-career era of high-toned, big boy art had commenced.

Rubber Soul continued to dominate the charts that spring. It featured organic sounds sourced from the streets of the city and countryside fields where one might have pictured John Clare wandering, but the Beatles, being the Beatles, were now moving entirely beyond Rubber Soul’s rustic-tinged soundscapes, as if such a masterwork were a mere digression in their journey towards something bigger, something better, something more “next,” if you will.

B4Y4A5 Beatles 1966 The Beatles arrive at London Airport to fly out to USA John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr

In this case, that would be the finest album of their career, and conceivably the finest rock and roll record ever made: a 14 song affair clocking in at under 35 minutes with a bad pun serving as a title: Revolver. For what do records do? Revolve. And this one was going to feel like it did so more than any that had come before.

People tend to forget how short the Beatles’ career was as a record-making collective: a mere seven years, from Please Please Me in 1963 to Abbey Road in 1969. Their pace was extraordinary, with single calendar years featuring the completion and release of two LPs and three singles, the latter rarely sourced from the former.

Mix in tours, spates of recording sessions for the BBC, film work, all manner of personal appearances, and you start to wonder how on earth four men were able to leap about from style to style, inventing some in the process, serving as the definitive version of one kind of band in June, say, and then another in July.

Revolver, though, which would be released in August, was the ultimate shape-shifter document, for having just infused the ears of the world with an album that was all green and brown tones, with a wafting air of cannabis throughout, the Beatles went interplanetary.

There is no record that sounds remotely like Revolver, and certainly no Beatles record. John Lennon had just reached a compositional career high point on Rubber Soul with songs like “Girl,” “In My Life,” and “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” and now it would his partner Paul McCartney’s turn to hit the apogee-mark.

Lennon was writing on the guitar at the time, as he always had, but with a greater penchant for distortion and overdubbed layers of guitars that came at you in metallic waves, as if borne in from an Arthur Clarke novel. McCartney, meanwhile, had become quite the aesthete in London, living in town and taking in the theater, films, anything, as the Jefferson Airplane would later sing, with which he could feed his head. He was also, for the first time, writing on the piano, and it is from this yin and yang of two geniuses composing about as well as ever, on somewhat oppositional instruments, that those spring 1966 sessions were setting Revolver up as something of, well, an absolute mother of an album.

George Harrison, too, was excelling as a writer, and it was his “Taxman” that was granted the prize position as album starter. The Beatles didn’t muck about with what they chose to begin and, more important, conclude their LPs. As with “I Saw Her Standing There,” the song that launched their first record, “Taxman” features a cod count-in, with Harrison, in a sardonic, almost glib voice, intoning a flat “One, Two, Three, Four,” as the real count-in is shouted out beneath him, and away we go into Future Rock.

The lyric is a diatribe against the English taxation system, but it’s almost immaterial, given what is at play sonically, as the Beatles, clearly, have a new weapon they hadn’t before. McCartney takes a guitar solo where normally Harrison would, a fury of virtuosic playing to make Jimi Hendrix sit up and take notice, and few, if any bands, have ever been tighter. As players, these guys are all coming into their own. But there is no more important instrument on Revolver than the studio itself.

This was a first. You hear it right away in the texture of McCartney’s bass. A bass is not meant to sound this rounded, as if it were an instrument you could isolate in any given track, and study as a composition unto itself. Producer George Martin, always a man willing to try an idea, is now clearly abetting two songwriters who were coming up with a ton of them in terms of the new sounds they’d like to try and get, thus bestowing each of their songs with an extra kick towards places no one had gone before.

For McCartney, that involved working with engineer Geoff Emerick on making his bass sound like a rumble of low-toned, especially melodic guitars, knitted together in the soundscape. Lennon, meanwhile, was talking of being tied to cables and maneuvered around the room so that his vocals would sound preternatural, and tasked Martin with some requests that would have required drilling holes in his neck and inserting electrodes. The Beatles-go-Frankensteinian.

Lennon is always considered the band’s maven avant-gardist, but that’s misleading, and the point of no return moment in the Beatles career, as far as advancing on the realm of psychedelia goes, comes with the second number, McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby.”

The tale of a lonely spinster, and the lonely people in her life, such as it was, is seen “wearing a face that she keeps in a glass by the door.” Well then. You didn’t get this on Rubber Soul, or anywhere else. Here the sound is clean, string-laden, the stuff of Edwardian minstrels leaving the band back home and tending to a respectful threnody.

McCartney explores more iterations of this sonic mood, though with more joy, throughout Revolver. “Here, There and Everywhere” is the finest love song of his career, a quiet, sunlit number, with degrees of affection becoming more pronounced in charming modulations. “For No One,” a piano track with a French horn solo by Alan Civil, is the emotional flipside of “Here, There and Everywhere,” and yet strangely uplifting as a song lamenting “what ifs.” McCartney is commanding melodic possibilities at the loftiest of levels, and you sense that there is nothing he can’t do with it. Including, even, making you look forward to a bit of heartache.