Revolver

Product Information

Bromell qualifies the statement by saying, "If we don't count the Holy Modal Rounders' 1964 cover of Leadbelly's ' Hesitation Blues'", which included a newly written verse referring to "the psychedelic blues". But with nearly 60 years of hindsight and several revealing outtakes in this edition, it’s clear that it might have been simply an OK album had they not refined it. Beatlemaniacs have already heard the sleepy, eerie first take of the song on Anthology 2, also included here, but in the context of the Revolver box, it’s stunning how the tune (more of a meditation really) with its dolorous, unchanging base loop (which sounds a bit like a cello with emphysema) was nearly fully formed at its onset. It sounds both like a Daniel Johnston cassette and the Stanley Brothers bleating “Man of Constant Sorrow”— and nothing like a children’s song about psychedelic seafaring. Due to the controversies surrounding the Beatles during their tour, critical reaction in the US was muted relative to the band's previous releases.

When he submitted his work to the Beatles, Epstein wept, overjoyed that Voormann had managed to capture the experimental tone of the Beatles' new music. In the surviving snippets of studio banter, the vibe sounds jolly, curious, and most surprisingly of all after watching Get Back, convivial.The latter peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, [347] making it, in Gould's description, "the first 'designated' Beatles single since 1963" not to top that chart. Giles Martin collaborated with filmmaker Peter Jackson’s Get Backaudio team to “de-mix” the Beatles’ original crowded multitrack tapes and extract each individual sound so he could reposition them in a wider spectrum. Beatles biographer Nicholas Schaffner cites 1966 as the start of the band's " psychedelic period", [15] as do musicologists Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc. Along with the restoration of the original album artwork by Voormann, the record sleeve that holds the session outtakes features Robert Freeman's proposed cover design, featuring the heads of the Beatles in a psychedelic circle.

Critical reaction was highly favourable in the UK but less so in the US amid the press's unease at the band's outspokenness on contemporary issues. In his review for The Daily Telegraph, Neil McCormick says that the album shows the band at their most unified and is a work in which "they introduce whole new vistas of sound yet still contain them within tightly structured and performed songs. When you’re used to seeing carefully preened mop tops and perfectly dusted rotating bookshelves, witnessing the mess — the editing process — can be jarring.An outtake of “She Said She Said” (Lennon’s ultimate acid trip) contains the later excised line “And it’s making me feel like my trousers are torn. MacDonald deems Lennon's remark about the Beatles' "god-like status" in March 1966 to have been "fairly realistic", given the reaction to Revolver.

nb 26] In the US, the album's release was a secondary event to the controversy surrounding the recent publication there of Cleave's interview with Lennon, in which he remarked that the Beatles had become " more popular than Jesus". nb 18] Riley describes the composition as a "shaded putdown" in the style of Dylan's " Positively 4th Street", whereby Lennon sings to someone who has seen "seven wonders" yet is unable to empathise with him and his feelings of isolation. Revolver has been recognised as having inspired new subgenres of music, anticipating electronica, punk rock, baroque rock and world music, among other styles. The standard method had been to double the vocal by singing the same piece twice onto a multitrack tape, a task Lennon particularly disliked.

Combined with the similarly "visionary" work of American producer Phil Spector, Howard continues, through Revolver, the recording studio had become "its own instrument; record production had been elevated into art. Issued on 20 June, this album combined tracks that Capitol had omitted from the Beatles' previous US releases with songs that the band had originally issued on non-album singles. For the box set, the Beatles’ archivists discovered Lennon’s work tape, which finds him keening about his doldrums over a folky acoustic guitar: “In the place where I was born, no one cared, no one cared.