The recording of Revolver took place over 31 sessions, ending on 21 June. Two days after the final session, the group embarked on what would be their final international tour, concluding with their last ever concert in front of an audience, at Candlestick Park, San Francisco on 29 August. So 1966 was indeed a watershed year – the group released just sixteen new songs in the twelve-month period, compared with exactly twice as many the previous year. No Revolver tracks were played on that final tour, and, for the first time, a Beatles album featured no true Lennon-McCartney collaborations.
Revolver is notable for involving a greater degree of studio technology than before, most evidently the use of backward tapes for both instruments and voices. Although John and George Martin both claim credit for discovering the power and appeal of incorporating elements of backward sounds into the group’s recordings, the idea clearly came out of the hotbed of the Beatles, George Martin and his team, and Abbey Road and its technicians. The technicians, this time in the person of Ken Townsend, were also responsible for the other key development in studio techniques employed by the group – artificial double tracking, which saw the light of day for the first time on ‘Paperback Writer’. Both techniques were key to what in many ways is the album’s most remarkable track, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Remarkably, this was the first Revolver track to be tackled, and actually exists in two equally extraordinary versions. It also features another studio innovation, the use of tape loops. Tape loop recordings would reach their zenith in ‘Revolution 9’, but for now they play a pivotal role in establishing the texture of the album’s closing track.
Add to this the recording techniques used for the strings of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, the brass of ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, and for John’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ vocal, and the varispeed recordings used in ‘For No One’, and we clearly have a work of art that is hammering away at the boundaries of accepted studio practice. A happy side-effect, as John said at the time, was that the new approach to recording meant that “there won’t be many people copying our ideas. The sound is harder to emulate, although we still have the same lousy voices!”
The editor of the Beatles Book, Sean O’Mahoney, who wrote under the pseudonym Johnny Dean, was with the group in a Munich hotel room on the night of their first concert on this last tour when they settled on the name for the album. It was originally to be called Abracadabra, but this had apparently already been used (although it’s not clear by whom). Pendulums and Fat Man And Bobby were also rejected, as was Ringo’s suggestion of countering the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath, released two months previously, with After Geography. John suggested Beatles On Safari, and Paul chipped in with Magic Circles, which led to Four Sides Of The Circle, and Four Sides Of The Eternal Triangle, and so to Revolver.
The Grammy Award-winning cover was created by Klaus Voormann, the German artist who had befriended the group in Hamburg in 1960. The line drawing/collage design includes Voormann’s own name and photograph woven into George’s hair on the right-hand edge of the image, making him the first non-Beatle to appear on a Beatles LP cover. Après lui, le déluge – the following album cover would feature 59 non-Beatle faces. (When Revolver was incorporated into the Anthology 3 cover, also designed by Voormann, he updated his own image based on a recent photograph.)
Chart-wise, it was business as usual. The LP entered the UK charts at number one and remained there for seven weeks. Like Help! and Rubber Soul before it, Revolver replaced The Sound Of Music at the top of the chart, handing the top spot back to the soundtrack album at the end of its run.
The US version was, for the last time, different to the official Parlophone release. ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ was missing from side one, and ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ and ‘Doctor Robert’ from side two, these three tracks having been released on Capitol’s compilation “Yesterday” … And Today, released the previous June. The five-week run of “Yesterday” … And Today and the six-week run by Revolver at number one on the Billboard charts were separated by a single week, during which Herb Alpert’s What Now My Love kept the top slot warm.
Revolver is felt by many, including the Beatles themselves, to be a companion piece to Rubber Soul. George has commented “I don’t see too much difference between Rubber Soul and Revolver. To me they could be Volume One and Volume Two.” But objectively Revolver takes the progress made by Rubber Soul much, much further. The judgement of the group could be coloured by the fact that producing Rubber Soul was such an immense achievement, particularly in its sonic innovation, and at they time they must have been extremely proud of the LP. But this would have been without knowing what they would go on to achieve with Revolver. Because on Revolver there is no real equivalent to the previous album’s weaker tracks such as ‘What Goes On’ or ‘Run For Your Life’, and likewise no Rubber Soul tracks to match ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
In an interview with the NME in March, John was asked what they were up to in the studio.
“Q: What’s going to come out of the next recording sessions?
John: Literally anything. Electronic music, jokes … One thing’s for sure – the next LP is going to be very different.”